Suggestion for defenses
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I find the solution to be quite simple. GGG simply needs to calm down on the numbers.
This involves itemization, Defenses, Enemy Density, Damage. Everything. They wouldn't need to cap armor and similar if those numbers were more manageable and produced diminishing returns. If a player's armor on average mitigated 30-40% damage then there's no need for the stupid "Little hit" Vs "Big hit" interaction. They can simply make enemies they want to hit hard do so. The same applies to Resistances and Evasion. ES is the odd man out because it's not actually needed. While ES has some interesting interactions it was PoE's way of creating Mana Shield when skills reserved Mana. They no longer do that so Mana Shield should be what they use in PoE2. As mentioned Regen in it's various forms along with the highest base pool you can get is your defense in PoE2. This was also a mistake from PoE1 and why everything has to kill the player in 1.5 seconds. Our regen is off the charts in both games. They're just coping PoE1 without considering the other designs around each mechanic or if they're good designs to copy to begin with. "Never trust floating women." -Officer Kirac
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Kraivan#1745
" I'm largely aware of where Meta currently is, I've only just gotten past my first handful of T15 maps. That's what prompted this type of suggestion for change. I felt pigeon-holed into changing my build because the defenses available to me felt "bad". After asking myself why it feels bad I dug into the background numbers and came up with what "could" be a baseline solution. The game currently is 3 campaign zones with some "end-game bones" super glued to it. " Not really, if your defenses aren't doing their job then regen is pointless. Getting hit for not your health bar is the only time regens even come into play. To do that you have mitigation in its various forms. " Not exactly a form of regen, it's a damage soak that comes off the top before any other resource. It gets replaced by the next instance applied, even if it's less than the previous instance. And in the games current state a pain in the butt to even get consistently. It at best is an outlier stat currently. " I haven't watched that first interview, probably wont bother too. But I'm willing to give GGG the benefit of the doubt that they aren't behind the scenes asking themselves "How do we kill the players?" and more likely asking "What will be difficult to deal with?" Difficulty breeds fun when done correctly, it's a complex issue that requires thinking, skill, and execution to move forward on. "How do we kill the players" isn't a design philosophy. Also the game has a fairly wide audience, not everyone is here to juice maps and get rich. Since that's what your bringing up I would imagine its the piece of the game your most interested in, in which case running Meta makes sense for you. For me though I just like coming home and turning my brain off, my builds whenever I play are almost always off Meta because when I see the passive tree I see possibility. I've still managed to make a screen clearing build, but that's mostly because watching chain reaction damage is fun to watch. As for archetypes it feels like there is a misconception. There isn't a single game where "Tanks" aren't responsible for doing damage as well. If you want to build a "Tank" more power to you, but you need to figure out where to find damage. I've always tried to stick to the 70/30 rule, 70% of my passives increase damage, 30% keep me alive. It's not a hard and fast rule but any more than like 40% into defense nodes and your going to struggle with boss health way before you get to the end game. " Every major boss fight in the game has multiple phases with invincibility built in, and it feels bad. Being told to stop doing damage while the boss monologues and takes pot shots at you is bad. Having to continue doing the standard fight mechanics because the boss AI hasn't registered it hit the 50% health stopping point sucks. I've died a number of times to all of the major campaign bosses because the AI just straight up forgot to move to phase 2 and I wasn't able to do damage. But I hit respawn and tried again, it's just the nature of the game. Xzorn#7046 " Stat capping is only really an end game problem, designing a game from the ground up (I know it isn't fully ground up since it's running essentially off the POE backend) based off how the endgame works is completely backwards. It's been stated that the end game is bare bones. They wanted to get it out because people will get to the end game and want something to do. Since the game is still in Beta actual useful suggestions could wind up in the game. People are treating it like it's full release, if your looking for that type of experience POE exists and could be played right now. " My suggestion to give Armour an additional mitigation mechanic is meant to bring it in-line with Evasion and Energy shield. In its current state its just elemental resistance but bad. If all resistances worked the way Armour did than everyone would just ignore them all together unless their build gave them some kind of bonus for it. The Entropy mechanic for Evasion is an interesting way to deal with inherent randomness, though I think it needs some adjustments. Energy Shield having a regen specific to it isn't exactly exciting, but is functional. It's good that the player has control over basically ever aspect through the passive tree. I look at that level of control and want it for the other two defenses as well. And Mana Shield exists in POE2 its a notable on the north side of the passive tree. I use it on my Lich because spells are free when I use lifetap on my main skill. Having a Spirit pool for reservation instead of Max Mana was a good change, keeping Energy Shield around means they can divest individual stat gains power. If you gained Energy Shield every time you gained INT than you effectively made INT the best stat to stack for defenses in the game. That's what taking ES out and using Mana Shield would do. And I think bring it all around I'm making a distinction here. Core Defenses are the main stats on gear, Armour, Evasion, and Energy Shield. Your effective health pool is what your at after Core Defenses, Resistances, and Regens are applied. In the games current state there is an in balance mechanically for the Core Defenses. Energy shield has an efficiency of about 90%, Evasion when spec'd to deal will all types of damage only has an efficiency of about 75% and Armour is trailing with around 12%. Efficiency here is calculating how good the stat is at mitigating all damage forms and types. This has lead to the clear "winner" in the survivability race. To note, if you don't spec Evasion to deal with all damage it's realistically 50% or less. The complete in ability to deal with Spell and AOE effects is a huge issue. |
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It is hard to make a clear comparison between single defensive mechanics that makes sense, because everything in this game work through synergy, not separately. And there is a lot of different combinations.
