The Balance Team needs a shake-up

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allbusiness wrote:

PoE is not a competitive game at all. Let's just be frank and honest. GGG treats it like one, but in truth it's not. The only 'competitive' part are the races.

That must be why i can't buy that voll's devotion for a chaos.

Excluding SSF, everybody is subject to competition with other exiles.

Which is one of the underlying aspects of the whole "balance" and "melee vs ranged" discussions, the rate at which you can farm and build up economical power compared to other exiles.

Peace,

-Boem-

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Fruz wrote:

^
No, Life should not scale like ES does, ES is supposed to be different from life.
There are other things in the game that screw up the ES/life balance enough, no need to turn even more ES into "blue life".

If life wont scale with GEAR, it will never be balanced. It will be one of following:

1. Good only for leveling or at the start of the league, and bad/useless in the end (current state).
2. Insanely OP when leveling, and still good in endgame, even with shit gear.

Both cant provide balance.

I'm not even touching ES! Just inability to scale your HP with better gear is enough to make life BAD. ARPG player should "feel" his character progression with getting better gear. He should see DPS increase, HP increase, and so on. If ARPG game takes this pleasure away from him, it leaves nothing but frustration and dissapointment. It may work for games like Dark Souls, but not for ARPGs. And especially - when enemy damage increases more and more in endgame content (higher-tier maps, worse mod combinations, guardians, Shaper, etc).
If GGG feels that life should be the same for 20c and 20 exa gear, then why high-level mobs do more damage? They should deal almost the same damage, but just have more HP. It will be fair.

Life may be different from ES in many ways, but it MUST scale well with gear, period.

You don't necessary have to change up the balance team's members, simply certain ideas that have lead to the list of complaints you have. GGG isn't likely going to fire anyone or reassign anyone to do something else, just because of a post like this.

I think the feedback would be far better, IMO if it was more focused on the reason why you think they come to do the changes that they have, rather then criticize them directly.

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

^
No, Life should not scale like ES does, ES is supposed to be different from life.
There are other things in the game that screw up the ES/life balance enough, no need to turn even more ES into "blue life".

If life wont scale with GEAR, it will never be balanced. It will be one of following:

1. Good only for leveling or at the start of the league, and bad/useless in the end (current state).
2. Insanely OP when leveling, and still good in endgame, even with shit gear.

Both cant provide balance.

They can, PoE used to be pretty balanced between ES and Life, it did not last very long, but it happened.

It's completely silly to say that "life is OP during leveling".
It's like saying that using gear is insanely OP during leveling for example .....

Stop it with your pointless "ARPG Should y, ARPG should Y", just NO.
It's just plain wrong.

Life is being scale a little bit from the gear, but is being scaled much more from other mechanics, such as high block / armour / evasion / dodge, ES can not afford as much as life builds can.
Not to mention MoM.

One of the problem atm is the amount of elemental damage that cannot be mitigate more with life than ES. Appart from that, the secondary defense will be more important and increase the EHP pool.
That's where the balance can be, and where it used to be.
And with this, it DOES scale with gear.

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Fruz wrote:

Life is being scale a little bit from the gear, but is being scaled much more from other mechanics, such as high block / armour / evasion / dodge, ES can not afford as much as life builds can.
Not to mention MoM.

Except ES CAN get all those defensive mechanics as well:

Block? Necro = block cap, Pathfinder = block/spellblock cap.

Armour? Guardian, Pathfinder = tons of armour or physical mitigation. And physical damage isnt so imposing in endgame, even. Elemental damage is what makes you die 90+% of the time, and armour does nothing for it. I could get 15k armour with just one flask on my Pathfinder, but it isnt worth 1 flask slot, even! For life character, 15k armour requires derious investment into it, investment that will totally wasted.

Evasion/Dodge? Well, Pathfinder could use Jade flask to get big evasion boost, but who needs evasion when you can cap block and spell block? Block/spell block cap is more than enough for rng defence, you better improve other defences from that point.

MoM just "improves" your life pool and its scaling with gear. But it has serious drawback too - you should use certain jewels and spam Rallying Cry just to reduce mana stress (or remove it), you should leave large chunk of mana unreserved, you should take mana passives, and even with all that, it still provides less HP pool than ES alone, and still doesnt provide good enough scaling.
I like MoM, but it's good only for some builds. Sadly, Pathfinder - one of the best candidates for MoM, but it it's much stronger with ES.

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

Life is being scale a little bit from the gear, but is being scaled much more from other mechanics, such as high block / armour / evasion / dodge, ES can not afford as much as life builds can.
Not to mention MoM.

