Game is too Critical Strike/Damage while applying status ailments Heavy. Solution Inside
" Exactly. You practically summed up everything i've said in this thread so far. It's so easy to achieve too. Activate some auras, get some elemental mods on your gear, and a few elemental passives here and there. Invest the remaining points into crit chance and crit damage multiplier and that's all you need. " I couldn't have said it better. That's why I created this thread. I was disappointed when I had to revamp my physical damage character. You invest in so many passives and you're still weak. It's just too easy to determine how you're going to deal damage right now, as elemental + crit yields benefits that easily outshine physical and Chance to by a long shot. I, just like you, want to see more diverse damage dealing methods. People should have a reason to not want to go elemental and crit, cause right now there isn't. Last edited by SoujiroSeta#2390 on Aug 20, 2012, 5:38:51 PM
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I'm all for creating more stats that can contribute to build diversity and more interesting forms of DPS, so decoupling status ailments from crits seems like a great idea. Even if you don't have tons of crit/crit damage from nodes, gear easily makes up for it.
By design, status ailments are only as good as the hit that inflicted them, so just decoupling them from crits would make them rather poor. This is easily remedied by tweaking the underlying mechanics ofc, but it does leave the question of where you would get these 'chance to' effects from. My solution would be to tie them in directly to skills, for two reasons. The first is that this allows for a further degree of control over the balance of these skills and expands their depth. The second would be that nodes could then buff the effects of the status effects themselves, rather than buffing the chance for them to happen. This allows for far better scaling from low to high levels, as well as across gear and between attacks and spells. Whether nodes gave you stuff like duration or 'inflicts 2 stacks of shock instead of 1' or whatever, it opens up possibilities that could be balanced far better than if these were just introduced into the current system. Another benefit would be that the various gems that get higher 'chance to' from quality would make more sense, and the bonus itself wouldn't suck. Looking at physical damage on the other hand, the problems with it atm are quite numerous; physical doesn't double dip anywhere, you can't convert anything to physical, physical bonuses are often tied to specific weapons or how you hold the thing, not everyone that uses attacks uses strength, attacks use accuracy, and specific attacks require specific weapons. Stun is good, but it only really comes into play if you spec and build for it. Physical attacks are missing something like bleeds or armor penetration or even defensive bonuses on use outside of establish mitigation or avoidance mechanics. At any rate, it needs some love and quite probably some new supplemental stats. Last edited by InVermilion#7677 on Aug 20, 2012, 7:24:48 PM
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This is presented as a large complex problem, but it seems like several smaller ones.
The most complicated is when status ailments should be inflicted. While it might make sense for strong critical hits to inflict status ailments, this puts way too much game mechanic focus on critical hits, making anyone who uses elemental damage get ripped off if they don't critical. Since the ailments' effects are tied to damage done, they already get a bonus from criticaling, they don't need to be entirely based on it, and anyone firing elemental abilities without a high critical chance sees no difference between their element or another one. I think status ailments need to simply have a flat chance to be inflicted when that type of element hits an enemy, and the main bonus to inflicting ailments should be from the skill gems themselves. This would make the element of your skill far more important than elements you pick up from gear or auras, which it really needs to be since with weapon attacks you can easily get all three elements at once. The second, and hopefully eventually unrelated matter is how good critical hits are. If everyone stacks criticals, maybe they're simply too good in general and should be downgraded. You don't need grand rewrites of how spells or attacks work when you can just play with some numbers. Third, as for spells/elemental damage being able to critical in general, in Path of Exile critical hits and to a lesser extent elemental damage in general are heavily tied to the intelligence stat; the website even describes the entire offensive focus of intelligence as being on criticals, and this makes sense since criticals are the result of your character being artful in combat instead of strong (which is probably why it also bleeds over into dexterity some). Making elemental damage not be able to critical destroys the entire design philosophy of the intelligence tree and skills, as does moving critical damage all over the skill tree so the dumb strength based characters can get it too. Fourth is the balance of power between physical and elemental damage. I would think that physical damage ought to have a better