Thoughts on the Champion Rework

Lets begin with the biggest change. Adrenaline on reaching low life instead of 200% increased. armour and evasion on low life. While adrenaline looks to be a very appealing and useful buff, the fact that a character needs to build psuedo low life to utilize it effectively is slightly unappealing. Building for a character just above low life causes characters to miss out on low life buffs and lowers effective hp by a substantial amount while likely requiring solaris/shavs/coruscating to protect against chaos damage. Building a non pseudo low life character would involve taking a damage equivalent to 65% of the character's hp which is arguably very dangerous for the sake of obtaining a damage buff. Provided, a 20 second buff is much needed if it were to remain unchanged, the fact that the duration cannot be refreshed until the buff wears off is quite "gimmicky".

Secondly, the 200% loss of armour and evasion on low life is not made up for by any means leaving characters to be very vulnerable when trying to obtain the adrenaline buff (even with fortify). The current state of armour and evasion in the game is not the most effective source of physical damage mitigation, however a 200% difference is quite substantial on any character that either scales or has a reasonable amount of armour and/or evasion (with iron reflexes). The rework attempts to remedy this by granting players with 1000 flat armour and evasion rating while you have fortify however not many players scale very much % armour or evasion on tree so at best this remedies the 30% armour and evasion while you have fortify as a roughly equal exchange.

Finally, the taunt tree changes are quite refreshing as there was arguable very little use for the tree prior to the rework. The addition of 100% chance to taunt on hit (up from 25%), taunted enemies take 20% increased damage, and taunted enemies cannot evade attacks is very useful and opens up many new options such as being able to run crit builds with minimal accuracy scaling.
Overall, the taunt changes are very nice, adrenaline is a good buff but not easy and potentially not worth it to maintain, and there is no reason to remove 200% armour and evasion on low life (unless it was somehow too powerful, in which case it should be toned down and not removed).

If I missed anything substantial please feel free to let me know :)

Or you can use a health removing mechanic to trigger it every 20 seconds and just heal back up. Lots of flasks along those lines.

I dont think you are supposed to try and build for uptime on that buff, its just something you get when you get hammered by a monster.

they can try but talking about it as if thats the intention of the node is completely missing the point of the node. If you can find a way to abuse it then fine, but if you cant find a decent way to do it thats not a problem with the node. Its like saying 2h rare swords arnt very good because I tried to theorycraft a fireball shadow using a rare 2h sword and i couldnt make it work. If you can make it work then great, if you cant then thats not a problem because a rare 2h sword was designed for melee characters who use a 2h sword to hit things, and its doing that job just fine.

This is a node along the lines of the "if uve taken a savage hit recently" type buffs. you wanna stack abyssus and self curse vulnerability and do a bunch of mental shit to try and take savage hits all the time then knock yourself out but the primary use of such a mechanic is that you use it on a normal character and when you naturally take a savage hit you get this buff. Whatever you can or cannot make out of it through further tinkering is not really a concern unless you stumble on something seriously overpowered.

Not everything is designed primarily to be abused, some stuff just actually does what it says on the tin, face value.

Just let the fail safe be a fail safe.

I think if you play hybrid you can do the suicidal coruscating elixir + panick flask for that ES regen that works as a pre-pot and 20 second buff with both defence and offence, its pretty nice. You can also use stuff like divination distillate if your panick flask leaves your life below cap still, get some magic find and max resists on top.

You probably need to use stuff like bloodgrip just to make the life flasks heal enough though, panicked divine with flask node + bloodgrip is like 5k+ life instantly = 5k+ es regen over 2 seconds at will, or have to naturally regen back to full.

I mean, I know you can do it, but why do we have to go through all the effort just to make it work? I don't see other ascendencies forcing you down some super niche pseudo lowlife for a single node. The changes were to make the ascendencies unique, impactful (not super gimmicky), and more aligned to changing metas. Its not that its unplayable, its just unreasonable to have to go through such extreme lengths to get the buff. I'd rather just play new assassin if I want good damage, and I'd rather play the new guardian if I wanted to be tanky, and I'd rather play necro (assuming they dont change the support part of it) for a support (although party wide 20% more damage and lycosidae is pretty good). Being in the middle means you aren't good at anything, which just doesn't really work in this meta.
Also lorewise why would a champion (top dog, the winner, the high and mighty) need a comeback ability, maybe they should rename to challenger hehe. The node just really feels like a noob trap if nothing else. I'm not saying you need 100% uptime on the buff. But if its designed as something that's just there for when you nearly die, then there's basically no reason to take it over the other branches

He is simply AMAZING. 100% Intimidation plus the new 100% Taunt causes enemies to get 30% increased damage, which is equal to 30% MORE damage from player's perspective. 30% more with all sorts of defensive buffs, while the berseker for just 10% more damage he has 10% increased damage taken.

Also it is very easy to set up your self for manual triggering Adrenaline. It is easy. Compare it to Bersker's Rage mechanic which has the same buffs pretty much ( when you double it 25% more speed), and it will be harder to buid it on a boss and has a huge downside.

As of now it seems like Champion will be able to deal almost the same damage as a Berseker (yeah, abit less, but Berseker was presented to us by Chris as the Ultimate damage dealer, thus the downsides), while having very decent defense buffs as well, while the berseker will be the most glass cannon of all ascedancies.

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astraph wrote:

He is simply AMAZING. 100% Intimidation plus the new Taunt causes enemies to get 30% increased damage, which is equal to 30% MORE damage from player's perspective. 30% more with all sorts of defensive buffs,

Also you do realize champion always had 100% intimidate + 20% increased damage taken for taunted enemies right...? The main value is the party wide lycosidae and 100% chance to taunt instead of 25% (basically 100% taunt uptime if you can hit 4 times in 3 seconds)