First of all, big fan of your videos. (b’.')b Enjoyed copying your beastmaster shamelessly.
I have to disagree with you on 2 of your builds. The vengeance FG and werebear (the ones I’ve played) are definitely tanky, but their DPS output isn’t high enough in my head (I realize tanky/glass-cannon definitions have some subjectivity to them) to view them as anything but “tanks” in relation to this discussion. I can’t comment on the lich or paladin, haven’t played 'em.
This is, again, just an argument about semantics. My feedback is that in order to build enough damage to clear the two kinds of content in a monolith (mobs and bosses) that consistently feels good, you have to give up TOO MUCH defense and be vulnerable to many one shot mechanics.
Another person might feel differently, and that’s fine and ripe for discussion. Arguing with me about my feedback (on a forum that exists solely to receive such feedback) in an attempt to prove me wrong about an OPINION I’ve formed by attacking the technical definitions of the “dichotomy” I’ve offered is just churlish.
See above; Boardman obviously feels a couple of the builds above strike that balance. To me, they’re just tanky. We could watch HIS videos and offer examples of what seems “slow” to me or “balanced” to him, and why. That’d be a healthy discussion on the topic (just an example).
Way to take what I was trying say from a whole new angle and make it sound better! Yes! This person gets what I mean. Thanks for re-expressing it in a meaningful way.
Llama strikes again. Yes, my feedback is that the GAP between taking 1 shot and dying, and taking 2 (examples: Lagon eye beam, EoC’s necro gingivitis breath, Argentus ring’o’booms, a lightning elemental doing it’s .5 seconds of warning lightning blast with 1-2 monolith mods, 1 second of bitterwings cold attacks, mace-fisted turtle wave attack from off-screen) is so huge that you’re required to sacrifice too much DPS to be a good-feeling “hybrid” of tank and glass… Or “balanced.”
Sorry but this is not JUST( downplaying) semantics.
Your claim is that there are only two kinds of builds - an objective declaration about the realm of the game. On the premises on which you’re making it, it’s just demonstrably wrong - be it your opinion or not.
Semantics or not, I have no other way of interpreting this other than “there are only two kinds of builds”( non-quoting).
I’m also not fully sure what are you disagreeing with me. You’re now taking the fun axiom as your foundation.
Claiming that builds have to “feel good” is a value judgement, a completely different category of a statement which belongs in the subjective world, while the lift-off for this thread was made on an empirical undertone that there simply are not any builds( or philosophies) which could fit in the middle of the spectrum in character tankiness.
Sorry if it might seem me lynching you and I don’t disregard your opinion even one bit but when we make our voices heard publicly, we open ourselves up for criticism; exactly how you hold a prerogative for an opinion, so do I.
Perhaps I didn’t carry mine far enough, I’ll give him another go and see if I have a change of opinion, he was actually my 2nd character ^_^.
It still seems like you’re attacking specific terms in my statement rather than the spirit of my post, but I can clearly see you disagree with my feedback. No harm in that. Do you have any videos I could watch/builds you recommend/guides you could link that you feel fit into this discussion? Boardman threw some out that I obviously have to try before continuing to push my side of this argument but I’d welcome some more. I’m actually playing now trying to prove myself wrong with my own VK build (gonna try building just enough prot to survive the attacks I mentioned earlier for 2-3 seconds with a TON of leech and maneuverability with MS and shield rush).
Too much other nerd stuff, good weather and gym for me right now but a week ago I enjoyed playing a Fire Skeleton Mage, Fire Archers, Blood Golem, Mark for Death, Transplant Necromancer which had to have a good balance of everything everywhere - ran 100+% quant Monoliths and relatively high Arena with no problems, didn’t test the limits though (:
Congratulation, you just named two extremes of the spectrum and pretended each functional build just sits on either edge of the spectrum with zero wiggle room.
OP is partly right there are only 2 kind of skillbuild:
Working as intended
reeeeeeeeeeeee that’s my build and it has to work no matter how shitty it is because it’s MINE!
And that’s it. In both of these build groups are different sample sizes but it boils don into woring and non working builds.
I think the discussion assumes a lot about gearing as well. You can have a build that is tanky and does crazy damage, but in order to do the crazy damage, you have to have some of the best gear in the game.
I somewhat agree that there seems to be a pretty huge gap between getting 1-shot (or close enough that it doesn’t matter) and feeling like you aren’t ‘tanky’ but will not instantly die if a mob gets up on you. The defense investment to get a return is too steep.
I have a level 36ish sorc. He gets brutalized by the skeleton rogue dudes. They aren’t even that difficult of a mob, but how much investment would be needed for them to not feel awful to play against? How many affixes to dedicate? That is just an example, but the sentiment is the same for any random harder mob.
ARPGs have a big issue these days at least from my point of view. Most of the time your HP is full or 0 there is to little inbetween. Look at all the crap we gear on a Sentinel for example. All the block protections, armor and protections, glancing blow, crit avoidence while trying to reach very high ammounts and finaly you are up there… 90% DR from block, 90% DR from armor and protections, 100% GB for another 50%, 100% crit avoidence so you’ll never get a crit again… still you drop from here to zero at some point.
I think the dmg curves in ARPGs are crap, the needed skills you want to have is endurence for the grind, math for minmaxing and that’s it. The ingame skill that is needed to play an arpg is a joke and that’s the root of the problem from my point of view. We need enemys with attack patterns, void zones and stuff we need to dodge, a skill level that is based on your fingers and reflexes as well instead of “I have 92% protections now so I’ll be able to push 3 more waves now muharrharrharr!”.
