Zizaran and build viability!

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Marxone wrote:

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

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Ydoum wrote:

I was literally about to quote and reply on the very same thing.

Yes, Harvest WAS a solution to build diversity. With the ability to craft very specific set of unique items, you could make the weirdest skills and playstyles work within the league's timeframe.

No it fucking isnt lol, Harvest offers nothing build defining that you cant already get on other gear without it lmao. You harvest kids.

Harvest actually could alleviate a lot of problems of skills and play styles, by making the numbers "good enough" easily.

It's not one fix for all (in the current state of over nerfed item mod tags even Harvest would not be as powerful as originally deployed) but it would give a roadmap for a lot of builds how to overcome the randomness of crafting system and get item mod combinations which might never appear on the market otherwise.

Thats the entire role of master crafting, a gap filler to make items usable that are otherwise missing something you need. It is the midground. Which they at sometime, buffed by bumping tiers up by 1 and by introduced veiled crafts. I actually compared new/old crafts with some of my OG mastercrafted items to see the difference and the difference is 1 Tier generally (Old OG was T4, new is T3+).

In addition to this, a big reason why this game has such a big issue with power creep is entirely due to how easy itemization is now. Back in the day (pre-harvest bullshit) builds were more diverse because the functionality was tree/item reliant and items had direct downsides. Items were less available and that forced people to be more creative which resulted in insanely strong, budget builds that out preformed a lot of other builds with investment.

Uniques have generally always been the "build enabler", with the downside of x for exponentially more power. Harvest crafted influenced items arent build enabling whatsoever, theyre just direct free powercreep with no downsides. Big reason why the games itemization is staler than a saltine cracker.

All harvest did was further push "meta" itemization and push people into meta builds. It didnt expand build diversity at all, its a complete bullshit statement that harvest did anything to make build diversity better when all it did was make the best skills exponentially more powerful, with this community being major meta drones the result was obvious.

Gonna watch the podcast right now while i drink my coffee anyways so i can see exactly what was talked about for myself.

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albert2006xp wrote:

The problem is people act like skill gems are the only factor here. The gem itself is just a small part of it. You have tons of passive points, items, ascendancy, etc stacked on top of that. This can lead to a lot of variation in use with the same skill that can lead to differences in how powerful it can be.

Players aren't making use of all the tools and optimizing and planning things out correctly. That's why there's the perception that Harvest was big diversity thing, because if you just stack enough power into something, it matters less that you didn't do it right. Meanwhile someone could be getting that power out of that skill in a way that you don't quite know how.

I think a better defense balance would actually do a lot to make more things good, because I've always picked characters based on whichever one has the lowest chance to die, thus the easiest to level, getting damage is way easier and just something you work out after.

What we can't do is just do a blanked buff to everything again so that bad builds get enough damage to not be bad builds. Bad builds have to stay bad for good builds to be good. You should be able to make a bad build through bad choices that no amount of gear can fix.

tell me then how to make a self-cast Forbidden Rite comparable to totem-based Forbidden Rite. it is all knowledge after all?


ofc it isnt. skills/skill setups can be EASILY divided into 'broken/good/strong-but-plays-like-turd/WORTHLESS'

no amount of nitpicking and smart tricks will make a skill from the last group beat one from the first. it is not possible. again, you can twist it as much as you want, you can move the goalpost (what do you mean by 'beat it'? etc) - it cannot be done.


there is a reason so many players pick 'meta' - because it is GOOD and more often than not also CHEAP (here Harvest made a difference). you get highest bang for your buck. sure, there are less popular builds that are just as strong but in most cases these options have some annoying drawbacks that meta builds dont have to worry about.

build viability is also 'ways of building'. totem Freezing Pulse vs Self Cast. totem FR vs self cast. Voltaxic Burst Cyclone vs Self-cast (tried the latter - it is TRAGIC). not only the number of actually GOOD skills is limited (reaching the same performance on 10 times the budget is NOT parity) then you also have 'set' ways of playing such skills.


in short - some builds/skills need 3 days to get to 'acceptable' level of performance, some need a month. later builds are not viable. you can dance around this fact but.. it wont change it.


if anyone wants a challenge, something to show off as a sign of 'builds' validity is ok' - here it is:

Voltaxic Burst + Voltaxic Rift + Fanaticism + Battlemage

make it work or explain me why this idea is bad

ps. good to see that the 'build diversity is fine' crowd has at least some SST/FR players. it is always good to have personal experience, isnt it?

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Phrazz wrote:

Firstly, I liked the interview overall. Good job.

