Intro
I want to make this post to emphasis the issues with overall balance of the game. Despite how the title may sound, I don’t want to sit here and just complain without reason or solution. In any case, on with this short and sweet post.
The straw that broke the camels back
The main thing that solidified my belief that there’s no (or lack of) concern with balance within EHG are the new Idols that were released. The new affixes are in some cases more than 2x the power as the older affixes. Does it take a genius to look at numbers being double than the old?
I could sort of understand replacing the old affixes (and stop old idol drops), but to have the old idols still drop is kind of silly, it’s just another thing to filter out of our loot filters, worse yet, we can only filter out the affixes, not the idols themselves as weavers share the same idol names as the old. It’s really reduced my respect for the EHG balance team.
To me there either seems like there’s no resources/individuals being dedicated to balancing aspects of the game, or there’s a lack of Pillars around the philosophy of how the game is/should be balanced. Both are bad for obvious reasons.
Philosophy
Part of this post is really a question of what the philosophy for balance is within EHG. Assuming there is a defined and shared Pillar/philosophy for this, I think a lot of people would be interested to know. And better yet, discuss whether that philosophy is healthy for the game. Or whether there are just issues within the game design pipeline that makes balance seemingly unprioritized.
Uniques should not “fix” a skill
One thing I have noticed more and more as the game is being developed is that EHG seems to be heavily relying on uniques to make skills viable. This is a terrible way to create a game for a few reasons;
- It’s harder for new players to understand how a skill is useful. When more and more uniques are required to make a skill functional, it makes build choices more restricted without any of the simplicity of it being apparent (not built into the skill).
- Skills end up always being tied to unique items. I think people would agree that uniques should be ALTERNATE ways to play a skill/build, not the only way to play a skill. There are some uniques that fit that role, but there are a number of cases where uniques end up power boosting the skill to viable levels. Where as normally they would be ignored.
An example of a skill being made viable is Bone Curses self curse node. With the new Swine unique it’s now plausible to self-curse yourself with the skill and not immediately die. Not to mention the fact that Bone Curse it probably one of the most abandoned skills in the game, the last it was changed from my knowledge was the tag to curse (when curse tags were made a thing).
Another example would be Aberrant Call. 12 extra wraiths + 3 levels to wraiths. That’s pretty huge, yet the best use for wraiths is through Wraithlord’s Harbour and despite it being a wraith summoner for you, you don’t even want it to summon a horde of wraiths due to action economy and it’s attack being the main damage dealer. It means that when you spec into the skill, you pick the node to summon a maximum of 2 wraiths, and then the Wraithlord goes from terrible to a strong minion.
The issue is; Summon Wraith should be at the power of the Wraithlord, and then the Wraithlord be the side-grade alternative build. Instead it’s the only viable wraith-focused build because Summon Wraith with Aberrent Call on its own is poo.
Skills should be viable out of the box without needing uniques. Uniques should only serve to change a skill in ways that doesn’t make the skill stronger or weaker anymore than a regular piece of equipment would. If you have a unique that straight up doubles it’s damage or defensive layers, then it’s probably not good for the game overall. ironically, some of these uniques don’t even push the skills power far enough, as is the case with Aberrent Call without Wraithlord.
And that’s the problem when the skill isn’t up to par, but uniques are. You get some uniques that makes the skill really strong, and then other that don’t hit the mark. Ironically makes the next point of powercreep a problem when you’ve added hundreds of unique items to the game (you end up needing to update the ones that pour power into a skill).
Powercreep
Parts of the game have undoubtedly been powercrept. This is really evident when you look at the passive tress (and the idols as state above). Some nodes still give things like “9 ward when taken below low life”. Why is anyone ever going to put points into that? When there objectively better universal options.
The issue is, every time the power of the player is crept forward, you’ve got to go back and rework every other aspect of the game. That seems like a really inefficient way to design a game. And the problem here is when individual skills are powercrept as opposed to classes/stats then it can create a situation where ONE version of a skill/build is powerful, while everything else is underpowered.
And we see this with Void Knight and Falconer. Are the problem skills/uniques/passives going to get nerfed to reduce the absurd numbers? Or is “everything else” going to get power boosted too? One thing is certain, every time there’s a power boost, aspects of the game’s balance gets left behind.
Passive Point Tax
Part of my problem with passives is that some of them just feel like a tax. Some are simply too good to not use in every single build. And other passives require way too many point investments to be usable, this is especially true for defensive passives that already have to compete with offensive or hybrid passives. Resulting in them never being usable without gimping a character. This is especially true for those nodes that are “Tiny amount of ward on condition”.
An example of skill point tax is the lich tree. For 28 points you get 46 INT. Why would you ever spend those points elsewhere? Especially when you consider the extra INT scaling you can get for various skills (such as extra armour for reaper form, or dodge & ignite/damned duration for ghost flame, etc.)
In addition, the second half of Initiate classes (Mage, Acolyte, etc) are often ignored because they don’t have anything to offer. It seems kind of silly to have nodes past the 20 point, especially with how weak most of them are. Some builds will throw a couple of points past 20, but most of the time going beyond 20 is a waste of points, and I don’t think I’ve ever put points (or seen) past 25.
Mana
Despite complaining about powercreep, this is one thing that really needs improvement. The problem is skills are being designed to not cost any mana, or have point investments to make them more efficient to not cost any mana.
