Set Gear Balance Changes...?

[Heikki Gross]

I guess, that part just slipped from me. Still the dmg type should be changed, it needs a bump in deflect dmg and the old pure dmg increase would open it up for use with beam. A simple solution is probably +1000% arcane dmg in Soft. That should be almost the same as the other way around.

There are two reasons, why I suggested all arcane skills add 2 shards, instead just all charges being reset with soft. It would let you freely use a variety of those arcane skills, the other version would just steer it to be locked to those skills what have charges. So there would only be one build, Blink, Paradox, TW.

The other reason is to not build is too spammy again. My biggest issue with the old arcanist was that it was just button mashing. My version requres you to cast 4 skills in 10 seconds, your version requires 7 casts.

And i will make you a small example of the timeline:
My version of casts: Blink (2shards), Sing (4shards), TW (6 shards), Blink (enter soft, restore one charge and the 10s cooldown (1500AR) of Blink starts), Cast all 3 skills again to gain 6 shards and once blink comes off cd, it hits soft again. Additionally, you are not forced to spam all those skills asap. Important is to keep blink on cooldown and now you have next 10 sec to spread your other 2 casts as you please.

Your version with casts: Sing 1, Blink 2, Paradox 3, Blink 4, Paradox 5 - now you have to wait for blink and sing to come off CD (this will take about 10 sec) and cast them again to enter soft. Second round starts the same and soft will end about 5 sec before you get another sing+blink off. If you would want to use TW with it, then add another 5 sec of downtime to it.

Yes there is alacrity, but it could shave maybe 30% off from that time and still no permasoft and the build is more spammy.

[Jose Sarmento]

Funny, I came here thinking to do a "summary" of Arcanist suggestions, following the "just Set gear numerical changes" principle that Travis highlighted (so that changes can be ported to the Unity version of the game without effort duplication), and saw that Heikki Gross had already done that, and more.

While I generally support all that he says, I would emphasize that if we consider just the "numerical" changes from his suggestions for now, we have a not-so-massive-but-still-decent improvement to the DFA and Arcanist builds that does *not* collide in any way with the rest of this suggestions; those could be then considered after the Unity port is completed.

One minor "disagreement" to his suggestions: if we changed SOFT bonus damage to be +Arcane, it would become additive to current +Arcane dmg, instead of multiplicative (unless I'm missing something?). I feel the bonus it could give to Deflect damage is not enough to offset that difference, especially if we compare 292% x 400% Arcane dmg (+92% from Gear, +100% from a new, merged, Belt of Whispered Arcane Secret Shielding, then x400% by current SoFT multiplier), vs. 692% Arcane dmg (if SoFT bonus would apply as +Arcane)

That said, here is a digest of the numerical changes in his post (if I am contradicting him, that is an unintended mistake):

Death From Above skill:

1. Double the damage from Death from Above, so at level 10 the Fireballs should do 1600% weapon damage (up from 800%)
2. The base number of charges of Death from Above should be increased from 6 to 10

Sash of the Igniter belt:

3. Sash of the Igniter should have have the burn damage increased from 500% to 1000%
4. Sash of the Igniter should have the burn duration increased from 6 seconds to 8 seconds

Belt of Arcane Shielding: 2. Remove the -armor modifier [Jose: I would actually suggest to make it a positive modifier, +2000 Armor maybe, to help the overall defense of the build]

Belt of Whispered Secrets: 4. Add +100% Arcane damage to Lightning struck debuff (yeah, I know without the Lightning Struck bug fix this doesn't help SCR at all, but it lets Arcanist experiment with it)

Arcanist SoFT (6pcs) bonus:

1. Increase the SOFT damage reduction back to 90-95% in PvE
2. Make arcane skills (Time warp, Paradox, Blink, Singularity) add two and all other skills one charge of SOFT. (not sure this is "numerical" only, but the underlying effect - bringing back PermaSoft - is crucial to Heikki's suggestions, and to mine back in the first page. That can be achieved by his suggestion, by my suggestion to have SoFT trigger finish all cooldowns including all charges, by simply further reducing the number of required charges for SoFT, etc. But one of those is required for the build to "function".

