Balancing Offense and Defense

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

I had the idea of creating this thread when the damage nerfs came in and multiple DW melee builds have a danger of dying much more often due to the lack of defensive options. I wanted to quote this message because it encapsulates the danger of nerfing certain strategies without adding anything to make up for it:

By the looks of the theorycrafted builds in FG, S&B with heavy Retaliation is going to be the new “meta” and I’m not fond of the cycle of having certain build archetypes dominate only for them to be nerfed into oblivion and having the next type dominate. First it was the DA meta, then casters with invulnerability skills and Time Dilation, then pet builds, then heavy weapon damage melee with Ghoul and Dying God for the Crit damage. Sometimes the nerfs are appropriate, sometimes the nerfs are so much that it outright kills that particular archetype.

I’d personally like to see more balance in the types of build archetypes that have a good chance of succeeding in Crucible, Shattered Realms, etc.

  • DW Melee - Often seen as “The Best Defense is a Good Offense.” Offensive builds are much harder to build around because whether you survive or not is wholly dependent on how much damage you output. I’m not a fan of “Stack ACDTH and then get Dying God for massive Crits” because it highly reduces the number of viable devotion combinations, but you definitely want to reward people who smartly stack damage with getting the appropriate secondary resists (Slow, Trap, Stun, Freeze).
    Having auto-attack abilities that also give great bonuses like Shaman’s Savagery and Oathkeeper’s AA is a great start, but I’d like to see great damage somewhat mitigated by forcing the player to forego the highest damage devotions and build for more defense. After all, if massive damage made everything a non-threat, there’s no point in build for anything outside of increasing numbers. Having Nightblades atone for their squishiness by Shadow Dance + Fumble + Impaired Aim is fine, but %Dodge and %Deflect are useless for most enemy abilities, and %Fumble is far too RNG for people to rely on it to withstand heavy Nemesis barrages.

  • Invulnerability or DoT Casters - These builds went off the map after the Arcanist nerfs - outside of the Agrivix set, the type of Caster builds that could see success fell off drastically. With movement runes becoming more often, it’s a lot easier to use big DoT skills like transmuted DEE or Calidors and then smartly kite until the big AoE damage spells and invulnerability abilities come off cooldown. A big reason they drifted off is because there’s little difference between 12/12 Mirror and 22/12 Mirror. I think casters should be as invulnerable as Ptiro’s old Clairvoyant Spellbinder if you can somehow combine 22/12 Mirror with 20/10 MoT. After all, you’re sacrificing to hardcap those abilities, and it could give use to lesser known items that would otherwise have no purpose.
  • Heavy Tank Builds - These will probably hit FG strong, as the combination of high health, high armor, high damage absorb, high DA and the new Retal to Attack method will diversify the types of builds that would succeed. The larger issue with these builds was a combination of low OA and low damage to the point that no defensive options would keep you from a Nemesis Barrage.
    It would be nice for heavy defensive equipment builds to be able to use heavy damage devotions, while medium defensive builds would not be able to use them because they’re defenses would not be enough. Building in this way would increase the diversity of devotion options, because now there’s little that prevents the dominance of Ghoul / Revenant / Dying God combo.

  • Healing /Regeneration Builds - It would be wonderful to see more builds like these, but outside of sets that specifically build for it like the Avenger set, there’s no reason to build around these.
    Adoomgod is on the hunt trying to buff more regen items so that they can be a viable strategy. Kiters would love to have something like this so that if they mess up and get swarmed, they can retreat and heal up before the next barrage begins. In my experiences, having 2 active heals + decent regen (over 500 Health Regen) is the minimum for a healing build to comfortably fight hard enemies, but there aren’t many ways to combine this and have the necessary damage.

    Perhaps classes like Demo who don’t have active heals should instead have great regen abilities. There’s no reason for something like Blood of Dreeg to not only have much higher regen than Vindicative Flame, but better benefits like OA and flat damage too.

  • Debuff Builds - Sadly, I have not seen many builds rely on massively crippling even Nemesis level enemies with -Slow, -OA / DA, reduced damage, fumble, impaired aim because Nemeses just hit too hard for those to really make an impact. Now that the DA meta is dead, there’s no point in having those massive OA debuffs, and Nemeses have so high Slow Resistance that you need massive amounts of Slow just to get some spacing against them.
    Thank you for the sets that allow you to Blade Trap / OFF bosses, it’s nice to see more build options like this that rely on medium damage and heavy debuffs instead of all damage, all the time.
2

I will leave few comments based on my experience of making those builds and playing with them.

