Suggestion: Resolute Technique balancing

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astraph wrote:

Nah, i had a crit dagger flicker, and while it was good, it could not compete with RT soul taker aegis aurora tanks with 40K armour. Even really cheap BoR/Aegis (sometimes with facebreakers) were insanely good and could easily get to lv100, even in hardcore (first eve lv100 in 1.1 hardcore was Aegis RT build i think).

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ACGIFT wrote:

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I0wa wrote:

You have a chance to hit crushing blows, same as it with crits, cb's remove a % of the mobs current hp, not total hp

While I definitely agree that there's a HUGE disparity between RT and crit builds, this would actually be kinda a terrible idea for one major reason:

Culling.

In that example, it'd mean any character with culling would just be able to take that, and would kill every single boss on exactly the 18th Crushing blow, (13th for Slayers) which would drop them to below 10% and proc the cull. We'd just be trading one toxic meta (stack crits) for an even worse one (stack AS and %CB) and delete bosses impossibly fast no matter HOW much they scaled up.

Now, Diablo 2 got away with this because there was no "instant kill" threshold: there were multiple mechanics that dealt damage entirely based upon the target's current health, (the Lightning Field spell, as well as the damage dealt by open wounds) but nothing that'd capitalize on being able to quickly cut enemies down to a fraction of their maximum health; you'd still have to kill them the rest of the way.

Even still, such a mechanic was PROBABLY reflective of some of the poor balance the game has; in the near two-decades since its release, mechanically D2 hasn't exactly aged well...

Lastly, note that boss HP levels are probably a good deal higher than you might be imagining. For each set of tiers, bosses have generally the same baseline health:

• White Maps: 387,775; 439,142; 501,216; 577,786; 666,566.
  
• Yellow Maps: 771,613; 895,076; 1,036,933; 1,199,279; 1,387,616.
  
• Red Maps: 1,605,336; 1,852,640; 2,147,393; 2,492,371; 2,886,311.
  
• Guardians: 9,535,418 (Chimera/Hydra) and 12,470,588 (Minotaur/Phoenix)
  
• Atziri: 1,172,846 or 5,024,900
  
• Uber Izaro: 8,813,933
  
• Shaper & Uber Elder: 18,328,731 (4,582,182 per ¼)

Even cleaving off 1% of their average health (which'd take 161 or 230 hits to Slay/cull, BTW) you'd also still start off chunking up to 183,287 health; this is BETTER than that much raw damage, since it bypasses the 30-40% elemental/15-25% chaos resistance bosses have.

Even going for the "average" you'd add on while mowing them down... That'd b
e equivalent to an extra 71,721 (Culler) or 91,074 (Slayer) "true" damage per hit.

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k4n3 wrote:

Crushing blow is not a bad idea if only RT provides a small chance of landing one (1 to 10%), lower chance for fast hitting builds and higher chance for slower ones.

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I0wa wrote:

I agree on most of it, but you say D2's balance is off, but "balancing" is literally the title of this thread pertaining to poe. Taking crit and leaving crushing blow out is why this thread is relevant rn. Crushing blow balances crit, ggg took crit from D2, and didn't know or didn't care that crushing blow was the equalizer, and D2's balance is off, but not as much as poe considering poe has almost 11 years in development, compared to D2's 3 year development. You just scale down crushing blow until it has a place in the game, not op, but still relevant, and only RT builds could use it, could also have can't hit a culling strike, if you've hit a crushing blow recently or something

• In D2 they were called Deadly Strike; notice neither "critical" nor "hit" was there.
  
  
• The Amazon DID have a skill called Critical Strike, which worked alongside deadly strike. (I believe it either outright granted "deadly strike" chance, or at least, I DO know you couldn't get both a critical strike and deadly strike on the same attack)
  
  
• In D2, both mechanics only got you double damage; there was never any way to increase the potency of these strikes.
  
  
• Also in D2, Crushing blow was always better than critical strike; there was NEVER any "X balances out Y" like you suggested. Also they were NOT mutually exclusive: the "Death" runeword, for instance, would grant you BOTH 50% crushing blow and up to 49.5% deadly strike on the same weapon. (plus, you could use any weapon with crushing blow on an Amazon or Barbarian who'd get passive critical strike)
  
  
• Because of the above, Crushing blow was a central part of the meta; Almost every runeword actually worth taking for the endgame either had it as part of it (e.g, Death, Destruction, Last Wish) or had to have a VERY convincing reason to give it up. (e.g, Breath of the Dying's obscene leech, attack speed, preventing monster recovery, and also being usable on ethereal weapons)

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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astraph wrote:

Nah, i had a crit dagger flicker, and while it was good, it could not compete with RT soul taker aegis aurora tanks with 40K armour. Even really cheap BoR/Aegis (sometimes with facebreakers) were insanely good and could easily get to lv100, even in hardcore (first eve lv100 in 1.1 hardcore was Aegis RT build i think).

youre only talking about your crit flicker. Ive talked to you about builds before and weve spoken about ci, and ive pointed out you can go aegis on those builds and its something you pushed aside as an idea. When those builds were around you could go ci, have more than 2x the hp of the life bringer builds, still be full aegis block and be crit melee with more damage than them using vaal pact with no downsides.

