Regarding the additions to the loot filter. Poor implementation (or bug) where counting the number of affixes doesn’t consider only the affixes selected but any affixes. I have doubts this is what people wanted and certainly not what I wanted either. If I say I want to see a wand with these 4 affixes only and with 7 affixes, I expect that any wand caught by the filter will have 7 or more affixes of the types I selected, not a total of 7 or more affixes as long as one of them is the type I selected. This option as is does not help filter anything.
The new idol slots. Although I like the idea of having more and all of my builds have been affected positively by this, some builds are affected negatively by this like the ones that use 4 tall or 4 wide. This is a minuscle buff (barely noticable at all) for some builds and a major nerf to some builds.
The new minion AI is much better but I wish it would keep the aggro for even more range and when told to attack a target I’d expect them to never let go of the target no matter how far away I am.
On the topic of minions we need a better design as far as the acolite is concerned. Right now they only work on a crit build using dread shade. There are no builds without dread shade, they are just not viable. Dread shade needs a major nerf and the minions in general need major buffs to stand on their own. They also need better access to crit outside dread shade.
The Stash upgrade is pretty good now that we can finally move tabs around.
The mana regen nerf was pretty noticable and was uncalled for. Most people already struggle to keep their mana in check and this is now even worse. Giving more mana regen on items is not a solution when people just don’t have the affixes to put them in (they are already taken by something else that is necessary/mandatory).
The Monolith upgrade was actually not that good. While the basic principle to make it go forward was good, it wasn’t implemented in a way that really makes it feel like much has changed.
For starters, because players want to avoid certain modifiers and want to keep enemies within a certain amount of bonus like for example, no more than X extra life or no more than X extra damage. Not much has changed. It’s not about seeking the good nodes, it’s about avoiding all the bad modifiers. That isn’t to say the rewards from said nodes aren’t good, but they are mostly an after thought compared to managing the dificulty.
The better item drops are not noticable either. When a player is getting to end game and looking for items to craft, he doesn’t wants anything, he wants specific things and I haven’t noticed more items that are worthy of crafting droping.
There is a lack of shrines like the chaos and the other. I haven’t seen any and I ran hundreds of echos, them being that rare is the same as them not being existant when they are supposed to play a major role in the new system.
Here’s a direct comparison to PoE which is what you are trying to compete with. In PoE you can chose the map layout. Here you can’t but I’d say that considering you are not doing map clear but rather do the objective and leave, that’s not a problem. In PoE you can to a degree tailor the difficulty of a map by ensuring that neither mods that are too bad for you are ever present at a negligable currency cost. Here however that is extremely hard because mods stick for several runs and that makes it increasingly hard to limit how bad a map is. Sure, it may be increasing the rewards but most people will prefer a map that is safe over better rewards at the cost of dying and losing rewards or timeline progression. Players need far more control over how hard maps are and shouldn’t have to take massive penalties that will likely result in them dying or not having fun playing the game just to get the rewards they want.
Crafting needs improving too. I know you improved crafting in this patch by making the high tiers of shards get less instabillity. But the fact that someone with as much time as I have put hasn’t even been able to craft a single 4x t5 piece clearly denotes this issue. Most pieces break before they even have 2x T5. Crafting a 4xT5 shouldn’t be that hard. There should be some failures here and there, but those are not the chase items. That’s not what a true end game piece is. A true end game piece should be a 3xT5 + T7 and that should be the hard thing to obtain, harder from finding the right drop that is in a craftable state than actually crafting it mind you. It is important that people are able to finish builds and move on to new builds. One of the major issues PoE has is that the majority of players are unable to even get a build finished. But you look at Chronicron and finishing a build is very much acomplishable. In fact they have the best crafting system and the best minion system of any ARPG.
I’ve talked about the spires in the past (in the steam forums) but I will again (here). Spires are a bad choice of content. Spires do not allow players to stop mid run in a safe spot if they suddenly need to do something. They don’t allow players to check loot as it drops. They just do as much as possible to make playing the game awkward. They should be removed for this reason alone. PoE did the same mistake with the Tempest league and there was no end of complaints about it.
On top of that the spire of bone, wendigo and poison are way too strong. Bone just feels like it auto-targets players with the shards which makes it hard to dodge and it hits really hard even with full resistances, it needs to stop auto targeting and the direction of the shards be random, damage also needs to lower. Wendigo is absurdly strong, it can kill a player even with full resistances in a second. It is in fact so powerful that it shreds minions like crazy. Most spires and enemies do anywhere between 20 and 100 damage to them but wendigo just goes 500 per tick, this needs to be massively lowered. The poison does way too much damage too, but i’m not sure if it’s due to a bug or what else. I’ve seen it do about the same damage on one of my characters that has full resistance as well as on one that had none or almost none so I can only guess that it completly ignores resistance which is probably why it is doing such massive damage, almost as bad as the wendigo but at least minions seam do deal with that way better.
