Skill Revamps - Part 3

Any melee changes coming? There's like 3 good melee abilities.

Okay I've come back and decided to point out the 2 issues that need to be addressed for the skill to be enjoyable.

1. the strongest crit node for rangers knocks enemies back making blast rain lose damage, somehow you need to work around this or this node cannot be taken and in that case you might as well pick up barrage.

2. Even if you don't pick up the knockback crit node, the enemies still walk fast enough to not be hit by some projectiles reducing the amount of damage the skills does in many situations.

Solutions are limited, either speed up the time it takes the projectiles to come down which is possible or add a slow mechanic which wouldn't make sense since it's element is fire and not cold.

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Trentbail28 wrote:

Any melee changes coming? There's like 3 good melee abilities.

You mean cyclone, blade flurry, reave, earthquake, lacerate(not the best but it still is viable), tetonic slam, molten strike and sunder? sounds like 3.

I would like more love to melee but I wouldn't lie about it just to justify my wish for more love.

remember to nerf the HP of mobs too when you destroy barrage

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KillerFit wrote:

(Which by the way is intended and it is the purpose of a skill)

Good thing you're not trusted to balance anything, since you demonstrated how much you missed the point. "But people use it!" doesn't mean it's balanced, but in fact the OPPOSITE.

Balance is really, really, REALLY simple. It boils down to asking just two short questions, and seeing if you can answer them:

• Why would a player ever want to use this, instead of a different option?
  
  
• Why would a player ever want to use a different option, instead of this?

The strength of answer you can give for each determines how well balanced it is. If you can only give a good answer for the former, but can't give an equally-strong answer for the latter... It's overpowered.

Barrage right now is a case where we can give a strong gameplay-maximization answer for the first one, but can't for the latter:

• Why would you use Barrage instead of a different gem? Because you can build millions of DPS with minimal skill and relatively inexpensive gear.
  
  
• Why would you want to use a different ranged gem for bosses instead of Barrage? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There's literally no argument for using any other ranged gem on bosses beyond "You want to be different," which isn't a valid gameplay-based reason. This means that Barrage isn't just overpowered, it's WILDLY overpowered.

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NetherPrime wrote:

You mean cyclone, blade flurry, reave, earthquake, lacerate(not the best but it still is viable), tetonic slam, molten strike and sunder? sounds like 3.

I would also sorta-add frost blades and even lightning strike; not in the "safe meta" tier due to low popularity, but definitely quite viable. (and to be honest, I personally do like Static Strike, though I'll confess that for most purposes, Molten Strike does the exact same thing just SLIGHTLY better)

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philosoaper wrote:

remember to nerf the HP of mobs too when you destroy barrage

This is a valid point... Though slightly less to do with Barrage, and perhaps more to do with the Pathfinder.

The whole issue with boss HP (and hence boss fight length) is the question of how much of that duration you have flask uptime. Any class that can have 100% uptime through the fight is gonna be fine; those that don't are going to struggle. Pathfinders have the issue that basically anyone who's not TOO braindead to copy-paste a streamer's build can go Pathfinder and guarantee 100% uptime for every boss fight.

But... Coupling the two together, where millions of single-target DPS (only hidden on tooltip by the fact that GGG never bothered to account for more than one hit per attack, something they COULD have decided to script differently) can be easily brought against any boss, GGG's response has been to... Raise the waterline and balance around that, indirectly nerfing the other builds into oblivion, when most of them are capped to the low hundreds of thousands.

To be honest GGG needs to do a heavily-tested, thorough rework-balance pass across numerous builds and content. They need to recognize that the game's seen fantastic levels of power creep over the past few years, and responding to it by simply advancing it further will only make it harder to keep all the fabled options (that is supposed to be a key selling point of PoE) viable and attractive.

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ACGIFT wrote:

To be honest GGG needs to do a heavily-tested, thorough rework-balance pass across numerous builds and content.

I played since beta and took a long hiatus, but isn't it pretty evident that GGG uses all of us as free testers? :P

Actually, if anything we're the ones paying them :D

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SafariDiscoLion wrote:

Explosive Arrow sitting out in the cold looking in the window wishing it had a real family that loved it again like the good old days.

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iBrownies wrote:

I played since beta and took a long hiatus, but isn't it pretty evident that GGG uses all of us as free testers? :P

Actually, if anything we're the ones paying them :D

They've done it one better; before 2.0 and 3.0 came out, they reserved the beta tests for those expansions as rewards/supporters.

Having partaken in both expansions, I can say that there's a lot of value in that, both in terms of the wealth of feedback from supporters... And wealth of support from feedbackers, what with all that they can milk selling beta keys.

The only real problem they had was being slow to listen to their beta feedback; almost all issues discovered by players during the beta tests went unfixed until after their respective expansions went live. (perhaps because GGG neglected to allot any time and assume players would discover problems for them)

If they fixed that, and simply allowed a supporter-exclusive test for a balance pass... The game could get a lot better, AND they'd have an excuse to make at least a few hundred thousand dollars extra selling beta keys. That's win-win for everything except our wallets.

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ACGIFT wrote:

This means that Barrage isn't just overpowered, it's WILDLY overpowered.

Saying it's overpowered makes it sound like barrage is the skill that needs to change. Like we need more skills that feel like shit against the game content.

People play skills that feel good to play. Not just because they're by the numbers better than other skills. If a skill is powerful enough to be fun, that's a success.

They're not doing anyone any favors by nerfing skills that make people enjoy the game. They need to focus on bringing the power level of the others up. Then, and only then, should they consider toning down skills that feel broken without proper investment into the build.

I have no faith in GGG's balance team anymore though, so I'm sure they'll fuck this skill revamp up just like they do everything else.

Barrage
Long term, we want to provide alternatives to Barrage that can compete with it, but its ability to scale with additional projectiles is so extreme that we have to reduce its damage per additional projectile to give other skills a chance. This will give us the opportunity to provide more general power for bow skills.

You forgot to mention it's also used for single target in almost every single wand build not just every single bow build. That's two different play styles across many different builds.

You need to nerf the shit out of this ability to make us use someonething else! god damn nerf it already
Barrage has been the number 1 most used single target skill for like 6 leagues in a row destory the ability or Create an even better balanced option for BOTH.