For me, Archmage kills caster- and Warcries kill melee-diversity.
" Sorry but if you think that any of the so called "trash skills" and especially strike skill would get competitive or even remotely popular just because of some number adjustment you are just deluding yourself. Even if you were to buff Heavy Strike by 50% or even 100% base damage the skill would still be on the bottom of every usage list. Maybe he would at least show up on POE Ninja with 0,0 or for the optimistic guys 0,1% usage but that's the best you would get. Every single problem Strikeskills were accused of having in this topic, clunkyness, gem swapping, high investment to get started, shitty clear and targeting would remain EXACTLY the same as it is right now. Not a single one of the whiners here in this topic would even consider a so buffed Heavy Strike for use on their builds because it's exactly those people who play nothing but the top tier meta stuff that's currently available. As long as Heavy Strike is not at the top of the meta, they won't play it. The will keep complaining here about it being clunky, having bad targeting, bad AOE, require lot's of gear to work and most likely also the fact that it needs 2 jewel slots for the threshold jewels because "opportunity cost". Not to mention that you would still need to find ways to not get annoyed to hell and back by it's inherent knockback. Best case scenario would be some streamer releasing a build video where he uses 50 EX gear and Heavy Strike to oneshot bosses, similar to how Groundslam got his 0,4% usage at the moment. Numerical changes might help some of the mediocre skills like Frostblades, Lightningstrike etc who are already really good mechanical wise but lack a bit in single target but that's it. The dead horses we have would for the most part, remain dead, no matter how you adjust their numbers. Well maybe if GGG multiplied them by 3 or more they would see use because then they would be completely busted with Huntergloves/Tribal Fury and explody chest but that's not exactly a healthy balance change. Not to mention that, even if all "bad skills" got that kind of rework and all of them actually managed to reach 0,1% usage or something like that, people would still whining about "game balance is out of whack" because we have a few top skills at 10+% usage while dozens of others crawl around at low 0,x percentages. It will take a hell of a lot more in terms of reworking to get even a shredd of "balance" into this game where all skills are "competitive". It would require something like this: " Maybe add "can move while attacking" into the list and you might actually get to a point where all strike skills would see heavy usage. Because now all of them work almost exactly the same. Personally this is exactly the type of change that i don't want to see. It's more important to the longlivity of the game for skills to be different then it is for them to be equally efficient. Having 200 versions of the exact same skill just in different colors would have no appeal and would ruin the game, no matter how "balanced" it might be competitive wise. Hopefully GGG finds a way to add something unique to strike skills like what they did with slams, something that both makes them stronger and gives them a unique distinction in terms of playstyle compared to other melee skills. Just toying around with cosmetics won't change anything, you'll still have to be a "special snowflake" to even consider using them. Last edited by Baharoth15#0429 on Dec 24, 2020, 3:51:40 AM
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" bollocks i did play HS, it plays ok with investment. but it is absolutely unacceptable for a single target skill requiring tons of investment to be STRICTLY worse than AOE-native Ground Slam/EQ etc it is just insane for a HS build to get BETTER with a single gem swap, keeping both thresholds and the like. numbers on that skill SUCK. they are outrageously stupid. and knockback is just pure shit in current POE. fix that, and then we can talk. i can accept this skill shitty clear, targeting and knockback - i know what skill i pick to play - but it being not only that but STRICTLY worse numerically is just dumb and people defending that is mesmerizing as well. like wtf? " Double Strike, Viper Strike. stop pretending that 140 flat phys doesnt matter. and it is all just because of clones.. that damage numbers make this skill. same with VS. noone would use these two if you cut damage in half. Last edited by sidtherat#1310 on Dec 24, 2020, 4:12:02 AM
