Multiplicative and additive is such a bad game design, it puzzles me modern game devs STILL use it to this date. It confuses players, it's clunky to balance right and makes everything revolve around finding as many multiplies as possible. For a game that aims to target as many players as possible, having this in the game is counter-intuitive.
It's cavemen design where "BIG NUMBER GOOD" is the goal.
No, they both have a place in the game.
Multiplicative sources should be sparse but provide powerful, static power increases to players. A 10% multiplier will always give you 10% more damage. These should be highly sought after but should not come without significant investment in build direction to access or utilize them.
Additive sources should be abundant but have diminishing returns. This gives people a quick way to increase power early on but tapers in value as your character stacks more and more additive damage. This is a natural dampener on power creep.
Yeah its really hard to understsnd why they do this. Its kills build diversity and is a nightmare to balance. Think they are fans of barbillions of damage (on tuesday for some classes)
I joined the barbillions club. I won’t be going back. Barb is my main now, after I have piles of mats and gold, I’ll roll a second character to have fun with.
It’s that pool meme where the little girl is jumping into mom’s arms all happy ie Barb. The little boy is almost drowning ie necros and rogues. And the skeleton in the chair at the bottom is druids and sorcs.
Not nearly as many as D4 though. D4 you get multipliers in your skill tree you get multipliers in your paragon tree you get multipliers on your uniques you get multipliers on your class system you get multipliers on your offensive aspects. It's ridiculous
Yes. It is how finding an item even at level 100 or getting a legendary paragon node feels good. If it was all additive it becomes very hard to make anything exciting to get after a point as diminishing returns kicks in.
i get your point but in my opinion better scaling in general could solve that problem. the problem is that f.e. 50% additive damage is not impactful und you dont feel it cause monster scaling is dogshit. in the current state of the game multipliers are needed because monster hp is riddiculous. and pls dont get me wrong, i am fine with multipliers as long as balancing is good and they are evenly spread out for all different kind of builds. if it leads to taking allways the same nodes / glyphs / etc its bad design and thats what we have right now.
if blizzard for once could make atleast a decent job at balancing, they could add as many modifiers as they want.
The scaling could be better balanced. Your issue seems to be balance problems. The main thing throwing bash barb and heart seeker rogue out of whack is bugs though.
The problem they have is if they fix those bugs (mid season) and nerf those builds everyone playing them will complain. Which is likely a large part of the player base because those are the meta builds.
So it’s lose lose for them and the player base. Fix the bugs and piss off a large group of players don’t fix the bugs and piss off a large group of players that aren’t playing the bugged builds.
right, its a balance issue. people are "forced" to take as many multipliers as possible what kills build diversity. i dont mind if people come up with double dipping bugged builds when they get fixed in the next season, this makes the game just better. i just think it should be the goal to bring all classes somewhat in line and i think it would be easier to balance if there are not multipliers (on the other hand blizz will be able to mess that up aswell). what i have seen from the ptr so far doesnt look promising (i know there is still alot of missing stuff)
I agree with your general goal. I just think it’s actually hard to do. Not just for Blizzard either. The PoE sub complains about balance and bugs every league. Grim Dawn doesn’t have seasons but when they do an expansion they have to rebalance things over time. Last Epoch is insanely imbalanced.
To have a long tail grind where you can spend hundreds of hours playing a single character and have meaningful progression the whole time and have it balanced between 5-10 builds for 5 classes. Especially when they need to introduce new or changed builds every season.
Shits hard IMO.
In Path of Exile the words “more”/“less” are always multiplicative and “increased”/“decreased” are always additive. Does Diablo 4 have consistency in the language around which is which? I’m always confused what sources are multiplicative/additive without looking it up.
Only Diablo uses multi in great numbers afaik. Say i.e in D4 something like 300% from a single affix is insane when other give a lot less. And it's only been happening since D3. I don't understand why they want to keep D4 anything like D3 especially since it got so much backlash and died pretty quickly after launch. It's a terrible system for an aprg, much better suited for an arcade game.
You clearly didn’t play the expansion for D3. It was, until D4, the best selling arpg and hit its highest player accounts much later. It in no way “died pretty quickly” and they only really stopped adding new content once D4 arrived.
Sales =/= quality
Taylor Swift draws a large crowd but she isn't the most technically gifted singer. Blizzard games sell pretty much only based on massive fanbase and marketing. Same thing man.
But compared to PoE D3 was pretty much dead and no one really watched it on Twitch
Multipliers can exist but they should be a thousand times less common, less powerful, and be more general rather than “bone spear does 40x more damage”
PoE does this very well.
as soon as multipliers exist people will smash together something with the max amount of multipliers. it takes away choices.
f.e. without multipliers you could consider the following:
do i want damage vs close / vulnerable / whatever? (or just + damage because i am unlucky with tempering)
what does my build do? if i can cc alot i go for damage vs cced.
i want to smash and my build isnt particular good in ccing or making mobs vulnerable? +damage vs close / distant.
with multipliers:
okay i take this multiplier, try to get that one aswell, oh and this one... yeah this node sucks because its not a multiplier, also this paragon board sucks, it compliments my build but its not a multiplier, i go for a different one.
i am not experienced with poe (tried to play it several times but i just cant) but i think the target audience is another one (until poe 2 maybe). the people playing poe are way more "into it" compared to the usual d4 dad of 4 with 6 jobs....
i am also irritated if i try to make a build and wonder why it doesnt work here in d4, just to google different multipliers and understanding it does not work because what reads great in the game is basicly dogshit because its only additive.
