The next thing that needs to be redesigned for the sake of balance

"

kasub wrote:

Can you state how it creates balance issues exactly? The current system seems perfectly fine to me. Getting higher max res is a powerful thing characters can do but no where near mandatory.

Imagine you are a dev and you ask yourself the question: "How much elemental damage should this boss/monster do?" It becomes a nightmare if there a stuff like the flask that can give 200% more effective hp on use. Because if you put too little elemental damage, then those who use flasks on top of some passives and aura will never be threatened while those who play at regular 75% will think the challenge is okay, but if you put too much elemental damage you will make it so that it is okay for those with flask and aura + passives while extremely dangerous for those at 75% res.


Physical damage is easier to balance because the difference in effective hp vs heavy hitting (2k+ phys dmg) is not even close to being in such a large spectra. They solve the "ondar's guille" issue by conceding to the idea that Ondar's Guille will make projectile attacks a walk in the park and letting bosses/monsters have attacks which aren't such.

Block doesn't cause as big issues because there is no entropy system for them preventing unlucky streaks and the frequency of those unlucky streaks is high enough to make you worried in hardcore 4-month leagues.

Agreed, the current system scales very well from levels 1 to 60 or so, works up to the low to mid 70s, then just breaks down.

If there only was a skill that could mitigate all the physical damage you take the game would be balanced...



/thread

"

mazul wrote:

What it should be changed to is a formula such as Diablo 3 and LoL: Damage reduction against elemental damage = x/(a + b*x) where x is some form of resistance stat and "a" and "b" are constants.

I fucking hate this suggestion.

I think capped resists are a really cool itemization challenge. When you are gearing you character, you're trying to reach that cap, and getting too much resistance on gear doesn't help, so it becomes a matching game rather than a stacking game. Capped stats on gear create experientially different gear selection challenges and thus should not be removed from the game for any reason.

Anyway, it would be almost impossible for GGG to do. They'd have to change essentially every piece of non-weapon gear in existence.

"

mazul wrote:

Imagine you are a dev and you ask yourself the question: "How much elemental damage should this boss/monster do?" It becomes a nightmare if there a stuff like the flask that can give 200% more effective hp on use. Because if you put too little elemental damage, then those who use flasks on top of some passives and aura will never be threatened while those who play at regular 75% will think the challenge is okay, but if you put too much elemental damage you will make it so that it is okay for those with flask and aura + passives while extremely dangerous for those at 75% res.

This is also problematic, but you guys are kidding yourselves if you think "uncapping" resistance is the only way to solve the problem. Oh, and by the way, the problem clearly defined is: allowing players to get too close to elemental near-immunity forces the game to be balanced around that, heavily punishing those who are not close to near-immunity. Also known as the Mad Prophecies 2 problem (mind the date of publication), although I believe there is a happy medium where defensive skills are neither needed nor useless but just kind of there and viable, especially as a deliberately "respec"-friendly option (such as resistance flasks).

For example, here's a different idea which would mitigate the problem described above, while retaining capped resistances...

• Cruel resistance penalty changed to -25% resistances and -5% maximum resistances (so from -25 to 70 instead of from -20 to 75).
• Cruel monster and environmental elemental damage decreased by 20%, chaos damage by 10%.
• Merciless resistance penalty changed to -75% resistances and -15% maximum resistances (so from -75 to 60 instead of from -60 to 75).
about 10%.[/li]
• Merciless monster and environmental elemental damage halved, chaos damage by reduced by 20%.
• Righteous Fire changed to deal 40% of maximum Life to self (from 90%), and 30% of maximum Energy Shield to self (from 70%). Optionally, damage to enemies could be made to match these two values (from 50% each), to make RF a little less powerful in PvE and especially in PvP, where the new resistance penalties greatly benefit elemental damage in Merciless PvP (although Penetration supports now have less effect).

What all of this would mean is that a character with 75% resistance now would take 20% less Merciless/map elemental damage post-change, a character with 85% resistances now wouldn't notice a difference, and a character with 90% resistance now would actually take 25% more elemental damage post-change. As far as RF goes, characters with 88% Fire resistance now would not notice a difference in sustainability, while those with less than 88% now could sustain it better, and those with more than 88% now would have more trouble; this basically means that you could more easily run RF without Rise of the Phoenix (assuming Saffel's), and RotF users would still have to invest significantly in regeneration passives/gear to make things work.

Most importantly, unlike the "uncapped resists" "solution," what I propose actually has a chance of becoming PoE reality. These are changes which you can actually imagine being implemented without needing to change everyone's gear (notice how those at cap now would still be at cap post-change).

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

"

mazul wrote:

What it should be changed to is a formula such as Diablo 3 and LoL: Damage reduction against elemental damage = x/(a + b*x) where x is some form of resistance stat and "a" and "b" are constants.

I fucking hate this suggestion.

I think capped resists are a really cool itemization challenge. When you are gearing you character, you're trying to reach that cap, and getting too much resistance on gear doesn't help, so it becomes a matching game rather than a stacking game. Capped stats on gear create experientially different gear selection challenges and thus should not be removed from the game for any reason.

First, I agree it's not feasible to make significant changes to the resist system in PoE at this point.

However, I think this kind of graph



is a bit a silly to have in the game. (This is the EHP multiplier against an element as a function of resistance, provided no increase to the resist cap.)