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" Flicker Strike and Pestilence Strike are two of the best melee skills in the entire game, significantly outperforming many non-strike melee skills in terms of both viability and usage. And while they both have obvious built-in utility which makes them superior to Heavy Strike if the damage were equal, the simple and unacceptable fact of the matter is that the damage IS NOT equal. To make the math easy, let's assume a build with a 100 damage weapon and a 1 attack/second base speed, using level 20 Heavy Strike: 222% damage effectiveness at 85% attack speed = 189 DPS, plus 20% chance of double damage for 226 overall base DPS. Flicker Strike has 168% damage effect @ 120% attack speed = 202 DPS, BEFORE you factor in the extra 10% attack speed per frenzy charge which is certainly not a small amount. No Flicker build would ever have less than 4 frenzy charges, but even a single charge here already makes Flicker Strike a 239 DPS skill (compared to 244 on Heavy Strike). In other words, Flicker is about 2% worse than Heavy Strike in the worst possible usage situation, and FAR outpacing it in anything resembling reality; at 5 Frenzy charges Flicker does 26% more damage than Heavy and the gap continues to widen from there. Even without CONSIDERING the utility of a teleporting auto-aiming long-ranged melee attack vs Heavy Strike, it's got an entire extra support gem's worth of damage. So I think you're half right here: while utility is certainly a factor in the playability of many skills, none of that matters if the skill can't kill enemies. Skills which make enemies dead faster simply are better skills, so Heavy Strike desperately needs the damage on it jacked through the roof to even have a chance at consideration. |
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Damage matters to an degree sure. But it's hardly the limiting factor to most skills. Given how vastly you can outscale monster health with damage using even half decent gear a few percentages more base damage are hardly going to make or break a skill. You can always compensate for a lack of damage percentage on your skill by just throwing a few more EX at the build to the point where your damage is so high that it doesn't matter anymore anyway. I am talking about the difference between taking 2 or 4 seconds for an endgame boss. And that's assuming the percentage on any given skill are even low enough to actually make that much difference. Even using my shit builds and shit gear i have so much damage output on all my builds that nothing aside from endgame bosses and 100% delirium content lasts longer than a few seconds.
The one thing you can't fix about a bad skill most of the time are QoL type of things, the stuff that makes the skill "feel good" nobody is going to play a skill that feels like shit no matter what damage numbers it has and unlike damage you can't fix shitty skill interactions with gear, well for the most part at least. Explody chest kinda does exactly that and many people consider it unhealthy because it can turn even shitty skills into viable ones. I mean just ask yourself honestly, even if Heavy Strike had more raw damage output then flicker, would you consider it a "competitive choice" compared to flicker? How much more raw damage would it need to even start feeling worth it to give up the much better feel of flicker? 200%? 300? 500? Especially considering that Flicker already does really good damage? Or even worse, consider Cyclone. Raw damage numbers on Cyclone aren't anything fancy, there are a bunch of skills who easily outperform it damage wise, and yet none of them gets even close to it's usage numbers. As said, there a few skills where numerical adjustments might work, Cleave is one of them, Lightningstrike as well but most of the bad stuff is bad for other reasons than raw damage. Last edited by Baharoth15#0429 on Dec 24, 2020, 10:12:57 AM
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I’ll repeat myself again: numerical adjustments can buff utility, not just damage.
