I’ve been slowly going many of the devotions and also experimenting with the procs in various manners.
Like the thread started for class +/-, devotions also need a voice. Post your specific thoughts and suggestions.
I know many feel that weaker should be buffed and that’s a fine approach with specific suggestions. I don’t always look at it that way, so take a breath and tolerate my nerf preference (or suggest counter-buffs, etc).
I’ve already made some previous suggestions and I won’t rehash those. These were tier 1 and now I’m looking more at 2+. However no reason not to comment if you have T1 thoughts.
One that I have thought a lot about and used a lot is DG. Imho Dead God needs a bit of a nerf for the Dead god proc. This mostly impacts non-dot and pets.
Reasoning:
The constellation is very easy to qualify for at 15 blue/8 red and has plenty of OA , and even if not chaos/vit - you are only getting one empty node
Proc(Hungering Void)
-if you look at the math and the typical meta of 3k OA:
Let’s assume you have 1000+% in a damage type. finding 200% in some path adds 20% damage for that type. Which is on all the time.
HV’s proc adds 40% damage limited to crits for everything, but also adds 10% to speed, which adds 10% more damage, even if not crit.
Now the problem is that to find the large +% in other ways, you usually have to commit to larger node investments to get it.
I’m thinking the DG proc needs the following tweaks:
crit ->30%
pet -> 100% damage, 5%crit
1000% stacked damage is very low. High end builds usually have at least 2000%, which means extra 200% damage is the 10% increase for chaos/vitality builds, not 20%.
10% attack speed will boost your dps by 10% only if you have 100% attack speed. If you have 190% already it’s only a 5% boost to dps (not including procs, by the way).
3k oa against 2.6k da (typical value for ultimate nemesises) is about 15% crit chance which with 40% crit damage means 6% increase provided there’s zero other sources of crit damage. Realistically it’ll be 4-5%.
So, 1.11.051.05 = 1.21 = 21% damage boost
The uptime is 2/3, so actually a 14% damage boost. This I think is pretty optimistic as well.
If we’re talking about nerfs, nerf all tanky devotions. Why? By only devotions, you can reach a super tanky character (but you have to sacrifice devotion-damage), and therefore you can make a character that is fairly tanky and still deal enormous damage by only picking appropriate devotions (this is, RR and going fully tanky). If your build contains enough RR, you can ignore any RR from devotions and still be super strong (but some bosses+ will receive a little less damage from you). Anyway, they won’t nerf it anyway, so feel free to think I am butthurt (I actually kinda am, ngl tbh btw).
Quite on contrary I think raising character durability by going defensive devotions is very suboptimal. The fact that pretty much everyone goes for respective t3 constellations instead of yellow-blue corner supports my opinion. Honestly I’d like to see some defensive constellations buffed, esp. behemoth. The reason is it’ll reduce the importance of going full physique.
I understand your opinion, and it does make a lot of sense (I also knew that before). I basically said that because I managed to make two tanks that can facetank everything except for Mogdrogen (although, not sure about the tactician, not sure if he can’t facetank Mog) and still deal 40k+ damage per hit (or DPS). I mean, for an unkillable machine that can heal once every few seconds and has no lifesteal, it is kind of [insert a word that describes something that is completely fucked up and retarded as fuck and is not a vulgarism]. I totally agree that it is kinda suboptimal to do what I said, but, damn, it’s fucking effective. No, no behemoth devotion. Only if you have 3 spare points. And unlocked it. Maybe even by a mistake.
You start gutting defensive devotions or class defenses just because build X can get ‘too tanky’ and build diversity will start to take a noise dive. Because then sets that were already light on defensive stats have nowhere to turn to and become (even more) obsolete. And I gotta agree with Stupid Dragon here, most times I’ve tried getting defenses from devotions and making up the difference with gear/augs its worked out far worse than if I go the other way around…
(In before I get told to dress all my casters in full plate with 6-7% global armor bonuses on all my crafted items if I want to take a hit…not meaning you with this one User_name)
Gutting defensive devotions, really? I’ve made 9 different characters, all of them are Crucible Gladiator 150-170, not even once I have used T3 defensive devotion (except in one of my earlier builds where I used Light of Empyrion - DW fire defiler, but I also changed devotion map afterwards, because build wasn’t any good in late Crucible regardless of defensive devotions).
The only builds than can possibly afford to do this are physical or pierce, because they only have a single RR constellation and therefore can spare more points for tankiness. Even then, it’s a heavily suboptimal choice with the exception of forcewave witchblades or a DW Beronath build who gets more mileage from Empyrion. And even for those, Ulzuin’s Torch and Dying God remain perfectly competitive options.
