Recovery mechanic

[Arionthe]

Arionthe,

I am inclined to agree with you, but what you are asking will considerably weaken Mage. Then you would have BH as king of the classes. As you can see by the LB, mage and BH and both stuck at 122 TL. Which tells me that the Devs did a hell of a job balancing mage and BH. So if you weaken mage, then you must also weaken BH. Why cause two fixes when are you have to do is fix one....buff up warrior.

Top Warrior is at 118 TL. Quite a bit behind. The easy fix is to upgrade Warrior. This is the only class that does NOT have a viable 6/6 build. Therein lies the problem. The simplest and fairest solution is to update Warrior. Give warrior a 6/6 build. Ultimate goal is to upgrade warrior enough so that the Top warrior will be able to achieve TL 122 just like the other classes.

Class balance wasn't actually my aim. I just noticed a recovery mechanic that is on orders of magnitude greater than what's available elsewhere. I felt it was out of place and probably making balancing mob damage difficult. What I mean is that upping mob damage a further 10-20% will change nothing (assuming enough hp pool) for mage while acting as a significant deterrent for others. Only thing stopping mage trial progress at the moment is the single target bossing damage as compared to BH. Imagine if mage can do 75% of the boss damage of a BH, 128+ will not be a problem at all.

Current game meta makes us all glass canons. I prefer to see challenges come in a greater variety of ways and our solutions to be just as varied. Right now it's just damage dealt and hp recovered.

Food for thought:
When recovery is controlled, mob damage no longer needs to be sky high in order to present challenge. This means the HP pool can actually take a number of hits before we fall. Why does every single arrow in high trials need to be vorpal/decapitating arrows? When we can actually take hits even in high trial, this opens up other possibilities. Far greater combat varieties. Things like status imparting attacks.

Allow me to illustrate a few examples.
Petrifying Attack: Petrifies the player for X seconds, reduce incoming damage by 50% (hey we are now stone) and crit immune. The attack actually needs to land in order to take effect. Which means it can be dodged, blocked, parried and if there is a shield bubble, it takes down the shield but does not impact the petrifying status.

Soul Scream Attack: Unable to use utilities for X seconds while normal attack speed -50%. You are dazed and confused, not clear minded enough to call on your skills. However procs still work as normal. Skill CD will also not be affected, just you can't use any of the skills during that X seconds.

Cone of Silence: While standing within the area of effect, skill invocation has 50% failure rate.

Can any of the above work in the current meta? Nope we would all be dead and rail against the impossible challenge simply because there is no margin of error. Our HP can only take 1-3 hits and our recovery better be working 100% all the time. I'm not against 1HKO by certain boss. I just find 1HKO by mob rather annoying because it robs us the possibilities of enjoying a more varied combat. Now let's rename Apple to Healing Potion and Potion to Elixir. Elixir removes any current negative status and provides X number of seconds for status immunity. Now the players have an active counter to the new effects (and another gold sink!) Now there is more strategy involved. The fight gets more tactical. Isn't that more fun than a random vorpal arrow taking your head off because the 20x immolation stack has blinded you to see anything else in the combat field.

[Bounty]

Arionthe,

I am inclined to agree with you, but what you are asking will considerably weaken Mage. Then you would have BH as king of the classes. As you can see by the LB, mage and BH and both stuck at 122 TL. Which tells me that the Devs did a hell of a job balancing mage and BH. So if you weaken mage, then you must also weaken BH. Why cause two fixes when are you have to do is fix one....buff up warrior.

Top Warrior is at 118 TL. Quite a bit behind. The easy fix is to upgrade Warrior. This is the only class that does NOT have a viable 6/6 build. Therein lies the problem. The simplest and fairest solution is to update Warrior. Give warrior a 6/6 build. Ultimate goal is to upgrade warrior enough so that the Top warrior will be able to achieve TL 122 just like the other classes.

[Arionthe]

-1 The issues of the LOH mechanic on the Warrior class has nothing to do with the strength of LOH mechanic on a Mage skill named Singularity.

1. If Warrior sucks, then it sucks. Why make Mage suck too? Please don't pull another class into joining the misery of one. (Just kidding, LMAO)
2. That's the class you chose. In any game, being a Mage makes almost everything easier PvE-wise except that on this game, Mages doesn't deal as much damage compared to other games.
3. I definitely think that Singularity LOH is a strong skill damage and recovery-wise but that's because the Mage players adapted to getting a huge number of mobs/camps for it to be considered strong. Otherwise, it's trash when used to few mobs.
4. If you nerf singularity damage on mobs which is the only bread and butter of a Mage (but still not that easy), then you basically break a Mage's one leg. It takes around 5:30-6:30 to kill a boss at Trial 120-123 I guess depending on player skill (not player items and class skill entirely-but celestials kinda play a big part).
5. Singularity never make Mage immortal. No amount of Singularity heal can help you survive from being oneshotted by a charging melee elite, a normal attack from an elite summoner, or a volley of arrows from 3-5 camps of elite archers not to mention a single group of ghost (when they leech), one shots Mage too.

