I am sure everyone is aware of the fact that HP builds are extremely underperforming in terms of raw survivability unless you’re a Primalist (Paladins ramp up ward via healing conversion anyway, so they don’t really count). And it takes surprisingly low amount of effort to build yourself something that has 6-9k WP as passive threshold while builds that do not utilize ward struggle to get to 2.5k HP.
So the first thought that comes to mind is simple: “buff the HP values on all gear”.
It does not solve the disparity between WP and HP builds, though. If anything, it makes it worse because ward builds mostly operate on “low HP > lots of missing HP conversion” mechanics, and buffing HP values will inherently buff their passive threshold as well.
But we do have a proper solution already, do we not? It’s called “Endurance”.
By removing “Endurance threshold” (probably by force-switching its effect with a ‘second instance of +HP with effectiveness of 80% of the regular one’) and making Endurance permanently applicable to one’s HP pool we will get to the point where 2k HP builds with 60% permanent Endurance would have an effective HP pool of 5k. It won’t be as much as a similar ward build would provide, but the difference between their survivability will be drastically lower.
Why is ‘Endurance threshold’ even a thing? What purpose does it serve? It doesn’t work on low-HP ward builds anyway. It affects only health. Well, we happen to have a distinct underperformance in HP builds. Lets remove the questionable limitation that is ‘Endurance threshold’ and allow HP builds actually survive a single hit in 500+ corruption runs.
They are going to tell you that the game is balanced to be played at a 300 corruption level difficulty scaling. Based on this knowledge, I would say that the ward is more likely to be nerfed than the hp to be buffed.
First of all… ward builds are overperforming, life isn’t underperforming. That’s a major difference.
Also the methods for life leech are a bit more direct commonly then ward regeneration, which means you can survive on less health then ward in similar content because there’s a inherent short downtime for ward which is missing for health.
Endurance is a fairly wonky stat, I have to fully agree there that it’s underperforming currently to a degree, much like healing efficiency or stun avoidance. There’s simply better solution available for the same place which has more upsides compared to those.
Yes, because that’s the baseline which the game wants to function.
EHG messing their balance up has nothing to do with the goal which is supposed to be achieved after all.
And yes, likely ward will get some reworks overall I imagine.
I wouldn’t say that its “ward too stronk” rather than “hp too weak”.
Oneshots aren’t fun. If we drop down ward builds (regular ward builds, mind you, not the cheesy “50-100k ward stacking” ones) - we will mitigate the ‘fun’ for people who currently utilize them without allowing a large amount of HP ones to survive three ticks of T4 Julra void pool damage.
I really think it would be much more pleasant to drastically increase the survivability of excessively squishy HP-based characters. And we can avoid affecting and overbuffing WP-based ones at the same time exactly through this: making Endurance damage mitigation effective permanently. This way ward-based builds won’t be affected because any damage they take is soaked by their ward shield which does not get protected by Endurance.
HP brings the majority of characters to 300 corruption, as intended.
Ward brings em above.
Which means ward is stronger then intended and health is in a decent spot. Slight improvement overall for it would be a good choice to allow more builds to consistently reach 300 corruption rather then ‘only’ 200 or 250 in a reasonable time investment.
Absolutely! Short term sure! 100% agreed.
But then content for it needs to be implemented before we can advance the existing system and go more in depth.
Long term it would be utterly detrimental. If new content comes out and you can already easily blast through it with a character which hasn’t even gotten 15 hours of play time yet then that’s a bit of a problem.
What exactly do you mean by that actually? I don’t quite follow.
Endurance is permanent for the last 20% of life and threshold increases that which can act in a multiplicative manner towards your EHP.
Ward also isn’t affected by Endurance.
Im not a fan of that endurace threshold either.
But a total rework wont be realistic in the near future.
I would say they should at least buff the base value and the affix value on items.
If you can get a threshold of 30% with 2 good affix roles it would be nice.
Or at least put some skillpoints regarding to endurance in skilltrees.
There is one for falconer but this one is kinda useless most of the time cause if you get hit by a useless trashmob the effekt goes off.
And you will get hit often by stuff like that.
Endurance Threshold itself is a decent enough mechanic, it just doesn’t scale enough to be better than flat HP.
If instead of flat Threshold, it was % of Health, that would help a lot.
