A serious look at Blood Rage, the most broken gem in the game

For CI, it's fine. Give CI melees something to play with.

It's only LL, it's slightly fucked for, but meh... reduce the numbers to somewhat less than the Faster Attacks gem and I'd be fairly content.

Making it harder to use hardly helps, RF is perma-sustainable for low-life, blood rage would be the same. Don't make it a second Vaal Haste.

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Chundadragon wrote:

For CI, it's fine. Give CI melees something to play with.

It's only LL, it's slightly fucked for, but meh... reduce the numbers to somewhat less than the Faster Attacks gem and I'd be fairly content.

Yes, i agree, that's why:

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- Blood Rage drains ES as well as Life
- Blood Rage only drains Life/ES when on low life

I also consider the drawback of Blood Rage to be next to completely irrelevant in nearly all cases. Therefore i would like to see it changed, like Rigtheous Fire was, to also drain based on ES. An alternative way that would not impact the regular CI user, and not rob more of the almost non-existant cast speed increases, would be to simply have Blood Rage drain only when on Low Life, where it would drain both ES and Life as Chaos Damage.

RF isn't actually worth the nodes to run for low-life attack builds, that's why good builds don't run it even though they have Crown of Eyes. It needs regen + max resistance.

You would need to build for it if Blood Rage had chaos degen, you'd need to grab zealots oath, regen nodes and maybe even chaos resistance on gear, which would result in crit nodes being pushed out and maybe more defensive gearing. Hopefully, with some nerfs to auras, there might be a choice between maxing auras or getting more crit nodes.

But yea, the only thing im convinced that needs to happen is reduction in power, that's why i wrote those other things as loose ideas.

Not in the current state - Blood Rage only needs like 4% regen or Vitality and it's A-OK.

For almost 100% attack speed and 20% leech it's still too good. It's only like 8 points and that's nothing when attack speed nodes at Scion are 3% each.

I would suggest both the drain change and the reduction in power.

Given we use vitality, we still need to use a minimum 5 points if we have chaos resistance on gear. Realistically it will cost 7-10 skill points to acquire that regeneration, because the gear has other stats we need more.

If you for example look at fyndels gear for very high end gear:

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/846000

You'll find there isn't room for that chaos resistance, so you either need the hard skill points or to sacrifice one offensive aura for purity, and we already would have sacrificed haste for vitality so you know something else needs to go.

Now if you match that with my suggestion of making anger into a more fire damage with attacks aura, then that would go.
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Realistically we are looking at sacrificing haste aura(maybe anger if changed) for vitality and using 5-10 skill points for zealots oath and regen, up to 10 if you cannot remove blood rage, and getting getting chaos resistance on 2 items which there is room for in possible itemization.

That would be the minimum cost to sustain bloodrage with regen so you can forget about it.




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If you sum up what i suggest to nerf low-life with you are looking at

7-10 additional skill points required
around 7% life leech reduced (blood rage)
Crit damage reduced by about 25%
Attack speed reduced 25%(blood rage)
{Attack speed reduced 36%(loss of haste)
OR Anger no longer matches build}


I think those can all be justified, low life needs to be hit from many sides. These changes, by my estimation, would reduce the damage of low-life builds by just around half.

I mean, the balance is absolutely fucked, you don't need that damage and other builds, in particular spellbuilds, never reach even a fraction of that damage, they need the hammer and they need it good if the endgame isn't gonna be all almost the same builds.

So let's say I was a GGG dev at an earlier time, before Blood Rage and Righteous Fire and Arctic Armour existed.

As a Magic: the Gathering player, I'm a big fan of cycles, and I'm also a big fan of skills which offer resource conversion. I'd look at the three main resource pools in the game — Life, Energy Shield, and Mana — and I'd immediately see a potential cycle there.

red gem - drains Life (and only Life) to convert it to something else
blue gem - drains Energy Shield (and only Energy Shield) to convert it to something else
green gem - drains Mana (and only Mana) to convert it to something else

The way to make the red gem drain Life exclusively would be to have it deal Chaos damage over time, to have it shut itself off if the user is at 1 Life (sorry, CI), and to never, ever release any item which allows this specific damage to not bypass Energy Shield; this wouldn't mean Shavronne's wouldn't exist, it would just have the wording I indicated earlier in the thread, "Chaos Damage from Enemies does not bypass Energy Shield." The way to make the blue gem drain ES exclusively would be to have it deal Burning damage over time, to have it turn itself off if you ever reached zero ES, and to never release an item with "Burning damage bypasses your Energy Shield" (which would be a weird mod anyway).

