ggg needs to take steps to make spells more approachable

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NagiSoi wrote:

Either reduce monster resistances or boost spell damage...

Boosting the damage won't help.

You will end up doing from insane damage to no resist mobs to no damage to double resist.

Resistances and resistance mods on rates/bosses need to be severely toned down (maybe give a 40% resistance hard cap on all mobs instead of 75 so that with penetration we could lower them to 0)

Leech should be given to spells also to help. Bereks grip was a step in the right path but we need more and more accessible ways.

i AM the bumpknight!

blood for the blood god!

Not as well versed with the game mechanics as most here, but I wanted to at least attempt to contribute. I apologize if I repeat things that have already been said but I want to make sure that I understand the situation since I'm new.

From what I've experienced and read about so far, it seems that the discrepancy isn't so much that magic is weak (although individual spells could certainly use buffs and the lack of support gem and passive node choices compared to physical damage is obvious), but that there exist far more resistances towards elemental damage and spells than there do for physical damage. The baffling thing is that there exist enemies that resist specific elements, but there are none that are weak to specific elements. Usually there's a "Rock Paper Scissors" effect where an enemy that resists something is vulnerable to something else. But not only is there a distinct lack of anything that has a weakness type, the farther up the ladder you go, the more enemies that flat out resist every element appear. This ends up with a very poorly balanced endgame seeing as physical builds don't have to worry about enemies suddenly resisting 60% of their attack strength.

Reducing or removing completely the additional resist penalties on Cruel and Merciless would certainly help, but would ignore the bigger problem that is present. There would still be enemies resisting elemental attacks and nothing resisting physical attacks. There a number of ways that this could be addressed. Enemies could have Resist Melee or Resist Ranged Physical introduced into their pools so that every damage type has enemies it will perform worse than others against. Enemies could be given weakness types to help compensate. Elemental Resist could reduce the chance for the respective elemental effects rather than lowering damage (ie Resist Lightning enemies will take the same damage from Lightning attacks, but chance to Shock will be halved). That last idea would be tricky and could risk making endgame builds based around permafreezing, burning or shock stacks less viable, but this is a tricky situation.

One thing that needs to be just completely removed, though, is "Immune to Curse". Making a build based around Curses that will be consistently viable is impossible with that modifier in place.

Posting from my phone so I've got to cut this short, please let me know if my current understanding of this situation is correct.

"

Prankman wrote:

Not as well versed with the game mechanics as most here, but I wanted to at least attempt to contribute. I apologize if I repeat things that have already been said but I want to make sure that I understand the situation since I'm new.

From what I've experienced and read about so far, it seems that the discrepancy isn't so much that magic is weak (although individual spells could certainly use buffs and the lack of support gem and passive node choices compared to physical damage is obvious), but that there exist far more resistances towards elemental damage and spells than there do for physical damage. The baffling thing is that there exist enemies that resist specific elements, but there are none that are weak to specific elements. Usually there's a "Rock Paper Scissors" effect where an enemy that resists something is vulnerable to something else. But not only is there a distinct lack of anything that has a weakness type, the farther up the ladder you go, the more enemies that flat out resist every element appear. This ends up with a very poorly balanced endgame seeing as physical builds don't have to worry about enemies suddenly resisting 60% of their attack strength.

Reducing or removing completely the additional resist penalties on Cruel and Merciless would certainly help, but would ignore the bigger problem that is present. There would still be enemies resisting elemental attacks and nothing resisting physical attacks. There a number of ways that this could be addressed. Enemies could have Resist Melee or Resist Ranged Physical introduced into their pools so that every damage type has enemies it will perform worse than others against. Enemies could be given weakness types to help compensate. Elemental Resist could reduce the chance for the respective elemental effects rather than lowering damage (ie Resist Lightning enemies will take the same damage from Lightning attacks, but chance to Shock will be halved). That last idea would be tricky and could risk making endgame builds based around permafreezing, burning or shock stacks less viable, but this is a tricky situation.

One thing that needs to be just completely removed, though, is "Immune to Curse". Making a build based around Curses that will be consistently viable is impossible with that modifier in place.

Posting from my phone so I've got to cut this short, please let me know if my current understanding of this situation is correct.

the big problems are 3 (imo):
a)resists. Currently it is possible, and quite common since almost very creature subtype resists at least 1 elemental to encounter double/triple resist rares. Those have their resistances boosted to even higher than 75% so only thing that actually helps (after the nerf to curses, a lvl20 elemental curse would only reduce the resist by 24%) is penetration.

to put it simply, caster HAVE to spent one slot for penetration if they want to do HALF their dps to a simply double resist rare.

the same spot for a support for a melee attack p.e. will boost the dps of the attack by 40%.

so if we had a melee attacker that his base attack did 100 damage and a spellcaster doing 100 damage, after that single support slot, against a double resist rare, the attacker would do 140 and the caster 60.

or the attacker would do 266% more damage starting from the same base.

due to how armor works atm, after a threshold, melee attackers don't have to worry about it since it usually only cuts 4-5% of their dps

having higher penetrtion, or capping monster resist to 40% (reduced to 5% with penetration) would help equalize those things.

a2)sub problem of the first, is that GGG nerfed elemental damage due to weapon elemental damage, and nerfed the curses. For an attacker a curse can either mean MORE damage, or MORE survivability.