The “With at least X of these affixes on the same item” Option does work as intended for me.
Only the “Total Affix Tiers of:” does not work as intended.
Here is a statement of Mox:
In the greater scheme of things i doesn’t matter that much, that some builds got nerfed… it was even probably the intend for some builds.
I could see small buffs for the 4x1 and 1x4 Idols, but not sure.
The intended goal was an increased build diversity, which they definitely accomplished.
There are now “necessary/mandatory” stats in LE IMO.
Of course there are very strong other prefixes for some builds, but it’s all about choices.
If you struggle to choose between multiple affixes: That’s great!
Also they not only buffed the mana affixes to a point, where just 1 T5 already gives you more mana/sec than before. But they also give mana regen on 2 additional slots(belt and amulet).
And Belt prefixes are majorly lacking anyway and most builds will most likely take mana regen there anyway, if they stuggle.
I feel like 100% different about this.
The new system is very much reward driven and not modifier driven for me.
And if there is an echo that has very difficulty modifers, while i already have some hard modifiers up, i will run some different echoes to let some modifiers run out, before trying that particular echo.
Also the new system simply offers you dozens of choices, sometiems even multiple paths to the same rewards.
The spawn rate of Beacons and Vessels (and also rare rewards) does majorly scale with Corruption and Depths from the starting point. Especially the corruption plays a major role in that.
It should be hard and i argue it was and is still too easy. You even don’t need 4xT5 items to access any kind of content.
Also if you say items break before they have 2xT5 already tells me that you are not crafting on already high tier bases?
They actually reduce the chance of crafting T4 and T5 affixes, but finding items with already high affixes is the goal here.
Agreed on the Wengari one. Bone is very strong, but not majorly op IMO.
Poison is actually not that bad. New poison spires in conjunction with poison shade at least incentive building some poison resitance, which was completely obsolete before.
On most of your other points i either agree or i am neutral about.
1 - You don’t make build diversity by making worse what is good. You make build diversity by making what is bad, good. While I do realise that sometimes something may be overtuned, this even hits some builds that could potentially already not be as good as other choices making them even less viable.
2 - While I do respect your opinion, it is a fact that LE only has 4 affixes per item which makes it hard to give up damage boosts for mana regen, even more so now with corruption. If anything a better way to deal with the mana problems which I imagine was the intent here would have been to not nerf base mana regen and add mana regen to passive nodes.
3 - The problem with leting modifiers run out is that you are puting other in. The amount of times I’ve seen myself be softlocked by not wanting to run nodes with more damage when I have one or more life when I already have one was ridiculous… It’s not that I cannot do it, it’s that I want to manage the difficulty of the content and even ignoring completly the rewards, it’s almost impossible. Thus why I used PoE as the prime example. No one did maps as good as they did because the abillity to limit the content to the difficulty you want is just perfect.
The new system only offers choices if they feel like choices. If I feel I have to take a node because I don’t have any other choice, then it’s not a choice.
4 - If they are tied to corruption level then I don’t know why they aren’t showing up at all even in corruption 100. Regardless, they shouldn’t require high levels of corruption in my opinion, considering that I and I imagine I’m not alone in this, just want to run away from nodes that make content too hard since there is no point in going after rewards, these vessels and becons are of major importance but they don’t appear. They only appear where content is already too hard. This is not good game design in my opinion.
5 - You argue that someone with about 120 hours of gameplay still hasn’t made a good piece yet is too easy of a crafting system? I guess we have very different views of what is reasonable. And you may say I don’t need that, I disagree. Why shouldn’t a player be able to finish their build to even the bare minimum degree which is having all t5 mods?
Also I know the idea is finding items with high affixes. My setup is to only show items that have at least a single T5 affix that I want. But then again it’s pretty rare to find an item that doesn’t have bad affixes in it. The only time I found a really good item that had a T5, a T4 and a T3 native with the last slot free you know what happened? It broke on the very first crafting atempt. I also notice that the higher the number of affixes an item has, even found so still low on instabillity the higher the chance it will break on the first couple crafting rolls. Maybe I just have bad luck, but regardless, the system is not good as is. It needs major improvements.
I really don’t understand this. From a developer standpoint, if you have 1 or 2 overperforming skills/builds/etc, its far more reasonable to nerf them, than to buff literally everything else up – and its less error prone too. If you buff something with the intent to make it on par with something that is super powerful, but you mess up and its now twice as powerful as you intended, then your argument would be that they need to buff everything up to that standard of power again … and this would happen endlessly (because mistakes happen, and players are clever and find interactions the dev’s didn’t think of).
I’m not sure why you feel this way, you don’t really need a damage boost on every piece of gear you could possibly get to do the content as is. As @Heavy noted, you don’t even need at T20 items to do current content. Also, more mana regen = more damage if you’re using skills that need mana.
