[HLD] Elemental damage all forms

Ok, It seems like for nearly 2 years now I've been pressing the same issues. Writing the same threads, same sentences. People have been finding similar complaints with PvP now that more people have been trying it. Some issues have been addressed, some still swept under the rug.

Since the inclusion of cwdt EC/IC, fast aps physical attacks/spells have fallen to the way side. The IC up time will absorb many hits unless you can land them in between trigger and cool down times. Elemental damage is immune to this obviously and suffers 0 cast/ias hurdles. That was the issue then and it still is now but with the recent PvP scaling formula favoring elemental damage its gotten worse. Multistrike physical melee is super weak. Multistrike elemental damage is the new meta. Faster attacks physical damage isn't bad but cannot keep up aps wise with multistrike depending on your weapon of choice/tree options. Spells are faster then ever with the addition of echo and are still the strongest most retarded form of elemental damage in the game + chill/freeze adds insult to injury here.

Penetration gems...without them RT melee/0 to low crit casters are pretty weak. With them are pretty strong, I wouldn't say on the same level as crit melee/spells but its better then what we have otherwise. Pair penetration gems with critical elemental damage....commonly the cookie cutter caster/cwdt set up or the ever popular coc dagger/wander. You start to see where the balance crumbled into a pile of shit when this gem becomes a factor. You cant even stand in front of a caster or coc wander/dagger long enough to kill them. If they are using end game gear you will die instantly to the explosion of spells automatically flying from their ass and dick holes via cwdt + their own self cast attack that will rip through your hp/es pool (regardless of how big it is) so fast. At melee range there is no balance to be had, elemental dmg/cwdt/the speed and the fact the damage output is through the roof at literally 2hits to any melees 6-12+. Only potential balance is if you can stun them, thus slowing them down so you can keep up in hits/damage....which we all know is a joke in PvP.


Here's an example of one of the characters I played recently.

90 Marauder 2h staff caster new kaoms.
7.5k hp
pledge of hands 6l
0 crit off tree, I only had 5-6% chance based on gem I used and 150% multiplier.
Cost <50exalts

Fireball, I was able to shotgun and 1-2shot the best geared players in the game. From a far the damage was still very strong but nothing unbalanced. Remove penetration and it took me 2x the hits to achieve the same results. This is non crit mind you, I was already 1-2 shotting people with no crit chance/multiplier.

Freezing pulse, same story as above but add the chill/freeze into the equation and a far faster cast.


Next..

Ball lightning, a pretty under used skill...cant even shot gun. Pretty hard to properly use against a moving target but that's a mute point at melee range. This skill rips through people so fast I refused to even trade it away.

Arc, spikey spell really didn't enjoy it. If anything outside of using this skill with traps the damage output isn't consistent enough to even be called broken.

Ice spear, good spell...imo the most well designed caster skill in the game so far. Actually has a purpose at range where a caster should want to be. Instead currently casters can out tank,out dps,out aps anything in the game like the fucken Terminator. So discourages the use of this skill because they just want to melee you with their spells anyways.

Fire storm, good example of a skill that honestly needs some sort of penetration to be viable. Crit or no crit its a hard skill to balance id imagine.

Flame blast, the ultimate huur duur example of how tanky casters are. Goal is to stand there and charge this up while you beat on them and their cwdt frost walls etc.. go off repelling you as they heal/regen. Saddest part is.....it actually works. You can literally stand there whacking off charging this skill a few levels comfortably without taking much damage because casters are just as tanky if not more tanky then any melee.

I wont go into any more spells. These are just a few I tried and probably the better examples. Point is they did fair to retarded levels of damage even at no crit chance/multiplier on my <50ex budget crap caster...with penetration gems. Remove the gem and my damage was still legit just wasn't absurd.