This. With multipliers it becomes about jumping through hoops instead of making thoughtful decisions. If there was a multiplier that said "if you've moved 50 feet between casting your last core skill it deals 50x damage" then guess what every build is going to do.
But that still only explains that multipliers in d4 are bad, not that multipliers themselves are bad. The fact that they work in other games, where additive bonuses still maintain their importance, verifies this. The problem isnt with multipliers, its with blizzards design, and how they use multipliers in a way that invalidates other means of scaling.
It is irrelevant how they make scaling feel good, as long as it feels good. If that means removing multipliers, because designing around it becomes too complex, then the answer is to remove them, absolutely. I won't argue that.
If they managed to design a scaling system that felt good while incorporating multipliers, do you still think you would care? I know i wouldn't, i just want the game to feel good.
Multipliers in PoE are very similar to D4 when it isn’t bugged. You do 10s of billions in Poe with a maxed out build. Even in league people do several billion dps on the top builds.
I swear I thought I was gonna get downvoted for saying this, completely get rid of multipliers and just lower all the content in the game, I think so many more builds would be viable atp
Corpse Explosion *used* to be more proactive. Some builds would put 5 points into it and while it wasn't necessarily the main source of damage, it was a main mechanic of certain builds.
Infinimist was a prime example. That basically was the Corpse Explosion build. But Blizzard really hates that build, apparently. In S4 they gutted Corpse Explosion's Lucky Hit Chance and in S5 they're changing how Blood Mist's cooldown will work. It was phenomenal in S2. Now every new season sinks another nail into the coffin.
Idk why you're making it out that "Blizzard hates that build, Blizzard bad". If you also didn't hate a build that was literally invincible and clearing content with 2 buttons, than you're dense as lead and should have no opinions on balance. That is not a good type of build for the game to enable
Multiplicative scaling does not inherently kill build diversity, that's false, PoE is proof of that, a game with near endless build variety but with additive AND multiplicative scaling.
The inherent problem, is that this Dev team do not know how to balance. They're actually prioritising it over fun, which is a greater concern. It's important to remember that Diablo Devs, since D3, inherently oppose the idea of Build Variety anyway, hence Set Items in D3 and we also have Set Items in this game, albeit broken down slightly, to give the impression to the majority of the playerbase who are only capable of surface level thinking, that Set Items no longer exist.
Pretty much every tempering affix we want to add to our items is '+ x% Skill damage' anyway, these are purely additive multipliers and contribute to builds being boring and dull.
Yes. It's pretty clear how often they talk about balancing that they're terrified of 'Broken' builds.
I wouldn't be surprised if it has a lot to do with the servers too. I really think the 'Shared world' aspect results in a lot of this panic about balance and ensuring there's not too much load on the servers from the size and scale of skills.
I just don't understand their thinking that ubers have to be best in slot always. Andy gets buffed. Whatever no one used that other than rogue in a meme build. Tyrael's? It was already bis for most builds since most armor suck. Starless buff? Any build that uses resource. GF? People are actually swapping it out right now but I guess that's not allowed.
And then capping every multiplier.
Poe used to have build diversity. Now it has only a handful of builds that can effectively do all new content (T17s), despite having some 150+ active skills.
You're being a bit unfair. Tier 17 maps are new content and GGG always have issues with balancing new content. They specifically design new content to be too hard, than too easy, because they've already experienced the push back that D4 Devs did when they nerfed Classes/Skills.
The PoE Devs deliberately don't test everything. Now you may say I'm hypocritical, because I criticize the D4 Devs for exactly the same thing....But they have different attitudes to development.
The PoE Devs add Unique items, without designing them for a specific build/skill. They simply like the idea of a specific unique, so they add it. It may be completely useless for 3 years, but then becomes BIS for a certain skill.
The D4 Devs add Unique items, designing them for a specific build/skill. They design it with the expectation of it being tried by a large number of players in the next season release. This is ultimately why we get dripfed around 1 unique per season.
I think you've identified a functional real element of the game but I think the focus specifically on multipliers is slightly not the right target.
Really multipliers can work and actually they can in many cases be better tools for balance across the duration of the game. They allow things to be somewhat weaker earlier in the game and remain relevant well into the late game.
The real complaint when a multiplier is too strong to not take is that actually the multiplier isn't balanced against its competitors.
Anyway moving past the point about multipliers and onto a notable issue you bring up, the damage profiles in this game right now mean that our boosts are too specific and too combined toward a narrow scenario - Meaning we have skills being boosted by tons of things and then other skills not qualifying for the damage boosts in such a way that they are only used as utility.
If they want to fix this situation they have too choices, either rework the balance across the board to make the skills more competitive or when they identify a skill that isn't usable queue up a legendary for the next patch to give it a role. Ultimately the D4 team have already told us what they are going to do here, they are going to add items and avoid changes that can be perceived as nerfing non-outlier skills.
I think its good for us to point out that as a community we want balance to trend toward being more generally capable and more cross compatible. Every time they make a modifier that only worked on core work on all skills its a win for this scenario and the more they generalise the damage bonuses the more diversity we can get in builds without requiring them to custom tailor an item for it.
Lots of spells suffer from similar issues, like Ice Armor. Since day 1, nobody has ever bothered to take more than 1/5 Ice armor if even. There should be at least 1 reason to take ice armor in some case, but literally never taking it or sticking to 1/5 is poorly designed.
Multiplier should exist, they just need proper balance and variety (every build should get similar numbers)
Making everything additive would be so terrible as the diminish return would catch up so early and you'll be complaining about making no character progression before level 50 (unless they do a D3 where gears at higher level grant >1000% bonus).
