Game is too Critical Strike/Damage while applying status ailments Heavy. Solution Inside

I will reply to you guys in order. 2x to charan, so plz be patient as it might take a while, and I have to do something soon so there might be a long pause.

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Charan wrote:

To preface my response: you're dead right.

However...

I know you feel it'd be overpowered still (maybe), but why not just remove the crit damage bonus from elemental damage and retain the elemental effect? Buff spell and elemental nodes if need be, or not. I think removing crit damage from spells would still be seen as a MASSIVE nerf, and totally risky on GGG's behalf; what you're proposing seems even more drastic than that.

Spell casters don't have to worry about accuracy. This means they have extra passive points over melee. This is one of the reasons why spell casting is 1000x better than melee. You don't have to be up close and personal to deal big damage. Stay far away AND crit for big damage while applying status ailments AND never miss. You will also deal more damage cause the melee accuracy investment doesn't apply to you. So those points are used to stack even more elemental damage.

Resolute Technique - Always hit never crit. Okay, fine
Spells - Always hit, constantly crit, constantly apply status ailments, without having to be upclose. Really?

That is broken. Elemenatal damage would be left unchanged, no buffs/nerfs necessary. I will explain below.

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I've never liked it when elemental damage could critical at the same rate as physical in any game. Ever. It leads to so many broken builds. The status ailments of elemental damage right now are pretty devastating: freezing, burning and shocking all quite dramatically affect the enemy, although burning is probably the least effective of the three by itself.

Exactly. There is no reason not have a high crit chance with high crit damage multiplier and stack elemental damage. There is no reason not to. It is the best and most effective way for damage. Physical doesn't even hold a candle to it.

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I think removing the crit mechanic from spell damage altogether, as you've suggested would be time-consuming, and then throwing in another mechanic to calculate the chance to inflict status ailments no less so. We have to think right now about potential changes that won't take the devs too long to implement. This is the effective way to get a suggestion noticed and considered -- because the first response is going to be something likw 'do we have time to do that?'

Now, even my suggestion would be quite time consuming. The balancing of the nodes is never an easy thing.

The way I see it, it would be done by first removing spell crit chance, and adding more "Chance to ___" clusters/nodes and "Increase freeze/burn/shock duration" clusters/nodes around the tree for all classes, with witch having the most. With a couple "Chance to" and "increase duration" nodes in the middle of the tree.

The "Chance to" mechanic works on a per hit basis. The duration of the ailment is also affected by the increase freeze & chill/shock/burn duration nodes/skills. So even if you might not deal as much damage as you would if you were to crit, which would improve the duration, you can not crit and increase the duration by investing in "increase duration" nodes. They would only have to add "chance to" and "increase duration" nodes and clusters around the tree, like the ones over at the witch/templar area.

A high lightning elemental damage witch would have a consistent damage range for her lighting spells, with a small base chance to shock. A chance to shock witch, after investing in "chance to" and "increase duration" would have a lower base damage, with the potential to deal more after shock stacking.

In the end the damage averages out. High consistent damage you can rely on with a low chance to deal more vs low damage that has a higher potential to deal more over time.

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But I completely agree with you that critical+elemental damage=extra damage PLUS status ailment is broken, or at the very least, discourages physical builds. I hate thinking along the lines of 'no matter what my build, these are the things I need' -- and right now, there are two things on that 'must-have' list: stacked life (if not going CI) and elemental damage boosts.

Yes, that's how things are right now. Elemental damage is a must, unless you just want to gimp yourself on purpose. It's kinda like armor. CI and IR are practically must haves for many builds.

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IF you were to remove critting from elemental damage, however, you'd definitely have to buff the basic elemental damage or spell nodes. There's no getting around that, I think. It'd be the only way to justify such a great reduction in the spellcaster's damage output via crits.

Critting should have nothing to do with elemental damage, and purely physical. If critting applied to elemental and didn't apply status effects, critting with elemental would still be better than physical cause it's too hard to invest into physical. Physical mods on gear are weak (6-10 physical damage) compared to 25% more elemental damage with weapons or 6 - 61 lightning damage or 15 increased lighning/cold/fire damage which can also stack for spell users and their 30% increased spell damage mods on gear as well. Which is also added to from elemental damage passives. Elemental damage doesn't need to be buffed. If anything, physical will need a buff even if crits only applied to it.

