What do you think that those diminishing returns would look like?
Do you think that after selecting some value (say 66% PTH) and making DA asymptotic towards that value (a soft cap) is going to have some drastically different effect than a hard cap?
No.
Lets say they did change the scaling. For example-
So after 3680 DA (66%PTH) your PTH would only change 10% by 4500 DA. Then it would change an additional 1% per 100 DA until 5000 DA where it would ‘soft cap’ (and reach your desired diminishing returns) of some arbitrarily small amount of PTH reduction per additional DA value (lets say .1% PTH for every 100 DA over 5k)
OK great we did all that extra work and changed the PTH formula for damage!
What did we get?
Some effective cap on DA.
Which is exactly the same thing as is being proposed by Zantai (except more directly and without such toil from the devs).
This doesnt even get into ‘WHY’ you would want to pursue those high DA values in the soft cap example over other things in your build (like HP or damage or armor or phys resistance, ETC)
Yeah but the thing is you’re not about to nerf 3 or 4 skills, you are going to render useless a mechanic that works for almost any build in the game, especially the ones that have no other hope of clearing 170. In my case, DA added almost 100 more hours of enjoying GD. Builds like forcewave and mortar have no hope of succeeding in crucible without DA and i enjoyed every minute of playing them. Just something to think about.
I never said you are taking the easy approach, just that it’s tempting to do it as it often looks like the logical way of resolving this. And it is, as long as you replace it with something just as good or better. However, it’s easier said than done and i’m looking forward to seeing what you come up with.
But different enemies have DIFFERENT OA values and DA shreds, so essentially, after a certain point, your DA gain will only matter against enemies with high OA (various bosses, etc) or DA reductions. You can think of it was of some sort of “soft cap” too. Against different enemies, your DA “hardcap” will be different too, so it wont be as “hard” as you may think.
I actually like this simple solution. If a simple trick can do things well, there is no need to use something more complicated. So it’s better to use simple tricks and mechanics whenever it’s possible, and turn to complex things ONLY when simple ones dont work.
BTW, it’s a VERY GOOD QUESTION itself!
There are SO MANY affixes in the game, and they even split into 2 categories - weaker “magic” category and more stronger & infrequent “rare” category. Yet, somehow it happened that some “magic” affixes (specifically - ones that grant OA & DA, and to lesser degree - things like resists, etc.) outperform all “rare” affixes, even the strongest ones, sometimes. And i have to admit, most of “rare” affixes are too weak for their “rare” status, giving random nondescript bonuses, that most (if not all builds) dont want at all. Although you made a good job at buffing certain rare affixes, there still is a lot to do.
So, the question is, why have 100’s of item affixes, when almost every build uses the same “stonehide”, “of kings”, “stalwart”, “of readiness”, etc.
Do you enjoy playing a build, that has “0% chance to be hit” listed in character’s chart?
I made such a build, roflstomped 151-170 waves on Gladiator with extra spawns, and it was BORING AS HELL!!!
If 1-2 defensive mechanics is too poweful, and others are too weak, why they cant be adjusted properly? I can accept the fact that i need a damn tanky build for 151-170 waves, but for that, i suppose it should use various defensive mechanics, not just mindlessly stack DA and be invincible due to broken PTH formulae.
A universal hardcap is a global change that nullifies effectiveness past a certain point of investment regardless of the context in which that hardcap was achieved. I hope that’s not too much of a mouthful.
For instance, suppose 3680 DA grants you roughly 66% PTH in Crucible (maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t, I have no idea, being as I don’t play Crucible). But then let’s say that a campaign build can also reach 66% PTH for some campaign content with as little as 3200 DA. Maybe some other content only needs 2800 DA to reach that point, but such enemies have more raw damage to compensate in turn for being easier to avoid that raw damage.
