One Week Nemesis Race Infographic

Oh, I forgot:

Of course people use IR. Only way to use evasion without dedicating a lot of points to dodge/Spellblock and all that.

Don't get ridd of that passive please. It's not broken, it just fixes a lot of broken mechanics in the game! If You want to have armor with a shadow or ranger or duelist, You need this passive, because You canÄt wear the high armor chests. So the only people not taking IR are Evasion builds, and they are rare.

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Qarl wrote:

There are some balance concerns in the stats which we will look at addressing at the new content and league cycle.

Scions were prevalent in the one week league, and take a lot of the same space as Witches and Shadows, reducing the numbers in these classes. Shadow appears to need attention specifically.

While the keystones used were influenced a little by players following specific examples, clearly Iron Reflexes is too dominant in this short format.

We will also be specifically looking at death rates for specific areas.

Good to hear that it finaly came to your attention that Shadow chars have a problem, maybe i can hope for a return to the old skilltree where my dual claw, hp based shadow can get resolute technique again. You trashed that build by placing Scion right in the middle, and now im forced to take ES notes as a hp based char. Can i maybe ask for ask for a fes resist notes (like Scion) where im not forced to take ES notes to get to them ?

It's so simple, when joining a race, make a Scion and scoop up all life and res notes first, kill stuff with ST, instant win. Scion is so OP in early game. This is not written so you can hit the Scion with the nerfbat, but a cry from an old fan of the shadow char to check the skilltree around the startarea for shadow :)

How in hell you need a 1-week race to confirm certain things? In any case, I hope this means buffs and not nerfs of things that are OK. If anything is too easy to build up damage with desyncyclone, specially coupled with things like facebreakers, but on the other side desynclone puts you at a situation of "risk" at direct contact with mobs (and desynch) so you need leech & damage, so overall is alright at is current state.

The most flagrant thing is that ES based characters (and hybrid life/ES) progression is completely broken, but has been so since CB, is risky & expensive to build an ES character, more in a 1-week race. Also "path of physical damage" favours the southern/south-east part of the tree, it synergizes well with life & armoured based classes (but also 'evasion tanks' which are now more viable with the buff to life pools etc.), RT etc. An other big problem is the prevalence of highly elemental resistant mobs in endgame, imagine every fucking mob having 75% physical damage reduction (even though because attacks can scale off weapon dmg way better effective damage would still be quite high compared to most spells), forcing curses/dual curses and/or EE (bad for parties in most cases) is not for elemental based characters (spellcasters or attackers, specially the ones that cannot attack FAST, and that includes multiple hits with chaining for example. to build up damage).

An other problem with spellcasters is the nature of delayed damage in some spells. I saw some spellcasters were quite good 'earlier' in the race because is way easier to scale damage with crappy gear off spells than from attacks, but as characters progress, attacks are usually way faster in outputting damage than spellcasters, even if in paper stuff like fireblast can obliterate everything. So in endgame (and more late endgame) the meta shifts to physical/fast attackers, which also more defensive cause higher leech etc. In theory, not in practice, spellcasters have the advantage of range, but given how fast most mobs move (specially act 3 ones) in the game, the advantage is reduced in endgame, and the delayed damage becomes a big disadvantage even if paper damage is great (puts you at risk, you leech less, and you kill stuff slower). OFC there is the forever persistent problem of ranged attacks being the strongest thing in the game, LA/SA and now ST because how strong they are both in defence and offence. Apparently now there are more counters to it, apart from lightning thorns, like the infamous birds, gap closing mobs like devourers, the specter of god undying, etc. so is not as bad as it used to be. But as spells need to be more immediate at applying damage to be competitive, and I don't mean faster casting of spells (shorter animations), but faster application of damage output, as well as a boost to physical resistance of mobs, higher base armour, more 'armoured' mobs.


As for the prevalence of summoners, it's know they are superstrong except against certain elemental bosses (which are avoided in races like this anyway) or nemesis affixes (SH I'm looking at you), specially with not so good geared summoners lacking defence for their minions. But out of that, they are an easy endgame class that can faceroll most content with cheap gear. Given their worse state at levelling is a decent trade off. At last, I think dual wielding still needs a lot of love, specially non-crit DW

TL;DR:
- Fix ES-based characters progression, broken since CB!
- Make mobs more resistant to physical damage.
- Easy the delayed damage from spells/reduce elemental resistance from mobs.
- Crit (specially elemental, not so much physical) based builds are penalized from many sources: accuracy, reflect, enfeeble, RNG; coupled with strong base damage, and ways to scale it with the passives, from physical 2H or multipliers that favour stuff like cyclone, this means a prevalence of RT on physical attacks.
- DW still underwhelming (needs more skills that exploit it, buff the nerfed ele-cleave, etc.)
- Hybrid defence (all sort) characters still are way harder to pull off than 'pure' characters, meaning more investment into defensive passives usually, and a higher need of better gear.


