Development Manifesto: 2.3.0 Balance

"

Dank meme inside

That's rank one bruh

Did they really just release the data for the new ascendancies skill trees but not the actual skill trees? Really? You guys can't manage to do that yourself? Why do we need some outside source to make a tool to look at skill trees for your game?

GGG does it again. Working with the community every step of the way. Great job bringing Arcane vision to viability, this was something that reddit cried out for and ggg listened.


HYPE FOR PROPHECY

Interesting changes..

Got a couple of questions tho:
Hierophant, Sanctuary Of Thought: what the actual fuck is the point of this?
They did buff it, yes, but is it really worth 4 ascendancy points to get 0 mana cost of skills vs
"Reduced mana cost" in the skill tree, jewels and even elron jewelry?
Why not add "mana is taken before ES" to this node, making it possible to be ES MoM and actually usefull and hella interesting?

Also, King Of The Hill: can anyone explain to me why it's positioned where it is? Wouldn't it make more sense to put it closer to ranger or maybe even between ranger and shadow?

TOTAL bullshit. Never had shavs and boom legacy, never had kaom and boom legacy never had windripped and boom legacy, never had those op flask and boom legacy. Guess what i have a voltaxic and a scion. Thanks. You guys are great

"

Qarl wrote:

Chaos conversion has been reduced in effectiveness. This only appears on a few items, but is a system change rather than just a change to those items. As such the items affected will not have legacy versions with old values. We have made sure these items display the correct new effective value however. The values of chaos conversion on Voltaxic Rift, Infernal Mantle and Consuming Dark uniques have been reduced to be 60% of their prior value.

So No more fun full on chaos builds? Just gonna destory my legacy Consuming Dark of 75% and 100% fire to chaos or the 100% lightning to chaos builds? Why? What purpose? Lots of enemies lategame are chaos resistant, i don't see the logic behind this.

"

Qarl wrote:

Shield Charge is now an Area of Effect skill. It deals damage to enemies you collide with as you charge, then deals a larger aoe at the end of the charge. It no longer always stuns. It gains more damage and stun threshold reduction the further you travel, up to a certain distance.

Will we still be able to stun bosses without massive investment into stun threshold reduction now?

Is colliding with the enemies an individual hit or a mini aoe? Your wording makes it sound like every hit is an aoe with the finale being a larger aoe.

And is the final aoe just an aoe at the designated charge location or does it still need to hit an enemy for the aoe to proc (Important! please answer this. it was one of the major issues with the skill as it was difficult to target an enemy at the charge location and still hit).

"

Rather than listing every change here, we have made an updated set of skill tree data available to the community for use in passive skill/build planning tools.

How do you use that txt file in a passive tree? oO what program or website does that? I can't find any.

I'm glad this chaos conversion change is happening now... right before I jumped on the chaos conversion bandwagon :P

also, RIP voltaxic. It doesn't deserve to have its current rarity tier anymore.

for the love of god please let me keep one fucking build without you messing with it I'm done fuck you and fuck your supporter packs ima burn the damn signed pics I got a tribute to your fuckery GGG.

So, about the changes then. In general I agree with them so I'll only talk about the 3 that I feel are more relevant to talk about. The only thing I'll not talk about is the ascendency tree because honestly, I can't see it. If you guys had instead made provisory page like your skill tree where I could see it, it would have been wonderful!

Anyway, on to the bad thing. Chaos coversion nerf. Call it a a system change if you will, it is a nerf as everyone knows.

Now why is chaos conversion being nerfed. Is chaos damage OP? Is the damage gains from possible double dip OP? The answer is no. There are 2 reasons why chaos damage is being nerfed. The first being that a huge number of people are using it and as it is long timed tradition of GGG, if something is being massively used, nerf it. Secondly GGG does not wants people to ignore elemental reflect.

Now for the first, popularity does not reflects how strong a build is. It might be strong yes, but it doesn't means it's even as strong as other things out there. I am thinking of things like SRS, deb atably one of the most powerful builds out there or CoC.

For the second which is probably the highest reason although in this case 1 and 2 come togehter, chaos damage being popular because people don't like reflect... It's not that people hate reflect as a mechanic, but people hate reflect as a whole map modifier! The thing is, It can be ignored, people ignore it by simply grabbing a chaos and rerolling the map. But people hate to do this because it wastes them a chaos orb and because other than reflect the map might have rolled really well.

This is where my sugestion about this whole situation comes in. GGG, instead of just screwing the players and forcing them into wasting currency to override this bad map mod as well as nerfing builds that are not powerful simply because they convert damage. Deal with the problem at the root and remove reflect as a map mod entirely. By all means keep reflect as a possible thing that some blue mobs or rare/uniques can roll, but not as a map mod. This saves the necessity for nerfing chaos damage!

In this next expansion I will still play chaos damage, You nerfed conversions? Fine, I'll just play essence drain + contagion (not as my first character since it's not exactly the best suited for it, i'll start with a 3 totem build that requires no uniques or extremely hard to get gear. No a cheap easy to get only 4 link 3 totem build). My guess is, essence drain was already popular before and it will only become even more popular to all the people who want to ignore these maps modifiers.

Moving on swiftly, good job on the spell totem, it wasn't really bad but it definitly needed a buff and this is a much welcome change. It certainly brings the use of spell totem at lower levels into much more viable levels however I still have to wonder how good it will become given that in a 4L 2 sockets are used just for the spell and the support gem that is actually nerfing damage. My guess is that while a good change it will only ever start being an option at 5L which means probably by the time we are mapping. This is what I like about the trap gem, rather than nerfing it, it increases the damage so it is usuable right from the moment you get access to it.

Lastly good job on removing hiden village as a zana map. It is an horrible boss to have to deal with. In fact I believe that this boss is very poorly designed as well as the lower level other map version of it. Now I don't means this as an insult but this boss as many other bosses for that matter seem to have been designed by children. You ask a child how to make a boss harder and they all will say the same thing. Just increase the damage and the HP and that is exactly what this and many other bosses are. A boss fight difficulty should be made up of interesting mechanics rather than high damage. One such case is the escavation boss. You have 3 bosses, each with different ways of fighting and you can only damage one at the time. None of them will one shot you which is good. Not only that but it's considered a pretty tough boss, amoung the toughest... So clearly you have the capacity to make boss interesting. I sugest you go over every boss especially these high HP and which oneshot you and review them. A boss that has too much attack speed with an AoE attack that you can't even run away from is very poor design. At very least the attack should be telegraphed and a couple seconds to get out of the AoE area.