True, it did very little damage. I retract my statement that the singe target was potentially nerfed; it may as well have been, but insignificantly so - especially with the introduction of the two new exclusive skills on Arcanist.
I do believe however that the AOE has been massively affected. 4 fragments now deal vastly inferior damage of a damage type that is hard to gear towards without making massive cuts in the main damage, elemental.
I now see no reason whatsoever to invest into Proliferation beyond one point unless you’re in desperate need of AOE, have geared towards Aether and use PRM as a supporting skill. And Supercharged is still dissatisfying at best. (I mean, Electrocute? Really?)
I also do understand the reason why you’d cap speeds, and I’m actually quite fine with it. However, it leaves me to wonder why there’s still so ridiculously many and high casting speed bonuses on items benefitting the PRM line. With all these, the casting speed in the Arcanist mastery itself through Mental Alacrity and Reckless Power becomes obsolete.
Which also leaves me to wonder whether I should pick Reckless Power at all. Star Pact affects at least two of the three main damage types in PRM and seems superior in that regard. However, Devastation would see no benefit whatsoever from Star Pact besides the reduced cooldown, temping me to go for TSS for single target instead, which feels… wrong. I feel like I’d be lacking a nuke.
Overall, I feel like I’m lacking in a clear path to pave the way for PRM.
Yay my Thermite Mine Elemtalist is excited, same for a few other builds
Nice work.
Good design imo is being able to provide solid rationale for decisions made. Crate excel at this vs other studios imo, whether I agree personally with the outcome or not.
I like what I am seeing from this build. It certainly looks like it may have opened the door up for some new and diverse builds. I’m really excited to start working on some of them.
There are other builds in the game besides Nightblade, so reducing difficulty bonuses on enemies but then also nerfing nightblade for a net zero power change to nightblade has the effect of benefiting every other build in the game.
My reading is that
%total damage applies after everything else has been worked out:
ie: you have 100 damage, 100% increased damage, but -10% total damage.
This would leave you with 100 (1+1)(1-.1) = 180 damage.
and
%all damage works as if it was just a +% to each skill in the first place.
ie: you have 100 damage, 100% increased damage, but -10% all damage.
This would leave you with 100 (1+1-0.1)(1+0) = 190 damage.
so the %alldamage is like you get that % increase or decrease for each of your damage types, but the %total damage is a reduction after your damage is worked out and is much heftier penalty.
example with 500% increased damage, and 10% reduced total damage vs all damage
%alldamage
100 damage, 500% increased, -10% all damage
is 100 * (1+5-0.1) * (1+0) = 490 damage
%totaldamage
100 damage, 500% increased damage, -10% total damage
is 100 * (1+5)*(1-0.1) = 450 damage
Hopefully that is right! or Zantai can elucidate our thoughts.
I wonder… with the nerfs to maiven’s sphere… won’t melee spellbreakers that go for 2wield die out? I mean, the combination of classes already has very low hp, and now gets 12pointer which scales their I guess “effective hp pool” just by 25% WITH drawbacks. Not to harp on you too much, just whether the nerf was completely necessary as melee are always in much, much more danger than ranged.
Thunderous strike is something what I planned to make a druid for, before realising the transmuter was only for melee… now it will be awesome… I can’t wait to drop the unique crossbow for 75lvl already.
Very nice changes. Lots of new things to experiment with. Love it overall.
Is it just me, or does 115% movespeed feel faster than it did before?
My only gripe so far - @Zantai - any plans to better support Chaos Caster Warlocks? There weren’t very many options before, and the recent changes to Arcanist don’t help this build variant much at all. I would also argue that Possession could use cooldown reduction in place of one it’s other stats.
Sure, I’d say that is part of the designers job. If a skill is in the game, it should be useful if the player creates the right set of circumstances to make it useful. I’m not saying every skill should be so overtuned that it excels without the player putting an effort in, acquiring the right gear, planning their devotions properly, etc. If they do all that however, it should offer a rewarding feeling and be successful to some degree.
There are (perhaps were, need to test to see) skills that weren’t useful under any circumstance and others that were always useful. Bringing these into some sort of equilibrium and then tuning the content to that is ideal.
I challenge you to name one ARPG that did not have an endgame involving you roflstomping everything in to oblivion with ease.
Torchlight II: Endgame was just a neverending dungeon of steadily increasing monster levels till it was mathematically impossible to survive. Till that point, content was easy.
Diablo III: Creators even stated they don’t feel like players want to be challenged by content, they just want to be as efficient as possible while obliterating everything.
Diablo II: People got to a point where they were only able to level by killing the last boss. Meaning they had the hardest boss in the game on the hardest difficulty on solo farm and easily spammed. Does not scream “Difficult” to me.
Torchlight I: lolololol
Divinity Series (excluding Divine Divinity): Was that ever considered hard? I ended up falling asleep through most of it.
Dungeon Siege: Once again, very little skill. It was so easy to get OP gear that you never even had to try.
You get the idea. Actually compared to those games, GD is a fair bit more difficult due to gear being a bit more modest in stats by late game. Point is, maybe the content was made easier as a whole, but that’s really just the nature of the genre.
Just to be clear, so those examples are based off sub-optimal builds without the BiS gear (i.e. not the ‘cookie-cutter’ builds)? I would expect such builds to be competent to get through content, but not speed clear it. Cookie-cutter all BiS and optimised builds should plow through speedily, but that does not define ‘viable.’