For example, pure evasion char sucks because you can't scale life enough to make them viable. But if you combo that with a small amount of ES, you will increase eHP, which probably will be enough to not get one-shot and that evasion helps to not getting hits that would prevent ES recharge. Another example. If you make a char focusing only on armour and life, it will probably suck even if you are a Titan, because you will not have tools to deal with elemental dmg. On the other hand, they put max resist nodes on the skill tree, and there are soul cores, jewels and gear modifies that can increase max resist. So, if you combo armour and max resist on a life-based char, you can be pretty tank as well. Specially on STR chars, that can stack enough life. Also, life is easier to sustain than ES. You can even make a hybrid of evasion and armour on a life-based char if you pick Witchhunter and play around Sorcery Ward. That is also a currently HC viable strategy. For that reason, I see no point in comparing single defensive layers. I'd rather compare survivability on the whole build. |
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" A really good point to be made! After reading through the discourse in other defense related threads it was beginning to feel like people weren't getting game mechanics at the fundamental level. So Synergies in builds are important to factor into all of this. And why I wanted to make a suggestion in the first place. I think the crux at the core of your comment though is that this game allows for a lot of freedom of choice. No, not all builds are viable nor should that be a goal. But the current state of mechanics are reducing viability solely based on what stats your choosing to put points into. Your likely putting points into those stats because you want to use a specific weapon or skill, and then because it has a stat requirement of STR or DEX you wind up having to dump Passives/Gear/Affix slots away from the core of your build to try and build Energy Shield in the current Meta. My perceived breakdown of the defenses: Armour - Currently the easiest of the 3 to get Big Numbers for, the problem with it being its only built up at 3 times the rate of ES when its only 1/5 as mitigating for Physical damage. Tying it to Physical resistance and then giving it a hard cap is a mistake, no other resistances have a cap damage they mitigate. Ultimately investing in Strength only will force any of those types of builds to fall off immediately. They are also getting penalized with less base movement speed for no apparent reason. Evasion - Also built up at roughly 3 times the rate of ES, it has 2 pretty big problems. The first issue being the background mechanics at play, Entropy having a non-scaling max of 100 and having your moment to moment base Entropy role also non-scaling between 1-99 means there are going to be way more hits that go through. Your likely not going to have a high health pool since it requires DEX to build, meaning your going to get unlucky and die from a stray hit relatively often. The other issue is that it only mitigates hits from Melee and Projectile hits, this game is full of Spell and AOE damage and without investing in Acrobatics Evasion builds have no way to deal with those types of hits. When you do spec into Acrobatics than the build up rate for Evasion compared to ES is 0.75 to 1. Do to its 2 big issues Dexterity based characters are forced to spend resources to get ES since Armour isn't a very viable option atm. Addendum: Evasion is also the only defense that is negatively affected by stun. Energy Shield - Currently built up at only 1/3 the rate of the other 2. This is largely due to it being the most efficient of them. It has a 1 to 1 (except for Chaos) mitigation rate. Every value is scalable, you can have a bigger max value, you can make it recharge faster, you can change how long before it begins recharging. This is a mechanic that gives the player the most control over the damage they take. There are specific skills and support gems that give the players options for oh sh** moments. There really isn't a counter mechanic to temporarily reduce max ES like Armour Break and Hobble. With these points in mind to reiterate, Armour and Evasion need flat value adjustments, with their current values they don't provide enough mitigation compared to ES. Armour needs a lot of TLC, it either needs some kind of additional mitigation system tied to it, or, should in the least have the cap removed. Most big hits already have some amount of unmitigable physical damage, there isn't a point in further increasing the damage taken on top of that. Evasion also needs some TLC, the current mechanic could be perfectly functional with adjustment. Give the player more control over their evasion stats similar to ES. Or even make it so any hit that hits has a step down similar to Critical hits, even Spell and AOE hits. And down the road maybe make some oh sh** buttons for STR and DEX heavy characters. |
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Each ascendancy is designed with one or two defesive kits in mind. I'm not saying that this game is well balance currently, but as long as I can find a defensive solution using that kit to build each ascendancy in a HC viable way, I'm fine with that.
