On Balance Feedback and Charge Changes

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grepman wrote:

as expected, no admittance of your statement being pulled out of thin air and being plain wrong. yawn. at least own up to your mistake, be a man ffs. no one pulled your tongue to produce a fake number to make your point better. too bad you didnt know about site that actually tracks gem usage. tsk.

Except that I wasn't wrong. I said top100. You then decided to check the top ~10,000(which is not the top100) to imply that I was saying something I wasn't saying. You then argued against that thing that I never said to try and discredit me because you know you had no legitimate response to what I actually said.

This is a common propaganda technique known as a "strawman"...but I'm sure you already knew that considering how seamlessly you jumped to it as your first move.

Commonly it is followed up by a faux superiority and moralism...check. If you're gonna come at me, you best come correct.



It's obvious at this point given how many times you've blatantly lied and ignored the numbers to keep forcing this objectively wrong narrative that you aren't interested in facts or reality, so it's really not worth trying to explain to you how the world works. This change is bad. It's been thoroughly explained why it's bad. And the only people who defend it are those who(like you), want everything to be the same and only the same 3 cookie-cutter builds to ever be viable.

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Chris wrote:

[li]Make it less mandatory for general damage dealers to invest in frenzy charges.[/li]

It was never mandatory for damage dealers to invest in frenzy charges, it was a welcome option to support unique build ideas and general build diversity.

This frenzy charge change completely destroys the really fun way of building Raider spell casters, now if you want to build a self-cast spell caster, your options are inquis/elemtenalist/assassin and zerker (which imo is the most broken ascendancy in the game along with support necro and you guys havent touched them)

Building with any other ascendancy is now just a net loss for spellcasters, and Scion still isnt a viable option as you're yet to get that right. Having to spend all 8 ascendancy points just to get 1 'Path of the X' and two extremely gimped versions of other Ascendancy's will never make up for a pure version of an Ascendancy

Path of Exile is known for its complexity, everything needs to be viable for everyone in some way, allowing the community endlessly flexibility to come up with unique and powerful ideas. If something arises that is too powerful, its your job to TONE it down, NOT completely destroy one aspect of it that ruins countless other builds

If the balance team was run correctly, your aim would be to encourage as many builds as possible, not just Life one league, ES another league, MoM next league, ES again for several leagues and now with 3.0 were going back to MoM as an example.

Please dont make this frenzy change, think about build diversity as in my opinion its the most important thing for PoEs future, instead of drastic changes to shift metas to another meta, how about focusing on small nerfs/buffs to encourage players to try EVERYTHING and ANYTHING

Also remove threshold jewels, if the skills are lacking buff the skills, we dont want D3 style item band-aids to pigeon hole builds

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grepman wrote:

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Nephalim wrote:

Getting power charges through coh and frenzy charges through bloodrage are irrelevant where it counts - vs the bosses.

This is a wild assumption but I have a feeling you've never actually done end game bosses or not very often if you actually think frenzy and power charges are actually powerful when they only apply to non bosses.

youre moving goalposts to mars now. discussion was about builds that use both. never did you or anyone else made a qualifier of how many charges are generated. still, 5 frenzy charges = 20% more damage, which is non-diminishing return.

you have a funny feeling.
if thats so, I might or might not have a feeling youve never put down orb of orms + pcoc or used a raider or frenzy to sustain charges on bosses.

I'm not sure what goalpost is now but I will make a few assertions.

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-A frenzy build that uses coh to gain 3 power charges is not hurting build diversity or benefiting outside of non boss targets.
-A power charge build that uses bloodrage to gain 3 frenzy charges is not hurting build diversity or benefiting outside of non boss targets.

-A frenzy build that spends the socket/combat time to lay down OoS is not hurting build diversity and has marginal gains.
-A power charge ranged attack build that uses the actual frenzy to get charges gains a moderate gain but I expect this to be rather rare if not non existent. Any other archetype that uses the frenzy skill to get 3/3 is an idiot.

I really don't think slapping the boss in the face with an unlinked frenzy skill gem to maintain your pitiful 3/3 or spending the socket and effort to tag the boss with OoS so you can maintain your 3/3 pcharge is worthwhile and ruining build diversity. GGG is probably celebrating in their office now that they have gotten players to use more than one skill at a time.

If your goalpost is that, some builds use bloodrage or coh to gain the other charge than I have no opposition against that statement. The points above highlight how it is either 1) totally ineffectual where it counts 2) comes with a burden and cost for marginal gains.

I'd like to see how many players used the frenzy skill or OoS to generate charges from that original list you analyzed.

