Unused/Underused Skills/Nodes and Affixes

Sounded the same to me but then again I think I misunderstood something because they obviously don’t act according to this.

Nononono :smiley: .That’s just nitpicking on the 4 digit stuff Mike said :rofl: . I’m a shithead but I’m not so completely lost that I want them to finetune the blance so everyone is able to reach 999C but noone will ever reach 1000C :smiley: . As I mentioned I’m happy with: basline balance equals X ±30%. That’s a big error margin and leaves enought room for Meta shifts. All I want to know is what X is in this case.

Sure I mentioned that as well when I said multiple factors play into it. but look at the judgment Pala pre nerf for example. They were all pretty close on the high end and EHG gave it a slap on the wrist. That’s the way to go. They don’t even overnerfed it into uselessnes what was kind of a suprise for me.

Skill and time is a huge factor that plays into it. We all know at least one person who struggles with the most basic concepts and is even overwhelmed with playing easy builds. Said person will most likely never reach 1k+ C while others are in the 3k+ ranges.

Then again EHG is able to see how stuff is performing and they can act according to it. It’s a lot of Data to go through and most likely a loooong rats tail of factors that needed to be identified and understood. It’ll take a ton of time and work but to my liking they do to little to late.

Yes if there was a cap the new meta would be how fast you can get there for sure. As I said above I want a baseline. If there are still things that are better or worse so be it. For example a person who says “My build is rebuke only!” should suffer in the self picked idiotic life choices. Someone who is playing Rogue shouldn’t be able to reach 40k+ C just because picking rogue while a person on the same skill level who invested the same time and effort is struggeling at 3k C because of class choice.

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Nice post bro! Definitely pro this and you’re spot on with older stuff.

Lol love how everyone who posts something good on these forums has people instantly hijack the thread and argue with their 2 cents instead of creating their own posts. It’s so cringe that it happens on 9/10 posts lmao

I was rather hoping he’d post some gripes with specific uniques/skills/nodes as he mentioned in the other thread as that’s more useful to the devs. A thread mentioning that some aren’t useful & some are almost always chosen isn’t particularly useful, especially when the devs already have that info. But a post about how some suck & are never chosen and why, that shit’s useful (especially the why, the more specific the better).

I did use Holy Aura nodes as an example but affixes such as Health on Kill is another one that I never use and don’t think anyone else does. That’s why I mentioned a look at the d/b and parsing the data as I can only go from my perspective and what I have seen in others’ builds also.

Anything Stun is also at least almost never used. I know that I never use it and haven’t seen it used in any builds I have looked at in a long time.

I was also looking for input from others from what they see as well, but there are so many skills with nodes that never (from what I see and have used) get used that they might as well not even exist. They are numerous though with the number of skills we have and the number of nodes in each one. That’s why I just used the one example above.

Mike asked me to go through and make a list when I brought it up on disc, I’m pretty lazy but I guess I could. I am unsure of some class specific skills as I’m a whore to Rogue/Sent and a part time Primalist lover. I’ll give the weapons/armor a go for a list, maybe start a thread and then people could add to it for the ones missed in posts above?

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Add to the Bad list
Churning Orbs and Trail of Storms nodes in Tornado (which is bad as dmg skill by its own) are unbearable pile of junk and waste of 6 pts

The Tornado that they wanted to rework? Back in April? 2020…

This post in particular has not aged too well.

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Oh I’m not an archeology fan :roll_eyes: but kinda unlucky in some of my offmeta experiments

Because since then it’s not been as clear-cut. They failed to abide to the 300c setup they stated even remotely… but ever since Aberroth and Uberroth came out it’s been a mess. The boss access and the ability to realiably fight them is quite different which causes the precision for targeting a specific end-goal to become quite hard, not to speak of rewards and needed content to beat being without any correlation with CoF prophecies. Same reward could push you into 100c content or 300c content, which is… fairly odd to say the least design-wise.

Which is a goner though, 300c is not reliable anymore, 500c is now. Because of Aberroth and the expected power related to difficulty to be upheld for people commonly. So the 300c is already a pipe-dream which has been lost beyond saving.

But no actions to balance related to 500c has been done either, so it’s a mess overall.

Endless scaling systems and lazyness are at least, the promising part isn’t. You’re right with that.

