Ways to balance low-life shavronnes builds and daggerers/wanders

That's a nice lie you write there.

Attacks do more shocks/freezes than spells.

Attacks crit more than spells.

The problem with spells isn't that when it crits it doesn't do good status effects, it's that you cannot get high enough crit chance to effectively apply it, and you can't cast fast enough either.

What that means is, crits will always benefit attacks more, so if you nerf crit multiplier you will relatively boost spells compared to attacks.

Critical strike chance is one of the main reasons spell suck. Most spells have a base crit chance of around 4-5%, the half of daggers crit, and there are almost no nodes around the tree to increase it.

So yea, nice talk of yours there, too bad it doesn't have any good points.

Crit multiplier is easy to stack, and if stacks too high now, meaning it's all about crits or go home. You can have a cheap build, or a couple of very specific builds using resolute technique, but as soon as you can afford any kind of decent gear in most builds you get much more from crit.

I mean spectral throw, or any attacks builds really, are all about:

- Get auras
- get crit
- get just enough ES
- get a very few of the best "increased damage" nodes
- maybe get a couple of mana nodes for pool size

90% of 90% of the masterly theorycrafted builds and the reason those estimated (90% * 90% = 81%) of all masterly builds are the same is that they just stack Auras, Crit and ES/Life for 90% of their points. And that's all there is to it.

I mean, the difference is just MASSIVE, they are many times more effective than other choices. It doesn't promote much difference in endgame builds when certain choices far outweigh others.

And btw, for spells, let's say work case they lose 25% of damage of crits, they will still have the same crit chance, which is the limiting factor, because they need to first crit before they can apply things like shock and freeze and burn. The shocks, freezes and burns are not a problem at all, they are strong enough, the problem is the crit chance.

But let's just move over to look at bloodrage. A lvl 20 bloodrage corrupted to 23 item quality and supported by a level 4 empower, while using inner force like all aura builds, gives:

- 89.84% Attack speed
- 18.63% Life leech
- Frenzy charges for additional 15% attack speed (total attack speed 104.84%)

Why doesn't it benefit spells? why are spells fucked over like that. Spell should get increased cast speed with it, so that it can more effectively kill things and apply status ailments, that is the real problem of spells and nerfing crit multiplier really doesn't touch it very much.

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What that means is, crits will always benefit attacks more, so if you nerf crit multiplier you will relatively boost spells compared to attacks.

How long did it take you to fabricate this bullshit? Attack based RT builds dominated CB/OB and to some extend every single 4 month league until Invasion. Attack based crit builds were used by almost nobody. People played all sorts of RT based Arrow builds or ran stuff like GS, IB and DB with BoR, something you certainly dont even want critical hits for.

Stop making up shit because attack based crit builds currently are the best you can play. The last time that was the case was in CB with Crit Dagger LS builds. I wont even bother reading the rest of that post because you apparently lack any form of knowledge of past metas.

One fucking league doesnt mean that a mechanic is broken when said mechanic was totally fine for years.

Well, I hope you remember low-life ele cleave - I sure as hell do in Anarchy. Although, tbh.. the fotm was low-life sporker back then. Daggers I don't really mind, crit is better, more investment = more results.

But get this guys --> I'm not jealous. And I think it's still quite overpowered. I hope that blew your mind.

In any case, I have full confidence that GGG will take out the long penis of nerfs and smash spectral to bits. Source: sporkers, cleave, freeezing pulsers... and the list goes on.

@crackmonster

Imo the way to go for GGG is
- to implement either crit chance or multi penalties on the aoe support gems like gmp/lmp/chain/fork and whatever else (Idk about multistrike or spell echo, they might need to get involved into that too)
- to buff spell crit chance back to the old level before nerf and rebalance from there

I am not sure yet what to do in the crit vs RT matter. But the game defenitely drifts a bit too much into the D3 direction of boring mechanics that are/were stacking the 2 crit stats + attack speed on all items on all charackters in all builds always. Improving bloodmagic and changing EB is something to think about as well, as these mechanics could become more interesting alternatives to the low-life stuff.


Of course low-life, daggers and ST still need to get addressed. But I think we have discussed this enough by now and basically everyone agrees on that.

Dagger nerf should be easy: Just like shields base stats were nerfed (also for exisiting items) they should nerf dagger (especially ambusher, idk if others are even any problem) base stats so that it takes the increased CC into account (which it doesnt right now, a mirror ambusher has even or even a bit more dps than a mirror sword, but it also got the increased CC).

Low-life probably can be roughly fixed by fixing auras and the amount of auras different builds can use. This should not be 1-2 auras for normals builds and 9-11 for low-life builds. Still snapshotting alone wont do this at all. I know some low-life ST users that already now play without snapshotting and you see basically no difference at all.

ST should probably get a pierce chance and a lesser scaling with projectile speed. But I guess everything is possible to modify ST and limit it a bit more to bring it back in line with melee and give other ranged attacks more room.

After all that builds and build categories that lack behind probably need to get buffed individually.


I think that sums it up pretty much.

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Chundadragon wrote:

Well, I hope you remember low-life ele cleave - I sure as hell do in Anarchy. Although, tbh.. the fotm was low-life sporker back then. Daggers I don't really mind, crit is better, more investment = more results.

