Well Sarno’s closed the other thread to prune it, so I’d expect this one to get the same treatment…
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Thx mcmagic and i agree with fluffin & both. I wanted to write something simple without being antagonized
No worries I think this discussion has gotten a bit too heated on both sides, and has gotten unproductive because of it. Some time away from the thread to collect any remaining thoughts might be for the best for all who are actively engaged in the discussion at this point.
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I am having a great time!
Guys, the other thread was closed & then moderated by @Sarno, do you really want him to do the same to this one was well?
Too late; I’m already here. 
edit: It’s worth noting that the other thread is open again btw.
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This topic is temporarily closed for at least 4 hours due to a large number of community flags.
This topic was automatically opened after 4 hours.
Works like a carnival ride, right? 
I agree with Llama8 here, I think giving the classes themselves a defensive identity is the way to go. Sentinel focuses on armor, shield block, & maybe phy resist. Could get bonuses in these areas no other class gets. Same for the Mage, maybe greater focus on ward and elemental resists to go along with greater mobility options.
Now the classes to some degree already get these said options, but I mean going even greater into these areas with bonuses not otherwise obtainable other than unique/legendary gear. For example, the Paladin gets a natural 15% damage reduction on block for physical and fire damage types from the passive tree. Gets miffed someone scratched his shiny new shield and get damage buff on next attack after block while reducing cooldown on shield bash by 1 second or something etc…
The idea is to make these things noticeable and class defining. Most on kill effects are not noticed outside of movement speed and on kill effects in general are bad passive choices to give classes in most cases. These all should be changed to on hit, on block, on dodge, on crit, so on and so forth. I know I for one don’t want to spend precious points on passives that won’t work on the boss that doesn’t spawn adds to kill and proc it. On kill effects should only be on weapons and gear for the most part.
I also agree with Lizardirl post on defenses other than maybe the point on mob penetration. Game is in serious need of end game item lure at the moment. Its pretty easy to max out and all you have is rare chest/helm affixes(way too rare), and exalted items(might be too rare as well, or at least too many low level ones drop).
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There’s many aspects to defining a class identity as it relates to stats
- Available passives
- Available skills
- Opportunity costs
- Scaling
The first two are somewhat there. The defense rework had an impact on the last two and to be fair, some of the problems existed before the rework. There’s very little opportunity cost built into defensive stats. Double that up with scaling issues and it becomes monotone. Maxing resistances is relatively easy to do and you don’t get punished for it because you’re still able to invest in other defensive stats because 1) defensive stats are mixed between prefix and suffix - you can easily max non-elemental resistances and not pay the price since other defensive stats are in the suffix slots, and 2) everything except HP is hard capped or soft capped.
The counterargument is to consider offensive/utility affixes. You can max out all your defenses hard capped or soft capped, but what price are you paying via the offensive/utility affixes? How many build defining uniques can you wear? The conversation moves away from defensive stat balance to stat balance in general. Hard cap your resistances/crit avoidance, soft cap your armor/dodge -> how many slots does that take that could otherwise have gone to offensive affixes?
The somewhat easiest solution is to separate out prefix and suffix into offense and defense to force players to choose which stats to invest in. Probably brings in other problems to resolve though.
So is the question how many affixes should be dedicated to offense and defense? Should it be a 50/50 split? Should players be forced by game systems to go 80% defense? I’m not sure the answer myself, but curious to hear other peoples opinions. How do you make mobs challenging enough offensively and defensively while giving people complete freedom on how to build their character is a problem I’m glad I don’t have to tackle lol.
On kill effects are fine generally, but useless on bosses. PoE solved this by adding to each ‘on kill’ effect a secondary trigger of ‘% on hit vs rare/unique enemy’. So that the node/skill wasn’t useless where it is needed most, against bosses.
I think that’s where Lizard’s feedback comes into play. It seems the balance isn’t there one way or another.
I hate on kill effects. Every time I see one the first thing that comes to mind is “how often is this useless to me?” The second is “I cannot make a build that relies on this.” This is why I don’t use many of them.
As an aside, Erasing Strike is the worst offender ever. Almost its entire tree is either modifications to an on kill effect or adding on kill effects.
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Again there are some nice ideas in here but I still think number tweaks will do the trick.
As far as I understand pen it counts vs your resis no matter if these are 75% or overcapped at 150%. Should’nt everyone be fine by overcapping the resis by area level? ^^
Yeah I was fine with the 75% resists, but giving every enemy 75% resist penetration… That’s just awful. It feels awful, you do not feel tanky, you don’t feel like you have any defense or mitigation at all. It’s really terrible. What you should ACTUALLY do is make it so that the default cap is 75%, you can give some special enemies some penetration, but on average you don’t have penetration everywhere.
NOT ONLY THAT, but here’s the big problem with POE who basically use this system. 75% is mandatory, it is the mandatory minimum defensive layer. And it feels awful, you can’t really over gear your defense in a meaningful way besides a very few builds, if you want to play a tankier build. I would say, that in this system, make it so that the average amount of resists needed for a build to survive long enough to do its damage and get by is about 50%. But keep the cap at 75%. This way, if people want to invest MORE into defense at the cost of some offense, they can, if that feels good to them or interest them.
