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

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Aviark13 wrote:

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Change Wind Dancer to further improve high Evasion builds rather than reducing Evade chance, but making it riskier if you're not Evading attacks a lot. It now gives less Attack Damage taken if you haven't been Hit by an Attack recently, and more Evasion Rating and Attack Damage taken if you have been Hit, so it's better for Evasion characters that have a high Evasion Rating and bad for characters that are being hit a lot. It has no interaction with Spells now, to focus its interaction on Evasion.

I must be missing something, because this sounds really bad for wind dancer?

You take 20% more attack damage when you have been hit, that lasts for 4 seconds (because you have to not be hit for 4 seconds to get the 20% less damage taken), so we can only evade 19/20 hits at most (%95 evasion cap and entropy means we take every 1/20 hits), which means if we are taking more than 20 hits in 4 seconds we are perpetually taking 20% more attack damage? I feel like 20 hits in 4 seconds is extremely common outside of bosses.

Personally this just reads as you take 20% more Attack Damage, but would love to be wrong.

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Berylstone wrote:

I don't understand why any build that specializes in block would want to cut their maximum block chance by 25%.

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fireinthahole wrote:

I'm a bit shocked.

Here I was expecting massive sweeping redesigns of core defences to make them more suitable for general use. Instead, they're just as narrow as they always were, and the few defenses that were in a decent spot have been nuked from orbit.

The problem with armour isn't that it's too hard to stack. That's never been a problem. It's that it only applies to physical damage, and only hits at that. Why choose such a narrow defence when evasion and energy shield compete for the same spot.

Putting max res on the tree isn't going to fix that. You'll just take the res where you can, and build something else anyway.

Likewise, spell supression is not a solution for evasion. In evasion's case, it's one shots that are it's bane. Reducing spell damage is all well and good, but spell dodge already effectively did the same thing, leaving evasion much the same after as before, and probably slightly weaker. 100% chance to reduce spell damage by 50% is still worse than ~60% chance to ignore it entirely.

Then you still have to contend with one shots as well. Overall, that looks a lot like a nerf to me. People will use it, but only because everything else was gutted, and defences were too fragile already.

Energy shield remains viable, but thats because IT'S USEFUL ACROSS THE BOARD. It gives you an additional hp pool, and several tools too shore up it's only real weakness - chaos damage - with minimal effort.

I am not a fan of these changes. I came into this thread expecting to see massively improved defensive options. Instead, I see the most useful defences removed, ineffective ones remaining much the same, and playing builds that can actually take a hit being likely even less viable than before.

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groink19 wrote:

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Berylstone wrote:

I don't understand why any build that specializes in block would want to cut their maximum block chance by 25%.

If you specialize in block, you obviously don't take that keystone. This is for builds that wouldn't usually have acess to spell block!

How do you know they're not adressing oneshots from rares?

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Berylstone wrote:

So basically it's just a huge nerf to Gladiator and they're going to add some sub par blocking passive that sacrifices max block for average blocking abilities so they can pretend they are buffing it.

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groink19 wrote:

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Berylstone wrote:

So basically it's just a huge nerf to Gladiator and they're going to add some sub par blocking passive that sacrifices max block for average blocking abilities so they can pretend they are buffing it.

It's official: you didn't read the notes.

They explicitly stated that the Gladiator ascendancy will have another block node to counteract the downside of the keystone.

I'm out of here. You guys are judging GGG even though they didn't even announce all balance updates. Rubbish attitude.