I’ld also (personally) ‘fix’ Ward build by removing the Armor reduction for Ward, similar to Endurance. That way, one can go Ward, Damage Reduction, or Leech, all scaling somewhat with Health. The main gain is that items like Cleaver Solution then don’t inherently become the default Ward build weapon simply because it allows such defensive scaling (both Armour & Ward scaling)
That would be a very very messy thing to code.
Armor and Resistances are basically ‘the same’ for the system. They count into the ‘mitigation’ layer and act multiplicative to each other.
Removing it would mean making a completely new layer which solely removes ward from the concept… or having ward not be affected by any sort of mitigation which would mean ward in the current state is actually too weak rather then too strong, it would mean a 3 to 4 times nerf.
Hence endurance threshold itself is probably the fastest and most sensible way to handle health-based builds properly, especially since it’s in a bad spot anyway and already warrants changes.
Except
a) Ward is too strong for their current target of builds capping out in the 300-600 range
b) Endurance is already excluded from Ward completely. It & Resistance also works 100% vs dots while Armor doesn’t. It shows selecting which mitigation is active when is not as hardcoded in the game as you make it out to be.
The 3-4 times nerf is also an exaggeration.
You need 8500 to get 75% phys hit reduction, which is a substantial investment.
For non-phys hits, you can’t even get a 2/3rd reduction no matter what, so it’ll never be a 3x nerf.
If you’re sitting at 3-4k Armor, that’s maybe a 2x nerf, yes. But more importantly, it changes the amount of stats Ward can scale with. Having to go flat health on chest instead of +50% armor curbs the way Ward builds can stack EHP vs Health builds.
There is a simple low tech solution to this issue: Don’t stand in shit.
That will be powercreep given the balance goal of EHG.
Then every class needs a lot of endurence nodes to make things fair and you’ll end up with builds that have 3k HP and 10k Ward still.
On top of that you could say you make bllock a master class wide thing.
Streamlining defence mechanics is the worst idea. It’s already bad, from my point of view, that the devs in the past made dmg types videly available when they obviously weren’t intended for the class. Look at fire Shaman for example it’s a complete shitsow and I don’t want this to happen with defences as well. I like it that classes are different and everything that make classes simply a grey mass is bad for the game and class idendity.
Somone already did the math for you on this one in another thread. Ward builds right now would still be stonger then HP builds .
Would they still be stronger than they are now?
Would they still be strong enough to roflstomp through 500+ corruption?
If it would bring Ward closer to the designed target, then that is a good thing regardless of where Health builds are. If Health builds then get buffed a bit that would also bridge the gap. We can slightly adjust both systems to fix the disparity, it doesn’t need to be a single fix-all solution.
True, which is another flag for the system to check with each singular hit I imagine.
Adding another flag for it is something fairly wonky usually.
Just coding stuff if I got it right, we don’t know the exact method they chose but it’sa likely one.
Yes, those 2 systems obviously need to be adjusted separately. Endurance adjusted/reworked and ward needs the fox of the bugs + according nerfs to bring them into the same line as other defensive measures.
Well, if I get 1000 damage with the mitigation and I remove the 75% from resistances alone then I’ll get 4000 damage. Which is a 4 times multiplier, with armor taken into consideration it becomes even more.
Agreed, unless you have armor affecting DoT it means health commonly has a higher value, which hence stacks with ward better, so high health tends to cause high ward with the options we have available currently. And it’s not all too hard to spec into.
That definitely, health builds do that too after all.
We’re not in PoE-land. If you remove resistances (which I was not suggesting, btw, just armor) you would only take 1750 damage, assuming you’re capped to begin with.
beta was cool now it’s just a frustrating piece op sh#t game. Getting one shotted all the time or getting stunned all the time not even talking about stuff hitting you 3 screens away like those lightning elementals or those poisson blooms. Running around with a lvl 88 necro getting 1 shotted every frikking time because you cant farm gear to actually play on 100’s. You should have left it like it was in beta and just increase difficulty once reaching 300 corruption like a masachist mode from there on. But no you had to add the one shot crap from that piece of sh#t poe game and the 100% stun crap from D4. Forget about the about the casuals that actually have a job , wife and friends and listen to the people that play this for 16 hours a day.
