I don’t understand the problems with losing slots for damage or monos being too slow. Best way to run the monos fast is to sprint to the objective then kill everything altogether in a minute or two. Each mono is very fast now.
Keep heading as far from the start as you can until you get to a Shade with a decent +corruption. Kill him and repeat until you have a timeline with lots of lovely corruption and loads of Exalted Caches (OMG I love these!). Usually I get a T7 in with the T6s.
If I can’t just smash through each mono in a few minutes then I know my tank is weak and I need to buff up (depending on the build that can be very different approaches).
I haven’t had a build yet where it was difficult to find damage. There are so many ways to scale damage, some more or less effective, but if you build is not about net performance, in the challenges the game throws up, then imo it is an interesting showcase build but not really playable. Like someone who shows 20k ward 200k damage and no resists.
I don’t have T20s (or even close) on any of my toons. I haven’t seen any content that needs it, but I’ve spent almost zero time in the arena, its not my thing. Maybe you need it for the ladder? Dunno.
Since 8.2 I’ve been having a blast customising my times lines for more and more corruption. This gives me lots of Exalted Caches (did I mention I love those?) from corruption upgrading the rewards, as well as my Blessing runs getting way faster. Finally got a max roll out of Spirits of Fire!
Hearing from people with different playstyles to me gives me confidence for the longterm future of the game. I really enjoyed the OPs comparison (mostly with PoE?), but my experience in the monos (empowered) is completely different to him. They are faster, they have better loot, the challenge is more varied, they are customisable to different difficulties to support a very wide range of builds at different levels of progression.
The monos are already close to or superseding the endgame systems in many other games. And we are still getting more endgame activities? Wow. The moment we have even a second endgame activity that rewards/challenges in a diffferent way to the monos we’ll really be able to see the dev vision.
I’m not sure how much any of us can say is missing in the current system, until we see what is actually missing
While this discussion is really interesting it seems like we are moving no step further into any direction that seems like a conclusion.
I will give some final thoughts on some of those points and then i am out for the moment.
I often have very strong opinion about certain subjectes too, but it just seems like we are both on totally opposite sides and we will never meet anywhere in the middle.
While there are some builds that just don’t work, most of the time this is just due to missing synergies or the creator of the build not understanding or utilizing all tools/mechanics that are available to him.
There are alot of builds that are not top performers, simply because there are builds that are stronger than intended. But just because there are better builds, doesn’t mean some of those other not so high performing builds are not viable or “good”, they are just bad compared to those top end builds.
What is “good” and what is “bad” is really skewed by the overall performance of ALL builds.
If you would nerf the one build out of 10 that is overperforming, all 10 builds are “good”… because they never were “bad”, “felt bad”, “are unplayable” or “not viable”.
It’s just people comparing them to other builds.
But all other 9 builds that were “underperforming” compared to that 10th build never were objectively that bad.
Of course there are always some builds that need buffs and i am not saying buffs should never be made
It is adding alot to the gameplay, if you can’t see that, you might never tried to play such a build.
You need to make conscious decisions, when to use your high mana ability, maybe even wait until mobs stack together to use it, if you can’t sustain it. Or with enough mana regen you can use one high mana cost ability, that you only use for big mobs packs or rares/bosses and one low/no mana cost ability for the rest, something that would maybe not be even possible without the current changes to mana (even with the old mana regen).
There are plenty of builds possible now, that weren’t in the old system and if they would keep the 10 mana/sec and buff the mna regen affix, it would be not as interesting, because then alot of builds have good ressource management baseline.
If you don’t like ressource systems, that’s fine, but don’t tell me “people don’t care”, when i know alot of people that do care about ressource management.
And don’t argue with “other games do X”. Also While ressource management in GD is not as limited as in LE, it does exist and there are quite a few builds that rely on Energy Potions. If you want to get rid of Energy Potion Consumption you need to invest.
Marvel Heroes (my most played game ever) also had big emphasize on mana management.
Again don’t speak for other people!
We are here to give our own opinion.
Trying to always generalize everything just looks like you want to give your point more weight, because supposedly there are a “many” other that think this way.
Wow, i am not even sure how to argue here LOL.
First off: Again, you speaking for “other people”, don’t do that.
