On Balance Feedback and Charge Changes

Still trying to understand how the upcoming Tinker chest would fit traps properly with frenzy generation if frezy charges doesn't apply to spells

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SerenaDrake wrote:

please keep in maind AUXIUM belt not work anymore with fixed chill duration for 4sec

There's DOZENS of them. Not to mention passives and a whole host of other systems. Which is further evidence that these changes are nowhere near ready and that a week is not nearly long enough to test these HORRIBLY broken changes...especially for GGG who should already be pretty busy with this whole "3.0 release" thing happening next week.

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DarkenLord wrote:

Still trying to understand how the upcoming Tinker chest would fit traps properly with frenzy generation if frezy charges doesn't apply to spells

"Herp Derp! Obviously it was meant to ONLY work with Kinetic Blast linked to Trap Support! DUH! That's a totally common thing that super works and I'm not just saying to make a rhetorical argument!" - 'GGG can do no wrong' apologists

Another thing that really gets to me is the values in the ES manifesto, as far as 25k with a good balance of offence and defense goes, you really have ED and RF and imo RF damage is weak as piss, the rest of us are sitting 10-12k. I really feel 9k with Vaal pact was when it just started to feel good and i find it really had to see how you guys factored in the huge loss for everything else, these builds are going to be sitting at 6-7k es without vp and losing a bunch of points on the tree. Firstly, that feels like shit and secondly, why the fuck would anyone choose that over life? On top of that ll now has a higher es pool than ci.
GGG do this over and over, you listen to feedback and that's great but i really feel you guys make an ok change, then make a bunch more on top of that and fuck it all up, i don't know if you want to remove them on purpose but it's what ends up happening. ES, VFB/VS, DoT and Assassin are a couple recent examples of going in way too hard with nerfs, changes may have been needed, but even half of them would have been too much unless you intend to remove them from play.
Pretty cut up about the flasks too, but it's just a too good or just right argument, for me the changes could have been left out but i guess it's more of a vision thing with them and it's your game.

Even if you're all "experts", the disconnect is clear.

I definitely understand where GGG is coming from with the changes to Shock/Chill and Charges, but the implementation was just really bad. This should have come with all of the changes at once, so the transition to the new system was complete and able to be tested instead of it feeling like a blanket nerf with the promise that it will be improved sooner or later. People would probably be more understanding if ailment effects for shock and chill were in the game. People would probably be more ok with the charge changes if all of the small things, like certain uniques, skills, and mechanics were changed to fit into the new system at the same time. Instead you get memes like introducing a trapper chest 1 day before you change Frenzy charges to be completely worthless for 99% of traps. Now for what to do about the changes these are just what I would probably try.

For shock and chill, I think this would be a good time to bring back stacks and remove the minimum amount needed to be applied. Make it just a staple of these elements. If you hit the mob for 1% of its max HP with lightning damage you get 1% more damage from shock for 4 seconds. If the next hit you hit the mob for 2% of its max HP, you get 2% more damage for 4 seconds plus the 1% for whatever the remaining time it has left from the first attack. Chill would basically function the same way.

Freeze on the other hand, is a tricky one. You don't want perma freeze, so I would probably add a minimum for freeze. You need to do something like 5 or 10% of the mobs maximum HP to ever freeze it. If the requirement is not made however, the effect is converted into a Chill at twice its normal value. So if I crit the mob for 4% of its max HP in pure cold damage it would not freeze, but would be chilled by 8%. This would scale with increased chill effect meaning with 100% increased chill effect it would be slown by 16%. This allow cold based crit builds to either freeze the target outright or very quickly apply chill. For act bosses or big map bosses, like Guardians or Atziri, you can never freeze them because that would be dumb and you would always get the double bonus to Chill effects on crit. If you crit a Guardian for 15% of its health it would get chilled for 30%. This will never happen, but if it did, it would not get frozen making the encounter trivial.

