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

I agreed with you on the skills and uniques but then you completely lost me on the ketstones.

You want to ruin pretty much every spec in the game. Keystones are how specs are defined and every keystone is currently fine as is.

I was most shocked with your opinion on ghost reaver...spell casters need MORE ability to leech not LESS. I hope GGG wasn't discussing your ideas about keystones in the meeting. I'd hate to see you ruin so many builds in this game.

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Fluffy_Puppies wrote:

You want to ruin pretty much every spec in the game. Keystones are how specs are defined and every keystone is currently fine as is.

Yes... obviously I'm only out to cause damage to this game, and everyone agrees that the tree is perfectly fine right now.

Builds are defined by they keystones... and their other investments on the tree, and their gear, and their skills+supports. Builds are most often defined by "what they do the most" and "how they do it differently than others do it" if that second part is required. If you say you use Incinerate a lot, you're an Incinerate build. Later, you specify that you're life/strength-based with Iron Will as opposed to es/shock-based with 3D, for example.

If keystones were intelligent tradeoffs, you'd expect to see them picked some times and not picked other times. Currently, keystones are just "meganodes" with huge upsides and negligible (or nonexistent) downsides, and they're getting picked up in 100% of builds (where the type of build directly tells you which keystones to pick). The same is true for uniques, recently.

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Fluffy_Puppies wrote:

I was most shocked with your opinion on ghost reaver...spell casters need MORE ability to leech not LESS. I hope GGG wasn't discussing your ideas about keystones in the meeting. I'd hate to see you ruin so many builds in this game.

Why do casters need more leech?

GR is the primary driver for the sameness between ES and life. If GGG never wants to return to the fact that they could and should be separate things, that's their prerogative, but GR as it stands right now is a no-brainer decision for virtually every hard caster.

You give up nothing and gain the ability to life leech. Why make the keystone mandatory if this is what people require to play? Why not just let life leech leech to ES in the first place? For that matter, why separate ES from life in the first place?

I remember reading (and probably commented on) your original write-up. This is a fine retrospective, and I agree with *most* of your assessments.

A few thoughts:

Spell Echo might not have been the most elegant buff ever, but can you really tell me that self-casters weren't in need of some help? My self-cast Arc now does something like 5.5k damage. Once I'm fully specced maybe I'll do 10k. 10k damage, in the current metagame, is about as low as you can get. Self-casters simply need the boost, elegant or not.

In a world of ST, CoC, Mjolner and otherwise insane, unique-based gameplay, giving us Spell Echo seems like a nice (and modest) attempt to make self-casting fun. And honestly, it's a lot more fun now.

Second thing:

You say that you are very happy with the designs of the newer monsters like Devourers and Evangelists (I'm inclined to agree now that the bubble falls off a little quicker), but what is your opinion on Invasion and the Corrupted Area bosses? I personally feel that boss design has had the same problems as unique design - too much of everything. Shotgun Arctic Breath totems, Flameblast exiles... I just personally think that item and monster balance has gotten significantly worse in general.

Lastly: Do you feel that IR is overpowered, or do you just dislike it from a design-standpoint? Honestly, ever since they removed the Dex bonus, I've basically not used it on anybody. It feels like a poor man's bandaid that isn't as effective once you have good end-game gear. Only exception is maybe Bringer since you are splitting a good chunk of defense there.

Thanks for necroing, was fun to re-read and see new feedback :)

EDIT: I personally feel casters do indeed "need more leech." I would be fine if they redesigned CI to have either faster recharge, or access to regen, or a higher base pool. But in the current state, you need leech. Even with 14k ES you need it. But I agree that if that Infused Shield was something like 20-25% more instead of 12% I could deal with losing leech.

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ggnorekthx wrote:

Spell Echo might not have been the most elegant buff ever, but can you really tell me that self-casters weren't in need of some help? My self-cast Arc now does something like 5.5k damage. Once I'm fully specced maybe I'll do 10k. 10k damage, in the current metagame, is about as low as you can get. Self-casters simply need the boost, elegant or not.

