The shields of the bosses

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21

Time to introduce… drum-rolls

…Aberroth!

Your 300 boss currently.

300 is the expected end-line currently.

Everything else is up to balancing.

Well, shot themselves in the foot with that I would say :stuck_out_tongue:
Does jack for it.
All it does is making it atrocious for the lower end. I’m stopped by random deaths in content and not by bosses, they melt.

Mission failed I would say.

Once again: Raise the power of too weak builds. Add health. All good. Problem solved.

Pinnacle eater of world or exarch of fire in Path of Exile tell a different story.
Uber-traveler in Torchlight Infinite also tells a different story.
Uber-Lillith also does in D4.

None of them has become irrelevant yet.
As a live-service developer it is your task to upkeep that status quo at every moment so you don’t need a half-assed mechanic which doesn’t work doing it for you.

That’s literally your job in providing a diablo-clone live-service game.

After spending 750 hours instead of 100 hours in low content to get their upgrade to then progress the next 1500 hours through content the others passed in barely 150 hours.

Yes, true.

The further you go the more severe that split gets naturally.

22

Right, but if you can get up to 600c, then it’s to be expected that the 300c Aberroth is a non-issue and the 600c version is your new baseline.

Problem isn’t solved though, because what’s making those too weak builds weak? Is it a singular skill they’re using? What about the gear? If they buff X skill, how does that affect the already OP builds that use it for a niche interaction? Is it a node in the skill that’s bugged that’s making the build too weak, if they fix that what about the builds that used the same skill with different nodes and are suddenly op? Etc. Adding more health doesn’t fix this issue as the OP builds will continue to be op. Whereas adding ward that decays at an increasing rate the longer they’re alive does. Replace “ward” with “temporary HP” the boss now has more health like you want but that extra health decays over time so the lower end builds that aren’t meta aren’t punished as much while the OP Meta breaking builds aren’t deleting bosses (or shouldn’t be, they are anyway since the system needs tweaked.)

I’ll take your word for it because I don’t play any of those. I did glance at Uber Lilith and she seems to have some genuinely cool mechanics but the site mentioned that her damage was nerfed so she doesn’t OHKO everyone and a lot of her mechanics can just be ignored now if you have the stats for it.

This is all extremism. It wouldn’t take someone 750 hours to reach 300c and clear Aberroth unless they’re REALLY taking their time and refuse to learn anything about the game lol.

As I said, this is ultimately a matter of preference. I like the system and want to see it refined.

1 Like
23

I thought EHG doesn’t want people to reach 1k corruption?

I guess that’s their balance then :slight_smile:

As said, exceptions are ok, the norm isn’t.,
EHG needs to get their shit together in terms of balance, we don’t need tacky crap to fix their inability or unwillingness to do it right once.

Yes.

And not my problem, their product, not mine… if I should be blunt here.
It’s their task to provide the balance and not mine, that’s what makes a quality product, it’s a core concept.

I could get into all the issues like hitches in difficulty, itemization, positioning of crafting and LP, drop-rates, drop-system, affix split being 2/2 and hence very static and so on and so forth.

They got a myriad of issues, they need to handle those issues. The product will never be great unless they handle them.
It’ll stay ‘yeah, it’s quite decent, better them some others, worse then some too’ until that’s done.

The market is shifting every month nearly, one day PoE has fixed long-standing issues… then Torchlight Infinite might, then Grim Dawn brings out a new patch providing great content, then maybe a completely new game comes up and competes.
Welcome to the world of a live-service game. You either are 2 steps ahead or you’ve already fallen 10 behind. It’s that kind of situation at any second for the company.

The OP builds are also not having problems with the ward system. Quite the contrary! They’re elated! Finally, couldn’t kill that boss completely before so I needed 20 hits extra for the last 5% leftover… now I can just hit it 6 times total and be done!

Hurray!

Sounds kinda backwards to me. Low builds having to struggle longer, OP builds enjoying even quicker kill-times.

Who’s affected… the middle? Yeah, the few ones there.

Ah, Blizzard doing Blizzard and simply pulling their own product under likely, as usual.

Sure, but it’s a system which has no reason to exist in the first place. Everything it does is trying to fix initial mistakes, wasting time in refining it is time not used to get things in order.

If it takes nearly no time to change it then fine, if it does… throw it into the bin where it belongs.

24

Where did you get that idea? They said they want all builds to be capable of clearing 300c, nothing about a limit. Otherwise… they’d just cap your corruption?

25

Directly from Mike in one of his streams :stuck_out_tongue:
He said ‘when people reach 1k it’s definitely too much’ at one time if I remember right.
I think that was back in 1.0 still when he went - again - into the 300c discussion not too long after the beginning when he walked back from 300c and everyone thought EHG had given that up.

Generally it’s hard to get any meaning out of his streams though, tidbits… but since he’s actively playing it often becomes… something and he cuts off in the middle of topics, so it’s at times hard to infer what was meant or if there was ‘more to it’ :stuck_out_tongue:

Nonetheless, I would say ‘if a large portion of builds can barely reach 300c then having builds easily reaching 600+ is a problem with balance’.

