Hey Nordic Games! Buff Earth Mastery.

[AH-1 Cobra]

I think the worst mastery is Earth. For quite a few reasons. (My opinion)

#1 - Nothing this mastery provides that other masteries don't functionally do better. Also doesn't have any synergies with any individual masteries that some other mastery wouldn't provide better synergy with.

#2 - End game, it's one of the worst performing individual masteries.

- If you want spell/caster damage, Storm and Dream are both better in that role.
- If you want a pet to tank for you, Spirit or Dream both have better tank pets.
- If you want defensive options on a caster, Nature does better in that role. Also has better pets.
- If you want to create some sort of melee/bow hybrid, again there is better synergy with other masteries. Even Thane (Warfare + Storm) has better synergy for a spellsword role than Battlemage.

Also, let's talk about the Core Dweller, and why it's one of the worst pets.

Core dweller is squishier than these pets, and needs its defenses buffed quite a bit:

Liche - Wraith Shell
Nightmare - Almost never gets hit.
Outsider - Too busy murdering everything on the screen, and has a truckload of HP.
Wolves - If you factor in survival instinct, as well as the fact you can get 3 of them. And wolves dodge attacks.
Ancestral warriors - Considering you can get up to 5 of them.
Summon Wisp - Almost never gets hit.

I think Storm is the 2nd worst mastery, but it's still considerably better than Earth IMO. Because it's got better synergy with other masteries. I wish Nordic games would considerably improve this mastery. Like give me a legitimate, viable reason to use Avenger or Battlemage for example over one of the other combos. Or give me a reason to use Juggernaut over Spellbinder or Templar.

If you disagree, and think I'm totally wrong here, you're more than welcome to post your Legendary Juggernaut klling sprees here and illustrate exactly why it does better at that specific role that Spellbinder or Templar, or even Paladin couldn't do better at.

[kekkuli]

I kinda agree, though earth is not that weak in my eyes.

However, some kind of conversion of damage would be awesome or maybe even required and maybe some added specialized gear for battlemage-type characters. By this conversion i mean that earth enchantment/storm nimbus would convert some percentual amount of your weapons physical damage to fire/lighting.

That, with few top tier items meant for elemental ranged/melee builds would create many intresting comboes possible.

Another thing that is kinda strange is that physical damage in spells doesn't scale with any attribute nor with any items as far as i know. It's weird.

[AH-1 Cobra]

Physical damage on spells is supposed to scale with STR. The problem is, it doesn't scale enough.

[Magco]

You lost me when you said "If you disagree, and think I'm totally wrong here, you're more than welcome to post your Xmax +Legendary Juggernaut klling sprees here"

Your arguement seems to be that Earth (and Storm) isn't powerful enough for Xmax. Is it really up to the devs to balance for mods?

[AH-1 Cobra]

Originally posted by Magco:

Your arguement seems to be that Earth (and Storm) isn't powerful enough for Xmax. Is it really up to the devs to balance for mods?

No you're hand picking things here. My argument is that Earth is the worst mastery, for reasons I listed.

If you would like to disagree with me, at least post something rational here. Like point out just one of the things I listed as to why Earth mastery is bad, and why I'm wrong about that, etc.

How about this, give me just one example where Earth mastery would provide better synergy with another mastery that some other mastery wouldn't provide even better synergy for the same role.

[AH-1 Cobra]

Originally posted by kekkuli:

However, some kind of conversion of damage would be awesome or maybe even required and maybe some added specialized gear for battlemage-type characters. By this conversion i mean that earth enchantment/storm nimbus would convert some percentual amount of your weapons physical damage to fire/lighting.

I agree with that. Some type of physical to fire conversion would be neat. With the bonuses from stats calculated prior to the conversion. Meaning STR buffs physical, then whatever that number is gets converted to fire damage, etc. The same could be done for Storm with Storm Nimbus. This would help INT based casters as well because flat phys damage is useless to them.

And then they need to buff the core dweller pet's defenses. Give it higher damage absorbtion numbers, and a change to avoid projectiles. It's a freaking massive chunk of rock, it doesn't make any sense why it gets mowed down by arrows.

[kekkuli]

Originally posted by crimsonedge11:

Originally posted by kekkuli:

However, some kind of conversion of damage would be awesome or maybe even required and maybe some added specialized gear for battlemage-type characters. By this conversion i mean that earth enchantment/storm nimbus would convert some percentual amount of your weapons physical damage to fire/lighting.

I agree with that. Some type of physical to fire conversion would be neat. With the bonuses from stats calculated prior to the conversion. Meaning STR buffs physical, then whatever that number is gets converted to fire damage, etc. The same could be done for Storm with Storm Nimbus. This would help INT based casters as well because flat phys damage is useless to them.

And then they need to buff the core dweller pet's defenses. Give it higher damage absorbtion numbers, and a change to avoid projectiles. It's a freaking massive chunk of rock, it doesn't make any sense why it gets mowed down by arrows.

Some added pierce resist would make sense, it's pretty much made of rock anyways :P

And yeah i looked it up, seems like phys spells do scale, but i wonder if its enough in legendary?

