0.9.5g Patch Notes

Some nice changes there, Avatar of Fire could so easily be fixed if you didn't have those ridiculous 20% elemental damage nodes - why are they so high compared to weapon nodes? They should be 6 - 8% like every other damage node.

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chillerspoon wrote:

Some nice changes there, Avatar of Fire could so easily be fixed if you didn't have those ridiculous 20% elemental damage nodes - why are they so high compared to weapon nodes? They should be 6 - 8% like every other damage node.

they're so high maybe because
1. elemental damage is less common on weapons than phy damage
2. elemental damage is most of the times lower (base values) than weapon's damage

so 8% for a weapon with 200 damage is a bit more than 20% for an elemental damage of 10-20...

So? Make more of them but lower the % so it's actually balanced in passive skill distribution, it's just such a massive bias to take AoF and those nodes with them at 20% a pop.

Edit: overall this seems like perhaps a bit too biased due to my preliminary raw experience with a bad character (low health, not high level, hasn't been playing at chaos long, not the best gear), and tried to find arguments against it. That said, there was certainly no lack of arguments to find against this change.

I don't necessarily take all this back, but it does seem less prominent in the right circumstances (right now Maelstrom of Chaos players are oftentimes 68-75 with great gear. Because of this, even with AoF's weakness they can probably deal with it. Maelstrom Chaos is the only major issue from what I can tell)
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The avatar of fire change was a terribly poor choice.

It doesn't fix things at all — it makes AoF useless at high levels, and still overpowered at low levels. Edit: applies to melee, ranged users are probably still overpowered.

My most recent character played through the lower levels (1 to 50 or so) with virtually no resists (always below 30%, generally much lower), and didn't have major issues.

However, at highest monster levels, particularly maelstrom of chaos, I will get crippled to the point of being useless.

Maelstrom of chaos feels unplayable now unless I don't confront any cold enemies (which is a huge hassle and very difficult). The amount of fire resistant and elemental resistant and elemental reflects were rather high to begin with (although I know this affects all elemental damage dealing people), but combined with cold dmg, it makes it pretty much unplayable vs some monster groups.

Cold damage archers for instance, are instant-hit, completely unavoidable. They will then slow a character down enough to get frozen by sirens or cold mages or melee cold damage monsters, or even just slow enough to get stun locked, and/or hit by regular melee monsters, especially fast ones, and especially extra fast aura ones.
There are thawing flasks, but not only does that force a person to get thawing flasks, but it probably isn't even a viable option considering the limited flask use now. One would need to use the potions regularly just to dispel chilled, which isn't really viable now that they cost so much more to use.

Lastly, if this is used in PvP combat (I heard some keystones may somehowbe disabled in PvP?), it would make for TERRIBLE rock-paper-scissors PvP. There will bound to be some extend of rock-paper scissors going on unless the game was designed and balanced all around PvP, but encouraging huge rock-paper-scissors mechanics like this is just ridiculous. It's not fun when everyone with x build always beat you, and rather boring when the reverse occurs.

There were many ways to fix AoF, and this one doesn't work well at all as it stands. It's still overpowered except at Maelstrom of chaos(or somewhat merciless), at which point you might as well /wrists and make a new char.
In fact, Considering most bow-users can out-range "monster" archers (and obviously don't get close to melee), I'd say that bow users are exempt, and essentially just as overpowered as they ever were. All this is doing is screwing melee players, particularly slower melee players, and/or melee players who chose to get primarily energy shield and armor instead of health and armor.

An analogy to this balance was having a skill that lets say dealt 1000% extra damage and was overpowered, and instead of increasing it's mana cost, or cast time, you make it so that it stuns the player for 50 seconds. That's just not how to balance well. A bit of diversity is fine, but one needs to be careful to not skew things in opposite directions, as-is going on here.

AoF it's too nerfed, probably a good choice could be to decrease cold resistance by 30-40%. In this way AoF should be dangerous to play also in the lowest level, with the possibility to have negative resistances, while in chaos you should invest a lot in resistances to have it maxed.

I think this is a better way to fix AoF, because, as pointed out in the previous post by Xapti, the change introduced in this patch is very detrimental to the chaos and merciless gameplay of a melee AoF character since he become useless, while being not very penalized in the early stage of the game!

So my suggestion is to give a fixed penalty in cold resistances to the AoF skill (- 30-40%)

P.S. the rest of the patch is gorgeous, keep up the good work!

Just to re-state one of like 5-6 suggestions I gave about changing Avatar of fire:
Reduce [total] attack speed.

This not only reduces AoF's effectiveness, but it "synergizes" with the fact that it deals fire damage. Burning effect sucks if your attack speed is high, so having a lower attack speed fits in well with it I'd say.

How about you go test it in the field and see what gives.

Nice looking patch notes.

I'm really happy about the zoom out ;-)

Before:



After:

Love the new zoom, but you also effectively killed grouping. Why create a party system if no ones gonna use it? Theres a simple solution.

There needs to be repeatable quests, not once a day but once every four hours (this is a ARPG not MMORPG, needs to be more faced pace). The quest(s) need to be hard enough that it requires more than one player, maybe even up to 3 or 6.

Example Rewards:
Quest "One":
2% chance of rewarding 5x Fusing Orbs
48% chance of rewarding 5x Chromo Orbs
50% chance or rewarding 5x Jewelers Orbs

If you create a few of these quests.. say one for jewel mods, one for rerolling orbs, one for augmentation orbs, and so fourth (with apropreaite percentages), this will get people to want to log in for somthing other then the same old, same old monster grinding.

Just my opinion.

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reparks wrote:

There needs to be repeatable quests

The day when i see the "dailys chore" in this game will be also the day i'll quit.
Mythos go with the quest gring/dailys patch and they survived 2 months lol.

BTW. How this patch killed grouping? Because im apparently missing something....