Snowdrift boots changes/unique item balance changes should be less drastic

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Just thought I would mention this here as it seems to be a reoccurring theme for skill and item balance and it is alarming to me.

The unique boots ‘snowdrift’ used to be 2% frostbite effect per 10% freeze rate, instead of 2% cold pen last year. It appears that the unique effect was deemed to be too strong, and this change was made, however I believe this change was too drastic- in some (alot) of cases, this change resulted in a loss of 7/8th’s of the build’s damage, if a build was built around the frostbite interaction.

For reference, Lizard put together a cold dot spriggan form shaman last year using these boots, in the space of 3 days gearing, and was able to hit 600k dot ticks with frostbite on the dummy utilizing the snowdrift boots. For me, after gearing my cold dot spriggan shaman for 1.5 months, I have been able to hit 45k dot ticks on the dummy, with near-perfect gear/idols/blessings. This build, which is almost unplayed by the population as spriggan form is not even particularly strong or popular, lost more than 7/8th’s its damage.

I was aware I was playing a nerfed build for arena/content but I thought I would be able to make it work. On my first day back to the patch I did a single arena push to 480 waves which was good enough for 2nd on the ladder at the time, but the reality is that by wave 300 I wanted to just quit because I had no damage and it was boring.

I also decided to put together a swipe werebear in a single day, just pulling together bits and pieces of unoptimized gear from my stash. The cold dot spriggan, hitting the dummy non-stop for 30sec with all totems up stacking 300+ frostbite stacks on the dummy = 45k dot ticks. The werebear swipes once and its 50k crit, and hes swiping every 0.25sec or so.

Why would I even bother playing the former? I feel like I have completely wasted my time gearing up the cold dot spriggan. I also think sweeping changes on unique item balance like this which results in such drastic damage changes is very alarming, especially when a build/ all frostbite archeotypes loses 7/8th’s its damage from patch to patch. Someone doing the numbers behind the scenes would have seen how drastic a nerf changing frostbite effect into frostbite pen would be, and I don’t think changes like this are healthy going forward.

We don’t get buffs to skill damage 8 fold in single patches, so why nerfs of this scale on unique item balance are okay? They could have changed it from 2% frostbite effect to 1% frostbite effect, it would have halved the damage, which is already a big change, and then waited and seen how it performed for a single patch first.

I don’t see how we will achieve healthy build/item balance if changes are so polar drastic like this. I also had interest in doing frostbite dot setups on different builds, like the glacier mage, but I think the state of frostbite boots are so bad now that it would not work on any build.

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Agreed, I despise the GGG way of balancing aka nerfing whatever is performing well into oblivion, opposed to making shit skills feel good. I get it though, it is a lot less work doing a couple nerfs compared to doing a large rebalancing.

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Thats not a unique change to snowdrift, so it wasnt actually a targeted nerf.

thats a change that happened to all effect items, and passives! Ailment effect got deleted and replaced by Pen as an entire ailment system rework.

And yes, its bad and nerfs most ailments by a minimum of like 15-20%

Ailment Rework a Failure? - #8 by Metal_Bawkses more reading on a recent thread talking about it.

Tldr; DoT still strong, but most ailments doodoo.

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This was not a targeted nerf. Its part of the global ailment rework.

The result was that average/sub-part builds became very bad. The strongest ailments builds dropped to average.

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Ah finally someone tried maxing it. My testing with around 1500 Freeze multi was around 35-40k frostbite ticks so I feel better about giving up on it.

For a bit of a better comparison, my spell damage spriggan shaman setup Shaman, Level 98 (LE Beta 0.9.1) - Last Epoch Build Planner gets 80-100k Maelstrom ticks.

It isn’t just unique item balance, most ailment builds got slashed with the Ailment rework(NERF). Patch 0.9 nerfed ailments on fast hitting skills like Spirit thorns which are now actively BAD for ailments because you don’t have large more multiplier nodes increasing the damage. Conversely, slow hitting/ cooldown skills aren’t any better since they’re inherently bad for ailments and lost another form of scaling(eg: Forge strike, even with 250% bleed pen it deals less damage than 2 seconds of rive/warpath). Ailments now only have 3 multipliers: more damage, increased damage and penetration and needs all 3 to deal decent damage, more damage is the rarest (usually only found in the skill tree).

Skills like Smite, Javelin, Warpath, Hungering Souls all have large more multipliers in their skill tree so they’re fine. Ailment builds aren’t fully dead, just boring, same as hit based but worse since damage takes time and unmodifiable base.

I was hoping for the Ailment change to get reversed this patch but sadly doesn’t seem to be happening.

Personally I hate this change since it just dampens build variety and means a skill without more multipliers is just filler/mana generator. Making things less complicated is a poor excuse.

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No, they got rid of every “ailment effect” and replaced it with penetration in 0.9. Apparently it was “too confusing”. On paper it’s a reasoble change because they’re both more multipliers, unfortunately most builds have some form of pen/shred already so its not quite 1:1. I’m surprised I/everyone else gas to tell you that? I would have expected an alpha gamer such as yourself would have compulsively read up on changes.

It would only be 7/8ths the damage if your build had a massive amount of pen/shred, which i don’t think exists in-game (& I cant be arsed to try and work it out on my phone).

That has always been the case. Skills with more more multipliers will always do more than those with fewer & they get inherited by ailments, so for ailment builds you want high hits per sec as well as as many separate more multipliers as possible.

