So…basically all the attack skill lines that don’t contain at least some % WD in them or used mostly as debuffs…
Not sure why canister bomb isn’t on that list too… That skill seems to be horrible… Beside using the transmutter for CC. And Blood Pox for some defuff/devotion proccer…
I’m a missing a “good” caster speed skill that doesn’t have % WD? CT and DEE line both do (although DEE is only 15%/18% from blood burst) have % WD…
So is that what you’re saying? That AAR/PRM/TSS/Stun Jack/Grenado need % WD (or other modifications but % WD seems to be the missing component here…), but not “all caster” skills like devastation and doom bolt or debuffs like BWC and OFF?
Summoners have gear that help them scale more at end game. Not sure they should be treated the same…
The bottom line is all about end game scaling… TD doesn’t help the scaling for normal play…but the DPS scales ridiculously high for those 8 seconds when used right… As you don’t need a lot of damage for trash mobs/heroes, it isn’t a big deal. It provides the boost for the fights were it matters… Not saying it needs to be nerfed, just saying it compensates for the lack of scaling by allowing a massive boost to DPS during that time.
Whatever is done, it would need to focus on those caster skills so melee characters can’t also abuse it as is the case with TD…
I think that is part of the issue with the perception of casters… If there builds out there, few know about it…
I think the general perception is that a caster should be able to do massive DPS at the cost of Defense, whereas melee classes should be much stronger defensively at the cost of DPS. But with Grim dawn, the Casters (speed casters I guess…) have the squishy part down, but the trade off is they do less DPS then a lot of melee builds… One the best “casters” is a CT build, but as you need to get in melee range it really doesn’t “feel” like a caster even though “technically” it is one… Still not convinced CD casters really optimize that trade of either, but will take your word I guess. Summoners, although they “cast” their pets, shouldn’t be consider casters as they are a “pet Class” with their own separate bonuses on gear and the should be considered different no matter how the pets come to be…
NO. If you put WD% on AoE skills with 0 cooldown such as PRM the game’s ballance would be destroyed. Due to how powerful WD% is it should be found only in skills that create massive drawbacks for the player and the only skill that qualifies atm is AAR. I say this because it is a single target damage skill with a damage type supported by a single mastery that also needs legendary gear in order to be reliably debuffed. However, the WD% component should not be put on AAR, but the modifier.
OFC, tweeking damage levels would also work but you see…there is no legendary set that offers any significant boost to AAR. The Clarvoyant set supports a cooldown caster , not a cast speed caster. It works for Phantasmal blades, ofc BUT not AAR. If you put WD% on disintegration you hit two birds with one stone, because ppl will actually use Temporal Arcblade = a lvl 75 legendary that nobody knows what to do with. That of course, if the caster weapon requirement is removed like it is for the Conflagration ray.
I did say “or other modifier…” my point it seem the major of subpar skills are ones without % WD (not that the fix is to add % WD to them). They just need some way to scale better late game…
yeah, the need both the caster offhand and % WD fix there… However, if the caster offhand is removed, then the same requirement for devastation would also need to be removed. At least right now, you can’t really use an AAR build without devastation. So if you still required the off hand for devastation people still would be using the caster off hand. Maybe with enough % WD you could boost AAR (but would also then need some AEO to compensate for devastation…but then if people still keep the off and to use devastation then the combined AEO would probably be OP…) to a level where you don’t need to pair it with devastation. If it was boosted another way besides % WD, then there would still be no need to use the Temporal Arcblade over an off hand…
I’ve never ran a CT build… Could you use the arcblade with CT? Or is devastation too important for that build too?
Yes, but devastation is not a single target damage skill and it works poorly vs. highly mobile targets with small hitboxes… therefore the player is forced to make a compromise between how many points he puts into Reckless power, Disintegration and Devastation. Or, more precisely, he is forced to find a ballance between AoE and single target damage as well as gear.
Anyway, as I have already ran the simulation with Temporal Arcblade + TD + Kraken - you will obtain a maximum of 900.000 damage over 8 seconds even with Devastation at a massive cost for your defense. That is still lower than any execution/ SS build (saboteur, WH, spellbreaker, BM) by a large degree.
So your simulation also removes the requirement from devastation as you can’t currently use a 2H and use devastation? So are you agreeing that the requirement needs to be lifted from AAR and Devastation?
Little confused by your use of “Yes, but…” as that is usually signifies you’re trying to contradict what I’m saying… But if you’re simulation removed the requirement, then you would be agreeing with me that AAR needs devastation so the off hand should be removed from both…
Yeah, you need to balance your points between AAR and Devastation as they serve opposite, but complimentary functions… (single target vs AOE) Well, I guess if they make TSS better you might be able to still keep the requirement on devastation, but with 3 skills vs 1 in devastation, TSS would need a ridiculous buff to replace devastation and justify the skill point investment…
I never said anything about only using one skill. I’m just using firestrike as an example of a single skill against which to compare other skills. Furthermore, autoattacking characters have access to those same procs with weapon damage, which further supports my argument that autoattacking characters scale better into the lategame…
This is my approach in Zenith, except I’m doing it starting at rank 1. Skills with longer CDs may get both damage modification and % Weapon Damage.
