So, Vaal pact nerf?

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1453R wrote:

Also remember: "melee" means individually namelocking specific enemies to death one-by-one with Heavy Strike. If that sort of playstyle isn't every bit as fast and powerful as a full-up Kinetic Blast build, then Melee is Dead(TM).

By melee, I think we all mean skills such as Cyclone, EQ, Sweep, Cleave, Reave etc. Not necessarily skills that shoot a projectile from your character, such as Sunder or Spectral Throw. Sunder just happens to be a ranged skill that scales with melee passives.

Once upon time melee actually had good and competitive clear speed. You were never gonna beat Kinetic Blast, it wasn't that fast, but it was fast. AOE used to be good. You dont know this, but Neph used to lead the entire standard league for daily xp gain with, if I remember, crit melee build. I remember this because I was checking my daily xp gain and on some days I was crushing it completely while leveling my 7th 100, on other days I found myself behind him. Good old days! :D

Would you play EQ, Sweep, Cleave or Reave today? Me neither. And there's no reason why these skills have to be bad, what kind of balance is that when the entire playstyle is simply uncompetitive and awful to play?

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Nephalim wrote:

It is hard for you to comprehend this but is it possible to oppose balance direction and not feel like the game is going to fall over and die next week.

PoE is a wonderful game at the core and the only reason people voice their approval and or lack of it so loudly is because they care about it.

Perfectly comprehensible. I just feel like there's a difference between disagreeing with the game's design direction and throwing the utterly ridiculous amount of shade people have thrown in this thread. I didn't hootinany it up a bunch of pages ago without cause, y'know. And let's face it - you're going to ignore me anyways because I'm not a Name and because I don't have a Closed Beta Supporter in my Bad Decision Display over there, so what do you care, ne?

I mean, am I wrong? Does anyone have any argument that might possibly change your mind about how the Vaal Picnic nerf is not, in fact, going to Destroy PoE Forever(C)?

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toyotatundra wrote:

By melee, I think we all mean skills such as Cyclone, EQ, Sweep, Cleave, Reave etc. Not necessarily skills that shoot a projectile from your character, such as Sunder or Spectral Throw. Sunder just happens to be a ranged skill that scales with melee passives.

Once upon time melee actually had good and competitive clear speed. You were never gonna beat Kinetic Blast, it wasn't that fast, but it was fast. AOE used to be good. You dont know this, but Neph used to lead the entire standard league for daily xp gain with, if I remember, crit melee build. I remember this because I was checking my daily xp gain and on some days I was crushing it completely while leveling my 7th 100, on other days I found myself behind him. Good old days! :D

Would you play EQ, Sweep, Cleave or Reave today? Me neither. And there's no reason why these skills have to be bad, what kind of balance is that when the entire playstyle is simply uncompetitive and awful to play?

The last time I had the 'MELEE' discussion, Earthquake was specifically discluded as being "this huge AoE around you that isn't REAL MELEE!! It hardly counts!" This was, of course, when EQ was at the top of the heap, not Sunder, and people were complaining that the namelocky skills weren't keeping up.

Would I play any of those skills now?

EQ? Sure, absolutely. I was actually considering EQ as my league start build for Abyss, but settled on Molten Strike instead. Which, may I remind the viewers, is a semi-namelocky single-target* melee skill with weird secondary AoE, generally held to be less useful than any of the given options.

Sweep? Dunno. I keep trying to come up with a good way to use Hegemony's Era because I love that staff and want to try it badly, and maybe Sweep is the way? It looks goofy though, I've always hated the 'hold your weapon out at arm's length and spin around like a total ignoramus' skills. It's why I cannot tolerate Cyclone even the slightest littlest bit, which is sorta sad given how much I enjoy the thought of a Ngamahu's Flame build.

Cleave? Been prototyping a Cleave Raider in poeplanner/Path of Bonking recently, seeing how Overwhelming Odds and Perseverance hold up in allowing one to reliably run Frenzy/Onslaught instead of Frenzy/Phasing. It's not there yet, but it's getting close. Would I run it if I figured out a solid plan behind it? Not this league perhaps, given that it's mostly a slower version of my planned Molten Strike, but in future leagues? Sure, it can go on the pile.

