Chaos Inoculation vs. Blood Magic (long)

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Flab wrote:

I guess that is another big separating factor in reasoning and balancing, dying at all. No build I am going to play is supposed to die at any point.

I don't agree that armour is useless without endurance charges, just that it's relatively useless if you're getting it from gear.

Having used enduring cry for months, I think it works well, the most dangerous situations (for me) are buffed packs. Single targets are basically never a concern, unless they are HEAVILY buffed (not even in turbo, aside from desync).

What I do agree with, considering I play exclusively melee is that armour and evasion are both expensive stats to stack, I've tried to, it doesn't pay off. You simply take what you can for cheap with respect to them, that's it.

My experiences in specific are limited to playing a very large array of EB archers, which can leverage armor into absurd numbers with the recent determination buff. Yes I also use inner force. I found that without endurance charges, my survivability had an abysmally small difference between 21k passive armor, and 7-11k armor. Once I hit 11k armor, I noticed (This is when it enters the "Noticable" range) small amounts of increased damage, until I hit 7k, once I hit that, I started noticing a rather large damage increase as I progressively switched out of high evasion armor pieces and passives.

Issue is, archers are in an incredibly HORRIBLE position to use armor, as they normally shouldn't be in range to leverage end cry, and if they are, that second or two can be rather vital, as these creatures need to die now, and warlords, which is better, is rather redundant, as it gives no sustaining power vs bosses, IE brutus, vaal, and gives charges after killing the sources of damage, meaning theres no damage to mitigate, or very little. Couple that with the fact that archers are very rarely if ever, in position to leverage and/or get end charges, they have severe issues with armor.

Now, while you can argue, why not use acrobatics and evasion. Recall my previous statement, I am EB, I can't use acrobatics with EB. Now you may proceed to argue, well thats a trade-off; let me bring your attention to the fact that acrobatics is enabling an ENTIRE DEFENSE, keystones are meant to enable builds, not defenses. The issue isn't that I am using acrobatics with a conflicting keystone: It's that evasion is extremely lackluster without acrobatics.

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EpsiIon wrote:

As it stands, CI IS overpowered, however, its because ES is designed as the "Stand alone" defense combination. Evasion/HP and HP/Armor are the other two defenses; Not balanced alone, but rather, balanced as a couple.

If this is really how it's going (does make sense), then maybe this really is the best solution.

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Flab wrote:

I still think Xendran's suggestion to make CI convert life to ES is a great idea. There are a bunch of things you can get more managable if you do this. It helps the status ailment situation (optionally, by choosing life nodes instead of ES), makes life in general for ES users easier and it'd make CI seem far more balanced imo. The only real remaining issue then being shield delay recovery for melee (and non-CI in general), if base life also affected that (a stretch, I know) you'd have virtually all bases covered as well as you could, short of dropping ES altogether.

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Flab wrote:

Getting a bit OT.

Thats the lovely coincidence of this issue. You can't talk simply about this one symptomn of the overall, universal, issue.

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Flab wrote:

EpsiIon,

I do agree with that actually, if you don't get IR and you don't get acrobatics, you're pretty much all life, maybe some block and fair evasion, at best.

Is this any different for melee though? I mean you're arguing that endurance charges are only useful for melee, but then, ranged players aren't supposed to be getting hit nearly as much by virtue of playing ranged.

You also forget all of the concessions given to melee for the simply justification that they're melee. Anything using 1hers gets 15% block chance automatically, then a shield adds even more AND adds more defense. 2hers are arguable, but even then, they have some exceedingly high damage, and are based in a section of the tree which encourages the leveraging of HP with a cushion of armor.

Dex tree and stat in general seems to revolve around mitigating the damage, rather then simply absorbing it. They have both armor and evasion, combined, theoretically, they should provide rediculously huge damage mitigation. This is not practically the case, due to the fact that evasion, to be utilized to any large degree, MUST include acrobatics, which makes any hybridization rather pointless. Meaning any person who does not wish to use evasion as their primary mitigation, must rely on armor, meaning they must upkeep endurance charges, which means they must use either warlords or enduring cry.

It's too much must, or required, or have to. The issue isn't melee vs range, as they have their own inherent balancing points, from skills to mana to off-hands to other mechanics.

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Flab wrote:

The situation there seems fair to me, even if it's shitty for both, one having to use/rely on endurance charges more, the other struggling to be able to utilize them efficiently.

As long as their are keystones such as eldritch battery and acrobatics, the defenses themselves must be self-balanced with each other in conjunction with HP in some way. Not evasion+acro+hp, or end charges+armor+hp, Hp+armor and evasion+hp and ES must be somewhere in the ballpark of balanced.

The issue isn't that I want end crys to be more available or easier to maintain, I want them to be less of a "Must-Have" in terms of wanting to effectively use armor.

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Flab wrote:

So yeah, evasion and armour could and imo should be more forgiving (and this isn't strictly related to the properties of either), but I really don't want to see shit like 70-80% evasion, continually buffing the evasion chance, this is people failing to understand the mechanic to begin with.

I'm not arguing forgiving, I don't particularly like forgiving, I am arguing more so, towards the fact that we have set off from balancing the defensive triad, instead adding in all of these random variables and then balancing armor with this in mind, instead of making THEM balanced around armor. It's simply being done bass ackwards.

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Flab wrote:

How can anyone argue against 20% evasion for instance, nevermind crits, just 1/5 hits missing. That's 20% less damage on average (not quite, considering spells). But it's not 20% less damage, because an average is horribly disfiguring the nature of the function. Armour does something similar, but in a different way, with the scaling.

Actually it does much much less then evasion. If you look at it overall, the DR from evasion is MUCH more consistent compared to armor, and it mitigates more damage build per build then armor, due to the fact that it mitigates crits, while armor does not. Not only does armor NOT mitigate crits, crits actually cause armor to undermitigate, to the point of the hit becoming near irresisted, increasing the need for HP to absurd levels at some points.

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Flab wrote:

Edit, while we're OT:
Why aren't there more threads about gear and mods?
I mean I really hate having to go read up on this sort of stuff (it really does ruin the game for me), but I recently did...and I have to tell you, some of that shit just makes no sense to me. I'd love for someone to explain to me how some of these things are balanced, useful and reasonable.

Need to be more specific on that one, I would tentitively throw out the "Nerf good mods by reducing their chances of rolling" stick until I have more information.