One of the reasons why you can faceroll the game with certain builds, and many builds in general, is because of the amount of damage people can deal, due to stacking elemental, without critting. People are dealing 5K + easily without critting. Now add critical strikes with critical damage multiplier, while adding ailments, and you start to see how easy the game becomes. They wouldn't need to buff or nerf elemental. They can leave it as is. Testing would be the ultimate deciding factor, ofcourse, but as of right now I don't think elemental would need to be buffed.

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There's one last side-effect of this change that actually interests me right now -- it'd give the one and only physical spell, Ethereal Knives, a little bit more of a boost. And goodness knows it needs it.

Thank you. Now they can even start adding physical damage spells, or elemental damage spells that deal some physical damage and can be buffed with physical damage passives. I mean imagine that. A spell caster who primarily focuses on buffiing physical damage for crit chance on her physical damage spells. That adds so much diversity.

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If you feel your suggestion is superior to mine (and it may well be, I'm just brainstorming here), feel free to poke the necessary holes.

No no no I would never put my opinions above anyone elses. They are simply my suggestions that I feel would improve the game.

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As an afterthought, by your system, the placement of 'chance to inflict status ailment' nodes could be a broad replacement of 'spell crit chance', perhaps. My system might still make it too easy to inflict status ailments. I'm not sure.

Exactly. Spell crit would be replaced with "Chance to" and "increased duration" nodes, and more "Chance to"/"increase duration" nodes will be added as well. Spells that never miss and can be fired from far away while applying ailments should never have the chance to crit. This contradicts resolute technique and punishes melee even more. Not only do you lose the chance to deal burst damage with resolute technique, you don't apply ailments and you STILL HAVE TO BE IN MELEE RANGE.

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Another solution would be to add an ailment for physical crits, perhaps based on each weapon type. Puncture for pointy things, for example. Not sure what blunts would be, since they already have stun and knockback isn't always desired. I'm not that fond of this solution but for the fact that puncture is really limited player-wise right now -- only one skill can inflict it.

Hmm, I never thought of that. If critting applied to only physical, you could spice it up even more by adding certain ailments that can happen on crit. Will definitely look more into that.

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In short, I completely agree with you regarding spell crits blowing physical ones out of the water damage-wise, because they shouldn't.

Thank you.

I'm a theory crafter at heart, and I hate when things become streamlined. With this change the damage meta game increases drastically.

1. Stack elemental - consistent high damage
2. Chance to - lower damage than "stack elemental", but with a higher chance to deal more over time cause the more you hit, the more chances to have to inflict the ailment. This would also favor DoT characters which are currently lacking when you can go AoE with high crit chance/multiplier with guaranteed status ailments on crit which are better when you crit.
3. Physical - lower damage than "stack elemental" but can deal more than "stack elemental" due to burst damage.

This would make some current skill gems usefull (melee damage on full life/increased melee damge). Right now weapon elemental damge is flat out better. This would also give PoE more room for expansion in the damage metagame. Physical damage spells, or elemental/physical damage hybrid spells. And as you suggested, a possible implementation of status ailments on physical crit. Which would apply to physical damage, physical damage spells, and potential physical/elemental damage hybrid spells.

You start to see the potential that can made here. Right now it's just stack elemental + crit chance + crit damage multiplier.



I'm about to do some stuff but i will return to reply to the rest of you. Sorry for the delay.

Also Charan I have a suggestion for how to fix evasion. I'm an armor/evasion hybrid and lol I'm pretty sure you know the problems by now. I want to go all evasion but it's too risky :P.

I will create another thread for it later :)

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Charan wrote:

Oh, the screen would still shake and you'd get all the meaty effects. And as I proposed, your *base* damage would be significantly higher, since you're losing that chance to do double+ damage.