Paradox skill:

add +15000 deflect rating effect
boost damage bonus to 60%
increase immunity duration to 5s
severely boost the % of Mage Power shield size to be in line with today's damage in 160+ Trials. The actual value depends on whether the shield absorbs damage before or after other reduction effects (if we assume permaSoft back to 90% reduction, 9K Armor, and a 100% Deflect Rating from the improved Paradox, that is 99.3% damage reduction combined, not even considering Dodge etc.). I'd say the shield surviving (outlasting) a volley of arrows from an Archer mob at the T165 range should be a decent starting ballpark maybe?

[Ozymandius]

Great point about having more playable BoM options!

[Heikki Gross]

As always, I will cover my thoughts about the mage, because that's the only class, where I think I have enough experience, to even open my mouth.

All my ideas base on the fact, that you will not nerf mutischool possibility. IMO you should just enable crafting it in the game. As we have seen, it didn’t break the game, but added another layer of decisions. We see no one running around with 3 damage schools on their gear and even having the second one, doesn’t come without a cost.

The other global thing what needs to change is alacrity. I think the dev’s went too far with the AR nerf, that the stat itself feels almost useless. Most use it only for GCD reduction, it has so little impact on the gameplay, that sacrificing it for dmg stats almost always pays off. So my suggestion is to start from alacrity and increase it from 0,5s to 1s and remove the heavy diminishing returns penalty of it at 2K AR. Any kind of steep limits like that will just kill all the creativity in builds. They are inhibitors, you will always know that going over 2K AR is very suboptimal, so you don’t even consider it. Building over 2K AR in this game comes with heavy cost anyway, so why put additional straps on it?

Why I talk about those two (unrelated to sets) things, is that if any balancing is planned to either of them, the decisions about sets are affected.

But now about class balance and sets.

When we talk about balance, for some reason, people think that the most important thing is the balance between highest trial cleared by each class. To be honest, that is important, but it doesn’t affect the experience in the game at all. What actually is important and what affects our gameplay a lot, is the balance between XP farming speed of classes. This has been a warrior’s territory for as long as I can remember and the discrepancy is so vast, that competing for top spots, you are forced to double class in anb. That makes warrior the cheapest and least tedious class to play competitively. None of us wants to dualclass in anb, it is a lot of work and requires a lot of resources, but mage and bh are just so bad at xp farm, compared to warrior, that you just have no other option. We have tried so many ways to make it work, but without any success.

So there are 2 ways this could be approached. Nerf warrior, or help others catch up. Warrior, as a class, is not in the best spot either and when you start removing those things, what let it to clear TL105 so fast, you will break the class even more. It would be very hard to get it to slow down there and give a buff to the class overall. Also I don’t think the players would receive it well, if they would have to start doing 1 minute clears instead 30 second ones. So I think that 30 sec, with good gear and skill, should be the norm for TL105. Now we have think about each class, what restricts them to perform as fast.

Sadly I’m no expert for BH, but I’m sure here are plenty of ppl here who can chip in on that. But for mage, fortunately we are in a spot, where there are 2 builds what work for LB pushing (ELR Beam and SCR) and 2 builds what do not work (ELR DFA and Arcanist). I would avoid touching the dmg of Beam or SCR, they are pretty much equal and we cant do anything to help those builds directly in XP farming, without a chance of breaking that nice balance they currently have. But DFA lets you transition to Beam and Arcanist to for SCR, if for some reason you don’t want to push with your xp farming build. Also those 2 builds have the most potential to be fastest XP farming builds on mage anyway.

So what to do with them?

DFA:

I think everything what Wispy said about DFA will help it for pushing and also for XP farming. I will just copy those points here for reference.

1. Double the damage from Death from Above, so at level 10 the Fireballs should do 1600% weapon damage (up from 800%)
2. The base number of charges of Death from Above should be increased from 6 to 10
3. Sash of the Igniter should have have the burn damage increased from 500% to 1000%
4. Sash of the Igniter should have the burn duration increased from 6 seconds to 8 seconds

Arcanist:

The build has potential to be a fast xp farmer, I have done a few anb’s with it and it can consistently clear TL105 with 1:00 to 1:15, but the limiting factor for not pushing it to a faster pace is SOFT being not frequent enough. Since the build overall is in a very bad state at the moment, there is freedom to do almost anything to it for making it a fast xp farmer. Once that is achieved, we can see where it lands on its pushing capabilities and later its just a numbers and values adjustment what will not benefit xp farming, but will give the ability to clear higher trials.

I have already given my input about the build, but will copy it here as well.

