[Feedback] Useless Monster Infrequents

looks decent, how does it handle grava?

Totems + devils and kite for SR I guess but I haven’t hit him in SR. Crucible generally burst with ascension up (I try to keep totems up near nemesis spawn point for 170/165/160) or wait for his disrupt then burst. Grava + Fabius and Iron maiden is annoying combo tho.

Edit : Yeah met him at SR 80 kite wid totems and attack after null, disrupt charge.

Sorry, what? I feel like we are at square one once again.
Every balance discussion we had recently was regarding endgame. Frankly, i’m not even sure what balance is outside of endgame. Likewise, the validity of MIs in endgame is regarded in the context of best affixes, compared to what “the majority of the playerbase” will usually get.

Ravager’s and Calla’s helm are very accessible to every player who strives to get them because there are classes that allow to assemble a “budget” superboss killer (and they don’t require too much skill). It’s much more time consuming to get very good MI helms and even some of legendary helm where you need several good rolls

In endgame most legendary helms and some of MI helms are balanced in the +1/+1 helms environment (btw Fettan’s Mask, a FREE item, is pretty close in power to, as you put it, “rewards for pinnacle challenges”).

That’s why in my opinion the helm slot is easier to balance compared to some of the rest slots.

Your comment was quite unexpected for me.

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Thanks for the constructive discussion, all.

As I mentioned before, I don’t think it’s appropriate at this point to gut the % Cooldown Reduction from some rare affixes in order to sprinkle it onto the MI Helms. Even if, I am generally not a fan of adding things such as +1 to mastery/% Cooldown Reduction/% Physical Resist as some general bandaid for addressing an item underperforming. When everything ends up with % Physical Resist, for example, might as well lower physical damage on monsters by a % and cut the stat out.

Gearing is supposed to be about choices, and when that choice boils down to stacking X in every possible slot over anything else, that’s no longer interesting. Of course, in some cases, that makes sense. You want more % damage and resistances on virtually any piece of gear, for example.

If other attributes are not sufficient at their current values, then the option is always to make further changes or buffs. As an exaggerated example, if the MI helms had no skill bonuses and no %CDR, but gave 100000% damage, nobody would think twice about using them. It would be a no brainer.

At the end of the day, everything can be simplified down to numbers that your character can take and dish out and how fast, and either everything on the screen is dead or you are.

Obviously we’d never go that far (modders, get on it), but surely there is a sweet spot between 100000% and replace the bonuses. Perhaps this approach takes more work than just pasting the same stats onto everything, but I think the end result will be more interesting and worth pursuing.


To start on the helms, we are going to normalize their skill bonuses to +3 across the board. There has been inconsistency in some helms having +3/+3, others +3/+2 and others still just +2/+2. I agree with swapping some of the skill bonuses to modifiers for the base skills instead.

A number of dot modifiers were woefully lower than their counterparts, so we’ll bump those up as well.

Some MIs in this thread were already seeing some changes for the next update, and even some that aren’t on this list as well. The feedback in this thread will be taken under consideration for v1.1.9.2, which should be out later this summer. Then we’ll go from there and the cycle of hatred progress will resume once more.


Yes, I can see why you are surprised considering…

is your baseline of low skill/budget.

Not to mention the idea of “just roll a superboss killer and get the helm for your main, palmface” is not our standard for the average player either.

As I said before, and for some reason this concept is impossibly difficult to comprehend for some people, the vast majority of the playerbase plays by different rules and standards.

A recommendation to a new player is never going to be “oh that MI is trash, just go kill Callagadra”. I’m glad superbosses are very accessible to our hardcore playerbase, but let’s set realistic expectations please.

Honestly, if I were to do superboss rewards again, I’d keep them cosmetic, since the alternative is precisely the sort of mentality we are dealing with here. Lessons learned for the future I guess…

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I suppose it’s gonna be a very long summer :frowning:

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Hm… now I am curious to see these builds.

Whenever I think of making a non pet build, it always ends up with the question “ok, but what about Cally/Crate?” and I simply decide to stick with pets.

So, would definitely love to see such builds, especially if they can be made with budget setups.

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Right away, sir!

I’d be careful with this. It’s neither here nor there for this thread, but one of the strengths of the superbosses is their replayability/farmability. It’s one thing to slog out with Calla for an hour, once. It’s another to fine-tune the process down to a tenth of the time. And with randomly-rolled usable loot, there’s always a reason to keep practicing/farming. “Pinnacle” rewards such as these are great motivators.

My adventures in Destiny have led me to see the other side of this coin. Unqiue (“Exotic”) weapons from the series’ raids have bounced back and forth between being highly coveted and a quick pass that isn’t worth the effort. When “aspirational content” (as Bungie, Destiny’s developers, puts it) doesn’t have much to aspire to, the content itself suffers in turn.

