An excellent post by someone who demonstratively knows this game as a player. One just has to look at the Ladder to know.
I have already experienced your end-game concerns and I barely have two characters in the 90’s. Your suggestions regarding having something worth grinding for are spot on and have been mentioned a few times in roundabout ways in other threads. Things have become much easier in 7.10 but the end-game around gearing, uniques, exalted and all those “holy crap” godlike items that aRPGs lure us in to grind another hour, another day, another month are not there. I had not considered it, but your comment about farming 2000 hours for 500hp struck a nerve and made me think of all the MMoRPGs that I have quit when I realised how much it would take for minimal improvements to my character.
Your future suggestions echo lots of what other players have said but come with the weight of your experience and knowledge to back them up. I am pretty certain EHG will be reading this and taking note of any discussions in this thread. They would be doing the game & themselves a disservice if they do not.
Thanks for this… The game can only get better if people like you care enough to give this level of quality feedback.
The new defence system has a lot of potential. Though it is far to easy to cap of resistances. Well I thought it was till I watched what happened ad you level up!
Started a new Sentinel. At level 8 I had gotten 86% Resistance in everything. I was amazed, it made those early levels easy as mobs couldn’t touch you. But as there is no growth from that, and the increased penetration that mobs get, by the time he reached level 40 he is starting to get some big hits. Even though he is investing heavily into armour, health and block via the skills and their synergy.
Though I have yet to reach any endgame stuff, as I am still running the campaign. I can see at level 100 with 120% resistance (To counter shred) 50% block, 50% armour. That he is going to die every few minutes.
So what started off great becomes a “Why did I level this?”
-Armour diminishing returns needs to be made less demanding than it is.
-Resistance cap, could do with a way to boost beyond the 75% mark.
-Block. Would be nice to be able to craft this onto other items, other than shield. You already have a unique 2h sword with block.
Very well written post highlighting your concerns and proposing ways that the system might be improved.
In particular I think your point about exalted items not being exciting (for defense stats) is a big deal. One suggestion I have is for exalted affixes to be able to gain secondary effects. e.g. if you had an exalted set necrotic/poison T6 maybe it could give +1 max necrotic/poison resistance and T7 would give +2. This could also be applied to other affixes like HP, dodge, armor, etc where T6 and T7 could add a % increase to their stats similar to the hybrid HP affix. Perhaps damage stats could give 1-2% penetration to their elements at exalted tiers.
This type of change in particular would make the endgame GG gear chase feel impactful.
Another extremely strong point you make is about the diminishing returns on armor and dodge. From what I’ve seen it’s easy to get around 1000 armor (~25% DR) on most characters without investing into it on gear. If you decide to invest you’ll most likely get around 4000 armor (42% DR) unless you’re a strength stacking class. It should be expected that strength stacking classes have more of an armor identity and this is a good thing, but IMO the diminishing returns on armor hit too hard too quickly. In effect it means most characters end up ignoring armor and being happy with the 16-25% DR they get from it for free.
Dodge is also affected by this where it’s pretty easy to hit 50% by slapping dodge suffixes on your gear, but it’s hard to get much more than that unless you ignore everything else. However my thoughts on dodge are different than armor. For armor I believe the current formula makes even early investment feel too weak and specifically it shouldn’t have such harsh diminishing returns. When it comes to dodge I believe you get too much dodge chance % early on too easily and that the formula should be more linear than it is. Lower the initial slope and make diminishing returns kick in later. The effect of this would be an overall nerf, but it would mean you can’t just always use dodge as a no-brainer defense layer (as it is currently) because it’s so easy to get that 40-50% dodge chance.
Wait until you make an endgame block build before you say it should be buffed. You can already get to 100% block chance for 50% additional mitigation from block effectiveness on sentinel. Though along with your point I wouldn’t be opposed to block being slightly more available in general (for other classes) and the passives and skill effects giving less block for sentinel.
Not to mention the more flat HP you build and the more % HP you get, the stronger they make each other. Why would you gear on diminishing returns stats (after reaching the sweet spot), when HP just gets better the more you get.
Problem is, it HP does not get much better either xD
I’m not entirely sure I agree with your comments about how everybody must cap resists. @Khastro did some numerical analysis here and just going resists isn’t necessarily the only way to do it.
That said, I do like the idea of trying to mix things up a bit so different classes get different bonuses to defences (over & above how much resists they get on their passive tree) & I think that would be a good idea to try & change how people gear.
Maybe the Sentinel gets +5% max void & fire resist, the Mage gets +3% max ele resists, the Primalist gets +5% max cold & lightning resist & the Acolyte gets +5% necrotic & poison.
Maybe certain classes can get more resist off their tree than they can currently (Spellblade doesn’t have much, Sentinel can get quite a lot, especially if they take Devouring Orb).
Maybe they should add more affix slots to the gear (6, ala PoE) but get rid of the set resist affixes?
I think ward could do with some more gearing options as implicits rather than just an offhand, some of the chest/helm implicits were a good start, but what about some high end bases that have no armour but “lots” (TBC) of ward per second? And add ward per sec as an offhand suffix & mage helm/chest suffix.
Maybe the dodge classes (currently kinda only the Primalist, but presumably the Rogue) could get reduced dodge effectiveness (ie, take some damage on a dodge) but reduced damage on non-dodge hits.
Hi, Lizard! I want to thank you for taking the time to make such an in depth post with your thoughts on these updates. I will make sure that the design team reads over this post and bring it up in one of our upcoming meetings. As all things in Epoch, your feedback is greatly appreciated and we do try to read and consider as much of it as we can between development sprints
Hard to take the info in their post as conclusive when it doesn’t include set resistance affixes. You can get capped resistances with skill and passive effects (see fire shield, devouring orb, shaman mastery, etc), set affixes, and blessings fairly easily in addition to stacking ALL of the hp affixes on your gear. Even if you build for straight hp there’s no reason not to take resistances to increase your overall EHP.
If max hp & some resists is also viable, why did you say that every class’ goal is to cap resists?
If you accept that the post I linked to was reasonable (if not an exhaustive mathematical modelling of whether hp was an optimal strategy) then it’s a valid path to get max hp from gear & then get what resists you can elsewhere. Which is not what you said above.
You cap resistances and all capped stats from wherever you can, then all HP, all classes.
You build hp on every suffix, period.
If you use your siffixes to build prots, then you are making a mistake, as you will lose the slots for HP. Its not that hard to understand. Prefixes dont take HP slots.
I read Lizards main post to say exactly that. Every characters goal is to cap resistances and then stack as much hp as they can (though he adds in other defense layers like dodge and amor at their easy to reach sweet spots).
Some characters can get away with being a full glass cannon and don’t get affected by the defense changes at all (e.g. bone curse lich).
But that’s not what I suggested. I suggested that you could do it the other way round, fill out your defensive affix slots with hp then get resists/dodge/etc where you can.
The order is there cuz one is EASIER than the other, not better. And you can always do both.
Why the fuck are we arguing about this, end of the day, u go for prots and HP for everyone lamao