DW-melee builds were indeed one of the strongest in the last couple of patches. But I am not sure nerfing them was a good idea. And here is why: I don’t think they were making it really far in Shattered Realms. In Crucible you build around damage but also you have to have a certain level of DA/Armor/Phys res/CC-res (one exception was N&O Infiltrator that was completely broken) and that was enough to put down watered down Nemeses quickly given that you had a great help from Blessings and a Vanguard banner. Without blessings and banners those builds were not going to be that great in tough situations that gonna occur in deep Shards. Like my infamous Korba Trickster with N and O couldn’t really handle Lokarr and Deathmarked Trickster could only do it with stun resist boots and fire resist potion.

So yeah, DW-melee is getting nerfed, but I don’t think they were making it far in Shards anyway.

2H-melee is going to be in a worse spot for obvious reasons.

Nerfing invulnerability spells will affect a lot of casters that are not Inquisitors or Spellbinders. Casters had tough times in Crucible 150-170 already, not sure how are they going to cope in shards.

Not sure if there is such thing as “Debuff build” but debuffing enemy’s OA helps tonns if you can stack 400 and more.

3

Didn’t realize you were testing with us, you should post more bug reports!

4

Small note of debuffing nemesis with blade trap or OFF, that doesn’t really work, or even at all. With blade trap, even with all the items you need, you can trap a nemesis for all of one second. OFF doesn’t work at all, you can’t freeze the target until you debuff it, but the debuff depends on being able to freeze the target (even a night’s embrace won’t help here). The only debuff that works with any noticeable effect is on OA/DA.

5

All those playtesters trying to go as far as possible in the Shattered Realm with DW builds are imaginary constructs created by Zantai. :rolleyes:

6

It would be cool to know what builds “they” test with and what they test.

When nerfing say CT+Dev spellbinders. Do they test both shattered realm, MQ, Lokarr, Crucible, the new FG bosses/nemeses etc or do they just do veteran Log? :rolleyes:

7

We step outside Devil’s Crossing and kill a zombie.

8

No wondering everything gets nerfed :rolleyes:

9

For debuff builds, I was referring more to Superfluff’s Cataclysm Deceiver that has -126 Speed debuff to make enemies slow enough that kiting is easier or Superfluff’s Drain Essence Apostate that has the massive OA shred.

Something that’s more unique than just go for massive damage, because then you have more a choice between going for more damage and going for equipment that gives bonuses to Blood Boil / Wasting and use the appropriate skills for great devotion proccing as well as their debuffs. Unfortunately, outside of OA shredding with Rumor / Rend, there are not many devotions that give good debuffs. Having a T2 debuff that has good stackable DA shred would be great for builds that have trouble with low OA, which would provide actual choices to make when mapping your devotion layout.

10

I think the whole damn point is to have some builds do better in Crucible and some do better in SR. But anything sub 7 in crucible is probably calling for a nerf from many people’s perspective and anything at or sub 6 certainly would have Z’s attention if he had more time to spare for balance.

I test on Shards 75, 50, 25 (usually 2 of the three, depending on how strong I think the build/items are) and on campaign content. I don’t test for Crucible because I don’t like Crucible. It would also be wise to stop believing that playtester feedback encompasses a significant amount of the balance patches. Most of it comes from the community and Z’s own views and vision.

I’d say the playtesters work just make up a non-negligible minority of the patch notes. And also keep in mind that that’s because we give a largely disproportionate amount of feedback compared to others. We are giving lots and lots of feedback and only a fraction of that makes it in.

Furthermore our main priority is finding game-breaking or fun-killing bugs, talking about how sets/enemies feel etc. Is something too easy/too hard? Generalized stuff. This is so that hopefully, when the product is released people have a over-all smooth and fun experience.

Nitty gritty balancing has, again, always been fan charity that Zantai gives the whole community, mostly in his off-work hours/free time. And often it’s a 2 steps forward 1 step back process. I also feel that people (understandably) underestimate how inter-connected all the systems in GD are. Try to tone down one build, hurt all these others. Tone up one thing to help a bunch of builds, suddenly one of them is OP. Etc. Then factor in that every player has a different sense of what “balanced” actually means/looks like. It’s not easy trying to please such a diverse fan base.

But don’t you worry. Post release I’ll be sure to complain about allllll the OP builds :p;)

11

I don’t want to be annoyingly negative, but nemesis have 90% slow resist and there’s no way to lower that, I don’t see the point myself.

12

My responses in green.

13

I can understand the nerf on ridiculous crucible speed like under 5 min CT spellbinder or the 5min infiltrator as those were just ridiculous, but why is under 7min considered OP? most builds at that point needed BIS gear and 4 buffs to clear under 7 min, and that only allow you to run around 3x with 4 buffs, getting your tributes back.

Consider you play the game to feel powerful and that 3x run makes a good, profitable run tribute wise, not to mention you need 4 buffs for it, i don’t see why it is abnormal.

14

So it doesn’t seem like I’m only here to troll, I’ll drop my own thoughts from a mechanical standpoint, if devoid of speculative insight for FG specifically.

