On Balance Feedback and Charge Changes

It's kinda funny how GGG asks for the community's opinion on things and what changes we're skeptical about along with a proper explanation for why some change shouldn't be done, and all (or at least part of) the community does is spit in their faces. Some changes are obviously bad, i get it, so please if you don't want something to change explain why.

That said, Crimson Dance seems a little bit lackluster to be honest. By removing the "increased damage taken while moving" part of the mechanic you also remove half of the identity of bleed, the other half being that it's a phys DoT. I like the idea of stacks though, even if it becomes kinda similar to poison.
One suggestion to a different change is to lower the "extra damage while moving" instead of removing it (ex. 50% -> 10%) and lowering the amount of stacks to maybe 3 and have a bleed-out mechanic (discard the current "50% less damage with bleeding" idea also). Bleed would then stack to 3 and then proc (on the "4th" stack) bleed-out which would be a large damage hit.

From: 10 + 50 while moving to: 10 + (10 x 3) + X% on 4th hit

Simple suggestion and i have no idea if it's viable. However, this change wouldn't destroy the identity of bleed.

Just my two cent's.

Power Charges, okay, I can see why you don't want crit to be too easy.
That's completely understandable.

But have frenzy charges really been that necessary for spell casters?
I'll admit I don't regularly watch PoE streamers or browse the build forums but I thought the meta builds were going vaal skills, unique flasks and/or power charges.

Has Blood Rage really been that common a skill gem choice?
I'd never really considered it for my casters since I just thought it an attack-focused gem.

Power Charges: 30% Crit, 4% Increased Attack and Spell Damage

Frenzy Charges: 4% Attack/Cast Speed, 4% increased Leech Cap (Thematic with Berserking, opens the path to removing Vaal Pact later on)

Endurance Charges: 4% Physical Damage Reduction, 4% to all Elemental Resistances, 4% to Chaos Resistance


__Add some additional Chaos Resistance to nodes near Duelist / Marauder, similar to Purity of Flesh.

On charges:

I always liked PoE for the freedom it gave me making my build.
Other ARPGs often outline the path so clearly it's hard to find anything other than builds that are so obvious that everyone ends up playing more or less the same.
In PoE, when I look at the skill tree and ponder "Hmm, I wonder if X will work with Y?" the answer is surprisingly often "Yes, it will."

The changes to charges are a huge step back from this, now power charges are for spell casters and frenzy charges are for attack builds and that's the end of the story. The path has just become narrower.

When I started playing in 1.0 the use of charges was much more restricted, but that was mostly because it was harder to get charges in the first place.
Since then between ascendancies, new supports, new uniques, corruptions - and so on and so forth - it has become almost trivial to gain and sustain charges at a very small cost, so every build has incorporated them to some extent.

And therein lies the true problem I think, my suggestion would be to make it harder to sustain maximum charges - for example by changing them so each charge runs on his own timer individually instead of all sharing a timer that refreshes on gaining another charge.


On Vessel of Vinktar:

I think this is the most blatant one.
How could it slip past the balance team that the leech on Vinktar's is 10 times higher than on any other source? And that this might be a bit of a problem that needs addressing.
For a simple comparison, just put it next to Atziri's Promise, which was pretty powerful, but not as blatantly OP.


On Shock/Chill changes:

I always wanted a system for status ailments that was similar to the stun mechanic, where you get the elemental status on reaching a certain threshold of damage, so I generally like the direction this is going.

However, the numbers on this change just seem awfully off.

A quick example:
If I'm hitting a map boss for 10% of his HP in a single hit of lightning damage, he will get shocked and take 10% extra damage for 4 seconds. That's nice, except I don't care, because if I'm hitting a boss for 10% of his HP in a single hit, he'll be dead within 2 seconds. I wouldn't even notice that I'm now dealing 11% of his HP per hit.
Even if I had 100% increased shock effect or 100% lower shock threshold, it just would not add up to a point where I'd notice much of a difference.

PoE is all about attacking and casting quickly, not only because it's a way to scale your damage, but also because it speed up your animation speed so you can react quicker and won't get caught in the middle of an animation and you will move quicker across the countryside. Not even mentioning that being fast is incredibly fun.
So anything that's not a pushover is most likely dying to a flurry of tiny tiny stings rather than a couple big hits.
Which is also the reason why poison is so popular (and broken), because each tiny sting adds another stack of poison, so your small damage hits scale into a large DOT effect, growing your damage with the square of the time invested in attacking (rather than being linear).

With the current design of chill and shock, you are heading in the opposite direction, but the builds that players will make won't follow this direction because animation speed is more important than potentially getting a marginal benefit from status ailments.