Second: I never heard anyone saying anything remotely similar.
And i do argue, that many other (like PoE) did ressource management very poorly, it’s soooo uninteresting and doesn’t give much diversity in building around ressources.
I don’t wanna start a WoW/MMO discussion here, that will most likely de-rail the whole thread.
But it sounds like you are thinking there were dozens of other MMO’s before WoW
Seems like you need to get to the drawing board with your build. I never had any issue with keeping up with the MoF System, even with the old one , that didn’t give me alot of choices.
If you builds can’t handle it, go back a few timelines and get better, discover better synergies, farm more loot, try experiemnting with different skills.
Beacons and Vessels can spawn in every timeline, even in normal. Their chances just scale with corruption and normal timeline have a hard corruption limit of 50, which is not very much, but they still can spawn.
The bset thing you can do to find them in normal timelines, is discovering the outer edge of th echo web, because they spawn rate is also higher, the deeper your are into a echo web(the further away from the starting point)
I never ever had any scenario, where there weren’t any chill, slow or armour shred modifers, which are usually relatively easy IMO.
Also if you builds can’t take so many stacked modifiers, stay in the inner part of the echo web, where modifers only hast a few echoes, so they run out faster and don’t stack as high.
Again it just sounds like your build can’t handle certain things, which is not the systems fault.
Sorry for not being sorry, but this statement shows me,that you lacking alot of expertise in terms of character building and understanding the stats in LE.
LE has 8 generic defensive layers: Health, Ward, Resistance, Armour, Dodge, Block, Endurance and Glancing Blow (i am excluding any class specific or special passive/gear related defensive layers, even though glancing blow is already pretty class specific)
You are not even able to stack all of those at once. Some are even not synergistic.
But non of these single handlely is “mandatory”.
I did played plenty of builds not utilizing any resistance. It just works fine.
Also there is a very very big difference between investing some resistance and capping resistance in LE. Getting some resistance is really strong, but there is no need to literally cap Alot of times if you try to forcefully cap resistance, you could even invested in another defensive layer instead and would give you more eHP.
Then you are objectively wrong. It does work like this. It’s important that the damage is only partially reduce by endurance, only the portion of the single hit that is damaging your health below your endurance threshold.
Yes, the devs will have their view of approximately where they want player power to be (“5”, for arguments sake), if they have an outlying build that’s at “10” & they then buff every other build to also perform at “10” then every build is going to have a much easier time against all of the mobs & bosses than if every build was at “5”.
It really would. Lets say a “normal” build takes 2 mins to kill a boss, but an overperforming build take 10 seconds to kill said boss. They buff every build to the same level, now that boss only takes 10 seconds.
How anyone can think that bringing every build up to the same level as the highest performing ones isn’t an increase in player power I don’t know…
IMO, when someone talks about “player power”, they are either talking about a specific build or a general/average level (which is what we’re talking about). Ideally every build should be able to perform against a number of metrics (single target damage, AoE/clear, survivability) to a similar level. Obviously that means that the scores would be averaged, so one build might have excellent single target but shit clear & average survivability, or excellent survivability but bad single target & average AoE.
But is it detrimental to gameplay? IMO, being able to constantly spam Zombies through the entire boss fight is a positive thing & that’s due to my high mana regen. It’s one way to balance the damage/cost/(mana) sustain equation, it’s not and shouldn’t be the only way.
Yes, but you said that you’d prefer skills to just have a cooldown instead of mana, which IMO, would be really boring. That said, I did love Sacred 1 & 2 which used cooldowns instead of mana. But they also had cooldown reduction on hit as a thing in Sacred 2.
No, it really does!
Not if you choose to run a Shade that has a green reduction to corruption. As you build up correction by killing Shades, you need to kill them further & further from the centre to continue to increase your corruption. Killing Shades closer to the centre will either not add corruption or reduce it making subsequent monoliths easier.
Can you show me a pic of a monolith web with only Shade nodes within a few monoliths of the centre (& that they all add corruption)?
But you said that it wans’t possible to do the content without capped resists! Is it easy to do that? No! Is it possible? Yes! Do the devs want builds to be able to ignore all resists easily? No, probably not. But if you build your character right, you can.
