(For those not wanting to read a wall-of-text, adoomgod and I discussed this during our patchnotes analysis, highlighted here.)
Everything I could possibly write as an introduction to this thread has already been perfectly summed up by GeneralCash, so I’ll just quote him to open up:
To which the point was somewhat missed…
Essentially the big issue here is that resist reduction is substantially more powerful against enemies with higher resists than against those with lower ones. adoomgod and I agree that the degree to which resist reduction could be acquired was - and kind of always has been - a problem and so this change was a step in the right direction. But it exacerbates the overall problem of resist reduction being over-popular to the point of being competitively necessary due to the fact that enemies still have their same over-the-top resists while players are less capable of reducing those resists.
GeneralCash described this problem in an equation, let me describe it in numbers. Suppose you have 10 Reduced Resists on your build and you run into a monster with 0 resists, one with 50 resists, and one with 90 resists, and ordinarily you do 1000 damage:
Against the 0-resist mob, you would typically do 1000 damage until you debuff their resists to -10, at which point you would deal 1100 damage to them (a 10% increase in your damage output).
Against the 50-resist mob, you would typically do 500 damage until you debuff their resists to 40, at which point you would deal 600 damage to them (a 20% increase in your damage output).
Against the 90-resist mob, you would typically do 100 damage until you debuff their resists to 80, at which point you would deal 200 damage to them (a whopping 100% increase in your damage output).
In Ultimate, where heightened-resists on enemies are a rampant norm (with several immunities scattered throughout the game), the first scenario isn’t especially a major occurrence; instead, players often wind up doubling or tripling their damage against high-resistance enemies with only a handful of resist reduction items or skills. Nerfing the potency of resist reduction sources does not nerf their effectiveness relative to everything else.
TL;DR the new numbers on resist reduction sources are actually pretty OK but they exacerbate the resistance problem as long as monster resists are so high and this nerf has only made resistance reduction all the more viable.
I personaly like the fact that their is resistances reduction.
It might be complicated at first glance because their is 3 ‘‘types’’ of reduction… but once I knew what’s going on I liked it as it gives me theory crafting.
Is it mandatory? I’d say yes to optimize your damage output.
The question is, is it a bad thing or a good thing…
It’s a good thing if you see that stat as a ways to optimise your build and as a stat that adds-up for theory crafting. For me that’s the case as there is many sources to reduce resistances, so you gotta choose a way. What I think is, without adding too many choices, in the future adding more ways (flat resist, -x%, x% reduction) will just helps in this adea of theory crafting.
Some people might say in the other ends that because you need it it gives less possibilities on how to gear and set up yout skills/devotion. To that I says that it’s true for a lot of stats in GD.
For exemples without maxed resistances it can be really risky as the game is blalanced toward a high base value (80%), and that’s without considering + to the resistances cap.
Obviously, on monsters having a high resistance value, not even OA or crit damage will affect your damage output as much as reducing the resistances.
I do not see it as a problem as long as the Devs give us ways to reduce resistances. I kinda feel it is at a right place although adding other possiblities wouldn’t hurt. As I said, the stat (resist reduction) is a stat that gives me more theory crafting and I like it!
Not sure how that’s an issue. Generally I think it’s beneficial for different offensive abilities to vary in effectiveness based on situation and enemy type. If something is just universally effective, then there is no reason to diversify your gearing or skill use.
That said, I have lowered bonus resistances by 3% in elite and 10% in ultimate for the next patch. This will affect all enemies, so in some cases, it will increase the phenomenon of resistance reduction being less useful against enemies with lower resistances and more powerful vs. those with higher resistances, while also reducing the overall value of resistance reduction somewhat. Seems good to me though.
To compensate, I’ve bumped up the enemy life bonus on ultimate a bit.
Hope that health increase is a little more than a bit. I’m finding that enemies in general are much too frail and 1.0.0.4 added a fair amount of power creep to begin with. I’m worried that the end-result of this change will make enemies even easier to deal with than they already are :undecided:
I concur with the latter two thirds of this, and the only reason I disagree with the former third is in the essence that generally speaking enemy Ultimate resistance was too high. In the current state of things, resistance reduction is presently too universally potent simply because the minimum playing field at which everything is evaluated on occurs with enemies universally having substantial resists.
Unless I’m missing something, it seems you have three ways of tanking enemies up (with slight variations between each means):
Give them high resists.
Give them high DA.
Give them high health.
(Edit: Option 4: Damage absorption? Essentially feels like more health, though.)
What with #1 being the universal state of being, resistance reduction is the universal go-to for rounding out one’s offenses. Talking with others about this situation, I was reminded at how this conversation now is very much like the conversation of exorbitant DA in the early days of Ultimate, except this time the availability of resist reduction is more consistent between mastery selections due to Devotion/itemization.
