about y lowering hp =/= es in upcoming patch

I dislike this notion that melee is armour. I will make a skeptical analysis of what has been said by Chris. Perhaps this should deserve its own post, but here you have a long piece as a reply. Skeptical is all you can do as far too much is uncertain and I do need to actual play it to cast my verdict. Don't expect an answer from my post, maybe more insight, but I won't draw any conclusions, if I do I made some mistakes in my writing, so sorry for that in advance.

Melee builds could be ES and ER too. Anyways "armour" builds do not exist in the game design, I think the correct method is to talk about life. I will explain how I look at the game design and how things are balanced or unbalanced.

The following 3 core mechanics exist:

ES + mana
Life + armour
ER + life

(Yes you can mix them up, make changes due to keynodes etc. but this is like red, green and blue in my opinion. All other colors are derived form this (or in the case of painting red yellow and blue).

While you level you gain + 6 life, + 4 mana and +3 evasion.
You start out with 50 life, 40 mana and 50 evasion.
So in the end 650 life, 440 mana and 350 evasion (might be 1 level off, since you start at lvl 1, but don't feel like looking that up, doesn't matter that much anyways in the discussion).

ES use to be designed so it could be higher than life, to be alien to life an inverse system based on passive out of combat regen, instead of active regen, with high pools to make this possible. That got unrighteous nerfed into the ground, while making it more similar to life (ES regen nodes nerfed, leech a must have (ghost reaver) and zealoth's oath added). Mobs hitting harder and less ES turned ES into a life clone, no longer alien. Recently ES got a bit of a fix (20% more node) and arctic armour got added, which allows you to turn some mana into defense. Arctic armour without EB is recieving a boost with this patch.

To make my point(s) more clear you should have a look at the tree. 20% phase acrobatics roughly does the same as elemental adaptation which gives you +5 to max resists. From 75% to 80% this lowers the damage you receive by 20%. 1st you got hit for 250 damage now for 200 damage, hence 20% reduction. Elemental adaptation is more reliable than phase acrobatics, however phase acrobatics also dodges physical spells and unlike elemental adaptation you don't have to get more %ele resists from nodes or gear to actually makes use of that +5. All in all this is somewhat balanced and thought out.

The life side of the tree deals with status ailments through the fact it is life, it determines the duration and whether the dmg was high enough in the first place. Evasion lacks this, though it does get a chance to evade crit damage. This is why on the evasion side we find crystal skin and stun avoidance. I think it is a huge flaw that at the north, the ES area, there are no nodes that reduce stun or elemental status ailments. ES has this build 50% avoid, ut I think it is lackluster.

Evasion does have one advantage over life and that is that it evades both physical as elemental damage in form of melee and projectile attacks. The compensation the life side got for this is armour. Armour to mitigate the physical part. All classes get %elemental resistance (though in the passive tree most of that is actually at the life side). If you do have similar physical mitigation in both evasion and armour% and ele resist% and you would remove the broken system with the huge hits, evasion will be at the top. Simply because evasion will also evade the elemental damage.

Here's a picture of this theme, the center bit of the passive tree shows it clearly:


The balance of this entire system lies with armour, what you get while leveling, what is in the tree, how the tree is set-up and what is given by int/ strength and dex.

Strength: +5 Life per 10 points
Intelligence: +2% energy shield per 10 points (also +5 mana)
Dexterity: +2% evasion rating

If we look at the centre than for 9 points, str side, a life based build gets: 84% increased life
ratio: 9.3

For 10 points, int side, you get 80% increased ES.
ratio: 8

For 10 points, dex side you get 140% increased ER.
ratio: 14

ER doesn't compare well 1:1 with life or es, especially since it is based on these two.
What we do see from this is that the life side is huge. It gets more %increase than ES, but above all else it scales from two ends. The strength and levels give you raw +life while the nodes give you %increased life. ES and ER do not have these options. This is where armour and gear comes into the equation. Life gear comes with base armour and has limited +life added. ER comes from gear and ES comes from gear too. You can get more ES from gear than life, you also get more ER, but this is strangely treated as 1:1 with armour. In terms of gear progression this would suggest that ES and ER players have a harder time leveling as those styles are more gear dependent, this is also what I experience between my characters.

