Very much appreciate the feedback and I think I can agree with just about everything you wrote.
When I first started writing this when I woke up today I felt like there was way too many “more” modifiers and that was going to be the core of what I wrote, but throughout the day going through every skill searching for what I thought were the most egregious examples I didn’t find any that were that convincingly bad, if I did I would’ve written them in my post haha.
So I think your right, currently the game is handling the knifes edge of too many multipliers okay but I personally would like to see the game take a step back from the edge that its teetering on right now. I can’t show that there are any particularly rediculous sources of “more” damage but I would say that there are tons of strong sources of defensive stats and utility that aren’t being used because there are too many sources of extra damage from skill trees to allow players to take what I’d argue would be more fun alternatives.
In other words, even if a source of extra damage is small, if it’s preventing players from choosing something interesting or fun, is that something we should consider changing?
On the offensive vs defensive issue, I think it’s worth looking at games like PoE where builds dont even try to build defensive anymore, as an investment in damage is worth way more due to their easy availability of multipliers. Imagine if path of exile only had access to “increased damage” modifiers, there is 0 chance the current state the game is in would ever happen, once you got got like 1000% there would be no point in picking up more little 10% increased damage nodes. Obviously this would be boring and isn’t what I’m suggesting, but that I belive this shows the foundation of my point is true, that multiplicative damage is the cause of not just high amounts of damage, but the ignoring altogether of defensive stats.
Thanks for taking the time to read this, and double thanks for being so understanding of where I’m coming from. This community has shown itself to be incredibly open to constructive criticism in a way that a lot of others aren’t and I think that we have a bright future for this game because of it.
if the results of that build surprise u maybe i should link it in the post when I discuss that issue so people can see what i mean if that helps to get across my point.
I wouldnt feel confident in that claim, but no, I did not think anything outside of 6 wolves could.
Don’t get me wrong, compared to many players like yourself, I’m incredibly new to the game, so I could be very wrong on a lot of this stuff, and I appreciate yall hearing me out. I’ll attempt to backup my statements as best I can so that my lack of experience can be backed up with explicit statements/specifics so we can better understand eachother.
All companions can if you build them “right” (probly not the right word)
Something of note, spriggan form and vines is its main DPS skill it should perform very well even if it is “Minions”. Companion builds (while able to do this) also have the benfit of YOU fight with another DPS skill such as swipe or serpent strike along with them.
There are several HIT damage companion builds that can kill abomination faster than 14 seconds. Spriggan Can do it in 3 seconds.
We like the feedback its always good, just trying to see what your seeing as I see companions completely different. They once felt weak but once you find the little synergizes that are hiding there quite potent.
Thank you for the well thought out post (even if you’re wrong in places ). 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.
Increased crit chance isn’t the problem, it’s the amount of base crit you can get. For example, if there were no other sources of base crit, you’d need 2,000% increased crit chance to hit 100%, which I don’t believe is possible for any build. But if you go with a Polearm (+8% implicit + 9% prefix = total 22% inc the 5% base) then you only need 350% increased which is much easier to get from the passive/skill trees & gear. It’s a little bit “worse” if you dual wield a Raider axe (5% base + 2x (5% implicit + 5% prefix) = 25% base crit then you only need 300% increased crit chance. But I don’t think any build (ignoring the Rogue’s Crit Vulnerability nodes) would be able to hit 100% crit chance without the flat added crit.
I do “worry” about multiplayer given the Rogue’s Crit Vulnerability would allow any hit-build to be able to crit all the time after a short build up by the Rogue, but I also wouldn’t want Crit Vulnerability to be removed as it’s interesting.
I think a “crit score” rather than direct crit chance would be a good way to reduce the incremental benefit of high crit chance without screwing over the lower values. And while there are some builds that rely on a very high crit chance for procs (like the Werebear to stay in bear form permanently), that could be adjusted with a numerical tweak to the procs (if it were practical to “only” have 50% crit chance instead of 100% for a Werebear then you could either halve the mana costs of the Werebear skills or double the mana gain from Swipe on crit in Bear form).
The problem with that is that only three of those effects (chance, duration & effect) is limited to DoTs, all hit builds will be buffed by
“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
Also, by describing “ALL The strongest builds are either A. DoT builds, “more” or crit stacking builds, Minion builds”, that’s all builds you’re describing, even the “less effective” ones.
As McFluffin said, Arena builds worry more about defence than damage.
IMO, the most egregious builds scale more modifiers from skills that affect other skills, such as Firebrand being able to apply most of it’s more modifiers to a consuming skill. This is fun, but can get out of hand (certain Rogue builds). I’m also of the opinion that passive skills shouldn’t have “more” modifiers.
Crit multi is well balanced, since it’s only worth taking once you’ve already got >700% total increased damage (& even then only 1 crit multi affix and assuming you have very high crit chance). Getting more flat damage is more likely to have a bigger impact than crit multi.
