So, Vaal pact nerf?

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zagibu wrote:

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unTop wrote:

Anyway the vaal pact location is pretty weird, and I wonder if Slayer will see any changes because of it. I built a Slayer for this league that would have had 10k life and a little over 6k life regenerated/leeched per second with just the Hematophagy cluster. With this new vaal pact I'd be regenerating more than 100% of my life per second. Sounds little different from the previously nerfed ES vaal pact caster builds and that's why I assume something is going to happen.

I'm not really an expert on Slayers, so I am interested to hear your explanations on how you intend to raise the default leech cap of 20% of max life per second to over 100%.

Obviously he's wrong. It's only 86%. Plus endless hunger. Nufin to worry about at all. Obviously the old VP was OP and the new one is exactly what this game needs...

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bSun0000 wrote:

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unTop wrote:

Try going max block with kintsugi, fortify, and some evasion..

Oh i tried some sort of max-fortify no-insta-leech build. 20 minutes to fully clear a single map.. no thanks. It feels terrible!

Which map? What build?

Because I mean, like...the rest of us who haven't decided to bork the game for years on end have been managing to clear maps at a perfectly fine pace without Vaal Picnic. The only time I take twenty minutes on a map is...

Y'know? Even when I have to do awful layouts like Crematorium or such because my map supply dried up, I'm not sure it's ever taken me twenty minutes to clear a map. Except for maybe when I was being super slow and cautious in Poorjoy's with my Warchief character with the glass jaw. That was maybe a twenty-odd minute map run, but that's about it. And my Warchief character did horrible damage (by endgame Warchief standards, anyways) to begin with, so that was my bad as much as anything else.

Elsewise I'ma have to call ShenaniBull on "you have to pick between 100% Balls-Out Vaal Picnic Offense or doing 5k DPS with a defense build and I don't want to make that choice!"

Packs can only get so dead. You don't need 50M DPS to make packs dead. Once you can instaboom a pack - a thing that happens well before you get to the 50M DPS mark - more DPS doesn't really do a damn thing for your clearspeed. it just lets you burn down bosses faster.

Really, guys! Really! We're not lying when we say that it's possible to, say...go 50/50 on your Offense/Defense investments! It's not a fairy tale! I've done it, even!

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bSun0000 wrote:

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unTop wrote:

Try going max block with kintsugi, fortify, and some evasion..

Oh i tried some sort of max-fortify no-insta-leech build. 20 minutes to fully clear a single map.. no thanks. It feels terrible!

Not sure what the issue was. You will have to make some tradeoffs to begin with but even then you shouldn't be taking more than 6 minutes per map. And after pumping in some levels, investing in gear, and grabbing some movespeed it's down to 2 minutes per map. The issue, and hopefully I don't offend you, might simply be that you aren't at the point where you can't effectively build/optimize on your own. I'd suggest looking at the hardcore ladder and glancing over a few of the players characters if you want to get a general feel. The high ranked ladder players are clearly going to be clearspeed oriented, while still keeping safe, and vaal pact isn't currently that played outside of berserkers there.

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unTop wrote:

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bSun0000 wrote:

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unTop wrote:

Try going max block with kintsugi, fortify, and some evasion..

Oh i tried some sort of max-fortify no-insta-leech build. 20 minutes to fully clear a single map.. no thanks. It feels terrible!

Not sure what the issue was. You will have to make some tradeoffs to begin with but even then you shouldn't be taking more than 6 minutes per map. And after pumping in some levels, investing in gear, and grabbing some movespeed it's down to 2 minutes per map. The issue, and hopefully I don't offend you, might simply be that you aren't at the point where you can effectively build/optimize on your own. I'd suggest looking at the hardcore ladder and glancing over a few of the players characters if you want to get a general feel. The high ranked ladder players are clearly going to be clearspeed oriented, while still keeping safe, and vaal pact isn't currently that played outside of berserkers there.