The balance or unbalance where does it come from?

One thing that has broken the system are the large hits we experience today, something addressed in the upcoming patch. The most exciting bit of the entire patch in my opinion. Armour got negated too much, but also ES and ER needed to stack huge amounts of life and ES to deal with these hits, making life too important.

If we assume that life+ER is currently in balance with life+armour than the patch would suggest that life+armour, thus life builds are getting boosted. If the main mechanics was assumed to be in balance ER = life, than ER is not receiving a nerf, while life is and ER is getting boosted this patch. Even without large hits however we know that ER and life are not in balance. This is because like armour getting more evasion rating returns less and less the more you get. The fact that there is this "cheesy' change of acrobatics (which suggests, you should not go pure evasion) seems a confirmation of this.



Amour and evasion both question whether it is useful to go beyond the 50% rating. Armour has become the example of silly large hits as it does nothing anymore. The game however has similar mechanics in place for evasion, which are not addressed this patch.

Increased accuracy, higher crit chance, increased attack speed, mobs that come with a higher base accuracy rating... there are far too many mechanics that weaken evasion. All of these are essentially "large" hits to evasion, what large hits are too armour. If you compare life to ER than we got something that scales linear to a system that stops scaling well. This makes ER far too dependent on life, while life isn't 1/2 as dependent on armour.

Another strange thing is the way how life nodes are integrated into the tree on both ends.



The exact same thing happens with ER vs AR if you would like to compare those. ER apart from the ranger nodes are all branch out nodes. While armour (and life) in many cases are directly connected to utility nodes (branch through).

Than there is the issue that life on hit, life leach, life on kill and life regen are all restricted to the life are of the passive tree (apart from claws). ES area knows ES regen nodes, but both dex and int (or ER and ES) areas lack in regen. Maybe this is an offset to the mana regen they do have, but I think this is somewhat a bad trade-off and not quite balanced.

Since armour nodes are placed efficiently and spread around the area it is very questionable that crystal skin (avoid status ailment nodes) are not. In fact these nodes are quite numerous to grasp in the 1st place, which questions design choice and balance.

Relation to the patch:

It is hard to say which way the ball drops with upcoming changes, without testing and playing them. Not enough information is given out, but if you negate arctic armour it does seem ES users pull the short draw. Building into AA makes EB mandatory, all this would suggest that arctic armour needs to be looked at.

Armour seems to be gaining the most and if purely looking at the end game and assuming the ridiculous hitting system is tossed out. Than probably the biggest gain lies in an ER+ AR hybrid build. With both at 40 to 50% for best defense potential. This is doable, does require insane gear and giving up dmg nodes in the tree.

The good are the lower hits. The rest is a realm of uncertain guess work for now. The ugly will be when people figure out that melee is not fixed. The numbers game is getting tweaked, but the numbers game ignores the different play styles between classes and other game mechanics (GMP hit mobs), stuff like physical reflect etc. So don't expect things to be done, but definitely things are worked on and I think my post shows how much needs to be taken into account for just these specific changes we see coming now and even than things might be missed (phsy reflect :) ).

Here's another picture that shows how nodes are not randomly placed in the tree, there is a design philosophy behind it all and GGG aims for consistency:

I love your whine and theorycrafting. You clearly all know so much about the game that you can do math and graphs with data taken out of thin air. So scientific. @OP what you see as valid argument, I simply don't. Understanding is not the same as agreeing. The way you produce all that irrelevant false data and present it so nicely reminds me of my old company board meetings. Fear and speculations only mess with peoples heads.

Double post/ copy paste relevant bits for the discussion here:

General Balance:
Monster damage from normal attacks and skills has been reduced in all difficulties.