How is that the bare minimum? Why do you think it is the bare minimum? To me, that’s a stretch goal, its not super unlikely that I can craft it myself, but its unlikely enough that given my time constraints that its not feasible to have all T20 items. Then again, its not necessary for the content in the game. (Side note, I haven’t had a chance to do empowered monoliths in the new patch yet).
This seems like a mistake. What about the items with T4 affix that you want and 2 other good T4 affixes? Those items are closer to T20 than an item with a T5 affix that you want and a T1 affix that is good.
While I agree that maybe some slight tweaking here and there may be needed, I disagree that the system isn’t good. I think it is good.
1 - I did say in some cases there are some things that are overtuned, but how does a couple builds having an overtuned skill justify nerfing all builds that use 1x4 idols? I’d dare say a lot of builds that use them are actually already under-performing and this nerfs it further. You can take a few points of damage out of a skill that over-performs and properly target the issue. That said I don’t believe I’ve seen builds over-performing and I have a pretty good lightning nova build which is one of the meta builds. Does it over-perform? No, it’s probably fine as it is. If anything there is a lot of things that need to be brought up to that level.
You can say that bringing things up can create a snowball effect. That is why you test it and test some more. That’s why you have a few selected people invited to test skills before they are released to the public to further try and find any interactions that are broken. As with anything, it’s about good development practices.
2 - You’re not sure? Perhaps you like to spend 5 minutes killing mobs. I like to destroy mobs instantly, it doesn’t even feels good to play unless the trash is being taken out like the trahs it is. For the tough fights you got the bosses, the trash is dangerous by number, not by being able to soak massive amounts of damage. Now add corruption and add mods, now you are starting to take more and more time to kill the trash and the game stops feeling satisfying to play. So you 100% need all the damage you can squeeze out of any build.
3 - What consists as finishing a build? Getting all pieces of equipment that you want with the mods that you want as well as level 100. So in LE you have a soft cap which is the T20 and the hard cap at T22. There is still the case of how high rolled each mod is but we’ll ignore that. In an ARPG the fun part is to kill stuff, get good loot, finsih your build and eventually when you get bored with that one, move on to a new one. PoE already drives people away by making it almost impossible to finish builds. I would hate to see LE going down the same path. Essencially what is at stake is that players don’t feel like they are being rewarded for the efforth they are putting in. They keep trying, good drops are rare and even when they do happen you just aren’t able to craft them to the point where it’s a finished piece. This feels terrible. It feels like you’ve been just wasting your time because the game is made to not allow you to have good things. Regardless of whether you consider it’s necessary or not to have T20s, it is important to reward players for their efforths.
4 - I know I could possibly make 20 different combinations for each piece that would possibly make it worth crafting. But at a point you have to think, when is enough, enough? The idea of the X amount of affixes would have made this not a problem, but alas, it was either poorly implemented or it’s bugged as @heavy said. For now, I’m just using a, at least give me a T5 mod I want on the item I want and when the loot filter is working better, then i’ll make a filter that looks for at least 7 or 8 levels of affixes I want regardless of individual level.
5 - You can feel it’s good. But I doubtr most people enjou hundreds of hours for a single good piece of gear. That is not good pacing, even more so if you consider the average player has a job and has like a couple hours to play a day.
You’re right, maybe it doesn’t warrant nerfing all the builds. But that wasn’t really the intent of the update, if I remember correctly. EHG didn’t want players only considering 2x2, 1x4 an 4x1 idols. The new layout forces the use of other sizes now. This is a step in a direction to make players decide what they’re willing to sacrifice to make their build function. I think personally, like all items, the choices on certain idols do feel a little bland and I’d love to see some of the effects from the aforementioned idol sizes on smaller idols at a reduced % chance of happening (think % chance to cast X skill on hit).
Part of good development practice is that you do not change more than necessary to achieve your goals. An extensive redesign every time you want to make a balance pass isn’t feasible. Of course they’re gonna test it. But testing, by default, is not, and cannot be exhaustive – even with automation.
I’m not sure if that’s a exaggeration. But I don’t think that all mobs should be one shot, actually I think most should take at least two hits. I like the enemies that take a little longer to kill (I can’t name any off the top of my head (like the guys that spin in a circle)). EHG
However, it sounds like–and please correct me if I’m wrong–you want to speed through the trash in the game(one hit clear screen run as fast as you can to next set of trash, rinse repeat). Which goes directly against the design goals of this game.
I think we’re just disagreeing on what it means to finish a build. And that’s fine, I just don’t think you need to be max level or have “perfect” T20 gear to have your build be finished. Eeeking out every advantage you can is fun, but does get a little tedious, especially if its unnecessary to do so. All in all, the game is still in beta and is trying to figure such things out, and maybe what’s missing is an “Uber” boss that’s not meant just be killed by anyone (attainable by everyone to get to, just more difficult to succeed in killing) – then again, I have mixed feelings on that kind of boss.