But a endless scaling system is vastly easier to build compared to a hand-tailored design.

And that’s 100% true.

Endless scaling is a great measure to cover up shortcomings. But it means those shortcomings are still there. Fever people realize it… but even those which don’t realize where it comes from are affected.

And that’s the start, they need to speak the silent part out so it gets the respective weight… and then adhere to following it.

Yes, and the differences are still hefty. But they’re also vastly more in line then LE’s builds. By magnitudes.

It’s fairly obvious something is plainly spoken ‘gone wrong entirely’ when your product fails at the same metric vastly worse then a comparable product which already gets critized in that aspect regularly and reasonably.

Exactly, EHG went beyond words and not actions are demanded and the only reasonable thing.

Which doesn’t mean their words should cease and them growing silent… but they gotta underline every little sentence with the according action and be beyond top-notch related to doing so.

And that’s not shown, hence sentiment can’t improve quickly… which is a immense danger for them.

Even if they state ‘we cannot work at that pace and hence we’ll have a single update per year only’ it would be fine. The issue is… whatever EHG says is extremely overhyped and underperforming as a common notion sadly. They fail to work with the emotions of the customers properly.

Things like hyping up a event that introduces very intrusive mobs into the core gameplay loop and hyping it as ‘something never seen’ before is out-of-scale for how the customer perceives it and how they state it to be. Management of expectations is atrocious simply.

The same is likely to be seen with Act 5 Morditas related stuff… because we should fear only hearing the name of a dude we have barely any knowledge of and the game lacks nigh any proper exposition of the deeds making us build a proper rapport to that statement. Hence it falls flat… and is simply overselling the magnitude of it for the absolutely vast majority of people. I’ll bring again a PoE example into it… when Lake of Kalandra was revealed people went haywire ‘It’s about Kalandra! This will be huge! We learn more about Kalandra!’
Why? Because the mirror of Kalandra is an iconic item which in itself tells the lore through the gameplay mechanics… and people haven’t heard anything about the character much further, but it showed in-depth lore stuff if you knew where to find it. But even without that the notion of it becoming ‘a league where you’ll have the ability to somehow duplicate things in some way/shape or form’ was premise enough. People knew what to expect roughly.
And even while the mechanic wasn’t all too overwhelming and received rather… mid at best… it still kept people eagerly engaged as it provided what was expected as a ballpark.

LE doesn’t have that… statements which make things seem huge but which are absolute duds in every respect. That’s undermining their efforts massively. You can do great things and be scorned… or you can barely do anything and be praised. It’s all about expectations and managing community sentiment.

If we’re nitpicking ‘yes’. Absolutely so.
Common sense then gasps and makes ‘1200’ acceptable still… and ‘800’ also ok-ish.

But let’s be clear here… as @Macknum stated… the difference between 100c strugglers (and not too few either) and 30k overachievers is just too much to be reasonable.

Why do you think their reputation is in shambles? Sure… not that alone… but it’s part of it.

So yes, it was on the line, they fucked it up, but they can’t avoid their reputation being on the line by simply avoiding the uncomfortable hard statements and then following through.

You either provide things properly or you’re called incompetent, and incompetence is a harsh thing to be connected to one, means you failed in some way. And while natural to fail in several ways… you should at least succeed in those that matter the most, but that’s not done.

It is player skill, absolutely so! 100%!

But it’s also game-design. There’s options to ensure people with bad skills rise up a bit more… and to hold those with extreme skills back.
Reduces the gulf between them.

Obviously there is a need for highly skilled players to showcase their skills and be distinct from someone without any skill to speak of… but the magnitude of how far apart that is can be managed and is mandatory to do so. And that’s a failing state in LE as well currently.

You mean like:

Lightning Blasts ‘Focal Blast’ line for example? Which no sane person takes as it’s absolute shit in damage effectiveness (100% is a joke for any skill) and reducing the only upside (auto-AoE) without a specific trigger is just nonsensical as it’s outperformed vastly in function and damage by other skills in the same class simply?
Or ‘Insidious Conduction’ as it’s forcing you to stay still with severe downsides on top of that? Like half ward generation, half ailment application, hefty extra need attack speed to even resemble anything but a single-target spell (which is unfeasable by itself) while also removing the ability to gain ward based on mana-usage from the channeling itself, causing that to fall away as well?
The whole bottom left side is nearly useless, with very few exceptions.

