Anger

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MegaDeth666 wrote:

Ha, exactly my gripe with the various stats and perks in this game. And, to be frank, this split of skills that boost A and C but not B is generally detrimental to gameplay.

Take D3's system, every skill in the game including auras or summons use the casters dps as a baseline for damage, [...]

Although I'm falling off-topic in regards to this thread and I apologize beforehand I couldn't help myself to answer this post.

In my opinion, a major part of what destroyed any sense of complexity and thought behind skills in Diablo 3 was exactly because of that reason. The fact that every ability in the game was determined by the base DPS of your weapon removed any desire or need to care for other statistics and affixes since all your damage was focused around one thing, the DPS of your weapon.

Personally, I perceive that as an extremely bad design decision which completely went off-track from Diablo 2. It made the majority of weapons seemingly lackluster and boring since we already figured out how to increase damage by one single common statistic. In PoE, I can try find a wand to increase spell damage or focus on finding an item that adds X amount of damage to a certain magic school (such as Cold).

A hunt for the highest DPS is eliminated when there are many sources of damage and it also provides a good base to add different resistances to different monsters which adds increased challenge to the game. Streamlining should never be the first solution to a problem.

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MegaDeth666 wrote:

However, in PoE, many skills and/or item properties are confusing for no apparent reason. Why does my Axe have 5% crit but the skill I swing the axe with 6% crit ? It makes absolutely no sense... And what crit do my minions have ? Would increasing my spell crit increase their spell/melee crit ? why/why not ?

Streamlining this convoluted mess would help everyone and would also allow for more diverse builds since many skills are locked to their archetype right now for no apparent reason ...

Having weapon classes with different inherent stats is great, that way I can for example decide I want to go for Daggers since I wish to make a heavy crit build. As to your specific question, if your Axe has 5% crit and your skill does 6% crit I'm pretty sure they stack together. Although I can't answer this with certainty.

Streamlining skills, items and just stuff in general usually leads to more convenient options but at the cost of less diversity and complexity. Exactly what you are seeing in Diablo 3 - I can only hope that a similar theme will not run for this game.

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Zeltak wrote:

A hunt for the highest DPS is eliminated when there are many sources of damage and it also provides a good base to add different resistances to different monsters which adds increased challenge to the game. Streamlining should never be the first solution to a problem.

What the heck are you talking about? Since when are people not looking for the item with the best DPS? The only thing splitting damage into all these categories does is make people pick a category. They just look for the item with the most DPS for their category. Same old same old.

The real difference is that spreading damage into categories forces you to reroll to try a new category, which is intended.

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Strill wrote:

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Zeltak wrote:

A hunt for the highest DPS is eliminated when there are many sources of damage and it also provides a good base to add different resistances to different monsters which adds increased challenge to the game. Streamlining should never be the first solution to a problem.

What the heck are you talking about? Since when are people not looking for the item with the best DPS? The only thing splitting damage into all these categories does is make people pick a category. They just look for the item with the most DPS for their category. Same old same old.

The real difference is that spreading damage into categories forces you to reroll to try a new category, which is intended.

What I'm talking about that instead of finding an item that has a fixed DPS number attached to them like in Diablo 3, that would give bonus to exactly -all- damage abilities regardless of class and skill choice, you have different sources of damage in PoE (just like in D2). It is a hunt for the highest DPS but not in the way it is portrayed in D3.

It is a hunt for the highest DPS with consideration to many different sources of attacks and in regards to different mobs who have different resistances. It is a major difference because it demands you to reconsider what exact source(s) of damage you want to focus on.

Perhaps I worded it wrongly when I stated that "the hunt for the DPS is eliminated", what I mean to say is that the hunt for the weapon with the highest base DPS is eliminated because not every class/build would want as high of a weapon DPS as possible. For example an ice-build witch would rather have % to cold damage or + to skill gems on their weapon. Although the same end result is achieved it diversifies items to a greater extent which is needed to not homogenize every weapon.

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Zeltak wrote:

Perhaps I worded it wrongly when I stated that "the hunt for the DPS is eliminated", what I mean to say is that the hunt for the weapon with the highest base DPS is eliminated because not every class/build would want as high of a weapon DPS as possible. For example an ice-build witch would rather have % to cold damage or + to skill gems on their weapon. Although the same end result is achieved it diversifies items to a greater extent which is needed to not homogenize every weapon.

Cold Damage? +Cold skill gem level? What game are you playing? Those stats are horrible. An Ice Witch, just like every other caster, needs a top-tier spell damage mod on any weapon for it to even be a consideration. Only after that is anything else worthwhile. Furthermore, +cold skill level mods are worthless regardless since there's only three links on one-handed items and one skill level is not worth giving up a support gem.

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Strill wrote:

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Zeltak wrote:

Perhaps I worded it wrongly when I stated that "the hunt for the DPS is eliminated", what I mean to say is that the hunt for the weapon with the highest base DPS is eliminated because not every class/build would want as high of a weapon DPS as possible. For example an ice-build witch would rather have % to cold damage or + to skill gems on their weapon. Although the same end result is achieved it diversifies items to a greater extent which is needed to not homogenize every weapon.

Cold Damage? +Cold skill gem level? What game are you playing? Those stats are horrible. An Ice Witch, just like every other caster, needs a top-tier spell damage mod on any weapon for it to even be a consideration. Only after that is anything else worthwhile. Furthermore, +cold skill level mods are worthless regardless since there's only three links on one-handed items and one skill level is not worth giving up a support gem.