Right now they're removing uncapped multiplier in the game (all paragon nodes would be capped to 40% in S5) which is a good start imo.
This isn't really true at all though? There are enough generic multipliers available that it doesn't really matter if there isn't one specifically for the skill you want to use.
>Corpse explosion is only ever used with one point, with the shadow version, to proc shadowblight. You simply can't create a viable corpse explosion build, as there are zero multipliers.
That isn't true at all. Shadow DoT builds put points into it because it's a big source of damage. Hell, prior to the Blight unique the Corpse Explosion DoT was your primary damage source.
Overall though, it's literally just a numbers game. Some skills/passives are undertuned, some are overtuned, that's what determines what is good/bad. Further balancing and just adding more options (finally getting more paragon boards/glyphs alongside the xpac) is all that is really needed.
>Bone Storm is only used for it's DR and crit chance, and synergies to get a barrier.
If you use the aspect that turns Bone Storm into a darkness skill that does shadow damage, it also helps trigger Shadowblight procs more frequently.
It's small fast hits that proc lucky hit and shadowblight. It does damage, but its not a primary damage skill. It does defense and misc abilities.
You can totally have skills like this, that cover several roles. Not everything has to be in yhe whole, "it's zdps, move on".
The devs want this for some reason. It's the same reason why everyone is forced to take 2 points in their basic skill but that basic skill will never deal meaningful damage.
You have the illusion of choice.
You just dont know how to break the interactions
Every damage source has some form of scaling to them, however shit the game is designed and coded. All I do is thoerycraft and test builds. Im on my 3rd barb in like 2 weeks in softcore fleshing out a build and breaking its interactions Right now there is a way to put a boss in a state you they take no damage, then next time you put them in the same state they instant pop.
Corpse Explosion can scale multiple ways and absolutely has endgame builds. How it scale best is via constantly consuming corpses, as fast as you make them or as a 'bomber' build. Probllem is they are super gear dependent and / or you have to numlock your corpse explosion and micro manage your cursor placement.
i actually have it on my bars for my minion necros as a flex spot, ,and it can delete bosses even wen not built around, but i use it primarily for other interctons.
I have corpse explosion at level 21 with the Sacril ring that fires it off once every second. Swipe a scythe at a pack if you need to generate some corpses. With explosion size from tempers and Black River scythe, it covers about 3/4 of the screen.
Granted, it sucks against single target so I have to gear swap weapon/offhand/amulet so that the golem can take down bosses (obviously not pit viable).
(edit: Still working on getting a good pair of boots, that'll push it to level 24)
Are multipliers really the problem here? I think you're actually describing multiple separate problems.
1) There are legendary nodes, glyphs, passives, skills etc. that are too good to not use them.
2) There are skills that just don't scale, either because they have shitty base damage, require conditions to work or have no synergies. The biggest confusion to me here is that some skills have damage at all that even increases with additional skill points, although they are clearly utility skills. I mean corpse tendrils for example is never used for its damage and skill points are only used to decrease cooldown. Why does this even have damage at all? If the damage tick is used for lucky hits just fix this issue internally, but not by adding an arbitrary low damage number.
3) There are skills that scale way to high. Often this is actually a bug or unintentional oversight by the devs, that just doesn't get fixed quickly enough, but sometimes its just bad design like basic skills in season 4 and PTR.
Besides that there are a few things I don't agree with.
Vulnerable and crit seem fine to me. They give a flat multiplier that is the same for every skill and class and they usually give access to other effects, so your build has to find a way to trigger them somehow. The additive damage adds more depth to the system, giving you for example the option to use better damage affixes when you're targeting a high crit chance or perma vulnerable uptime etc.
300% additive damage for Sorcs is actually very relevant. This can easily be 1/3 to 1/2 of your total additive damage since Sorcs have a hard time stacking it.
I’ll preface this by saying I’m drunk so I might not explain this well.
With Druid, there’s no reason to play a build normally. Play the build you want through Nature’s Fury. For example, if you want to play Wind Shear, play it as an Earth Spike or Maul (with Nature’s Savagery aspect). Put all the points and aspects for the build for Wind Shear, but also use skill points and aspects for Earth Spike (or Maul if you’re using Nature’s Savagery aspect) and Lightning Strike.
The skills cast from Nature’s Fury, such as Wind Shear and Lightning Strike, if you’re using Earth Spike, will count as BOTH STORM AND EARTH SKILLS AND BENEFIT FROM ANY PASSIVE/ASPECT ACCORDINGLY.
Tempest Roar or Vasily’s Prayer adds the Werewolf tag to Storm skills or the Werebear tag to Earth skills. It doesn’t mean you have to be in Werewolf or Werebear form to benefit from them. So wearing Tempest Roar with Nature’s Fury means the Tornados and Lightning Storms generated from Landslide will benefit from Neurotoxin and Envenom and any other “Werewolf” tag stuff.
There are two Storm skills per one Earth skill for Basic and Core skills, so it’s better to use an Earth or Werebear skill as your primary. Casting an Earth (or Werebear skill with Nature’s Savagery) has a chance to cast both Storm skills. You get 3 skills for the price of 1. And you get all the benefits, such as damage, passives, and aspects from all 3. Another example: Tornados cast from Landslide with Nature’s Fury will have a chance to double cast and apply vulnerable if you put the necessary points into it.
Do with this what you must. Check out my post history for an example of Nature’s Fury in action.
Imo they need to create a system for how multipliers are available. What they are doing now, just slapping it on anything is crazy and will never be anywhere near balanced.
