Is Damage Reduction too strong in general?

General
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Just thought I wanted to create a discussion topic for this as its something that occurred to be recently as a reoccurring theme.

I’ve made many, many builds since multiplayer launch and many of the most fun builds I played which were very fast, had high damage and I was still very much enjoying them, I ended up abandoning them because I ran into problems that I couldn’t find a solution to, because I am quite specific that I want my builds to be strong enough to compete for the endgame arena ladder or very high corruption.

Alot of the time it is a problem of lack of defenses or damage reduction. Shatterstrike spellblade was one example of this- amazing build, enjoying myself, 12k+ ward, big damage, great mobility- But zero access to damage reduction or armour, so I see it as a dead end for arena or high corruption. Same situation with shattered lance set werebear- great damage, fun, but ultimately not enough tankiness for what I want to do. Same situation for lightning meteor sorc, judgement paladin, bladedancer, several builds in fact.

I remember someone commenting that ‘damage reduction is KING in this game’. Are we in a game state right now where that is true, and access to damage reduction/armor is too important? And its becoming overbearing, because everything needs to be done off a ‘can I get enough defenses’ starting point otherwise everything I put together hits a wall when it simply cannot survive.

What do other people think?

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I think the defences could be a bit better balanced between each other & the rng defences (block and dodge) will always have their own feels-bad non-numerical “issues”.

But I don’t see “defence is king” aa a concept any better or worse than PoE’s dps view on things, it’sjust a design decision that pushes the player towards a particular playstyle/build design. The issue you’re seeinfg, IMO, is the uncapped damage scaling of monos/arena. If it weren’t uncapped then they could tweak things such that all defences felt more equal, or better yet, more suited to different things.

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Yes it just feels off when I am constantly abandoning builds that I was still enjoying very much because of the lack of access to defenses.

I was really enjoying the spellblade, it was very smooth and satisfying to play, and I would have developed it further and pushed it into the endgame; if I had not come up against the problem of almost zero access to armour or damage reduction. For reference, spellblade has a whopping 10% DR available for 5 points and zero other options available for me to utilize toward improving this build’s weakness. Alternatively, the druid has ursine strength (16% DR), boar (15-30% depending how spec’d), impervious (20% for 5 stacks), as well as access to copious amount of armour and health, without getting deeper into specifics.

I’ve had similar issue come up in the past with other builds such as smite sentinel and brushed it off as ‘the game isn’t done yet, probably its just not there yet’. But now we are coming closer to the 1.0 release and I still feel I am abandoning the majority of my projects once they fail the defenses check, and it does not feel right when I still want to play those builds and are disappointed that I have to step away from them as I don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel for a build that has 10% DR and zero armor.

Alot of the builds that are ‘meta’ right now either have access to a very large amount of DR or are things like swarmblade with 85% dodge chance from serpent stacking. Otherwise I don’t see those builds in very high corruption as they struggle much earlier in their progression.

I thought it might just be specific to me as my goals are oriented directly on the far endgame (high wave arena and high corruption), but I am pretty sure there are alot of other players who are also interested in pushing the same content and I’m wondering if they felt the same thing happening to them.

Also, I’ve wanted to create a scurry build for a long time. Now, after so many ‘failed’ builds, my very first thought before starting is ‘can it get tanky enough?’, or 'can I make the minions tanky enough?". I haven’t even thought about theorycrafting the build yet or better yet know ANYTHING in general about the build, but already the first thing I am thinking about whether I should be looking at playing in spriggan form so I can spam eterra’s blessing onto the squirrels to heal them otherwise they won’t be tanky enough to survive.

That last part of that thoguht process I thought was almost alarming. I don’t know anything about the build, haven’t even started a planner or know much about minions in general, but the first thing I am thinking of is am I (or my squirrels) going to have enough defenses to survive, since defenses seem to be such an important part of the game, more important then anything else it seems.

Also the fact that once you have ‘enough’ damage in the endgame, getting more damage does not seem to do anything. Smack 600 corruption oroboss for 1million damage crits multiple times, and it appears his health bar increases 10 fold a few moments into the encounter, rendering your damage progression irrelevant- if those damage increases never existed at all- whereas had you invested further into improving defense instead, this would have had a meaningful impact on the encounter.

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Not really.

