On Balance Feedback and Charge Changes

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DemonikPath wrote:

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ellefanor wrote:

So, how does PROFESSIONAL TEAM of game designer does this?

Attack traps, have you heard of them? If not WHY THE FUCK are you complaining and not learning game first?

If you think limiting Frenzy charges to a hand picked amount of skills (KB and PS..trap? Frenzy and Elemental Trap with bows???) is a smart decision maybe you need to learn the game instead of being so BM, pal.

Now in terms of actually being productive and specific about why I disagree with the charge changes, you can take a look at a lot of design philosophies that GGG has put out in the form of uniques with regards to frenzy charges. The obviously over-memed Tinkerskin and nodes like Master Sapper have already been addressed a bunch so I won't bother going over that.

A build that incorporates Tulfall, such as a Tulfall raider (insert cold spell), the premise of the build is to build power charges in order to gain frenzy charges (usually in addition to blood rage and raider ascendancy) with the wand itself granting extra cold damage per frenzy charge.

Tulfall isn't too strong as it is with a measly '(10-15)% increased Cold Damage per Frenzy Charge', the increased being the sole limiter here. The flat %more to the spell from frenzy as well though, makes this a much more interesting and unique wand to build around, because not only is your cold damage being supplemented by the benefit of the wand, but the charges don't feel like superfluous fluff and instead are serving a purpose of giving your character meaningful damage for the likes of end-game mapping.

In a game with a lot of complexity it's easy to overlook small things for bigger changes, but it's good to make sure you're not contradicting majorities of builds by making them non-existent with one seemingly stupid change. Frenzy charges in both unique design and skill tree design have been shown to be universal changes. If changes like these are to be introduced to make them more specific, it might be a good idea to change ALL the nodes and items regarding said charges before hand to something that makes a bit more sense at first glance (a la Master Sapper, Tinkerskin, etc...)

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GGG_Neon wrote:

It would be very useful to hear your explanation of why certain builds or items have been damaged (or improved too much) by the change, with specifics and explanations.

Hegemony's Era - Melee weapon focused on Power Charges. New changes reduce crit. chance, when spell damage modifier do absolutely nothing.

Power Siphon - really similar situation to Hegemony's Era. Nothing gained from new changes, less crit.

This could be a great chance to revert changes to Crown of Eyes, once top tier unique, now mostly useless worth few c...

My main gripe with the charges changes is that they limit build diversity. The very fact that you can do almost anything with any skill on any class if you do it well may be the biggest strength of PoE. I would really hate for PoE to become more one-dimensional like D3.

For example, scaling my fire burst ignite build is now limited to fire dmg, burning dmg and DoT. That's not a whole lot to be honest. Curses are useless because they dont apply to bosses, the only relevant enemies, anyway. Frenzy charges aren't usable anymore. Power charges are useless as is all other spell damage. This leaves me with very few, and frankly, not enough ways to scale the damage. Also, it makes designing the character a lot more boring, because there are so few possibilities.

If you feel like frenzy charges are mandatory for too many builds (power charges certainly aren't), make them harder to obtain, or, much better, make them a bit weaker (4% -> 3%). Frenzy charges being available to basically any build is no problem if the opportunity cost is in line with the benefits.

Also, I want to challenge your way of playtesting changes. In science, you would never change multiple conditions of an experiment at once, because it makes it impossible to identify the effect sizes of the different changes. Please consider this for your balancing efforts which I am sure are based on empirical data. Don't make multiple changes impacting one issue at once (ES, DoT, Charges) or you will have a much harder time balancing the side effects.

Thank you for reacting in this way to community feedback.

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Mikkni wrote:

Yes some builds won't have the benefit of Frenzy Charges any more. But that is the point, why should every single build use Frenzy Charges? That isn't build diversity...

It does suck a lot for builds that didn't have a lot of scaling options like RF and Detonate Dead.

Plus Detonate Dead with Traps was near a lot of the nodes.

I personally like all the changes you made. The only i don't really understand is the hp boss boost, i'd like to know the premise behind this,. Imo it's just annoying as it make a lot of map mods really hard to do, unless you avoid the boss or only kill it on really easy crafted maps to enable them on the atlas, and those 2 things are the direct consequences of it. Both those are just bad. I understand you want the acts boss now difficult since the give a skill point, but why boost all the boss hp rather than only those?
I also have to disagree with the last ailment changes, it's just rushed, you guys need to change most of the skills/items that rely on ailment, and add to those freeze/shock chance to compensate. But i have to say that the base of the idea might not be that bad, it's just the feeling that a few forum cry babies triggered a change that is actually worst that why they were crying about. For ex my frost blade don't seam to be able to freeze any boss anymore, but it freeze entire maps of lower level maps/zones, so ye the test in game isn't really giving good results.

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love has blossomed in da harsh land o' Wraeclast

I think that the charge changes are in a very positive direction. Removing elements that can easily fit into any build creates build diversity and promotes more interesting solutions for problems within a build.

Take legacy league for an example, almost every build ran some form of double dipping, it was a single mechanic that ran through the majority of the builds in the league, the same thing can be said for frenzy charges.

The perfect game state of PoE for me is one where not every skill or item is top tier or even considered viable, the reason that I got so sucked into the game in the first place was through having to utilise interesting build interactions to make some skills function at a higher level. This is something I feel has been lost over the years with power creep and this change looks to move back in that direction.

Apart from all that I think it's important for the meta to shift, forcing players to try out new skills and items keeps the game fresh and lets you experience the build creation side of the game again instead of defaulting back to whatever build worked the last few leagues.

After following the development of PoE since closed beta and seeing the changes GGG has made to the game over that time I have full faith that these changes will improve the game in the long term, these guys know what they're doing.

More then love lol

The change doesn't make sense with Master Sapper node and the new unique for trapper , they might be changed later but people are reacting with what information they are given.

These changes would be well and good if you were a bit more thorough with how you handled them, while I'm sure there is a lot more thought process behind these changes, due to the way you handled it, it feels like you just randomly decided on the changes, and implemented them without much care.

There are so many uniques, so many skills, so many niche builds getting affected by these changes, and you're not doing anything to adjust them, I'm sure it's in the works to change some of them to fit in with the new charge system, but it really should have all been one patch.

I'm sure you're aware, but just to list off a few things that are weird, don't make sense now, or are getting OBLITERATED by these changes:

Victario's Acuity
Rashkaldor's Patience
Auxium
The Blood Dance (reduced cast speed?)
Jaws of Agony
Tulborn/fall

Caustic arrow builds, any sort of "non-meta" caster in the bottom right side of the tree, and I'm sure there are a TON of other builds and things getting fucked by these changes.

Generally speaking, I would say change is good, but maybe in the future when making these broad, sweeping changes you'll go through affected things a bit more carefully, and adjust everything accordingly, AT THE SAME TIME.