Honestly I’m surprised, I was pretty sure they were just going to toss Overpower Crit & Vulnerable all into the same bucket.
Their solution does seem slightly more elegant, and actually propels Druid and Barb to the top again (and Necro actually) since those 3 classes are the only ones who can Overpower (weird that they didn’t say anything about how OP interacts with the 80% total cap, I guess it
130?)
I wonder though if that’s going to drastically change how much people want to stack Crit and Vulnerable damage now, knowing that the overlap is hard capped.
To be perfectly honest, I had also really hoped they were gonna add more buckets - like for elemental and damage to CC’d enemies since those are very limited windows.
Maybe the full patch notes will elaborate more. Overall not nearly as hype as the last stream, but still mostly good changes it seems.
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It seems like it might be better just to stack one or the other now, good chance you will end up getting less damage if you crit a vulnerable enemy because of the caps.
Didn’t they mention there will be multiplicative elemental buckets as well. They used Sorcs Conjuration paragon nodes as an example. But this one is specific - meaning you have to use something to make it multiplicative but not a generic bucket like crit and vuln (which is probably what you are asking).
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I think what will end up happening is you’ll have crit/overpower builds for classes with overpower, and crit/vuln builds for the other classes.
crit/vuln sounds like it will be less beneficial, and trying to use all 3 buckets might actually be worse, as you’d sacrifice + skill level or other stats on your gear to achieve it.
Honestly I think it’s good. People won’t all just be copying eachother and using the same glyphs.
I might actually go back to blood mist necro and watch the entire screen explode with massive overpowers again.
Yeah for glyphs, all part of the goal to make every affix equal.
The last thing they need is more buckets. They need to combine redundant ones.
Yep. I hate it when everyone is just crit and vuln (or Barber in S1).
They said they are adding options through different things, like Paragon changes. What I was hoping for was changing some categories directly as a lot of the additive categories are just bad - many of them compete with other options in the same slot with wildly different ranges (though damage while Berserking is apparently multiplicative now which is awesome)
I really, really wish they would clarify the UI so that it’s easy to tell which stats are additive and which are multiplicative because it’s annoying AF sorting that out without a guide)
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They actually DID throw them all into the same additive damage bucket.
The way it works now is that every crit will do 50% bonus damage regardless of whether you have built 0 crit damage or 300 crit damage. The same goes for vulnerable damage; whether you have 0 or 300 vulnerable damage, a hit against a vulnerable enemy will be multiplied by 1.2.
However, additional critical damage will be additive. Essentially, the “critical hit damage” affix is now, “additional damage to enemies when you crit”, and “vulnerable damage” is now “additional damage to vulnerable enemies”.
So, at best critical damage will be effective 100% of the time and will be on par with things like “damage vs. close enemies” on a melee build like a WW barb (which will still require you to re-snapshot your WW when you get into melee range). Similarly, additive vulnerable damage will be another conditional additive multiplier that I think will struggle to compete with more generic and easily applied additive multipliers like core skill damage and the like.
Honestly, you’re probably better off just taking the free 50% crit damage and 20% vuln damage and calling it a day on those multipliers.
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Adding more buckets will further reduce build variety because it will force you to divide your damage into all buckets as evenly as possible to get the most damage out of your build.
Imagine that you have 1000% damage to split between 2 buckets.
So, we split that evenly into the 2 buckets and we get:
(1.0+5.0)x(1.0+5.0) = 36.0 or 3,600% damage.
Now imagine you have that same 1000% damage but now you have 5 buckets.
Well, we can still put that into just 2 buckets and get the same 3,600% damage:
(1.0+5.0)x(1.0+5.0)x(1.0+0.0)x(1.0+0.0)x(1.0+0.0) = 36.0 or 3,600% damage
Or we can split it evenly into the five buckets and we’ll get:
(1.0+2.0)x(1.0+2.0)x(1.0+2.0)x(1.0+2.0)x(1.0+2.0) = 243.0 or 24,300% damage.
This is not an ignorable damage increase and the game will be balanced around you knowing how to properly split your damage into all buckets, otherwise people who do it properly will absolutely obliterate everything.
Realistically, there should be no buckets because then this stupid scenario happens and it makes the game impossible to balance around the casual players that they’re desperately trying to attract.
Thats always been whats fun with ARPGs, min maxing damage buckets.
