Beta 0.8.5e Patch Notes

Personally feel like Ward should be relagated to being a passive mechanic outside of spellblade where the numbers can be tuned specifically for spellblade and not random stuff that can get potentially 10x the hit rate for on hit ward gen.

Take the classic “Low life ward” items, exsang + perfect rolled last steps gives you 35% of missing health per second as passive ward gain, on a 2k health player, lets say you are missing 90% of that, you generate a decent 630 ward per second. This allows you to have a peak HP of anywhere from 2-4k depending on ward retention, and you basically have 630 regen.

Now look at twister heart, its not even on hit, but rather on cast. if you cast 3x per second, and have a perfect rolled one, you are able to gain on a 2k health player, a whopping 960 ward per second assuming you can keep hp topped off, which is fairly easy with leech. And if cast speeds get higher, it gets better and better.

being able to generate a defensive mechanic with no upper limit that scales with offensive stats its just not good design. The low life ward items and Vessel have hard upper limits strictly based on a singular stat, where as stuff like AoM and Twister heart have multiple scaling vectors that just let them get way too out of hand.

That.

To state the obvious: why don’t we just have a “max ward” value, that can be increased via affixes or passives? You would still use ward-generation mechanics, but within this limit.
Feels too easy, I must be missing something, but wouldn’t that solve everything permanently?
Or maybe it’s just too much work to implement at this stage, I don’t know.

One thing I do know for a fact is that Amarathy is completely right: there has been many instances in the past of over-warding (cool word, don’t you think? :wink:) and there will be some more all the time, regardless of how often they individually nerf the uniques.

Edit: the base “max-ward” could be different for each class, I like class identities. Mage base 1500, Acolyte 1200, Sentinel 500, you get the idea. Of course influenced by affixes after that.

There is no upper limit? What about number of ignite / damned stacks on the target and yourself? If i get 3 ward per stack per proc and i have 100 stacks on target, i get 300 ward - i dont see anything infinite here - limits are how many stacks i can apply per period of time and how many attacks per second i have for proccing the rings.

I think the ward gain from proc can be easily managed, something like:
“You gain X ward for each ignite / damned stack, applies for maximum of 100 stacks.” or
“You gain X ward for each ignite / damned stack you applied in last 2 seconds.”

By infinite scaling I meant that there is no upper limit, so it could theoretically be scaled to infinity. So as long as you can increase the number of ignites or your attack speed, you can increase the amount of ward generated. Maybe infinite scaling was not the proper term here.
The more proper term would be either direct scaling.
Arguably in this case it is quadratic, since the generated ward scales with attack speed and ignites, but ignites scale linearly with attack speed as well, so the generated ward scales with the square of the attack speed.

The problem is that often times directly scaling in ARPGs lead to these degenerate results.
The devs are aware of this. this is the very reason why Chronostasis has an upper-bound on the amount of consumed ward, I am not sure why the same countermeasures are not being applied here.

This is exactly the sort of limit that I was suggesting.

He means there’s no cap.

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Not sure if it will help much but its nice to see Set pieces getting some love… Will be interesting to see if they make a re-appearance in builds or enable some new interaction…

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Actually I made something that was working a litle, with Damned the idea was with a necromancer:
You take the damned chance on dread shade, then all of your pet apply damned, and then you curse yourself your target, it was working ! ok not on the order oif magnitude of sorc or paly, but around 20/30k on best scenario in my testing.

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Actually for leveling pebble set for necro, getting +42 flat dammage really makes skeletons viable again!

Great to see you here. Thank you for all the awareness and facts you bring to the community. Keep it up friend :smiley:

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lol really leveling isnt viable we need skeles to be op?
by the time you can wear the three peiece crafted gear would outperform it

Getting gouged open is worse than a burnt tongue.

But I definitely would like to see each ailment have its own gimmick. (Poison has -res, frostbite has freeze etc)

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Would this amount of ward be enough to survive a ground zero of a thermonuclear blast? Or walking in and out of the core of a star unscathed? (which is quite similar to the former, not counting the gravity, ofc)

Just curious how this level of immortality can be even measured in real life terms :joy:

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Yes, if you’re going to compare a wind tunnel to a hurricane… A nuke detonating is a transient effect (comparatively), the core of a star is on-going.

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Guess it depends on the universe, if you can land 100’s of ignites on a falling atomic bomb or land many ignites on a star you possibly could

However if this is Dark Souls/ER universe you can have millions of HP/defence but die from a drop over 10 or so metres

The ring also procs when you get ignited, so that shouldn’t be a problem. But since stars have over 9000 ignite effect that could become a problem sooner or later.

Regarding the ashes/other ward based item nerfs.

As the problem is just “this can scale exponentially and thus be abused for impossible numbers”, instead of nerfing the flat numbers, why don’t you nerf it with a CAP? Perhaps capping at 100% to gain 13-29 ward (the amount of ward isn’t the important part, the cap at 100% so that it doesn’t proc twice is).

I say this because as in your version of the nerf, it only works for the massive abuse builds(as only they can push the bonus to numbers that would even be viable), who will either not work at all as they fail to achieve their objective or they will still be broken because they do infinite scaling shenanigans.

I assume you mean to remove the “per stack” part of the proc rather than upping the chance to proc up to 100%?

This would be my preferred change. And 100 might even be too high especially if they revert the chance nerf because, as it stands right now, the ring no longer matches the intent of the ring that they’ve communicated to us. Heck, revert the entire change but change it to a max of 15 stacks and it would still be an amazing unique.

I just felt (and still feel) like the ring is another step in the same direction PoE went back before the Slam tag was introduced. For melee: Just try to get as much attack speed as you can because it will outweigh any damage you can do with a 2-handed weapon.

I mean the per stack part. the percentage unchanged