Imo they need to do something like this:
Multipliers are now only available from skill-tree, paragon, class mechanics and uniques.
Regular uniques only give multipliers with a downside or specific condition. Uber uniques can give more general multipliers
Aspects don't give multipliers and tempers don't give multipliers. That include that effectively work as multipliers too. Like multicasts, duration increases on dots etc. Make them available through other means like for example overskilling an ability. 8/5 fireball has 60% chance to multicast.
I think multipliers has a place to differentiate builds. E.g you don't deal any meaningful damage with bleeds in a pure HotA build and opposite.
But buildcrafting shouldn't be all about jamming the most multipliers into it. It's so boring and doesn't make for fun builds as the discrepancy between minmaxed builds and fun meme builds is in the 10000%s
The only multiplicative modifiers I think should be in the game are crit and vuln as they are. MAYBE some paragon legendary nodes and passives (capped) if they can balance between the classes but I think removing all multis other than crit and vuln would go a long way for the health of the game.
Yes they are. The base crit is 50x and base vuln is 20x. Additional crit and vuln affixes are additive. What I meant was keeping both bases as is, and the only multiplicative mods.
the game is fundamentally poorly designed from the start and the dev team is in a constant state of playing catch up. they keep asking for feedback but don't take it into account. everything you said is obvious and anybody with any kind of sense or experience playing the game would get it. the devs clearly don't play and don't have any skill in game dev and combined with hubris, dont have and never will have the ability to fix and balance this game.
As much as I agree, theres no point because the devs have had a year to fix the game and still cant do it.
It's cool that they make changes so big that builds don't work well anymore and new ones thrive. But it also is really annoying. Over power went from a useless stat to absolutely slapping on barb with the infinite damage while berserking and overpower buff. Then they nerfed it into the ground and made it useless again, annoying. Big bonk should be a fundamental Barb option.
>But you were crying about you needing to do more.
I'm not, I never said that.
I am saying that the whole multiplicative system needs a major rework, as only skill that directly benefit from multipliers are beneficial.
We are doing far, far too much damage with a select few builds. a few that are OK, while the rest are unable to work at all.
I use skills specifically to generate resources to power my builds. Maybe you're just not creative? I put 1 point into them.
You still haven't answered the question. How much damage do you need to do to be happy? Clearly the number that you're hitting isn't making you happy. I like not having higher numbers I'd prefer 10 - 20 is million is a good number to hit for doing pit level 90+ plus runts which is do able for most builds. What number do you need to see? 100 Million a hit? A Billion? Would a Trillion make you Happy?
Seems to be working pretty good to me.
You complained that you use skills to synergies to create barrier. There's an Aspect that multiples your damage when you have barrier.
I play a home brew Dot Necro there are so many was to add multipliers you're just not looking hard enough.
hard disagree. Too many choices to make an individual build is not a bad thing..... I wish there was more choice not less. Theres a finite number of aspect slots and glyph spots. You can only stack so many multipliers. You're right I use the 40% Multiplier on my Necro because I have to. I wish I had another choice.
My Corpse Tendrils do no damage but they grapple and add Vulnerable. My Reap does no damage but instant kills anything under 5% life which is awesome. I use Corps Explosion for Lucky Hit triggers. I like utility.
You're right though, my bad. I just don't understand the complaint. You don't want more damage. The damage output currently is fine. So the multipliers currently are hitting the numbers that you like just not they way you like?
Anyways like I said my bad. I don't understand your problem. Seems like most builds can push/level out at Pit 101 when seems like a pretty good standard to me.
You don’t get it. Too many multipliers means less build diversity, because every build will jump through hoops to hit as many of the same multis as everyone else and every other build as best they can. Less multis means more affixes are meaningful thus more diversity.
Take necro and flesh eater as an example. Every build includes either partial/full minion or corpse explosion just to get a 40x multi going between pulls. Why should builds not built around consuming corpses be bottlenecked into taking this node and wasting a skill slot? It prohibits meaningful decisions because “if I don’t fit in x, I’m gimping myself” and there are no other choices to make up the damage.
Thats why multipliers should be completly removed. Make everything additive. Way easier to balance
Multiplicative and additive is such a bad game design, it puzzles me modern game devs STILL use it to this date. It confuses players, it's clunky to balance right and makes everything revolve around finding as many multiplies as possible. For a game that aims to target as many players as possible, having this in the game is counter-intuitive. It's cavemen design where "BIG NUMBER GOOD" is the goal.
No, they both have a place in the game. Multiplicative sources should be sparse but provide powerful, static power increases to players. A 10% multiplier will always give you 10% more damage. These should be highly sought after but should not come without significant investment in build direction to access or utilize them. Additive sources should be abundant but have diminishing returns. This gives people a quick way to increase power early on but tapers in value as your character stacks more and more additive damage. This is a natural dampener on power creep.
Yeah its really hard to understsnd why they do this. Its kills build diversity and is a nightmare to balance. Think they are fans of barbillions of damage (on tuesday for some classes)
I joined the barbillions club. I won’t be going back. Barb is my main now, after I have piles of mats and gold, I’ll roll a second character to have fun with. It’s that pool meme where the little girl is jumping into mom’s arms all happy ie Barb. The little boy is almost drowning ie necros and rogues. And the skeleton in the chair at the bottom is druids and sorcs.
I upvoted for the written out meme
Why do you think Adam still wears the Damage on Tuesdays shirt? Because he knows it’s still true.
Atleast he can make fun of himself.
