Please give reflect builds some love (mainly Sentinel)

Feedback and Suggestions
1

At the moment %reflect is calculated after mitigation, which heavily limits the survivability options of a non-minion reflect based character.

  • Dodge doesn’t work because you don’t get hit, so you don’t reflect the damage.

  • Block, armour, and protections don’t work because you mitigate most of the damage, so you only reflect a trivial amount of damage. Glancing Blow and Crit avoidance also have the same anti-synergy.

  • Stacking a lot of Health without significant protections seems like the only option, except you can’t really get high enough health to survive in endgame without any damage mitigation.

  • Sentinel can’t get the amount of ward that a Lich or a Spellblade can get, so this is also a no go. I also don’t think Sentinel should be built around ward because it would make this class too similar to magic based classes.

Suggestions:

  • Calculate %reflect damage before mitigation. It won’t be OP as reflect can’t be easily scaled and it will be a very slow and risky playstyle.

  • Give us passive nodes or have reflect-based mechanics in one of the stances (possibly Juggernaut Stance).

6 Likes
2

I want to say that they don’t really want to make reflect builds too much of a thing because it’s a very passive play style (though pet builds say hello).

3

Why bother having the mechanic in game though? No one will want to spec into a half-baked mechanic. Also you can make a build full of autocasted+proc spells already.

7 Likes
4

I agree with @Callizer , that if there are mechanics within (any) game it should be supported in anyway possible, even if the majority of people probably don’t bother with said mechanic. (i really like getting the most out of ANY mechanic just to see if it works, even if it’s niche build)

I do have a friend that i played ALOT of Grim Dawn and several other ARPG’s with that support kinda a reflect/retaliation playstyle.

And he had TONS of fun just trying to build around this mechanic. While the playstyle itself might be a bit more passive compared to other it is really statisfiying, especially with not only “damage reflect” but also “on-hit taken proc”.

As far as i can tell Grim Dawn is the ARPG’s that support this playstyle the very best(and endgame viable).

For you that don’t know much of Grim Dawn and are interested:

In Grim Dawn the Basic mechanic is called “retaliation damage”.
The Basic function is that if y mob “hits” you, whether range or melee he gets instant Damage, key Point here is “HIT”, because there are several ways that don’t “hit” you like DoT’s and (most) spells.

This retaliation damage is just a flat/percentage increase stat on several items/sets/devotion tree etc. SO in Grim Dawn’s case the Damage that is applied is a value that is calculated just with mob’s armor/resistance, not form the actual hit that hit you.

Grim Dawn further expand this mechanic with some additions to spells, most notably on some spells for example it “XY% of retaliation damage added to attack”. So this gives you the oppurtunity to even build in 1 or 2 ACTIVE skills that scale of your basic build.
While those active skills never scale as well as some “normal” builds it is enough that that for some tough Mobs you have additional dps and most importantly for pure caster Mobs that you can’t retaliate you have some means of killing them reliably.

On top of that Grim Dawn also had several “when hit taken procs”, whic hreally gave some builds “cool” and intersting additional stuff
TL:DR:

IF mechanic exist, support it for reliable endgame builds(add further means of scaling it)

6 Likes
5

I would also concur. If this mechanic exists in the game then it should be made sufficiently viable. @Heavy makes some great examples with Grim Dawn, which I was planning to do but his explanations are quite good already.

I also enjoyed GD’s implementation of retaliation and much more so when the ‘retaliation damage added to attack’ mechanic was added alongside the Forgotten Gods DLC. It certainly introduced a lot more depth to the overall retaliation mechanic, but did create a ton of balancing issues which haven’t fully been resolved yet. But I can hardly complain as I hit insane damage highs with the mechanic…so it was definitely fun.

3 Likes
6

I must say that “thorn-damage” is just one of many parameters of LE mechanics, and all those parameters are passive, just numbers. You can have a lot of damage increases, health increases, dodge increases or any other BIG NUMBERS, but gameplay becomes interesting mostly because of skills - something that changes any situation. Something that effectively uses those numbers and transforms them into a result.