Umh… 1000 damage would be 25% of the damage taken (since 75% are mitigated)
4 times 25% = 100%
Hence 1000x4 = 4000
You got a thought error there with the percentages.
They were in since a while and are meant to be ‘artillery enemies’ which intentionally make you keep moving. That’s their whole design point.
Unusual definitely but after getting used to it they become fairly non-essential.
Also which one-shots are you talking about? I know of none existing at all outside of Julra’s time change mechanic.
Stun also was in the game since I knew it… I don’t see why it was fine in beta and not anymore since nothing was changed there.
If you provide a link to your build I can look up to see if there’s some quick-fix solutions to alleviate your frustrations.
Ah damn, I always forget to take that into consideration!
Sorry for that, my bad.
It’s just such an uncommon mechanic that it somehow fails to stick in my mind… I made that mistake repeatedly and my brain just denies to retain this piece of information for some reason.
There will be no powercreep.
People are already farming 1500-2000+ corruption. Granted, they farm those levels of corruption on ward builds, but that doesn’t mean you have to tone them down to 500 Becuz Reasons. What we really need is a survivability buff for HP builds.
And don’t you “don’t stand in bad” me. Julra’s pool is dropped at your position whenever you shift phases. And my Rogue can barely survive two ticks of that damage without dying - and two ticks is what I get anyway despite the fact that I falconjump out of every single pool in due time. This is just wrong. Casters have reliable teleportation skills AND they are ward-based, Falconers have a glitchy, slow and unreliable Aerial Assault AND they’re HP-based. I think the idea is quite simple to grasp there.
And I think you’re missing the most important part of what I was trying to say. The survivability disparity is NOT because of “X is too strong”, it is because of “Y is too weak”. We are literally living glass cannons everyone, dealing WAY more damage than is necessary against the enemies that have just enough damage to kill us. So when ward-built casters can comfortably clear 600 corruption without dying too much, I say its okay and we should let them do that. But that means that we must allow HP builds to feel themselves manageable on 400-500 corruption, not just die to a random off-screen bile spew on its first damage application instance. Maybe on the second one, yes.
There is literally no reason for Endurance threshold to exist. It serves no purpose.
Converting this stat (on already existing gear) in a tiny bit of extra HP or armor instead while making Endurance applicable to HP bar as a whole would literally solve EVERY problem here. And it would not take any effort at all to implement: all that needs to be done is to remove one string out of affix pool for items dropped in the future.
No… I’m generally not. I forfeit a bit of damage in favor of actually surviving encounters.
You’re not forced to solely invest into damage, take 1-2 extra affixes to make you survive.
No, 300. My rogue can survive Julra T4 but can’t handle even 250 corruption properly, hence I’ll say 300 is more then fine if your defenses are properly built.
True, it needs a serious rework. Has its place then though if it’s done.
Also you don’t wanna remove affixes from the pool, item progression already is fairly quick for the genre, it’s why games as they become more complex put ‘filler affixes’ in, like light radius in PoE. It’s to give another ‘nothing’ as a extra option.
Overall:
Balancing for 300 is not a question or discussion but a necessity.
Yes, we won’t have powercreep because the current balance is so utterly bad that any newly implemented content will be fairly meaningless in the current situation.
Without creating a baseline we won’t have options to create further depth for the systems, we can only make ‘the same type’ of content on top, never something introducing a raise of power level.
That’s what makes it a necessity and not something which is a friendly ask.
Evidence: Nothing solid, just my own experience of playing the game over 1000s of hours since it first released in EA. I have many many Alts representing most Masteries (no spellblades :P) pushing corruption to various levels, with several pushing more than the mentioned 300 corruption endgame balance point). I have all sorts of builds. I have high HP chars with massive DR, I have LL/High Ward chars, I have the juicy high HP and high Ward chars in there too. A bit of everything.
And in my own experience, saying “HP builds are extremely underperforming in terms of raw survivability” is simply not true.
What is true is people are happy to jump on that bandwagon and loudly proclaim it, instead of using the tools they have to try to address it and to check if it really is true.
You say that like non-ward builds cannot surpass 300c. It’s just not true. I’ve seen HP-only builds push 1000c without breaking sweat.
One example easy to overlook is with the right build and gear you can have Endurance cover high amounts of your HP with max DR. But I guess no one can be bothered looking into how to do that, when it’s easier to just shout “ward OP”.
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