But that's what I'm pointing out players love. Those huge 150%+ hits. It's immensely satisfying to take some crit dmg% nodes and lob a fireball or shoot an arrow that hits so hard it stops a monster in its tracks. Taking that away from casters but not archers or melee isn't fair. It's also pretty dull when your damage isn't a little spikey. Two fireballs per zombie, four per rock monster. /snore

If you disconect crit from status ailments, balancing crit for casters is trivial. No need to remove it.

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Charan wrote:

Disconnecting status ailments from crits would be ideal, yes, and I was slightly horrified to learn that's how it worked. I wanted my sword to have a much higher chance to ignite enemies, and the result of that request? Higher crit chance. Well, okay, that's nice, but not really what I wanted.

Then again, I think the status ailment being a result of a crit makes sense, given the percentage chance and the overall devastation of the ailment. Freezing is pretty badass. Chatters proved that before he was very considerably and considerately rebalanced.

If you had 'chance to' nodes, and they were primarily in the caster areas, would this change melee builds as well? Some non-casters are very fond of their status ailments, and you'd potentially be removing that from them unless they were willing to trek across the Skilldrasil.

It does make sense on a gut level that a crit might do something more than extra damage, but we all agree it's a little problematic right now and a separate mechanic for applying status ailments already exists in the game.

There should probably be clusters of status ailment nodes in the parts of the tree where there is elemental damage to make pure melee work well. My bad. I play mostly ranged and am more familiar with kiting tactics. I can't play melee very well to test them because they're click-heavy and aggravate my RSI.

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Kyliathy wrote:

From one patch to the other, there are less and less ways to succeed in POE on Merciless. Soon, only 2-3 build types will be valid for each class, and, whether you like it or not, this game will become something that only offers the illusion of choice, but even the slightest misstep in the Skilldrasil will ruin your chance of making it on Merciless.

This is so important. One of the things that made D2 so much fun is you could clear Nightmare difficulty on a less-than-perfect build.

Maybe we should be throwing out ideas for crit-based physical damage status ailments to build up melee, rather than asking for nerfs to elemental damage. Something as simple as a bleed added to physical damage crits might be enough to even the playing field.

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You don't have to be up close and personal to deal big damage. Stay far away AND crit for big damage while applying status ailments AND never miss.

Do you have ever played a spell caster?
I cant count the times i wasted all my mana to hunt down fast moving or just door/obstacle bugged mobs. Refill flask several times to clear the bugamid or any other indoor area.
Never miss ...

The big crits are not from spellcasters, they are from "mr. convert" phys to elemental with tripple aura.
Oh yes, you forgot about it, the 3 damage auras. What does spellcaster have? Ahh yes, the insane cheap allways 10% haste aura.

Ok i got it now, thats really imbalanced.

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People are dealing 5K + easily without critting.

Pls show me that spellcaster.
I play with icespear singletarget 6L and my dps on it is 1,7k. Pls show me how i can deal a noncrit for 5k. Ok, i'm just lvl 69, maybe i miss the last 31 levels like all the others?

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I'm a theory crafter at heart, ...
...Right now it's just stack elemental + crit chance + crit damage multiplier.

With your suggestion its just stack basedmg + chance to X + nothing because you don't tell us any replacement for all the critchance and critmulti nodes.
But i guess what, some 10 Int nodes whould be nice. Maybe there a plans for adding some nice highlevel wands with 400 Int req and 21 spelldamage buildin :>

*gets angry and throws whetstones at the OP and all supportes of this insane idea*

I got enough for you all :D

Not so much a direct response as tangential thoughts based on feedback.

1)What sort of buffs would physical damage need to be on-par with elemental?

2)What happens when chaos damage crits? I'd say 'nothing' right now. I'd propose reducing chaos damage overall and making crits do 'full' current damage.

3)Seta's point regarding spells always hitting seems an obvious one, but when highlighted expresses a difficult issue to negotiate. For some reason, even though spells always hit and often crit, there isn't a REALLY clear gap between casters and melee in terms of effectiveness. I think there's a much larger gap between physical and elemental damage.

Unrelated: this is mostly theorycrafting on my behalf. I play suboptimal builds so I'm really used to bashing my head against very different walls. Even so, I have observed that elemental damage is STILL ruling the roost. Is this a result of GGG's decision not to allow elemental immune monsters? Maybe that's a related factor.

