Nerf to spellcasters is UNJUSTIFIED!

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Pizzarugi wrote:

Welcome to PoE, where GGG does everything they can to make new leagues center around their planned FotM builds. Melee is the new flavor, meaning spellcasters need to die.

Honestly a lot of spellcasters weren't even affected. The only ones affected are those using ES (exspecially as Occultist) and relying on Warlords Mark to sustain mana.

I also cannot see how Wicked Ward, Vile Bastion, Ghost Shroud or Beacon of Ruin is tied to casters. Those are not really caster nodes, Vile Bastion, Wicked Ward and even Ghost Shroud were basically used by every Occultist and Trickster I would assume? Regardless if they used Spells or Attacks. The change to Beacon of Ruin is mostly meaningless, nerfing the Shock Value was definitly needed, and I'm speaking from a HoWA perspective, because even the lowest amount of lightning damage provided a strong shock and the proliferation was mostly unneeded because many of the used skills hit half the screen anyway.

So most changes were aimed at survivability on ES builds, which was very very high if you feel ES is bad now... well just cast with life, worked well for a few patches before ES got buffed so much that people switched back to it after it got nerfed before. A life based caster basically saw no changes except for the Warlords Mark change and the nerfs to some specific spells.

Meta Shift not Balance.

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E_Zann wrote:

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Bone2flesh wrote:

Occultist reached levels of 20k ES last league. that is not OK. Nerf required because no build should be able to sitin all the shit and still survive and kill everything.

Yeah because of stupid items. Look at my gear here, is that bad? I know it might not be top-tier, but its definately good ES gear, and I reach 11.6k with my lvl 94 Occultist, not 20k. In some extreme cases people reached 20k, thats not the norm. How much will I get in 3.7 then?

In Betrayal league i was played Death Oath (0 ES on body armour) Occultist with 100 ES on quiver and i had 8.5k ES (in SSF). And i wasn't invested too much into ES, instead i invested a lot into damage. You have +900 ES on body slot and +200 ES on shield slot and you saying you only have 11.6k ES overall? I guess something is wrong with your build because with those items i would have at least 14k ES. Reminder: it was SSF and damage-focused build, in trading league with more focus on ES it would be easily 20k ES.

Did people actually check the changes?

So what changed:

1. Occultist got gutted, if you purely relied on his high ES gains you are propably screwed.

2. 3 Notes at the right witch start got nerfed, however a new cluster got added which would provide a lot more ES then the nerfed nodes.

3. Getting ES got harder, exspecially dense jewels made it easy to get high ES items (since not being able to roll life was actually an advantage), the items itself however didn't lose power, the only change affecting them was the quality craft which got removed, but also not from all items (I think body armor still has it). Also high end abyss jewels got nerfed.

So to sum it up:

a) Don't play Occultist
b) You might need to pay a few chaos more to get similar items... or maybe not if more people play life based melees
c) You might lose about 40ES per abyss jewel if you actually had the highest tier ES rolls.
d) You might need the new ES cluster to compensate for the witch start, as a caster you could use the other route and switch some damage passivs up and you would not lose too much

So a character having 12k ES would lose about 1k from not having the Occultist passivs and maybe another 500 from the quality craft nerfs and abyss jewel changes. To regain the ES lost at the witch start he would need to invest 4 points (and actually he would get a bit more ES from there). So a top build would propably lose about 1,5k ES one never having the best craft options and abyss jewels would lose close to 1k ES. A non-Occultist ES char would lose about 1k ES less.

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LowBudget780 wrote:

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Arthotus wrote:

GGG doesn't tell you what builds you can and can't play.

That's exactly what they do. They literally removed the two key features from an elementalist ascendancy keystone this league and replaced it with nothing, so if you were planning on using Beacon of Ruin in your build it's totally useless now.

Again, as I posted before, if tools are being used to trivialize content in an unhealthy way, of course they'll get taken away.

They also put a caveat on Beacon of Ruin in other balance logs to say they were removing it for performance and reliability reasons too, not just balance.

What builds "are impossible to use" now? Sure, some will be weaker than before, but you should still be able to rebuild most of what the build was, unless it was counter to how the game was designed, like dabbing flame blast proliferation builds.

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Bone2flesh wrote:

Trickster nerf was necesary and fair. Those stacks gave so much defensive and offensive power and they were 100% full stacked on my character last league.

It's not eveen that bad.

Occultist reached levels of 20k ES last league. that is not OK. Nerf required because no build should be able to sitin all the shit and still survive and kill everything.

The people ho claim these two things are also people who do not play the classes.

why es was soo high last league has little to do with the ascendancy and more to do with them creating 8 affix items.

these are all the compound nerfs to es:
1) no synthesis so much lower es values in general
2) nerf to abyss jewels
3) the starting tree of witch is so poor you are better to take the 10 int path and get out as soon as possible. approximately
4) they nerfed % values accross the board - 38% less es from the area closest to the with start zone.
5) they removed 250 flat es you got from the occultist ascendancy.
6) delve crafting for es lost 50% and the 16% body armor mods.
7) They made trickster back into a life build that runs energy shield leech jewel for free damage.

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Emphasy wrote:

2. 3 Notes at the right witch start got nerfed, however a new cluster got added which would provide a lot more ES then the nerfed nodes.

except it doesnt

how does 4 nodes giving 25% give more then the 38% you have lost at the start of the witch?

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Prizy wrote:

Meta Shift not Balance.

i think all this "meta shift" nonsense gives WAY too much credit to ggg. i don't think they intentionally try to create meta shifts and there's little to no evidence to support such.

unfortunately, there is ample evidence to demonstrate that ggg is just terrible at balancing. the pvp history, alone, demonstrates this all too clearly.

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robmafia wrote:

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Prizy wrote:

Meta Shift not Balance.

i think all this "meta shift" nonsense gives WAY too much credit to ggg. i don't think they intentionally try to create meta shifts and there's little to no evidence to support such.

unfortunately, there is ample evidence to demonstrate that ggg is just terrible at balancing. the pvp history, alone, demonstrates this all too clearly.

I told you if we tried hard enough we'd find something we agree on.

But really I think people are getting excited over nothing. I'm still putting my money on casters being the fastest and safest builds even with all these changes.

Cry me a river. I play only range characters and nerfed ascendancies are still very good. You guys act like spoiled brats that got a candy taken away. The game is already a retarded oneshot fest, the new changes are a very brave step away from the shit the game is right now, be grateful GGG has the balls to nerf your favorite braindead shit unlike other game developers that are too afraid to do this kind of stuff