People that choose DA to tank up in campaign now find themselves at a point where their tankability is a constant, unchanging in effectiveness regardless of what they fight against. Conversely, they actually become significantly weaker against the 2800-enemies than the 3200-enemies, despite stacking a seemingly defensive stat to shield themselves behind. Actually, this could have the adverse effect when trying to balance enemies of homogenizing their designs, so that the 2800-higher-damage enemies aren’t too powerful.
A hard restriction on survival can eventually result in too much homogenization of design, be it players building builds or designers designing enemies. Sure, we do already have hard restrictions in the form of resistances, as those can’t exceed 95% (for players), but that restriction is a fringe case even for those of us on the fringe of dedication to the game, and is rarely pervasively reached for too many builds. 66% PTH, however, is easy to reach, and I’m not convinced that that easiness is a ‘problem’.
In lieu of the above, if it’s remotely relevant anymore, I voted that Crucible was the problem, if anything.
Oh, so this is where this thread got moved, when I lost it in “Ideas and Feedback” this morning it used to be only 3 pages long. Oh well, not reading whole 11 pages.
Just my 2 cents, I think DA stacking is fine. It is only good for literally two things: killing (cheesing) Ravager and soloing waves 150-170 in Crucible Gladiator. For everything else it’s boring and hardly effective. So if a small group of enthusiasts wants to complete those two small portions of the game, fine, let them have it. Rewards of 150-170 are same or worse then 130-150 (given how much time you need to spend), Ravager is just a gimmick.
I mean, after AoM was introduced and before waves 150-170 were added there was no challenge in Crucible with new level cap and items, any build could slice through it. But players wanted artificial dificulty and they got it, and then they found a way to cheese this dificulty abusing just one defensive mechanic. Fine with me.
What I see from Z’z post is that they’re going to (1) nerf stalwart and co. (2) impose a hard cap of 3680 DA in cruci (3) nerf crucible in some way we don’t know yet and (4) buff blessings and banners.
I personally think 3 and 4 are what crucible needs right now, but even if you nerf crucible to the ground, since the DA meta has been discovered, people will continue using that until it’s needed to the ground, which is why I think 2 is a very good solution. Sure you might not like that devs are imposing a hard cap on defenses but with the upcoming nerfs (and blessing buffs), then that hard cap should be a value wherr cruci is doable for most builds. That cap might change depending on what changes we’ll see but I trust Crate in this.
As many people have said, I think nerfing stalwarts while imposing a hard cap on DA isn’t good. 3680 DA (if that stays as is) is easy for many builds to attain with judicator rings, so stalwart will almost be obsolete amyway.
There are 2 HUGE problems in new waves: wave 160 and wave 170. Now you’re cutting the effectiveness of DA by half for the sake of overall game health - I can take that. But please keep in mind that a vast majority of builds that are not shielded tanks or kiting casters simply can’t pass wave 160 without DA stacking. There are simply no defensive mechanics for them to do so because the nemesis’ damage is too high. If you do not want to do anything with nemesis themselves then please give us at least some really worthy buffs to compensate.
How about a crucible buff that will give 30% damage reduction against nemesis IF a character doesn’t use a shield or caster off-hand?
The few builds i made that stacked DA never went past 4.5k unbuffed. That’s hardly 0% chance to be hit, let’s not exaggerate. I often try to lower DA as much as i can, to get more dps so i can improve clearing times. I know the 6k+ builds you’re talking about and i agree there should be a cap because those are ridiculous, but don’t think that’s me. Imo people should be happy that they can play something else besides spellbinders and kiting tanks in Crucible, but obviously that’s not the case
This is an offline single player game for god’s sake. There are no dedicated servers, there is no competition, why should you care how somebody else plays or what they enjoy? It doesn’t affect you whatsoever. The chinese guys were right to be afraid of the nerf hammer when sharing their builds. They were having fun and now it’s about to end
I’m sure you were never planning on the formula to reach the extremes that it did (player DA being >3000 over enemies’ OA), but having PTH also contribute to damage reduction is a huge deal in itself. On one hand, it’s nice to see classes that don’t have EZ-mode damage reduction skills in Time Dilation + MoT + Mirror be tanky and handle damage effortlessly as well. On the other hand, players have more than enough offense that as long as they stack DA, even mediocre offenses are enough to handle the highest waves.
