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

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projectile spells ... therefore always hit.

This is wrong.
In theory they don't rely on hit but they need to hit the hitbox with the projectile.
Bows with arrows hit automaticaly because these are ranged meleeattacks.
So with hit you have the possibility to allways hit regardles of how fast or small the hitbox is.

To say that a melee is in disadvantage because he needs to stay in melee to be a melee and deal melee damage is not an argument.

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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 :(

Thats the intention of criticals, to deal insane damage to your opponent.

*throws some whetstones just for fun out of the window*

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Charan wrote:

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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

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

I've played 0Hrs 0Mins 0secs of this game.

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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.

What i'm saying is EXACTLY what you guys are proposing. you're just too set in your mind to think otherwise. you want a whole re-work of a damage system, basically, take x from a and add x to b, because a is less than b. But you COMPLETLEY ignore classes and what they obtain from just being that class.

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

Let's be serious here, to say any class has access to the same type of damage as any other class and vise-versa is just silly. Sure they can reach those spots for the damage, but they would have to sacrifice damage to get there. That's not considered access.

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

Sure they can, and others passively do this by lvling DEX/Dodge and STR/Health, as they look for their damage multipliers. And Witches go for Energy Shield and chaos Innoculation, because STR is too rare to come by without sacrificing the damage that's there in their face. Also, everyone has access to energy shield so that whole comment is pretty false in comparison to the other classes. And i haven't even gotten started on armour.

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

Good thing you're just a forum moderator.

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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.

Doesn't change the fact that it made me laugh. As goofy as I am, I have equal respect for everyone so i read it. But, funny post is funny. (Clarification: I have respect for People, not necessarily their ideas.)

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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 see from your history here, you feel it's okay to bring up the irrelevant in a topic that doesn't call for it, to try to make yourself more dominant. Is that how it should work? Is that how it does work? At least here?

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I hope I've made myself clear.

HAHA! So do I!

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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.

Thanks for the Advice but "GTFO & GKYS" was my genuine response of the matter in question. And was directed towards the thread as a whole and not any person. That opinion still stands.

But hey maybe you're right, maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about here, since I use sarcasm and have never actually played the game. Just maybe.


/EndThread

I've been very busy lately. So it might take a while to respond quickly, but i'm here now so time to tackle the comments :)

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MorriganGrey wrote:

I agree about the imbalance, but you can't take crits away from casters. It emotionally breaks the game for the three int and int-hybrid classes, even if their DPS is comparable to the physical damage builds.

Remember that half the fun of an ARPG is causing mayhem once your character gets powerful. Everyone loves to do a blast of damage, and preferably to one-shot some of the enemies you face. One of the things that fascinated me about WoW players when I was raiding was that some would stack crit even when it was the completely wrong thing to do for their build/spec. Why? Their love of burst damage and big numbers popping up outweighed the fact that they did 1/4 or even 1/3 less damage overall. There is powerful psychology at play with critical strikes in games.

I think what might be simplest is to have the elemental status ailments disconnected from crits. I was really surprised when both critical strikes AND a support gem could trigger burning. There are status ailment nodes and gems and at least for fire spells the status ailment is checked twice, once for %burn chance and once for crits. If both are true, the critical burn is applied. Taking the status ailments off crits might not be too drastic of a game engine change. A critical strike would then be the same for elemental as physical. It would be a %chance to crit modified by the crit damage% with nothing extra attached. Still emotionally satisfying when your fireball drops something in its tracks, but better balanced.

I love mayhem, but I also want balance. I don't like looking at the tree and seeing a lot of things go to waste cause I see a lot of potential.

Taking away status ailments from crits would still render physical damage and Chance to useless. People would still stack elemental and crit. Even without the ailments stacking elemental and critting would still yield more damage than physical and crit. "Chance to" would still be useless cause people would still be dealing as much damage as they are dealing now, because of critting with stacked elemental damage, and still killing everything quickly. The status ailments while critting, right now, is an added bonus which further makes critting with elemental damage better. Removing it would just remove the "bonus", but would still give people no reason to invest in physical or "Chance to", assuming "chance to"/"increased duration" nodes where in all sections of the tree.

Why invest in chance to, when you can use those points to stack more elemental, more crit chance, more crit damage multiplier and kill things faster?

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The one big problem is that right now freezing from cold crits is awfully important for kiting. Witches would need "chance to freeze" skill nodes pretty early in the game. Frost witches would be really broken without a skill tree revamp because Breath of Rime is in a bad place. Bow rangers use frost for kiting too, from Hatred aura and gear with added cold damage. There are other ways to kite but the traps are iffy, Freeze Mine is cumbersome and requires two skill slots, and there are enough curse-proof elites to make Temporal Chains unreliable. Not sure how to address it with rangers; I'd rather see the traps improved to be honest.

Hmm, now i think about it Freeze mine would become better. Add points to "Increase freeze duration", and that would improve it.

