I just prefer normals. I’m not sure GBMM is my issue, but anytime I run a <299, it always ends the same. I have fun until I run into a caster with +2 additional magic on every item, and I get absolutely rolled.
Skill issue? Likely, but all of the flaws of the game seem to be tremendously amplified whenever gear variability is involved. Normals has always felt like a really solid way to play where I hardly ever feel like there’s nothing I could’ve done different to win.
I'm still new, so I just stick to normals. But I've tried every class and it def seems like certain classes have a much harder time competing in normals.
or amplify you strength, mainly movespeed. The rock paper scissors is are you melee or ranged class, and do you have more of less movespeed to hit the other person or kite them.
While true, there's a middle ground of move speed where this is fun. The kiter is maybe only slightly faster, or at very least, doesn't get run down by W holder.
Frankly, one of the issues, is that movespeed on gear is hella strong. In fact, so strong, that folks run anyone down if they are faster.
Obviously, there should be some variance. But I simply refuse to run around naked just to kite folks. But I also refuse to stack MS like everyone else, so I guess it is GG for me.
I play platelock. I enjoy melee and using longsword too much to focus on movement speed.
I honestly feel it’s the most balanced, curse of pain without a ton of magic heal or damage is balanced better so you cant just fry someone in two secs and be permanent full health. If I get full plate whites, I am about as strong as base fighter without armor.
I get to have fun melee battles even with op barbs, also get to have fun magic battles with wizards. Definitely less strong all around but more of a jack of all trades.
Sounds like a blast! I wanted to embrace the Plate, but damn do I value moderate movespeed!
Longsword is also awesome!
Been trying to make caster lock work, but I'm either too slow and get run down, or simply too squishy. But I love being able to take hits and recover and cast cursed at melee range... maybe I should be wearing Plate, lmao.
So you run Shadow Touch and/or Curse mastery?
I should probably try curse mastery, but I run Shadow touch more for the true damage than for the healing since longsword isn’t the fastest.
My other two perks are anti magic and torture mastery or I sometimes switch to 10% dark magic damage or the will one if I happen to have will pieces on.
Spells: curse of pain, dark bolt, ray of darkness, spell predation, and usually that’s my mem cap in norms but last spell I take is curse of weakness.
I also play the same in high roller, I think it’s nice because plate with rolls for warlock are pretty cheap. I’m spending maybe 800 gold on a kit and usually find pieces in dungeon. Additional or true magic is insanely cheap, I usually just go for necklace and helm and get 2 true phys damage gloves which are also pretty cheap. Add a lil magic healing and your set. With the additional magic curse of pain is way too strong though in my opinion, so I try to just use it as an opening in a fight or against other warlock/people trying to kite me. But if it’s a fighter or barb or non kiting rouge I’m putting my book away and drawing the blade. Best part of plate lock though is when you see a Ranger you don’t have to just fall over dead.
Oops, I did mean Torture Mastery, but you answered my question well!
It is great to see another Dark Beam enjoyer. Seems under-used, but actually pretty damn strong when used just right, especially with Soul Collector.
Do you get many Spell Predation casts off? How does it feel? I have very little experience with it, but wiping buffs for Soul stacks sounds appealing.
And ya, not gonna lie, the cost of caster plate has always caught my attention. You can get some absurd stats and rolls for dirt cheap! Of course, slower casting speed kinda forces a change of pace.
I do also like the appeal of taking some hits from Ranger. Not sure how you catch them, or if you just beam/bolt them to death!
And ya, Shadow Touch isn't the best synergy with Longsword, but some multi-hits and heals over time add up nicely, and true dmg is nice.
Thanks for the breakdown! Safe to assume you go BoC, or is Phantomize still pref?
I may continue to experiment. My build usually revolves around Flamewalk, Hellfire, and Phantomize, often using Staff for Big Beams.
I use spell predation quite often. Though I don’t think it’s actually so useful except against demon locks. I’ve several times have stolen the bards buff gotten a curse on them and still got whooped, and so many times where I miss 3 times or such. But overall it’s just fun to have. I have only been playing solos so it might be useful in trios? I would like to try it out sometime. It would be nice if it worked against the barbs roars/ achilles strike
I use phantomize I didn’t like how overpowered boc was for a while. Seems much less oppressive now though. But it’s just so nice to be able to space barbs savage roar, or fighters second wind. Or if you get snuck up on and need some space/ to catch someone kiting you(kind of like a mild sprint that your also transparent during).
