Corrupted blood immunity?

"

Mark_GGG wrote:

Endurance charges provide flat % physical damage reduction, which stacks with the reduction from armour. That does not mean they are increasing your "armour mitigation" - they are separate from armour. The reason they apply to Physical DoT where armour does not ,is that armour needs a hit to calculate reduciton for, and thus cannot apply to DoT. flat % reduction, such as from endurance charges, can, and should, apply.

Of course, I am taking quite a few liberties in portraying this issue, but that's because it is one. If physical damage reduction from endurance charges stacks with armor mitigation it means they are similar in nature, which they don't look like in the least to me.

However, my issue with this isn't so much in endurance charges applying to bleeding, those charges are supposed to toughen your body in all aspects so it could work against bleeding as it' pretty vague how exactly are they managing it. I'm taking a much bigger issue with stacking with armor, flat reduction percentage on top of scaling one is a nightmare to balance and it makes armor much more effective with charges than evasion is, I'd personally like to see that interaction removed, armor mitigation should be completely separate from physical resistance, reduction or whatever, it's not the terminology that bothers me here but the feeling that endurance charges should be using a separate stat.

Now, about immortal call, the skill description says it 'covers your body with impenetrable shell'. As I see it, that should be upping your physical reduction the same way armor mitigation does, if you're already bleeding it shouldn't be able to do squat about it. So I think 'makes you immune to physical damage hits' would be a more appropriate description.

"

Mark_GGG wrote:

"

raics wrote:

How about we make a small wager: If they also remove the minion/totem damage penalty when they step on minion/trap gem damage interaction I owe you a chaos orb, if they don't you owe me one.
Both interactions follow the same principle so should work the same

False. The totem damage penalty is intended to reduce any and all damage output from the skill to counteract the fact that the totem uses it repeatedly while you do other things and only pay the cost once. This is true regardless of whether the skill does damage directly (fireball totem) or summons something to do damage (raging spirit totem). It should logically still apply.

The trap/mine damage bonuses are intended to reward use of traps and mines to deliver skills to counter the fact that using traps and mines is more complicated to do than manually casting - which is much less true for minions (once summoned they move anywhere anyway, so aren't restricted to where the trap/mine was) and when stacking the two together (using a mine which summons a trap compared to just a trap is less extra effort than comparing a trapped skill with just using the skill.

Those two modifiers exist for very different reasons and are not equivalent; your attempts to portray them as such as erroneous.

Exactly. That's exactly what I was saying about balancing the game with exceptions. If gem X would be too powerful with support Y, you don't make an exception especially for them, you first try to change gem X and if that fails you try with support Y, slowly increasing the scope of game elements that would be affected by the change.

By your own logic, if you used a trap to summon a raging spirit or a skeleton after the change you wouldn't be 'rewarded' but you would be penalized by putting them on a totem. I agree trap should reward one-time use, not an effect you get extended uses from, like a zombie or specter and I'm quite happy you decided to tweak that. However, a remote skill is a remote skill and same rules should apply to totems, mines and traps, regardless of your particular intentions behind them or role in the game.

Abut totems and minions, fortunately, the only skills that pose a problem are spammable summons, particularly, raging spirits and skeletons, and that problem could be fixed without creating an exception. Raging spirits have a timer and a large cap, right, that makes them similar to other spells so their dps is heavily affected by cast speed. So, if you increase cast speed penalty on a totem and reduce damage one, it should affect raging spirits enough. Being on a timer, distance from enemies is also a factor and totems are harder to relocate than yourself so it's also got a natural dps loss. If cast speed penalty on totems becomes 50% less and damage penalty 20% less, it should affect raging spirits enough.
As for skeletons it would also be simple, reduce their damage further, they aren't used for damage anyway so it's no problem at all, and larger cast speed penalty on a totem would even balance it out somewhat compared to decoy totem. While you're at it, please give them '50% damage effectiveness' instead of '50% less elemental damage', if they're meant to receive less benefit from flat damage gems and auras you should do a proper job of it.

Now, Mark, this is nothing personal, you're very forthcoming with the the forum, a veritable soul of patience and paragon of courtesy. I just strongly disagree with your stance on some matters and I don't feel that 'because we decided like this and we say it is so' makes for a good argument.

"

Mark_GGG wrote:

The trap/mine damage bonuses are intended to reward use of traps and mines to deliver skills to counter the fact that using traps and mines is more complicated to do than manually casting

If it only would be true, considering that traps here are thrown into enemies faces and mines are set just under their feet. Considering common usage of traps and mines, it's just free dmg boost. If traps would be traps and mines would be mines, it means, laying a trap would be much more time consuming and you would need to do in outside the mobs and next lure them to traps, it would be justifiable, but now... and of course hard casters are penalized because of that.