I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with superbosses dropping extremely potent loot. They just have to be an exception, not a rule, for balance. And the current rewards strike that fairly well, as they do not totally eclipse set items and in some cases still leave room for non-set non-superboss uniques to take their place. But when they can slide into a build, they can be used very well indeed!

As would I. I quickly skimmed through some ‘Crate’ killers and none of them strike me as being particularly low-budget (barring a now-out-of-date Ulzuin setup. RIP Ulzuin…).

Calla can be done with something simple like Krieg’s set, but the process isn’t particularly fast and leaves a lot of room for error. So I also wouldn’t recommend that for “new/low skill players” either.

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As much as I want to disagree with you, you are right. You really don’t have a clue about balance. Wow.

Thankfully big Z keeps things more down to earth. The majority of the game is leveling, and being able to make cool builds early on is very fun. In particular, the MI’s that give conversion are just awesome.

I’ll try to explain myself one more time (although it’s disheartening to feel like i hit a brick wall i thought we brought down already).

Celestial helms are very good. On average, they are the best helms in the game, no question. And they are given as rewards for killing the hardest enemies, yes.

But the buttom line is they do not obsolete most of legendary and MI helms. So when i call Ravager’s helm a baseline, what i mean is, if you take a green helm and think to yourself “Can i use it in some build where it will be better than a generic best item?” and the answer is yes, then the helm has passed an endgame validity check.

It’s very good that some of green helms are accessible to new players and give them much needed boost in the campaign. But you can reach both this goal and the goal of the item being viable in endgame at the same time, as you did with your balancing throughout the years.

And one more word about the challenge of the Celestials. I’ve killed Ravager on my first legit playthrough within 3-4 months of playing the game with leveling gear and the weakest class in the game, Tactician. I wasn’t a hardcore player, i played quite badly, i just wanted the helm to i exploited the mechanics of the fight and took him down in 30 mins on a 3rd attempt. I couldn’t quite kill Calla but i didn’t need her helm. Celestial fights are also balanced in that way: if you want to grind the helms for rolls and kill the bosses quickly face to face you have to be very powerful. But you can kill them even with an underpowered character and get one copy of the helm if you have enough patience.

There is Grimsheet for that. Also i think Crate is a very different story. You can’t kite it for eternity, there are some serious dps and stat check you need to pass to kill it.

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When it comes to this 2 skills Escobar’s Axiom must be applied. Both swarm and wind devils have a good reason for having more -rr% than any other sources - they are cancerous to use. Because of their clunkiness, the values are somewhat justified. -15% rr for swarm/WD is way too low to consider using.

I’m not too good with superbosses myself but this could be a cool build challenge for anyone up for it. Fresh start (blueprints, shared stash, everything), new character - level 1 to all superbosses (or just all superbosses except crate?) within xx hours played. Kiting caster build would probbly win tho

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Can’t wait to play that update ! It seems there will be many changes and that update might be THE last significant update for me. Thanks for your work Z and the Team !

And how many players resort to using a highly optimised budget superboss build? I don’t like neutering content/rewards on the basis of an unknown portion of players using the path of least resistance. May as well just argue the rewards should be neutered because GD stash exists.

I’ve only theory crafted a low budget Ravager build a while ago. The problem with Callagadra is the health regeneration, DPS check makes budget builds more difficult to pull off. Resorting to kiting makes Ravager doable with much less, just need more time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn_p-5PkJco&ab_channel=idontwannaknow0

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You said budget builds. I do not remember seeing any budget Superboss killers there.

You do realize that “budget” implies easily farmable items and not full legendary setups or double rare greens, right?

Not entirely true, per se.

This: Mnemosyne - Pet Conjurer took 7 mins (approximately) to kill Crate. For non pet builds, it might be different though.

Damn, really good work. Even if it was Ravager, it is still a superboss. So, kudos :+1:

You can check my topic with meme acid ranged ABB blademaster. It took about ~32-35 hours on fresh account to get Ravager’s and Calla’s helms there.
Or another one with pierce PB (slightly outdated though).
I think every kiting bild is able to get these helms, just a bit of patience.

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That is actually pretty impressive :open_mouth:

sry for the revival
But, while before i didn’t agree with the notion either, today i learned you can farm celestials on Elite and get their 94 Legend there.
A challenge vastly different in terms of difficulty/build requirement than Celestials on Ultimate, and now i’d kinda have to agree with Banana on the overall accessibility of the items/helms

Not that i think it should be used as a blanket excuse/demand to make the standard +1 on helms. Just that it definitely puts the acquisition of such powerful helms in a bit of a different scope, at least imo now

(i also can’t believe it took me so long to notice :confounded::man_facepalming:)

Lol in before Zantai removes level 94 versions of the celestial helms from Elite.

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i’m more bummed it took me like 4 years to notice :rofl: since if it happened it would just be “back to usual” for me :joy:

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