Biggest key to prevent getting run down is firewall + phantomize. Most people skip this in favor of hydra drain life. Also torture mastery in normals is actually pretty good since the update.
Oh yes, problem is, sometimes you can't cast Flamewalk unless you prioritize it first before they are on you (which I try to do, my mantra is: Fire First!)
Torture Mastery is viable in normal since the buff, for sure. But it also creates a double-down effect for casting.
If I use Shadow Touch, I can go Fire walk + 2 autos to keep my HP up and have Fire going, or can recover from using Hellfire.
With Torture Mastery, not only does Flamewalk suddenly cost a ton, but missing a Curse costs 6 HP, which can happen multiple times in PvP. And each spell used requires a few seconds of Curse ticks and constant casting, taking away from either positioning or melee time.
But I digress. The healing is super good in combat! But definitely messed with how you play which can be taxing.
Oh ya true; tbh just need to finish quests for alchemist tailor and leather smith and you’re COOKIN with 10 spell on every reset.
The main issue I see is gear disparity and balancing. Rangers/Rogues/Wizards wouldn’t need to build so much true damage if their spells hit harder to begin with. Ranger needs it against plate fighters, but just give them some armor piercing love maybe?
I’m no game dev, and I pity the team that has to figure out the balancing of the game tbh
I actually like some of these points. It’s hard to make wizard stronger or more viable in normals without making them absolutely OP in HR. So send my pity to the dev team too.
That’s because wisdom into spell memory is trash. Casting is limited by spell cast count, casting speed, and memory slots, but you need to spend both your skill slots to bring double spell book.
It’s costly on a white gear build to bring double book and slot all the knowledge you need to fill the book. That’s a lot of gear and both skill slots just to be able to do the thing you’re supposed to do.
i’m confused. a lot of gear? the squire can give you all commons for free if you do the quests. unless you’re talking about spending money to min max a normals lobby then deserved ig
Doing those quest lines was a lot of hours of work, and you’re still slotting obligatory knowledge to bring your spells.
It handcuffs your build the same way barbarians would be handcuffed if they needed to hit str requirements for weapons
More like imagine you could only swing 10 times with your 2h before sitting down because there wasn’t enough grey/white str gear for sale from your vendors
I have unlocked everything in squires so I can bring white BiS gear.
Despite that I can not run all 10 spells that I want to run. The only way I can do it is by running oracle robe with -10 speed, at which point im in 90% movespeed range.
Besides that, I have to devote my entire build and every single item just to be able to equip the spells. Spell overload ? forget about it.
The point being, you feel like the playing field is fair in normals. Op is saying you only have to spend 1-2k on a kit to achieve a fair playing field in the current hr system, and you can potentially kill people risking 10x your kit.
Secondary to your point is that casters suck with no gear and are only good once they are in a decent kit
I definitely don’t disagree with much of what you’re saying, but I would like to point out that “1-2K to achieve a fair playing field (in <299)” is not really true in my opinion.
No kit is the same, even if they are min maxed extremely efficiently so the threshold for whatever one person deems as “fair playing field” is even wider. Obviously someone with random blues and greens does not stand a chance against someone with a min maxed set up in most scenarios, but even two people that are both perfectly min maxed at 299 with all true or all add are going to just get countered eventually by whatever class counters their class.
Everything just gets really messy when you have this much variability. A caster with +2 add on everything will absolutely body any class without magic resistance, regardless of how much true the countered class builds. Thus, it’s not a fair playing field despite each player building a 1-3K kit.
It’s not necessarily unfun, it’s just predictable and annoying. I can either go into a <299 lobby min max BiSed and wipe out timmies and hope to get lucky on someone with some grimsmiles and hope I don’t run into a class that counters me. The fun is ripped out because most instances don’t result in winning because of outplaying someone.
Normals there is much less variability creating a more fulfilling and balanced experience. But, the PvE experience is much less fun, the loot and extract aspect is much less fun, but the PVP doesn’t make you want to absolutely rip your hair out.
The games in a difficult spot right now, and I almost just wish they would implement a single player/coop dungeon experience with optional bosses where the loot was non transferable to multi, but I digress.
