State of Armor/life builds

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

ya when you look how impossible it became to balance elemental damage on mobs when people had an 8% difference in flat ele resist balancing phys damage mobs against 0 armour vs 30,000 armour would be such a nightmare.

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Boem wrote:

Gonna invent a new node here after reading this.


First node of the cluster

Aging equipment :

4%hp
15% more armor

Then instead of a circle or line it branches out to 3 other nodes behind it.

Phoenix marked helmet :

10% increased armor

20% of fire elemental damage is reduced by armor

Drowned body armor :

10% increased armor

20% of cold elemental damage is reduced by armor

Grounded boots :

10% increased armor

20% of lightning damage is reduced by armor

Something like this would be hard to abuse imo by other builds since it is not simply a +% based reduction, but a reduction based on another line of defense usually associated with the left side of the passive tree.

(but abuses will always appear)

Peace,

-Boem-

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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LSN wrote:

Nothing new about this. Dagger/es builds are the best melee tanks and damage dealers at the same time on purpose.

While shadow (right side) has got ci, eb and all the high attack speed increased base crit weapons (claws, wands, daggers), the left side with templar, marauder and duelist is just inferior in all categories.

Game is designed around the shadow/witch/ranger class on purpose, and those three classes cover all the game needs anyway, which is witch = spellcaster, shadow = melee tank and ranger = physical/elemental projectile. The devs obviously don't like or want to bring balance to the other classes, I wonder if they even recognized yet that there is a balance problem. If they did the following should not have happened: While dagger builds were op before the forsaken master patch and every other melee weapon build was lacking behind them, they got further buffed to be even stronger than before now and outclass any of the life melee classes that clearly that it became stupid to play one of these.

Templar, marauder and duelist? As you have mentioned, in fact they were further weakened in order to make players choices easy. I guess those of us who once picked one of them can be considered stupid, as we believed that GGG has got a bit of sense and understanding for balance.

For the next balance patch I suppose that blood magic should be moved to the right side (next to ci and eb), so that shadows and witches wont have to go the far distance to the left side in order to support their one million damage aoe builds on low life with 9 auras. We do not want to limit their fun.

You're wrong there. Strength part of the tree has 3 AWESOME crit clusters, which are VERY desirable for shadows and witches anyway. Same for Unwavering Stance.
Also Strength part got almost all life regeneration nodes, and tons of life nodes as well.

Armour itself is a bit weak, probably.... if not used with close-to-max block

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aleksandor wrote:

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Jiero wrote:

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aleksandor wrote:

I'd really like it if they just changed armor to a flat % reduction that doesn't give a crap what the damage of the enemy is hitting for: it still offers the same percent reduction whether its 10 or 1000000.
This is how most other RPG's do it, and its the one that works the best.

This works when the numbers of everything are constrained to nominal limits and in here they aren't at all. How do you balance enemy physical damage for example when a 95% DR 10k hp tank is standing next to a 50% DR 5k hp non tank? The tank has an effective 200k hp compared to the non tank's 10k effective hp, anything that would scratch the tank one shots the non tank. Those other rpgs do this ad the result is that they turn back into trinity rpgs of tank/dps/healer...

Not really, so long as Armor follows a diminishing returns formula where it costs twice as much to Increase from 50% to 51% as it did to increase from 0% to 1%. So long as the damage reduction never accelerates like it does with Resistances and Blocking, it should be easy to Keep reigned in.
After all, if you're pumping armor, you're not pumping Life, so Effective health should even out properly, since the % increase in DR will keep being throttled back as you stack it.



Granted, they'd have to reevaluate Determination and Armor nodes, but armor being reliable isn't a bad thing.

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LSN wrote:

The difference is that an es build can afford to go all the way to the left to just pick these and the aura cluster

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LSN wrote:

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

You're wrong there. Strength part of the tree has 3 AWESOME crit clusters, which are VERY desirable for shadows and witches anyway. Same for Unwavering Stance.
Also Strength part got almost all life regeneration nodes, and tons of life nodes as well.

Armour itself is a bit weak, probably.... if not used with close-to-max block

The difference is that an es build can afford to go all the way to the left to just pick these and the aura cluster while a life build on the left side can't afford to go to the shadow start to pick crit nodes without losing too much survivability (armour/life).