Endurance charges now only provide 4% elemental and physical damage reduction per charge.

Reflect mods for monster auras and maps has been reduced to 18% from 20%.

The Alchemist Poison Bomb has been reduced in damage in all difficulties, beyond the general monster rebalance.


Skill Balance:
Mana recovery from the Clarity aura has been increased.

Life values for minions and totems has been reduced to reflect new damage values for monsters.

Molten shell armour and threshold values have been adjusted for new monster damage scaling.

Arctic Armour has had its damage reduction adjusted for new monster damage scaling.

Multistrike attack speed penalty reduced to 36% from 40%.
Melee Splash - damage penalty reduced from -20 to -16%

Passive Balance:

Life +% nodes, and most Energy Shield +% nodes have been reduced.

The penalty on Acrobatics changed to halving (50% less for each) ES and Armour, instead of removing these entirely.

Elemental Adaptation has been reduced to 2% maximum resists.

Diamond Skin and the renamed Crystal Skin notable passives have been reduced to 12% from 15%.

Inner Force has been reduced to 12% buff effect from 18%, other buff effect nodes reduced to 3% from 6%.

The Strength bonus on Heart of the Gladiator in the Marauder start area has been reduced to +10. +10 Strength has been added to the following early Marauder notable passive nodes: Armour Mastery, Troll’s Blood, Raw Power, Butchery.

Soul Raker, Essense Raker and Spirit Raker have been increased to 4% leech each. Spirit Raker now includes 20 flat ES.

Flaying dagger notable passive now includes +6% maximum life.



My analysis:

It does not make sense to nerf crystal skin if life and damage are scaled 1 to 1. Since this would yield similar effects on the status ailments you receive. The fact these are changed and ele resists are lowered means that mob dmg is lowered more than life and as such these nodes need to be lowered. This means that w.r.t. current game content ES is not receiving a nerf, apart from the regen bit. This is my guess, don't take it as fact, but this seems the logical conclusion to me.

Arctic armour gets boosted with more mana regen from clarity. Arctic armour also reserves a nerf to its damage mitigation, this is a bit strange considering armour gets a buff and they are similar systems. Also to build into AA requires EB which receives a nerf. Not too sure how this will work out, since no exact figures are mentioned.

With chaos dmg also lowered the north side (ES side) is receiving a buff if you ignore CI, but taken into account low life builds and chaos resist (since chaos resist seems to remain unchanged, unlike diamond skin nodes or elemental adaptation)

@lososthefish

The issue with the forums are morons like you who seem to have 0 reading skill or total lack of understanding. The graph I made is based on this formula:

Chance to Evade = 1 - Attacker's Accuracy / ( Attacker's Accuracy + (Defender's Evasion / 4) ^ 0.8 )

The armour formula is as follows:

Damage Reduction = Armour / ( Armour + (12 * Damage) )

Even if these would be wrong, it doesn't change the fact that evasion and armour work like this in the game. Oh and they are not wrong, maybe you should grab a tinfoil hat.

It takes an idiot like you to question the graph. Clearly if you increase accuracy or evasion the shape will remain the same. The 50% will still be an efficiency threshold, any high accuracy mobs will treat 50% as lower. If you are specced into evasion than basically whatever highest accuracy mob there is, you do like to have 50% vs that guy and not really go beyond this 50%. In your character sheet this would display the %evasion above 50 than. Hard to get? No I don't think so.

Ozgwald, very refreshing post especially after some ppl or rather someone has to offer his opinions in a condescending manner with no attempt to offer anything substantial.

one point though, u compare life +ER n life +AR, while essentially they are the same since most builds will take iron reflexes keystone. ER with acrobatics is another debate all together, but most ppl tend to just take iron reflexes because grace n determination plus the ability to use eva or armor makes it the easiest choice.

changes with artic armor n clarity are interesting, but as u noted, it's not easy to use AA unless u build for it, or keep it at a relatively low level. furthermore, AA does not reduce the dmg done to yourself by RF, and not only are they reducing ES, they're taking away an additionl 3% from max resists which affect it even more. GGG is really against RF lol.

