Can someone explain the spell block nerf to me pls?

I said earlier I didnt agree with 1453R, thats not entirely fair, I do agree with his points and gggs point that the change from % of attack block given as spell to flat % spell block is a good one, I fully support it, think its a great idea.

I also think block was a little out of hand maybe? Getting say 55% block is huge, thats a really big damage avoidance layer. I think weve got a bit carried away with the idea that you get 75% or gtfo, that if ur block ur 75/75... 75% is gargantuan mitigation, I do think that something that powerful should either take ur ascendancy like gladiator or should come at an uncomfortable investment. When people go for armour and ev, were not shooting for 60-80k right? We dont think well if Im ci I have to have 18k es, if I go acro I have to have 75% dodge, its more healthy if it comes down a bit and people start thinking yeah, 20k evasion, 20k armour, 10k es, 50% dodge, 50% block, Im happy with these figures and the mid tier investment it took to get them.


Its too far though, I think if they added between 2% and 4% to all the current uniques/nodes it becomes reasonable. I think that an accompanying nerf is fair, 75% should not be seen as a standard, but its too hard to get to 50% with these current rolls, theyre absolutely trash.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

I said earlier I didnt agree with 1453R, thats not entirely fair, I do agree with his points and gggs point that the change from % of attack block given as spell to flat % spell block is a good one, I fully support it, think its a great idea.

I also think block was a little out of hand maybe? Getting say 55% block is huge, thats a really big damage avoidance layer. I think weve got a bit carried away with the idea that you get 75% or gtfo, that if ur block ur 75/75... 75% is gargantuan mitigation, I do think that something that powerful should either take ur ascendancy like gladiator or should come at an uncomfortable investment. When people go for armour and ev, were not shooting for 60-80k right? We dont think well if Im ci I have to have 18k es, if I go acro I have to have 75% dodge, its more healthy if it comes down a bit and people start thinking yeah, 20k evasion, 20k armour, 10k es, 50% dodge, 50% block, Im happy with these figures and the mid tier investment it took to get them.


Its too far though, I think if they added between 2% and 4% to all the current uniques/nodes it becomes reasonable. I think that an accompanying nerf is fair, 75% should not be seen as a standard, but its too hard to get to 50% with these current rolls, theyre absolutely trash.

Was there not a huge investment already?

Block builds already had barely any dps to speak of. It took multiple jewel slots which in this abyss jewel meta is a truckload of lost damage on top of the other forms of defense you can get from those jewels + reckless defense making you take more crits.

Block builds also got stomped hard by degen. No block build could afford to stack block and also grab any decent amount of life regen unless they wanted to do 50k dps. Meanwhile slayer has insane amounts of regen and honestly outtanks block builds in most areas of the game while doing 20x as much damage (literal figure)

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

I said earlier I didnt agree with 1453R, thats not entirely fair, I do agree with his points and gggs point that the change from % of attack block given as spell to flat % spell block is a good one, I fully support it, think its a great idea.

I also think block was a little out of hand maybe? Getting say 55% block is huge, thats a really big damage avoidance layer. I think weve got a bit carried away with the idea that you get 75% or gtfo, that if ur block ur 75/75... 75% is gargantuan mitigation, I do think that something that powerful should either take ur ascendancy like gladiator or should come at an uncomfortable investment. When people go for armour and ev, were not shooting for 60-80k right? We dont think well if Im ci I have to have 18k es, if I go acro I have to have 75% dodge, its more healthy if it comes down a bit and people start thinking yeah, 20k evasion, 20k armour, 10k es, 50% dodge, 50% block, Im happy with these figures and the mid tier investment it took to get them.


Its too far though, I think if they added between 2% and 4% to all the current uniques/nodes it becomes reasonable. I think that an accompanying nerf is fair, 75% should not be seen as a standard, but its too hard to get to 50% with these current rolls, theyre absolutely trash.

To me it also relates to the state of the game a bit. A poster in another thread mentioned rightfully that the oneshotting makes it feel more arcade than rpg in some ways. There's not too much of a medium when tuning defenses. The fast healing/leech/regen doesn't help much either. When I take a heavy hit, usually I recover very fast and I'll be ok. There aren't many situations where I have to tune defenses to sustain. As in, little less offense, little more defense kind of tweaking.

