One of the biggest issues I’ve noticed from last Season Sentinel rework and now this Season’s Acolyte rework is while EHG has done an amazing job at adding in new choices and best of all new interesting threshold bonuses.
There now aren’t enough passive points to actually take those choices because for some reason, some passive nodes are 8, 10 or even 12 points! Which honestly feels really bad when you have to dump 12 points into a passive and suddenly you can’t take any of the new threshold fun stuff.
Example is in the Pally tree (Reverence of Duality) passive that is a whopping 12 points and required heck lets just say it. Mandatory. Every level I sink a point into it, I’m just annoyed because I have to do it for so long and can’t take the other cool stuff EHG designed.
Why can’t we just reduce this passive to 6 points and double the value of each point. In fact I don’t think ANY passive node should be more than 6-8 points. Heaven forbid you are also Ignite pally and need the 10 point node (Pheonix strike) Just those 2 nodes and 22 points down the drain.
I have absolutely no wiggle room for the QoL EHG has added and also can’t explore other masteries because now with a 100 level character I have 88 points in Pally and STILL don’t have enough points!!!
Personally I’d love to see EHG work on reducing these nodes point allocation. It really throws a rench into progression, customization and build diversity.
Another option and I hope they think about it is with new chapters maybe add in 5 or even 10 more passive points? Just throwing it out there. Again appreciate these reworks but there is another huge design issue we need to tackle before more reworks hopefully in upcoming seasons.
Note - Now some might argue that if there are a lot of good nodes there is now difficult choices and that is good. However often this is an illusion because you need to take all the mandatory points to create the build and have no points to make difficult choices between good nodes. Just coming from someone who has made probably over 100 builds theorycrafting.
I agree with reducing the 10-12 point nodes. (without increasing their power too much though, doubling them WOULD make them mandatory, because they would be way too strong) 8 i still fine if its a very good node with a 5 or 6 threshold and as long as tehre aren’t too many.
But what you describe as an issues is no issue. That is what these type of games NEED and I am so happy that more and more masteries get to this point now.
In the last 6 years of theorycrafting builds in LE I have never moved around and finetuned my passives trees as much as with the last few patches of all the new mastery that got all those cool threshold passives. Void Knight is my favorite right now and Lich will probably top that as well.
But there are no mandatory nodes for the most part. Or you could flip it around and say all of those nodes are mandatory, but you can’t pick all of them. Whichever way you look at it, it is good design. Having more things than you want, but can’t pick is exactly what we need, so there are choise, tight comparisons.
At the end of the day for a specific build there will always be a “best setup”, that wil lvary from a case by case basis. but as long as the difference between certain passive allocations are so tight there is always some level of flexibility and possiblity to do something slightly different. Especially early on, before a build is “solved” there will be a lot of changes over the first few days, weeks.
And even if a build is very established you can still take the same build and slightly adjust it to your preferences with some different setup.
What you see as an issues absolutely helps and supports build diversity
It is not a design issue, it is deliberate, good and healthy.
For me, I just don’t like these types of passive trees in RPGs. I put up with them, but I don’t think they’re good design. They bury interesting choices in a pile of minutia that I couldn’t care less about. I want to make cool choices that fundamentally change how I play, but for every one of those cool choices, I’m forced to make HUNDREDS of smaller, less interesting choices. Do I want 30 health and 3 strength? Or maybe 20 health and 4 strength? ooooohhhhh. or maybe 50 health and 1 strength. Oh man this is really getting exciting now. kill me.
I don’t need that level of granularity. Do I want damage or health? There. Simple choice about what I want out of my character. I don’t need 20 different combinations of those options.
Players don’t really have the capacity to meaningfully choose between these. They’re math problems. Which is funny, because these games are also often allergic to giving players the tools to answer those math problems or even compare solutions. The only way I could even begin to care about how much I want between this much crit and this much attack speed is if I had a DPS meter to compare the difference. But no. That would… make players want to optimize too much? Why structure the choices that way if you don’t want players evaluating their choices in that framework?
