On Balance Feedback and Charge Changes

Regarding the charges, I think that there is a solution to the more damage problem that would suit everyone.

Change frenzy charges back to "more damage" from "more attack damage"
Change power charges from "more spell damage" to "more damage"
Change charges so that if there are overlapping mods (i.e. more damage) you only get the benefit from the higher number of charges...

So if you have 4 frenzy and 3 power charges you get the 16% from the frenzy charges... you go up to 4/4 and you still get 16%. You go up to 4/5 and now you get 20% from the power charges.

This means that you can go either frenzy OR power and still get the same benefit... So there is no mandatory requirement for one over the other.

People who want crit and dmg will go power charges.
People who want speed and dmg will go frenzy charges.

That provides options without making one more necessary than the other.

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allbusiness wrote:

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Galtrovan wrote:

Assassin nerf. It needed to be done. Why on earth the crit node was that powerful to begin with is beyond me. The same goes for the 100% more damage on poison/bleed. Just wow.

Frenzy charge change, I'd like to know why generic 4% more damage was added to it in the first place. 4% attack/cast speed as originally implemented was good in my opinion. 4% more damage just made Frenzy charges over the top. At any rate, changing the 4% more damage to attack only, I don't like. If you are going to do 4% more for attack only, I'd rather you just remove the 4% more damage altogether and return Frenzy to 4% attack/cast speed. Or even change the 4% more damage into something else, like 4% totem/trap/mine placement speed per charge. That way, no matter the build something about the charge applies.

Power charge change. Reducing the crit chance, fine. 4% more spell damage per power charge to compensate for the reduced crit chance, don't like it just applying to spells. If you are going to do 4% more damage, make it generic so that spells, attacks, traps, mines, everyone benefits.

All the charge types have always applied to all builds fairly. Let's keep it that way. Not make it so thees charges are for these builds. These other charges for these other builds.

Besides, do as I suggest, you don't have to go through all the existing uniques and change all the ones that wouldn't make sense... ala the one you just showcased.

My 2 cents.

Assassin's identity was that it could crit cap with weird ass weapons without having to use a diamond flask. Other classes had to use a flask slot to get close to that crit cap; Assassin didn't. Nerfing it's identity in poison like four times in a row and crit just makes the class incredibly weak, especially considering the class is a pure offensive class with no defensive capabilities unlike the other classes.

I would like to agree 100% with this. What made assassin somewhat broken was the interaction with poison, and nothing else.

But poison was a broken mechanic by itself, so once they had fixed this, there was no further motive to nerf the ascendancy even more. Maybe i could even ignore the nerf to toxic delivery, since dots seem to be useless so who cares, but removing (almost halving) the critical capabilities of a SPECIALIST CLASS that is supposed to excel, now, just in that specific field seem weird imho.

This is the same thing as removing vp from es. First, not all player, and i would say, just a small minority, reached an es pool like the ones they mentioned, but again es has NO INSTANT RECOVERY MECHANICS outside instant leech, while life has also flasks. So life has now 2 way to get back from a mistake, while es has none and with an effective ehp pool that is nominally and realistically maybe just 30% bigger than pure life builds, but also usually deprived of all these defensive meachanics of which life still benefit. You can imagine playing with a skill that require to stand near the mobs (read: melee range) when at every single mistake you have to run back and wait some time for the es to get full again? Cuz the classic leech alone won't do shit for you, outside reducing your "cooldown" time.

About the charges: again, it may not be the case, but the devs seem to try pushing the players into taking certain decisions, while this should be a game about the freedom of choice. What attack build will spend 2 points (plus the pathing required to get into the area) to gain 15% critical chance x point? And you still have to find a way to generate these.

On a side note, i'm not advocating that ci/ll/es builds were not too powerful, but i can say that even a life build, if properly geared and optimized, can still shit on shaper, guardians and uber atziri. So what was the point of removing JUST es from the equation? If istant leech is broken, es simply gave you a broader time window to abuse this mechanic, and nothing else.

Again, give some leech effectivness to end game bosses, introduce new mechanics that limit vp (maybe leech immune mobs?), REMOVE VAAL PACT FROM THE GAME but give flask to es too etc etc.... Any of these, just some, or even all these "fixes" i just naively suggested could have given back a proper challenge to the game without ruining the pool of choices a player had to get his character done (and for those who cares about std, without ruining all these expensive builds that costed huge time and commitment to their respective owners)

In the end i think is too late to get back on all of this, so i just posted my opinions again for the sake of the discussion, since last time i wasn't specific enough.

