Big Balance Thread - All in One

Hey we're all friends here. Maybe just hard to establish tone while typing quickly :) All is good!

Guys, there's some really, really good stuff here and I appreciate everyone typing out all the long stuff so I don't have to. I agree with basically everything in this thread.

I've been playing for 3 years and I've been melee this whole entire time until Talisman league, and it's because Melee is COMPLETELY DEAD in this game for pvp with no hope whatsoever, that's why Sith and other melee gods quit/are quitting. (Not trying to be dramatic, this is what it looks like to an experienced player). Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one stupid enough to still be 2h RT in this game. One thing I do know I am is hard-headed, and I choose to believe that GGG will address these issues in the future, so I don't want to divvy all my gear up I've worked so hard to put together.

Just to preface, I'm not gloating in this next line, and the point of my post isn't to complain about losing. I have said this time and time again: I'm not invincible, just very strong! :) But there's a certain point where you get tired of trying to kick water uphill, and I think that's where everyone is at right now.

I just want to paint a picture much like rup did. I have 10k life WITH acro/phase acro (14k life w/o), overcapped res, great chaos res, 6 perfect jewels, all good life regen nodes, the best weapon in the game, leg kaoms (obv), 100% freeze/chill immune, all the items I could want for this character including weapon/ammy/boot/flask swaps etc... I use multiple melee skills, not just Cyclone. Static strike, Heavy, and Double I carry on me at all times depending on who I am fighting, and I incorporate PA/CA on my offhand.

With all these things, I have very little chance. It's still possible to 1shot me offscreen before I can even see you, kill me with 1 op trap/mine, or just walk into me for 0.1 sec with blade vortex - all while wearing a tabula and barely investing any exalts at all. Don't even get me started on EA. LOL.

The first two things that needs to happen is make Frost Wall self-cast only, and decrease duration of Whispering Ice.. No FW totem, no FW cwdt. People are abusing this like crazy, and everyone knows it. This is an easy fix that GGG could fix in minutes.

Would type more but running out of time!

Oh and one more thing, there's a guy in pvp talisman that is abusing spark/knockback pretty well. He can crash everyone in the entire arena because there's too many instances of knockback hitting at once. Probably just nip that in the bud too.

<3

First off, Sith was really late to the 2h party. He was 1h/axe then started 2h after repeat stomp-age from some MullaXul guy. Nothing against Sith I really liked the guy but there's only 3 original 2h that I know of. One quit (Bigdaddyslam), 1 I never see (XDominus) and the other is me. Google had more of a hand and time vested in 2h then most others too, can't forget Tommie either.


As for balance and crit.

45-80% chance is actually very easy to obtain for a bow user, dagger user, spell caster.

The "ehp" difference between the Templar,Marauder/Duelist trees versus the Witch,Shadow,Ranger trees is mute. A few % more regen and barely a few % more hp does not substitute Acrobatics,status avoidance and the ever potent crit potential. What kills troll tank builds that are primarily based on the survivability provided by the western side of the tree? Critical damage. One side of the tree completely counters the other and not vise versa. RT ignores evasion but the damage output even with the absolute best gear possible is still shit compared a mediocre crit spec. Add the fact ranged + crit go hand in hand so perfectly and the argument that RT builds get better ehp,staying power versus a crit spec evasion,hp,acro or crit es (which retains the insane damage, block and generally higher or equal "life" pool to that of a legacy kaoms 2h with perfect gear) is just flawed. Honestly even if you find a medium between damage output and survivability on the western side of the tree no spec, be it melee,bow,trapper,caster is going to out dps nor out survive a similar build that is built on the other side of the tree without running and abusing life regen like a little whore...that is if you aren't dead within the first 1-2 shots first. Only exception to this is Explosive arrow builds in the non FFA arenas because well..its Explosive arrow.

Like already mentioned too, crit damage is why DOT effects are so strong. DOT is perfectly fair in RT or Poison arrow form because they can't crit. Add crit multipliers to a puncture arrow, regular melee hit that can bleed/poison and you're looking at 1.5 to 6x more damage on average.

So it's really hard to just say nerf this by x %. Because without crit most everything in this game is balanced already except traps (too many MORE multiplier supports) and EA. If people would just get their heads out of their asses and stop defending crit multipliers they'd see that too. One of the smartest things we've gotten recently was the Controlled Destruction support that makes non crit spells more potent and viable. Still does nothing for the rest of us but it was well deserved for IW,non crit spell users.

Also, cannot be evaded but can still do critical damage mods basically said "fuck that" to the old idea that evasion was an option to almost....almost deal with crit melee,bow damage. Almost as in...if they didn't get lucky and still kill you immediately in 1-2 button pushs. Only answer to crit spells is block or dodge, brilliant. Enfeeble is great and all but with 8sec + warding flasks the norm now adays you'll be hard pressed to keep this on someone unless you want to run around in circles for a few minutes til they no longer have flasks so it then contributes to your survival. Blind goes hand in hand with evasion and is pretty much worthless now adays and will be even more worthless come Ascendancy....except for the crit user themselves because they will do even more damage to you if they blind you instead woooooooooooooooot talk about sticking it up your ass.

I kinda get why ggg does not react to most of the balance suggestions.

Pls stop writing books.No one has the time to read that.

Here is my feedback:

ea? -> eyes of the greatwolf (fire dmg taken converted to whatever you want) -> opponent loses 39% penetration

bleed? -> should be kinda dead with blood grip, no?

chill? -> You can get chill immunity in hld quite easily.

This is nothing new i am telling you and it works so why don't u use that?

"

Heelon wrote:

I kinda get why ggg does not react to most of the balance suggestions.

Pls stop writing books.No one has the time to read that.

