This medal could use some stat upgrades. OA and resists seem fine to me, but its other stats could use some improvements. I am referring to the Reduced Requirement stat, it shouldn’t be restricted to Melee Weapons anymore and should affect Caster Off Hands as well.
Equipping Caster Off hands (as pointed out by Ptriodaktill) is ridiculously expensive. 724 spirit is so ridiculously high that on very rare occasions even Arcanists might have to put a point or two into spirit
Spirit itself has crappy damage returns and little to no bonus to energy reserves. Not to mention on some builds it is difficult to get 2.7k effective DA (minimum for main campaign) even when using Runebound Topaz so every point in Physique actually counts
Since a feedback thread regarding the off hand spirit requirement issue has been overlooked the least we could get is BoM helping us with equipping those Tomes. Of course it’d be great if spirit requirements of Off hands is revisited.
I won’t bother suggesting buffing spirit as at this stage of the game I think the common sentiment is that “it’s just how it is”. People have gotten used to it, so reducing the costs is all I am going to as for
Taking into account current spirit requirements for off-hands the proposal seems reasonable to me. We can also consider to buff Gildam Arcanum Commendation in the same way as well. According to Grim Dawn Tools DB only 2 medals provide reduced requirement stats.
I’ve said it in the last thread, and I’ll say it this one: actively attempting to change the metagame focus so that “anything that doesn’t fit the ‘thou must put every attribute point in Physique’ command has to be ‘revisited’ (which really means complained about over and over again until Zantai relents and changes it) so that it all must fit the command” is a poisonous way to balance the game. Getting up to 19% CDR and huge Energy regeneration already helps separate off-hands from simply being crappy Shields; there should be a cost to them and people should actually feel that cost. You shouldn’t be able to equip 100% heavy gear, put everything in Physique, give no indication that you’re actually using caster spells, but still be able to equip an off-hand (unless you’re part Arcanist, that is). Tomes are meant to be bristling with magical energy; why should warriors who haven’t seen a spell in their lives somehow be able to equip them?
Casters should be differentiated from Sword & Board melee which can facetank whatever is thrown their way. This can be done in a number of ways:
The standard approach of providing huge absorption skills whose cooldown is high enough that it requires off-hands to reliably chain-cast them [Mainly referring to Ptirodaktill’s Spellbinder just as the expansion came out].
Provide access to offensive abilities that prove the adage- “the best defense is a good offense” [Devastation mainly, and this includes tomes that have really good modifiers on skills]
Provide skills with a huge amount of regeneration / mitigation [remember that ABCbarbecue has a Cabalist that beats 170 Gladiator with 2300 DA]
Give caster classes abilities that create considerable chances of fumble / impaired aim.
If I were in charge, I would make it so every off-hand is essentially build-defining in at least one of these 4 regards, while increasing their Spirit requirement. There are many ways people can go about this while not touching the stat requirements:
Your BoM suggestion and the Gildam medal suggestion are good, that idea gets a +1 from me.
It’s odd that both Dryad and Crane reduce Spirit requirements even though they’re both Order constellations. I’d find a way to place one of those elsewhere in the devotion map so that more builds can have access to them.
Ensure that every caster set has a healthy amount of Spirit so that whoever attempts to build around a caster set has no problem at all fulfilling the requirements while saving the rest of the gear to shore up resistances / defenses.
Provide a few off-hands with extremely good “proc when hit by Critical Attack” abilities. That allows casters to time their MoE’s / Blade Barrier’s to make the best of the fact that they may not have the required DA. This should be in addition to, not replace, any of the 4 marks of caster users I have above.
There are additional ways we can go about this as well, but people already complain enough about the “if your build doesn’t have every point in Physique, it’s garbage” claptrap already. There’s no need to exacerbate the problem by accepting that statement as gospel and attempting to redesign the game around that premise.
OT: I’d like to see some Belts give -% Spirit Req’s for offhands as well as more medals; BoM needn’t be the only source.
It seems a little silly that one can amass ~-50% Cunning Requirements for Ranged Weapons when they cap out at 551, and yet Offhand Spirit Requirements top out above 700 yet -% Spirit Req is essentially nonexistent.
Way to add absolutely nothing to the discussion but still had the aching need to tell the world how dismissive you are of my opinions. No-effort snark, 0/10. Triharder.
