Fire Penetration

you don't say

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Mark_GGG wrote:

I think the problem here is that nowhere in the game does it mention penetration being an on-hit effect.

Fire pen is still great and gives incredible returns for ignite spells.

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Gravethought wrote:

I think the problem here is that nowhere in the game does it mention penetration being an on-hit effect.

Fire pen is still great and gives incredible returns for ignite spells.

I agree that fire penetration is still strong on a percentile basis of improvement in damage against resistance monsters. The problem is that if a monster has 75% resistance, instead of burning damage being 1/4 of the strength (compared to 0% resists), burning damage is only 1/16th of the strength. The resulting balance gives too much damage against mobs with a lack of resistance and tiny amounts of damage against resistant mobs, particularly if your build is also based upon using curses to mitigate resists and the mob is also either curse resistant, which all bosses are, or curse immune, in addition to having high resists. To me, increasing burning damage based upon fire and elemental damage will only exacerbate and exaggerate this phenomenon.

With regard to the on-hit effects, I think fire penetration was described to not work on dots adequately before patch 1.0.2. I still don't think the wording says that previous on-hit effects like life leech and life on hit will work on dots. I don't think the wording implies that at all. However, when previous on-hit effects such as item quantity and item rarity, in addition to elemental damage and fire damage now scale with burning damage, I believe that it does imply that (because the fix was made to IIR/IIQ) fire penetration will work on burning damage. This is water under the bridge now for me. The devs have to make the decisions that they think are intelligent for the game. I am only throwing out the possibility that there may be cultural differences between New Zealanders (who I think are fun players to game with) and Americans when it comes to direct and implicit wording of the English languages as it may explain why so many people, including myself, had that impression.

As far as design balance is concerned, I never thought that burning damage was weak on typical mobs. On the contrary, it was already very strong. I stopped playing my explosive arrow/lightning arrow character with life & ES and 6 auras, not because the dots were weak, but because of the nerfs to:

1) curses
2) auras
3) shock damage
4) buff to life + mana as a life pool source
5) player elemental resists

I made the conclusion that not only does my character have low regen and a sizable delay before leech can take place, but that I am very vulnerable to elemental spell damage in a way that enfeeble and evasion cannot be used to counteract. Bow templars have no spell dodge or spell block and you can't go to get curses and ES and still pick elemental adaptation as well (and it's not around any other great nodes).

I think the balance issues stem around the fact that life plus ES builds need a buff, and that needs to be a skill gem/unique/keystone that allows players to convert some attack evasion to spell based evasion, where if a player does have spell evasion, spells are given a relatively high accuracy based upon spell level.

With regard to constructive commentary on the 1.0.2 changes to fire penetration, if I were going to make any changes to augment burning damage, it would have been to fire penetration rather than to general increased damage/elemental damage/fire damage to allow players a way to counteract resistances on curse immune/resistance and elemental resistant mobs. I don't think I need to evaporate a room of non-rare/non-elite/non-unique mobs any quicker on my bow templar if I go back to playing him.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

The only relation between this and the DoT damage changes is I managed to get them both in for the same patch.

A bit OT but does this mean the burning ground from fire trap will trigger IIR now or is that still excluded?

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Mark_GGG wrote:

There is a reason that the IIQ/IIR support gems now working on dots was explicitly not part of Chris's post about the DoT changes - because it has nothing to do with those.
The change is that damage modifiers can now apply to damage over time. This change had no interaction with on-hit effects, none of which can work with damage over time.

In an entirely separate change, we added a second effect to the IIQ/IIR support gems -they have their regular effect on-hit when hitting, and a second effect of storing extra values in a debuff applying damage over time so that their modifiers can be applied that way too.

This wasn't part of the changes to damage modifiers applying to DoT, and is a specific change to the IIQ/IIR gems by adding exrta functionality, not a change to their (or any other) on-hit effect to apply to DoT. The only relation between this and the DoT damage changes is I managed to get them both in for the same patch.

Using this same kind of process, couldn't you make it so that Fire Penetration works on the burning ground effect of Fire Trap?

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Using this same kind of process, couldn't you make it so that Fire Penetration works on the burning ground effect of Fire Trap?

Why just fire trap?

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Mark_GGG wrote:

In an entirely separate change, we added a second effect to the IIQ/IIR support gems -they have their regular effect on-hit when hitting, and a second effect of storing extra values in a debuff applying damage over time so that their modifiers can be applied that way too.

This wasn't part of the changes to damage modifiers applying to DoT, and is a specific change to the IIQ/IIR gems by adding exrta functionality, not a change to their (or any other) on-hit effect to apply to DoT. The only relation between this and the DoT damage changes is I managed to get them both in for the same patch.

Why this wasn't in patch notes? If it is entirely different change - it's even more important to put it to patch notes. The change to IIR/IIQ gems affects how players may setup their gems and build, and not a lot of people read developer posts somewhere deep in "support gem feedback".