For a caster the reduced curse effectivness actually meant: The one and only way you had to lower resists so that you can actually do your dps and not half of it... is now gone.

b)itemization

atm there isn't one single pure caster item. This means, that every time you try to craft/buy/whatever an item, it's value is increased by quite a bit because it's always possible to roll 100% useless afffixes/prefixes on them. Attackers can use bows/maces/axes/swords/two-handers/etc and not have to worry about this.

Part of the problem is that atm there are FAR TOO CASTER MODS on the item pool, making a "caster only" weapon seem like OP because it would easily roll good rolls.

All of the above can be fixed if they introduce more caster item mods. Added x damage to spells, added fire/lighn/cold, penetates x/y/z, etc are all viable solutions that could help in both the dps problem, the penetration problem and the itemization problem in one go

c)supports.

as a great example lets look at "added x damage". A lvl 20 support offers less than a single item mod for elemental attacks.

To even begin to comprehend how big that issue is, it's 100% the same as adding in the wands as a rollable mod: 40% MORE spell damage.

bump

I sign this thread, Spells are lacking.

Imo nerfing monster resistances is probably enough. My Freezing Pulse char is dealing good damage against monsters without resistances. It's just too bad that every 2nd monster has high resistances which make your damage really bad.

Either nerf Elemental Resistances to make casters more fun or if you don't want to nerf the game ... just add more physical resistances. Wouldn't like that very much though.

i like the fact that they add a new "spell" every patch but they all do so little dmg compared to attacks its just a joke

anothe rbig problem ar the support gems for attacks and spells

just use any physical based attack (works on every atack as long as you invest in physical gear,doesnt matter if you convert it to an element)

add the support gems physical attack dmg (can be the new physical ranged,melee physical or melee physical on full life),faster attacks (which has a lower! multiplier and higher! attackspeed increase than its counterpart for spells) and added fire (if you use physical dmg items its another more dmg multiplier) the result is more than endgame viable (you could put it in and you dont have to worry about leech either)

no spell could ever achieve that

now lets asume you got your hands on a 6link and can run atleast 1 offensive aura (hatred which again adds 36% more! dmg to your attack)

as melee you add multistrike and if you dont want to bother switching skills for aoe and singeltarget add melee splash

ok as ranged you cant use multistrike but WED will be very good as well (since you add 39% of your physical dmg from added fire and another 36% from hatred) and stil have the option to add GMP/LMP or CHAIN

you dont even need "many" dmg passivs (you could even do ok without any lol) when you have q versions of those skills gems together with the level bonus of your gem (4% increased physical dmg for each level) and your str bonus (ok ranged attack need iron grip for this,but there is no keystone for spellusers)

the big problem isnt one of those things alone its the synergy of them

the inherent issue with spells vs melee was that for melee the damage scaler was supposed to be a combination of high modifiers effecting a base weapon

ie gems and auras.


spells were supposed to scale by applying said modifiers to mobs in the form of multi curses.



and trust me a triple cursed mob MELTS, but then ggg did some lame trick where curses are only 30% effective vs bosses. and then there is the curse immunes so spells lost that dps scaler against things they need the scaler the most for


the important thing to remeber though is that spells were not supposed to get damage from gems persay. rather gems were designed to better spread the damage out.



unfortunately the prevalence of curse items .. nullifies the int based advantaged that multi cursing used to have for spell casters

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

the inherent issue with spells vs melee was that for melee the damage scaler was supposed to be a combination of high modifiers effecting a base weapon

ie gems and auras.


spells were supposed to scale by applying said modifiers to mobs in the form of multi curses.



and trust me a triple cursed mob MELTS, but then ggg did some lame trick where curses are only 30% effective vs bosses. and then there is the curse immunes so spells lost that dps scaler against things they need the scaler the most for


the important thing to remeber though is that spells were not supposed to get damage from gems persay. rather gems were designed to better spread the damage out.



unfortunately the prevalence of curse items .. nullifies the int based advantaged that multi cursing used to have for spell casters

why did they create the same amount of cruses for attackbased charrs

a tripple cruses mob will melt doesnt matter if its a spell or an attack that hits them (though the attackuser doesnt even need cruses they melt them anyway)

ele weakness + flamability/frostbite/conductivity together are weaker than Vulnerability even without the cruse resitance of rares/bosses

Vulnerability adds 34% more physical dmg
flamability (-49 resi)+ ele weakness (-49 resi) = -98 resi which have to work against +75% (or even overcaped) resi most of the time,which elads to a tooltip dmg increase by 23% if you use both curses and they would have 100% effectivness