Path of life nodes

There are many reasons why behind this

#1 that unlike ever other aRPG , PoE has mechanics that severely punish you the less health you have. Stuns happen more often the less health you have, status effects (shock,freeze,burning) last longer the less health, etc etc. This basically makes health a lot more valuable in PoE compared to any other comparable aRPG, where some status side effect (lets say being frozen) is static, regardless of how much health you have

#2 GGG just did the "copy every other aRPG" mechanic, and they increased difficulty by just increased mob health/damage by ridiculous amounts, instead of doing something more innovative like improving mod AI. Like I said, pretty much every comparable aRPG does this, but when combined with #1, it just makes things that much worse

#3. Negative resistances in higher difficulty levels. This was presumably done so people had a reason to stack resistances, but all its done is force everyone to cap resistances, this has nothing to do with life, until we get to #4

#4. End game bosses do ridiculous amounts of elemental damage. The reason why this is is because of the elemental damage formula. Long story short, the more MR you have, the even more effective it gets at reducing damage. For example, the jump from 0-50% MR is just as strong (in the damage reduced) as the jump from 50-75%. This left GGG in a peculiar position to balance elemental damage. On the one hand, if GGG wanted to improve build diversity (i.e. not forcing everyone to stack MR) they would lower elemental damage done by end game bosses. The problem with this however, is that anyone that would stack MR would be almost immune to boss fights, particularly piety and dominus. So we have the the current position where elemental damage is through the roof, so boss fights wouldn't be trivial for the characters that stack 75% MF, and go above that. Which gets to #5. Also this is a reason why curses, as well as penetration, are pretty much mandatory on elemental damage users, because dropping a monsters MR has a huge impact in how much damage you deal, particularly if the monster is already sitting on high MR (i.e. resists elemental damage mod)

#5. In order to deal with the ridiculous elemental damage, you need a massive HP pool as a buffer. You can easily get oneshot in later maps if you have below 3k health, even if your MR is capped at 75%. Another option is to increase MR, but that isn't possible for every build (similar reason why safrells/aegis shield builds are so popular now is because of #4)

Reasons 1-5 is why PoE is still path of life nodes, its becoming more and more apparent that in order to fix this problem, GGG would have to do some pretty severe changes, including possibly changed how elemental damage is calculated

I have no qualms with the game assuming you have capped res at endgame. You should.

But ele dmg is high.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

I have no qualms with the game assuming you have capped res at endgame. You should.

Which is the problem. Being forced to cap MR

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SL4Y3R wrote:

But ele dmg is high.

Bit of an understatement ;)

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sidtherat wrote:

d3 in reaper of souls is doing something with DMG>ALL

they remove life steal. and as such finally disjoint DPS and SURVIVABILITY

these two being connected with life leech was something that dumbed down arpgs for years..

This is the most intelligent thing I've read all week

Tying a defensive mechanism to of fence creates a situation that makes balance nearly impossible. See riven and Vlad in lol. And the fact that lol has nerfed leech repeatedly.

Leech let's players play stupidly by letting them heal to full. That's why PoE is so full of cheap cheesy one shot mechanics, because damage from monsters is so worthless they need to onehit you or it dosent matter

Sometimes I feel bad for the monsters of wraeclast. Imagine how frustrating it is to watch hundreds of your brothers suicide attack an evil exile and watch him magically heal constantly...

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sodium777 wrote:

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sidtherat wrote:

d3 in reaper of souls is doing something with DMG>ALL

they remove life steal. and as such finally disjoint DPS and SURVIVABILITY

these two being connected with life leech was something that dumbed down arpgs for years..

This is the most intelligent thing I've read all week

Tying a defensive mechanism to of fence creates a situation that makes balance nearly impossible. See riven and Vlad in lol. And the fact that lol has nerfed leech repeatedly.

Leech let's players play stupidly by letting them heal to full. That's why PoE is so full of cheap cheesy one shot mechanics, because damage from monsters is so worthless they need to onehit you or it dosent matter

Sometimes I feel bad for the monsters of wraeclast. Imagine how frustrating it is to watch hundreds of your brothers suicide attack an evil exile and watch him magically heal constantly...

