ggg needs to take steps to make spells more approachable

Look it is a fact , spell caster characters arent anywhere near as popular as melee or even bow users.


And that hurts everyone , spells are a good source of the games variety, and if the class isnt fun to play at any point , well then that is a bad thing.


And that really is the issue right now , there are a number of things in the game that are conspiring to make spell casting unpopular .


1 the lack of availability of caster items. All caster items share their rolls with weapon based mods. This makes getting good spell casting items a real chore. And I am not just talking about grinding out the perfect crit spell damage mana dagger. Im talking about getting just some passable spell damage wand /staff/ knife for the purpose of leveling.

Simple fact , I can easily get a decent melee weapon or bow , from drops. It will take me some dedicated boss farming to get a wand that is passable.

this slows down everything , it slows down progression because your damage source will be difficult to scale at all. and poe is already excessively slow paced in the start up .


2
spells scale horribly in the early - mid game. from level 1 - 48 there will never be a time where spells will come even close to the dps of ranged / melee weapons. at best they will do 50% of the damage of item characters for that 1 - 50 area. At worst they will do a quarter of the damage.

that simply is not fun. It not fun to know that for the first 50 levels of the game that any party you are in , YOU will be the one slowing everyone down. ALWAYS.

spells simply do not have the base damage in the early game.


3
spell damage passives are utter garbage. I understand that spell caster can get spell damage from wands , and melee and bow users cant. But that doesnt justify a spell user having to use twice as many nodes to get the same bang as a melee / bow user.

6% elemental damage nodes? that's a joke. Not when melee nodes are 10 - 15 easily.

These nodes pull new players into bad practices as they are desperately wasting points on shit nodes to make their mediocre dps better.

There are better ways. Buff the nodes , make them 10 - 15% , but cut the number of nodes in half.
so instead of 8 shit nodes , 4 decent ones would be much better.


4
there is an over dependence on curses , which conveniently dont work on bosses all that well.
Why? WHY? we can already see spells have dps troubles in the early game who thought it was a brilliant idea to make the beefiest monsters in the game almost immune to curses?

this serves no purpose than to make bosses even more of a superfluous gear check for spell casters whose dinky spells damage chip away at the bosses hp while the bosses can one shot said spell casters.



5 1 -2 OP spells are ruining it for everyone else. Discharge is not the yard stick we should be measuring the success of spells. as kripprarian and others have demonstrated discharge is so powerful that it doesn't need ANY damage nodes to be viable.

When every other spell in the game has dps troubles . discharge has the exact opposite issue of doing too much damage.


discharge is not a spell . it is in a league all on its own , we need to stop comparing it to the joke that is other spells.


6 crit is too important a scaler for spells these days, This is less crits fault and more the fault of all the previous 5 things, but is pretty much the only good way to scale spells. this dramatically limits build variety.


Note much of these issue become less of an issue once the spell gems hit level 20 , but the average level 20 gem will see the user of it in their mid 80s.

waiting to level 86 to get your endgame damage . is absurd. that is my point.

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

Why? WHY? we can already see spells have dps troubles in the early game who thought it was a brilliant idea to make the beefiest monsters in the game almost immune to curses?

this serves no purpose than to make bosses even more of a superfluous gear check for spell casters whose dinky spells damage chip away at the bosses hp while the bosses can one shot said spell casters.

I've heard rumors that Piety and some map bosses have over 200% cold resist.

That is kind of stupid if it's true.

To add to your list:

Every end game mob and their mothers have elemental resist. Meanwhile 0% physical resist.

They can't. I've come to the conclusion GGG don't know how to balance anything and we are going to go through a continuous loop of one type being overpowered compared to the other, whilst they annoy the fuck out of there player base for making drastic build changes half way through a league. These guys are amateurs, and it shows.

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omgken233 wrote:

To add to your list:

Every end game mob and their mothers have elemental resist. Meanwhile 0% physical resist.

Well, technically, "the most armour monsters have in the game is about 930," which provides about 7% physical resist against a 1000-physical-damage hit.

So, yeah, pretty much 0% physical resist.

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MrMisterMissedHer wrote:

"

Saltychipmunk wrote:

4
there is an over dependence on curses , which conveniently dont work on bosses all that well.
Why? WHY? we can already see spells have dps troubles in the early game who thought it was a brilliant idea to make the beefiest monsters in the game almost immune to curses?

I don't claim responsibility.

However, I argued the case that curses in general have too much of an effect (before they were nerfed) on game balance. I also suggested that bosses should have some sort of curse resistance due to them being, you know, bosses. A pack of blue monsters with curse immune for instance was easily more hairy than any boss, if you were using curses.

For enfeeble it's literally like having at least 30% extra hp. If you start combining curses and add hexmaster, it gets silly.

It also means that due to the strength of the curses, they become mandatory, yet they imposed heavy restrictions on grouping setups and general balance ends up being around having a boss enfeebled, or running around with everything having elemental weakness on it.

I think curses are in a much better spot now, they are still really useful, but I take it that some of the effects of heavy reliance still needs to be tweaked and translated to the appropriate places.

Can't say shit about playing as a caster atm though.

And that's why your opinion on curses is completely useless. And they were not mandatory due to the strength, they were mandatory because without them your damage is severely limited as a spell caster. But once again with the GGG logic of 'OMG ITS USED BY SO MANY. MUST BE OP NERF NERF NERF' when they should be looking at WHY it's used so many times, and in this case it's because spells suck without them.

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MrMisterMissedHer wrote:

"

Peenk wrote:

And that's why your opinion on curses is completely useless. And they were not mandatory due to the strength, they were mandatory because without them your damage is severely limited as a spell caster. But once again with the GGG logic of 'OMG ITS USED BY SO MANY. MUST BE OP NERF NERF NERF' when they should be looking at WHY it's used so many times, and in this case it's because spells suck without them.

Now I'm pretty sure my opinion on curses relating to playing as a pure caster is useless currently.

Unfortunately I am also able to use curses NOT playing as a caster though and I partied extensively with a build running multiple curses that carried me.

Curses shouldn't make up for spells sucking shit though, because other people will exploit the fuck out of it.

See that is another issue with the curse nerf of maps and such, people made full support characters and now are completely useless is most scenarios. This is the thing that annoys me most about GGG, they see everything in a very small line of sight, totally ignoring anybody who thinks outside the box to use these 'op skills' in a way which other people don't. I mean that's the idea of the game right? But I've given up on that part of the game and now just follow the cookie cutter builds, anything theory crafted to be very strong will just be nerfed.

I just rerolled my level 80 freezing pulse CI witch to a marauder and it's a completely different experience!

I don't get chilled every time a monster does any kind of cold damage.
I don't have to wear Eye of Chayula in order to not get chain-stunned.
I don't have to link life leech to my attack because physical damage can leech through gear and skill points.
I don't have to use my curse slot to remove cold resistance, because monsters just don't have physical resistance.


Why would anyone ever use CI?