On Balance Feedback and Charge Changes

:/

I am not usually the one to cry out about changes, but this time I'll leave my thoughts here, even if its on the 16th page.

You recently revealed the new trapper chest, which was already mediocre in itself, because of the "when traps are triggered by enemies" restriction, but that's okay, let's say you wanna shift away from the Sunblast/Sab. trapper meta. You gave it Frenzy charge generation, and at the same time, made Frenzy charges COMPLETELY useless for trappers. How is this intuitive? It doesn't make ANY sense.

Secondly, Power charges (in my opinion) were already a sub-optimal way of scaling critical strike chance, just think about it: Best case scenario, 2 skill points for 50% global (conditional****) critical strike chance, so 25% / skill point. It's not bad, but there are much better nodes than them, and for most builds, getting a Power charge was at least 3 skill points.

Assassin changes are fine. Nerfing Noxious strikes on one hand is an amazing change, because you wouldn't have to balance around the BEST poison/bleed node in the game, but it only makes sense if poison/bleed are actually playable (not saying they're not, but I haven't seen any YET).

Flask changes are amazing, I love them in all shape or form.

I have nothing else on my mind right now

I agree with everything but the Frenzy Charges change. I think it should either give less More Damage (what?) per charge or give some Movement Speed (I was thinking of it as a stackable mini Onslaught) and no damage increase. Heck, why not some extra general cooldown recovery speed rather than more damage, as Frenzy Charges are thematically 'aligned' with speed, nimbleness?

It also hurt builds using that one chest revealed some days ago, which, IMO, does not make that much sense.

I really like the change on Power Charges and shock/chill mechanics. Also, glad GGG managed to nerf Vaal Lightning Trap and Vinktar's.

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ErugoPurakushi wrote:

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TRIPL3try wrote:

Don't cater to the crybabies, Chris. You should also nerf the way spell casters exploit Fortify with shield charge and whirling blades. Remember how that is supposed to be designed for melee? Every class uses it now. It's stupid.

Absolutely agree! You guys do fantastic job of making that balance feel good and nice. I think we need that changes to make builds vary more!

Again, agreed, no need to revert the changes GGG.


Reddit will always cry about their beloved builds getting gutted.Builds, mind you, that are being played for several leagues on end, without even thinking about trying something else.If its facerol capable, the "regular" reddit soldier is a happy little camper.


The Changes are fine Chris.

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Chris wrote:

There's a common misconception in the community that our balance team doesn't play Path of Exile. They actually do play it, a whole lot. We have people with level 100 hardcore characters, multiple famous community members who have come to work for us and you may not even know it. The minimum requirement to join our QA team is 1000 hours of PoE experience, and we still turn people with that prerequisite away if they're not good enough at the game. Our design, balance and QA team are experts at Path of Exile. I would not accept any less. They put substantial work into each change, planning out not only what it affects now, but what it affects in the future. These changes are all considered in the big picture of the other planned changes.

While processing player feedback in preparation for 3.0.0, we found four requests that we could address simultaneously with our proposed charge changes:

• Nerf total crit chance available. It was getting too close to cap, too easily.
• Nerf the Assassin. This was frequently requested.
• Provide more uses for power charges on spellcasters (especially non-crit ones).
• Make it less mandatory for general damage dealers to invest in frenzy charges.

We recently made these charge changes in the beta, and received an immediate negative reaction from a vocal portion of the community. While we firmly stand behind the intention of this change, it's very clear that the community not only misunderstood a lot of the consequences, but also generally didn't like the direction of the change.

We make this game for you guys, so if you don't want the change, we aren't going to force it in purely to solve long-term problems. The short-term and build continuity do matter as well. We hope to get feedback from your playtesting in the next few days of the beta, so that we can make a decision this week about whether it remains in this form, is reverted, or is made in another form.

We communicated poorly about the changes and their motivation. While we may lament the community misunderstanding the consequences of the change, it is clearly our fault for confusing the community. While it has been crazily hectic recently, we do need to stop and take the time to more clearly explain what we are testing, and why.

Almost all of these changes are on Beta. Please playtest them and let us know the results of what you find. We'll post again after the weekend with our findings also.

Thank you for your time, support and occasional overreactions. We expect nothing less <3

Maybe if you hired your guys based on skill and intelligence instead of monotonous actions they wouldn't do such a piss poor job.
You pushed major changes to core mechanics 2 weeks before launch and revaluate those over the weekend? That basically shows that you had no concept, no planning, no communication whatsoever.
Furthermore you have no fucking clue what your community actually wants and neither how it fits into the game.
They did not ask you to make power charges basically a caster only charge nor frenzy attack only, they did not ask you to break attack assassins nor spell raiders. Instead of removing even more things you are supposed to add alternatives, options, to augment builds, not push them into a corner.
You did not deliver one good reason as to why you did so-and-so, instead you want us to explain to you the most obvious of things even though you apparently have top players at your disposal. Maybe get them out of shaped strands already. You can even google the interactions, there is a wiki full of it. That's how bad of a job this is.
It proves that you put zero thought and effort into it.
You guys are either delusional or oblivious. A manifesto or better communication won't help. This is a problem that has been here for very long time.
What's next? Balance around RMT?

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Vivre wrote:

This thread is the most blatant lie I've seen on these forums yet.

