Rustic Sash needs a buff due to Heavy Belt

Currently rustic sash gives a bonus 5% physical damage. Seems nice, but there's a bit of a hiccup. Heavy belt can get up to 35 points of base strength. That amounts to 17.5 base health and +7% physical damage to melee attacks.

The issue being, nearly every build that relies on ranged physical damage also picks up iron grip (and most elemental builds grab it too). So the actual trade off comes out to be:

5% physical damage

VS

7% physical damage + 17.5hp.


As you can see, rustic sash in no way shape or form truly competes as an option against heavy belt as it does what rustic sash does better AND gives hp.


Possible changes:

A) 5% Physical damage > 5% Weapon damage

Rustic sash is converted from physical damage to weapon damage, enabling elemental weapon builds to receive utility from it as well.

B) Buff the 5% physical to 14% physical. Calculations below.

If you look at passive tree tradeoffs. 8% physical damage bonus is very common, and non-notable flat life boosts sit at 20hp (literally only found one of these hiding near the shadow start). What this means is the passive tree calculates 2.5hp to be worth 1% bonus damage (by this metric a strength node is equivalent to 4% damage bonus as it's 2% + base 5hp). In order for the sash to compete with the heavy belt, it would need 7% (strength bonus damage) + 7% (equivalent value of 17.5hp in passive points) to be balanced in terms of passive points required to gain the benefit of the sash.

Rustic Sash does however buff EK which is rather nice, if you change it to wep damage then you kill some usefulness. If you buff it to 14% that would be an insane boost. It may need a bit of a boost but nowhere near the 14%.

Also personally to me the implicit mods on belts are just a small bonus(unless I am making a life build) on top of the mod rolls. It has its uses they just may not be as prevalent.

"

Zeshin wrote:

It may need a bit of a boost but nowhere near the 14%.

You can get 8% for a single non-notable passive point, which is more than the rustic sash gives. However you need 3.5 passive points worth of non-notable strength nodes in order to make up the heavy belt.

It only seems like a lot because the heavy belt is actually pretty crazy. As I said, the heavy itself comes with 7% "invisible" physical damage bonus alone. As well as 17.5hp.

14% is quite literally just making it equal to the heavy belt in terms of how many passive points you'd need to spend to get said benefit that way instead. Physical damage nodes are not rare in the slightest, so we're not talking about a trait that's hard to find.

But why should it get something equivalent to something in the passives tree?

Also why should all items be equal?

The passive tree is simply a means for comparing value. You can value item benefits by the number of passive points you'd have to spend to get it.

Basically, if I wanted the benefits of heavy belt and rustic sash, I could wear one and use passive points to get the other benefit. Now, avoiding notables and hard to reach passives, how many points do I need?

Wearing a rustic sash, I'd need to spend 3.5 points to get 35 strength (now this is a little unfair since strength nodes are meant to be lower value connectors, realistically I'd value it more along the lines of 1.5-2.0 passive points).

Wearing a heavy belt, I'd need ***Less than one passive point*** to make up the value of rustic sash.

The only difference is ranged attacks not getting the physical benefits from heavy, but as I mentioned basically all physical damage builds take iron grip. I've never seen anything except noob builds... no scratch that. I've literally never seen a physical related ranged build that doesn't take iron grip.

So that issue is utterly moot for this discussion. If you want the benefits of both rustic sash and heavy belt (and they're both aimed at the same build anyway, so why wouldn't you), it would be stupid to take the rustic sash over the heavy belt unless it has 14% or more physical damage benefit. At that point, wearing one belt and buying the passives to make up the other would make both belts perfectly equal.

Above 14%, the heavy belt would be underpowered. Below it's underpowered.

Perhaps even more conflicting is that right now, both belts have very little difference in how they operate. The sole and very small difference would likely be the physical caster etherial knives shadow. They do however have the ability to pick up iron will support gem I do believe.



Edit: Not all things should be equal, but what's the point of having an item that plays a very similar role to another, but is vastly inferior on all accounts? You might as well just not have said item exist at all. Rustic sash being a lvl 2 item compared to leather belt being lvl 10 is not a significant difference, you cross that gap in 30 minutes to an hour easily.

I'd rather just see the rustic sash be moved into another role, rather than making a massively inferior item compared to another. Switching it to omni damage, or even spell damage. That would justify keeping the value. Sure it might be inferior to a mage compared to a physical archer wearing a heavy belt, but at least there'd be some reason to use it.

I do agree the rustic sash is a bit niche (and kind of a dumb niche at that, as you show, heavy belt is strictly better for that niche, save for EK builds as pointed out). Would there be any harm in making it roll between 5% and 10% IPD? An 8% or higher roll would make the belt superior for damage compared to a heavy belt, which would be fine if you don't care for the life (let's say you're a CI build).

I also believe some base types should be inferior to others, as it makes rares more interesting that way, but I do think the rustic sash is way too weak right now.

Ranged builds that don't include IG: Invalesco's EB EK build. Also I have seen a few really good Ranger builds that use CI/GR and focus on running through the caster area crit nodes and use frenzy as a mainly physical damage build. IG is mainly for Duelist/Marauder ranged builds.
However, both of these builds will not take a Rustic Sash either...

That being said I also believe it needs a slight buff but even though you can compare it to the passive tree that doesn't always equate to item balance. Personally I want them to add some sort of crit chance % belt.