1.0.0 Balance Changes

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Artinuis wrote:

Stupendous!

Finally, the real answers we've been waiting for!

Yes, and it all sounds really resonable and good :)

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Qarl wrote:

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k0do wrote:

Is it just the % auras, or the flat ones too?

because if the flat auras are increased in mana cost too, thats a pretty big blow to the blood magic keystone :/

Most of the flat cost auras are changing to being percent based for cost as well.

This change leave ES based chars unchanged while playing with HP based chars will get a massive nerf. Why do you buff ES even more? It's already far superior than HP.

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mvm199 wrote:

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Odoakar wrote:

As a solo player, I'm a bit worried about the aura change. There's no one other than me that can run those needed auras (for any ES based character, purity+grace+discipline is mandatory).

Nothing is mandatory at the end of the day, you will survive anyway, thats what players said when they fixed covenant, BUT they make things so much easier when you have all these auras, and it worries me that they arent really fixing the situation.

Grace is a fucking joke aura (with or without IR), discipline is not a difference of life or death in terms of how much ES it provides, and purity is really for ew / -res maps unless you are running real shitty gear and bad passive tree

I would disagree here, if you don't have some really good +res gear, it's quite hard to get enough resists on any character that's not near marauder or duelist part of the tree, to pick those nice +12-15% resists. And even with max resist, you can easily get destroyed by shock stacks or burning champs.

Discipline can give you probably around 600-700ES, when you don't have a 700+ ES vaal regalia on you, then it's quite a considerable buff to your life.

Grace/determination combos are also usually mandatory as for any character that relies on ES, getting AR/EV on your gear is quite hard (again, unless you have a s 600AR/400ES shield).

It's going to suck, I was fine with the patch destroying all my characters who went through the middle, but I just now realised that it will destroy all my characters. I like the overall changes but again it feels like solo players are getting shafted.

More mana cost for auras seems insane. In the words of Danny McBride - "Clarity costing even more mana? Now I KNOW you all must be trippin'!"

I like most of the changes, but like others I'm a bit wary of the aura changes. The argument that it will nerf solo play and buff party play further is very compelling and I'm hoping you considered that when making the change. It just seems like something that didn't need fixing, everyone I play with is generally happy with the aura system and how much they can help with augmenting a character's power level.

While I understand each aura is increasing in power, it's the variety of effects that's important. If I'm running Purity, Clarity, and Determination, then I need help with my resists, mana regen, and armor. Having *really* nice resists (although I doubt you'll be increasing the max resist bonus anyway so buffs there are fairly useless) doesn't make up for the fact that I can no longer address my lacking mana regen and armor rating.

We'll see how it goes, but my first thought is this is another change that feels "hurried" to me, similar to removing IIQ. Not coincidentally, both changes hurt solo players more and I mostly play solo. So I'm certainly biased, but you've stated previously you thought the balance between solo and group play needed adjusting (to make solo play more rewarding). I guess I'm a bit confused as to how that philosophy jives with these changes.

p.s. Will you be fixing MF gems to work with DOT's? Until you do, these builds will remain neglected (and I'm saying that as someone who mostly plays a proliferate fire trapper).

aah feeling really bad about auras , i dont know why did you think this was neccesary imo there is enough diversity when choosing auras , the only cases when people just use auras because they can can be seen in Determination and Grace builds that are probably using IR and kinda maybe Hatred and Haste as they are probably just for dps most of the time but still haste could be considered of another function .The point is we dont have many choises when it comes to auras Get beast gear with resists or get purity , get retarded gear with high evasion / armor or get det/grace , get epic weapon or get hatred etc etc.

No matter how much you are gonna buff purity, if that means he has to ditch determination he will be in loss of a lot of armor , if he ditches hatred he will be in loss of a lot of dps and for what maybe (being optimistic here) 10%+ to all res and 2 % to max res?Thats bullshit considered to the 5k of armor in loss or the 1k dps..

