2.4 and the CoC nerf - what to expect ?

CoC nerf = goodbye important part of the players

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Carrasco_Santo wrote:

CoC nerf = goodbye important part of the players

Yep, they said that about every nerf in this game's history, yet Perandus set records for player concurrency and retention. I'm sure this time it's different.

I expect QQ players to cry about what needs nerf next

There's a lot of interesting discussions, but very few direct answers to OP.

Here's my 2 cents :

Possible nerfs I'm thinking of :
- Longer cooldown between crit checks : 0.05 today -> 0.25 (or whatever other anti-lag value).
- Remove the 0% mana consumption for linked spells -> linked spells require 50% of their nominal mana consumption to be able to trigger (or whatever other value).
- Reduce the crit chance of CoC, so that it triggers less often.
- Apply the checks of CoC for each linked spell separately, so that 0, 1, 2... only of the linked spells may trigger at a time when crit.

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FNX_Heroes wrote:

There's a lot of interesting discussions, but very few direct answers to OP.

Here's my 2 cents :

Possible nerfs I'm thinking of :
- Longer cooldown between crit checks : 0.05 today -> 0.25 (or whatever other anti-lag value).
- Remove the 0% mana consumption for linked spells -> linked spells require 50% of their nominal mana consumption to be able to trigger (or whatever other value).
- Reduce the crit chance of CoC, so that it triggers less often.
- Apply the checks of CoC for each linked spell separately, so that 0, 1, 2... only of the linked spells may trigger at a time when crit.

Ok, please dont take this the wrong way but have you played CoC? A lot of these suggestions would completely destroy the build.

1. Reducing the internal cooldown that much is a MASSIVE nerf. These are unsupported spells. A lot of the Damage comes through attacks per second scaling.

2. If the spells cost mana when CoC procs them you wouldnt be abke to sustain. The build already uses -mana elreon diamond rings (super expensive to craft) and reduced mana jewels because they have to be able to run 3 auras minimum. For discharge ice nova they run discipline purity of fire and lightning to help with reflect and to help with being able to do uber. For no volls or bladevortex alot of people use something else like arctic armor instead of two purities. Because volls protector halves your mana you basically have nothing. This is often why budget builds go trickster so that cyclone doesnt cost any mana because its a movement skill. If spells cost mana when it procs you will not be able to sustain them at all.

3. Reducing the crit chance again severly hurts the build. The key is consistency. The build is super squishy when its not leeching and so if you are in a pack of mobs and your spells dont go off you are dead instantly. A lot of uber capable coc players even use phase run for this exact reason. Its so squishy when not criting that traveling between T14/15 uber packs can be very dangerous so phase run can help. But as soon as you start spinning you have to crit or you will likely die.

4. CoC checking each spell individually resulting in possible 0,1,2 spells cast again causes issues with survivability and not being able to leech. Moreover thats a big time damage nerf. CoC relies on both spells going off because the spells are unsupported. They instead focus on attacks per second to get many procs because the unsuppoeted spells hit far less hard.

Lol it wouldn't destroy it; It would outright REMOVE IT lmao like clearly that guy does not ever play CoC and assumes shit I fucking hate that.

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Bars wrote:

Dude, why are you even wasting your breath arguing with a guy who starts off with 'I've never played CoC' and then explains how OP it is :)

jeez, that's why i gave theoretic numbers and not imagined experience. This is discussion forum after all..

Probably i will have to come up with more solid material with existing builds some time later (if i will be up to it). It may prove or deny, will see. I don't really see myself fighting vain war here.

I gonna add some more cents to this thread as well:

Obviously we really dont need to talk about chaos meta in this thread. Its more than obvious that it wont stay the way it is in next patch.

I think GGG will need to nerf CoC in order to release new powerful spells which otherwise would be abused by CoC.

To the topic:

One change has already been mentioned multiple times which is a drastic increase of its cooldown time. This will most liklely be the case.

Another possible way for a CoC change would be to remove it from the drop table in temporary leagues.

If CoC is going to change one way or another I think the most reasonably change is the internal cooldown being increased as that seem to be the way they have changed CoC in previous attempts to balance it.

There seems to be a lot of people that seem to take this discussion of what we expect to change with CoC (not what we want to change) a bit to personally. This is all theory, we are not asking GGG to do anything, we are merely putting out our opinion on what could change in the event it does.

A decrease of CoC's internal cooldown would have a profoundly negative effect.

A build's strength isn't measured simply in damage output. It's also measured in clear speed, survivability, utility. If you just want to deal a lot of damage, there are a ton of ways to go about it, especially with the ascendancy classes. The trick is getting a good balance between defense and offense and the HC ladders in the temp leagues are an excellent indicator. Players at the top of these ladders have truly optimised and min-maxed builds because they can't have any weaknesses. There only one CoC build which is doing well in these ladders and this is cyclone CoC discharge. That's it. What's more, it isn't dominating the ladders - it's just there along with other solid builds.

Nerfing CoC's internal cooldown would do nothing for CoC discharge. It doesn't generate that many hits, it's just that the hits are powerful. It would, however, severely impact barrage, kinetic blast and ground slam CoC builds - which aren't in the same ballpark as power level simply because they have weaknesses.

So, the main effect would be to pigeonhole CoC into a single cookie cutter and kill build variance. The throne would remain unchallenged, the lesser contenders would just die.

This isn't good design by any means.

All this is purely hypothetical as GGG base their balance decisions mostly on the prevalence of certain skills and builds and there's no way they're going to nerf builds which aren't too popular and aren't doing too well in HC.

As for CoC discharge itself, yep - it's good. Also expensive. There are other builds which achieve a comparable power level without needing that much of an investment. I think the game needs builds like this - if players couldn't invest hard work and time into becoming powerful and being able to confidently tackle all content in the game, they wouldn't have an incentive to play. And there is a world of difference between a high-end and solid endgame build and builds which achieve tremendous damage output with no drawbacks at a lesser cost, which is the situation with some chaos and poison builds right now.

To summarise, although some other complaints are legitimate, I believe most of the CoC complaining is done mostly by players who are essentially clueless about PoE's true endgame and deeper balance considerations and just like to complain about anything they perceive as powerful since they, for whatever reason, can't or won't have it.

I have a strong suspicion it is done predominantly by players who go for slow and tanky builds and feel offended other players are exploding the entire screen. The same players who would go up in arms if someone even mentioned a nerf of some ridiculously good defensive ascendancy options like the Champion's perma fortify or the Gladiator's massive bonuses to block + 100% spell block. The funny part is, they use exactly the same arguments which negate most of the CoC QQing: 'But I've invested in it!' 'It's a trade-off, I don't deal that much damage!' and so on.