So you could give enemies with lower resists higher DA, or give enemies with higher DA and resists much lower health. Combining these three elements of defensiveness, while a lot of work (which we both know would really only benefit a small subsection of the playerbase), would go a long way to diversifying Grim Dawn’s endgame. But I’m probably preaching to the choir at this point. :eek:
Cheers! Although, like Nine, I’d insist on that ‘bit’ being ‘quite a bit’.
I would like to add my 2 cents here with some food for thought.
First of all, not all buillds have the same type of access to lowering resistance debuffs. A prime example of that is any build that does chaos damage.
Keep in mind that whether resist reduction is better balanced or burned to the ground, there will always be some aspect of a character build that is preferrable to all others. In the past it was OA, now it is RR, tomorrow it will be something else. It is just how games are.
When you decide on the health buff to compensate for lower resists, you gotta remember those new (undergeared) players getting into a new difficutly. I mean what is squishy for you and me, might be not so squishy for a less geared player or a less then optimal build.
Would also like to see some better balance between RR for different damage types, as for example chaos damage currently has almost none.
I fail to see how 1.0.0.4 introduced a fair amount of power creep. The changes do not affect every build in the same way. In fact some builds were better balanced (toned down a bit). Now I am not saying the game is harder, but it is definately not easier for everyone as suggested.
That said, my suggestion would be around 10-15% for elite and around 20-25% for ultimate. Keep in mind that players lost DPS by having less RR through the latest patch.
I have a chaos based ranged Occultist+Demo which I had to give up because the problems with high chaos resistances monsters in the late game (BoC, Harbingers and others). I’ve used all the possible for my build resistance reduction gear but it hardly helped.
While it is something to keep in mind, I wouldn’t advocate in doing so from your position. If a new difficulty feels the same as the previous one, what’s the point of progression? Making the next difficulty harder by beefing up enemies - a minor difficulty change, all things considered, but that’s another thread entirely - seems pretty OK to me. In your instance, it gives more of a reason for people to stick in (Normal, Elite) to farm up a bit more. As it is, you don’t especially need to except for a couple builds that are more item-dependent than others.
When I, after 3 years of owning this game, finally progress out of Normal Veteran and into Elite and then Ultimate, I want the change in difficulty to present a serious challenge to me and the character that I have built, loved and invested so much time in to.
It would be very disappointing to migrate into Elite and face roll mobs - experiencing no challenge.
I appreciate the constructive discussions that have been taking place between the more experienced and knowledgeable players such as yourselves.
There are always two sides to every coin, often more. It can be a delicate balancing act to provide a challenge to both players with geared characters and players that are still in search of gear.
As I approach Grim Dawn, the same way I approached Diablo II - a Single Pass experience, it will be interesting and probably very enlightening to see the increase in difficulty as I progress through to the end of Veteran and beyond.
I can tell you that I sit here, at my desk, late at night, popping mobs, looking forward to what the future holds
If you build well you will unfortunately have this feeling in elite. Normal is slow because you don’t have as many skills and synergies yet, and by comparison I tend to blast through elite. (Something we’ll look at btw)
@Imp: We could always not buff normal hp at all, and buff elite hp with the reduction to enemy resists less than we do on ultimate. But this is a very very narrow view of what would be a large multi-faceted iteration. If done correctly it shouldn’t really hurt new players at all or much.
Honestly, I don’t think there is even a way to fix how powerful resistance reduction is.
We saw that resistance reduction exponentially increases your damage when a mob has close to 100% resistance but that is a bit extreme. If we take the worst case scenario (a mob with 0% resistance) each % of resistance you reduce is still a +1% to your total damage. So even in the worst case RR is still very appealing.
I’m sure there are many players like me that just hate nerfs. Nerfs are psychologically bad and make you wonder what other games are there to play.
If you have to rebalance things, you can make other things more interesting, you can introduce great new things, and you can make enemies more powerful. Result would be pretty much the same. Sure, it’s easier to nerf Beronath’s Fury than to make all other LMB skills more worthy of all those points you have to invest in them, but easy&lazy is not what we came to expect from you guys.
This game of yours is truly a remarkable and very rare gem. Especially nowadays, when almost all games are hopelessly consolized and trivialized. Please, don’t spoil it with unnecessary interventions!
If I buff every skill and mob by 10%, except for BF, then the result is the same as a nerf to BF, it just takes a heck of a lot more work to accomplish the same thing…
There’s no need for perfect balance in games like this. Also, people use BF primarily in order to conserve skill points. Heck, I use it even on my Trickster. Some other builds don’t work at all without Beronath’s Fury. I’m sure I will continue to use BF even after the nerf, for all builds that needed it before. And all available resistance reduction. With a little bit less fun than before. That’s the only difference for me after this patch.
