Fixing the Aura Stacking + Pumping Single Skill Problem

I was thinking earlier today about how auras in PoE compare to auras in Diablo 2.

What struck me is that in Diablo 2, an aura was a part of your build that you could pride yourself in. It wasnt just some switch that you flip whenever it is convenient.

If you were a paladin with a charge build, it meant that you could give your party a high level vigor while traveling. Not just any paladin build could do that. If you were an avenger, you had an incredibly useful conviction aura for your party that not just any paladin could contribute.

Additionally, there was a balancing factor, in that you could only use one aura at a time.






With PoE auras, instead of limiting each character to using 1 aura at a time, GGG chose to keep them in check by giving each aura mana reservation. While this might open up the versatility of auras in theory, it seems like it also requires auras to be somewhat underwhelming so that aura stacking builds are incredibly overpowered.

As for the other part of the equation: I have no idea how GGG could make an ability such as an aura into a build investment. That being said, it would be nice if there were some sort of build investment outside of passive point allocation, such as choosing an aura to specialize in.



In their current form, auras dont seem like they need to be party buffs, because that's not really how they're balanced. They're not something you activate for the benefit of your party, they're something that you just have on because your build is based around it, regardless of whether or not party members can benefit.



Another thing I wanted to say is that part of the problem might simply be that there arent enough auras to choose from. If there were a wider variety of auras, aura stacking wouldnt necessarily feel so cookie cutter.

With regard to cooldowns and skill design:

I actually think that cooldowns go well with ARPG gameplay, based mainly on my experience with D3. However I don't entirely agree with the proposal given by the OP on adding CD to main DPS skills such as Freezing Pulse. Notice that in D3 your main DPS skills were not on CD. CD abilities were buffs, evasive moves, high damage moves and miscellaneous utility skills. DPS skills in D3 were instead limited by resource (mana, fury and the others). If things like Frezing Pulse or Ethereal Knives need to be nerfed that should be done through cast speed or damage values. I think using freezing pulse or any other DPS skill with a 1-2 second cooldown would be fairly frustrating and would make the flow of gameplay very choppy.

Also, there's no benefit in adding CD limited evasive or utility skills to POE unless the game gives you a reason to use them, or rather forces you to use them to survive. In D3, the whole game is designed around rotating through CD limited abilities during combat, and selecting the best ones for your build as you only have a finite number of skill slots to put them in. Try to use only your DPS skills and you won't get very far. POE seems to be designed entirely around maxing out a single skill and going to town. To turn POE into a game where cooldown based abilities are meaningful would require a major redesign of the game.

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deteego a écrit :

The way that auras are used currently is a bad design choice because there is no drawback to using them, people have excessive mana pools and so auras are used because people have way too much mana and don't have anything to do with it

If there was a significant drawback to auras, where people have to decide "ok maybe I can have an aura, but I really have to decide which one to use, if I want to stack them, there is going to be some significant drawback"

Of course there's a drawback: you need mana.

The blood magic keystone is already borderline broken and that's WITHOUT being able to use % auras. Your suggestions, in general, seem to be towards making this an entirely different game. This isn't D3, this isn't WoW. Stop trying to make it D3 or WoW.

You shouldn't be able to make a successful character in this game by taking random passives and using random abilities "hurr more choices" - choice in this game is trying to make a character that can play around all of the obstacles with current restrictions.

It's not like you can't do ridiculous things without auras or without taking certain nodes. This whole whine is as ridiculous as the whine about how people stack health. No shit, that's the baseline defense of your character. Variety in builds comes from picking different kinds of nodes. Do you honestly believe that if we didn't have to pick this many health nodes we'd have more builds available? Of course not: there would still rise a few certain builds to the top that would be optimal in dps vs survivability circumstances.

It's the same with auras. If you take away aura stacking suddenly you go "wait, this blood magic thing seems really powerful, maybe we should nerf that too!" and after that you go: "Damn, this eldritch battery stuff is providing too much mana regen and everyone has to take it: let's nerf that too!". And this will keep on going.

The ONLY aura I can see being too strong for things like weekly races is Purity. That is the ONLY aura that I find is necessary (and the reason is that you tend to not find good resist gear in a week long race without some good luck while progressing - and there's an alternative even here: you can take resist nodes and spec out of them afterwards).





Okay, now that is all out of the way, let's talk about alternating abilities. A while ago I discovered the awesome ability called "Infernal Blow" and I figured: "hey, this deals aoe damage, so what if I heavy strike a mob first and then use infernal blow to blow it up? Sounds great, right?" Turns out that's wrong, it is very difficult to alternate melee abilities with a target in this game as you need to press at the right time to attack but if you press twice you will hit twice. Also, there's some neat autotargeting in the game which would make this even more of a nightmare. Sure, as a ranged character that just shoots shit on the ground that's not an issue but if you have to target a monster it doesn't go as smoothly.

