I’ll preface with my opinions on glancing blow overall. My view of GB is that it’s your first defensive goal with a character as you approach mid and end game. Other ARPGs make you have to cap your resistances (75%, 80%, whatever it is in your favorite ARPG) and then start increasing your health. With protections being unbounded GB is the first thing you have to “cap” as you start fighting harder content. Late game the defense to cap is crit avoidance.
For all of my characters it has always felt like an achievement when I get to that 100% glancing blow chance. Some characters get really good ‘of deflection’ drops and I can get there early with some idols. Most characters I have to scrape together various ‘Enduring’ items until I get there. However, it always feels like I’m working toward a very real and impactful defensive goal for the character as I enter monoliths and arena.
Back to the topic at hand. 0.7.9 introduced a lot of great new uniques. Spoilers ahead: The first you’ll encounter is from the final boss of the first timeline. Woven Flesh - health, leech, and a MASSIVE amount of glancing blow available at level 51. One level after Enduring items start dropping. With this chest all that’s needed is one well rolled ‘of Deflection’ suffix or a high rolled GB idol to get capped.
In my opinion this being so easy to obtain combined with the just how strong GB is in general and the high value of 85% glancing blow trivializes the midgame defensive goal of capping your GB.
I’d understand if the devs don’t see GB in the same light that I’ve mentioned, but for me this unique causes a lot of frustration. I’d love to see the value of GB be reduced to 50%, or even have a range of 40-85% to at least make you feel extremely fortunate if you manage to get a high rolled version of the unique.
This is definitely a very strong unqiue for the early endgame, but sacrificing body armour slot is a huge opportunity cost, since alot of the class affixes (and some other general very strong) come from body armour.
Don’t overestimate the rest of it’s stat, all the other stats are decent but espcially the % health roll is almost negligible. The unique itself does not even have regular life leech and overkill damage lifeleech is somethin not every build can utility effeciently.
Depending on your loot and crafting luck this item may serve it’s purpose way into the late 80’s 90’s, but is not worth a slot for ultiamte endgame.
I am not sure how rare it is, but since it’s target farmable it should be at least decently rare
I think Glancing Blow is a horrible system, so having a baseline unique that you have to sacrifice your chest slot for that helps you get around that system before getting better gear so you can swap the chest out is fine.
It allows new players to have this item they can just put on if they’re not having luck with gear, considering 100% GB is mandatory for late game.
Yes, but that’s only for certain builds (channeling skills) and has the risk of not working while you’re moving / not channeling. It’s also not given to every character at level ~50-55. I think Liath’s Signet is actually a good example of an item with some tradeoff to it.
I’m curious to know how you feel about resistances in other games such as PoE or Grim Dawn, etc. My experience in those has been that having your resistances capped becomes mandatory to enter late game as well. Do you feel similarly that resistance capping, with enemy damage being balanced around the player having capped resistances, is also a horrible system?
I don’t like this item very much. In SSF you equip this, stack protections from other gear and you just blast through the timelines with any decent dmg build.
Just curious how you feel about defense milestones in other aRPG’s.
GB is a more streamlined system than capping out X amount of different resistances. While 100% is your goal, the GB makes you tankier with every little bit of GB than you stack, so while preparing for endgame, in the process of increasing your GB you have easier gear managmenet compared to PoE or Grim Dawn were you have loads of different resistances. Which IMO feels more like a “Loot Management Game” and is far more tedious.
I really like that LE offers similar different ways for defensive options compared to other aRPG’s while LE’s protection system is way less oppressing
In Poe to be capped on res how many items do you need ?
With full T1 res affixes ? 3 ? 3 and a half ? So the rest can be focused on damage and some life/Es and so on. Plus you have 6 affixes on items not 4. But this lead to other problems.
Plus Poe has only 4 res stats you need to cap, sometimes 3.
In LE you have 7 res stats to cap + GB + dodge +block + crit avoidance, etc…
They are so many stats to take into account that, and it’s only my opinion, the majority of your gear stats has to have defensive stats.
Not saying that it is a bad thing it’s just a different way of managing your gear.
And now there is a new item that helps with GB very much. I’m very excited about this and will try to make a build around it.
I really love these kind of mechanics.
