Some of you guys think that they would remove boss ward and then increase boss health by basically nothing (50%) when what would happen instead is boss health would need to skyrocket by at least like 1000%. We need to clear up some things. Yes, there are broken builds that do too much damage, but even basic, not overpowered “just good” builds like beastmaster wolves, shaman thorn totem, and necromancer minion spam completely wreck the game well past 300 corruption.
The “low dps” builds tend to just be shit builds. No amount of balance is going to make those any good. I’ve seen builds on the forum that religiously avoid everything in a skill that would make it do damage.
Ok, let’s make a big breakdown then to realize the actual state. Not from the perspective of solely ‘Boss Ward’ but also taking into consideration ‘DDR’ as well.
Initial premise of DDR:
Provide a system which hinders high DPS builds to ‘vaporize’ a boss while not affecting low DPS builds.
So:
High DPS build needs to be sufficiently hindered
Low DPS builds aren’t allowed to be hindered
Problems that arose:
Visual feedback for the existence of the system itself
Leech being extremely affected by it
Not working for extremely high DPS builds just bypassing it.
That’s the former status in short term
New system is hence ‘Boss Ward’, we know the implementation so let’s see if our initial goals hold up + if it fixed the problems as well as actual realized problems if anything goes extra.
High DPS build sufficiently hindered:
No, it’s easier then before to kill bosses. If I did a slow-hitting 35% total HP hit twice before DDR kicked in then the follow-up was 3-4% per hit. This means I get a reduction to 10% of my damage.
Old hit-count total: 2+10 = 12 total hits
New count hence (3 ward sessions 70% Health): 2+3*2= 8 total hits
Result: The old system did a better job then the new one.
Low DPS build not interfered with (as DDR didn’t kick in to even be felt):
No, absolutely not, at first sight even.
If we say a fight took 5 minutes formerly we would add worst-case 1,5 minutes to a total of 6,5 minutes.
We do damage during that though, which in 30 seconds (0,5 minutes) means we do 10% of our total DPS at most during that time, hence (since I don’t want to go into progressive math I’ll keep it simple) we simply say we reduce the 30 seconds it would take to wait it out simply by our full potential 10% damage, hence by 3 seconds.
So the new count is (in seconds): 300+3*27= 381 Seconds or 6 Minutes 21 Seconds
Hence: 27% increase in total time for a fight
Result: No, it does now affect low DPS builds clearly.
Not working on extreme DPS builds:
It makes no difference in that case anymore anyway, too short fighting times, failure of the system by design.
Total End result:
The new mechanic fails entirely to uphold the initial design philosophies which warranted the existence in the first place. Hence… why have it exist?
Without its existence Leech is not affected, no visual issues are there and the low DPS side is not affected anyway. Hence a 75% boss-health increase + raising base damage from low DPS builds is the best possible solution to reign in high DPS builds accordingly without punishing the low DPS builds.
Simple as that.
Those numbers are something which need to be run before implementation and not after. You just don’t throw mechanics into the fray and ‘hope for the best’. Math crunching, internal testing and then the release.
So:
This data I provided is one which is available before release. Why wasn’t it even taken into consideration?
The way to do such stuff is really really simple after all, data from DDR was available since the existence of DDR happened. So those are the testing steps:
Step 1: Put in Numbers from DDR examples through different cases. Step 2: Take Numbers from Ward + decay time from ward Step 3: Compare results Step 4: Check of results uphold design philosophy
If the answer is ‘Yes’ implement. If the answer is ‘No’ rework, not ready.
That’s it, that’s all it needs.
Not done, hence scrutiny and calling it out.
Then ask yourself the question: Is DDR a generally applicable system with upsides or a band aid?
The answer is band aid since it fixes a problem existing through a un-handled core issue. That’s the definition for a band aid.
Then follow up: Is Boss-Ward then solving the un-handled core issue?
The answer is: No.
Hence the outcome is ‘It can’t be the best option since it also is a band aid by design’.
Yes, it’s better then DDR. But poop and poop with a hat still underneath stays poop
Edit:
Those don’t fall under the category of ‘core builds’.
Hence builds which are directly designed by EHG.
Core synergies with clear intention. Hence the ‘on the face’ builds which they clearly want you to do without thinking.
This includes items specifically implemented with skills that have those ‘on the face’ synergies.
Outliers on both sides are fine, you can make any build as garbage as possible and you can also find unintended - and interesting - combinations skyrocketing a build. Both are fine, ingenuity is to be rewarded. Extra laze and not even using the basic tools doesn’t need to be brought up.
This maybe more of a question for Dammitt or Tunk, but did they not tweak the base HP as well so that overall the TTK for low DPS builds is at least similar but for high DPS builds its longer? That was the aim at least.
Which they do, as you know, and this is why they tried the current system to replace the previous one. If this doesn’t work then I’m sure they’ll go back to the drawing board & try something else.
