I know but that renders the whole thesis that there is no way to scale non crit hits completely useless. There are plenty of ways to increase damage and crit is just one of them. Sure crit is strong like it always was in every H&S game out there but crit would do almost nothing without all the other modifiers because 600% of nothing is still nothing.
So is crit strong? Yes no doubt about that.
Is there no way to scale non crit dmg? There are plenty of ways to do so.
By “other classes” do you mean builds that can generate an obscene amount of ward?
Not really, i’m talking about things like, 100% chance to dodge that rogue has access to, Flame Ward that mages have access to, a second health pool that Lich has access to, a node that gives you -20% less damage taken while on low life that primalist has access to.
At somepoint HH sentinel was one of the builds that could generate the most obscene amounts of ward and i still didnt think of it being the tankiest build in the game.
Sentinel is tankier now, but unless you play using rebuke, i still dont think it has good denfenses when compared to other classes.
Masteries like marksman or necromancer in some circunstances might be less tanky than sentinel in general, but i argue that those classes are suposed to be squishy while a class that relly mainly on closeup combat should be more tanky.
Is that the normal dodge that’s capped at 85% like block or the Silver Shroud effect that has a 10s cooldown (though tbf, with high normal dodge this becomes more useful)?
So, ward then, just not quite as egregious as some of the methods from 1.0.
Fair, though if it was so powerful why aren’t Liches ranking so highly?
The Sentinel has a -10% passive which doesn’t require being low life though it does only affect “nearby” mobs, which is most if the screen. Plus Sentinel gets life on hit from the free spammable skills.
That’s a bit of a weird take. If it can generate ungodly amounts of ward that’s a massive buffer against being both one shot & whittled down. Surely that’s a reasonable definition of tankiness?
Yes i was talking about silver shroud, but i also forgot to mention glancing blows and dusk shroud.
For me Ward you gain from flame ward is more of a bonus, by default you take 30% less damage and you can get nodes that give you up to 30% less hit damage taken and up to 30% less elemental damage taken. There is also a node that give you up to 1000 flat armor which for mage is pretty big. The downside is that you cant have 100% uptime, but still is a lot better than having to be rooted on place to take less dmg, and you can have up to 3 charges.
I have no idea why someone thought 100% uptime just from passing through frost wall was ok.
Primalist also has a 8 point node that gives 16% less damage taken from nearby enemies, i think its just OK, it does cover a pretty good amount of the screen, but unfurtunally we still have a couple of monsters that deal a lot of dmg while basically being out of screen.
Yeah i think it was a weird take from me mentioning HH, it was probably one of the tankiest builds in the game. It was just to say that even at the time i dont think it was the tankiest build, because ward hadn’t been nerfed yet and Warlock was getting the same or even more ward at the time with profane veil + bone prison and maybe double that with the zombie belt and there was also ghostflame. Runemaster was also really tanky with 100% flame ward uptime while also getting a pretty good amount of ward (not sure if hh was tankier though).
I’m not sure but i think HH never did that much dmg aswell, at the time it was bugged and not getting the proper multiplications if i’m not mistaken, it was just really tanky.
Does not matter how bad y’all think it is, nothing worse then The Cold Reaper transformation for lich.
I was under impression that aura of decay was the most useless ability in game, but now I am been proven to myself I was wrong.
I tried to build a cold lich. Just to realize that there is not a single ability under either lich or Acolyte that deals cold damage.
And then I turned the game off. Did someone forget to add cold skills for acolyte?
Why is their one node on the entire tree lmao
Yes, but that doesn’t work, which is the whole topic.
So, imagine you have an item giving you 100% inc, that’s a additive layer.
If you now crit you have double the damage. Inherently, without multi taken into consideration.
Imagining we have 100% critical chance and a single of our… I think 11?.. item slots does those 100% inc we actively have ‘200% inc’ in reality. So actively that means ‘this one affix is worth 2 slots instead’.
Which gets expedited when we have more slots with the same affix obviously. 2 100% inc? Value of 4 item slots. 3? 6 item slots… 5? Now we have actually our theoretical limit nearly reached, which is 10 item slots in value.
Given that it’s vastly easier to scale % inc in different ways we often get 200+% on an item though, so it only gets more severe with every single bit of crit or even crit multi which we loose.
