[Feedback] Efficiency of RR debuffs and their unfairness

Grim Dawn Ideas and Feedback
1

Included TL;DR

It’s been bugging me for a huge while now, basically when I first saw the values of Guardian’s of Empyrion.

  • Curse of Frailty is a debuff that doesn’t do anything aside of making the enemy weaker, downside of it is that you have to cast it in order to get -30% vitality, acid, elemental, -25% physical and -50% bleeding RR.
  • Thermite mines are quite painful to cast, giving -40% elemental, aether and chaos RR.
  • Veil of Shadows and Aura of Censure are buffs that debuff your enemies, both are cast once giving us OA, total speed reduction, -30% pierce, cold and poison RR, 103 cold damage per second and 120 fire damage, 20% disruption, 15% damage reduction and -30% elemental RR, which has literally no downside.
  • Devouring Swarm and World of Pain are similar to CoF, giving -60% vitality and -40% bleeding RR, dealing 65 vitality and 50 bleeding damage and -25% pierce, aether and chaos RR and 109 elemental damage (ignoring the first two nodes).
  • Wind Devils need to be cast to deal (ignoring main skill) 150 cold damage, applying 25% slow and -35% elemental RR.
  • Spectral Binding requires you to get hit in order to reduce the enemy vitality and aether resist by -33% and physical resist by -25%, dealing 44 vitality and 60 aether damage and reducing attack speed by 18%.
  • Guardians of Empyrion are required to cast at least once, dealing 124 fire damage, applying -35% bleeding, fire, physical or bleeding, vitality and acid RR. There’s no downside whatsoever because you don’t even have to remember to use them at all.

All in all (using shortcuts and following my list up there from top to bottom):

  • Cast defbuffs: CoF, TM, DS, WoP
  • Summon debuffs: WD
  • Permanent debuffs: VoS, AoC, SB, GoE

Comparison:

  • Cast debuffs are basically equal. All are practically equal, some are clunky to use but in the end they do what they should do and their strengths are basically equal.
  • Summon debuffs: Wind Devil could be compared to Guardian’s of Empyrion, but they’re completely different skills as one has to be spam-used and another not.
  • Permanent debuffs: they are equal since they all do something different and their strengths are easily comparable, aside of Guardians of Empyrion.

RR efficiency on each skill:

  • Elemental, acid, pierce, chaos and aether – Every debuff has the same efficiency in this part. Every skill has the same amount or a small touch lower, but they have something to compensate for that.
  • Vitality and bleeding – They are rather wildly different, but in the end Devouring Swarm, even though has more RR, is harder to use and has less AoE (straight line) , is the strongest for Vitality only because of the enormous 60% RR. The 6 more skill points you have to use on it is not even a big deal at this point.
  • Physical – both Curse of Frailty and Spectral Binding have 25% and require some action to be used. One needs to be cast, the other requires you to get hit. However, even though SB needs a target to hit you, it’s slightly worse than CoF (12 seconds CoF and 5 seconds SB - duration). All in all, SB has a nice AS debuff to make it better. Guardians of Empyrion have 35% physical RR and are available all the time, you only have to use it once and you walk around with 35% RR, while other skills that require you to break your DPS chain in order to increase it. Every skill/proc/whatever in the game has lower physical value. Mark of Assassin is 32% on crit for 18 seconds, CoF is 25% for 12, SB is 25% for 5 and GoE are 35% forever (while in range).

Conclusion:

  • Guardians of Empyrion is the most broken physical RR debuff in the game. There’s no way DA shred, AoE, duration or AS slow can compensate for that. A walking permanent 35% RR will always be better no matter how you look at it - duration can be refreshed, but efficiency won’t be, attack speed slow won’t affect enemies so much and DA shred does in fact help, but it doesn’t increase your DPS more than an additional 10% RR.
    – Assassin’s Mark has 18 seconds duration, but that doesn’t mean anything at all because you’ll always bind it to a skill you often use and you do not ever remember about how long it lasts, making it’s duration about 2 - 5 seconds (depending on how often you re-apply it).
    – CoF, however, does benefit from the duration, since you have to cast it, breaking your DPS chain.
    – Spectral Binding and Guardians need to be cast once, SB needs you to get hit, effectively requiring you to do more for a lesser effect.