"

raics wrote:

a remote skill is a remote skill and same rules should apply to totems, mines and traps, regardless of your particular intentions behind them or role in the game

That's simply wrong. Why should they? Totems and Traps/Mines are very different mechanics. Yeah, they all are remote skills, but theys behave very different, and personally I thought I would be having fun with SRS totems until reading this thread, because I either missed the memo in the snapshotting thread, or there wasn't one, but it completely makes sense for them to retain their 50% effect on minions. The actual issue is communicating the difference between Remote Mine / Trap and Spell Totem ingame, for example Remote Mine and Trap having "%more damage except on minions" and everything's alright.

"

Helionova wrote:

That's simply wrong. Why should they? Totems and Traps/Mines are very different mechanics. Yeah, they all are remote skills, but theys behave very different

Yup, the behavior and role is different but the mechanics for both are 100% the same, after this they won't be, and we got another needless exception. You know, like I wrote above, it could be done in a number of different ways, why make an exception to game rules if you don't need to?

One of the reasons the game isn't doing as well as it could is trying to make the players do too much legwork, you know. Highly unnecessary legwork. I know being unintuitive before it becomes cool is the major idea here, but some streamlining and elementary logic can't hurt here and there. After all, it's pretty naive expecting every player is a mechanic nerd like me.

Having to rebalance other skills because you think changing around cast speed (how is SRS the only skill affected by it, wtf, it makes a lot of totem builds way more unresponsive) does the trick is way more leg work than you think it is. It's not a needless exception, it's a good exception.

"

Helionova wrote:

Having to rebalance other skills because you think changing around cast speed (how is SRS the only skill affected by it, wtf, it makes a lot of totem builds way more unresponsive) does the trick is way more leg work than you think it is. It's not a needless exception, it's a good exception.

You know, I thought about that quite a bit, here's what I think.

With 50% less cast speed/20% less damage you even got more dps than now (40% of original damage versus current 35%), I suggested that on purpose because I think spell totem is a tad bit underpowered now. Response is not an issue, totem placing speed isn't affected by the penalty anyway and casting speed wouldn't be all that much lower than now. As it is spells do too little damage to inflict status effects reliably so you can't really chain those, with just 20% less damage per hit they would be able to inflict a solid freeze, shock or ignite at least sometimes. It would feel more like an actual assist than just a small dps boost, besides, if we got some kind of an assist spell that doesn't do damage it would be pretty broken right now.

I feel the totem support change would not only solve minion issue but also be positive in the long run and fairly future proof. Wouldn't it be better to remove the original cause that breaks skill interactions than ban broken combos as they appear?

Stuff like that makes me cringe.

I purposely avoided the topic of status ailments, because it depends a lot on the skill used and how much damage you're doing to begin with and how the weather is. I said unresponsive, because with less cast speed it's going to take even longer until your totems start to do damage. You might do a similar amount of dps over a 20 seconds or so, but it takes time to set up your totems and then wait until the first casts come through, if you're relying on skills with status ailments it might be even worse, because then there's luck involved with shocking stuff etc. Your clear speed is always going to suffer, it just feels boring to play because you have to wait a set amount of time, usually with strategic totem placing the only real thing you can do and funnily SRS totems already are a pretty strong victim of this, it takes a pretty long setup time until you can clear packs, since it takes a few seconds until you have a decent amount of spirits ready, at least until you get a big amount of cast speed.

tl;dr less cast speed feels like shit to players, even if the dps is the same

I also disagree with buffing Spell Totem in general, I think normal spell casting should always do more damage, since it effectively immobilizes you during spam. Totem builds are still viable and strong but not as dominant anymore, which is a good thing, because if the best way to play is to set 2 totems and then wait while stuff dies, people get bored of the game. Unlike other builds, SRS doesn't even suffer from taking Ancestral Bond, so you already have a big plus there.

We both probably saw this compared a number of times but here goes. Totemist builds still work, but I could probably say that for a number of other things nobody plays, the point is how.

You currently do 35% of self-cast damage, with AB that's just 70%, with soul mantle you reached self-cast damage but also managed to compromise the main reason to play a totemist, and that's safety. Not to mention nobody prevents a selfcast char to also have one totem and do 135% normal damage. I won't even bring in echo to the table.

The point is, I haven't really seen all that many totemists these days, they're just about extinct, low clear speed and ridiculous totem durability even with max passive investment kill the deal. The only totemist I've seen used to any significant extent now is three dragons flame totemist, not much else. And that, my friend, isn't a spell totem user.

Just check it out, what's the reason for such a huge dps penalty if you got a native totem that can outgun any damage spell + spell totem combo (and without the need for extra gem slot). Ridiculous. I remember back when incinerate totem was a better option than flame totem, batter damage, you could skip faster projectiles with quality on main gem and it was much cheaper. Of course, not saying that should be brought back, reduced cast speed instead of less was a damn joke of a restriction and good riddance to it. Actually, 50% less cast speed would ensure incinerate is never again a better option than flame totem no matter how low overall dps penalty is, slower stack gain would kill it... which I count as a good thing as both totems are somewhat redundant and extremely low cost on incinerate warrants a 'soft disable' like this.

Tell you the truth, I'd just love to try out the spell totem gem with 50%cast/20%dmg setup for a week, I actually think it would feel better overall.