Sure there is plenty of ideas out there, but: how to Fix Armour/Eva stupidly easy.

Armour: REMOVE the 10% threshold/hardcap on the damage reduction while increasing (at all levels) diminished returns for stacking armour to whathever value you think is appropriate.


Evasion: 1/6 or 1/5 of the total evasion rate (the effective % chance to evade attacks according to each mob's accuracy) reduces damage from spells/attacks that ignore evasion (all spells?!).
So, someone with 50% evasion agains't said mob, would have 10% or +-8% damage reduction against attacks/spells that always hit. This of course, would not apply to skills that simply have 100% accuracy (aka "enemies cannot evade attacks").

This + a slight increase in HP per level would totally fix it, imho. Something like 12 hp per level > 20 (8 x 89 = +712 hp at lvl 90, with an average of 150% increase = 1780 total extra hp) Finally a slight 1% increase in some life nodes, specially the ones that only grant like 3 or 4%.

Boom life can compete with ES again.


... know this is kinda pointless, but i had to get it out of my system.

both AR and EV are fine. perfectly fine.


what isnt fine are two stupid things:

1) ease of scaling for ES. it takes little to no effort to get 5k ES without even trying. it takes just some effort to get 8k ES and once you start picking items with ES (compared to circumstantial items that just got good stats) you reach 10k ES without any special tricks.

INT -> %ES conversion is VERY strong (30 INT node == 6% ES) and is a part of the problem. same with %ES rolls on rings. 20% for 1EX + few divines? is someone that crazy to think that it compares to %AR roll. is there anyone who crafter 20% AR or EV on a ring?

so you get huge buffer for free + vaal pact to refill it instantly

2) damage in the end game 'tuned' to kill such builds (The Sponge -> buffer + insta refill).

AR and EV can do whatever they want but if bosses deal 6k elemental spell damage (that both AR nor EV do nothing against) then there we have a problem.



part of the problem are also players. players who do not really understand how this game works and try to do really stupid things like 'pure EV' builds: 5k life, 0 AR, some dodge and EV and they expect to succeed. well. they wont. same with 'pure AR'.

game was designed with hybrids in mind but noone cares about it because we have ES so stupidly strong that it can work alone. and people want to repeat that for other major defences.

not to mention that most of the players (ones moaning too) 'learned' the game by doing copy-pasta builds

Reduction in spell/secondary elemental one shots or a way for Life builds to address them (Pantheon?), slight buff to base Armour/EVA values (probably mod values) on endgame items, and you're pretty much done balancing. People look at AR/Eva and assume it's garbage because they have holes and/or the math on reduction confuses them (hint: x% reduced has increasing returns, asymptotically towards literal infinity.)

By the way:

The 10% "hardcap" is a mathematical result of the Armour formula. You can't "remove it" without literally changing the way Armour is calculated.

Armour investment scales EHP linearly, so there's no diminishing returns to increase. And diminishing returns would be awful. Armour, like Energy Shield, is dependent on gear affixes, so you want to push the player to gain as much of it as they can. I feel like GGG has even been trying to do this with resistances lately (Breach uncapped resist uniques, Elemental Weakness granting pack size, etc).

"

sidtherat wrote:

1) ease of scaling for ES. it takes little to no effort to get 5k ES without even trying. it takes just some effort to get 8k ES and once you start picking items with ES (compared to circumstantial items that just got good stats) you reach 10k ES without any special tricks.

I agreed with most of what u said, but this bit here, you say it as if 5k es is somehow something to have, as if thats even remotely viable to run content with. 5k es I would put as an equiv of about 2.5k life, thats cruel difficulty level defenses. Some effort to get 8k es, I wouldnt even consider 8k es acceptable for proper mapping, 8k es is like having a 4-5k life build, if all you have going on from the sum total of your gears defense is 8kes then hf camping white tier maps because thats about all youre good for imo. Why would you need special tricks to hit 10kes? thats like baseline acceptable for a proper endgame char, thats like saying hey, I got 5-6k life... yeah well done, you passed minimum requirement, you character is now no longer a joke.

the day you need special tricks to hit 10k es and 8k es is what decent ci builds are running around with is the day ci is dead.

