Nerf life nodes while boosting base life so life itself isn't nerfed 2: Electric Boogaloo

Original Thread (February to June): link
Patch 0.11.0 (announced June 3): link to patch notes
Retrospective thread (June 25): here

Over the past three months, I've changed my mind about how the whole life node nerf was handled. In the retrospective thread, I saw the 0.11.0 changes as my idea failing; however, since then, I've realized they didn't really use my idea, only half of it.

They used the "nerf life nodes" half; they did not use the "boost base life" half. They replaced that with a monster damage rebalance, which simply doesn't work.

Why? Because it doesn't really change the source of player survivability in life-based builds. For those who are still going life (and not ES, after life was nerfed), it's still Path of Life nodes, because the core issue hasn't been addressed at all. Base life is still pitiful and calculated exactly the same as it was prior to 0.11.0; the only reliable ways to increase your life are still item affixes on gear, and lots of passive nodes.

So I'm reviving my old idea, but with some contemporary modifications.

1. Leveling: not enough of a source of life
The core of my suggestion is to make base life less dependent on... anything, really. A character with very few life nodes and not a lot of +Life affixes on gear should indeed by fragile, but not as ridiculously glass as they are currently. You shouldn't need every single piece of gear to have the life affix to consider it usable.

• From 6 base Life gained per level, to 9 base Life gained per level.

2. Items: too much of a source of Life as a percentage
I understand that neither GGG nor the players would like anyone messing with their gear. Fortunately, my suggestion doesn't require it. By increasing the amount of life you gain just by leveling, the amount provided by your gear proportionally becomes less significant, because 100 to 740 has less of an impact than adding that same 100 to 470. Numerically, gear affixes wouldn't change; however, their impact would become less noticeable. (Yes, that does mean this suggestion is a good Kaom's Heart fix.)

3. Life nodes: too much of a source of Life
How much increased attack speed do you get from a single node? 3% for most, 4% for the slightly better ones, maybe 12% for a notable, right? Increased attack speed boosts your total DPS — all forms of damage, not just physical. For the same reasons, the standard for increasing life — which increases your survivability against all forms of damage, not just one element — should be 4%.

• All non-notable hybrid evasion/life nodes should be changed to 6% Evasion, 3% Life.
• All 6% Life nodes should be changed to 4% Life.
• All 10% Life non-notables should be changed to 6% Life.
• The 12% Life non-notable should be changed to 8% Life. (It's the first node every Marauder takes.)
• All 8% Life notables should be changed to 6% Life.
• All 10% Life notables should be changed to 8% Life.
• All 16% Life notables should be changed to 12% Life.

This would lead to about a 30% average reduction in effectiveness of life nodes for the average build; 200% increased max Life would become about 140%.

4. Strength: actually not enough of a source of life either
When you see "mirror service" ES chests, they often have Intelligence as an affix. Why? Because the increased ES is important to survivability. With life-based chests, you almost never see this. Simply put, Strength doesn't compete strongly enough with the +Life affix to make it relevant. With base life from levels being increased by my suggestion, increasing Strength to keep its input proportionally relevant is required.

• Life per point of Strength from 0.5 to 1.0.
• Base life for a level 0 character with 0 Strength from 50 to 30. This means that a level 1 character currently has 63-71 starting Life, depending on starting Strength; under my suggestions, it would be 53-69 starting Life.

5. Energy Shield and Monster Damage: Not involved in any way
Let's not muddle this up with monster damage tweaks or changes to ES. Keep those exactly as they are. This is about fixing how life builds work, it's simply not a non-life-build issue. A CI character under this suggestion operates exactly the same as before (actually slightly better, due to how stuns are calculated). I guess hybrid ES/life characters, to include Righteous Fire users, would have more base life without committing a single node to Life; if that's a disadvantage to them, no tears shed by me.

