This post regards gearing in general, but that of course includes the experience of crafting.
Right now all of player power is dumped into the prefixes. Suffixes provide only defenses (unless you use minions) for a large number of builds. To this point, what suffixes you get don’t matter. By end-game you can easily sport 150+ resist in everything given how high individual resists can roll. Those suffixes feel entirely wasted and getting exalted’s with T6 or T7 suffixes is a let down (for me, at least, every time it happens). This seems like it forces you into a position where you max-resistances and dump the rest into some combination of armor or endurance and that generally works for every play-style that isn’t using ward which is many of them.
My solution would be to move attributes and mana to suffixes to compete with other defensive oriented stats to make gearing your character defensively a more fine-tuned balance. I will try to address them individually. The examples I provide are not attempting to be comprehensive and focused toward stimulating a discussion regarding affix choice.
Attributes initially make sense since their primary purpose is damage scaling. Some provide utility like attunement does for mana, etc. However, attributes competing for +2 Judgement slots and damage multipliers tend to lose the battle for which affix gets the slot. Yes, there are some builds that focus on stat-stacking, but this is something that can be balanced around to provide a choice between player power and player survivability. A change like this could make getting a T5 (edited because I was wrong again, oops) resist feel like something worth Glyph of Despair-ing because there is actually something meaningful to replace that resist with.
For most skills mana is pure utility. Of course it lets you do damage but unless you’re playing Judgment it isn’t scaling damage. Mana is another example where a player gets to decide between casting or channeling more spells/melee and defense. Right now mana is generally considered a “bad” stat and that seems silly because you’d think a sorcerer with the biggest mana pool would be invited to all the parties. I believe mana in place of defenses is a more worthy choice than mana over damage. Why should I care about doubling the spells I cast when I can effectively double the effect of my mana pool by doubling my damage instead? The obvious choice is click less-do more damage.
Anyway that’s my take. Sorry for the voluminous post, but these are core mechanics of the game and can effectively make or break the desire to pursue gear (i.e. play an arpg).
Your suggestions are pretty much describing how the affixes used to work a while ago and this was changed to what it is now.
Prefixes are now intended to be offensive and suffixes primarily defensive.
Gear limitations have also changed to match this. Eg. you cannot get vitality as a prefix in gloves anymore. So not all affixes can be randomly added to any gear.
Not sure on your comment about Health for example, it’s a suffix and is used as such by almost every build because health is a powerful stat. Resistances (cap at 75) are generally easy to get and most players will realize quite soon that they can use suffix slots for other things.
I think in principle it could be an interesting idea, not sure. Though I do agree that prefixes are more likely to be more interesting.
As far as I’m aware, “all the cool kids” are using passives, blessings, item implicits & idols to cap resists initially then getting health & endurance on suffixes.
You can’t Despair a t6/7 affix. The only crafting that can affect a t6/7 affix is the rune that rerolls the value of the affix within it’s tier.
For most skills, yes, though being the loveable pedant that I am, I do have to comment that there are several skills that have nodes that consume either extra mana or all of it to give bonuses (Detonating Arrow, several Marksman/Rogue passives come to mind). It would be nice if the Sorc had some other active effect from mana, no idea what.
It already is.
IMO, leech should be got rid of, then the damage of mobs reduced a bit & see how that shakes up the meta.
You’re right. I made a mistake there, but I think it still holds for attributes and mana. Right now suffixes just feel very lackluster. I know they cap at 75% and that’s why its just weird sporting so much resistance.
Yep, I fixed it thanks lol. I know some skills scale with mana, these are things that can be balanced around. But gearing defenses is a breeze once you know what prefixes scale your damage the best and unless you’re the exceptions which I didn’t want to list, mana is mostly pointless.
Another potential solution would then be to create new defensive mechanics to compete with the current suffixes if 50:50 damage:tank prefix:suffix is the hard-line in the sand so to speak. The suffix stat rolls are so high that gearing defensively is a very linear path from level 1 to end-game.
They simply have to make defensive suffixes more exciting with more potential options.
Right now everyone simply scales health because you can get resistances other ways, or even skip them if you are chad enough to be okay taking some extra damage.
Armor/Dodge suffixes suck in most cases and simply need buffs. Strength aligned characters can use strength rolls to get damage and %armor, so %armor is kinda whatever. Flat armor just needs its values buffed. Dodge is a rogue thing, and they nerfed it because allowing everyone to stack dodge is problematic to an extent.
But there is some interesting mechanics out there, like Endurance threshold, and stuff like hybrid block suffix. They just need to be expanded/buffed to allow more choice in defensive gearing.
Like a good example damage taken to mana instead of life could become a non specific mechanic. This opens up a way for people who generate lots of mana to use mana as a defensive tool. They could bring back glancing blows as a defensive mechanic, or even something like a flat reduction to damage taken. You take say -50 damage, this happens before mitigation, a defense against many small hits but much weaker vs big hits.
I think the idea of having offense and defense split to prefix suffix is actually good for the player power side of things, it allows you better options over items and give clarity to what goes where and what trade offs you can make.
