AoE vs Projectile

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magicrectangle wrote:

Spoiler

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DeathStalker77 wrote:

So I'm trying to understand why Tornado Shot would be better than Caustic Arrow ...

The benefit (as I see it) with Caustic Arrow is that you don't actually have to hit the target to do damage, in fact you can actually hide around corners and still effectively kill (though Life Gain On Hit still seems best with Rain Of Arrows - more hist, more life gain - but the projectiles are slower).

The improved caustic arrow is a great budget / league starter skill.

In fact I started Delve with a caustic arrow occultist (the occultist corpse explosions help improve the AoE a bit), and it was great. I took it to delve depth ~450 without much issue, and it clears T16 maps fine too. But you're killing one pack at a shot, not 1-2 screens at a shot, so it isn't a "clearspeed meta" build.

Tornado shot with multiproj, fork (rigwald's quills), and chain (deadeye) offers absurd screen coverage, and you absolutely CAN shoot around corners with it, but preferably you just run open maps as that's where it can truly shine just wiping everything. It does require more gear to really shine than caustic arrow, but the clearspeed difference is night and day.

Caustic arrow is a traditional AoE skill. It can benefit some from projectile modifers as well of course, as it does have the projectile tag. But even with GMP it won't cover the kind of area that a pure projectile skill does, forking and chaining to monsters all over the screen and beyond.

Of course I haven't actually tried fork and chain with caustic arrow. Since I went occultist I don't have the free chain, and I kind of need soulstrike for survival so no free fork either. I'd be interested if anybody tried it as a deadeye what kind of screen coverage they were able to achieve with it.

Hopefully TencentGGG addresses the "projectile offscreen" potential the same way they did with AoE in 3.5, not 4.0.

Chris said they would adjust that part of the damage (and believe me, nothing holds a candle to a skill that can shoot in all directions and fork and chain, and gets asinine damage and clear due to simply adding more projectiles => the reason why TS is the best coverage skill is because it has it all), but the "fix" seems to take a lot more time than expected.

The idea that skills would be better served by having AoE investments centered around leveling the skills instead of going out of your way to spec every AoE node was fine, and the current IAoE simply needs up to a +2-3 radius at max level to be more noticeable and contend with other gems. A Carcass Jack and the templar AoE nodes already ensure that the AoE of a melee skill is "big enough" so the AoE rework was a success regarding toning down the investment required for AoE to "feel good" and have purpose...

Now, if TencentGGG have "the balls" to adjust projectile offscreen damage the same way - since Breach, through Abyss or Delve, you already were forced to not hit enemies as they were spawning, and that ensured you actually deal at least with some of them - so I can hardly wait for an implicit equivalent to Point Blank to be implemented for all projectiles as a "de facto" offscreen damage limiter.

"The higher the distance => the lower the damage" would help "balancing" and implicitly make AoE or even the melee skills feel a lot more in line with projectiles...

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sofocle10000 wrote:

"The higher the distance => the lower the damage" would help "balancing" and implicitly make AoE or even the melee skills feel a lot more in line with projectiles...

If they did that, then the skill of Far Shot would be negated.

Didn't read anything. Would limiting distance projectiles travel and making proj speed increase that distance work? Like melee range and aoe works now

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Fruz wrote:

Literally : a rework ( any buff/nerf notion is completely irrelevant to it ).

You wrote all of that, completely missing the fact that the balancing was done on the skills level ? for real ?

Nope, i CANT call that "balancing".
And you completely missed MY point.
Certain skills received am innate bonus to radius and AoE. Still, why would anyone invest into AoE increases on items/gem, if numbers on them are so low? Yes, "base" radius on some skills could be enough, but again, why investing into increased AoE should have such SHIT returns? When projectile skills still outclass AoE skill in coverage by a mile!
And there is a huge disparity between different AoE skills, even after than "rework".

"Balacing" assumes you change something to make it a valid option. Not too powerful, and not too weak. It isnt the case with AoE changes. While before changes AoE increase was a bit too powerful, after the change it became a total crap! And formula itself is crap, it assumes that there are monsters all over the screen in all directions everytime, while in practice, there arent. There wasnt a need for such HUGE nerf, just redings few numbers here and there could do the job. Or, at least, if they indeed wanted to prevent heavy staacking, then they should at least double values everywhere (maybe even triple sometimes), to confirm what they're saying!

*shrugs*

i'm playing an AoE melee build in delve and doing just fine. i'm using 3 aoe nodes by the templar area and that's it (no iaoe/conc).

I think the main problem is that projectiles have many more possible gem support-modifiers than AOE-skills. We have GMP, Pierce, Fork, Chain, all modifiers that increase the ability to hit more enemies multiplicatively. inc-AOE in contrast is designed to scale linearly (100%IncAOE ~= double amount of enemies hit, assuming uniform distribution). Of course, the damage penalty for some of those modifiers is large, but there are ascendancies that can build around it (e.g. deadeye and chaining). On the other hand, it is really hard to build around the implicit damage penalty that GGG seems to apply to AOE-skills.

Of course, the design space for pure AOE skills like Shock nova is limited. AOE chaining has absurd damage scaling potential. And I really can't come up with something else.

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

why would anyone invest into AoE increases on items/gem, if numbers on them are so low?

Players that know well enough how to build a character will invest when they deem it necessary ( and in many cases, they do ).

The whole point was to make it not mandatory, which is exactly what happened, it's an actual option.

We went from "everybody feels the need to invest in it otherwise it's not optimized" to "inc AOE might or might not be worth investing into depending on the setup".
Which feels definitely much, much better.

You don't find it worth it anymore, but others ( likely much better players ) seem to do to a certain extent.
Some skills got more or less nerfed ( and other buffed ), it happens, just deal with it.

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UlfgardLeo wrote:

I think the main problem is that projectiles have many more possible gem support-modifiers than AOE-skills

Not just gems, I feel like scaling projectiles is in many cases just easier than scaling AOE damage (altho carcass jack does a really good job regarding this for example, but drillneck does the same, while not taking the chest slot ).

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DeathStalker77 wrote:

Spoiler

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sofocle10000 wrote:

"The higher the distance => the lower the damage" would help "balancing" and implicitly make AoE or even the melee skills feel a lot more in line with projectiles...

If they did that, then the skill of Far Shot would be negated.

Nope, Far Shot could have it's use as long as it would also read "for up to xxx radius (aka the visible radius on a regular 16:9 screen) the projectiles deal increased damage the further they are (holding ALT should highlight that they also don't incur any traveling damage penalty)", so as long as you SEE the projectile, it actually deal increased damage...

Besides, that should have been the way projectiles worked from the start. Or have a severe accuracy reduction every xx radius, so they couldn't have damaged what they couldn't hit...

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sofocle10000 wrote:

Besides, that should have been the way projectiles worked from the start. Or have a severe accuracy reduction every xx radius, so they couldn't have damaged what they couldn't hit...

Hello RT.

Isn't concentrated effect like one of the best DPS increase support gems in the game?