Leech is already nerfed in PoE, its not instant, where as in most aRPG's it is. The only way to make leech instant is with Vaal's pact, which has severe drawbacks. If you are life based, you can't use pots to heal, and if you are CI, you have to travel across the tree to get it

And since life regeneration is different to instant regen, it has ramifications through map mods (such as statis, i.e. can't regen life or mana). In PoE, life leech is mainly used to counter the weakness of blood magic, or so you don't have to rely on pots so much. Its definitely not the same as the "spec purely into offense and rely on lifesteal of defense" issue that you are talking about. If you try this in PoE, you will die constantly, regardless of how much damage or lifesteal you have, especially since lifesteal is based on your max life and its over time. You are not going to die to just burst damage, you are going to die to moderate, or even low damage, if there are enough mobs hitting you

I have to say that this whole point is majorly wrong, and lifesteal is one of the things that PoE did right, its usually a ridiculous mechanic in other games, but PoE making static based leech instant, and scaling based leech over time means that you can't just stack offense and expect to survive solely by leech, moreso than in any other game

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deteego wrote:

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SL4Y3R wrote:

I have no qualms with the game assuming you have capped res at endgame. You should.

Which is the problem. Being forced to cap MR

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SL4Y3R wrote:

But ele dmg is high.

Bit of an understatement ;)

Also, the system of resists used in PoE is just silly. Each point of %-resist helps you more than the previous, up until the next point helps in no way whatsoever (because you've hit cap).

No other mechanic works this way, for good reason: under such a system, the optimal places to be are either capped or with 0% mitigation (chaos resist, for a lot of players, falls into this latter category).

Diminishing returns are a good thing -- increasing returns are kind of ridiculous.

I'm still annoyed I can get 1 shot through 88 resist well granted don't get me wrong I have 4k health or something on my Discharger lol while my ranger who has once again I've stated has a Legacy kaoms heart so OF COURSE shes going to live.

I don't understand "being forced to cap resistances."

If you don't get them really high, then you die faster. If you don't want to die faster then you get them as high as possible. If you don't want a static improvement to resists every single point added in and have it scale, then you have the exact same outcome that people would try to stack the bare min of resist or stack it as high as possible (ala D3)

I don't understand path of life nodes either.

It's a RPG, please enlighten me in what game were it isn't good to stack as much health/resists as possible unless your giving it up to do something else.

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RagnarokChu wrote:

I don't understand "being forced to cap resistances."

If you don't get them really high, then you die faster. If you don't want to die faster then you get them as high as possible. If you don't want a static improvement to resists every single point added in and have it scale, then you have the exact same outcome that people would try to stack the bare min of resist or stack it as high as possible (ala D3)

I don't understand path of life nodes either.

It's a RPG, please enlighten me in what game were it isn't good to stack as much health/resists as possible unless your giving it up to do something else.

The difference between 70% resist and 75% resist is enormous; the difference between 0% and 5% resist is trivial.

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RagnarokChu wrote:

I don't understand "being forced to cap resistances."

If you don't get them really high, then you die faster. If you don't want to die faster then you get them as high as possible. If you don't want a static improvement to resists every single point added in and have it scale, then you have the exact same outcome that people would try to stack the bare min of resist or stack it as high as possible (ala D3)

I don't understand path of life nodes either.

It's a RPG, please enlighten me in what game were it isn't good to stack as much health/resists as possible unless your giving it up to do something else.

Uh, do you understand PoE mechanics? Here, let me drop you a link

http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Resistances

In D3, I definitely did not need to cap resists to progress, in PoE, I definitely do need to cap resists to progress. Its not that you just "die faster", the difference between 75% resistance to 77% resistance can be the difference between one shot, and just getting your health lowered by half

The MR mechanic is utterly retarded, I have no idea why you are defending it

Also regarding pure defense stacking, PoE is also the worst aRPG in this area. In D3 you can almost go pure glass cannon and be viable, and you can do the same in TL2, for the reasons I have outlined earlier

Honestly making MR stack with diminishing returns is the nicest way to solve this problem. That way, you can still continuously stick MR if you want to, and your return are still good (going from 80 resist to 82 resist is a ridiculous jump), but it would definitely equalize the amount of MR that characters can get. The difference between a character fully going MR might be 80%, and doing a decent amount of MR might be 70%, instead of now which would be something like -30% all the way to 88%