DW Melee - Often seen as “The Best Defense is a Good Offense.” Offensive builds are much harder to build around because whether you survive or not is wholly dependent on how much damage you output. I’m not a fan of “Stack ACDTH and then get Dying God for massive Crits” because it highly reduces the number of viable devotion combinations, but you definitely want to reward people who smartly stack damage with getting the appropriate secondary resists (Slow, Trap, Stun, Freeze).

Having auto-attack abilities that also give great bonuses like Shaman’s Savagery and Oathkeeper’s AA is a great start, but I’d like to see great damage somewhat mitigated by forcing the player to forego the highest damage devotions and build for more defense. After all, if massive damage made everything a non-threat, there’s no point in build for anything outside of increasing numbers. Having Nightblades atone for their squishiness by Shadow Dance + Fumble + Impaired Aim is fine, but %Dodge and %Deflect are useless for most enemy abilities, and %Fumble is far too RNG for people to rely on it to withstand heavy Nemesis barrages.

I’m a little confused as to what your point here is, or what you’d want to see. In one moment you advocate for wanting DW to need to stack defenses more, but in the next you correctly note that such defenses are largely inept for truly surviving an onslaught of Nemeses.

DW melee has long been my preferred playstyle and I don’t soon expect that to change. It afford a high-risk/high-reward gameplay with ADCTH, with lots of rubberbanding in one’s health. I know that my partner in crime, adoomgod, isn’t really a fan of the fact that ADCTH can heal you to full in an instant or be totally ineffectual, but the alternatives are that it’s either perpetually insufficient to survive the burstiness GD offers in its enemies or it’d be perpetually overpowered and the de-facto means of survival. That there’s always a chance of death is what truly makes DW melee so much fun to me, and the addition of movement runes, expanding upon our ability to kite and dance between enemy attacks, should raise what I find to be the skillcap for a very precise micromanaging gameplay experience.

Invulnerability or DoT Casters - These builds went off the map after the Arcanist nerfs - outside of the Agrivix set, the type of Caster builds that could see success fell off drastically. With movement runes becoming more often, it’s a lot easier to use big DoT skills like transmuted DEE or Calidors and then smartly kite until the big AoE damage spells and invulnerability abilities come off cooldown. A big reason they drifted off is because there’s little difference between 12/12 Mirror and 22/12 Mirror. I think casters should be as invulnerable as Ptiro’s old Clairvoyant Spellbinder if you can somehow combine 22/12 Mirror with 20/10 MoT. After all, you’re sacrificing to hardcap those abilities, and it could give use to lesser known items that would otherwise have no purpose.
Emphasis mine, I don’t think this is a reasonable request or one you should ever expect to see fully realized. Immortality is not within the design philosophy of the game, and attaining 20/10 MoT and 22/12 Mirror is not so great a sacrifice as this comment makes it out to be. You could argue that, given enemy repertoires inclusive of Nullification, even with perma-uptime Mirror/MoT, a player wouldn’t be truly invincible, but I think that’s really splitting hairs. For a mechanic to completely negate all damage permanently unless exposed to an enemy archetype that poses an equal threat to all other builds anyways is really just too strong and was rightfully nerfed into oblivion. These abilities are panic-buttons, not intended to be your primary modus operandi for survival.

Heavy Tank Builds - These will probably hit FG strong, as the combination of high health, high armor, high damage absorb, high DA and the new Retal to Attack method will diversify the types of builds that would succeed. The larger issue with these builds was a combination of low OA and low damage to the point that no defensive options would keep you from a Nemesis Barrage.

It would be nice for heavy defensive equipment builds to be able to use heavy damage devotions, while medium defensive builds would not be able to use them because they’re defenses would not be enough. Building in this way would increase the diversity of devotion options, because now there’s little that prevents the dominance of Ghoul / Revenant / Dying God combo.
That’d first necessitate the existence of a ‘heavy damage’ devotion, which isn’t really a thing in absence of high % damage as boasted by more traditional builds.

This comment seems fairly speculative in terms of the upcoming FG stuff, so I’m not really going to discuss it much unless you can narrow it down to current content.

Healing /Regeneration Builds - It would be wonderful to see more builds like these, but outside of sets that specifically build for it like the Avenger set, there’s no reason to build around these.

Adoomgod is on the hunt trying to buff more regen items so that they can be a viable strategy. Kiters would love to have something like this so that if they mess up and get swarmed, they can retreat and heal up before the next barrage begins. In my experiences, having 2 active heals + decent regen (over 500 Health Regen) is the minimum for a healing build to comfortably fight hard enemies, but there aren’t many ways to combine this and have the necessary damage.

