Racing as Ranger in the Upcoming Expansion

bows nerfed monsters buffed its the era of caster rangers

+1 firetrap ranger THE DREAM

wait...the mana cost for rain of arrows increased? what the hell? how can can you even use it if you attach 1 link to it?

-HeaT

I see so much wrong with skill gem balance in the Beta, but I simply don't have the patience to put up with the hordes of GGG fanboys who will even defend the most ludicrous imbalances imagineable.

It's an absolute waste of time and those people simply don't understand the purpose of a Beta and actively contribute to shitty balance decisions.

Earlygame Cleave for example effectively has more than 3x the damage effectiveness of Spectral Throw in the Beta. Cleave with two white swords does 5x the damage of EK. It's an endless list and I know there are people out there who genuinely think there is nothing wrong with some skills being 5x worse than others. The whole game is balanced around melee damage, everything that isn't melee has effectively half the damage effectivness (especially early game).

So why even bother...

RoA damage got "buffed" and is still significantly worse than Tornado shot, increased AoE per level (which is what made the gem semi-viable in the first place) was removed, etc...

Graphics, atmosphere, zone progression is all pretty damn nice in the Beta, but skill balance has never quite been this bad ever before and I feel as if GGG fanboys who are unwilling to accept that GGG balancing isn't all that great (as I'm sure we all know from past experience) do the rest in refusing to accept that some skills are simply shit and need substantial buffs and often times argue from premade conclusions.

I don't have the patience for this.

I'm almost certain that all classes except Witch will be playing Melee in races, Ranger/Shadow/Templar/scion is going to be Cleave, possibly even Duelist and Marauder aswell, depending on how strong Leap Slam is (haven't tested yet).

That's not me saying that Cleave is overpowered, it's me saying that everything else in the Beta is garbage and most damage numbers simply weren't adjusted for increased monster life at all.

The increase in monster life change is stupid aswell, it's a cheap way to artificially slow down the game, it's as if GGG and their minions have learned nothing from early-Beyond levels of pain inducing boredom.

You would think that the implicit goal should be to make the game play faster and improve the flow of the game, but instead monsters have more health so everything happens a little bit slower, unless you play melee of course.

And just to put all of this in perspective. So far I've tried leveling as Bow ranger and EK.

Right now I'm leveling as Cleave in order to transition into Ele ST lategame.

Even with 0(!!) damage nodes taken so far (lvl 15) cleave outperforms both EK and Bow ranger in terms of damage. And it's not even close, cleave easily does twice as much damage as the other two skills (I'm also running ST on LMP, which doesn't come close to cleave either).

Again, that's not me saying that Melee is OP in the Beta, it's me saying that everything else is complete and utter garbage.

i played as shadow till level 60 when i ripped to a fatal game crash error, lvled with firestorm which was pretty terrible (switched to storm call later which was better) and exacerbates the slow progression feeling harbored by the decision to increase monster life. the disparity between spell gems seems to be the same as melee from what slix was describing. my 3 linked +1 firestorm with faster casting + fire pen, with some speced passives for fire damage was LESS effective in clearing than my 2 link storm call w/ faster casting...like what? i think at one point that same set up was still worse in a +2.

im not a fan of monster life increase and agree it slows down the general pace of the game. it's strange because they removed a lot of areas in the game which should make the game feel shorter or around the same with the inclusion of act4. however it feels much longer and i think it's a combination of monster life and balancing of skills.

my other gripe is the difficulty right now feels too up and down, which is counter intuitive when you transition into a higher difficulty. for example, the difficulty naturally progresses becoming more difficult linearly as you complete act1-4, but then you just absolutely crush act1-2 cruel even though it's technically supposed to be more difficult. as a caster with less options for phys mitigation, and badly tuned skill gems, coupled with increased monster defense, act 4 cruel was grueling. then i just CRUSHED act1-2 merciless. *shrug*

-HeaT

The only way the devs are going to get a real idea how horrible some skills are, is if they forced themselves to sit down and progress from level 1-60 with that skill alone.

But that isn't going to happen.

It's hard to tell what the future of some races is going to be like, since they are rebalancing the gem rewards.

"

HeaT1 wrote:

im not a fan of monster life increase and agree it slows down the general pace of the game.

Wait... everyone didn't love the unwavering sig race?

also, i miss coves, that zone was underrated. it was FAR more interesting than the normality of the new zone in act 2, northern forest i think it's called.

i dont know about everyone else but EVERYTHING was hitting me like a truck. several times i had white mobs hit me for half my life in cruel at 2.2k life. i guess the only phys mitigation i had was the 4% from the chaos golem...still though.

-HeaT

They have their asses between 2 chairs.

They created very strong early gem skills like FB or tendrils. Now they try to nerf the damages those skills can do by raising monsters life pools or the mana cost. They don t really want to nerf AOE too much but they also want the first chapter of the game to be harder.

They probably feel bow users have too much survivability early and so they make it even harder to use. In the end they forgot about racing I guess.


2.5 patch you bet we will see a nerf to life on tree and melee skills.
They just can t balance everything at the same time and in the end they balance almost nothing.

Imo they should calculate the average dps of all the AOE skills gems from level 1-20 and make it somewhat similar when using average gear. Maybe just lower down the ranged skills a bit.

I think there would not have much problem if all the skills from the first rewards were similar in dps when using average gear.