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The gon rune ward generators on gear are too strong. They should be converted to +X% crit chance or crit multi in line for elemental skills with their prefix nature. Other runemaster specific rune affixes should be brought in line with this since as far as I can tell, there is no reason to use them when gon runes are overtuned.
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Make Runic Invocation a generic aura/buff as a potential upgrade route.
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Right now you have a weird mix of affixes (like gon runes) where you NEVER are going to use the ability actively because of how much ward you generate with 2 T5s on gear and like 5 skill points. This leaves you wasting 15 skill points on stuff you’ll never press the button for.
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I’d suggest the top left of the skill be reworked to do the following:
1. Use the 4th skill on your skill bar at 3 runes of that match its element tag(s) but put both skills on cooldown for 4 seconds as a trade off. Consistent (instead of the current random) skill triggering makes this actually usable since you don't want to trigger the wrong skills at the wrong time (such as Flame Ward which is 100% mandatory for mage builds usually).
2. To support it add the following:
1. Base crit for each Gon rune. Consume all Gon runes on trigger.
2. Fire spell damage for each Rah rune. Consume all Rah runes on trigger.
3. Frostbite for each Heo rune. Consume all Heo runes on trigger.
4. These 3 scale off quantity of runes plus point investment. So you can, for instance, do an Ice Barrage spec'd into Frostbite with 100% pierce with high uptime if you are a frostbite/ice build without manual casts and without bricking the passive benefits of running something like Runic Invocation with the per-rune benefits to your character active.
3. Further support beyond the rune related stuff:
1. Make passive buffs (such as the +Spell Damage) trigger when the skill goes on cooldown due to it activating another skill as if you used Runic Invocation directly.
2. Add a few things like this to make it sort of the "triggered spell" equivalent of a Paladin's holy aura rather than just another Holy Aura. Rune selection matters. What spell you are triggering (ice/fire/lighting) provides different party buffs when triggered.
3. Probably should also just have this trigger on Engima use as a travel skill as well instead of relying solely on spell trigger passive mentioned above to make it more flexible for the two main playstyles that aren't using the shield invocation as the only reason to use this.
4. I know you want to make Invocations a thing but for alot of setups they either use it as a Teleport replacement or a Ward generator. Lean into what it is actually used for, not just the small number of invocations people actually use imo.
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Mage is supposed to be the elemental class, making converting elements easier. Ice barrage cannot be converted to lighting despite thematic nodes (such as 100% pierce) that make more sense as lightning or fire than ice.
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This is not a balance issue in my view as you can already scale off spell damage / crit chance / crit multi and it is 100% better than just scaling off elemental damage options with the exception of penetration but even ele pen affixes and options in the sorcerer tree could just be moved to be less accessible to those that don’t go sorcerer to avoid the double dip in crit/pen if this is a concern.
1. For instance, you can grab a Fire or a Lighting option after you pick up the 5 points in Pierce on Ice barrage instead of needing to convert your lightning stuff to Ice with 1 passive in the Mage tree. Or just provide the passives in the Mage tree to lock you to the desired element for all abilities if you want. (i.e. +% shock, all abilities are changed to lightning with 5 points)
- Runemaster is overtuned in terms of ward generation as well so I think certain nodes (such as the 60 int for 36 ward/s, ward on hit) nodes should be shifted to something more in like with crit.
1. Provide +.25% base critical strike chance per point instead of ward on crit node at the end of the tree.
2. Provide +.25% base critical strike chance per point instead of the ward on hit for the existing ward/on hit node all mages get in the Runemaster tree.
3. The ward/s node is fine if you can't use the crit/on hit nodes on top of it, in my opinion. The issue is the combination of all the other ward generators.
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Ward is (as noted by the devs) heavily tuned to push high corruption compared to other defense types. I see two potential solutions.
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Easy/quick fix: Cap maximum ward at a ratio to maximum health. I’d start with 2x as ward does decay and most classes can’t easily heal it without a bunch of health->ward potion conversion mods that are mostly useless rn. Simple, easy to implement, and keeps people from getting stable and large amounts of ward that stop almost all dangerous mechanics with minimum investment in resists/other defensive mods beyond crit reduction/avoidance.