Because… they’re quite far apart now, aren’t they?

And for a simple example… why does my Wraithlord still do 100k+ damage? :slight_smile: It’s the wraithlord being OP himself. It was known in 1.0 when it was one of the strongest builds.
Why haven’t we seen that adjusted in 1.1 then?

Balance is a core element of the game and needs to be upheld.

Otherwise we see dumb mechanics like the ward one which is solely directed at solving shortcomings from the dev-side, because balance is a high priority issue.

Sure, takes a long long time to get right properly, always does. But I find it worrying that seemingly things get changed ‘by feel’ rather then from a informed position.

Why do I think that? Some of the changes definitely lead me to it and it also explains how broken nodes doing 10 times as much as they should make it into the game. Nobody checks the math seemingly, they test it directly.

So we get things like with bone curse… where a bug is fixed that didn’t allow it to scale… but also it gets nerved from the baseline.
How? Has to be direct testing and ‘feel’ solely, or haven’t you looked at the numbers ever?

Makes me think a bit. Could also be the Unity engine as a problem as I heard that build times there become extreme after a while, which would make that understandable… but still bad.

26

Mike said it more than once. Something to the effect of “If a build is doing 1k corruption, we have made a mistake”. Either way, that is their intended goal, somewhere between 300c and less than 1000c.

Current balance goals don’t preclude future goals. So they don’t need to cap it.
It’s natural that they want balance to be closer. Right now having builds struggling to be effective at 300c while other builds are doing 2k corruption while watching a video on another monitor is an obvious problem.

But as the years go on, and power creep settles in, it’s natural that all builds would be able to do 3k to 4k instead. And 30k a few years after that.
For now, though, their intended class/build balance is just 300c at the bottom and less than 1k at the top.

Incidentally, this is also why they introduced the soft cap into corruption.

2 Likes
27

Yes, exactly.

That’s why I’m saying a prime direction for EHG to put into the forefront is to get the balance handled.
That would go a long long way into making the game better perceived.
Varied build power is no issue… but if the build power is so severely different that you actively have some builds scraping around at 200 corruption while others run 10 times that… it’s problematic to say it very mildly.

I would argue this includes solely the ‘core’ classes. What I mean with that term in that case is those without any specific uniques being needed. Just the baseline class interactions.
Those should be handled to get either down to maximum 600 corruption with ‘mediocre investment’ and those lacking behind up to 300 with ‘mediocre investment’.

Because then not only would be the ward mechanic useless but we could even compare experiences to each other half-way properly.
It’s kinda hard to say ‘It’s a skill issue’ if someone picked a build which one would expect someone to grab ‘off the shelf’ but that one simply sucks beyond 200c while another one picked a falconer and wonders why some people complain about being held up as he’s in 1k+c strolling around.

And given that there’s a surprisingly wide variety of builds handling 1k corruption we can say ‘Yes, EHG made a whole lot of mistakes’ :stuck_out_tongue:

28

I also remember him sayin that, but it doesn’t meant they don’t want people to be able to do 1000C at all.
He said that only to reiterate what he was answering about their goal on balancing being around 300C and reinforce that there’s no reason, currently, for players to be chasing very high corruption like that.

I suppose they just don’t want it to be done so easily, at the point we are now, where some builds can just shred through 1k corruption with medium gear and get to 2K when they upgrade to BiS, especially not within only a couple of days in a new cycle…

Otherwise, they wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) be marketing the game as having “infinite scaling end-game system”, and would (or should) cap corruption at 750 (or whatever the soft cap is atm)

1 Like
29

I do believe that they do have it as a priority. I just think they fail to achieve it for mainly 2 reasons:
-They’re still not good at evaluating the consequences of their buffs and new stuff properly, which is why you have new builds in 1.1 running out of control like static orb
-They’re probably a little afraid of the community reacting for nerfing too much, which is why you still have a bunch of falconer builds doing obscene amounts of damage.

Personally, I think they should just mega-nerf the OP builds and bring everything in line. Either that, or do a massive push to bring all builds to 1k+ values and the buff corruption levels again, so everyone is back doing 300-500.
I think it’s better to just rip the band-aid fast than to let things fester too long.

If he says that builds doing 1k is a mistake, I think they clearly don’t want them doing 1k. Which makes sense. If your bottom is 300c, you shouldn’t let your top be that high, or else there really is no balance.

This doesn’t mean that a dedicated player can’t push a build past 1k. Just that the build itself doesn’t regularly do that with minimal investment, as is the case with several builds currently. But if someone wants to sink 200h into buffing up their character and pushing they can. However, the vast majority of people using that exact same build wouldn’t be able to break 1k.

That would be the healthy state for the game.

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30

Agreed.
While it will definitely cause an uproar for a cycle it’ll also cause a overall better experience for… well… everyone.

You can compare yourself better with other players and also as a side-effect… it stabilizes MG. A player in corruption 2k gets massively better items then someone in 300 after all.

