I’ve said this many times, and I’ll say it one more:
Vulnerable should be a Rogue only ability. The squishiest class gets it’s own unique mechanic (it’s the only class that doesn’t have one), and the mechanic is “can I kill this tough mob before it one taps me”?
Or my other solution to fix the issue, which is to remove Vulnerable entirely from the game. The attribute is so busted that even enemies have it.
But I like your idea of how to fix it, which is to make Vulnerable an attribute that gives you potential for other things, instead of just plain damage. Vulnerable could remain in the game for everyone, if it’s purpose was to facilitate Lucky Hit procs (increasing your base coefficient). Or like some other guy said, it could also be the case that Vulnerable targets eat larger CC durations when affected by such. Or the more basic one, which would be to make skills apply additional effects, like Rapid Fire giving back mana, or Bone Spear piercing all targets… It’s an elegant solution without outright removing the stat from everyone.
But as it is right now, like you said and like I’ve been saying since basically day 2 of early access, it’s a MUST stat and that just takes away from build complexity. Even MAIN stat is secondary to Vulnerable, how can that be a thing.
Because we shouldn’t have a mechanic in the game so powerful that every class needs to be adjusted in order to use it.
As for damage against CC/status- That isn’t a separate bucket from the rest of the damage sources. The damage buckets are-
X damage (so generally things from skill tree or aspects that specifically say %X instead of %+)
Main stat
Crit
Vulnerable
Every other source of increased damage like % bonus damage, bonus damage to certain damage types like physical, damage against close, damage against healthy, damage against distant, damage to chilled, damage to stunned, damage to CC’d…
I’ve heard this CC/Status “bucket” as being the next most powerful, but, as far as I know, damage to CC’d isn’t it’s own bucket at all. It’s additive in there with all of the other stuff.
Even if damage vs… affixes aren’t multiplicative it’s still the next best way to apply damage boosts after vulnerability because they are the easiest damage bonuses to apply consistently.
Outside of very specific builds crit and overpower aren’t consistent enough to rely on for constant damage boosts. This is why builds are focusing on vulnerability over crit or OP.
It vulnerabilty loses its damage bucket people aren’t going to suddenly focus on crit or op; they are going to focus on damage vs… It won’t result in as high of a damage bonus when applied, but it will result in a significantly more consistent damage bonus; and let’s face it consistent DPS is better than randomly applied burst DPS.
In order for vulnerable to be worth it, you have to invest in gear that increases vulnerable damage.
Without any gear investment it is just a 20% increase to dmg. This is negligeble and can easily be outshined by any other skill, stat in game. It is hardly a must have.
Rolling a +20% dmg to close enemies, provides the exact same dmg increase to every skill, and all the time as long as youa re close.
Since you have to invest in it for it to really work, just like any other mechanic in the game, it locks you out from using other things, that would make it wildly overpowered.
You should take another look at it, and how it works. It is not really a must have, and is only functional if you are using a build that has any skills that benefit from it.
I know there has been a reply to your post already, but I wanted to break it down in more detail.
The difference between +20% damage to close enemies and +20% damage to Vulnerable enemies is that +20% damage to close enemies doesn’t multiply the rest of your damage like you think it would.
If that +20% damage to close enemies is your only source of increased damage, then it does work exactly like you’d expect. The problem is that it doesn’t multiply with OTHER sources of damage. For instance- If you have +20% damage to close enemies and +20% damage with physical skills, you’d think you’d have a total damage increase of 44% damage when close using physical skills (1.2x damage from the damage to close multiplier, then another 1.2x damage from physical damage multiplier or basically 1.2 times 1.2 = 1.44)
It doesn’t work that way. Those two sources of damage are additive. You’re getting 20+20 instead of 1.2 times 1.2. Doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it becomes one when you notice how MUCH +% damage you get from paragon. I think I’m sitting somewhere at like… +160% damage with bone skills, I have several nodes that are +20% damage or +50% damage to healthy targets. Let’s stay away from those extremely large numbers and just look at something like
+50% damage to close enemies
+50% damage to chilled enemies
+50% damage with bone skills
+50% damage with physical damage
If these all worked multiplicatively, you’d be seeing this result- 1.5x1.5x1.5x1.5=5.0625 which would be about a 400% damage multiplier.
