Chaos damage and why it hurts the game in it's current form.
Please try and keep the discussion civil guys, I highly doubt that this thread was created with the purpose of comparing skill levels.
On that note, Chaos damage in it's current form is actually much easier as compared with how it was like in Closed Beta.
If you use the argument that HP stacking + HP regen is the only defense versus chaos damage, that would be true in CB. But now with chaos resist nodes and mods being able to spawn on items, I don't think that's true anymore.
I noticed my character being mentioned earlier on, thought i'd touch on that a little more with my own experience of chaos damage in high level maps. My character has 2k HP with just 11 out of 101 points being spent on hp nodes. I only have 3 pieces of gear with +life mods on them and I didn't even help Oak in normal for the 45 hp. In order for my build to work, I had to minimize the amount of HP I had. I actually had a pretty tough time trying to keep my HP around the 2k mark because of the sheer abundance of +life mods on items.
I am able to manage Chaos damage on level 75 maps easily with 2k HP and 75% chaos resists. In fact, I would probably still be able to do just as well with 1.5k HP and a similar amount of chaos res.
My point is: 2k HP at level 83 is hardly considered health stacking. If I were building a health stacking character, I would usually have 2k HP by level 50.
Summary: 2k HP is very very easy to achieve. It is hardly considered health stacking. If however you do have only 2k HP at end-game as a HP build, you're doing something wrong. With 75% chaos res, you would still be able to manage chaos damage in high level maps, but chaos damage will be the least of your worries because if your build does not have a sizeable ES buffer, everything else but Chaos will be killing you.
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The first Righteous Fire/Non-Shavronne's/Shavronne's HC
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IMHO design-wise it should be easy to take chaos resist in positive % via passives only (I'm talking merciless here). It can still be tackled (keep 2 x chaos rings + ammy handy) but some more chaos res passives will help a lot.
Please try and keep the discussion civil guys, I highly doubt that this thread was created with the purpose of comparing skill levels.
On that note, Chaos damage in it's current form is actually much easier as compared with how it was like in Closed Beta.
If you use the argument that HP stacking + HP regen is the only defense versus chaos damage, that would be true in CB. But now with chaos resist nodes and mods being able to spawn on items, I don't think that's true anymore.
CB didnt have act 3 nor -60% Chaos resist penalty. The maximum you can realistically achieve from chaos resistance passives is around +32% resistance, and that requires going all over the passive still tree.
The only 16% chaos resistance passive is up by CI, and there are two more in the INT witch area as well, far out of reach for Marauders, Rangers or Duelists (all of whom have literally no access to enough chaos resistance passives).
Regarding your build, 11 health nodes alone isnt health stacking, but adding those on top of all the ES nodes you have would to me still be spending far too many passives on defensive skills, and not enough on offensive ones. I dont like being forced into taking that many defensive passives period, whether its HP or ES makes no difference, ES IS HP.
My ES specced Shadow has a grand total of 4 health nodes. And those will eventually be respecced when he takes CI. But in the meantime, even with the 16% chaos resistance passive, he drops dead in a mere second when hit with chaos damage in Chamber of Sins merciless.
With the current form of Chaos damage and over reliance on defense, trying to build a pure DPS character completely sucks.
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Last edited by bhavv#7360 on Feb 18, 2013, 12:49:00 PM
Sorry, I meant it didnt have act 3 nor the resistance penalties. Act 3 Merciless is pretty much where the shit hits the fan with chaos damage.
Merciless back then without the penalties would have been simple to beat, I got to reckless difficulty in the CB without taking a single HP node, but couldnt even get past cruel Act 1 in OB with the exact same build.
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Last edited by bhavv#7360 on Feb 18, 2013, 12:51:25 PM
Chaos damage has become a huge issue since the introduction of open beta. Massive changes were made to both the sources of chaos damage and the ability to negate it. It is my opinion that in it's current for it alone is responsible for reducing defensive build diversity to two viable builds. Below I will list the reasons for this and some possible fixes for the current situation.
Chaos damage, how it is delivered.
Currently there are only a handful of monsters that deal chaos damage. You have chaos spitting snakes, poison arrow archers, Vaal constructs shoot chaos damage and the poison alchemists that shoot chaos bombs. These are all ranged, on top of those you have monsters that use viper strike such as spiders, and bears that have a chaos damage aura.
One major issue is that their is no way to avoid taking large amounts of chaos damage. Some attacks such as the viper strike monsters and the vaal constructs use direct attacks, these can be blocked, dodged or evaded. However some monsters use special AOE chaos damage such as the bears, alchemist bombs and poison arrow. This damage cannot be blocked, evaded or dodged. Combined with the monsters using these attacks being ranged means that it is impossible to use three defensive mechanics to avoid or reduce taking chaos damage.
