As we know, bosses are immune to CC and have a relatively high defensive ability. But we also know that trash won’t kill us; heroics - maybe, but when we create a build or update our gear we think of bosses and nemeses. Because they will kill us.
As a result, CC skills and builds are useless, crit builds and skills are almost useless (given that you need to sacrifice a lot of protection or dps to make the crits proc often enough). Therefore, I have a few suggestions.
First, I suggest to stick defensive ability to the enemy’s level. Bosses and trash should have the same defensive ability (as long as they are of the same level); to balance, overall DA of enemies might be increased.
Second, whenever a CC effect is used against an enemy with high resistance or immunity, a stackable -OffensiveAbility debuff is applied instead. Let’s call it “CC conversion”. The more resistance to the initial CC effect is, the more of the CC effect is converted to -OA debuff; in other words, -OA debuff is proportional to the reduction of the duration of the CC effect. This would make CC skills meaningful while characters built around CC skills would not become overpowered.
As an alternative, let the enemies have a cap of CC resistance of 80%. Whenever knockdown or freeze effects should be applied, they are animated as stun symbol - just to avoid excessive animation work.
As an alternative to the alternative, let the enemies have a lower cap, however whenever they become affected by a CC skill, their resistance to this CC effect increases for some time. This is close to what we see in Darkest Dungeon. I find this option interesting because it motivates to be versatile in CC skills.
As an alternative to the alternative to the alternative, assign an accompanying effect to all the CC effects. These accompanying effects are the ones bosses do not have resistances to (-res, -DA, -AO, -%damage etc; sorry if I am wrong about the examples). Whenever you try to apply a CC effect on an enemy, you also apply a respective accompanying effect for the expected duration of CC (before CC resistances are applied).
A variation of item 3. Let the bosses have a cap of CC resistance of 80% (or lower). In addition Give them a chance to completely negate CC effect. Whenever knockdown or freeze effects should be applied, they are animated as stun symbol - just to avoid excessive animation work.
That’s it! Thank you for reading!
Just to clarify:
The idea of the post is to deal with the total asymmetry of the rules one should apply to the 80% of time spent in game (clearing trash) and 20% of time that really matters for the character’s survival (boss fights). That is why I proposed to make the way crits and CC work vs trash and bosses more consistent - even at a cost of average increase in enemies’ DO and CC resistances.
Update: added item 6.
Could you please specify? Do you mean it is easy to stack enough AO and it is not a problem? Or do you mean that bosses should have relatively higher DO?
Uh, what? Crits are one of the most valuable stats in the game. Getting high % Crit damage with high OA can lead to massive damage.
Yeah, CC never gonna change. Devs believe they are meant for weak mobs. The “Enemies get higher CC resist the more they are hit by CC” doesn’t work when some builds can kill major enemies in less than 10 seconds.
Yes, relatively easy. High end bosses have around 2500 DA, I think, so 3100 OA would result in 20-25% crit chance (after reaching 25% there’s a breakpoint which makes raising it further somewhat pointless). If you have +100% crit damage then it’s a straight 25% buff in DPS. If you already have 100k DPS then it’s an additional 25k DPS, gained with less effort that would had been needed to raise it via %damage bonuses at that point.
Most high end builds you’ll find in Classes & Builds subforum are around 3.2k.
Thank you all for sharing your experience. Next time I will try a character focused on OA. My problem was that I tried to max out survivability of my previous characters and stacked OA only with items that are good overall. Maybe I was just short of the AoM components (I have only 4 on my richest character) or good mythics, but this was a kind of a ceiling for me because I was not willing to farm these components. But what I see as a shortcoming is that my OA did a good job against ordinary monsters and this fact was repeatedly creating an illusion that all is fine enough to proc powers and item skills. And then I face a boss and my crit rate drops to a meaningless value.
The idea of the post is to deal with the total asymmetry of the rules one should apply to the 80% of time spent in game (clearing trash) and 20% of time that really matters for the character’s survival (boss fights). That is why I proposed to make the way crits and CC work vs trash and bosses more consistent - even at a cost of average increase in enemies’ DO and CC resistances.
There’s no real assymetry with crits. Crits are as good vs bosses as they are vs trash, it’s just you need 400-500 more OA vs heroes and bosses compared to white trash monsters. Level 100 values, ofcourse.
As for CC - I don’t like it either (mostly the fact that there’s just not enough skill points to spare on skills that do not work against enemies I care the most), and I think your idea of converting CC to DA shedding against CC-immune enemies is kinda cool. But most CC being worthless against bosses was discussed over and over again and it appears that devs do not plan to change how CC works.
In my experience (mainly reading several build threads) not every build needs high Crits. I play a DoT build so Crits are extremly important for me, but for other builds sustainable/reliable damage is more important.
Oh, now I see you meant white trash monster trucks :o
I played a shielded Ignaffar tactician. I could do without crits (at least I had enough damage to kill the boss at Port Valbury), it was just upsetting that many proc skills were almost unavailable to me in bossfights unless I sacrificed an unacceptable part of survivability.
I really often end up with 2.7k OA/DA with my builds. You just have to pay attention to what gear you get, devotion you get, components and augements. There’s an accessory augement (Devil’s Crossing) that gives +20% all damage (wow) and +2% OA and DA. You can stack it up to rings and amulet for 6% OA and DA. Now you go for some devotions, search for paths with DA and OA to reach your goal. Never go full legendary set builds - rare items provide (sometimes) massive amounts of either DA or OA or sometimes both. If your DA is low, get Runebound Topaz for 3% DA iirc. Stick it to rings and medal for 9% DA (and some health).
I firstly thought it’s impossible to even reach 2.7k, but then I realized there are better ways of obtaining damage than simply getting % damage (OA and DA - DA increases survivability, therefore damage, kind of).
I could not use these accessory augments because I needed the augment for block; I also had low cunning because my damage type was fire. I suppose my build did not have potential for crits vs bosses, but the story is about how trash monsters are teasing me with 2x crits which become irrelevant in any serious encounter. Stupid trash monsters!
There’s nothing about cunning there. I have like 3k OA and 2.8/2.9k DA (don’t remember exactly) on a cold trickster with a two handed weapon with literally no cunning added. My other build, old DK had 3.3k OA with like 350 cunning.
Here’s an example build, I’ve never made it in my game, but as you can see, I have 3030 OA and 2925 DA with no cunning added (also the build itself is totally unfinished). Don’t even bother in adding cunning or spirit if you don’t need those for your weapon requirements.
When AoM was released, I struggled to get to 2700 OA and DA. I learned how to better pick my devotions and use the augments mentioned. You really should not need the augment for block. Your skills, and devotions should be plenty to get to near 100% recovery, and 60-70% chance to block. That is good enough. You may find that a lot of shield builds theses days don’t even go after that much recovery.
As time goes on, and you craft and find good stat items, you will start to easily get to 3000 OA on more offensively minded builds. Pants, boots, medals and shoulders are good for this. On defensively minded builds, you may only end up with 2700, but that still gives you more than 15% chance to crit most if not all bosses (excluding super bosses).
From my experience, 50% block recovery is enough. If you have a shield that has 1.0 Block recovery, with 50% you have only 0.5, and not many shields have 1.0 recovery - most have 0.8 - 0.9. I have ~20% block recovery with The Untouchable, 57% block chance and I don’t have many problems with my enemies. My block recovery jumps to ~50% with Overguard and that’s enough for me. But even though, getting more than 50% recovery is nothing bad.
