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

dudes, hold your excitement; they'll buff mobs spell damage to own through spell suppression.
obviously...

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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%.

I don't like this, it will just make any drop that doesn't roll the 10% feel worth less for both SSF and Trade, anything that doesn't have the extra values will be inherently worth less.

Casual Player: Sirus I came to bargain... look my new shiny monkaS Armour without dodge/evansion...

Sirus: DIIIIIIE!


Casual Player is dead

Sirus landed 3000 fire damage + 3000 cold damage + 3000 lightning damage + 3000 chaos damage + 3000 universal damage

Causal Player mitigated 100 damage with 30k armour
Casual Player had 9k Life still took a bunchload of crap mechanic damage from stupid boss fight

Fortify should depend on damage and be a stacking buff?

Making Fortify depend on damage does not solve the problem: Non-melee characters may still be able to produce a moderate or large physical damage hit often enough to benefit.

Assuming that Fortify stays on for 4 seconds after triggering, it could be relatively easy to maintain Fortify as a non-melee character. Vengeance procs melee damage automatically. Depending on proc likelihood, continuous damage melee skills such as Bladestorm or Cyclone can sustain Fortify when attack speeds are high. Added melee damage could potentially increase likelihoods that allow Fortify to be sustained with low investment. We arrive at a difficult balancing act: Nerf those three melee skills and similar melee skills, or nerf external sources (from items and jewels, not from skills and the passive tree) of added melee damage.

Making Fortify stack would address this problem, but not completely. Characters who persistently use melee attacks would see a gradual benefit by increasing and maintaining stacks of Fortify. High-frequency attacks (e.g. Cyclone and Bladestorm) could still be exploited at higher likelihoods. Perhaps, this could be addressed by lowering the likelihood of trigger without investment. Perhaps, shortening the duration of Fortify without investment could fix the problem. Additionally, melee-themed buffs like Rage and Exert stack, and they're harder to abuse.

Suggestions on how to make Fortify melee-oriented:

1. Make Fortify a stacking skill. See above. Maybe, allow multiple stacks to occur as damage increases?
2. Lower the duration of Fortify. Increase duration with investment.
3. Start Fortify at low likelihood and increase with investment.
4. Syngerize Fortify buffs to other melee stacks like Rage and Exert.
5. Have Fortify buffs scale with armor or present on melee-themed passives.

important question tho.. what will happen to modes on monsters with " hits can not be evaded"

they remove dodge.. but 1 of the reasons why evasion isnt relayable is the fact that some monsters ignore evasion completely.. unless they remove these modes this is actually a nerf to evasion build who run evasion+dodge


also will armor be finally effective for large hits? i kind of doubt it..


and energy shield changes seems kina lame and doesnt make energy shield more easy and relayable for not very funded people.. . all they did was create more gap betwen bad es items and good expensive ES items which will cost milion of ex .. there isnt any buff to dis to make it easy place for nabs to get ES .. i feel like ES just gonna be for high end rich builds and maybe not even good enouh ...

Hmm...

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The Gladiator’s Block Ascendancy Passive Skills will be reworked. We’re experimenting with a new Notable Passive that makes the Gladiator’s chance to Block Attack Damage lucky, which helps offset the downside of Versatile Combatant.

I cannot figure it out. What's the meaning of "a new Notable Passive that makes the Gladiator’s chance to Block Attack Damage lucky"? Maybe the Gladiator will reach 90% Block chance? Or maybe anytime the Gladiator block an attack he also drop an Exalted? Santa's back!!! ;-)

Mostly garbage

So GGG is bringing back things to where they were in some areas while others will remain bad, get worse and in the case of dodge just removed.

I'm quite sick of this dev team, even though I know they won't care about this post. So reward players who don't build any defense in general but nail those that do.

Adding RNGesus to high base gear is dumb.

The real problem is the design of the game. GGG doesn't respect those who want to clear before they are dead nor those who invest in defense. They want us to die with no real way to mitigate the amounts of BS they refuse to balance decently. Which is all self inflicted problems. The effort to nerf the viability of surviving the game or flat out nerf potential of getting items decently is just sickening at this point. Watching expedition get loot nerfed over the last month has shown me that the whole notion of risk reward doesn't exist to ggg. No matter how you suffer to get the loot they will make more excuses as to why you have it too good. So they make the game hard even though most capable have gone around it and make it the rewards useless or even more infrequent. This vicious cycle of stupidity is just plain dumb.

