Path of Exile 3.16 Balance - Part 2 - Core Character Defences and Recovery

Goodbye MF. You're weaker, leader of squishy right now. Game over.

My reaction to Part 1:
"Yeah finally GGG is back on the road"

My reaction to Part 2:
"Nahhh ... not again GGG"

Some changes are good but most are read really bad. So - we now have more options to scale our defenses by putting passive skill points into some nodes and some more options by item mods. Okay - kinda makes sense. ... Base values of every (?) type of defence/item is now (up to) 10% higher!?

Ok - why the range? All this does is: "Hey I found Ilv.86 Astral Plate. Has it max Armour roll? No? Oh just trash..." ; "Hey I found Ilvl.86 Shaper influenced Astral Shield. Has is max rolled Base ES? No? Oh just trash..."

And while having more ways to scale our defenses it is still better to invest our affixes and passive skill points in dmg buffs than defense buffs. And while this remains true all those new "item affixes" just make more items as not useful as usual. Not even talking about "travel points" to reach a new keystone or this one passive skill wheel with the scale options to my fav. defense layer. We do not know any locations of those. But trading offense for defense nodes is one thing. Trading more offense for defense nodes AND traveling is just a really bad trade.

And these higher base values. 10% ... This doesn't impact anything. Currently I probably never had a character with more than 5 - 6k Armour. Needing 25k Armour to mitigate a reasonable amount of damage to make it worthwile my Astral Plate alone should offer 5-6k Armour while maintaining life and atleast 2 influenced mods ... Same with Evasion. Evasion + Dodge was nice and strong. Evasion alone is as bad as armour - I would say even worse.

If GGG wants to make Evasion and Armour a reasonable layer of defence the direction is kinda good. But the numbers are just a joke and the investment (dmg loss) and the gated rng (affixes) probably not worth. Never heard someone saying "Oh I hit Lv.86 but I have absolutly no use for my skillpoints".

tl;dr
20% smile - 80% sad

-- EDIT

Non of these changes will prevent 1 Shot mechanics.

Soo in Baeclast#75 (11:25) Chris said:

"We have a problem with someone entering a screen full of monsters and they are already dead on the ground 'cause their attacks were able to kill them off-screen before there was any meaningful combat. That's the thing we want to adress."

Just a short reminder here: Being One-Shotted by monsters isn't "meaningful combat" either.

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sSs1897 wrote:

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dovaY wrote:

JUST delete the gladiator already , first nerfing bleed to the ground , now deleting what it was good for which is blocking by cutting the blocking to 50% and introduce "LuCky" blocking , like really tell me now why anyone wants to play glad after this good bye my fav class. rest in peace poe.

if it is lucky block then it makes 50% block 75%, so not really nerfed a lot? I do not understand what you are whining LUL

Lucky block only applies to attacks, gladiators would end up stuck with 50% spell block and be required to pick up versatile combatant keystone on the passive tree. More investment for less.

I've always picked up versatile combatant because of how stupidly strong and broken it's always been. I'm not happy it's getting nerfed, but it's reasonable and was expected. I didn't expect that they'd make it available to all classes. Even in a nerfed state, it sounds pretty damn good.

Why do i dont feel good about raider at all after 3.15, and when 3.16 will come

Fortify change ? what is with evry melee skill that hits often but small ? like cyclone 300% attack speed scaling with small hits ? ggwp cyclone dead ?

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LeChris_POE wrote:

From first reading i have a feeling that fully evasion based chars ... are removed from the game. Dodge gone, Evasion "buff" and blind nerf offset each other at best ... sooooo ... half of defence is just gone (or even more in case of Raider).

Is there now any reason not to go block?

Wait for the patchnotes dude.
Defence should be way easier to build into any build, in this upcoming league.
Its to soon to say how evasion, armor, block and so on is going to pan out :D

Hey, is the juiciest spoiler out the day, the word "Fortifications"?

Ambitious. Would be better to come out with a whole new game though.

Solution:
Base Types are now generated with a random 0-10% higher base defence, as an inbuilt currently-non-modifiable property. This means that all base types can be better than they currently are, and armour base types are not homogeneous any more. Energy Shield values on base types instead vary from 0-20%.

But why... regress back to bad diablo 2 mechanics that were never fun, at least make it modifiable damn it.

3.16 here I come.