Penetration gems mess up balance between ele/physical

It's no surprise to anyone that elemental damage scales much higher than physical damage. The argument behind this is that many mobs (and players) have high resists so while your sheet DPS is high, the mob itself is only receiving 25% of that actual damage. While the average high gear ele user will be at 10k and physical users will be at 5k, the physical user is doing higher average DPS across all moves than the ele user as there are very few mobs with physical resist.

Adding the new penetration gems and individual elemental curses completely throws this out of whack. I haven't played around with the curses but I have a lvl 17 lighting pen which removes 42% lighting resist. That alone is giving me almost 3x my DPS against a mob that has max lighting resist, not sure how DPS works with negative resists. Combine this with elemental weakness and lightingiblity (don't know what the lighting resist curse is but I know the fire one is flammability, so I'll go with that) you can take any mob with max resists or a player with overcap resists (80-85) into negative. This isn't even that hard to do with there being a keystone and 2 uniques that allow for an additional curse.

Elemental users generally have easier access to crit and with many pieces of gear being able to give flat elemental damage along with up to 30% elemental damage for weapons then up to 20% for each individual elemental damage. The only drawback there was to this extreme damage scaling was the ability to have high resists. Now two curses and one support can remove all of that leaving the only elemental check as reflect, which isn't that common enough for people to not make high elemental builds.

If you are moving in this direction can we get something at least equal for physical damage? Having something that ignores armor is kinda pointless because again, most mobs don't have physical resist and the harder you hit the more armor you ignore anyways.

I'm not good at coming up with ideas for skills or anything like that but I'm very good at picking out imbalances. This is a pretty clear imbalance to me. I mean the damage balancing was based solely on resists and now someone is 2-3 skills away from just throwing it completely out of balance.

Ok ele users, come tell me how wrong I am.

Conductivity. :)

I haven't seen how strong it is at high levels yet, but a penetration support is competing with lots of things. Crit multi, faster cast, aoe/conc effect, and things like LMP/GMP or faster projectiles for fp. It definitely seems strong, but 1.4 MCM seems high as well. Maybe the MCM could come up to balance it, but I'd need actual feedback on how good it is at high levels first.

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Moosifer wrote:

Ok ele users, come tell me how wrong I am.

Hey Moose...your wrong :)

I only say this because a few patches back, (just before the new league began), elemental resists for mobs were increased This was done in anticipation of the new "lowered resists" gems so in theory all they do is restore the balance that was in place a few months ago.

I don't recall it ever being stated just how much of an increase was given to the mob resists but if there's any issue then it's the new gems that need to be tuned rather than requesting an equivalent gem for melee chars.

Thats for PvE anyway.

For PvP it's a different story....

Pneuma, I agree it's more of a high lvl issue.

The best I can do is point out Ceto (again, dude must thing I'm in love with him at how often I bring him up) and Wytchfinder. Both are high lvl, high geared DWers, both have 6l and probably can't do much to make their toons better. Wytch is ele and Ceto is physical.

Both have done some recent changes to give themselves more DPS. While they are asses and don't tell me their DPS off diamond, Ceto was able to hit 36k on diamond with cleave after I gave him a 6l. Wytch on the other hand did a major respec and was able to hit 118k on diamond with cleave as well.

Even if the resists for mobs went up, I'm assuming they are at 75%, wytch would do 26k to that mob, assuming all his damage is one element (which it probably isn't) while Ceto will still average 36k except for in rare cases.

Again assuming wytch is one ele, he gets one of those resist reducing supports (I'm assuming they hit 45 at lvl 20, I got my lvl 17 from epsi and haven't seen the difference in one lvl yet) now instead he's doing 80k to the resist mob and 150k to a normal mob.

The decision is easy for someone who is using FP, spark or (the 3 people who use) fireball but even elemental weapon users like wytch could find a big benefit from using lightning pen as it would allow huge bursts with how lightning damage scales. In general someone who is spread out across alot of elements isn't going to be hurt too much by a resist mod regardless unless they have purity aura.

I don't think you can really adjust to this Bazz. It's pretty goddamn powerful and keeping it in means that even as a melee users you are better off going elemental over physical allowing for much higher dps with less passive investment, more expensive and harder to find gear but again this is a high lvl/gear situation. I doubt 115k DPS will be common even if people copy wytch's build.

Balance means jacking up physical damage alot or introducing physical supports that would be very powerful even to someone who doesn't know the mechanics of the game. At least lowering resist is kinda hidden as it won't show up in anyone's sheet DPS.

Lowering the gem values won't do much because at 25 resists max on the gem, that's still double the damage, lower than 25 might not make it worth the socket at all which means add it to the pile of niche gems.

Supporting moose's claim here, a bit.

1.4 multiplier is pure gold, especially when linked to an elemental spell. level 17 penetration gems give 41% penetration. Against a 0% resist mob you're getting 41% MORE damage against 40% more mana cost. That's a really sweet deal; no other support does that. Against a capped resist mob? Well, it's multiplying your damage output by a factor of around 2.5x.

Now, here's the kicker: DDT, Panda, and I ran a pretty thorough test to figure out exactly what the penetration gem is doing. Even when panda equipped 130% fire resist, DDT did considerably more damage with a penetration linked than without. Yet, when Panda only had 50% resists equipped or so, the penetration gem still significantly raised DDT's damage.

To me that says: penetration gems lower both the resist cap and the resist score of your target. So if a target is over-cap on resist, you still get a 40% resist reduction. Pretty much, a bit strong.

Correct me if I am wrong but ins't the balancing factor to Ele damage compared to Phys is that Ele can't leech? Sure it can with a gem but that's 1 less damage gem in use. If phys damage could match ele damages then the leech would be too powerful, no?

I don't see a problem with elemental penetration supports when used with spells. Melee and ranged have long had supports that directly raised damage of skills like Added Melee damage, elemental damage, damage on full life and so on.
It is about time spells got a really useful bonus damage support. Until now we had to go critical route to get something or got fast cast route. This is a new direction, now I rather put penetration then fast cast on my spell. It is more fun to kite and do bigger bursts of damage then just stand in once place all the time and wait for criticals with my super fast cast

118k dps? what

huh

how

magic?

There's no way a spell damage built can hit 118k dps. Nor would you even want to? You're probably one shotting the highest level monster in the game with such offensive power.

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anubite wrote:

118k dps? what

huh

how

magic?

There's no way a spell damage built can hit 118k dps. Nor would you even want to? You're probably one shotting the highest level monster in the game with such offensive power.

Not quite, but it gets close. My harper, which I assembled in less then a weeks time, had 92k dps at lvl 78, with LMP+Ele hit

Ele pen gems have 0 affect of you lower the mob's resistance to 0, by the way. if you get a mob to say, 0 resist with curses, pen has 0 effect.

Couple that with the fact that pen gems do not function full-heartedly with ele weapon users, as most ele weapon users use a combination of the three elements, rather then solely one, the utility of the pen gems themselves, is highly reduced.

However, most ele weap users are incredibly squishy, vulnerable to reflect to quite a high degree (Moosi, you know EXACTLY what I'm talking about) and in general, cannot utilize leech as much as phys users.

In a game, where the primary defense of everyone is the liquidity of hp/es due to leech, ask debate for yourselves what happens when you shrink the main ability of said survivability, by specifically specializing in ele weapon damage.