Why the "You need more health" paradigm is bad

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Hemmingfish wrote:

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goetzjam wrote:

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MasterTBC2 wrote:

Life nodes should be removed just concentrate on getting
one type of defence ES, AR, EV + Dodge, Block.
Get all hp from leveling and gear. Leveling should give % inc life and flat then so life from gear wont be useless.

Then GGG would have to focus on balancing the endgame for people that have life on every piece of gear, which completely defeats the purpose of what they've been doing on making life on gear less mandatory with the increased life gained per level. So anyone that chooses to use a unique item or multiple ones will suffer significantly with your purposed changes.

Life nodes are perfectly fine, this mentality that its stack all life or GTFO is wrong, you spend probably 1/4 of your points on life nodes, some damage nodes and the rest is pathing.

You want to remove the tradeoff people currently do for things like max block or builds that traverse a greater part of the tree, that isn't good design, the current get what life nodes are around what you pass is pretty good. If you are deing make sure you have capped resistances and other proper defenses, most of the time you aren't deing because your life is too low, its because you don't have capped res and are trying to tank hits you shouldn't be.

How is needing life on gear any different from needing capped resses?

Capped resistances can be achieved easier then sacrificing life because you want to use multiple unqiues. The passive tree has a good amount of resistance nodes, shields can have high res, rings can roll with nice res, the point is capped res is much easier to manage then having good life rolls required on every piece. What is the solution under his no life nodes premise where everyone that doesnt have max or very high life rolls on gear, they just suffer because they want to have a different build?

The dude has had an account for a month, his suggestions aren't based on longtime experience or observations, but rather what he thinks it should be from a very limited perspective.

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Erasculio wrote:

One thing I keep reading here over and over is that any high level build is only viable if it has lots and LOTS of health (or ES if CI). Many builds have passives allocated almost entirely to health nodes, and little else.

I think that's bad, actually, and a bad way to see the game.

Yes, it's just as bad as "DPS/movespeed above all" paradigm, that happens in other ARPGs/RPGs. Players should get different nodes according to specifics of their builds. If every build has to invest at least half of its nodes into HP alone, it isnt a good design. You can just "remove" those nodes from the game, and give players some boost to %life per level gained. Or make life nodes "backbone" (like +10 stat nodes currently are) - then they will be picked "automatically" while trying to get other nodes.

Feedback from newer players is invaluable. Older players tend to see bad game design as "features" and are more likely to just defend the status quo mindlessly. There have been numerous studies on this behaviour in other areas of life. If a new perspective sees clunkiness or poor design where you do not, perhaps you have just habituated yourself to it?


Additionally, for a game like this to survive it needs new players. Any activity comes with natural attrition, if the standard line is "playmore scrub" I think you'll find your preferred activity dying the slow death.

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BrainHP wrote:

Feedback from newer players is invaluable. Older players tend to see bad game design as "features" and are more likely to just defend the status quo mindlessly. There have been numerous studies on this behaviour in other areas of life. If a new perspective sees clunkiness or poor design where you do not, perhaps you have just habituated yourself to it?


Additionally, for a game like this to survive it needs new players. Any activity comes with natural attrition, if the standard line is "playmore scrub" I think you'll find your preferred activity dying the slow death.

I am an old player, but i never protected bad game design. I know, that if you can get some stats enough with passives ONLY (like % increased maximum life or life regeneration), then you're literally forced into learning those passives.

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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Erasculio wrote:

One thing I keep reading here over and over is that any high level build is only viable if it has lots and LOTS of health (or ES if CI). Many builds have passives allocated almost entirely to health nodes, and little else.

I think that's bad, actually, and a bad way to see the game.

Yes, it's just as bad as "DPS/movespeed above all" paradigm, that happens in other ARPGs/RPGs. Players should get different nodes according to specifics of their builds. If every build has to invest at least half of its nodes into HP alone, it isnt a good design. You can just "remove" those nodes from the game, and give players some boost to %life per level gained. Or make life nodes "backbone" (like +10 stat nodes currently are) - then they will be picked "automatically" while trying to get other nodes.

And this fact happens because ggg DON'T want to REDUCE the damn monster's damage. Instead, they will increase it -.- Path of life nodes -.-

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Wispo wrote:

And this fact happens because ggg DON'T want to REDUCE the damn monster's damage. Instead, they will increase it -.- Path of life nodes -.-

Actually, monster damage isnt the main factor there. Life nodes are just TOO benefitial, because they are almost the only way to get % increased life. The only unique, that provides decent % increased life, is Belly of the Beast, and guess what? It's one of the most popular chests in the game!
As for rares, they dont have %increased life mod at ALL!
Also, life leech, life regeneration and flask mechanics all heavily favor large HP pools. Which isnt bad design itself, but it becames bad when you have only one stable source of %increased life.

You can say "but there are no %increased damage rolls on rares too (except for casters)". Well, gems provide decent amount of "%increased damage" for free, so sometimes you can skip most "% increased damage" nodes, but you usually cant (or, dont want to) skip life nodes.

So, in my opinion, GGG SHOULD implement new rare affixes, that provide "%increased life". Also, lots of "%increased life" nodes could be swapped with flat "life" nodes instead, so gear wont be the only way to get flat "life".

I have started my frst life build, and as i use 3 uniq and whas forced to use 4 becouse of penalty of one of uniq i finde my self i position wher build can worck but only whit inaff skill points and question then is for how long.

It is good when you have uniq for build enabler or for the edge in doing things you cant posibly do whit rare items but many build get broken att some point becouse of life they miss.