And the great solution for this is ...go partying? Really i get it , i understand what you wanna do but cmon guys this is an ARPG right?I would totally expect this change in a MMORPG but here?DOnt u guys already realise that soloing is so much popular and wanted in these kind of games?No matter how much you will improve fps drops or the clutter in the screen i will always feel better soloing , yea i party sometimes but i dont wanna have to do that.

Passive points are out of any discussion , i know i know its the biased older player view but its true .As someone who has spent a lot of time on that amazing skilldrasil i know what efficent and whats not ...i have maybe built tons of build for myself , my friends and even those random dudes on reddit to understand the way the tree works .I can surely say its nearly Tree of Defense nodes, you can never have an efficent life build without like 200% increased life and what does that mean? 5 points left for dps ? yep from 100 fucking points a lvl 80 player can have only 5-10% of the nodes can go to damage and if u are lucky to magically have some points left you can get that extra utility node , can u assure me the reduced aura nodes are so effective to actually balance this?Do you really expect me to ditch 300 hp from 3 life nodes to get that extra 1k armor and 5% resists?Life is too fucking important and thats bad..

Es builds are better to some degree in the points mess and frankly i dont see any reason why a person would prefer a life build to a es build now? Like you made flat reservation auras to % one , great who profits from that? Surely not the marauder , because lets face it unless you make the % 5 or so that guy who wants to run some auras on his life will not be able to have any auras without sacrificing a huge pool of it , its gonna be that Es build who can be more diverse in his tree and stack all his auras as he likes because he can actually do that.

I really dont like this as many other solo players and obviously as someone who has been struggling from ages to tell life builds need some kind of buff and no it cant be partying.

edit: oh and obviously even if i am really sceptical for all the aura (useless) change i think these other changes are pretty good and needed so GJ there .

I just wish there were more DoT's to choose from, but maybe that is planned in the future?

Poison Arrow and Viper Strike are great, but now that PvP is going to be a bigger part of the game I think it is fair to say that these two skills are going to be completely useless in PvP since half the characters running around will be completely immune to chaos damage.

Thanks for the news Chris...
Sounds globally good.

No news about unique nerf/buff though ? what is planned on this ? Will the actual uniques be modified also ?

One more thing: "while this may seem like a direct nerf to item acquisition, exiles..."

c'mon! I know you mentioned bosses, but many players don't ever (and don't care to) farm merciless act bosses. Exiles are not common enough to be statistically significant as far as "ease of acquiring items" is concerned. Especially when compared with the removal of item quantity. I often run ~100% quantity maps with 100% quantity on my character, leading to 4x as many items as usual.

Without IIQ on my character, I'll be getting 2x as many items. The exiles don't even come close to making up for that. I encounter one in every 10 or so maps, and they drop about as many items as a large blue pack.

The removal of IIQ is a MASSIVE nerf to item acquisition, exiles are cold comfort. Luckily it's only on the new leagues where everyone else is in the same boat, but it's a huge nerf to self-found for players on those leagues. I can only hope you find more creative solutions to the problem of item spam and we don't have to endure this change in permanent leagues.

The biggest disappointment concerning this change? While it's a massive nerf to currency acquisition for solo players, group players are mostly unaffected (as you are leaving the group bonus for currency drops). Why not leave IIQ in the game but have it only apply to currency/gems?

overall nice changes, but i'm worried that party play becomes mandatory because of the aura changes :/

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Many players want to kick off their shoes when they get home from work and farm The Docks (or similar areas) for hours without having to think about the difficulty of running Maps or Bosses.

Didn't you forget about something here?

Yesterday i was doing exactly this on Docks in a public party and: One Rogue Exile with RoA appeared and the whole party was dead nearly instantly.

I don't want to say that i don't like the Rogue Exiles. It's just like a Docks instance with a thought Exile is about 3 (or more) times harder than a Docks instance without it.