Here is my feedback:

ea? -> eyes of the greatwolf (fire dmg taken converted to whatever you want) -> opponent loses 39% penetration

bleed? -> should be kinda dead with blood grip, no?

chill? -> You can get chill immunity in hld quite easily.

This is nothing new i am telling you and it works so why don't u use that?

It's that simple? We had no idea, thanks for enlightening anyone who hadn't a clue.

It's not that simple, that's why people write and elaborate. There are too many layers to consider when it comes to balance. Exampled by skills crit versus skills rt, east side of the tree only countered by the east side of the tree etc..etc..

"

Heelon wrote:

I kinda get why ggg does not react to most of the balance suggestions.

Pls stop writing books.No one has the time to read that.

Here is my feedback:

ea? -> eyes of the greatwolf (fire dmg taken converted to whatever you want) -> opponent loses 39% penetration

bleed? -> should be kinda dead with blood grip, no?

chill? -> You can get chill immunity in hld quite easily.

This is nothing new i am telling you and it works so why don't u use that?

haha this is funny. really man, you should start doing stand up thingy and get rich.

"

ea? -> eyes of the greatwolf

this is though... this is AHAHAHAAH the best. ahahahaha.

Stop worrying about existing mechanics, ascendancy worries me more than anything already existing in pvp right now. Besides the problematic builds right now, ea, untweaked released skills, offscreen crit damage and whatnot.

And 45-50% crit on a caster is not an easy task, I barely break the 50% mark with top notch gear, matter of fact crit is fine on spell casters, bow crit worries me a lot more. Iceshot,la secondary damage offscreen shotgun crit is over everything atm. Remove shotgun from these since they removed them for caster, also fix arctic breath shotgun possibility. Anything that can shotgun currently is a mechanic bug/abuse that hasn't been addressed by GGG. The fact that some skill secondary damage doesn't get reduced is alarming. EA secondary damage is probably not even reduced at all.

Tempest shield is fine, you probably havent seen it pre 1.3. It will hit three times if your 3 shotgun projectiles hit the enemy at the same time, remove shotgun from ur LA and it wont hit you 3 times in a row anymore, a broken mechanic for another broken mechanic.

I posted a thread about BCR clusters for generalized 2h users, that would help.

And the meta right now is about sarn arena, most people build their characters around it and end up with super squishy spec with most damage possible, ofcourse that's advantageous in wide open arenas, but it will never be as good in real 1v1 environnement. There are so many builds that do good in sarn because of their spike 1 shot damage with offscreen possibilities. But when the 1v1 arena comes these builds are bad, they are easily getting hit and die way too fast due to their low defenses and poor area control. I see a ton of these sarn builds, people need to wake up and make real 1v1 characters. An exemple is my firestorm build, its a true 1v1 spec that relies on controlling the area in closed environnement. In fact its pretty bad in sarn arena due to how much space there is to run and evade but when I play 1v1s I can really see the true potential of it.

Another thing is that they should make it mandatory for EA users to have BCR gem, since they dont rely on it due to their secondary form bypassing any dodge/block mechanic they can add another powerfull gem, removing that possibility would decrease their output and make it more balanced.

"

hauntworld1 wrote:

Stop worrying about existing mechanics, ascendancy worries me more than anything already existing in pvp right now. Besides the problematic builds right now, ea, untweaked released skills, offscreen crit damage and whatnot.

And 45-50% crit on a caster is not an easy task, I barely break the 50% mark with top notch gear, matter of fact crit is fine on spell casters, bow crit worries me a lot more. Iceshot,la secondary damage offscreen shotgun crit is over everything atm. Remove shotgun from these since they removed them for caster, also fix arctic breath shotgun possibility. Anything that can shotgun currently is a mechanic bug/abuse that hasn't been addressed by GGG. The fact that some skill secondary damage doesn't get reduced is alarming. EA secondary damage is probably not even reduced at all.

Tempest shield is fine, you probably havent seen it pre 1.3. It will hit three times if your 3 shotgun projectiles hit the enemy at the same time, remove shotgun from ur LA and it wont hit you 3 times in a row anymore, a broken mechanic for another broken mechanic.

I posted a thread about BCR clusters for generalized 2h users, that would help.

And the meta right now is about sarn arena, most people build their characters around it and end up with super squishy spec with most damage possible, ofcourse that's advantageous in wide open arenas, but it will never be as good in real 1v1 environnement. There are so many builds that do good in sarn because of their spike 1 shot damage with offscreen possibilities. But when the 1v1 arena comes these builds are bad, they are easily getting hit and die way too fast due to their low defenses. I see a ton of these sarn builds, people need to wake up and make real 1v1 characters, sarn is for puppies.

haunt, tempest hits me 3 times with self cast frost wall too. and that beeing worse at 1.3 doesnt mean its balanced yet. i have 5.5k life. thats best you can get with ranger. tank builds(which means minimum damage investment) one shot me sometimes.

Ive never seen tempest hit 3 times in a row except if its stuck on two caster tempest block loop or if it blocks shotgun projectiles.

Maybe post a video about it because I'm skeptical, ive never seen that happen in my whole caster pvp existence. If its true then post it on bug section because its not intended.

But atleast we can deal damage to you trough tempest shield once we get hit by something offscreen that we cant reach with our normal skills. To me tempest is fine considering the huge reduction we saw to block earlier in the old patches... its nothing like before. And you need to make sure that you have high chaos resist because most people link added chaos to it, if you have minus chaos when it crits youre going to get obliterated.

Ill post more about what I think later !

Alright sry i forgot that you have a 2000ex build you should know way better than me. Damn how could i dare to critise you. Can someone borrow me 2k ex so that i have more knowledge about hld pvp?