So certain caps on passives and multipliers are there to try balance things. Fine. But the caps on movement speed, attack speed, skill size etc are too low in my opinion. In the season 4 ptr, big skills were fun. Any why can’t I sacrifice something to be allowed to zoom around the map? Why do I have to focus on hitting hard? What about hitting with a tenth of the power but 10 times faster. Speed feels good, big aoe feels good. Even the armor cap feels too low, why even have armor aspects in the game at this point?
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Probably preparing for a mechanic that converts armor to damage… Ill put my money on that statement.
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Do we know the final caps yet? I thought final patch notes were next week or something like that.
But if they stick with some of the caps from the PTR, I can agree some are a bit low.
I haven’t heard anything about the caps changing. Most were set at s4 launch and will probably not change for s5.
My bad. Thought you were talking about some of the class multipliers from the PTR. Some paragon board and skill tree multipliers got capped. For instance, the Druid lightning paragon board had a legendary node which gave a damage multiplier based on close and far damage bonus. It was unlimited, but is now capped at 40%(x).
Several classes had caps like this added to multiplicative abilities.
Overcapping Armor should just result in diminishing returns Barrier or Fortify Generation for the effective portion past the cap relative to the enemy level when you take Physical Damage.
Elemental Resists need to go naturally to 85% and gear or Elixirs that increase Max Elemental Resist changed to provide an Absorb function where any portion past cap Heals you and generates Resource with diminishing returns. Overcapping Elemental Resists would work like Armor described above.
This gives value to overcapping Armor and Resists without breaking it.
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I think the armor cap was a stopgap and there’s a whole rebalance coming in the expansion, so I guess we’ll have to see how that works.
Attack speed is an odd one, where there are two separately capped pools of attack speed bonuses. Not sure if that’s also true for movement speed. Having a cap is good in the sense that it lets you know when you’ve solved that problem, but that only works if you can clearly see when you are capped.
As you say, though, the biggest issue with the caps is that they seem to be tuned around the idea that every character will cap out everything. I have no idea why they would want that to be the tuning, rather than asking characters to specialize.
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I’m a bigger fan of diminishing returns over caps myself. Reward time investment with power fantasy it’s a PvE game anyhow. Only becomes a problem if completion times on top end activities is too fast consistently or if everyone does the same build.
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This. Hard caps means you have a goldi-locks zone and makes that cap become a pre-requisite. I think it is a problem that you even NEED to cap Armor and Resists. Damage is out of control how tuned it is. One-shots of any sort should be an anomaly. There needs to be a wider spectrum.
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I’m torn on that. I think allowing high investment means that you can enable specialized builds, so that different builds really play differently. On the other hand, caps and breakpoints allow effects to be chunkier, so that you have a clearer, more strategic puzzle of how to combine and optimize stats, rather than an infinite sliding scale.
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That gets solved by having proper documentation, something Blizzard is derping up pretty badly with D4 so far. Ideally they’d have a help section in the menus with a thesaurus and hard numbers for caps, etc.
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i just wish they made caps really clear. make it obvious if i capped something.
i ran around with 50% too much armor for a while before i noticed the cap. didnt feel great.
tbh i’d rather have no caps and only diminishing returns… but if youre gonna insist on caps, make it very clear when that cap is reached.
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TLDR verion: System stability and performance, as well as the enjoyment of players who don’t want to see effect vomit when out in the world.
Chances are movement speed is tied to what the servers and most PCs can load/handle without instability or crashes. Similar to attack speed (though this leans more to the server/network side than PC performance)
Large AoE effects mean the risk of the whole screen being covered in player effects when in combat, either by yourself or when others are with you (think Blood Maiden). This would make it more difficult for you or others to see enemy effects or otherwise distract/annoy others who may want to see what they’re doing.
I don’t know if you’re playing in S4 but that’s a thing now. Hover over the armor stat and it tells you what the cap for level 100 is. Levels below 100 don’t show their cap but if you hit 85% then you’re capped.
there’s one already. thorns with bone golem
Diminishing returns does not mean infinite. It gets to the point where either the investment is not worth the return, or it flattens out so much so that even stacking everything you can, there is an effective cap.
The entire problem now is the chunkier damage. There is limited ways to build your character to mitigate the damage so you take ridiculous burst damage. Because Diablo 4 is now Quantity over Quality, when you have a screen filled with effects and enemies, unless they tune that damage to be so low as to effectively not matter, you just end up with random one shots that are nearly unavoidable.
In this Season especially, this is why so many players are complaining about The Pit Bosses. We have seen a dramatic reduction in Damage Reduction as an Affix and Blizzard’s only counter to that is to raise Maximum HP which is a horrible way of handling EHP as an nearly 2 dimensional mechanic.