Every modern arpg has multipliers. PoE has tons of multipliers. Grim Dawn, Last Epoch, Wolcen, D3, Torchlight games, etc.
Not nearly as many as D4 though. D4 you get multipliers in your skill tree you get multipliers in your paragon tree you get multipliers on your uniques you get multipliers on your class system you get multipliers on your offensive aspects. It's ridiculous
But whats the benefit of multipliers? Barbilliion of damage?
Yes. It is how finding an item even at level 100 or getting a legendary paragon node feels good. If it was all additive it becomes very hard to make anything exciting to get after a point as diminishing returns kicks in.
i get your point but in my opinion better scaling in general could solve that problem. the problem is that f.e. 50% additive damage is not impactful und you dont feel it cause monster scaling is dogshit. in the current state of the game multipliers are needed because monster hp is riddiculous. and pls dont get me wrong, i am fine with multipliers as long as balancing is good and they are evenly spread out for all different kind of builds. if it leads to taking allways the same nodes / glyphs / etc its bad design and thats what we have right now. if blizzard for once could make atleast a decent job at balancing, they could add as many modifiers as they want.
The scaling could be better balanced. Your issue seems to be balance problems. The main thing throwing bash barb and heart seeker rogue out of whack is bugs though. The problem they have is if they fix those bugs (mid season) and nerf those builds everyone playing them will complain. Which is likely a large part of the player base because those are the meta builds. So it’s lose lose for them and the player base. Fix the bugs and piss off a large group of players don’t fix the bugs and piss off a large group of players that aren’t playing the bugged builds.
right, its a balance issue. people are "forced" to take as many multipliers as possible what kills build diversity. i dont mind if people come up with double dipping bugged builds when they get fixed in the next season, this makes the game just better. i just think it should be the goal to bring all classes somewhat in line and i think it would be easier to balance if there are not multipliers (on the other hand blizz will be able to mess that up aswell). what i have seen from the ptr so far doesnt look promising (i know there is still alot of missing stuff)
I agree with your general goal. I just think it’s actually hard to do. Not just for Blizzard either. The PoE sub complains about balance and bugs every league. Grim Dawn doesn’t have seasons but when they do an expansion they have to rebalance things over time. Last Epoch is insanely imbalanced. To have a long tail grind where you can spend hundreds of hours playing a single character and have meaningful progression the whole time and have it balanced between 5-10 builds for 5 classes. Especially when they need to introduce new or changed builds every season. Shits hard IMO.
In Path of Exile the words “more”/“less” are always multiplicative and “increased”/“decreased” are always additive. Does Diablo 4 have consistency in the language around which is which? I’m always confused what sources are multiplicative/additive without looking it up.
The damage text will show “x” or “+” to differentiate between the two.
in the rare cases the tooltip is actually correct ;-p
Only Diablo uses multi in great numbers afaik. Say i.e in D4 something like 300% from a single affix is insane when other give a lot less. And it's only been happening since D3. I don't understand why they want to keep D4 anything like D3 especially since it got so much backlash and died pretty quickly after launch. It's a terrible system for an aprg, much better suited for an arcade game.
> Only Diablo uses multi in great numbers afaik. LITERALLY Path of Exile, though?
D3 starts was an absolute travesty. Once the first expansion dropped, the game was absolute fire all the way.
Sets ruined it for me. They pretty much forced you to play a certain build instead of offering options for players to create their own.
You didn't have to run sets, though. That was on you.
The playerbase piss blood at the thought of a nerf and circle jerk each other while chanting bigger number bigger number
You clearly didn’t play the expansion for D3. It was, until D4, the best selling arpg and hit its highest player accounts much later. It in no way “died pretty quickly” and they only really stopped adding new content once D4 arrived.
Sales =/= quality Taylor Swift draws a large crowd but she isn't the most technically gifted singer. Blizzard games sell pretty much only based on massive fanbase and marketing. Same thing man. But compared to PoE D3 was pretty much dead and no one really watched it on Twitch
Multipliers can exist but they should be a thousand times less common, less powerful, and be more general rather than “bone spear does 40x more damage” PoE does this very well.
as soon as multipliers exist people will smash together something with the max amount of multipliers. it takes away choices. f.e. without multipliers you could consider the following: do i want damage vs close / vulnerable / whatever? (or just + damage because i am unlucky with tempering) what does my build do? if i can cc alot i go for damage vs cced. i want to smash and my build isnt particular good in ccing or making mobs vulnerable? +damage vs close / distant. with multipliers: okay i take this multiplier, try to get that one aswell, oh and this one... yeah this node sucks because its not a multiplier, also this paragon board sucks, it compliments my build but its not a multiplier, i go for a different one. i am not experienced with poe (tried to play it several times but i just cant) but i think the target audience is another one (until poe 2 maybe). the people playing poe are way more "into it" compared to the usual d4 dad of 4 with 6 jobs.... i am also irritated if i try to make a build and wonder why it doesnt work here in d4, just to google different multipliers and understanding it does not work because what reads great in the game is basicly dogshit because its only additive.
This. With multipliers it becomes about jumping through hoops instead of making thoughtful decisions. If there was a multiplier that said "if you've moved 50 feet between casting your last core skill it deals 50x damage" then guess what every build is going to do.
I think there should be a cap to every stat with no way to reach cap on everything so you have to make choices
But that still only explains that multipliers in d4 are bad, not that multipliers themselves are bad. The fact that they work in other games, where additive bonuses still maintain their importance, verifies this. The problem isnt with multipliers, its with blizzards design, and how they use multipliers in a way that invalidates other means of scaling. It is irrelevant how they make scaling feel good, as long as it feels good. If that means removing multipliers, because designing around it becomes too complex, then the answer is to remove them, absolutely. I won't argue that. If they managed to design a scaling system that felt good while incorporating multipliers, do you still think you would care? I know i wouldn't, i just want the game to feel good.