So in general cap resists at 75%, make the minimum resists you really need to get by 50% or so, make it so that everything just having a ton of penetration goes away, because that’s honestly awful and when I saw that I had a SERIOUS “WTF were they thinking” moment. Like I was convinced that this was some way that I was missing the meaning and that it wouldn’t interact that way, but no, it does, and that’s terrible.
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Please check what they posted about resistances and the area penetration:
One of the main reasons that we have avoided this system in the past is that having uncapped resistances is very punishing. It provides this knowledge gate for players that is often a hard learned lesson. The rate at which being uncapped affects the damage you take is also fairly unintuitive. Being even 25% below the cap will cause you to take double damage compared to someone at cap. It feels like you should only take 25% more damage but it’s actually 100% more. To counteract this, enemies have a 1% resistance penetration per level, scaling up to 75%. This resistance penetration is applied after the cap. This means that at level 75 and above, being 25% below capped resistance will only cause you to take 25% more damage. Damage dealt by all enemies has been reduced across the board with this new scaling in mind.
The area penetration was put in place precisely to counter act what you just described: making reaching the resist cap mandatory.
75% resist cap and being at 50% resist:
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Traditional system: you take 100% more damage being 25% below the resist cap.
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LE’s system: you take 25% more damage being 25% below the resist cap.
Here’s the equation as I understand it to be:
Let’s say a mob deals 1,000 damage
Damage taken is the following: damage - (damage x resist)
Old system: 1000 - (1000 x 75%) = 250
You have 50% resist. You’re 25% below the resist cap: 1000 (1000 x 50%) = 500 damage taken
You went from taking 250 damage with 75% resist to taking 500 damage with 50% resist. You’re below 25% the resist cap, but in reality you take 100% more damage.
LE’s system: 1000 - (1000 x [75% - 75%]) = 1000 damage
You have 50% resist. Below 25% the resist cap: 1000 - (1000 x [50% - 75%]) = 1250 damage taken
You went from taking 1000 damage with 75% resist to taking 1250 damage with 50% resist. You’re below 25% the resist cap, but in reality you take 25% more damage.
The percentage reduction stays true in LE’s system. You see in your sheet that you are at 50% resist instead of 75% resist. Right away you should think you take 25% more damage and that holds true for LE’s system. In the traditional system in reality you take 100% more damage just being below 25% the cap.
But if you look at the absolute numbers then you can argue you’d rather take 250 damage in the traditional system instead of the 1000 damage you take with LE’s system. But they also said this:
Damage dealt by all enemies has been reduced across the board with this new scaling in mind.
This means that technically maxing out your resistances isn’t mandatory. You can theoretically have no resistances and only take 75% more damage. In the old system if you had no resistances at all, you took 300% more damage. Taking 1000 damage with max resist would mean 250 damage. 1000 damage (true damage) is a 300% increase from taking 250 damage if you had maxed out your resists. Taking 300% more damage in any game is really terrible. Taking 100% more damage by being 25% below the cap is really terrible. With LE’s system you take 75% more damage by being 75% below the cap (0%).
Hope that makes sense. Never been good at explaining things.
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Yeaaaaaaah, that’s all completely irrelevent given the whole part where I said “balance around 50% being the expected amount of res” SO all of your math is invalid unfortunately. While it’s true that resistances and damage reduction actually scale in a non-intuitive manner, the point I’m making is, DON’T MAKE THE BARE MINIMUM BAR FOR SURVIVAL THE MAX ATTAINABLE SURVIVAL STATS. Make it in this point 66% of the max, that way, everyone can hit 50% those who want a more defensive style can go for 75%. (adjust the values on gear accordingly).
I don’t care about a knowledge gap. I really don’t. People will do one of 2 things based on decades of experience. One group of people will learn about all the mechanics and really increase their knowledge. The other group of people will happily play in complete ignorance figuring it out as they go if they bother to figure it out, not playing an optimized build, and generally just doing their own thing. There may be a small group of people who immediately quit, but I’ll be honest those type of people are probably not the type of people to pick up this game in the first place.
It’s not a knowledge gap. It’s a reading comprehension gap. My response is a direct response to your “…but giving every enemy 75% penetration… That’s just awful.” I just directly proved your statement wrong. What feels awful is taking double damage being only 25% below the cap. Taking 25% more damage for being 25% below the cap doesn’t feel bad. 50% > 25%.
You said make the default cap 75% without area penetration, but normalized at 50%. Which if done means you are advocating for a system where you’re heavily punished for not having max resistances. If you cap resist at 75% but make it such that you only really need 50% means that damage is trivialized for people who decide to max out resists.
And that doesn’t even get to the fact that your suggestion to normalize damage at 50% can be done with or without the area penetration LE put in place. So yes, what I explained is relevant as your suggestion can exist with or without area penetration.
Here’s a simpler way to explain things: area penetration was put in place to make it so that you don’t HAVE to max out resists. You can play the game at 50% if you so wish to. If max resist is required in the current patch, it means damage numbers in general are too high. They haven’t adjusted the numbers enough to function with the area penetration changes. You identified the problem but don’t understand the math so you came to the wrong conclusion.
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