Ptirodacktill’s original thread was referring to a Purifier, but didn’t state which off-hand the build was going to use and what gear supplements it. It does speak to a larger balancing issue: if one wants to build around a 26/16 skill, and the off-hand is necessary to obtaining the maximum ranks (especially if the off-hand also contains a really good modifier for said skill), how does the equipment match up to support it? If the gear supports that skill better than anything else, but leads to attribute requirement problems, then buffing that particular gear with Spirit bonuses would help the builds out greatly.
Looking at specific tomes which can be utilized better is probably a better way of approaching this than asking for wholesale changes to off-hands as a whole. Finding synergies between otherwise little-used equipment would really help in building ideas. Anything to take away from “take generic best equipment (like Justice set is for Fire builds) and add generic best jewelry (usually Judicators + MoD) and now you get to add generic best off-hand to that as well.”
Not everyone plays an Arcanist and even then not everyone uses Devastation. On Arcanists I was very specific when I said “1 or 2 points into spirit”
1-2 points into Spirit OR even 4-5 points into the stat ARE NOT absrud if you ask me.
But Arcanist has innate spirit scaling and yet I have to spend even a single stat on the most useless stat in the game is troublesome
I might have misinterpreted what you’ve said but I do not think the spirit requirements on Off Hands need to be increased. Despite Spirit being useless I am still fine paying the cost on non-Arcanists when equipping CASTER ARMOR. On some builds caster armor is exceptionally expensive yet it is an understandable price. But off-hand costs are just out right ridiculous
As Ceno said we already have various ways to reduce Cunning requirements and Physique requirements (to go full Cunning for Main Campaign). So I don’t see any reason for Spirit to receive any special treatment. It’s not as if CDR builds are the only tier-1 builds out there.
Lastly we have some exceptions in shields such as the Will of the Living, Untouchable and Spellscourge Bulwark that have some valuable CDR. As Funky pointed out some green shields can roll with a decent CDR value as well
And reduce the CD on the granted skill
I only suggested BoM cause it’s the only one with -x% Requirements stat that I could think of at the time (of course there are more).
I did forget about belts though, yeah them getting the stat makes sense.
In hindsight the title of the thread could’ve been differently phrased.
Maybe I have never been lucky which is why I never noticed this till now. This might prove useful to create some whacky build
Your signature reminds me that Zantai never gave us podzemele bagels :mad:
When I was saying I would increase the requirements, I was simply stating a hypothetical about how I would design caster off-hands if I were a lead designer. If you aren’t an Arcanist that uses the CDR to chain cast MoE + other damage absorption skills, I don’t see many off-hands out there that say, “wow, these skills are really great, I’d totally invest in points so I can use that!”. The fact that people are panicking that they have to spend 1, 5 or even 20 attribute points (out of 105, mind you) on Spirit is more troubling to me. New players aren’t going to realize off the bat that Physique is everything, and there are plenty of players that already put 10 Spirit points at around level 50, and we don’t really have any way to guide them to say, “those Spirit points don’t have to be useless, there are casters that can be just as good as facetank everything players, just guide yourself to this gear or this gear.”
If Arcanist is one of my masteries and I need to invest into the most useless stat then there’s something wrong there
CDR arcanist won’t be affected by 1-5 points that much but the cost reduction would greatly benefit non-Arcanists
Also i said not everyone uses Devastation, never said anything about chain-mirroring
Wrath of Agrivix, TSS are pretty impressive nukes for certain builds
I was referring specifically to Devastation because it is a skill that requires an off-hand in order to use it (yeah yeah Spellscourge shield yeah yeah). You do not need to have an off-hand in order to use TSS or Callidor’s.
There’s only a handful of equipment that gives bonuses that are caster off-hand locked: mainly the Outcast Secret helm and the Eternity relic. Other than that and some cool stuff like Obliteration beam, there’s not much that off-hands have that CDR shields don’t already have.
Agree, try to reach the spirit req for an off-hand on a non-Arca and you’ll struggle to even wear good armors if you’re not Soldier either.
Currently had a plan for a build using Farath Cube, Lightbringer Set and Arcanum Electrolis but there’s simply no way to make that work since even devotion to reduce weapon spirit req don’t work on off-hands.
Wait, what?
