ggg needs to take steps to make spells more approachable

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Gorrim wrote:

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shroudb wrote:

Tell me a non-discharge non cast on crit (which insidentaly makes the best way to cast spells an attack...)that can run up to the numbers of a normal melee build (like having 20k HUGE AOE dps +14% life leech with gear worth ~1ex)

Seriously, your highest level character is 64 , so please, go roll a high end caster first and THEN come to talk here.

EK builds might poke a hole in this claim of melee superiority...... I believe some are getting 300k dps? (yes EK is a spell)

Other than that the only 2 other dominant self cast builds that I can think of are FP/Cold caster, and Incinerate. Both are more tanky than dps output builds though.....

I have faith in my new experiment on a lightning caster using the new Storm call, but the Jury is still out. (I hate that it only has 4% base crit......)

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Rahabs wrote:

As someone who plays casters almost exclusively, I have no problem saying ranged isn’t really a play style anymore. The variety of movement abilities in game now, reflect, thorns, curses, bubbles, coupled with the default view distance, “ranged” just means 2 hander sweep range. Stuff can be kited effectively, but with POE’s dysnc, lag, ect you’d have to be on crack to say you don’t need leech or decent regen. And that’s for kiting melee, never mind the missile barrage and aoe abilities you find in maps. As others have said this puts spells at a huge disadvantage since they don’t get leech from items.

Buffing mob armor / nurfing melee isn’t the way to balance out dmg spells, and I agree that it’d be nice to have some spell pen passives in the tree, but I think the main drawback to spells right now is they have very low base crit, and can’t buff that. Attacks can get a sweet roll, or drop and have a base crit of 10% fairly easily. Spells in general can’t get above 6%, which then renders all those points you dump into crit nodes less effective than their melee counterparts. In addition, spells have no buff auras to add all those great elemental effects. Yes it’s harder to load auras now (and god that sucked a lot of creativity out of builds) but any attack can still throw wrath on and suddenly have all that shock stacking that spells get, but they keep their 10% base crit % chance from their weapon.
The other major discrepancy I see between attacks and spells is cast time. Spells have some pretty long and elaborate cast times, but we don’t have 15% cast speed notables combined with numerous other fun stuff like 20 dex. Instead we get to spend 3 points in most cases for 9%. This renders incinerate (or maybe firestorm) as the only spell which can apply some of the % chance proc abilities in game (blind on incinerate is hilarious btw).

As others in this thread have pointed out, GGG recently buffed the hell out of HP melee builds, and with good reason. Last time that was done was way back in CB if I recall. Just from looking at the current tree it’s pretty easy to see the witch area hasn’t been updated in a long, long time, and she’s probably next in line. My suggestion would be to either up the base crit on most direct dmg spells, buff / streamline cast time nodes, or revamp the witch and templar area spell nodes so they have combo effects like the shadow nodes (8% dmg vs 8% dmg + 5% to ignite).

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Mannoth wrote:

EK builds are invalid, they do not care about having their DPS cut by armor.
Imo an idea i had would be something like: Spells penetrate 15% of elemental resists (maybe even a noteable or something? Like +15% mana cost, +15% elemental penetration for spells).

That way elemental cleavers and etc are still the same, spells get some love.

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Mannoth wrote:

EK builds are invalid, they do not care about having their DPS cut by armor.
Imo an idea i had would be something like: Spells penetrate 15% of elemental resists (maybe even a noteable or something? Like +15% mana cost, +15% elemental penetration for spells).

That way elemental cleavers and etc are still the same, spells get some love.

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Gorrim wrote:

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Mannoth wrote:

EK builds are invalid, they do not care about having their DPS cut by armor.
Imo an idea i had would be something like: Spells penetrate 15% of elemental resists (maybe even a noteable or something? Like +15% mana cost, +15% elemental penetration for spells).

That way elemental cleavers and etc are still the same, spells get some love.

EK is valid as its a spell, it just doesn't have the downside of matching up against monster resistances.

On that note, what about gems/uniques/passives/auras that convert elem damage into physical dmg? There are a plethora of the above that convert phys to elem dmg, but none that do the opposite....... Then the Phys leach stats could be adjusted to phys dmg, not phys attacks and casters instantly become ...... OP, nm on that last part.

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shroudb wrote:

one of the many issues spell casters have is that reists work always (as opposed to armor that works.. never)

so in merciless+maps+etc when every single mob has very high resist elemental damage, their dps is cut to at least half most of the times.

curses are mandatory to bypass this, but curse-immune and etc shennanigans make it mandatory to also run penetration gems.

so, your curse is FORCED to be an offensive one and you also lose 1 gem slot. This is just to even out the resists vs armor anomally.

a solution would be to scale down monster resistances, bu a LOT. Like "resists elemental damage" on merciless on a white mob needs to be close to 15-20% resistances, while individual "resists x" can be as high as 50%. That still allows rares to have 70-75% resistance if they are of the subtype and have the resistance mode. OR elemental resist curses need to be buffed to be close to 75% resuced resistance at lvl 20.

then comes the fact that since spell damage is heavily dependent on gem level, you have to wait to ridicusly high level to actually use your spell to 100% effectivness (high mid 80s for lvl 20 gem) while attack users again have no problem finding/buying a great weapon at something like lvl 70 and have 100% of their dps output from then on.

finally, the supports themselves are kinda worse in a lot of cases. Take 2 generic MORE multipliers in the game: more physical damage: drawback=none. More aoe damage: drawback much reduced range. Why?

Spells, at the moment are relegated to being used as a support/secondary casts (CoC, CoS, CwDt etc) are all far better ways to actually casts the spells, rather than... casting them!

Final nail in the coffin is the actual casting stat, int and mana gain and mana costs.

Stats are suppossed to give bonuses, p.e. str gives health and damage, more health=more survivability, more damage is well more damage.

int gives mana and es. Es is survivability, good so far. Mana on the other hand isn't even a bonus for spellcasters since their mana costs are close to 1000% on some cases compared to attacks. I get it that attack users often don't have a lot of mana so their attacks need to be cheap(er) but on the other hand, boosting your main stat only so you can actually use your skills (as opposed to get a benefit from it) is ridiculous.

Mana costs for spells need to be reduced to attack levels, and then casters can enjoy the benefit of having a ton of mana/mana regen to use other things with, like more auras, arctic armor, MoM, etc.

And MoM needs to be moved to witch area.

the are my 2(more like 50) cents.

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ciel289 wrote:

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Mannoth wrote:

EK builds are invalid, they do not care about having their DPS cut by armor.
Imo an idea i had would be something like: Spells penetrate 15% of elemental resists (maybe even a noteable or something? Like +15% mana cost, +15% elemental penetration for spells).

That way elemental cleavers and etc are still the same, spells get some love.

you want to increase the manacost of spells even further when they are already ridiculous high compared to attacks just to give them back some of there "real" dmg that physical attack never had to worry about? doesnt seem fair to me

dont get this the wrong way, i dont want to offend you in any way but the manacosts of spells are unfair (imo) just thinking about increasing them even more makes me crazy

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wehrberg wrote:

Try a dual void battery Fireball build, it's like running around with a rocket launcher... a rocket launcher that shoots out 3 rockets at a time!