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

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neronxx wrote:

I love how everyone is commenting as if their opinion matters, thinking it will be considered lol.

Couldn't have said it better. Don't comment, just keep your wallets shut, that's what gets things done. Another 4-5 patches and we might be back to the good old POE that we had until the end of 3.13

They couldn't even get a flask rework done, now look at this wall of changes and believe for a second that it will turn out well.

I don't know if the removal of Dodge is such a good idea.

Inherently, it fulfills exactly the same role as evasion, only a bit more random and finnicky, but since it's two rolls for damage mitigation, you might be able to survive with a mediocre HP pool and were able to gain much higher defences than with only evasion due to the cap.

Now with that gone, i kinda fail to see how evasion-based builds that don't have such high HP are gonna survive, because at some point you WILL have the unlucky hit and you cannot minimize your chances of being hit like with dodge. I built a bow raider in expedition and put emphasis on HP on equipment and also in the tree, much more than the build originally did and came up to like 5,4k HP, which got me one-shot pretty often despite having 40% evasion and 68% dodge.

I assume it was attack hits that killed me, since GGG still didn't implement a death recap feature, which i don't really understand.

All in all, i think making base defenses more viable again is good, although i really liked the different options you could stack and figuring out how to add another layer, which will now be kinda streamlined. I really hope evasion is not just gonna be "well, you better get TONS of HP, because 75% evasion will not save you from that occasional 7,5k damage hit".

Wouldn't spell suppression just work better if the value isn't set to 50% of spell damage taken but instead scale as well up to 75%?

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Problem:
With the desire to increase Armour, Evasion and Energy Shield power across the board, we felt that the base values on items were too low. In addition, we feel that our item system needs more base type heterogeneity.

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%.

This one is incredibly short sighted and adds even more randomness to a system that is already incredibly random. The game already relies too much on trading and crafting to find decent items and now you want to add more to that?

So you want us to stop while mapping,pick bases from the ground,identify them,look for those with extra quality,hoping we find one with some good stats to craft upon,lose all charges and buffs in the process and try to fit them in the 1995 style inventory?
Is that your plan to slow us down and "force" us to pick items from the ground?

So um. Quick question? wheres the buff? You just completely destroyed dodge, evasion being entropy based completely destroys the change to wind dancer. You removed defensive layers. You added more rng to gear through the base type 20% increase and removing quality crafts that makes getting 6 links harder. Ye i cant see the positive in any of this because all of the downsides to like half the tree just completely overshadow the "minor" changes to buff armour and energy shield.

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Archernar wrote:

Now with that gone, i kinda fail to see how evasion-based builds that don't have such high HP are gonna survive, because at some point you WILL have the unlucky hit and you cannot minimize your chances of being hit like with dodge. I built a bow raider in expedition and put emphasis on HP on equipment and also in the tree, much more than the build originally did and came up to like 5,4k HP, which got me one-shot pretty often despite having 40% evasion and 68% dodge.

Exactly, this is why most players in endgame completely focus on dps instead of defenses, because at higher difficulties, it's do or die.
Imho this is fine - it's hard to balance a game on so many different classes, so the defense-wise weaker ones have to find other ways...unless you want to make all classes very similar, which seems kind of boring.

I don't see why you would remove dodge/spell dodge completely. Even now, with these two defenses, you die plenty of times to random one-shots. Like u said, this happens no matter how much life u stack.

I don't know how it plays out, but unless GGG has tested spell suppression thorougly, they will kill 99% of all evasion builds, which would be really bad.

I mean ideally spell suppression is designed in a way so that evasion characters are less often randomly one-shot, so the game is still challenging, but less punishing. I interpreted the announcement this way. But then some people mentioned based on the numbers, it can't work, unless evasion nodes on the tree are increased by 100% etc.

Am I trippin‘ or did every intelligence build get a heavy nerf to elemental damage mitigation/avoidance? Losing Blind and Fortify, eHP against elemental damage goes down by like 35%-40% according to my PoBs. I don‘t really see any way to get that back. We can get a decent amount of armour (and ES recharge I guess) now, but that doesn’t help against elemental damage at all.

GGG did say, they want to add max res nodes to the armour part of the tree, but those are most likely not going to be obtainable from the top side of the tree. Am I missing something?

Change Elusive to provide 15% chance to Avoid Damage from Hits, instead of it's old Dodge-related stats.

dont see any difference beetween 15% Chance to Avoid Damage and 15% change Dodge damage.

Separate mechanics, separate rolls, separate stacking; it's an entirely different thing, and also, dodge prevents you from getting hit in the first place: in "avoid damage from hits," you still took the hit, which proc'd any on-hit effects that might be in play. (one good example is... You can still wind up getting interrupted by blocking a hit that otherwise would've had its damage avoided)

There's very few sources of "chance to avoid damage," while there are (until 3.16) a fair number of sources of dodge/spell dodge that stacked additively; elusive could be coupled with quartz flasks, as well as Vaal Grace, to get a sizable amount of dodge & spell dodge.

And stacking is critical to make these work well: because it's an outright percentile reduction in the rate you get hit, each point is worth exponentially more than the one before it.

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j33bus wrote:

This one is incredibly short sighted and adds even more randomness to a system that is already incredibly random. The game already relies too much on trading and crafting to find decent items and now you want to add more to that?

Man, they're in full F2P mode, and it's been like that for ages.

That means creating artificial useless BS to keep you hooked because it globally (not specifically) increases their profits.

They've added lots of rando-useless-NG just because of that. It comes from phD studies telling them that's the way to make more $$$ and it's the sole reason they're doing stuff like that.

Imagine they made around 50% of revenues as after tax and all expenses paid profits last year. Literally 50+ millions. But they can't hire a few people to actually balance the game and gamers still call them "Indie" and "my friend < Chris >".

Just lol.

Edit: That's also why we have shards. To create time-waste drains to artificially lengthen time spent. It serves no other purpose.