You don’t needevery defensive layer possible to be capped. Will you be tankier if you do? Sure, nobody’s arguing that. But you can absolutely do the content without every single defensive layer capped.
I think you have a very skewed view of the difficulty of the game, unless you’re pushing into the thousands of waves or thousands of corruption. But then maybe the devs don’t intend that to be much of a thing (even if it’s possible).
Well that’s entirely on you, but that’s how Endurance works. And yes, Endurance doesn’t affect damage taken to ward, but that’s not an issue, it’s a design decision.
They are both “big hitters”. One is specialised for clear, the other single target. Could Lightning Blast potentially be nerfed a bit since, as you say, it can be spec’d for massive single target damage, perhaps.
How much damage does Ele Nova do on a large pack, or several large packs? Just because a skill designed for AoE/clear doesn’t do high single target damage doesn’t mean it’s not doing lots of damage. The fact that you can AoE down most of a screen (ignoring the chunky champions) in a fraction of a second shows that it’s doing high damage. Just not high single target damage.
I’d agree, Lightning Blast spec’d for single target could probably do with a cost increase.
The problem is losing damage. It’s not about the monolith being slow, it’s about how fast you kill enemies. Trash mobs shouldn’t survive a hit. Elites should maybe take 2 or 3 at best and bosses shouldn’t last more than a minute and a half.
The point is not about how fast you clear the monoliths once again it’s how fast you clear packs and so on. On top of that, I will not run past enemies and ignore them until I reach the end goal, that’s just giving them more opportunities to kill me and going for the good rewards. Thanks but no thanks. I’d rather avoid bad mods. No reward is worth dying for.
I don’t have difficulties with damage too if I can adjust the difficulty. And it’s not as if enemies having more health will make the monolith unacomplishable. But if trash mobs are not geting one shot then it’s not satisfying to play. It’s also not fun when enemies in echos can just oneshot you either.
I don’t do arena either. But T20s are the minimum expected for a finished build. T21+ is where you are chasing the good items. If I was the lead Dev for this game then everything T20 is the expected state you are in before entering empowered timelines. After empowered is when you are looking for the T21+.
And just like that, there are plenty of people with top tier builds that all they do is try to manage the dificulty. Some builds deal with this better like minion builds as they are generally a bit safer so they hardly care for whatever modifiers are at play so long as the minions are still killing fast. That said most builds don’t have a wall minions to largely ignore damage.
I cannot agree on customisable. The whole point I’m trying to make is that you can’t customise it. You can’t chose what you want to deal with and what you don’t want to deal with.
The monolith has potential, but for that potential to unlock it needs to be fully player driven. The player should be chosing how hard he wants to make it and by definition, how much rewards he’s getting from it… I don’t even see much of a need for other end game activties. It’s just that monoliths need to change into a more flexible system.
Except they are. A build is considered good or bad when it’s compared to it’s peers. If you don’t establish a base line for comparison then no comparison can be made. Therefore you need to compare builds against the best and then decide if it’s good enough or not based on performance. This idea that a build is not bad, only when compared is silly. It’s why we compare things. To come to a conclusion as to what is better.
A good Developer will understand that making players feel strong or even overpowered is not a problem because the game can still throw challenges regardless and can still kill them. Thus a game is always more fun if you give the players their power fantasy and let them feel powerful, making thus the balance point around the strong builds and not around the weak builds.
No, literally what happens is. I killed several packs and I am running low on mana. I’m going to stand here doing nothing looking at the screen watching the mana fill and then move on. This is not adding anything at all to the game except annoyance. Even if there was a fight I’d simply just kite or run back until I had mana. This doesn’t makes the game any better, it only makes the game objectively worse. Fortunatly my minion build doesn’t needs mana and my Mage build has a mana recovery abillity that recovers it in a second, but plenty of other builds out there have to deal with the annoyance far more than I have and it’s not good because you can say however much you want you can solve the issue. But if solving the issue requires losing damage then it’s not a solution.
Because it’s true. Think about it. Why did such systems were removed as games modernised? Simple. People don’t like these mechanics and often they don’t add much or just add complication. In this case it removes the focus from the battle and puts it somewhere else.
