General class balance observations
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So something is OP? Hmm. Does it brake the game? If yes, fix it, if not, well, does it really matter? If you like, play that character class, if you don't, play another.
BTW the reason why I have a Marauder and a Witch is mostly because they were the most appealing to me given their class name. I would not have known what to do with a Shadow, so when starting the game I went Marauder. Remove Horticrafting station storage limit.
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Perhaps a more healthy conversation revolves around not jumping to conclusions.
1. Templar is picked less than other classes, and in both leagues even when it is picked those characters tend to perform more poorly than characters of other classes. What do you feel explains the Templar's poor performance? What could or should be done to even the playing field? 2. Same situation for Scion in reverse: it is picked often and outperforms other classes consistently in both leagues. Why do you figure the Scion performs so well, and what could or should be done to even the playing field? When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Last edited by ScrotieMcB#2697 on Sep 9, 2015, 4:19:17 PM
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considering that builds that start at "x" class can end at the start of another class saying that the class is stronger becouse is played more dosent make much sense, they could be picking it becouse it peaks a bit faster or simply becouse it has better quotes or look.
as for balance goes i think templar needs some love, currently it has a lot of mana reduction and mana increace nodes that no one wants, may be if GGG would remove those mana reservation nodes and add them to the reduced mana nodes say 1 % reduced reservation for reduced mana small nodes and 2% reduced reservation to big mana reduction nodes, then people would be more willing to pick templar that currently holds a lot of those keystones. alternative transfer duelist life regen nodes to templar area so duelist has crit advantage, marauder has life/armor advantage and templar regen advantage. self found league fan http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/324242/page/1 Last edited by caboom#7201 on Sep 9, 2015, 4:57:19 PM
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" well theres a lot of people who understand why you would chose one thing over another, because they play the game a lot. Maybe leave them to talk about how to change this game to make things better? im not saying it makes u a bad person or bad player or theres anything wrong with not no lifing this game and being an expert as a consequence, its not meant as an insult, you know way more than you should given your play experience because you are a very smart person who cna put 2 ans 2 together and often come to the right conclusion. there is a problem with the shadow, its a shit start, you are right but you dont know why you are right. The reason is because the first 5 nodes are all damage no matter what way you chose to go. In highly efficient builds you usually only take damage when it leads to a notable in the majority of cases, where with life you take small life nodes regardless of a notable being there, you take every life node you can reach. That means if you start shadow you probably take all the life nodes at the ranger start, but if you start ranger you will rarely take all the damage nodes in the shadow start because you will get better damage from a cluster containing a notable elsewhere on the tree. This makes the ranger more efficient life start in 95%+ of cases. You dont seem to know this, I know it because I play the game a lot. The devs who designed the tree dont seem to know this, i know it because I play the game a lot, shitloads of people who play the game a lot and make a lot of min/max builds know this. Thats why the devs should listen to what those players have to say, not players who have the same incomplete info they have that has led to these bad design decisions. The devs can make educated guesses already, the problem they have is not having the actual experience that expert, been there and done it players have that highlights where the game plays out in ways educated guessing cant always predict. Templar was played a lot because spells are sure thing budget/early league build. Now they completely fucked caster defenses and forced them to use melee defense, so you are better starting a spell caster as a scion who can reach melee defenses/life easily and still get damage by using jewels so you dont need to be heavy into the witch and templar. They fucked caster defenses to try and fix people using spell builds too often, and it didnt work, like experienced players told them it wouldnt work. You just end up making more marauder and scion casters which is a stupid way to have a spell build meta. The reason people use spells is because theyre easy to scale damage wise with next to no gear. The devs decided cloak of defiance, mom and aa were the problem, because theyre fucking clueless and theyre basing these judgements on server stats rather than knowing the game from a players point of view. They decided those defenses were too strong, even though they were shit but were just better on a budget than the other options, thats where the real problem was, why are people not picking hybrid and ci as a defense mechanic? Why are people not choosing attacks as an offense mechanic? These were the problems that needed fixing if there even was a problem that needed fixing, imo it was debatable if this was even a problem not just a consequence of acceptable differences. Real players could have told them that but their voice was lost in a sea of clueless people talking about cod being op based