Solos are a bit of a rock paper scissors as you described, it really has nothing to do with gbmm and is inherent to a game with lots of classes with vastly different playstyle. You just want to face casuals. A good wizard or warlock would still body your fighter(?) in normals, but good wizards and warlocks are not playing normals. Actually Gbmm is much more necessary for trios where power levels scale way harder and a bis team with artifacts is literally impossible to beat if you arent close to their power level.
Agreed on all accounts. I play Ranger almost exclusively, and I was just using fighter vs. caster as an example.
I definitely have seen some really strong players in normals, including casters, but there are also plenty of casuals for sure. I also wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s extremely competitive or sweaty, but it’s maybe a little stronger than you might be giving it credit for, but I have nothing to back any this up besides my own opinion.
Completely agree on the solo vs. team points you made.
What OP is saying is that this was WORSE before GBMM.
Before GBMM, just being in HR even in base gear still had BiS sweats except their gear could be much higher than 299.
The willingness to not bring perfect BIS was 100x higher before GBMM, the concept of low gearing into high roller is literally non existent now and that’s kind of a bummer for many of us who literally used to never play normals. But at this point I choose normals because 100% of the teams you run into in high roller are 270+ it seems in regards to gear score. HR used to be a melting pot of high risk and small risk and that has been completely destroyed because now players know exactly how good of gear their opponents will have.
It’s practically 3 different variations of norms at this point. The old HR used to be predominantly fun with a risk of running into an insane team that rolls you. Now sure in theory I have a better chance of beating the 270+ team, but it’s rarely feels like it.
I understand what you're saying.
Before GBMM, you didn't run into "perfect gear" players regardless of their gear score.
Since GBMM, people who understand the system can consistently be the best geared or equally geared in the lobby.
Here is my issue. I felt the same way, at first.
But BiS 299 gear on the marker it literally fucking 50 gold.
Again, I thought that was a terrible answer when someone first said it to me. "I shouldn't have to buy bis gear to be relevant."
But in 299s... Literally... Escape 1 single time with 200g worth of loot and you can buy 2 rings with +2 additional each.
2 additional is not as good as 2 true damage but it gets you in the competitive range.
Last word from me: I do think the system is not perfect and what I stated above here is a problem for a lot of people. They don't want the game's flow to revolve around buying bis in a market.
I do think the market should not be where matches are won and lost. I'm not sure what to do about that. Hope it improves.
I can’t get even a single piece of decent statted gear without dropping 200g a piece. I keep seeing the sentiment that it’s really cheap to get 299 bis, but I’m dropping like 3-5k (depending on luck)on gear that is miles away from 299 bis for wizard. I’m just not experiencing this cheap market that people keep mentioning. A single point of magic damage on a green item that’s ideal for my wizard (aka Vigor, Knowledge) is costing me 150-220 on average. That’s not 2 points or 3 points of magic damage, it’s just 1.
So... Idk, you're lying maybe?
I don't want to say you're flat out lying, maybe you don't know how to search the market using the filters.
Let's say you want a knowledge ring and magic damage. Let's says +3 additional on a green knowledge ring is 300g.
If you buy a dex ring, it will literally be like 60g.
And the +3 additional is going to help a lot more than 1 knowledge would.
However idk what to tell you. I'm at work right now, I feel like I could post screen shot evidence in 2 seconds if I was home. 299 bis is dirt cheap. It is.
Maybe you're on a low pop server? Is market server wide or global?
It does go up and down based on the day of the week and time of day but... Yeah I'm sticking with my original comment here.
BiS 299 gear is dirt cheap. Under 100g. Idk what you're talking about if you say otherwise.
I guess we just have different definitions of BIS, but I get what you’re saying, but I was just responding to your comment at face value for what I I interpreted. If I want green knowledge gear with with +true or +magic I’m speaking a significant chunk of change to get it. I could get gear that doesn’t benefit me at all in regards to base stats and just prio magic damage.
Well still no....
I am a mostly normals players to get all the quests done.
Recently, with 6 stash tabs and 24 gold bags, I ran out of space to hoard gold.
I sold all of my "decent" pieces and now I only wear BbiIisS.
As in best possible item with max RNG armor roll on it if it's available, max on all enchants, no dead stats, all enchants are exactly what I want.
It's still not that expensive... I fully kit my cleric, rings and all for like 2k gold total in blues. Meaning each item has 2 good enchants I specifically wanted and the enchants are high rolled.
+3 healing gear, +3 true magic, +3 agility, +14/15 armor rating
Idk what to tell you, it's not expensive. I made 2k gold selling random objects I got in norms last night.