Which would be massively shit to any build that isn’t a brokenly OP one. This is why the OP builds need to be brought in line & the underperforming builds need to be brought up. Then once everything’s “broadly similar” (ish) the mob & boss HP can be balanced around that.
First of all - Sorry, I’m going through some shit right now that has me very irritable this morning, and my reply was unnecessarily rude.
I, personally, am not ignoring that possibility. When I say I don’t think bosses dying too fast is a real problem that needs a specific solution, I’m also implicitly saying that I do not want that either. I don’t want the numbers on this tweaked - I want the Ward burst system to be gone, or at least relegated to pinnacle level content where it makes any sense to care about boss TTK, because it sucks to engage with no matter what the numbers are.
I disagree with your characterization here. I’m not saying it should be removed just because the first iteration of it doesn’t work. I don’t think it has a real reason to exist in the first place, and I think that as a system for solving the alleged problem of bosses dying too fast, bursts of extra Ward to chew through multiple times in a fight will always be unfun and annoying to me no matter how they might push the numbers around.
Because a health bar is already a perfectly functional, transparent, and intuitive system for controlling how long it takes to kill a boss. I feel there’s no good reason to add new layers of additional systems instead of either balancing overperforming builds, letting people kill bosses fast because who cares, or failing all that just giving bosses a little more HP. IMO, it’s overengineering.
For all intents and purposes, I am. If we’re going to continue the analogy, this is the part where Gordon Ramsay goes around mid-show and says “This doesn’t taste good, and I don’t know why you marinated the salmon in ketchup to begin with, but if you present this as your finished dish, I’m definitely not giving you the white apron”.
And I don’t think that it could fundamentally be better for low DPS builds than high DPS builds anyway - the amount of Ward you have to burn through is the same no matter how much damage you’re doing. There’s allegedly decay that’s supposed to help with this, but it’s slow as molasses and has been unnoticeable. And if they make it too much faster it would just continue to benefit high DPS even more.
Hey, what if they keep the ward system but tweak it in a way it will only trigger if X% dmg is dealt in less than Y seconds, and adjust the ward value depending on how fast it was triggered? Maybe even make ward boss do not decay at all in this case.
Could be a start point and good middle ground for dealing with very high DPS builds without affecting the very low ones.
Actually it’s not. The higher your DPS the quicker your damage brings the ward down to zero. If your DPS is lower then the ward is around for longer so it has longer to decay & the boss ward’s decay increases with time, therefore lower DPS builds need to “waste” less DPS on the ward before they get back to boss HP. It’s not a perfect system, but this is how it’s intended to work.
That said, high DPS builds will always kill the boss faster than low DPS builds.
That’s because it starts off slow & accelerates as time goes on.
There is a problem, that being that some builds can get their DPS “so high” that they trivialise the boss mechanics that the devs have spent time implementing & that makes the devs sad. Do you want to make Mike sad? What kind of monster are you?
Sees a pile of poop with a hat: “PERRY THE POOP!?”
Now that that’s out of the way.
I agree with your data that it’s clearly not working as intended, I also agree that EHG could have, and should have, checked this before releasing it.
That being said, I disagree with it being a band-aid. The reason I disagree is because the “true” fix is not feasible with EHGs community voted design philosophy of not adjusting builds mid cycle (bugs excluded). There’s nothing stopping them from adjusting the mechanic keeping bosses from dying in seconds, but they literally cannot change a build like Wraith Lord killing bosses in less than 5s mid cycle should they remove the Boss Ward.
You could add more HP to the boss, but then low end builds suffer, so we’re back to square one of “make sure overtuned builds are brought into line” which other games do all the time
The same stays true for Path of Exile and they don’t have this issue at all in relation to their bosses.
As said, outliers for ingenuity don’t count and aren’t an issue, those are to be reigned in after a cycle.
Bugs have to be fixed, period. Why they even made a poll for that is beyond me. It was a stupid decision to even ask that, it’s self-explanatory and the job of a dev to provide a product to be functional. If someone gets upsides through a clearly broken mechanic and knows that then that’s called ‘exploit’ after all, and hence there’s no basis for complaints. Went into it knowingly and got burned mid-way, as should be.
For those unknowingly… well, tough luck, you can never make everyone happy, harsh but true, and overall it’s healthier for the game.
So nah, it simply doesn’t hold true.
Also:
If you need to implement a mechanic since you lack the ability to change the underlying issue it doesn’t change it by design to be a band aid. Actually the opposite, it’s a showcase of something going wrong, period. Allowed short-term to exist to alleviate issues… when they’re existing long-term then it’s clearly time to become wary, problems accumulate and tend to explode at the worst times and then needing more effort to solve then they would’ve otherwise ever done.
Could’ve done it between cycles.
They didn’t
So no excuse for that, right?
Which is also included as mentioned. Broad sweep of balancing. There’s clearly underperforming core builds available.
If it’s simply a ‘you’ problem by making a shit build? Well, that enforces you to actually handle it, you know… like you’re supposed to? The problem solving aspect of diablo-clones which is everywhere existing outside of D3 which has barely any of that as you don’t run into problems before your progression is basically over already.