But get this guys --> I'm not jealous. And I think it's still quite overpowered. I hope that blew your mind.

In any case, I have full confidence that GGG will take out the long penis of nerfs and smash spectral to bits. Source: sporkers, cleave, freeezing pulsers... and the list goes on.

The thing with LL Cleave is that I dont strictly consider it a popular build. The reason for that is the fact that it wasnt really touched in HC leagues, which to me are the only ones that should matter in terms of balancing. But I guess you can consider it as popular.

LL Spork wasnt considered powerful because of the crits and general damage output, but due the fact that it provided insane IR/IQ while probably being the safest MF build in the entire game while providing decent damage and incredible utility. The damage never was that outstanding, hell in comparison to a lot of other builds it was rather bad because you couldnt even put down your totems before the pack was dead due to the inbuild delay. Other builds took the cake, damagewise. But I get your point.

Needless to say this still is the first league in which a crit based build is the non plus ultra in terms of damage without running into severe problems. And that certainly doesnt mean that its the mechanics fault.

Haven't read through all 18 pages of this thread yet, but aside from nerfing blood rage (which is seriously overpowered, and the quality bonus itself is just stupid imba), and nerfing daggers (BiS daggers have only around ~30 less numeric weapon DPS then BiS axes and swords, alongside having appreciable crit), and crit multi (damn this was already nerfed, does it really need more nerfs?) why not nerf crown of eyes?

For example

Crown of Eyes, Hubris Circlet
Requires Level 69, 154 Int
+(200 to 250) to Accuracy Rating
(120 to 150)% increased Energy Shield
−30% to Fire Resistance
(1 to 3)% of Physical Attack Damage Leeched as Life
1% of Physical Attack Damage Leeched as Mana
Modifiers to Spell Damage also apply to Attack Damage at 60% effectiveness


Or nerf all these things. And for fucks sake, just nerf Atziri's Acuity already. The fact that it can only drop from a certain boss makes it EASILY farmable, not gated as much by RNG as the rest of uniques. And the gloves themselves are just stupid overpowered.

It seems to me that LL in of itself is not overpowered: the issue itself is really Crown of Eyes. Most of the issues people site with LL builds (daggers OP, crit multi OP, auras OP, blood rage OP, etc. etc.) ONLY APPLY TO ATTACKS, NOT SPELLS. Hence, nerfing the item required to access these bonuses seems more logical to me.

But nerfing crown of eyes wouldn't make a difference because...

What's the worst thing about LL builds being overpowered? The damage is already done. At this point, nerfing gear would just exacerbate the issue of legacy items. If you go ahead and nerf crit multi, legacy items with up to 70+% increased crit multi still exist (you could nerf it from the passive tree, but that would impact ALL crit based builds, not just LL builds). Nerf daggers? The BiS daggers already exist, and there is no way to get rid of them (read: Loath Bane). Nerf pain attunement? Possibly, but LL builds get ALOT of DPS bonuses from other things besides PA. Nerf auras? Oh god please no, so many other builds are based on auras.

Edit: This only addresses how to nerf LL builds, not if it should be nerfed, or why it shouldn't be nerfed, or anything else in that regard. Personally, I don't care about it too much: any build with BiS gear is overpowered. LL builds simply have an implicit property of requiring BiS gear, hence they seem to be always overpowered.

It took me some time to comprehend your post but it appears you are against nerfing all the ingredients of the build you mentioned, to which I agree as the issue with this build being overpowered would more likely be a result of the total package.

You do seem to support nerfing Blood Rage and Atziri's Acuity yet without further clarification why (except calling them overpowered).

And I might not understand correctly what you were suggestion for CoE but can you explain how that change would affect low life builds and why CoE should change?

Since most of the people wanting nerfs seem to think OP is ok, but not to the extent this build is OP, so he was reducing the effectiveness of the CoE. That seems like it should satisfy some of the complaints. The Acuity is something that I think is actually the biggest contributing factor of the build. You have no mana issues with it since it's instant leech. If not for the gloves, you'd have to increase your mana to give you a high enough leech rate or enough regen to spam the 6 linked skill. Or link to Blood Magic (giving up a damage support) and use Vaal Pact.

Edit: stupid autocorrect doesn't know nerfs

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You do seem to support nerfing Blood Rage and Atziri's Acuity yet without further clarification why (except calling them overpowered).

And I might not understand correctly what you were suggestion for CoE but can you explain how that change would affect low life builds and why CoE should change?

Bloodrage/CoE are the top two factors that have made LL attack builds very overpowered.

I also suggested the same thing earlier in the topic. CoE having 50% effectiveness while bloodrage having its LL IAS bonus reduced and its chaos damage to be based on ES + life(instead of just life).

That last bit is quite significant when current lowlife builds don't even use zealot's oath, let alone any regen.

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mark1030 wrote:

The Acuity is something that I think is actually the biggest contributing factor of the build.

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kasub wrote:

Bloodrage/CoE are the top two factors that have made LL attack builds very overpowered.

@Kasub: I think that you're pretending that you own the truth but instead should motivate your opinion.

The majority of the post are like this, people saying "this is the problem" and start explaining their suggestion without even motivating why they think it is the problem (except of course calling it overpowered).

Shouting that something is overpowered is not a valid motivation for a nerf without explaining why you think that you know.