And that’s commonplace with skills actually. We got those lovely nice skilltrees which seem great… but in reality we got 25% commonly used if the skill is even used at all without being a simple ‘side-effect which is nice’, then 50% of the whole skill-tree which is extremely situational and railroaded depending on build, and 25% which is simply ‘dead’.
Puts ‘choices’ quite into another frame when realizing it.

We got few skills per class which railroads the build types already, then those skills are reduced further because some simply suck and you try to avoid em… using those only because of a lack of useful alternative… and then you even got inside those skills a railroaded progression which is presented as ‘great choices’.
A choice is not only ‘Is A or B better for me?’… it’s ‘I can use A or B both… which do I think fits me better?’.
Simply finding the only feasable soltuion and then saying ‘you had a choice’ is just nonsense.

I’m not sure. I definitely agree that it’s not clear in-game at all on account of the lack of fixed difficulty monos/maps like PoE has, but I view the whole thing differently to you it appears.

IMO, the 300/1,000 c numbers (if we ignore for a moment that they may not be relevant anymore) for the lower & upper bounds for build worthiness, alon to being able to do t1 maps or t16 maps in PoE.

Abby/Uberroth then form the route up to the pinnacle & I’m aware that Uberroth isn’t ~1k c difficulty as far as I’m aware so this is probably where things get a bit aspirational, and that people say that the path up to Uberroth leaves something to be desired.

If the whole 300/1,000 thing were still relevant then EHG would have to actually do something around that, nerf whatever the fuck is going into the tens of thousands of corruption & buff the numerous underperforming skills. I don’t even think it matters where the devs draw their lines in the sand to balance around as long as they do something about it & are consistent & effective and not over zealous.

It also needs to be clearly communicated in-game, IMO & this is where fixed levels of maps help. If monos weren’t the sum total of endgame content & it was primarily focussed around fixed-ish difficulty things like PoE’s maps then monos being effectively endless wouldn’t be an issue, just like Delve isn’t an issue in PoE.

Yes, exactly that.

We lack any form of ‘anchor’ to properly see - in quite clear terms - where we stand as a player. That’s a pure design-based issue. And a very serious one.

If EHG solves that and balances accordingly around it the game’s reception would go up substantially even with the ongoing complaints overall. It’s something which is direly undervalued in effect, it has a massive effect on perception when players have a reliable comparison for the brain to latch onto and deem oneself ‘successful’… well… or not :stuck_out_tongue:

There is also the massive problem that other ARPG are having, differences in speed and efficiency. Say both class A and B are able to clear 1k+ monos, now one takes 30 seconds and the other takes 45 minutes. A ton of people whine that both can clear it gut them both without understanding why they both can, or the differences in them. A few years ago people were screaming about warpath and minions being op because you could do harder content, it just took forever, yet many of us had rogue builds that were sub 30 second monos. It was literally taking 20x the time to loot the map vs just clearing it.

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That’s the same thing that we’re talking about & it will always exist. But at the moment the issue is more basic, once the majority of builds can do a putative “max corruption” then the devs can look at balancing so that they can all do things in a broadly similar time.

Yes, that’s true. But before that becomes relevant we need to establish a baseline at least in relation to power.

Because ultimately when any sort of content is dropped which is at the top end (whenever it drops in the future should the game survive that long) then suddenly we got a slew of builds which cannot do that anymore because they’re underperforming. And another slew which trivializes it.

Time-investment is important as well… yes. Before that though we need to have the ability to even finish the prospective content at all.

The only reason why there is no major issue with perception in this regard currently is that in LE the itemization is not progression limited as soon as you reach level 90 monoliths (not even empowered). At this moment you drop every possible item in the core loot pool potentially with enough time investment, all above in the core loop solely being a multiplier.

This is good when it’s the topmost layer of content, a endless mechanic scaling solely danger and reward-chance, reducing purely time-investment rather then providing something new? Great!
But we don’t have that as the top layer anymore, after entering empowered there’s still the weaver nodes which provide special rewards, we got rewards only dropping at specific corruption thresholds and we got bosses which only unlock upon reaching a specific corruption threshold as well.