Add it all together, and what do you get?
Well let's say an EB Witch is level 70, has 500 life from gear affixes, and 120 Strength. Now lets look at a life-based Marauder who is level 75, has 750 life from gear affixes, and 400 Strength. Finally, lets look at that same Marauder, who is now wearing Kaom's Heart: level 75, has 1650 life from gear affixes, and 360 Strength.
Here's what all three examples have in common:

• Changes would actually be very moderate overall. I'm not trying to change the game that much.
• Non-Kaom's life receives a mild boost.
• The combination of Kaom's life and heavy life node stacking receives a slight nerf.
• Pressure to take every life node possible is (slightly) reduced, allowing (slightly) more passive tree experimentation.

Comments? Criticisms?

Question:
At present, is life improperly balanced throughout the entire game or is it a particular time when the balance issues arise?

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PolarisOrbit wrote:

Question:
At present, is life improperly balanced throughout the entire game or is it a particular time when the balance issues arise?

That depends on how far you intend to progress, how many respec quests you want to spend time completing, and how Orbs of Regret you feel like using.

Or to be less cryptic: The issues only really arise during endgame, but in a sense the entire progression prior to that is a preparation for endgame, thus the "Path of Life Nodes" effect kicks in for many as early as the character creation screen. For others, much later. For some, never; they're just not concerned with content past level 60.

"

How much increased attack speed do you get from a single node? 3% for most, 4% for the slightly better ones, maybe 12% for a notable, right? Increased attack speed boosts your total DPS — all forms of damage, not just physical. For the same reasons, the standard for increasing life — which increases your survivability against all forms of damage, not just one element — should be 4%.

Actually, ias is one of the worst nodes to stack due to most builds already having 100-200%. projectile damage or wed and even 20% accuracy will generally yield more dps per point investment. The only reason to stack it is because its really fun and enjoyable to shoot faster.

I'm fine with most of it as I'm a big proponent of gear being too powerful compared with the skill tree, but I don't see how nerfing life nodes again will serve a purpose.

The skill tree problem is that life nodes are "boring", and that can be fixed not by nerfing them so people take them less, but by making them more interesting like the ES nodes.

We already have ranger Evasion/Life hybrid nodes, now we need some more hybrid nodes instead of the plain ones. Doesn't even have to be resists/armour/evasion, it can be a node that gives you extra life and int/dex/damage/crit multiplier/etc.

What I had in mind was to just make some life nodes flat instead of a %. Buffing strength is nice, but remember that a lot of strength comes from gear.

I dunno. While I like your outcome, I think seeing a bunch of 4% life nodes would be a little underwhelming. Hard to get excited about spending hard-earned skill points on things that look like they don't help much. Sure, if you get a lot of them they add up, but not very satisfying to click each one as you get points. Instead of lowering the percentage on all the nodes, I'd rather see fewer nodes with higher numbers, so you at least feel like you're getting your money's worth, so to speak.

Or maybe to achieve the balance you seek, more nodes need to give a flat number instead of a percentage. I think it might be more satisfying to click on a 4% node if it also gave +10 life. Maybe have nodes that give between +10 and +100 life, depending on how hard it was to get to the nodes. That would put less emphasis on the percentage nodes.

Just add hp to melee notables. Problem solved.

If it is primarily an end-game issue, then why did you suggest a core systems change?

Let me explain:
First, I agree this is mainly an issue for high level characters, not for low level ones. The consequence of that is that I think the low levels do not need significant rebalancing efforts, at least in this regard. It took a lot of time and testing to get things working as well as they are now for 1-60, I don't think it's wise to keep changing that system as a fallout of problems further down the road.

Second, is it really life that is the problem now? I think you have taken on so much personal responsibility for life that you have gotten stuck on trying to fix your original "flawed" idea rather than look for new flaws or changes in the situation. To whit, uniques and keystones. Energy Shield has better leech and regeneration due to keystones, uniques in the current environments (which exclude Kaom's) are heavily stilted in favor of ES builds compared to life builds. Modifying the keystone benefits/penalties, re-introducing Kaom's, and equalizing future unique introduction to help build types (including "life") that are viewed as underpowered could have major implications on end-game balance in regards to life vs. alternatives. When the problem is end-game balance, how about targeting things that only apply in the end-game: uniques and keystone combinations?