Summary,

elemental damage PvP formula is too lenient

penetration gems need re assessed because when paired with critical casters/coc users and cwdt the damage is broken as fuck.

budget pvp is very viable

cwdt still does too much damage

casters are far too tanky for what they are

cwdt EC shouldn't be a thing. should be self cast only, you can leave cwdt IC.

the damage of shot gunning is retarded

One last thing and it goes hand in hand with elemental vs physical because RT/Crit is a factor here.

RT sucks really really hard compared to crit, given the fact stun is a non issue in PvP there is nothing RT has that legitimately makes it a stronger/better option then taking crit. I have a near 800dps 2h sword with RT, optimal links/tree and it takes me 4x the hits it takes me to kill someone with my 200dps crit dagger. I also have near 10k hp..and die instantly while my dagger has just over 5k + acrobatics and takes more hits/can stand there hacking away longer and is the better character for about 10x less cost.

Mara/Templar trees though revised and really nice. Are not on the same level as the other areas of the tree where crit,acro,es is prevalant. Why? Well crit damage as exampled above trumps RT heavily. Acrobatics is amazing, es pools are higher then hp pools and spell damage/crit modifiers perfectly compliment the already elemental biased meta 1000%. Mara/Templar trees have realistically 7-10k hp of worth, life regen, RT, stun, block and basically the same amount of base damage to take as any other side. Given this 2h on this side of the tree has 0 defenses worth a damn in PvP, Bow has acrobatics and that alone is worth its weight in gold. 1h on either side of the tree is good but crit > RT 1h and acrobatics/phase acrobatics is a better 1size fits all low investment defense option then shields and shield/item swapping for spell block. Proof? my dagger has no block, has acro and is basically shit....stands toe to toe and out dps's the best RT meleers in the game plus takes as many hits with just acro.

Sure you can make a lame ass run in circles "PvP" tank...if you even want to call it that. That does 0 damage, just walks around wasting peoples time and regenerating life/cwdt'ing you with defense skills...that's a tank on Templar/Mara side of the tree. Its shit, its a joke, its useless..


Armor is a useless stat and EC/IC basically makes it less then useless. What side of the tree is plagued with armor nodes...Mara/Templar. Why going ES has no negatives, the defensive stats in this game that are meant to mean something are useless in PvP. Fact es can stack upwards of 17k es plus still hold a shield and have 0 draw backs due to tree/unique designs AND be the cookie cutter crit class's "life" source thus doing insane amounts of damage to boot...wtf? My shadow for example 5k hp, would be 8-10k as CI plus benefit from melee on full and still hold a shield. That 40/30 split from acrobatics I can't get with ES is had with 1 shield and maybe a few shield nodes that are already on my way to shit I need anyways.

Armor does nothing against elemental damage making it suck yet again. Resists are put in place to mitigate elemental damage but you added penetration gems that work by reducing your MAX not by reducing your % from max....meaning you said hey "fuck your resists too". Elemental dmg is dominate, Templar/Mara tree's suck for PvP.

This side is also counter productive. Unwavering stance? Thanks for the free 800% multiplier crit that has 0 evasion to pass. While you have big bad RT vs evasion....which is not even remotely close to the same level of counter. Add to the fact you still have acrobatics and its even more laughable. Heart of the oak is easily the best anti stun node and paired with acro is no brainer. But block...ya sure there's block on the HP side of the tree but how ineffective is it to block both melee and spells while still doing DMG or having a good HP pool.

