Can we just do away with fake dual wielding already?
" It's all cool except the GGG actualy try to "balance" game around those OP builds by nerfing skills, tree, everything but the core reason of OP'ness of those builds. As a result op builds stay op with minor changes but plenty of custom builds just cease to exist. So this kind of logic is hardly acceptable for poe. |
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Well the thing is, it wouldn't be too hard to balance 2h vs. Fake Dual Wielding. The big issue with fake dualwielding is that it is always worse than actual dualwielding.
What it does is putting certain skills at a disadvantage just due to their weapon selection, a good example is Sunder, which always uses your main hand, Sunder never actually is able to Dual Wield... so why does it get the Dual Wield bonus? The only change they actually can do is remove the Dual Wield Bonus (more attack speed and physical damage) from situations that are not using both weapons. This would mean that Sunder would be a 1h attack and the difference between a Stat Stick and a Shield would be smaller, it would also mean that skills like Molten Strike that work with every weapon would not be so much at a disadvantage due to not being able to use stat sticks, because 15% more attackspeed which sunder cannot get is already a bit of a stat stick. The usage of Stat Sticks can't really be removed. However the Dual Wield bonus should be removed if attacks only use one weapon. " It actually does neither. 1h + Shield always had a lot less damage than dual wielding. The Dual Wield bonus for using a Stat Stick doesn't change that. Even without the Dual Wield Bonus a Stat Stick would offer much more offensive power than a shield and that should be the case. Shields are mostly invalidated because they don't provide offensive power and the ones that are used are either on builds that get offensive value like Wanders and Lycosaidea or that just don't have another option (like Facebreaker). And two hand was always worse than basically anything else. 2h weapons basically center around if cyclone is good, if it is not then 2hers are hardly used. 2hers synergize really well with specific skills and are dependent on those skills performance. Due to how powerful attack speed is 2h hardly keeps up with dual wielding, even if you actually have to use 2 weapons like with Frost Blades. |
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" There is literally 0 reason to use a shield over fake dual wielding. What purpose would you ever use a shield when you get reasonable defenses and like 3x-5x the DPS as a fake dual wielding build? 2H might do like 500k dps tops with 2H RT, north of a million or two with really good pretty much mirror tier gear. Meanwhile stat stick blade flurry can do like 3-4 million dps with high end reasonable gear, and like 10 million plus in mirror gear. |
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Yup, this is some weird shit, namely the global mods on shaper items are basically +1 / +2 / +3 links on your mainhand.
This low roll blue trash in offhand: gives my Sunder Gladiator more DPS than this crafted tyrannical of celebration mace: doesn't make any sense and completely devaluates crafting & 2H builds When night falls
She cloaks the world In impenetrable darkness |
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I think anyone who has at least someunderstanding of the game already agrees, that there is an issue with stat-sticks/fake-dw. And as a summary what, as i read it, most reasonable posters agreed to was this:
* Shaper stat-sticks have to be nerfed, either with lower roll ranges and reduced number of mods or a complete nuke by making the mods local. * Fake DW should not receive the same DW benefits real DW does. So as long as an attack is not capable of using both weapons it should either not get any of the DW bonus at all or at most half the bonus. The question is, how do we get GGG to listen to us and at least consider those changes ? The Bestiary league proved once and for all, that GGG only listens to crying instead of well thought out criticism.
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" I get where you're coming from, and as a huge proponent of inclusion in games I don't think developers should be looking to exclude all but the most skilled players (I guess "skill" meaning fast reaction time in a somewhat clunky overhead point-and-click game). But PoE does have plenty easy-to-play builds out there, and reducing the gap between the most broken stuff and everything else wouldn't eliminate them. I'd also point out that in a game where the economy is a big factor, preserving builds that are intentionally "easy difficulty" skews the whole system and makes those builds feel mandatory for all players who want to gear a "hard difficulty" build. My point is, if that's the intent of GGG I don't think it's a wise goal for this kind of game. Establishing set difficulties associated with builds or playstyles invalidates one of the major sources of fun in PoE, which is coming up with original builds and trying to explore a variety of skills, gear, passive setups, keystones, etc. Fundamentally, the 3-month long leagues are a built-in incentive to try new builds, and this is utterly contradicted by the game's poor balance. We're all in this leaky boat together, people. Last edited by demon9675#2961 on Mar 17, 2018, 4:50:12 PM
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I agree with getting rid of fake DW. I don't think it is healthy that some skills are automatically better due to the fact that they can use a fakeDW statstick, like Blade Flurry. This does opinion does not apply to skills like Spectral Shield Throw; that is not a fakeDW skill.
This could probably be a huge bottleneck when it comes to balancing less strong skills; they'd always have to take fake dual wielding into account when they balance non-fakeDW skills. Last edited by BrightDanny#4424 on Mar 18, 2018, 4:11:46 AM
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" Or they have to look at each new skill as if someone was going to use fake dw and balance it accordingly, meaning those skills will be weak if you're not using a stat stick. Or they'll balance endgame content similarly, making fake dw mandatory for tough bosses/maps. Then everyone truly "has to" use it, and oh boy does the game become small and boring. There are a lot of reasons why preserving an overpowered exploit and trying to design content around it is shortsighted. It just screws everything up. I think - hope - GGG cares enough about the integrity of their game to not want to break it in order to preserve a gimmicky easy mode just to sell MTXs to casual players (not that I have anything against casual players; I just want the build guides they follow to result in characters that are merely somewhat stronger than everyone else instead of ABSURDLY stronger than everyone else). We're all in this leaky boat together, people.
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The whole system, from skills to item affixes, would need a fix.
Dualweilding should be the most offensive, powerful and expensive melee style, since it shuld require two good rolled weapons, not one good rolled weapon and a 50-alt spam blue stat stick in your offhand. Fake 2W could still serve a function, but only a defensive / utility one (and not as defensive as 1H + shield) - the player would need to forgo offense to make 2W more defensive. 2H should be the "budget" melee option, since it requires to roll only one weapon. It should be cheap and affordable to create/loot such weapons (it kinda is already). Since outside of staves 2H doesn't offer much defense, offense numbers should still be very high (but not as high as true 2W). 1H should be the cheap defensive / tanking style, with the lowest DPS output, but highest defense / utility. --- The global shaper "gain phys as elem damage" would need to go first, because they are really bad design. A blue item with just one such affix is an added 7th link and will give you more DPS with certain skills than a crafted weapon that requires 2000+ alts to create. Completely unbalanced and doesn't make any sense. Why would players even choose 2H (and go through the trouble of at least 6socketing if not 6linking two items, instead of just the chest), to have less versatility, less DPS and less defense than 2W? Say you craft or buy a good 2H weapon, you are unlikely to upgrade it, since upgrade is all or nothing. With 2W you get one good mainhand and then progressively replace your stat sticks as you loot better ones. 2W is strictly superior to all other melee styles right now. When night falls
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" I recognize that there are more systemic issues here, but let's just start with a global nerf to the values of "% elemental damage as phys" mods on elder & shaper items. Getting 10-20% is still amazing; the fact that those even go up to 40% (more than a Hatred aura that requires mana reserved) is just a joke. Any item that has two or more 15% extra elemental damage mods is going to be fabulous anyway, and no build should be "broken" by this nerf because any build that requires 40-60% extra elemental damage to do somewhat decent dps just isn't very good. We're all in this leaky boat together, people. Last edited by demon9675#2961 on Mar 18, 2018, 10:36:08 PM
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