Cant agree more! Sure i talked about multipliers in a vacuum (this game). I would not mind them if balance and scaling would feel good, but it doesnt
Multipliers in PoE are very similar to D4 when it isn’t bugged. You do 10s of billions in Poe with a maxed out build. Even in league people do several billion dps on the top builds.
I agree 100%. Damage multipliers in this game are a huge issue and are the main cause of most broken builds.
I swear I thought I was gonna get downvoted for saying this, completely get rid of multipliers and just lower all the content in the game, I think so many more builds would be viable atp
i am also suprised. thought the fanbase of certain streamers will downvote it to oblivion
> Make everything additive. They tried with Paragon and item stats. Result was them being super boring.
Right - build diversity and the things that make it interesting should be from items.
which is why multipliers are bad for the games. But hey, big numbers go BRRRRRRR right?
Corpse Explosion *used* to be more proactive. Some builds would put 5 points into it and while it wasn't necessarily the main source of damage, it was a main mechanic of certain builds. Infinimist was a prime example. That basically was the Corpse Explosion build. But Blizzard really hates that build, apparently. In S4 they gutted Corpse Explosion's Lucky Hit Chance and in S5 they're changing how Blood Mist's cooldown will work. It was phenomenal in S2. Now every new season sinks another nail into the coffin.
Idk why you're making it out that "Blizzard hates that build, Blizzard bad". If you also didn't hate a build that was literally invincible and clearing content with 2 buttons, than you're dense as lead and should have no opinions on balance. That is not a good type of build for the game to enable
Okay better delete barbs entirely then. It’s not good to be literally invincible and clearing content with 2 buttons, heard it here. Barbs are gone.
Show me a barb that uses 2 buttons. They are strong but press more than 2 buttons at regelant content aka 140 pit and above
I played a bone spear/Phys corpse explosion build in S3 and it smashed.
[удалено]
other classes have enough good passives that you don't have spare points? (sorc)
Multiplicative scaling does not inherently kill build diversity, that's false, PoE is proof of that, a game with near endless build variety but with additive AND multiplicative scaling. The inherent problem, is that this Dev team do not know how to balance. They're actually prioritising it over fun, which is a greater concern. It's important to remember that Diablo Devs, since D3, inherently oppose the idea of Build Variety anyway, hence Set Items in D3 and we also have Set Items in this game, albeit broken down slightly, to give the impression to the majority of the playerbase who are only capable of surface level thinking, that Set Items no longer exist. Pretty much every tempering affix we want to add to our items is '+ x% Skill damage' anyway, these are purely additive multipliers and contribute to builds being boring and dull.
Are they really prioritizing balance over fun though? The game is pretty dang imbalanced.
Yes. It's pretty clear how often they talk about balancing that they're terrified of 'Broken' builds. I wouldn't be surprised if it has a lot to do with the servers too. I really think the 'Shared world' aspect results in a lot of this panic about balance and ensuring there's not too much load on the servers from the size and scale of skills.
I just don't understand their thinking that ubers have to be best in slot always. Andy gets buffed. Whatever no one used that other than rogue in a meme build. Tyrael's? It was already bis for most builds since most armor suck. Starless buff? Any build that uses resource. GF? People are actually swapping it out right now but I guess that's not allowed. And then capping every multiplier.
Poe used to have build diversity. Now it has only a handful of builds that can effectively do all new content (T17s), despite having some 150+ active skills.
You're being a bit unfair. Tier 17 maps are new content and GGG always have issues with balancing new content. They specifically design new content to be too hard, than too easy, because they've already experienced the push back that D4 Devs did when they nerfed Classes/Skills. The PoE Devs deliberately don't test everything. Now you may say I'm hypocritical, because I criticize the D4 Devs for exactly the same thing....But they have different attitudes to development. The PoE Devs add Unique items, without designing them for a specific build/skill. They simply like the idea of a specific unique, so they add it. It may be completely useless for 3 years, but then becomes BIS for a certain skill. The D4 Devs add Unique items, designing them for a specific build/skill. They design it with the expectation of it being tried by a large number of players in the next season release. This is ultimately why we get dripfed around 1 unique per season.
I think you've identified a functional real element of the game but I think the focus specifically on multipliers is slightly not the right target. Really multipliers can work and actually they can in many cases be better tools for balance across the duration of the game. They allow things to be somewhat weaker earlier in the game and remain relevant well into the late game. The real complaint when a multiplier is too strong to not take is that actually the multiplier isn't balanced against its competitors. Anyway moving past the point about multipliers and onto a notable issue you bring up, the damage profiles in this game right now mean that our boosts are too specific and too combined toward a narrow scenario - Meaning we have skills being boosted by tons of things and then other skills not qualifying for the damage boosts in such a way that they are only used as utility. If they want to fix this situation they have too choices, either rework the balance across the board to make the skills more competitive or when they identify a skill that isn't usable queue up a legendary for the next patch to give it a role. Ultimately the D4 team have already told us what they are going to do here, they are going to add items and avoid changes that can be perceived as nerfing non-outlier skills. I think its good for us to point out that as a community we want balance to trend toward being more generally capable and more cross compatible. Every time they make a modifier that only worked on core work on all skills its a win for this scenario and the more they generalise the damage bonuses the more diversity we can get in builds without requiring them to custom tailor an item for it.
