Did the Defensive rework actually make things worse?

Let me start by saying that I'm still having fun playing this game, just like I have been for most of my 9 years. This is not so much a complaint thread as a directional suggestion.


AN's damage would be much easier to get right if players weren't taking widely different amounts of damage.

Honestly, i think they should just go the simpler route and just make evasion work for both phys and magic hits, change suppres sources to mitigate dots and general non-hit based damage

It would make help to make evasion a bit more desirable: It would work on more sources of damage than armor, wich could be used to compensate the drawback that evasion is rng-reliant and armor is consistent
It would also not be absurd from a role-play perspective: Someone can dodge an arrow, its not a strech to think it could also dodge a fireball. If you really want to make it "realistic", just keep part of the damage(like, rather than completely nothing, a suscessful dodge makes you take damage equal to 100% - your dodge%, so its very impactfull if you invest on it, but nothing if you just have a bit of it) to give it a DnD-esque feel where succeding on a saving trow still makes you take part of the damage(to account for the "area" aspect: you dodge a fireball but still takes damage from the blast, but its still better than a direct hit)

The way suppress is atm is just not good, garanteed flat 50% reduction is just too much, it forced the game to be balanced around it and screwed tons of builds in the process. Why they thought it was okay when they culled fortify for much less is beyond me

Spell suppression only works against spells you know? It's certainly a great mechanic against pinnacle/uber bosses who mostly deal spell damage and it also has it's use for mapping, but you can easily cut it's usefullness in half while mapping and when it comes to AN mobs.

As to whether the defense rework made things worse, no it didn't. It just gave players a choice. Before the rework you could stack HP or you didn't. The latter usually just used cast on death portals and didn't care about dying. They won't care now. The people that could just stack HP now have a variety of means to keep themselves alive. Suppression is one of the better ones but it isn't self sufficient by any means since it's just one layer against one type of damage and it's not neccessary either, there are plenty of alternatives. The alternatives may not be as strong against spells but they cover a wider area to compensate.

People ignoring things like Spell Suppression are either playing in party where their defenses are completely outsourced to aurabots, or have enough instant recovery that if they can't get oneshot, they are always on full health.

There is abundance of defensive options right now, some are stronger than others. Some need more investment than others.
+ max res and dmg taken as X is probably the biggest mitigation you can get as solo player, yet the investment needed is much higher than just slapping Determination and Grace onto anything and be "done" with defenses.
Aegis Aurora with Determination is just stupid because it is so easy to cap block now compared to some previous patches. Even full evasion characters are viable (susceptible to dots tho). To a point of bigger absurdity than old Dodge + Eva combination.

Even with these options, I would not touch HC with a 10 feet stick, because the dmg is often times way too unpredictable. Some are even straight up fck ups by GGG balancing - especially early league patches often discover some "mistake" when forgotten monster had 300-500% more damage than originally intended.

Some defensive mechanics could be borderline useless on specific boss encounters, which makes them unpopular. Others with heavy instment can make character immortal if you don't misplay and get some telegraphed oneshot

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Baharoth15 wrote:

Spell suppression only works against spells you know? It's certainly a great mechanic against pinnacle/uber bosses who mostly deal spell damage and it also has it's use for mapping, but you can easily cut it's usefullness in half while mapping and when it comes to AN mobs.

As to whether the defense rework made things worse, no it didn't. It just gave players a choice. Before the rework you could stack HP or you didn't. The latter usually just used cast on death portals and didn't care about dying. They won't care now. The people that could just stack HP now have a variety of means to keep themselves alive. Suppression is one of the better ones but it isn't self sufficient by any means since it's just one layer against one type of damage and it's not neccessary either, there are plenty of alternatives. The alternatives may not be as strong against spells but they cover a wider area to compensate.

All well and good, except... spells are the most dangerous sources of damage in the game by a LARGE margin. Most of the more rippy AN mods deal with spell hits, and since they made AN the center of the whole game, it means suppress is extremely valuable no matter what content you do
Look at ninja: Almost every build under the sun uses either capped suppress or block with recover on block. Pretty much the only ones that dont go for either are glass cannons or outliners like int-stackers that can achieve 13k of ES

Currently we have clear choices: Suppress if your character is on the right side, max block if its on the left, trow in more max res if you want to tackle uber content. The alternatives are not as attractive because the simple fact spells are significantly more dangerous than every other form of damage

No... the rework didn't make things worse.

its all the other monster changes that came at the same time that made things worse.

Yes and No.

It did smooth out the difference between mid and top range builds. but...

It lowered the ceiling in performance for evasion/dodge builds while making defensive auras mandatory. I never liked Auras since beta but there was more variety at least over time.

Does it work better than before? Again, Yes and No.

Some builds flourish with the changes easily breaking Phys Cap. Others eat dirt.
Specifically builds that relied on Fortify, Immortal Cry layering and similar.

They may have given us "Defense stats" but they also removed all the layering to reach further and with AN we're right back to kill it quick before it does something dumb.

This is what we traded for basic stats, least what comes to mind:

- Second Wind + Enduring Cry
- Fortify Leap Slam
- Immortal Cry Layering
- Flesh and Stone
- Elusive
- Block
- Blind
- Basalt Flask

The only difference I see or care about is the worst build diversity in this game's history.

