Path of Physical Damage / Health > Caster / ES

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

well using a witch as a base case isnt really fair , the witch is terrible. especially for armor the scion would have been a better test case.

I agree. Most Witch builds wander into the Shadow and Templar areas anyway, and Scion seems to make that easier.

Well Pure Casters pared with ES feel weak regardless of class. The only problem is for a witch this is the only reasonable thing to do :P

My EK-Scion feels great considering that he wasted a lot of points to get all the aura-passivs. An Incinerate Tank is also very nice. But both builds do something you won't expect from a caster, they go tanky since there aren't any good nodes to push their damage.

The highest damaging spell is fireball (ignoring Molten Shell or Discharge here). A lvl20 Fireball has about 400 average damage with 0,85s cast-time. So the maximum you can get out by supporting it would be with conc. effect, faster casting, LMP (and shotgunning), Slower Proj. and high-strength Iron-Will. Crit-based mods might be better, since Fireball is one of the few spells with a reasonable base-critchance. There are a few problems a Spellcaster has here:

1. Spells are incredibly level-dependent and getting a lvl20 Spell takes some time.
2. Weapons are much more flexible, while a lvl20 fireball always has 0,85 cast-time and 400 average-damage.
3. Some attacks like heavy-strike have above 100% damage-effectiveness
4. Attacks can profit from auras and ele-mods on equip
5. Some Spells (Arc) are terrible to support

I have seen dps-numbers as high as 100k for some Melees. Not sure how to ever achieve that with Spells even considering shotgunning with LMP.

ES seems kind of like a shitty defense to me anyway, since it is for the most part mutually exclusive with other defensive stats. It somewhat disallows going for another defense (You can be Life+Armor, Life+Evasion, Life+Evasion/Armor, but if you want ES you can't really go Life or Armor or you'll just end up weaker).

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AhlenS wrote:

ES seems kind of like a shitty defense to me anyway, since it is for the most part mutually exclusive with other defensive stats. It somewhat disallows going for another defense (You can be Life+Armor, Life+Evasion, Life+Evasion/Armor, but if you want ES you can't really go Life or Armor or you'll just end up weaker).

Well there are enough Melee-CI builds that proof this wrong... however it also shows that the combination of ES + Caster is problematic, since Casters don't have the ability to sustain ES as Melees with Vaal Pact and Ghost Reaver have.

A couple things:

1. I don't think it is fair to keep bringing up 50-100k DPS on melee. An average char with average equipment won't have anywhere near that, and that is way far and above what you need to kill anything in the game, thus can safely be assumed that if any changes are made, it is to bring down the ridiculous scaling of melee equipment on end-game gear. Trying to change a level 20 fireball to do anywhere near 100k would instantly break the game and anyone with an ounce of logic can see that.

2. The main problem with ES is the game is based off of two concepts: Max health pool and how fast you can regenerate it. ES does fine in the max effective health area, but fails miserably in regeneration. The base 6 seconds is an extremely long time in a fast paced game like PoE, thus forcing any sort of ES play to go for ZO/GR, both of which are out of the Witch starting area.

At the very least, Witch needs some sort of keystone that helps regenerate ES. A ES-on-elemental damage-hit or something.

3. The base crit chance on spells needs to be looked at. Critical hits are supposed to be the Witch's "thing" yet starts with such a low crit chance compared to weapons, at best you are breaking even. Then when you throw in melee IAS and several more weapon nodes, it falls behind again.

4. Perhaps more spell supports would be the answer. Part of the reason why melee attacks can get so high is the multiplication effect from several sources, one of which being support gems. Or perhaps additional caster-specific item affixes. Either way, the issue is damage scaling through gear (or lack there of), and that should be the focus of changes. Messing around too much with the base damage on spells is begging for trouble.

5. Personal rant here: They really should change summon scaling so it is more manageable in the early game. Summons are a great way to make up for a lot of caster issues (such as avoiding attacks to keep ES up and lack of armor/evasion), but the current set-up is extremely frustrating, especially for newer players and/or characters. Summons are near worthless in the beginning of the game and border-lined overpowered in the late... could smooth that out a bit.

The two main problems there is, again, regeneration. Summons have the health pool, even in the early-ish game, but with zero regeneration they will inevitably die fast. Once you support them with LL/LoH, rejuv totems, resists, etc., they become very tanky. But many of those concepts are later-game elements, and strength-based without any easy access to through quest rewards.

Edit: Lulz... said two problems, but only actually stated the one. The other is the elements that make summons tanky/strong are not Int-based. LL/LoH, melee splash, totems, and such are difficult to come by as a starting Witch. If given the choice I'd much rather see those nerfed in some way and given some innate boosts to summons instead. It seems a bit wrong that summons are expected to be Int-based Witch play, yet the best way to play one is essentially as a Marauder.

The ideal fix would be something that kills two birds with one stone: Give Witch area a keystone that helps regenerate ES somehow, and perhaps a few more nodes behind it that transfers over to summons. A way to not only keep their own defenses up, but to support minions without needing to stack a ton of late-game strength-based gems.

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Emphasy wrote:

I have seen dps-numbers as high as 100k for some Melees. Not sure how to ever achieve that with Spells even considering shotgunning with LMP.

Spells usually show significantly lower numbers than their actual damage. For example, Fireball does not show any area increases into its tooltip damage. Penetration, possibly the highest damage increase gem, does not show in tooltips. LMP/GMP show you lower dps numbers, and so on.

You also cannot expect casters to have the same damage as melee. This is basic ranged vs melee balance. And comparing caster damage vs abyssus builds is ridiculous.