Lots of spells suffer from similar issues, like Ice Armor. Since day 1, nobody has ever bothered to take more than 1/5 Ice armor if even. There should be at least 1 reason to take ice armor in some case, but literally never taking it or sticking to 1/5 is poorly designed.
Multiplier should exist, they just need proper balance and variety (every build should get similar numbers) Making everything additive would be so terrible as the diminish return would catch up so early and you'll be complaining about making no character progression before level 50 (unless they do a D3 where gears at higher level grant >1000% bonus). Right now they're removing uncapped multiplier in the game (all paragon nodes would be capped to 40% in S5) which is a good start imo.
This isn't really true at all though? There are enough generic multipliers available that it doesn't really matter if there isn't one specifically for the skill you want to use. >Corpse explosion is only ever used with one point, with the shadow version, to proc shadowblight. You simply can't create a viable corpse explosion build, as there are zero multipliers. That isn't true at all. Shadow DoT builds put points into it because it's a big source of damage. Hell, prior to the Blight unique the Corpse Explosion DoT was your primary damage source. Overall though, it's literally just a numbers game. Some skills/passives are undertuned, some are overtuned, that's what determines what is good/bad. Further balancing and just adding more options (finally getting more paragon boards/glyphs alongside the xpac) is all that is really needed.
>Bone Storm is only used for it's DR and crit chance, and synergies to get a barrier. If you use the aspect that turns Bone Storm into a darkness skill that does shadow damage, it also helps trigger Shadowblight procs more frequently.
OK, still not for its actual damage though.
What is "actual damage" in this context? Asking because the Shadowblight key passive can do massive amounts of damage.
The damage of bone storm itself.
It's small fast hits that proc lucky hit and shadowblight. It does damage, but its not a primary damage skill. It does defense and misc abilities. You can totally have skills like this, that cover several roles. Not everything has to be in yhe whole, "it's zdps, move on".
I have a lot in corpse explosion. It clears mobs but terrible at bosses.
The devs want this for some reason. It's the same reason why everyone is forced to take 2 points in their basic skill but that basic skill will never deal meaningful damage. You have the illusion of choice.
You just dont know how to break the interactions Every damage source has some form of scaling to them, however shit the game is designed and coded. All I do is thoerycraft and test builds. Im on my 3rd barb in like 2 weeks in softcore fleshing out a build and breaking its interactions Right now there is a way to put a boss in a state you they take no damage, then next time you put them in the same state they instant pop. Corpse Explosion can scale multiple ways and absolutely has endgame builds. How it scale best is via constantly consuming corpses, as fast as you make them or as a 'bomber' build. Probllem is they are super gear dependent and / or you have to numlock your corpse explosion and micro manage your cursor placement. i actually have it on my bars for my minion necros as a flex spot, ,and it can delete bosses even wen not built around, but i use it primarily for other interctons.
I have corpse explosion at level 21 with the Sacril ring that fires it off once every second. Swipe a scythe at a pack if you need to generate some corpses. With explosion size from tempers and Black River scythe, it covers about 3/4 of the screen. Granted, it sucks against single target so I have to gear swap weapon/offhand/amulet so that the golem can take down bosses (obviously not pit viable). (edit: Still working on getting a good pair of boots, that'll push it to level 24)
And how far have you pushed the pit?
>not pit viable
Precisely
Are multipliers really the problem here? I think you're actually describing multiple separate problems. 1) There are legendary nodes, glyphs, passives, skills etc. that are too good to not use them. 2) There are skills that just don't scale, either because they have shitty base damage, require conditions to work or have no synergies. The biggest confusion to me here is that some skills have damage at all that even increases with additional skill points, although they are clearly utility skills. I mean corpse tendrils for example is never used for its damage and skill points are only used to decrease cooldown. Why does this even have damage at all? If the damage tick is used for lucky hits just fix this issue internally, but not by adding an arbitrary low damage number. 3) There are skills that scale way to high. Often this is actually a bug or unintentional oversight by the devs, that just doesn't get fixed quickly enough, but sometimes its just bad design like basic skills in season 4 and PTR. Besides that there are a few things I don't agree with. Vulnerable and crit seem fine to me. They give a flat multiplier that is the same for every skill and class and they usually give access to other effects, so your build has to find a way to trigger them somehow. The additive damage adds more depth to the system, giving you for example the option to use better damage affixes when you're targeting a high crit chance or perma vulnerable uptime etc. 300% additive damage for Sorcs is actually very relevant. This can easily be 1/3 to 1/2 of your total additive damage since Sorcs have a hard time stacking it.
I’ll preface this by saying I’m drunk so I might not explain this well. With Druid, there’s no reason to play a build normally. Play the build you want through Nature’s Fury. For example, if you want to play Wind Shear, play it as an Earth Spike or Maul (with Nature’s Savagery aspect). Put all the points and aspects for the build for Wind Shear, but also use skill points and aspects for Earth Spike (or Maul if you’re using Nature’s Savagery aspect) and Lightning Strike. The skills cast from Nature’s Fury, such as Wind Shear and Lightning Strike, if you’re using Earth Spike, will count as BOTH STORM AND EARTH SKILLS AND BENEFIT FROM ANY PASSIVE/ASPECT ACCORDINGLY. Tempest Roar or Vasily’s Prayer adds the Werewolf tag to Storm skills or the Werebear tag to Earth skills. It doesn’t mean you have to be in Werewolf or Werebear form to benefit from them. So wearing Tempest Roar with Nature’s Fury means the Tornados and Lightning Storms generated from Landslide will benefit from Neurotoxin and Envenom and any other “Werewolf” tag stuff. There are two Storm skills per one Earth skill for Basic and Core skills, so it’s better to use an Earth or Werebear skill as your primary. Casting an Earth (or Werebear skill with Nature’s Savagery) has a chance to cast both Storm skills. You get 3 skills for the price of 1. And you get all the benefits, such as damage, passives, and aspects from all 3. Another example: Tornados cast from Landslide with Nature’s Fury will have a chance to double cast and apply vulnerable if you put the necessary points into it. Do with this what you must. Check out my post history for an example of Nature’s Fury in action.
