What is the counter balance to ascendant classes?

Are monsters getting global damage and life buffs to compensate for ascendent classes? I can't really see GGG simply giving the entire base an entire skill group that does not actually us skill points from leveling normally.

Also, how many ascendant skill points will we be able to get? Enough to skill the entire ascendant tree?

/hype resume

If GGG was planning on balancing the entire game around ascendancy classes, it might probably end up the same way as Act 4 turned out - an overtuned mess that only the cookie cutter classes can go through.

On the flip side, if they let the difficulty stay as is, these skill points might open up interesting build variations.

We don't have all the data yet so can't really answer your initial question.

As to your second part, you will be granted a maximum of 6 ascendant points to choose perks/atributes/whatever? with.
(2 points for every first labyrinth clear in any difficulty)

If i had to guess i would assume they are removing some stuff from the tree to trim it down a bit to compensate for these perks? but like i said, just a wild guess, they can go different routes to balance the game now.

Peace,

-Boem-

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Boem wrote:

We don't have all the data yet so can't really answer your initial question.

As to your second part, you will be granted a maximum of 6 ascendant points to choose perks/atributes/whatever? with.
(2 points for every first labyrinth clear in any difficulty)

If i had to guess i would assume they are removing some stuff from the tree to trim it down a bit to compensate for these perks? but like i said, just a wild guess, they can go different routes to balance the game now.

Peace,

-Boem-

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense since the trees are setup with 2 or 4 node paths meaning you can only get about half of your ascendent passives.

Higher level more challenging maps with exp penalties perhaps.

Adding those nodes to existing characters in the existing environment would be silly. You would only make characters already having an easy time of it have an even easier time. They wont make that mistake.

So these new nodes are either going to be so hard to get that only characters that don't need them will be able to get them, or they're going to turn up the difficulty of the rest of the game to make room for characters that can out-do what we currently do.

Either way it's bad design. They're throwing out their existing game for some new thing that may or may not work. I really hope the best for them, but it doesn't look good.

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Ashwin wrote:

If GGG was planning on balancing the entire game around ascendancy classes, it might probably end up the same way as Act 4 turned out - an overtuned mess that only the cookie cutter classes can go through.

On the flip side, if they let the difficulty stay as is, these skill points might open up interesting build variations.

I'm pretty sure they will tune the difficulty up again. Do you really think we'll have things like 100% block to spell block, +100% spectre damage, +0.5% base crit per power charge, or crits ignore ele resists without higher difficulty.

Doubt they'll tell us for a while, heck they're probably still figuring out all the changes themselves.

But they only just did their press release, the next significant number of info releases we get are going to continue to be the shiny new stuff to hype up the release. I imagine we'll get some of the balance details closer to release, although they may incorporate some of them into the Talisman patch too.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

So these new nodes are either going to be so hard to get that only characters that don't need them will be able to get them,

You can get your first 2 nodes in Normal difficulty. They're not going to be hard to get at all.

All they showed in the trailer was you dodging shit so if you can do that, Well you can obviously finish your Ascendant.