Global hedge against OP broken builds and Nerf Hammers?

General
41

Wow, this thread had a lot to take in, almost overwhelming, lol.

For a while, Lich was the only class to reach 500+ in arena and the result of that wasn’t a nerf to it in 0.7.7 but general buffs to every class. Now the ladder finally has some high end diversity in the 500+ range.

Forge Guard and Spell Blade hit 700+
Lich and Sorcerer are at 600+
And finally the lonely Druid managed to break 500+

Ideally, I think given enough investment, every sub-class should be able to hit this milestone. It would be interesting to know exactly what got them that far, but from what I’ve seen so far myself, skill goes a long way in not making fatal mistakes and getting blown up. I would love to be able to see their passives, skill nodes and gear for their builds though.

These would be the prime examples to look at for any truly broken mechanics or ideas for what other skills should aspire to. The 2 lich builds show diversity as they only share 2 skills while the 2 sorcerer builds are almost carbon copies with only 1 different skill.

As far as poison goes, sure it’s infinitely scaling, but mechanically capped. There are only so many stacks you can apply before you finally kill something, and there are other things to evaluate as well. If the time to kill is long enough, you are still vulnerable to attack so having 50 stacks doesn’t matter if you’re dead. On the other hand, if you have a lot of different poison applications and build pure tank, at what point do you break down mentally waiting for high health enemies to wither and die in a war of attrition? You would think at some point, even if you made every single affix for defense, there will eventually be something strong enough that can hit you hard enough to kill faster than your poison stacks can whittle away at their huge HP bar.

With that being said, ignite and bleed need some love. Just by providing utility, while not necessarily doing the killing on its own, the DPS combined with other skills could more than make up for that gap.

Ultimately, I don’t agree with having caps unless it’s necessary for game performance, bug fixes, etc. The game is still young and has a lot of room to grow. Eventually there will be new skills and possibly classes I would hope, but when it comes to more difficult content, it should be the gear getting stronger (while updating old pieces on new drops) to compensate for the difficulty and maybe 5 more points to use in skills to bolster their strength (so many nodes left incomplete!)

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42

Here you go: https://forum.lastepoch.com/t/frozen-sorcerer-glacier-build-arena-600-capable-video

43

Caps = overperforming builds are capped; all other builds remain intact
Nerfs instead of caps = overperforming builds are nerfed (sometimes to the ground); all other standard builds that were using skills/passives/gear affected by the nerf are hammered too as collateral damage.

44

are those the only 2 options?

45

Of course not! The best option will be robust development and testing, resulting in a game with no “unintended” ways to break it. In any case, I presented a way to solve an issue. I have nothing further to add to my argument.

46

Correct me if I’m wrong but we have some numbers already like how many attacks are possible and how fast stacks can be applied. The easiest thing to is to make all stacks do the same ammount of dmg and that’s it. If you can maintain for example 10 ignite stacks but 100 poison stacks each poison stack needs to deal only a tenth of ignites dmg. Sure this would cripple poison builds a lot and they would need ages to kill something but it’s only fair if the potential dmg is the same.

The other way to work this out is to make a stack limit on enemys like only 30 stacks of one debuff can be applied at once. Sure thats a cap again but it might be the easiest and most fair thing to do.

I realy don’t want to be the designer who comes up with secondary traits for ignite to match the potency of poison because the differences are far to big.

47

Hard caps on stats ruin games like this in my opinion.

If caps exist you take away all of the excitement that comes with experimenting with builds and trying crazy things because everything has a known maximum and there’s no reason to test or explore options. It makes it way too easy to solve the game.

If arbitrary caps were put onto stats like attack speed or damage or ailment stacks or whatever, that would be the fastest way to make me stop playing the game because after that there’s no point to continue playing and trying to learn about the systems and interactions.

Balancing with things like hard caps or cooldowns are by far the least interesting way to do it. If poison stacks are broken, nerf the stack multiplier, give it diminishing returns, nerf the skills that apply hundreds or thousands of stacks per second with reduced ailment effectiveness or reduced chance to apply ailments. Putting a hard cap on stacks only serves to more quickly narrow which skills are optimal for application.

48

Yeah, that’s the “all other builds affected by the nerf are hammered into the ground” option that Nllsq gave…
If the per stack increased damage buff poison got had a diminishing returns component build it, that would make it harder to do the top end poison damage that “certain builds” can do without killing the low end damage (as much).

There have already been several suggested (and for bleed).