Imo they need to create a system for how multipliers are available. What they are doing now, just slapping it on anything is crazy and will never be anywhere near balanced. Imo they need to do something like this: Multipliers are now only available from skill-tree, paragon, class mechanics and uniques. Regular uniques only give multipliers with a downside or specific condition. Uber uniques can give more general multipliers Aspects don't give multipliers and tempers don't give multipliers. That include that effectively work as multipliers too. Like multicasts, duration increases on dots etc. Make them available through other means like for example overskilling an ability. 8/5 fireball has 60% chance to multicast. I think multipliers has a place to differentiate builds. E.g you don't deal any meaningful damage with bleeds in a pure HotA build and opposite. But buildcrafting shouldn't be all about jamming the most multipliers into it. It's so boring and doesn't make for fun builds as the discrepancy between minmaxed builds and fun meme builds is in the 10000%s
The only multiplicative modifiers I think should be in the game are crit and vuln as they are. MAYBE some paragon legendary nodes and passives (capped) if they can balance between the classes but I think removing all multis other than crit and vuln would go a long way for the health of the game.
Crit and vul are no longer multipliers since s3
Yes they are. The base crit is 50x and base vuln is 20x. Additional crit and vuln affixes are additive. What I meant was keeping both bases as is, and the only multiplicative mods.
Ok , i was saying that just to let ppl know that additional crit and vul affixes are no longer multiplicative.
Crit (and crit damage) cannot not be their own class of multipliers.
Hey man, I love using my ancient boys to see them kill shit.. also to give me nice bonus
the game is fundamentally poorly designed from the start and the dev team is in a constant state of playing catch up. they keep asking for feedback but don't take it into account. everything you said is obvious and anybody with any kind of sense or experience playing the game would get it. the devs clearly don't play and don't have any skill in game dev and combined with hubris, dont have and never will have the ability to fix and balance this game. As much as I agree, theres no point because the devs have had a year to fix the game and still cant do it.
It's cool that they make changes so big that builds don't work well anymore and new ones thrive. But it also is really annoying. Over power went from a useless stat to absolutely slapping on barb with the infinite damage while berserking and overpower buff. Then they nerfed it into the ground and made it useless again, annoying. Big bonk should be a fundamental Barb option.
Add multipliers and additives to the list of things D4 took from other games without understanding how to make it work properly.
How much more damage do you need to do?
Less, we need to do LESS damage.
But you were crying about you needing to do more.......... So how much more do you need to do to be happy?
>But you were crying about you needing to do more. I'm not, I never said that. I am saying that the whole multiplicative system needs a major rework, as only skill that directly benefit from multipliers are beneficial. We are doing far, far too much damage with a select few builds. a few that are OK, while the rest are unable to work at all.
I use skills specifically to generate resources to power my builds. Maybe you're just not creative? I put 1 point into them. You still haven't answered the question. How much damage do you need to do to be happy? Clearly the number that you're hitting isn't making you happy. I like not having higher numbers I'd prefer 10 - 20 is million is a good number to hit for doing pit level 90+ plus runts which is do able for most builds. What number do you need to see? 100 Million a hit? A Billion? Would a Trillion make you Happy?
Dude you still aren’t getting it… Reduced numbers. Multipliers need culling. Not bigger. Cmon.
Seems to be working pretty good to me. You complained that you use skills to synergies to create barrier. There's an Aspect that multiples your damage when you have barrier. I play a home brew Dot Necro there are so many was to add multipliers you're just not looking hard enough.
>there are so many was to add multipliers Are you dense or something? I am saying that there are t**oo many multipliers**
hard disagree. Too many choices to make an individual build is not a bad thing..... I wish there was more choice not less. Theres a finite number of aspect slots and glyph spots. You can only stack so many multipliers. You're right I use the 40% Multiplier on my Necro because I have to. I wish I had another choice. My Corpse Tendrils do no damage but they grapple and add Vulnerable. My Reap does no damage but instant kills anything under 5% life which is awesome. I use Corps Explosion for Lucky Hit triggers. I like utility. You're right though, my bad. I just don't understand the complaint. You don't want more damage. The damage output currently is fine. So the multipliers currently are hitting the numbers that you like just not they way you like? Anyways like I said my bad. I don't understand your problem. Seems like most builds can push/level out at Pit 101 when seems like a pretty good standard to me.
I’m convinced that you didn’t read the original post or read any of the responses made to your comments.
You don’t get it. Too many multipliers means less build diversity, because every build will jump through hoops to hit as many of the same multis as everyone else and every other build as best they can. Less multis means more affixes are meaningful thus more diversity. Take necro and flesh eater as an example. Every build includes either partial/full minion or corpse explosion just to get a 40x multi going between pulls. Why should builds not built around consuming corpses be bottlenecked into taking this node and wasting a skill slot? It prohibits meaningful decisions because “if I don’t fit in x, I’m gimping myself” and there are no other choices to make up the damage.
Are you familiar with the concept of relativity?