I am totally fine with both effects being capped, but fast attacking, but lower damaging, build should be able to apply chill and shock as well as hard hitting, but slow attacking, builds. I think a system like this would accomplish it nicely.

Now comes the changes to charges. I am 100% ok with lowering the offensive benefit of charges, as long as they make sense with everything in the game as a whole. First, as I mentioned in the beginning, fix every skill, unique, and mechanics that works with charges before implementing it. Power Siphon should get some other bonus with Power charges because 30% crit is not that great and it definitely does not care about more spell damage. Change the Master Sapper wheel in Ranger for trappers or buff the hell out of attack based traps if you are going to make frenzy charges attack damage only. Make all of the changes and then implement the new system. Don't implement a half finished concept and expect people to be ok with it.

Charges themselves could use a small change to be more interesting while limiting raw damage. My take would be to make all charges half defensive and half offensive at lower values. If you don't want generic damage than make it something else. For instance, you could make Frenzies grant 2% increased attack and cast speed, 2% more attack damage, and 1% dodge per frenzy charge. That means with a 11 frenzy charge build you would get 22% attack and cast speed, 22% more attack damage, and 11% chance to dodge. Power charges could be something like 30% increased crit, 2% more spell damage, and .25% mana regen per charge making it good for regen, defense if specced into MoM, and crit and caster builds. Endurance charges would stay the same defensively but add something like 2% more physical damage (yes, that means this would help scale bleed and poison).

I find that these changes would make maintaining charges more impactful overall, as it would be helping your damage and keeping you alive. Not as much damage as the current live charges, but the addition of solid defensive or sustainability effects should make it a fair tradeoff to most players.

So there are my suggestion on how these systems can be improved. I hope they help a little bit and I look forward to seeing what GGG comes up with in the end regardless. I think everyone, even if a lot of people are angry at the moment, want 3.0 to be a success and take the game to the next level.

Dear GGG,

Please stop ripping CoC to bits. "It's too easy to reach crit cap" but it's really not. Good diamond rings, ammys maybe, just about every applicable crit node on the top and right of the tree, diamond flasks, 6+ power charges, ice golem, close to 1k accuracy, AND Horror gloves to get some skills to 90%+ effective crit chance. Crit chance isn't the problem, you need to be very heavily invested in it as a non-Assassin, and still somewhat invested as one. With ES changes, this puts extreme stress on gear requirements, making it next to impossible for anyone who's not rich. In my opinion, don't nerf crit chance (from power charges OR assassin), change the way the crit damage works. There's no reason why we shouldn't be able to reach 100% crit chance as an assassin with supports like cast on crit available (especially with 4 max casts/sec, which isnt hard to reach as a caster, it seems perfectly balanced to me). Isn't the whole point of assassin to crit?

I propose something a long the lines of more crit less damage/crit multi from assassin. If you crit less consistently, you should have decent damage per crit to compensate. If you're critting near 100% of the time, you can get away with not having as much damage per crit and still do equal damage, while at the same time not taking repeated jabs at one of the most fun build types in the game. Hell, maybe add a keystone for crits kind of like Resolute Technique. Add tons of crit chance (more multiplier, maybe even max it out for attacks or something) cap max crit multi to a reasonable number to balance damage(250%ish I would see as reasonable). "Balance" should not kill builds that are barely on the line of viable. "balance" should not make a 5-10ex build cost closer to 50-75 or more. Balance pulls in the top end builds a bit while allowing bottom end builds to still work and do most content. There will always be top end players spending 500ex on near perfect gear that can faceroll everything. It's going to happen, period. With that kind of investment, they should be able to. I am perfectly fine with harder content just for those types of builds, too. It rewards people who have time invested into making enough currency and learning the mechanics to make such a build.