Completely agree. And I do feel rewarded most of the time.
You’re right, most people–including me–don’t like that and have a job. But the difference is that we have different definitions for what a “completed” build is and what a “good” piece of gear is. And maybe I’m okay with it being a little harder to get what you think is ‘completed’ and good.
People really should differentiate between a build being “complete” and minmaxing. A build is complete when all of its synergies and functions are attained. Eeking out a few more minmaxed points doesn’t do that. Also, T22 isn’t the “hard cap”. You could theoretically drop an item with multiple T7’s on it. T20 isn’t a baseline, it is an end goal. While not exactly BiS, those are what people build as BiS when planning.
It would be incredibly boring to play the game if you could have all T20 gear within a month. There would be no point in playing that character after that.
1 - Except the 2x2 you can still have 4 of them. Granted they were nerfed on how much mileage you get out of them.
2 - While you are right, it’s also true that a there is far more that is under-performing than there is over-performing and rather than bringing these up to par with the best, the best are being nerfed. This is not good design in my opinion because I’ve seen plenty of times where this goes (We all have I dare say). Eventually everything feels pretty bad to play.
3 - I think that is a result of a missunderstanding. You think of trash mobs as anything that is “white” where special mobs is blues and yellows. That is not what I meant. Those spiny guys are a not a trash mob, they are a special, regardless of their colour and thus tougher, those can well take 2 or 3 hits to go down. But the trash the kinds of mobs that come in numbers and are not meant to be particular tough should go down in one hit.
4 - Alright, we can disagree on this.
As for an ubber boos that not everyone can beat. I am very much against it. It’s what PoE did with Sirius and honestly I feel it’s terrible. A game should aim difficulty for the average player and then have ways to increase or decrease difficulty by offering higher or lower rewards so it reaches those who want more or less challenge. In a way, this is already what LE is doing with the whole corruption system. We don’t need an ubber boss that only a small percentile of the player base can kill. Not to mention, if this tries to follow the PoE route, they are going to find it really hard to get any market share. They should instead differentiate from them (as they are doing so far) and go after the market that PoE is neglecting which is actually the larger portion to be fair.
5 - I don’t. I do like 20 echos to get a craftable item (don’t even talk to me about gambling, I never got a single craftable piece in gambling for my necro and I found maybe 1 or 2 for my lighting mage after spending many, many millions! And despite all that, I managed to get a T19 once and other than that I rarely get anything over a T12, most don’t even get to T10. I just feel like the game wastes my time and laughs at me for spending it here instead of on a game that actually rewards me for playing.
6 - Although I got more lucky on my mage and got some generally better pieces, my necro (and every other character I made too) don’t even get to have capped resistances simply because crafting is just so bad. It’s too RNG prone. This not mentioning also even having a single good damage mod, let alone even having 2. And of course there is also the other things to conside like critical strike avoidance or endurance threshold. Maybe you don’t feel you need these thing. But I do. I’m already over level 80 on the necro, I’m doing the level 85 timeline and I just can’t even do it. I don’t have anything, heck my minions are doing literealy 10X less damage than they should with full T20s. It’s playable, but is it fun because crafting and drops don’t help? Not at all!
Changes like this, that will overall improve build diversity sometimes do have negative effects on build that might be not as good already, I agree.
But that’s a price worth paying.
The devs will adjust some of the idols in the future… Maybe…
The thing is, for some build better mana management means more dmg, so mana is an offensive affix in alot of cases.
Also the nerf to base mana regen was necessary to not trivialize mana management.
With the new system you only need 19% mana regen, to get to the old level of mana regen already.
And here is the thing. Once you done some echoes you literally have dozens of choices and can runs quite a few echoes in a row with new modifiers that don’t affect difficulty that much or at all.
When you playing a Dot build you will take all CSA and GB modifiers for no or minimal difficulty increase.
With the new system there will be always available echoes with easy modifiers.
Also you can deliberately stack modifiers that have a hard cap (like endurance, GB and CSA)
I think it’s a really good design. You can experience the base system just fine on normal timelines with low corruption, but once you dive I to empowered and can raise your corruption indefinitely, the system really starts to shine.
And the fact that high corruption not only gives you directly more reward, but also gives you more opportunity to modify your echo web makes this system great.
And here is the thing. All T5 mods is not the “bare minimum” by a landslide IMO.
I don’t know what some of the better gear pieces you have already made, but even T12-T25 items with all desired affixes are already really “good” items.
T20 all desired affix items should be a longterm goal.
1 - I highly disagree. If instead of doing they they decided to better the build that need getting better like for example, totem builds, it would promote build diversity in a much better way. Nerfing doesn’t promotes build diversity, it just eventually makes everything feel bad. Seen this happen way too many time.