Still, that only solves the damage side of things. It does not solve the lack of utility from % Weapon Damage. In my opinion, any skill on a sufficiently low cooldown - or no cooldown - that could reasonably be used as a primary attacking skill and thus warrant significant investment (skillpoint-wise and gearing-wise) ought to have some degree of % Weapon Damage scalability.
While I agree not all casters are in trouble, I would disagree that Summoners are “casters” in the typical sense of the word since as the other poster said, they are balanced despite having spells due to their pet’s damage.
Also, Time Dilation is IMO abusing a mechanic and I can’t see that devotion staying the way it is forever given the absurd boss kill times made possible by it.
It is not a coincidence that the two decent cast speed builds, PB and DEE, have WD%. I think the people above are over complicating it by changing spirit or introducing new stats, just change the handful of skills that exist without WD% to have WD% so they are on an even playing field with other skills and can use the same stats/devotion procs and the system actually makes a lick of sense to new players.
I’m sorry but this makes no sense to me. You say it breaks balance but you don’t back that up with any reasons. Of course you’d tone down the flat damage part of the skill and perhaps not make it 100% WD. There are plenty of LHB skills with WD% even AOE ones (Fire Strike, Primal Strike) but adding it to PRM breaks … what again?
I just think the system would be simpler and more consistent if every damage skill had a WD% component. This makes item upgrades feel more impactful and skills more consistent across the board. Though I agree that it is a good second best solution to add it to spammable/low CD skills to fix the current scaling problems.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not against WD% damage on such skills if the percentage is reasonable. But unfortunately there is no magic formula to say what is reasonable.
For example: even at 40% I will find a way abuse it. I would take 3 items from Iskandra’s set + the Iskandra’s Ballance relic on my Battlemage and equip Beronath Reforged as the sword. Since PRM will penetrate and stun on a large area and doesn’t require a caster off-hand I could also take Will of the Living and destroy whatever waves of monsters Crate throws at me even with just 10% Adth.
Firestrike + Primal Strike have small AoEs that are under 4 meters. Anyway, as I said, I am not 100% against WD% on PRM, but that would be like puting WD% on Brimstone fragments. If someone knows how to determine mathematically what percentage it should have not to permit abuse I am all in. Otherwise it is “game over, man…game over !”
…but you can’t do this with Fire Strike or PB? The PRM fragments don’t need WD %, though even if they did I’m skeptical that your scenario is all that game breaking and I think you’re being overly optimistic of its efficacy.
Unfortunately, PRM is all about fragments. There is absolutely no way to incorporate WD% in this skill without removing the fragments from the main skill of the line.
No, you couldn’t do it with Fire Strike because it is much easier to stack +200% cast speed than it is to achieve +200% attack speed. Again, the AoE area that has that %30 WD in the Fire Strike line is small.
Yes, you can achieve a similar effect with Phantasmal Blades on a Witch Hunter by puting Mark of the Wending on the blades. But there is a catch here…(actually there are two):
the Witch Hunter is held back by massive energy consumption problems in this scenario. The Arcanist isn’t…
You also have to stack +% vitality damage through the roof and the percentage %WD of PB will not carry too much of a debuff with frantic throw. For example, a MoD will give you 2 resistance debuff and that is not much. I could add…
PB is not an omnidirectional AoE. There is no radial effect to it so to say.
Fire Strike can be DW’ed which “increases” attack speed and also has fragments…yet isn’t broken by having WD%? I think you’re crying foul where there’s no reason to and similar skills already exist that aren’t broken by WD, PRM isn’t THAT different, and I think you’re overblowing how powerful AOE WD% is. None of the “broken” mechanics you mention can’t be fixed by tweaking PRM’s flat damage or energy consumption. Crate’s already done damage boost passes to the skill and its still bad, can we please fix the underlying problem?
^ If that makes you happy I’ll vote it in a poll. As I said, I’m all for this idea if someone determines exactly what does break-point values are. However, I doubt the Devs will tweak the flat damage due to one simple reason: they mainly balance for Normal / Veteran and decreasing flat PRM damage will make the skill extremely unnatractive for new players who have 0 knowledge of what items exist in the late-game AND…more importanly…usually judge skills by their low lvl potency.
But again, if you think that will solve PRM…go with the flow I have nothing against these ideas
I appreciate it and low level effectiveness can be adjusted by making the level 1 skill’s flat damage the same as it is now and it just scales slower so that in the end its less flat damage and more WD%.
