Boring is what exists now. The only dot that people actually build for is poison because it is broken. The others are just around as a consequence of skills people like.
Except that’s effectively what poison does now, subsequent ticks do more damage due to the number of stacks.
It is not what poison does. Poison adds a flat % increased damage which scales insanely fast. Poison can be scaled within a few seconds to be doing 1000+ damage/tick. If poison shredded protection instead, it would take much much longer (maybe even impossible) to get to that same level.
Yes, i think something like how ignite works in poe is really cool. Also PoE created a perfect example of how good their DoT mechanic is when you compare skills like toxic rain and caustic arrow. Toxic rain being a short duration, low dmg stackable DoT that gets insanely powerful with scaling high attspeed, and caustic arrow being a non stackable, long duration big hitting DoT. Some real mechanics in my opinion over there.
I think the more important thing about this is that poison is, in part, over powered simply because any build can easily use it. You don’t necessarily have to be a poison/DoT build to take advantage of the current poison balance.
If a player wants to be a DoT build, they should need to invest in DoT scaling passives and gear to make it viable. And players focused on hit damage builds should not have easy access to effective DoTs without sacrificing the effectiveness of their current hit build. Once this is better developed it will make it easier to scale/balance things so they are all equivalently powerful.
Case in point is Boardmans completely Void based build that still uses a Plague Bearer’s Staff to stack poison dots. Poison stacking is WAY too powerful with the increase damage.
Dots should make the victim more vulnerable, not the aggressor more powerful. You don’t hit someone harder just because they are bleeding, but your hit could hurt more because they are bleeding. Protection Shred just makes more sense than flat increased damage.
It might be hard to balance and something will always be “more powerful”, but LE is still early on on it’s dev and i think there is no better time for EHG to try stuff like this out.
I always like if you can take any “base mechanic” of an ARPG and take into totally different direct with gear/skill choices.
Sure, but you will never find an arpg game that is perfectly balanced. Especially when it’s an online arpg. Once meta (and i can not tell you enough how much i hate the word META) kicks in everyone is looking for the ‘‘perfect’’ build to play to be more efficient. It’s sad because PoE is actually balanced very well in terms of defeating every endgame boss and content. You can do it with every skill in the game, some just take longer. Grim Dawn doesn’t suffer with this meta/balance shit because it’s offline and everyone plays what they want to play! And that’s imo the most valuable characteristic of an arpg.
Totally agree, PoE has a phenomen when they “nerf” a skill from league to league for like 2% and everybody goes like “OH NO SKILL XY is no longer playable” and nobody plays that skill anymore, while it’s still “fine”
Some fun fact if you care: I once played a PoE Glacial Hammer Build, just because Glacial Hammer literally had 0% usage on PoE.Ninja (i guess it was rounded off) and it was totally fine, felt awesome to use very good dps, everything was fine but because no major “Influencer” made a build for mit(at that time) nobody was playing it
Agree, i also don’t get the playerbase. Just look at poeninja again. 45% guardian, blight league 50% necro, legion league 50% cyclone. Why?
Haha i know exactly what you mean with your glacial hammer build. I tried a burning arrow chieftain one league before metamorph i guess when they buffed bow builds and it was extremly strong. Played it in metamorph again and destroyed everything but yeah it was sooooo bad before because no one played it
PoE is a game that has been around for years, and it is probably not the best parameter to use when comparing things like skill depth/complexity just because it has had so much time to change and evolve. But, the idea that anything can be viable (with a few exceptions) is something that should be valued about PoE.
In my experience playing PoE over the years, almost everyone that cries about things being nerfed and therefor “not viable” are just players throwing temper-tantrums on the interweb because they can. It happens every league. This is probably a condition that the current atmosphere of PoE is what is more along the lines of “what is the flavour of the month OP build that can 1 button insta-kill everything and not take any damage”.
If you actually look at almost every “OH NO SKILL XY is no longer playable” situation, you will find that players can still very easily clear everything with it. Just look at the current league, the herald stacking builds that were “nerfed into the ground and i want my money back” nonsence… those builds is still currently facerolling absolutely everything in the game.
So the important thing to take from games like PoE is that just about every skill IS viable. I have many friends that specifically play that game to use the skills and builds that people say “don’t work”. And they do so successfully. It is actually pretty funny watching them pick the worst skills for each other to start the league with.
Which is why I’d like to see the other dots gain some buffs to do something mechanically different from each other.
I kinda do like the idea of dots giving protection reduction for their element per stack, that way you could use dots as a support to your main damage dealer. Though shred at the moment isn’t particularly useful/effective.
But that’s what poison does at the moment, you’re not hitting harder, they’re taking more damage (though there isn’t really a difference in practice between the two).
Protection shred would need a rework to make that work.
Each stack of poison increases poison damage taken. This means that if you hit something with a poison damage attack, the attack hits harder. Poison shred reduces someones resistance to poison damage. So while functionally the same, they are thematically much different.