EDIT: referring to the first paragraph about 1000 hours of experience. Or maybe 40days of AFK trading counts.

Additionally CEO posting damage control posts like this really crumbles GGG's credibility.

You're seriously suggesting that Chris is blatantly lying?

Turn off Alex Jones.

This is my analysis based on the information provided.

Charges

Frenzy
I like the idea behind removing the pressure from characters to go out of their way to get frenzy charges.

Making this change without making changes to related elements, such as uniques(ex. your new trapper chest), seems unwise.

(Assuming the minion based charges also change.)This change has big negative consequences for spell based minions for summoners using Victario's Charity and Necromantic Aegis as they lose massive amounts of cast speed.(They can also lose massive amounts of damage if their damage isn't affected by the spell damage multiplier from power charges.)

Any non-attack crit character that was using both frenzy and power charges can now potentially give up their efforts to get frenzy charges and spend that effort on getting more crit instead.


Power
While I understand the desire to lower the prevalence of crit based builds, I do not understand the targeting of crit chance over crit multi. The unreliability of crit is one of the things that makes playing crit on a low level/not fully geared character feel bad.

The minion situation above will also be greatly impacted by the crit chance nerf of power charges if the minion based charges are also nerfed.

Adding a more multiplier to spell damage creates the following problems:
1) You shift the requirement from frenzy charges to power charges for any spell damage based character that isn't already using them. This is a little better in most cases but still limiting.
2) Any spell based character that doesn't benefit from more spell damage is losing the damage bonus from frenzy charges without getting anything in return.
3) Any character that can benefit from the multiplier that couldn't get frenzy charges before gets a sizable buff.
4) Since extra power charges are generally much easier to get for spell users than extra frenzy charges, lots of builds will now have more mandatory passive points with less room for creativity.

Power Siphon is a great example of the need for additional changes alongside this change. Here we have an underused skill that gets nerfed by the crit changes to its main mechanic(generating power charges) without being able to benefit from the added more spell damage multiplier.



Ailments

Chill
This is really only important on targets that don't die quickly. Since the effect is now based on minion life this goes directly against the goal of the player. It doesn't matter if you chill that regular skeleton you left on 20% life. What matters is that rare/unique/boss you left at 80%+ life.


Shock
This change has a number of problematic effects:
1) Just like chill the most important targets are affected the least.
2) In addition getting a big shock on something that is already badly damaged can be a partial or complete waste of extra damage.
3) Anything with rapid subsequent hits that can shock(ex. storm call) receives a big nerf as before a large percentage of the damage could benefit from the full 50% buff.

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Boren wrote:

Also is the idea that frenzy is too common an and required as a general damage buff. This could be entirely by my failing, but I have never considered a casual 3 frenzy charges to be valuable enough for me to go out of my way to get them.

Probably because you didn't realize you could get 12% More damage for 1 jewel.

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Boren wrote:

The majority of my builds are spell crit builds without frenzy charges, so these changes just end up being a 20-28% more damage buff to my generic go to build.

Well you lose a lot of crit chance and gain more damage that you could have had but didn't in return. Small buff overall. Most spell builds got a buff here.

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ErugoPurakushi wrote:

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TRIPL3try wrote:

Don't cater to the crybabies, Chris. You should also nerf the way spell casters exploit Fortify with shield charge and whirling blades. Remember how that is supposed to be designed for melee? Every class uses it now. It's stupid.

Absolutely agree! You guys do fantastic job of making that balance feel good and nice. I think we need that changes to make builds vary more!

but this is killing build variety
i could for example create a tulfull unique build built around its effect now the unique is trash as frenzies do nothing to that build.

people are fine with nerfs what their not fine with is outright breaking of mechanics and unique interesting ways to build.
frenzies were pretty difficult for majority of spell casters to get unless they was some raider monstrosity which would still be weaker then a more dedicated ascendancy.
most were CI so couldnt run blood rage and even then frenzies were impossible to get for bosses when you actually wanted them anyway.

Vinktars will still be BIS for everything because of the thing they refuse to aknowledge is its OP effect and that is the leech the shock was a little bonus that we can get elsewhere anyway(vaal lightning trap etc)


this change also means bottom left of tree is either RT for attacks or your dumpster how is that increasing build diversity, when its took away options to build down in that corner of the tree.
nobody will do crit attack based setups as the investment is not worth the hassle again killing more options of builds.

I don't like these changes. I'm disappointed with myself for even getting so upset about all of this.
I'm not some pro player that you all seem to only care about... so maybe my idea doesn't matter... But can't you see the problems that theses changes are bringing?

Reducing the amount of Critical Strike Chance that a player can get is a good idea, but there are other sources of Critical Strike Chance than just the Assassin ascendancy and Power Charges. Increased Critical Strikes Support could be a problem. It has a bonus of +1.9% Base Critical Strike Chance and it is extremely powerful.

Maybe instead the problem is a combination of both Critical Strike Chance and Critical Strike Multiplier...
Maybe it's that players are able to get such high numbers of Critical Strike Multiplier that other sources of damage are not needed...

I don't know, it's just an idea, but these current changes are ill-omened.



Power Charges ≠ Spells
Frenzy Charges ≠ Mandatory

Like what? If you think Frenzy Charges are too powerful then lower the numbers that each grant, or nerf Raider is that ascendancy is the problem. Also, having Power Charges catered for spell casters is bad design.