Unique amulet suggestion (removing enemy immunities): well-argumented technical feedback welcome!

"Year Zero":
(Onyx amulet: 10 to 16 to all attributes)

* Enemy stun immunity is replaced by 200% stun recovery
* Enemy curse immunity is replaced by 50% reduced effect of curses
* Enemy elemental status ailment immunity is replaced by 50% reduced elemental status ailment duration
* Enemy hits can't be evaded is replaced by +2000 accuracy rating
* Enemy 100% chaos resistance is replaced by 75% chaos resistance and chaos damage does not bypass energy shield

* Cannot use flasks

"Wraeclast has its own rules"

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This amulet is designed both to offer a way to deal with certain "pain in the ass" mods for certain builds, as well as to combat the rock-paper-scissors principle of PvP. To balance things out it comes with an immense drawback.


1) Enemy stun immunity is replaced by 200% stun recovery: Unwavering is not a huge problem in PvM as there are few monsters that have it, but in PvP the vast majority of players runs around with stun immunity, making stun builds non-existent in PvP. When equiping "Year Zero", all your enemies formerly immune to stun will lose that quality but are granted 200% stun recovery instead. That means such enemies can be stunned from now on, but only very briefly. A dedicated stun build however should be able to gain enough advantage out of it to be worth the investment.

2) Enemy curse immunity is replaced by 50% reduced effect of curses: This means you can actually allow yourself to heavily rely on curses, even in curse immunity maps and in PvP where everybody is using curse immunity flasks. Do mind however, that such a flask will still remove the curse upon use. The subsequent curse immunity however is replaced by reduced effect of curses, which means when your enemy is under the effect of such a flask, you can curse him but your curse will be weaker till the flask effect runs out. As long as the enemy has flask charges, he can still remove the curse everytime you cast one on him.

3) Enemy elemental status ailment immunity is replaced by 50% reduced elemental status ailment duration This allows you to ignite Atziri! But the burn time is halved though, even with increased ignite duration, as the 50% reduced is on the receivers side. In PvP it is a great way to overcome cheap ways to completely ignore shock (Fairgrave's tricorne), ignite (Ashrend, Rise of the phoenix, The goddes scorned), chill (Icetomb) and especially freeze (Dreamfragments, Wanderlust, Alpha's howl and Shiverstring). Overcoming freeze immunity in PvP can turn out to be crucial. The time your normally immune enemy is frozen is cut in half, so freeze immunity still provides a substantial protection against this amulet. What counts for curses also counts for status ailments: they can still be removed upon activating the proper flask. Only the immunity is pierced by this amulet, not the power to remove! And you might not have flasks, but your enemy does... .

4) Enemy hits can't be evaded is replaced by +2000 accuracy rating: also very PvP minded. Having a high evasion against RT or Lioneye's builds is absolutely useless, and this amulet gives back the meaning of a big investment in evasion. Chances are they will still hit you most of the time, as the formerly always hit is replaced by a hit boosted with 2000 accuracy, which equals 2 fully leveled accuracy gems.

5) Enemy 100% chaos resistance is replaced by 75% chaos resistance and chaos damage does not bypass energy shield: This will be the mandatory item for chaos damage users in PvP. Because anytime they come across a CI character, they will have to put this amulet to still have a game. The CI character now comes with a respectable 75% chaos resistance, something very few other characters have, and will take the chaos damage on their ES (otherwise they would instantly die). Even if that is a solid defense against e.g. your poison arrow build, at least now your chaos damage based character has a chance against those CI characters. CI still did a wise investment: they traded some life for +135% chaos resistance. A great bargain against chaos damage!

6) Cannot use flasks: Ouch, that is a VERY serious drawback, especially taking into account that this is mostly a PvP amulet and flasks in PvP are VERY important. Well, it's a price to pay... .

=> The aim of this amulet is mostly to still give a chance to certain imbalanced rock-paper-scissors setups in PvP. The huge advantage of one against the other (e.g. Stun based character against Unwavering, Chaos based against CI, Freeze based against cannot be frozen items, Evasion based against RT, and heavy cursers in general who face those damn flasks) is somewhat nerfed to offer a chance to the scissors against the rock. At the rock side, he will still benefit from his immunities but in another slightly weaker form, so this amulet doesn't obsolete any investment at all!

What this amulet should do is encourage diversity in PvP. Builds that are now excluded (Stunners, Freezers, Chaos damagers,...) are invited back into the Arena. They will still have their hands full with their former impossible-to-beat enemies, but instead of impossible, those have become just "seriously advantaged". The fact that flask usage is cancelled is an immense price to pay to join the game. Do mind however that this amulet will mostly only be equipped against certain enemies.


My questions:

1) "Is the drawback too heavy?" Not using flasks in PvP might be suicide... maybe we should think about other options when it comes to the drawback. Or add more power to the ammy (like a certain curse, ailments,... protection to make up a bit for not having those on flasks)?

2) "Are the numbers ok?" Half freeze time instead of freeze immunity might not be enough. We don't want cold builds all over the place freezelocking us. But as long as they don't manage to consistently freezelock, their flask drawback might balance their inconsistent freezing advantage out. Still, I'm maybe thinking about a 65% reduced duration to prevent freeze-lock builds.

3) "Are there abuses I didn't think of? Anything else that makes this a dangerous or imbalanced item?".