TL;DR:

  • Vitality builds rather use Devouring Swarm for vitality RR, but for wave clearers CoF and Spectral Binding are way better because of the higher AoE. Efficiency is completely debatable.
  • Guardian’s of Empyrion have the strongest physical RR in the game and are permanent. There’s not one skill that could even beat this skill by any means because neither AoE or secondary bonuses are stronger than the additional 10% RR. DA shred in CoF won’t increase your damage by 10%, 18% attack speed won’t increase your damage nor defense, it’ll only delay your pain, but 10% more physical RR will not only increase your damage but also defense, since the faster you kill something, the less damage you get.
  • All other types of RR are easily comparable to each other, some a little less, some a little more, but in the end the efficiency is the same if we include all other bonuses the debuffs give us.
2

I’ve always felt that the one obvious technical issue that slipped through the cracks is RR. Probably in the base game it was not seen as so critical and possibly left that way to add to build complexity…but you can also see that the intent was to have more than one damage type on some builds. Ultimately it became the Holy Grail for damage and evolved the game into a single-damage-type meta.

But specifically on topic of Guardians: I’d say to reduce the RR by at least 30% and overcap 1 per 2 points. Give more damage to the pets instead of RR. Overcap won’t matter much anyways, as most just go 12/12 now for a minimum of 13 points investment (often less as sooo many items give +1 to OK!).

3

you forgot that guardians are responsible for most of our balance outliers. Warlords? 35-40% more phys RR than other physical masteries (and 15% more than Witchblade, but occ has no physical damage bonuses as opposed to OK) through snapshotted guardians.

The last 3 shieldbreakers breaking the game? (IK shard 93, Ulzuin vs Crate of Entertainment, current pyran cruci) are all using the extra 45%+ fire rr (which translates to total damage modified by 45%+) to clear all that much faster than a sorcerer, which it was supposedly designed for.

4

mines -> 50%
COF -> 40%
guardians -> 30%
rework OFF ->40%

5

Just a little reminder:
If Bleeding RR is reduced with this amount, builds without Shaman/Occultist will have a very hard time to get decent RR for Bleeding.

6

I don’t really get what you mean. If you meant to give a change proposal, then it’d be a good way to make the game more imbalanced and make more people quit playing. Buffing an already rather OP mechanic is just stupid. If we’ve gotten to change proposal, reduce Guardians’ physical RR by 15% (35 -> 20) and change other RR from 35 to 25.

In the end, this thread was not made to propose changes, because we already know that Crate’s not going to change GoE (in “how to nerf Warlords” thread Zantai just said to no less physical RR in Guardians), but just to show that Guardians are, effectively, OP.

Simple and easy fix:
Guardian’s -> -15% physical RR -> +10% bleeding RR.

7

I do not know about you, but I think that the RR mechanic overpowered. RR is an option, not a necessity, but many builds take as many RRs as they can carry, and builds without RR at all quite sooner or later encounter difficulties with playthrowgh. When you invest points in RR, you have to sacrifice other parameters (other skills or effective devotion), so assemblies without and with RR have equal final efficient.
Or just I have a unique look at game :crazy_face:

8

I have to agree with you. RR is just a stupid mechanic, not in general, though. At least in GD2 -x% RR should be reduced to as little as possible, or be as rare as % reduced.

Why do I think so? -x% RR is just a modifier to enemies’ defense, while y% reduced and z reduced are the actual RR. Modifying the enemy defense automatically and effectively removes y% reduced, as it modifies the current resistance by y% value - effectively multiplies it by 1 - (y/100), so not only enemy resists are reduced, but your RR too. Then the other actual RR is applied, z reduced, which works the same as -x% but is applied last. GD has become a RR fest game, if you have no RR your build is basically trash, shit and you suck at this game. Or at least people think so.

So if GD2 happened, it would be the best to either get rid of character resist modification and use actual RR. Divine Divinity, an old game that probably no one even remembers anymore, had a very good RR mechanic, where you could either modify (endlessly till you get to or under 0) enemy resist by a certain percentage (e.g. -25% RR = 100 resists -> 75 -> 56.25 -> 42.1875 resists and so on) and another RR where you could only reduce resists by 25 (55 -> 30 resist). numbers were chosen at random

This is exactly what I’d love to see in a game like GD. Less RR bullshittery, more challenge because of it. It’s way more fun to have characters that can and cannot kill a certain monster and that have issues with one type of monsters but melt another one. At least in my opinion.

9

unknown-5 unknown-6
55% passive rr on a non-exclusive aura.

10

But Veil of Shadow has limited AoE around you and doesnt fit well to non-melee builds…
Guardians of Empyrion also have limited AoE on their RR and cant be controlled (sometimes they run after an enemy you dont want to hit ATM). Still, i agree, RR for CoF and WoP could be higher. Especially for WoP, as it requires a lot of skill points to be effective, you cant get everything with just base skill (unlike CoF, for example).

