Fixing the Aura Stacking + Pumping Single Skill Problem
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It didn't work on D2 because (I presume) of the underlined part I quoted (and maybe the part from the middle).
If you had an effective alternate skill that bypassed the fire-immunity that you could have used against that monster relatively easily and seamlessly, I doubt people would have complained in D2. The fire-immunity thing was an example from other games, not a suggestion I wanted to put in PoE :/ |
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" If the problem is "players spam the exact same skill over and over," then it fixes the problem at least somewhat -- you need to start spamming a different skill when you come up against an immunity. I definitely think we need to make some damage types much better against certain monster types, to reward players for having a diverse skill set. These differences would start out minor in Normal, and become somewhat drastic by Merciless. For example, let's say a Merveil's Daughter had 75% cold resistance, -20% fire resistance, and 40% in chaos and lightning. A witch whose primary skill is Freezing Pulse encounters one. If they've developed Fireball as a secondary attack, it's hard to imagine a situation where switching to Fireball wouldn't be the right call; it's hard to spec cold so hard that 300% more Fire damage is the wrong move. That's kind of what you want. And actually, I think I like it too. It means using different skills for different monsters is rewarded, although not necessarily required. But then you say, what about Cold Penetration? Wouldn't the FP witch just use that, and ignore the Fire switch? Good point. So let's increase all those resistances by 20. 95% cold resistance, 0 fire resistance, 60 chaos/lightning resistance. (If you said, what about Frostbite and Elemental Weakness? Well, if the witch is using those, they're not just mindless spamming the same skill, are they? It's now this one-two-punch combo thing. And that's okay.) Note that 95% is pretty darn close to immunity, yet there's definitely tools to break that resistance down. What I'd like to see in Merciless onward is: * no white monster types with immunities, but one strong elemental resistance each * each white monster type has a strong elemental weakness * occasional immunities on blue/rare monsters, when the natural resistance and a resistance mod happen to line up... but this should never be so powerful that one avaialable penetration effect can't get resistance below 100%. In any case, immunities are a better idea than adding cooldowns. Both stop you from spamming your skills as often as you might like. However, with high resistances -- functionally never immunities, since people would use penetrates to bypass them -- you'd be reacting to what's on you're fighting, learning your monster types, and dealing with an actual situation. Advanced situations with varied monster composition would come up. With cooldowns, the only thing you're reacting to is a faded clock graphic over the icon of your bomb skill. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Dernière édition par ScrotieMcB#2697, le 31 mars 2013 à 12:33:02
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But yeah, the problem is what I said earlier
In other RPGs, you already have a functioning Fire AND a functioning Cold skill, and if you don't they are very very very easily obtainable (just swap for the mage character for instance). In here it doesn't really happen like that. You don't usually have both functional/effective fire/cold skills, nor they are easily obtainable or easily "swappable" And if you DO have both functional Fire/Cold skills....you don't have both functional Fire/Lightning skills, nor both functional Cold/Lightning skills, or Cold/Chaos or Physical/Cold, etc (for every independent situation where that "almost immunity" happens) If you use FP and encounter that "almost cold immune Merveil daughter", then you NEED that fireball (or similar) in your char. If you keep it in your char, then it's a wasted socket slot you have to take into account when getting new gear with new groups of sockets Annoying for every other time you don't encounter an "immune" Merveil daughter. If you don't have it in your char, you need to TP back to town and get it from your stash. Annoying, but not game-breaking What if your Fireball is lvl 1 though and your FP was lvl >15 (plus supports)? If you use Fireball alone you may not do shit to Merveil D, if you support it with stuff you may have the wrong supports for it and still not do shit against it. Even more annoying But what if you don't have Fireball at all in your stash? What do you do? Do you have to spend minutes or maybe hours trying to get a measly Fireball gem in trade chat/forum to trade? Do you have to reroll a char just to get this gem? Do you have to farm until it somehow drops? Annoying, annoying, annoying, utterly annoying. And for what? Just to kill 1 dude that has that type of resistance. This just doesn't and will not work, unless the whole thing is revamped in a way it does. How? I dunno.... |
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" I already suggested how, and its not through immunities. Immunities are a stupid concept, and they don't exist in PoE for a reason, they made certainly valid builds (valid in the sense that there is nothing wrong with the build, like if you want to do a pure fire mage, there is nothing wrong with this) unplayable, or people would just ignore the mobs with immunity. People are not going to massively gimp themselves for a 0.1% chance of a mob that has an immunity to whatever build they are based around So far there are 3 camps of people, one camp of people are the ones that thing aRPGS's should not have cooldowns on abilities (this is false as shown earlier) and think the current state is fine. The other group of people think the current state of spamming single skills is not fine, but they believe that the problematic skills just need to be nerfed/rebalanced. My point is that this is not going to work on many levels, as long as you have "zero cooldown" as a common denominator, than the skill that will always do the highest AoE DPS will be broken because you don't have cooldown to balance it out. What is FP/EK/LA will just be something else, its not going to fix the issue. Furthermore, with the number of active/support gems that are going to be in the game, perfectly balancing this would be next to practically impossible The last camp of people are the ones that believe there is something intrinsically wrong with how the skills are setup. Some people (such as myself), believe the issue is that more skills should have cooldowns, to balance the fact that certain skills due to unique mechanics are always going to be broken. Other people believe there is some other unique mechanic that needs to be changed/implemented to fix the problem All I know is the people in camps #2 are wrong, because GGG has already tried number balancing this skills (directly and indirectly) and it hasn't changed anything, and the people in camp #1 are also wrong, because there are plenty of aRPGS around that have sane cooldown on skills, and it doesn't effect the pacing of the gameplay at all (mainly because those aRPGS don't put cooldowns on everything, as people are trying to incorrectly claim) Dernière édition par deteego#6606, le 31 mars 2013 à 18:36:29
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I don't know what "cooldown change" you'd make that doesn't negatively affect gameplay.
