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.
Btw, that’s why I put the fix in the title.
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.
I picture it like this:
*Prefix
*Prefix
*Infix
*Suffix
*Suffix
So you know, it’s 5 affixes total.
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.
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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.
–
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.
You are probably right in that.
Then post a thread about it!
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.”
I think this is the crux of the problem though, you think it’s a chainsaw, I don’t… It’s been an interesting conversation but I don’t think either of us is going to budge.
It effects nearly every build without regard to the specifics or nuances of that build. Hard to see it as not a chainsaw.
It doesn’t though because there are plenty of builds that use mana generators, or channelled skills as well as 1 mana regen prefix on your belt (which is lacking interesting prefixes so it’s probably the least loss to stick one there) gets you back to 10/sec.
Aaaaaaaand we’re back to where we were in the first few posts… So if everybody else can do a loop or two back through them I have work to do.
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This is what I meant earlier about the incompleteness of some of these points. They messed with passives too. My Sorc didn’t need the regen, but lost cast speed for nothing. Uses a unique belt, so that’s not a great solution either. 1 or 2 mp/s isn’t worth what my belt offers.
This is a specific example, but shows how even builds that don’t need the regen are still effected by these sweeping changes. Lich saw something similar too.
I realize I sort of skipped over this point before. I don’t disagree with the idea that it can be used to sustain more damage for longer, that’s just obvious fact. It’s also used for movement/positioning, CC, and defensives. This is why I place it in the category of “Utility” rather than as an offensive stat.
Well when you put it that way, it does make it sound more interesting. Yes please I want more mana to give me more of those options.
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Generalizations/maximizations are generally a difficult area and are rather wrong, not least because of possible specific circumstances or exceptions.
To stay with your example:
→ Often a “more” (maybe around 30%) within a skill tree is worth more in terms of damage than a simple “increased” (on most items max 60%) on a piece of armor. And that’s simply because the total amount of those “increased” are already at 700% to 1400% and another 60% are therefore rather negligible.
In such cases, the stubbornness then makes sense, right?
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I hope they nerf mana regen a bit. it is OP as hell in my opinion lol.
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