I love this game because of the depth, options to do whatever you want, even if it mean making a character which wont get past level 60 cause you screwed it up. It's what makes this game great. Pushing certain classes/ascendancies into certain parts of the tree, or forcing certain stats on gear, making charges more or less desirable for certain classes, and all this "streamlining" just waters down the game, making it more and more like diablo, just with more points invested into getting to the end goal. If I wanted streamlined, no thought builds, I'd be playing D3. Please keep in mind MUCH of your player base plays for the depth. If a templar wants frenzy charges, why shouldn't he get them? The changes in recent times have severely diluted build variety in terms of viability. Following this path, I foresee 6 viable build with small variations of each based on playstyle. It's getting to the point where I feel Scion is the ONLY viable character that stays true to the games nature of experimentation and synergies. Ive spent a lot of money supporting this game (compared to the average $60 plus a DLC or two), others have spent insane amounts nearing or passing the thousands, and I don't plan on stopping (though it has been a while, things happen). Please don't make me, and countless others, regret supporting this game.

I ranted way more than I meant to. TL;DR, stop watering down and "streamlining" the game. most of your player base LIKES the complexity. I'm fine with most of the changes that have been made, but since ascendancies it seems like you guys are pushing further and further towards blizzard's approach to arpgs, and we don't like it. Keep in mind that you guys are where you are because the game filled a hole that diablo left wide open, and filling that hole got you support from the people who wanted the depth. Don't turn your backs on your roots because of success. We understand you have a business to run too. We understand to expand you need money, and to make more money you need more players, and to get more players you need to make it less complex to lure in the casuals. We get it, we really do. But please, PLEASE leave that for consoles. Leave the PC game complex in all of its glory. This is the MtG of ARPGs, please don't make it a yu-gi-oh, that's what D3 is for.

Edit: If you're 100% set on throwing CoC to the sea, at least give us more fun triggers to work with. We like the thought that goes into making synergistic builds. CwC was nice, though I've never played it. If you're gonna water down the game for new players, at least add optional complexity in other forms for people that want it.

Nerf perfect agony to make it not mandatory for poison build (HAHAHAHAHAHA sadly it's still, i don't see much player using any other class other than assassin's doing poison anyway)
Made a keystone to assimilate a unique ailment status (bleed) to become weaker poison (HAHAHAHA, just remove bleeding and give gladiator poison, change all the bleed nodes to poison, it's a lot easier)
Specify charges to work with certain form of build, a charges is too strong because you don't need to invest much to make it powerful? what about you reduce the starting max charges count from 3 to 2 and add 1 more to the tree so people can actually "invest" to get what they want, take out the number and give it another thing to justify the nerf is totally stupid. GGG balance team : wait what? 2 skill point for another 50% is still too easy! it required generation, it has duration if we can't keep up. Specifying damage killed diversity.
Ailment effectiveness based on life taken per hit is not exactly that bad, but please redesign the number, it's all number we are talking here, including those point above this
The worst of all part, we get to have 1 week to test em out in beta, having community good player member working for you? i would very much like to know their name so we get to have an interview with the guy to ask him how fucked is GGG standard operating procedure to land big changes at the last week, don't shove us away telling us this has been long plan, judging by the look at most of these items and spells that previously interacted with charges/status ailment, no you haven't.
I seriously hope 2 month later i get to tell all dem diablo 3 fans in the neighbor that, no, we did not fuck up.

If the objective was that for any damage dealer it was not necessary to have both type of charges, it was achieved (obviously everyone who used both will be very angry now). Now a caster sees more benefit of the power charges and less of the frenzy charges, and vice versa with a non-caster. I think the problems goes through the side effects. One problem with this is that you are segregating charge types with class types (or even more) and that does not sound right... other problem is there is a lot of content designed that were designed for "old charges" and they were outdated now.

Changes doesn't look bad, assassin was too strong as even traper would be assassin.
People need to stop crying before they actually test it, we will also have new harbinger uniques which in my opinion should add a lot of new builds.

Where's that 1m+ dps beta poison build, Qarl?