You'll also notice that there are some classes that are almost never played. Like assassin, who is, in fact, probably the least played class on HC and loosing to even non-ascended ranger. A few people that choose this class anyway DO take Vaal Pact. Of course i can always take Marauder or duelist as a starting point and then tell people "hey, i don't see a problem, the game is totally playable without VP you whiners!". Because yeah, my gladiator is nearly immortal with conventional leec. My cyclone slayer too (and oh he's going to be GODLIKE in less than a month). Even my DP vaalpactless zerkers (ok they're all dead but they felt immortal while it lasted). And that being said, i don't even really invest in defences on them. Who cares about defences when you can have max block+spellblock or 10k life, fortify is cheap when put on a movement skill and AA takes only 25% mana?

I really don't understand how can people be happy about the fact that GGG are adding a double leech keystone to a duelist area and how they don't see they'll be forced to take it now to be competitive.

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bSun0000 wrote:

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unTop wrote:

Try going max block with kintsugi, fortify, and some evasion..

. The high ranked ladder players are clearly going to be clearspeed oriented, while still keeping safe, and vaal pact isn't currently that played outside of berserkers there.

THEN WHY DOES IT NEED A NERF?

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shaunika90 wrote:

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bSun0000 wrote:

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unTop wrote:

Try going max block with kintsugi, fortify, and some evasion..

. The high ranked ladder players are clearly going to be clearspeed oriented, while still keeping safe, and vaal pact isn't currently that played outside of berserkers there.

THEN WHY DOES IT NEED A NERF?

Maybe because GGG doesn't like it entirely dominating the, more popular, SC mode?

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LaiTash wrote:

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zagibu wrote:

I'm not really an expert on Slayers, so I am interested to hear your explanations on how you intend to raise the default leech cap of 20% of max life per second to over 100%.

Obviously he's wrong. It's only 86%. Plus endless hunger. Nufin to worry about at all. Obviously the old VP was OP and the new one is exactly what this game needs...

Nah, not quite. Well, sorta. It would be 86%, but if you could get a Flow Untethered to effectively get a 20% more mod on that rate, so up to 103.2% max life per second.

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unTop wrote:

Maybe because GGG doesn't like it entirely dominating the, more popular, SC mode?

So you're suggesting SC folk to either play HC builds with "no DPS" by their standards? Guess what, not going to happen. There are plenty of SC builds that don't rely on leech and are still able to do 50 billion DPS.

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You'll also notice that there are some classes that are almost never played. Like assassin, who is, in fact, probably the least played class on HC and loosing to even non-ascended ranger. A few people that choose this class anyway DO take Vaal Pact. Of course i can always take Marauder or duelist as a starting point and then tell people "hey, i don't see a problem, the game is totally playable without VP you whiners!". Because yeah, my gladiator is nearly immortal with conventional leec. My cyclone slayer too (and oh he's going to be GODLIKE in less than a month). Even my DP vaalpactless zerkers (ok they're all dead but they felt immortal while it lasted). And that being said, i don't even really invest in defences on them. Who cares about defences when you can have max block+spellblock or 10k life, fortify is cheap when put on a movement skill and AA takes only 25% mana?

I really don't understand how can people be happy about the fact that GGG are adding a double leech keystone to a duelist area and how they don't see they'll be forced to take it now to be competitive.

Some things just aren't going to be viable. It sucks, especially when it's a build you made before that was just bordering viable because of one interaction/item. I've wanted to play cold snap for a while, but even with indirect buffs it was always sub par compared to other skills and maybe only borderline viable for higher end bosses. Ultimately it's going to be difficult to balance every interaction between nodes, class, ascendancies, and items and someone is going to get the short end of the stick.

It needed a nerf because it allowed for some ridiculous builds. When nerfing you take the most 'broken' version of the build. Remember when a people had 25K ES? Yeah, nerf. Vaal Pact? You could stack tons of offenses with just one layer of defense (health) and trivialize bosses.

Nerf'd son.

As for assassin, its not played because a combination of things. And one of them is if you need vaal pact, so many other classes do vaalpact so much better then assassin, so why bother playing assassin.

A bit of a non-sequitar there.