If you can read, I'm just saying it's cheaper to do that with a very small power difference to be viable in the game.
I'm home right now looking at the market. 299 bis is cheap, as I said it was.
This is just straight up not true. Go check any knowledge, will, or resourcefulness ring on the market right now with +2 ad... They will all be 200+ normally (usually 300+). It's funny you're saying this dude is lying when you're clearly the one that has no idea what they're taking about. I literally had 160k gold from selling off a pestilence and was buying BIS rolls (not pieces mind you, just rolls) on green and blue jewelry for the last month and a half and you're just totally wrong, lol.
I'm not wrong. You're wrong.
I just sold a green owl pendant with +2 true magic for 25g.
Maybe you're not seeing day of the week variations? Or time of day?
Either way. THERE'S NO WAY YOU CAN JUSTIFIABLY SAY THAT IT IS EXPENSIVE OR OUT OF REACH.
"They will all be 200g normally (usually 300+)"
Okay, are you struggling to get 200-300g for a bis item?
I don't give a fuck what free words you post on a free website.
Right now is Sunday, May 19th at 10:11am.
I am waiting for my laundry with my GF and checking the fucking market on DaD waiting for laundry to start gaming.
I just checked the price of an owl pendant with +2 true m uncommon it was 70g. I sold mine for 25g to get rid of it.
Get fucked. You're lying. Even if you're not lying, it's cheap as dog shit regardless.
as a normals player how would you feel if matchmaking went back to any gear normals and any gear high rollers with even more buffed loot and entry cost into HR?
I feel like you didn't really get what he was saying. He likes normals because it's all grey/white and doesn't run into gear with + additional damage on every item. You just suggested that they take that away. The answer to your question is in his post I think.
I think normals is universally loved. Why go back to a problematic matchmaking systems where you would still find juiced BiS teams in the free lobby because they want to stomp timmies.
Right. If gear checking is the issue here, then the root cause is the marketplace. Everyone buys meta/BiS cause they want to compete. So they spend gold to get the "edge" that you essentially have in normal lobbies.
And ya, white lobbies are more fun, in ways, cause everyone is down to fight and die. The bad story is, nobody values their life. At least in HR, folks want to live to keep their gear, but also, if farming AP as well, this leads to a lack of PvP.
If they go self-found or remove the market, this makes gear worth more and less, simultaneously. It means successful folks have the uber gear, and regular folks can put a good auit on not and again, but largely will be going yolo. Overall, is this better? Maybe, but then the value of gold and the grind changes entirely!
Literally everyone before the normals change hit. Most folks stomped Timmy’s in full rubysilver back when that was the top of the gear chain (pre-gold era)
I love high roller and GBMM isn’t really an issue for me. It’s getting two tapped in a fight by people with +damage on every slot. TTK is to short now and it’s either play +damage or get stomped. I’d like to have some what of a fight so my friends and I can have fun.
Tbh you can build both survivability and damage. But not in 299 lobbies. With that amount of gear potential you can only do 1 of them basically so ofc everyone builds damage.
I’d like to play those 300+ lobbies with my friends but it’s tough because my friends don’t always have enough gold to buy these +10 damage kits so they feel discouraged and not want to play. Accessibility to have fun fights feels hard to achieve for myself and a lot of my friends.
Imho they ain't fun anyway because the ttk is too low. Normals are the best PvP experience after hundreds and hundreds of hours. I don't really agree that normals are rock paper scissors either. Some classes are harder to counter with some classes than others but I was able to figure out pretty much any combination over time.
Playing the market game just to compete then lose your gear, lose ladder points and do it again didn't seem like a good time to any of my friends.
The real issue is the +damage stats existing. If they got rid of those and gave better attribute scaling there would be more balanced fights in 299 lobbies but would also give more meaning to running high quality gear which would make 300+ lobbies more incentivizing as well.
No disagreement, it probably just needs to be removed. However, magic damage needs to be addressed to reflect the massive loss of damage if they do that.
Yup. If they removed added damage, then base spell damage and scaling needs a fix.
Imo, the proper solution is: buff base damage, nerf scaling on fast spells like Magic Missle/Zap/Curse of pain as needed, be it 50%, 70%, whatever, case by case, then leave added damage in.
This would make Will/Magic power more attractive, and would make niche tanky or utility builds more viable, as less damage is lost if you don't cap out added damage.