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Yes, it was the same before as well but previously(pre 0.9) you could compensate for lack of more multipliers by stacking ailment effect and still make a strong build. Eg:

  1. The example here of Frostbite Spirit thorns(Spriggan form) which had barely any more multipliers in its skill tree.
  2. Old Serpent Strike had 0 more multipliers for poison in its tree but was still one of the most solid poison builds thanks to %effect from viper.
  3. Ignite Fireball used to be strong and in older videos you can see it getting 150-200K DoT ticks on the dummy(with all the ignite effect uniques). Now it can barely do 50K.
  4. Bleed Shurikens had almost no more multipliers in its skill tree yet was strong with its high bleed chance support and effect from Salt the Wound.

These builds were all pretty viable options on par with ailment builds that had more multipliers. All of these and more were gutted by the changes. Even meme stuff like Ignite Earthquake+Swipe was nerfed as collateral damage.

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This is part of the ailments rework. Ailment effect went into ailment pen, all ailments got severely nerfed, I believe poison and frostbite got the worst part for different reasons.

One of the worst reworks ever, nobody asked for it. The ailment game isn’t any less confusing, but it is more boring to build into. Many DoT-related decent uniques went into the “why bother” area, actively going against their “we will give more power to items somehow over time” motto. If they follow this trend (and we were told this could be happening), removing increased vs flat crit, I’m out of this game.

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True, but at the same time I feel like some people make it look way worse than it actually is. Of all of my ~35 characters just over half of them are ailment builds and they are still among the strongest of all I’ve ever played. For example, I just finished my Cold DoT Swarmblade. In shorter fights (e.g. while clearing monos) it is on par with my Lightning Crit Swarmblade - both builds have similar powerful gear - while in longer fights (bosses) it outclasses the Lightning Swarmblade by a mile. The same applies to pretty much all of my DoT Sentinels.
It’s true that you have to invest way more into those builds to get them to a decent level now. In my experience, since the rework, non-ailment/crit builds are usually easier to gear for but ailment ones have the higher damage potential, once properly geared. Some builds, that barely worked before the rework, don’t cut it anymore but those are the minority as far as I can tell. Another benefit is that they don’t care about the Crit Avoid mono modifier.

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TBH, they could keep the nerf to poison shred stacking & revert everything else about The Great Ailment Nerfening. Maybe reduce the % effect numbers if they wanted to make ailments a bit less effective.

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Don’t get me wrong, the nerf itself was healthy, especially with poison, if anything maybe it swing a bit too much. But far from “ailments are worthless now”. My problem more than anything is with the horrible idea of removing ailment effect, and they destroyed some uniques and specific combos in the process.

Exactly this. Or any similar approach. Tame values a bit, adjust here and there, remove infinite shred from poison etc. But the effect as penetration is really not my cup of tea.

Anyways is just a rant, I doubt they will rollback these changes at this point.

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its not the end of the world, most ailment builds still do work. they are just far weaker.

I disagree with you that “well its not the majority” DoT sentinels in particular dont mind losing 25% damage, since they already did 2x or more damage then everyone else thanks to VR.

We all know VR giving 150%+ enemy damage taken to DoT is eventually gonna get the can, and when it does those DoT builds are going to be in the gutter.

Ailments as a whole were never a strong build, as matter of fact before the ailment rework people were constantly clamoring for ignite buffs. Bleed/Poison were the only good ailment builds. Heck frostbite was only a thing thanks to snowdrifts, and now poison/frostbite suffered and now the only real contender for ailment builds is bleed.

It just feels bad because I dont think anyone thought ailments other then poison needed to be nerfed.

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No, I did not read up on patch notes and I was unaware of the ailment rework that happened in the past year. I took an extended break along with most other people (I think?) before the 0.9 patch as there was nothing happening for a long time.

I understand now that it wasn’t a specific change to the unique snowdrift boots but more a rework to ailments as a whole, I guess to address some things like poison being too strong because it stacked pen forever?

Reguardless, it still feels to me like the ailment rework changes were still focused on ‘nerfing’ a specific build/archeotype of builds (poison I guess) and perhaps the bleed manifest armour build, and everything else that was already performing okay got hit really hard, among them frostbite and ignite.

I still think this focus on ‘bringing into line’ builds that are performing too well without really having the balance counterpoint of also ‘bringing up to the line’ builds that were performing poorly being overlooked, in this case, alot of builds that were perhaps closely on the line where they wanted them fell off big time.

It is still a big balancing act though, trying to find somewhat fair balance across a game that has so many variables might be an almost impossible task.

Although I just wanted to share my feedback on what my experience was, which was a negative one.

I have never pushed into arena, and then wanted to just suicide myself / leave when I knew I could push so far further, because of boredom from having no damage and having to ‘wait’ 30-45seconds on every rare mob while I waited for it to die while permafrozen. And the fact that I knew I had just put a level 89 werebear together a day before, in unoptimized gear, random blessings, no LP uniques crafted yet, hell it was even the wrong damage type weapon (void) instead of cold/lightning which would scale with my relic/gear mods better, was already performing better on day 1 in terms of damage over a build that I had reoptimized skill wise and gear wise, obtained perfect 3LP T7 legendary gear, near-perfect idols and blessings.

There has to be something wrong with that picture and all I took away from it was, that I needed to be VERY very careful of what build I choose to develop in the endgame in the future. Because ultimately I feel like I actually have wasted alot of time on the spriggan, and that is a shame, especially when I was somewhat enjoying myself for a lot of its progression.

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It happened in 0.9, nothing happened in the year pre-0.9 because it was all hands to the pumps gettin mp done.

That was one of the changes, but not actually affected (much) by the change from effect to penetration. As I said in my post, I think their reasoning behind the change from effect to pen was because effect was “too complicated”. Maybe @EHG_Kain could confirm.

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Correct - The change to snowdrift was not a change directed at snowdrift, but a change to “ailment effect”. We had a brief write-up about this here: September 2022 Development Update

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