Works like a carnival ride, right? 
I agree with Llama8 here, I think giving the classes themselves a defensive identity is the way to go. Sentinel focuses on armor, shield block, & maybe phy resist. Could get bonuses in these areas no other class gets. Same for the Mage, maybe greater focus on ward and elemental resists to go along with greater mobility options.
Now the classes to some degree already get these said options, but I mean going even greater into these areas with bonuses not otherwise obtainable other than unique/legendary gear. For example, the Paladin gets a natural 15% damage reduction on block for physical and fire damage types from the passive tree. Gets miffed someone scratched his shiny new shield and get damage buff on next attack after block while reducing cooldown on shield bash by 1 second or something etcâŚ
The idea is to make these things noticeable and class defining. Most on kill effects are not noticed outside of movement speed and on kill effects in general are bad passive choices to give classes in most cases. These all should be changed to on hit, on block, on dodge, on crit, so on and so forth. I know I for one donât want to spend precious points on passives that wonât work on the boss that doesnât spawn adds to kill and proc it. On kill effects should only be on weapons and gear for the most part.
I also agree with Lizardirl post on defenses other than maybe the point on mob penetration. Game is in serious need of end game item lure at the moment. Its pretty easy to max out and all you have is rare chest/helm affixes(way too rare), and exalted items(might be too rare as well, or at least too many low level ones drop).
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Thereâs many aspects to defining a class identity as it relates to stats
- Available passives
- Available skills
- Opportunity costs
- Scaling
The first two are somewhat there. The defense rework had an impact on the last two and to be fair, some of the problems existed before the rework. Thereâs very little opportunity cost built into defensive stats. Double that up with scaling issues and it becomes monotone. Maxing resistances is relatively easy to do and you donât get punished for it because youâre still able to invest in other defensive stats because 1) defensive stats are mixed between prefix and suffix - you can easily max non-elemental resistances and not pay the price since other defensive stats are in the suffix slots, and 2) everything except HP is hard capped or soft capped.
The counterargument is to consider offensive/utility affixes. You can max out all your defenses hard capped or soft capped, but what price are you paying via the offensive/utility affixes? How many build defining uniques can you wear? The conversation moves away from defensive stat balance to stat balance in general. Hard cap your resistances/crit avoidance, soft cap your armor/dodge -> how many slots does that take that could otherwise have gone to offensive affixes?
The somewhat easiest solution is to separate out prefix and suffix into offense and defense to force players to choose which stats to invest in. Probably brings in other problems to resolve though.
So is the question how many affixes should be dedicated to offense and defense? Should it be a 50/50 split? Should players be forced by game systems to go 80% defense? Iâm not sure the answer myself, but curious to hear other peoples opinions. How do you make mobs challenging enough offensively and defensively while giving people complete freedom on how to build their character is a problem Iâm glad I donât have to tackle lol.
On kill effects are fine generally, but useless on bosses. PoE solved this by adding to each âon killâ effect a secondary trigger of â% on hit vs rare/unique enemyâ. So that the node/skill wasnât useless where it is needed most, against bosses.
I think thatâs where Lizardâs feedback comes into play. It seems the balance isnât there one way or another.
I hate on kill effects. Every time I see one the first thing that comes to mind is âhow often is this useless to me?â The second is âI cannot make a build that relies on this.â This is why I donât use many of them.
As an aside, Erasing Strike is the worst offender ever. Almost its entire tree is either modifications to an on kill effect or adding on kill effects.
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Again there are some nice ideas in here but I still think number tweaks will do the trick.
As far as I understand pen it counts vs your resis no matter if these are 75% or overcapped at 150%. Shouldânt everyone be fine by overcapping the resis by area level? ^^
Yeah I was fine with the 75% resists, but giving every enemy 75% resist penetration⌠Thatâs just awful. It feels awful, you do not feel tanky, you donât feel like you have any defense or mitigation at all. Itâs really terrible. What you should ACTUALLY do is make it so that the default cap is 75%, you can give some special enemies some penetration, but on average you donât have penetration everywhere.
