New Rune system feedback.

[ninakoru]

Hello,

I want to give some general overview from a player's perspective of the new rune system. There are some runes that out-perform anything else:

- Activation rune of hagan: 12 to 7 ancestral strikes (depending on rune level), while by first look seems OK, the thing is, the skill itself scales extremely well with lots of enemies, to the point some builds with 40-50% Ancestral strike chance and guaranteed critical strike can trigger the rune in a single area of effect skill cast with a moderate/large group of enemies.

A great way to limit the rune's performance scaling with enemy density, is to add an internal cooldown to the rune's ability to gain points towards the trigger. If we say, the rune has an internal cooldown of 15 frames. You could "only" gain 4 points per second provided you are able to do an ancestral strike at least 4 times a second. And most importantly, if a single cast would trigger 5 ancestral strikes in the same frame, if would only add 1 point towards the trigger.

- Enhancement rune of hagan: At max rune level, it effectively multiplies any rune effect x4, and the cost x3.25, this rune in combination with the hagan activation rune is just bonkers: Effect runes like nimble warrior or slorm temple are totally overpowered with it.

Maybe 4x is just too much, I would lower the maximum potential of this tune to perhaps 3x at most (with a x2.5 trigger cost multiplier).

- Thornbite effect rune: The way it works now, gives you a stacking shield buff that doesn't expire and is equal to up to 15% of the sum of your armor/ele res/evasion, despite that in the description say it gives half of the value it finally gives to you.

So, if you have 10k armor and 10k ele res and no evasion with a fully leveled rune, it gives you 3k (15% of 20k) shield every time it triggers, and the description says that it protects you from the next 1500 incoming damage.

Most players are aware of this, we can abuse this rune to remove all difficulty on the forge and secure 100 wave runs on wrath 10. Also, many players are removing all the max life modifiers on their gear and skills in order to get more damage and more armor/evasion, as the rune works, the 2.8k base life is enough as you can gain an infinite shield that works the same way as HP.

It would be great if the shield does as the description says, so if in the above example you receive 5000 damage, the first 1500 is subtracted from your stacked shield, and the rest (3500) of the damage goes against your remaining life or other shields. Other simple solution would be that the shield doesn't stack additively with each trigger anymore, and only refreshes the shield value to your maximum capacity.

Thanks for reading.

[Vesperas]

I feel like feedback posts like this are ostensibly about specific items, builds, etc., but in reality they're more about the state the game is currently.

Abusing the thornbite effect rune (or alternatives to it, like heavy shield globe focused builds or abusing other blatantly overpowered stuff) are more mandatory than anything at the higher levels, due to how the game is inherently designed.

The extremely fast paced nature of combat, huge amount of negative effects or damage sources happening at once, and high prevalence of modifiers affecting enemy damage, health, and / or attack speed make the higher level content physically impossible to complete without building around something to negate it.

For example, there's an epic modifier (or perhaps legendary, I forget) in the Great Forge that, IIRC, increases enemy attack speed by 150% and damage by 50%. Meanwhile, it's also possible to randomly have an elite Fallen Knight spawn directly on top or immediately next to the player, whereupon his attack instantly goes off the moment he spawns, connecting with all three lines, and resulting in an immediate one-shot.

I'm not sure if it's worth balancing the broken or overpowered items or abilities (or even possible, honestly) until the damage versus mitigation versus avoidance system is properly balanced first.

[TorinuxCthulhu]

Runes are not the issue, problem is gear stats (still) and some Legacy Tree nodes. @Vesperas is right, some specific OP, "OP" builds are not OP when it comes down to the Slorm Tower. Try to clear a 3K floor (max floor) with a mere +15 gear against lvl 920 mobs and without "abusing" what we have. I mean, you can do it, cause I did it, but having a really high budget set of gear makes it easier.

I'm yet to understand why a player can't be like a God after putting in thousands of hours farming resources and money? I like challenges yes, but I don't like farming for endless hours and still not being able to comfortably clear content in the game.

Yes some stuff needs balancing, but like I said before, putting in time into balancing at this point where we still have unreleased stuff, is futile. Lets wait until everything gets added to the game and then, and only then, we focus in balancing stuff. One of the reasons the game has become a balance "mess" is the balancing attempts, balancing items and passives in aRPGs is not an easy task at all. Take a look at games like PoE and Diablo, they have been around for ages and they still can't get balancing right.

[ninakoru]

Well, is just a balance suggestion, nothing more. I'm not asking for a nerf, I am just stating these specific combinations are broken.

To me, being able to not build life at all in gear, because I get an infinite shield, is broken, and should be addressed. Yes, there are so many thing that need to be balanced, but expecting people clearing 3k temple floor going cheese.... man.