Don’t really know how to start this, but I wanted to give some feedback on the damage formula and affix drops from someone who has probably put in more time than 95% of players. My experience with the game so far has been generally positive, I think the recent patch to nightmare dungeons really helped fix the feel of the end game. It makes the grind feel a lot better. I do hope that eventually we get a tier 5 or maybe a seasonally unique tier 5 so that the open world doesn’t feel less valuable in comparison to nightmare dungeons, but that’s a different topic.
One thing I have noticed is that most affixes don’t feel good to find. I don’t know if this was done for scarcity reasons or to make weapons feel different, but what I’ve found is that it actually makes most drops feel the same. The community may not have it exactly right, but from my limited testing their conclusions on the damage formula seems mostly accurate. You have main stat, additive damage, crits, multipliers, and vulnerable all as separate buckets multiplying off of weapon damage. Something to this effect.
Due to how the damage formula currently works, it appears that additive bonuses are significantly lower in value than other types of bonuses because there are so many of them, and because they are more accessible than other types on glyphs. I might only be able to use two or three of multiple dozen additive buffs in the game, just like how I’m often looking for crit or vulnerable damage specifically because of the formula. It makes sense that these additive damage buffs may have been designed this way because most of them are conditional effects. However, in my experience most people try to stack whatever is the easiest for them to keep up consistently and otherwise ignore additives bonuses. Melee players just use close, whirlwind uses core because of snapshot, etc.
For these reasons, it seems obvious to me that there are currently too many additive damage bonuses in the game. The bonuses that are in the game also need to be tuned. If something is conditional but harder to achieve, I should get a larger bonus for it. As a barbarian, I have two different similarly upgraded two handed weapons. One can roll up to 70.5% close damage, while the other can roll up to 58.5% core damage. Most builds in this game are either melee or ranged, because there’s just more synergy that way. Core damage is obviously more limiting to only one skill rather than all of them, yet it rolls lower. Based on how I understand damage being calculated, there is no reason to use core over close as a melee build if they’re both added to the same bucket.
At the same time, I’ve noticed another issue. Vulnerable damage is very, very strong. So strong in fact that without looking at numbers I would wager 90% or more of the people pushing nightmare dungeons are using the Exploit glyph, regardless of whether they need it to apply vulnerable, simply because of the +vulnerable damage. Vulnerable existing isn’t a problem, it isn’t even necessarily a problem that it is strong, I find the mechanic fun. What I worry about is build diversity. If it’s going to be this strong, we need more methods of applying vulnerable so that people aren’t limited to forcing a handful of skills into their build.
Vulnerable being so strong also makes the damage feel more inconsistent than it should. Often, my build will go from hitting a couple thousand against damage resistant elites with no crit/vulnerable, to hitting for millions against normal enemies with vulnerability up and crits. This means vulnerability often doesn’t feel like a brief power spike, it feels like another barrier to doing damage, which is the less fun part of it.
If anyone sees this and is willing to test it out, I think there’s a way to solve all of these issues and make the game feel more consistent. Vulnerable could remain it’s own static multiplier, but no longer increase (no +vulnerable damage). This allows it to remain significant and impactful without feeling like a barrier to doing damage. Instead of vulnerable damage, just separate the additive bonuses that are all in one bucket into two. One multiplier can be general damage (+ basic dam, close dam, dam over time, etc) and the other can be based on more specific affixes (+ dam to crowd controlled, dam with lightning, dam to poisoned, etc).
I believe this would accomplish a few different things, first being that it would improve the quality of drops naturally by making these affixes more important to builds that actually use them. It also substitutes as a separate multiplier to make up for vulnerable damage being reduced, which could mean a little less tweaking to make the changes balanced for the current game. If you were to make similar changes, vulnerable damage could simply be replaced with a chance to apply vulnerability on hit. That would even buff lucky hit since it seems a bit weak on most builds I’ve seen. Additionally, vulnerable would now be more in line with the benefits from overpower.
Finally, some affixes could just be removed because they’re too similar and it makes it more confusing for players. For example, we just need damage to crowd controlled enemies, not damage to slowed or stunned or whatever. Likewise, damage to chilled/frozen could probably just be one. I could see damage to healthy being practical for interesting one shot builds, but due to enemy damage scaling I don’t think anyone would ever want injured or execute. The gameplay is too fast for that kind of design to be worth it.
This was long, but those are just some of the things I’ve noticed so far in trying to put together my own nmd pushing build. I’m not claiming to know everything about the damage calculations and it’s possible something I mentioned was wrong and looks different internally compared to how the community sees it from simple tests. It may be both less overwhelming to new players and less annoying to veterans by just reducing the amount of affixes and making better drops more rare to compensate. It would also probably feel better to have a more noticeable impact from your additive damage buffs considering they make up the majority of affixes.