ggg needs to take steps to make spells more approachable

This here is a very interesting thread.
I've read through all 20 pages of pros and cons, 20 pages of different (but interesting) opinions and points.

Currently, I'm a lvl 83 fire witch running a CI build.
Contrary to most of the posts, I find leveling up as a witch very easy. For me, it's the Merciless when the witch starts to fail miserably O.o
And the end-game maps, well, they are a nightmare.

This witch is my very first character in Path of Exile, so some of my opinions might (or might not) be wrong, but I'll add my two cents:


First off, I cannot agree more with people pointing out the ridiculous mana cost of our spells!
Our mana-related passives aren't bonuses at all - they are necessary.
As someone already mentioned; we might pretty damn well have 300 Intel, but we're all out of mana half of the time (exagerating to some degree, but you get the idea).
With that, along with the somewhat slow cast times, our spells just aren't as "spammable" as some other classes' abilities, meaning that we are often unable to do as much dmg as we need.


In pretty much all the games I've played, casters (mages) traded their life/defense for a neat DPS burst, meaning they could kill most of the creatures before the said creatures had time to do enough dmg to kill the caster.
While melee classes usually had somewhat "low" DPS, but they could withstand an insane amount of damage, meaning they took longer to kill something, but could survive as long as needed.
PoE took this usual concept and threw it out of the window (which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, mind you).
The bad thing is that in PoE, casters (witches) still have lower life pool as well as lower armour, but we weren't given the usual DPS burst to compensate. Quite the opposite - we have lower damage output compared to other classes.


On a related note, some people raised an objection that we have the advantage of kiting.
Kiting is usually a fair part of caster's (or any ranged char's, for that matter) gameplay. Kiting is also perfectly doable in most of the games.
Again, in PoE, kitting is often next to impossible, because the vast majority of monsters have some sort of ability to teleport/leap to you (and they are usually very fast, too).
I dare to say that some monsters are even more dangerous if you try to keep a distance from them.
CI build takes this even further with its downside of being stunned/ frozen easily combined with the inability to recover your ES with your flasks.

All in all, ranged or not, there are monsters that we all just have to "facetank", as you people call it. This pretty much negates our "awesome" kitting advantage.


As far as the lack of any sort of life leech from spells or elem. damage goes... Oh my God, yes. How could GGG get away with this?
To make things balanced, IMHO, every phys. attack-related mod should have its spell dmg-related counterpart.
Allow us to life leech with our spells where other classes can life leech with their attacks.
Allow us to have caster-related modifications where other classes have ranged/melee-related mods etc.


Someone here also pointed out that a caster can do just fine with the right combination of ES uniques.
Hah-Hah, I thought MY jokes were bad...


And oh, don't get me started on the fabulous elemental resists that almost every monster posses. Even without them, we're already doing less damage than other classes, but our dmg is apparently still not low enough in GGG's point of view...

hey!

just want to weight in on the spell caster items. All items that roll spell caster stats have a chance to be good for all spell casters.

Attack weapons may roll only attack modifiers and defensive stats, but not all attack weapons are good for all attacks. You have to find the right base item, with the right base attack speed, for your build.

It works itself out and is pretty fairly balanced. If there were caster weapons that could only roll caster stats, caster weapons would be far too easy to find in comparison to attack weapons, due to attack skills needing specific weapon types and weapon bases having different characteristics in dmg per hit/hits per second ratio.

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LostForm wrote:

just want to weight in on the spell caster items. All items that roll spell caster stats have a chance to be good for all spell casters.

Attack weapons may roll only attack modifiers and defensive stats, but not all attack weapons are good for all attacks. You have to find the right base item, with the right base attack speed, for your build.

It works itself out and is pretty fairly balanced. If there were caster weapons that could only roll caster stats, caster weapons would be far too easy to find in comparison to attack weapons, due to attack skills needing specific weapon types and weapon bases having different characteristics in dmg per hit/hits per second ratio.

+% fire/lighting/cold damage
+# level to fire/lightning/cold gems

Also, with faster attacks/multistrike/double strike weapon speeds hardly matter in most cases. DPS is DPS.

Finally, being limited to axes or maces or swords depending on passives is hardly a big deal.

Seriously, you do not understand the issue.

Let me put in this way: How would you feel about melee weapons suddenly being able to roll mana regen or spell damage?

