Aren't RF builds extremly punished from certain Map Mods?

Hexproof posts are the trend now on this forums, as it just break many builds that rely on curses to be viable, both in DPS (mostly casters) and survability terms. Now I want to analize how bad some mods are for RF builds.

If you want to use RF, you have to build around it with a lot of life regen and high fire resistance, so without it you lose like half of your damage. These mods simply don't allow you to run it:

-x% maximum Player Resistances (15-25)
I'm running RF with 90% fire resist. With lvl 20 gems I'll be able to reach 92%, so at the best case, I'll go down to 77%. Even with a fire flask, something I'm using as a "push to regen like a sky-rocket", it will drain a lot of HP/sec. And don't tell me that I need to run with 5 fire flasks... thats not an option. And thats the best case with a -15 mod and max level at Purity of Fire gem.

Players recover Life, Mana and Energy Shield 50% slower
With this mod, I'll need to have at least a 14% HP/s regen with 92% fire res, if my maths don't fail. Something hardly achievable.

Players cannot regenerate Life or Mana
I think I don't need to say anything about this mod with RF xD.

Players have Blood Magic
Thinking that you need Vitality and Purity of Fire auras to make RF viable, you will reserve 30% of your life. You will cast your spell from life, for me "just" 93 mana. Even with life leech, and some positive regen, higher level maps are very risky after losing 1/3 of your life. And also it makes me lose a lot of DPS from not running Hatred.

..............

Why I'm talking about this? Well, rolling maps with trans/augment/alts is viable, you just need to avoid these mods using some more alts, not very expensive. But when you start running higher ones with alch/scour/chaos, you will meet a lot of times these mods, and you need to choose: run it without RF (why I make this build then???) or just drop another chaos, and another, and another, and... If you choose to make an EK build with Crit, you will be able to run these mods easily and reach the same DPS (or even higher), so, what are my options? Struggle with this build wasting a lot of chaos rolling maps or make another char?

It seems that RF got extremly nerfed so it isn't worth running. Always when people talk about it, it seems that is a heavy imbalanced skill, but after using it the reality is that the DPS is not so huge as any critical spell oriented build, and the drawbacks at map mods are much worse than most builds have to face.

Maybe I'm losing something and those mods are doable with RF with certain tweaks. Would like to read how people with experience running RF at high level maps play.

I was running high life RF, which is a very fun build. However, all the things you say are correct. I retired the character because playing around map mods is so constrictive. Additionally vulnerability makes things hard, but at least still manageable.

It's interesting how these downsides were completely ignored as an argument before 1.0, when the crowds were pushing to nerf RF sporkers.

Now that people are playing with RF on their life builds because nothing else really works anymore, something that low life RF builds had no choice but to work around (with insanely expensive gear, switching out gear sets, downright turning off RF etc.) is suddenly a huge issue.

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exit_zero wrote:

It's interesting how these downsides were completely ignored as an argument before 1.0, when the crowds were pushing to nerf RF sporkers.

Now that people are playing with RF on their life builds because nothing else really works anymore, something that low life RF builds had no choice but to work around (with insanely expensive gear, switching out gear sets, downright turning off RF etc.) is suddenly a huge issue.

All these problems are made VASTLY larger due to the RF changes. Let's assume prepatch you had something like 500 HP and 4000 ES. RF is doing 12.5% of your ES per second, at 0 resists. At 75% resist it's doing 3.1% of your ES per second. Given how high the dps generally was on these builds I would certainly expect them to be able to leech that with RF on. Not that I have the range of -max resist on maps memorized, but let's just say it's 75%. So even with NO RESISTS they're taking only 12.5% per second, but now you get regen which can make up for most of that with regen, and probably be leeching. Let's go a step further, no regen, no resists. Can a high DPS build leech 12.5% per second, I would guess so. Taking it to it's max and adding vulnerability. 12.5% 8 1.4 gives 17.0% / sec. That would certainly be a challenge, but these builds had hella DPS with RF + PA, I would expect they could hit the 20% leech cap, though it would certainly be a challenge. Also as gear goes up ES goes up and you take lower effective damage from RF.

