Freeze pulse and the shotgun change

Thank god they made this change. And yes I'm actually using Incinerate build so I'm affected by this aswell.

Shotgun is terrible mechanic which made it quite impossible for GGG to balance things properly since they allways had to do such changes while having in mind that actual dps in point blank for most builds is multiplied 5 times. In some cases even more (COC/Mjollner).

I can't wait to throw GMP away and replace it with something else.

@Diphal: yes, the overall change is good, but getting rid of the mechanic entirely even for skills that actually feel well thought for using it is going too far.

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Faatality wrote:

@Diphal: yes, the overall change is good, but getting rid of the mechanic entirely even for skills that actually feel well thought for using it is going too far.

Here's my list of spells which seemed to me to be well thought out for spell shotgunning.

Spark

It's a short list. Notice the lack of Freezing Pulse.

As I've said before, Freezing Pulse already has a point-blank mechanic, making shotgunning absurdly redundant.

I had a look on the data miners site and it shows that freezing pulse got buffed by 75% (well its actually 74,915%)

lvl 20 FP: 236-354

lvl 20 new FB: 413-619

In addition to this the GMP support gem has also been buffed because it will only deal -26% less damage.
Why did i mention it? Because you still want to use GMP with FP because of the aoe.

Some maths:

Old FP with GMP deals: 5*50 = 250% of the base damage

New FP deals in: 175 *0,74 = 129,5% of the base damage in relation to the old FP

So FP loses 120,5% dps. Thats quite significant.

You might as well remove freeze pulse from the game with this change. Glacial Cascade looks cooler and works a lot better under these circumstances.

Completely disagree. No support should drastically increase your coverage and your single target damage at the same time. Choice is completely removed from mechanics like that. Giving more damage to spells when standing in melee and putting yourself at risk is fine. FP achieves that without shotgunning.

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Zed_ wrote:

Completely disagree. No support should drastically increase your coverage and your single target damage at the same time. Choice is completely removed from mechanics like that. Giving more damage to spells when standing in melee and putting yourself at risk is fine. FP achieves that without shotgunning.

Except that poe has never been a game about choice in regards to support gems.

You link physical attack damage on melee skills all the time.

Not to mention how multistrike and spell echo are usually mandatory.

I think your argument is flawed. If one gem benefits one skill more that it does for others then more power to it.

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Kranyum wrote:

Except that poe has never been a game about choice in regards to support gems.

You link physical attack damage on melee skills all the time.

Not to mention how multistrike and spell echo are usually mandatory.

I think your argument is flawed. If one gem benefits one skill more that it does for others then more power to it.

I disagree with most of what you said. Most melee skills have builds with elemental versions, which obviously wouldn't use Melee Phys. Even if you have just a little additive elemental damage on your gear/buffs, many other supports can be comparable.
Multistrike and Spell Echo limit your mobility and are avoided by some players. MS is probably getting nerfed on top of that. There are plenty of spells that don't function well with Spell Echo, like Molten Shell and anything that you would use for status effects, take crit Ice Spear prolif as an example. Spell Echo also has at least Spell Totem, Trap and Remote Mine as potential alternatives.

There's nothing that could even come close to an alternative to LMP/GMP on a shotgun skill, provided you can afford to go into melee. Nothing. This mechanic has caused way too much trouble for way too long.

I agree that it caused trouble in general but not for freeze pulse. It enabled freeze pulse to be somewhat decent...

Also I think you misunderstood my point. For each skill you usually have a couple of links which are must includes because they deal too much dps to ignore.

Take tornado shot: lmp/gmp is the way to go in both single or multi target fights. Also about elemental attacks, the choice in scaling with physical or elements comes first then the gem choices naturally follow. If you go elements route them WED is a default choice.

Conclusion is, in poe we already have the situation where for most skills there will be that 1 or 2 sick support gem that adds a lot more dmg compared to anything else. Shotgun removal wouldnt change this in any way, so your argument simply does not hold.

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Kranyum wrote:

I agree that it caused trouble in general but not for freeze pulse. It enabled freeze pulse to be somewhat decent...

No, it didn't. It held FP back, because it already had mechanics similar to shotgunning to begin with.

FP, more than any other skill, had to be throttled in light of its shotgun potential. No longer. Now it is free to be the special little snowflake it was always meant to be.

Like Scrotie said, I'm more concerned about Spark. That was a skill that was actually designed to shotgun, and because of that it is far more likely that rebalance for that skill could miss the mark.

Also, in re GMP=x5 damage: It wasn't. It was x5 x(1*50%), or x2.5 damage. If all five projectiles hit (easy enough if you're centering the attack on the Big Baddie). Consider now, that the sum potential of FP's base attributes had to be balanced around 2.5x single target damage and between x1 to x2 peripheral AoE damage. The net potential "more" damage from GMP alone far outweighed any other support in the game (e.g., MPD at ~50% more or x1.5).

Going by this alone, I'd estimate FP will (by the end of testing) sit around approx x1.75 it's base attributes as they are now (some combination of cast speed, base damage, and DE).

In other words, FP as is, is ~40% less effective than it could have been due solely to its pseudo double-dip with GMP.