There are more, but these are the most prevalent right now IMO.

In my opinion the problem is not IR the problem is the lack of comparable good survival Keystones ...due to the increase in mana reserve for auras IR is a good optin for ppl hwo dont play in party and also play mostly selffound...the game has 2 major problems 1.trade is a nightmare and 2. the high lvl maps are far to inacessible...if u nerf IR to this game will be played only in grups and only by those players hwo like to spend countless hours trading for stuff so they coud aford godly items and high lvl maps...Poe is a great game but in endgame becomes a pain and just kills all the fun...after prob more then a few hundret 70+maps i had exacly 0 lvl 74 map droped(i play solo)...not to mention that good items drop extremly rare and all good uniques are gated behind high lvl maps..the game becomes frustrating as time goes by...all this combined with the fact that all decent pasives and skills are changed contantly it kinda gets u to fell like all ur grinding is pointless and after a big patch ur char setup will be trash and all the time invested in planig it and finding good items was a waste...btw never play builds inspierd from forums or stramers cose i like to pland them myself so after big patches my build still remain useful but generaly weaker and no fun so i just delete them and start over.

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Kaysee wrote:

I would be interested to see something on the following:
- a breakdown of Streamers : Non-Streamers level 60+ and level 80+
- % of top 20 players who were Streamers.

Please don't bother with such useless stats that have absolutely zero relevance.

Regarding the show being the least played character.

Lets be honest this isn't solely due to the starting nodes. Yes the movement speed nodes could use +20 to int/dex or something alone those lines and the elemental damage nodes could be +8 or so.

However the main reason the shadow is played so little, is due to spells and CI being far less used after the recent patchs. Spells in general do less damage require more nodes to buff the damage significantly. Also getting a spell to level 20, or any gem for that matter takes a really long time ( something the average player will never do). Meanwhile you can use a 500 dps one hander at level 68, a level that's quite easy to achieve. This is a problem.

Imo spells should do their current damage at lvl 17 or 18. And levels 19 and 20 should add more damage then they currently do.

I don't see what kind of balance conclusions you can make from a one week race, except maybe for special balance changes for one week races only. Good examples :

- IR : cheapest way to get armor, no matter what your gear is, and in a one week race, people want cheap things. Get grace and a few passives (leather & steel, steel skin, sentinel) et voilà. Even with shitty gear, at least you don't have to worry about regular white physical mobs.

- CI : Chaos Inoculation is almost as powerful as it was during the Onslaught league (vaal pact keystone has been moved). CI is just a late game keystone and is by far the most gear dependent spec of the game. Late game + gear dependent = don't fit for a one week race. People saying "uh 6 people went CI path of life nodes all over !!!" are so wrong.

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BldSwtTrs wrote:

Meanwhile you can use a 500 dps one hander at level 68, a level that's quite easy to achieve. This is a problem.

Quite easy to achieve? Well perhaps the level 68 is easy enough to achieve but show me a 500 Dps one hander?

And in a one week race?

It would seem like moving that vaal pact + Es being inferior to life is really taking its toll on the number of shadows. For myself the biggest problem is the location of Vaal pact, no phys character would normally take Vaal pact, so why locate it so far from templar, witch and shadow? Its like swapping Blood magic and Chaos innoculation, so that BM would be far away from life and CI far from ES... BUT, big thanks for making this kind of chart. Really intresting info. :) GJ GGG.

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reboticon wrote:

The reason people take IR is simple. Physical spells. Phys/Chaos EK, Evangelists. They hit like a ton of bricks, and the only way to mitigate them is with block and armor. Even with 4 (3 + oak) endurance charges, you are only mitigating 16% of the damage. With Evangelists also having bubble shields, they are death walking for an evasion based character.

Exactly. Evangelist are bane of my evasion/acrobatics characters.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

But 134 took Blood Magic :) Population seems pretty high considering few overall play 1 week races.

We don't know the level on those characters. For some build, it's quite convenient to take BM on mid-levels and respec later. In such race, there was for sure a lot of ranged characters, BM is still convenient for LA build with poor gear in some stages of progession.