New Skill Development - Part 2

When builds like tornado shot are so good that you can clear an entire screen with 1-2 shots, you had better make new warcrys do something more than slow movespeed and add a corpse explode. We get heralds and master crafting increasing dps and making range builds with fast clear speed too desirable. If you're in melee range you're in range of some of the more brutal melee hits in the game. Melee skills also have laughable range compared to ranged skills like flameblast/tornado shot. Being tanky enough to facetank a boss isn't all that great when range builds can just avoid being in range and still do half the screen in aoe with equal damage.

The skills should prioritize rewarding players for being close to danger with meaningful aoe or some substantial bonus. You perform the new abyssal warcry, enemies are slowed, somebody else 1 shots the pack and the corpse explode is just as pointless as casting it. It seems it will be equally useless against bosses. Maybe a melee build could use it and try to slow dangerous mobs and kite with molten strike, it just seems like a complete joke. Enduring cry and the new war crys should give melee a bonus, not ranged, and not just cheesey useless mechanics. Abyssal Cry would need to flat out stun enemies for it to be used today I feel. A better cry would be the mobs affected by the cry give you or other parties members in melee range of the warcryed mobs an aoe/dps boost for the amount of affected mobs close to the player, something worth casting. Maybe affected mobs share damage, meaning if you single target a pack of mobs under the warcry with a "melee" skill they all take full or part of that damage. Even an IIR/IIQ cry would be more useful than 1/3 of the temp chains curse at melee range, which abyssal cry essentially is. The Quecholli unique mace is nice for the free corpse explode, but not if I had to charge it first at the cost of a potential attack in the time it took to charge.

Not making these warcrys a spell or changing EC is an awful idea I feel. Being able to automate tedious tasks like multi-curse on hit is good for the game experience when so many builds just crush mobs with half a screen in aoe. Slow calculated game play has gone out the window currently. The damage balance is pretty bad and getting worse. Most mobs don't or can't hit you effectively, some hit you but don't do any damage, some do damage but can only hit you when you are stationary in melee range (lol), then there are awful mobs like rhoa and frogs that can offscreen you in ways that almost demand an automated IC setup. Now we have bloodline packs which apparently a lot of which are going to be added to the game. Do we really need more oneshot mechanics when fast dps big aoe has been made so accessible? Shouldn't we have more medium range damage as opposed to either no damage or insta death before removing cwdt-ec-ic is tossed around? Evasion is finally not a garbage defense and while build diversity is lacking for melee's effectiveness, the game is more balanced lately than ever before.

Bloodlines being added to the game, in its current state, is so bizzare. The bloodline affixes are almost completely onesided in punishing melee and favoring range. As a ranged build you're somewhat immune to damage or oneshot from all 3 bearers, heralds (sprinkler), all the pulsebloods, cult of the elements, voidspawn and living blood accidental spawns. The rest are just more annoying than dangerous and otherworldy sucks for all. With act 4, melee builds are to get unautomated EC so they can have the option to cast a 50-60% movespeed slow at melee range?

Adding a warcry like abyssal cry and removing enduring cry as a spell make me somewhat nervous for act4. I'm all for a major change in the game but abyssal cry doesn't make me optimistic.

"

grepman wrote:

"

Redblade wrote:

Fooling around in standard a bit atm and it seems IC doesn't counter devourers initial hit if you pop it just after they spawn but before the hit. Wonder how the die hard supporters of manual casting see that mechanic fitting in to their world view...

the mechanic is exactly the same for cwdt+ec+ic as it is for manual casting

so, I fail to see your point. especially since you'll still be able to automate IC.

I honestly can't tell what happened, all I know is that I had charges, popped IC as soon as they spawned and they still chunked me for about 3k. Only other possibility I can think of is that there was a rare with added elemental damage (Mjölner build so can be hard to tell some times) which is equally scary as I have 85%+ resists.

While I can agree on the premise that CwDT EC/IC is problematic we have to point out the obvious cause for it's overuse and that's high physical burst damage, especially from devourers which you can't play smart to negate the damage. Now if GGG had said something about balancing the main reason people feel they have to use this gem combo I'd be all ears but they didn't.

This change would require a drastic change to physical reflect.

"

Jackel6672 wrote:

War Cries should also be awesome for summoners.

Summoners? It's probably class least interested in such gimmicks and most hungry for sockets, so I really don't think so. Seems like you haven't played serious summoner...

"

grepman wrote:

there is no choice now

"No choice" is not induced by existence of this possibility, but due to design of mobs, especially devs love to unexpected, spiked damage without boundaries and sense.

If we assume, that they will redesign mobs and rebalance mobs damage to avoid such, I would agree with you. But my experiences after more than 2 year here says, that they will not do it, and even if do, it will be done wrongly and need readjusted which take at least few months (maybe, hopefully).

That's why "those with supporter tags are so untrusful". It's because they have seen a lot of GGG failures.

GGG team is too small for their ambitions of creating very complicated game. They constantly try to take much more chunk that they can chew, denies open beta test and what we see in results is constant flow of new, smaller and bigger failures when they issue new content. It's just build in their project management approach.

