What is the counter balance to ascendant classes?

BLAMT

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Shagsbeard wrote:

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.

It's going to introduce trade-offs.

I hope they take it a long way and seriously prevent people from speccing up to 95% crit while also maintaining a tanky character, which was totally possible before. At the very least I expect there will be more specialisation required than say, picking a scion instead of a shadow.

Crit is one thing I'm fairly certain they're going to address - "everything is better with crit" will hopefully be over soon

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ihasmario wrote:

Crit is one thing I'm fairly certain they're going to address - "everything is better with crit" will hopefully be over soon

I can't see this happening anymore. Which is pretty unfortunate.

You wont have any nodes during normal, so that wont need to be touched. You will have 2 nodes through cruel, I doubt just 2 nodes will have a massive impact. You will have 4 nodes for Merciless, that is where you might see some slight adjustment but the biggest impact will be deep Merc and into mapping where you will have the 6 nodes.

Perhaps the new challenge area will be significantly harder and the power boost will be balanced, perhaps GGG has seen a lot of people skip map bosses and harder map mods because they do not feel their character is tough enough or does enough damage to do the fights and these are designed for a wider variety of builds to be able to do more of the challenging fights with less of a focus required on a handful of cookie cutter builds that can handle the end game content.

I am sure in time they will talk about their motivation for the changes.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

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.

The characters who are currently facerolling the content will not be meaningfully affected by a few more significant bonuses. The Ascendancy system seems intended to relieve some of the pressure on Unique Items for their role in enabling new builds, to address the long-standing issue of class identity (which has been one of GGG's concerns since the original introduction of the Descent races), and to (finally!) introduce 'clever' notables in a way that's tractable for the balance team to handle.

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ephetat wrote:

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Shagsbeard wrote:

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.

The characters who are currently facerolling the content will not be meaningfully affected by a few more significant bonuses. The Ascendancy system seems intended to relieve some of the pressure on Unique Items for their role in enabling new builds, to address the long-standing issue of class identity (which has been one of GGG's concerns since the original introduction of the Descent races), and to (finally!) introduce 'clever' notables in a way that's tractable for the balance team to handle.

Rangers Getting 1 more projectile or 1 more chain is absolutely game breaking regardless of where you lie on the power spectrum.

Duelist Getting 100% spell block based on block also means existing tanks can ditch their crappy spell block uniques in favor of dps oriented gear.

Shadows can supercrit full life mobs reducing the need for CC and relying on stacking base damage to make the first hit instant kill.

The sheer power of the ascendant passives are far stronger than anything PoE has ever seen and that is a goddamn good thing because everyone loves big shiny toy guns. It's just, santa is demand your soul in exchange.

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mynameisonlyforthegods wrote:

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ihasmario wrote:

Crit is one thing I'm fairly certain they're going to address - "everything is better with crit" will hopefully be over soon

I can't see this happening anymore. Which is pretty unfortunate.

There is literally almost no global crit nodes left in the entire tree. You have one cluster near shadow , one near ranger and a triad multi cluster near witch that rarely is ever optimal. It looks like they will remove 2 existing crit nodes near shadow which leaves the total number of global crit nodes to 9......in the entire tree.

I disagree. Where you see game breaking I see fun.

My tornado shot ranger already inflicts more than enough damage, survivability is the problem, when i see the damage boost in Deadeye I am not thinking OP, I am thinking, great, i can now cut about 20 or so nodes and still put out good damage and I have more nodes to invest into survivability and utility. I am more hopeful that there is going to be ranger sub-class which gives you a better defensive baseline, it's great dodging and evading, but if you die when you get hit then that doesn't make it hardcore friendly.

I also see this as a significant boon when it comes to events/races because these sub classes will give you the basis of a build, it should typically lower the barrier when it comes to putting together something viable in a short period of time where you wont have free choice in terms of item availability.

Tanks who invest a lot to be defensive and block a lot of attacks pay a substantial price for that, the spell block thing would be a significant boon and again, would make it more viable to play in an event where the availability of a legion of uniques is going to be difficult to pull off. It will also help the tank to be solid defensively without having extremely poor offense or rely on playing a facebreaker build.

These sub classes should increase build diversity imo rather than just make the current op flavour of the quarter more op. Even if it does make some op builds even more op, they were op to begin with and would likely be looked at fine tuning the abilities that are currently OP.

For the Shadow one, I do not look at it as if I can one-shot everything, I am looking at it and saying builds like cast on crit will be easier to build, so you probably wont have to wait until level 80+ before you can play the build, I think Assassin would significantly lower the entry point for a build like that and would lower the overall investment required or wouldn't need an awesome weapon.

I think the focus for Ascendancy is to make builds function a lot earlier than they used to, I think people playing a lot of builds totally different because they were not viable until level 80+ was problematic and I think these sub-classes will help to improve things. That is what I am guessing is their motivation, it should help to bring a lot more builds into play a lot earlier. I loved playing a summoner but they were pretty much unplayable until merc+, they were just too weak, died too easily, didn't do enough damage but around level 70-80 they become very solid. They should be solid from level 1, a lot more builds should be a lot more doable a lot earlier.

I'm guessing that they are going to nerf the tree. Right now a standard node may give you 20% crit or 2-3% block or 10-15% phys damage. With the new ascendant nodes, I suspect many of these nodes will be nerfed so that you won't be able to easily cap your block or crit or scale really high phys damage.

Overall I think balancing so many types of monsters and map mods around a changing skill tree is really hard. They obviously did not do a good job of balancing monsters/bosses after a long 2.0 close beta and the tree was not even that different. It's much easier to just balance trees so that after buffing part of the tree and nerfing another part, most builds will remain relatively the same. They now released the buff part first to create some hype so people will be excited and buy their packages. Then they release the nerf....

Again, this is just my guess.