An idea to fix the Vaal Pact+Ghost Reaver combo

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Astarte911 wrote:

Considering how much meta it is at the moment, "a small" adjustment wont do it. There is need for something substantial, like moving it back to the south/south west.

At the moment, you can pick any crit build, go with ES and VP and you are essentially an unkillable beast. Especially, cuz ES is allocated in North/North east, while all crit and CI/VP/GR as well.

It essentially feels like those players have 160 passive points. So concentrated are those nodes..

Vinktars (with Pathfinder for an example) just makes the whole situation even worse.

So your option would be to relocate the keystone so it can't be available to GR build without a huge tradeoff in passive points. I guess the only downside to this solution would be the diffictulty to balance its position but that is not my job so I'm ok with it :D .

One of the best ways to "fix" Vaal Pact would be to simply return it to the way it was back before Awakening released. Stick it down by where it used to be, between the Marauder and Duelist areas of the passive tree, and reimpose the restriction on the amount leeched down to 50% or some other similar value.

Even with no penalty on either Ghost Reaver or Vaal Pact, though I do think there should be one on at least one of the two, moving it back to where it once was is by far the best thing they can do. Then the only way to get the keystone on the passive tree would involve spending a significant number of passive points to allocate it for an Energy Shield based character starting from the Shadow, Witch or Ranger areas. Melee builds such as Slayers, Gladiators and Berserkers would have absolutely no trouble allocating it, as it would either be on the branch to Constitution or a few nodes away if you decide not to take the life wheel.

Moving it where it used to be is a way to go about killing melee and meleeish skills for ES builds.
Marauder. Duelist etc have easier time getting more maximum life leech per second or defenses that help your sustain even without instant leech.

Personally I don't think the problem is with instant leeching itself, but the way you can play ranged (safe) and tank the same way as a melee build that constantly has to take hits in the face.

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Moving it where it used to be is a way to go about killing melee and meleeish skills for ES builds.

The fact that people think the removal of Vaal Pact will remove all possibilities of playing an Energy Shield melee character only proves the fact that there's a problem even more. ES melee builds can definitely play without instant leech. It's damn amazing to have, but it's in no way required for a specific play-style to be viable. I would 100% agree if you mentioned Ghost Reaver, but you didn't. It's very likely to cause many people to stop playing ES melee builds, but the people who want to play melee for the sake of playing melee will still do just that. You could expect a decrease in Assassins and Tricksters playing melee and also expect an increase in Slayers, Berserkers and Gladiators for the exact same reasons.

You also have to keep in mind that no matter what happens to the node, if anything, it will impact the community as it's ingrained so deeply into the meta-game. When they moved the node up to the shadow-ranger area it impacted all the people playing melee as duelists and marauders. The removal of Vaal Pact hit two-handed melee builds quite hard, as well as all duelists and marauders. There were significantly more melee builds back then as a proportion of the games population, and don't think I'm saying it's because of Vaal Pact because I'm not. I'm stating it because it impacted them very heavily.

You cannot justify that moving it is a bad idea because of the fact that it will reduce the number of players using it in specific builds, because they've done it with Vaal Pact before and they've done it with other things in the past. Bringing up the fact that duelists and marauders don't need Vaal Pact anyway because they already get significantly more access to life leech rates and such is irrelevant. There's a reason that you don't see people spec into life leech mechanics besides Ascendancy points and Vaal Pact, because they're not good enough to justify the investment. If more builds used non-instant life leech as a core mechanic then I'd agree, but I guarantee you couldn't find 1 for every 100 that uses Vaal Pact or other sources instant leech.

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Personally I don't think the problem is with instant leeching itself, but the way you can play ranged (safe) and tank the same way as a melee build that constantly has to take hits in the face.

It's both. if the problem wasn't instant leech by itself then you wouldn't see every style of build make use of it. When there's a single mechanic that the majority of the population use, that allows them to face-tank the hardest content in the game, there's a problem. Though that stems into the one-shot meta being an issue as well, but I'm not going into that. The problems with ranged are largely because they can achieve virtually the same level of damage output while keeping their distance. It has little to do with instant leech and more to do with "Why engage the enemy to deal damage when I can deal more from a safer distance?".

My ideas would be...

