Chaos damage and why it hurts the game in it's current form.

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Nallenbot wrote:

I read the first five pages of this thread, which is all I could stand and OP aside found it to be my most disappointing and stupefying PoE experience to date. I am sorry that I have nothing to contribute in this post right now, but perhaps someone would be kind enough to let me know if it becomes in any way tolerable in the 26 pages following and worth discussing or if it's a total write off.

Although I unfortunately read the whole thing, it is a write off.

ITT: Couple people want Glass Cannons... and one guy with a superiority complex.

Okay, so I am not on mercilessness yet and I wasn't in closed beta, and I am playing a witch that is not going to take CI and a tanky marauder, and here is why I think there is a problem with chaos damage. Chaos Damage seems like it is just better than any other damage type, and here is why.

1) As I can't find a location that says exact damage outputs of monsters I have to try a guess them based off what I know. Something I do have the numbers for after research is the gems. The Added Chaos damage gem has both a higher lower and upper value than the added lighting damage gem. This leads me to believe that chaos damage monsters do equivalent damage as non-chaos damage monsters.

2) Chaos damage is harder to build resistance to, I have seen very few pieces of armour with chaos resistance on them compared to any other elemental type and it is definitely not as easy to get on the skill tree.

3) The only chance that lighting damage has to be better than chaos is the chance to shock vs ignoring energy shield. This means that lighting damage does more damage against targets with little or no energy shield as long as their resistance are equal in value.

Based off these observation, chaos damage seems the scariest type of damage to both of my characters, and my gut tells me this is bad due to the fact that my witch and marauder have such different play styles. My witch is scared of it because it ignores a large portion of my effective health, and my marauder is scared of it because it is so hard to get resistances against it, and yes I plan on countering this with my armour but elemental damage will be countered by armour and skills, but chaos is only armour.

So to sum up the issue, chaos damage doesn't seem to be balanced when compare with other damage types. Yes it can be countered, but if this game was more competitive it seems like the only reason you would ever use anything but chaos is if it was specific to your build, or if using chaos was bad because the meta caused everyone to expect you to use chaos and build against it.

As a counter to this argument though, this game is not competitive, and therefore having a damage type that was meant to be scarier than any other damage type is okay.

When I first heard about chaos damage, I told myself :
"Neat ! A type of damage you can't mitigate in any way will allow for precise gameplay. Now they have a way to precisely control what amount of damage a character is going to take. As long as chaos damage is % of life based. Awesome idea !"

I mean, for me it was obvious that chaos damage would be % based. Why would it exist otherwise ? It would only be "yet another similar damage type".

The major problem is how hard is get some resistance.

I've read most of this thread, and I was sad to see it derailed so easily by what is an obvious troll. This is my most pressing concern with the game right now. As it stands build diversity is limited to stacking HP or going ES+CI, as stated by the OP.

Now, let me clarify one thing. I don't want to be able to face-roll the game with no defense and all offense, however, I don't want to be forced to do the exact opposite of that either, and focus purely on boosting defense. There is a balance to be had here, and I know that GGG will eventually find it.

The game is still in Beta, so things may change over time, and I truly hope that the developers take a second look at chaos damage.

My main concern is that it further limits what a usable or good piece of gear looks like. To elaborate, I'm forced to refer back to D3. In that game if a piece of equipment didn't have main stat, vit, and res all, it was basically worthless, why? Because players were forced into getting those stats in order to survive. In other words, I find that later on, if an item doesn't give me health or chaos resists, I am much less likely to consider using it. Why is this a bad thing? Because it makes finding good equipment that much harder, and makes the game more of a grind. Granted, you can trade for items with chaos resist, but that brings up a whole other side of the issue, items without chaos resist will lose value.

tl;dr: Chaos resist limits not only build selection, but item selection as well.

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Mephasm wrote:

I've read most of this thread, and I was sad to see it derailed so easily by what is an obvious troll. This is my most pressing concern with the game right now. As it stands build diversity is limited to stacking HP or going ES+CI, as stated by the OP.

Now, let me clarify one thing. I don't want to be able to face-roll the game with no defense and all offense, however, I don't want to be forced to do the exact opposite of that either, and focus purely on boosting defense. There is a balance to be had here, and I know that GGG will eventually find it.