Edit: I’d also like to see the higher level monoliths be made harder so that “even monolith players” need to care more about defences, especially different defences, not just capping resists, stacking HP & leech).
Yeah, I kinda wish you could raise the level of MoF timelines Like greater rifts in D3
Imagine if everytime you completed a timeline it would let you run it with mobs 5 Levels higher… Run and complete it enough and you could be up against level 200 mobs!
It’s early & I’m quite busy today… Besides, that still doesn’t chance the result, 1,900% isn’t achievable by any build is it?
I don’t think that would be necessary, the devs did mention they had ways to make the monoliths harder (in response to a suggestion that the empowered monoliths start at lvl 100 & scale up from there to ~130 or so at an empowered Dragon Emperor monolith).
oh its definitely not necessary But would be a nice ladder. People could compete to see the hardest mobs they could defeat and you would have the RNG of having to choose diffent Affixes for the mobs
its level 91, at level 100 it will get 50% more minion physical damage (with 1 point relocated)
Its primarily focused on going for Arena (and with mid lvl gear because i play ssc), which means i dont have minion dmg modifiers on gloves, rings, amu or relic (and thats a potential +200% minion dmg + some physical dmg)
One of the idols is a regen idol, which could be switched with some pet dmg
I dont have the up to 200% minion dmg Blessing
So if i went for a Monolith build i could swap all those items out, and it would get around 450%+ extra damage, and that would probably take down Abomination in 5-6 sec or so.
So i would agree with the OP that Vines get a massive advantage over the companions, as i dont think a “pure” companion build (not a hybrid) could do that. I could ofc be wrong tho
Ah ye forgot about your Werigan build heh. I know you didnt say my build was bad just wanted to point out it was mid level geared and more focused on defence when compared to other pet builds that had max level and better gear
Hello Cujo, glad to have the one that made me think of this topic come weigh in!
I think you kind of glossesed over the biggest point about why the vine build is so unique. For the amount of investment in damage it’s return is truly incredible.
To show the negative impact this has on the game lets consider the increased variety of viable vine builds that could exist if this interaction was nerfed, and the skill was buffed to allow for similarly small investments into the skill to be just as powerful. This would open up room for investments in say minion health to make a build that actually made interesting use of the vine walls of the spriggan, and more importantly for a non-shaman build to be able to make use of vines.
I think in this discussion we are repeatedly mistaking that nerfing these specific cases has to be the end of the changes. Whenever I’m suggesting these things my head sounds more like “oh if we nerfed this then we could do all these other things.”
Maybe it would help to feel the issue more personally if you considered how might you change cujo’s build to have similar performance with a different use of vines that fit more what you saw as a fun interesting setup. If you can’t pull out of that specific shaman node without the skill becoming worth way less, than it’s doing something none of us want, its pidgeon-holing us into one choice not opening new interesting ones.
Dev-time gets spent making each of these things in the game, and the stronger the synergies they have with one specific thing more than any other the fewer fun (viable) ways we get to use the fruits of their work.
On DoT builds I do have to say I don’t know nearly enough to say whether these builds are overpowered now, but I can say that the way they’re balanced is super precarious. Releasing say options for the stats that allows a player to get 10% more of each than they were gaining before will multiply to a 33% power gain, while if a similarly better investment became available in just a single stat (increased damage) they would just see the 10% gain.
You point out that only those 3 (chance, duration & effect) are unique to DoTs, but these are 3 stats that the devs seem to treat a lot more freely like they do with “increased damage” unlike their very stingy treatment of most other “more” modifiers.
So I suppose what I am saying is less that these stats are inherently a problem, and more that I would like to remind the devs that in the long term they need to be careful and treat these as the highly multiplicative modifiers they are (to give them the very stringy “more damage” treatment).
It is good yes, and compared to some other pet builds i made, its superior in terms of damage. But as @Boardman21 has shown with several builds its not the top end pet build.
However imo i think companions should get bigger effect than vines from +flat damage.
I really wouldnt call this a negative impact, as shamans are the true underdogs of Ladder (currently theres only 1 shaman on the ssc ladder which is this one, and i couldnt even go half the waves the leaders are at), so i really would call it a positive impact that shaman finally has 1 build that aint below top 200. (there probably are other shaman builds that can do it, but they havent shown up on ssc ladder yet)
Both Druid and BM are very viable Vine builds, this for example : https://studio.youtube.com/video/nd0XWQ7loms/edit
(I did make a BM a while ago which was even better than the druid, but lacked the mana, but with the recent change to attunement that gives mana, im going to make another one soon)
Compared to some other pet builds its quite good, but compared to what a whole lot of other chars can do, its really still in the middle of the bunch
If it were possible to get base damage for ailments (like you can with spells, melee, throwing attacks, bow attacks & minions) then yes, they would need to be a bit more sparing with them but as it’s not possible to get base damage for ailments they had out the % chance like candy to the classes that they want to be DoT classes.
The increased effect & increased duration are pretty rare modifiers.
). 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!