dps than elemental damage in any roughly equivalent case since it has no status ailment it can inflict. Maybe monsters simply need better elemental resistance than they have now to accomplish this; apart from resistant magic and rare enemies, you barely notice certain foes shrugging off an element. I don't want immune monsters, even though this game would handle them better than hell round Diablo 2 did since you can switch skills much more easily, but there should be some enemies one element doesn't do much to. If they did this they'd probably have to change elemental weakness from lowering resistances to raising elemental damage though, since anything that lowers elemental resistances would undermine this system. Bringing elemental damage down would probably also require changes to the way damage conversion abilities work, but I don't have a clear idea what to do there. Or maybe elemental skills are just too good now; Lord knows there is no weapon skill that even rates next to ice spear or freezing pulse. Fifth and mostly unrelated is how difficult people seem to think this game is for one type of character or another. I've gone through the whole game with no real difficulty with two different mostly physical damage archers, one that focused on criticals and one that didn't, as well as an entirely physical based duelist that didn't even use iron reflexes or critical hits. I never used item find items, I never did level grinding, I had no party members, and almost all my gear was made by orbs, and not even alchemy ones most of the time. This only one or two builds are viable thing simply isn't true, never mind the physical characters can't win thing, since you could make way better characters with vastly better equipment than that. As for witches not having any defense, all I can say is “What?” You can get absurd amounts of energy shield, and chaos innoculation is the single best skill on the tree by a long shot. As for kiting, you can kite in this game with just your movement speed, and temporal chains makes it trivial, never mind bear trap, ice wall, chilling, and freezing. So go on, make your crappy physical, no critical characters, they can make it to the end too. |
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I agree, but I see the problem a different way:
Critting just shouldn't automatically apply status effects. It should be based purely on damage vs total mob life. e.g. 50% of mob's life taken away by lightning damage in that one hit? That's a 50% chance to shock... ... and so will be increased by some chance when critting, naturally... but not to 100% chance on a crit regardless of actual % of elemental damage dealt. I know the damage amount determines duration of the effect, but still... Doing this would de-couple critting from status effects without nerfing elemental damage, while adding value to + %chance to X passives/support gems (especially for high life mobs, like some elites and bosses). Tada! :P Last edited by Daemonjax#0396 on Aug 21, 2012, 12:44:45 PM
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" What would be the point of applying any of the status effects when they would be dead anyway? Take away 50% hp from that mob? Then they would die to the 2nd hit no matter what status they have. Take away the crit damage from spells. Look at resolute technique. Sure hit + no crit. Crit damage should be what physical damage does on crit. I found this thread again to show that crit can be "abused" to ridiculous amounts. |
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" I made the example simple for you, so you could follow the math. ;) |
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Funny this post from August 2012 still makes sense on February 2013
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The easiest way to fix this is to simply reduce the side effects (freeze,chill,burn,shock) of the elements, which would make it then fine (and rebalance by adding some more elemental damage if the nerf is too harsh)
Shock having 220% damage amplification with 3 stacks, its not bloody surprising why its so ridiculously strong. Chill/Freeze is also quite strong, but due to its nature is weaker against stronger mobs (shock stats you can constantly reapply even against high health targets to continue the damage amplification, cold is less effective in this regard) Definitely shock, and maybe freeze/chill, need to be reduced in effectiveness |
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" or frost nova all those frost resist mobs AND STILL FREEZE em to death sigh so nice to see em explode i understand the predicament your in but all the ailments make elemental so much fun in this game they should just make similar ailments for weapons like bleeds for swords or crushing (wich would hamper their effectiveness) on maces and maybe armor ignore for axes |
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" nerfing something that people use because of its strength will always cause hatred flaming you name it instead i think boosting other ailments especially fire or any ailment to physical damage like im suggesting in prev post would help remedy a lot i myself dont use heavy strike but glacial hammer why? well it has a nice freeze it works virtually against everyone. |
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