And now that gets even further enhanced when we take base damage into account. Since base damage itself is additive… but multiplicative with % inc and then on top multiplicative with crit. This makes it a exponential curve.
To adjust that the balance would need to take this into consideration, meaning skills need a more rigid limitation on usable item bases while wielding said weapon… and those weapons focusing majorly on the core aspects of what the skills which the item base will be used with.
So for example a crit-based item base will focus on crit itself in the intrinsics, a shared base with % inc as it enhances flat and crit roughly the same by itself… and bases for builds without crit will majorly focus on flat damage this way.
That’s sadly not done though, hence we see a disparity leaning heavily towards crit, making everything else simply less viable.
There are exceptions to the rule, but they are far and few between.
That’s… nonsensical.
Crits are a measure of build variety and multiplayer scaling is mandatory to at least keep a minimal semblence of balance for solo vs teams.
Playing in a group already makes everything vastly easier. Not only is enemy targeting much more forgiving… you also have basically endless lives. Grou-play makes the game a joke.
‘Numbers go brrrr’ is a huge psychological aspect. Number range is very important for that. Last Epoch does a very good job with their ranges actually.
If you make them 100X larger they actually loose value for your brain as it can’t cope with those easily, you have ne relevant examples commonly available where those would be viable.
World of Warcraft for example had a so called ‘stat crunch’ for that exact reason as over time numbers got to overinflated they became meaningless, hence reducing them down again with the scaling got player retention up quite a bit.
Nah, just means you’re not good enough at math to do that. Damage calc needs to be complex for a reason, which is to enforce that variety can exist in the measure it does.
If you take away all the ‘unneeded complexity’ from damage calc you end with exactly 2 values: Attack/Life. That’s it. Because that’s the core trinity of most games. A measure to see how strong you are. A measure to see how much punishment you can take.
Then we can add defense, which already makes it a multiplier, and you likely won’t be able to do it in your head when the numbers are sufficiently high… at least not in a reasonable time 
And with resistances on top? Forget it, suddenly it’s a double multiplied defensive method. Same goes for offence… and then you add the damage types to it as well… and the methods of scaling like crit, flat, inc. Tadaaa… basic system as we have it in most games, like Last Epoch has as well. It’s no rocket science anymore, never was… just took a whole for devs to get to a comfortable point.
Srceenshake… sound effects… animations based on attack and enemies hit… without ragdolls.
There’s many ways. Ragdolls are not only resource intensive but also nigh always very easily broken.
Minimal amounts, you go with attack speed scaling for the multiplier there, since ‘recently’ is ‘4 seconds’ to be exact. Which nigh always does crit in this timeframe, so you can ignore crit completely at sufficient speeds.
And those builds are quite viable, and even quite strong at times, offering more defensive options in many cases.
So no… non-crit is viable in other games, many instances even. LE just does a worse job then others… but barely any game does a ‘great’ job in that regard, it’s hard to balance.
Depending on attack speed it is reliability though. Which can be the difference between sustaining or even outright bursting something down… or feeling like your character got wet noodle arms.
Yes Base damage… use a bow with high base damage affixes on it to counteract this loss. You hence don’t need to invest so heavily into crit which opens up affix space which can hence be again used for more damage.
That’s how you scale it.
Nothing with ‘channel’ in LE is ‘great’. So nah, absolutely not. Channeling in LE means either being a sitting duck or loosing movement speed. Not even sustained Warpath is good, you use it in short bursts between evading movements.
Yes, it can be a viable build… and there are quite a few channel viable builds… but each one of them is generally more ‘clunky’ then other options, having more downsides then non-channel skills in general.
And there ends my time for the day for writing, so I’ll have to cut it short here before reading on sometime else 
I use best loosely here. As for me at least, there are easy ways to get large increases to both defense and offense while channeling. Some cases you can stack these with while transformed and get some nasty results.
https://www.lastepochtools.com/planner/o3yGW80Q
The idea here is to first enter reap, then use death seal, then use channel ghostflame. The result is kind of crazy. As your not really supposed to be able to get both. Warlock is one of the few classes that can use both.
Why are you not “supposed” to be able to get both? You clearly can using basic game systems.