NOT ONLY THAT, but hereâs the big problem with POE who basically use this system. 75% is mandatory, it is the mandatory minimum defensive layer. And it feels awful, you canât really over gear your defense in a meaningful way besides a very few builds, if you want to play a tankier build. I would say, that in this system, make it so that the average amount of resists needed for a build to survive long enough to do its damage and get by is about 50%. But keep the cap at 75%. This way, if people want to invest MORE into defense at the cost of some offense, they can, if that feels good to them or interest them.
So in general cap resists at 75%, make the minimum resists you really need to get by 50% or so, make it so that everything just having a ton of penetration goes away, because thatâs honestly awful and when I saw that I had a SERIOUS âWTF were they thinkingâ moment. Like I was convinced that this was some way that I was missing the meaning and that it wouldnât interact that way, but no, it does, and thatâs terrible.
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Please check what they posted about resistances and the area penetration:
One of the main reasons that we have avoided this system in the past is that having uncapped resistances is very punishing. It provides this knowledge gate for players that is often a hard learned lesson. The rate at which being uncapped affects the damage you take is also fairly unintuitive. Being even 25% below the cap will cause you to take double damage compared to someone at cap. It feels like you should only take 25% more damage but itâs actually 100% more. To counteract this, enemies have a 1% resistance penetration per level, scaling up to 75%. This resistance penetration is applied after the cap. This means that at level 75 and above, being 25% below capped resistance will only cause you to take 25% more damage. Damage dealt by all enemies has been reduced across the board with this new scaling in mind.
The area penetration was put in place precisely to counter act what you just described: making reaching the resist cap mandatory.
75% resist cap and being at 50% resist:
-
Traditional system: you take 100% more damage being 25% below the resist cap.
-
LEâs system: you take 25% more damage being 25% below the resist cap.
Hereâs the equation as I understand it to be:
Letâs say a mob deals 1,000 damage
Damage taken is the following: damage - (damage x resist)
Old system: 1000 - (1000 x 75%) = 250
You have 50% resist. Youâre 25% below the resist cap: 1000 (1000 x 50%) = 500 damage taken
You went from taking 250 damage with 75% resist to taking 500 damage with 50% resist. Youâre below 25% the resist cap, but in reality you take 100% more damage.
LEâs system: 1000 - (1000 x [75% - 75%]) = 1000 damage
You have 50% resist. Below 25% the resist cap: 1000 - (1000 x [50% - 75%]) = 1250 damage taken
You went from taking 1000 damage with 75% resist to taking 1250 damage with 50% resist. Youâre below 25% the resist cap, but in reality you take 25% more damage.
The percentage reduction stays true in LEâs system. You see in your sheet that you are at 50% resist instead of 75% resist. Right away you should think you take 25% more damage and that holds true for LEâs system. In the traditional system in reality you take 100% more damage just being below 25% the cap.
But if you look at the absolute numbers then you can argue youâd rather take 250 damage in the traditional system instead of the 1000 damage you take with LEâs system. But they also said this:
Damage dealt by all enemies has been reduced across the board with this new scaling in mind.
This means that technically maxing out your resistances isnât mandatory. You can theoretically have no resistances and only take 75% more damage. In the old system if you had no resistances at all, you took 300% more damage. Taking 1000 damage with max resist would mean 250 damage. 1000 damage (true damage) is a 300% increase from taking 250 damage if you had maxed out your resists. Taking 300% more damage in any game is really terrible. Taking 100% more damage by being 25% below the cap is really terrible. With LEâs system you take 75% more damage by being 75% below the cap (0%).
Hope that makes sense. Never been good at explaining things.
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Yeaaaaaaah, thatâs all completely irrelevent given the whole part where I said âbalance around 50% being the expected amount of resâ SO all of your math is invalid unfortunately. While itâs true that resistances and damage reduction actually scale in a non-intuitive manner, the point Iâm making is, DONâT MAKE THE BARE MINIMUM BAR FOR SURVIVAL THE MAX ATTAINABLE SURVIVAL STATS. Make it in this point 66% of the max, that way, everyone can hit 50% those who want a more defensive style can go for 75%. (adjust the values on gear accordingly).