Finally, consider raider was a worthless class until frenzy charge on kill changed to frenzy charge on hit. Obviously QoL with charge generation plays a huge role in the actual power of the charge.

thanks for the measured and generally great response and i apologize on behalf of this community for the way some people acted after the changes were first announced (though ggg does bear some responsibility for the toxicity of this community, y'all don't deserve its vitriol)

personally i agree 100% with the assassin nerfs, i like the frenzy change, and i disagree with the current values/strength of shock and chill (which apparently y'all do too). what i don't like is the spell damage added to power charges - this seems to make building crit for spellcasters a better choice 95% of the time, which seems counter to the whole reason you nerfed assassin in the first place

if you wanna get overly complex i'd suggest an either-or scenario for power charges where the higher your total crit chance the lower the spell damage buff, and vice versa. this would probably be overly complicated though and i'd instead suggest just removing the spell damage buff and reverting the frenzy charge change with an added nerf of 2 or 3% more per charge rather than 4%. i like the change to frenzy charges but it's probably not worth unbalancing spellcasting so much. another option is to make the frenzy charge buff melee only and increase it a little, this would help a bit with the massively underpowered melee problem y'all have had since day 1 and wouldn't significantly effect ranged attack builds since they're so much stronger than melee already

i'd also suggest reverting the changes to vinktars and instead heavily nerfing the life leech, as it's a large part of why folks are calling vaal pact so op

Hey GGG,

I've played this game for a long time and honestly think the changes to charges and assassin are bad. The great thing about charges is that you could invest into them on any build and it became a dynamic part of your character. You do not have 100% uptime of all charges on every character. I like being able to have endurance charges on my shadow or raider the same way I like to have frenzy charges on a Templar. these changes do not really present any real positive change from my understanding of them. As an assassin hitting critical strike cap makes sense, a raider attacking really fast from having frenzy charges makes sense; however having the option to have these charges on other classes and in other builds is really nice. I don't want to play assassin only if I am doing a spell build because otherwise I'm wasting points. This change reduces the options available to players and I don't see the positive parts of the changes. Perhaps with further information on the changes I'll change my stance on this but for right now these changes reduce the amount of options for players. Also I understand you aren't removing the option for these charges in other builds but it makes it less valuable meaning due to efficiency and META builds it overall does decrease build diversity and options.

I suggest that if you want to change charges change the nodes on the passive tree. There is already a 4% increased spell damage per power charge so change that to a more multiplier for spells(you can even add the downside of 20% reduced crit chance per power charge). For frenzy charges they can be left as is but if there's too much damage in them change them to give more attack and cast speed and no % damage as that is the identity of a frenzy charge.

Hope a better change can be put in place.

PLEASE ADD BASE CRIT TO HERALD OF THUNDER (now it's 0) otherwise with deadly infusion nerf, herald bomber build gone be dead, and it was my build for 3.0!

GGG, Thanks for bringing up this discussion. I think if you have a long-term, you should stay with it rather than meeting any short-term satisfaction. Issues like frenzy power with traps can be adjusted overtime. And I don't think we can judge whether this is a good change or not before playing it hard. Actually I feel little sad that you said it is fine to roll back your proposal if there are too much panic, because the hesitation of making change will destroy the game.

My issue with Power Charge change for 50% to 30% is how are certain builds suppose to get enough crit to function? Like Cospri's Discharge, At 6 power charges thats 100% increased just lost!

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MEZIR wrote:

The only way to easy power charge generated with boss is OoS+ PCoC

PCOC works on anything. You can link it with Frenzy and pull both frenzy and power charges on boss's.
Anything that can crit even halfway consistently will easily pull PCs with PCOC.
You can also use that one shield that gives Power charges when throwing Traps. There's Voll's Protector. There's that Malachi's shield that pulls charges on hit. (20% Chance i think) There's Romira's. There's shit tons of ways to pull PCs even on bosses.

Frenzy Charges if anything are a lot more limited. You have 3 options.. Frenzy which only Melee and Bow can do, Raider of course, and Blood Rage. Which if you're a VP build might not be the best option and does not work well on bosses. I want to say there's a wand (Tul maybe?) That can pull Frenzy Charges but i would have to go look. But PCs are one of the easiest charges to sustain 100% of the time. followed closely by End Charges and then Frenzy being the most limited.

I bet most of the people posting here and welcoming the changes are just comparing these recent changes with 2.6 and do not know about the previous beta changes.

How can you say that it was necessary to nerf poison/assassin further. Even Viper Strike was nerfed once again. It was not even that great pre wave 4, it was decent (at least viper strike, dont know about other poison based builds but i bet they were worse). Now its nerfed to the ground.

Frenzy changes only working with attack skills... dont like this so much. Frenzy charges are now a very minor boost to non attack skills. I do not spend 2 passives for an additional 4% cast speed. There are way better nodes to pick up (nimbleness/mental rapidity) which are right next to the typical building path of a caster build anyway. Not to mention interaction with uniques and passives like master sapper.
It would have been maybe a better change for frenzy charges to be generated only by attack skills. So that they are still useful for casters but not that "easy" to obtain with spells using mechanics like "on kill / hit".

The power charge changes are okay. The critical strike chance nerf a bit too much. The problem here is the same as with frenzy charges. Who wants to pick up additional power charges only for 15% chance per point?

Changes to chill shock are fine.