Except ES CAN get all those defensive mechanics as well:

Block? Necro = block cap, Pathfinder = block/spellblock cap

Why don't you understand in "used to be balanced" exactly ?
Are you taking the pathfinder perma flask uptime as a reference to say that ES has max block ?
What about the other layers there ? You know that block isn't mutually exclusive with evade / dodge and armour right ?
You know that life builds have those at the same time usually right ? And it does make a difference.
Acrobatics + Phase acrobatics are very strong keystones for example.

Did you completely skipped the part where I said that elemental damage was a problem regarding end game balance ? Or did you skip it conveniently ?


MoM "just improve" the life pool ????
One third of the incoming damage absorbed is "just improve" ? I hope that you are trolling at this point man.
You can have corrupted item that give you mana from hits, you can manage to have a very high mana regeneration which makes it good for the few times where you need all of it, etc ...
And you can use one or two spirited response if you can afford too of course.
It needs some investment, but it's far more than "just improve".

7) immunities - I'll keep promoting this video because it just nails it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIFOb8oRP3o

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Fruz wrote:

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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Fruz wrote:

Life is being scale a little bit from the gear, but is being scaled much more from other mechanics, such as high block / armour / evasion / dodge, ES can not afford as much as life builds can.
Not to mention MoM.

Except ES CAN get all those defensive mechanics as well:

Block? Necro = block cap, Pathfinder = block/spellblock cap

Why don't you understand in "used to be balanced" exactly ?
Are you taking the pathfinder perma flask uptime as a reference to say that ES has max block ?
What about the other layers there ? You know that block isn't mutually exclusive with evade / dodge and armour right ?
You know that life builds have those at the same time usually right ? And it does make a difference.
Acrobatics + Phase acrobatics are very strong keystones for example.

Did you completely skipped the part where I said that elemental damage was a problem regarding end game balance ? Or did you skip it conveniently ?


MoM "just improve" the life pool ????
One third of the incoming damage absorbed is "just improve" ? I hope that you are trolling at this point man.
You can have corrupted item that give you mana from hits, you can manage to have a very high mana regeneration which makes it good for the few times where you need all of it, etc ...
And you can use one or two spirited response if you can afford too of course.
It needs some investment, but it's far more than "just improve".

man. this time you are defending something that cannot be defended. ever.

MoM - and im one of the few people toting it around ever since Spirited Response has been released - is childs play compared to CI. really. investment required is not comparable.

same with these 'layers' you speak of. first of - CI does NOT need them. buffer is enough. second - CI CAN get them if one wants to. but for the most part it is irrelevant because 12k ES + regen (not even mentioning leech) is enough to survive 1 hit (or as many hits as you want) from non-bosses. and for bosses CI has flasks and plain old 'manual positioning'. ive been there, done that

my 5k life dodge/eva/ar 2h sword raider is pretty amazing but there is no chance she will be ever able to kill Minotaur. ever. pool is just not high enough and i only have so many portals to refill flasks. one rock and im dead.

with CI? EZPZ

you are really trying to defend something that no other experienced and well-versed player would ever try to defend. life is (and always was) inferior to ES (CI). it is all about the buffer. developers are unable to balance without using one-shot mechanics and because of that it is only the buffer that matters.

oh and btw - when i hear anyone using 'MoM' and 'mana regeneration' in one sentece i suspect he never actually built MoM character.. relying on mana regen as a MoM is suicide

Dude, I never said that it was balanced right now, read again.

I said that those mechanics could make life balanced without having just boost all the life rolls everywhere like he would like to, because ES and Life are supposed to behave differently.

At the moment, the top content having very high damage + the potential ES buffer one can achieve ( + instant leech and crazy dps, especially with instant leech .... ) make all of those layers feel pretty bad, but it's not a reason to just forget about them and buff the hell out of life by increasing the buffer.


And relying on Mana regeneration alone with MoM isn't quiiite enough, although on a range character you might be able to temporize after a big hit, but most players just seem to despise downtime ....
Old games used to have down time and choices to make, now players don't ever want to wait for anything ://.

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sidtherat wrote:

oh and btw - when i hear anyone using 'MoM' and 'mana regeneration' in one sentece i suspect he never actually built MoM character.. relying on mana regen as a MoM is suicide

Leech + spirited response and vaaled rings all the way brother.

God i wish somebody made a div card that gave "random unique ring with % damage takes as mana corruption", i'd be all over that card like a bee to honey.

but yeah, anybody experienced in MoM play in current end-game knows regen = failed build.

Hell that mostly holds true for all regen based builds considering the pack size modifiers.

Peace,

-Boem-