[AH-1 Cobra]

Originally posted by kekkuli:

And yeah i looked it up, seems phys spells do scale, but i wonder if its enough in legendary?

It's not. I can't even reliably kill trash mobs with a single cast of eruption in act 4 legendary regardless of stats/gear. And if 1 cast kills, they have to be standing right in the middle of it for the entire duration. Volcanic orb does truly laughable damage. One tap from a decent melee weapon does more damage than Volcanic orb does. Even on a build that doesn't have anything other than the straight up normal attack. That attack should do a % of your weapon damage or something so its viable in Legendary.

If someone claims eruption does good damage in Legendary, post gear/build/videos please. Fights like vs Typhon and Hades in Legendary.

[kekkuli]

well, i tried volcanic orb a little myself. Took it to act 2 epic and up until then it pretty much 1 shotted everything expect bosses of course. My gear was pretty decent twink gear though.

[Rorda]

Originally posted by crimsonedge11:

Originally posted by kekkuli:

And yeah i looked it up, seems phys spells do scale, but i wonder if its enough in legendary?

If someone claims eruption does good damage in Legendary, post gear/build/videos please. Fights like vs Typhon and Hades in Legendary.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbqqSSGNYqw
Just found one. Damn, that 80% CDR cap really kills mages lategame potential. It might be playable but not even close as powerful or fun.

[AH-1 Cobra]

Yeah for eruption works if you can shotgun it like in the above video. Individually they don't do that much damage though. It took 7-8 of them just to drop regular gigantes mobs quickly.

FYI, every other mastery tree could exploit CDR for crazy DPS potential, so that's not exclusive to Earth mastery. Even something as simple as war horn with no CD on it can wreck the hell out of some mobs, or distort reality/distortion wave, or Lightning bolt, Lethal strike, phantom strike, permanent summon outsider, permanent colossus form, etc.

If you use 80% CDR w/Refresh from the Nature tree, you can knock 60 secs off a CD every 6 1/2 secs which can allow you to do stuff like get permanent colossus form/outsider/ancestral warriors. But only if you spec nature mastery for refresh. So something like Guardian (Defensive + Nature) with CDR gear can rek a massive amount of faces with perma colossus form.

I made a mod that removes the CDR cap. So that fun can still be had in AE. With CDR removed, Earth Mastery is fine.

[UndeadUnbug]

I think spellcasters in general need some kind of rework. Less damage early, much more damage lately with good items. Especially after 100% recharge nerf.

[Blizz]

Originally posted by Undermind:

I think spellcasters in general need some kind of rework. Less damage early, much more damage lately with good items. Especially after 100% recharge nerf.

^this

Casters need serious overall damage scalling rebalance. And indeed earth mastery is in worst position when talking about casters.

Reduce base and low levels spell damage, and greatly improve ultimate levels and spells synergies damage bonuses.

The cooldown nerf may have been legitimate at some point, but that should come with counterparts.

[MTaur]

The early game is super strong just by dumping points into burn-over-time on EE. Grab any ranged weapon, shoot everything once, clear Act 1 and 2 on Normal. Only the Rogue has similar ease, but has to skip over undead as much as possible to keep up.

I haven't played the super-late game after the Anniversary changes, but if the late game is as unbalanced as the early game but reversed, then that's pretty bad.

Also, I think that if you need more than 80% CDR to make spell casting work, then the cooldown and damage balance was already way off to begin with. I don't really like it as a balancing lever. In much the same way, you sort of have to max all resistances. There is a laundry list of things to do, and the rest can be budgeted to cool extras.

For a sequel, some kind of alternate charging mechanism for Colossus Form and other things like that might be neat, or at least worth considering. They will have a lot more options working from scratch, but even for TQ:AE, they could still tweak a few of the available levers further.

[kekkuli]

Yeah if you do know anything about casters in tq, and i'm talking 'bout spellcasters here (VO, LB) they all based on spamming spells endlessly with 100% recharge in late game. Now that you took that away, but didn't really touch their damage...this happens :/

However i totally agree with Mtaur, spell damage was way off before. Needing 100% recharge to kill as fast as melee/range builds was just poorly executed skill planning.

[AH-1 Cobra]

Caster builds are way more balanced in Grim Dawn. The base cooldowns aren't ridiculously long like in TQ, you got spells with no CDs like Callidor's Tempest (partly weapon % based), even nukes like Devastation have lower base cooldowns than Eruption does. And you got CCs like Flashbang that can be used every couple secs, etc.

You also got tons of gear that provides % based increases, and spells can crit and also take advantage of increased crit multiplier bonuses, etc. Not uncommon to be able to get 1300%+ increase to a specific damage type, on top of high OA and crit multiplier. Then you got resist debuffs to factor in as well. As well as procs from gear and devotion abilities that can trigger from spell casts, etc. That's casting done right. TQ is the perfect example of how it's done wrong in an ARPG.

I don't expect Nordic Games to make sweeping changes to make it more like Grim Dawn, but there are some simple things they can do to improve it considerably.

It would be cool if someone actually put the effort into making a "Titan Dawn" type of mod, but we'd be talking about an enormous effort here, and I don't think there is enough interest or dedication by anyone actually talented enough to pull that off.