Is this to say everyone prefers the modernisation that made games “better”? No. I prefer turn based strategy games to have squares instead of hexes even though a hex system is objectively superior. But I am also aware that whenever a system proves to be bad that most people prefer the better one.
Again as I said before. People can recognise a better system over a worse one. That’s why systems changed the way they did. To please more people more so than to make games better although in many cases they did make the games better.
You might never heard anyone saying that, but it is a fact is it not? Do you need mana regen in PoE? No. Do you have a mana system? Yes. So why is it there? It’s there cause people expect to have to spend mana to cast but at the same time they don’t want to manage that resource. It’s there purely due to expectations. Same thing for Grim Damn and Chronicon.
You can argue that. But it’s clear that games have been moving away from that for a very good reason. Look at Wolcen. It’s a bad game I know, but wanna know one of it’s bad points that gets pointed out a lot? It’s rage/mana management system (or whatever the moving bar is called). Again, I accept that you like the mana management system. But it objectively makes the game worse.
The point was merely to take an example of made it succesful. Were there many? Quite a few. Were they poping up like mushrooms everywhere? Certainly not. But it is a fact that their success formula is well known. Take the good systems out of other game, don’t use or make better the bad systems that were in play. Of course by today standards a lot of bad systems could be pointed at it, however for the time these bad systems were expectations, like fetch quests and so not recognised as bad.
I actually got less bad choices in the old system. It had less choices but it seemed to me like choice tended to be skewed towards not giving you a tone of stacking defenses and offense to the enemy even if you had to re-roll. On top of that if you were having a string of bad luck you could at any time reset the monolith. Yes you lose the progression but at least you have good odds of it not happening since it wasn’t often for a streak of bad modifiers to happen. In the new system I always get softlocked. Reseting means that I’m just making things harder and even if I assume I don’t get softlocked in 2 or 3 moves like it has happened already (because reseting the monolith doesn’t removes the modifers you already had), I will still eventually get softlocked and everytime I get softlock, difficulty increases. This will lead to me eventually getting to the point where I’m 100% softlocked.
Again I will point out that the issue is not a build. It’s a copied build that is on the top performers. But I’ll point out again what seems to be obviously being overlooked. I don’t want trash mobs to take more than 1 hit to kill, elites may take 2 or 3. Bosses should not take more than a minute and a half to kill and ideally, I should never be getting oneshot or instantly burst down to 0. If there is a reasonable chance of any of the above happening, the difficulty is then too high… Not too high to play but too high to have fun playing.
Customisable difficulty is the way forward. Look at it this way. If I can customise I can polay how easy or hard I want and have fun. Similarly, you can play however hard you want and also have fun. Why do you have this belief that a game should be harder than it needs to be for everyone? How does that benefict you or the community as a whole?
Again that defeats the point of them existing. They need to be plentyful. Not so much that you are not getting enough reward nodes (even though many of people ignore rewards nodes for safety) but not so few that it’s hard to re-roll nodes.
Also there is an edge? I usually tend to go in one direction with my minion build and I never hit an edge so it must be far but at the same time, not sure I like that. The web should be infinite in my opinion.
I always take chill and slow nodes, they are easy to deal with. I take most of the nodes that give bonus to rare as long as it isn’t crit or their damage is getting to the point of oneshoting me without a crit. I still get softlocked everytime. What seems more likely to me is that you probably take more bad nodes because you are fine dealing with unpleasant things and just avoid a few or maybe if you have to bite a bullet you go for say, all dodge nodes so that they all decay at the same time.
Again it’s not my build that is bad. It’s that past a certain limit, the game ceases to be fun to play as I’ve explained before.
Right, I guess I need to explain better because it wasn’t obvious enough. When I say all defense layers I mean generic ones + the build reliant ones. So for generic ones you have resistances, endurance, endurance threshold and crit avoidance. Then you may have yet another layer depending on your build (I say may but it’s very likely there is another) like dodge or block or armor and so on. All of them are mandatory to be capped (and yes I realise some of them don’t have a cap, those are just as high as possible).
You can keep saying it’s not mandatary and for some rare builds like the naked paladin, maybe it isn’t. But this are not the majority of builds. The majority of builds require you to cap all layers of the defense. The generic ones and any extra that the build may use.