That’s why there are “only” builds that work and are most effective and crap builds because at the end of the day the biggest thing you need to do is not actualy play the game but theorycraft as soon as you understood it and abuse everything the devs mess up untill it’s fixed.
I think we need both. We need, as you say, enemies with attack patterns to dodge unless you’re a tanky build & can ignore it while you whittle them down with your spork. Or if you’re hybrid, you do a bit of both, sometimes you’re dodging, occassionally you say **** it & take it to the face.
This is what I want too. I will hardly ever look at the health bar if it is just about full or one-slotted. I want the game to be a constant struggle where it is hard to regain life, but you never ever lose more than let’s say one quarter in one hit.
IMO base health should be huge, health regain very very scarce and very much ‘over time’ instead of instant.
One need, the need for gear and certain treshholds for protextions, is already there so I don’t mention that one again ;). But like you say I want builds to be like:
Tank: Soak almost all dmg - deal almost no dmg
Brusiser (aka middle ground): Able to soak some dmg - able to deal some dmg
Glasscannon: Deal tons of dmg - die when hit
Something arround these lines… I get it this is kind of an antique setup but it works as a philosophy. Then again if someone with a glasscannon build has “them skillz” and is dodging everything this special someone will get more out of the class. Right now you are pretty much able to build that much tank to not care about most stuff while still beeing able to dish out a lot of dmg with certain builds.
On top of it the dmg you take and the ways to regenerate the dmg is kind of funny I know only two conditions on my toon: Full Hp or dead ^^. Whith such dmg calculations in the backround you are pretty much forced to build more and more tank for whatever class you play.
The first one is unfortunately completely useless (unless in multiplayer), and the reason the third exists and is popular (look at POE ladders for Delve), is that with incresed skill (I mean reflexes and agility) of the player, the glass cannon is more efficient to play (especially if there is a common economy where it just pays to go quick and kill more mobs per hour to get better, profitable loot). This is despite of the minority advocating “going slow and deliberate” - a marker place will always trump that with efficiency being the thing that pays off.
Somehow, the trend is to increase the damage numbers untill the devs are sure that there are no unkillable builds that are viable in single player (that is a build that deals enough damage to clear all content). And that leads to players building an even more tankier build, and in a cat and mouse game, the damage creeps up again. In effect, only the tankiest builds can hope to survive one or two of those “I better make sure this kills any build” attacks the devs throw at you, and all other builds are one shot. Then, it’s only logical for players to say the f word, and just go for a glass cannon build, cause there seems to be no middle ground.
There are plenty ways around that, and some have been mentioned, like making healing meaningful and reducing damage spikes, adding tactics as a meaningful way to deal with monsters, apart from agility only based approach (‘you ought to have dogded that one shotting attack, it was telegraphed for 150 miliseconds, and our leaderboard top 100 agree it’s long enough’), or controlling the damage (like minions are protected in D3, or someone mentioned melee damage reduction in T3). All these approaches mean you have to put more (design and development) effort in the game, and abandon the old moulds (as much as I liked D2 back in the day, I don’t agree it’s the holy grail, just like D&D has it’s faults, despite being popular). I’m hoping this might happen in LE, but frankly, I’m not holding my breath…
Lack of affix slot on items doesn’t help, i can’t stop thinking this…sadly. This will solve many broken heart.
The tank/DPS/support or whatever “holy trinity” is more viable for MMORPG but far less for ARPG guys
Tanks could work fine in ARPG if they had good mechanics to work with it. Retaliation or ‘Damage dealt to Attacker’ (Thorns) is a great mechanic for tanks. Those mechanics are just garbage in LE because the damage returned is based on post-mitigation damage received. If they just flipped it around and made Retaliation and Thorns based on pre-mitigation damage received, it would be a viable build I think.
That is why Retaliation and Thorns works so well on minions.
I also like the idea of tanks as “aura-bots”. I picture a Paladin in heavy armor slowly moving across the battlefield with his holy fire auras. Debuffing any enemy within the aura while also dealing damage over time that gets progressively more painful. These tanks could have attacks that aren’t very strong on their own, but when combined with the debuffing and slow building damage could compound the damage. Imagine an aura that makes burning stacks renew while the enemy is within the radius. Then, an attack that applies 2 or 3 stacks of burning would deal substantial damage over a period of time.
What if you had attacks that did more damage based on the number of ailments on a target, or the stacks of chill? So if you take the slow node on Holy Aura skill X does more damage, or has a chance to hit any mobs in an area around the target. If a target has been Lacerated (from Rive), then Vengeance does more damage, or applies some of the Lacerate damage to other targets or gets a chance to knock the target down/stun/etc or something.
There are lots of ways to make ‘tanks’ viable as a class. The whole point of them though is to be grindy. They can kill things, but it takes time. That is why I like the idea of damage scaling over time on the enemy. Poison as a mechanic in LE is a great idea for a tank type build (the way it scales currently is opposite a tank though, Poison right now is best with insane attack speed.)
Well LE has it’s flaws like every other gameand we can only hope the merits overweigh at a certain point. Right now I think, and please don’t throw stones at me, that LE is one of the most boring arpgs out there because it trys to be different and this approach takes far more time to finish.
If they wat to publish a good game they have a long way to go. I still wait for the rogue untill I thouch it again because it’s tiresome, repetetive and far to restrictive to waste time on it right now.
There are plenty of fair issues with the game and I think these need to go. From Mitgitaion to dmg curves to build diversity to balance philosophy and so on and so forth. The direction is promising, what the devs do is promising as well but the goal they aim for and how it’s done is sad sometimes. On the other hand it’s just another point-click-kill-loot game so maybe my expectations are to high or I’m just a regular german who can’t be satisfied ^^.