My suggestion would be to make shock and chill ailments stack multiple times, but cap out at their respective maximum values.


On the damage over time changes:


Not really a timely topic, but I thought if I'm writing a single feedback post I might as well fit it in here:

I agree that double dipping was a big problem for the game and the damage scaling that it resulted in produced too high damage values.


However, the approach that was introduced in the beta does not really address double dipping issue, it just drastically reduces the damage scaling.

Builds that want to focus on, for example, burning damage from ignite, will still have to stack up on sources of fire damage and elemental damage, because it's scaling both the initial hit and the damage over time, just the way it used to be.
For almost every build, the initial hit damage was a very important part and the damage over time was convenient and welcome, especially against bosses, but the focus was always on the initial hit (with the exception of a few builds that did not actually apply hits).
With the nerfs to damage over time, the initial hit will become more important, but sources that do not scale both, like spell damage, melee damage etc, just won't fit into those builds.

I think it's a pretty bad sign that, after "removing" double dipping, a build around ignite would still look pretty much exactly the same as before.
In fact, you pretty much have to spec as if double dipping still existed, if you want any decent overall damage.

The problem becomes especially apparent when we take a look at poison, which scales initially from physical and chaos, but the DOT effect only scales with chaos.
Physical focused builds, which includes most melee builds, will not have the means to fit both chaos and physical scaling into their skilltree or gear, resulting in either terrible initial hit damage or terrible damage over time.
I've got a feeling we won't be seeing many of those builds around.

All changes are fine ... just change tinderskin in power charge (no frenzy charge) and Master sapper in 4% increased damage per power / frenzy / endu charges .
With last Thickster change you cant full benefit from frenzy + power charge or it will be totally broken so ggg have to cut in attack and spells for each charges.
Dont be crazy... you cant reverted only frenzy and keep power charge changes.

The new changes are awesome.

Do not listen to the very vocal yet insignificant moaning impulsive and very childish minority that continues to spam everywhere " GGG U SUCK, DON'T NERF MY SHIT I'M A PRO MLG POE PLAYER".

These clowns haven't even had the chance to experiment with the new changes yet they rush to whine like real spoiled brats because their cookie cutter builds are no longer working and they can't be arsed to put the effort into learning anything new.

Hello all.

I disagree with the current changes. Although I haven't played beta yet I feel the direction of this is just plain wrong. What happened to the GGG that buffed stuff to bring it more up to par with the rest? What happened to the GGG the made positive changes? Patch after patch we get these watered down skill and mechanics. Balancing is not only about nerfing the shit out of stuff.

First and foremost what I would like to see is a better balancing of the ascendancy classes. You guys probably have more data than anyone on this. You know what classes are popular and what aren't. What classes are weak and what aren't. Why haven't there been significant changes to weaker ascendancy classes?

Aliments must be a big headaches for the balance team. I think you need to rethink how they work and what they do. DoT (Ignite, Poison and Bleed) and non-DOT (Freeze,shock) already have a divergence. It is obvious that someone speccing into DoT always does more dmg than someone speccing into non-DoT. Hence this should be fixed. For instance give a greater dmg range to non-DoT, which isn't the case right now.

Flasks. Well Flasks. Either change how they work or change what they do. But really nerfing vinktar again? Don't you see this is problem. Like all the flasks. You already had to nerf the pathfinder aswell.

When going into this final week I would also like to say stop killing build diversity. It's really annoying for me to see that so many good viable builds are no longer possible. Personally I feel like CoC needs another rework, it has disappeared completely in current state.

I remember when I played Lightning buzzsaw : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aX9Yj7FvqHw

And there are tons of other builds that you have gutted and for what? This is not balance. Balance is not bandwagoning the meta, like what is happening now. I challenge you at GGG to bring back these old builds and some form or another. If you do nothing I guarentee you next like will be raider/necro meta.

I have over 3000 hours on the game, if you ever need someone to pitch you guys some ideas let me know.

And that's my 2 cents. Have a nice day everyone.

"

We communicated poorly about the changes and their motivation. While we may lament the community misunderstanding the consequences of the change, it is clearly our fault for confusing the community. While it has been crazily hectic recently, we do need to stop and take the time to more clearly explain what we are testing, and why.

This is very reassuring to hear!

As for the changes themselves, I can only really comment on Vaal Lightning Trap & Charges.

Charges are interesting parts of builds, figuring out clever ways to generate them in exchange for strong nodes on the passive tree has been fun. With the changes I don't see myself picking up power charges in very many of my crit attack builds, and other builds lose frenzies altogether.
In my eyes it doesn't hit the game-breaking builds, it's just a blanket nerf to variety.

