Yeah, most support gems add 40-50% more modifiers that multiply everything.
Yeah, I think there are too many damage types (& their attendant resistances), though IMO I’d also add a non-elemental modifier poison/necrotic/void.
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Oh, I would guess having or not having 50% damage mitigation has an effect on every class. My thoughts were that if there was no GB you would have 4-5 affix slots available you can put protections on. This does not compensate for 50% damage mitigation. But it’s not like comparing a char with 70% mitigation and 100% GB on the one side and 70% and 0% mitigation on the other side. If you use the slots for set elemental protections you can ramp up your previous 70% mitigation.
On top of this there would be 2 affixes less in the pool (set GB + GB) when your items are rolled. This (slightly) increases chances to roll the affix combinations you are hunting.
I am not a fan of the gambling factor on combat stats where you either take near to no damage or instantly die. And I am not talking about telegraphed attacks. That’s ok. But the damage range of enemies as well as my own skills feels to large. When I hit the dummy with for example Smelters Wrath with 100% crit chance I have crits that do 19k damage and also some that do 9k damage. That’s to random imho. Same is with incoming damage. When you are unlucky a crit from a Wengari axe thrower instantly kills you. Sometimes it only scratches your armor.
So min and max damage before any modifiers are taken into account should be balanced to have a shorter range.
I like the mechanics of mitigation where the damage i take decreases with the quality of my gear. I dislike the luck factor of stats that give you a chance to mitigate 100% damage or take the full volley. So even dodge is something I don’t like that much.
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I like the systems GB and CA and I think they work wonderfully especially together. Its simple yet hard to craft 4. A perfect set only needs to use 4 prefix and 4 suffix to achieve both. I honestly feel it’s more a problem with such a low number of armor slots kore than it is these defensive mechanics. I think we need 2 more slots for shoulders and should have a pants slot. 3 more slots would give you 6 more prefix slots and 6 more suffix easily making up and more. This is just my opinion.
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The main reason I don’t like GB is because it is basically like one stat that does the same as all protections together, plus it doesn’t have the restriction of being based on your health pool. Maybe they should just make GB another protection along with something else. You could have 3 sets of 3 protections.
Physical Protections
Glancing Blow
Armor
Toughness (ability to shake off damage)
Elemental Protections
Cold
Fire
Lightning
Entropy Protections
Void
Necrotic
Poison
The physical protections would work a bit differently from the other two categories. Physical protections do not work against non-physical damage, but they all check. So if a big physical hit comes in, it would check against your GB, then your armor, then your toughness. Each could reduce the total damage, but is not a guaranteed mitigation. Percentage chance and damage reduction amount would need to be balanced somehow. Maybe Strength could increase physical protections by 5 per point of str.
This would also allow you to gear for all 3 of the entropy protections with one stat as well. Maybe there could be a unique item or two that adds to all protections.
I like GB
would love to see GB removed, as it’s mandatory in any end-game build and therefore useless, because it doesn’t distinguish, but still eats prefixes.
CA should reduce incoming crit damage, and not reduce crit chance, because unless it’s 100%, you still get occasionally oneshot.
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The calculations for one-shot in this game are beyond terrible and why the game won’t survive. I’m not sure who had the idea for GB, or is responsible for the defensive mechanics of this game, but it’s time for some new perspectives. As a lifelong Hardcore player who clears all content in all games, there needs to be significant changes to the end result of damage calculations against current mitigation. Switching armor to negate a percentage of all damage as opposed to just physical is where you start, plain and simple. This will move GB to a secondary mitigation tool as opposed to primary. It can still be leveraged as a primary mitigation style, but moves it from a requirement to more of a choice given other options (change to armor). I’d also consider removing the fragmentation between elemental and entropy. The primary issue and promotion of GB is that it affects all, so reducing the fragmentation reduces the singular need and relevance of GB.
I don’t think LE calculates damage much different to most other games, the main difference is that resistance/protection isn’t an absolute stat like it is in PoE, it provides protection/EHP relative to the character’s HP/ward, and that blocking only increases the protection figure that is used when determining hp lost. Glancing Blow would be equivalent to D3’s % damage reduction from the various sets.
That said, I think they could probably do with either removing one of the damage/protection types or providing more affix slots so it’s less burdensome to get protections. Alternatively, if they removed glancing blow & reduced monsters damage output by 1/2 that would benefit everyone (those who go for max glancing blow get a few affix slots freed up & those that don’t get 50% reduced damage).
Are you sure your issue isn’t that protections are relative rather than absolute?
If protections were absolute then every build, even ward-based builds would want to get as much as possible whereas at the moment, high ward builds don’t really want protections which provides a bit more diversity in terms of affixes that different builds look for.
Yeah ward builds only want more ward and maybe maxHP because in a ward build you don’t need anything but more ward ^^. But that’s another issue.