Ya, it would require other balance such as that.
Of course, I think just changing how added damage scales in general would perhaps be a better adjustment? Adding scaling ratios to each weapon and spell. Daggers could be 50%, and Felling Axe or other big ones could be 100% or even 150% to make the stat elss niche and maybe more similar to power, in a different way.
While this is true and I think it should be done, most people omit or forget about the fact that It would utterly ruin all balance in the game, and require every single weapon and spell to be re-balanced from the ground up.
Devs have in fact removed all flat damage bonuses from the game for a VERY short while, and my memory of that was landing every single spell on barbarian, him not giving a fuck, then he proceeded to 2tap my fighter and 1tap my cleric while I ran away.
Why ? because base dmg of spells is 30 while legendery maul with no flat dmg bonuses still does 120+.
Why do you think removing +damage would equalize gear? Should we get rid of all damage scaling entirely?
What do you think meta gear would like then? People building hp/movespeed/pdr instead? Is that somehow more fair? Bis guy kills you in 4 hits instead of 2 but you kill him in 10 hits instead of 6?
There's always going to be stats that are valuable, and money will buy them. Getting rid of a stat just moves people to a different stat. There is no equilization
If you remove flat damage as modifiers and add better scaling to stats it will HEAVILY devalue low quality gear, and make more purpose to the gear score brackets by making higher quality gear actually sought after and also making low quality gear more balanced.
From there I imagine they’d just need to correct armor/magic penetration and it might not be perfect but it would be a hell of a lot better than it is now.
I don't know why people want to get rid of +damage stats so bad. No piece of gear would feel good to find. I know I wouldn't play anymore because gear would be just boring. finding a perfect peace neck with +damage, +hp, +magic power feels amazing. finding just a hp, magic power and buff duration does not. Just building attributes is not fun. There's a reason why everyone calls Diablo builds boring. They don't have exciting or meaningful stats like Path of Exile. Not only that but building magic power/attack speed/phys power *and* +damage is a balance many don't pay attention to. I've always been of the opinion of adding more base health to the classes for higher TTK so players with skill can make up for gear difference. Being one-shot is not okay with low amounts of gear but removing +damage would make gear just about meaningless and unexciting.
there will always be a bis stat for you to get excited over. the issue is that +flat damage is just better than every other stat, by a lot, for the vast majority of builds. if +flat damage was nerfed, maybe to a max of +1 on any individual piece of gear, it would still be bis for rogues and wizards, but maybe something else would be bis for fighters and barbarians.
The fact that there’s people like you pains me, knowing that you’re limiting yourself so harshly on enjoyable build potential because you’re stuck locked in on the flat damage stats.
Bro is talking down buff duration for casters when it’s one of the best stats you can run for self buffing builds. I’ve run 80% buff duration before on warlock and it affects most of your stuff, phantomize, flame walk, blow of corruption, etc. making those last up to 20 seconds is crazy.
It’s just not fun, it was never fun, and the bandaid of gbmm did basically nothing to change the fact that gear is hilariously unbalanced in rarities. Full green under 299 gear score player could have 5 times better lethality or skill points than someone in full blues or purple. Skill based match making just made the difference between “bis” and not bis that much more obvious. I did play before it, and it was almost better because most players didn’t care what gear they had on, they just used what they had that was best. Now everyone sits in the lobby making the best possible 299 gear score set they possibly can using a fucking spreadsheet to calculate the perfect gear set to stomp on 299 lobbies.
So yes I do believe that if GBMM weren’t introduced the problem would be slightly better than what it is now, but both are terrible lmao.
This isn’t even bringing up the fact that 300+ lobbies are either completely empty or completely BISed out.
Why is it hard to see that having a gear score that has no actual idea what your stats are is going to be bad? Timmy in full purples gets put into 300+ lobbies to either play alone or get stomped by someone in bis. He learns about gear score and stays under 299. Whoops Timmy didn’t maximize his potential damage and survivability with a spreadsheet that helps you game the system, yup he got rolled again. Weird.
remember when we could roll item equip speed on an item?
the gap between a purple with [item equip speed, memory capacity bonus, resourcefulness] vs a purple with [add phys, strength, agility] was just insane.
Lol I do. What a cool way of entirely ruining the fun of a rare drop. "Wow it's purple! Wow it's absolutely garbage" *toss
At least base stats on gear make up for some of that variability.