There is also the "problem" that people just specialize in 1-2 skills, mainly 1 AoE and 1 single target, and just support those (with their 5L-6L) and that's it, and then just use some curses or totems or minions every now and then (everybody seems to be using those nowadays). If you add cooldown to the skills, it just means people won't be able to use their "main" skills effectively. Since their "main" skills are basically their only skills in terms of attack, then they find themselves not being able to attack as much (and that'd be the only consequence basically), which would be frustrating in relation to what they could have done before. |
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People stack auras not because they're too strong - taken on an individual basis, they're actually pretty fair - but because there's nothing else that's compelling. Most builds rely on two, maybe three, active skills. There's very little reason for ranged characters to load up on defensive abilities because by they, by their nature, are inclined to focus on killing enemies before they can even reach them/become an issue.
And heck, most of the defensive abilities that do exist are fairly lackluster, so once you have your single-target killing skill, your AoE skill, and whatever movement skill you want, the most obvious thing to do is load up on auras. You're probably looking at a series of minor adjustments than one big one, really. Making more enemies that are a threat to ranged and making the defensive skills better would be a start. Another way would be to put some kind of debuff on you - 'Strain' - that lowers the effectiveness of your auras the more you're maintaining at once. Add passives and uniques that can play off this penalty. Before anyone suggests it: I don't think more auras should = more mana reserved per aura as a penalty, because I think if someone wants to play a 'support' character, stuffing as many auras onto themselves as they can, that should be an option. It just shouldn't be the default state of most builds. Dernière édition par ShogunGunshow#4998, le 31 mars 2013 à 21:16:37
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" This is a great idea, actually. It keeps players on their toes and to be wary of the enemies they are facing. Either they need to switch abilities or apply a debuff, which is much more in the spirit of an action game rather than 'spamspamspam'. |
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I don't believe that immunity=100% resistance to something in general.
Also, penetration works the same way that -maximum resistances work on maps, so setting a resistance cap of 100% wouldn't suffice in your plan. Also, making monsters weak to certain elements could actually make things worse. Any build utilizing Elemental Equilibrium would become incredibly strong at that point. (My EE build can already reduce a player with capped resistances to something like -10%--before any penetration supports are factored in). Dernière édition par Pastromy#5792, le 31 mars 2013 à 23:47:40
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"I'm not talking about any kind of nearly unbreakable immunity. If you played Diablo 2 and remember that thing they did where "- enemy resistance" worked at 1/5 efficiency when piercing immunity... well fuck that shit. I'm talking sometimes you might need to apply a curse if you don't have a penetration support linked. After that, the monster might have a really, really high resistance -- like 80 to 90% -- but would not be immune. I think that's a reasonable expectation to put on players -- either support with penetration or curse or run an alternate skill. The point would be that, due to the heavy resistance after a single penetration effect, it still might be better for the player to run an alternate damage skill. Not required; just more efficient. Or, you could ignore that too, by running two penetration effects, at which point you can pretty much ignore the situation entirely, but might need to curse some types of monsters. The trick to the system is to also include strong weaknesses. The goal is that you'd need three or more penetration effects to get the "immunity" down as low as the weakness levels; looking at the penetration supports and the elemental curses, and there's about -135% penetration possible. So something with a cold "immunity" might have 115% cold resistance and a -25% fire resistance. That's the kind of system I'm suggesting here. It's not what Diablo 2 did; it's more flexible than that. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Dernière édition par ScrotieMcB#2697, le 31 mars 2013 à 23:54:16
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"No, it doesn't; check the wiki. However, we'd just set the cap of monster resistance at, say, 125%. It would never need to resist more, ever. It's not exactly super-hard coding. "EE being OP would be fucking awesome. Especially from a "how skilled is this player" perspective. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted.
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