In addition to Macknum’s post, I think that balancing the mechanics of defences (armour/protections/block, dodge & ward) is a separate argument from balancing skills, though there is a fair bit of overlap given that skills often provide defensive bonuses (ignoring things like teleporting/shield charging out of the way) and that trying to balance both the defensive aspect of skills while also changing the basic effectiveness of the defenses is just asking for headaches.
Since defenses are the base that skills then modify/build upon, I’d think that it’s best to get the defenses themselves balanced between each other (while allowing for different effectiveness in different situations) first then you can look at the skills/passives.
And it’s not as if we have all the classes/masteries available.
Totally agree.
First half of my post is about Protections vs Dodge, especially about the cost of similar results in “affix amount”. But then I just had to compare skills because I wished to compare natural regeneration with Ward generation, but there’s no natural ward generation mechanics.
P.S. Catalyst grants 25 which is very close to HP regeneration though.
It’s not the ward mechanic that is op in the first place. If a mage only uses flame ward and some items that generate ward he’s capped somewhere. The massive amount of ward generation that we see on the high performance builds come from abilities that generate ward on hit. These skills need to get regulated (nerfed).
For the classical tank characters there should be the possibility to get a similar number of hp and protections compared to ward.
One thing that people often get wrong with the hp+protection mechanic is that they think it’s good to have low hp pool and high protections. This is not the case. The only benefit is that on a low hp character your hp regen works better because it is a flat rate independent from your max hp.
But besides this it is absolutely viable to stack hp instead of protections. It doesn’t matter if you have 600 hp and 2000 protection or 2000 hp and 600 protection. The difference in damage mitigation % between the 2 examples (77% to 23%) leads to the false assumption that the build with 23% is weaker.
So imho it would be a good idea to show the sum of hp+protection for every damage type which is a better value to compare builds instead of talking about damage mitigation %.
But stacking hp is not easy. It’s because the flat values on hp affixes are lower compared to protection affixes. That’s probably intended because hp is good against all damage types whereas protections only cover a single damage type. So this is the planned way to balance these stats. On top of this there are more passives that increase protections by x% than hp (that’s subjective, I haven’t counted them, yet). So it’s an absolutely logical choice to boost the flat values on gear for protections.
Why am I talking about all this, you may ask, dear reader… I just want to say that nerfing the ward generating skills and adding sources for tank classes to gain a significant larger hp pool can be a way to balance the classes. To prevent people from answering “but hp is useless” as I’ve seen many times before, I wrote this little essay.
And last but not least, larger hp pool needs the regen rate to be dependent on max hp.
Right now everybody runs around with small hp pool. Therefore leech feels awkward. With a good amount of resistance and leech you constantly overleech but can’t make use of it. With higher hp pools being easier to obtain we could also make a better use of leech.
Sadly there is now way or mechanic right now to get a meaningfull HP pool. In times when 30k Ward where a lot things were unbalanced already. Now people throw numbers arround that reach 100k Ward. So tell me how much HP and protections do you need to match this numbers? I still thin protections and HP are in a good spot and Ward is the only and biggest offender here. If you build a full tank you can get a lot done but if you dont you get smashed pretty fast. With ward things are different, if you build for ward gain and retention you become a god that is only killed by player error instead of game mechanic while you don’t need that much defence. On top of that classes like sorcerer get so many o shit buttons, CC and movement skills it’s bonkers to give them the possibility to be the tankiest class ingame by a quartermile.
Werebear with 85% protections and 800 to made wave 500 so to hit 1000 waves I think 90% protections with 1200 to is about where you would have to sit but currently not obtainable. To be equal to 100k ward I think it would come more down to how fast you can replenish life once you achieved the above stats. You would need probly 3-4ooo life a sec generstion
I could also suggest something else that what they did in older rpg’s.
Lets give to melee classes a bigger gain from strength and dexterity where strength would boost hp and hp regen AND protections, dexterity give more dodge AND protections .
Mage classes get bigger gain from int where int give also more protections and perhaps attunement as more mana and mana regen.
Also melee classes could not use ward mechanic/items , mage classes also no melee based items, etc.
I agree with @Macknum - Ward is too strong. But @XLVI_carpo 's words are very true - main problem is the amount of ward-gain on hit. So yes, there is some problems with defense layers and other recovery parameters, but AoE, mob density, average fight distances etc. also have some significant balancing issues.
It’s not a bad idea but it’s complicated when you have both caster & melee masteries & the mechanics of attributes & defences should work the same for everyone (therefore I don’t think it would be good for Strength on a Forge Guard to give more than it would on a Mage). You could do it by adding passives that give other bonuses per attribute which would probably allow them to make it more mastery-specific without changing how the underlying mechanics work.
I really disagree with that, it would pigeon-hole the player into making specific builds rather than going “off-piste” and trying more innovative builds. And what would you do about Spellblades, Paladins & Liches? The Spellblade is a melee mastery on a caster base, the Paladin is the opposite to the Spellblade (though not to quite the same extent).
It’s an easy thing right now. The performance of a max ward build should = the performance of a max resi build supplemented by either leech or heal/hpreg. Ward should be the tank option for mages from my point of view and no auto “iddqd”.