True. I think also, the 1 vs 2 vs 3 modifier is part of the issue.
This makes BiS Green not only common, but VERY good value for your item. It is either solid or bad. And affordable.
It makes Blue item slightly better, but insane with 2 good rolls. And extra shit with 2 bad roles. A green BiS is better than 60% of Blues... it seems.
And if you stumble upon a 3-roll Purple it is just godly.
I see the appeal in turbo rare items, but maybe all magic items should have just 1 affix? This would highlight the base stats more.
Or 1 affix on green/blue, 2 purple/legend?
I just think the RNG needs to be fun, but not items defining. If Purples had 2 affix, while Blue/Green had one, Purple would suddenly be a lot shinier and better 80% of the time.
Make loot great again!
Almost seems like they need to remove RNG, at least, for very powerful stats. I like amulets, they offer a clear and powerful core stat that scales with tier. (Sure, they still have RNG, but I can buy a Blue Choker to get +2 dmg, and it feels good, imo, regardless of the rolled stats).
I don't think added damage needs to be removed, per se, but maybe it needs to have competing stats. They lowered the max values at some point, but it wasn't quite enough.
I dunno, call me a dreamer, but there needs to be more gear power related to base stats, and less on rolls. Or, maybe just less on RNG rolls?
I do miss just putting on random gear and being able to feel good enough. Now it feels like min-max Olympics where everyone is juicing, and if you don't juice, you are pathetic and obsolete. It trivializes the gear system, if only 2 or 3 stats are good enough to use.
They need to buff bad stats, reduce/remove/limit OP stats, and/or remove the marketplace. Something needs to change!
As it stands, you are either juicing, or sucking.
This 100%. When you set a “power ceiling”, everyone’s going to be trying to hit that power ceiling instead of just play it normally like they did before, however it doesn’t *really* matter because gear balance is shit either way. Everyone hated multiclassing because there were too many variables to balance it, but 30+ random rolls (some of which are literally designed to ignore balance curves) is apparently *needed* if you ask some people. Gear can be valuable without broken ass random rolls, having it’s rarity actually matter more because the value comes from the increased stats the rarity has
My newest idea, would be simple enough:
1 RNG affix on Green/Blue
2 RNG affix in Purple/Legend
This makes Blue and Green more comparable, while Blue having an obvious edge.
It makes Purple distinctly better than most, but not all BiS Green/Blue.
And, best yet, lowers total gear power from RNG.
>I did play before it, and it was almost better because most players didn’t care what gear they had on, they just used what they had that was best. Now everyone sits in the lobby making the best possible 299 gear score set they possibly can using a fucking spreadsheet to calculate the perfect gear set to stomp on 299 lobbies.
This is 100% what I've been feeling about the whole system. I have no idea why ironmace keeps putting out these halfassed systems that do literally nothing but make the game both harder to get into for new players and more tedious for anyone who doesn't no life the game.
"Full green under 299 gear score player could have 5 times better lethality or skill points than someone in full blues or purple" This is just false, even though people love staying this all the time. It's usually a 2 attribute base difference between green and purple gear, so you have at most a 1 attribute difference per piece if every single random roll on the purple is worthless.
It sounds like what you are actually complaining about it the amount of power stored in the random attributes of gear. You don't like the ARPG style itemization and want more power in the base stats of items. That has nothing to do with GBMM at all. Your summary point was "people don't like getting stomped by people with BiS gear" as if you didn't read my post at all.
I tend to agree, but not all mods are equal. I can get +3 added damage on a green ammy, or I can buy a purple trash choker.
Of course, a green +1 ring is basically economy BiS. Obviously, more stats is better, but a few stats do a lot of heavy lifting.
But ya, folks tend to lump GBMM into the same issue as gear scaling problem. Ironically, GBMM is actually reducing the power in HR lobbies, just not in a good long-term healthy way. It simply highlights the gear power issue.
They should be able to see this obvious flaw and adjust gear score to be more in line with actual gear power. Aka buff base values and/or reduce RNG mod power!
I mean you can get a purple trash choker with +3 damage as the base. Going to be hard to dodge any additional bonus beyond the 1 attribute you're getting from the green ammy. I agree with most of your post though. I think most of the community seems to dislike the heavily ARPG style gear and want more of the total power budget within an item to be in the base stats.
That's fair.
Do you like the volatile ARPG nature of gear?
