New Skill Development - Part 2

"

grepman wrote:

"

Tempada wrote:

"

KorgothBG wrote:

If loosing the trigger casting of EC+IC will "break" your build then you are doing it wrong...

Losing the EC + IC CwDT combo is a small matter, I agree there. It's overkill and unnecessary in a lot of cases. My concern is over losing self-cast EC. I use CwDT EC on every one of my builds because few things counter physical damage so well for the investment. Even with a lvl 23 AA and armour or block chance, I still feel like I need EC. Losing the ability to self-cast such a fundamental mode of survival is certainly a reason for the community to worry, and it's an inconvenience if your build is already laden with auras and such so you need to swap abilities in the tool bar every time you sign on (assuming EC is still mandatory after the changes).

It's not too early for concern, but it's way too early for QQ.

how would you lose the ability to self-cast EC ? you'll just lose the interaction with spell echo, thats all. maybe you phrased it wrong and are concerned about losing the ability to automatically cast EC ?

Whoa, sorry, I did phrase that wrong. I meant I worry about losing EC in a CwDT setup (auto-cast).

"

grepman wrote:

destroy a lot of existing builds- nonsense. if your build is destroyed by taking out a cheap defense equivalent, your build wasn't so good to begin with- defenses matter

Clear speed matters as well. If you have to sacrifice so much dps to get tank that you're clearing a mob every minute, nobody is gonna wanna play anymore. This is especially true after they nerfed, oh, lets see... CoD, LC, Life, Acro, Block, and armor/es hybrid. About the only thing left to nerf is cwdt and evasion (cause armor is already shit as is). The more they nerf defenses, the more the game slows, the more people don't want to play it. Half of my friends already quit because it's just not fun to clear half as fast as you used to.

"

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

On the other hand, non-crit ranged builds will have even MORE of an advantage over melee, cause they didn't need VP regardless.

"

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

Cause every new player is willing to cast EC every ten seconds (super dynamic gameplay btw), knows what it takes to actually run AA, and can afford LC/CoD. Acro/Ondars helps, but without the extra phys negation that ec/ic provides, you're still gonna die a lot, especially as a new player. MoM is practically impossible except for scion builds that are specifically built around it, almost noone else can path to it and have even reasonable defenses/clear speed just from the sheer points required. Sure, gear can make up for it, but the gear needed would be super expensinve, leading to...

"

in fact, I'm 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 poo

You're forgetting that LL, the staple of rich players, requires much of the same gear that CI does. They also have shittons more dps that they could give up for tank and still clear exponentially faster than everyone who doesn't have dozens of exalts to throw at a build.

"

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

I'm pretty sure Acuity is still a thing that exists.

sweeet... (say it with cartmans little fat voice in mind! ;) )

"

tmaciak wrote:

"

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...

Yea because increasing AOE on these war cries will offer no benefit when your zombies pop a monster and it starts a chain reaction.

Summoners will have a choice on what they want to use. War Cries for crowd control / extra damage, or straight up Auras for defense / resists and extra offensive damage. All of this along with curses.

I plan to play another Summoner in act 4.

"

Jackel6672 wrote:

Yea because increasing AOE on these war cries will offer no benefit when your zombies pop a monster and it starts a chain reaction.

Yea, because monster should not be dead before you are able to cry any cry.

I haven't played summoner for some time, like since last weekend ;) but last time I played, summons AI was constructed that way, that summons are lead by your last action. So if you cry, they should tend to move to place where you cried. Yea, it will be very funny to see how your zombies run between monsters and you when you start to cry. Very helpful, such benefit :)

"

grepman wrote:

"

mrgrin wrote:

EC has always been a pain to keep up, not that it´s
hard but the way it slow the gameplay down. Even with
inc. duration passives (2 of em) it´s still only 16 sec.

Compare it with frenzy/power charges that you generate
even when doing something usefull and on the go.
Sure EC on stun is possible with lets say leap slam
problem is bosses) and you still need> stun and ec on stun
linked with leap slam.

I liked the way d2 handled warcry buffs (longer duration).
and no req. for monsters to be near.

If GGG feels like they need to keep the:
have x monster near give y endurence charges, maybe they
could considerate to at least change the code so that
rare/unique/boss types counts as more then one monster.

For melee its a really irksome job to keep EC up in a
bossfight (hard boss). Since you dont wana get hit when
not leeching or get interupted (and the need to recast
every 10/16 is tiresome/boring/irksome, not hard).

I hope they change the way "warcry" gems works and
figure something out so you can instant cast warcry gems
even when using other skill gems. (then they could keep
the low duration).
The CWDT can do it so maybe its a way to work around the
limitation av the gameengine in a similar way for those
gemtypes.

theres warlords mark to generate ECs

problem is it´s on kill and % chance on that.
wont help you on bosses or smal groups with bad luck,
you still will need to carry End. cry with you and in a
party there are other curses around.
Also you want end. charges up before the monsters are
dead not after.
And there is also this as melee:

"

So imagine i am melee in a group with a ranged.

