Analysis and critique of the intellect passive setup.

I think crit makes total sense as the power charge benefit. And it's 3% as opposed to 5% for Frenzy to reflect the fact you'll get a lot more IAS than crit (so the frenzy orb IAS ends up being devalued later)*.

Frenzy orbs even have the 'ramping' effect seen with the "gain charge on crit" passive, since you'll attack faster and thus get more crits that way.

The wildcard is crit effects, which are super powerful. And the power orbs increase the number of these by far, far more than frenzy would via more attacks, since a suite of power orbs will easily straight up quadruple your crit chance.

Compare to frenzy orbs, even totally buffed out at 8 orbs for 7% IAS each, you're going from about +100% IAS to +156% IAS, a 25% increase in attacks (and therefore crits). Quadrupling your number of crit effects....vs increasing number of crit effects by 25%. Now that is a massive difference.

*Note on devaluation of Frenzy orbs due to high IAS from other sources: currently this devaluation is so great that it outweighs the 3% vs 5% thing. A full orb suite will pump your crit from somewhere around 8% to 32%, which is fairly close to a 24% dps increase (and I'm not even counting things which increase crit bonus). The 40% IAS from frenzy orbs, when applied to an easily achieved 100% IAS from other sources, is only ~20% increase in dps.

Wow I should mouseover charges more. Didn't know about cast speed on frenzy that's a game changer. Now when those "Your party gains a charge when you do" passives work charges become even more must have than I had previously thought. As a witch I'd never group with a melee class that didn't have that.


Be nice if the tooltip said what %increase it was on the charges. I believe its a 3% for each different charge?

My thing with power charges is that they increase damage output. However they do that is fine. But decreasing mana costs seems kinda lame for a bonus. Possibly if it was like 10% per charge. I could then focus on cast speed which in turn increases damage.

Mana reduction for PvP could be very good as I am foreseeing this to be the main factor in the result of all pvp matches. Unless dps output is high enough to get past the "tank builds". In games with a low number of controlling abilities (stun/snare/mesmerise/etc) it generally comes down to resource management though.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

Cast speed is already taken by frenzy charges (along with attack speed).

The charges' basic effects need to be things which are reasonably equally useful for any character. That's why frenzy charges give both attack and cast speed, and why I suggested mana cost reduction, since that's something which can apply to all skills, not just spells.
Critical strikes are the Int way to affect basic combat (dex gets attack speed, str gets increased damage), and they are a good fit for the charges, since everyone gets crits.
Maybe they could increase the critical strike damage multiplier, rather than the chance to crit? Or maybe they just need to have a reduction in effect. We've got a lot of balancing yet to come, I'm sure these will be ironed out.

I think crit should stay with power charges as it is useful for all classes.

Also for the witch in particular, crit triggers all those nice and fun effects attached to the elemental spec (ie burning, frozen and shocked) which helps differentiates all the witch builds.

Basically it makes the witch gameplay much more fun and exciting because of the effects triggering and gives incentive to try new witch builds. And that should be encouraged.

Thus if you feel like a nerf is needed, keeping crit and reducing the effect to 2%(?) would be the best approach IMO.

Changing it to mana reduction or crit dmg multiplier would be removing too much of the usefulness and fun factor of power charges. That is never a good thing especially when charges are an original and defining feature of POE compared to other ARPG.

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aimlessgun wrote:

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aaricia wrote:

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aimlessgun wrote:

Every element needs to have similar kills per hour.

If every spec had similar kill speed and cold can freeze and fire can burn ... then all witches will switch to cold or fire.

Please read what I type more carefully.

I'm talking about kill rate over long periods. This takes into account freezing and burning. Freezing increases your kill speed per hour because you maybe can play more aggressive, and you don't die as much.

The whole measure of success in an ARPG is how much loot and XP you can get averaged over a long period. Everything, everything is in service to this. Freezing, burning, tanking, whatever, the measure how good these things are is by how they help you get more loot/xp per unit time.

If a class or spec gets significantly less xp/loot per hour, it is, in ARPG terms, bad. Obviously there will be bad builds if you screw up. But each class should have a few good builds that are all fairly close.

I cannot stress this enough. Zoom out your focus. Think big picture. Think about how to balance xp/loot over long periods of time.

if XP-loot over time is everything and nothing else matters than why bother playing different classes at all ?

The answer is we want fun, effects and seeing mobs die in a myriad of ways using many wonderful skills. The XP-loot is a by product of that fun that keeps us returning to the char we like and hack at monsters.