That said, on the most important subject of the whole interview, build viability, you got totally swallowed by Mathil. No critique to him, he just went into it like a debate, while you went into it as a pure interview. Mathil also has a couple of luxuries that 'most' players don't have; 10+ years of knowledge and 8+ hours of game time per day.

So, Zizaran, you attacked this completely wrong. You lacked examples. You lacked comparisons. You lacked context.

Build viability is not in a great place right now, mostly because certain skills have been forgotten for a long time, both when it comes to numbers and mechanics, and the fact that the "average" has been nerfed through defenses and support gems, hurting "average skills" more than "good skills".

Now, what you should've done, was to ask Chris: "For Jimmy, a player playing a couple of hours a day with the goal of beating Sirus/Maven, is it as viable for him to choose Heavy Strike as it is to choose Spectral Shield Throw? Is it as viable for him to choose Cleave, as it is for him to choose Forbidden Rite Totems? Is it as viable for him to go self cast Freezing Pulse as it is for him to put Freezing Pulse on a totem?

Of course it isn't.

A wide nerf like the support gem nerf, will always affect the "bad/average" skills the most, and the buffs of those skills weren't on par in most cases. While I'm personally OK with the support gem nerfs, the buffs to the skills themselves need some work - and need to be looked at for 3.16 (even though I think that some buffs to defenses will help a lot).

And Chris, while we all like transparency, be careful of not going completely Sean Murray.

(And no, I'm not really expecting any of them to read this)

Yeah im fine with the nerfs overall because its going to pinpoint the problematic skills and interactions by putting them way over the baseline. Great example of this is self curse Soul Mantle. Its funny how slept on that totem setup has always been when the scaling is ridiculous, its kinda similar to how Mines/Traps were majorly underplayed regardless of inherently having some of the best damage in the game.

They definitely hurt lower end skills and all that with their support nerfs but it means that we are going to see buffs in the right direction for the next patch.

The biggest problem with support nerfs, specifically for melee, is the fact that melee is entirely reliant on the weapon as their scaling point. The better the weapon, the better you scale however with the support nerf, they essentially knocked off anywhere from 150-300 dps off your base weapon with the multiplier nerfs. A 350PDPS 1H feels completely unplayable after the changes because other things werent adjusted like monster life and armour values, while we also saw more nerfs on our end with things like Physical Overwhelm.

GGG has always had this really bad issue of Rare Weapons Vs Unique weapons. If the unique weapons are too good, people ignore the rare ones almost entirely unless they can get them for a good price. If those weapons are overused they get nerfed, which we saw prior with virtually all 2H Melee weapons.

I think the problem with the 2H weapon design is, generally speaking, they dont do much outside of "damage". Theres no real build defining 2H weapons, especially for physical. Theres nothing really interesting to them either.

The most interesting 2H to be introduced as a unique, was probably Wings of Entropy. It was a very build defining item at the time of its release. Outside of that Hiltless was a bit more unique but not really all that crazy.

They need to find a way to give 2H uniques reasonable DPS but also actually make them build defining. Its okay to have them just have added damage like "supported by x" gem but those arent interesting and they generally result in the aforementioned (a confliction with rare items power and availability).

I dont think its because melee is boring inherently either, i think melee is one of the most fun things in the game, it just seems a whole lot less thought goes into making items for it.

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

They need to find a way to give 2H uniques reasonable DPS but also actually make them build defining. Its okay to have them just have added damage like "supported by x" gem but those arent interesting and they generally result in the aforementioned (a confliction with rare items power and availability).

I dont think its because melee is boring inherently either, i think melee is one of the most fun things in the game, it just seems a whole lot less thought goes into making items for it.

I don't think that's as much of a problem, because some things about 2H are inherently build-defining, hitting harder but slower is good for things like bleed, ignite, impale or warcries. And there are some fairly interesting items, like martyr, brain rattler, dervish, debeon, geofri and uul...
So, there are some nice concepts there, but most of them have issues, either having too little support in the rest of the game for what they're trying to be, in the case of martyr, the numbers being way off in the case of pretty much all of them, or having poor synergy with their own mechanics, in the case of uul. It's less of those items being boring than the rest of the game being what it is.

It's been repeated enough, but a good part of the problem obviously comes from how dangerous hitting 1.5 times per second is, especially this league. So, there isn't really such a shortage of things you can do with 2h weapons, there's a shortage of things you can consider and not think 'yeah, I'm just gonna die if I do this'.
The way I see it, the real solution here isn't to make them faster, there should be a place for what 2h weapons are trying to do. You just need to get something for your effort, and possibly not die, that would be nice. We'll see what they will do about the defense situation in next league.