The way protections work in LE isn’t my cup of tea. I think it’s a dumped down sad excuse vs the other protection and resistence attempts we know from different other games. GB is just a braindead useless stat for me because outside of OP ward builds… okay I say they are OP just to spare the discussion about ward beeing OP or not ^^… everyone is in need of it whp want’s to go toe to toe with the enemys. Maybe some people with stream and video capturing possibilitys do some videos to compare 100% GB vs 0% GB while facetanking. I don’t see any need for this stat outside of artificial increases in affix or suffix (wherever they are placed I don’t know it from the top of my head) slots so those can’t be used for other stuff.
Why? Why does every single game have to implement resistances in exactly the same way? Can’t we try something a bit different?
You could make an argument that since every build needs it & there’s no viable alternative then they could very well remove it & reduce the damage by 1/2 & no-one would really notice. I’d prefer, however, for there to be a comparable alternative to glanging blow that requires similar investment (in terms of affix slots & tiers) to get a similar effect (being 1/2 damage).
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Sometimes trying something different brings innovation. Sometimes, the established way of doing things is simply the best way having learnt from experience. I havent quite figure which is LE’s protection system.
Yeah, which is why I quite like it. I also liked Sacred 1/2’s Combat Art system. It was different. Not everything needs to be the same beige. Would you be happy if there were only < insert a single genre here > to play?
I am definitely with @Llama8 on this topic. LE tries something different. In the first place I seemed to see some flaws with this system. But it is not that easy to understand. Perhaps I don’t fully understand it, yet.
But the LE system works. It’s far away from being broken.
It just works different. The fact that I dislike some aspects might be due to the fact it is unfamiliar in the first place. People seem to like things they know and are sceptical towards any innovation.
So I don’t want to see the whole system changed into the common standard system. But there are chances to tweak the system to be more accessible.
Looking at ward it’s really easy. Stack int, ward retention idols and pick the skillnodes that generate ward. Done. Ignore resistances besides GB and CA (and dodge perhaps). This is way more easier to achieve than collecting gear for a tanky Sentinel where you have to balance your protections for every damage type.
When I wrote my steam review I pointed out the complexity of the skill system as a big pro. And I am still of the opinion. But it is unfair to have ward builds being so easy while protection builds are hard in comparison.
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Maybe they should go along the lines of making Ward builds still viable in the same way, but making the gear a lot more rare to get, or the idols. A bit like good Chaos Inocluation/ES gear in PoE. Once you have it, the thing is kinda OP, but getting it is a challenge. By balancing drops, I think the builds could be balanced as well. Make GB drop more often. Maybe even put it in bigger numbers on idols, that’d be nice.
I like the way ward works and would not like to see it changed. I do think it should be harder to achieve however.
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Is it honestly the only way to go to survive right now in endgame? I do not see how a game could fail either way save for the most hardcore of the hardcore players. I tend to just do what I want in action rpgs and get as far as I can with a build.
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GB is very strong and very easy to gear. And maybe the rarity of the shard should be raised so its not your first go too defensive stat, as its not as fun when starting a character.
The thing is, even if they remove or nerf GB, something would took its place on first “mandatory” tier affix. In fact, many builds need other mandatory affixes to run properly.
It could be prots, it could be dodge, or just %damage mitigation from other sources.
Its just part of ARPGs, you collect this stat, then this other stat, etc.
But GB is very challenging and complex for top tier builds that need many t5 affixes and prefixes, on top of yout t5 set GB. In order to get an upgrade, you have to keep track and juggle with your GB gear.
Without this, gearing would be a walk in the park, any item could be an upgrade. No planning or multiple options need in order to progress. Less decisions to make.
Glancing Blow only takes 4 slots on your build and one of the main things you have to do now when theorycrafting a build is decide what prefixes you are going to lose in order to get the GB.
Are you gonna use unique belt? Unique gloves? Well maybe you have to give up ring prefixes (the most valuable) so you can run the desired uniques. The more uniques you run, the harder this will be.
So while I agree GB might be boring when u start a build, it is really a core part of buildmaking, not just becouse its strong, but becouse it makes it challenging.
Also keep in mind GB does not protect VS dots, and dots are the highest threat on high arena at the moment (around 7/10 of my deaths are to dots)
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I personally like the system the way it is.
I would like to see more sockets available to add more affixs to items. As you have to either build full defence and sacrifice damage, or build the other way round. Or as Broadman21 suggest more items…I always wondered were my characters pants had gone 
I agree LE system is new and different, and we as humans hate change, it’s just one of our odd traits. Sometimes when I read posts like this I wonder if those people have a yearning to get back to the time when all we had was Attack v Defence in combat. 
kind of agree that GB is overtuned. hard to balance everything but no affix should really be the obvious choice in almost every situation. maybe they could change it to spell glancing or something
Oh man, wouldn’t that be a world, picking gear based on what you want, rather than a mandatory stat that gives a global 50% DR that you literally can’t progress without. Building a balance of protections/avoidance/damage is not the same as absolutely having to waste affixes on GB just so you can play the game.
GB is garbage.
I don’t really get that. How can you waste affix slots on something that’s so effective (in virtually all situations)? You can argue that it’s too effective & therefore mandatory/an affix tax, but you can’t argue that it’s ineffective/garbage.