Making spells scale off of WD% is a bad idea if every spell was made to work this way, especially because then there would be requests to buff weapon damage of the weapons used themselves, which now could be used by melee classes in new builds.
While that’s not a bad idea per se, it sort of homogenizes everything which is what I hated in D3 - it was an easy to implement, cop-out solution which they literally had devs do nothing at all to balance. But it wasn’t really fun as everything was weapon damage and casters were running out with humongous 2H weapons for certain builds which looked ridiculous.
I’ve never played a caster though so I don’t want to say more than that.
How does it homogenize everything? It literally changes nothing meaningful about the way the skills work or play, and in that way I call it “more consistent” in that now skills scale using the same amount of stats and can proc the same devotions. Its a more even playing field than we have now where the only two relatively viable cast-speed spells are DEE and P. Blades which, shocker, have WD% components. We also don’t have these super confusing to new players game quirks like: “why can’t my PRM gain anything from the Eel node’s 20% resist debuff?”…“Wait, what’d you say? its because it doesn’t have Weapon Damage % as a stat? Why does that make a difference?”.
I also don’t understand your first paragraph at all, can you reword it please. To me, when your primary skill doesn’t have WD%, it makes gear upgrades super boring and less impactful…because they are, especially at high levels. I also don’t understand your D3 point. That game had a lot of problems but the fact that every skill derived off WD% wasn’t in the same zip code as one of them. They were tweaking those %'s every single patch so your balancing point is flat out wrong.
I don’t have a great understanding of game mechanics, so correct me if I’m wrong in my explanation.
Basically, if you used a WD attack, the maximum benefit you get is by equipping a weapon that has higher WD ranges i.e the spell will do more damage with a 20-40 WD weapon than with a 10-20. %Total Damage, %Element damage also boosts it pretty well, but not as much as a simple WD increase. Therefore it makes it really easy to simply consider that every spellcaster weapon should have high base weapon damage so that the spells themselves do more damage.
This resulted in D3 loot being so badly homogenized, apart from the really stupid shit they did with attributes. Basically everyone ran around with the highest weapon damage weapon they could find, because every other stat was a joke compared to weapon damage. Obviously things have changed in the mean time, i.e casters like WD/Wizard use Daggers and Orbs/Effigies/whathaveyou, but only because of legendary effects/set bonuses etc which provided massive % damage boosts that compensated for the loss of WD as compared to using a 2H weapon.
And this btw leads to power creep, which is the single most damaging factor for D3, because everyone hates power creep and eventually everyone’s pretty much using the same set. Sure, devs aren’t designing items like that for GD and GD is a very different game, but you can see where I’m going.
Is that really how resist reduction works i.e it only works if your spells have a WD component? If that’s so then that’s frankly…well no other word to say it - “retarded”.
homogeneity in gearing is a lot better than the embarrassing amount of unusable skills in this game, in large part due to lack of %wd scaling. further, the gearing in this game is already mundane and frustrating so it’s not like d3’s system is a step down in any meaningful way
arcanist and demolitionist need a complete and total rework. for demo, the semi-recent changes to vindictive flame/flame touched/blast shield were great, and fire strike has always been a passable skill, but literally everything else in the tree is atrocious. stun jacks is horrible, grenado is horrible, canister bomb is horrible, blackwater cocktail is horrible, mortar trap is horrible. guess what these skills have in common! ulzuin’s chosen has always been one of the biggest jokes in the game’s history. it’s really just a terrible class no matter how you look at it.
for arcanist, tss/prm/aar are all really bad (again, guess what attribute these skills share that makes them underpowered), maiven’s sphere and its synergy are so shockingly bad that i have no idea how anyone could justify their existence. the class was good in b30 or whatever when the entire game was poorly tuned, then nine made a poll to see what people thought were the best classes in ultimate, and arcanist was summarily nerfed to the ground. it’s hilarious to me because occultist now is so much better than pre-nerf arcanist ever was, so i have no idea why such a savage nerf was deemed necessary.
the two classes were so clearly designed with early access in mind, as the majority of their skills offer no scaling potential beyond normal/veteran.
None of the problems you listed from D3 were the direct result of skill damage being in terms of WD % and it does not follow that if Grim Dawn were to do the same then the same faults would result. Right now we have an arbitrary mix of WD% skills and non-WD% skills so I don’t buy that the loot isn’t broken now but it would be if that arbitrary list of non-WD% were rebalanced in terms of WD. I’m not saying put all the damage in the WD%, just have skills have a mix of flat and WD (like existing caster skills like PB, CT, and DEE) so they scale better late game and gear upgrades feel meaningful. To me the list of positives in terms of gearing, itemization, scaling, balanced, etc far far outweigh the theoretical downsides people have mentioned that are just that, theoretical and unfounded.