Freezing from cold crits is one of, if not the main reason, why there are soooo many ice crit witch builds. Not only are they dealing big damage in the process, nothing can move so it's safe. Also, Ice witches don't kite, they stand still and freeze everything in place with freezing pulse/ice spear totems while critting until it dies. In all my group play I've never seen an ice witch kite, regardless of whether we're surrounded by 1000 enemies.

Testing would have to be done, and how much "Chance to freeze" a starter ice witch would need is something you can only know by testing. If she has access to too much "chance to" in the beginning, considering how low the enemies resistances are a that point, they might freeze everything in place even with a low "chance to freeze" percentage.

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Khastro wrote:

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There is still no reason to stack physical damage

yes there is.

here is the first (there are two at least ;) ):

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3. "x% damage leeched back as life/mana from physical damage" is also useless when you have the support gems mana/life leech.

two support gems that gives you no damage increase is a HUGE deal.
one or two good rolled rare (rings, gloves, amu) will not gimp your dps that hard. with really good rolls you will not even notice.
for some builds warlords mark is a very good option also (flasks, later good endurance charge rate)

Every support gem you use doesn't have to give you damage. This depends on several things:

1. How many gems are linked to the skill you want improved
2. Accuracy, chance to hit, and mana cost.

The more gems with mana cost multiplier that you link to a skill will increase the skills mana cost. Once you start to get 5-6 links, or even 4 depending on the cost of the main skill used, linking more gems to increase the damage could, if anything, be a detriment. The mana cost will skyrocket through the roof, and if you're melee, which has to worry about accuracy and missing, you start to waste mana. As you're wasting mana from missing, assuming you aren't using blood magic(no mana) with crazy life regen/resolute technique(can't miss), you have to use mana flask. You're going to be clearing through a lot of monsters, so unless you have a lot mana/mana regen you're going to be drinking mana excessively and eventually have to tp back to town constantly to refill. This is a case of simple mana cost management and where mana leech comes in. It improves your mana usage by giving you "extra" mana you wouldn't have had, without increasing the cost of the skill it's linked to.

Life leech is very important for builds that don't rely on life regen, and even some life regen builds. Its a mechanic that improves your hp flask consumption by making you use your hp flask less when you're in battle and getting hit a lot. Rather than stack a million potions, you can stack a couple, leech life, use a flask, leech, leech, leech, use a flask. If it didn't exist, life regen would be too important for all melee builds.

Damage isn't everything.

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[...] It's bad enough that it's hard to stack physical, [...]

i dont see this, could you explain this with the skilltree and the typical gems and the typical suffixes/affixes (especially on weapons...) and a typical class that is intended to use physical dmg like maybe duelist or mara or so.



and now the second reasen:

the dealt -% of physical damage increses with increasing physical dmage. ("armor")
the dealt -% of elemental damage is constant with increasing elemental damage ("elemental resistance")


shock buff is only really usefull against highlife monsters like bosses, because you need two hits at least, as far as i know.
freeze is for control
burn is something between that (chance to flee+dot)

i dont say its all fine and balanced, but somehow it works for me.
lot of elementaldmg is based on good physical damage for example. its not some kind 1 dimensional problem. the two ways of dealing damage work together.
i play with about 80% physicaldmg on my toon, and i cant complain about a low killspeed or so.
and i have never seen a caster setting up the pace like Usain Bolt

"% of physical damage leeched back as ___" is not as good as elemental damage linked to life/mana leech and here is why. You would have to buff your physical damage, and then buff your percentage of physical damage leeched back. Buffing physical damage is hard enough and you can't get anywhere close to buffed elemental damage, but now you also have to worry about the % leeched back.

Why make those 2 investments, which in the end still won't be good as stacked elemental and crit with life/mana leech gem? The reason why i didn't put physical and crit, is because that is a third investment, which would further improve my point.

Not only are you dealing more damage with elemental damage, cause it's easier to stack, when you crit, you'll leech back more life, and apply ailments. The only investment you'd have to make is stack elemental, stack crit chance, and stack crit damage multiplier. As you crit you'll leech back more life/mana. You don't have to go out of your way. You would have to stack physical (which still won't compare with elemental), increase your % of mana/life leeched back (gear/passives), and probably still have to use warlord's mark.

Btw, you can stack more elemental damage than you can physical. It's a lot easier.

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Olej wrote:

I Like Charans idea of removing crit dmg from elemental attacks while keeping status alignments and improving its base dmg.

Is sure would need some rebalancing around the spell dmg/ele dmg nodes but it would nicely buffout out physical.

Also I would keep the "chance to x" nodes/gems/on skills so elemental no crit based could still burn/freeze/shock from time to time but with lesser effect than crit based ones (f.e crit based would take into calculation how much dmg it would made if it still could crit)

Furhtermore to make non crit ele dmg viable fire and lightining could also have some on hit alignment like chill (but dont realy know what put on them )

Elemental damage, would become just like how physical damage is. By itself, it's just raw damage with a very small chance to, and no increased duration buff.

