Anyways, the entire thread seems to have been started to due to the sudden OPness of Cold builds
Well i said this once and i say it again:-
Cold Breakers have existed for a ages
Shadow Strike has been sticking around for a while
Arcanist/Nightblade both masteries and their respective skills have been with use for a while
It is pretty clear the damage spike happened in patch 1.0.0.8, so that’s the point when things got broken.
Last time Night’s Embrace got nerfed because everyone copying each other’s builds made it seem that Night’s Embrace was the reason why Breakers were suddenly so broken. Not that i am against that particular nerf.
So I kindly request you guys properly look into this situation this time before nerfing the wrong stuff. I’d start by looking into the Cold related stuff you guys buffed in previous patches (Rings, Scythe)
Imagine all your flat frostburn multiplied with SS weapon dmg and than multiplied by 2 cuz you hit with both weapon, add to that NJE crit dmg, NF flat frostburn and innate crit dmg which can be really high on SB and you have your answer
So there will be an overwhelming balance patch coming before the expansion gets released? Hopefully. I died a total of 12 times on my conjurer but 100+ on other classes. :furious:
Tankiness is definitely something that cannot be overlooked in this game, especially when it is so challenging. Good God my Elementalist DO NOT survive.
Titan Quest’s forums is that way in a large part I think because over time people have recognized that the 5-10 second kill difference between an un-optimized build and a fun (but well-planned) one just boils down to nitpicking and being petty.
It was not something that came about spontaneously or even in the first few years after the original game came out though - the community had its own share of flame wars, rivalries, endless brag threads, player put down moments… hell even a dev or two was known to participate.
I guess ultimately people just kind of grew out of it. As standards changed, things kind of just settled on their own.
Also, the thing about TQ is from the get-go there is a universal “everyone has the potential to be OP” label attached to every class, even the single mastery classes (because individual skills were potentially OP more than actual builds).
It’s different from GD where synergy is required to make builds work, especially in ultimate.
Of course, this was also something that TQ forumers only realized like 5+ years after the game came out. Before that it was all “Haha, Sapros builds are GOD and you will kneel before me!”
Who knows, maybe it will also eventually become true for GD.
Figuring out synergies is going to take longer than unlocking all the mysteries behind a single skill line though.
talking about the full offensive set up, its doable, but not viable imo since its a bit about RNG and luck,
still from my experience, with 2 spellbreaker (me as dw and another with soulrend) both on offensive set up, really full offensive, just liked the last posted its a joke, a bad joke (with crucible buffs im saying), im pretty sure we broke some records there …
if im saying this it aint to bring a heavier and quicker nerf, but i think theres something really “unbalanced” in the game :
multiplayer difficulty scaling
imo, compared to solo game, multiplayer (crucible and campaign) is way to easy, 2 players is like x2 easier than solo, or you can say solo is x2 harder than 2players in multi depending on your way to see the thing.
with all the buffs players can add to themselves, i really think the difficulty should be higher, way higher.
every game i join, with decent chars and ok connection without lags every seconds become a speed run no matter what is being runned, even and especially skeleton keys.
i know its maybe a bit off topic, and even if many see GD as a solo game, its really fun to play in multiplayer with friends, and with that actual poor difficulty scaling we dont even have to bother about synergies between our builds since its already way too easy to kill any nemesis or boss or whatever
and no, i dont always play with my SB, neither the players i play with.
Balancing between stackable things that in normal cases shouldn’t be possible (like in multiplayer and double nemeses combos in the crucible) is just not a priority atm, I think. And it’s going to take a while to sort through all of those.
Most players who think Crucible rarely think about actually using tributes, oddly enough. It’s weird because people who do play Crucible a lot assume that everyone else uses them.
never said it was a priority, just thought it wouldnt be stupid to point that out, game aint balanced in multiplayer, thats all, and i wasnt focusing about crucible, its the same in main campaign, i just think mobs, bosses; lets just say everything should have more hp and hit harder, scaling better with numbers of players.
for example if its really hard for char to take down fabius in solo, and then you take another 3 chars, not exact same chars just around same efficiency; then fabius is easy to take down.
Oh great, another nerf incoming to a non-cookie-cutter build I use because a top build with double-rare MI gear and high rolled legendaries is working better than your vision of the game intended. My 2h cold spellbreaker can’t get close to the kill times posted on top build threads, maybe it’s because I don’t have the “perfect” gear, maybe the issue is with flat cold and frostburn damage double-dipping with dw setups, maybe something else entirely, but obviously the easy way to “fix” dw spellbreakers is to nerf Shadow Strike and not give a fuck about other builds. Just like my non-saboteur dw fire strike build got nerfed “to counterbalance the buffs to Nightblade WPS skills”.
At what point would you say the game is balanced? When every mastery combination has only one viable build with best rolled MI and legendary combos and their damage and tankiness is within 5% of each other and their playstyle is all similar? Might as well just rename Grim Dawn to World of Diablowatch. And when someone dislikes such a homogenized experience, you can refer to them like Jay Wilson talked about David Brevik, because obviously they are losers for trying to play a single player game in a non-cookie-cutter way.
Reminds me of trying to kill Belial in D3 on HC soon after release, 3 players, 2 RIPs. Later they realized that people prefer to play solo cuz it’s much easier to kill boss when he doesn’t do tripled damage to you and removed extra damage.
I’m ok with hp scaling in multiplayer but damage scaling - nah. There is not so many tankiness synergy in this game. Ofc we can see some use of support builds with a healers sets but it will end in a really bad meta we can see now in some game with 3 supports and 1 DD party.
