Hello, I’m Sylv. I’ve been playing LE for some time and I really like seeing the game grow. I’ve been meaning to make a general feedback post for some time. Though I’ve experimented around with all classes, all of my time is spent playing non-minion builds and most of it sentinel builds. This feedback will include general topics and sentinel-specific ones. (will edit many times for formatting).
Set Items
With the “recent” addition of legendary items in the game, set items have been overshadowed by the generally superior legendary items. Further analysis of set items shows that they seem to focus on offensive set bonuses almost exclusively. While cool offensive bonuses the Shattered Lance’s set (% melee cold damage based on your health regen) are honestly a lot of fun for the game, what about defensive set bonuses? At the time of writing, it is not clear to me the “space” that set items are meant to have in the game. However, simple bonuses such as +% health, %crit avoidance, generic +% resistances, etc seem decent enough to add to full set bonuses to be more seriously considered as a basic end-game option. I mean, if you’re going to wear 2-3 pieces of gear that would traditionally hold defensive affixes and replace them with gear that does not have similar affixes, you’re effectively reducing the defensive options of your build.
Take for instance, the “unofficial” Frostbite set which consist of Frostbite Shackles & Snowdrift. It gives you both an offensive venue to invest your affixes in (%freeze multipler as frostbite effectiveness) and a defensive venue (uncapped cold resistance as ward retention), which is cool and playable in end-game content. However, this “set” can have legendary affixes as well. Something to think about: which one is the future of set designs? green or red?
Soul Bastion
This dungeon has me worried for the future of dungeons. While Temporal Sanctum offered a coherent experience, en engaging mechanic and fantastic final reward, the same cannot be said of Soul Bastion.
Its final reward reward scales off the number of mobs defeated in the dungeon with it is designed randomly and has a lot of dead-ends: it’s basically a maze. Moreover, you are incentivized to clear the maze to obtain more of the final reward. Because of these elements, I haven’t had a lot of fun playing in Soul Bastion. If I could expend some charges to blow up the randomly-generated barricades, I would happily do so.
The final reward also does not strike me as particularly unique: there are no chase items incentivizing farming this dungeon, it is an exalted factory. As I understand it, you can obtain a t5 sealed affix, which is interesting, especially for + to skill levels. Is it enough for people to farm this regularly? I doubt it. What if you could get set items with a sealed affix?
Mace design
For most builds, attack speed/cast speed is basically the best offensive affix. Since some melee weapons benefit more to increases to attack speed according to their base attack rate, this naturally disqualifies a lot of the “slower” alternatives (mace, spear, staff) from a lot of builds, with sword/axe/dagger being the stronger options. However, I’ve recently been playing around a specific melee build that does not benefit from attack speed (for a change). You would think that this would open up the idea of playing with a mace. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.
Let’s analyze maces a little bit. They bring bonuses such as stun chance and stun duration (mostly irrelevant since the target is stun-locked if you attack fast enough), with the highest implicit stun chance bonus being 128% and 166% for one-handed and two-handed maces respectively. On the other hand, the “neutral” Lagon blessing can bring up to 160% extra stun chance while a t5 suffix on a one-handed weapon brings up to 140%: showing that the bonus is far from being “unique”. I cannot foresee a way that the “stun chance” implicit offsets the fact these weapons are significantly slower than axe/sword/dagger. They also offer no critical chance in either one-handed or two-handed versions, which make them inferior for just about every critical strike build, going against the concept of a hard-hitting blunt weapon, since they are weak.
In trying to make maces more relevant, one idea I came across is to have certain skills scale off of stun chance through a “more” multiplier (and perhaps adjusting the neutral stun chance numbers as well to make mace the superior option in benefiting from this node). Another is to include passives that scale inversely to your base attack rate (being generally between 0.9 and 1.2): an example could gives you a bonus based on the value [1.4-[base attack rate]]. A fast weapon would receive 0.2, while a slower one could get a factor of 0.5, more than double the bonus. Now the specific number is not exactly relevant to this suggestion, but rather the idea of scaling inversely to the base attack rate. A third suggestion is to have a node somewhere (passive tree or skill tree) that fixes the base attack rate of your weapons to a fixed value (for instance 1.1). Finally, melee critical chance would be much appreciated.