excellent analysis Mulla, from me some short re to this:
1. Arena design is horrible(too small, too many walls, corner fighters is simply a joke)
2. Cwdt reflectors too op, Molten is op in cwdt and hand cast too.
3. to the 2d->all penetration element gems is too OP, i tell this all the time (we need 20% as a max)
4. to the 1st and 3d-> EA is OP(small arenas full of walls+penetr gem+idiotic quill bow)
5. to the 4 ->walls spam (wall need high cd for not spam it, or!!! may be cast by hands only not CWDT)
6. too many elemental in all!!! (mele range cast) builds, like Mulla say, who need phys dmg if enemy got cwdt IC+EC , molten reflection+punishment curse..
7. puncture traps or all puncture mechanics was lasy in all times(ask any on sarn or old pvpers)dont tell me about flasks, its simply lasy and op (drop and run, drop and run , in 1vs1, 3vs3, and w8ing for burn flask and then kill, on 3vs3 its spam on small arena tons of traps , what a skill ahh?)
8.about shotgun skills, may be if cut penetration gems we dont need to balance this at all,and EA too.
this is my IMHO(sry for my english)
P.S. I do not advocate for nerf all this things, i wanna smart tuning of this, yes its twice hard to do, but i think GGG can do this with help of our small but rly strong pvp community.

You're right.



As for how people should interpret what I wrote. It's not about me, not about melee, not about how sucky 2h is (even though 2h melee is the pussiest, weakest build in the game...fact). Its about this....

the trees have disparaging issues when it comes to PvP. the value of armor vs evasion, the value of US vs HoTo, the value of block vs acrobatics, stun in general, hp vs es and the most obvious the value of RT vs crit.

elemental damage + penetration is powerful even without crit, very powerful. I used the example of my budget caster to prove this. I have played many physical/elemental bow,caster,melee characters in my time and know that you do not need 1000ex worth of gear to compete.

when you combine all 3, elemental and its few viable ways to mitigate it + penetration + the explosive damage output of criticals (even with low-middle of the road gear) you see the overkill impact it has. Its not all required to be viable, the damage of these skills is sufficient with either just crit or just penetration. proven again by my example and further proven by my experience playing crit caster/melee opposite of my RT/non crit variants.


for anyone that wants to claim other wise, go for it but you're full of shit. we'd reach a better balance faster if people stopped defending their builds based on lack of skill. or sand bagging whats truly a bit too good, nothings "broken" but some things are just that much better then others and a lot of people refuse to admit it. results vary with anything, some people may think even with all mirrored gear a caster is still ass cheeks or that traps,bow,melee own the world I dunno...but facts are facts and elemental damage and the other things I addressed are facts. instead GGG has to sift through piles of posts with ppl bull shitting one another. hell maybe my posts are shit too, whatever but Im not bias, not down playing and not trying to bs anyone.


I don't know what demographic GGG focuses on to balance PvP. I know one thing though you don't balance a FPS around a guy that can't aim down the iron sights, or balance a fighting game around the guy that can't do the moves. You don't balance an Arpg around a guy that doesn't want to find gear or level up. If you're going to try to achieve at least a decent enough balance in PvP so you can just let it evolve on its own. You need to look at the potential of all things end game...top gear, top players and how the mechanics of the game interact with PvP themselves. Starting class vs starting class, potential builds and how they actually translate to competition. That's why I brought up how sucky the hp/armor/rt side of the tree is in relation to the es/evasion/crit side.

RT sucks !! why you go for it then?

Oh you need to make sure that you will hit every time // you have to pay the price of your choice Mulla


I agree with you elem penetration is strong (most ppl got max res 75% ,, pen gem + passive nodes turn it into (75-40 max)% = 40% max - 35% Min !!

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alshabibi7 wrote:

RT sucks !! why you go for it then?

Oh you need to make sure that you will hit every time // you have to pay the price of your choice Mulla


I agree with you elem penetration is strong (most ppl got max res 75% ,, pen gem + passive nodes turn it into (75-40 max)% = 40% max - 35% Min !!

Ya, because crit with 2h is a thing. Just look at all dat critz on left side of the tree

yesss, 5% on 2h (6.9 on max roll) with mara crit nods rox all the way, all who use RT on 2h sword, axe, mace dumb players. And weapon distance of 2h+crit on it simply OP))

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alshabibi7 wrote:

RT sucks !! why you go for it then?