So when the lower end builds are raised up what hinders EHG to raise up the HP of bosses to better represent and fulfill their position properly?
To be fair, what I meant and said poorly was that the size of the Ward burst is the same for everyone, always. However, for all practical intents and purposes, it is the same amount. Because:
And it increases so slowly and so unnoticeably that it may as well not increase at all. I have never yet noticed a difference between the beginning and the tail end of burning off Ward. I barely notice the fact that it decays period.
HP and Corruption can already solve that alleged problem. There’s no need for these weird extra systems on top of it.
Well Mike apparently wants to make me sad, so…
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Edit:
Here’s my ultimate problem - I do not play ARPGs for every even minorly “special” mob to be an “encounter”. When I want that kind of gameplay, I play different genres of games. I don’t want it here. In other ARPGs in my rotation, that content is optional and easily avoidable. It has been the same for LE for the last several years, until this ridiculous Ward mechanic was implemented to solve a problem that I will never agree is real. Nothing will convince me that TTK enforcement belongs in an ARPG except for maybe on pinnacle content. I absolutely do not give a fuck if a campaign, echo, or timeline boss can die in 1 second and neither should anyone else. That content is supposed to be fodder.
This mechanic takes away what I think is fun about LE - I want to fart around with stupid, silly build ideas and try to make them work without the entire game being tedious and/or constantly dying if the build turns out bad. The balance LE found is why I have liked it so much. It’s not like POE where everything wants to ram you into the ground all the time, and it’s not like Diablo where almost nothing is interesting or transformative at all and there’s zero room for creativity and weird bullshit. But now this Ward shit is everywhere, even fucking trash mobs, and it’s completely unavoidable, and it sucks. It makes me want to just netdeck some broken build, the way I have to play POE, in order to not be annoyed at the end of every echo or timeline, instead of enjoying what I think has been the best part of the game.
Eh I dont think it would change anything for the high dps builds. I think funny enough having played the system with high and low damage builds, is to add MORE ward, and increase its decay, make it decay in say 10 seconds maximum, this means most fights that are “important” are only at most ever extended by say 30~ seconds, most bosses of merit aka mono bosses have 3 ward phases at 75/50/25, many weaker ones have 2, at like 70/30, some even only have one iirc at half.
The pinnacle boss has 4 iirc, 80/60/40/20. if you set the decay time to 10 seconds, and massively increase the ward, then most builds will simply be throttled by the ward rather then health, this sets the time to kill to the same for most builds. Simply amp the ward value as needed to stop the broken builds.
I just dont think we can live in a world where they “buff hp” of bosses and it ever feels good for low dps builds anyways. They really just need to adjust the decay rate heavily. it literally does not start decaying iirc in my test for like 5 seconds and takes quite a few to fully disappear… on my aberoth kill I most certainly was fighting blue bar far longer then red bar lol…
I mean… functionally you’re absolutely right about that.
But do you also know why it would be a really bad idea? Think about what it functionally does.
High DPS builds can’t get easily through that ward then, right?
So… what happens to low DPS builds? They definitely can’t affect the ward meaningfully.
So once again we have low DPS builds more affected by this mechanic then high ones.
By this time… why not just give the bosses a 10 seconds lasting invulnerability phase that allows leech? Does the same stuff… it has no meaning.
Yes… that’s why I mentioned the balancing.
First of all, you can’t ‘save’ every shit build from little Timmy’s tinkerbox when little Timmy picks a dual wield passive and then equips a two handed weapon saying ‘it’s his build’.
No Timmy… that’s a piece of non-functional garbage, not a build. Kill it, it suffers. Show it mercy Timmy.
So that leaves the core experience builds to be brought up to at least function around the same level as the medium DPS builds. Not fantastic but at least not baaaad. And suddenly… boss-ward looses all meaning the second that happens anyway.
At now i found it to be more fair, knowing that the damage that i deal actually 100% matter causing no random DR of what i don’t have full controll of, at least for now, for me, a clear win, and i prefer it over the simply give the boss more HP with no DR, this will not help the low DPS builds, that benefit from this ward automatically decay system
An alternative could be to bring back how DDR scaled with DPS to determine the damage reduction value, but instead have it determine how much ward to apply to the boss when the boss reaches a health breakpoint. Have the boss keep track of incoming DPS up until the health breakpoint, have the ward amount scale based on the DPS with some constraints, then reset the DPS once the ward is depleted. High damage builds get appropriately high bursts of ward, low damage builds get appropriately low bursts of ward. It’ll take a bit of trial and error to dial in how exactly ward should scale with DPS, plus I’m sure there’s ways to game the system, but it sounds like a better approach than just applying more ward and upping the decay rate, and a much better approach than just giving bosses more HP across the board.
The visualisation of the ward gain just killed the game for me. Somehow this makes me completely mental for whatever reason. Untill this mechanic is gone LE is dead to me ^^.
Life can be shit sometimes. 