Theres also the fact that the time Im talking about, bringer wasnt even in the game. Youre talking about 1.1, Im talking about early open beta, 1.1 was about a year later than the point Im talking about. Im not talking about hardcore viability either, or budget, crit attacking was simply way stronger damage scaling. You can still get to 100 in hc arguably easier with an RT build right now, and were talking about how shit RT is compared to crit, nothing has changed, its almost always been like this since early open beta.

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ACGIFT wrote:

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k4n3 wrote:

Crushing blow is not a bad idea if only RT provides a small chance of landing one (1 to 10%), lower chance for fast hitting builds and higher chance for slower ones.

Then this brings the fundamental problem that it's so RNG-bound that... You may as well have gone crit anyway, since at least it'd be more consistent.

As I'd established above, introducing D2's crushing blow mechanic means that if you touched it at all, you'd be incredibly reliant on it for your damage output.

And overall, making it very random (rather than consistent) just outright breaks with the whole theme/point of RT: making your hits more reliable.

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I0wa wrote:

I agree on most of it, but you say D2's balance is off, but "balancing" is literally the title of this thread pertaining to poe. Taking crit and leaving crushing blow out is why this thread is relevant rn. Crushing blow balances crit, ggg took crit from D2, and didn't know or didn't care that crushing blow was the equalizer, and D2's balance is off, but not as much as poe considering poe has almost 11 years in development, compared to D2's 3 year development. You just scale down crushing blow until it has a place in the game, not op, but still relevant, and only RT builds could use it, could also have can't hit a culling strike, if you've hit a crushing blow recently or something

Claiming that all of D2's mechanics are a whole package is kinda silly. By the same token, we should be complaining about how bleed ("open wounds") does damage based on your weapon, rather than the target's maximum HP.

Also silly that you act like Diablo 2 invented critical hits, when PoE didn't even copy D2's crits:

• In D2 they were called Deadly Strike; notice neither "critical" nor "hit" was there.
  
  
• The Amazon DID have a skill called Critical Strike, which worked alongside deadly strike. (I believe it either outright granted "deadly strike" chance, or at least, I DO know you couldn't get both a critical strike and deadly strike on the same attack)
  
  
• In D2, both mechanics only got you double damage; there was never any way to increase the potency of these strikes.
  
  
• Also in D2, Crushing blow was always better than critical strike; there was NEVER any "X balances out Y" like you suggested. Also they were NOT mutually exclusive: the "Death" runeword, for instance, would grant you BOTH 50% crushing blow and up to 49.5% deadly strike on the same weapon. (plus, you could use any weapon with crushing blow on an Amazon or Barbarian who'd get passive critical strike)
  
  
• Because of the above, Crushing blow was a central part of the meta; Almost every runeword actually worth taking for the endgame either had it as part of it (e.g, Death, Destruction, Last Wish) or had to have a VERY convincing reason to give it up. (e.g, Breath of the Dying's obscene leech, attack speed, preventing monster recovery, and also being usable on ethereal weapons)

And yes, it does boil down to the fact that D2 has/had a lot of awful points where things were just plain "too good;" another element was "ignores target's defense." There's a ton of stuff where PoE managed to just plain do better at balance.

And there's basically no point where a mechanic like Crushing Blow could be introduced into PoE and have a happy medium: it'd either be too potent that it'd be the automatic new meta forever, or it'd just be too random it'd be against the whole point of RT: consistency.

And that doesn't even get into other issues, like how as a proc it wouldn't leech, and consistent leeching is one of the few justifiable reasons for RT...

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mireigi wrote:

New option added:

Involve Stun Mechanics
Change the keystone to:

Your hits can't be Evaded.
If you haven't stunned an enemy recently, enemy stun treshold is reduced by 75% for 2 seconds.
When you stun an enemy you gain 15% more Global Defenses for 4 seconds.
Your hits against stunned enemies penetrate 40% elemental resistances, and ignore 30% armour.

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I0wa wrote:

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mireigi wrote:

New option added:

Involve Stun Mechanics
Change the keystone to:

Your hits can't be Evaded.
If you haven't stunned an enemy recently, enemy stun treshold is reduced by 75% for 2 seconds.
When you stun an enemy you gain 15% more Global Defenses for 4 seconds.
Your hits against stunned enemies penetrate 40% elemental resistances, and ignore 30% armour.

It could be added to the res technique keystone: Hits ignore targets armour, and resistances. I think it would go along with the flavor of resolution, as well as providing a unique and much needed damage boost

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sofocle10000 wrote:

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I0wa wrote:

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mireigi wrote:

New option added:

Involve Stun Mechanics
Change the keystone to:

Your hits can't be Evaded.
If you haven't stunned an enemy recently, enemy stun treshold is reduced by 75% for 2 seconds.
When you stun an enemy you gain 15% more Global Defenses for 4 seconds.
Your hits against stunned enemies penetrate 40% elemental resistances, and ignore 30% armour.

It could be added to the res technique keystone: Hits ignore targets armour, and resistances. I think it would go along with the flavor of resolution, as well as providing a unique and much needed damage boost

Granting an Inquisitor level "elemental penetration" (it would be close to 80% with just those 40% and an Ele Pen gem, add a Wise Oak and some other Pen and you hit 100% easily) and bypassing armour would make RT the most powerful keystone in the game, make no mistake. And that will meke it TOO powerful.

Still, beside adding Fortify to it, RT keystone could be "buffed" by always granting the max damage rolls when you HIT your enemy, and could use a nice enemy stun threshold reduction.

Either of those above suggestions would improve the current status of RT, although I find the always having max damage rolls the most fitting one...