If it does, again, it’s not noticable. It could be that it’s hard to notice because the damage is still hitting so high that having a better endurance and threshold still doesn’t saves me, but if that’s the case, then perhaps the system needs improving. If your defensive layers are getting better, you should be able to notice it.
Also agree with what you said in the begining. We will probably not see eye to eye on this. We seen to want different things out of the game. Where I want a more customisable difficulty and a game that is friendly towards new player and average players. You want a game that is more geared towards the hardcore players and players who have a much higher tolerance for annoyance.
Let’s look at your example and at the nerf that happened. Would you say losing 2 1x4 idols nerfs a build damage by half? probably not but ok, so maybe you were exagerating. How much does this nerfs actually? Probably not even 10% of the damage which already shows that if such builds were over-performing, it was not significant enough to warrant a nerf, even less to the builds that were “balanced” or under-performing but also got caught by the nerf.
You could even say that the only build I’ve seen so far as overpowered which is the oneshot abomination is not considered broken by the Devs since it was not nerfed even though it will oneshot anything in the game. Granted there are tradeoffs for it but still. You can easily see where this is going.
It’s better to just focus on bringing the builds that are underperforming in line with the ones that are the top of the food chain.
I see where we are differing here. The whole point is not for you look at an “average” build. The top builds unless they are on absolut perfect gear and level 100 and doing an empowered timeline with nothing to add life or any damage mitigation to the enemy might indeed mean that these tops builds can kill them in 10 seconds.
That said it is expected that when you reach empowered timelines you are not level 100, you do not have perfect gear (for now, I belive T20s should be there when you reach empowered timelines anyway) and on top of that there will likely be things making the boss tougher which results in the top builds already taking 1 minute or more to kill the boss. And this is the top builds. Now buff every build to this point and everyone is killing the boss in 1 minute. That’s good. Eventually they will get the power to kill the boss in 10 seconds if the stars align on the mods it has and you are on perfect gear and level 100. But odds are you already are on much higher corruption anyway and the starts did not align so you are probably killing that boss at roughly the same speed.
Let’s look at another thing. Well not exactly look, I don’t have statistics, but Let’s go with boardmans classification of builds build power. Form S tier to F tier. Between S and A tier, there is a bit of a difference, but I’d say it isn’t higher than 10% to 15% more power.
I’ll go ahead and say, even without statistics so yes, you can say I have no proof of my claim, that at least 80% of the playerbase plays builds that are either S tier or A tier at least. There aren’t many people able to make their own builds, they tend to copy the good builds, sometimes they may try to make their own but after failing a few times they just want something that works.
Of course those who do know how to make builds rarely play anything bellow A tier either.
What this means is that the majority of the playerbase is already centered around the A to S tier level of power. So if you now turn all build’s power be around A to S tier, then the players aren’t gaining any power. They already had this power and that’s what they were using. Now you just increased build variety.
It is detrimental. You say that the only way to balance your zombies that do what? 30k explosions? I’m not sure here but that’s the most I’ve seen in build showcases for zombies so I’ll go with that and let you correct me if I’m wrong. You cast a zombie. It comes out from the ground, walks to the enemy and shortly after explodes. There is a delay here, you can only have 6 and well, you will probably be having to dodge attack so you will not be constantly casting and as such constantly DPSing the enemy.
Let’s look at boardman’s ice minions build and we are looking an average hit of 10K to 13K damage per minion on average (I believe the archers are the ones that do the 10k and the mages 13k). We are looking at now at bare minimum 10 archers and 5 mages so let’s average the damage to 11.5k and multiply by 15 and it’s 172.5k per attack. They don’t have to be resummoned. Their leech is enough to sustain them and they don’t care whether or not you are dodging attack, they just keep firing and guess what is the best part of it. No mana regen. Even if you had unlimited mana and could pump everything into increasing your zombie’s damage, they would still be doing far less damage than the ice minion build and the ice minion build is perfectly balanced. It’s S tier but not broken.
How do you think now that having no mana regen problems makes you build OP? It doesn’t the way I see it.
Sacred was great, I’ll give you that. Sad to see what was done to 3, even after having blind guardian on 2… I shed a tear every time I think about how the franchise was destroyed.