I donât care about a knowledge gap. I really donât. People will do one of 2 things based on decades of experience. One group of people will learn about all the mechanics and really increase their knowledge. The other group of people will happily play in complete ignorance figuring it out as they go if they bother to figure it out, not playing an optimized build, and generally just doing their own thing. There may be a small group of people who immediately quit, but Iâll be honest those type of people are probably not the type of people to pick up this game in the first place.
Itâs not a knowledge gap. Itâs a reading comprehension gap. My response is a direct response to your ââŚbut giving every enemy 75% penetration⌠Thatâs just awful.â I just directly proved your statement wrong. What feels awful is taking double damage being only 25% below the cap. Taking 25% more damage for being 25% below the cap doesnât feel bad. 50% > 25%.
You said make the default cap 75% without area penetration, but normalized at 50%. Which if done means you are advocating for a system where youâre heavily punished for not having max resistances. If you cap resist at 75% but make it such that you only really need 50% means that damage is trivialized for people who decide to max out resists.
And that doesnât even get to the fact that your suggestion to normalize damage at 50% can be done with or without the area penetration LE put in place. So yes, what I explained is relevant as your suggestion can exist with or without area penetration.
Hereâs a simpler way to explain things: area penetration was put in place to make it so that you donât HAVE to max out resists. You can play the game at 50% if you so wish to. If max resist is required in the current patch, it means damage numbers in general are too high. They havenât adjusted the numbers enough to function with the area penetration changes. You identified the problem but donât understand the math so you came to the wrong conclusion.
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The problem is what point they balance the damage around. If damage is balanced for people having max res, then having less than that is a problem. If damage is balanced around no resist, then every point of resist is a benefit.
They need to balance around no resists and just make resist very much harder to get. Make it impossible to cap all the resists. Then get rid of penetration scaling with zone level. Make penetration a rare random roll for monsters.
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I am pretty sure EHG will try to balance around â0 resistanceâ (taking enemy penetration into account), for the later parts of the game.
The penetration of mobs does scale in a linearly up, as you progress the game.
And being not capped (resolving in getting into negative resis for mobs in lvl 75+ areas) does increase the damage you take, compared to what devs balance around, but it is still less punishing than in other similar games.
Maybe the general mobs damage output is not perfect yet, but the whole defense change is still pretty new, i am sure the devs will work something out.
I personally think the area penetration idea is brilliant. Every point of resist is equal in value. Every percent you add is another percent of damage reduction. Nothing wonky like taking double damage because youâre only 25% below max resist. Getting rid of penetration would put LE right in line with other games with resistance systems. Grim dawn is a primary example of this. You HAVE to max out resists and even get increase to max resist stats if you want to survive. It doesnât matter at what point you normalize damage at (50%? Max?) because no matter where you normalize the damage, each point of resist is that much more valuable.
What they need to worry about is the damage numbers in general. Did they adjust it enough that the difficulty level didnât go up as a result of implementing area penetration? Defensive scalability and identity is also another issue.
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The penetration scaling is there only to force people to waste slots on resists. If not for the penetration, gearing resists would be an actual choice. If resist is too easy to get, like GB in the past, then people will spend the slots on it.
Get rid of the penetration scaling so that getting resists is an actual choice. Increase the cost of resists (make each slot give much less resist) making it much harder to cap.
At that point, resists become an actual choice to gear and some may choose to go another direction.
**everyone complaining that âtaking 100% more damage from being only 25% below maxâ are basing that on the starting point of max resist. Someone with 50% resist instead of 75% resist is still far better off than someone with 0 resist. Resist systems are about preventing damage. You donât start at the assumption of max resist.
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I know where you wanting to go. Very similar to the âold systemâ, where you had no âclear goalâ and it was a build choice âhow farâ you go in terms of mitigation by âprotectionsâ
With the new patch having âclear goalsâ, has both advantages and disadvantages.
I would agree on making it a bit harder to get resistances. But the âclear goalâ thing is also something that is nice.
We only need to have more build variety/build decisions after reaching those goals.
