New keystone idea

I've seen a couple of mentions of people wanting to create slow large hitting weapons as their supporter unique items. From what i read between the lines, they were deemed overpowered.

Here's my take on the concept. A keystone that has the effects
- Critical strikes do not deal increased damage
- 50% more melee physical damage
- 50% less elemental damage

This would either be a keystone in it's own right or gated behind resolute technique. The basic idea is to allow for the creation of true physical builds. Since i began playing, hatred / added fire seems to be mandatory for any physical damage build and more recently herald of ash. At this point, you're doing more elemental damage with added fire / hatred / HoA than physical.

The 50% more and less multipliers are a rough estimate of where I think would be a good place to start.

Please feel free to tell me why this wouldn't work, why i'm a scrub or how many times this has been suggested already. Thanks

If you want to help melee don't worry about damage. Better think about survivability.

Maybe convert melee elemental damage to defenses :D

I'm not thinking of it as a keystone to help melee, just one to challenge the metas of attacking ever faster to scale damage and scaling physical damage by adding elemental. Many melee physical builds are very one dimensional in both of those respects.

This would be a way (provided it is balanced appropriately) to bring melee a bit of diversity.

I am totally for this idea. Its pretty hard to theme your build at all in this game since by the end of it most characters look like the same rainbow of elemental effects and auras...

The problem of course is how well physical damage scales vs Armour. More raw damage means more Armour penetration basically, so huge amounts of pure phys damage, while it's paper DPS is lower, it shreds enemies defenses and ends up doing more damage as a result.

If it were an attack speed buff then it would probably be less problematic, but like you said, if everyone attacks at the speed of light then diversity goes out the window, except in a different direction this time...

On that note: The ability to hide effects like the heralds or auras. We need this GGG. Please?

From what i've experienced against armoured monsters, their armour seems to have a negligible effect at it's current level anyway.

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I_Are_Noob wrote:

From what i've experienced against armoured monsters, their armour seems to have a negligible effect at it's current level anyway.

The effect can be pretty marked though if you keep stacking single hit damage. Once you reach around 12x their Armour total in damage, their Damage reduction becomes effectively 1% if I read the Armour formula right (Which i probably haven't.) The more physical damage you stack, you effectively get a hidden "x% more physical damage" modifier behind your attacks. Its by no means negligible even with the highest recorded Armour a mob having being 900ish ^^

I am supposing that PvP is the real reason they would hold off on this sort of thing: Big single hit phys attacks I can imagine are a large problem for any Armour based characters, and with Resolute Technique already negating Evade, Evasion characters don't need them capable of 1HKO level damage ^^

Its hard to balance damage levels when you can allow people to access the "I kill every time i hit" level of single hit damage.