The belt:

1. Join belt of arcane secrets and whispered secrets into one belt
2. Remove the -armor modifier,
3. Fix Lightning Struck proc (currently it does not give 50% DR like one on scr set does)
4. Add +100% Arcane damage taken to Lightning struck debuff

For damage, this will help Arcanist a lot and SCR not so much, it will just give a more reliable Lightning Struck appliaction.

The set and skills:

1. Increase the SOFT damage reduction back to 90-95% in PvE. - that, paired with my suggested belt change, would maybe be enough to clear very high trials.

2. Make arcane skills (Time warp, Paradox, Blink, Singularity) add two and all other skills one charge of SOFT. This would bring back permasoft, while not making the build to spammy. Those arcane skills have long cooldowns and should award more charges, while having the ability to use other, short cooldown skills (nova, immolate, blizzard) to build up charges would open up some other build variations and create various farming XP options. We might see a version with Time warp, immolate, blink.

3. Change the SOFT damage modifier to be 400% arcane damage not all damage. This would prevent the set to be used for frost and fire builds, since all skills would add charges and it would probably then be better than ELR. Also changing it to +arcane damage would also boost the deflected damage, which the current set bonus doesn’t do.

4. Change paradox skill to be – Your hero gains 15000 deflect rating, deals (30%) 60% more damage, becomes immune to control effects and does not receive damage for (2) 5 seconds, any damage that would be received while paradox is active, is converted into an absorb shield, lasting for 12 seconds. While the shield holds, your hero retains gained bonuses. Also the % of power should be adjusted to meet the damage numbers foes deal these days or remove it all together, it will make eating those killmoves of bosses worthwile and gives makes the buff last longer.

This change would make the skill more desirable and be used in combination with the suggested belt, to be a true deflect master. Im not sure if all this would make the set completely viable, but it would be a good starting point. Being able to utilize permasoft and added defence from various sources, may let the Arc mage to do bigger pulls or stay alive on higher trials. Getting more charges or casting more skills will yield more ripple damage. Boosting the set Arcane damage by the belt and SOFT, will let you also do serous damage by deflecting the attacks. I think this does add up to the fantasy of the set and doesn’t change it into a completely different thing from what it was.


Changes to other builds:

SCR: Fix immune texts - the texts are generated when there is a mob type, what reflects damage, while you are immune. The fix is easy, remove that reflecting damage from the mob. I have never seen the reflected damage hit me in a way, that I could tell that im in danger. Tbh I have never noticed it at all, so it is probably completely negligible, why have it in the game breaking other stuff?

The set does lack some survivability and I think the belt change will help it exactly the needed ammont. DMG wise it is in a good spot, pretty equal with ELR Beam, but only if you don’t change the dual dmg school.

ELR Beam: Fix vortex while beaming on mobile. I think that ELR also may need a bit more survivability, but I don’t play the build for the very high level trials, so I’m unable to point out anything in particular

For both sets, I don’t think that they have plateued yet with dmg, the issues come mostly from the fact, that you have to start adding a lot of toughness to survive certain encounters.

Other gear:

I know that this topic is about sets, but it is also a good time to look at other gear, what are just placeholders in crafting list and some changes to those, may enable some other cool builds.

Illusionist Belt – Make the Blink add that dot to all the mobs around you, not only to your target. Similar way as shatter works. It would make the belt usable in some xp farming builds, where keeping aggro is an issue.

Versatile belt – in addition to having an extra attack from secondary attack, add a dmg modifier to your primary attack. Lets say +100% dmg for your primary.

Those sad talismans are also quite lonely, but I lack any good ideas for them. Just boosting their dmg will not help. If anything gets too powerful, our reigning talisman will just be replaced with that one and everything will continue as it was.

I also suggest to look at the Vanilla uniques, and try to do something about them as well, they are just below sad.

[WarriorSeven]

I agree on the alleged damage capabilities from Multishot, as well. This topic has been discussed previously. Either the description needs fixing or the actual damage needs to agree with the description.

Mage - Scholar and Apprentice.....(uh-oh)

Presently these two sets have a single purpose - by mixing and matching them a new player can at least get some Critical Rating and Critical Damage into their build whilst not having better armour sets available to them or not many Champion levels. I think the Scholar set alone should be doing that job unless you are happy for this to remain the case for now.