Perhaps classes like Demo who don’t have active heals should instead have great regen abilities. There’s no reason for something like Blood of Dreeg to not only have much higher regen than Vindicative Flame, but better benefits like OA and flat damage too.
Regen is a slippery slope. If it gets too high you achieve passive immortality beyond that of the MoT/Mirror combo. Even before then, it’ll trivialize DoTs. Before then is where you have something that’s decent for kiting but insufficient for defending you from GD’s raw burst damage - see the DW/ADCTH section. This is where Regeneration, from a design perspective, ought to be reasonably attainable without too much sacrifice in kill potential in order for it to be a viable means of defense. To approach the bursty problem, perhaps some health-gating mechanics ought to be introduced, or some on-hit heals could be more prevalent on Regeneration items - see Touch of the Everliving Grove, for instance.

15

You might if you remembered the days when 8 minute runs were considered great. But annoying snark statement aside I’m actually super happy you asked that question.

For starters I need to clarify that ofc this is subjective in terms of how fast we want the game to be or how it should feel but there are some objective facts to look at to inform our subjective feels.

First of all a build that gets 5 minutes vs a build that gets 6 is a much huger gap than a build that gets 7 minutes vs a build that gets 8. Despite both gaps appearing to just be a minute, you have to look at what percent faster the build is compared to the builds beneath it. The lower the crucible clear time, the more of an extreme outlier it looks to be. Buuuut

This obviously wouldn’t be an objective issue if most builds were around the same speed. However if you step back and realize that the form builds tend to be setup for crucible, and that there are a lot of similarities between them, you would realize that the average clear for builds actually is like 7-10 minutes. There are a few class combos and specific skills that thrive in crucible, which is fine, but the gap seems pretty big. This makes the other builds feel much worse to play in crucible.

Yes some builds will always be king by a decent margin. But if the margin is insane it A. Makes you feel silly playing anything else in crucible and B. Just is poor balance.

Secondly, you can’t just say “buff all the other builds then;” because we don’t want campaign trivialized further or legendary sets being more ridiculously powerful than they are compared to other items, devotion, base skill point investment, and because buffing many many builds is a lot more work than just clipping the claws of a few outliers. Furthermore endless buffs is a never ending cycle of gimping the games difficulty.

Third, Waves 150-170 were never meant to be this accessible in the first place. Cashing out at 150 was to be perfectly resectable and 170 was supposed to be a real challenge. And I’m pretty sure the game has gotten easier than the devs intended.

And some pure legendary builds do sub 7. I concur that if it requires crazy grinding to get mis that cover your oa da and resists to make a top tier build it should be allowed more room to be an outlier in power. I see people talking about how some builds take skill to pilot… But ever since people claimed that about pre nerf spellbinders I stopped believing that. I released a video proving how even unoptimized spellbinders were faceroll easy pre nerf. Otherwise yes, I agree that if a top build takes actual thought, skill, alertness to pilot it deserves more room to stay strong. Still sub 6 seems ridiculous.

These are just my ways of looking for things. I don’t speak for crate nor do I know what they actually feel about these things but based on the history of buffs and nerfs this is my basic inference.

Also assuming you get 8 legendaries per crucible run.
5 minute runs are 16 per 10 minutes.
7 minute runs are 11.4 per 10 minutes. Significant difference

16

[…] Building in this way would increase the diversity of devotion options, because now there’s little that prevents the dominance of Ghoul / Revenant / Dying God combo.

[…]

Adoomgod is on the hunt trying to buff more regen items so that they can be a viable strategy. Kiters would love to have something like this so that if they mess up and get swarmed, they can retreat and heal up before the next barrage begins. In my experiences, having 2 active heals + decent regen (over 500 Health Regen) is the minimum for a healing build to comfortably fight hard enemies, but there aren’t many ways to combine this and have the necessary damage.

You can add Bat to the list of devotions: it feels like every non-WD caster will take it, because sustenance is otherwise close to zero.

17

I would, but I have to much end-game knowledge and experience - qualities that contradict Z.'s picture of a perfect Praetorian!

18

Will suck if they nerf again build that go far in shattered realm:furious:

19

I don’t think anyone denies your ability to make crucible builds, your experience in making builds by crunching the numbers etc. It’s more a question of whether we agreed that they should be allowed to get as strong as you want them to be. Point out all the OP shit in a list. I bed Z would appreciate community members being more open to the top being clipped now and then for all the tens of weaker stuff he buffed to be good. :stuck_out_tongue:

20

Dude, with every post you contradict yourself when it comes to Crucible deciding build viability.

First, main campaign was ruled out as something that is not viable as something to define build viability because a faction gear character can do AG, but in the past, people determined build viability by how fast they did things and not just doing it. Remember all those people using Mad Queen as a measuring stick?

Now two of the builds you claim to be top can’t handle Lokarr, or can only handle him with specific gear? So, they can do Cruc Glad 170 but not a boss from the MAIN CAMPAIGN?