For another example, the old anvil stance nodes in Forge guard(available to all Sentinel) were a solid 25% less damage taken for a 25% less damage dealt. They were still very rarely used in this manner (the only use case I remember was Physical Rive that had an infinitely stacking damage and could afford the less damage dealt).
You’ll still need skills that have enough damage multipliers to offset the less damage dealt and ideally a way to bypass the less attack speed.
It’s a lot more common than you think, resist shred is used quite widely. Ailments have a lot of penetration now due to the change from ailment effect and the conviction passive as well as the recent change to lethal strikes gives a bunch of pen to Forgeguards
Sooo that’s what I’m saying if you read my full comment, you have to figure out specs that can bypass the downside or have damage multipliers that can work around it.
Forged weapons with the current skilltree don’t have enough multipliers to justify going with a 2h+shield. Manifest armor on the other hand does and can also be buffed by the shield (Flayer’s Pride would be strong assuming the phys pen works for MA).
Sure, I agree with you on most things. I guess I was just mostly trying to point out the difference between this and the damage taken penalty for dual wield (and likely failing).
While you could argue that simply using a second weapon is already enough penalty for losing a shield, in this case that wouldn’t apply. If there were no penalties, there wouldn’t be any reason not to pick up a 2h weapon always.
So they tried to balance things out where you could find ways to make a 2h weapon work, but also in a way that using a 1h could also be worth it. It’s a hard line to balance, but I’m sure they’ll keep an eye on the numbers and adjust as necessary.
If you introduce a new thing and it’s not that strong, people just ignore it. Then, when you buff it up, they’ll use it.
If you introduce a new thing and it’s crazy bonkers broken, people will use it (almost exclusively, that’s how meta works) and then everyone will cry out when it’s nerfed.
I just don’t get the point in putting effort into making uniques with cool effects if nobody is gonna use them. If they were gonna go back and buff them up after they saw people didn’t use them that’d be one thing, but there are a bunch of uniques that have been useless for a long time now.
Also, as far as negative experiences go: Not everyone is gonna is gonna just ignore these items. Sometimes people will get baited into trying to make them work then just get frustrated that they don’t do anything after spending a lot of time investing into them.
Also, not a competitive game. There’s no reason they absolutely need to nerf something if it’s fun. Or at least they don’t need to nerf it right away. Also, there are tons of uniques like this. If all of them were strong it’s not like suddenly we have no variety in the meta. There would actually be a lot of choices.
What is fun? For some people, if an item would let them farm 10k corruption, that would be fun. For others, that would be boring.
If most items were broken OP because they didn’t balance them properly, the game would be too boring and most people would play just a few days at a time, like D4.
Yes, just like there are a bunch of masteries that are still subpar. Balance is tricky to achieve and you have to bring stuff up carefully. Otherwise we get warlock/falconer all over again. This does take some time to achieve.
That’s fair. But people that use noob bait will always be much less than people that jump on the OP meta bandwagon.
For the sake of argument, the 2h slot also allows you to use the set shard planned in the OP. The only real discussion at that point should be to shield or not. Is the defense from the shield worth doing less damage than not having a shield?
I think the answer to that might depend on how the DoT nerfs turn out. Having played the double shield FG last season, I can say that being super tanky against hits is very nice, but it still doesn’t do shit when you run into a puddle and hey guess what half the instant kill things on Abberoth are “Damage Over Time.” The time period being like one second.
But if DoTs are just a reasonable source of pressure rather than something that just kills you outright, then taking a shield seems like it’d be super worth it as long as you could invest enough into block/block effect. I suppose that’s the other issue, for the build, are you gonna have the affixes available to run block stuff? idk what you need for the Forged Weapons Build proposed and at least some of the slots are going to be taken up by the set affixes.
Yeah, I’m the same with uniques that are less likely to drop than the age of the universe.
There is, it’s called balance & challenge. And yes, I know that LE is a very long way from balanced.
There could be, yes, though if you then didn’t use any of said uniques your build would be somewhat under performing & you’d start to move towards a D3 scenario where the only “viable” builds are ones that use specific uniques (or sets in D3’s case) & anything else has a lot of difficulty with the game because said uniques are ubiquitously used so the devs balance the mobs around that.
And EHG further complicated their balance conversation with LP.