Yes regeneration rates are affected by this patch (but not negative per se). Righteous fire is 100% of your maximum life. Both life and ES is lowered, so in theory that should balance out. Since % regen doesn't change and this patch effectively life regen from gear gets a boost, things might not be as bad as you think.

The bigger issue more likely is that you can support less auras with bloodmagic since the life pool would be lower. This whole bit is quite hard to pin down though, since life from gear and regen from gear plays a big role and %life plays a lesser role in righteous fire builds.

The biggest concern would be %max resists, I agree on that.

Unrighteous Fire has been reduced to reflect the different relationship between Life and Damage in monsters.

They also scaled the mob unrighteous fire, if there are big issues with righteous fire I am sure they will be patched. I can't imagine no alpha testing had been done on this, so I would n't stress too much.

Also I am more saying ER = Life, or at least that seemed the intention. In the end it became pretty much life+er = life+ar as you stated. If the lifepool can handle it than there is no doubt that ER > > AR since ER mitigates more types of damage (if 50% AR would be 50% ER, which is not the case due to the way the armour system and evasion system work, but just as a rough example).

Note: The last two posts are about the supposed leaked patch notes. They seem real, but could still be fake. They are not from a GGG source. If they end up fake I will edit out the last two posts here.

Quote from chris on these:

most low life RF builds have 0 health % passive nodes, or rather just one 8% node to get the 1% life regen next to body and soul.

so hp on a low life RF build wont be affected by the patch, it'll remain more or less the same. meaning that the lower ES regen will take precedence... how badly it'll affect usage of RF will depend on how much total ES% is lost.

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0rochi wrote:

not gonna bother going into how it'll affect RF builds since it's already been brought up countless times, all i wanna say here is :

GGG says they're lowering hp and es because mob dmg values will be decreased and hence armor will be more effective, hence it'll be better overall even if hp/es is lowered. im assuming they neglected one glaring point... hp builds HAVE high armor to begin with, because they use armor gear or eva gear with iron reflexes. so a direct increase in armor effectives vs decrease in hp does benefit them, BUT for ES builds, most of us use pieces with pure es, so essentially we have almost no armor at all. so basically lowering ES is just a huge blow to those who rely on pure ES, with no substantial gain, if at all, from the increased effectiveness of armor... because we have NO armor. how is that fair?

obviously i have no idea how much es % will be reduced in comparison to hp, but i hope GGG has already thought of what i'm saying, because it would really suck for those who have invested heavily into pure ES gears otherwise.

its suppose to be a rebalance.. as it is these "armor + life builds" are grossly underpowered to cheese builds like RF

I don't think their point is to nerf pure ES or pure hp builds that we see now, their point is to boost armor+es/hp builds and give them the place they should have. If there is a single preoccupation imo it is not for es builds, but rather for eva builds (i talk about all eva build without IR) that are into oblivion and seam to get absolutely nothing in the new patch either. And acrobatic is kind of way up, honestly they should put it in the center of eva builds (straight in front of the ranger starting area), especially if it become the "must have" of all eva builds.

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Halagaz wrote:

I don't think their point is to nerf pure ES or pure hp builds that we see now, their point is to boost armor+es/hp builds and give them the place they should have. If there is a single preoccupation imo it is not for es builds, but rather for eva builds (i talk about all eva build without IR) that are into oblivion and seam to get absolutely nothing in the new patch either. And acrobatic is kind of way up, honestly they should put it in the center of eva builds (straight in front of the ranger starting area), especially if it become the "must have" of all eva builds.

Will it become a must have because it now has some armor left? The acrobatics changes might not be bad (might combine very op with IR, having high armour and 30 dodge and 20%spell dodge, could work). However the change does suggest that evasion doesn't stand on its own (pure evasion). Wouldn't a 10% more life on the old version be something better and in the mindset of pure evasion?