The game is still in Beta, so things may change over time, and I truly hope that the developers take a second look at chaos damage.

My main concern is that it further limits what a usable or good piece of gear looks like. To elaborate, I'm forced to refer back to D3. In that game if a piece of equipment didn't have main stat, vit, and res all, it was basically worthless, why? Because players were forced into getting those stats in order to survive. In other words, I find that later on, if an item doesn't give me health or chaos resists, I am much less likely to consider using it. Why is this a bad thing? Because it makes finding good equipment that much harder, and makes the game more of a grind. Granted, you can trade for items with chaos resist, but that brings up a whole other side of the issue, items without chaos resist will lose value.

tl;dr: Chaos resist limits not only build selection, but item selection as well.

To further this idea, I only have ONE major piece of equipment with chaos resistance.. and of all things, it's actually my sword with 20%. Chances are - either I'd take a massive hit on EVERYTHING ELSE in order to gain the chaos resistance, or I'd have to pay out my nose in order to gain a very little difference (most rings I see have around 8% resist for chaos).

Chaos would be fine if it was easier to fend off the damage. What I don't understand is why there's chaos damage in the first place when all of these concepts could've applied to physical damage instead (and thus, we fix the armor/evasion problem as well as this issue with one stone essentially).

That's really what doesn't make sense to me, even if physical damage and chaos damage ARE different at this point. My character gets around most stuff fine, but it's still annoying knowing that I needed to stack every remote HP node around me in order to do that. The build I WANT to make would be utterly useless currently because stacking armor is a terrible idea of spending points.

Most people that say Chaos damage isn't an issue are running cookie-cutter builds that didn't even bother exploring the skilltree to it's potential. Considering that is the entire point of this game - I find that a bit troublesome to say the least, heh.

do i smell diablo 3 mentality here buhuhu i have to play a balanced char and cant go glascannon ? really ?

my ranger has 80 80 80 48 it takes alot of time and work and thats what its all about doing some work for the gear to be rewarded with a balanced char

seriously since open beta started so many whine threads poped up with the joined d3 reject community its really amusing dont wantt work for balanced char play the "other" game where you get everything for free

chaos is fine as it is

Just because you're a supporter dose not mean your opinions are facts. I strongly disagree with your post

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ventiman wrote:

do i smell diablo 3 mentality here buhuhu i have to play a balanced char and cant go glascannon ? really ?

my ranger has 80 80 80 48 it takes alot of time and work and thats what its all about doing some work for the gear to be rewarded with a balanced char

seriously since open beta started so many whine threads poped up with the joined d3 reject community its really amusing dont wantt work for balanced char play the "other" game where you get everything for free

chaos is fine as it is

chaos damage has a purpose and a good one.... damage, which you can't stack defense against..

in theory..

But fact is chaos damage is just promoting to use already overused defense mechanics.. HP(or ES)..

It's not about facerolling.. PoE doesn't have balanced builds either. (in fact, in D3, most of the builds has to have defensive utilities because they will be screwed in a second).. it's about opening some build options... in theory we have mechanics which should be making game difficult ..even if you are super geared with awesome build... but it doesn't work..because you can stack defense against it (hp nodes)...but also making already underpowered defense mechanics or builds even weaker.

I like concept of chaos damage.. I don't like execution. I think there are many smart ways to implement it.. For example ...Chaos damage deals huge damage but can't take you more than for example 25% of the health in one hit.. just a example of course.

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ventiman wrote:

do i smell diablo 3 mentality here buhuhu i have to play a balanced char and cant go glascannon ? really ?

my ranger has 80 80 80 48 it takes alot of time and work and thats what its all about doing some work for the gear to be rewarded with a balanced char

seriously since open beta started so many whine threads poped up with the joined d3 reject community its really amusing dont wantt work for balanced char play the "other" game where you get everything for free

chaos is fine as it is

Balanced, LOL. Coming from a "Ranger" no less.. seriously? Your opinion is already invalid. Anyone can create a kite spammer. Apparently you didn't read my comment about COOKIE CUTTER BUILDS because this obviously applies to you.

Chaos is not fine just as it is. Just because you have a means of making it work doesn't mean it is "normal and balanced". Don't be such an elitist.