Oh you need to make sure that you will hit every time // you have to pay the price of your choice Mulla


I agree with you elem penetration is strong (most ppl got max res 75% ,, pen gem + passive nodes turn it into (75-40 max)% = 40% max - 35% Min !!

First off, crit options on templar/mara/duelist sides of the tree blow. I can fully equip my character with crit items, scavenge for accuracy, cut my base damage and gem options to achieve what maybe 30-40% crit chance and a dinky crit multiplier. Ultimately having a crap character because 2h cannot sacrifice anything in this game. You need all the life you can get, all the speed you can get and all the chances to hit you can get because 2h literally sucks compared to 1h/shield but no one seems to see it because they see guys like myself wrecking...but I'm only winning because my inventory is filled with 40000 different items/gems and a few bow set ups. Rarely can I even stand in front of any other melee or caster because they simply shit on my hp orb like I have no items on at all. Crit is counter productive on this side of the tree for 2h minus staff, trust me. If you're going crit...use a dagger or 1h sword and focus your efforts on the tree in the direction of shadow/ranger sections.

The damage of a 2h is literally nothing compared to a 1h with crit. I used my shadow vs my marauder as an example because its my most recent one. I have a bino's dagger...92% hit chance and really never miss. Lots of accuracy to be had so that's really not the problem on either side of the tree. Its the sheer abundance of crit chance/multiplier vs the sheer lack of. If my 230dps bino's with a super easy to achieve 500-600% multiplier hits 2-3x harder then my 780dps 2h + gets block/acro and 6k hp if I use a belly of the beast. Its not comparable, you can ramp up puny weapons with crit multiplier making them beast + benefit from all the great defense options at the same time. While 2h can't efficiently go crit because at the end of the day you're sacrificing even more defenses you already didn't have, or sacrificing speed you desperately need, or base damage you still have to take because there isn't enough multiplier near by to substitute the lack of. Trust me man, 1h with acro or a shield or even dual wield with acro/block with a solid tree and a smart player is on par or beats the best of the best 2h. Not to mention 2h doesn't even out range 1h...like wtf?

Only reason I'm 2h is because I started it in beta, most of my gear is still from beta and I blow my currency on science so I can write these things confidently. I also don't care if what I play is shitty or weak because I play it because I want to, meta isn't a thing that concerned me ever. Plus the way I see it, how can we not eventually see 2h get some love? Even PvM's bitch how bad 2h is and things like weapon range alone are no brainer buff's that would be enough and perfectly fair. 2H doesn't want to be the next caster or crit dagger...trust me we just want our shit to work like it should. Mass hp to be a defense option and a 2h weapon to actually do 2h damage from a 2h range. Damage scaling is helping the hp as a defense part, damage is fine I can't complain, range is the last step.

As for penetration and the problem spells. From reading peoples feedback in the season 2 thread, seems LLD is starting to boil down to the same problems HLD has minus CWDT set ups. Freezing pulse is too powerful at shotgun range, chill+freeze mechanics add layers to this, traps with elemental spells attached break ppl. Molten shell adds another layer because while they are firing off traps/self casting stuff that already wrecks your hp/es pools you're battling with breaking Molten shell off too. Now if this was HLD you'd also be dealing with tempest shield reflect chiseling away at you + CWDT frost walls for annoyance or CWDT spells with 1-2hit kill potential layered on top of the existing problem. Not to mention the general perception that a caster should be squishy and powerful ranged cannons isn't really what you get in PoE. You get casters that want to stand melee vs melee with you and trade hits and pretty much do this successfully...little stupid if you ask me. I can circle people just for science to see if they even namelock,move,adjust to it....they don't they just sit there firing away like they aren't even looking at the screen. Can't balance PvP around people not wanting to move... Is the lack of good players the reason GGG wants everyone to auto attack from their asses and barely move yet still kill people? I dunno...really have no clue.