Third, consider the source of end-game balance feedback. One thing I think we have learned from the life change is that end-game players do not discuss balance in the same way as designers. Kaom's was overpowered, Kaom's was a component of life builds, therefore life was overpowered as well. A player may make the leap to the 3rd part of that comment (viewing the environment as static); a designer would not (viewing the environment as dynamic). But when players short-circuit their feedback to just the part that is relevant to them without explaining how they came to that conclusion ("life is overpowered") the designer listens to the feedback from their own perspective ("players say life is overpowered. how do we fix that? guess we need to change life"). This doesn't please everyone because the designer misunderstood what the player said.

Why life over/underpowered is important. A solution which ignores that is doomed to further rebalancing, tweaking, and patching, down the road.

I agree with everything except point 3. But I'll come back to that at the end...

I think your strongest point is about too much base life coming from gear, compared to coming from levels. It's the main reason why so much of the gear sucks: if it doesn't roll life mod, it better have 4+ uber strong mods or it's junk. And even then, I'll pick the average chest with +100 life over a 1500 defense tri-resist 0 life chest any day, because I can balance resists and get defenses by other means... but not the flat life.

How important is life on gear? While writing this, I checked out a few of my level 75+ characters to figure out where their base life comes from. I find that about 60% of my life comes from gear, the rest is levels, str and so on. Fuck I better not lose any of these life mods on gear, or it hurts.

What I would like to see is around 20-35% of life coming from gear depending on how good your gear is. So your suggestion of increasing life per level would do just that.

Like I said the only point I disagree with is point 3. I think reducing the amount of %life per node is not a good idea, they need to remain relevant. What should be done instead is balance this new influx of base life coming from levels is to remove a ton of life nodes from the tree. Currently I try to get about 150% life on my characters. When you think about it, the fact that I'm able to do this is kinda insane. I can more than double my survivability, and I can triple it if I go all out and get 200%. The tree should just not allow this, it makes every other nodes look like crap.

So I think after removing a bunch of life nodes (similar to how the tree was right after they implemented this version in closed beta, like early version 0.9.x) you should be able to reach only about ~75% in life nodes on a character, with small life nodes staying at their current value of 6%. If you go serious path of life nodes on a hardcore character, 100% in life nodes would be adequate, and ~130% a worthy goal.

Basically, make it so the universal defense (life) comes more naturally to characters, not something you have to base your gear and passive tree around so much.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

3. Life nodes: too much of a source of Life
All non-notable hybrid evasion/life nodes should be changed to 6% Evasion, 3% Life.
All 6% Life nodes should be changed to 4% Life.
All 10% Life non-notables should be changed to 6% Life.
The 12% Life non-notable should be changed to 8% Life.
All 8% Life notables should be changed to 6% Life.
All 10% Life notables should be changed to 8% Life.
All 16% Life notables should be changed to 12% Life.

This would lead to about a 30% average reduction in effectiveness of life nodes for the average build; 200% increased max Life would become about 140%.

Combined with your other boosts to base life, this Life Node nerf would serve only to perpetuate the Path of Life Nodes syndrome that we're all so tired of. What GGG should do instead is impose a diminishing returns formula on % Increased Life, making it asymptotically cap out at around +150% Increased Life from all sources combined. That would enable life-based builds to get their necessary life boosts without ganking every available Life Node, while simultaneously capping excessive Life Node abuse.

Diminishing Returns mechanisms were the saving grace of many of Diablo II's overamped damage quirks. While GGG's efforts to avoid attribute caps have generally been laudible (e.g. no caps on max APS), I think asymptotic caps on defensive attribute boosts would help more than hurt. A prime example is elemental resists, which are crudely hard-capped at 75%. An asymptotic diminishing returns cap would make the trade-offs of resistance optimization far more challenging.