As a result, there's no thought to the goal of itemization as far as resists are concerned -- just get to the cap, with each point of resist being better than the previous one. I don't think the mechanic of actually accomplishing this is particularly interesting either; it increases reliance on trading/indexers, and makes it more difficult to adjust your build to accommodate new gear. (Maybe that last piece is a good thing, but I think it is a bit tedious.)

Lastly, this sort of system forces the life-stacking issue that we see in PoE. By making the resistance system so rigid, they've made mitigation harder to accomplish, so survivability has to be increased by means of increased raw HP. (Spell block/dodge is still an option, though, but there are fewer choices of mitigation compared to, say, incoming physical attack damage.)

I'll say, though, I like your suggestion of bringing down the cusp at 75% to something more reasonable, like 60%, to make the overcapping bonus less sharp. If any changes are to be made, they'll probably resemble the idea you've put forward.

Though I'd prefer a bit of a softer cap leading into the hard cap -- something vaguely like



stretched/translated as appropriate.

This ruins the whole +cap passive stuff that they have in place right now, but I prefer smooth (infinitely differentiable) functions when possible.

• Lower resistance cap to 50%
• Lower monster elemental damage to be balanced around this new cap

This change would be beneficial because monster damage will be normalized, so that someone who is at the "regular" 50% cap won't be completely obliterated by the overtuned monster elemental spike damage. And for those who want to stack +max gear/nodes, they can still do so, but they would only be able to get up to ~75%, instead of the current ~95% (near immunity).

"

The next thing that needs to be redesigned for the sake of balance

quite obvious : legacy gear in standard/hardcore.

"

kasub wrote:

Can you state how it creates balance issues exactly? The current system seems perfectly fine to me. Getting higher max res is a powerful thing characters can do but no where near mandatory.

Problem with current system is that you either have 75% (or more) resists and elemental damage is mostly really bad against you (merciless and up) or you have less than that, and everything is insta-gibbing you. 25% less resistances, and you take double damage.

While this forces character itemization, which is kinda of good thing (you can't just go full retard with your items, because you have to make sure you'll hit the cap), it really limits the way you can play - and this is the problem. There is no playing without your resistances capped. I think this might be matter of taste while it only comes down to items themselves, but there are also flasks. And this is where shit hits the fan.

With this in mind, and purities giving shit-ton extra effective hp, you litteraly HAVE to run purities in order to face elemental hard-hitting foes. Running wrath and anger? Can't do. Are there other ways to improve max res? Yes, for fire it is a shield. Using a bow? Fuck off.
Can we add another item that increases the cap? No, because if we do, someone is going to use BOTH shield and that given item. Is there a way out in current system? Nope.gif.

Current formula is too primitive and not flexible enough to make any changes to work. Due to that fact, possible builds are REALLY limited thus to make balance changes possible it has to be changed to something more complex. It COULD still have current you-gotta-have-DAT-HIGH-RES on gear thing (which is good), but also would allow more options on how you reach that super-duper-high resistances for boss runs

"

syrioforel wrote:

there's no thought to the goal of itemization as far as resists are concerned -- just get to the cap, with each point of resist being better than the previous one. I don't think the mechanic of actually accomplishing this is particularly interesting either; it increases reliance on trading/indexers, and makes it more difficult to adjust your build to accommodate new gear. (Maybe that last piece is a good thing, but I think it is a bit tedious.)

Lastly, this sort of system forces the life-stacking issue that we see in PoE. By making the resistance system so rigid, they've made mitigation harder to accomplish, so survivability has to be increased by means of increased raw HP. (Spell block/dodge is still an option, though, but there are fewer choices of mitigation compared to, say, incoming physical attack damage.)

As opposed to a system of resistance-stacking, or the current system of armour-stacking? I actually agree with you that there should always be an outlet for defensive stacking in an ARPG, but I do not believe that every mitigation mechanic should be stackable. In this game, the primary outlets are Life and the defenses (Armour, Evasion, and Energy Shield), and they should be there and be meaningful... but that's not a good argument for making resistances work the same way. If anything, resistance non-stackability is a good thing because it adds variety to the way we look at gear and stops short of turning everything defensive about gear into a pure numbers race.

I honestly believe this is a situation where you've managed to identify a problem, and then fell in love with the first potential solution which popped into your head, without actually taking time to consider the drawbacks. Your hatred of the old blinds you to what would no doubt be a hatred of the new, if it was to be implemented. Do you really want even more things to endlessly stack in this game?

I wouldn't call resistance itemization thoughtless, either, especially when one considers being slightly below the resistance cap as a possible acceptable drawback of an item. I ran maps for a long time with my Ambush character at 73 Cold before I eventually itemized out of it. Which brings me to my next point...

"

syrioforel wrote:

I'll say, though, I like your suggestion of bringing down the cusp at 75% to something more reasonable, like 60%, to make the overcapping bonus less sharp. If any changes are to be made, they'll probably resemble the idea you've put forward.

Being one, two... maybe up to 5 percentage points short of a resistance cap in this game is currently an acceptable and interesting drawback (although taking 20% more damage of one element is admittedly pushing it). Going past that is borderline suicidal. One of the main benefits of making the impact of each resistance point less sharp is that there would be more room within that acceptable drawback space, which in turn would make resistance-based itemization choices more interesting.