What about make those bosses' heavy hits(heaven touch, flame blast, etc.) to be dots? Since using the flasks take time, the one-shot could be fixed by this way too. This could make ARMOUR more useful, and the ES could be less impressive, and it might be better if we made the VP also cut the dots duration from enemy.

Evasion and armour are pretty fine ( evasion on it's own isn't great for melees though, where armour alone is a bit better ).
It's leech and the ES scaling potential being too high that just trivialize content.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

"

sidtherat wrote:

1) ease of scaling for ES. it takes little to no effort to get 5k ES without even trying. it takes just some effort to get 8k ES and once you start picking items with ES (compared to circumstantial items that just got good stats) you reach 10k ES without any special tricks.

I agreed with most of what u said, but this bit here, you say it as if 5k es is somehow something to have, as if thats even remotely viable to run content with. 5k es I would put as an equiv of about 2.5k life, thats cruel difficulty level defenses. Some effort to get 8k es, I wouldnt even consider 8k es acceptable for proper mapping, 8k es is like having a 4-5k life build, if all you have going on from the sum total of your gears defense is 8kes then hf camping white tier maps because thats about all youre good for imo. Why would you need special tricks to hit 10kes? thats like baseline acceptable for a proper endgame char, thats like saying hey, I got 5-6k life... yeah well done, you passed minimum requirement, you character is now no longer a joke.

the day you need special tricks to hit 10k es and 8k es is what decent ci builds are running around with is the day ci is dead.

there goes the basic English vs native speaker. tried to be more sarcastic than i should have been, sorry

'special tricks' net you 20k ES not 10k but i failed to convey the message. 5k ES you get by just picking some ES items and picking CI. 8k requires some extra picking ES nodes. it is really really easy to get there. 10k is perfectly achievable with medium gear (without Discipline ofc) esp compared to life that simply 'eats' your passive points like crazy and allows for good damage only when a) wearing bonkers weapon OR b) abusing current bull.. mechanic of the league OR a+b because everything else is in life nodes.

fair play sid, maybe my bad on the reading a bit there too.

Like I said I do agree with the majority of what you were saying there, and the overall point you were getting at I think is fair.






Regarding touch of god and stuff, are we really supposed to tank those though? I think I would be leaning more towards making them do like 2 million damage so that it doesnt matter if you have 5k life or 20k es, you just get 1 shot regardless. Certainly in higher maps anyway. Talking specifically about the big slams here, vaal slam, dom slam, mal slam etc.


Honestly I think they should really tone down the map mods and then just boost a lot of regular mob damage so that things are a bit more consistent. I feel like 1 shots that arise from yellow mobs etc are really hard to eliminate when you are trying to make a monster scary but also consider that it might be doing like 200% more damage given map mods. Personally, vol blood aside, I cant recall being 1 shot by a rare mob in the last few years but I appreciate people who run stuff like pure evasion specs do actually come across that sort of stuff.

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adghar wrote:

Reduction in spell/secondary elemental one shots or a way for Life builds to address them (Pantheon?), slight buff to base Armour/EVA values (probably mod values) on endgame items, and you're pretty much done balancing. People look at AR/Eva and assume it's garbage because they have holes and/or the math on reduction confuses them (hint: x% reduced has increasing returns, asymptotically towards literal infinity.)

By the way:

The 10% "hardcap" is a mathematical result of the Armour formula. You can't "remove it" without literally changing the way Armour is calculated.

Armour investment scales EHP linearly, so there's no diminishing returns to increase. And diminishing returns would be awful. Armour, like Energy Shield, is dependent on gear affixes, so you want to push the player to gain as much of it as they can. I feel like GGG has even been trying to do this with resistances lately (Breach uncapped resist uniques, Elemental Weakness granting pack size, etc).

OP and other people who don't understand basic math want armour to scale better than es. That said, I think it doesn't scale well enough. I think energy shield values and amount of physical damage reduced by armour (for an infinite hit) should be the same with the same investment on the tree (including needing to invest in life). On the high end, that's just not even close to possible. You can get like 15k es fairly easily but you are definitely not getting 150k armour. 15k es is more on par with like 25-20k armour in terms of investment needed.