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Vexidious wrote:

"

LostForm wrote:

just want to weight in on the spell caster items. All items that roll spell caster stats have a chance to be good for all spell casters.

Attack weapons may roll only attack modifiers and defensive stats, but not all attack weapons are good for all attacks. You have to find the right base item, with the right base attack speed, for your build.

It works itself out and is pretty fairly balanced. If there were caster weapons that could only roll caster stats, caster weapons would be far too easy to find in comparison to attack weapons, due to attack skills needing specific weapon types and weapon bases having different characteristics in dmg per hit/hits per second ratio.

+% fire/lighting/cold damage
+# level to fire/lightning/cold gems

Also, with faster attacks/multistrike/double strike weapon speeds hardly matter in most cases. DPS is DPS.

Finally, being limited to axes or maces or swords depending on passives is hardly a big deal.

Seriously, you do not understand the issue.

Let me put in this way: How would you feel about melee weapons suddenly being able to roll mana regen or spell damage?

claws already can roll mana regen and daggers can already roll mana regen And spell damage.

I assure you I understand the issue. There is no amount of chaos orbs you can roll on a mace and use it for viper strike. It will not happen ever.

No, the fact is that attacks only using certain weapons is a huge limitation on weapon upgrades, at least as big as rolling both attack and magic stats on items.

And for you to imply that a weapon with 1.2 attack speed base and relatively high phys damage base and a weapon with 1.7 attack speed base and very low phys damage are relatively the same is laughable.

the nerfs were bad but the items are really to blame here. the game is being balanced around the existence of things like low-life shav, making anything less than that basically trash.

then of course there is crown of eyes. roll an attack based char or bust.

Spells OP, "WE WANT MELEE"
Melee OP, "WE WANT SPELLS"

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JoesGetNDown wrote:

Spells OP, "WE WANT MELEE"
Melee OP, "WE WANT SPELLS"

more like elemental cleave/LS OP "buff physical"

nerf elemental damage to hell and beyond+ buff physical to stratosphere->err spells?


the thing is that there is a HUGE differance atm in both survivability AND dps between physical attacks and 95% of the spells (excluding EK and discharge)


i assure you, if all spells were buffed to discharge levels of damage physical builds would be flooding the forum.


the thing is, that item mods for spells are what currently gate the game to being so attack friendly:

a single elemental weapon gives 3 support gems for free compared to spells, each flat +x damage is actually MORE damage given to the attack than a lvl 20 gem, and you can roll 3 of them+ another 3 mods.

casters atm are lacking that diversity:

only one way to heal as a caster: leech gem. only one way to do even HALF of your tooltip dps on a rare: penetration (another gem slot) +curse


so, from the get go, casters start with -2gem slots and - their curse against double resist mobs (quite often).

This isn't something that can be easily fixed with a simple +x damage given to spell passives:

when you start with doing 1/4 of your damage to somem mobs and 100% of your damage to another, you can't really say "ok let's buff caster damage" because you can either buff it too little or too much depending on the mob you hit.


Allowing spell leech in items and HIGH passive penetration (75%) but capping the penetration to not go into the negatives can fix those two issues:

casters would be able to free up 2 gem slots->boost to caster damage: check
casters would be able to do their tooltip damage to all mobs with proper passive/gear investment: check


the thing is that we NEED at least those 2 mods (spell leech/spell penetration) on items or passives or else the gap will remain.

another "easy" solution would be to fix the mob types:

completly remove the "resists all elemental damage" type from the game

split the mobs into 6 categories: mob population should llok like
18%resists element X
18% resist element Y
18% resist elemnt z
18% less physical damage taken
18% evasive
10% resist chaos

resist x should have natural vulnerability y
resist y natural vuln etcetcetc
less physical damage taken should have less evasion
less evasion should have increased physical received

NONE of the unique bosses should be of either type.

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kinglouis wrote:

the nerfs were bad but the items are really to blame here. the game is being balanced around the existence of things like low-life shav, making anything less than that basically trash.

I have said this twice now, but nobody seems to have paid attention. I agree with this 100%. To have casters balanced around an item that most will never see is just dumb. They give us a tasty passive point (Pain Attunement) but then put it just out of reach by requiring us to have shavs to use it effectively. I would argue that ES based RF is in the same place.

deserves first page status bump