I saw the length of the original post and laughed, then i saw the responses, and laughed some more.

If every class had the same DPS and type of DPS,
Everyone would be the same.

Having Every class access to the same type of damage does not balance anything.

Witches have virtually 0 HP 0def 0dodge
And you want your Melee/Physical class to deal the same damage as them? While still having WAY MORE HP AND HP LEECH than a witch?

GTFO & GKYS!

/EndThread

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sirjonnyboy wrote:

I saw the length of the original post and laughed, then i saw the responses, and laughed some more.

If every class had the same DPS and type of DPS,
Everyone would be the same.

Having Every class access to the same type of damage does not balance anything.

Witches have virtually 0 HP 0def 0dodge
And you want your Melee/Physical class to deal the same damage as them? While still having WAY MORE HP AND HP LEECH than a witch?

GTFO & GKYS!

/EndThread

I'm sorry, just how much of this game have you played?

Also, what you're saying is completely different to what is being proposed. This thread is far from done, but I'm not sure you need to add anything more to it, not going by just how much of the point you missed.

Right now, every class HAS access to the same types of damage. Do you even understand how classes work in this game?

Witches CAN have quite a lot of defence, usually via Energy Shield and Chaos Innoculation.

...Like I said, I don't think you really know what you're talking about here.

As for the length of the original post, we INVITE lengthy, detailed feedback. It promotes creative, constructive responses and good dialogue between people even if they disagree. No need for mockery or scorn.

I see from your brief post history here that you felt it necessary to add a 'tldr' to a post you wrote that was no more than five lines long.

I'm honestly sorry you feel that's necessary here. It's not. Be detailed. Be precise. Expect people to read all of what you say before they respond. That's how it should work and it's how it does work, at least here.

I hope I've made myself clear.

PS Saying 'Get the fuck out and go kill yourselves' is not the best way to conduct yourself in a thread with an active forum moderator participating. Just a little advice.

But he is right.
The OP just looks at the damage, or in other words only the advantages of every element and compares it to pure phys. Which goes hand in hand with high defense, hitpoints and is not anything close to a glasscanon.

Even elemental resists are the advantage of strength area. All status effect scale with HP.

And i ask again, where is my insane damage aura, energy shield leech and manaleech on gear?

"Chance to X" is useless with average or low damage. The reason is simple because of its scaling with HP and resists.

High phys damage scales with itself because of the scaling with armor. Its not the fault of spellcaster if phys user converts everything and wonders why the phys part is so low after reduction. Ofc with elemental weakness instead of vulnerably and ofc with resolute tech.
Hit is for free on every peace of gear and just because at level 70+ the numbers go down a bit, this doesn't mean the real chance is low because the mobs stay way below that level.
Removing crits and the use of diamondflasks is just of false understanding of gamemechanics by the mainstream.

All the reasoning of the OP is just false.

*throws even more whetstones*

The core issue, according to a dev, is that spells, particularly projectile spells, do not rely on any sort of accuracy and thus cannot interact with evasion and therefore always hit.

That a dev would say that tells me that the idea of spells never missing is something that may at some point be addressed. May.

Your wording would indicate to me that you play a caster primarily ('where's my insane damage aura', for example), Devimon, and thus are behaving quite defensively to a change that you'd see as an unmitigated nerf. I think it'd be a dramatic change, but what game better than PoE to explore this sort of progression away from the damage types all behaving the same at a crit level?

I'll let Seta more directly acquit regarding whatever else you've said, half because it's not *my* idea you're directly addressing, and half because I'm not sure what you're trying to say half the time.

Hmm I complained about spellcasters needing criticals to activate their element special effect back when Power Charges were the thing to get high Crit Chance and every witch and their mother went for Power Charge builds.

I asked GGG to remove Elemental special effects from criticals to make spells different from normal attacks.

So I am +1 for this request. Maybe not in this exact form as OP suggests but I hope something will change. I personally hate that my Cold caster Shadow rapes when he crits but if a string of non-criticals happens I waste all mana on 2 normal mobs :(