Means that the former well positioned mechanic turns from a boon into a detriment suddenly.

Just to pipe in here - I would love them to scale the game harder - once you have a really good end game setup for example Kartal using ballistas or me using Warpath (there are others) the AOE you do along with the dmg makes corruption almost pointless, my aoe is complete screen so most things don’t get a chance to attack. Ballista clears 1.5+ screen you can drop one and run off the screen and things have died before you get there.

As much as I hate saying it because I flipping love good aoe, the size of the aoe probably needs a nerf or it’ll just keep happening. It’s also a massive lol when you can roll Uber while being near the edge of the screen so half the mechanics they’ve put into the fight do not affect you at all.

Uber shouldn’t be 500 either he should be higher. I wish they would also remove friend farming it - I’ve had friends carry me to get his items and I’ve carried others. I think if you fight him and die - 0 loot. If you fight him and do less than 30% of the dmg - 0 loot. Leave the campaign easy, IDC. End game difficulty should be harder.

What @vyanie said is so true as well. You have this class forge guard (example not a trigger!!! ) that’s supposed to be the tankiest in the game, able to use 2 handers and shields - but its ridiculous. It does the least dmg of the sentinels and it can’t run as high corruption due to that and lack of aoe/leech. Void has the best leech and you can cap resists and have crazy armor with that so you’re uber tanky and pally well you’ve all seen a judgement paladin which I argue is the tankiest by definition. The class is garbage and killing things is super slow, aoe is crud and manifest armor is made of glass. Run through a map in 45 seconds on the VK/Pally, run that same map on FG and it’s 3x times longer. FG needs to be brought waaaaaaaaaay up with dmg or the other 2 nerfed hard, which won’t happen but they just seem ignorant to it (and other slow mapping/bossing class/builds)

Anyways again off topic I think haha ewps

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@Travoas - check this out I just made for items, you should start one for skills/nodes, I’d happily add to it.

Still? That either needs a capor diminishing returns. Being able to hit more than entire screen is too much.

In PoE it’s rather easy. If you can do t16 maps without dieing you did it. If you can do it in a very fast pace without thinking you overachived but you are still in the same spheres. It’s the same with PoE2. if you could kill the biggest boss you did something amazing. If you were able to kill the same boss in his spawning animation you were overachieving but still not alone there.

Then again people could run t20 maps or whatever but somehow that was never the discussion because the meta shiftet to sepped or some MF grouping stuff.

So if EHG says they aim for xyz C to be the reachable celing at this time and increase it with coming expensions I think no harm would be done because the Meta shifts to speed.

The only thing that will be shown is how competent EHG is what could be very harmfull given the state of the game.

It’s their last official answer so they better adress it again if they changed their stance on this topic. I take people by their word and don’t do mental gymnastics to excuse or explain if something is going against what they said or promised. I just call out the difference between wht they say and what is happening. I don’t make stuff up or find excuses when EHG by their own words is messing up constantly since release and just call it a mess and a sign of a different approach. maybe they have more pressing matters to attend to but balancing is way down on their list. That’s the nicest thing I can say about. On the other hand I just think they can’t balance shit and randomly landed where we are right now and give or take a bit to certain skills and interactions.

If I were in EHGs shoes I would’ve announced something ages ago instead of looking like a random incompetent pleb who isn’t able to dial up or down numbers.

They already scaled C harder. I don’t even know how much C the current state we are in would’ve been back then. 100k+ for the people who push hard I guess.

So the circle closes :smiley: . Will they be able to balance it so the skill isn’t bad to start out with but not op in the endß Like adding dimishing returns maybe?

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Exactly, because the maps have fixed levels/difficulties. If corruption were capped in LE, that would serve a similar purpose.

Yeah but it could be increased at a certain point. I always talk about establishing a baseline because I guess without a baseline you have a hard time balancing stuff. If they started that way they could’ve increased the maximum corruption each season and be good with it.

From my point of view it would be enough if our toons were able to run 1kC± right now so Uberroth would be a hard nut to crack as well… looking at it just from a balancing point of view.

Sadly everything is all over the place and that is irritating af… it looks like they don’t even care to me.

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