It's pretty crazy how penetration works. Who ever thought you needed this type of mechanic in a game where PvM is this ez and nothing is immune to elemental damage. Even in Diablo immunities where handled via - resistance % not a flat reduction. Imagine how powerful cold sorceress would of been if cold mastery was a legit flat reduction and you couldn't stack thawings,4sapphire monarchs,other resist sources to mitigate it? Would be hacked cold soceress out the ass right now instead of hacked hammerdins.

About 2 years ago now I wrote about the dominance of penetration gems and how they effect PvP. About Molten shell and its synergy with an already abundant array of caster defense/offense options. Crit,es,eveything...non bias just solid comparisons that should of been looked at and evaluated way before we even started season 1.

I'm hoping the changes they make to EC and the introduction of other war cry type gems can help alleviate some of the elemental dominance in PvP.

I wish GGG would respond to this. I'd like to see a statement regarding if they have any intention on physical melee builds to be a viable option or if they want everyone to convert to elemental damage for PvP.

Really physical melee needs to be viable in the current meta casters are way too strong they can't miss can crit and penetrate and they don't have to do too much gear swapping regardless of who they are facing.

My caster set up for PvE can take down a dedicated PvP character with over 9k HP and I don't even have to run... I just stand my ground and shogun melee chars down. Low life casters are better tanks than tanky melee chars.

I agree with some of this but you're exaggerating a bit. 17k ES with 800% multiplier? I don't have bad gear by any means (20% es on rings, ammy has >60 multi, etc) and I can only achieve 12k ES and 600% multi, which IMO is worse than 10k hp with 40% dodge 30% spell dodge when you consider ES shields give 31% block at most (and that's for a mirrored one). If you want 14k-15k ES you need to take off abyssus and put on a 500 ES helm, another mirrored item. At that point you have 400 or less crit multi but sure, 17k ES is achievable by the time you have mirrored everything, and for that cost you could probably equip 5 equally endgame life characters.

To get 800% crit multi on 1h melee you will need crit multi gem (nerfed from 149->79% and is worse than most support gems like incr melee dmg, so it's actually a terrible gem) and all the crit nodes you encounter, plus abyssus. Daggers have some op nodes on the tree, sure, until you realize it has less than half the range of something like atziri's disfavour (5 range vs 11, because if you're maximizing crit/ci nodes you will not be taking master of the arena, and even with that you have barely over half the aoe after effects stacking multiplicatively with incr aoe nodes, gem effects), making it useless for cyclone. Yes, remember cyclone? Still the most op melee skill in the game? Good luck hitting someone with that using a 5 range dagger while desyncing to hell. Calling for another straight crit nerf is a little underhanded, considering before 1.3 someone like me could achieve 900%+ multi without crit multi gem and now it's 600%.

RT 2h isn't low dps. Even with my 12k ES I get killed in like 1 or 1.5s by some 2h sword. You can say that's a long time considering I might kill him in half the time, but with weapon range, I will still die first if we're cycloning, and other melee skills can't even compare (it also happens to be the only melee skill capable of dealing with knockback).

As for spells, yeah. Even without crit you're dealing okay damage (but let's be honest here-in the real endgame pvp it isn't going to cut it) but with crit it gets nuts. You can try to beat it with block/dodge but it leaves everything to rng (isn't that what this game is, anyway?). I've died to coc in a few frames if I get hit by one barrage, with block/rumis on. Still, I'm not sure how they could balance it considering a pvp engagement typically lasts 0.5s with someone dying or wb/leapslam/lw away in 0.2s anyway.


EDIT: I saw your comment about people saying 2h > crit because guys like you in pvp. While I can't say if crit or 2h is better atm, it's a little condescending to be saying that only guys like you, using 2h have any pvp skills lol

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berkshireee wrote:

I agree with some of this but you're exaggerating a bit. 17k ES with 800% multiplier? I don't have bad gear by any means (20% es on rings, ammy has >60 multi, etc) and I can only achieve 12k ES and 600% multi, which IMO is worse than 10k hp with 40% dodge 30% spell dodge when you consider ES shields give 31% block at most (and that's for a mirrored one). If you want 14k-15k ES you need to take off abyssus and put on a 500 ES helm, another mirrored item. At that point you have 400 or less crit multi but sure, 17k ES is achievable by the time you have mirrored everything, and for that cost you could probably equip 5 equally endgame life characters.