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It is a better fix but would need to be tuned and affect more than just ward:
1. Implement ward penetration of 15% at level 50+ areas, 30% at T4 dungeons/empowered monos/etc. This is for all damage types as the "chaos pen" idea of games like POE is awkward and weird and has some bad interactions imo from a design perspective (i.e. coruscating elixir and forgetting to press it or mods messing with flasks and killing you that you can't anticipate since its from a rare rather than a map mod)
2. Increase the default endurance threshold to 30% of life, removing the need for +endurance threshold affixes for most builds. It also means ward characters will need endurance with what I have in mind, reducing the availability of other defensive mods in line with the very soft cap nature of ward generation for eHP.
3. Ward pen also forces life leech or other life recovery mechanics at a minimum so it just forces a bit more investment for the same effective HP against anything that isn't a one-shot.
4. This change aims to force ward characters to add defensive affix (endurance) to their builds so they can't just stack current health into the ward.
5. Limit the missing health = ward-generated modifiers to only count health above the endurance threshold for missing health, and the current health drain stops at the endurance threshold (without consuming life but while still generating ward). This is to balance out the fact that 30% of the damage is going to ignore ward, so you get 30% less ward generated and 30% less health consumed.
6. Acolyte and mage are the main ones affected by this change, as their low life, high ward generation meta is being nerfed.
1. Acolyte has plenty of life recovery options to enable Lich/Death Seal.
2. Mage would probably need some sources of leech on gear that is reliably accessible (such as leech catalyst implicit for elemental damage) for people who want to enable this playstyle, especially if you gate the sorcerer leech/pen nodes as I suggest to balance making it easy to shift a Mage's abilities to a single element since they have plenty of generic damage scaling already and we are weakening their overtuned defensive mechanic in exchange.
7. Paladin, the meta seems to be in high health with healing hands ward generation. However, with the fact they already have to heal their health pool as a byproduct of healing hands or smite leads to the fact this is probably fine for them. They get penetrated but they also heal so they don't really gain/lose anything.
1. Paladin (the other ward class I play rn) is probably too strong with a vengeance/healing hands or smite/healing hands combo due to the recovery effects and the fact they can run strong defensive layers without major sacrifices in damage (shields, armor). The only real weakness is poison, etc. that mostly are not stopped by armor/block without additional gearing.
2. I'd suggest lowering the ward generation of Paladin abilities to 50% less healing effectiveness and healing players up to their endurance threshold, but otherwise, keep it the same. This balances the solo Paladin (less ward gen but enabling them to play low life like an Acolyte/Mage if desired) and keeps it viable in party play by healing their low life cousins (Acolyte/Mage) by healing them to threshold without bricking the missing health ward generators.
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Give us blessings that allow us to bias things toward what our loot filter shows (bases, affixes) rather than specific gear slots or suffix/prefix-type stuff.
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This should be instead of existing MF options.
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For instance, +% off-hands and related affixes in your filter instead of +% catalysts.
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+% one-hand weapons and related affixes in your filter instead of +% wands
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The goal behind this change is to make it easier to farm multiple builds at the same time as well as just QoL to avoid needing to swap blessings when we can’t pick ones we’ll get for optimal play.
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Right now, needing to roll a bunch of blessings per character discourages people from playing multiple characters. The same is true of unlocking empowered monos multiple times. Both should be revised as this is not a balance issue but a quality of life issue.
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If you think this is too strong, perhaps just do it for Circle of Fortune to improve their experience as I think its 100% required to do this sort of thing to make CoF worth for casual players. I don’t have the time to farm exact gear I need for 2-3 characters I want to try/play without MG.
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Reduce reputation requirements for MG/CoF
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Right now, pushing them is hard. It is going to take me a month to unlock everything I need for my characters with 2 characters in monos/post-campaign (1 in decent corruption empowered since it is my main) and I still can’t buy legendary potential non-weapons.
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I don’t really want to sit there and grind with 1 character just to have enough reputation to gear him to see how far it can go and stop playing my other more party-friendly characters (i.e. Paladin that keeps my allies alive/buffs rather than pure solo play) with friends because I need good gear. It just feels bad to be punished (faction rep wise) for playing weaker characters with friends vs. my main solo character that I play more often. It’s also bad for player/character retention.
1. I'd suggest normalizing that people are done with unlocks for legendary potential uniques (level 8 iirc) by the time they have all their blessings from empowered monos on one character.
2. 9-10 can be increased as stretch goals as I feel that aren't 100% required to push a character as deep as it'll go corruption wise for reasonable investment in time.
- Favor as-is seems fine as farming it to buy gear is not too hard and it outpaces the tier I can buy gear from anyway. Especially if I stop selling cheap stuff (5k or less gold) to speed up my reputation gains from MG since I believe successful sales provide a bit of that.