49

I’m not convinced by any of those suggestions because it’s always better to go with the option that offers a quartermile of more dmg. I realy can’t think of something outside of making poison equaly “weak”. I played ignite and bleed builds but the damage was rather meh for all the investment I put into it. Poison builds are far more potent and I found them to strong for a long time but EHG never did anything about it so I came to the point of thinking “Okay maybe posion works as intended and bleed and burn will see more love soon.”. Well this didn’t happen either ^^.

50

And that’s the difficulty of balancing different skills (or ailments) for single target versus AoE. If poison was the single target ailment, you could make ignite an AoE (via merging the spreading flames mechanic so each stack of ignite you inflict on a target spreads to every other target within X distance, though you may need to work it such that if a target already has ignite stacks on it, it can’t then have ignite spread to it from other mobs but can still have more ignites applied directly) and bleed a defensive ailment (damage deal by bleeding mobs is reduced by x%).

That way you have the different ailments being used in different scenarios.

51

And still poison comey out on top if bleed isn’t offering 50% dmg reduction ^^. On top of that the %dmg reduction will be worth nothing in scaling content like the arena at a certain point. Sure it pushes you further but so is the imense dmg difference from poison dmg.

From a practical standpoint I would happiely gut poison dmg into the right place instead of adding new mechanics into the code that need to be tested and balanced again and again. Call me crazy but there isn’t much time left untill release and we aren’t even in phase 3 yet. If they want to keep the release date they have to do a loooot of work. When I think about the missing masterys and the missing class and the time needed to balance them… well there is more important stuff to do then to redifine the base mechanics of some statuseffects in my eyes.

52

You raise a valid point about time & resource constraints. But I don’t think that just gutting poison would be a particularly good way of balancing it.

53

A buff for ignite and bleed is something I want more for sure :slight_smile: but this won’t happen and never happened in the past in any game ^^.

54

Poison literally should not have a stacking dmg increase. That’s all. Let it stack, but why does it need an exponential dmg increase? Remove that and problem solved.

55

Great discussions here!

After reading everything, I feel like something that keeps getting brought up is that at the moment in conversation is poison and it’s (current) OP’ness. @MisterWar 's idea to simply remove the 8% attached to poison seems pretty good. But if that’s the case does poison fall in line with bleed and ignite, or still way out-perform?

Difficult to solve this one, but I haven’t made a dot build yet so I can’t add much. Think Ill make a poison build though to see whats so ridiculous about it currently.

56

When you bring all dots into line with each other there’s no need for different ailments anymore. There might be more “innovative” ways to balance ailments. Keep poisons damage increase per stack but make it harder to apply stacks. Or reduce tick rate per stack (or maybe every 10 stacks).

Also there already were a lot of suggestions to pimp bleed and ignite with secondary debuffs on enemies. But a poison nerf is defenitely necessary.

57

Not realy because there are far to much ways to apply poison. Try an ignite build vs an poison build and look at the possible difference in stack numbers. Even without the dmg increase poison will outshine every other form of dot.

BTW for all possible dots… why don’t we just change the way they are applied in a D&D matter for example. Undeads, Elementals, Ghosts, Spectral beeings and so on simply can’t bleed or be poisoned but undeads burn pretty well. So just give certain enemy types certain resistences against certain dots that reduce the chance to suffer said dot by xyz%. So undeads might end up with a +500% poison resistence that is calculated against the poison chance of the player while they have -200% burn resistence that benefits the players chance to set them aflame. Such a system would balance itself because single DoT users will have a hard time against certain enemys.

58

Ooooo, no. Put a diminishing returns on the increase per stack & that way poison still keeps it’s identity & low-end damage without being totally bonkers on the high end damage.

Different dot resistance for mobs would be a nice touch.

59

Decreasing stack ticks or apply chance also works like diminishing returns. Or am I wrong?

60

Not really, it would reduce the damage at the high end, but it’d reduce the damage at the low end as well, so it wouldn’t work like diminishing returns. Diminishing returns has minimal impact at low stacks (in this example) but a high impact at high stacks (eg, at 1 stack you get the full 8% increased damage per stack, but at high stacks you would get a much lower increased damage per stack).

For example, in the above graph, the blue line is the current situation with 8% increased damage per stack, the purple line is with a logarithmic diminishing return on the increased damage per stack & orange is bleed. Up to ~50 stacks, the diminishing returns formula gives ~92% of the current damage (due to the parameters I chose, it actually does slightly more damage up to ~35 stacks, but that’s not the point & anyone who knew what they were doing would be able to choose better parameters), but that starts dropping as you get more stacks.

Just reducing the ticks per second or damage per tick would be a flat reduction.

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