Yea, phys focus will be the thing until they ever split defensive stats across all 3 attribute points.
My personal belief is that Physique needs to just be HP/HPregen and brute strength aka physical damage. Cunning needs to be OA, DA, and “cunning” damage aka Bleeds and piercing damage. Spirit should grant %resistances to all resistances, along with energy, energy regen, and magical damage. I think the value I stated back in that suggestion thread was 100 spirit = 3% all resistance. This would mean casters would have to invest far less into defensive stacking, and could double down on offensive stacking to try and function (because quite frankly, casters suck lategame in GD due to only having 3 sources of scaling to weapon damage builds having 4-5 sources of scaling, let alone the fact that weapon damage build scale HIGHER on those sources too.)
Casters already struggle lategame, and this struggle will only become worse every update as we are already peaking pretty much. They can’t grow much more, but weapon damage builds laugh as even a single skill point can add hundreds to thousands to their DPS at times. Casters at best can try and add an extra ability to use on rotation.
Part of this patch’s purpose was to try and diversify value of stat point distribution. I’m just saying that they will never achieve that goal unless they either make Cunning/spirit stupidly overpowered per point invested, physique virtually worthless, or do as I said and actually break the current “Physique is a 1 stop shop for all of your defensive stats from attributes”
If casters got significant resistances from spirit, they could opt to focus a bit more on spirit, and use the resultant opening in their equipment/augment slots/component slots, to itemize for the missing HP/DA they have to deal with, vs resistances they must have just as bad.
Hmm, so far I can’t complain about the “new” OA. Especially on normal enemies it actually feels really nice. If at all it imho should be only reduced for bosses.
died about 30 times on my BM on patch day, before that I only had a handful of deaths in ultimate… yup game is not playable far as I’m concerned right now.
Funny i had just made a post about that before patch day lol. I called out soldier and nightblade. Well OA change just shoved a hot poker up NB’s @!$ so now soldier even more FOTM. And not because it’s OP ironically enough- because it helps guarantee minimum viability.
My sources of DA are 90 physique, 3*survivor’s ingenuity, Trozan set and devotions, after this post I also realized I could ditch turtle in favor of Watcher and get an additional 100 DA + scaled hide at the cost of like 300 hp.
This. My current toon is a battlemage with like 2k armor, 2300 DA, some defensive devotion skills(one of which actually buffs DA up to 2500!), all resistances overcapped except chaos, and now I’m getting absolutely ripped apart by some aetherial trash mobs? Not to speak about my first nemesis encounter after the update(Valdaran), died like 10 times to him, with that defensive stats, wtf???..game is unplayable for me now, sorry. That mob OA numbers in ultimate need to be completely reversed!
I agree, game is basically unplayable as anything but the tankiest of tank characters and even then I dunno because, shockingly, I want to build for the way I want to play! I like playing casters, but holy shit it’s nearly impossible to do such a build without near perfect gear and shoving every devotion into straight defenses. That’s fucking boring. I shouldn’t feel like I’m paddling upstream in a chickenwire canoe for having a desired playstyle that isn’t “get a shitload of defensive gear, hold LMB at enemies while rotating defensive powers, eventually they will fall over if your energy and hp hold out.”
I want to be able to do things like maximize my dps and move around throwing it at enemies. I want to be able to kite things that are worth killing. I want to have a shot at killing bosses and nemeses by doing something other than a witchblade tank, and right now I can’t because the problem of having no actual survival/avoidance tactics be viable is even worse. There’s no CC in this game for anything worth CC-ing. Anything >yellow is practically immune to slow, stun, et al., pet threat is an embarrassment, their taunt just flat out does not work, and that’s all there is in this game that might even qualify. There’s not even a generalized “move X yards in a direction” skill to get away, let alone a “jump X yards backwards” skill that is sorely needed for ranged characters to be able to stay at range.
At the very least, if you’re going to make shit like 2k+ DA and 130% resist all mandatory to play the fucking game, you could at least do us the favor of putting that shit on more than just melee fatbutt gear. All that does is “encourage” (i.e. force) people to play the One True Build with the One True Set and leaves everything else as useless vendor trash. Which is the reason I stopped playing WoW.
I really like the idea of Spirit giving resist to all. It would solve a lot of problems for casters. With the difficulty of getting HP/DA it’s almost more important for casters to cap resists as you don’t have high HP to soak up the damage, or high DA to avoid big damage numbers in the first place.
It’s frustrating trying to make a good caster build and having to gimp offense in both gear and devotions just to stay alive. Spirit giving resists would be a great solution.
Pretty harsh, I must say, but since the devs seem to read those topics this days, after the patch issues, I find this approach justifying.
Yes, atm the game is about standing still and facetanking whatever comes. Pet build is the only exception. There’s no such thing as a ranged build, any ranged build becomes melee in 1 second after engaging.
And the reason for it is long and well identified, as you’ve said - CC doesn’t work on anything except trash.
There are a few other serious flaws, like physique being the only stat actually required to equip top gear, lack of defensive options on mage items and so on. But CC is the main one, and solving it will also solve the lack of defense on mage/ranged characters.
Zantai and guys, PLEASE take a close look at CC resists on bosses. Facetanking shouldn’t be mandatory. Thank you
Seems likely this will be changed in the hotfix, but I just wanted to +1 my support for reverting the changes made. Even Elite feels overtuned now, at least to me. I’ve had a character (admittedly quite offensive in nature) go from cruising without any problems to consistently dying with 1-shots from heroes or MASSIVE burst damage from trash mobs. This is with ~1650 DA and near maxed resistances. Oh, and 3 heal spells (from Occultist + Nightblade + granted skills). In Elite…
We’ve got to see a better balance. I agree with the sentiments above, the current meta is already encouraging full physique investment and mandatory investment into several defensive devotion constellations. Increasing OA enforces this meta even further, which isn’t cool
Mad Queen shredded my full marco’s cadence witchblade build to shreds like it was a wet paper bad. Zero chance at winning that fight with the OA numbers as they currently are. It’s not even a remote possibility. BiS gear mostly. Yeah, it’s pretty nuts.
