The above imply that +Skill level is more interesting.
You’re right, and this has been noted many times in the forums. No one is disagreeing with you on that. I would disagree that 3 Prefixes are necessary if you were intimating that – but I don’t think you are. The pool of affixes and available prefix/suffix combinations does feel a little bland at times. But yes, now that I’m thinking about resource management, it makes it more interesting for me.
If that’s how you want to play the game, and what you want to build around, then yes. But there are plenty of viable builds/way’s to play this game without using such skills, making Mana Regeneration entirely necessary and not utterly useless. If you don’t want to worry about mana regeneration and just play with skills/builds that don’t need to, then you should do that. Its not a false choice, its just unnecessary in certain situations.
Also, lol no. The forums are for discussions. Discussions are based on feeling. Constructive dialog between people isn’t formed by one telling the other how they should feel, or what they should feel… which is exactly what
this was trying to do. This wasn’t discussion. It was you making a blithe comment due to you feeling like your opinion is superior. Its not, we’re all on equal footing here.
I get it, you don’t like mana regen for reasons. I, and plenty of others like Heavy have suggested that we don’t think its that bad, and given good valid reasons for why we think so. We can agree to disagree on the subject and that’s fine. Ultimately, we don’t get to decide how things are balanced and we can give our thoughts on it politely, and discuss without telling one another that the way their engaging with game is like consuming cyanide.
The opportunity cost differential between the two is extreme. It’s only a choice technically, not practically. I can choose an inferior way to play, yes. That doesn’t make it “interesting.”
Actually, it’s the insistence by some users, such as yourself, to perpetuate this idea about me that is pushing me to care less and less about said feelings. Every time I try to be more courteous, I just get more complaints like this. Give me good reasons–you have yet to do that, despite claims to the contrary.
One motto would disagree with you… ‘An overwhelming offense is the best defense’. If mana is stopping you from doing more damage and you are already res capped. Using all of the implicit defensive stats on gear in meaningful ways, then prefixes are loaded. I always attempt to build in a mana regen either by skill or by passive first then gear.
Mana doesn’t stop me from doing anything. That’s the point. If I wanted to free up that skill that gives mana per hit, I would need enough mana regen to be available in such a way that I actually want to build it in order to make that trade-off. Having it on prefixes precludes this.
Further, people have this weird fear of “power creep,” yet want more build diversity. It’s real unfortunate if this is the first someone is hearing this, but you can’t have it both ways. You only achieve build diversity through “power creep.”
It’s simple, honestly. Build diversity is the idea that many (or most) tools are viable options. This means they all have to be good enough to warrant use. This means they have to be powerful. In trying to curb “power creep,” especially through nerfs and lose/lose choice propositions, you actually inhibit build diversity. You simply can’t have it both ways. It’s a pipe dream. This is where D3 got it right–they just gave you potentially infinite scaling challenges so that each build would find its limits naturally, despite the “power creep” designed into the game.
The trend I see in this game is the proclivity to nerf and create those lose/lose propositions–those false choices. It is anti build diversity. If that’s the vision for the devs, fine. This game can become another Wolcen, because this genre thrives on build diversity. It’s the chief reason–above all others–that PoE is successful.
That’s the problem. It’s not inferior, its different. I’m not going to search through all of them but there are plenty builds Boardman21 + Other's 150+ Builds & Leveling Guides Compendium (v0.8.3E) that don’t have some sort of reliance on mana generators – I’ve made 2-3 myself that perform great.
But maybe your point shouldn’t be about mana regen, maybe all mana generators need to be nerfed so that they aren’t “superior” (in your view at least).
Well, if there’s more than one of us doing that, then maybe its something to consider. I’m not perpetuating anything. I’m actively telling you based solely on your response(s) to me, that your behavior is not constructive, offensive, and damaging to the discussion at hand.
Or, you know, they’re still balancing the game, and wanting to create a good baseline for when they officially release. Mobs got tougher this patch, and player power went up a little this patch as well, but overall the delta between the two seems to be leaning towards the mobs.
This is the exact wrong mentality. This line of thinking leads to trying to force people (through design) into particular decisions that they wouldn’t want to make instead of freeing up other viable options. This is anti build diversity.
I am confused, PoE is a bad example. PoE has only few really meta builds that all take either uber high end key uniques. Headhunter, Badge and Call of Brotherhood, Nebulus, Watchers Eye for examples. With all the 1000’s of passives and build options you would expect more. You will still see the same generic builds over and over again. It’s boring. I have played it so much that nothing they do to the meta will change it.