But getting back to the topic. Yes, ideally you’d have neither of the systems and if you’re gonna have one, at least stick with cooldown rather than mana management in my opinion. It’s a far better system.
No it doesn’t. Let’s say I have 15 nodes available. 8 are dodge, 3 are crit, 3 are health and 1 is damage. I don’t want dodge at all so those nodes are off. I don’t want crit cause I have a low avoidance chance so those are off too. I already have a health node and I don’t want to make trash mobs take 2 hits to kill so those are off. I already have 1 node of damage so I don’t want to take another as it means many rares can just oneshot me even without crit so that’s off too. It would seem as though I have no choice. I cannot chose to keep my current level of difficulty. In fact chosing difficulty would be something more akin to having a list of mods and you check the ones you want present. Then you make your way through the monolith going after the nodes you want. At any time when you are not in an echo you can go and add or remove modifiers to make something easier or harder.
That is what chosing difficulty means. When you force a player to take modfiers they don’t have by presenting several bad options, you are not giving a choice of difficulty, you are forcing an unwanted level of difficulty down the player’s throat.
If this is true then all the ones I’ve seen so far only increase, even the ones closer to the center though the closer ones give less but they are giving, not taking away. I’m guessing that removing corruption is only a possibillity once you reach a certain threshold which is again another way of how you don’t have control.
Can do so, but i am not in game at the moment, I’ll send you a PM with it when I log in a bit. Still got some stuff to do.
Except that isn’t necessarely building a character right. Let me put it like this. I hate melee builds. I will not play melee builds ever simply because they are not fun for me. Even if it’s a melee build with AoE, I still don’t like it. You need capped defenses, at least the generic ones in 99% of the builds. The gmae can allow you to do something out of the ordinary that ignores a mechanics, but it’s not something that can be generically ignored so it hardly counts.
Perhaps I have a skewed vision of the game, in the sense that I play the game to have fun and dying is not fun nor is taking too long to do anything I think I should be doing faster fun. I don’t mind having less rewards if the game can be played in a fun way. Could I do higher levels of difficulty? Absolutly, I’ve done so before. Is it fun though? No, not really and I play games to have fun.
What was said was more towards, if the damage hit ward then once it gets past ward and hits life endurance will still be ignored. Or at least that was the impression it game, I could have misunderstood him.
Not really? I wouldn’t use ele nova on a boss. Even if there was no mana drain, the damage is just way too low and will make the fight drag on longer than needed. It hits hard enough to clear the trash quick, sure but I wouldn’t call it a hard hitter per say. Similarly could lightning blast be nerfed? Well, anything can be nerfed but it’s not overperforming so why should it? In fact there are other skills with neglible mana cost that do even more damage and they are perfectly fine as they are. So I doubt that will happen.
On my build is currently dealing little over 3k damage but the gear is not T20 or higher nor is the character level 100 nor do I have all good idols. And yes it’s doing high damage but it’s what I’d call, sufficiently high damage. It’s enough for it’s purpose but it is by no means what high damage. It’s not as if it’s overkilling those mobs 3 times over. What you want out of a clearing skill is that it oneshots the trash. That is literaly the minimum quallifying criteria.
And no, lightning blast does not need a cost increase. It would make it both unplayable as a starting skill and as an end game skill.
Yeah, not on a phone no. lol. But much like him, I don’t believe there is a common ground here because people tend to be polar opposites when it comes to this kind of situations. I’d say balance should be done around the average player. Player power is important and should be granted because you can still having challenges while making the player feel powerful and nothing should every outstay it’s welcome. Being how much grinding is needed to have good gear or how long it takes to kill something.
But other people are just polar opposities of that. There is nothing wrong with that of course, but I do feel there is plenty of games out there that are marketed towards the hardcore crowd as far as ARPGs go and very little aimed at the average players.
Without getting into everything that was just said – I have no more patience for a longer reply right now. There are two things I’d like to address
This is not how it works. If you take a single hit and have ward, you will take damage normally, if that hit ever takes your life to your Endurance Threshold, the rest of the hit will be be mitigated by your Endurance.
I think you should really try to make your own builds, you might just see where the rest of us are coming from, and it has some added benefits–you get to learn the game mechanics better. But also, you might see why we think certain things add to the enjoyment of the game.
