1.0.0 Balance Changes

I like the aura change, and here's why.

If all of your builds actually require auras to be viable, then you either have bad builds or its a problem with the underlying system, for which auras are just a bandaid.

If the aura rebalance invalidates huge swaths of the playerbase, then the devs will next look at why builds don't work without auras.

My money's on everyone being just fine with less auras, though.

"This is crap! I'm losing like 20% of my damage? What if I can't one shot everything anymore? How am I supposed to play the game now?"

Balance changes ? seriously ?
I was really looking forward to final release. Personally I tought, that they're gonna rebalance solo vs parties, but it turned out that I'm just naive. Sure GGG, punish solo players even more, force them all to group up in order to trivialize the content. Awesome.
I can't really understand the loot and IIQ changes as well. Considering that you usually find absolutely nothing (99,9% of the time) I can't imagine how it's gonna work out. Only time will tell I guess. To be honest - it all doesn't look promising - at least for me. I might give it a shot, but I'm not excited anymore. Well, in the end I've paid 60 bucks already so I guess it's a fair deal considering how many hours I've spent doing maps, in order to get awesome lv20-40 uniques and tons of usless items.

Not cool GGG, not cool at all.

Regarding the Auras nerf:

Can we expect a change on Voidbringers and Voll's protector or will they become yet another vendor uniques xd?

If having too many auras was a problem [I run 2 will hurt though because of the above mentioned uniques] why not just increase the mana cost depending on how many auras you have?

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Scorp2778 wrote:

Wouldn't an easy solution to the BM builds problem with the changes to aura's to % based be to change the BM skill from "Removes all mana. Spend life instead of mana on skills." to "Spend life instead of mana on skills."? BM players could still cast 2-3 aura if he or she wanted and it would lower the cases where people run 5+ auras. I don't see any huge problems with the aura change other than BM builds.

+1

I'm good with all the other changes. I'm good with increased aura costs.

But this decision seems to make blood magic keystone completely useless, so revamping blood magic to adapt to these changes would be great.

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dracuify wrote:

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Scorp2778 wrote:

Wouldn't an easy solution to the BM builds problem with the changes to aura's to % based be to change the BM skill from "Removes all mana. Spend life instead of mana on skills." to "Spend life instead of mana on skills."? BM players could still cast 2-3 aura if he or she wanted and it would lower the cases where people run 5+ auras. I don't see any huge problems with the aura change other than BM builds.

+1

I'm good with all the other changes. I'm good with increased aura costs.

But this decision seems to make blood magic keystone completely useless, so revamping blood magic to adapt to these changes would be great.

so..... this keystone now becomes mandatory. No thanks.

Great changes for the release, I look forward to playing a ton again :)

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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.

Just trying to punish those of us who like to play solo and BM I see.

Great

Now where's the fucking socketting fix so I don't do another 12 armor pieces that require 400+ jewelers each?

Looks good so far. I can't really say I disagree with any of the changes presented here.

IMO though, what would help more at offloading the link bottleneck in character progression would be some kind of a recipe / quest which would guarantee 5-link sockets. Quest is probably not the way to go as then people will rush characters through the game just to stock up on 5-links. So a vendor recipe with a decent cost but not astronomical would be great. Recipe could even be tied to fusing orbs to help sink them from the economy. You could have a set number of fusings say maybe 150, which would guarantee you a 5-link if traded to a vendor with the 5-6 socket item.

People are really believing that people in pub games are going to be willing to change their skill setups to maximize aura usage?

In coordinated map groups, yes, but the normal game? no.

They have free reign right now to redesign the tree, and Chris has said that they are trying to cater to both crowds.

All in all, being specialized may work much better than how it was previously, where it was popular consensus that we needed all auras we could to survive.