I don’t really know how shred works. I understand that protection numbers on monsters is quite high and maybe the numbers on shred are low, but I don’t know if shred stacks have a time limit or the calculations when protections get near zero or if they can go negative.
I would hope that shred stacks lasted on monsters until they die.
DoTs could also still have unique features. It seems pretty easy too.
If something is on fire, it would be easy to spread, so ignited enemies spread ignite around.
Poisoned enemies are made sick, so maybe poison could add other status effects like confusion.
Bleeding enemies could be having internal issues, making them more likely to be critically hit.
Void dots could maybe blind because they are being consumed by darkness.
Lots of effects that could be beneficial while not broken due to stacking.
I agree completely. There really needs to be a distinct advantage to using DoT’s (of specific damage types) over others. More importantly, there needs to be a very big difference between DoTs and Burst damage period. Unfortunately, not very many of the protection reducing effects in this game are quite ready - they aren’t particularly useful when compared to alternative ways of increasing damage.
This is a big distinction that seems to be overlooked a lot. DoT by definition is something that spreads the damage out and shouldn’t be high upfront damage. DoTs should “ramp up” the dps as it is applied until it competes with the alternative damage types that do damage in bursts up front. The current system hasn’t quite tuned all that in yet though.
I personally feel like DoTs in general need a pretty big overhaul. Not that I dislike the ones in game, I just think the the current implementation isn’t quite aligned with what they are shooting for. It kind of feels like the DoT mechanic is still just in the early stages of what they actually have planned for it. I look forward to hearing feedback from devs about DoTs because I personally love DoT builds - almost as much as I love dedicated healing builds/roles.
100% agree with you, i my self am a PoE Player(if i play, not so latlely) that tries things that are “non-meta”.
My Statement was not that the game is unbalanced, i just made an observation about a LARGE part of the PoE community.
There are SOOOOO many people JUST playing build guides, because PoE is very overwhelming. They don’t even try experiment themselves because they feel like making errors lessens the “fun”, but the more you Experiment and try to make builds yourself, the better you get at the game.
I feel like LE has a better “starting” ground for newer player as most of the more complex stuff comes over time, while in PoE as soon as you hit lvl 2 and open the passive tree, you feel like you wanna quit the game
Well this is getting a bit off-topic now, but feel free to pm me if you wanna discuss more
Uhm… any damage scales with number of hits.
I mean, gaining additional fireballs (for example) increases ALL your fireball damage - direct and DoT.
Yeah, poison is stronger than other DoTs. You just need 2 stacks to make it more damaging than Ignite and 4 stacks to make it more damaging than Bleed.
That’s not how ignite works in poe sadly, Ignite is in fact complete trash in Poe because it does not work that way. The damage of the hit has 0 effect on the damage of the ignite. Ignite damage is determined by a percentage of base damage, and scaled with different multipliers.
I like how Dot works in last epoch. Currently, Dot builds are a trade off between quick damage and consistent damage. It’s very hard to oneshot monsters or mobs, but also hard to have a super long bossfight if they are ticking down from Dot which scales exponentially. This opens the way for a satisfying mix of offense and defense if they ever get the mob oneshots, ability for player to position, and balance of defences in a better spot.
For offense - There are ways to reduce enemy resists or buff your own damage, and a few ways to allow Dot to life steal. The skills and passives require some thought to get Dot viable, and not waste points.
You can have weak archetypes for casual gamers ( I made a scorpion baby focused build) or strong builds for uberfans of the game - see any of boardmans builds.
There are also interesting strategic choices. Should I add bleed chance or attack speed to improve dps? How can I AOE clear using a single target Dot build?
You may wish to have a look at Heavy/T-hawk’s posts further up:
Just because something’s not popular anymore doesn’t mean it’s not effective/can’t clear the hardest content.
Unless you know this & are just being sarcastic/ironic…
I mean, I saw their post. It’s pretty much nonsense. Yeah, you can scale ignite to do say… 500k shaper dps. Given the power creep and overall nerfs, that’s simply so ridiculously not even close to a useful amount of damage. Yes 500k dps will clear the game, but it’s not really viable because A, it’s incredibly slow, we’re talking significantly slow on its own, slow enough to feel bad, or run out of flasks, or generally make it take long enough that the boss probably will murder you. Ignite is fine for clear, but it’s really really bad at bosses. B, When you compare it to what most other skills are doing it’s really really sad. It just feels like you’re intentionally playing a bad build for whatever reason, that’s fine to do but you have to recognize you’re doing it. That said, yes you can clear awakened 8 sirus with an ignite build. It’s a truly awful experience though. It’s a trash mechanic in that game because it no longer scales with hit damage. The example was nerfing by like 2%. Ignite by switching from scaling from a hit to a flat % of base damage scaled independently went from 10m dps ignites, to 500k. That’s basically a 95% nerf. Sure 500k is technically enough, but it feels fuckawful.