Option 1:

1) GR's new description includes "life leech cannot be applied instantly"
2) Introduce two small nodes and then one key node behind GR
3) First two small nodes would increase life leech rate by 10%
4) Key node would increase the life leech cap by 50% and 20% life leech rate

Option 2:

1) GR's new description includes "life leech cannot be applied instantly"
2) Introduce two small nodes and then one key node behind GR
3) First two small nodes would increase shield recharge rate by 15%
4) Key node would reduce 50% shield recharge rate and "OTHER" shield recharge rate modifiers also affect life leech (excluding the effect of the key node itself)

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Bars wrote:

VP + GR is not a combo, it's the only way ES builds can function apart from some ridiculous super-high ES + ES regen tanks and other fringe cases.

Also, ES is not a problem. The problem is life being fucking terrible and disproportionately low to the damage output of high-tier maps. Hell, it's too low even for mid-tier maps nowadays. Try playing a life-based Shadow, Witch or Ranger in a SSF league and it becomes glaringly obvious. You pick every life node along the way, get life on gear, and it's still between the 4-5k mark at around level 80, which is inadequate even for tier 6-7 maps if you're in HC.

This exactly. There is nothing wrong with GR + VP. It's just a requirement most of the time. Life is too low for the current content. Maybe it ok pre-atlas release, but not anymore. Address the real issue.

I much much prefer to play life builds.

I don't care how strong ES is with VP and GR.

If armor actually functioned vs large hits like most people assume it does (it hardly does anything for big hits currently), and evasion offered to create "glancing blows" in the sense armor reduces damage (but maybe at at a 1/3 effectiveness or so), then there would be, imo, more balance between the two styles.

Because what it really comes down to is absorbing one-shot type mechanics.

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This exactly. There is nothing wrong with GR + VP. It's just a requirement most of the time. Life is too low for the current content. Maybe it ok pre-atlas release, but not anymore. Address the real issue.

I agree. Life based builds don't often die because of physical hits but mostly elemental and chaos hits. We have lightning coil and arctic armor to defend against physical attacks but purity skills provide little help when it comes to elemental attacks.

So to sum up a bit what has been said, here are the three dominant way of thinking that appeared on this thread:


-Some think that life based are currently too weak to face the content of the game and that it needs a buff (including armor and other defensive stats). I'd argue that life based is currently not too weak but rather weaker and need more investment than ES to be viable in lategame (as some people said, life based build doing Uber Atziri and Shaper exists) but this might change with the scaling of future content if nothing is done.

-Some think that nothing is broken and nothing should be changed. I'd say you are right for now but if future content is scaled on the majority of player playing ES, this might become a problem and life based might very well be unplayable in lategame in two or three patch.


-Some think that there is an unbalance between life and ES in term of suvivability and that nerf GR+VP would help rebalance this. In these people, some think changing either VP or GR would do it, other think moving VP in the tree would be the solution.


To conclude I'd say that buffing life would be the easy way out but might not be healthy for the power creeping of the game, balancing ES sustaining and maybe scaling down content (or not) would ask more work from the devs but would make future balancing simpler.

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Bouveti wrote:

(...)

We all have different standards. Different goals. Different ideas how this game should feel.
We play different leagues (HC/SC), invest different amounts of time and enjoy different aspects of the game.

As an example, my standpoint:

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I think life is in a pretty good spot.
I face actual choices in my builds (stuff like "Can I really afford another damage cluster? Can I really invest 5 more skillpoints into capped block chance? Or will 67% have to do? I want this keystone, but is it really worth the travel cost with no life along the way?").

In endgame content, I have to rely on skill and attention to survive.
...and sometimes I just die, which is fine to me.
If I'm not afraid the game can kill me once in a while, why would I even play?

On the other hand, CI is boring for me. It's just too easy and uninteresting. Skilltrees write themself. GR/VP is just stupid, with enough buffer, all I need to do is hold down a mouse button and I win. Great. There's nothing clever about it, no interesting choice.

Same goes for "endless strand" that many players seem to enjoy... I'd never do this, no matter how "efficient".
I don't feel rewarded when I mindlessly crush content, and after hours and hours, a number turns from 94 to 95. I feel rewarded when I beat a crazy quadruple essence nasty base monster with killer nemesis mod in a brutal map.

I also don't like ranged, and I don't want too crazy DpS.
If all I do is oneshot whole screens without even noticing what I kill, why would there be different monsters in the game in the first place?
The only way to notice different monsters and having to adapt sometimes, actually feeling the map mods you rolled, is by playing melee.

I love my life based melee dudes, and I don't want them to be buffed. If anything, I'd want the game to be even harder.

... how could a discussion with a "24/7 CI, I'm HC, I never want to die, need 100 million xp/hour" dude lead to any remotely useful result?

That's why all these threads are ultimately pointless.