Balance Changes to Chill, Shock, and Charges

Would have personally preferred to have the frenzy item conflicts fixed and to keep the spell damage on the power charges which made them useful for many more builds. Otherwise I like the more consistent approach to building shock though.

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lordgab wrote:

About the threshold, why not remove them from loot table and drop a raw unique jewel instead which you can trade at the jewel vendor for the jewel of your choice.

I really like this, but we'd have to have it accessible at the same time that such jewels can drop, which is earlier than Act 5, I believe.

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darthross wrote:

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Drimli wrote:

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darthross wrote:

Appeasing the vocal minority who lack understanding of the game.

Thumbs down.

Lol? i am pretty sure we where MANY that did not approve of the frenzy charge changes... they basicly made all or most duelist and ranger spellcasting builds not viable... so please stop commenting before you learn more about the game and builds.

Right, except the actual elite players such as Etup, Alkaizer, Raiz, etc. who thought the changes were fine.

But I agree, we should value the opinions of people who can't even speak fucking English properly.

Apparently the game that is available worldwide should only cater to English speaking population? Somehow the opinion of people who speak other languages is less valid? What is this xenophobic nonsense?

In the same line, how are the opinions of people on Reddit somehow worth less? Besides there were plenty of people on these forums who were against the changes.

In my opinion, the problem with these changes was how late into the beta they came and how tacked on they felt, at least in case of charges. If this was introduced a month ago, so the charge changes could perhaps undergo several iterations to figure out the best way to handle them. Instead we got this heaping pile of "here deal with this" and if it messed with somebody's starter build well too bad.

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laminarija wrote:

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Voegelin wrote:

So, if I can hit a mob 50% of its life, which means, I can kill it in 2nd hit.

Why would I need to shock it ?

Do you really think about it ?

Or please tell us which memeber of QA team support this 50% damage/shock ?

I would personally want to know why would I need to shock mobs if I can 2 shots them ?

Thanks.

You have definitely not read the post.

Most people didn't. Which only pisses me off more.

People whining over changes when they didn't even bother to read the whole change, and GGG then jumping the gun to revert those changes sets a poor precedent.

To the people who didn't read it, there were ways to reduce the amount of damage you had to do for full shock effect. Also the actual % of damage done required for max shock wasn't set in stone. But it really doesn't matter at this point.

Here's to another 6 months of waiting for proper charge changes.

Let me get this straight, the jewel vendor isn't getting released? Because of minor concerns over prophecies and ease of acquisition? Ease of acquisition still exists if you're allowing it to be used as quest rewards, and prophecies/recipes can be adjusted. I thought the intention was to make it so everybody had opportunity to play these builds, in which case the vendor was a good idea since it provided access to everybody without RNG gating.

I'm not saying I needed these jewels (I've found at least one of almost every threshold jewel on live), but I liked the idea a lot since your recent approach to fixing skills has been threshold jewels. If we have skills available for everybody, why not their jewels too? It just made sense to me.

Huzzah! Sanity prevails!

I'm so glad GGG didn't listen to the vocal minority of 12 year old edgelords that were saying "Just ram the changes through anyways" to spite everyone else.

Nerfs are fine. Nerfs are great.

But anyone who knows the first thing about this game and has been playing longer than "since halfway through Legacy league" understood that this fundamental change at BEST needed way more time to be tested(And in reality was just a really bad design).


PLEASE, keep testing changes. But actually test them before you implement them. Don't just throw them in at the last minute(as this was clearly meant to do given the massive number of uniques and passives it destroyed)

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lordgab wrote:

About the threshold, why not remove them from loot table and drop a raw unique jewel instead which you can trade at the jewel vendor for the jewel of your choice.

+1

This is actually an amazing idea.

I'm really excited by the shock/chill changes. I feel like investing in those mechanics will be something I consider from now on, which does the one thing I hope changes are made to further most: promote build diversity.

As for the charges, I'm very glad the frenzy change was reverted. Charges are a fantastic mechanic, and having them offer unique attributes that every class can fully benefit from is ideal in a game like PoE. Obviously power charges are in a place that's not wholly ideal, as their benefit is largely negated by classes that don't value crit (RT, EO, etc). The only things currently in the game that circumvent this are The Aylardex (Damage taken from mana before life + increased mana regen per charge), and Discharge.

As an alternative solution, I want to lobby for a flat buff to Power Charges. Critical Strikes have been nerfed overall recently, and Power Charge's siblings have always carried the benefit of multiple effects suited to them thematically. I recommend a flat bonus to to mana regeneration in the realm of 0.25% mana regenerated per second per Power Charge. This fits the theme of "power", and gives power charges value in any mana-based build. It also synergizes well with Mind of Matter, which has quickly acquired an identity of being extremely important to the classes specifically on the northern side of the tree (which, coincidentally, are the ones with access to Power Charge improvements).

Shock and Chill changes? Sure, let's see what happens with them. Players don't seem to have heavily invested in chill before and shock would probably benefit from some fiddling.

The whole charge announcement thing was poorly presented, but I think nearly everyone agrees on that.

It just seems like the whole "align each of them with their appropriate attribute" thing is GGG saying that we're only meant to be using charges for those types of builds.

It's always seemed to me that dexterity was aligned with speed, intelligence with power, and strength with resilience.
If you look at the passive skill tree, 'damage with [weapon]'* is broadly spread around, and certainly not just in the dexterity, dexterity/intelligence or dexterity/strength portions.

* ('attack damage' by itself doesn't actually occur that often in the passive skill tree and even then is usually part of a leech node's description)

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KingKestrel wrote:

Please don't listen to Reddit.

The whole reason Reddit blew up first was because the original announcement about charge changes was just a "quick note" in a post about Chill and Shock balance changes on the 8th page of the Beta Wave 4 announcement thread in the Beta Announcements subforum.

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Deifyx wrote:

First of all, frenzy charges still give cast speed, you lose the flat damage ok, but you can use power charges and uniques you never used/seen before that provide power charge generation.

I think they'd have been better off if they'd instead said they were reverting Frenzy Charge to attack/cast speed only as it was before 2.0.

Removing just the spell damage buff gave a strong impression of frenzy = attacks only which was amplified by hearing about it through what seemed a casual off-the-cuff comment.