Most players don’t get to engage in that meta because it’s too time-consuming to achieve. It also doesn’t really require you to, so lots of people are constantly engineering new and unique build ideas. I mean, there’s even a meme that Path of Building is “true endgame,” lol. I’m not saying PoE is perfect, but it’s the extremely vast availability of build options that drives people to play it. There are other contributing factors, but none of those would matter if the meta were as important or strict as you’re implying.
As someone that does get to the true endgame once you get those listed items within any build just drop a skill and go. Even streamers such as MBX or even zizaran are struggling with content.
That’s because they’ve played forever. They have tried nearly all the common and uncommon ideas. They’d have to get super niche to explore what I see other people trying out. That’s actually part of the beauty of it, imo. People don’t care if their build fails at some point in endgame because the idea was interesting.
LE has a long way to go before it can offer that, but pidgeon-holing people into building in ways they don’t want to build at this stage is not the path to get there.
What you are saying takes time, history and a volume of past work. PoE has that, LE does not. Examples, not all of the masteries are released. Now imagine taking the individual classes and masteries and turn them into a PoE skill web and this would end up with the same kind of thing as PoE. One philosophy is that LE will not go down that rabbit hole, that a class is its class by nature, not by selecting nodes in a spiderweb.
I’m not asking for the spider web. I want more build options through careful design choices. The current design limits those options in unhealthy ways.
Well, all I can say is I agree with you in principle. Some patience and time is required in these kinds of development cycles. All of the recent work in 0.8.2 is evidence they are attempting to balance two things 1) their motto/mission statement for the game 2) Our constructive input and meaningful discussions. Trust me on this, it took a LONG time for the team I worked with to get into a good rhythm and they had to go through a lot of issues, some of it was their own limitations and skill sets. Once they started to grow then things took off and things took far fewer experiments and more targeted results like what you are mentioning.
You know… something occurred to me in my last edit. This game deliberately chose not to do the classic 3 Prefix / 3 Suffix model. Cool, I guess? It does make it super hard from both a character building and design standpoint to fit enough stat variety in, though.
What if they added a central affix–an infix, for lack of better word? Maybe this would be a better place for utility and resource management stuff. Prefixes for power, suffixes for defense. I’m sure some would argue that it’s a bit simple compared to other games, but it does vastly help with playability and new player learning curves.
Might be worth considering more deeply…
Edit: Naming convention would need to be recalibrated. Probably not including the base item type in it.
Yea, I get ya. I was thinking something similar for the idols. A unique tetris L style that you could also get the opposite direction to allow for more usefulness there. The real word would be a root (main word ) which the prefix and suffix attach to.
Anyways, done for now check back later. You could be on to something.
I went for max mana regen affixes on my Vombies Necro & I can spam it for a lot longer than I would have otherwise been able to (>325% longer, infact). So I wouldn’t say it’s a “terrible design choice”.
It’s kinda a utility stat, adding more of it allows you to do more damage, like, say, % increased damage or crit chance.
Sounds like a fallacious argument to me.
I’d argue that defensive affixes are boring as well, whoever went “yay, I’m now preventing x% more damage being taken!” apart from those wierd HC types.
And if you can’t fit mana on hit in your build or it’s not available for your class (kinda, mainly thinking of Primalist & Sorc’s here, 'cause neither of them is likely to be using Tempest Strike/Mana Strike)?
Not for all builds. For a Necro spamming summoner (Wraiths/Zombies), the belt, rings, gloves & amulet prefix slots are different to what a normal caster/melee build would do. For rings you get the choice of Int, minion damage/health/dodge or mana regen. If I’m wanting to spam my decaying minion of choice then Int, minion damage & minion health are all very strong/BiS, but depending on what I’m doing for my mana sustain, mana regen can be necessary to keep me pumping them out without having to switch to a different skill to generate some mana. It’s a choice. And it’s a different choice for different builds & classes, this is a good thing.
It doesn’t though, being able to increase your mana regen by ~225% permanently is not a trivial thing.
You’re going to have to go into some more detail on that since it sounds bonkers. I would have said that build diversity comes through having many different options that can achieve roughly the same thing in different ways, not by just putting a few thousand percent modifiers on things so that everything can do at least millions of dps, but the “OP” builds can do billions… If you went down that route you’d need to balance the mobs around the millions/billions of outgoing dps which would mean the lower end of the scale still performs less well than the higher end (the Diablo 3-isation of the game).