More like no one needs defensive devotion setup cause campaign is easy enough without it. Crucible has also been that way since the DA nerf. The only case I can make for defensive devotions is when you wanna clear 170 glad with no buffs/banners or you’re undergeared.
The best buff for defensive devotions is a general mob buff. But that turned into a DA fest last patch. Idk what to do with them rn.
Increase Driad’s devotion completion bonus to 4 Yellow.
My reasoning is simple: 5 nodes (even very good ones) for 3 points seems wrong. Also, it would enable some builds with very tight point allocation could use the diversity.
He has a point though. Dryad seems to be ghouls counterpart…but Dryad is no ghoul. Either a bit of a pickup to Dryad or 1 extra affinity wouldn’t be unwarranted…
Alright I’ll state the obvious: abominable might needs a different trigger condition. Any of them, just not the one it currently has. It’s the biggest flaw left in the whole devotion system in my opinion and so easily fixed. Just do it.
I suspect you have misjudged the value of some devotions. The cause of being tanky comes from Armor Rating and damage absorb stacking and not healing (sole exception is wendigo totem). Healing devotions and armor rating/damage absorb devotions should be considered separately.
Healing (especially devotions) is far from OP. Healing is actually extremely under-powered in comparison to life steal. Life steal has global access, is easy enough to get, reaches crazy healing over time numbers (even with 95% boss res) and has no cooldown. Heal devotions are utter garbage because the healing per second is minuscule in comparison to life steal potential (mostly because long CD). Healing skills, on the other hand, are not globally available to all mastery and the good skills are gated to Shaman and Nightblade. Even with +% healing mods being introduced healing will probably still be garbage (because long CD), and healing will remain Shaman and Nightblade only.
The cause of you being tanky is actually the damage mitigation acquired from Armor Rating stacking + Damage absorb (and not healing). This is where I agree with nerfs, but devotion nerf isn’t enough, field command armor% is too powerful. An arpg like this should never let players reduce damage to close to 0 like AR/damage absorb can; a diminishing return/plateau system like PoE is best to keep damage mitigation within a narrower range. Otherwise the game ends up with practically invincible tanks like we have now and has a balance problem because the game goes to one shot territory for low armor builds.
Once Armor Rating and damage absorb is rebalanced shields and blocking would become much more attractive and worthwhile
By the way, I remembered something I always thought did not make much sense: the way physical/pierce devotions are all (except useless ones) on critical attack. Like why? Is there a balancing thing? Because I see fire builds for example (I got one) going out on all cylinders proccing infinite Ghoul/Meteors/Fissure/whatever. Every other Resist Reduction proc is on attack, but no, pierce/physical is also on critical attack. That just discourages players from picking them up, because how are you going to effectively proc Assasin’s Mark/Blades of Wrath/Living Shadows/Oleron’s Wrath at the same time? Answer is you won’t.
I actually like some on-crit procs on WPS. I don’t play belgo you can put one each on the WPS and since OA is good enough to crit a lot of times then things should proc pretty much consistently. Haven’t tried that on non-ranged chars though.
However, on things like phys cadence witchblade you’re pretty much required to take 1 pt pox to spread assassin’s mark/fury cause CoF can’t proc any of the two.
Binding on crit devotions on WPS is not as nearly as effective as having a devotion that procs 25% on attack and binding it to something like Wind Devil. Or let’s just be honest: 20% on attack is a better devotion that 100% on crit in most cases.
Abominable Might. Its proc is terrible. I want it redone with chance on attack or chance on crit, even if it’s nerfed in result.
Unknown Soldier. Now it’s better to get Hydra (for ranged chars) or even Ishtak than Unknown Soldier. Its nodes can be better: for example, some minor ADCtH, more OA or resistances (acid/poison or Slow) should vastly improve its attractiveness.
Attak Seru and its proc. Oh god, uneven terrain makes this proc completely useless. Any way to fix this?
You’re basically lecturing a tank player. As I play tanks, and I always improve them to take even more damage and deal even more damage, your point of view doesn’t affect me even a little bit. If I sound mean/aggressive, sorry, that’s not my point, just poor english. It’s very easy to reach a super tanky character, heck, you don’t even have to care about which devotions to take to be most tanky. Everything unlocks everything, basically, you just pick this, pick that, oh, look, two more are unlocked when I only wanted these two… well… I’ll pick these too. And even if you don’t push your gear to be tanky, you’re effectively reaching 85+% armor absorption and over 3k armor. And also massive damage absorption if you use shield and pick Obelisk of Menhir’s Stone form.