When you start to see people ignoring their defensive kit consistently to go after ES, that shows that it is clearly unbalanced. But where is the actual problem? Is it ES that is too good or are other status too bad? It is a hard question to answer if you don't consider synergy and how things are done in actual gaming. For example, building a Titan with its kit (life bonus, high armour rating and some extra max resist) you can clearly make tank HC-viable chars. A well-built Titan can even facetank Xesht T4, including its palm slam. Not just tank, but facetank because leech is broken in this game even though most people aren't aware of that yet. Obviously, it is not low-budget, but it is a T4 pinnacle boss after all. It is hard to say that armour is in a bad spot when it can make something like that. It is clear that Titan kit is functional. I can say the same for Smith of Kitava, Gemling and Witch Hunter (mayber others but I didn't have time to test/analyze them). Anyway, if armour related kits on armour related ascendancies work just fine and even so people are still ignoring it and consistently building "ES Titans", that just means that ES is too strong currently and must be nerfed. Not that Armour needs attention. Actually the only kits that I really feel underwhelming and I can't see them being HC-viable are those on DEX ascendancy for life-based char. Even if you try to build, for example, a Pathfinder with Sustainable Practices and a lot of Evasion, you will still have serious problems to mitigate physical and chaos dmg because you won't be able to stack enough life. Life scalling currently is too STR-stacking dependent for them to be really viable. Except for WitchHunter, I can't see it being viable. I'm not saying that they should buff specifically evasion, but adding some tools for pure DEX chars to improve those kits would be interesting. For example, some extra sources of life around ranger's skill tree region or moving some "dmg taken on mana" nodes next to them. I don't know, but something like that. |
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There's a lot to go over but I'll put my experience with the game into context, I've hit end-game with 2 different toons at this point. A Contagion + ED Lich, pure INT no real problems has high ES the only problem is that it's boring. My other toon I'm more active with because the spec is actually interesting to play its a XBow Pathfinder, the obvious choice with this type of character based on where its starting point is would be DEX, and based off my original build I was able to get armour and evasion passives without going wildly out of my way. I wasn't exactly under geared for the content but had to run as a hybrid for skill and weapon requirements. This ultimately caused a lot of chaffing due to not enough evasion or armour.
If I'm geared well enough to clear the content but run into survivability issues that leads to the question what about the gear and defenses is leading to the survivability issue? It's good to hear that a class built around STR and mitigating damage does well enough in current end game content, that's looking and talking about one type of character with the "path of least resistance" spec though. And my suggestions are coming from a place of character build exploration, this is why I made sure to say not all builds should work. But a DEX main character trying to build into a DEX/STR build isn't exactly a far fetched idea. I've made a lot of effort to make the point about early and mid-game balance but I'll take a moment to talk about end game balancing since that's all most people look at when talking about this sort of stuff. In the end game for Armour it's less about that it reduces damage but arguably more about the inherent extra life that comes from specing into STR to begin with. Titan is fairly unique in having a More node for Max Health. I can't think of another single node with more value when it comes to increasing survivability. There are very few ways to multiply health and only the one way to get More. Most bosses have some form of unmitigable physical damage in their attacks which reduces the effectiveness of armour. Because of unmitigateable physical damage and the cap that armour has makes depending on it to reduce damage be all or nothing. This makes STR a poor choice to hybrid in. STR/DEX builds are depending on lower amounts of armour to handle increased number of hits from lower amounts of evasion. These builds have less health and are more likely to get flattened, it's a lose-lose in the current version of the game. Even for STR/INT hybrids there just isn't much of a point with where the game is at to put anything into Armour when ES is infinitely more customizable and consistent. The reason I think Armour needs work is because it's in a weaker spot currently than even evasion due to the cap reducing efficiency. Most likely 99% of the player-base aren't going to hit high reduction rates. And most of them don't know the value of any type of Life increases. But from what Armour they do build they get very little value out of it. Your point about where Evasion is at in the end game mostly comes back around to its weaknesses making it inconsistent. At it's core Entropy as a mechanic is fine, but there isn't any actual mitigation going on at its core and unlike armour it doesn't have any inherent health bonuses to keep a DEX user up for that 1/4 hit that goes through in the end. To get it so evasion isn't a meme it would need some kind of change. Personally I like the idea of treating all instances of damage similar to how crit's currently work. Even making AOE and Spell damage get ran through to account for no other damage reduction or life bonuses inherent in specing for high evasion. After giving all of this more thought, why make it so only Armour increase Physical Resistance? Make it so all Defenses increase Physical Resistance and give Armour a mitigation mechanic so it stands out more. This would also resolve "some" of Evasions shortcomings by reducing the damage it would take from the hit's it does receive. If everything effectively ran on the same numbers as they are today then ES would have less Physical Resistance compared to Armour and Evasion giving it another type of downside. This would also solve the Hybrid problem as building Armour, Evasion, and Energy Shield would be more of a preference on how a person plays at that point. |
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