I feel High HP pool is the best defence still, there has been a massive shift in PoE from higher hp to ‘more defences’ ie max resists, damage shifting (take all damage as xx), defence Auras, Spell Supression (50% dmg from spells) even myself have lower HP values nowadays

Yea that the thing I really hate, taking off 30% of a bosses hp in 7-8 seconds, then spending another full minute killing it

I played Squirrels to 97 and also Crows on the same character, both pets just kept dying at 320 corruption pretty often, controller is bad for multi pets so healing them was annoying, real good boss killer though

I was working on a Solo Scorpion Beastmaster prior to PoE league. That node in Swipe that uses minion skills and heals them is completely broken in a good way but I think it only works on 1 pet. You should try that build, the Scorp fires a poison Nova when you hit doing really good AoE and single target as it seems to shotgun

Was only early stages lvl 80 i think but was already approaching 3k life, 56% endurance 300k dummy ticks, but you just tap mobs and move on letting Scorpion spit out poison everywhere, if you have an Omnis that would be amazing for the build but there are really no other uniques assisting with Scorpion. Because of healing it to full life every 2seconds you dont need any minion regen or anything, I never seen the Scorp drop below 40%, you can use a Shield for more defence. Maelstrom on autocast for healing etc

Also was planning a single juiced up Crow with Crowstorm ability

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Hmmm since I play Hack and Slays it always worked like getting enough tank to beat the game. There was almost no exeption from the rule outside of some patches that made some skills broken or interactions noone was aware of untill they’ve been fixed.

Sooner or later every build stops working because it’s outscaled by difficulty but some builds work better and some don’t. I don’t even think about DR in LE because I slap on everything I can get and try to get enough dmage out to kill stuff in a reasonal ammount of time. On top of it avoid Dual Wield like the plague even with the lowered dmg taken.

The story content and non empowered monos are a walk in the park but empowered monos scaling and corruption simply breakes the game at a certain point and you have either to little damage to have a good time or to little tank to make it through.

Then again that’s a balancing issue and htey need to do a lot of work to balance things out but that’s rather unimportant to me right now because the game is playable for a long time untill you hit a brik wall.

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You could say exactly the same thing about PoE and damage. It’s just a design choice, which way they choose to go is irrelevant.

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Thanks for the solo scorpion suggestion, actually sounds really cool, I will try to look into it later this week. Appreciate your ideas

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Isn’t one of the challenges due to one of those builds having a concept based on using suffixes to generate damage via the set bonus, rather than suffixes for resistances/defensives?

I don’t know anything about that mastery and think it was a super cool and innovative idea. Not saying it’s not an issue with the mastery. It just jumped out to me as a reason why it would have weak defensive traits.

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I think maybe you just hit the ceiling of the build, this is normal and quite inevitable since the game scales up to infinite, it is just not possible to have every possible build to be able to reach the same ceiling, otherwise, why have defenses at all? Just try to think of it as a developer, the system is created so that you eventually reach a point where you can’t do anything else, and that is ok actually, your character is done, you had a lot of fun with it, you can now try different builds or a different game, there is nothing bad with reaching that point, especially in a beta version… I’m sure there’s gonna be a lot more things to do later, like end-game bosses, etc.

You can’t have every build be a tank, or every build have a ton of dmg, it wouldn’t be fun that way. I do agree that a lot of classes need some more defensive options, like shaman for example, and this is something that will continue evolving as they add, remove and balance things up.

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I personally don’t think so. If anything, it’s a little on the weak side. I was playing a Druid / Shaman hybrid that used Earthquake recently and that character got up to 72% total Aspect of the Boar damage reduction and it still wasn’t enough to stay alive in all situations. That’s not to mention the armor, dodge rating and sometimes shield block that character also had.

I think there’s a lot of enemies in general that are just meant to kill you if you get hit by them. And in general, I’m okay with that. I think that should happen in a game if you want it to stay challenging.

What I more find interesting and sometimes annoying is what those enemies are and how many of them you sometimes have to deal with together or in a row. Also sometimes their ability to whack you from off screen and you hadn’t really had a chance to do anything about them yet. I would like to see that tuned slightly.

But no, I don’t think any of this is really an issue with defense stats being too strong. If anything, the game forces you to invest a lot in defense stats to still then be fairly vulnerable most of the time. Maybe this isn’t as true on Sentinel, but it’s definitely true on the other classes.

