finally realised just how worthless armour is

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B_TAHKE a écrit :

And btw neither armor nor evasion isn't substitute for health.

Armor, evasion, and health all compete for your hard earned passive points. Therefor, armor and evasion need to do something to increase your effective hit points to be worth taking.

Taking straight 10% health increases your effective hp by 10% against:
Weak physical hits.
Strong physical hits.
Elemental hits.
Chaos hits.
In fact, all hits!

Taking 10% armor MAY increase your effective hp by more than 10% against:
Very Weak physical hits.

It will give a *very* marginal benefit against:
Strong physical hits.

And it does nothing against:
Elemental.
Chaos.

There is an opportunity cost here. Taking armor or evasion passives means you can't take health passives. The health passives are much stronger over a wider variety of situations, hence there is really no decision to make. No decision to make does not make for an interesting game.

From an "interesting game" perspective, balancing your passive point spending on...
Armor to combat light hits
Evasion & Blocking to combat heavy hits
Resists to counter elemental
... sounds interesting, since none of them provide a "catch all" defense. They all have strengths and weaknesses. But HP% is the odd man out by providing a superior generic durability increase.

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CombatVVombat a écrit :

There is an opportunity cost here. Taking armor or evasion passives means you can't take health passives.

False. You can take evasion passives and take health passives.

Health without mitigation is useless. Mitigation without health is useless. Seems pretty straight forward.

Why is HP being a necessary stat so troubling to people? That is why there is tons of it on the passive grid, regardless of how you choose to play you can have access to plenty of life. Stacking armor on top of life and endurance charges is VERY effective. Stacking dodge/evasion/block on top of life is also VERY effective. Stacking massive ES with or without life can also be very effective. You must accept that life cannot be compared directly to mitigation stats.

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thepmrc a écrit :

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CombatVVombat a écrit :

There is an opportunity cost here. Taking armor or evasion passives means you can't take health passives.

False. You can take evasion passives and take health passives.

Health without mitigation is useless. Mitigation without health is useless. Seems pretty straight forward.

Explain how you put the same point in two places at once?

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CombatVVombat a écrit :

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thepmrc a écrit :

"

CombatVVombat a écrit :

There is an opportunity cost here. Taking armor or evasion passives means you can't take health passives.

False. You can take evasion passives and take health passives.

Health without mitigation is useless. Mitigation without health is useless. Seems pretty straight forward.

Explain how you put the same point in two places at once?

Well you obviously get more than one point.... I can take 25 HP passives and 4-5 Armor passives and that would be a pretty good balance. This balance is also quite evident in the tree by the fact that there are life nodes EVERYWHERE and mitigation stats are more sparse. Mitigation stats only become effective when you already have a large HP/ES pool.

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thepmrc a écrit :

Well you obviously get more than one point.... I can take 25 HP passives and 4-5 Armor passives and that would be a pretty good balance. This balance is also quite evident in the tree by the fact that there are life nodes EVERYWHERE and mitigation stats are more sparse. Mitigation stats only become effective when you already have a large HP/ES pool.

Armor passives are completely useless in merciless, you would be lucky to get 1-2% more real damage mitigation against the mobs you need to because of the scaling of mob damage

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thepmrc a écrit :

Well you obviously get more than one point.... I can take 25 HP passives and 4-5 Armor passives and that would be a pretty good balance. This balance is also quite evident in the tree by the fact that there are life nodes EVERYWHERE and mitigation stats are more sparse. Mitigation stats only become effective when you already have a large HP/ES pool.

You have a finite number of points, though.

Is it worth it to pick up mitigation nodes that happen to be along your path? Maybe in some situations. Mitigation makes each point of life more valuable, but only in limited range of situations, and evaluating the actual impact of that 10% armor is dependent upon the rest of your characters stats (base armor, namely).

Actively pathing to defensive nodes? Not in the budget.

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B_TAHKE a écrit :

Most roguelikes get such things, you just click slay every monster and then you suddenly die, up to the point of therms "Yet another stupid death" and "died of boredom" exist. But you know if it is bosses then by no means other then your mistake you can come unprepared, If it is rares well be carefull, Additional projectile casters are not fun for melee. Can't you see rare mob firing 3 fireballs? There are all modifiers written on mob and reading themis part of the game. There are actually not so many unfair deadly coombinations, like packs of hasted charging rhoas(mostly because they charge off the screen and don't give alot time to read their mods). Better magic and rare mods overlay on monsters/monster hp bar- is good idea though. BtW "Titan quest" is just boring like for 2.5 acts out of 4, and even then it becomes challeging only due to mostly how piercng damage work and scale making armor even worse then in PoE. And most bosses as maradeur were challenge but not really difficult, just get warlord mark and heavy strike them to death. (enfeable or temporal chains is another option fornon phys damage builds, Another is using DoT attacks). Also playing just by running EZ mode not caring about any kind of danger is boring.