Thank you for feedback!

I don't play PvP so I can't comment on the necessity of such an item with regards to PvP.

For PvE, however, I actually dislike the concept of immunity as a whole. Immunity results in some builds becoming useless against some monsters. I would much rather see some builds becoming "much less effective", rather than simply becoming "useless".

Taking curse immunity as an example, if I have a build that specializes in multiple curses, I would want to always use those curses, albeit at a much reduced effectiveness against some monsters and bosses. Even if it is half a second duration at 10% of the effectiveness, at least give me the satisfaction of being able to use the skills that the build has invested so heavily in.

Curse immunity - replace with greatly reduced curse duration/effect
Stun immunity - replace with greatly increased stun threshold/recovery
Elemental status immunity - replace with greatly reduced duration
Hits Can't be evaded - greatly increased accuracy rating
etc, etc.

Maybe a bit sidetracked from your original idea though.

P.S. I think you mean "flasks". This is PoE not D, although it is easy to forget sometimes. :)

Regardless of PvE or PvP, an immunity to something a build builds around is a bad mod. RT is stupid as far as PvP balance goes. Those types of immunities either should not exist, or require a lot more than one affix to achieve (ex: 20% avoid chance on 5 separate items, at least 1 of which has to be unique).

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P.S. I think you mean "flasks". This is PoE not D, although it is easy to forget sometimes. :)

Thanks for pointing that out! Edited... .

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Regardless of PvE or PvP, an immunity to something a build builds around is a bad mod. RT is stupid as far as PvP balance goes. Those types of immunities either should not exist, or require a lot more than one affix to achieve (ex: 20% avoid chance on 5 separate items, at least 1 of which has to be unique).

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For PvE, however, I actually dislike the concept of immunity as a whole. Immunity results in some builds becoming useless against some monsters. I would much rather see some builds becoming "much less effective", rather than simply becoming "useless".

Seems my unique item suggestion opened up a discussion on a much bigger issue. All in all, I agree with both of you. Maybe a unique amulet isn't the sollution to a much bigger problem, maybe they should indeed change immunities to very high resistances. Everything that completely obsoletes a mechanic (like RT obsoleting evasion), should maybe nerfed a bit while remaining very strong (2000 accuracy instead of always hit is still very strong and for many builds worth the cannot crit).

More opinions on this topic are highly welcome!

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What else is even there? We don't even have all the immunity stuff D2 had. Every elemental damage hurts monsters, even if its a little less sometimes, but no mob is immune

Which is good. It's one major lesson poe learned from D2. It's stupid to faceroll all mobs except the immune ones which are impossible. The aim is that most mobs pose a certain but acceptable challenge. With some extremes on both ends ofcourse. Should be a Gauss-curve.
But GGG should have implemented the same logic with other immunities.

Immunities kill abilities entirely and hence build diversity. It narrows everybody down to the fewer things that work consistently.

If the game is too easy, I can only agree. The monsters need to be buffed along with replacing their immunities by heavy resistances.

But what you seem to forget is that removing immunities will also make the game harder at the same time: people themselves will also lose their possible immunities to stun, freeze, curses (from flasks),... along with the nerf to RT and other always hit modifiers. Nevertheless it will still be very wise to take Unwavering or CI because they will still grant a huge benefit instead of the former immunity. Maybe read again, dear Dirk: this is not a suggestion that will make the game easier!

PS: still replying negatively to every thread, DirkAustin?

My take: This amulet seems to greatly favor the shadow area of the tree in some sort of leech build where flasks aren't important. Anyway I would have to remove the changes to elemental status effects in the amulet because of Atziri unless you introduce some sort of appropriately severe downside to go along with flasks not working anymore.

Such as "100% less chance to critical strike" which might balance out the fact that shadow area of the tree seems greatly favored for this amulet. Though doing that would pretty much reduce the amulet to trash status. I don't think you'd be able to get away with making an Atziri killing amulet without going ham with the downsides.

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Soepkieken wrote:

Which is good. It's one major lesson poe learned from D2. It's stupid to faceroll all mobs except the immune ones which are impossible. The aim is that most mobs pose a certain but acceptable challenge. With some extremes on both ends ofcourse. Should be a Gauss-curve. But GGG should have implemented the same logic with other immunities.

100% agreed.

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And D2 did one thing right, immunity to 1 thing at a time is perfectly fine because it makes players not go all single skill and element attack, making players instead spread their damage stats out a little over all elements.

Only if this was true. After patch 1.10 (the major one) all monsters in hell difficulty were immune to AT LEAST one element. This meant rare monsters and super uniques were more often than not immune to 2~3 elements, often including physical immunity. Meteorb was a popular Sorc build, but it's useless against fire/cold immune. That's OK because you have an Act 2 merc! Oh crap, physical immunity as well, no choice but to skip the monster. There is nothing challenging about skipping a monster - on the other hand if the monster had extremely high resists to cold/fire/physical that would actually pose a challenge for the Meteorb build. What ended up happening with D2 was that most people built Hammerdins (with Enigma) because that was the only build available that could actually handle 99.99% of the situations for MFing, and then "crushing blow" builds for handling Ubers. Most builds simply had to accept the fact that there are monsters the build could not handle and had to skip.

In short, there is nothing challenging about immunity, and removing immunity need not make the game any less challenging.