"

tmaciak wrote:

"

grepman wrote:

there is no choice now

"No choice" is not induced by existence of this possibility, but due to design of mobs, especially devs love to unexpected, spiked damage without boundaries and sense.

open beta, summer of '13
monsters hit hard, sure no devourers or chimeras or evangelists or birdmen yet...however mobs in general hit harder (remember this is before the big nerf to monster damage), theres less dps, there are no trigger gems

yet there was choice

no choice isnt 'induced' by design. the design promotes desync and one-shotting. however, the fact is that CWDT combo is something that is SO much better than other alternatives at alleviating these design 'side effects'. it has nothing to do with the original cause.

I mean, think about it. just because big bad wolf isnt around doesnt mean you wanna build your houses out of straw and other garbage. just like with CWDT the choice to go brick is clearly superior.

people would still be using CWDT combo if design was less 'harsh', just because its easy and trivial to get a defense of this caliber. clearly, its the best choice against physical damage and phys reflect with no real investment.

"

grepman wrote:

open beta, summer of '13
monsters hit hard, sure no devourers or chimeras or evangelists or birdmen yet...however mobs in general hit harder (remember this is before the big nerf to monster damage), theres less dps, there are no trigger gems

yet there was choice

No, there was no choice. Only IR/Grace/Determination which people used like EC/IC/CwDT now. 8 auras characters to pull out any defense you can get and still have non-zero DPS.

I played melee then, I now how it looked like.

And TBH, if I would need return to those times, I would probably quit, because comparing to what we have now, it was very unfunny gameplay experience.

Removal of cwdt/ic/ec = RIP Literally almost everyone.

I'll quote someone else's post:

"it will:
decrease game pace
destroy a lot of existing builds
make ranged builds even more desirable
make new player experience much harder when trying to enter end-game map gameplay
give rich people with amazing builds and capabilites even more of an edge over poor ones as they will be the ones able to mitigate this change"

Not to mention how absolutely devastating rhoas/devos/frogs/etc will be when you're going to be permastunned? Or be required to take unwavering stance/kaoms roots/whatever on every build. Woo, changing the meta from one absolutely required thing to another absolutely required thing.

Changing the stun recovery mod on flasks to stun immunity/avoidance might work too, cause noone uses that mod currently.

So -at the very least- can you please fix armor before nerfing pretty much everyone? Or better yet not nerf them at all?

"

tmaciak wrote:

"

grepman wrote:

open beta, summer of '13
monsters hit hard, sure no devourers or chimeras or evangelists or birdmen yet...however mobs in general hit harder (remember this is before the big nerf to monster damage), theres less dps, there are no trigger gems

yet there was choice

No, there was no choice. Only IR/Grace/Determination which people used like EC/IC/CwDT now. 8 auras characters to pull out any defense you can get and still have non-zero DPS.

I played melee then, I now how it looked like.

And TBH, if I would need return to those times, I would probably quit, because comparing to what we have now, it was very unfunny gameplay experience.

I was a big opponent of that combo (grace/det/IR) for the same reason Im opposing cwdt stuff (too easy to get for little investment)

but it wasnt the only choice, really. people ran and self-cast EC+IC. melee players used self-cast EC and self-cast IC.

acrobatics and evasion were the worst option back then and people still used them

a lot of people used IR, sure, but it pales in comparison to the mandatory nature of the CWDT combo.

"

themastercheif wrote:

Removal of cwdt/ic/ec = RIP Literally almost everyone.

I'll quote someone else's post:

"it will:
decrease game pace
destroy a lot of existing builds
make ranged builds even more desirable
make new player experience much harder when trying to enter end-game map gameplay
give rich people with amazing builds and capabilites even more of an edge over poor ones as they will be the ones able to mitigate this change"

Not to mention how absolutely devastating rhoas/devos/frogs/etc will be when you're going to be permastunned? Or be required to take unwavering stance/kaoms roots/whatever on every build. Woo, changing the meta from one absolutely required thing to another absolutely required thing.

Changing the stun recovery mod on flasks to stun immunity/avoidance might work too, cause noone uses that mod currently.

So -at the very least- can you please fix armor before nerfing pretty much everyone? Or better yet not nerf them at all?

let me answer this reddit quoted post:

decrease game pace- a little bit. not a big deal. game pace got crazy fast with big deeps and little monster health, not a bad idea to slow it down.

destroy a lot of existing builds- nonsense. if your build is destroyed by taking out a cheap defense equivalent, your build wasnt so good to begin with- defenses matter

make ranged builds more desirable- maybe, but physical damage crit bow users wont have it easy with no vaal pact and reflect anymore

make new player experience much harder- nonsense. new players can self-cast ec, run AA, get LC, MoM, acro+ondars, etc etc. new players need to understand the importance of a sound defense to not get shat on in high maps with bad mods

give rich people with amazing builds and capabilites even more of an edge over poor ones as they will be the ones able to mitigate this change - poe is balanced over temp leagues, where everyone starts out the same. but even in perma leagues, no, not really. the poor and the rich have the same number of ECs they can manually self-cast. cloak of defiance and lightning coil are not expensive.

in fact, Im going to go ahead and state the main difference between poor and rich in todays game is DPS, not defensive factor. all defenses are well accessible to anyone. aside from gathering big ES pool if you play CI and legacy leftovers like legacy kaoms, legacy aegis or big ticket item like acuity etc....there is nothing that rich have much better in terms of defense over the poor

in fact, Ill go ahead and say the rich are likely to be hit MORE by this because they wont be able just wing it and outdps anything without VP