There’s a big difference between “this affix is generally good to fix needed resistances” and “a Pierce Nightblade build needs 4 of this very specific affix to shine, otherwise the damage and survivability are 50% of what it could/should be.” The points is for MI’s with rare affixes to be a nice bonus to an already established build, not a mandatory chore.
My suggestion remains to make it so that you have to choose between converting Elemental to Pierce or Acid to Pierce, but not have both in substantial numbers. That way, maxxing out Lethal Assault doesn’t get triple the benefits in having so much stacked flat damage. Maybe removing the Cunning bonus from the Cutthoat’s affix or toning down the flat Pierce damage as well.
Making the belt conversions ranged only doesn’t fix things either, because Pierce Infiltrators would still be broken. Instead of it being a melee Nightblade with Inquisitor RR and WoR support, you just end up making more a ranged Inquisitor with Nightblade VoS + Blade Spirit + Pneumatic Burst support.
This has been pretty awful whenever I’ve tried, although it’s been quite some time now. I think the ranged change would actually resolve most of this, since the only AAs you can get are beranoth or runebinder.
Generally same thoughts on pierce. I’d actually like to see other damage types affixes get buffed (dreadlord is the only one I can think of being close to pierce options), with a small tone down on pierce. Work needed for this may not be practical though
That still doesn’t make much sense. Top builders gdstashing their builds have been a thing since mid AoM (technically vanilla but only a few did stash back then) but most of the time greens, especially the affix part saw more buffs instead of nerfs. What you said works in theory but historically speaking, instead of affixes being nerfed for parity with legendaries due to affix “value” lowering with stash being popular, they instead get buffed. In fact, this thread is the first big discussion I remember about nerfing affixes since I joined here. Imo this indicates that Crate doesn’t really account for stash when balancing greens.
Never said they were easy. You’re implying that I think they’re stash easy to farm but nothing is stash easy to farm unless you stash it yourself. And it’s fine cause those rares are for people who farm for them, not for casuals. But it is in fact easier while the hate going down doesn’t really feel proportional.
Even on legendaries there are damage types that are better supported (bloodrager and only bloodrager on bleed while most other types have multiple viable options). Greens are even harder to balance.
Kids these days and their fancy stashing programs. Back in my day, we had to hex-edit (kinda) our stash files to make items!
…then they encrypted that file and all was lost for a few patches, had to actually play the game. It was ghastly.
The notion that a green-laden build is unindicative of balance irregularity doesn’t hold water. It’s all relative. Doing X time on a GDStashed perfect build doesn’t imply that doing Y time on the same build with lesser gear isn’t itself unbalanced. It’s the same premise behind why the whole “stop nerfing builds based on elite players” doesn’t work. Top builds aren’t nerfed because casual players are doing 4 minute Crucible runs with them. But that casual players do Crucible runs far faster with them than with other builds is cause for such things to get nerfed. The same applies to gear - perfect gear or otherwise, an overperforming build can be tweaked down at all levels of its existence and brought to regularity with other things.
Unpopular hot take: leave RA and krieg set as is. The idea of making everything perfectly balanced is boring. There SHOULD be overpowered setup. There is no need to go around nerfing everything that is powerful just because. This isn’t a competitive game with leaderboards and such. I think the overtuning of this game is hurting it. Let some stupid, OP stuff exist in the mix (other than pets ffs.) it’s already not nearly as pleasurable to play as faster builds with 2 movement skills and such, so I don’t really see why it had to be tuned so heavily. Also, as a side note, please don’t go through with the “of blades” nerf. You guys have been full anus diarrhea splattering us retal lovers for too long.
The problem with RA is that it overperforms all other 2H skills. If we gonna keep the RA as it is(which will not) then we gonna have to buff BA, Cadence, Savagery and RF. Which might cause more balance issues, so it’s better to tame RA a bit, so aleast BA can do better.
Obviously full investment, overcapped BA should be better, but they are going too far with this crap, as usual. Nerfing all the aether damage on it and forcing krieg into a battlemage set is just absurd. Tone down the weapon damage, sure, but all the other adjustments are just pointlessly handicapping a fun relic and skill. The krieg thing pisses me off a lot more. I like the freedom of the set. Now they are punishing you for playing a necro combo with it?
Actually, removing aether damage on it force you to use Bonemonger pieces or arcanist belt to convert all vitality into aether with screaming veil. If you don’t want to use screaming veil then you gotta use both belt and bonemonger pieces. Maybe I don’t know most recent RA builds but, is there a build that use full krieg and lucius blade and better than other alternatives? If not, then Screaming Veil+ Bonemonger or Screaming Veil+Ygraad Belt(and Krieg set) Spellbinder should be still the best aether RA.
That’s not an excuse to have broken stuff. Obviously perfect balance is impossible, but there shouldn’t be item skills outperforming mastery skills by miles, or sets twith targeted farming outperforming sets that are much harder to get.
I too don’t like nerfs much (probably nobody does), but this one had to be done. Also don’t forget that it was on 3 sec CD just months ago, so I even had to create a topic about it being a rather lackluster skill… though I was joking when I said “should it be spammable?” XD
Like I said, I’m more upset about the armor nerf and some others. I do think they are overnerfing RA though. I just wonder what percentage of players are playing the things that they keep nerfing. Usually things only get nerfed because they are overused and dominate the meta. I doubt that there are an overwhelming number of players playing RA or frankly any of the things they have nerfed in recent patches. I don’t think that there are very many people like the sweaty neckbeards of the forums.
And you’d most probably be right =) Still, after nerfing, some guy will show up with build that “oblitirates Callagadra in 24 seconds” or some shit like that… I mean, my retal Warlord was killing Calla in ~6 minutes some patches ago, and it gets slower and slower because somebody finds a new way to abuse somehing. And then they complain about not being able to facetank SR 90 reliably XD
I never wanted RA to be turned into a spam skill, nor really % on attack. I liked casting/using cooldowns skills like that (or Annihilation when it was cd), but the dmg values were extremely lacklustre. I hope in GD2 cooldown skills make a genuine comeback (instead of being supported by severe patching down of the cd, or extreme item support). This also happened to skills like doom bolt and devastation.