Chaos resist and required stats on items.
About now a lot of people reading (Who have read this far) are probably thinking just stack chaos resist, this is not an issue... Well with no mechanic in game other than chaos resist that can reduce damage from these attacks it becomes an issue and makes chaos resist a required stat on almost every item.
Chaos resist is a rare stat to find on an item, it only comes in one form, there is no way to boost the amount via the passive tree excepting a very few nodes in small sections of the witch/shadow tree.
So now we have a source of damage that cannot be evaded, blocked or dodged. That we revive -60 resist in that last difficulty, meaning the majority of gear must have some chaos resist to reduce damage to a reasonable level. And to top it off there are is only one small section of the passive skill tree that has any hope of using passive nodes to mitigate this damage.
Something needs to be done.
With chaos damage as it stands there are only really two defensive builds that stand any hope of making it in end game without constant deaths when facing a chaos damage source.
First is to remove it entirely with Chaos Inoculation passive and invest a lot of your passive points in energy shield. This way at least removes the need to stack chaos damage on almost every item.
Second is to stack life nodes and some form of regen/life steal. With this method you will need large amounts of life in the final areas of the game to avoid damage spikes, some form of life recovery such as regen or life steal and to stack chaos resist.
That is it, with chaos damage as it stands you cannot build for a duel tank with medium amounts of life/energy shield. You cannot build evasion or make use of the phase acrobatics keystone and elemental resists unless you stack huge amounts of life also. You cannot build to block attacks/spells unless you also stack life.
There is no possible viable build unless you stack life. Forget energy shield entirely unless you plan to get CI. Don't even consider using either of the life leach/regen applies to energy shield unless you get chaos inoculation.
Chaos damage as it currently stands is hurting build diversity. At least 1/2 of all passive points granted in the course of leveling must be assigned to life/ or CI+Energy shield in order to just deal with this one unavoidable damage source.
Chaos damage needs to be reworked in order to breath new life into build diversity. Some ideas for this are to rework chaos damage as elemental poison damage, include chaos resist in "resist all elemental damage" nodes/stats. Make it possible to mitigate all sources of chaos damage with evasion/dodge/block, Introduce Chaos resist to more areas of the passive skill tree.
TL;DR
Chaos damage is broken, you cannot avoid taking it and the only way to survive is Chaos Innoculation or life stacking. This is hurting build diversity, please fix.
I think its fine and this is coming from a witch that was not CI. I just converted over to CI but not because of chaos dmg and almost dieing but hated to only have gear with chaos resist. 40-50 percent Chaos resist in merc you will be fine with atleast 1k health.
Regarding your build, 11 health nodes alone isnt health stacking, but adding those on top of all the ES nodes you have would to me still be spending far too many passives on defensive skills, and not enough on offensive ones. I dont like being forced into taking that many defensive passives period, whether its HP or ES makes no difference, ES IS HP.
To add to this, you've talked about hardcore play in the past in this thread. Unfortunately, this isn't a game that you can spec full offense and be fine in. It isn't INTENDED to be like that. Defense is just as important as offense in this game, especially on hardcore and stating that you don't like speccing defense would make me assume that you're looking at this in a purely offensive setting - which would be untrue of how it should be looked at.
You NEED defense in this game - your primary defense is either HP or ES. Armor/Evasion/Block/Dodge/Resistances - those are secondary defenses.
Regarding your build, 11 health nodes alone isnt health stacking, but adding those on top of all the ES nodes you have would to me still be spending far too many passives on defensive skills, and not enough on offensive ones. I dont like being forced into taking that many defensive passives period, whether its HP or ES makes no difference, ES IS HP.
To add to this, you've talked about hardcore play in the past in this thread. Unfortunately, this isn't a game that you can spec full offense and be fine in. It isn't INTENDED to be like that. Defense is just as important as offense in this game, especially on hardcore and stating that you don't like speccing defense would make me assume that you're looking at this in a purely offensive setting - which would be untrue of how it should be looked at.
You NEED defense in this game - your primary defense is either HP or ES. Armor/Evasion/Block/Dodge/Resistances - those are secondary defenses.
But it was like that in the CB. The FAQ says you can specify full DPS if you want to, and I had a developer reply to me via email telling me that he thinks that playing a glass cannon is currently viable in PoE. That developer is completely wrong, as is your opinion on what this game is meant to be like.
(b) Personal abuse, foul language, inappropriate subject matter, obscene, harassing, threatening, hateful, or discriminatory or defamatory remarks of any nature ... are not permitted.
- PoE TOS.
Last edited by bhavv#7360 on Feb 18, 2013, 12:54:50 PM
