Chaos recipe nerf only fixed a symptom

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UnderOmerta a écrit :

But if you do raise monster damage, you're making the game too tough on solo players, and it also punishes players in a party that get hit because of factors beyond their individual control (lag, FPS dips, desyncs, etc) that can all result in them taking damage without the opportunity to react. That means unless they're perfectly coordinated with their party, they have that much more likelihood to get one-shot by any stray monster that they may or may not see.

And personally, I fail to see how anyone can advocate raising the damage of monsters when the entire game is already a quest to pursue the next life node.

I was advocating increasing damage for party play only, on a per-player basis. Solo wouldn't be effected at all, and lag/FPS/desync would be somewhat mitigated (if you stall out, other party members might be able to save you)... the less teammates you have to save you, the less the damage is increased.

The overpowered nature of life nodes is a passive tree issue and needs to be fixed by making other nodes more attractive. At a certain point, X damage (or X armour, or X whatever) is more attractive than Y life, it's just a matter of figuring what X and Y are and adjusting the values. The conventional wisdom that making the monsters do less damage won't change this balance issue; if life > all, life > all, so the difficulty might change but the passive build wouldn't, because it would still be the best passive build. My suggestion regarding life node strength can be found here.

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ScrotieMcB a écrit :

I was advocating increasing damage for party play only, on a per-player basis.

I don't get how people haven't learned this lesson already.

In a party dps grows per player, there is NO effect on EHP. Most monsters don't have many AOEs and attack single target only. If the damage is raise per member in the party each individual person takes more damage, not the party as a whole.

What happens when you increase the damage is what happened with D3. The only successful builds are extreme tanks or extreme glass cannons. It ends up discouraging party play because people just can't handle the amount of incoming damage. The only people you'll see in parties are pure glass cannons as their combined damage ends up having very effective kill speed but their EHP ends up completely relying on manually dodging attacks.

It's everyone's first thought for balancing party/solo play but in practice it's terrible.

Just sayin. hahah

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Moosifer a écrit :

I don't get how people haven't learned this lesson already.

In a party dps grows per player, there is NO effect on EHP. Most monsters don't have many AOEs and attack single target only. If the damage is raise per member in the party each individual person takes more damage, not the party as a whole.

What happens when you increase the damage is what happened with D3. The only successful builds are extreme tanks or extreme glass cannons. It ends up discouraging party play because people just can't handle the amount of incoming damage. The only people you'll see in parties are pure glass cannons as their combined damage ends up having very effective kill speed but their EHP ends up completely relying on manually dodging attacks.

It's everyone's first thought for balancing party/solo play but in practice it's terrible.

Although I don't recall increased monster damage ever being a factor in D3 pubs, I also played pretty much solo-only in D3 so I couldn't really comment. Nevertheless, I'm not ignorant to the concept; before making this suggestion, I understood that, in terms of actual player EHP, that it is not increased per party member, and that increasing overall monster damage makes conventional tanking harder.

However, I'm not really focused on conventional tanking, in part because this game has taken many steps to make it practically impossible anyway, but more because people tend to tank with skill-based crowd control: minions and totems.

This represents a fundamentally different situation than those "previous lessons" you refer to.

Now when it comes to disposable meatshields, increasing players does increase EHP. Up to six times as many totems = a lot of targets for the monsters to take out before actually dealing with the party. The only real solution to this is to increase the efficiency of monsters in taking out these disposables... which means increasing monster damage and/or speed and/or quantity.

Of course, you don't want to completely ignore conventional tanking. Forcing conventional tanks to go for extreme survivability at the expense of DPS, or perhaps not being able to achieve viability whatsoever, might have been taking things too far. However, I believe it's equally unwise to completely ignore the disposable-based tanking, and properly addressing that requires some degree of increased monster damage. You end up with a balancing act of wanting to increase damage as much as you can to keep certain builds from being too effective, without increasing it so much that you unnecessarily nerf another build into oblivion.

So really there should be some kind of compromise here between the conventional wisdom and the less conventional kind. That's why I used map affixes as my primary source for deciding how much to assign; my logic, perhaps flawed, is that conventional tanks find ways to run those maps, even if it might be a bit harder.

You can't really keep specialized builds away from partying. It should be obvious that highly specialized, lopsided builds would be more suited to party play (playing a role in the team), while well-rounded builds more suited to solo. Although you can try to keep solo builds from getting pushed off the cliff, the build population for partying is always going to look substantially different than the build population for solo; it's already slanting heavily in the direction you want to avoid, and what I'm trying to do is at least make the game a non-faceroll for them.

If you balance around totems and meat shields then builds that don't utilize them will be punished. Also if you scale damage in parties citing totems and meat shields as the reason melee builds will still suffer as they become a ranged meat shield along with decoy totems.

Again, sounds good in theory but is awful in practice. Chris even cited how they tried it a while back and they found it too punishing to melee. So I'm fairly sure they wouldn't do it.

