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.