I think it’s a bigger thing that players can so easily stack Stalwart pants + 2 rings + pants + boots and not have to worry about obtaining the Resistances + Skill bonuses necessary to take on the tougher content. The increasing returns on DA stacking are the main contributor to this, but I’m more upset that players who can’t (or don’t want to) stack one stat can’t use a combination of other defenses (absorption, armor, health regen, debuffs that actually work on bosses) to create something similar.
We think measures can be taken that alleviate this situation at high end play without having too dramatic of an impact for the majority of players. So with v1.0.6.0, we are looking to make the following changes:
1) Reduce the effectiveness of the Stalwart, Readiness and Dranghoul affixes for stacking DA, along with a few other rare affixes.
While this change does impact non-Crucible players, these affixes are vastly prevalent at high end play. A nerf to them will be felt hardest at excessive values of DA stacking, not so much at the values required for the campaign.
2) Apply a minimum cap on the PTH formula of 66%.
Against a Nemesis in the Crucible on Gladiator difficulty in wave 170, without Mutators or buffs/debuffs, this makes a DA value over ~3680 only relevant for counteracting monster debuffs. Going below 66% PTH is overkill for the campaign.
As long as piles of enemies can swarm the player and apply Stun + Freeze + Petrify + Ground RR pools + FUMBLE POOLS simultaneously (and stack multiple versions at once) and take away the player’s ability to play the game, I will never support these measures (Mainly talking about the 2nd one).
If enemies can reduce a player’s chance to actually do anything to <20%, I don’t see why players can’t return the tables to them as well. In many cases, DA stacking (and on a lesser note, -OA stacking in the event players don’t want to simply stack Stalwart rings) is the only way players can navigate through some of that nonsense, and I would love to see certain classes have fumble immunity and other ways to defeat enemy cheesing if you’re going to reduce player cheesing.
I’d also prefer to see better equipment for +Maximum Resistances and other ways of damage absorption if you’re going to remove the only way some classes are able to reach even a remotely tankable status.
3) Review and selectively adjust spawn counts and debuff intensities of monsters in Waves 151-170.
As has been pointed out here several times, Crucible 100-150 farming is actually fairly accessible with a variety of well-built characters, it is only once you get to the difficulty jump in 151-170 Crucible that DA-stacking becomes more tempting.
However, we do not want monsters in the Crucible to be too different from those in the campaign. Barring a few exceptions such as % Max Health debuffs and dispel mechanics that are more punishing in an enclosed arena, we do not want to go crazy adjusting monsters, so this is not going to be extensive.
I will point out that 151-170 Crucible was always meant to be a challenge and its rewards actually do not scale nearly as well as 100-150 does. This was intentional so as to make this extreme challenge not as alluring for those farming for loot and rather to be a proving ground for those that wish to reach the absolute peak potential. You’re effectively getting ~10% more loot for ~30% more effort.
Something that has become a bit lost with the release of Ashes of Malmouth is the use of Defenses and Celestial Blessings. It is fairly common to simply go Empyrion for Health and Amatok for the damage and ignore the rest. So this brings us to the 4th point:
4) Improve the value of Defenses and Celestial Blessings in the Crucible as a more valid counter to the power of enemies in the 151-170 range.
This change will impact things in two ways. First, it will make this feature of the Crucible a more relevant strategic choice to fill gaps and enable you to defeat the toughest challenge currently in the game. Second, it will give new players a more powerful stepping stone on their way to the toughest challenges by giving them better options to boost themselves when they are struggling.
Of course with further testing and revisions any of this may change and specific values listed here may not be final; but feel free to discuss.