As always, good luck guys:)

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NessOnett8 wrote:

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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.

you said "0.01%". if you know a lick of math 1/100 is not top 100. its top 10000. you made statements that were flat out WRONG like not a single berserker in top 100 used a single frenzy charge. and you cant own up to it

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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

show me a single lie Ive written here. pure and utter nonsense. you pulled out numbers out of your ass and Ive shown you - quite easily- that you were wrong.

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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.

lol. I dont want everything to be the same. if anything I want shit nerfed hard. but, you are literally incapable of understanding that frenzy charges providing bonus to every single build possible that does direct damage is actually directly fucking up alternatives.

only 1 advice : stop listening people recently arrived in ur team from blizzard......we REALY feel their influence in the way u are developing the game those times.

give us MORE REAL end game experience , stop balancing the game with nerf , increase the difficulty with new maps t16/17 !!!!

have fun (that's something becoming more rare in POE those last time....sorry)

I am sure that many people before me have commented about this but unfortunately I do not have sufficient times to make sure I am not double-posting, so here are my comments on power charge changes:

A character that is going to be severely hit by the proposed changes in CI-GR-VP and now power charges is Trickster.

Walk the ether is the biggest enabler for CoC builds (either with physical spells such as bladefall and ek, which was what I used to play in 2.6 or with discharge) and without a way to reliably build on crit with Trickster nerfs him significatly.

Trickster needs significant invest to crit in order to shine and in almost all of your Development Manifesto posts you quote at some point "...with significant invest should/will be able to..". Crit does not come cheap to Trickster these days. Nerfing his crit chance a straight 8% (rough estimate) in order to hit another Ascendancy class is not the way to go in my opinion.

If you nerf his ES cap by 25-30%, his crit chance by 8% and remove Vaal pact, what is exactly left out for him?
Life nodes? (Where?)
More spell damage to compensate for lost crit chance? (Even 40% increased spell damage through increased inconsistency is a straight up nerf)
More eva (The discussion about eva is so huge I won't event comment here).

This ought to also apply to other classes as well, epsecially Witch ascendancies, Trickster is just a concrete example from my experience.

Furthermore, chances to Frenzy charges really forces the people to use certain ascendancies for certain builds, which is in contrast with what is stated in every development manifesto, that you want diversification as much as possible.

For example, If raider spellcasters are considered too strong, find a way to nerf raider alone, not mess with frenzy charges to force him go dow a certain path.

Your changes, till 1.0.6 that I am active to the game NEVER added restrictions to game play. Balance is one thing, restrictions are another. I feel that most of 3.0 proposed changes are trying to re-balance the game in a very restrictive way.

tl;dr


If the point is to nerf the Assassin, nerf him directly. Affecting global mechanics such as power charges with Assassin in mind, frenzy charges with Raider etc. in mind affects so many other aspects so that it feels that here you focused on the tree rather than the forest.

There are builds currently which can use all 3 charges. Can you explain why this is a problem? I see people actually wanting to make the charges so restrictive only certain classes can take full advantage of just one - why? Why forcefully restrict the game while messing up so much in the process instead of simply nerfing them a bit(40 % crit for power charge and 3% damage for frenzy for example)?

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allbusiness wrote:

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GreenDude wrote:

Don't beat yourselves up. You guys are clearly hard at work and we appreciate it.

Keep in mind that while some changes may be pushed hard by a portion of the community, the portion that reacts poorly to the changes may in fact be a different one completely. Theres a lot of poe players so I dont think its the same people who are upset with the changes.

Ultimately its not an easy choice as to which side you listen to.

I think the major problem is that GGG tries to make a shit ton of new content AND balance at the same time. That is just a recipe for disaster, which is why this whole 3.0 patch looks like a complete shitshow. Most companies do not attempt to try and make massive balance changes when they introduce a crazy amount of new content, unless they give themselves a significant amount of time (i.e. see Reaper of Souls which put Diablo 3 back on the map, the Blizzard devs gave themselves WAY more time to balance things out PRIOR to releasing new content AND balance).