For sure, i explain myself a bit wrong; i didnt mean mobs should hit x3 harder when its 3 players; but they should imo hit a bit harder than now; in multiplayer i feel like the game is x3 easier when playing with total of 3 players; and it shouldnt be like this (imo again), but again it aint a top priority and multiplayer as it is atm offers fun,
i just think it could be balanced better
Nemesises waves arent even the most dangerous ones. Yes, Nemesises are tanky, but most of their so-called “power” comes either from reflecting damage/retaliation (Fabius, Iron Maiden), or spamming Freeze (Moosilake), or being able to reduce your resistance to damage they deal (Valdaran - to elemental, Zantarin - to Vitality). If you have some overcap on elemental and vitality resist (though that isnt even needed if you stay in melee range), if you have 80% freeze resist and enough ADCTH to outleech retaliation/reflect, then all Nemesises dont pose any threat.
For my Witchblade, most dangerous waves are
137 : Anasteria - INSANE resistance reductions (With 53 overcap on Aether, she sets my Aether resist to 20 below cap if she hits with both of her resistance-reducing abilities. All other resists are also get dumpstered into the void, and damage taken skyrockets! In addition to that, Anasteria is hard to target.
146 : Eldrich Guardians - Very strong resistance reductions.
149 : Sharzul + Lucius - Very strong resistance reductions and massive fumble (miss).
Also, 147 (Mad Queen) is very dangerous if you dont overcap poison, vitality and pierce resistances.
Tributes may give you HP and damage, but they cant give you resistances, and resistance are the most important part of surviving Crucible.
Yeah, we dont want “full-support Guardian meta” like it is in PoE, where dedicated supports turn average players into supermen, and enemies - into vegetables.
And indeed, scaling damage for more players is a bad move when you face really hard content, they should scale HP, maybe reduce some cooldowns, improve AoEs and attack/cast speeds, but not damage.
Sorry perhaps i worded my question poorly. Taking into specific context:
SS will be modified by Merciless Reportoire’s, Overload and Elemental Balance (% bonus modifier). This much I understand.
but… will it take into consideration the flat damage bonus recieved from IEE or Execution passives? or will it only will the total damage calculation only consider the flat damage values located in:
Shadow Strike > NJE > Nightfall, which is basically the Shadow Strike tree itself.
EDIT: nyerkk… why was this put on the balance thread and not on the build thread, lol…
This has flat part that is multiplied by shadow strike weapon damage %%. You can add here Lethal Assault. Some of this skills also improve cold/elemental/poison/frostburn damage and it improves flat cold/poison/frostburn damage of SS/NJE/Nightfall but it’s already calculated when you look at the SS/NJE/Nightfall tooltip with this skills on. SS itself doesn’t multiply it by additional 300+ WD%.
This will not be multiplied by shadow strike weapon damage %%.
Afaik Execution flat damage applied only to Execution proc itself. Please, someone prove if I’m wrong and it includes some flat damage which can be applied to all WD% attacks.
Skillpointwise Execution is more cheap (but less consistent) way to apply flat damage. For 8 points you get same WD% as for 13 in Shadow Strike. But SS adds almost tripple shitload tons of flat damage on top of it from the skill iself.
I’m not sure if you noticed but overcapped resists don’t work against absolute debuffs. You can stack as much resist after your personal as you want, but a 50% absolute resist debuff against something like 90% capped resist will still reduce your resists to 40%. Multiple different versions can be deadly.
Some attacks were simply meant to be avoided/waited out, especially for builds that value offense over defense.
Like I said, many effects do not seem balanced around situations that are normally impossible in the normal campaign. This applies to both the crucible and multiplayer and it’s likely going to take a while to sort them all out, which can interfere with expansion work.
Tributes give you the bonus HP (among other things) to be more resistance-focused with your gear/enchants in the crucible. This fact is crucial because players should learn to treat the crucible as a different meta if they want to beat it reliably, and not play it like you would the normal game. You can (and should) make adjustments to your gear to account for (massive) tribute bonuses and even defensive towers.
For example, simple math will tell you that many of these bonuses have diminishing returns if you already have a lot of them to begin with. You should take that into account for maximum overall gain.
It’s very different from even ultimate difficulty in the campaign where I can freely around in mostly offense-focus gear on my builds. There is really no need to have all your resists maxed all the time in ultimate, and you can burst down things in ultimate easily without getting overwhelmed like you could be in the crucible.
And i noticed, that overcaps DO work, actually, in current version, at least. If you play older versions of the game (i.e. 1.0.0.5), then you’re right.
Actually, the only thing you really have to adjust, is your OA needed to not miss while hitting an enemy (since Crucible buffs provide nice OA amount). Higher HP and damage are nice, but in normal campain, enemies dont hit as hard, and you dont have to kill them as fast.
Indeed, but i’d rather say that campain is far more forgiving. But sometimes, you may meet nemesis along with some nasty hero (with resist reduction for example), and feel the pain…
That’s why you bring things like Aether Clusters. You also learn to recognize some of the more dangerous unique mobs over time and learn to be a bit more careful around mobs which carry weapons.
I generally play recklessly because that’s how my builds are set up, but if I was ever forced to play hardcore I’d probably work on getting a Nemesis to spawn somewhere “safe” so I won’t have to worry about meeting one randomly.
It’s been a while since I actually checked resist reductions, but these days I simply avoid mobs when I have a resist debuff on so I never really noticed the change in practice.