While that is still true, it isn't the same hard-set rule it has been in the past. You know, back when melee classes general swung slow and hit one target at a time. Any modern aRPG has melee characters throwing out huge swings and clearing screens of enemies in a few attacks.

There is still a difference between something like firing Split Arrow from a full screen away and needing to run up and Ground Slam, but it isn't significant enough to use as justification anywhere near the lines of "50k+ DPS vs. 4k fireball"

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BGSacho wrote:

Spells usually show significantly lower numbers than their actual damage. For example, Fireball does not show any area increases into its tooltip damage. Penetration, possibly the highest damage increase gem, does not show in tooltips. LMP/GMP show you lower dps numbers, and so on.

You also cannot expect casters to have the same damage as melee. This is basic ranged vs melee balance. And comparing caster damage vs abyssus builds is ridiculous.

As mentioned in my first post but i'll repeat it here : any presumable range advantage a caster has is overshadowed by spectral throw and lightning strike. And the illusion that caster can kite and dps is a complete fallacy. Why? Because casting anything root you in place unlike other games where caster is able to cast and move (slower) at the same time. This alone place caster in a inevitable fate of coming into melee range of late game mobs. And there are just too many game mechanics which make melee range combat a unavoidable situation for caster, flicker strike mobs, leap slam (from out of screen) mobs, fast moving mobs, ground slam mobs, mobs that can only be killed in melee range, bosses that move too much..just to name a few. So in short, the rationale that caster should have a much lower survivability or dps compared to melee has become unreasonable.

The problems with spells is not lacking damage passives - its the limited base damage and limited ways to scale them.

Attacks get their base damage from weapons and accessories/gloves (you can roll x-15 phy dmg on rings and x-22 phy dmg on amulets). A 2-handed weapon, for example, can roll up to 850+ DPS with perfect stats. A 1-handed can roll 540+ DPS, etc.

Spells can only scale from gem levels. Lets look at some spells for example:

lvl 20 Ethereal Knives has a base DPS of 543.5
lvl 20 Fireball has a base DPS of 437
lvl 20 Freezing Pulse has a base DPS of 350
lvl 20 Ice Nova has a base DPS of 175.4

At the start of a league, spell casters (generally EK and FP users) tend to be able to keep up with attack based builds, since the average person would only be using a 200-400 DPS weapon. As time goes on, attack builds find/buy better gear that scales their damage up, while a caster is limited to a lvl 20/22 skill gem (sacrificing one gem slot for Empower if they want the +2). They could also use specialized uniques like Searing Touch and Taryn's Shivers, for example, to get those +gem bonuses.

Also, the thing about spells is that the majority of your spell/elemental damage x% will come from your wand/dagger/scepter/staff/shield. In that sense you get to concentrate more on defensive passives, while attack users have to invest somewhat into damage passives.

However, attackers (mainly melee) get access to more multiplicative damage multipliers such as Weapon Elemental Damage, Added Fire Damage, Melee Physical damage, Melee Damage on Full Life, Multistrike, etc.

The only thing that exclusively "scales" spells is LMP/GMP on a projectile based spell, as spells are allowed to shotgun. Other than that, you could scale AOE spells like Ice Nova with Concentrated Effect - but that is available to AOE Attacks as well.

Penetration gems can also count as "scaling" gems against a low resist target, but they act more as a necessity to combat against game design rather than being a pure bonus. You will often come across single/triple resist monsters in the game, especially bosses. However, there are no monster mods containing "resist physical damage" or "has high armor" etc. Spells are elemental for most part (aside from EK) and hence suffer a huge handicap in damage against such foes. Physical Attack-based classes generally do not have to worry about this, and the armor formula further rewards high physical damage.

The other way you can scale spells (more effectively than attacks) is via critical damage, as spells will never miss. This only works well with some spells however (some only have 4% base crit chance), and there are spells the do not even have a base crit chance (incinerate).

When you look at things in a bigger picture, there is technically a "balance" between the two damage types, but the recent buffs to 2handed weapons and weapon passives, as well as new support gems, have skewed the balance towards the physical attack-based builds.

And so comes the issue at hand - you can't simply raise all base damage on spells just to bring them up to par with attacks (some certainly need it though, like Ice Nova), since you have to consider that high DPS weapons for attackers are not common place, and that spells only rely on gem levels and are accessible to everyone. GGG would need to come up with some way for spell casters to scale their base damage based on gear in order to level the playing field.

The issue at hand here is twofold :
1) caster has much lesser dps than physical damage (melee/bow) thus decreasing their survivability. Compared to bow, spell projectiles move at a much slower speed allowing mobs and bosses to either stepside/ jump over/ flicker/teleport away, so caster has to get close to the mobs to get their spells to hit. So any range advantage is lost there too : another game mechanic which makes spells irrelevant.
2) caster has much lesser effective health than melee. Strength adds to melee dps/health, intelligence adds to energy shield, but even with high int investment, energy shield gears are hard to come by. Without any ES gears on, my ES is 0 with 300+ int.

It's interesting to note that caster here share the same woes as playing a mage in Skyrim. At master difficulty, the gulf between the 2 gameplay becomes evident immediately. Melee oneshotting mobs and live to tell the tale. Mages run around like crazy (losing dps in the meantime) and their fireballs are at best a nuisance to the mobs. However, at least for Skyrim there are community designed mods that "fix" those problem by making spells scale up properly. But for the developer to leave balancing to the community to fix a game design flaw rather than releasing a official patch to acknowledge and fix those issues just leave a bad taste in the mouth.