*the conversion mod doesn’t apply to raging tempest btw
and the dmg mod doesnt’ stack, as mentioned
It is worth pointing out that the folks here who spend a lot of time testing sometimes seem to come across as being very good at min-maxing for performance under certain scenarios while at times not quite being aware of how the rest of the player base actually plays the game. I’m not saying that y’all don’t know how other folks play the game, but it’s very easy for people to get that impression. So when someone makes a suggestion for a change or nerf that has collateral damage that the person proposing the change is seemingly oblivious to, it can rub people the wrong way. People make all sorts of builds that might seem sub-optimal to forum denizens but that still work for their purposes. Build diversity is the great strength of this game. Not defending the tone here or how the criticism is being aired at this point, but it is worth keeping in mind.
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Morgoneth set’s damage conversions were a remainder of an old approach to item design which has since shifted, especially with FoA sets, where dual-damage sets feature less conversion modifiers while supporting items help fill in the gaps.
The set should be viable both in Cold builds and Vitality builds. In the next build, Wind Devils on the set will receive Cold damage modifiers, while the Nightbringer unique will allow you to make them fully Vitality-based, and other existing (and upcoming) items will let you turn them into full Cold.
At the same time, the Shadow Strike support on the set will be full-vitality, with the base conversions on the set pieces converting Pierce and Cold to Vitality, instead of the current mix. Ill Omen remains with its existing Cold support.
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guessing should prep for lots of complaints about “muh souldrend morgo cold reaper” 
#DeadBuilds
(yes i see soulrend’s vit dmg % supports)
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These are some nice changes, thank you.
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The problem is, even at maximum -cdr, Soulrend only reduces 1,7 x19% = 0.32s to SS, with dual Loxmere daggers = 0.6, 2 Noctirns = 0,4 plus 256 bonus piercing dmg, Bonebleach = 0,6.
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don’t see how that is/was a problem, people seemed to enjoy that build regardless, and been one of them “popular” ones in mentions/assembly
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Overrated. Reality is that the current ss cooldowns are too long in relation to how much you need to invest to make it work, and if i better think of it, it applies to most cd builds if not all.
Currently, the timer ranges depend on the build and damage type in some cases, but generally, 4:10 - 4.30 is a good build, 3.50 - 4:10 is very good, <3.50 is god tier build.
Indeed it was lee’s first run, but that ofc is irrelevant. I can say how many runs i did on witch hunter for the exact same timer and it wasnt just “a couple of runs”. The build’s average is low 4, with huge dependancy on the map layout and spawns, especially since its a 1 mobility skill build.
i think we’re talking past eachother
there is a vast, huge, ocean of difference between people enjoying a build or it being popular, for various reasons be it thematic, ease of acquisition or apparent synergy, vs what might be “optimal” or appropriate performance to the meta gang
A build doesnt’ have to be top20/meta good, to be popular, and for better or worse morgo soulrend cold reaper was one of them that did the rounds/mentions in the casual crowd, (heck the item looks alone might have done it on that one )
hence the "prepare for cries about dead builds"joke, because most players dont’ care about optimal, they only care if their build gets nerfed in the patch notes 
(while not seeing what we do what’s ahead for FoA/future replacements)
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This difference comes from how each player, be him some elitist or the casual player, look at things. Elitists tend to look deeper into problems and contribute to get them fixed while casuals just pick up a skill, see if its fun, if it is they play it, if its not… next. What i can guarantee though is if the skills get fixed, some casuals might not even notice it, which js not the case for elitists, while other skills that werent fun might become fun for the casuals.
i’m not doubting they wont notice the positive changes
I’m emphasising them only paying attention to the “negative” perception/change, for them 
Like, last? or the patch before that, Zantai straight up wrote a huge, ginormous, biggest in the history of GD patch notes disclaimer for pets, and people still complained about nerfed pet builds
So when they see their 2h cold breaker/reaper suddenly isn’t cold anymore that’s “all” they’ll see 
(i’m “predicting”/pointing out), - regardless of the optimization aspect
it’s basically 1 giant deadbuilds joke
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Since you brought that up, i legit dont mind that change, mostly because vit wasnt competitive for a very long time to begin with, other than that you can do a custom cold ss reaper which will be mighty fine by comparison to vit builds.
yep, not disagreeing with the change, reaper has cold RR now, breaker will still have the same as before, so it’s just armour set change and cold 2h ss will still exist somewhere in custom armours, even until FoA
Just making fun of player(s) expected reactions is all
Personally, my PB Witch Hunter + a ancient vit melee one are going to love this change, because vit melee is rather hard with only 1 -RR% skill. Never mind finding enough conversion sources to get mainly vit damage.
Also loving the fact that I can now skip taking a flat -RR devotion if I want to due to more skills getting some flat RR. Not as much as Rowan’s Crown or Manticore, but it’s going to make building devotion paths a lot less formulaic. Though with acid/poison Manticore is probably still going to be a must have, because acid resistance is annoyingly high in SR34+ 
Demonslayer WH: Witch Hunter, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.3) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
SR 30-31, 3:36, no special levels: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1qCRzYEENB
Though SS cannot be used with ranged weapon, SR run speed is outstanding.
Vitality RR is just one of the reasons. The more important reason is that PB is powerful now and many PB builds can reach similar SR run time, like
Aether PB: Spellbreaker, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.3) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
SR 30-31, 3:26, no special levels: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1A2XWY5EwY
and
Piercing PB: Infiltrator, Level 100 (GD 1.2.1.3) - Grim Dawn Build Calculator
SR 30-31, 3 rounds, average time 3:50: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1GSQ8YkEx8?p=2
These two don’t have SS, either.