To the topic, map runners need a means of generating income that's special to them while allowing people who don't map completely cut off from self wealth generation. I still think the most graceful solution is bumping map IIQ for difficult mods up by 3-5x as much while possibly making beneficial mods like area/maze/pack size give negative IIQ. Please encourage people to run hard maps and reward them more than people doing easy maps.

Theres no catch 22. The solution to groups facerolling maps doesnt lie in simple numbers fuckery as i stated in a previous post. And im not for or against soloing or grouping, im for a balanced game. Simply increasing monster damage will just force even more defensive stat stacking to prevent random 1-shots, which is hardly what poe needs atm.

I think the best answer is to have monsters (and bosses, who suffer from the same issues) use extra abilities as the player count rises, specifically aoe, pierceing, forking and chaining skills (with summoning skills added for bosses). Ai changes to make certain monsters prioritize players over minions and totems would help too (d2 bosses had this iirc). Other possible options such as adding more monsters or friendly fire wont work due to netcode and playability issues.

Regarding better ability for players to fund map chaining, several solid solutions have been presented in this thread, most of which have also been posted many times previously over the past few months. Perhaps the lack of change is due to the map system working exactly as the devs intended, who knows.

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Moosifer a écrit :

If you balance around totems and meat shields then builds that don't utilize them will be punished. Also if you scale damage in parties citing totems and meat shields as the reason melee builds will still suffer as they become a ranged meat shield along with decoy totems.

Again, sounds good in theory but is awful in practice. Chris even cited how they tried it a while back and they found it too punishing to melee. So I'm fairly sure they wouldn't do it.

Didn't know about that. So Googled it.

In 0.9.5, they removed +10% monster damage per party member; the reason cited was "It broke the Armour system," not the reasons you provided. Although 10% per member is significantly more than the 5% per member I suggested, the core problem there remains the same: for 6-player parties, it can hit armour-based characters twice as hard (100% instead of 50% for 0.9.4x, 48% instead of 25% for my suggestion). So I can agree that that particular point of my suggestion wasn't very well thought out... directly increasing monster damage provides lopsided penalties for group play against Armour.

However, increased attack/cast speed does not favor any particular defense over another, nor does it effect what one-shots you; the same is true regarding increased monster mob size. I still stand behind those two points, at the conservative amounts posited.

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Moosifer a écrit :

To the topic, map runners need a means of generating income that's special to them while allowing people who don't map completely cut off from self wealth generation. I still think the most graceful solution is bumping map IIQ for difficult mods up by 3-5x as much while possibly making beneficial mods like area/maze/pack size give negative IIQ. Please encourage people to run hard maps and reward them more than people doing easy maps.

Map affixes should be "more" item quantity, not "increased" item quantity. One of the key reasons area/maze/pack size are so valued is that they are effectively "more" affixes, unlike stacking multiple difficulty affixes. Although some individual affixes might require adjustment, this is the key theoretical move to making very hard rare maps reward its conquerors appropriately.

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ScrotieMcB a écrit :

However, increased attack/cast speed does not favor any particular defense over another, nor does it effect what one-shots you; the same is true regarding increased monster mob size. I still stand behind those two points, at the conservative amounts posited.

High mob aps means evasion becomes less useful, also negatively impacts ES's regen although not as significant the damage it would do to an evasion user. Any changes to monster DPS means melee has to have more EHP, regardless if the DPS is through flat damage or aps. If you are suggesting this stuff as a way to make ranged dangerous in a party it just won't work as you think it will. Rather it will just make life for close ranged melee even more hell than it currently is.

You remember me of me. We are both very passionate about what we want changed and are persistent as mother fuckers. The difference between us is when someone explains how my idea is bad I jump ship and you keep plowing forward. Just let it go man.

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KoTao a écrit :

I think the best answer is to have monsters (and bosses, who suffer from the same issues) use extra abilities as the player count rises, specifically aoe, pierceing, forking and chaining skills (with summoning skills added for bosses). Ai changes to make certain monsters prioritize players over minions and totems would help too (d2 bosses had this iirc). Other possible options such as adding more monsters or friendly fire wont work due to netcode and playability issues.

This is absolutely superb suggestion. It helps to address the party-to-easy syndrome and also provide more difficulty in an interesting way rather than just increasing the numbers.

Chain, Pierce, Fork and summoning skills would greatly help to make fights more interesting, requiring coordination and proper role/function management. I'm all for it.

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KoTao a écrit :

I think the best answer is to have monsters (and bosses, who suffer from the same issues) use extra abilities as the player count rises, specifically aoe, pierceing, forking and chaining skills (with summoning skills added for bosses). Ai changes to make certain monsters prioritize players over minions and totems would help too (d2 bosses had this iirc). Other possible options such as adding more monsters or friendly fire wont work due to netcode and playability issues.

A fantastic idea. Not necessarily every monster should get the extra AoE/anti-party attacks, nor should every monster be able to prioritize, but if a lot did then it would make things more difficult for parties, and more memorable.