I think the best way to address what you want to say is for Devs to focus on giving some more love on the class you're using and make it suck less (sorry, I think everyone's already using the word/term on warrior anyway), perhaps, making a good viable 6/6 set that will make your dreams come true is the key.

By the way, I think they already announced changes for Warrior so we'll just have to wait and I think LOH is working as intended. On another note, I don't hate Warrior. In fact, I love it back then when aggro bar isn't a thing (pulling entire map and killing all back then when mobs still drop items in trials.

I disagree with your first statement that singularity recovery has no impact on other classes. The reason, as I stated earlier, is that we all have to fight the same mobs. When there is an OP recovery mechanism going on, in order to balance that (making encounters non trivial), mob attributes will need to adjust. For classes that lack the OP recovery mechanism, we are now fighting amped up mobs without the same suite of tool to deal with those "game balancing enhanced mob attributes".

1) Again nerfing mage isn't my intention, I'm simply pointing out a situation where I question if the current meta is the intended one. That's why I asked if Singularity is meant to perform this way with regard to LoH. Now the initial design might have called for precisely this interaction. Therefore it could be that the Dev's original intention is exactly this. However some edge cases might have been missed when designing this ability. For example Devs never imagined ppl can have multiple singularities on screen with enough AR and Alacrity. So what I'm really asking is that generating millions in raw HP recovery with a single skill invocation (I usually play with floaty numbers off, perhaps some high level mage can share a screen shot of what recovery numbers they are getting when actually pushing high trial with big mob pulls) is the intended situation.
2) Not sure how to respond to that.
3) Maximizing a skill with the proper use case is just par for any industrial player. I don't see anything wrong with it. Why use a mob skill on a single target?
4) No where did I say nerf singularity damage. If you are referring to the immolation triggering, I had already mentioned to buff immolation effect as compensation. In fact if they buff immolation as a trade off for capped singularity immolation trigger, mage players will actually gain in trial pushing. We all know the biggest obstacle is bossing. Wouldn't you want a 3.375x damage buff vs the current 1.2x (50% damage buff per immolate vs 30%) when bossing?
5) I refer you to my response to Jage post. You are confusing dying while singularity proc with evidence that singularity driven recovery isn't OP. It has more to do with your hp pool being insufficient to act as an buffer to allow that massive recovery keeping you immortal.

I'm not sure for Devs to give singularity level recovery to BH and W is the right approach. Clearly if that is the case, the Devs wouldn't have moved off life steal in the first place. I take that as evidence that they made the switch with one thing in mind, making the game challenging.

I'm just pointing out the mechanism imho is OP and feeds into the current meta where HP investment is irrelevant beyond 1hko buffer.

[Arionthe]

Yea agreed, and im not sure the LOH recovery gained during sing cast could be called immunity.. lol ive definetly died during the proc.. and my loh is around 1.8k

This has more to do with your HP pool and device performance. On PC, your 1.8k loh with singularity into a mob should make you immortal (provided that you are still normal attacking so that the shield bubble is getting constantly refreshed). The other factor is HP pool. Let me make this example.

You have 10 Hp pool, your singularity is generating 10000 hp/sec. You are surrounded by a mob of 20 doing 100 dmg per second. Now your recovery is enough to sustain/face tank this mob. However your HP pool can't. There is simply not enough HP buffer to take the volatility of your HP bar, meaning enough damage hits you before that massive recovery can bring you back from brink of death to full health.

Same character but now with 1000 hp pool. Now that mob of 20 doing 100/sec (total 2k/sec) will never be able to threaten you as the recovery vastly outnumber the incoming damage.

So dying during singularity proc is not evidence of singularity driven recovery isn't OP. I don't know how high of a trial your mage can enter. But do this, equip jewelry made of VIT/LOH/ARMOR/AR (very cheap to make as you aren't using CD, CR). Use your CP to get enough haste for 6.5+ attack speed (you can equip a shield and drop the glass canon passive for even greater tanking power). I'm pretty sure you can basically stand and dodge nothing at your highest trial. Of course you won't be killing anything. The difference is doing the same jewelry on BH or W won't come close for the same face tanking ability. This should prove my point about singularity driven recovery is OP.

