The Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Harmful Content

This is one of the best posts I've ever read. Very good points. I'm kinda sad I'm just now seeing it.
MF is one of the biggest annoyances to me. I have to wear terrible gear and Andvarius while farming Docks so I can have a CHANCE at decent drops.
If I'm not taking high damage and doing less, then I'm suffering -50% IIQ and -250% IIR, making my farming a waste of time. But a Dual Totem Sporker can run all the IIQ and IIR they want while hiding from monsters and picking up the loot after everything's dead.
When safety/danger is unbalanced between characters (or melee vs. ranged) it makes drop and drop quality increasers (i.e., simulated kill speed) highly unbalanced in a game about loot grinding.

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pneuma wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I'd rather see US changed into something which benefits armour far more than ES.

Given that ES has 50% stun avoidance by default, it stands to gain less from US than an armoured(,life) character does.

This isn't true at all. A character with a strong focus in armour only gets stunned on physical damage during boss fights, and a character with capped resists only gets stunned on elemental damage during boss fights. (Unless their life is crap.)

Very well written post, and many points I agree with. However, I strongly disagree with your judgement on Ghost Reaver and Vaal Pact. These are absolutely needed for many ES builds, and forcing a player to rely on passive regen only is ridicolous, since it does not work while you are being damaged. Running to hide every few seconds to regen ES is not fun, a sporker build wont care since they mostly hide anyway, but any build that rely on actively casting spells/attacking the whole time will be made obsolete with a nerf to Ghost Reaver.

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reboticon wrote:

My point is that BoR is Best In Slot for Facebreaker builds

I agree. I would say something should change on Facebreakers, if anything has to change. Don't forget that FB builds also hit several thousand dps around level 25 and continue to roll the game all the way up to mid+ maps.

The difference between BoR and Lioneye's is still a big difference. Lioneye's is BiS for any eleconversion bow build (LA, IS), for any crit based bow build (due to rolling twice for accuracy on crits), for Puncture (insanely hard to beat Lioneye's physical per-hit damage without a godly rare).

Bringer of Rain is very good on FB and on the yet-to-be-talked-about Scorned build due to the immense flat physical damage. For "vanilla" melee builds (GS, Cleave, LS, Leap, Sweep, single target+splash), it's not better than a well rolled helm and chest. It's also very limiting on what skills the character can use due to only having a 7L, two 4Ls, and a possible 3L.

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Appren wrote:

Very well written post, and many points I agree with. However, I strongly disagree with your judgement on Ghost Reaver and Vaal Pact. These are absolutely needed for many ES builds, and forcing a player to rely on passive regen only is ridicolous, since it does not work while you are being damaged. Running to hide every few seconds to regen ES is not fun, a sporker build wont care since they mostly hide anyway, but any build that rely on actively casting spells/attacking the whole time will be made obsolete with a nerf to Ghost Reaver.

To reiterate, changing GR would require ES values to be much higher. ES has a very strong regeneration mechanic built in. The proof is in the pudding: high ES characters worked perfectly fine without GR for a very long time.

GR was added for ES-based melee builds that put themselves into close-range combat all the time. With an expectation of lots of small hits, they would be devastated without some form of reliable leech. GR was for claws, and was added along with Essentia Sanguis (the unique that has GR) after a long discussion on the boards about how to make ES-melee viable.

Just for the sake of an experiment, count the number of times you get hit while playing a ranged ES character. You will very rarely run to hide without GR if the buffer is large, especially since you're actively killing the things that can hurt you before they get to you.

I get hit every time I meet a reflect mob, every time there are archers, sparkers, flicker strikers etc. If ES would keep regenerating (at some rate, not full ES regen rate) while being hit, then MAYBE I could see a slight nerf to Ghost Reaver, otherwise no.

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Appren wrote:

I get hit every time I meet a reflect mob, every time there are archers, sparkers, flicker strikers etc. If ES would keep regenerating (at some rate, not full ES regen rate) while being hit, then MAYBE I could see a slight nerf to Ghost Reaver, otherwise no.

Reflect mobs, archers, sparkers, and flicker strikers all existed when GR did not, and people still played max ES (with CI).

You may not believe it, but it was a reality. More importantly, it creates an actual difference between life and ES instead of the "red orb or blue orb" choice.

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pneuma wrote:

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reboticon wrote:

My point is that BoR is Best In Slot for Facebreaker builds

I agree. I would say something should change on Facebreakers, if anything has to change. Don't forget that FB builds also hit several thousand dps around level 25 and continue to roll the game all the way up to mid+ maps.

The difference between BoR and Lioneye's is still a big difference. Lioneye's is BiS for any eleconversion bow build (LA, IS), for any crit based bow build (due to rolling twice for accuracy on crits), for Puncture (insanely hard to beat Lioneye's physical per-hit damage without a godly rare).

I know you said you haven't really seen much of it yet, but Lioneye is truly no longer BiS. Voltaxic Rift just utterly destroys it, especially in combination with Thunderfist. The extra chance to shock, the 100% duration, no need to worry about reflect, bypasses ES. One of the things any LA build used to fear is The Rock Golems. Voltaxic simply melts them with chaos damage. Bandits are the only thing they don't melt, and bandits melt anyways.

After thinking this over for a while, I really don't feel like there is much of a problem with any of these items. I think there should be Godly stuff in the game. Trying to get a lot of that stuff is the reason most people keep playing. The real problem, in my opinion, is just how hard it is to roll a good rare and the diluted affix pool.

I showed a pair of boots that are easily comparable to rainbowstride for life build (In fact, I think they are better.) Those boots dropped with those stats. Out of maybe 5,000 pairs of rare boots, I found maybe 10 pairs that were decent.

The problem became much much worse when the extra stats of Attribute Requirement and Light Radius were patched in. Those are both troll stats, and everyone knows it. All it does it add orders of magnitude to the chances of finding a usable item. Before those, there were A LOT more people using rare items. Now everyone just wants uniques, not because they are necessarily BiS, but because you know what you are getting, and it makes it much easier to build around.

If balance were in my hands, the first things I would want to do would be to remove these:
-Thorns
-Light Radius
-decreased Attribute requirement

If we look at all the complaints across the forum, the people calling for nerfs on things are far less than the overall complaint of " I can't find a single decent item." If acquiring non unique decent items became something one could actually accomplish, I think most everything else would work itself out. Worst case, it would sure make any balancing that had to be done a whole lot easier.

edit: Failing that, I think every non ES item should have a life roll, or an extremely high % chance of rolling one.