Personally, what I want out of an RPG skill system is something more like D3 or WoW’s talents during MoP. Give me a choice of like 5-10 really chunky options in a given area of character building. That’s still combinatorically massive, especially when you add gear to the equation, but they’re all choices I care about.
I kind of doubt LE could just become that game, so I’d settle for them doing what you’re talking about and at least cutting down the number of points any given node can have. Like what if we said that any given passive can have 5 points MAX and then maybe a threshold bonus somewhere in the middle. That at least cuts down the noise on what your choices are.
0 points: I do not value this at all.
1-2 points I think a bit of this is useful, but I don’t need to go overboard investing in this.
3 points: Threshold bonus that entices you to go past your splash investment.
4-5 points: I really like this.
If we doubled that to 10 and the ranges became 1-4, 5, 6-10, would that suddenly change anything? Are you really losing out by not being able to pick a 3/10 instead of a 1/5 or 2/5? Is that difference really that important to anyone?
Sure. Something like that. LITERALLY ANYTHING! I shouldn’t have to squint at damage numbers flying off a target dummy to get any idea of if my changes improved things. OR, the game should be designed so that such minutia isn’t important to the set of decisions the player has. Anything but what has become the unchallenged default for these games.
The problem with that is, if its half baked implemented and shows wrong or incorrect values sometimes this can lead to wrong decisions by the player and then they think it the correct way to do something.
The devs are not without a reason careful with these tooltips, implementing them in a not reliable state would be worse than not having any
Well, not that I disagree with you, but this already happens with several tooltips.
I do agree that there is no point in adding it to minions unless you’re doing it properly, but most skills also need this.
Anyway, Mike already said several times that they want to improve on the tooltips, specifically minion ones. It’s just not an easy task and takes longer to do.
But i don’t understand how they can be wrong. I mean the damage needs to be calculate in order to deal it out right? I mean the monsters know how much DPS they are taking why can’t EHG just give us that number?
That makes sense. So all the other DPS tooltips are currently 100% accurate?
I’d gladly take any hint at my dps with minions considering the difference of DPS can be off by orders of magnitude as it is, and at least ballpark numbers would be better than the nothing that we’ve had with no reliable way to test for years.
They don’t, though. They know how much damage per hit they’re doing. Not per second. That requires a different set of calculations that isn’t easy to even set the parameters for.
The don’t need to be 100% accurate, they never will be.
But they must be good enough so that if you change something on your setup and the number goes up or down you know it will increase or decrease your damage (by that specific skill). That does work relatively reliable, but not in all cases yet.
Also dps comparison between different skills is useless right now and will probably always stay that way.
That is NOT how that works. The monster (or better the client/server) only know each individual instance it takes. But not the dps it takes form all sources.
dps is a calculation of many many many different factors. Yes the game has all the values and nubmers but combining them in the correct formula is difficult and needs to be done on a skill by skill (and evne skill node by skill ndoe basis).
So then, current DPS tooltips are not 100% accurate and probably never will be, but also they can’t even attempt to add DPS to minion tooltips because they won’t be accurate?
Once again, I’ll take the current implementation of DPS(non minion) tooltips over what we currently have for minions, even if they’re flawed, which is what I said in my original comment.
But they don’t wanna do that, because that you give you very accurate numbers.
The purpose of tooltip dps is not to give you exact numbers, but to let you see if an item change is an upgrade or not.
Dummy dps would show EVERYTHING the character has working togheter in a very accurate way, which they want to avoid, because then each build will get a number attached to it and people would ignore a large nubmer of buidls because the number is 2% smaller then build X
I think the biggest issue for minion DPS is that minions only have stats after summoned and for many the DPS will change on many variables, like did you summon golem next to a dead one? How many and which minions did Abom consume?
Stuff like that. Makes trying to make the calculation a bit more complicated.
Would be cool if threads could stay on topic so that way EHG can make adjustments to passive trees to allow better build diversity and players have way more agency over their builds.