Now I'd figure that both Life and Energy Shield are primarily defensive resources, while Mana is primarily an offensive resource. So I'd want the red and blue gems to be converting the defensive resource to something offensive, and the green gem to be converting Mana to something defensive. Since both the red and blue gems could involve situations of being very low on EHP, I might want to include some kind of "active defense" into both of those as well.

Thus, Arctic Armour is a design I truly agree with; I believe I would have done the same thing. Righteous Fire is a design I don't quite agree with; I would have done pretty much the same thing, but made it ES only.

But Blood Rage is all wrong. It should be a red gem, first of all. Then the offensive nature of the gem should be its defining attribute, not its secondary... so the attack speed part of the gem should be always-on, and the life leech part (it's that active defense I was talking about earlier) should be low-life only. CI shouldn't be able to use it at all, and Shavronne's shouldn't be able to use ES to pay for it.

And paying for it should be much harder. Back before chaos resistance existed, I might have set the Chaos DOT on it at about the level it is now. But there is no way in hell I would have kept it there after introducing the concept of chaos resistance. Just like having a high Fire resistance is a part of sustaining Righteous Fire, so a high chaos resistance would become a part of Blood Rage. Imagine two to four times the chaos DOT and you have a good idea where I think it should be. All of those "life-based Righteous Fire" builds (impossible with the purely ES-based RF) would instead be life-based Blood Rage builds, using a combination of life regeneration and Chaos resist to sustain a very significant Chaos damage-over-time on themselves which massively improved their attack speed. Blood Rage might not even have a duration, but instead, like Righteous Fire, just stay on until it can't drain resources any more (stop at 1 Life).

All that said, I still think Shavronne's low-life builds might still occasionally use Blood Rage in my alternate reality. There would still be the "turn off at 1 life" thing, which is something those builds might take advantage of somehow. For example, with just a little bit of Life Gain on Hit from gear, they could go back up from 1 to whatever their maximum unreserved Life happens to be, then a CWDT can trigger Blood Rage and get a short burst. The point is, you can see how clever people would still find ways to do clever things. But I think you can see how sustaining Blood Rage (especially in addition to sustaining Righteous Fire) would be a very different thing in this hypothetical situation.

So to cut a long story short, you can just as wel change Shavs like mentioned above to have chaos damage not bypass ES from enemies.

Like I was trying to help Crackmonster understand, there are many many ways to address this specific build that uses tons of synergies and mechanics.

I don't see why you want to take one ingredient, soak it off the total package and address that ingredient only. If any you should reflect your change in other build's contexts as well.

So still my remark as before and very much on topic whether you want to believe it or not: When are you going to decide what ingredient you want nerfed since you already posted topics for nerfs to:

-auras
-Shavs
-CoE
-Blood Rage
-CoC

You have to keep in mind that there is a big difference between skills, elements like auras and unique items in terms of impact to other players.

So if you want to address a specific build, then try to address it as specific as possible in a way that affects as least people as possible and ideally only the build in question.

So I like the suggestion for Shavs a lot better than your suggestion for changing Blood Rage and also if this is only about low life why are you not addressing low life directly to begin with?

In my opinion the way to address this build is still to redesign ST so that it won't work with any melee weapon anymore so that daggers cannot be used.
Wands or bows are definitely not similar to daggers like the people said who disqualified this suggestion. Switching to bows or wands with this build means you will typically have less damage, less attack speed and less crit but most of all that you have to use a different skill than ST like Power Siphon or Bows skills. These skills do not have returning projectiles and do not hit enemies multiple times.
At the same time this change would balance ST with wand and bow skill but also with melee which is better of being ranged with ST in its current status.

So I say address the design flaw instead of breaking synergies or nerfing the ingredients of the build, ingredients that are use by other builds too. For example I don't think you are able to justify a nerf to life based melee builds that use BR.

I honestly believe low life is the problem for all these things. It is clear to see the original intention for low life was a very difficult build to make, but recent unique additions and overpowered defensive buffs while on low life have made it in some cases stronger than the full life counterpart. It's broken.

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lukeiy wrote:

I honestly believe low life is the problem for all these things. It is clear to see the original intention for low life was a very difficult build to make, but recent unique additions and overpowered defensive buffs while on low life have made it in some cases stronger than the full life counterpart. It's broken.

