1.0.0 Balance Changes

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Auras
We had two problems with Auras:
Using various tricks like Blood Magic, end-game builds would run six or more auras at once. This resulted in very little aura diversity or interesting party synergies.
Their effects were not impactful enough. If you had six active ones, it was a big difference, but each individual aura wasn't incredibly meaningful.

To solve this, we're making auras more powerful but are increasing their mana reservation costs. There are new aura cost reduction passives that allow you to specialise in having many auras if you still want to be a full-on aura character. Now each aura that affects you can really be felt and there's a lot more diversity in aura loadout. When we're testing high level characters it's amazing how different they feel when different combinations of auras are selected.

Most auras like Purity (mandatory for maps that have -max res, and to reduce spell damage taken), hatred (to boost DPS to make up for taking more defensive nodes), grace (for more evasion in evasion build, and a catalyst to IR), determination (more armor, and a catalyst to IR), and maybe to some extent clarity (mana reserve hogfest, but for mana regen) are important for an end-game to overcome the harshness (not completely since all builds have a weakness or two) for end-game maps.

Limiting the use of auras because there are not enough auras to begin with does not help much. There are more auras from mobs then there are from players. Where is the diversity in that? I understand adding more mana reservation nodes will help alleviate stacking auras, but what about those that do not have much to begin with because of the penalty that these aura come with?

I think that this increases the disparity between partying and soloing. More will have to depend (or as I call it piggybacking) on partying just to make it through mapping. It is great that auras are getting buffs, but if that is what it takes to discourage auras-stacking, then I would prefer the system to be unchanged.


I will see how this will be effected once the patch comes next week. Honestly, you guys need to add more auras in the future to add real diversity to auras. ;)