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My personal take:

Defenses are mostly OK, we are living in a health meta, and the DR you have access to is very important to make out the most of your life.

Suffixes are very tight in this game, but in a generalistic point of view I think defenses overall are in a good spot (there are a few outliers like Bastion, but yeah)

The problem lies in how the game scales the difficulty.

In any other ARPGs, enemy health scale way higher than enemy damage, so you usually have the build problem of scaling both defensive value and offensive value to tackle harder content.

In LE, enemy damage scales at a very high rate, so the endgame pushing, arena or high corruption, is all about squeezing all the defensive value you can get. If you have a good offensive skill setup, damage is never the problem. Defenses always are.

The game balance now is not great, but the systems in place for your build are good enough. But more than anything, nobody at EHG has ever stop to think how defenses and damage scale in the endless features of corruption or arena.

Maybe at some point this will be addressed, I hope it is the case for the few players that we like to push the build to the limit, and the competitive aspect of arena.

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But it’s an unlimited scaling system, how would you expect them to balance that? Let’s say that they make monsters have more hp but do less dmg, ok, now you can do a couple more waves or push more corruption then what? Everything is just slower because you have to DPS for a longer period but no matter what, there is going to be a point when you are going to get killed, maybe you can do 10 more waves or 100 more corruption, but it will be slower and it won’t make a difference, you will eventually end up in the same place, only you will get bored faster and probably hate the game more for having it make you take 10min on an echo…

It just doesn’t make any sense, you reached 600 corruption, you are dying too often, and can’t do anything about it, well ok, that’s it, play something different, and really that is it, thats what the game has to offer for you currently.

It doesn’t matter how many things they change to the defenses, you will most certainly end up reaching your ceiling, only some builds will be able to push a little further and some won’t, if you ask me if a build is able to get to 300 corruption, which by the way, most are, then the build is viable, there is really no point going over that other than you trying to get some content out of a game that clearly doesn’t have it yet.

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No, this is Trundle we’re talking about. Trundle is one of the few uber players who are allowed to discuss balance changes. Based purely on skill, Trundle would be able to take any random group of skills selected by a feline walking along the keyboard to a corruption with at least an extra 0 on the end. Unfortunately, this skill & its skill tree are just bad and need changing. Something that only Trundle could have shown us & we must thank him for it.

This is the way.

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I concur with most of what’s being said here. In my experience, if you want to push to high corr/arena you must:
– 1) have a crutch combo that spikes DPS to high levels;
– 2) have a high health/end or beast level Ward setup;
– 3) have a gimmick to change damage types and have a straight % Damage Reduction through passives or skills;
– 4) have an insane armor and block package

Every build I have tried has this issue. Every Single One. The only build that I have not tried to push yet is a pure #4, which I think has to be a Sentinel. IMHO, Sorceror and Marksman effectively have no push endgame viability as they have no DR (even if you are lucky enough to have an Orian’s drop). Also IMHO, Dodge is a completely ineffective strategy for late endgame.

One way to mitigate some of this is to have Arena/Corruption leaderboards segmented off by Specialization so that each one can be compared to themselves rather than against other whole classes that clearly have large DR.

One of the builds that can help with off-screen mobs that can OS you is the BowMage or Dragonsong which can kill off-screen themselves.

Last but not least, I can’t wait to see how groups of 4 will shape up as perhaps you can have teams that break the DR meta in interesting ways.

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I never said balancing is something easy to do, specially in ARPGs, where there are so many factors that came in, not only raw DPS numbers.

If you ever tried to push a build you soon will find is all the upgrades are, first - optimizing your resists so you can liberate as much space in idols and suffixes, usually for health, endurance and in the idols for the dual increased/flat health (most of the time), then the only exalted affixes you really care are getting exalted increased and hybrid health, +4 main skill on chest? is a waste, compared to T6-T7 vit or increased health. You end up turning any non-essential blessing into a defensive one, usually resistances and armor.

What I’m trying to say, endgame pushing should be pushing both offense and defense power, but in this game, is just stacking more defensive value. That to me, is a bit disappointing.

Of course, the thing with limitless scaling, there will be a point the monsters are too beefy and/or you cannot stand the damage anymore. That is implied in such systems, you will not climb forever in arena/corruption regardless.

You are wrong in that, if you don’t want some content to be done, just remove endless arena and cap the corruption at 300.