Vitality PB and Demonslayer Set is good now, and is not broken strong compared with other PB builds. Or PB is broken strong. It’s not RR’s fault.
reavers hunger amulet does vit shadow strike. and please tell me you mean pierce and lightning to vit instead of pierce to vit and lightning to cold (NOT cold to vit).
I think what Gnome is trying to communicate is that yes, we absolutely agree that there’s a set of particular circumstances that look fine at the surface level, but when players take it under the microscope and zoom in hundreds of times, the build completely falls apart. Our response is twofold:
- We are not disagreeing that the builds fall apart in those very minutiae circumstances; it’s rather “these circumstances are so niche that the vast playerbase is unlikely to encounter them once, much less the hundreds/thousands of times the buildmakers come across them in their precise optimization processes.”
- Because the “major issues” are completely circumstantial, there’s no easy solution outside of making everything the same (as what works with one build can easily work for another), but making everything the same dilutes build diversity because it takes things that are actually unique about that particular skill and gutting out everything that made it unique in the first place.
I’m not saying that “unique” is always good or always bad. There are plenty of experiments that end up completely flopping and there’s no reason to stubborning cling to obvious anti-synergies for the sake of novelty. You said it best earlier with this statement:
Not everyone wants to hold down the spam / melee button and have entire screens blow up with leeching back to full. We’re not saying that we don’t want cd builds to be better and that we don’t appreciate the testing you’re doing. We ARE saying that we want to operate within the skill framework the devs have given us, and want to keep the cd aspect of the skills while also making it fun and competitive.
Yes, CD builds lack the constant leech and sustain spam / melee builds have access to; the question is, how can we buff things that cd builds have access to but spam builds don’t so that we buff CD builds while not also widening the disparity between the two?
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PB spam is still very weak at the baseline. Acid PB with that all converting gun Dervish is garbage, Harra PB is very sad, chaos PB conduit is a meme, and all custom PB spam builds are very weak for the amount of investments you have to make. And you get energy problems on top very often.
Demonslayer is OP cause of 5 supercharged spirits and all the conversions to PB. Aether variant has more rr than any natural double rr mastery AND gets 14 blades. Those two are super strong because of the particular gear. Infil is kinda strong because of strong procs and double pierce rr with fully converted spirits. You can play almost any skill with pierce Infiltrator and win.
PB is once again a situation where skill strength is gated behind 2-3 items or sets, and everything else is mediocre to bad.
edit: that said, those are impressive runs, you guys are doing some work in SR.
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ARPGs were(?)/are about building a character and trying to solve it by making it work. The deviation that appears to always occur is that here (IMHO):
If it doesn’t compete, needs buffs/changes.
But why?
How many different version did you test?
How many of those versions did you forgo your end build vision in order to make it work?
And if it did work, because it didn’t fulfill the desired “within time frame”, it there for doesn’t work.
That’s the part that doesn’t make sense and can potentially put people off.
Serious question. If the vast majority of the player base doesn’t know a change occurred why was the change made and who was it for? For the health of the game? But the vast majority didn’t notice…but I assure you they will notice when things like the -cdr disappeared from Rad for SoC…regardless of whether it was an old design philosophy or whatever reason. And it won’t be because now the set is bad, but more for the fact that they wanted to spam SoC…the fact that it puts out more dmg and has faster clear (does it?) on the PTR doesn’t matter, it’s the change in function that does.
So if 4:10-4:30 is considered a good build in CR…does that make someone’s “homebrew” build bad if they did it in consistently around 5:10? On HC…4:50 still bad? 4:30.78654? Bad? Yeah dumb I know. Stupid examples even as I typed them but serious from a question standpoint.
The sense of achievement that a player feels when clearing something close to the “set” time while not following a guide, not using GDtools, while playing a build considered a meme by “good” players is very fulfilling.
For a second ponder what it would be like if someone told you we are changing something you tried so hard to make, put so much time into, for the “health of the game” or no one cares it’s “meme anyways” when a (likely) large part of the player base “won’t notice.”
And if it cleared CR or SR within 30 secs of what was considered the high end time for a good build, that’s bad then? I’m sorry but you know how that would sound right?
I can hear the responses already:
Move on,
Play something else,
Mod it,
Deal with it,
Valid.
Nobody is complaining about times being 30 sec - 1 min off the top tier. It’s the unfortunate truth of ARPG build making that the vast majority of builds reach a state considered “good enough,” (let’s say 7 minutes CR / SR), but to make inroads and make things competitive in a meta, the offense / defensive investments need to be 2-3X as much as to reach the “good enough” threshold. Same thing applies to all optimizations - getting to around 75% is fine, but the 75-100% mark take exponentially more time and effort.
The builds people are testing aren’t reaching a comfortable time in the middle tier - the builds just die because they’re exposed to a stress level people won’t experience in 99.9% of their playtime. It’s fine to take a deep breath, recognize what’s going on and why some builds excel in these high pressure situations while other builds completely fall apart.
I have no problem if it takes me 10-15 minutes to run through SR 30-31; I don’t care about legendary farming efficiency. I am interested to see what kinds of builds do end up succeeding and why they succeed. At the same time, there is the risk if the baseline skill gets buffed to relatively match other skills, then custom builds with specific gear can blow the balance right out of the water.
It’s a fine and delicate balance between mastery skills, equipment bonuses / modifiers, and how they change the way you play the game. If a skill is being carried by 1 specific set but is too weak in every other variation, then the baseline skill needs to be buffed so that other variants of the skill can succeed.
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