I feel there’s too much of a lock-in on damage type in builds to warrant immunities. A mage, for example, can’t easily swap spells around. With current setup I’d prefer targets would be highly resistant to a damage type with build options to cope with that (like shredding). Players can balance this out. Immunities are too binary for me and can make things clunky.
MP could cope with this, but who would want a fire mage in the group if targets are immune to fire? And translates to a design challenge for 11th when it comes to how to spread it around and before you know it someone feels left out by design.
Casters are in an even worse place than non-casters from that point of view since the majority of their base damage comes from adaptive spell damage which takes the damage element from the skill tags. Compared to flat added melee/bow/throwing damage which is of a specific element so it’s easier to change it to a different element by changing the prefix on the weapon.
But all of this is irrelevant to the purpose of the thread which is to fix perceived issues with the player’s armour rather than how mobs mitigate the player’s damage. I think mobs getting damage immunities is worth a different thread…
I know what you mean regarding to the scarcity of the usage and that’s what I mean with the design challenge it would put on 11th’s side. Some scenario’s I’d see in front of me would be a fire mage vs a fire immune mob with more health that would have to be pinged down over a long (tedious) time.
The thought that it would have to be very scarce implies the difficulty with it.
I’m not sure I reached hell on D2 - it’s been very long (I got to 1 level from the max on a barb, if I recall right - I might not have reached hell). I do remember having to cope with the effects of immunities as a MUD programmer - it basically meant equipping characters with a wider arsenal. This can be fun, don’t get me wrong there. But I think currently there’s too much of a ‘lock-in’ on damage types in the design.
If it were easier to swap spells on the spot and less of a deep investment in a type I’d understand the role of immunities better - it would allow characters to manifest their diversity in powers.
edit: agree with above poster on how this deserves its own thread
Maybe armour could just be a hedge against massive hits? It would reduce the effectiveness of Crit Avoidance, but maybe that stat is too ubiquitous as is.
How about armor that scales from two sides. It would look like endurance does with two parts. The first part would scale the “% of HP dealt in a single hit” and the second would scale the “% of HP left after hit”.
So lets say you have 10% Armour Durability (this means it triggers on the monster dealing a killing hit at 90% or more of your max HP)(100%-AD%)
Then you have 10% Armour Resilience (this is the amount of HP you are left with after a “one-shot”)
So a monster hits you for 90% of your max HP and the hit would kill you, instead you are left at 10% max health. This cannot heal you if you are below 10% health when the hit is taken, but the hit would leave you at your current health.
If AD was at 20% then if the monster deals a killing blow of 80% of your max health, you would be left with your AR% of HP.
For this to be balanced, it should be relatively difficult to scale. Neither should ever be able to go above 35% (with the exception of a high cd skill that lasts a few seconds).
This would mitigate the massive one-shots that people see now, but still leave people vulnerable to lots of smaller damage hits or dots.
Every single armor point could also be counted as another flat reduction.
→ So 400 armor would also be FLAT 400 less damage (maybe half for spell hits) per hit.
Then everything that hangs on it must be adjusted.
Nice! My shield throw armour stealing FG would be invincible with 10k armour .
I absolutely dislike the suggestion to reduce any of the damage types. This concept is already build into the core of LE. We have entire classes and masteries themed around these types. All the corresponding ailments and damage conversions make a lot of the build diversity of LE.
It would be absolutely horrible to see all this stuff be flushed down the toilet.
The complexity between D3 and PoE is one of the biggest selling points of this game, imho.
EHG would have to go back to the drawing board if they’d want to go down to 2 or 3 different damage types. Also I would find this absolutely boring.
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