Heavy strike is probably a bad example of this because it literally just hits things with no additional numerical fields to adjust other than damage, but there are a whole host of other underutilized skills (not just melee) that could benefit massively from more projectiles or radius or strike range or hit frequency or base speed or duration or increased angle or any parameter whatsoever. These are all numerical changes. Another way to illustrate this point is to think about how bad slams would be if they had horribly low radius and even lower speed than they do to the point where you couldn’t get an attack off before dying. Obviously the non-damage numbers matter there. Or if toxic rain only fired one arrow. Or if you could only summon one spectre max. Or if ball lightning hit as infrequently as winter orb and had a tiny radius. These are all numerical changes that would render skills unusable - think of the current garbage skills as being in that state right now, with better versions hovering just out of sight, unimaginable only because we’ve never seen them before. Although we have seen it before with molten strike, which used to have more balls. Or cyclone when it could cover the screen and was even more broken than now. Or icestorm when it had no maximum to active storms. Those were all numerical nerfs (icestorm had a greater rework but let’s focus on the one parameter of max storms). My only point in continuing to argue this is that GGG always had the ability to buff underutilized skills without the heavy dev resources needed for a full “rework,” especially graphics, but chose not to. Having so many skills feel not just inferior to the meta but borderline unusable was NOT inevitable and can indeed be fixed. Not with the goal of perfect balance, but at least some semblance of variety. We're all in this leaky boat together, people. Last edited by demon9675#2961 on Dec 24, 2020, 12:22:59 PM
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Heavy Strike is just as good example as any. Why? because DAMAGE numbers matter. take Viper Strike. what other utility it has? it is a single target, no splash, average attack speed strike skill - EXACTLY like HS
but people play it and are very successfull with that, on the cheap. why? because NUMBERS matter. Viper Strike deals huuuge damage and because of that can BUY the build utility with resources not spent on damage people telling stuff like 'just throw couple of EX at it, until it works'.. bollocks. you throw EX, get the damage to 'ok' level and hello to 4.5k hp garbage build with no survivability, movement speed nor utility. if damage is not a problem WHY people commit build suicide and equip Abyssus ffs! before anyone tries with dangerous changes (extra projectiles and the like) - try something easy and safe first. Heavy Strike - by math alone - needs 330% base damage effectiveness to be EQUAL to Ground Slam in effectiveness. until it gets that - Heavy Strike is a dead skill, 100% strictly useless, it cannot be disputed. how can you make HS interesting (after you made its damage equal to equivalent alternatives)? add maim maybe? maybe make it similar to Ensnaring Arrow in terms of bleed damage boost? stronger stuns? longer stuns? just a bit of something special. without numbers you can make it blind, swing and sing - noone cares. Double Strike is all the proof i need. DAMAGE NUMBER DO MATTER |
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" Correct. But my point is we don't need to limit ourselves to damage in this discussion. To the folks saying that simply increasing damage effectiveness won't save bad skills, I say fine, then increase other parameters too (there are a ton of options depending on the skill). These are all numerical buffs. People hear the word "numerical" and think that only means damage effectiveness or flat added damage; it doesn't. This is in support of your earlier point that numerical buffs can make a huge difference and totally transform skills. The fact that those buffs aren't limited to damage is exactly why. Heavy strike needs damage. Other skills might need something else as well. Simply adding radius/aoe makes all the difference in the world for some skills. GGG could get creative, WITHOUT needing a full redesign/new graphics. Meaning we don't need to wait leagues and leagues. These changes could have always been made relatively quickly, and when we speculate as to how they could be buffed we don't need to get bogged down in a discussion about the details of entirely new mechanics (like attacking while moving, just as an example). We're all in this leaky boat together, people.
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" They can up numbers as much as they want, w/o removing the knockback it's useless. Having to use a shit glove because it was cool in 1456 is outrageous. You other guys can try to convince me HS is not shitty as much as you want. I played at least 4 leagues before I realized it's not worth my time. Only melee skills that I played and I know are super effective for more than 95% of the current game: Reckoning (trivializes the game so much I feel like cheating) and Pestilent Strike, and here I am with sid: numbers, explody clearspeed. Still need barbarism or other means to hit 1 aditional target. "There's no thing like random one-shots in this game. You only die because you take 353,456,237 hits in 0.2 seconds."
"The best items in the game should not be crafted, they should be TRADED." - Cent, GGG |
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I think The Surrender might be the single best unique created in all of PoE. Only comparable game-changing unique imo is Shavronne's and that one now has competition with SL and Esh-ish. That lvl 30 reckoning is exactly what EVERY unique item needs: some kind of addition that makes it truly unique
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but also useful.
sorry im drunk af, excuse any spelling fuckups |
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