[Suzy.Bae]

-1 The issues of the LOH mechanic on the Warrior class has nothing to do with the strength of LOH mechanic on a Mage skill named Singularity.

1. If Warrior sucks, then it sucks. Why make Mage suck too? Please don't pull another class into joining the misery of one. (Just kidding, LMAO)
2. That's the class you chose. In any game, being a Mage makes almost everything easier PvE-wise except that on this game, Mages doesn't deal as much damage compared to other games.
3. I definitely think that Singularity LOH is a strong skill damage and recovery-wise but that's because the Mage players adapted to getting a huge number of mobs/camps for it to be considered strong. Otherwise, it's trash when used to few mobs.
4. If you nerf singularity damage on mobs which is the only bread and butter of a Mage (but still not that easy), then you basically break a Mage's one leg. It takes around 5:30-6:30 to kill a boss at Trial 120-123 I guess depending on player skill (not player items and class skill entirely-but celestials kinda play a big part).
5. Singularity never make Mage immortal. No amount of Singularity heal can help you survive from being oneshotted by a charging melee elite, a normal attack from an elite summoner, or a volley of arrows from 3-5 camps of elite archers not to mention a single group of ghost (when they leech), one shots Mage too.

I think the best way to address what you want to say is for Devs to focus on giving some more love on the class you're using and make it suck less (sorry, I think everyone's already using the word/term on warrior anyway), perhaps, making a good viable 6/6 set that will make your dreams come true is the key.

By the way, I think they already announced changes for Warrior so we'll just have to wait and I think LOH is working as intended. On another note, I don't hate Warrior. In fact, I love it back then when aggro bar isn't a thing (pulling entire map and killing all back then when mobs still drop items in trials.

[Jage]

I guess in my mind changing immolate makes the one advantage I have over all the other mages gone.

Yea agreed, and im not sure the LOH recovery gained during sing cast could be called immunity.. lol ive definetly died during the proc.. and my loh is around 1.8k

[Purple Potato]

I guess in my mind changing immolate makes the one advantage I have over all the other mages gone.

[Arionthe]

-1

If you remove recovery from singularity, or even nerf it then mage cannot survive ever.

If it doesn't trigger Immolate then a LOT of damage goes down the drain (Arcanist cant get much past T100, apprentice wouldnt get much past ~110)

Warrior has increased heal from shockwave and frenzy.

BH has increased heal from RF and invulnerability for 2 seconds with smoke screen (along with minion revive).

That's why I said change the LoH/Immo triggering by Singularity concurrently with a reduction of mob damage and buffing the Immo effect. This is all just a balancing issue. Right now a number of people have already reported that device performance impacts the actual LoH/Immo triggered by singularity. By capping LoH and Immo trigger actually reduce platform performance gap. Right now iOS device singularity makes the mage effectively immortal during mob phase. PC gets 2x immortality. But it works out the same, there is excessive recovery going on, just even more on PC than on iOS.

I didn't say no immo trigger, just cap it to be about 3x per second. Since it's stackable to 3, that is more than enough to get maximum effect during bossing. I also suggested to buff the effects themselves. This trade off will actually help with the bossing phase for mage. Imagine it does 50% more damage to affected target, 3x will yet you 3.375x damage. That sounds a lot better than 1.2x. All those numbers can be tweaked for the mage damage not to be affected.

I realized that warrior has increased healing from shockwave and frenzy. But let's be honest; they pale to what actual LoH does even for a warrior. Meaning the tiny bit of frenzy heal is nothing compared to the increased attacks/second and the consequent increased LoH. That's also why I would like to see healing attributes in more skills (mage and BH included).

I already said to cap BH RF to 10 LoH per sec as well. The current meta they are very effective but just not nearly to the degree that singularity puts out recovery.

Anyway my brightest idea is actually to re-think recovery entirely. See my post after yours.

[Arionthe]

If the devs are open to it, I actually think a complete re-thinking on recovery can be helpful.

If we have a blank canvas on recovery, I think the below system will be more realistic, more controlled, and help make HP relevant again. Also from screenshots of the new beta, looks like Apples and Potions get their own gestures. So Devs are definitely investing coding/screen resources to make them more of an integral part of the game. But they will never be that with the current meta (LoH/Singularity makes apple/potion trivial, as long as you have a mob to shoot that singularity into).