“You didn’t do any tradeoffs” – You didn’t because you didn’t make the build. The person who made the build most certainly did. They don’t necessarily explain that though. Make your own build and you will see that you have to make choices, interesting ones at that.
Can you name a single build that has been ruined by the changes to idols? Unlike PoE where they often nerf a skill down into oblivion the LE devs are very cautious on that. The system where 99% of builds just used 4 of ‘that type of 1 x 4 / 4 x 1 idols’ was braindead and no diversity. I think the idol changes are justified and good.
Endurance reduces any damage taken from any source (hit or DoT) where the damage dealt is below the threshold. The damage from a single hit can “start” above your threshold and any of the damage that’s below it will be affected by Endurance as per the example i gave earlier. I am correct in this. It may be difficult to see in practice but this is how it works.
If you like to be able to zoom through a map one shotting trash as fast as you can, that’s fair enough and I can see how you would feel like you’re being “softlocked” by multiple offensive or defensive mods on the monolith. I’m curious to know how you spend your character’s stat budget though if you go balls to the wall on all the defences you can get (resist, endurance, hp, crit avoidance, block/dodge as class appropriate) yet you still feel “softlocked” by more than 1 offensive and defensive modifier. I agree that dodge is a modifier to be avoided at all costs but I’m personally a lot happier to take multiple offensive and defensive mods. Though the offensive ones can make things a bit spicier than I intended.
I must admit, while running through the normal monoliths I would just head as directly away from the start as possibly not really paying attention to the modifiers but occasionally heading off for a nice reward (as I think I said before), but never once did I feel “softlocked” until I came to a position where every single monolith ended in a Shade!!! But apparently I can’t log in to my imgur.com account on my phone…
I understand and accept that your concept of fun and how you like to play is different to mine, but just because you come across a thing that challenges you in a way you find uncomfortable doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing that the devs need to fix. Growth and change as a player can be hard and uncomfortable but it’s very rewarding when you are able to overcome the challenge and do stuff that you had previously thought impossible or un-fun.
Any build that used 4 of the 4 slot idols will have been nerfed. I’d also argue that GGG don’t “nerf builds into oblivion” that’s more the usual denizens of their forum/reddit that freak out with the smallest nerf even if the build/skill is still perfectly viable.
and that is 99% meta builids. ‘Nerfed’ is too a strong word here imo. All the builds are absolutely viable in end game. Losing 2 idols is not the end of the world.
depends on what you consider to be ‘viable’. Farming t14 maps? Or doing 5 way legion or a8 sirus fight? Winter Orb is an example. A skill that 0.01% of players are using nowadays. Because even casual players like to make a stretch goal for themselvs like beating high end bosses in game (even though they never will do). Winter orb was a good skill now it is clumsy and only good for maps. All this is off-topic of course. I still think GGG does nerf skillls too hard. You can of course may disagree.
Will limit my answers too because there is no point going over the same thing over and over again.
To further explain what is being said here. There was no trade off for the skill be cheap specifically. The path taken was the optimal damage path, not anything to save mana so nothing was sacrificed.
While I’m not good enough to make my own builds, I can tweek a build easily enough and when I don’t is because I don’t see a better choice that can be taken.
I’m not saying any builds were ruined by the idol system change. What I am saying is that in response to people saying that it was done to nerf builds that were over-performing is that. A) I don’t believe they were nor that the nerf was enough to make a build stop over-performing if it ever was. B) That builds that were under-performing that used those types of idols now are doing worse. Does it means they are unplayable, probably not but it was not a warranted nerf regardless!
Now you are exagerating the 1x4 idols users because there is just as many 2x2. Why is that though? 1x1 and 2x1 are the generic ones. They barely offer anything worth while, no wonder that no one wants those. The 1x3 1x4 and 2x2 are the class specific ones that have better modifiers, but what happened when you put 4 1x3? You have 4 idol slots that do not fit good idols for your build. So you do either 1x4 which have better mods or 2x2 and ensure the entirety of the idol slots are filled with benefical idols instead of something that is not worth it.
The real problem stems from making smaller idols have small bonus and being generic and the 1x4 a in a lot of cases being a 1x3 on steroids. If instead each type of idols had very differnt but very benificial bonus, perhaps it wouldn’t be so simple 4x this idol. Giving better options and combinations is always better than just straight up nerfing.