I think that traveling node should be mach stronger in they bonuses to provide mor iniciative to to mor uniq build.
My character curently having 260 str and almost 300 dex 2.5k life whit 20% points in life, you should expect mor of thos points and not to be inefficient but looking att statistic its not so impresive.
Ther is life and ther is a procent life, having to mach of one or the other give litle benefits.

Effective life and rezistance get out of sunc and frustation get real, thers come the question what defence mechaic is best to conter it and how that effect deversity of builds.

Att this point i starting to see the difrance of up to level 70 builds and the difrance on my 80+ characters and its is limiting whit insanity how they defence going to points of imunity just to make do.

Just no.... this idea is not bad, but it cannot function in aRPG, ever. As your character gets better, it becomes immortal. Therefore you don't have to pay attention to monsters. That's just how these games work.

It could be different if PoE would have some infinite scaling mechanic. Like not capped maps(I'm promoting this idea for ages, but GGG doesn't give a shit, at all).

Someone argue that PoE has scaling mechanic via map mods. Well it doesn't. Its not worth rolling maps and if you do, you aim for monster pack size, nothing else. Someone skip -max res because its too dangerous, I skip temp chain because its too annoying and Blood Magic because I can't do it as CI based build. Everything else is ok - not scaling anything. I mean, you could roll some seriously challenging map, but how many currency you would have to spend in order to get -max res + extra ele damage + monster damage + reflect + another mods you consider challenging at the same time. Nobody would do that to just get feeling of beating such map...

Why I'm talking about this and how it is related? If there would be some real infinite scaling mechanic, you wouldn't get into state where you are immortal and you feel no challenge. More survivability would be allways good aswell as more damage. As a result, this whole tread would be meaningless.

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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Wispo wrote:

And this fact happens because ggg DON'T want to REDUCE the damn monster's damage. Instead, they will increase it -.- Path of life nodes -.-

Actually, monster damage isnt the main factor there. Life nodes are just TOO benefitial, because they are almost the only way to get % increased life. The only unique, that provides decent % increased life, is Belly of the Beast, and guess what? It's one of the most popular chests in the game!
As for rares, they dont have %increased life mod at ALL!
Also, life leech, life regeneration and flask mechanics all heavily favor large HP pools. Which isnt bad design itself, but it becames bad when you have only one stable source of %increased life.

You can say "but there are no %increased damage rolls on rares too (except for casters)". Well, gems provide decent amount of "%increased damage" for free, so sometimes you can skip most "% increased damage" nodes, but you usually cant (or, dont want to) skip life nodes.

So, in my opinion, GGG SHOULD implement new rare affixes, that provide "%increased life". Also, lots of "%increased life" nodes could be swapped with flat "life" nodes instead, so gear wont be the only way to get flat "life".

Good point by itself, but it won't change the situation: a situation that compels you to have a large life pool to survive, because other defenses go from semi useless (75% elem def, now harder to overcap due to future delete of inner force) to useless (armor) to over nerfed (acrobatics). I still dream the day in wich we CAN lightheartedly decide to go 1k hp but with a defense that lets us survive 95% of the content in lvl 80 maps (with an investment on that defense, obviously). It's called DIVERSITY, but GGG it's too restrained by its LIMITED vision of the game to understand this word

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Feedback from newer players is invaluable. Older players tend to see bad game design as "features" and are more likely to just defend the status quo mindlessly. There have been numerous studies on this behaviour in other areas of life. If a new perspective sees clunkiness or poor design where you do not, perhaps you have just habituated yourself to it?

Feedback is great from a new player, but it isn't and shouldn't be the end all on changes being purposed to the game. He is suggesting completely removing life from the passive tree and making gear focused life a thing. Currently its a 2 stage process, acquire life on gear AND the passive tree. Shifting it from either gear to tree or tree to gear can create an inbalance that will upset many builds\playstyles.

Keep in mind a new player doesn't have the knowledge of alternative life based mechanics or how they work at all.

They can go to the build forums and see someone's build that has 120% life on the tree, but when they plan out their build they take 5 extra damage nodes instead of a big % life cluster, they fail to cap their resistances (which is in the utmost importance) and then blame the death of the fact they are missing 25+ res on the fact that he didn't get those extra 5 life nodes.

So while I made a short comment about his feedback, I didn't go into this much detail before because of time, if you've read my post in the past typically they are in a more detailed fashion, this time I did not.

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Wispo wrote:

Good point by itself, but it won't change the situation: a situation that compels you to have a large life pool to survive, because other defenses go from semi useless (75% elem def, now harder to overcap due to future delete of inner force) to useless (armor) to over nerfed (acrobatics). I still dream the day in wich we CAN lightheartedly decide to go 1k hp but with a defense that lets us survive 95% of the content in lvl 80 maps (with an investment on that defense, obviously). It's called DIVERSITY, but GGG it's too restrained by its LIMITED vision of the game to understand this word

Acro was NOT overnerfed, if anything you should be complaining about EB or ondar changes in beta, those were hit much harder then acro and block. Although I guess technically block was hit really hard, now it requires investment in all forms (tree, gear, masters (block on gloves) and corruptions.

Your tradeoff investment for 1k HP and defenses that let you survive is block+evasion. Problem is not getting hit, with lockstep you can manually dodge things, but in order for the game to remain balanced, they force you to invest into life at least a little bit so that when you DO get hit you can take it. If there was a build that required 0 investment in life and 0 investment in ES then life\es would become invalid defense options, removing the diversity from all but a few niche builds, your idea isn't original and won't introduce diversity but actually have the opposite desired effect.