Do I run in and risk dying to try and get 1 hit in before everything is killed up to 2 screens away....

Or

Do I cast enduring cry as I watch everything killed up to 2 screens away and stand there with my endurance charges surrounded by corpses?

Decisions decisions.

Fantastic as always but what about item filtering for dropped items?

Oh, and if you have high block, and all 3 counterattacks linked with Endurance Charge on Meelee Stun, you soon discover you never seem to not have any charges.

The death of defenses is almost complete.

Before all the gimicky defenses were necessary, people could make a defensive character by investing in tons of life, the max resist nodes, and armor nodes. This gave you a large life pool and decent phys mitigation so you can withstand large amounts of physical damage. Players also used endurance charge on melee stun/enduring cry for endurance charges for further phys mitigation. By taking the max resist nodes you shored up your one weakness, burst elemental damage. Chaos damage was dealt with by getting some chaos res on gear, having tons of life regen and maybe a chaos flask.

Melee characters (Mara/Templar/duelist) were very tanky and safe but had low clear speeds (you didn't take hardly any DPS nodes) and suffered at high end maps 75+ (death was possible because you didn't kill things fast enough) when not grouped with DPS players. Of course there were exceptions with really expensive gear (BOR/Aegis/soul taker as an example) or you got your hands on a sick weapon, but they were outliers and required huge currency investment.

-no need for gimicky uniques like LC or COD.
-no need for MoM
-no need for AA
-no need for cast on damage IC combo, you don't want to dump your endurance charges
-no need for ondar's guile and evasion (my current duelist cycloner is WAY better as a hybrid Eva/ar character then as a pure armor tank simply because of this node)
-no need for max block or spell block

All those gimicky defenses were for the DPS characters and ranged characters on the right side of the tree.

Then GGG nerfed life and nerfed max resistance. Players had to go to the gimicky stuff with max block/spell block being the go to. They nerfed block. They nerfed armor values on gear. So players went LC or CoD and AA. They nerfed those too but players had no real other option so they are still heavily used but just not as effective as before.

Thus, it's obvious to me that GGG is going to nerf the cast on damage taken combo. They are nerfing everything defensive systematically. And it's so damn obvious for anyone who has played consistently and seen the meta and price of certain items change over time.

Why? Only GGG knows but I bet it's for a variety of reasons. They want players to die. They want players to never be safe. They don't want unkillable characters farming content with total disregard for their safety. Maybe to benefit the economy in the temp leagues, keep players interested in the game longer by keeping them from dominating all content or becoming bored of their uber character, to protect their integrity as the developers of the most "hardcore" game on the market, or maybe simply because having characters be unkillable enables better and more effective botting (sometimes I think all the bloodlines mods on monsters is just to stop botting or slow it down).

So if you like to play RPGs were you grind a super powerful defensive tank, this isn't the game for you. This game isn't about being a hero, it's about grinding under peril to survive until you ultimately die.

My prediction: Onder's Guile is next. That node is currently the most powerful defensive node in the game-trivializing projectile attacks and mitigating ranged reflect on evasion based ranged characters. It's next. Guaranteed.

GGG isn't going to stop this trend. It's what makes this game special and unique. The end game, whether high level maps, atziri or uber atziri, GGG doesn't want that content to be trivial, ever, and that's were we are headed for Act 4.

Warcries should give a minor buff (or debuff) when you cast it. Then when you fulfill some conditions, it gives a major buff and some sort of reduction to the cd.

Like enduring cry giving endurances charges, and when you tank quite a bit of damage and kill stuff in melee range, you give out another different enduring cry, gaining movement speed, regeneration and a reduction in cooldown to enduring cry.

I feel that would make it cooler and easier to control (and more unique), but when nerfing the gems or changing them there could be a huge outcry on the other hand.

Noob here...so please be gentle.

From a relatively new players perspective, I'm not even sure I fully understand this change. Is it basically making it so CWDT will not trigger "war crys"?


There are many seasoned players in here stating that this will make it so new players will understand the importance of defense.

I can tell you as a new player, I feel that this game is already too focused on defense. I take every health node (near or sometimes far from my char starting point) and I always have +max life on every piece of non-unique gear I can get my hands on.

Is this not focus enough? The problem I see with this is that it hurts the viability of dex/int based melee ranged classes and not so much pure str/dex melee builds (that seem to be closer to multiple life and resistance nodes).

The access to life nodes is pretty abysmal from a Shadow perspective (at least imo noob opinion).

I could run crazier setups like CWDT - Decoy Totem - Molten Shell which may work as well.

I'm not complaining about this change. BUT as a comment to those stating that this change will urge new players to "defensive stats"...I can say that we already do that.

Getting certain classes to 4K life w/ res cap by end game is not a easy challenge unless using all rares.

If they do nerf this stuff...I hope they give a little bit more naturally flowing access to defensive nodes for all classes rather than just the southwest side of the skill tree.