Enemies and players should deal significantly less damage. There needs to be less enemies in each pull but those encounters should be a little more strategic with what we have now. The way the game is designed currently, it does not allow a lot of reactive gameplay and instead most of it is just pre-emptive. Spam Potions, Pop Barrier, or Invuln etc. to engage enemies or run the risk of instant death. It is an absolute shame that you get to a point where survivability basically becomes a moot point and you hit a ceiling and you can only increase your damage and hope to blow things up before it touches you and kills you instantly.
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Good games give you more control over particle effects, damage text size, status text, text color, turning off other player particle effects or reducing them. The more control given to players allows them to tailor their experience to them which results in a more enjoyable net result.
Diablo 4 is like, “Nah dawg, whenever you make anything Vulnerable, we are going to have it spam and overlap 50 times. Also, all your effects and other player particle effects are going to take up the entire screen. BUT on the other hand, we are going to make enemy Shadow clones stack on top of each other and have multiple ground effects where you cannot see anything you need to see. Oh yeah, and also like uh your Buffs and Debuffs are going to be small AF icons at the bottom of the screen you cannot even tell what is going on.”
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I definitely agree with you there. Was keeping within the context of what D4 does or allows.
Yeah, infinite was an exaggeration, but what I really meant that it would be extremely fine-grained. That inflection point where you should switch from investing in the most powerful stat to investing in the next-most-powerful one would be squishy and hard to pin-point. Same with switching from 2nd best to third best, and so on. That means you could swap too early or too late by a fairly large margin, because you aren’t feeling big differences with any one trade off, but if you are consistently switching late or consistently switching easy, you end up with a build that is missing a lot of power.
Looks like they are starting to add tools there (there’s a new unique or maybe aspect in S5 that spreads out burst damage into damage over time, and sly steps lets you counteract burst damage), but I think the problem is more about the lack of options and the balance on the caps than about the caps themselves.
Capping move speed and attack speed serves a practical purpose for the sake of performance. Capping crit chance and block chance and CDR allows them to have additive effects so the total bonus is easier to calculate (instead of all being inverse multiplicative like DR is).
They could let you creep past max resist and max armor with some system that translates surplus values into multipliers that asymptotically approach 0% damage taken. But they could also create the same tension by just lower the value of armor and resist affixes and powers.
I do think they need to increase the variety of encounters by making more mob families with very different ways of attacking you and defending themselves. The shield guys you had to hit from behind in D3 were cool.
That said:
I think this is just that there are preemptive powers that are just too strong right now. Why dodge the stun traps when you can just continually pop unstoppable or immune? Why prioritize the champions when everything just melts anyway?
I find that when I am pushing pit with an under tuned build the game is suddenly very active and strategic. People just find ways to not need to play that hard.
At least they are adding an option for this next season.
In my opinion the caps on speed and atk speed are fine. You already have 125% max m speed base not accounting different type of buffs. I think it is important that it doesn’t go higher cause of the mobility skills each player has. If that was higher, the mobility skills would be rendered useless for half of their value.
As for atk speed, we can already reach a maximum of 200% atk speed. I think that is more than enough.
In relation to skill sizes, well… here it gets tricky in my opinion. Sure it is nice to have larger size skills, but from the PTR S4 experience, some skills can become quite broken on larger sizes. I would like to see some larger size skills, but not some broken ones.
In relation to paragon board nodes being capped. As much as I hate caps on skills and paragon nodes, in some cases I think these are necessary because some classes have the potential to abuse certain nodes. There are certain nodes that apply each time you do a certain CC or effect and if the nodes were to be uncapped we go to a situation where you get close to infinite dmg cause of the multiplied dmg. A good example is how druid’s Thunderstruck node was working in PTR S4, making druid able to go to trilions of dmg only by abusing that node.
When you are pushing Pit, it becomes obvious that the only path forward is a Glass Cannon build to abuse mechanics to achieve overtuned scaling since it doesn’t matter typically if you have a little more DR as you will be one-shot by all sorts of things. This is compounded by having things on timers where the limit is damage. You cannot build defensively and have a longer and safer fight since you fail the DPS check.
The community has had this complaint specifically with Uber Lilith since the release of the game and while Blizzard has attempted to fix those issues, they also introduced the same thing players were originally complaining about to new content! It is one thing to have clear Wipe Mechanics and Skill checks and it is another to just have attacks be spammed that all one-shot you and you have 0 chance of ever surviving anything even if you have Imposing Presence, ridiculous HP, Seligs, Barrier, high DR, and Challenging Shout up. If even that doesn’t matter, why even bother investing in Defense?
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