2 - This is both correct and incorrect. You would do more damage simply from wither not running out of mana or from mana lasting a whole lot longer. At the same time, the damage you are doing per hit or the frequency at which you are hitting is lower.
When all is considered into the end game and into higher tiers of corruption, that damage loss to add mana regen is going to prevent you from going further than you could.
A more elegant solution would have been to keep the mana regen in it’s previous state and add to all builds an early mana regen node like they did to Lich.
You say it trivialises mana management. But mana management is not something anyone cares about. Look at most other RPGs. Do you do mana management in PoE? In Chronicon? In Grim Dawn? The answer is no, skills are there to be used and if you want to limit the use of a skill you add a cooldown. That’s the good way of doing it.
3 - And when all nodes you have left are dodge, more life or high critical chances nodes what do you do? You may reset the tree but I’ve ran into a case where after reseting the tree I managed to do 2 more echos before being softlocked again on modifiers and no way to reset again. I will say it again. The system barely changed because a lot of people just don’t go after rewards, they go after what viable to play. A way to easily manage what kind of modifiers we’re up against is necessary for the game to actually feel like it’s presenting choices.
4 - I’ve always been talking about empowered timelines you know? You know what I don’t do? giving enemies crit chance, give enemies more than one damage buff, give enemies more than one life buff or resistance buff or glancing blows, I also don’t give enemies dodge and I don’t give chance to avoid critical strikes. I could be forgetting something but generally that’s it for my lightning mage. I also don’t increase corruption beyond the 106 I currently have because guess what, more corruption makes the enemies have more HP and more damage which further makes any such mods harder to put on them and deal with.
This is to say, the system is not working properly. I need more ways to avoid bad nodes by being able to turn them into something else. Preferably a system where I can more freely chose what kind of penalties I take would be even better.
5 - Since when are T5 mods not the bare minimum? Let me put it like this. My necro build, every resistance mod except one has to be T5 in order to cap resistances. How is that not mandatory? How is the critical strike avoidance T5 not mandatory either? How is the endurance threshold not mandatory? In fact even maxed endurance threshold never gets to fully cover your life which means it doesn’t works agaisnt things that will kill you in 1 hit which is bad enough already. And then of course there is the damage mods. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to spend ages killing things so of course you need t5 damage mods, even more so when you are doing empowered timelines.
6 - My better item is a T19 and other than that it doesn’t goes above T15. Most of my items are between T10 and T12 which is by no means suficient.
T20 is not long term, going past T20 is long term. Those are the really good pieces that people crave and which they have to put in time to find such craftable pieces. If people need to spend hundreds of hours to get a single finished piece (which is not even how high they can go), then LE is not going to have a very bright future. PoE already suffers from 3 massive issues that cause it bleed players in the first month of any league. One is ridiculous fights like Sirius. Another is how gear locked content has become and how unattainable for the average player good gear is. The last is how much time it takes to grind the atlas to awakening 8 where essencially you only do high tier content. LE doesn’t have the problem of BS fights nor the problem of Grinding to get to high tier end game. But it has the gearing issue. People want to complete their builds and they want to complete them in a reasonable amount of time. People want to feel rewarded for the time they put into the game and that time has to be accounted for the fact that this game will have leagues too and that players expect to be able to finish 2 or 3 builds during the entire league. As is, they aren’t finishing even a single build in the entirety of the league period which leads to people abandoning the game early since they aren’t being rewarded for the time they put in.
I think you mean 25% (8*1.19 = 9.52, LE may truncate that for display purposes but it uses the correct figure).
Do you have an example of a build that looses damage putting mana regen instead? My Zombies Necro build has t5 mana regen on all available slots & 2 Sapphire rings & I can spam Zombies for a long time. Could I gain a little bit more damage by swapping one of those regen prefixes for minion damage/Int? Probably but then I might start running short of mana on longer fights.
Yeah, but all “expensive” skills having cooldowns is a boring way of doing it. I’m glad there are more than just 1 tool in the box in order to balance skills.
I presume the ideal thing to do would be to run a Chaos node (to reroll some of those nasty mods into nicer mods), run the rest of the nicer nodes then run a Memory node to enable you to re-run the previously run “nice” nodes.
That’s entirely your prerogative, but if you’re capped on crit avoidance, those crit chance nodes are free stuff. IMO, glancing blows & resistance nodes are annoying but really not that bad. Dodge is to be avoided at all costs unless you’re running a DoT spell build.
If you feel like you’ve reached the peak of what your build can cope with with 106 corruption, that’s entirely your choice, but it doesn’t automatically mean that the corruption system is not working properly. I think @Tunk was running high corruption, so he’s ok with it at least.
If you had a way to easily avoid doing “bad” nodes (like dodge, enrage, etc), wouldn’t that just be making the game easy? You’d never pick a “bad” node. Kinda sounds like a bit of a cop out to me.
