I think some things need to be nerfed though, for example, poison is just so much more powerfull than the other DoTs by virtue of it’s 8% increased damage taken per stack:
As you can see, at 1,000 stacks (probably not achieveable), poison would be doing 2.8m damage per second compared to 40k/48k for Ignite & Bleed. Even at 200 stacks, poison does 119k per sec compared to 8k & 9.6k. Does that not look like it should get a cap of some sort?
Path of Exile has a belt called Headhunter that is phenominally powerful, but that’s kinda ok since it’s also incredibly hard to get hold of so very few people have it & it doesn’t distort the meta too much. But while most classes can use Poison, only pet classes can apply so many more stacks and thus do so much more damage per second.
No i do not think poison needs a cap, it just needs to be balanced. They already reduced it from 10% to 8% im sure it will probly fall a little bit more, that or they will give bleed/ignite some sort of its own bonus. Yeah sure minions/companions can lay down lots of poison/bleed but i dont see any wolves running around with 90k ward. Should we cap ward to? no we balance it. You introduce caps and your telling people “this is what you must get to to be good”
Potatoe/potatoe. Caps are one way of balancing something & personally I’d either reduce the per stack % a lot or put a cap on that, since that is the problem (capping the per stack bonus would also not impact the more “casual” side of things that don’t go nuts on poison stacks).
Caps aren’t “this is what you must get to be good”, they’re “beyond this is too powerful”.
I’ve mentioned elsewhere that the other DoTs need their own unique mechanical differences to make them more interesting/different.
Edit: And reducing it from 10% to 8% is a pretty small change. 100 stacks would go down from 38.5k to 31.5k per sec.
I also thought that they could apply the ward decay formula (kinda) such that higher stacks of poison give a smaller bonus. That would be a more elegant & tapered solution.
No its not cause thats only 10%
My point is they didn’t want to do a hard nerf so they only did 2% knowing they might have to go more down the road.
I just dont believe in caps. No one wants to go to work and be told hey bud if you make 50 in tips your not getting paid anymore by the hour but you still gotta be here.
I did say my preferred fix would be diminishing returns on the per-stack bonus. Ideally either an exponential or logarithmic one where you get a smooth transition from high bonus at low stacks to low bonus at high stacks.
My preference would probably be the purple version below.
Still gets you 235% more damage (compared to bleed) at 50 stacks (currently you’d get 265%), 395% more damage at 100 stacks (currently 556%) but it’s not quite as bonkers.
So if they did that and gave the other dots some mechanical buffs (eg, bleed reduced damage the bleeding mob deals per stack, diminishing returns, ingite increases damage taken by other fire/elemental damage also diminishing returns) that would help to bring the other dots into line with poison.
A global “speed limit” is lazy design and essentially would show that the developers do not understand the levers they can adjust in their game to fix problem builds.
The coolest parts of games like this is the silly amount of combinations that are possible and the discovery aspect of finding these strong synergies.
If DPS or damage output or monster life loss was limited, it takes away a fair bit of the satisfaction of finding these powerful synergies as the game then becomes, what is necessary to hit the limit rather than how strong can I be? It becomes a goalpost and makes any choices past hitting that goalpost meaningless.
Yes having the OP part of a build nerfed stinks as many people will lean on this OP node or piece to the build and prop themselves up on it since the skill is doing the work rather than having decent gear or anything behind them as a backbone. Losing this does stink but can be necessary for the future health of the game especially if there are changes they want to make and have an infinitely scaling survival mode
I think it depends how it’s handled. If it’s just slapped on such that any half-way competent build can hit it then yes, it would be a lazy way to fix a problem. But if it’s set such that only a few would hit it then that’s much less of an issue.
Also, sometimes caps are put in to protect other parts of the game, such as client/server sync (Sacred 2 had a movement speed cap so that the player couldn’t move fast enough to cause desync with the server).
Thats a very fair point, I guess my main concern is if this were implemented on monsters damage taken / damage output, this would become a disappointing wall.
There can be useful caps put in place. PoE has a resistance cap of 75% base. This is a manditory minimum for all builds to hit. But before recently, players could get a stat to raise this cap even up to 100% (making them immune to that damage type). This wasnt healthy for the game and thus they made a soft cap of 75% and then a hard cap of 90%.
It makes sense to have movement and defensive stats limited. I am shocked that glancing blow and block chance and crit strike avoidance do not have caps. Ideally damage is something id like to see the top end not limited
Glancing blow/crit strike avoidance have an effective cap of 100% (more gives no benefit) & block also has an effective cap (somewhere in the high 70s I think plus an additional ~25% for 4s on Ring of Shields cast).
But none of those can make you immune to damage, Glancing blow “only” reduces damage from hits (not dots) by 50%, crit avoidance “only” allows you to ignore the increased damage from crits & block “only” allows you to use a higher protection figure for damage calculations (again, only against hits, plus you can’t have it permanently against all hits). I view them (glancing blow/crit avoidance) as similar to getting your resists to 75% in PoE, every build should do it if you want to do end-game & end-game is balanced around having them.
Seeing that these stats dont have a cap, its almost obligatory to get to that 100% since they are that powerful. I am surprised the developers hadnt limited this to a lower value since these 2 stats in conjuction are so massively powerful.
But i do see your point, I could see value in defensive limitations but i dont see very much value in offensive limitations like op was describing to avoid collateral damage with nerfs
They do have a cap, 100%. If glancing blow didn’t have a cap, values above 100% would provide more benefit (say, 200% would mean you take 25% damage). Plus there’s a limit to the number of affix slots you can get them on.
The benefit in offensive limitations (ideally diminishing returns) is to have more builds that are capable of reaching, say, within 10% of the top dps number. Then you can gradually buff the under-performing builds so that there are more comparable builds.
We are discussing semantics at this point on the idea of what is considered a cap.
Since more or less every other game has a hard cap of 100% for stats and often has diminishing returns to never allow you to get there, this doesnt actually feel like a cap. I was expecting an effective cap to glancing blow chance at 50% or 75% since then its a choice. But in the current iteration, 3 or 4 pieces with the “set glancing blow” affix gets you to 100% and over easily.
This game is unique in the sense that where over 100% for a stat actually does things. In most other games, If you reach 100% ignite or poison chance, you just poison or ignite with each hit. But nothing over 100%.
I could see the value in diminishing returns but it very much depends on what is being adjusted. The poison calculations/damage should absolutely be scaled via diminishing returns after a certain point.
If they did limit glancing blow/crit avoidance, the game would be spikier (some hits would be glancing & others wouldn’t so those would hit twice as hard, especially if they were a crit!) which wouldn’t feel particularly nice. Plus they’d probably need to reduce the damage output of mobs to compensate for the reduced damage reduction the players can access.
It is another lever for them to pull. I do truely belive that glancing blow/crit avoid is too easy to cap and far too powerful and that other defensive options really pale in comparison since they are diminishing and really only seem to protect a flat amount.
Ideally, id like to see these 2 stats nerfed and the other defensive options brought up to be much more relevant.
