Empowered enchants are way too powerful. I’d start with halving their power if not 2/3 reduction in their benefits. Do not allow stacking empowered enchants. I’d also be fine with their removal. It is possible to make an unlimited blinking mage with one shot damage on masterworked gear with rapid healing. Other builds can simply one shot bosses.
Enchants with durable are too strong.
Boosts:
Lifesteal is pretty weak. Lump it as a health enchant so no stacking but make it worthwhile to use.
Fire bonuses other than fire damage % are underwhelming. Maybe give a stamina recovery effect when burning enemies or something else interesting.
Ranged classes in general are too powerful and essentially can avoid the combat mechanics pretty easily. That said they are fun to play and maybe this is just a balancing issue. Mages can basically one shot groups and archers can stun lock enemies pretty easily with arrow spam.
Please note, there are probably other areas that need boosting or nerfing but between Durability and Empowered Enchants that are so overwhelming it is hard to gauge properly. Bring those back down to earth and we can take another look.
Side note, Mottled Rubies don’t seem to be dropping for me at all. I have 10+ of other mottled gems.
I’d like them to bring lifesteal to be more effective baseline but without needing to stack 2 25% regainable health gems on gear and have 2+ increased % healing modifier just for lifesteal to feel sorta meaningful.
But that might also be the fact that lifesteal at 12-15% is fine, it’s just that enemies deal so much baseline damage that your health spikes from 100→30% or less in a few seconds, so the time lifesteal would need to be felt effective at its baseline 12% is a lot longer than the time it takes for enemies to deal many times over what you are healing with a single hit they deal to you.
On the other end you run a full plate/mesh build with 64-70% physical DR with lifesteal+regainable health+heal on stagger and suddenly you become near immortal short of getting stunlocked by the giant elites with the sticks.
It’s a very binary experience that should be smoothed over.
yeah it’s a bit hard to gauge. Part of the problem is because of empowered gems and durability you can basically have 100% damage resistance. So how much life steal needs to be tuned up is hard to judge. Presumably if you nerf resistances then you can raise lifesteal up a little.
Also, they need to stop lying about the stats. It’s not 10% life steal, it’s 1/3rd that. So 12% lifesteal gem only gives 4% in reality.
Oh, without wanting to, you answered my misunderstood about lifesteal… I never get it, i made 400 damages with 25% leech and only get 35, wich suck and isn’t enough…. that why i’ve completly abandoned this kind of build… it’s all clear now, i’ve to retry one with more increasing healing.
Totally agree with you, i hope they’ll change the description and made it clear and correct…
About nerf, yes, empowered are powerfull, but it’s also nice and fun to get an invincible character after lots of hours played, somehow like in PoE when you’re full min/max….
I agree, but to make them too strong, you still need to use two enchantment slots (one for the boost, the other for the durability).
This forces you to sacrifice one enchantment.
I think the problem is that very often, the fourth enchantment you choose isn’t nearly as effective as the first ones (often attack, critical hit, or elemental enchantments…). Especialy with legs armors.
Well durable facet alone probably makes it top choice as long as it is put on a weapon or plate armor item. Then throw in the extra durability increase enchant, the empowered gems and the exalting and suddenly you’re getting double your damage from basically one-two enchants. Or double your resistance, healing, focus gain, etc…
Keep in mind most other enchants are doing like 10 to 15% damage boost. Not 200%.
The max you can get with a durable facet and +75 durability enchant is a 30% boost for defense or 25% boost with attack It’s maybe a lot, but never close to your 200%.
Having this kind of facet forces you to forgo other bonuses that other facets could offer.
Exalt doesn’t give these two enchantments a better advantage than others. Especially since it’s a mix of flat and %.
The main problem comes from gems that boost enchantments. And these gems are problematic on most builds, not just on durability-based enchantments.
30% boost is for ALL damage resistance and is 3x what the phys or elemental res enchants provide. It’s overtuned by A LOT.
Attack is a 50% increase in damage without using empowered infusions. That’s 3-5x better than any other ‘conditional’ offensive bonus and without considering that it’s altering flat base damage so any other bonuses are amplified as well.
So sorry, it’s over tuned.
Agree 100% that the empowered enchants just exacerbate it all-on all builds.
With empowerement, you can get 75% with max focus, 80% low life or 100% low life…
So 25 + 75%/80/100 → 43% more damage / 45% / 50%
Ofc, it’s easy to get the 75% at max focus gems, but the 100% at low health isn’t easy to find… i’ve just get 2 in more than 70hours.
Attack damage +% depending durability is only available on weapon. So you can only get +50% max.
