Defensive and melee philosophy
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I have read through many post, some raging some saying nerfs were required but I still do not understand the main thoughts behind the defensive balance changes. The thing many players but apparently few of the devs understand is that in PVE, and make no mistake you have a PVE game with PVE players, defenses cannot fail. Pretty good is simply a less frequent failure in a game where failure has to be limited to player error. And to an extent that should be limited to large errors. Even for the non-hardcore character no one wants to die at level 85 while 90% to level.
POE is considered a hardcore game by many and that is fine. ( difficulty level not related to hardcore playstyle ) I am ok with errors or failed mechanics understanding leading to a death. I think most of us are. But saying block is overpowered because you can facetank a pack of mobs is warping my mind. EVERY melee character has to facetank multiple packs of mobs every time they fight. Ranged can wipe out a whole room with certain DPS combos. Defensive characters have to be able to walk into the room and then walk out covered with monster blood not their own. A DPS failure means you attack again. A defensive failure means you lose xp or reroll. Mechanics should not be dictated by items because that is unbalancing to folks who do not have said items. Rumi's are a great item for example but we cannot balance block and spell block on the combination of certain items to achieve optimal defensive balance. If the item changes how a mechanic works past a point you considered balanced then change the item not the mechanic that makes the item worthwhile in the first place. The concept behind the game is players defeating content while facing and overcoming risks. A well built well played character should essentially not die in most circumstances. He should also kill most content in some time frame or another. Huge DPS builds are out there and their advantage is doing very high DPS and killing quickly. Please consider and facilitate the other side of the coin that there should be builds in the game that go another direction and can live through almost anything. Making those two things exclusive of one another is fine but the current mechanic of mostly killing everything before it gets to you is not balanced by maybe living long enough to get to it. |
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Freedom is not worth having if it does not include the freedom to make mistakes
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" I'd like to expand on this with an example from a run-through of Death and Taxes I did last night. Not every-one is in the position where they can rely on perfect play to keep them alive. Yes, it is possible to do Atziri with CI + EB if you have good reflexes and know the fight. But throw in even a hint of latency or even ... dare I even mention it ... the big-bad, desync, and this becomes much, much, much trickier. I play most of my builds with 75/75 block/spellblock alongside at least 2 other forms of mitigation (typically MoM and AA) simply because I can't rely on good positioning and movement to keep me alive. That is a lot of sacrifices just to stay alive. I live far from all the servers and play on a latop which more than meets the minimum requirements for the game and yet still gets shit on as soon as there are even a hint of particle effects on-screen. Last night, keeping in mind that I'm not going to have nearly this level of room for error after 1.3 hits, I made a point of throwing off the lazy habits I've gotten into when facetanking and played as technically correct as I could. I lightning warped out of every single flameblast and call lightning marker I saw as soon as I saw them. I got through the first three Avatar stages just fine but then, in the 4th, the resurrect dialogue suddenly popped up. I didn't see the flameblast that killed me. I know it was a flameblast because I could see the Avatar channeling but, since there was no big, red, menacing circle under me, I assumed that he was targetting my my team-mate, the other member of the group. Nope, wrong. I got killed and had no way of predicting this. It may have been lag, it may have been desync, it may even have been the 438746837467254754698 different effects flying around the screen simultaneously that I had no way of turning off and which obscured m vision of the battle. Regardless, the point is that I died and no amount of technically correct play would have saved me unless I had played super-uber-level-9000 paranoid and assumed that every single flameblast was always directed at me regardless of whether or not I could see the marker. Now 75/75 block isn't going to prevent that from always happening, but it does make it 4 times less likely. I've played a game (old school mud called WoTmud) where the only way to stay alive was permanent 24/7 paranoia, constantly checking my surroundings for danger, and it was exhausting. Tbh, I much, much preferred playing when the mud's population started to drop and you could be less paranoid because then I could play for more than an hour or so without becoming completely exhausted from the pursuit of constant perfection in my play. Keep in mind that this is by no means a glass cannon char. I can cruise through 120% quantity 76 maps with -max resists, ele weakness, ele reflect and other assorted mods barely stopping to pot, albeit slowly due to low dps, because I have made a lot of sacrifices in terms of gear and passives to do so. But one flameblast which I didn't and couldn't see wiped me out instantly. Essentially totally destroying block (and make no mistake, this is destruction, not just a tweak) just makes the pool of builds I can afford to play that much smaller. I guess it's going to have to be herpderpfreezeeverythingbeforeitevergetsnearmewithcrit now which, coincidentally, takes similar levels of sacrifice in terms of gear and passive points to achieve, gets even more bonuses in the form of strong offense AND defense and was barely touched at all during these "balances". So yeah ... build diversity is dead! Long live build diversity! Last edited by f4sak3n#2799 on Dec 11, 2014, 4:55:45 PM
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