TLDR: The below is a massive essay basically on what I view is a danger facing this game. Namely the out of control damage that PoE has today that eliminates gameplay. This thread is to discuss what unneccesary causes of this exist and how we can prevent/keep it to a minimum. I understand if you can’t read through all of this, so it might be worthwhile just jumping to the solutions sections and seeing what you think.
Thanks for reading in advance! And I hope we can make this lovely game keep the things that made a lot of us fall in love with it!
Last Epoch has a great many players coming from other games such as D3, PoE, and Grim Dawn. I’ve read many players in these forums and discord mention their appreciation for the games pacing, and that it avoids what some in PoE circles call “the speed clearing meta.” This refers to how in PoE currently, and in certain parts of Diablo 3s lifetime, a build being “good” came to require a build be able to kill most any common enemies in a moment, and to be able to move extremely quickly around maps.
It is true, that outside the most perfect of builds in this game, this game does not have many builds that are so powerful. However, as those that are more active on this forum likely know many builds are able to break these normal limits, now able to kill the games final bosses in under 30 secondsish.
This thread is mainly to discuss the causes of these builds being incredibly stronger and solutions to prevent the massive power disparity between these builds and others.
To start, I will layout what I view as the general balance philosophy of the design so far.
WHAT I BELIEVE IS THE CURRENT BALANCE OF STATS
The current design very lightly values “increased damage” modifiers, despite some parts of the game not giving much of them (skill points that give only 20% increased damage). The same is true of “Increased critical chance.” The game hands out these modifiers like candy, and without significant effort amounts of “increased” damage and crit can reach 400%+ with most reasonably optimized builds.
This incredibly high average of these stats makes the particularly strongest sources not problematic. Specifically, the way that some passives provide 5% increased damage while others can provide 10-25% increased damage is balanced out by the fact that builds will be recieving this from so many sources that in total the builds/skills that have more will only be a 10-30% stronger in total. What is quite arguably the highest damaging weapon in the game is only 10-20% higher in dps than other weapons as the extra 100%ish physical damage it boasts over other weapons is only averaged against the 300% increased damage builds already have.
The difference in relative increased damage between builds that make better choices in a few item slots or passive choices will never be more than 40-50%. This is a size that is, in my opinion, completely not problematic considering the amount of total affixes/points that go into such numbers.
Similarly, “increased critical chance” is, in a vacuum, worth very little. But with two raider axes with or with a two hander with +10% crit chance and 0 added crit multiplier, each point of increased critical hit chance becomes equal to 0.10.15100(base crit multi)*4(increased damage) = 7.5 increased damage. However, looking at the passive skill tree, the amounts its being given out in are similar to the amount that increased damage is being provided in.
Now this is not to say that “increased” critical strike chance should be reduced, rather one of two other options are suggested.
Summary: This first part lays out why critical strike can/will grow problematic. Sources of stats that make “increased critical strike” extremely powerful are too readily available, and this combined with its multiplicative nature makes it unlikely to be balanced/balanceable with the current system.
First, options to fix this will be laid out, and then the pros and cons of each.
BALANCING CRITICAL STRIKE
- My personal preference is this suggestion. The sources of base crit are removed outright. “increased crit chance” is changed to a “critical chance score.” this score provides large amounts of increased crit chance at low amounts and then gradually less the larger the score gets. This need not actually depend on character level, the only negative balance implications would be crit builds could be stronger relatively at lower gear levels. This would be counter-balanced by crit build requiring more specific gear/stats. Critical hit multiplier could recieve a similar treatment, being more neccesary the less the diminishing returns are on the crit chance score.
Pros:
Builds that are able to squeeze out every last source of crit are less wildly stronger than those that are suboptimal.
Build diversity increases as everyone will be incentivized to get SOME crit, and each build can choose where their best source is.
This is a knob that can be tuned into the future, preventing 100% critical chance ever occuring as numbers change.
Correctly tuned it could be an optional source of damage for most builds, allowing it to be a stat that many builds choose between fun, randomness, and higher average damage, vs consistency and lower average damage, rather than the very binary choice it is now where one must go all out crit or not at all.
Cons
Is significantly harder to understand than the basic crit chance calculation method.
Some players enjoy halariously high crit chance and multis and love big numbers.
Makes it harder to predict the better stat choices for damage (though not like its particularly easy either way, and a tooltip dps calculator thats coming will largely alleviate this).
Will require dev time to rebalance stats, but I’d argue it’s not balanced now so wont really change much all in all.
- Flat critical strike chance needs to be given out incredibly sparingly A raider axe giving 5% is far too much, a prefix giving 5% or 10% on a two hander is still incredibly strong, and should probably be reduced to .5% per affix level or something similar.
Pros: Simple to understand. Requires minimal dev time.
Cons: Makes crit flat out less desireable than it is now.
Rather than something players want some of you want either as much as possible or none.
Likely will mess with devs current math but not nearly as much as solution 1.
I likely will need to add a lot to this, but my brain is struggling to picture how this reads to others so I will go straight on to the issue of “more” damage, so please suggest stuff you think should be added to this first section and I’ll make a rewrite pass later.
Onto “more” damage and attack speed
After spending a few hours thinking about how to show/prove my beliefs about these stats, I’m really struggling to come up with concise yet convincing ways to do so. My best solution is to layout my general beliefs, and get into specifics on whatever of my assertions people would like to discuss further.