If anything, I fully support these options. Not only will this fuel player creativity in allowing people to pick and choose how to be blessed based on build choices, but new players can definitely benefit from Crucible loot and using the blessings to perform better in Crucible will help them if they ever reach a particular snag in their build development (this is especially a problem for players looking for multiple set pieces because usually the set bonuses are the real build driver and the build’s performance won’t do nearly as well without all the pieces.
In my experience, the difficulty of 150-170 comes from the introduction of two factors that nullify just about every other defensive mechanism: huge burst damage and fumble. Fumble means that ADCTH goes out the window, since it becomes unreliable and can’t consistently help against the damage spikes you tend to see. This gets compounded by enemies like Alex. Alex is fine in the campaign because his huge burst damage happens when he’s primarily alone, and if you can take the meteor and whatever comes immediately after, you have more than enough time to heal back up. However, when Reaper, Iron Maiden, or Valdaran are sitting on top of you and keeping your HP at the 50%-75% mark, not dodging that meteor means instant death, even at capped resists. Neither ADCTH nor life regen will help much against one big shot of damage if it hits you just after another nemesis. This also doesn’t touch on the relative difficulty of maneuvering against four quick nemeses, stacking resist reduction, or Moose/Valdaran freezing or swapping with you at inopportune moments.
Dealing with these situations means relying on defensive measures that heavily or completely negate damage: Mirror/Blade Barrier/MoT, dodge/fumble, or high DA. Not everyone has the first type of skills, or can wipe Alex before he fires again. Dodge/fumble are considerably harder to get to meaningful values compared to abundant sources of DA. This leaves DA as the easiest way to negate those spikes while sacrificing fewer elements of your build.
To rebalance the Crucible, I’d say that Crate should invite the top 10 or 20 builders (such as Jajaja, Tz, Chton, Superfluff, and others) to come up with 5 or 6 builds with flairs and OA/DA around 3k (not more than 3.2k). Then throw at them such waves that overwhelm them to the point that they have to scrap every last drop of their skill to handle 150-170.
Then fix that monsters stacking debuff feature. Limit the number of debuff that can be stacked on a player to 3-4; for every additional player thereafter (in a group play) the number increases by 2. Even at limited number, stacked RR from nemeses can still be deadly to players. This should only apply to Crucible, tho, not to the main campaign.
Also, don’t nerf DA stacking for main campaign. Just put hard-coded limit to Crucible where any and all DA above, say, 3.5k will be axed from the stat the moment a player enters an arena. So, even if a player makes a build with 7k DA, the moment they enter the Crucible, their DA will be reduced to 3.5k.
I don’t know if the game engine can handle such scenario, tho. Maybe it’s the limitation of the game engine that makes Crucible so bonkers.
Let’s start with the actual PTH formula, according to the Game Guide:
where:
P = PTH
A = OA
D = DA
Plugging in D = 3680 and P = 66, we get A = 2820 as the OA of a “Nemesis in the Crucible on Gladiator difficulty in wave 170, without Mutators or buffs/debuffs.” According to Grim Tools, the typical nemesis OA here would be 2653 with IM having 2996. So this seems legit. Now plugging in just A = 2820 and simplifying yields:
So there is a linear component and a rational component. The problem here is clearly the rational component - it means you can achieve ZERO PTH at 6138 DA.
My recommendation is to replace the rational component with an exponential decay or decreasing sigmoid function, fitted closely with the original rational function up to a certain point.
EDIT again:
A decreasing sigmoid function would mean it would severely impact your own crits against monsters and an exponential decay function would probably boost it too much…yeah this is tougher to balance than anticipated…
Read only half of this thread (TL;DR), but I’d like to voice my uneducated opinion nonetheless.
Having only just reached what I would call the late game in GD, today is the first day I’ve read about how DA results in exponential returns.
Personally, I dont see how that is a problem. I see a lot of people throwing flak at the mirror, overguard, etc.
