Ailment application/shred/Bone Curse/etc on slower hit per second builds is much, much lower. Applications/procs are based on hits per second, and where some builds can apply 50 stacks in 1 second, some struggle to do 5. This means that many affixes, spells, and skill nodes are defunct for those builds, thus reducing build variety and creativity.
I suggest that ailment/Shred or any proc in the game based on per hit should be balanced around its hits per second.
It feels like I’m penalised for not building around hits per second. This change or something akin to it would encourage me to try out builds that do fewer but bigger hits instead of aiming for ridiculous hits per second to enable Shred Armour stacking etc.
For example on a Hungering Souls 3 minion Lich, I am doing approx 7 hits per second and thus 7 triggers of Bone Curse. A minion focused Necromancer can apply upwards of 60 procs in the same time period, thus making this skill much less viable for my build. While I understand that some skills will inherently be better for some builds over others, I feel like encouraging as much build variety as possible is a good thing. If Bone Curse’s damage scaled based on the damage of the hit received, this would be a “best of both” solution that wouldn’t nerf Necromancer, while enabling the Hungering Soul Lich to make better use of a whole other skill.
Yes, the on-hit affixes are somewhat larger when on a 2h, though IMO they could do with being a bit higher as it’s “numerically better” to get 2x affixes on dual wielding than 1 on a 2h.
More expensive skills or skills with a cooldown I would expect to have both higher added damage effectiveness along with higher % procs.
I am afraid that this will not change the situation, since even with a two-handed weapon, gaining speed will also remain the most effective way to implement stacks.
To be honest, I do not understand how this system can be implemented, but I think this is a question for the mechanics itself.
Yeah, I believe D3 worked around this by giving each skill a modifier to proc rates, so faster weapons/skills had lower modifiers so they proc’d less often per hit but hit more frequently to balance it out.
While this assuages the problem a bit for attack builds, it does not make a difference for spell builds, nor for Bone Curse. The problem here is mostly spells/skills that hit very rapidly vs. ones that don’t. Or specialisations that encourage rapid hits vs. ones that don’t.
To respond to your specific point however, let’s look at Chance to Shock affixes on weapons.
One-Handed Sword
Chance to Shock on Hit - added
+(18% to 21%)
+(23% to 28%)
+(30% to 35%)
+(35% to 40%)
+(42% to 53%)
+(67% to 81%)
+(82% to 105%)
Two-Handed Sword
Chance to Shock on Hit - added
+(32% to 38%)
+(42% to 51%)
+(54% to 64%)
+(64% to 74%)
+(77% to 96%)
+(122% to 147%)
+(150% to 192%)
So you are correct, and while a 2H has approx 80-100% more ailment chance, like Duminant says, you’re still highly incentivised to use attack speed stacking on a faster weapon.
It shouldn’t make any difference between attack builds & spells since spells can benefit from cast speed (obviously) to hit faster compared to attack builds that use attack speed (& the weapon’s implicit) to hit faster. Conceptually there’s no difference between the two.
I highlighted D3’s way around this above, not sure if it’s the best way, but it’s certainly a way round this particular problem.
And without normalising the proc rates via a hidden modifier on skills you’re never going to get away from that if you have things that have a duration that can’t be reset.
Another way would be to go PoE’s route & have ailment duration reset on the next hit but cap everything to 1 stack & then balance the power of that 1 stack to get back to where the devs want the power of the ailment to be. This would be a way to “solve” the current “problem” though IMO it’d be a boring one since there’s already a game that does this (PoE).
I would rather have a mechanic that automatically scales the effectiveness depending on the attack speed gained.
But the problem here is that the game has a very large number of such mechanics, not only various sores and debuffs, but also a system of wards per hit.
For example, a skill is enhanced by 4% of some characteristic (for example, strength).
And then make the skill increase (or weaken) depending on the attack speed.
The problem is not this per se, it’s about many skills/spells/builds/weapon types that are inherently less viable than others due to their slowness.
Let me give you an example:
If I cast Hungering Souls 5 times a second and have 3 minions that also attack 1 time per second, I apply 8 ailment stacks per second.
If I have 35 minions and cast Hungering Souls 5 times a second, I apply 40 ailment stacks a second.
Another one:
If I use Flurry with an +attack speed build (Adrenaline Rush etc) and two 1 handers dual wielded and attack 20 times a second, I apply 20 stacks of ailments/shred a second.
If I use Cinder Strike with a 2H (which has less possibility for +attack speed), I might be attacking 5 times a second and thus applying 5 ailment/shred stacks a second.
This MASSIVELY affects the viability of certain skills, classes, and weapons. It makes certain skills have very little ailment viability, even though they may have nodes that are intended to incentivise building around ailments, and without anything else to compensate. Due to the immense power of Shred, it makes skills that should feel powerful feel weak. It makes many mechanics in the game significantly and inherently worse than others just by the nature of them being slow. If I want to be a big beefy dude who hits really slowly, I am penalised for that. I am incentivised with all builds to add +hits per second specifically, rather than investing in what might be more interesting for my build. This is detrimental to creativity and variety.
I think it could be wonderful to have a solution like in D3.
Certain skills would need to be specifically balanced of course. I imagine there’s lots of creative solutions!
