Really? That’s news to me. Every physique based build I’ve made can use heavy armor. I guess that is what you mean to say? Physique based characters? Even then, if you plan to use heavy armor, and not a caster offhand, or a cunning based ranged weapon, you put all your points in Physique. If you are using a caster off hand, you have to put points in spirit, and ranged users put points in cunning. I think there may be a few options meant for different classes with different requirements too, that may cross the lines.
I meant to say stats in general. Looking at my lower level blues, the tanky items have very few stats on them. Just a few defensive ones mostly. While the caters versions will have a quite a number of stats. Not just energy regen, but just a number of more stats. At higher levels, items in general have more stats, so I have not really compared the differences, so maybe it changes.
While it may be difficult to get to range a lot of the time, ranged users do take less damage while they maintain any form of range. I can feel a large difference in damage intake between a melee, short range, and long range caster. (Short range is like Flames of Ignaffar, it is ranged, just not long range). You do have to constantly move, which is annoying, but you still take a small fraction of the damage.
Melee builds get more defense, and ADCTH. Gun users get less armor and damage, but still get lots of ADCTH. Casters get less armor still, and less ADCTH to none, but get more range, CC and things like Mirror and pets.
The system may not work perfectly, or entirely as intended, but the principles of RPG still appears. I don’t think the solution is to make every character able to use every item at the same time. Perhaps the solution is to make playing at ranged a little easier, or give easier access to healing.
I meant to say stats in general. Looking at my lower level blues, the tanky items have very few stats on them. Just a few defensive ones mostly. While the caters versions will have a quite a number of stats. Not just energy regen, but just a number of more stats. At higher levels, items in general have more stats, so I have not really compared the differences, so maybe it changes.
From what I have seen, its true that caster armor typically have a bit more stats. But that is generally so because they are build around more damage types and have need of damage conversion that are not physical to -> x which can only be found on items and a few specific skill mutators (unlike physical to -> x that are found on exclusive skills and many weapon components). I don’t have a complete oversight so for a better judgement I still have to look through more of the items (maybe some of the testers could offer more insight into this).
While it may be difficult to get to range a lot of the time, ranged users do take less damage while they maintain any form of range. I can feel a large difference in damage intake between a melee, short range, and long range caster. (Short range is like Flames of Ignaffar, it is ranged, just not long range). You do have to constantly move, which is annoying, but you still take a small fraction of the damage.
True, ranged builds are generally safer and receive less damage. But there are exception to this such as iron maiden and large hulk packs that are nearly impossible to kite.
Also with non DoT builds any moment you are kiting you are losing dps.
This leads to many bosses that have movement skills becoming quite frustrating to kill with non DoT ranged builds as you needs to way kite much just to stay alive, making such boss battles take far longer when compared to other builds.
Melee builds get more defense, and ADCTH. Gun users get less armor and damage, but still get lots of ADCTH. Casters get less armor still, and less ADCTH to none, but get more range, CC and things like Mirror and pets.
The system may not work perfectly, or entirely as intended, but the principles of RPG still appears. I don’t think the solution is to make every character able to use every item at the same time. Perhaps the solution is to make playing at ranged a little easier, or give easier access to healing.
I agree on this on this in general. Various builds should feel distinct and have different ways of dealing with various challenges.
However currently I feel there is not much of a reason to play anything but a soldier melee or caster DoT builds (with a few rare exceptions), if you ignore play style, ascetics and basically everything else but the power of the build.
DoT Caster builds deal a large amount of AoE damage while being able to kite without a large dps penalty
Melee soldier builds deal a large amount of single target dps and can become close to immortal while still dealing good dps.
Most other builds just cannot compete with these advantages and while a number of them are fun to play they just feel inferior to the above mentioned builds.
It feels more like the need for physique on ranged/caster builds to survive is the problem. heavy armor is sometimes more appealing because they offer more hp.
the base hp of ranged/caster builds is very low they gain far less hp in general then melee builds but even with capped/overcapped resist some attacks just melt the hp of ranged/casters in seconds.
atleast we got some decision/reward here.
i remember from titan quest where requirements were extremely undertuned/non-existant like the pierce damage immortal tank only using light armor because nothing could hit/affect him anyways and more damage was all he needed :rolleyes:
I will serve as the opposite voice and state the opposite - there needs to be more items in the game with punishing stat requirements, but have the rewards from said items enough to truly make a build viable.
I think the highest Physique requirement is 1077 for some items - there should be items in the game that require over 1000 Cunning or 1000 Spirit in order to use. The question then becomes: is it worth it sacrificing HP/DA just to equip said item?
It would be great if wearing light armor gives bonuses over heavy armor - like wearing all light armor puts the run speed up to 200% while heavy armor can only get to 135%, or if wearing all light armor gives an innate 30% avoidance bonus to make up for the loss of DA (or just make good caster armor that requires 750+ Spirit that gives the best DA bonuses in the game so that heavy armor tanks don’t have easy access to those armor pieces.
I agree with the general sentiment that Physique / Heavy Armor is currently the only way to play if you’re not a DoT kiter. There just isn’t enough caster armor with excellent DA bonuses / avoidance bonuses / damage absorption procs that make it worth using over general heavy armor. I’d like nothing more than to see builds go all Cunning (like the Belgothian build from the expansion) / all Spirit (which I’ve seen nothing so far) because the set items / endgame item proc was just so good the player can easily build around it and the rest of the items would path up survivability issues. I’d rather have real build diversity than Crate take a problem (put all points in Physique) and then design around that flaw as if it were a feature.