Slow is nothing, bosses are immune to it anyways.

11

Pet attack controls them.

12

Imagine investing 50 skills points into a skill that has less RR than a skill in another mastery that can be obtained much earlier. Because this is what will happen if the RR in Celestial Presence gets reduced. It already only gives 5% more RR than Night’s Chill and Presence requires two more points than Night’s Chill.

13

So, it’s better to have a skill that basically is a must in order to have a very well performing build? With Celestial Presence you get the HIGHEST possible value of RR in the game. More funnily, you can make a build that uses only one, literally one, 1 no more than 1, skill in order to apply over 100 PHYSICAL RR. That’s 75 - 95% increased damage vs. most enemies. How? -45% Celestial presence, which will most likely sit at 22/12, because it’s super easy to overcap, 22 reduced from Shattering Smash, -28% from Spectral Binding (you’ll most likely get Grava’s pants, if not, -25%), -20% from two rings and -32% from devotion’s proc. That’s 45 + 22 + 28 + 20 = -115% physical RR. With no skill bonuses, completely - 102% physical RR. Now you can check GT on how many monsters will take 90+ increased damage. The only damage type that can achieve the same value is bleeding, but it’s a DoT, which doesn’t allow you to shred your target in 2 seconds.

Physical RR is the most fucked up RR in the game. And, what’s super funny, it requires you to use only ONE skill to apply that -115%. Other builds usually… uh I mean, always have to press additional skills along with their main attack to apply RR. But hey, no one cares because it requires you to spend 50 skill points to unlock it, right? Balanced, right?..

14

how far can you make the away from you?

15

I never needed to move them. That’s how massive the range is.

16

not sure if I follow you here. The amount of damage modification that rr ultimately provides depends on the initial vs. final resistance of the monster. From -100% to -145% “only” get 22.5% more damage.

17

if you become too separated from them, they will respawn near you.

I think guardians rr is just a slightly better termite mine tbh

18

They’re better than any other RR in the game since there are not many builds that can stay away from a boss for longer than a second. Well, if this is Benn or Moosilauke, then that’s another story, but probably all other enemies are always on your face or 3 meters away. It requires a ton of skill to have Guardians too far away to not apply the RR. I actually tried to use guns to check how long can I make the Guardians have no effect, and in MOST cases, or rather all nemesis except for the two trash ones that are also slow, the RR was applied all the time (135% movement speed). Same goes for Aura of Censure and Veil of Shadows.

19

On Gargabol, that has huge fire res, guardians are useless on a glassy caster that I am playing now I can tell you.

20

@USER_NAME_01 I think that RR ‘study’ of yours is very shallow, because it mostly presses on absolute values of RR rather than trying to revolve around how various builds actually perform.

If I learned anything from crucible speedrunners it is that the application speed and clunkiness is the most important factor when ranking RR skills, by far.

Veil of Shadow is simply the best RR skill in the game. You may say that it suits melee builds more and I would agree, but in practice there are many things that just try to maul your face anyway, as for ranged enemies there are mobility skills now.

Thermite Mines are the worst RR skill in the game, because of the time it takes for them to deploy. In theory you can place them and facetank, but in practice the current crucible and SR meta is that you need to be very mobile.

Everything else is somewhere in-between, with various quirks. E.g. melee builds and cdr casters would need at least some cast-speed to use CoF, DS and WoP well. Even though you group Guardians of Empyrion with VoS and Censure it is a more difficult skill to use due to them still being pets. Sometimes it’s just better to re-summon them mid-fight.


Then there’s another factor to consider. Someone already noted how the deeper into the skill tree the higher RR numbers tend to be. That’s a good point, but I feel like the more important thing is what the mastery brings to the table besides RR.

Veil of Shadow is perfectly okay here as well, because it supports all Nightblade damage types but Vitality.

Curse of Frailty has elemental RR, but there’s no abundance of elemental casters with Occultist because Occultist brings nothing for elemental to the table. That -%elemental on CoF is pretty much a pet thing.

Same thing about Word of Pain / Death Sentence. Yes, it is an RR skill, but Inquisitor is just not that good for aether and chaos, so it is shadowed by Censure. Moreover, unlike CoF you need to improve two other nodes for QoL and it even has a lower % than CoF, VoS and other things that are not that deep into skill tree and require less investment. It is probably the second worst RR skill after Thermites.

As for Devouring Swarm getting a whooping -60% to vitality there’s a thing that vitality is the most resisted damage type in the game, so you essentially need more RR if you play vitality.

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