If method A (mana generators) is significantly superior to method B (mana regen) then either A needs to be nerfed to bring it into line with B, B needs to be buffed to bring it into line with A (but then all builds would be generating “too much” mana so mana costs need to be increased putting you back to square 1 with the addition of A & B being roughly comparable) or they both need to be tweaked to bring them closer to each other (potentially with a bit of tweaking of the mana costs as well to maintain the devs intended usage of the more expensive skills).
If you were free to choose A or B depending on preference, or if A were better for some builds & B for some other builds, IMO, that would be build diversity.
What if mana regen was intended to be the more effective choice for build types X (summoners, for argument’s sake) & generators for build types Y (melee, for argument sake), you could likely do the opposite but you would be handicapping yourself. And you’d quite possibly come here to complain about which one you chose.
Build diversity as an abstract concept is all well & good, but the devs also need to have their own view on how they want their game to perform & to an extent, stick to it.
Apparently, they did have 6 affixes back in the day, but moved to a 4 affix model & presumably buffed the strength of the affixes at the same time to maintain the same stat budget per item.
Yeah, maybe, you could put mana regen & CDR there but I’m not sure what else. 'Course, if everyone has mana regen on an item, it’s not exactly helping build diversity is it.
If there were a sufficiently diverse pool of “utility” affixes it could work, with some tweaking of the base values given we’d all have access to more stuff naturally.
TLDR - this is what happens when y’all have conversations while I’m asleep. You brought it on yourselves.
I’ll be honest, Llama8, I can’t be bothered to go through point by point for a post that long, so here’s the tl:dr (and I did read the entirety of yours).
You make a lot of good points, but I regard many of them as in some form incomplete or only specific to certain applications. I do think they are otherwise well-reasoned. My biggest disagreement is on the topic of power creep and build diversity. Specifically here:
This is what causes the endless death spiral of nerfs in these games, and it happens at the point I bolded. It’s actually find for builds to slightly overperform in some areas. If leaving that alone means that many other builds are allowed to be fun and viable, it’s a net win–benefits outweigh detriments. This is what I mean when I say that build diversity and power creep go hand-in-hand.
What I am not talking about is exaggerated slippery-slope stuff like this:
To use my original (title) suggestion as an example, nobody is going to suddenly do billions of damage just because they have a bit of mana regen on a suffix.
I agree there’s a line of balance consideration that needs to be made, but it’s better to err on the side of allowing something to feel strong than to make many other things feel like shit.
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I can think of plenty to put there, but I’m still working through different considerations of that idea to see if it holds much merit, how difficult it might be to do, and if there aren’t better alternatives before maybe making its own topic.
Yeah, fair enough, though I still think it’s reasonable to make the rest of the world have their awake/sleep cycle based on the UK.
Yes, just nerfing stuff may be the “right” thing to do from a balance point of view, but it pisses the players off. If the devs intended balance point was “10”, skill A was “9” & skill B (maybe we could call this one Shadow Daggers) was “20”, it would be a lot simpler to give A a small buff & B a big nerf rather than go through every single the other skill & buff them to “20” then buff mobs to “20” as well to achieve the original intended balance. Hence, I think/assume, devs nerf as well as buff.
You could go through every single skill/mob & re-scale everything to 20, but that would be a much bigger amount of work than just tweaking the, hopefully, few outliers. This is the path Blizz took with D3. I’m not sure it would be viable to a studio that didn’t have Blizzard’s resources.
You say it’s exagerated, but it’s exactly what Blizz did with D3 (chucking multipliers in the tens of thousands onto specific skills) & it what the Outriders’ devs did as well. Once you hit lvl 30, the damage/defences rapidly scaled up to gear lvl 50 to make it impossible for a gear level 30 character to do the content that would require gear lvl 50. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but my example above has had a few real world examples/occurrences.
No they aren’t, and it was an argumentum absurdum.
Still doing my own mental work on it first. It might be a bad idea.
I’m familiar with the concept, but why use a chainsaw (sweeping mana changes) when a scalpel (specific skill change) is more appropriate?
Bring that “20” down to “12,” but leave the other “11” and “12” skills alone. If those “3” and “4” skills need help, you take that scalpel and fix them up. However, I see many devs and players see those “11” and “12” builds and immediately jump to “Those need to be nerfed.” Nah, not really. Not everything has to be up to that level either. A build can be perfectly fun and still viable at an “8.”