As a Necro you can get a lot of resists from the tree so you really don’t need those t5 affixes to cap your resists. My Necro has most of her resists over 100 with t5 resists.
While 100% crit avoidance is nice because you then can ignore crits, getting it up into the 80s & 90s allows you to mostly ignore crits. Plus you can get crit avoidance (& resists) from blessings, further negating the “need” for t5s.
Ward says hi.
Was it @LizardIRL that did the Dragon Emperor with a nekkid character (excluding staff, boots & belt)? Can he still do it? Lizard! I challenge thee!
@Llama8 Doesn’t endurance work no matter when the hit is initiated? As in, I take full damage until I get to my threshold and then the rest of the hit is mitigated appropriately?
1 - You already made the example for me. Except that it’s not a little bit more damage, each of those mana regen are taking a possible 8 int or at least 60% minion damage. Multiply that for possibly 10 items and we are looking at a major damage loss.
2 - Except it doesn’t balances, it just nerfs by removing the abillity to cast continuously or by allowing so at a damage penalty.
3 - Except as I said before, those are unicorns, I’ve never even seen one. If they were dotted everywhere, sure, that would solve the issue, but that’s not the case.
4 - Yeah, if I have capped it or nearly maxed that’s fine. Except there is 2 issues. I need a couple items with a T5 crit avoidance and the empowered blessing. You can see how this is an issue and why those nodes are avoid like the plague instead of free nodes. Glancing blows are essencially more HP to enemies and so is resistance and so is endurance.
It’s not about what is the peak of my build but what I feel confortable playing. I want trash mobs to die fast, I don’t want boss fights to take half an hour either and I also don’t like enemies to pose enough threat that they can oneshot me.
5 - It’s not a cop out, it’s an actual choice at that point. Do you make it harder to get better XP and drop modifiers or go for the easier ones that give you less bonus?
6 - Not really, you get a bit of elemental and a lot of necrotic. I still need almost all T5 resistances to cap them. I could have a T4 physical and probably a T1 or 2 necrotic. Everything else has to be T5.
7 - Already addressed Crit avoidance previously.
8 - Ward is A, for builds that can have it, B only work when everything else already in place like crit avoidance and caped res and last but not least, only really matters when you can use it to the point of face tanking with all the above problems taken care of.
To give you an example, my necro can easily go over 1.5k ward. Do you think the bosses care about that when my resistances are uncapped and they can still crit me? The answer is no, even without a crit they very easily go through to my ward, at best it buys me a second to try to get out, assuming that’s enough.
First off, could you please use the quote feature for lenghty discussions like this.
It makes reading and understanding what exactly you refer to much easier.
It doesn’t matter much if you buff buffs or nerf builds. Build diversity is warranted by having a similar power level across as many buidls as possible.
Even some of the objectively “worst” build in LE, actually don’t feel that bad, if you don’t compare them to some of the top end outliers.
What makes builds “feel bad”, is just comparing them to other builds that perform better.
Just changing a few things that are too strong is so much easier than trying to buff everything else.
It is really build dependant. For some slots you don’t even have to scarifice that much damage (like Belt, Gloves and Rings)
Having a smoother rotation or even enabling self sustaining skills, without the need of a mana regenerator might leads to possible other builds setups that do mroe dmg or have better utility/defense.
The new maximum mana/sec cap definitely enabled buidls that were not possible before.
Please don’t speak for others, thank you! I do care alot for ressource management. It makes combat so much more engaging than brainlessly spamming your rotation.
Congratulations you took the best example possible: Yes PoE has a mana system, but you can trivilize it on about 99% of all builds.
LE is not “most aRPG’s”, just because others do this, that doesn’t mean it has to be this way.
The system is supposed to make the game harder… the increases in difficulty are supposed to happen. If you can’t handle them, imrpove your build, simple as that.
Being able to choose which modifers you want would also trivilize them in the current state.
If anything clsoe to “choose your own modifiers” would make it into the game, they need to implement modifiers that affect ALL builds, so they might be forced to stick to generic dmg and hp increases which is super boring.
I don’t understand it… the as stated above: The system is intended to increase the difficulty, otherwise there would be no progression.
The so called “bad” nodes are there to give you noticeable difficulty increases. If you can’t handle specific nodes, there are literally dozens of choices with the new system.
I never ever had the case where i was “softlocked” into taking “nightmare modifiers”.
And even if that’s sometiems the case, take th echo with the best reward and play savely and slowly, if you build can’t handle it.
There is no single defense layer “mandatory”, it’s always a combination of different defensive layers, depending on your build.
Capping resistances is also not the ultimate “go-to” way… there are many other viable options.
This is not how endurance works.
Endurance partially reduces damage from single big hits, that will bring you below your endurance threshold.