ROFL

I still think that, for now, the way to make mana reservation more meaningful would be to cap mana leech and regen to 20% of your non-reserved mana. If you reserve 90% of your mana but are still able to repeatedly cast 6-linked spells without a bunch of potions or having invested a lot of your build into having lots of mana then something's probably unbalanced.

In the long term, I think auras should be more interesting then they currently are, which is just a buff that goes along with your builds damage type, pretty much like curses. Both auras and curses are staples at the moment. Curses however have the top of the tree keystones that can add a lot to a build and requires investment; auras have some nodes scattered about, but you're better off just grabbing inner force and +level uniques to stack better.

Aura related keystones that could be build defining would help to make auras interact differently for different builds. Say if Inner Force, currently a huge boost to anyone stacking auras for only 3 points, were made into a keystone with a downside - removal of buff effects on you from allies and removing buffs you give to them. It'd be a lot worse for anyone who values team play or uses minions while making aura radius passives useless.

On the opposite side of things a new keystone could be added between conduit and leadership that decreased effects of buffs on you by 30% but increased effects you give to allies by 50%, with maybe a radius boost too. It'd require investment but could potentially create "auramancers" who focus either on team play or minions.


Otherwise though I don't think anything else would need to be done. Mana reservation is a good mechanic but is currently fairly easy to get around imo. Auras as skills would benefit from having more to augment about them other than radius and cost.

One more thing I think is a bit out of fashion with the rest of the game is how auras don't have their cost increased with levels, so getting +2 to their level from a unique is a free buff so long as it's a % based aura. If % auras started at a lower cost but levelling increased it then an aura boosting item would require some investment in lowering the cost.

If that were the case then the new +2 aura level, -8% mana reservation helmet would be a build definer rather than something godly on the level of Kaoms.

Haven't played in some time, but here are my thoughts. Haven't changed too much from when I originally left.

I think one of the fundamental problems with this game's skills generally not having cooldowns is that the skills simply aren't designed with synergy in mind. There is zero incentive to create interesting synergies because the skills simply don't compliment each other outside of the blatantly obvious curses.

Cooldowns don't necessarily have to be the answer, but the abilities in that is game lack conditionals. What I mean by that is there is no way to conditionally super charge an individual skill by use of another skill.








The problem with the area control trap master dude is that traps suck as a primary damage output. Their cooldown is long on its own, combined with a use limit and similar or lesser damage prevents them from being as useful as spamming EK or freezing pulse. How cool would it be to play a guy who has to try and funnel enemies into a pit full of fire traps and freeze mines supplemented by flame totems? It would be harder to play than spamming FP but it should be more rewarding. It's a challenge and you have a lot of customizability in how you want to set up your traps and utilize the terrain etc. to your advantage.


GGG says they want players to utilize tactics and positioning in this game but their skill design does not make that obvious. The best skills are skills that aren't reliant on anything else or are only reliant on setting up uninteractive passives. Playing a battlefield engineer is, by this game's design, less effective than skill spam builds. It's not only harder, but it's also trash by comparison. This should be inverted. For a game that is supposedly designed for hardcore gamers, I find it odd that difficulty is primarily imposed by stat checks and competing with people in your group for loot as opposed to making the hardest to play builds the most effective and the mind-numbing spam builds for the casual crowd.





Long post I know, and I want to stop before I start getting into other philosophies I disagree with but I want to shed light on just one final thing: randomness works against these things.

Randomness is all about finding and working with averages. There is no reliability in the RNG. Reliability is what makes synergistic builds like the above possible. You can't rely on dodging in this game so any complex build that would be reliant on dodge should instead just look at it like it were a number. If the A->C->B->B build relied on a random factor, it would never be good. If you can't rely on your skill to be effective, then you will simply die when you try to execute a (relatively) complicated rotation. However, GGG has put so many random factors into this game that you can't rely on several game aspects in order to create intricate and creative builds. Randomness favors skill-less spam builds by design.

First off, very few skills need cooldowns, and those cooldowns should be fairly short (1-5 sec at most). There is no need to put arbitrary cooldowns on skills unless those skills would cause too much of an issue when allowed to be spammed, such as Cold Snap which can lock down a group of enemies fairly easily (as was the case in closed beta).

Now, for auras, they need to have more of a presence in the skill tree (just like minions, curses, traps and totems). Increase the base radius so that they are actual auras that benefit those running with you, but limit the base number that can be used to one. Then add +1 aura nodes to the tree, and add some uniques with +1 aura mods. There needs to be a skill investment to running 5+ auras on a single character.

Another option would be to change auras into self-only buffs, but then add in an aura support gem which turns these self-buffs into auras, but lowers their stats by a percentage (similar to how skill gems reduce damage by making them an AoE). Even if I went this route, I would either lower the base values given by these skills, or again limit them to 1 and add nodes on the skill tree.

Everyone that wants cooldowns maybe hould go play another game?

In my opinion cooldowns and rotations are MMO mechanics and do not go well with the pacing of ARPGs. Simple damage nerfs would be better if skills are op. As for boredom... No one is forcing you to spam one skill.