I'm also in the no camp, The ubers would be designed differently without spell suppression / chad maxres though which I would have preferred but on the whole its actually a big improvement.

Players aren't being forced to run determination/grace they are doing so because they became attractive enough to use. It isn't like GGG removed the glass cannon setup you could still do double offensive auras in those slots for example and blow everything away but I think most players enjoy being better rounded when it isn't prohibitively expensive to do so.

Spell suppression is still too good a stat to put in a game though and that is where I think their mistake lies. There are many ways to tweak it down slightly, less value, works like evade, harder to cap etc but at its core the concept breaks their design space as they already crutched spells for all boss skills.

I would have preferred the old values where it was easy to cap but it reduced by 30% instead of 50% and then an across the board nerf to monster spell damage to hide less of the improvement behind one door.

I'm expecting the next endgame expansion to contain content that looks stupid if you don't have capped suppression or 85+ maxres (and the problem with maxres is they always got around it by giving boss skills penetration which suppression conveniently ignores, obviously not actually ignores but it isn't tailored specifically to threaten maxres builds.)

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feike wrote:

All well and good, except... spells are the most dangerous sources of damage in the game by a LARGE margin. Most of the more rippy AN mods deal with spell hits, and since they made AN the center of the whole game, it means suppress is extremely valuable no matter what content you do
Look at ninja: Almost every build under the sun uses either capped suppress or block with recover on block. Pretty much the only ones that dont go for either are glass cannons or outliners like int-stackers that can achieve 13k of ES

Currently we have clear choices: Suppress if your character is on the right side, max block if its on the left, trow in more max res if you want to tackle uber content. The alternatives are not as attractive because the simple fact spells are significantly more dangerous than every other form of damage

Are those statements based on actual data or are you just making it up? The only case where hit based spells are really a big threat are ubers. Normal versions are so easy you shouldn't even need it. And even with ubers there is a big argument to make whether it's the dots or the spell hits that are the most threatening because there are close to zero defense options against degen.

Below pinnacle bosses we have a lot of attacks. Most Elder and Shaper guadians are using attacks, same for their invitations. Conqs and Breachlords are mixed bags and mapping, well it's hard to make a concrete statement here unless someone feels like clicking through all the mobs ob POEDB and write it down, but most mobs that people tend to complain about are again, attacks.

Leapslamming goatman, charging rhoas, porcupines, Eaters tentacle bitches, Exarchs behemoths etc. The only spell casting mob that comes to mind that feels dangerous are skeleton mages with spark on maps with additional projectiles and i guess spectral revs corpse explosion?

As for AN, what dangerous abilities are you talking about? The on hit/death stuff like toxic balls, mirage, and magmar barrier? All of them are completely harmless as long as you don't stand around like an idiot for hours during mapping. But yeah, i guess they are spells so if you don't want to go the easy route and just evade them then suppression will help there.

Also, every build under the sun using spell suppression? According to ninja 20% of builds use the crit chance from spell suppression mastery which is essentially a nobrainer to take for any non dot build using suppression so i again don't know where you get that idea from. If we add the 12% chance when you have evasion on helm, gloves and boots we are at 31%. Even the heatmap doesn't show the clusters as particularly common aside from the ranger ascendancies.

Don't get me wrong, suppression is a strong defensive layer and if you are in any position to get it then that's probably what you should do since it's pretty good.
But you (and many other people) are overselling it quite a bit. Probably because you are under the mistaken impression that the current "meta" defense setup of Determination, Grace, Defbanner and Suppression is the best there is. Well let me tell you it's not. There are at least 4 setups that provide way stronger protection while not requiring tons of passive tree points and 110% reservation of your mana. I guess there is some argument to be made for it when you are in the top right side of the tree as that's a defensive wasteland but pretty much anyone else has better options available.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Players aren't being forced to run determination/grace they are doing so because they became attractive enough to use. It isn't like GGG removed the glass cannon setup you could still do double offensive auras in those slots for example and blow everything away but I think most players enjoy being better rounded when it isn't prohibitively expensive to do so.

That's not really the case.

My Ultimatum Exanguinate build was sitting a 1.4mil physical eHP and 900k elemental without using any defensive auras. That's considerably higher than both Phys and Elemental caps. It did that through layers that we no longer have or at least aren't nearly the same potency.

It had a mild 2mil DPS but the league was about being in a circle not dying and it did that well. That same build now is 350k phys and 50k Elemental. Why? Because I lost 20% Block from 78/78%, 20% Dodge, Immortal Cry is no longer a 5 stack 90% up-time and lost 20% over cap Phys which couldn't be taken from me by map mods. The build still has 87% Phys but it now does 500k DPS.

By comparison.
The build I used this league is 130k phys eHP, 120k ele, all defensive auras but with 18mil DPS.
Dropping just Determination puts my phys and lightning down to 44k eHP.
That's not "attractive" esp when it's so easy to break millions of DPS. It's required.

EDIT: Oh and all the main Defensive Auras have improved mana reverse while 0 offense do.