Well, you can only put mana regen on 2 rings, an amulet, belt & relic so that’s a max of 5 items you’re potentially missing out on damage affixes, though relics can only have 1 minion damage prefix so that’s less of a conflict. It’s a trade off between higher damage lower uptime (due to less mana regen) or lower damage higher uptime (due to not running out of mana).
You can argue the numbers, but in principle that’s good for build diversity since you can choose two different ways of doing it.
Plus damage isn’t everything & I’d rather have a large amount of ward (6-8k if I’m not taking damage) that I can keep up almost indefinitely on a boss fight by being able to keep spamming Zombies due to not running out of mana.
Yes, that’s called balance. Lower damage skills are cheaper because they do lower damage. Higher damage skills are more expensive because they do more damage.
I’ve seen 3 or 4 of the Chaos nodes while running through the non-empowered monoliths (ignoring the left side monos 'cause I want to get to the empowered ones before the heat death of the universe). They are certainly rarer than the Shade nodes but you can’t just ignore them because you’ve not encountered them. They may be more common in empowered monoliths.
If you had the min roll on the crit avoidance blessing (50%) plus two (“a couple”) of min rolled t5 crit avoidance suffixes you’d be at 100%, yes. If you had a max rolled blessing (70%) you’d only need 1 mid-rolled suffix.
Or if you’re a Paladin you can ignore it completely because you can get it from gear implicits & a few passive points.
Which is fair enough, but I don’t think bosses are going to take half an hour even if you’re nekkid (but for a weapon, boots & belt). It sounds like you want to zoom-zoom through content, which is entirely your choice.
Personally I go as straight out from the centre as I can until I get enough stability for the final boss fight. I might go for a nice reward if I come across one but TBH, I’m kinda ignoring the modifiers 'cause it’s all pretty easy. I’ve noticed that one or two mob types (the XXX Flesh) take noticeably longer to kill but that’s it.
You do get an ungodly amount of necrotic resist, that’s true, if you take all 4 resist nodes you can get 30% ele resist (nearly half of what you require), 90% necrotic & 40% poison (though I don’t usually go for the 20% poison on Putrid Demise).
With this build (with +2 Zombies on the helm instead of Death Seal), I’ve got 4 spare suffix slots that I put armour in but I could easily go with lower tier resist suffixes & still cap.
I’m not so sure about B. If you can generate 5-8k of ward fairly quickly (Zombies necro & Spellblade) I think you might be able to forgo much in the way of resists & crit avoidance & still be in melee range. You may need to be a fairly high skill player to do it.
Part of my view might be that I’m still not done with normal monoliths & I may change my view when I hit empowered.
It actually does matters. What you call outliers is exactly what the good builds are and what people tend to like to play. It’s the bad builds that need to be brought up, not the other way around otherwise everything feels bad to play.
I understand that to you most builds might feel just fine. Eitehr because you are playing said outlier builds or because your tolerance for bad builds is far higher than other people. But there is a reason why people look up good builds online all the time no matter what ARPG is and how easy or hard it is to make builds.
It’s always easy to try and nerf a few things that are doing better thus making it feel worse to play than it is to actually buff what is doing bad. You are totaly right. But you know what? You can either do the thing everyone does and always comes out with the same invariable result that everyone hates because eventually everything is bad and not fun to play. Or you could actually make the harder thing and make everything good in which case build choice is up to playstyle preference.
Belts on some builds maybe. Rings, no you are always losing damage there.
Yes the new maximum allows for things you couldn’t before. But it’s also true that if mana was never meant to be an issue, those things would be possible to and better for it.
Very well, let me correct that to most people don’t care. look at all the other games. Do you see anyone complaining that their mana does not run out? No, in fact the rare cases where something is too mana hungry that it cannot be sustained is when you see complains.
And what you speak of management is in reallity, let me run around a bit to recover and then press right mouse button again. This is not adding anything to the game, it’s only adding dead periods in which you don’t attack. It doesn’t requires any more brainpower.
But let me go a step further, let’s assume you could do something, have an extra step to recover mana so that it wasn’t as braindead as you say. You know what it really is doing? Adding more complication that people will hate. Plenty of people (me included) already struggle with managing 5 active skills and keeping up with what’s going on screen. In fact, that is so much so true that I don’t play a build that requires 5 active skills. You want people to be paying attention to the fight. No skill rotations, not mana bars, not whether your minions are dying. You want people to be looking at the boss and his telegraphs to avoid them so then you can attack while paying attention to the next attack.
Not just PoE. Chronicon and Grim Dawn do the same. Do you know why they do this? Because they realise that while people expect a mana bar to exist, they also don’t expect to bother with it either.
LE is not like other ARPGs, you are right. But one would hope that they learn to use what’s good about other ARPGs and correct what they did poorly. Do you know why WoW is often thought of the first and the best MMO (for it’s time of course). Well that’s because most MMOs prior to it did a lot of things wrong and what WoW did was grab the good systems from other MMOs and then try to correct the bad ones. It’s not rocket science. Games iterate on the acomplishments of others and overtime (if done correctly) make the whole genre better.