As for always hard/ always easy comment hard games enjoyable not because you die in few hits, but rather a weight put on your decissions,to deal with as many dangers as you can. If you decisions don't makecertain aspects ofgame harder/easier then they are pointless.
Armor/Evasion/ES is first decision you make and most effective one(in both making some encounters harder and some other easier). Another your combat tactics, and skills you take with you. To cover weaknesses in your permanent decissions.
But both of our opinions are quite subjective.

it is my belief that a Marauder should go toe-to-toe with anything. crush stuff with fury instead of hiding behind shields, shooting projectiles or casting spells/totems. and it was true for mostly anything up to that point in both Normal and Cruel, and most good Rogue-likes I played over the years.
Marauders face-tank. that's what they should do by definition.
with the help of Granite Potions I face-tanked Merveil (an act boss) and even Brutus - who is among the hardest-melee-hitters in the game, together with Kole, Vaal (OHKO big rock) and maybe some Act 3 statues.
and then this over-buffed trash-mob 2-shot me.
why? well just look at the modifiers in the picture posted by @rephikul: this mob has all kinds of damage reduction besides Chaos, increased damage, increased accuracy, increased critical chance, AND uses Cleave and Double Strike.
it is basically the ultimate anti-melee mob. no way to beat as a true face-tank without using a shield, totems, minions and/or a hell of a lot HP - or dying at least twice.

but that's not even the sad part.
the sad part is, that as insanely overpowered as this guy is - a Ranger with Split Arrow and Fork + Poison Arrow takes him and all his minions down in less than 30 seconds.

that's what I'm talking about in balance, or the lack thereof.
I have no intention in letting my big bad brawler grab a bow/wand and start summoning minions.
the game should be fair no matter which class you play, and what build you chose. and difficulty should increase steadily instead of "spikes" like this one.
only the very best builds and gear make it to the end of Merciless. only the top players using the best builds do so in Hardcore. but a pure-melee should not hit a wall where a ranged character does not, and vice versa.
armour + HP should be as good as evasion + HP, and definitely as good as pure-HP.
right now that isn't the case. far from it.

my only hope is that Grinding Gear will do a gigantic balancing act, and fix it all before the final release. otherwise they will lose me as a player.

Face tanking everything, is against game design intentions, not saying it is boring,to extend bots playing better then you.

Btw how you decide "you get 2% damage reductions against mobs you need" how you decide against what mobs damage reduction I need. Do you know armor reduction is calculated from average damage of all mobs of your level. Why I had no problem with my maradeur face tanking pack of squids 8 levels damage wise highier then me. Probably it is missconception on what armor should protect from? If you think your armor is bad take it off and try to tank pack of enraged monkeys on cruel and see how much damage they do.

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johnKeys a écrit :

"

B_TAHKE a écrit :

Most roguelikes get such things, you just click slay every monster and then you suddenly die, up to the point of therms "Yet another stupid death" and "died of boredom" exist. But you know if it is bosses then by no means other then your mistake you can come unprepared, If it is rares well be carefull, Additional projectile casters are not fun for melee. Can't you see rare mob firing 3 fireballs? There are all modifiers written on mob and reading themis part of the game. There are actually not so many unfair deadly coombinations, like packs of hasted charging rhoas(mostly because they charge off the screen and don't give alot time to read their mods). Better magic and rare mods overlay on monsters/monster hp bar- is good idea though. BtW "Titan quest" is just boring like for 2.5 acts out of 4, and even then it becomes challeging only due to mostly how piercng damage work and scale making armor even worse then in PoE. And most bosses as maradeur were challenge but not really difficult, just get warlord mark and heavy strike them to death. (enfeable or temporal chains is another option fornon phys damage builds, Another is using DoT attacks). Also playing just by running EZ mode not caring about any kind of danger is boring.

As for always hard/ always easy comment hard games enjoyable not because you die in few hits, but rather a weight put on your decissions,to deal with as many dangers as you can. If you decisions don't makecertain aspects ofgame harder/easier then they are pointless.
Armor/Evasion/ES is first decision you make and most effective one(in both making some encounters harder and some other easier). Another your combat tactics, and skills you take with you. To cover weaknesses in your permanent decissions.
But both of our opinions are quite subjective.

it is my belief that a Marauder should go toe-to-toe with anything. crush stuff with fury instead of hiding behind shields, shooting projectiles or casting spells/totems. and it was true for mostly anything up to that point in both Normal and Cruel, and most good Rogue-likes I played over the years.
Marauders face-tank. that's what they should do by definition.

I lost ya here. So you want the marauder to trivialize the game and provide an experience that is devoid of challenge. Gotcha.

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johnKeys a écrit :

it is basically the ultimate anti-melee mob.

Just gonna nitpick: You surely havent faced a regenerating, endurance gaining, moving quickly, massive, dealing substantially more damage chaos snake with run-back-a-bit-when-get-hit AI. It never get off your back, and will always regen what futile damage you deliver as it scuttle away. How do Rangers deal with that kind of monster? Arrow dodge and just shoot it. What do WE do? Portal, I guess.

The mob that 2 shot you? I dont know how you got killed. I basically sit there, occasionally summon rej totem and let him kill himself off my tempest shield. If you have 8000 armour as you proclaimed, he probably cant even scratch that 1.5%/s regen.

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thepmrc a écrit :

I lost ya here. So you want the marauder to trivialize the game and provide an experience that is devoid of challenge. Gotcha.

There are ways to make tanking interesting rather then "sit there and afk." I'm against "sit there and afk", too. But as of now there are very little abilities/tactics to accommodate tanking and that should be addressed. Existing example: Rej totem is a good tanking support ability, skelly totem isnt. Should be done examples: A "hook" ability like Brutus's would be most useful. Mobs should have less melee reach so heavy strike can actually be useful. Etc.