on a lot of people using it, which is the same useless info ggg have looking at server stats and seeing cod being used way too much. Thats why the game balance is still fucked, because real issues were not addressed properly, were not diagnosed because the devs leading the charge are mostly not experienced players and dont seem to filter feedback and listen to experienced players. Before this expansion I had a lot of characters, a fair amount were casters, and they were my weakest characters. My most defensively useless, dogshit character was my cod aa mom witch... so ggg decide to nerf the fuck out of that defense mechanic, the weakest defense mechanic i would even consider using. Now I have way less characters, I dont play pure spell casters at all, because they were always a bit shit and now theyre fucking garbage at high levels. But people are still playing them because they cant get 350+ pdps crit weapons to make good attack builds and they just enjoy spells, they simply enjoy playing those skills regardless, which is why they played them in the first place, not because anything was wrong or op about eb mom aa cod. Class balanced cant be 'fixed' completely until the mechanics of defense and offense are fixed and the skill balance is fixed. Honestly, theres only 1 way to actually balance this game properly, it doesnt involve any suggested change to the game. Qarl and Rory, and Chris because although he isnt involved in balance he is lead dev and has a big say, these 3 guys need a time out. They need to be banned from the office for 4 months, game development taken down to maintenance levels. Their new job is playing the game 10 hours a day 6 days a week in a live league, pref softcore so they dont rip and end up repeating 1-80 again and again and learning fuck all, they need to grind to the mid 90s on many different chars, get a few 100 ex from trade, craft some items, map a shitload for an entire league. Thats how you fix this game, if those guys did this then they wouldnt need us to tell them whats up, they would see it all for themselves and then fix the problems. Sadly they dont want fixed I think, they dont give a shit about class balance, skill balance or mechanic balance, they just care about shifting imbalance, and they dont need to understand problems to shift imbalance so they dont value having a clue what they are doing any more. All they need to know is enough to be sure if they destroy something that it will shift people around, and that is the only goal, creating a refugee player base constantly evacuating nerfnuked areas of the game. |
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" but crit is an intelligence aligned mechanic, thats why the templar has it. The reason you chose 1 class or another all comes down to the first 5 nodes, most builds hit the start area of at least 2 classes and it comes down to which class has the better first 5 nodes to get out into the good nodes everyone takes. |
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" Fucking hell this is spot-on! I emphatically agree with everything you said. IGN: Victory_Or_Sovngarde It's not a 13 week development cycle, it's a 13 week supporter-pack cycle. You can play any build you want, as long as it's the current meta. Last edited by Ashen_Shugar_IV#4253 on Sep 9, 2015, 6:45:54 PM
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Damn snorkle, +1.
I do agree witch needs some def buffs but imo it goes a bit beyond changing a few nodes in the beginning. They really need to make CI a little easier to work with. Hell maybe even make CI give compound energy shields so one can be recovering while the other takes damage, not sure how you'd balance the total/divided es budget on that though. |
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This thread really illustrates how the community has tunnel-vision on the meta and cannot back off from that "urge to win" enough to view the game system holistically.
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The main reason people go marauder over duelist or templar is because they can take the life exit and then grab the 16 and 12% damage nodes. This is the same reason people go ranger over duelist/shadow, and the same reason people go witch (if they use ES) over shadow/templar. Easy to fix if GGG wanted to.
Scion is already strong for any build that wants to connect Marauder/Templar to Shadow/Ranger. Adding jewel sockets just makes it even stronger. All my builds /view-thread/1430399
T14 'real' clearspeed challenge /1642265 |
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+1 to Snorkie. I especially like his description of us the playerbase as "refugees," because it's true.
Yeah, yeah, someone will say "that's as intended, because this game is about being exiles and stuff." I think that's using lore as an excuse for poor game design. I don't care if it's intended, it's irritating, not fun, and horrible for game balance to be constantly fleeing nerfed builds for the next flavor of the league - while the majority of builds at any given time languish in uselessness for the base of hardcore, hyper-efficient players GGG seems to want to balance around. Which leads me to another point: Scrotie does a good job parsing out the issues with each class, but I think build balance is a much, much more urgent problem. Frankly, if builds were more balanced we might see some interesting new uses for currently underused classes. And, of course, there's a lot of overlap between builds and classes. But looking at it from a build perspective - which takes gear and skill interactions into account - seems to me a more productive (if complicated) way to frame the problem. We're all in this leaky boat together, people. Last edited by demon9675#2961 on Sep 9, 2015, 7:38:07 PM
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