In terms of the Apprentice set, there is currently no feasible way of making this set competitive (even in the lower ANB league tiers) simply by tweaking numbers on it's set bonuses. If you set the auto-Immolate to something ridiculously high so that it does meaningful damage, the set would be incredibly boring to play as it would be a case of auto-attack only and let the auto-immolate do it's thing. As such it needs to be completely re-designed - I'll make a separate post in Feedback / Suggestions as to some thoughts around that once I've had some more time to ponder and consider unintended consequences....

Just as a heads up (and I know it's a bit off topic here) the main two reasons that Apprentice set's "auto proc Immolate" doesn't really work :-

1. Auto-Immolate cannot be used to trigger Shatter if using the Grand Magister's Command weapon set.
2. Manually casting rank 10 Immolate does more overall damage than auto-casting rank 50 Immolate in actual gameplay. The reason being that manually casting rank 10 Immolate on a static target (Kara / Garm / The Broken Dragon) will enable it to do it's full ticks of damage over time as the skill will be on cooldown whilst the damage is being dealt, two manual casts will do two full rounds of damage with much (if not all) of the second cast being 45% more damage. Auto-Immolate cancels out the remaining damage from any existing Immolate - in the case where auto-Immolate procs on two consecutive auto-attacks, the total damage could be as low as 1 tick only of the first Immolate, then the full set of the second proc at 45% damage increase. This turns out to be considerably less damage than manually casting rank 10 Immolate and waiting for it to cooldown before casting again.

I think the range of Blink should be increased too, it's range used to be much further. Should help with Arcanist.

[Jose Sarmento]

Something that occured to me for Shield Warrior...

(disclaimer: I never played Shield Warrior)

We can all agree Shield Warrior is the tankiest of tanks. Big guy in heavy armor with a shield on top, etc.

Taking a page from Demolitionist 2, used ubiquitiously in Havoc BH because Sticky Bombs are presently the only ability that scale to Trial level.

The Shield equivalent could be something like:

new Defender 6 bonus: you can not take more than X damage (2000? 5000?) from any single source effect, after applying Block, Parry, Dodge and all damage reduction effects

E.g. you get hit by a volley of 7 skeleton arrows while also sitting over an Incinerator Elite circling flames (because F them, you're a Shield Warrior). Each "tick" of the flames can't damage you more than 2000 HP, after applying Dodge and Arrmor (if you Dodge the tick ,you take 0). Each arrow that actually hits you, after applying Block and Dodge and Armor, doesn't do more than 2000 HP damage, whether you are on Trial 140 or Trial 200.

[OldFartAtPlay]

One of the issues with BH gear is that the other sets don't have a belt that synergizes with the armor and weapons the way the molten belt does with the Havoc and Ignitors gear. I'd like to see a belt (preferably the Assassins) that would buff the Assault build. Multishot needs something as it's oddly anemic in actual use compared to it's "on paper" stats. A synergistic belt and perhaps a buff to the damage rating of charged ammo might make Assault good for more than just gold farming.

Since Stalker was so recently the meta it shouldn't take much to improve it. One thing that always puzzled me about Stalker was that the set gave additional poisoned ammo damage but when this build ruled almost nobody at the top of the leaderboard used it, opting for piercing ammo instead. Maybe buffing poison ammo would make the set work as designed.

And to echo what others have said, buffs only please, no nerfs.

[papa jim]

For stalker either an upgrade of the 6 pc bonus above the level 15 snipe or enhance the poison damage from the shadow assassins pistol set.

[Hairball]

Lots of great suggestions so far, also Im finding the experienced players suggestion very insightful

First, I’d echo the suggestions about the trinkets, because there are only about a few I’d currently consider using, whilst the rest are just languishing in the armoury never getting an airing. To be able to improve some of the other trinkets would add much more variety to the game.

Next, for Mage, I’d echo Wispy ‘s suggestion about improving the Death From Above …. If this could be made more competitive instead of the usual Frost beam, this would add more variety to the Regalia set. This would be especially useful when trying to craft Bracers of Mastery during and ANB, so I’m not just holding out for a frost beam brace to appear, to have two options would be helpful.

From a Bounty Hunter point of view, I play most of the amour sets, I find there’s a lot of variety with the bounty hunter codex. My favourite is the Havoc set, and I find whichever set I’m using, there’s at least three, maybe four bracers of mastery that I can effectively use during an ANB, options are there. The other characters of mage or warrior don’t seem to have as many options for effective use in my opinion.

From a warrior point of view, I love playing Fury set, but this set is not as competitive at higher levels, it just seems to lack something and takes an age to kill the stronger enemies and especially elites and particularly Bosses.