That said, if they consciously said, “we’re never balancing around LP”, then I’m wrong.
Regarding useless uniques; I wish they had on their checklist of things to do; check usage of uniques, review those that are never used. I’m talking end game here, because I think during leveling, folks just cram whatever in, so it being used isn’t really a good indicator of whether it’s crap or not… heh, although if a unique is available from an early level, and its’ never used, top of the list!
My point is more that if something is even slightly above average in a competitive game everyone will flock to it and if something is slightly bellow average it will essentially never get played. So it’s absolutely essential to be on top of balance both speedily and precisely. In that context, yes, underpowered things are less of a problem than OP things because they don’t negatively affect the people not playing them whereas OP builds affect everyone.
In a single player game though, balance is a bit more wishy washy. Nothing anyone else does will affect you directly, so the only way the overall balance will impact you is what build you are currently playing and how the difficulty of the content is balanced.
Unlike a competitive game where the difference between a 49% WR and a 51% WR is enough to change everything, the band of acceptable builds in a single player ARPG is much wider and is determined by the difficulty of the content.
As long as the content isn’t balanced around them, OP builds aren’t a problem for people playing average builds. Obviously long term if they brought the difficulty up to meet the OP builds instead of bringing them down, it would be a problem, but as long as long as they don’t do that, it’s fine.
If anything, underpowered builds are the bigger problem than OP builds. If there’s an OP build, for some people that will be fun, for others they might decide it trivializes things too much so they avoid it. After a season they nerf it. Some people are sad, but as long as they didn’t kill it they should be fine.
But in ARPGs builds are the content. Every dead end build that can’t do enough to be worth playing at all is just missing content. My stash is a graveyard of stillborn dreams and promises when it should be full of creative potential.
Unless you’re in MG, in which case it does.
OP and meta builds shift the economy, not only by making some items more expensive simply for being more popular, but also by flooding the market with more items than a non-meta build can.
So a non-meta build can’t afford to buy the good items because they’re being used by the meta ones, nor can it find many items for their build, because everyone wants to sell the gear for the meta builds, since those are the ones that sell for a lot.
And half the playerbase is MG. So balance is very important and overperforming builds affect players more than underperforming ones do in this case.
Nope. People still trying to sell a lot of these offmeta items, even for 0 gold. And offmeta lp3 may outweigh more popular lp1 item in MG just because of it’s price
With a T7 block chance on Bulwark of the Lost Abyss and the block related passives + blessing you can get a solid amount of block chance with a decent 36% damage reduction from block like so: https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/Bxmabedo perfect rolls will reach 100% block cap and otherwise the remainder can be got from skills like Sigils of hope(if the nodes still there after its rework), Shield bash(remove its horrible cd tho), Ring of Shields or any source of Haste(and ring/glove affixes too ofc). You can combine 2-3 of the above options till you slam T7 block on a Bulwark. At 36% this would basically be equivalent to 100% glancing blow on a rogue of course you can get more but this is already pretty solid on fairly low investment. The melee crit multi from apocalypse should also be useful.
Yup, absolutely! Even if the difference in power is miniscule it’ll be pounced on (yes, there is some hyperbole here, but not as much as I wish there were).
It is, but it’s also really hard. And the more variables/dimensions the greater the difficulty. I, for one, am very glad that I don’t have to balance interesting/complex aRPGs.
Yeah, I can get that viewpoint.
That’s the problem though, for people who are addicted to the meta, even a small or justified nerf does kill the build. We’ve seen this particular reaction for years in PoE.
Bingo, they really need to have more interactions and let people break the game. Which is when you really have fun.
Yea this annoys me with Fire Aura and the 1 sec CD on everything. Which makes it impossible to ever play a Fire Aura build because you can’t generate any stacks reliably. They need to remove this, let players get 50, 60 or a 100 stacks.
Yea that happened from classes like Sorc where it’s just stack Int and it does like 15 different things to make your build work. Then Mana which interacts with everything else.
And yet players need 3-4LP items. Build guides have 3-4LP items. In the end the LP system needs an overhaul. Also the slamming process, should be a way to reslam, trade, shatter LP and more. There should be a Legendary forge you unlock that appears at the end of time or next to the new woven crafting bench. Instead of wasting players time 100 of times every season making them do a dungeon just to craft. It’s an outdated process.