31

Well, that’s exactly what I said worded differently XD

Anyways, Kulze is claiming devs don’t want people to be able to do 1000C, and that’s not true.
I was watching live when Mike said the exact same thing you quoted, so I only joined the conversation to add that this only means that they messed up in some builds balancing, not that they don’t want people to do 1k corruption. :sweat_smile:

3 Likes
32

Don’t take that comment of mine so tightly there.

Let’s rephrase it: A mediocre player with mediocre effort put into the game but the urge to not stop before at least mediocre well equipment has been acquired shouldn’t reach 1k corruption with any build that doesn’t use obscure and probably overseen mechanical interactions to do so.

Better? :stuck_out_tongue:

33

Problem with this mechanic is that it’s not doing its job properly and it’s just meaningless. You still have builds one shoting abberoth within seconds. It’s only hindrance to casuals and low dps builds. It adds nothing to gameplay and is boring.

You could remove it completely and it changes nothing for best builds and make game more enjoyable to bad builds.

No idea how to fix this? Make it scale with your damage? But it’s same thing as ddr then.

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34

I guess the only answer to that would be to have very short (like a second or less) invulnerability phases such that most of the damage that one or two shots the boss is effectively invalidated but mid/low dps builds are minimally affected by them.

No, this is mathematically false. If the total hp of the boss including ward is, say, 400% of their red hp bar, a high dps build has to chew through all of that extra blue hp. A low dps build, however, doesn’t, because the ward decays over time & that decay accelerates so the lower your dps the more the ward will have naturally decayed over time compared to being reduced by your damage.

One can argue that the decay acceleration isnt fast enough & that the ward should completely decay much quicker & if they did that as well as increasing the value of the ward then for high dps builds it would function closer to the invulnerability phase I suggested while having less effect on lower dps builds. The only problem with this is that that’s getting functionally closer to the original dynamic damage resistance that everybody hated.

Therefore, the best answer is to balance builds so the outliers are relatively close to the main body of build dps. But that’s difficult & the Aboms of the world will shit their collective pants because then their builds will only be a bit better than those of the mouthbreathing chavscum they believe them selves to be better than.

35

The mechanic tilts me from the face of the earth. I understand how it works and why it is there but only the visual representation made me uninstall the game because it messes up my mind in a very negative way. I don’t know why and how this is happening but as soon as I fight the first boss in the story I’m done with the game and logout while I fight it. No Problem what is wrong with me though but it makes me realy mad ^^.

36

Mathematically I think that what you are saying it’s true but in current state people hate this because it affects players with low dps most. While gigachads skips it completely.

I think it’s kind of sociological thing too. Fighting bosses with few hp bars give me some cheap Asian mobile game vibe. You could just make bosses have more hp instead of ward and many people that are mad about it wouldn’t even notice that their kill time is exactly the same. It’s a tought nut to crack.

But at least disable it during campaign :stuck_out_tongue:

2 Likes
37

How long is the ward-decay?

How high is the damage of the player?

You can see it like this:
Someone who formerly needed 0,3 seconds and now needs 1,2 seconds to kill the boss doesn’t care.

Someone who formerly needed 10 minutes and now needs 15+ because of ward decay does care a lot.

And that’s the actual situation.

And not even that… only if you see it in relation to each other.

‘A low dps build will need 40% more time but a high DPS build now needs 100% more time!’
Yeah sure.
And the actual numbers? How much is that for each? :stuck_out_tongue: You don’t care about a second but definitely for a minute :wink:

Yes.

And now tell me what the function of the ward mechanic is when it was meant to not need to enforce a big balance swipe.

Because it’s meant to stop high-dps builds from trivializing the fight.
Which they still do without any change.
So that alone means ‘mechanic utterly and entirely failed’.

If we now go ahead and balance the game… what is the mechanic there for? It’s supposed to stop extreme outliers… which would’ve been balanced after all… and it actually never handled them anyway.
Nothing’s leftover to ‘handle’ → The mechanic is useless.

It’s… a… shit… mechanic.
One of the worst ideas in the whole genre to date, backwards thinking from start to end.

Exactly that!

2 Likes
38

That would be the same for high dps buils but longer for low dps builds, since low dps builds benefit the most from the natural ward decay. I don’t disagree that it feels bad.

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39

Then low dps builds would seriously be affected. Because if we, let’s use Llama’s numbers, add 400% more HP to the bosses. High dps builds are still unaffected, but now low and mid dps builds need to chew through all 400% instead of the decaying ward.

If you want the HP to Decay like the ward does… Then it’s literally the same mechanic with a different coat of paint.

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40

This entire statement is built around the concept that the Boss Ward mechanic is finalized with no future changes possible. Is it working as intended right now? No. Obviously not. Does this mechanic prevent balance changes outside of the mechanic? No, obviously not. Can this mechanic be tweaked and optimized in the future? Yes. Obviously.

Does that mean the mechanic “utterly and entirely failed”? No, it just needs work. I wouldn’t say class balance “utterly and entirely failed” because Wraithlord is busted. It’s a living system that needs constant attention. No game will ever achieve true balance and as long as the devs don’t say “screw it, we’re done.” there’s always room for these systems to be touched up.