There are also some redundant belts for all the three avatars, that maybe could be altered. I doubt many people these days use Belt of the triad or girdle of battle lust for the warriors, Arcane belt of shielding for the mage. The bounty hunter belts all have a purpose.

For me, as I really just play for fun, I love to have variety and would welcome any changes that enable that.


KEPE WUMA TOXE 3576….. Warrior account (C/L 2226),
WELE QEBU VUYO 4842….. Mage account (2242),
WOQI ZOBA WUGA 9469….. BH account (2262)

[MristerX]

+1
If I remember correctly a blocked attack still deals 60% damage. Maybe adjust that number to increase toughness of a sw.

[Jose Sarmento]

Arin covered the Warrior, so I'm going to suggest for Mage (Arcanist) and BH (Stalker).

One thing that I could suggest, transversal to all classes, is to slightly boost Osmosis effect. Would benefit Cleave/Shield (Warrior), SCR (Mage),and not affect BH much (if at all) because they already have Molten Belt (far superior). Plus who likes 8min boss fights?

For the Arcanist/Mage, I would:

a) reverse the Armor reduction in Belt of Arcane Shielding, so it gives a (buffed?) bonus to Deflect and to Armor. That can be Arcanist's belt then. For Whispered Secrets belt, fix the interaction between Lightning Struck from the Belt and from SCR's effect (as reported by Kinnu), so that can be SCR's belt.

b) have the SoFT trigger recover all skill charges. That could make for faster / near permanent SoFT, boosting Arcanist's survivability (if coupled with a Paradox boost, see below), as well as boost Cosmic Ripple damage to 5x at once (playing Blink, Paradox, Time Warp) rather than 3x at once. Cosmic Ripple is the only source of Arcanist AoE damage, but right now, it's too tough to keep aligned with ToS without having too much of a "deadzone" between ToS procs.

c) give Paradox some decent survivability. Boost the immunity duration to 4s, and the shield bonus to something that isn't paper thin at T140+. Also could make it synergize with Damage Reflect, which I feel could be a signature of the Arcanist build.

For Stalker/BH, I would:

d) find some more reliable way to align Stalker's 6-pc Snipe proc with Rapid Fire. Right now, I think it's too hard to time that properly while running around / evading, as high trials require. I was thinking something like old Blade Flurry's button (an icon which appeared on the top right of the screen), except instead of requiring clicking it would just signal you that your next ability cast would trigger the Stalker Snipe.

[Wolfsgirl]

I currently use the Brooch of the Stormcaller and the Brooch of Vampirism on my Mage, wish that the Stormcaller Regalia Gear would craft with equal or greater stats than the Arcanist gear that I am currently wearing. I cannot for the life of me figure out what it is that I am doing wrong, because the Stormcaller Regalia leaves me with much lower stats than the Arcanists gear of equal level.

[Arin]

< Warrior >

Warrior's meta from season 1 to season 16 (now) is as follows:
Season 1~3: Shield warrior (6 defender) & 6 Warlord
Season 4: 4 Warlord + 2 Fury (leap, ITZ, shock wave)
Season 5~11: 4 Warlord + 2Fury (cleave meta)
Season 12~16 (current): 6 Juggernaut (shock wave meta)

Among these, since shield warrior is the only build that doesn't rely on shockwave (cleave meta was excluded), I think it can be a good competitor to current meta. I prefer buff to nerf, so I suggest shield warrior's buff rather than 6 Juggernaut's nerf.

Current meta's highest TL so far is 172 (Season 16), but it seems that TL 173 is very doable & TL 174 might be doable as well. So, to make shield warrior playable at TL 172~174 at least, it needs huge upgrade in both toughness and damage (shield slam is mainly for mobs and deadly throw is for boss). If what devs want is the simple adjustment of bonus effects without new material, I suggest some buff as follows:

- removal of the limitation on the number of shield slams at a time (currently limited to 6)

- increase shield slam damage (at least kinda increased by around 200%~300% by bracer of mastery (currently 100%)

- increase deadly throw damage (increased by 1000% by Gridle of Heroism belt, currently 30%, deadly throw must be more powerful than living sword at least), reduced cool down of deadly throw

- hugely increased toughness so that it can survive at least 4~5 mob groups' attack at TL 172~174. (Currently it can't stand even TL 160)

- reduced cool down of shield block so that it can be constant with current AR


PS: 6F buff can be another option I think, I will add some thought about it later.