You can increase damage after charged attack, increase damage after pary, etc… with all buff, maybe you’ll be able to increase a lot, but you’ll have to pary/charged attack in less than 5sec to get all buffs active at the same time…
You can get 170% increased damage at the max, with all maxed out, food, oil, utility rune and staggered ennemy ….
Yes sure, it’s even possible to make a six figure damage number with the right boost. But we were talking only about the durability enchant, nothing else.
I agree with the notion of gems being too strong. You could reduce the bonuses by 50% ( from 100% for low hp to 50% for low hp for example) and it would still be a meaningful and sufficient upgrade.
Durability associated Enchantments are overtuned in comparison but they require a specific build and they only escalate after the use of strong gems so at least to me they seem less problematic in themselves. Also they allow for interesting builds like making a tanky cloth armor charakter with fast movement for example, rewarding a “jack of all trades” in a way. And it was fun and rewarding to figure out the strength of durability based enchantments in my playthrough because I enjoy theory crafting in games and not just slapping flat dmg resistance on everything.
Damage resistance:
Damage resistance becomes problematic if you trivialize the encounters or make them boring. But on the other hand coming up with creative or strong defensive builds may be very rewarding to players. So maybe there are solutions out of the box that allow you to maximise your build in a rewarding way without trivializing the game.
One simple solution to high damage resistances would be to always have (for example) 10% of every damage dealt ignore all armor and explain this in the ingame Codex as well. So if you get to 99% dmg reduction it would actually result in 89,1% dmg reduction. If you dont want to implement it generally, maybe this could be a guaranteed effect for the highest tier of outbreak. Edit: Or
Also you could consider allowing certain Procs, for example bleed or other elemental procs, to fully ignore armor and add these to bossfights or specific large opponents to make them stand out and retain the feeling of an immortal charakter, walking through arrows that can not pierce the armor while making giant monstrosities a force to be dangerous even to the toughest defense.
Damage Changes before Toughness Changes:
Before you reduce damage resistance and tankiness I would look at the damage the player can deal because if you would just nerf tanky builds, the ranged Builds will replace them and reward not engaging in the combat gameplay. A possible change could be to always double or even triple the HP of bosses if you engage at the highest tier Outbreaks and make it so that despite taking full damage all the time, a boss can never lose more than 20% of his health in a single attack and after losing more than 10% in a single attack he takes only half the damage for the next 10 seconds, stacking. That way both fast attacking builds and slow attacking, high dmg builds are valid options.
Thanks for reading sorry for the long post.
Edit: Also maybe reduce or remove lifeleech on Throns and Thistle Ring and for attack runes of 1 Shot Mages that cast using their HP, instantly refilling it. These interactions result in overpowered combinations as far as my play groups experience goes.
Agree, durability based enchantments as well as all empovering gems need a revisit.
Another troublesome stat is crit chance/damage. We already did enough damage without crits, now it is just absurd.
I wanted to rebuild by stagger build in this update, but quickly noticed that enemies do not survive long enough for this strategy, because I kill regular mobs with 1-2 hits and plague bosses with 3-4 hits.
The least that should be done is group +crit & +damage/+armor penetration enchantmens into one category. And even then I would say it won’t be enough.
However, top builds do 5 digits damage numbers, while a casual player will do 200-300 damage. The diffirence in damage output is just to big.
If you buff the bosses to sruvive several 10K hits, what do you think will happen to the average player?
More realistically, it depends on the learning curve. If the game does a great job of communicating, all along the way, what I need to do to reach those damage numbers, it could be fine. But if it’s remaining one of those ‘gritty’ games that refuses to hold your hand, then yeah, average players like me will bounce right off the game very fast. If I’m not naturally settling into a build that gives me that kind of damage by the appropriate point the game and the boss HP is that high, I will just give up and quit the game.
For some players it might be a cognitive load thing, and for others it might be because they just simply don’t have the kind of time it requires to go figuring out or researching the right type of builds that get you there. There’s way more gamers out there that don’t fit into the “hardcore” category, and this game needs to decide if it’s catering to a broad audience or not. I’d say with their current sales, though, they don’t really have to worry about it anymore.
you are forgetting the Empowered enchant that can give you twice the durability, twice the gain on durability and twice whatever other offensive aspect you use. And that’s without Exalting the durability to 20%.
Divine scimitar, blue with 36 in strength and dex
base
with 10% dura and +75 dura
+ dura facet
+full focus gem (75%)
452
534
570
656
% increase:
18%
26%
45%
same as above but with 10% crit bonus enchant
469
554
591
698
% increase:
18%
26%
49%
above but exalted 4x to increase to 20% damage based on durability