Fire and lightning might not need anything.

1. Elemental damage would be more of a "Okay I want to deal good consistent damage without having to make much of an investment and use my passive points for other things. There's a little chance to ___, but I'm more worried about damage/kill speed".

2.Physical damage would be "Okay, I know i'm gonna have to make an investment and my base damage will not be as high as those with elemental, but due to burst damage, I could have the highest damage in the game".

Chance to builds
Frost witch - crowd control with slow kill speed
Lightning witch - unpredictable damage range (cause of the lightning damage ranges 6-400 damage) with potential "burst" damage, so to speak, due to shock stacking.
Fire - Perfect example of DoT. More damage than frost witch and unstacked lightning damage witch.

Melee with elemental would be able to freeze/burn/shock as Chance to/increased duration nodes would need to be put around the tree.

I'd be interested in this change, especially in the movement to delink criticals and auto-status ailments. That, and perhaps a physical damage ailment would widen the range of builds available. I've personally tried a few pure-physical damage characters; I managed to drag one into Ruthless before finally giving up.

I think it's a mistake to assume that all physical damage builds are huge life-regening tanks that fear nothing. I've tried building pure physical damage shadows and duelists, and I usually either give up or dump elemental damage into the mix because otherwise they're going to die constantly.

I don't have much to actually add to this conversation, just that I support it. I like the sound of the puncture-ish ailment, though we have to consider this in light of stunning. Would stunning be elevated to an ailment, or a step in an ailment like chill?

Maybe the game just needs more and stronger pure physical or physical-related skills. Most of the builds that do well with physical damage and without ailments have a hard-hitting, bread-and-butter skill to work with, i.e. Ground Slam.

Physical could apply bleeding on crit. Something like a stacking DoT.
1st crit = 100 damage in 10 seconds.
by 3 seconds you crit again for 100 more damage in 10 seconds.
for 7 seconds you would have DoT from both strikes dealing damage, then the first dot fades and the second persists for 3 more seconds.

That way Elemental damage would be all about burst damage while physical would be about steady high damage that takes some crits to build up.

My bad. Was so exhausted and fell asleep last night while replying to the comments.

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xXkoverasXx wrote:

This is a huge big part of the damage mechanics of this game, if you remove that, the game will be broken,the mechanics you want to add is only a physical damage buff, the game must be fun, and i dont see anything funny that i wanna play in your comments, only change to a "all-physical dmg builds" (thats gonna happen, because like you guys say, is so easy to stack crit and crti dmg, and almost imposible to stack elemental damage if you dont use a physical weapon) and that is so much boring whithout elemental ailment.



Maybe this can be remplace whith another original idea, but not whith this guys, this is a boring mechanic :/.

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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.

We all know a few games who offer the illusion of choice, don't we?

I feel the same way.

The game must be fun? That's vague. What is fun for you is not fun for another.

This thread isn't about me, it's about balance and diversity in the damage metagame.

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LadyDevimon wrote:

Oh my dear god, this idea is incredible.

Just because the pure physical isn't good as every elemental path, the other paths need to be even worse?
Thats your balancing, dumbing things down to be boring?

This idea is all about to make the marauder the best tank, best damage dealer and most fun build with criticals only. A bit overplayed, yes.

This suggestion cant be serious....

Physical allready stuns enemies on every hit. The duration is based on the damage to maxhp ratio.
The pure phys way with strength is not about max damage output, its about a mix of survival and damage with aditional stuns.
So its between the elemental ways.

What you want is phys to be like an all in one element with all advantages at once.

srsly dude -.-

I don't mean to sound rude, but have you played melee by any chance cause what you said in your post, which i'm assuming is in reference to melee builds, is wrong?

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Charan wrote:

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.

1. I would say buff physical damage nodes in the skill tree, and buff physical damage mods. That's the only way I can see it being done right now without too much problem.

2. Yeah chaos critting would do nothing, just like elemental. Critting would only affect physical damage. Do you mean reducing chaos damage dealt from monsters or players? Yeah currently act 2, and some maps, are chaos damage heavy. Reducing it or giving us resistance, which iirc they devs said they will address, will certainly help. Right now you have to stack too much life or have CI to be safe against it.

3. The reason for this is because many melee characters also stack elemental and crit, or simply stack elemental. Which is the problem i'm trying to address. How elemental has become the "go to" damage. Which in turn makes physical ineffective. There are people who want to use purely physical, but when they see how good elemental is they start equipping auras, getting elemental mods on gear, etc.

Hmm, i personally don't think so. It's impossible to forsee how things will play out especially when you're creating a game like PoE, which is trying to achieve a lot of things. The more freedom you have and the more options you give people, like in PoE, the more problems you will encounter.