Reave? Okay, anyone who complains about Sunder being "quotes MELEE quotes" doesn't get to talk about Reave. I've seen the videos of Reave offscreening packs with a fat stack of Vaal Reave buffs up; if we're going to call that "MELEE" then everything gets to be melee. Sunder, Lacerate, EQ, all of it. None of them come close to Vreave's coverage. That said, I wouldn't play Reave because I hate the HUSTLE HUSTLE playstyle of trying to maintain Vreave stacks between packs and how badly that limits your build and map options, but I do recall a time when Vreave was considered a very high clearspeed build. It was not so long ago as all that.

If you're going to try and compete in the Race to 100 or do two-minute Shapers or any of that, then yes - your options are constrained. That said, Barrage is taking a savage loss to its total DPS this expansion which is going to knock down the top killspeed ranged* builds (which, may I remind the viewers again, often use Point Blank for a DPS bonus and thus fight at the same range the melee guys do, if not CLOSER because Sunder), and Dark Pact was super-overperforming all around and is also getting needed nerfs. With the loss of VP's instant leech, the Berserker Everything Meta gets to go away. If the 'Slayer Everything' meta replaces it? Well hell, the Slayer's built primarily as a melee class and offers very little to spellcasters.

Without Cloaked in Savagery to cheese VP instaleech with, casters won't have any reason to try and make a stab at Slayer given how badly out of position Duelist is for any spellcasting build. Dark Pact is done, Barrage is sporting a black eye, and yet Sunder remains untouched, and we have no idea if any other melee skills are being tuned up to compete.

If we could survive 3.0.0, we can survive 3.1.0. But you'd never know that to hear people pissing and moaning in this thread about how their favorite Heavy Strike build is DED 4EV3R without Vaal Pact.

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1453R wrote:

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Nephalim wrote:

It is hard for you to comprehend this but is it possible to oppose balance direction and not feel like the game is going to fall over and die next week.

PoE is a wonderful game at the core and the only reason people voice their approval and or lack of it so loudly is because they care about it.

Perfectly comprehensible. I just feel like there's a difference between disagreeing with the game's design direction and throwing the utterly ridiculous amount of shade people have thrown in this thread. I didn't hootinany it up a bunch of pages ago without cause, y'know. And let's face it - you're going to ignore me anyways because I'm not a Name and because I don't have a Closed Beta Supporter in my Bad Decision Display over there, so what do you care, ne?

I mean, am I wrong? Does anyone have any argument that might possibly change your mind about how the Vaal Picnic nerf is not, in fact, going to Destroy PoE Forever(C)?

I don't see why having a closed beta tag or not would change my opinion of someone. You are making a lot of assumptions both myself and everyone who has voiced opposition to GGG's balance direction.

The VP nerf is fine if GGG would reduce global mob damage and lower the variance for spike damage.
Is VP healthy for the game? Probably not, but it is the direct result of GGG's 5 year holy war against player defense for the sake of slowing exp progression. This is now more evident than ever by harshly reducing the speed at which players gain exp after 96.

GGG has been railroading players into this super clear speed, out leech meta for a long time because through a long series of nerfs that have made alternative forms of defense mostly meaningless for end game content. They are trying to alleviate the symptoms of the sickness but are not doing enough to cure the disease itself.

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Nephalim wrote:

I don't see why having a closed beta tag or not would change my opinion of someone. You are making a lot of assumptions both myself and everyone who has voiced opposition to GGG's balance direction.

The VP nerf is fine if GGG would reduce global mob damage and lower the variance for spike damage.
Is VP healthy for the game? Probably not, but it is the direct result of GGG's 5 year holy war against player defense for the sake of slowing exp progression. This is now more evident than ever by harshly reducing the speed at which players gain exp after 96.

GGG has been railroading players into this super clear speed, out leech meta for a long time because through a long series of nerfs that have made alternative forms of defense mostly meaningless for end game content. They are trying to alleviate the symptoms of the sickness but are not doing enough to cure the disease itself.

Chicken and egg, man. Grinding Gear couldn't lower spike damage or critter damage with VP in the game because spike damage was literally the ONLY POSSIBLE WAY to kill a Vaal Pact character, especially a VP Berserker. If you didn't spike it in one singular hit, it would leech back to full life in a frame or two. Everyone sees this as GGG being patently unfair to players, but the Angry GM put it very nicely in a recent article of his. To mangle the sentiment via terrible paraphrasing:

"The way to create a truly challenging encounter is to figure out what it takes to kill the players, then dial it back just a hair. This means that the asshole GM trying to kill his players and the awesome GM trying to give his players a deeply satisfying brutal challenge to feel great about overcoming end up making a lot of the same decisions."