Also what is so crazy about it? In your example planner you don’t even use all of “while channeling” affixes. You literally have one “while channeling affix” on gear and one transformed affix on idols.
Congratulations you used some of the available tools that have good synergy.
These are far away from being nasty, just regular good.
He meant multiplyers, not multiplayer…
You’ll also notice that there are a lot of words that he uses differently to everyone else for, reasons.
Why do you think you aren’t supposed to get both while rransformed and while channelling? Lich is the only mastery that has both but if the devs didn’t want anyone to use both at the same time they wouldn’t have allowed it.
Also, Warlock can’t transform.
Yeah, it doesn’t make sense to me why Primalist gets 16% DR and Sentinel gets only 10% when all Primalist masteries have exclusive DR as well (Boar, Impervious and Conflux).
I was just testing some 2h melee builds to push corruption and Tempest/EQ Beastmaster is so much tankier than Phys Rive Void Knight its crazy. I feel like Aspect of the Boar is something that should be kinda baseline to melee characters. Like the beastmaster is tanking hits at 1100 corruption while the Void Knight is almost dying at 500-600.
Have you heard of Charged Detonating Arrow?
It does work but you’re right, I had no idea what the post was about at first. Now that the conversation has gone on, I do. And im saying as an alternative, if you want to do more white damage, then invest in damage.
That’s a fair point, charged anything, even more so if it’s puncture on a marksman is probably the worst you can pick
Mostly because no class that can transform can channel. Lich has been made a long time ago- I half hazardously think the devs forgot about lich form.
Warlock was also kind of OP on launch, people where using Torment, so physical may have been missed by devs and players.
It’s synergy is not very good- death seal
Is all about removing ward, and ghost flame and warlock are about making ward. The two functions don’t work at all in a harmonious manner. Aka they not been designed to work together. They just can be made to work.
Sure, but I also read the forums. When people say they quit, I tend to believe it.
The player count is evident enough without anyone talking.
Which is no viable point or argument to bring up? You got one right there, that’s the special feature of that class.
If a mechanic functions based around removing something while another functions based around generating something then that is inherent synergy right then and there, a prime example of what ‘synergy’ actually is. So no.
Yes, it absolutely is, and it doesn’t show a great picture currently, especially not with PoE 2 teasing to be basically a game which is more grand then LE is… while being in Beta.
LE focuses too much on story and too little on long-term mechanics. That’s a bad focus for a live-service diablo-clone. It’s a fantastic focus for a SP or ‘normal’ MP game, not for live-service though.
That is not true. Druid can channel as well.
Also Lich could already channel way before Warlock got introduce.
So what now? Is it not good or… and I quote “nasty” or “crazy”
Better make up your mind.
So you trust and take “I quit posts” very serious, but you don’t trust a dev giving info on stream or the forum. OK understood.
That has nothing to do with the point though.
People leaving and the active player base shrinking has a plethora of reasons.
But you claim to know the one reason and section of the game causing this…
And why are you quoting me across different threads?
Only if the mechanic that removes the thing gives you a benefit based on how much was removed, like the Chronostasis sword, that gives flat damage per ward consumed. Death Seal by default doesn’t do anything like that & only does if you put points in the Necrosis or Leper’s Skin nodes, which is rare. So, kinda no.
That’s because the devs are hiding things & lieing to us just so they can egregiously monetise stuff.
I never tried playing this, but first thing that comes to mind is going cold chaos bolts, you could use Mourning Frost to scale mostly flat cold damage and maybe use Mad Laddle. Not sure if you really need to convert any of your skills though lol, maybe chaos bolts itself just to get some frostbite chance for Exult in Misery.
You could go frostbite aswell, but i think it would be worse than hit.
So i also see no reason for that conversion, they should just give us a global bonus like on Swarmblade tree.
Those nodes are also so bad, you get much better armor from Desperate shroud anyway and necrotic res overcap is only good for three things AFAIK Imperishable passive and Boneclamour’s ward generation which doesn’t work in death seal and Torment which is a Warlock exclusive and can’t be used with Death Seal.
To be fair in general a few nodes need some brushing up. EHG hasn’t updated some of them since… a while overall, in several classes. It’s a bit overdue but likely to come up sooner or later, hopefully sooner then later I would say.