I get the same sense,

most of the stuff with low life bonuses seems to be designed with the idea that low life is something temporary and/or risky, not a permanent state one can comfortably be in.

One solution I can see it to introduce a second state, Low Energy Shield, and add that as an extra requirement for several (not all) of the current Low Life bonuses.

Blood Rage would be a prime example, attack speed bonus only applies at Low Life and Low Energy Shield.

First, Kabels, you need to be on topic, please. If you read what i write, you'll see i want each aspect balanced as it deserves, i don't want a single balanced and the rest ignored. Second, the list you write of things i have made posts about is wrong, it's a plain lie. I have in fact only made posts about 2 of those 5 things, 2 i have on purpose avoided touching and 1 i don't care about.


@Scrotie

Now i read your post quite carefully, and i'm not going to comment much on your idealism of the Life, ES, Mana trinity. The only thing i will say is that i try my best not to make suggestions that require changing the basic mechanics and ideas behind the game. Because in the end, it is GGG's game, and i made such suggestions once but have stopped, they will continue to make their game, and if you demand a change in understanding for a change to make sense, it is demanding quite a lot. Not saying that it cannot happen.

First i just want to say that i do not care whether things get done my way or another equally good or better way, what matters to me is that blood rage becomes balanced, and that you have to make reasonable sacrifices for it, and that it's power is good enough for the sacrifices you have to make.

The implications of what you suggest are:

- Blood Rage no longer works with CI
- You need Vitality, 3-5 Chaos resistance items and additional skill points to make it work
- Only the richest Low-life characters can now afford to run blood rage, and for them, the power of blood rage remains approximately the same. So it becomes more expensive to gear for lowlife.

There are some things i would take issue with:

It would destroy something which is not a problem (Blood rage CI).
It would also be the regular users that pay a much higher price than the low-life abuser.

- Low-life would actually be the safest build to run it in, because with a high drain they still have their shield. Life based characters drop to a more squishy point, leaving them weakned.
- The regular life fighter now needs to get lots of chaos resistance and regen for something that was not overpowered for it before. A heavy nerf.
- It wouldn't do that much to address the max power of a low-life build.

But those i listed above are mainly due to you wanting to increase the dot and disable it for CI.

I like the idea of changing Shavs/Lorica to "Chaos Damage from Enemies does not Bypass Energy Shield". I think that simple solution in conjunction with reducing the power of Blood Rage as suggested in OP would have pretty much the same effect as what i intended. It is the side changes you mention that i think are bad for the game.

Where you want to keep the power of blood rage more or less constant by making it harder to use it gear/build wise, i want to still have it something that is rather straightforward to use, but does not give you the same power. I do not want blood rage to have the power it does, nor do i want it to be something requiring heavy investment for regular users to use effectively.

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Crackmonster wrote:

First, Kabels, you need to be on topic, please. If you read what i write, you'll see i want each aspect balanced as it deserves, i don't want a single balanced and the rest ignored. Second, the list you write of things i have made posts about is wrong, it's a plain lie. I have in fact only made posts about 2 of those 5 things, 2 i have on purpose avoided touching and 1 i don't care about.

Actually you need to be on topic which is to balance a very specific build, looking at the context you're putting BR in in your OP. Your problem is not BR nor any of the other ingredients of the builds but the end result.

You keep making the same mistake over and over: You're totally ignoring all other builds that might use what you want nerfed.

Aim for the specific build instead of an ingredient of the build individually.

You're not seriously looking at BR, the title is totally misleading. What you're seriously looking at is a low life build specced for aura stacking, ES with CI, ST and daggers supported by very specific end game uniques: Shavs, CoE and Atziri's Acuity.

You are totally ignoring the effort and investments, that's one. And two you are aiming for the wrong components of the build over and over.
Nerfing auras like you suggested before will impact almost any build really and is totally ridiculous.
Nerfing BR affects any player that wants to use that skill obviously and you cannot justify a nerf to a life based melee build that uses BR for example.
Nerfing CoE and nerfing the spell to attack damage mod in order to address LL build is wrong, instead you should address low life itself if that's the problem.

The best suggestion was the one to change Shavs so that chaos damage not dealt by yourself does not bypass ES.

Besides, I find it very disturbing that everybody is ignoring the design flaw of ST. A flaw that makes it possible for this build to start throwing around daggers. Daggers are the strongest melee weapons in the game and have the best nodes in the tree too. Also ST is a lot better than wand or bow skills as it allows you to hit enemies multiple times.