If the game is incapable of killing the player, it is incapable of challenging the player. And given that there is one, UND PRECISELY VUN, way to kill an instant-leech VP character... *shrug*

People keep screaming that the game isn't CHALLENGING enough...while playing builds that are actually factually literally immortal against any/all possible damage except for single-hit spikes. In order for challenging content that is more than "Dodge the Slams" to exist, instant leech needs to not exist. Instantaneous recovery needs to be limited, the way things like Seething flasks are. The game requires the ability to pressure players to death rather than simply shooting them in the face if you want the game to be less spikey. It needs to be possible for the player to be overwhelmed and brought down by heavy sustained damage, because then non-oneshot damage can actually be valuable for enemies to possess.

Vaal Pact made people immune to pressure. Not 'resistant to'. Not 'strong against'. FLAT. OUT.
IMMUNE. There was no possible amount of damage a VP character could take that they couldn't gigglefuck their way through for free, with the exception of "more than 100% of the character's total life from a single packet of damage". This is no longer the case - VP characters in 3.1.0 will now be vulnerable to sustained pressure damage, if a lot less so than many other characters are. So now the devs can start easing off on the spikes and switching their paradigm to pressure damage, or a mix of pressure and slammy facepunches just to keep folks on their toes.

BUT FUCK IF ANYONE CAN CONVINCE PEOPLE OF THE NEED TO GET RID OF FREE UNLIMITED INSTANTANEOUS RECOVERY BEFORE WE CAN GET THE DOWNTUNING OF BOSS SPIKES AND CRITTER DPS THEY KEEP BITCHING THEY NEED FREE UNLIMITED INSTANTANEOUS RECOVERY TO SURVIVE, NOW CAN WE?!

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1453R wrote:

Reave? Okay, anyone who complains about Sunder being "quotes MELEE quotes" doesn't get to talk about Reave. I've seen the videos of Reave offscreening packs with a fat stack of Vaal Reave buffs up;

That was Reave with old aoe. Have you tried it yourself recently? Today's Reave as a Slayer + inc aoe gem + Vaal Reave up, has garbage aoe. It's a true melee skill now, unplayable.

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1453R wrote:

If you're going to try and compete in the Race to 100 or do two-minute Shapers or any of that, then yes - your options are constrained.

Yes. And they don't have to be.

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1453R wrote:

With the loss of VP's instant leech, the Berserker Everything Meta gets to go away. If the 'Slayer Everything' meta replaces it?

Current mapping meta are wanders and bow Rangers, and Necromancers.

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Nephalim wrote:

The VP nerf is fine if GGG would reduce global mob damage and lower the variance for spike damage.
Is VP healthy for the game? Probably not, but it is the direct result of GGG's 5 year holy war against player defense for the sake of slowing exp progression. This is now more evident than ever by harshly reducing the speed at which players gain exp after 96.

Yes. I await the "Current levels of monster damage were set back when players had 12k ES + Vaal Pact. We finally realized this is insane." line in the patch notes. If not, rip 3.1.

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toyotatundra wrote:

That was Reave with old aoe. Have you tried it yourself recently? Today's Reave as a Slayer + inc aoe gem + Vaal Reave up, has garbage aoe. It's a true melee skill now, unplayable.

It's still fairly large with vaal stacks but isn't bigger than cleave by a margin large enough to make it a legit option.

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toyotatundra wrote:

Yes. I await the "Current levels of monster damage were set back when players had 12k ES + Vaal Pact. We finally realized this is insane." line in the patch notes. If not, rip 3.1.

Now that RF and DP builds are consistently hitting 10k life? Not bloody likely.
I do expect a sharp drop in dark pact popularity, though, instant leech was a very important cog in that machine.

F****!! and here i am building my DP/ZERK. I should have read this before. Damn it. I need to start all over now.

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toyotatundra wrote:

Current mapping meta are wanders and bow Rangers, and Necromancers.

put another way, your clear , your carry and your aura bot. hehe

slayers still work as lab farmers though once you hit a certain gear and hp threshold

This was a required change in order to move forward with the game.

I just wish they would have made it before the ES nerfs, because they may not have been necessary given reduced leech speed.