Haha would you believe that I’d already considered this? Radical it might seem but it would also be easier to balance. The only defensive devotion procs I’d leave in would be shield related, and maybe leave the %hp regen ones but lower flat hp regen from devotion or remove entirely so to benefit you’d have to get it from skills or gear.
Well I’m rambling again. Basically yes, I’ve considered making all devotion procs offensive in nature. It’s not a terrible idea actually. But ideally by improving some of the other things I mentioned it won’t be needed. Ideally you will be able to get your defense from items or devotion or a mix of both, instead of outright needing huge amounts from both.
They can add difficulty back in, in more interesting ways. Dodgeable enemy heavy skills and attacks. Interesting monster buffs auras and debuffs. Monster cooperative ai mechanics. Boss mechanics. Challenge dungeon features (a dungeon where you lose a % of your health every second, a dungeon where challenge rooms and the boss have -% movespeed auras, a dungeon that inverts your resistances, a dungeon that has meteors constantly falling but slow enough to dodge. Etc. More mechanical difficulty, less stat wall difficulty )
Treasure troves are clearly going to be nerfed, but I’d like champion drop rates lowered a touch and trash mob drop rates improved. Maybe 1/600 or so trash drops a legendary. And make it so it’s worse in multiplayer but not linearly. So not 1/1200 for two players, 1/1800 for 3. More like 1/900 for 2. 1/1200 for 3. Because you can share loot in multiplayer and loot is instanced so higher chance of getting something someone can use.
My bad - enemy damage has been reduced in elite and ultimate. I’ve been busy handling other things and forgot to add it to the change log before the build got posted. I’ve updated it in the original post.
It sounds like higher difficulties may still be too punishing though, in which case, ill make further adjustment. I’ve been pretty busy coordinating with GoG / Humble and handling other post-release issues, so I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to test and fine-tune balancing.
Love the pic, shows again that there’s too much of an emphasis on resistances. 143% poison resistance counting the -50pt from Ultimate? And I bet you still can’t take more than three poison hits without using a potion
Understandable. Could you provide us with any insight on how you want to make ultimate more manageable for melee without trivializing the content for ranged? Obviously we won’t hold you to your current input, as it may likely change upon testing.
Just curious as to what approach you currently want to take, regardless of whether it changes. Thanks in advance, understand if you’re too busy to reply or lack a current confident path in addressing this.
Also I agree here. Wendigo got crushed. Was so cool before.
No, patch has no effect on GoG release. All our work is done for the GoG release and they’re just sorting things out on their side, getting ready to release it.
Actually I feel quite tanky vs. anything except melee physical and bleeding damage. Poison is really a non issue since I started wearing the Dreeg set, only that purple troll boss in East Marsh made me dodge his poison nova thingy.
But as I said, damage from melee hits feels more like it has been increased, contrary to what the patch notes say.
I think the current issue is that ambient damage is too high. Ambient damage tends to have much more impact on melee than ranged, whereas, when ambient damage is more reasonable, melee / tanky builds are less threatened by burst damage than the typical ranged build.
I feel another issue is that by ultimate, the %dmg bonuses at their current levels on devotions may not offer enough gain in clear speed. On account of the overly high enemy damage and possibly too low enemy health, it is much more advantageous to just dump everything into defense.
If enemy life was a little higher and player damage bonuses were raised, it would increase the value of investing in offense. Lowering enemy damage would reduce the requirement to all-out invest in defense. Then melee players would be able to keep more sustained contact with enemies and ranged players might feel a little more threatened in tight spaces if enemies don’t drop quite as fast.
I think the goal should be that if you invest heavily in defense, you should feel significantly less threatened but have a lower clear speed than someone who invests more offensively. A more offensive oriented build should have higher clear speed and be more fragile but not to the current extent where it is too punishing.
Well that’s good to hear, I’m joking a bit but I haven’t made it to Ultimate yet hello hardcore my old friend, and even as a sword & board pure Soldier, I’ve always felt like I was taking too much damage. My last lost character was one-shot by Gollus for 4k+ HP in Veteran, I guess I was a victim of the shotgun effect (if devs read, this might be worth looking into).
Please fix that weird things like 617 physique for Shadeleather leggings (400+ before patch) and 449 Cord of The Ancestor (300+ before if i’m not mistaken). I have lost 2 pieces of equipment!
No heavy armor. The Dreeg set is caster stuff and has generally around 600 base armor, the chest has 682. The pants (Arcane Harmony Leggins) have 832 base armor. I didn’t switch out any gear pieces after the patch.
Here’s my detailed armor breakdown:
Before the patch I was able to face-tank most white trash mobs, after the patch each blow from even the tiniest enemy does like 10-15% of my total health. That’s not so much of an issue because trash mobs usually don’t get close to me before they die, but especially heros have generally become a lot less tankable for me.
I agree with the first part of your post, but don’t really agree with enemies having too little life (well, maybe certain ones like bees and grobles) – if anything they have somewhere from the right amount to too much. What causes +% damage to be less useful on Ultimate is how enemy resistances scale up with difficulty, making -resists a significantly better DPS booster than +% damage can be, particularly with how -resists stack at the moment.
It’s not so much that it’s too challenging – I don’t think it’s as hard as people are making it out to be to make a viable Ultimate build – but what is lost in Ultimate is the ‘fun’ of Normal and Elite. By this I mean fluid gameplay, little downtime, but with there still being plenty of danger. Ultimate often becomes more tedious than challenging.
My self found melee Saboteur just can’t progress reasonably in Ultimate anymore after the patch… My gear wasn’t too good to begin with, but the resist devotions and hp ones made it at least doable… Now, not so much. He’s borderline stuck now, and spending 80% of the time running around kiting and potting being inefficient as a melee character is just… Meh.
It seems like you understand the problem(s), all right.
Obviously this patch has changed some of this, but my observations after around 250 hours of playing (pre-1.0.0.2):
-Monster damage is too high (endgame) to build “glass cannon.”
-Glass cannon builds don’t do much more damage than DPS builds with defensive devotions, who gain tons of survivability at the cost of a small amount of damage.
-Increasing offensive devotions may help, but still won’t prevent squishier melee classes from eating instant death before they can dish out lethal damage.
Obviously, as stated, the best way to fix this would be to nerf defensive devotions as well as lowering monster damage. I see now in the patch notes that monster damage was nerfed, but I feel like my squishier melee characters are really struggling against being one shot, or heavily kiting and waiting for pot cooldowns. Meanwhile my tankier classes are killing a little slower, but not dying and are all around more enjoyable since I’m not spending the entire time running. I think you guys are on the right track, but I think monster damage is gonna have to come down a little bit more if you want to make it work with more diverse builds.
Another option would be to put some stronger defensive options in the melee skill trees themselves. There is quite a bit of sustainability in most of the trees, it’s the burst damage that kills you in an instant.
Thanks for the reply. I just want to say I think it’s more an issue of ambient damage than enemy hp. I mean, once my spell casters and nukers are fully built, trash pops the way it should, but until then, anything that makes it past my aoe can be quite scary.
But my concern is if you just lower ambient dmg you make the game even easier for ranged. While ambient dmg affects ranged less, it still affects us. I suppose one step at a time. Step 1: make melee fun. Step 2. Add challenge for ranged.
But I’ll defer to your experience. And yes I suppose if monsters were tankier it increases the chance AoE doesn’t obliterate them thus letting them take more shots at hitting range characters. Hmm. You may be right.
That’s… A good thing lol. Caster gear shouldn’t be for. Facetanking. Thank you for your feedback. More evidence physical dmg from enemies is in a good place now, or at least better.