Funny how everyone was flabbergasted with damage buckets before release, like bruh, have you played ARPGs wrong this whole time?
50% crit is not at all free, since you need crit chance for it to do much of anything.
20% Vuln dmg is not necessarily free, but very build dependent, since you need a way to apply Vuln.
But yeah, it seems like these two will have a hard time competing with easier to apply dmg modifiers.
As long as there are plenty of choices in each bucket, as well as more buckets than you can realistically spread your items and paragon toward, it could still very much allow for more build diversity.
And allow for different affixes with different uptimes to better stay relevant, instead of just picking the additive affixes with highest uptime.
Imo 7+ buckets (on top of Main stat and attack speed) with at least 5 affixes in each (and most of the time significantly more than 5) could be a good base.
Also lower the individual affixes though. Getting +30-50% per affix is silly.
Agreed, having to figure out how to get different dmg sources into your build is part of the fun, not a detriment.
As long as there are multiple choices in each.
The issue here was that the choice was always Crit and Vuln.
If it was (pick 1 of 5) x (pick 1 of 5) x (pick 2 of 10) x (pick 1 of 7) x (pick 1 of 10) (just a very simple scenario of course), that could offer plenty of build chocies still.
Yes I agree, I am addressing this to the person who I was responding to.
They mentioned adding more buckets as though that would add build diversity.
I was just giving an example to explain that not only would it restrict build diversity, but that it would make the game incredibly un-fun for people who strayed from the meta because they would do like 1-10% the damage of someone who played meta and the game would be forced to be balanced around the meta.
Imo 7+ buckets (on top of Main stat and attack speed) with at least 5 affixes in each (and most of the time significantly more than 5) could be a good base.
If you look at the example I provided, you would see clearly how bad of an idea this is.
You would be hard restricted to choosing one affix per bucket and only going into a bucket twice once you had chosen an affix from each bucket.
Think about it like this: If you had an empty bucket, adding even 10% damage to it would increase your total damage by 10%. Adding that same 10% damage to a bucket you already had 100% damage in would only increase your damage by 5%. And if for some reason you were a bit silly and had 500% damage in a bucket, that 10% damage would only increase your total damage by 2%.
Damage buckets don’t need to exist the way they currently do and they could think of a much more elaborate solution than just making crit damage additive. Either make it smaller or make other damage sources larger so that they have the same output. Making your critical strike multiplier additive is pants-on-head stupid.
How do these even work now? When does your vuln and crit damage become additive? Im more confused than ever.
Yes, but there can be an opportunity cost to spreading yourself too thin.
Like spending a bunch of paragon points to reach a 7th paragon board, to pick up 10% dmg from a new bucket, vs. spending all those points to enhance numbers in your existing buckets with less points spend on traversal on the boards.
That is definitely less the case with item affixes, but there is also a cost in trying to keep up enough different effects for theses affixes to apply to, like; need a burning, vulnerable, frozen enemy at range, while you are in bear form yada yada. Where it might have resulted in more dmg to focusing at being better at applying some of these effects.
Especially if combined with the patch 1.2 stuff about legendary nodes and what not scaling multiplicatively with specific affixes.
Sounds like; any and all vuln and crit dmg from affixes, paragon etc. are additive. Only the base values that are always present for crit and vuln is multiplicative.
Well, Damage While Berserking is confirmed as a new bucket which I am all for, absolutely love that.
The only other buckets I would like to see, are damage to CC’d enemies (lump all of them into one bucket) and possibly DoT effects, since they cannot Crit or Overpower (neither can channelled skills AFAIK) and this would lift them up significantly without breaking the game.
I think they really do need to either make CC damage a new bucket, or just remove it from the pool altogether because the bonuses are highly niche and generally with very low uptime overall (and they don’t work on bosses)
Might have to make some adjustments for outliers like Rogue’s ability to potentially spam knockdown on Elites, possibly Ice Sorc as well though you can’t really chain-freeze (you can chain stun however)
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From what I understand, they ended up with the critical. Let’s see if there was a significant increase in its damage, because as an additive, its values must be higher than other damages, as we are never always applying the critical.
Vulnerability as an affix is more or less useless while exploit is still mandatory for farming at least. Its just a straight up 20% multiplier.
Very little has changed other than you may swap out exploit to something else for bossing
Any reductions in the power differences would still be an improvement. Vuln being 20% ahead > Vuln being 200% ahead. And so on.