Recently there was a thread about uniques being to underpowered. Now heres a really nice one.
And I don’t see it being op. Like somebody else said, it’s lacking other stats. There is a tradeoff when you use this item. And you have to gear very differently.
I really like this particular new item.
To get it you have to put some hours into monolith. You propably won’t get it right away with a fresh toon that just beat the story. You need a bunch of GB already to beat the Abomination.
I dislike defense milestones in most ARPGs, tbh. In Last Epoch, it especially bothers me as we only have 4 affixes per item. I would much rather have interesting and impactful choices with those affixes rather than one stat eating 3-5 of them every build.
It definitely doesn’t trivialize GB, and there are heaps of builds that use powerful affixes only available on Chest and Helm, like damage dealt to mana before health for mage as an example. It also requires a perfect roll 15% GB suffix on an item to really cut down on the affix slots.
To clarify, I’m not worried it will trivialize GB in endgame. As you and others have said it’s missing a lot of stats that you can get on a well rolled and crafted rare/exalted. I just think it provides too much power for how early and how reliably you can get it.
I’m actually a really big fan of how many different ways you can build defenses in LE compared to GD and PoE. High hp vs low hp + prots vs high ward vs hybrid etc etc. GB is just the one constant.
As far as gearing goes and being able to make impactful choices I think the introduction of the new armor/void prot set affix and necrotic/poison prot affix help with that a lot. It’s not so clear cut on what affixes you want to use where and you might have to shuffle around where your set GB affixes are to accommodate them.
I’ve not got that far yet, but how easy is it to kill the Abomination at lvl 55 (or close to it if you start your monolith run at 55) rather than at 90+ which I assume most people who did it were at?
I went into mono at 48 and didn’t have any trouble, but I already knew what to expect from the fight since I’d completed it on other high level characters first. I wouldn’t say a new player without a handle on crafting would be able to do the same, but the point is that it’s relatively doable if you craft up some gear.
I’ll play SSF in the coming weeks and see how it feels on a fresh character. It’s possible I’m overblowing the issue and it’s not realistic to kill the abomination without having already capped GB. I don’t think this is the case, but I’ll test it out
Not necessarily, there are channeled abilities which allow you to move, but I do aggree that the conditionality makes it a bit more balanced. Not to mention, It takes a ring slot which has access to almost all affixes compared to other slots making it more valuable.
You can’t really say that because there are way too many easy to make builds that can kill it relatively easy on top of the fact that you can create some of these characters in 5-8hrs of gameplay tops.
And even if you say that new players would not be able to make those very strong early endgame characters, if that is the case, they will likely not yet understand the value of glancing blow and wouldn’t know to rush to that item.
Just a little venting here…I like POE’s passive “Glancing blows”, but I have never liked nor really understood why glancing blows is in this game as an affix. The game in my opinion already suffers from a limited number of affixes per item. And I feel restricted as a result. I have 2 unique items on my FG, that leaves me with 36 affixes to customize my character. I currently have had to dedicate 7 of those remaining affixes to get GB to 100% Then they dropped “crit reduction” on us and that is considered a must have as well. To me this is approaching Grim Dawn territory in terms of complexity for “complexity’s sake” damage types/damage reduction types.
They keep dropping shiny new “rare affixes” to look for but we don’t get more affix slots to incorporate them into our builds, and with ‘mandatory’ stats like Glancing Blow and Crit Reduction it takes the shine off these rare affixes a little bit (in my opinion).
Namely just one right?(correct me if i am wrong) Warpath, which is definitely one of skills that can utilize Liath’s Signet in any build.
For all other skills you just can’t slap that ring on and facetank everything you need more defensives + sustain.
But yes agreed, everything that is situational is always more balanced, for some builds that utilize the said “situational thing” it doesnt matter htat much, but generally you need to put a little bit more effort in the whole build as a whole.
As i said, i am ok with the Wovel Flesh unqiue, it might could get the GB nerfed a little bit so you need 1 or 2 more GB affixes on other gear to get to the 100%.
What i do like about that unique is, that the rest of the GB cna be easily achieved via “normal GB affix” and not the set affixes.
As strong set affixes are, they can be a little bit tedious for the transition phase from midgame - > early endgame, because they start being really worthwilhe after more than 1 or 2 items.