The system is supposed to make the game harder is no escuse to force players to play at points where the build can’t keep up. Again, good game design allows you to chose your own difficulty. The harder it is, the more rewards you get. So if you can’t do harder content. Do easier content until you can. The problem is again, that the game softlocks you.
Being able to chose your modifiers doesn’t trivialises, it just makes you get less rewards because the harder modifiers that people skip out on would be the ones with the higher drop rewards. This is a self balancing mechanic.
This is meant towards the inabillity to find shrines and such that re-roll or allow you to replay echos since it was mentioned that they only appear after empowering the timelines but they don’t appear to me at all, I’m guessing only at very high levels of corruption.
I have. I have a case where all nodes I have are dodge, + health, crit (which I don’t have enough avoidance) and there are some + damage too but I already have 1 or 2 so I don’t want more or I’ll be just getting oneshot. I’ve been picking the nodes I can avoid, then picking a new + health when one decays but because eventually you start running into many dodge and crit nodes, eventually all you have is nodes you can’t take. There are some that you can take if others decayed, but they haven’t decaysed yet because the more you try to explore, the more you find places that block you.
Sorry but this is just wrong. Capping resistance is mandatory. Not being crit is mandatory too. You are right that there is no single mandatory defense layers. ALL defense layers are mandatory!
Very much doubt this. I notice that after I hit the threshold I do take less damage. But if I get hit by a big hit before I am at the threshold then the damage is not reduced. That is why it’s so hard to survive big hits. They essencially ignore endurance or at least, that’s what I’ve seen so far. I haven’t seen endurance save me from oneshots.
What different people consider reasonable is indeed debatable. But I’d say for the average player who has a couple hours a day to play, being able to get a T20 every couple days should be reasonable. That’s still going to take that player close to a month to complete a build, ignoring however much time it takes to finish the campaign first.
But again, that is what I consider reasonable, some people will think 1000 hours for a single T20 is perfectly fine.
No, relics can have 2 minion damage mods, 3 if we count intelligence. You have minion damage and + to summon skeletal mages which also has a built in minion damage of it’s own.
Granted, most minion builds are not mana starved.
Plus damage is not everything but it’s tremendously important. I don’t want to see the boss life ticking down by 1% every 10 seconds, I want to see it tick down 1% per second at bare minimum. There is such a thing as fights overstaying their welcome.
Except most skills don’t actually work like this. Most skills that tend to be well over the top on damage and if they are, they already have a built in mechanic called cooldown which is far better.
I have never seen them in either empowered or non empowered monoliths and I got at least 30 hours on 8.2 doing monolith. That should be indicative of something. More importantly. If players can’t just chose their own difficulty, then these nodes should be very common to prevent softlocking.
Yes, but would you look at that, I get softlocked so getting the empowered blessing is an issue. Would you look at the other problem too, getting a T20 is extremely hard. I can’t control when a piece of gear is going to break or when I’m even going to get something craft worthy.
Paladins may be able to do it more easily sure. I haven’t tried all builds. But I don’t think I should be forced into a single option to be able to have an easier time surviving the monolith. And that is not to say how it plays cause if it requires 5 active skills then I can’t play it. Ideally I use 3. 4 is as much as I can handle but then I won’t be able to pay proper attention to what’s happening on the screen.
Obviously 30 minutes is exageration. But I expect a boss fight not to be longer than a minute and half tops. That’s about 1% boss life done per second (which is technically higher DPS considering dodging attacks). Some builds can kill bosses before they even attack which is nice, but not necessary either in my opinion. But if a boss fights starts to drag into the 3 minutes mark, I don’t even want to do it anymore. It’s just not fun, it’s outstaying it’s welcome.
Not for me. I definitly notice when the trash starts taking 2 hits to kill or worse if they have dodge. I also notice quite sharply when I get 1 shot even by map trash thanks to crits or when I take 2 or 3 hits quickly in a row that deal very high damage and stunlock me to death so I don’t do that. I want a relative level of safety.
I am doing Ice minions so I don’t go for nodes that are dead for me except for a bit of resitances. That’s wasting all the passive tree potential.
I’m not doing spellblade, I’m doing a proper necromancer. I can generate ward but even then it doesn’t goes past 1.5k. Even if I had my build finished I doubt it would go past 2k.
Also I’m not a high skill player. I’m an average player or at best slightly above average.
Don’t worry, my necro isn’t either. My mage is on empowered and softlocked. But my necro still hasn’t made the last 3 timelines to get to empowered. I can tell you the dragon emperor’s breath does not care. I can survive about 1 second under it and the other attacks will probably straight up oneshot me considering the AoEs of the 3 dragon fight previous to that did it.