But we have endless arena, and corruption doesn’t have limit, also, in the future they will re-introduce leaderboards, so the infinite scaling situation has to be looked at.

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Shatterstrike spellblade was one example of this- amazing build, enjoying myself, 12k+ ward…

How?!

I’m currently 92 on mine, have taken every ward and ward retention node I can fine, stack retention, and have never seen myself break 3k in anything but the longest of fights.

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That’s what happens with uncapped /“infinitely scaling” difficulty though. At some point, every single gust of wind will oneshot your character.

How? The AoE of the proc isn’t that large.

Because he’s Trundle and he’s just, better, than you.

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Worse than balancing it - The game would no longer have a point at which it would end. Which leads to a very concerning philosophical question I’m actually rather interested in: What are you actually doing at that point? You’re not getting gear, because the gear is never good enough. And you’re not having fun, because you’re doing the same things over and over again, with very little variation in what you’re doing and no unique experiences, to the point that we call it “the grind.” This would essentially turn the game into a time wasting simulator. Again, if the game is never over, how do you ever feel enough achievement to decide to take a break?

I’m not sure why someone who is that absorbed in a game like this would want it to be that way. I think this would be very bad for those people’s mental health, or at the very least their time scheduling.

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Damn it, I actually pressed delete on my post and there was no prompt on it, it was a misclick.

I can’t be bothered to write that all again. I guess I’ll just leave it as is.

Pretty much, yeah. Should I apologize for being too good at the game? Perhaps had I simply been a ‘decent’ player but not quite as good as those players, potentially they could have focused on the subject material and debate at hand, instead of my results which were only a statement based on reality and relevant happened events, which appeared to them as bragging perhaps. Had that been the case, then maybe they could focus on the debate instead of coming from what looks to be projected insecurity because someone else’s ability made them feel negatively about their own ability.

Or something like that. I am fine with being disliked, its actually not terribly important to me, but I would rather read about their opinions on the actual thread topic or discussion at hand- which was game balance- instead of projecting their insecurity spaghetti all over the place and touting the ‘defense of the precious sacred noobs!’ who I was so terribly violating by saying that advice coming from someone with experience or ability had more weight than advice from someone who barely played the game.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LastEpoch/comments/12u8c7l/its_not_just_me_right_smite_is_absolutely_opbusted/?rdt=58308

Take a look at that screencap. This player hasn’t even scratched the endgame yet seems to be yelling from the rooftops for a skill nerf because its ‘really overpowered and busted’. No, the advice of newbie or inexperienced players can hold less weight and that’s just reality.

Would you take advice from a 400lb man on how to get into shape? Or ask an aerobics instructor for mixed martial arts lessons?

Or would you ask someone who started at the gym two weeks ago for advice on powerlifting over someone who had years of experience as a strength coach? No? Because if you did that you would probably end up getting poor results or worse yet getting seriously and permantly injured. I have a permanent shoulder issue as a result of having someone spot me who didn’t know how to spot one time. Training with noobs; never again.

So why would you ask for an inexperienced player to dictate endgame item/skill/whatever balance and not expect for that to be end up badly? Its just bizaare to me.

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You’re absolutely right. We have a lot of wannabe pros joining the ranks of the LE community since MP launch. This is something we cannot prevent. Especially with new content creators that want to stand out and create clockbait content and pretent to have found the most broken mechanics.

Recently I stumbled upon a “Build Guide” where the creator claimed he has build the most broken Warpath build. His showcase was from a lvl 50 character with 500 hp and he melted the story content he was currently at.

Then there’s a german content creator that pretends to be the only viable source of info on that game and he has “invented” all the op builds that are on maxroll and these are just a ripoff from his builds. When somebody asked him to share his builds he answered that they somehow got deleted from Dammitts page for no reason and he hasn’t had the time to re-upload them.

The thing is you can’t fight that. It’s happening to many times too often to be controllable. You can only hope that the people are smart enough to tell if somebody is an idiot or not.

So in that case you want to have a community that is smart enough to not swallow anything that is thrown at it. But then this exact community will also question you as a “pro” gamer. Because even having several thousand hours playtime in LE doesn’t guarantee that the stuff you tell is exactly on point.

Even if you ask 4 different professional bodybuilding coaches about the best and fasted way to build up muscles, the chances are that you get different answers.

:v:

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