3 Likes
I actually prefer resists being percentage based and having a cap. I very much like the current system. I think the implementation in LE is not great.
I liked the old system too because of build choices, but the system was very abusable and worse than the system we have now.
I want a medium. I want percentage based resists that have a cap. I want resists to matter though. When you decide to spend precious gear slots on resists, it is at the cost of something else. The penetrations scaling currently just forces people to use slots to get back to even. I think that is not great.
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Because the very nature of a percent based system is to max out resists. If youâre at 74% resist with the max at 75%, you take 4% more damage. Even if you somehow normalize damage such that getting by with 50% resist is the norm, characters that do max out resists will be at a greater advantage because each point of resist reduces that much more damage and thatâs where it starts trivializing content. Damage is no longer a concern. If the system is set up that youâre ok with taking 500 damage from a 1000 damage hit, taking 250 damage with max resist is going to be much more valuable no matter what the environment is.
Because in that environment, you can get by with 500 damage hits incoming, but why not take half that damage with every hit taking 250 hp from you? You can take two hits and take the same amount of damage than the person taking one hit. If you have 1000 HP, you can take 4 hits until you die with max resists. With 50% resist you take 2 hits to die. With 2000 HP you take 8 hits to die with max resist, 4 hits to die with 50% resist. You can have 5000 HP - 20 hits to die with max resist; 10 hits to die with 50% resist. And thatâs just at face value. Factor in HP regen and HP leech and the ability to stay alive with more hits incoming means you stay alive longer to let regeneration and leech come into play. Itâs not just a one to one comparison. Being able to take more hits and prolong your life gives you more opportunity to gain back your HP and take more hits.
The penetration scaling is not there to force people to waste slots on resists. I donât know why people canât understand the penetration system. Itâs there so each percent of damage reduction is what it states it is. You increase your resistance by 1%, you take 1% less damage, not 4%. Without penetration and under the traditional system, you ARE forced to waste slots on resists because for each percent of resist youâre missing, youâre taking a higher percentage of damage. 1% missing and you take 4% more damage. 25% missing and you take 100% more damage. 75% missing and you take 300% more damage. Itâs very simple, basic math and to say otherwise flies against what the math tells us.
Like I said to the other person, yaâll understand the problem, but donât understand the math so you come up with the complete opposite solution. You want resist to become an actual choice to gear. Taking away penetration does the opposite of that - it makes resist not an actual choice to gear, it makes it mandatory because you take greater and greater amounts of damage the more resist you miss. Conversely, if damage is normalized below the max resist, each percent of resist you can gain is still above the value of itâs number. 74% to 75% is a 1% increase in face value, but a 4% decrease in damage taken.
Without area penetration: 1% resist = 4% damage reduction
With area penetration: 1% resist = 1% damage reduction
Do the math. 4 > 1. Each percent of resist without area penetration is more efficient. More efficient means higher value. Higher value means higher priority.
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No. 50% resist should not be the ânormâ. Capped resist should not be the ânormâ. Resists also do not exist in a vacuum. Resists need to be taken at the expense of other defense systems. Currently, why even have resists at all? Penetration negates having resist, so just scrap them both. The system SHOULD be;
Choose 5 of the following to specialize in;
- Fire Resist
- Cold Resist
- Lightning Resist
- Void Resist
- Poison Resist
- Necrotic Resist
- Physical Resist
- Armour
- Health
- Ward
- Dodge
- Block
The ones you choose to not âspecializeâ in, will not get anywhere near âcapâ. It shouldnât be that you get nothing in the others, but maybe since you arenât specifically working to maximize them, they are only able to get to about 20% effectiveness.
I see defenses like making a D&D character. You WANT 18 in all your attributes, but you canât. You have to choose which you want high and which you want low. If you want to buff one above average, you have to reduce another below average.
Right now, resists are a foregone conclusion that just reduces build diversity. Pointlessly takes up affix slots. The fact that having max resists means less in this game only makes resists more pointless. Calculations have already been done on how someone can just slam all Health and come out just as good, if not better. The MAIN complaint about the old protections system was that it was inferior to other defense systems. That didnât change. They only really fixed what could be abused by the old system.