Dotcap and dot build scaling needs to be rethinked.

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VoidWhisperer42#5989 wrote:

I honestly think they did a great job balancing DOT builds, and I believe it was done on purpose. The DOT archetype is already pretty strong compared to other build types, especially early on. Once you apply your DOT, you’re essentially free to roam, dodge, and focus on positioning without having to worry about maintaining your damage. That uptime is huge, it allows you to keep hitting your enemies while staying mobile and avoiding danger.

It feels like this was a purposeful design choice to make DOT builds more accessible and efficient in the early game. Another reason DOTs are so appealing is that, while they require more gear to truly cap out damage, they deliver solid results early on for relatively little investment. That’s why they’re such a go-to for players starting the league, they get cheap, effective damage that carries them through content. You can rush through the game, then swap to a more high-end build once you’ve cleared everything.

With DOTs, you can get consistent, tanky gameplay while not having to micromanage downtime, making them perfect for rushing through content and then upgrading to something with insane damage scaling.

I agree and also, while u maybe can't scale ur damage anymore at a certain point, u can still scale ur movement speed and defenses.
A speedy character that's also very tanky and has 37mil dps is a very solid character that can do almost all content in the game.

Elementalist maybe isn't the best defensive option for that tho.

afaik dot cap is a technical limitation in the code, didnt jonathan talk about it on a podcast years ago? i forget, but i dont think its a choice its just how it has to be.



i think 35 mil dps is enough tbh.




i tend to agree with the idea that they cant make significant balance changes. the community riots and its really bad for the games health in so many ways. anything that could even be perceived as a nerf is endtimes, thats the sad world we find ourselves in.



and maybe its not all bad, poe1 exists because people like it the way it is. theres a new game for new ideas and massive changes, this game is about people who have spent 12 years enjoying it to keep enjoying the game they have been playing. change is needed to stay fresh and alive but massive changes have improved the game and made it more appealing to some but also ruined the game for others, confused, bloated and turned away people, alienated returning players. theres ups and downs to big change and i think theres credit in the idea that we have poe2 for the big changes, thats why it exists, and we have poe1 for the people who want the game to be the way they game has been.



maybe its not wrong to keep a 12 year game for who like it actually like it as it is and for new ideas to go into new games, be that poe2 or people leaving to start new ideas where they are allowed to be devs who make games rather than caretakers of an old idea some people still love.

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

i tend to agree with the idea that they cant make significant balance changes. the community riots and its really bad for the games health in so many ways. anything that could even be perceived as a nerf is endtimes, thats the sad world we find ourselves in.

How is this even remotely true? Hexblast got completely destroyed. Top tier melee skills like Lightning Strike and Frost Blades were nerfed to hell. Detonate Dead has been nerfed multiple times now. Where the riots at?

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Johny_Snow#4778 wrote:

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

i tend to agree with the idea that they cant make significant balance changes. the community riots and its really bad for the games health in so many ways. anything that could even be perceived as a nerf is endtimes, thats the sad world we find ourselves in.

How is this even remotely true? Hexblast got completely destroyed. Top tier melee skills like Lightning Strike and Frost Blades were nerfed to hell. Detonate Dead has been nerfed multiple times now. Where the riots at?

but thats micro, an individual skill change that is met with some dooming but generally gets through. its end times for a small group of hexblast enthusiasts and some may quit but theyre not significant.


when they make big changes like nerfing all more multipliers on gems across the board there was outrage, chris had to go on emergency interviews, acknowledged they lost 1/3 of the player base and try to calm things. then chris was hounded endlessly every after for destroying the game with his vision etc.



you need changes to skils like that to keep the meta fresh, keep the game moving and interesting. but i would make a distinction between we nerfed 3 skills + buffed this other bunch vs completely rebalancing the game, changing all the mechanics unwriting every skill to fundamentally change the larger picture of skills and supports etc.

you could 'fix' issues by making every build that does 300 million damage now do 30 million by changing scaling numbers across the board. then the dot cap works fine in the context of the game, then you need to rebalance all monster life but also take into account scaling through acts etc, its a massive task. the game would probably be in a better state if they did that but it might just be a new game in some ways and i think its too big a risk.

Isn't this exactly what they are planning to do now? There is talk about "destroying the Atlas", might be a foreshadowing about an entirely reworked endgame, probably something like what PoE 2 has

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Johny_Snow#4778 wrote:

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

i tend to agree with the idea that they cant make significant balance changes. the community riots and its really bad for the games health in so many ways. anything that could even be perceived as a nerf is endtimes, thats the sad world we find ourselves in.

How is this even remotely true? Hexblast got completely destroyed. Top tier melee skills like Lightning Strike and Frost Blades were nerfed to hell. Detonate Dead has been nerfed multiple times now. Where the riots at?

Forced meta shifts aren't anything like the scale we are talking about and plenty of people still complained about those it was just a subset though as isolated instead of general.

Also while Hexblast was neutered it should never have been there in the first place when they reworked it the second time and LS/FB are still pretty good they didn't get nerfed to hell at all despite the hyperbole of PoE posters.

Realistically nerfs this league were extremely tame borderline non-existent. I think splitting steel not returning and hexblast are the only actually relevant (numerically) ones.

The scale of change they are talking about is potentially even beyond the exalt / div switch, which kind of changed everyone's interaction with the game at a fundamental level. NOT a simple, typical league skill rebalancing. Those types of changes don't actually effect the GAME at all....they only effect the people who played those skills and want to play them exactly the same post-nerf. A teeny tiny portion of the player base.

I also agree that it is likely impossible to do at this point, without alienating too much of the playerbase to the point of total game destruction. They would need to be okay with taking significant profit losses for a decently long period of time before they can even consider changes on that scale. And that likely won't ever happen because they are a company. Plus, PoE 2 was created almost for that exact reason: they couldn't make the changes to the existing game, so they made them in a new game.

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

How is this even remotely true? Hexblast got completely destroyed. Top tier melee skills like Lightning Strike and Frost Blades were nerfed to hell. Detonate Dead has been nerfed multiple times now. Where the riots at?

It was nerfed because it scaled top high at certain thresholds. There are people still playing it. - lightning strike