To get 800% crit multi on 1h melee you will need crit multi gem (nerfed from 149->79% and is worse than most support gems like incr melee dmg, so it's actually a terrible gem) and all the crit nodes you encounter, plus abyssus. Daggers have some op nodes on the tree, sure, until you realize it has less than half the range of something like atziri's disfavour (5 range vs 11, because if you're maximizing crit/ci nodes you will not be taking master of the arena, and even with that you have barely over half the aoe after effects stacking multiplicatively with incr aoe nodes, gem effects), making it useless for cyclone. Yes, remember cyclone? Still the most op melee skill in the game? Good luck hitting someone with that using a 5 range dagger while desyncing to hell. Calling for another straight crit nerf is a little underhanded, considering before 1.3 someone like me could achieve 900%+ multi without crit multi gem and now it's 600%.

RT 2h isn't low dps. Even with my 12k ES I get killed in like 1 or 1.5s by some 2h sword. You can say that's a long time considering I might kill him in half the time, but with weapon range, I will still die first if we're cycloning, and other melee skills can't even compare (it also happens to be the only melee skill capable of dealing with knockback).

As for spells, yeah. Even without crit you're dealing okay damage (but let's be honest here-in the real endgame pvp it isn't going to cut it) but with crit it gets nuts. You can try to beat it with block/dodge but it leaves everything to rng (isn't that what this game is, anyway?). I've died to coc in a few frames if I get hit by one barrage, with block/rumis on. Still, I'm not sure how they could balance it considering a pvp engagement typically lasts 0.5s with someone dying or wb/leapslam/lw away in 0.2s anyway.


EDIT: I saw your comment about people saying 2h > crit because guys like you in pvp. While I can't say if crit or 2h is better atm, it's a little condescending to be saying that only guys like you, using 2h have any pvp skills lol

17k es and 800 multi was more realistic pre patch but 6-700 multi is still obtainable and in top gear/legacy gear 800 is a thing.
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1187868

Here's a rough example above, doesn't show full stats but as ci dagger this is real and doable even now. Add a stronger base dagger, flicker strike and you shouldn't be losing in PvP or pvm unless you're just shitty.

As for the rest I just skimmed because I really don't PvP anymore nor care. I stopped pvping about a week ago seriously and now just do it BC I'm bored and even then its a waste of time. The core balance of this games PvP is so mega fucked its funny when you look at it. Its rock paper scissors at the most elementary level and options are still poor, mechanics are still screwed. PvP here blows and I can re quote all of my posts from the day I joined regarding PvP balance and what I experienced and its all still relevant. As for 2h, condescending yada yada...I call it how I see it. When I gave a shit about PvP in this game there was not one 2h as accomplished or innovative. Today its basically clone wars and that shits even more boring. I'd rather work in my garage, around my house, play other games and go to work then sit in queue for 45m just to fight some retard standing still holding down attack + exploding with cwdt set ups. Or see its some troll wanting to draw games. Or worse yet some douche bag clone basically using same shit I am or once did to beat them. PvP in these games is monkey see monkey do, shits as boring as it gets. I stopped caring years ago, just held on BC I had faith GGG would deliver.

On the surface this game looks deep. When you play it long enough and see through the smoke and mirrors you realize its one of the most casual friendly games around. If you're still losing as a crit user with trigger gems, molten etc etc..all the babies first arpg mechanics. You're just not playing right my friend.

This games designed so fat fingers billy can magic find/PvP while he eats a burger with 1 hand and holds his bed pan to the back of his chair with the other. Not my kind of thing sorry, see ya.