There is more effort spent on making sure map roll suck for for any players instead of making it viable for people building around map mods to do so. There is more effort to ensure one shot bursts or lots of trash mobs are overwhelming is a way to kill a player than making such fights viable. There's no way around this at this point GGG. If you want a slower game do so but be honest about letting players living in such a world while not spending more time on your BS rngesus system to get there. You flat out want every build to die a lot, that quite frankly is unsustainable. Sincerely the way you rigged map rolls is disgusting while you whine players got it good. I'm now wasting time on map rolling in a way I never have I won't be playing too long with the amount of time it costs for the reward I get.

I'm not against a challenge I'm against a rigged challenge by whiny devs who go even though you were successful let me give this pittance so you have to run more BS and repeat the cycle again.

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Fhrek wrote:

Casual Player: Sirus I came to bargain... look my new shiny monkaS Armour without dodge/evansion...

Sirus: DIIIIIIE!


Casual Player is dead

Sirus landed 3000 fire damage + 3000 cold damage + 3000 lightning damage + 3000 chaos damage + 3000 universal damage

Causal Player mitigated 100 damage with 30k armour
Casual Player had 9k Life still took a bunchload of crap mechanic damage from stupid boss fight

so much this! 100% - love it - fixing crap mechanics would have worked too. It is easier to make players beefier then to rework a boss tho.

Pure evasion is dead.

why the hell is tempest shield a reservation skill now?? If you buffed the damage, this means you might want it for damage... But it's a reservation, which is bad for damage? It was already REALLY gimmicky to use it as a main damage source, and now you can't even do orb of storms with it as your backup damage.

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Gid_PathofExile wrote:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTsQnURSBgo&ab_channel=Fyregrass

Yep, my head calculations were correct. Bows had no Defence, and now they have even less.

Go to 5:11 and then go back to the start.

3 minutes in the video and .. yeah, the same old Fyregrass doomsaying that he uses to promote his channel since 3.15 *sigh* He'd probably say I'm critical to be critical but anyway

1) The "invested" char he shows has 8500 evasion. That is far from invested - in evasion. Which is totally fine for that char because it relies on other forms of mitigation and uses Evasion just as another layer of defense not THE layer.

2) He claims the char is invested by showing his weapon and talking about awakened skills gems. All that is invested in terms of damage, it does not make any point about evasion at all and is completely meaningless.

3) He claims that the char would lose massive amounts of EHP but "I did some calculations but I'm not going to run through them"... we will just assume that he calculated correctly.

4) His "conclusion" is: Character has now with Blind and Dodge and Evasion around 58000 EHP and will after Blind and Dodge is removed have only 20000 EHP. A really helpful analysis, who would have thought that removing 2 of 3 defensive layers would lead to less EHP?

5) He then shows his softcore build that "invests pretty heavily in defense" and has 3000 evasion... I mean at that point I have to ask, is that for real? That is as much evasion as 1 (!) piece of good body armour together with like 5 nodes in the tree provides. That is not "heavily invested" that is not even moderately invested.

5a) Apparently he can't use actual evasion gear and has not 1 (!) single piece of pure evasion on his character. Not one.

6) And if one thinks he is finished.. he is not. Now he looks at poe.ninja showing that only 3 (!) characters are using bows and those are actually minion builds. That is concerning, does he eventually still have a point? Surprise, no he has not. What he looks at are only the lvl 100 characters in HC trade. Which there are only 54 to begin with... what is that sample trying to prove? That if you just sample only the data points that prove your point you can more easily prove your point?

6a) In reality poe.ninja shows for HC trade that 8% of people listed there use Bows. Of those 90%+ are using an actual bow skill (Toxic Rain, Caustic Arrow, Scourge Arrow, Tornado Shot, Ice Shot, Storm Rain, Lightning Arrow, etc.). So in conclusion we have approx. 7% of all listed players on HC trade using a bow with a bow skill. The actual underrepresented weapon type used is two weapons with a total across all melee combinations (so no wand/wand) of 3.1%.

7) As a bonus on top he shows us his lvl 94 character using cyclone and that without any supports he does 1000 damage and by socketing in added cold damage he does 3000, which is a 200% increase and obviously being a 2-link it still clears like shit. He then asks if we think it clears good and deserves a nerf because if not that would be literally the same as GGG deleting Dodge because it gave to much value for too little investment.
That is just... yeah, I don't think I need to comment on that, it speaks for itself.

The sad thing is that he might even have a point still - but I can't tell because what he has shown is just completely nonsensical, unrelated or deliberately misleading. Do Bow-users need some other way to get layered defenses now that Dodge is gone and Block obviously is no option for them nor is Armour? Probably - maybe standing back, being able to clear several screens ahead shall account for it though. That is not the case for all bow-skills though, so yeah, maybe. But this video is certainly not the way to present it.