GGG committed a major blunder here by trying to do too much with too little time, and they are most definitely rushing to hit August 4th for whatever reason. They should have just delayed the patch by a month at the very least for extra time to polish balance.

Bad example, Reaper of souls put the last nail in the Diablo 3 coffin. They did something very similar - restricted the game so much it lost any lasting appeal. They removed rare items from gearing completely, later on unique items themselves fell out of favor because of sets, then they balanced......if you call that balance......the game completely around sets. Furthermore trading got hard deleted and gearing became a joke, you get your set in a week(a day currently, lol) and there is little else to play. The difference between builds became so severe there was always a fotm build which performed like 10 times better than the rest. Finally - greater rifts. This is what their end game became. Even though they did try introducing other activities like bounties and normal rifts both of them failed miserably just like D3 did after that expansion.

I have tested the power charge changes directly on a caster build, an ed/contagion build on an occultist. From the strict point of view of power charge, for me they balance the big nerf on spell damage roll on wands (since ed have no elemental roll, it have no balance from this change). So power charge change is good for ed/contagion. Also bear in mind that i'm only talking about the specific build i tested. Also from my understanding this power charge buff will help Ci/LL builds.

I also tested hp/mom because it's my first caster and i really had to see if that alternative is any good to a CI build. Changes are on point, i have around 5.2k effective hp at lv75/80, but the ability to spam both life and mana pot kind make it easier. The only really thing i see about hp/mom is that it force you to use a mana pot, so take away an utility flask, which is probably what you guys are aiming for.

GGG, when will the charge changes be reverted?

never.
changes pritty much final...how much changes in beta reverted/changed did you saw so far ?
ppls cried about ES overnerfed,ppls cired about DOT become garbag and what GGG did ? nothing.

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Johny_Snow wrote:

There are builds currently which can use all 3 charges. Can you explain why this is a problem? I see people actually wanting to make the charges so restrictive only certain classes can take full advantage of just one - why? Why forcefully restrict the game while messing up so much in the process instead of simply nerfing them a bit(40 % crit for power charge and 3% damage for frenzy for example)?

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allbusiness wrote:

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GreenDude wrote:

Don't beat yourselves up. You guys are clearly hard at work and we appreciate it.

Keep in mind that while some changes may be pushed hard by a portion of the community, the portion that reacts poorly to the changes may in fact be a different one completely. Theres a lot of poe players so I dont think its the same people who are upset with the changes.

Ultimately its not an easy choice as to which side you listen to.

I think the major problem is that GGG tries to make a shit ton of new content AND balance at the same time. That is just a recipe for disaster, which is why this whole 3.0 patch looks like a complete shitshow. Most companies do not attempt to try and make massive balance changes when they introduce a crazy amount of new content, unless they give themselves a significant amount of time (i.e. see Reaper of Souls which put Diablo 3 back on the map, the Blizzard devs gave themselves WAY more time to balance things out PRIOR to releasing new content AND balance).

GGG committed a major blunder here by trying to do too much with too little time, and they are most definitely rushing to hit August 4th for whatever reason. They should have just delayed the patch by a month at the very least for extra time to polish balance.

Bad example, Reaper of souls put the last nail in the Diablo 3 coffin. They did something very similar - restricted the game so much it lost any lasting appeal. They removed rare items from gearing completely, later on unique items themselves fell out of favor because of sets, then they balanced......if you call that balance......the game completely around sets. Furthermore trading got hard deleted and gearing became a joke, you get your set in a week(a day currently, lol) and there is little else to play. The difference between builds became so severe there was always a fotm build which performed like 10 times better than the rest. Finally - greater rifts. This is what their end game became. Even though they did try introducing other activities like bounties and normal rifts both of them failed miserably just like D3 did after that expansion.

RoS put D3 back on the map, they just didn't support it well afterwards. The changes and balance changes they made in RoS were all good for the game, and brought alot of popularity back to the game. However, the initial set of changes and balance changes had to be thought up of over an extended period of time, and Blizzard DID NOT RUSH ANY CHANGES. There was an extensive testing period also with significant content introduced to the players to test. This FOO Beta has been almost useless IMO, other than to see the initial content. Almost no end game changes were really introduced other than massive nerfs for really no apparent reason.