I was just giving an example of a different source of damage than the standard physical damage received from a weapon. I have never played an ice-oriented Witch so I have no clue about the effectiveness of affixes such as +cold damage or +skill gems of said magic school. My point was that just like in Diablo 2 you would have several sources of damage that could aid different builds and as such diversify items on a larger scale rather than following a streamlined setup such as Diablo 3 has worked out, which is what I originally quoted. As the way your attitude is coming off in these posts I will leave uncommented.

For now this discussion has went off-topic in regards to the Anger skill so I will stop replying.

To bring the discussion back to the main topic...
In my opinion Anger seems to be very underpowered compared to other +dmg aura skills like e.g. "Hatred".
I was testing around a bit with builts based on faster attack speed, +%fire dmg on multiple characters and other things but I was never able to discover a situation where Anger would offer at least close to the damage increase like hatred does.
Don't forget that both skills lock 30% of the mana and for the same cost i would prefer Hatred anytime over Anger, not even mentioning the benefits of possible freeze/ slow effects from the cold dmg.
My conclusion would be either to drasticaly reduce the cost of the Anger aura to equal out cost and benefit of this skill or to raise the dmg bonus by a lot that Anger can compete with other dmg auras like Hatred.

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TPxErebus wrote:

To bring the discussion back to the main topic...
In my opinion Anger seems to be very underpowered compared to other +dmg aura skills like e.g. "Hatred".
I was testing around a bit with builts based on faster attack speed, +%fire dmg on multiple characters and other things but I was never able to discover a situation where Anger would offer at least close to the damage increase like hatred does.
Don't forget that both skills lock 30% of the mana and for the same cost i would prefer Hatred anytime over Anger, not even mentioning the benefits of possible freeze/ slow effects from the cold dmg.
My conclusion would be either to drasticaly reduce the cost of the Anger aura to equal out cost and benefit of this skill or to raise the dmg bonus by a lot that Anger can compete with other dmg auras like Hatred.

Incorrect on nearly every count.

Hatred reserves a percentage of your mana, and adds a percentage of your physical damage as cold damage. Thus, high physical damage builds benefit greatly from this, the mana cost is never too high (always 30%), and the damage increase scales not only with the gem level, but with your equipment.

Anger reserves an increasing mana amount, based on the gem's level. Level 1 reserves 40 mana, while level 15 reserves 110 mana. Anger also adds a flat damage amount. That means that fast weapons benefit more from anger than slow weapons do (more dps).

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Incorrect on nearly every count.

Hatred reserves a percentage of your mana, and adds a percentage of your physical damage as cold damage. Thus, high physical damage builds benefit greatly from this, the mana cost is never too high (always 30%), and the damage increase scales not only with the gem level, but with your equipment.

Anger reserves an increasing mana amount, based on the gem's level. Level 1 reserves 40 mana, while level 15 reserves 110 mana. Anger also adds a flat damage amount. That means that fast weapons benefit more from anger than slow weapons do (more dps).

well...it seems u didn't get the main point i was actually concerned about. (with the mana thing I was a bit wrong ok).
My main point is, that Anger doesnt improve your characters dps that much as hatred would do, Anger seems bad compared to other available skill choices like hatred.

(just as an example, my marauder lvl 20 does ~190dps, with anger lvl 3 its almost 30% of his mana locked and ~195dps while with hatred lvl 3 he gets 30% mana locked but the dps is now ~230.)

It is easy to see that hatred grants a much bigger improvement dps wise than anger. (otherwise I would love to see a real example, where a character would deal less dmg with hatred than he would with anger...

And for the Attack speed thing with hatred u brought up: High attack speed while having hatred active should be as good as with low attack speed, because every single hit gets a 20% small dmg improvement which ads up with a lot of fast hits to be similar to one slow hit with a big 20% dmg bonus...
(e.g. 2 chars with 100 base dps, one attacks with 1hit/sec: 100dmg with hatred =120 dps; and one char with 2hits/sec of 50 dmg and hatred also equal 2*60=120dps)
--> its not important how often you attack per second, hatred should improve your dps about the same amount, so far the base dps before activating hatred is the same

Different auras are better for different builds. On my level 60 archer level 15 Hatred gives me 150 dps, level 15 Anger gives me 400 dps. Hatred also takes up a much larger portion of my mana pool because I have over 600 mana (~180 mana), meanwhile Anger takes up 110 mana.

What support gems would actually work on this gem?
Apart from Mana Reduction.

I tried Concentrated Effect, but no luck.
Looking at the exact wording/meaning, it seems that Area Damage = direct AoE damage effect of skills like Firestorm or the Novas, Cleave as well, not sure about Molten Shell or the Minion explosions.

Other than linking Mana Reduction there's only the Inner Force keystone cluster to grab, if we'd want more out of this? (and Wrath & Hatred, respectively).
I'm not including Elemental Damage boosting effects, since they're a no-brainer.
The classes that would probably benefit the most by Inner Force like Shadow, Duelist and Ranger are like 20-25 nodes away from that keystone.
That's a tough call to get more synergy into the mix.

tl;dr
I'm looking for more options to add meaningful support gems here other than Mana Reduction (same for Wrath and Hatred).
Maybe I'm just missing something?