But from my perspective, limited though it may be, every single class has an ‘OP’ defensive skill. Aspect of the guardian with it’s insane resistances, menhir’s, aspect of the boar, oak skin, seal, blast shield, etc. etc.
Making full use of the tools available to each class is not in my opinion unfair.
Furthermore, 150-170 is optional. Arguing for the viability of each and every playstyle in crucible is akin to arguing for the viability of any and all gearing options.
Just like how ravage/mog/and lokarr to a lesser extent requires specialized builds, why should the crucible be any different?
Perhaps nerfing the stalwart prefix some to make it more difficult to get this gamebreaking 4.5k DA is the solution. It would make it harder for any mishmash of class combinations to get there, and would force them to use the tools that their skilltree offers to compensate.
Good to see a concrete suggestion for the formula, but as far as I can see with Zantai’s post, they won’t be touching it in the next patch. Especially since you pointed out that it’s tough. Maybe with Forgotten Gods they’ll have a look at this.
After giving some thought, I think the most ideal solution is a hybrid of my and Zantai’s solution: a piece-wise function that switches from a linear+rational regime to an exponential decay regime at some PTH somewhat below 90.
Again this is tough to do and requires some knowledge of multi-variate calculus. That is, the partial derivative of A and the partial derivative of D along the path of the PTH threshold should be fairly close for both regimes.
This explanation might be a bit easier to understand if you plot the surface of the graph:
In my opinion, this is big because no matter how optional it is, 150-170 crucible has a bigger effect on the game than you think. Some of the most prominent builders build crucible builds. Look at Fluff, JoV, jajaja. The latter two already quit but their ideas and builds comprise some of the most popular builds we see today. And when you look at their builds, you always see crucible in there. New users, who usually look for the ‘strongest’ builds available will follow suit. Chthon and Tz’s builds for example are known to be campaign-only but they still get a lot of people asking them if their builds can clear 170/ravager/mog.
The superbosses have this similar effect but due to the fact that there are way less builds available for them, and their loot are usually shit, then there’s less attention for them.
We’re not asking for crucible to have builds too similar to campaign. We’re asking for a broken mechanic to be toned down along with the issues of crucible which limits entire build archetypes from clearing it. DA abuse is a broken thing that has always existed but only came to light due to another broken thing tjat happened.
That’s more or less the ‘‘problem’’ in my opinion. What the current state of the game ask you is to either cheat your gear or play the curcible non-stop for an higher chance to get what you need gear wise to stack that DA. Saying it’s a goal to get that gear is a nonsens to me, because good luck on getting perfect rolled MIs for 10-20 builds.
The other problem as I discussed above is how many build needs to focus more on the DA side for the devotion. Which means many tier 3 devotion become obsolete.
D2 LOD didn’t ask you to make so many change to a build or wasn’t as hard to get to point you were able to do the actual challenge (ubers).
I was kinda fine with the Ubers in D2 LOD, where you needed to build a character (usually paladin shield/smith build) a certain way to do it efficiently. Overall it was a matter of having the gear which wasn’t as hard (because of d2jsp.org, gotta say that) as getting the gear needed in Grim Dawn to do the waves 151-170. Yet the gear (torches) you were getting out of the challenge was 10 times more interesing than what you get in doing the 20 other waves in GD. It’s just food for thoughts, and my personal opinion.
In Grim Dawn the Ravager drop an interesing helm (3 versions) but not many builds actually use it because most the time it’s a matter of giving up on a full set bonuses… etc. Considering that in grim dawn you lvl alone most the time it’s also a pain to lvl a tank build exactly the way you need to to lvl the devotion procs. Overall the experience isnt’t the same and what is needed to get to the challenge is just time consuming and boring… mainly due to the fact that such builds aren’t that strong during the lvling process (melee build, especially the shield build version to kill the Ravager).
Now all that said I wonder how Zantai sees the crucible… if builds should be different than in campaing mode. If many godly MIS should be needed and if for many builds that aren’t tanks they should give up on tier3 devotion most the time to get the DA constellation?