By the way, hell if I know why are they trying to adjust things the way the do, buff monster hp to match spell dps and then buff all melee skills and whatever else isn't making the cut anymore, when they could just lower spell dps across the board and call it a day.
Probably because we're dumb and 'buff to monster life and buff to melee' sounds better than 'nerf to spells'.

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sidtherat wrote:

ps. good to see that the 'build diversity is fine' crowd has at least some SST/FR players. it is always good to have personal experience, isnt it?

At this point the community is polarized and does not agree on anything as i see. A few selected dislike deterministic crafting although given double influence with Awakeners Orb and Mavens Orb there is ZERO chance for drops being good or even better than crafted items. Drops suck chris and another expansion wont change this if no improvement happens that drops can rival crafted items then give the majority of us who loved the idea of deterministic crafting as aspiring endgame back.
Again 3.13 was the golden era of this game with deterministic crafting you could make anything strong by crafting nice gears for it. It was a matter of time, effort and fun not about RNG opening packs of random bullcrap rares.


And yeah i have to smile each time someone comes around to tell build viability is all fine with his Spectral Shield Throw/Forbidden Rite experience.

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zzang wrote:

Again 3.13 was the golden era of this game with deterministic crafting you could make anything strong by crafting nice gears for it. It was a matter of time, effort and fun not about RNG opening packs of random bullcrap rares.

Unfortunately, that's a bandaid, not a real solution. Unless you're a fan of meta setups clearing high reds on 1 socket and a wish for glory.

Serious, watched ghazzy the other day mapping with forbidden totems, he was showing something and a while later realized he forgot to put the gems back, didn't even notice that five supports are missing.

Buffing skills that aren't hopelessly mechanically awful to the point of usability isn't hard, and I've yet to see an OP setup that can't be toned down. No need to take a pneumatic hammer and tear the house down if the job can be done with a needle.

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zzang wrote:

A few selected dislike deterministic crafting

I don't think you'll find a lot of players - if any at all - that dislike the idea of some sort of deterministic crafting. You'll find A LOT of players disliking the level of deterministic crafting we got from Harvest (3.11 and 3.13) - with good reason.

People are also using the word "deterministic" as they see fit, but that's another debate.

But no matter what they do with crafting in the future, they need to improve drops first. Because drops do feel more or less useless now, and if they improve crafting without improving drops, drops will feel even more useless (if possible). You should WANT to identify rares.

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raics wrote:

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zzang wrote:

Again 3.13 was the golden era of this game with deterministic crafting you could make anything strong by crafting nice gears for it. It was a matter of time, effort and fun not about RNG opening packs of random bullcrap rares.

Unfortunately, that's a bandaid, not a real solution. Unless you're a fan of meta setups clearing high reds on 1 socket and a wish for glory.

Serious, watched ghazzy the other day mapping with forbidden totems, he was showing something and a while later realized he forgot to put the gems back, didn't even notice that five supports are missing.

Buffing skills that aren't hopelessly mechanically awful to the point of usability isn't hard, and I've yet to see an OP setup that can't be toned down. No need to take a pneumatic hammer and tear the house down if the job can be done with a needle.

To clarify: Im all for tuning down overpowered self scaling stuff like Forbidden Rite or Spectral Shield Throw and other mechanics that make for example Strike Skills feel like turd. But this does not exclude deterministic crafting as aspiring end game content.

Also drops in their current state simply suck and cannot be better than an Awakener Orb double influenced Maven elevated rare by definition. Unless they improve drops to that level or remove crafting completely drops will always suck for the very most part that people are filtering out 99% and for the rest of 1% again 99% of that isnt even picked up for Identify.

There will always be small fluctuations in build power and im all for closing the gaps between ranged/spells/summoners and melee.

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zzang wrote:

To clarify: Im all for tuning down overpowered self scaling stuff like Forbidden Rite or Spectral Shield Throw and other mechanics that make for example Strike Skills feel like turd. But this does not exclude deterministic crafting as aspiring end game content.

Sure, I mean, the question in regards to build viability is 'does this game need to give you this or that amount of power'. The answer to that is obviously no, the amount of power a player needs to have ultimately depends on how hard the content is, and GGG can make it as hard or easy as they want and the power can come from wherever they want. That cat can be skinned in so many ways it probably thinks the entire thing is in impossibly poor taste.

The amount of determinism in crafting and how powerful can the crafted gear be only boils down to how much of it devs want us to get from the ground, how much from trade and how much from crafting, maybe it's 10-30-60%, or 20-60-20%, who knows. Nothing else really matters for that discussion.