this topic concerns changed skills so it’s in pt branch, not really expecting phys dmg fix in this concluded pt
Since the “magical phys dmg” fix the amount of both competitive and even just playable phys builds shrinked to 20-25% and never recovered. Phys dmg mostly supports WD skills and all the millions of small phys flat sources that participate in WD are killed by enemy armor with thier corresponding armor check. So the only builds that can manage are the ones which deal 80-95% of their dmg with big chunks of flat that only gets one armor check each, like Cadence or Avenger. And trauma builds, members of red list of threatened species.
This PT i’ve tested a lot of channeling builds and just happened to stumble on the absolute best representation of this problem. So we have 3 builds:
Builds have similar devo setup and effective OA value. The first two have similar tooltip of 40-42k flat and some minor dots. FoI actually has 43-48k tooltip and much bigger dots. Also FoI has dot duration and a significant advantage in solo rr% value. Naturally you expect FoI to perform at least on par. But in reality it’s not only worse than DE and AAR, it’s multiple tiers below. Here are the performances:
Nevermind the timers, just by looking at the footage you can see smth is very wrong with FoI. This happens to most physical builds with 10+ armor checks.
I have no proposed solution to this. This armor mechanic was a mistake any everybody knows that. IMO, unless there are generic tools to drastically reduce enemy armor, at least for enemies right infront of you, phys dmg can never be properly balanced.
How about more sources of Armor shred? It’s been suggested before. Would that help here if placed around strategically in different Masteries or on other Devotions?
Well, one way to fix it would be to redo the armour vs damage calculation so all the flat physical damage is added together and then that total is checked against the armour.
No idea how to implement it, but since it’s all code and maths, it should in theory be possible.
Regardless of balance, the current armour mechanic is very unintuitive. It’s practically impossible for an uninformed player to figure out it works that way without accidentally stumbling across a post discussing armour.
Doubling crit for Disintegration is also going a few years back. The game is constantly changing. If smth became irrelevant at some point in the past it’s counterproductive to write it off just on this basis. Every possible change should always be on the table.
It’s as relevant to the topic as your previous post. What happened 8 years ago doesn’t matter. Phys dmg is completely fucked by armor. It has more of those 10-20 flat sources in the game than any other dmg type and all of them are irrelevant for almost all skills because they are neutralized by armor. To make them work you need to either change the entire mechanic, which i assume would have happened long ago if it was that easy, or introduce much bigger armor shred sources than Maul.
Solving performance of individual builds will never solve a problem of Seal of Might and phys augs having 12 flat that suggests to the player they are getting 12 flat dmg but in reality they aren’t.
i think, don’t quote me on it
reason it got removed was that this type of specific armour reduction turned out to not work?
(i recall some talks about some/certain old armour reducts not working, hence people surprised Maul got added since expecting it wouldn’t work, but since debuff type it then does/would the solve that or something)
point was it’s not the same
“these” got removed, because deemed useless (i think/as i understood)
so “these” are not what’s being suggested, since it would be pointless to introduce the same armour shred there was 8 years ago, which got removed because it was pointless/these shreds didn’t actually help non-converted phys builds at the time
*but again that’s assuming i understood their removal correctly ofc
tldr
what’s being suggested/has been suggested is useful armour shreds, not useless “to be patched out anyway” types of armour shreds
I might be misremembering things but when this problem was originally discovered I thought Medierra saying something like it was so hard with Physical Damge to balance in the beginning. He just pumped up the numbers higher and higher until the damage became something. It was deemed too much work to change then, so it probably can’t be at this point. But you never know!
It’s really confusing and disappointing. Indeed it looks like you can accumulate a bunch of flat damage all over the place, but then when you learn how it actually works it totally changes how you build around it. And in my case that mostly resulted in don’t build around it, it’s too much effort to figure out what does and doesn’t matter when and where. And when you have a bunch of things that convert to physical I just assume it’ll suck, because suddenly all separate (flat) sources are reduced by armor.
Radical suggestion: Remove armor from all monsters
Replace with %phys resist instead to compensate.
Thinking about it more, armor shred would not work since the numbers are so low vs the vastly higher monster armor values. That really means Maul is only effective with skills doing higher %WD and/or high flat… So scratch that suggestion!
Maybe the only answer is to just buff the skills directly that are most affected like AAR, DE and FoI.
The title is very dramatic. When I think of a physical damage build, these skills are NOT what comes to mind. These examples are coming from far left field and do not represent physical builds at all. If you’re complaining about physical damage in general, this is a horrible way to do it…
…And this is a good way to do it. I can agree that meme conversions for these skills suck. Adding more support for these conversions is reasonable.
Yeah, the channeling skills were not made with the armor mechanic in mind, When i suggested physical AAR to be a thing was because i just wanted it to be a thing for fun, i didn’t cared if it was competitive with whatever builds some people think are the best.
