Build Diversity and Capped Damage

A thought I would like to share. PoE has one of the best systems to create a diverse set of builds. As Build of the weeks of the past few years, and youtubers show in their sketchy videos, it is possible to create builds based on mechanics that players and developers did not think about.

There is a problem though with these edge case builds when considering their viability as a serious PoE Build. Even if a player with a lot of game knowledge creates a build that is utterly unique, these builds must compare themselves with 'meta' builds that destroys end game bosses. Damage scaling has reached such levels that efficiency is the be-all end-all of all builds.

A suggestion that I would like to give is that the developers should consider adding damage capping to mobs and bosses in the game. This means that disregarding how much damage and how many sources of damage a player, or a party of players dish out, a boss can only lose about, for arguments sake, 10% of their max health per second.

This will have some advantages, an alternative way of handling power-creep, reduce glass cannon builds, rewards balanced builds, allows creative builds to have some viability, useful for early game speedrunning balance etc.

Of cause there will be people who will be unsatisfied with a change like this, but that is true for any form of nerf.

Actually there are caps, altho more or less technical caps that are bound to architecture. (ie. 2^31-1 damage per minute, or 35 791 394 damage per second on dot builds)

Would be nice if those numbers be either approachable by variety of builds, or none of them. The fact that you can spread the poe balance scizzors that wide is kinda silly. But certain portion of invested playerbase likes this aspect of PoE, to find new limits.

Grim Dawn handled this well.

Let's assume there is a damaging spell that has a maximum natural skill level of 16. That's how many points you can pump into it. Gear can raise it further, but not above 26 which is 10 levels above natural skill level cap.

And this +10 rule is global. You cannot raise a skill to a level exceeding "cap +10" value.

So what happens if your gear grants a total of +15? Well...you can get away with putting 5 points less! You can leave the skill at 11/16 and still max it out and spend those five points on some defensive skill, buff or generic passive boost.

It's a very clever way of putting a ceiling on a skill power level, the devs know that players won't be able to stack skill levels to outer space and end up with level 60 skill that oneshots bosses. And they can balance the game around a certain base skill level, cos that's what most builds will be aiming for. They don't have to account for skill level 29, 32, 35, 40, 50 or 60.

Uncertain if this can be implemented into POE in any way, shape or form, as this game is a clusterfuck of systems to the point where it's impossible to calculate how much damage you're doing and even the in-game damage display cannot do that (and by cannot i mean it's missing the mark by fucking orders of magnitude)

personaly i think the problem has more to do with items.

there is no denying that some builds are far more effective than the rest but olmost any build can be end game viable with enought investment. problem is only a few have the resources to buy or craft those godlike items that are needed to make those builds viable forcing players into builds that are more affordable.

the solution is to transfer power from items to the skill tree so instead of having a sword with a base damage of 100-150 we get a sword with a base damage of 70-120 and then sword nodes give an aditional "+ flat phys damage with swords"

mirror gear will still be valuable to max out the build but they will no longer be mandatory to make it work.

You're spot on with the solution, however GGG will never do it because they're all about Trade being a major component of the game. They want you on that hamster wheel grinding for upgrades so that the elite level traders, market manipulators and streamers can keep the marketing machine going.

PoE is not about the game and actually hasn't been for a long time. It's a gambling simulator using all the same addictive triggers to keep you playing, keep you on the hook for just one more map, one more loot run, one more upgrade so that you eventually give them real money.

I would like to see a rework on how gem level scaling currently works. Cap it at +5 levels or something so its not the most bang for the buck stat in the game.

Big problem with max damage per second on a boss in a loot-based min/max game like this one: it puts a time limit minimum on every encounter. This is a HUGE no no and should be avoided as much as possible.

One of the greatest things that drives players to improve their characters further is getting lower and lower times on boss kills, or clear speed etc.

Say the life % value ends up being too low and players at lvl 80 are already doing the max possible damage. Why should they invest in more damage at that point? Game over.

Say they set the life % value too high: this pushes monster and boss life astronomically higher and doesn't really do anything to solve the problems plaguing the game.


They definitely need help balancing damage/life/defenses, but adding "phases" or phase-like effects is NOT a good solution.