So if all you have is 10 buff-skills increasing your passive thorns and allowing you to stand and wait till all your enemies die… weeeeeeell… that’s really sucks. I’ve leveled one character like this in Grim Dawn - it was so boring :sleeping: (effective though).

But who says that it will be done that way? Skills may force you to attack large packs of enemies to get short bonus, sacrifice your health, move across the battlefield to build your dominance area and a lot more.

7

Yeah, D3’s Invoker’s set had a decent way of doing a more active thorns build. Using specific skills build up stacks that buffed your thorns damage & which were then applied to your skills as base damage.

1 Like
8

There are some skill based builds that would benefit from retaliation and thorns: Channeling smelters wraith with rebuke. You stand in the middle of a pack, rendered motionless channeling your skills while everything is punching the hell out of you.

I ran that build and it was very cool. But nothing for top ladder. But with maxing xxx while channeling equip it may be better. I had not the endurance to max stats on that build. Definitely more thorns damage would improve such builds a lot.

9

But did you ever use the “% of retaliation damage added to attack” mechanic? Almost every skill in the game can make use of it now (either on the skill itself or through item skill modifiers) and it’s basically a different way of boosting your attacks damage. Though, it admittedly takes a lot of very specific items (and usually high level items) to make viable. But it introduced so many crazy new builds, even if some of those were slightly ‘broken’ (in terms of damage).

10

Callizer has a point here!!
i would love to see some reflect/retaliation builds, especially on force knight or on paladin.
And what is boring to some is fun to others :wink:

1 Like
11

Yeah I thought of Smelter’s Wrath as well. It’s so satisfying to be a badass standing there and charging a powerful attack. Reflect/retaliation will definitely help.

Also it can support a zDPS/support playstyle when multiplayer eventually comes. Just focus on healing, buffing, and reflecting damage.

12

Maybe a reflct build with pet (reflct on pet) can be viable. I think I’ve seen that on some affix on my necro

13

Minion reflect builds are indeed viable because you can treat them as disposable minions. This post was mainly to address the problem with non-minion reflect build.

14

Make sense :slight_smile:

15

Completely agree, I’ve been playing around with a mage reflect/‘when hit’ that channels focus or disintegrate. I’ve seen some awesome synergies and powerful combinations come out of it, but have venom weavers that don’t ‘hit’ in arena, as well as 1-2 extra mobs in the library basically meaning the build can’t do anything against them.
%reflect doesn’t seem to do much as well, because the damage done to the player is nowhere near the hp pool of most enemy mobs. Even at near 400% reflect, I barely chip away at siege golems which tank the majority of my health in most of their abilities.

16

I remember Mike saying that there are some reflect tweaks coming with the next patch(es) on the discord.

17

The problem with the current reflect mechanic is that it is based on the damage you take after all your defensive layers.

That means the more protection you have, the lower the reflect damage because enemies do less damage to you.

You have to build on hp pool with less protections possible. This makes you very squishy. Actually this can be build on minions very well because you can scale minion hp way better than your own.

Reflect minion builds are viable.

No idea if they want to change the reflect mechanic to reflect damage before mitigation or make hp stacking more viable for that purpose.

18

Absolutely, and for mage hp stacking isn’t really an option as there is very little in the passive tree or skills to support it. I’m trying out armour and protections while channeling with leech - I can survive most things and quickly recover thanks to leech, but if nothing is proccing ‘hits’ on me, then I can retaliate and hit back to generate that leech.
%reflect needs to be pre-mitigation for sure!

19

They need to add more scaling mechanis to reflect builds.
For example scaling reflect damage with intellect.
Need to buff flat reflect affixes.
Maybe make some unics that support reflect damage.

20

the way I feel about it in its current state, reflect should just be a minion thing. when fully geared its amazing for necro, and forge guard.