Instead, it’s actually 50%+50%+50%+50% or a 200% damage multiplier.
Almost every source of damage in this game works additively instead of multiplicatively EXCEPT Vulnerable. Vulnerable is multiplicative. So, using the example above again- Having a total of +100% damage to Vulnerable targets doesn’t make your 200% go to 300% total damage the same way that adding +100% extra damage with Bone Skills would, it doubles it to 400%. That’s why it’s so powerful.
I can confirm Vulnerability is a huge source of power. My bro’s barb has like 159% vulnerability damage at level 71 and can crit for over 2 million. My sorcerer, while fine, cannot clear elites and bosses the way he can. He can take half a torment dungeon bosses hp in one swing and he can do it consistently. I feel like vulnerability being multiplicative is the problem. Plenty of other builds need buffed to compensate, however.
I hadnt thought about this before but when you point it yes it sounds like vulnerability is bad for the game when you are at a disadvantage if you dont use a build containing it. I wonder if blizz will change it, we’ll have to wait and see. This game needs updating/change for sure tho it just feels like this game can be so much better but is being held back by a few things.
And you base your opinion on absolutely nothing. Great post from you and others with similar views. Please make a constructive argument with reasoning as to why it shouldn’t be rebalanced. OP your dealing with imbeciles here, sorry.
It’s really not, having vuln be a 4-5x damage multi makes it mandatory for every build.
Any build that can’t consistently apply vuln is automatically bad, every build runs the same paragon board and glyph and skill for vuln within a class. If gear doesn’t have vuln affies it’s automatically bad.
This is not healthy for the game. Vuln should be strong sure, but not nearly as strong as it is now. Other options should be competitive.
All of these conditional damage stats need to go, they are just so low effort and such low impact. Damage if close, if far, if vulnerable, if healthy, if injured, if crowd controlled, if slowed, if stunned, ect ect ect…its all the same boring modifier that doesnt impact how the game feels ect.
It would be, but I also don’t think nothing should be done to compensate classes.
I don’t necessarily mind a nerf to damage as a result so long as the game is balanced properly around it, and I do think that there should be some kind of compensation as a result. I really wouldn’t personally mind a nerf to our damage output, but that’s a whole separate topic on how high our damage values are compared to how quickly we get one shot at these higher NM dungeons. The balance between damage we deal and damage we take is pretty good at lower levels, but then the damage we deal and take both skyrocket without giving us good ways to mitigate that incoming damage. Higher NM dungeons are one shot fiestas on both sides of the coin, and I’m personally not a fan but that’s a very subjective subject.
I’m not a mathematical kind of tech guy who can figure out game balance however, so I would rather just let Blizzard’s team figure that math out if they did decide to implement some changes.
Remove vulnerable reduce enemy hp by what vulnerable added. Done. Obviously you need to fix more things but renoving it is key. I’ll make a thread about why later.
Vulnerability is a prime example of blizzard doing one of their classic moves.
Making a solution to something that not a problem and does not need to exist.
Vulnerability does not need to exist in the game, at all. All it does is make another set of stats that get thrown into the pool that you need to worry about getting on gear, it makes it so unless your build has a way of making enemies vulnerable easy, the build is basically worthless.
If they want to keep vulnerable, they need to just have every single Sorcerer skill auto apply it like Ice Shards does. That way we don’t have to dive bomb in the middle of monster packs and be a Barbarian. Or give us a Ice Cone skill that freezes from a range.
Overall it’s just bad design because it’s a must have and you are just hurting yourself not getting Frost Nova like every sorc should, regardless of build.
It’s a short maintenance debuff we have to appy constantly. Plus there’s stats that can increase it’s output. Not to mention vulnerable stats make it a really high multiplier in the damage formula. It should of just been a debuff with no other increasing multiplier.
spot on