While I mostly copy builds I do at times tend to modify it a little bit. I did took some utility out of the mage build in the form of some chill chance and some cooldown, in favor of getting both more damage and more resitances to make gearing easier. I don’t go particularly hard on being tanky because tanky character often suffer from a lack of damage. I would say that if I had to chose how to invest I’d take bare minimum defenses to not die and then dump the rest towards damage or some possible utillity that I may like.
On a different note this is not a case of growth as a player. I know what i like and what i don’t like. I play games to have fun. It’s not about steping out of my confort zone for a little bit, it’s about playing most of the game in a way that is not enjoyable.
i wouldn’t even consider myself a zoom kind of player, I’m not one of those people in PoE that always goes at a super fast pace or even has an optimised method of farming. I am far slower than that. I go at whatever speed I normally can, I sometimes stop cause I need to do something like answer a PM or need to do something around the house (kinda why I hate spires). I stop to check items and so on. But when it comes to killing enemies, they have to die and they have to die right now. If they are not dying when I attack them, the game is no longer fun. I’m talking about the trash mobs of course. I also don’t like being killed. I like that the chance exists, but I don’t like one shots or instad death by a burst of multiple sources of damage. It feels like a cheap death. Feels like because a real difficulty couldn’t be made they had to do the whole, dodge or die which is a terrible form of creating challenge.
Now bear with me here but all I am defending on the monolith case is that difficulty is player contolled. That means that for me I’ll probably play at a much lower difficulty than you do. And that also means that I get less rewards than you do but I’m ok with that. At the same time, you are still getting all you want out of the game.
My sugestion makes everyone happy. Or at least it should but for some reason, some people cannot accept that someone will play with less difficult modifers than them regardless of the fact that they are being punished by haver less good drops. It is especially baffling because how someone else plays does not affects others in any way.
That was still unwarranted, but let’s compare. I lost a total of 60% damage on ele nova and 72% on lightning blast with that nerf. It’s considerable, but let’s look at the difference if I had lost 2 entire idols. 300% on ele nova and 380% on lightning blast. It still wouldn’t be game breaking, but it would definitly been felt quite harshly.
I didn’t mean the idol stats are set in stone. They are definitely will be further tuned by the devs. But the new idol layout as a whole is ok. At least it is better than the previous one which allowed much less diversity.
I would argue it doesn’t adds more diversity, you’ll be just picking up smaller idols that give the the same kind of bonus but smaller. It’s just a big loss of damage overall.
If you want diversity you need to make idols do other things that synergise with your build but at the same time having one is enough. For example in my minion build I have a single idol that provides marked for death on minion. I only ever need a single one but it’s great to have. Let’s say I had a 2x1 that provided frailty on minion hit. I would also want one then.
The better form is to provide very different and synergistic bonus instead of what almost always ends up being as the onlky good solution, more damage on both mods if possible and if not then one mod is kind of whatever.
No, because diversity is not an idol size but what it does. If I had to pick between a 2x1 that does 10% damage or a 1x1 that does 3% damage. Would you call it diversity? You are still picking up just a straight damage percentage increase, one just provides a better bonus than the other in consideration to space occupied.
Diversity is when it does different things like I gave an example. Doing the same to a better or worse degree is not diversity.
In my book using more different idols is more diversity than using 4 of one size. If it is not for you then I can’t do anything here Again we don’t talk idol stats here. Only the new idol layout. As to stats I may agree with you
I think it’s a valid point that if they want to improve the usage of the smaller idols then they should have more more interesting modifiers. Make is want to use the smaller idols because they do interesting things rather than because we “have to” to fill up the blank slots. I think the 1x1 idols being generic is ok since they are useful to add hp or resists and can go in anywhere.
You both have valid points about “idol diversity”. Using more differently sized idols *is *“more diverse”, but using more idols that do different things is also “more diverse”. I think the thing to be avoided is when a player decides to use a single size of idol with the same affixes because that’s the “most optimal”. I think the change in shape of the idol thing is a good step in the right direction. IMO what needs to be done next is to add other affixes on the smaller (3 slot and 2 slot) idols.