WoW’s trinkets for example, many of them have proc chance / attack speed. So if you’re using Dragonspine Trophy (haste on hit) with a fast weapon, it has a lower proc chance, but with a lower speed weapon it has a higher proc chance.
This is a common problem/balancing point in RPGs, it has been dealt with countless times before, I reckon there’s lots of ways of dealing with it. Many of them quite simple and I’d hope wouldn’t be too difficult to implement.
Most fast hitting skills (like Flurry for example) already have a reduced ailment frequency.
While flurry is still a very good skill for ailments, I think it’s pretty balanced.
I think we should have something like a higher ailment frequency on some inherently slower or expensive skills, like Forging Strike, Erasing Strike or Meteor.
So for exaple Meteor could have 200% Ailment Frequency, meaning that with 100% chance to shock on hit, you would apply two stacks of shock.
I think balancing skills vs. weapons is more important.
For me it’s ok if some weapon types are superior in certain regards, like DW for ailment builds.
Fantastic and proactive response. I love the suggestion! I did not know that about Flurry.
I love the idea of giving certain skills +ailment frequency. Especially considering it’s already a modifier in the game, it seems an elegant solution.
There are still some complexities to work out, like with the 3 minion build vs. 35 minion build I mentioned, we can’t just give Hungering Souls more ailment frequency, as both builds would benefit from this and the disparity remains the same. We need a factor that is on the side of the monster receiving the ailment, perhaps. A mechanical change to ailments themselves.
You might say “well, some builds are better than others at applying ailments”, and I’m completely happy for that to be the case, but the disparity can be ENORMOUS. And with the power of Shred in particular (-5000-6000 armour isn’t unreasonable to achieve as it lasts 4 seconds), this feels even larger.
Resistance Shred on the other hand has a cap. Though this is still a very powerful modifier for faster attack builds.
Yeah I think it’s a pretty new mechanic, which certainly hasn’t been applied to older skills yet.
Yeah Armour shred is very strong and can create some really crazy edge cases, but it’s also important to remember, that even though Armour Shred doesn’t have a hard cap, it has very heavy diminishing return.
To just throw some numbers out(lvl 100 area):
8 Stacks; 800 Armour; ~20% inc. phy dmg taken
22 stacks; 2200 armour; ~40% inc. phy dmg taken
44 stacks; 4400 armour; ~60% inc. phy dmg taken
And there are tools to make armour shred siginificantly better for “slower” skills/builds, like increased duration and increase armour shred effectiveness.
Both of these stats will also help fast hitting builds too, but they help slow hitting builds more, to close the gap, because of the diminishing return.
Yup, it’s a direct more multiplier and worht for any build, especially if you don’t have an penetration.
None of this is to counter-act the point you brought up, especailly the whole minion thing I cannot comment on, since I am no minion expert and never liked playing minions anyway.
That is already the case, if an ability does get %inc damage from attributes, ailments applied by that ability do more damage based on that attribute scaling.
Yea, but those attribute damage scaling for ailments are a lot inferior than to just stack att speed which means all ailments atm scale primarily on att speed, attribute being the bonus.
Conceptually, I was thinking something more of some ailment scaling primarily on attribute(low stack), other primarily on att speed(high stack). Gives each ailments more identity(I have a thread about this last time for example. I think you have read it, Heavy).
The problem with this approach would be, that you currently can stack both rate of application and attributes.
There needs to be some way to make ailments exclusively scale with one of each or make attributes, application chances and cast/attack speed competing with each other.
Theoretically if dps was the same for fast attack and slow attack builds attack speed would become obsolete. It would be a dead affix because you invest nothing to be a slow build but invest into attack speed to be a fast build, there is no afflix for slower attacks. More creative solutions would have to be implemented. Such as if fast speed builds were able to apply more ailments slow attack builds should have something different that complements them. Of course this wouldn’t help anyone wanting a slower ailment build.
Some off the top ideas:
Gaining more stun chance or duration per ailment on targets increasing in % as the slower you hit such that fast paced builds get close to zero bonus.
Adding an ever increasing knockback or pull in to attacks increasing in strength the slower you hit.
Since faster builds apply ailments more quickly having something like higher crit chance or crit dmg based on how few ailments a target has. Any skill, talent or item that gives this bonus should also give guarented ailment on hit so you either focus on attack speed and get value off the ailment side or value slower speeds to get value off crit side.
Having ailments frontloaded like the first few stacks do more than the last few stacks but never going to zero value, such that 50 stacks still do the same as now but 5 stacks do a lot more. This might help those wanting to do a slower ailment build but have some unforseen sideeffects I’m sure just can’t think of it now.
Giving an extra bonus, like a kill threshold or sth, to skills that haven’t damaged a target in the last x seconds. So weaving in or slow paced skills would benefit from whatever bonus is decided and fast paced attacks won’t. This bonus could be anything from more dmg to higher crit to applying more ailment stacks multiplicatively.
Not necessarily. Diminishing returns on attack speed (going from 0% to 1% is more impactful than from 100% to 101%) would mean that eventually attributes would give you more damage than more attack speed. Though where that break point is would also depend on how much % increased damage you character has.
