Life is King...and we need a bloody revolution.
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I'm not keen on the principle of having lots of hybrid nodes. A few hybrid nodes as an incentive for a particular build style are fine, but they shouldn't become the whole story. If there's a choice to be made and a balance to be struck, let the players choose and find the right balance for their build. The relative strength of low Evasion vs high Evasion is an issue (I would change the Evasion formula to be like the Armour one, i.e. get rid of that 0.8 exponent), but telling players 'look, you need this much life to go with that much Evasion, so I'm making you take both as a package deal' is condescending. These nodes would just become even more must-have than pure life nodes are now.
You say that monsters hitting faster but less hard is a questionable change, because it removes the fear of sudden death from big hits. But making it easy for people to get a big life pool does exactly the same thing! Why not just give monsters less damage per hit, but more powerful in other ways (attack speed, status effects, regenerating, etc)? That way players have a choice in how they face a range of challenges, not just 'you need 3k life to take on this guy'. Last edited by Incompetent on Feb 18, 2013, 8:02:42 PM
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Charan, your proposals would be swell if, say, passive builds were balanced among most of the nodes but armour, evasion and ES were being ignored. However, as your opening thesis explains so eloquently, this is not the case: life is king and nothing else is really competing.
I think Charan gets that this is a passive skill point opportunity cost issue, and that non-life defense nodes are just too weak compared to life to stand up. However, it's not just defensive nodes that kneel to King Life... Should I get 8% more physical damage with my weapon, or 8% life? Well, not all of my damage is physical, and that would lock me into the weapon I'm using... I might want to switch later. Plus I'm going to pick up Strength traveling through the grid, that will help physical damage and give me some base life which will get multiplied... yeah, I'm taking the life node. Should I get 4% faster attack speed, or 8% life? Well, attack speed effects all my damage... but it's 4% vs 8%. I'm gonna go with the bigger number and get the life node. Should I get 10% armour, or 8% life? Well, I'm going to get more EHP increase from the life node, so.. yeah. Life node. Obviously. Charan, if your proposals were "successful" you'd tranform a monarchy into an oligarchy. Life and armour and evasion and ES would be king... and would rule over everything else. That's not a solution. Decreasing 8% life nodes to 6% (minimum nerf) to 4% (probably more appropriate nerf) is, I hope, an actual solution. Right now it seems impossible, but that's because the game has mutated, made harder by the devs to combat the overstacking of life. In a life-stacking world, they had to, or the monsters wouldn't present a threat. If we just go back to square one and recalibrate the higher difficulties with life stacking appropriately nerfed, we might strike a good difficulty balance in a world where passives other than life nodes and keystones are actually worth taking. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Last edited by ScrotieMcB on Feb 18, 2013, 8:23:33 PM
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ScrotieMcB: Great post and I agree entirely.
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Great idea.
Remember that we also need to convert some life nodes into something offensive according to area they appear, such as : spell damage melee physical damage projectile physical damage area of effect radius cast speed attack speed move speed spell critical chance spell critical multiplier attack critical chance attack critical multiplier accuracy stun theresold stun duration on enemies knockback chance pierce chance and other offensive nodes as well. Thoughts? | |
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How about giving every node a small inherent life %?
Or give every piece of equipment inherent life % and scale the percent up in tiers like all the stats do? Ascension tied to Lab is the worst thing GGG has done...apart from GGG's philosophy on Trading. Oh and Gambling Loot boxes. And selling out to tencent.
I used to love GGG. I supported to ensure GGG remained independent, now I just wish I could get my money back. -_- | |
" It's true, I was never really looking at changing the ruling system. I proposed replacing one king with another, which you generously call an oligarchy. I appreciate that you've clarified that all the nodes bow to Life right now -- not sure I completely agree, but naturally life is the tyrant. I figured if we could reduce the number of nodes required to get acceptable life and do so by encouraging people to focus more on their defence types, this would free up more nodes to get back to things such as damage, support, etc. In essence, I wanted to combine life, armour, evasion and energy shield into one overall concept, survival. But I see your point: this method still encourages the player to neglect the other nodes as they scramble for survival -- I assumed, very poorly, that a player would not be so greedy and merely get the required survival nodes to survive rather than simply facetank, as some put it. Unfortunately your proposed solution is far less feasible than mine. You're calling for a rebalance of mobs' damage, which is far from a new suggestion, supplemented by a reduction in the potency of life% nodes. If the solution were that simple and doable, I think it'd have been done by now. I'm pretty sure most players who have ever thought 'Life is King' will have realised that the most obvious recourse is to reduce enemy damage and life availability. But that's just scaling. As it stands, normal difficulty is very tough if you don't focus on life. Very. I don't leave act 2 without less than 600 health typically. Merely rebalancing the higher difficulty whilst reducing the effectiveness of the life nodes would just make normal that much harder. Going back to Square One is no longer an option. Life is King. Where do we go next? Warhammer 40k Inquisitor: where shotgunning is not only not nerfed, it is deeply encouraged.
Dogma > Souls, but they're masterworks all. You can't go wrong. I was right about PoE2 needing to be a separate, new game. It was really obvious. |
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" Yes, I just proposed changing all life nodes into defence because it was the easiest example. I think the removal of all those life nodes would give plenty of opportunity for re-emphasising all the other sorts of nodes. Warhammer 40k Inquisitor: where shotgunning is not only not nerfed, it is deeply encouraged.
Dogma > Souls, but they're masterworks all. You can't go wrong. I was right about PoE2 needing to be a separate, new game. It was really obvious. |
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" I see. | |
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Edited main post to reflect PHRandom's suggestion.
Warhammer 40k Inquisitor: where shotgunning is not only not nerfed, it is deeply encouraged.
Dogma > Souls, but they're masterworks all. You can't go wrong. I was right about PoE2 needing to be a separate, new game. It was really obvious. |
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" If we can't recalibrate monster damage to the new life, then we calibrate the new life to monster damage. This is possible by altering base life (through three sources: levels, Strength, and items) such that, after the new, nerfed life passives are applied, the same life total result is achieved. Example with mostly made-up numbers: Let's say the most % life stacking you could do currently with a shadow is +300% with 81 skill points (level 64, 63 from levels, 18 from quests). Let's say he has 434 base life from levels, about 54 Strength for another 27 (461), then gear, which could get him up to 1000 if he had a bunch of great mods. Since he'd have +300%, he'd have 1844 to 4000 life, depending on gear... ...now let's reverse engineer with only +150% life, assuming we go for the 4% version of my nerf by halving all life node values. He'd need 738-1600 base life to achieve the results. So let's say you make life 60 at level 1 and increase by 10 per level, and make Strength give 1 life per point. Now that level 64 shadow has 754 base life before gear, able to get to about 1300 with great gear, and finals to 1875-3250 life depending on gear even though he only has +150% max life. It might need more fine-tuning than that, but my point is that we can tone done life nodes and leave monster stats the same and still have a playable game. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
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