I definitely understand the pragmatism involved.

Part of me is upset that they didn't try to go for a deeper, better fix. Relying on a "required support" throws away creative opportunity, but it does indeed help hard casters. It would also not be so mandatory if the other caster-like options (CoC, Mjolner) didn't have such huge advantages (ignore cast speed, ignore mana costs mainly). The power creep is real.

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ggnorekthx wrote:

You say that you are very happy with the designs of the newer monsters like Devourers and Evangelists (I'm inclined to agree now that the bubble falls off a little quicker), but what is your opinion on Invasion and the Corrupted Area bosses? I personally feel that boss design has had the same problems as unique design - too much of everything. Shotgun Arctic Breath totems, Flameblast exiles... I just personally think that item and monster balance has gotten significantly worse in general.

I definitely agree with the "too much of everything" sentiment. A boss should be distilled down to the core of what makes them scary.

Good monster design comes from the white mobs, not the rares and the unique bosses. Take a gander at Killing Floor to see great monster design in action. Each random mob is completely unique and they work together to kill the players. At the same time, they only have 9 mobs in total, two of which are mini-boss material, and any given mob has a pretty safe strategy to kill them (in a vacuum).

You get amazing encounters organically when you fight a few random enemies and those enemies have properties that work together. GGG instead listed all these combinations of fights and started making "a boss" to represent that combination. It goes without saying that there are a lot of combinations (and GGG made a fuckton of bosses between the invaders and the corrupted areas).

Ex. I want:
- A slow moving enemy that kills you in one hit (requires kiting)
- An enemy that summons minions to block projectiles from the front (requires piercing/aoe)
Result: Ossecati

Ex. I want:
- An enemy that enrages as they take damage (requires burst damage)
- An enemy that leaves trails of desecrated ground (requires good movement)
- An enemy that stacks bleeding on the hero (requires staunching/hurts movement strongly)
Result: Beheader Ataguchu

I'm not sure if it's been a particularly bad approach, though it does suck up a lot of manhours in design and testing (and art). I have to give them props for at least trying to design more in this space instead of leaving enemies completely dumb (and never combining with each other in interesting ways).

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ggnorekthx wrote:

Lastly: Do you feel that IR is overpowered, or do you just dislike it from a design-standpoint? Honestly, ever since they removed the Dex bonus, I've basically not used it on anybody. It feels like a poor man's bandaid that isn't as effective once you have good end-game gear. Only exception is maybe Bringer since you are splitting a good chunk of defense there.

IR is just ugly from a design standpoint (as is GR). Both are apples to apples exchanges that diminish creativity in the game. IR separately has a really gross theme ("iron" reflexes?), and runs counter to what you'd think it's usage is.

If you saw it near ranger/dexterity and thought "oh, it's for dextrous defenders to turn into moderate armor defenders" you'd be dead wrong. It's for pure armor/aura characters that want to get even more armor out of Grace, until a time when their own gear is good enough to go without the few points investment.

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ggnorekthx wrote:

EDIT: I personally feel casters do indeed "need more leech." I would be fine if they redesigned CI to have either faster recharge, or access to regen, or a higher base pool. But in the current state, you need leech. Even with 14k ES you need it. But I agree that if that Infused Shield was something like 20-25% more instead of 12% I could deal with losing leech.

As stated before, the GR change cannot be made in a vacuum. It must be combined with a global buff to ES, otherwise losing the ability to leech will indeed put ES dead in the water.

A lot of that also has to do with the fact that ES CDR was taken out back and shot in the head when GR/ZO were added, and GGG has made no attempt to revive it. You don't need leech if your buffer is very large and it comes packaged with good natural regen. Currently, the buffer is both not large and the natural regen is not good, but the regen is great if you take GR/ZO.

Take away GR/ZO, and now it sucks.
Buff the buffer size, and now it's too good.

The first step GGG can take towards unmaking this mistake is to make ES CDR relevant again. The second step they can take are heavy-handed fixes targeted at ZO/GR, which allows them to make ES much stronger than it is currently.