If I were to suggest an alternative or extension of the change it would be to replace some of the charge duration nodes with interesting ones like Spell Damage per Power Charge & Evasion per Power Charge etc.
That way new pathing choices can be made or builds that normally wouldn't pick up charges now might, be it for extra spell damage or mana regen or what have you.

Vaal Lightning Trap needed changing, it's been a staple of every build I've made the past leagues and it's not exactly been fun. I'm not super excited about the numerical change though, it's still going to be a staple in any build that can spare a socket, it'll just do less?

I can't think of solid alternatives but I hope one pops up.

I think it would be nice to have a tab on Charges in the new Help Panel, some ways to generate them and the stats they give to the player. I remember as a new player having no idea what they did for me as the Charges tab in the Character Screen is kinda stowed away, might just have been me though!

"

Nerf total crit chance available. It was getting too close to cap, too easily.
Nerf the Assassin. This was frequently requested.
Provide more uses for power charges on spellcasters (especially non-crit ones).
Make it less mandatory for general damage dealers to invest in frenzy charges.

1. This is a reasonable request. I completely understand the reasoning behind wanting the highest damage output builds to not be equally consistent with other builds. Also, crits feeling like CRITICAL hits doesn't really happen when it's easy to make crits be most of your hits.


2. Assassin was already nerfed indirectly multiple times in 3.0. As a life based build, it's very difficult to get sufficient life as a Shadow, while still being competitive in terms of damage and clear speed with Inquis, PF, and Raider. If you want instant leech, which you almost always do as a hit based build, life is the only option in 3.0. Additionally, the allure of the four poison ascendancy nodes is considerably lower after the nerfs.
In the context of attack builds, Raider was better than shadow in 2.6, with the exception of heavily-focused poison builds and very low base crit weapons (like Varunastra). In the context of elemental caster builds, this is probably a buff to Assassin, which will almost always have sufficient crit anyway, but now also gets a pretty significant More spell damage bonus. In contrast, Raider is now pretty useless for casters. This is pretty disappointing considering a major selling point of this game is the crazy builds, where your witch kills stuff with a 2H sword and your Marauder kills stuff with spells. Disabling a class' usefulness with half of the skills in the game is the opposite of what I hope to see with future ascendany changes.


3. Yup. I like this. Playing non-crit cold snap will feel less awful now, I just wish this was achieved without removing the usefulness of frenzies for casters.


4. It's still equally mandatory to get frenzy charges on attack builds, and spell builds just replace frenzy generation with the new equivalent (power charge generation). For my ED build, this will mean I swap out green dream for blue dream. I also think this is a weird decision, considering this feedback was already around at the time when frenzy charges were given that same more damage buff. Remember the 2.0 beta? Literally every character wanted to fit in frenzy charges, and Blood Dance was the best unique in the game for its drop frequency.

"

Chris wrote:

While processing player feedback in preparation for 3.0.0, we found four requests that we could address simultaneously with our proposed charge changes:

• Nerf total crit chance available. It was getting too close to cap, too easily.
• Nerf the Assassin. This was frequently requested.
• Provide more uses for power charges on spellcasters (especially non-crit ones).
• Make it less mandatory for general damage dealers to invest in frenzy charges.

Hi there, thanks again for designing such an awesome game!
Here are my thoughts on the changes. Since there is already a lot of feedback concerning build diversity and uniques, I'll focus on the four points you wanted to target:

• Nerf total crit chance available. It was getting too close to cap, too easily.
  The total crit chance has been surely nerfed by the changes to power charges. But due to the spell damage buff on power charges, it seems that the effect hits different builds in a very different way. While builds relying on critical spell damage will most likely actually profit from the changes, builds relying on critical attack damage might effectively loose 50% crit chance per charge, if it turns out that charges are not worth the investment anymore. Of course, the investment can be put to other (but maybe less worthy) use.
• Nerf the Assassin. This was frequently requested.
  The assassin class was nerfed by the changes to the respective nodes. Is a further nerf of the assassin class still needed? If so, the changes to the power charges seem to hurt only the attack based assassins while buffing the spell based assassins (see previous point).
• Provide more uses for power charges on spellcasters (especially non-crit ones).
  This has been definitely achieved. But see also the next point.
• Make it less mandatory for general damage dealers to invest in frenzy charges.
  Although you made it less mandatory to invest in frenzy charges, it seems to me that the problem has just been shifted. Instead of frenzy charges being usefull/mandatory for general damage builds, now frenzy charges are usefull/mandatory for attack damage builds and power charges are usefull/mandatory for spell damage builds.