If a game is only reduced to a number of loot and xp per hour then it pretty much remove all the fun factor out of it ... why not just play 1 class .. any class really or just run an item generator that poops out items and xp each 30 secs.

That is an extreme example of course but made to illustrate a point.

What you have is conflicting design views and the answer lies somewhere in between:

1) one view wants class differentiation via skills, gameplay and mechanics. the further we take this goal and obviously the further the XP-Loot per hour figure will differ from one class to another.

2) another view wants all classes to have the same XP-Loot per hour (lets call this ROP or return on playtime or reward over playtime) because if we dont then the assumption is that people will feel forced to play the class with the most return on playtime.

But I am not so sure the assumption is right. people have other goals then just ROP or accumulating items the fastest possible.

Yes it is an important goal but not the only goal. What about wanting to play the game from the viewpoint of another class after farming for a while and ROP is not that important anymore ? What about PVP ?

it is not right to cater to those other needs/goals by having really different classes ?

Some class will be fun for different playstyle and that is fine too. Some class will be fast and furious but die often. Some class will be slow and cautious. Some class will only use minions or freeze everything in place and be even safer.

Maybe 1 or 2 classes that is naturally good for farming is enough. Some classes will be naturally better at PVP and that is fine too.

The important thing is to make everything viable if you make the right skills, passives and items choice both for PVE and PVP. But viable should not mean equal in terms of playstyle and speed.

The ROP can never be the same if your goal is to cater to all these needs.

And also ROP depends a lot on the playstyle of each individual players and not only on class mechanics. I for example am a very slow player and like to take my time going through everything ... my goal is not speed or the highest ROP at all.

Nobody wants that each and every build in game has the same ROP. Playing a PvP build rewards you with a greater ROP in PvP and a smaller ROP farming. Playing a wand witch might make you kill slower but it's more fun as your wrote.
However there are several conventional builds for each class. Fire/Cold/Lightning for the witch and those should have about the same ROP. They don't need to be identical it's fine when the lightning witch is a bit faster then a cold witch but the difference shouldn't be too noticable, maybe 10%-20%.
From a ROP perspective it would be afwull to be forced to play one class. No one likes that. You need to be able to choose. If i like to farm i do want to choose between a cold witch and a lightning witch without a huge penalty.
Here is a quote of Mark_GGG adressing the melee balance.

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No it doesn't/ He never said that. We want a huge number of different builds to all be viable. Nut not all of them can be. A dual wand Marauder isn't going to be as effective overall as a dual-wand witch, or a two-handed mace marauder. That's as it should be. Players will want to try these underdog builds for the challenge.
But a marauder should be able to be roughly equally effective with Two hand maces as with two one-hand maces, or a one hand mace and shield, and also pretty damn close with any of the above using swords or axes in place of maces. All of which allow a different selection of active skills and passive bonuses.
Having some builds (such as the bow witch) not be as viable as others DOES NOT MEAN that there is one best build for each class. It doesn't even imply that at all, in any way.
We do want to reward players for taking passives which work well together - for example combining extra stun stuff with maces (which have more of their own stun passives) will match up a little better than with swords, perhaps. It's FUN for people to discover interaction between skills which work well, and if everything works just as well with everything else, that fun is removed. And none of that means there's only one best build.

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aaricia wrote:

1) one view wants class differentiation via skills, gameplay and mechanics. the further we take this goal and obviously the further the XP-Loot per hour figure will differ from one class to another.

I think a well designed game should be able to give us very fun and different gameplay experiences while at the same time keeping xp/loot per hour similar.

You do your best to get both.

You are right about the two different views, and people are different mixes of those two things. And my statement saying it all comes down to xp/loot per hour is only showing one side. But I really do believe that it is an achievable goal without sacrificing too many different gameplay styles.

The real issue here is not shock nova as much as it is other things; namely:

1) Power charges. They are perhaps a bit too strong. At the very least, the "gain charge on shocked enemy death" should probably go. And/or drop the 3% crit bonus to 2% maybe.

2) Support gems on shock nova. Knockback and increased AoE in particular is an extremely effective combo with shock nova. (partly due to the damage calculation bug)

3) You are too impatient with your levels. Just because lightning is far ahead of cold at level 25, for example, doesn't mean that it won't be much closer at level 50.

Position the power charges in a balanced way like


Start
/ | \
/ | \
L F C
\ | /
\ | /
P.Charges

LFC Being light fire and cold :)

Edit: post removed my spaces but you get the point, 3 equally long routes through all 3 elements from start -> charges