The issue is really apparent in mana stacking builds. Any build other than void knight that stacks any sort of mana, has no reasonable way to regenerate it based on their maximum mana (sorcerers effective 0.4 mana regen per 100 mana isn’t enough to warrant reasonable).
Sorcerer is encouraged to use high-cost skills AND stack mana to take advantage of their passive tree and nodes, but they cant do so without waiting 10 working days for their mana to regenerate. You really shouldn’t need to invest so heavily in both mana and mana regen that it leaves you with no damage prefixes.
The argument of “we want mana to be important by making players concern themselves with their mana spending” doesn’t work. For one, players don’t play like that, instead the build is either made viable or not based on it’s ability to use skills frequently.
And why isn’t the same argument made for health? Should flat health regen and leach be removed so players “can make sure health matters”? If a player has invested their stats into mana, it should come to a point where it “doesn’t matter”. That’s WHY they invested into those stats, so they can be ignored. Much like how you can ignore damage if you invest into defensive stats, or ignore enemy health pools by investing into damage.
As for solutions, I think there are a few things that I think should be done to remedy the issue of mana regeneration:
- %Mana-regen exclusive affixes (so not including weapon mana & mana regen hybrid affix) should be moved to a suffix.
- %Mana regen affixes to be multiplicative with one another instead of additive.
- Side note: “damage taken to mana” (because it’s a defensive stat for gods sake) should also be a suffix instead of a prefix. Seems odd that it’s a helmet prefix.
As for the reason for %mana regen being moved to a suffix. It’s not exclusively an offensive stat. It’s a sustain stat. Being able to cast for longer is as defensive as it is offensive. Ward for example disappears when you’re not casting due to skills/affixes and passives. In the same way as health could be considered an offensive stat as it lets you not be dead, thus deal more than 0 damage.
Attunement
Attunement is an odd stat. All the other stats add a defensive layer, but not attunement. Why? Part the problem is when you use skills that scale off max mana, then it ironically makes attunement a double offensive stat; for something like Storm Bolt coupled with Excited Bolt node (scales MORE damage based on current mana).
Attunement just seems a little bit out of place, and builds that scale damage from mana makes attunement really strong, but otherwise it’s at best a slight convenience to have a bit of extra mana pool. It’s either weak-sauce, or really good, depending on the skill being used. It’s just an odd way to design stats if one of them isn’t following the pattern that’s been layered out.
Therefor, I think Attunement should give endurance threshold; 6-8 points would probably be enough off the top of my head, and that would still make it a little bit weaker than vitality when you account for %health modifiers, but overall a better investment for any build (not just mana stackers).
Side note: buff dex 
Minions
I’m not going to talk about snapshotting, it’s clear that snapshotting isn’t an intended mechanic and EHG are at least trying to fix snapshotting.
My grip with minions are their weaknesses have outpaced their strengths. In general minions have the following weaknesses/strengths.
Weaknesses: Killable, slow to act (takes a moment for an attack to be delivered from minion to enemy due to how agro works), target priority requires micro management (or investing into minion porting), and a need to invest into health for minions instead of double damage prefixes.
Strengths: Draws agro (acts as a soft-defensive layer), free to cast/use other skills, free to dodge without removing DPS entirely.
The issue I have is the game is becoming more and more AoE focused, and anti-player focused. For example there’s an enemy that “prioritises player”. This directly removes one of the strengths of minions. It would be like adding a modifier that “ignores ward” (like chaos damage in PoE). Enemies also have far more AoE or piercing projectiles, which again removes part of the strength of minions.
Now these changes in isolation aren’t really anything to complain about, except the minions still have all of their weaknesses. And made even worse due to the fact enemies are now hitting ALL of your minions more often. In addition, minions aren’t particularly strong without exploiting the game. I’ve played around with squirrels and exploding skeletons and they are okay. Usually you sacrifice clear speed or defence in order to make these viable at higher corruption.
The deadliness of certain AoEs just means minion builds now have to not only micro their own movements around AoE, but also their minions movements around AoEs. There’s always been an issue with this on certain bosses, but it’s now extended to echos I feel (at least at higher corruption levels). And honestly, I think the weaknesses already outweighed the strengths before. The only reason why it’s “never been a problem” is due to snapshotting and more importantly a lack of powercreep, as minions (aside from falcon and wraithlord) have remained relatively the same.
The simplest solution to this without breaking every other minion defence related mechanic would be to simply increase the damage reduction that minions receive from player levels. A more thorough change would be to go the falcon route and make minions impervious to enemy damage (not self or player sourced damage), but that would require the removal/reworking of affixes, nodes, passives, uniques. Not to mention it would make things like minion leech meaningless outside of self/player damage. Either way, those are my thoughts.
Conclusion
Overall I think EHG has improved over the years I’ve played. I think the powercreep should probably be nipped in the bud set a benchmark of what skills/builds should be capable of.
Mana regeneration is probably my biggest concern as I think it’s a problem that is easily fixable, but just hasn’t been addressed for some reason. Adding all these different uniques, passives, and skill nodes to get around the 8 mana regen seems very counter intuitive. It means some builds can essentially ignore the “challenge” and others cannot; which isn’t good for balance and just frustrates players wanting to play according to theme rather than meta.
That’s all folks.