Life Regeneration: Making it a rating instead of some flat number per second. The rating determines what % of HP pool gets recovered each second.
LoH becomes Accelerated Metabolism: Also a rating that effectively acts as an multiplier on Life Regeneration. This only kicks in during combat. Hence the player recovers slowly out of combat and faster during combat. It also acts like a Cool Down Reducer for Apple and Potion (like AR for Skill CD).

Have more healing attributes to damage skills. For example Shockwave does some HoT (Heal over Time), but it can also further reduce Apple/Potion cooldown. Like Alacrity for Skill CD. For example a cast of SW reduces Apple/Potion CD by 2seconds (the time reduction is affected by accelerated metabolism thus it always take say 15casts of SW for a 30sec CD on potion to go away regardless the Accelerated Metabolism rating, basically how alacrity works with AR).

Remove Life Regeneration as a stat on gear (or else this might get out of hand too). Or make it so special that only certain uniques can have it.

Make Accelerated metabolism stat only available on Chest (controls how big this multiplier can get) and Cape. (like how MS is only available on leg and boots)

With recovery controlled and also apple potion more prominent in the recovery game (a nice gold sink btw), mob damage doesn't need to be as high as it is currently in order to provide a challenge. This also moves HP pool away from just a 1HKO buffer, make the margin for error greater while playing. This will enhance the gaming experience in general and mobile in particular.

[Purple Potato]

-1

If you remove recovery from singularity, or even nerf it then mage cannot survive ever.

If it doesn't trigger Immolate then a LOT of damage goes down the drain (Arcanist cant get much past T100, apprentice wouldnt get much past ~110)

Warrior has increased heal from shockwave and frenzy.

BH has increased heal from RF and invulnerability for 2 seconds with smoke screen (along with minion revive).

[Arionthe]

Once upon a time, recovery in the game is based on life steal. Or a % of damage done. Since the player damage scaling, hence the consequent hp recovery, was getting out of hand, it was changed to LoH instead. We might be crossing the same Rubicon again with LoH, especially with the mage skill Singularity.

I play a little bit of mage, but it is obvious to me that firing a single singularity into a mob makes the player effective immortal. This is due to singularity arcs apparently triggers LoH. A recovery mechanic that was supposed to be multiplied by the number of attacks per sec (capped around 10 before considering the various attack speed buffs that itself is capped around 50%) is now effectively triggering hundreds or even thousands of times a second. This is orders of magnitude greater LoH triggering. Not to mention the shield bubble from apprentice 2 effectively doubles the LoH while the shield is up, you have a recipe of no high level mage invests any stat budget beyond the base 1k LoH from CP. I'm just curious, is the situation an intentional one? Red (Developer) Adrian (Developer) .

This doesn't matter to me too much except for the fact that mob damage scaling is somewhat related to player recovery. Basically mob damage has to scale relative to the effective recovery in order for fights not to become trivial. Since a warrior (to a lesser extend BH since RF also increases effective recovery) doesn't get its own set of monsters to fight, super high recovery from mage is making fights unnecessarily hard, not to mention the dedication of significant stat budget to LoH on gear.

A second negative consequence of the high mob damage scaling to combat mage singularity-loh is making HP stat investment useless beyond 1HKO. Since no matter how much you invest into HP stats, you can not absorb more than a couple of hits from elites. This greatly tilts the playing field in favor of recovery vs HP. Making everyone glass canons no matter what.

Also singularity arcs trigger immolation. The mass immo triggering is degrading device performance especially in android devices. For a smoother mobile experience, how about capping the triggering mechanism but buff the effects of individual immo. This will leave mage player no worse off but improve device performance and closing some of that device gap.

Suggestion: LoH and Immo trigger is capped at 10x per second by singularity (immo triggers 30% of the time so basically 3 immo per sec due to singularity). Tone down damage scaling of mob in response. RF LoH trigger is capped at 10x per second. So Singularity and RF still provides essentially 2x recovery when in use.

Now if the current singularity behavior with LoH and Immo is intended; then nevermind all of the above. Why don't we just go back to life steal and everyone can be a walking god.
Adding the below table to illustrate. Column definitions and what buffs/skills considered are in post 15. first 1 post page 2.

	Attacks/sec	W/Buffs	W/Skills	LoH	1 Mob Peak Recovery/sec	50mob Peak	Singularity 1 Mob	W/Bubble	Singularity 50 Mob	2X Singularity 50 Mob
Mage	7	10.5		1000	10500	10500	31000	62000	1581000	3131000
Warrior (DW)	7.5	11	15	1000	15000	15000
Warrior (SW)	6	8.5	16.5	1000	16500	16500		33000
BH	7.5	7.5	20	1000	20000	20000