Skill Revamps - Part 3

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Long term, we want to provide alternatives to Barrage that can compete with it, but its ability to scale with additional projectiles is so extreme that we have to reduce its damage per additional projectile to give other skills a chance. This will give us the opportunity to provide more general power for bow skills.

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ACGIFT wrote:

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KillerFit wrote:

(Which by the way is intended and it is the purpose of a skill)

Good thing you're not trusted to balance anything, since you demonstrated how much you missed the point. "But people use it!" doesn't mean it's balanced, but in fact the OPPOSITE.

Balance is really, really, REALLY simple. It boils down to asking just two short questions, and seeing if you can answer them:

• Why would a player ever want to use this, instead of a different option?
  
  
• Why would a player ever want to use a different option, instead of this?

The strength of answer you can give for each determines how well balanced it is. If you can only give a good answer for the former, but can't give an equally-strong answer for the latter... It's overpowered.

Barrage right now is a case where we can give a strong gameplay-maximization answer for the first one, but can't for the latter:

• Why would you use Barrage instead of a different gem? Because you can build millions of DPS with minimal skill and relatively inexpensive gear.
  
  
• Why would you want to use a different ranged gem for bosses instead of Barrage? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There's literally no argument for using any other ranged gem on bosses beyond "You want to be different," which isn't a valid gameplay-based reason. This means that Barrage isn't just overpowered, it's WILDLY overpowered.

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NetherPrime wrote:

You mean cyclone, blade flurry, reave, earthquake, lacerate(not the best but it still is viable), tetonic slam, molten strike and sunder? sounds like 3.

I would also sorta-add frost blades and even lightning strike; not in the "safe meta" tier due to low popularity, but definitely quite viable. (and to be honest, I personally do like Static Strike, though I'll confess that for most purposes, Molten Strike does the exact same thing just SLIGHTLY better)

"

philosoaper wrote:

remember to nerf the HP of mobs too when you destroy barrage

This is a valid point... Though slightly less to do with Barrage, and perhaps more to do with the Pathfinder.

The whole issue with boss HP (and hence boss fight length) is the question of how much of that duration you have flask uptime. Any class that can have 100% uptime through the fight is gonna be fine; those that don't are going to struggle. Pathfinders have the issue that basically anyone who's not TOO braindead to copy-paste a streamer's build can go Pathfinder and guarantee 100% uptime for every boss fight.

But... Coupling the two together, where millions of single-target DPS (only hidden on tooltip by the fact that GGG never bothered to account for more than one hit per attack, something they COULD have decided to script differently) can be easily brought against any boss, GGG's response has been to... Raise the waterline and balance around that, indirectly nerfing the other builds into oblivion, when most of them are capped to the low hundreds of thousands.

To be honest GGG needs to do a heavily-tested, thorough rework-balance pass across numerous builds and content. They need to recognize that the game's seen fantastic levels of power creep over the past few years, and responding to it by simply advancing it further will only make it harder to keep all the fabled options (that is supposed to be a key selling point of PoE) viable and attractive.

"

KillerFit wrote:

"

ACGIFT wrote:

"

KillerFit wrote:

(Which by the way is intended and it is the purpose of a skill)

Good thing you're not trusted to balance anything, since you demonstrated how much you missed the point. "But people use it!" doesn't mean it's balanced, but in fact the OPPOSITE.

Balance is really, really, REALLY simple. It boils down to asking just two short questions, and seeing if you can answer them:

• Why would a player ever want to use this, instead of a different option?
  
  
• Why would a player ever want to use a different option, instead of this?

The strength of answer you can give for each determines how well balanced it is. If you can only give a good answer for the former, but can't give an equally-strong answer for the latter... It's overpowered.

Barrage right now is a case where we can give a strong gameplay-maximization answer for the first one, but can't for the latter:

• Why would you use Barrage instead of a different gem? Because you can build millions of DPS with minimal skill and relatively inexpensive gear.
  
  
• Why would you want to use a different ranged gem for bosses instead of Barrage? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There's literally no argument for using any other ranged gem on bosses beyond "You want to be different," which isn't a valid gameplay-based reason. This means that Barrage isn't just overpowered, it's WILDLY overpowered.

"

NetherPrime wrote:

You mean cyclone, blade flurry, reave, earthquake, lacerate(not the best but it still is viable), tetonic slam, molten strike and sunder? sounds like 3.

I would also sorta-add frost blades and even lightning strike; not in the "safe meta" tier due to low popularity, but definitely quite viable. (and to be honest, I personally do like Static Strike, though I'll confess that for most purposes, Molten Strike does the exact same thing just SLIGHTLY better)

"

philosoaper wrote:

remember to nerf the HP of mobs too when you destroy barrage

This is a valid point... Though slightly less to do with Barrage, and perhaps more to do with the Pathfinder.

The whole issue with boss HP (and hence boss fight length) is the question of how much of that duration you have flask uptime. Any class that can have 100% uptime through the fight is gonna be fine; those that don't are going to struggle. Pathfinders have the issue that basically anyone who's not TOO braindead to copy-paste a streamer's build can go Pathfinder and guarantee 100% uptime for every boss fight.

But... Coupling the two together, where millions of single-target DPS (only hidden on tooltip by the fact that GGG never bothered to account for more than one hit per attack, something they COULD have decided to script differently) can be easily brought against any boss, GGG's response has been to... Raise the waterline and balance around that, indirectly nerfing the other builds into oblivion, when most of them are capped to the low hundreds of thousands.

To be honest GGG needs to do a heavily-tested, thorough rework-balance pass across numerous builds and content. They need to recognize that the game's seen fantastic levels of power creep over the past few years, and responding to it by simply advancing it further will only make it harder to keep all the fabled options (that is supposed to be a key selling point of PoE) viable and attractive.

And good thing no one cares about your opinion :D
Seems to me your the "Professor" who knows everything here!There is a reason some Skills are attactive more than others!How they feel to play,how much Damage they deliver,how hard are they to play and so on!We are here to play,not get a degree in PoE engineering and 100% fines in playing!There is nothing to ballance in Barrage,it mechanic worked till now with no problem.No body said anything about Barrage for years!Where is your post from last year in which you said Barrage should be nerfed?Where is your post from the year before in which you said Barrage should be "balanced"?Oh w8,there is non,becuase you say what people say,you dont have your own opinion!ANyway nerfing barrage with 20% wont give us a new and better skill than it,will it?Second,by nerfing Barrage they will gut the already strugling on a budget mid-tier player!I have a mirrored bow char,and kill Shaper with almost the same speed as with barrage,what does that tell you?With mirrored gear you can abuse any skill,that does not mean it is unbalanced!If you can stack millions and millions of damage just like that,than pick up a 200pdps bow,gear it up with somewhat normal gear,and do a Shaper run!Come than back here and tell me how much "millions" of dps you did and how fast did you kill him?We just need more single target bow Skills!Thats the solutions,present the people with 3-4 skills ballanced the same,and i can guarantee a lot of people will start using new skills instead of barrage!
Oh and another thing,we all know how "good" GGG are in nerfing things...They gut the skills so they are unusable...Remember the Classic discharger builds....It was full of them and they were a trade mark of GGG,and a very very cool skill!I started playing this game because of that skill!Remember Mjolner builds,it was full of them...what happened to them?havent seen such builds in over 2 years now...Interesting why?GGG has a history of nerfing things to a point that they are unusable!