As for high life, -max resists is straight up impossible. 50% regen should be workable at high gear levels. No regen should be workable at very high gear levels with lots of flask downing. Vulnerability is workable. Any combination of those is unworkable. As it turns out, taking 9X or more damage makes things play out very differently.

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Saffell wrote:

I was running high life RF, which is a very fun build. However, all the things you say are correct. I retired the character because playing around map mods is so constrictive. Additionally vulnerability makes things hard, but at least still manageable.

Yeah, vulnerability hurts too much too, forgot to talk about it. So the problem rises when any of these mods come together.

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exit_zero wrote:

It's interesting how these downsides were completely ignored as an argument before 1.0, when the crowds were pushing to nerf RF sporkers.

Now that people are playing with RF on their life builds because nothing else really works anymore, something that low life RF builds had no choice but to work around (with insanely expensive gear, switching out gear sets, downright turning off RF etc.) is suddenly a huge issue.

The "nerf to spokers" claim was not because they did huge amounts of dps. It was because they could stack tons of IIR/IIQ without losing too much survability or damage. Also, as far as I know, most people needed to be rich to buy Shavs to make low life viable end game, or they were just suicidal MF bombs to gain massive currency. Anyway, I'm not so experienced with that build since I stopped playing it after farming for some time becase boredom, so I can't talk much about it.

I'm just trying to expose that certain mods are a huge issue for RF, yes. Much more mods than any other build can have as downsides. I could turn off RF? Of course, but whats the point of building around it if you cannot use it in half of your maps? I would do it better with a critical build with only one mod that I couldn't do, phys reflect, nothing more.

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RaGoNXIII wrote:

If you want to use RF, you have to build around it with a lot of life regen and high fire resistance, so without it you lose like half of your damage. These mods simply don't allow you to run it:

Most builds have mods that are difficult or impossible to play.

Try doing Blood Magic with a CI build.

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Artanthos wrote:

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RaGoNXIII wrote:

If you want to use RF, you have to build around it with a lot of life regen and high fire resistance, so without it you lose like half of your damage. These mods simply don't allow you to run it:

Most builds have mods that are difficult or impossible to play.

Try doing Blood Magic with a CI build.

apart from BM being an idiotic mod for maps since ti restricts a ton of builds, it is still only a single mod vs all the -regen ones -max resist +burn damage etc that resticts RF.

RF is imo a fun but niche build though, so i don't know how you could balance all the maps around it.

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Artanthos wrote:

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RaGoNXIII wrote:

If you want to use RF, you have to build around it with a lot of life regen and high fire resistance, so without it you lose like half of your damage. These mods simply don't allow you to run it:

Most builds have mods that are difficult or impossible to play.

Try doing Blood Magic with a CI build.

As shroudb said, is just one mod, a mod that shouldn't be there, versus 4-5 that can even combine to make your build trash. This is not a QQ thread, I would like to know how people using RF do it, and also make GGG notice that there is a big problem with RF in terms of balance with pros/cons looking other spellcaster builds. Probably people just throw another chaos to the map, but hell, I'm not sooo rich.

This was the case for life RF all along and main reason why RF is niche. I don't think GGG wants to give balance maps around specs...

On the other hand RF was changed quite and i suspect it's troublesome skill for them. Maybe we are doing it wrong building around RF and it's not intended to keep the buff for longer time and fact that it's possible is just errror in system.

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shroudb wrote:

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Artanthos wrote:

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RaGoNXIII wrote:

If you want to use RF, you have to build around it with a lot of life regen and high fire resistance, so without it you lose like half of your damage. These mods simply don't allow you to run it:

Most builds have mods that are difficult or impossible to play.

Try doing Blood Magic with a CI build.

apart from BM being an idiotic mod for maps since ti restricts a ton of builds, it is still only a single mod vs all the -regen ones -max resist +burn damage etc that resticts RF.

RF is imo a fun but niche build though, so i don't know how you could balance all the maps around it.

My summoner will never run a -regen map.

Doing very little direct damage, she would have no means of recovering hp/mana.