Current Challenge Difficulty Model will penalize Life-tapping Abilities

Vaqual · April 2

The reduced damage done to monsters will penalize abilities that convert a portion of their damage done into healing, such as Puncturing Sweep. Other heals are not announced to be affected, which will result in a dramatic nerf to these types of heals by comparison. Their healing coefficients will need to be multiplied by a factor based on the selected difficulty when hitting a scaled enemy. Please keep that in mind.

AlterBlika · April 2

Tbh this should be the disadvantage of healing from dealing damage. This is also how it works in pvp where your damage is gutted but heals are never multiplied in return.

Not the end of the world, it just maybe forces you to build a bit different for vestige overland

Vaqual · April 2

If you already take 600% more damage it wont be very great to see specific heals become 600% less effective. In PvP those heals are also not cut twice by battle spirit, only the damage portion is affected. If all heals were affected equally by the challenge difficulty it would at least be comparable to battle spirit, but without this adjustment it is plainly unfair for those abilities. "Forced to build differently" isn't exactly what would make this a worthwhile challenge. It isn't like this would be a mild inconvenience, this is a complete elimination of such abilities.

Vaqual · April 2

And that isn't to say it discourages passive heals fairly either, because things like Surge, Blood Magic or even Health Recovery would still remain serviceable. That would just be needlessly punishing for completely non-problematic abilities.

GeneralGrundmann · April 2

Well, yes, skills with healing abilities based on damage dealed get worse.

That's the logical consequence of doing less damage if the player chooses to play on a higher difficulty.

Personally I would like to build around this new challenge instead of simply getting changed rules for this kind of skills. Of course its easier to get rules changed, just to carry on as usual.

Vaqual · April 2

Maybe the point isn't clear: Why would only one specific type of heal be affected? You seem to somehow interpret this as a challenge when it really is just an arbitrary exclusion of certain abilities. All offensive abilities with non-damage scaling healing or shielding components will remain completely unaffected. You can still get off a brawler with 300 % shield value, but Bloodthirst will heal like a noodle. Burning Embers is going to heal the same as on the base difficulty, while Swallow Soul will be six-fold weaker.
This isn't about "toughening up" for the challenge, this is simply about creating fair rules for these abilities.
Clearly you can figure out that they will be worthless for those difficulties and ditch them with the current concept, but I'd like to think beyond that point. I hate to see abilities become irrelevant. And for what? It won't make passive heals go away, it will just prevent a small subset of abilities and sets from being considered. Because some of those abilities do literally nothing beside their %-return.

GloatingSwine · April 2

Slot Storm Calling, cast Critical Surge, get heal-on-crit not related to damage dealt (and Hurricane for major resolve if enemies hit harder).

Vaqual · April 2

I am aware of alternative solutions, but this is entirely not the point.

Vaqual · April 2

Without changes or amendments, the current concept will impair the functionality of these life-tap abilities so much that they lose their purpose. Since some of you seem to have problems grasping the concept, an analog hypothetical example:
Imagine the difficulty would add 100k penetration to mobs. That would negate the value of Armor rating to a degree, where Heavy Armor would no longer provide a numerically balanced alternative to the bonuses from Medium and Light armor (similar for opportunity cost on Resolve buffs): It simply wouldn't matter if you ran 10 k or 33 k, since it would be negated to the point of insignificance. This isn't talking about preferences, play style or meta, simply about the conservation of proportional numerical balance for the sake of build diversity and options.

If an abilities secondary effect is balanced around the damage it does, reducing the scope of the abilities damage by an order of magnitude will inevitably penalize the ability twice through the same modifier. Not even battle spirit does that and there is no reason why "Challenge Difficulty" should do that.

GeneralGrundmann · April 2

I understand the point perfectly.

It's just the case that I am, personal opinion, very fine with the fact that these skills get worse with increased difficulty.

Vaqual · April 2

And why is that something good in your eyes, when in fact no other type of ability will be similarly affected by this difficulty concept? Is there any substance to it besides a personal dislike?