I would claim that:
ALL The strongest builds are either A. DoT builds, “more” or crit stacking builds, Minion builds, or finally, bug builds.
Bug builds will be ignored here as those are ones that do things such as abusing the avalanche spam bug or some other bug.
This may sound really general, but please continue I’ll narrow this down shortly. Additionally feel free to provide a counter example to this assertion, but I cant really think of any.
I narrow down the strongest builds into these categories because I belive that the reason why each of these build types are so strong is due to a design flaw, an abuse of a couple of stat weightings.
MINIONS
The Causes of Minion Imbalances
We shall first briefly cover the issue with minion builds as thats quite a bit easier, and then we shall go into the more complex balance issues.
The issue with minion builds currently is not just that the top ones are too powerful, its that a lot of clunky weird unfun builds are overshadowing the more basic straight forward ones.
If someone came into the forums and said “minion builds suck, they need to be buffed” and refered to non-dot animal companions on the primalist, they would be entirely correct. However, with the current game mechanics I don’t believe there is a way to fix this. Upgrading their base health or damage will not fix the underlying issue. I would assert the underlying issue is that minion/companion damage relies on both flat damage buffs, and “increased damage.” This is fine while observing similarly functioning minions, but becomes an issue when balancing differently functioning minions against eachother.
Most notably, a vine spriggan build can produce absurdly high damage with extremely minimal investment in minion damage. If a vine spriggan build attempted to use an animal companion with their same equipment the companion would do extremely weak damage, the builds strength entirely revolves around the fact that giving flat damage +2 damage to 55 vines results in whats functionally 110 damage to any other minion.
To deal with this issue I would recomend multipliers being added to every minion based on their attack speed/amount summoned to keep these flat modifiers somewhat equal in their effect on them. It need not make them all literally the same, but they ought to not be so wildly different than they are now. Such a change would I believe allow room to buff the animal companions damage without negative impacts on the balance of other minions. In other words, it could allow room for more precise tuning between the different minions damage.
Summary: Flat minion damage having different relative effects on different minion types is causing a lot of fun to use minions like the animal companions to be weak, while things like vines wind up overpowered.
GENERAL CAUSES OF OVERPOWERED BUILDS AND WHY IT’S AN ISSUE
Explanation
DoT builds all rely on the excess supply of multiplicative modifiers for their damage. For example “increased duration” multiplies with “increased chance” multiplies with “increased damage” multiples with “increased damage taken” and “increased attack speed” let alone the straight up “more damage” modifiers that exist in certain skill trees for DoT effects. Every additional one of these that a build takes advantage of multiplies a builds damage by %s in the double digits.
“More” builds is a bit broader, it refers to the fact that all of the top builds function off of stacking many “more” multipliers, and almost always also stack crit, attack speed, or both on top of that. This may sound really basic, but it can cause issues with certain choices.
To demonstrate, lets go through the following excercise:
Example
if ideally a player should sometimes choose defensive choices and sometimes offensive ones, (assumed that this is the ideal) lets observe what happens in a few cases
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If choosing between a capped multiplicated defense (resists) and additive increased damage, I will choose some of both, swapping at two points, first when the likely stronger early on additive damage becomes less powerful than the resist stat, and then back to damage when I reach the cap.
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If choosing between two additive effects like life and increased damage, I will swap back and forth, as both constantly decrease in relative value as more is added to them.
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If choosing between life and “more” damage, its possible that one will choose SOME life first, however there will become a point where the multiplicative damage becomes more valuable. This scenario differs from scenario #1 however. Mathematically, the moment that the “more” damage investments become better, they will stay better, they have no diminishing returns, every single time its worth the same % as the previous investment.
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Simiarly problematically, if a character ever gains enough damage that “more damage” is worth more than an investment in resistances at any point before cap, they will never invest in resists again. Even more problematically, this is doubly true in Last Epochs resistances design, as unlike PoE where players are allowed to make up for the subtracted resistances each difficulty, and thus 1% less resists below 75% is 4% more damage taken for most players (as most are resist capped) in Last Epochs design it’s merely a quarter that.
Summary: significant availability of multiplicative damage scaling is incompatible with a game that desires its players to care about defenses.
SUGGESTED SOLUTIONS TO PREVENT OUT OF CONTROL DAMAGE
Solutions
To prevent these multiplicative modifiers from becoming the end all be all of the game, and to increase build diversity, I recomend three things.
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Stop making more multipliers work seperately, make them add to eachother.
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Remove attack speed from either passive trees or the skill trees. I struggle to come up with a strong argument why this is a good idea beyond: it will be easier to balance against eachother as the sources will be symmetric/alternatives. However, I acknowledge this is a less strong argument.
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Reduce the amount of different types of modifiers to DoTs, the fact that they are all multiplying together makes them way harder to balance together, and will inevitably lead to powercreep. If you need to make multiple sources they could be mutually exclusive in some way to help balance them.
Summary: Reduce the amount of things that multiply together across the board to both increase build diversity and and maintain balance into the games future.
Conclusion: Im super sorry if this is a tough read, I’ll spend a bit of time tomorrow making this more readable but there is so much here I needed to just get something down/out of my head so I can start sorting this out.
Super duper thank you if you were able to get through all of this, I really appreciate your time! Looking forward to hearing all your thoughts!
). I’ve tried to pull the relevant parts of your post, but it was quite long & I might not have got quite the right bits.
Coffee Up!