Debuffs are too similar and too imbalanced

[Zarono]

as everyone knows, poison is overpowered with it’s shtick buffing itself for every extra stack making volume = power with a couple of very over the top unique weapon options.

plague usually just comes along for the ride to support poison and make it even better.

Ignite is just a worse poison that doesn’t gain extra bonus damage per stack, and requires you devote most of your item slots to improving it’s chance/duration/damage to get as many stacks on as quickly as possible before you inevitably get splattered across the floor because most of your build is uniques with no defense stats.

then theres the spreading flames debuff which is just an even worse burn because (to the best of my knowledge) it doesn’t stack while it’s only merit is it spreads on its own, which is nice and all for the story when things will die to 1 or 2 stacks of a dot, but it’s not even a threat to anything in monoliths or arena.

frostbite is a cool idea, but it gets no support outside of whatever talent tree it pops up on, and even if it did it’d still only be as good as burn.

shock deals no damage over time, of course, but it’s resist shred is typically useful for the builds that can apply it in a high eough volume to matter. as long as it applies to anyone doing elemental damage to that target once multiplayer goes live, i’m sure a lightning sorc or other assorted shock builds will find their way into the meta.

bleed is only super viable in minion builds running onos tull chest piece and while that’s nice and all, minion builds have their own issues with survivaing due to the descision to put stats towards their pets to actually deal damage, or putting stats into their own defense, and thus their pets die and do no damage (TL;Dr on this one: bleeds are only useful in minon builds which have their own problems to contend with right now)

the other assorted Dots and debuffs are likewise super niche with no support outside of the tree’s they appear in (time rot is an example)

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my suggestions to address this imbalance would be to leave poison as is and use it as a standard of power.

combine burn and spreading flames such that burn will always spread by default, and enemies can have as many stacks spread to them as the guy with the most stacks.

make frostbite gain damage the lower the enemies health gets (and make it scale pretty good, or give it better item support)

shock could be made to last indefinitely (if it doesn’t already, the tooltips don’t say it has a duration)

Bleeds could grant more direct power to the character that applied them (like a frenzy buff that occurs more often or is stronger against high health targets)

and so on in this vein.

[Lera]

I’m not sure if that even possible to balance poison with this mechanic. I’m assuming a problem since if you build all possible poison sources, that probably will always best choice, any hybrid build will weaker. So if devs will make hybrid build OK, then full-poison will OP, and if full-poison will OK, then hybrid will irrelevant.

[Llama8]

Pretty much, though they could also add in a diminishing returns on the increased damage per stack modifiers so it gives less benefit at higher stacks without gimping it’s effect (too much) at low stacks (as I have mentioned before & given an example).

Edit: If we had all the numbers in order to put together some bounds on hits per second for the player and pets, then you could do some analysis on what poison is capable of and the effect of various nerfs.

[Zarono]

well they could just make it to where poison can’t be extended to last past 4 seconds, which would always limit the amount of stacks that could exist at once (although this might not be adequate in multiplayer is everyone goes poison)

[XLVI_carpo]

@Zarono

frostbite is a cool idea, but it gets no support outside of whatever talent tree it pops up on, and even if it did it’d still only be as good as burn.

This I would argue. Frostbite also has good damage potential and can be utilized with Morditas reach very well (see skurge’s shatterstrike spellblade on the ladder)

Imho poison has to be nerfed. It’s absolutely ok when there are high damage dot builds, but the way poison outperforms every other build is not healthy for build diversity. It’s also very simple to build. Even classes that don’t have any synergy skills with poison can make poison build only with 1-2 mandatory items.

Full dot builds should only be viable with the corresponding classes and their specific skills that enable them.

[Zarono]

i get that feel, but i’m on team anti nerf and would rather just see everything else be buffed to the level of poison, but i also would like to avoid a situation where a dot based build is the only viable way to progress so certainly tuning needs to be done, another issue to contend with the idea of infinitely scaling difficulties is the fact that the current array of dots and debuffs have a “base damage” that is independant of your characters actual stats, like ignite always does 40 damage or whatever over 3 seconds instead of dealing something like 4xIntellect (for int classes) per second for 1x attunement seconds, or something like that which would scale better to not be game breaking early, but still be viable and supportable later, but that’s getting into a version of the game we aren’t quite to yet.