Vaqual · April 2

I know the notoriously overpowered Blood Mist would just destroy any challenge the Vestige difficulty may offer (I hope the sarcasm is evident), but I would be happy if the responsible Devs (maybe @ZOS_BrianWheeler ?) could have an unbiased look at the topic and at least consider these points. If I am mistaken, @ZOS_Kevin can you forward this to the correct address? Not sure about the handles for Mike Finnigan or Alec Verish.

Palumtra · April 3

That's the point of higher difficulties you know. Forcing you to build/play differently instead of W+M1/beaming everything down.

Vaqual · 1:01AM

No that is just a complete trivialization of the issue. This is not about full DPS players with RotPO/Reaving Blows no braining through it. If you don't care about that stuff, so be it. But there are genuinely balanced and even underpowered abilities and sets that are fully designed around their Life Taps. Just because you have a personal grudge against some cookie cutter setups, doesn't mean that all other abilities that follow the same logic have to stay in the dirt.
Do I think beam and HA setups enable to much healing from cleave with those aforementioned Tap sources? Yeah, it is quite brainless.

Does that make Blood Mist busted?
Does that make Blood Thirst busted?
Does that make Swallow Soul busted?

No. They are often barely worth bringing even with optimized setups. They don't need to be punished just because some noob builds get too much free AoE.

I am also not asking to buff them to fully compensate the difficulty. On the base difficulty they are balanced so that their output is comparable to other heals. Burning Embers is a good example, as it was changed from a Tap to a regular Heal just last patch. The output is in the same ballpark. It will be able to keep up with other passive heals also on Vestige difficulty, while all heals that are Tap-based will just be trash.

What are these abilities for then? Pretending to be basic OP in overland? Being borderline useless in PvP due to shields and generally poor scaling? Being useless in organized PvE due to dedicated healers? The niche of those abilities was always primarily solo play. Now we get a dedicated solo play challenge, but it is setup in a way were they won't even keep up with the passive HoT from Structured Entropy. Brilliant.

And what is all this talk about "building differently"? Most people who have played higher Arcs in IA are already used to handling high incoming DPS without relying on Tap-DPS-Specs. Adapting to Vestige won't be rocket science, we will have pretty much the same options as we do now. These are such poor justifications for brushing over this problem.

Layering HoTs is no bit cooler or more difficult than cycling Tap abilities. Same balanced returns (considering uptime, overheal, target requirements, etc. it is overall in a decent spot on the current live version), same number of GCDs. Both are suboptimal for DPS.

Get off your high horses.

And if the Devs won't find an appropriate solution, they should at least rework those abilities and sets so they can have a purpose somewhere. Because many players like them for the flavor.

Vaqual · 1:48AM

One way of raising the floor without touching the ceiling would be to add a clause to those abilities, where healing would default to a minimal value if damage is being mitigated too much. E.g., restores X % of the damage done, but at least Y. There are enough reference abilities to determine sensible minima based on the respective player stats.

Attorneyatlawl · 4:09AM

GeneralGrundmann wrote: »

I understand the point perfectly.

It's just the case that I am, personal opinion, very fine with the fact that these skills get worse with increased difficulty.

It's not "worse", it's unusable. There isn't a "build differently" for people used to pvp, higher ia arcs, etc. The lifetap skills should be reconsidered for balance in the challenge modes, @Vaqual is right. They take a double whammy with the challenge modes.

ZhuJiuyin · 5:30AM

Vaqual wrote: »

One way of raising the floor without touching the ceiling would be to add a clause to those abilities, where healing would default to a minimal value if damage is being mitigated too much. E.g., restores X % of the damage done, but at least Y. There are enough reference abilities to determine sensible minima based on the respective player stats.

Setting a minimum healing requirement sounds good, and it would also help certain abilities, such as Dark Magic's Blood Magic. Although this ability is not popular with most players, considering that class mastery and refresh will likely lead to more abilities or sets having similar trigger conditions in the future, setting a minimum healing requirement seems necessary.