Two-handed Weapons
On a similar topic, we have recently discovered just how strong 100% block chance is through the neutral unique “Bastion of Honor”. Sentinel can get 60%+ damage reduction through block effectiveness namely through sentinel-specific idols. It is difficult to ignore just how powerful this damage reduction is in end-game content. While I have found a two-handed playstyle to be very enjoyable early game, it tends to drop off as content gets more difficult. Should there be a defensive layer available to two-handed weapons in order to be competitive with the shield playstyle? and if so, what would that layer of defense be? In their recent design of “Torkrefin’s Hunger”, they decided to go with a heavy bonus to health which is is an interesting alternative, though specific to this particular unique. I am not sure about the solution and if others see it as a problem. Considerations are generic DR, two-handed bonuses from melee skill trees or passive trees.
Game-defining uniques
Being very analytical by nature, I have observed just how powerful some uniques are in the game right now and I would like to share some that I find problematic.
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Eye of Reen. While clearly designed for ignite builds, I have found that this weapon can scale % critical multiplier to extreme levels for melee builds (I also confess that every ignite builds I tried to create were terrible, a different topic). Skills such as Harvest or Warpath that can easily get you to 100% critical with a sword can obtain very high crit multiplier for this weapon. Add some attack speed, area of effect and even some stun chance and you have a perfect storm. A simple fix would be to limit the maximum number of stacks of Reen’s Ire.
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Siphon of Anguish: The “Doom” ailment increasing melee damage taken is simply BiS for melee builds, leading to very little variety in rings. Doom is also very potent for DoT builds, especially those with high “more” modifiers though I am not sure the tooltip DPS accounts for the fact Doom has a maximum stack of 4. Either way, it seems that adding this unique in almost any build raises their DPS significantly. The downside is that it’s grindy to get a good legendary version with the affixes you want. I suggest reworking the Doom ailment completely. Suggestions include making armor shred more effective or making it a basic void dot ailment with unlimited stacks (and reduced damage numbers): basically something with more limited scope.
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Bastion of Honor: As discussed previously introducing 100% block chance on a neutral shield has really changed the game especially for those pushing higher arena runs. My main concern with this shield is the complete absence of drawbacks. Anyone can play it and invest in neutral block effectiveness. Traditionally, if a sentinel wants to get to 100% block chance, he needs to get a legendary “Bulwark of the Last Abyss” with additional block chance, which constantly sacrifices your health while on high health (which is playable, though very annoying). If it were to limit your max resists, armor or dodge, I believe people might think twice. At the end of the day, the real question is whether or not we should even have a 100% block neutral shield. Should shields offers more block chance/effectiveness to begin with for sentinels to not be the absolute best at shield defenses, or should there be different layers of defense for other classes so that this neutral shield isn’t game-defining?
I could mention Prism Guard and Wings of Argentus for their insane DR as well, but I’ll end this section for now.
Sentinel-specific suggestions
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Void Knight is extremely melee-oriented. Yet, plenty of gear affixes (void dot, void spell dmg), idol affixes (shield throw converted to void, void dot) and passive nodes (spell/throw void dmg) seem to indicate that a different playstyle exists. Can we consider the void knight passive bonus to add 75% increased void damage instead of melee void damage? Can we also consider adding throw speed/cast speed to the “Time Legion” passive node? Can we get a real void ailment that doesn’t have a maximum number of stacks (let’s not talk about future strike)? Finally, am I the only one who thinks volatile reversal is honestly way too strong for a 0-mana cost instant skill? They nerfed smite from 40% ias, but they leave out volatile like it’s completely fine? That skill is truly insane in how much it scales off your damage, costs no mana and is an instant cast obtained by anyone who puts 5 points in the Void Knight tree.
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Given that Forguard is designed to be sentinel’s two-handed wielding class, perhaps adding a %DR to the passive node “Molded by the Forge” could be interesting as an extra defensive layer mentionned earlier to incentivize the two-handed playstyle. Adding effects for two-handed spears and staves would be very nice as well. On a different note, I genuinely feel like Forguard’s design need to be reviewed: on one hand you gain armor when hit, but on the other hand, you are the “minion” class generating shields, forged weapons or an animated armor set to tank hits for you. Keep in mind that sentinel already has an extremely comfortable access to way too much armor through the armor bonus from strength & flat bonus from sigil of hope. Their class abilities (forge strike & Smelter’s Wrath) also strike me as non-viable.
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Given the last two comments, paladins ends up as the currently most flexible class with excellent access to utility (sigil, holy aura) and different playstyles (melee, throw, spells, dot)
Conclusion
Thank you for reading and I look forward for your comments!