The reduction just isn’t showing for me then, it does with the cunning req on firearms though.
Talking about the Crane and Dryad spirit req reductions.
If we say that caster off-hand requirements should be lowered to enable non caster masteries to use them, then it must also be the case that we lower physical requirements to enable casters to don heavy armour or wield heavy weapons otherwise we create an inequality (true iff !stacking phys).
My experience thus far is that ranged weapons are the most difficult to equip as a caster due to high cunning requirements. But isn’t that the point? Not every mastery can equip every item. I’ve certainly had to add points into spirit (as a Warlock) to enable certain off-hands, but that made perfect sense to me; what I find a little odd, every time I do it, is being able to don heavy armour or wield a giant maul easily because I followed the advice of stacking phys. I would expect to be penalised for trying to have my cake and eat it, but in terms of casters this isn’t the case if we simply dump all our attribute points into phys. The penalty rears its head in relation to off-hands, and other items that an individual may wish to try, that require something other than brawn.
If anything the sudden need to put points into spirit or, occasionally, cunning shows that the advice to stack phys is misguided and driven by other agendas such as Health/DA. And that stacking phys is, in fact, counter to the notion of specific masteries. If we look at the game as function optimisation then such things are naturally a matter of balancing a series of variables. Making that easier achieves only that.
I’d already made up my mind that with the next attribute reset potion drop that I get I will be distributing those points far more widely than I have thus far.
I never intended this to be my suggestion. (If things got lost in translation then I apologize)
My suggestion was to allow non-Arcanist CASTERS to be able to equip off-hands w/o spending retarded amount of points in spirit
Occultist, Necromancer are two good examples of caster masteries.
Nah, it’s probably me that got lost! Just been discussing this on twitch and most agree with the stack phys argument. I’m unconvinced but I don’t seek to optimise my characters.
The first thread that dealt with the subject was saying to reduce all off-hand costs to barely over 500 Spirit (an outright 30% reduction cost), which would have allowed every archetype under the sun to equip these off-hands, so my mistake for reading that into your intentions, Chthon.
All of us agree that more equipment choices to help reduce Spirit requirement costs for specific classes that need it- whether it’s through Badge of Mastery or the Gildam medal, Belts or Chestpieces that reduce spirit requirements, or more equipment that provides great Spirit bonuses - is always a good thing to have. It’s great to have confirmation that both Dryad and Crane help with this as well, but it will hardly help anyone who isn’t touching the Order constellations, so changing it so that Dryad helps reduce Spirit requirements for Melee weapons while another constellation like Scholar’s Light adds a -10% Spirit requirement for off-hands will help more players reach the requirements easier while keeping the devotion structure that helps them reach their T3 requirements.
Otherwise, looking at each off-hand that could be build-defining, but is too hard to build around to accomplish anything, would help better direct how to better assist players. Briefly scanning the list, there’s a good number of off-hands that Shamans can build around between the pet-related off-hands (the Wraith off-hand that leads to permanent Primal Spirit) and lightning-related items (Storm Totem and Wind Devils), but outside of Eye of the Storm relic, there isn’t much that helps Shamans equip what they want, and Shaman isn’t a particularly Spirit-heavy mastery in the first place. In fact, looking at belts, the only belts that provide great Spirit bonuses are Girdle of Stolen Dreams and Sash of the Bloodlord, and Occultists are not exactly lacking for Spirit points. Checking out which equipment pieces would lead to better synergy if they were buffed is a pretty large undertaking that I can’t go into, but is definitely something someone should consider placing into further feedback threads.
EDIT: Forgot that a good number of Melee weapons use Spirit as well, so changed my suggestion a bit. As an aside, why does Wolverine reduce Physique requirements for Melee Weapons? Has there ever been an issue where someone wanted to equip a Melee weapon but didn’t have enough Physique for it?
If 30% Reduced Spirit requirement is stackable through various sources then I can live with it but a direct 30% reduction sounds too much. A 10% reduction sounds nice
Highest phys requirement, for 2-handers, is 650. Given that phys is the meta this might as well be no requirement at all. Also a bit of a curious difference vs the 724 for off-hands.
Edit: the only use of these phys req reducers is for pure cunning builds. In theory you can do a pure spirit build, but just thinking about that gave me a headache.