Well I guess there's some of it, but mostly if you need the defenses they better be really good for those wtf moments. Max block or endurance charges up to the teeth, the soak pool (hp/es and such) good enough to take a big hit. Very much on the reflexes over tuning sustain.

Might be just me.

edit: not other game, but other thread >.>

Or - and here's a difficult thought - don't bust your nuts/the bank trying desperately to cap block.

Get what level of block you can pick up with, as Snork said, a comfortable investment. Maybe that's in the 30% to 40% block range for whichever type of block you're looking for. A'ight. That's a 30-40% chance to just flat-out say "NO" to whatever just hit you. Acrobatics is considered insanely good for doing that as one keystone, even after it ravages your armor and essentially eliminates any chance of running ES on your build. Acrobatics, at 30% "NOPE" chance, is considered super strong after disabling half the game's other mitigation sources.

Why is block complete shit at any level below 75% when it stacks perfectly fine with other sources of mitigation?

As it stands, nothing on the north side of the tree could ever get any level of spellblock. or regular block, for that matter. hanging out in the general Witchy area? No block for you. Hanging out in Duelist area? Oodles of basically free attack block, everywhere you look. The game then allowed you to turn attack block into spellblock, but there was no way to do the inverse, or to allow casters to get JUST spellblock, as their class tropes would suggest they should damn well be capable of.

It was dumb. Now it's less dumb. yeah, I'm surprised at how low the numbers are myself, but that doesn't mean the fundamental system itself, now that it's been fixed, is not less dumb. Just means that much like the Great ES Nerf of 3.0, the numbers got punched lower than they might mebbe should've been. That's an easy enough fix in the future.

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1453R wrote:

Just means that much like the Great ES Nerf of 3.0, the numbers got punched lower than they might mebbe should've been. That's an easy enough fix in the future.

I'm sure that's very comforting to those whose builds are now completely non-viable. Exactly how many months/leagues should they wait for this supposedly "easy" fix? Why can't GGG just get it right the first fucking time? PoE is a game with long-established mechanics and balance considerations, which is why literally everyone can see how ridiculous this nerf is. What's GGG's excuse?

well, they never went back and fixed es, so expect its corpse to just rot at the bottom of the river potentially forever while they whimsically move on to the next thing and excuse the behaviour with a wave of the hand and a flippant remark about shifting metas = healthy, how its impossible for them to make bad balance decisions its just important that they keep making decisions that drastically change things so no matter what they do its fine.

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RPGlitch wrote:

I might be wrong, but doesn't the dodge keystone reduce your spell block chance?

There are other sources of dodge: boots, armour, flask, heck even unique jewel and kraityn's favor.

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SodanKerjuu wrote:

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RPGlitch wrote:

I might be wrong, but doesn't the dodge keystone reduce your spell block chance?

There are other sources of dodge: boots, armour, flask, heck even unique jewel and kraityn's favor.

That doesn't sound very easy to me, seeing as you now need like 2-3 times the items...but okay.

I didn't say it is easy, just pointed out that you can now get dodge + spell block hybrid defense without having to invest into regular block. This can be good for crit spell casters and life/es builds such as hierophant, trickster and occultist.

Even getting +10% on any of the nullification mechanics is nothing to laugh at, especially now that you can dodge and block all secondary damage types.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

well, they never went back and fixed es, so expect its corpse to just rot at the bottom of the river potentially forever while they whimsically move on to the next thing and excuse the behaviour with a wave of the hand and a flippant remark about shifting metas = healthy, how its impossible for them to make bad balance decisions its just important that they keep making decisions that drastically change things so no matter what they do its fine.

Its gotten sidewards fixed, its like they get a small buff each league from general power creep so the classes with a bonus to ES (Heiro/Occultist/Trickster/Guardian) have reached the stage you can do pretty nice ES builds, and Sabos I guess.

This block change feels like about the worst they've done though I can see what they were going for but considering block really wasn't that OP due to its investment requirement and the general nature of DW vs everything else right now I think they completely missed the mark. I'll stick to dodge which is pretty functional right now.

Also to ^ your grasping at straws mate nobody is gonna make that, including you :p