Beta 0.8.5e Patch Notes

Rings can still maintain stupid amount of ward against 4 targets

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Ok gotcha

Look mom!

IMO this ward generation could get nerfed by another 90% and it would still be broken op XD
Most builds need to invest entire skill tree, passives and gear to get around 10k ward, and with that ammount you are already immortal to anything the game has to offer so dunno…

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Ty for answer.

The highest ive gotten pre nerf is 2M+

Ive seen 4M from other players:

I understand that EHG is trying stuff up while we are in beta, exploring ideas and options. I think that is great but after playing for so long this kind of power disparities make me wonder.

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I think that is a really good balance way of doing it, plus let not forget we are still in beta, so it’s really the time to test stuff :slight_smile:

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It is sad to me to see such broken stuff coming out at this point. Wars just needs to go away

At the low end stuff like Ashes aren’t that powerful, but the testing is definitely slipping when it comes to optimally geared characters.

Ward doesn’t need to go away, just needs to be balanced. balanced in such away that specific skills and class build setups don’t vastly perform over the top in comparison of others. Ward should be a mrchanic you build into, thats separate from hp and dr, so that if you choose to build into a lot of ward, it would be comparable to building hp×dr sources, with no additional modifier that scales with attack speed, but ends up with comparable ehp values of health+endurance+ other sources of dr.

For example. I go to the store and I have the option of buying either chocolate, or strawberry ice cream :icecream: both are very good flavors, loved by millions of people. This is how ward and health should translate. Two very good flavors of something, separate from them selves a better example would be do I want a :pizza: for dinner, or a :hamburger:

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On the Isadora set specifically. What is the theme of the set? It has a lot of necrotic themes but the gloves give a substantial amount of flat cold DMG.

I am a firm believer that anything can be adjusted to a useable state with numbers but for these set items (some of the older ones especially) I think it’s worth asking what niche do these items fill.

You cant really balance this ring without giving a massive reduction in Ward Retention

These rings should give -90% LESS Ward Retention, so if you have 2 you most likely cant sustain Ward at all for longer than a few seconds tops

Not really.
The infinite scaling nature of the rings is the main culprit in my view, there is currently no upper limit on the ward generated with each proc, and the proc has no CD.
If either limitations were to be in place, the generated numbers would be much more reasonable.
Alternatively, they can nerf the ward generation number so that they get reasonable on the more optimized builds, but that involves very significant reductions in the values.
EHG seems to be opting for the second route.
Personally, I would have preferred the first option, because it forces the item in a very tight niche where it can possibly be used only by highly specialized builds.

Ultimately is a matter of deciding who the rings are for.
You can tune the rings in such a way that they still have infinite scaling but do not get too overpowered, but then the ring will be useless for everyone but the most specialized builds.
Alternatively, you can remove the infinite scaling, but then the item becomes more of a generic powerful item for all builds that have access to ignite, and not a dedicated item for ignite buids.

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They could also decouple the ward per damned stack 'cause I don’t think there are any builds that stack damned on hit.

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But it wont matter if your individual stack of ward only lasts .5 seconds instead of more than 5

I’ve had my rant about the knife edge model of ward either being invincible or paper so I won’t repeat myself on that but my main take away from this patch is seeing interesting item effects like humming and ashes being gutted rather than address the systems that is driving the unbound scalability. It’s not the first case of absurd levels of ward and I’m sure this won’t be the last.

I 100% get that we are on the home stretch to 1.0 so the scope is on a tight lock but I’d just really hate to see the game hit that milestone if there is a large instability in the overall player power balance. It might seem like a distraction to the scope but as a player I would much rather see those things addressed rather than bandaiding and gutting items/skills.

Ignite definitely needs some love to its base effect, though I still find it odd thematically that ignite does less damage than bleed. Getting a paper cut is worse than being set on fire!

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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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