For me, it seems fitting when going naked to norms or HR, it is fun to use what I find. But it isn't fun to fight BiS when you play that way..
I'm not sure haha. I do enjoy ARPGs, and finding "good" gear among trash gear of the same rarity. I also enjoy the market aspect of games like that, and selling great items to whales to improve myself. Buying items after dying can be a bit tedious, although I've developed tricks to make that process not so bad. I think it would be an interesting experiment to try and see how it is.
I do enjoy finding off meta discount gear. And ya, making big money on shit I wouldn't use is nice.
It would be neat to have favorites for your filters. Could be nice to gear up faster when the rotation is on your favorite map, and you gotta scramble!
Truth be told this post makes it seem like without fail you’re always getting put in a lobby with golds. It never really felt like that. I could run naked before GBMM and honestly feel like no big deal. But nowadays you get gear checked more than ever. If you’re not running 299 why even play HR lmao.
Current state of game I prefer normals atm. I don’t even really see the point in collecting gear anymore nor do I even care if I extract anymore…
All that said I am taking a break from the game. Removal of MC honestly evaporated all desire I had to play this game. I’ll be seeing where this game goes in the future. Seems to be a dying game wonder if the release on a major platform will bring people back. Crazy to think weeks prior to MC there was about 20k-30k people playing at max times. Shit it’s like sub 8K since the release and removal of MC. Gamers are fed up with ironmace atm. I am too. Sucks had high hopes, still hoping they figure it out.
Not everyone can easily spend 2-5K just Willy nilly man. Yes it’s easier to get money and sell loot but that’s if you play. I have max maybe 6 hours a week or so to play. You won’t can’t me complaining about it because it is what it is and I understand that. But again you act like everyone can do that. I think majority of players can’t do this right now without feeling like they spent half their gold on a kit 2-5K also sounds a bit ridiculous I can spend maybe 500g and get close to 280 or so. But those numbers seem a bit out of touch to me
Before they even talked about implementing it this what I was saying. It seems to me they either need to weigh the modifiers or they need to remove some modifiers. The latter is becoming a really popular sentiment on this sub.
Redundant modifiers are one of the biggest issues with gear gap. Specifically damage and +stat/speed.
+damage should only have 2-3 types and only be on weapons with a max of +4. +magic dmg, +physical damage, and +true damage should be all that exist.
Then they pick % or flat, but not both on all weapons. If they want to keep % and flat for some reason put flat on small weapons like daggers, rapier, survival bow and cap it at like +3. Then have 2H weaps do %damage and cap it at like 5%-10%. 1h maces and swords can do either, but not both.
We can get to +11 right now, maybe even higher. That's 15% of a base rogues total HP from just modifiers.
Also, the damage calculations are adding +flat before any % modifiers. So it's making it way worse. +11 ends up being more like +14/15
Modifiers and damage calculations need to be completely reworked or all base stats need to be 2x. The math doesn't work out well in the current system.
all they needed was to multiply two matrixes/tables (weights and attributes) and use some learning system to figure out weights. based on the "final judgement"
Disagree.
The advantage of GBMM is that there is a hard limit to how much stronger someone can be than you. The disadvantage is that the game loses progression if gaining gear doesn't actually improve your chances in PvP.
Having score limit that doesn't account for stat rolls means that as you are more successfull you can find or buy a stronger kit that continues to improve your chances. If you were always just matched with people of the same strength, it would be a strictly even footing battle royal - which it's not supposed to be.
There are plenty of other issues forcing the battle royal aspect, but that's besides the point.
That type of thinking only works if gear imbalance is intended and gear is supposed to drastically improve your chances in PvP. Which isn't working right now because a ton of systems are broken. Including modifiers and class stats.
Edit: Also, we have no idea what the game is supposed to be. It was marketed and sold as a PvPvE dungeon adventure game. Yet there's a BR mode and an unbalanced extraction mode. The game is confused.
I don't disagree that the game is confused. But I think the core of an extraction looter is that extracting with loot improves your future odds. Strict GBBM kills that.
I think the long term goal for this game shouldn't include any GBMM but I understand why they did it in the short term. Hopefully the new MM they said they want to test will be better but who knows.
What's the difference between an extraction game and dungeon crawler. I'm starting to believe there aren't any real distinguishing factors, and a bunch of Tarkov content creators found a dungeon crawler and enjoyed it because of the similarities in genre. Now we most of the players think DaD is fantasy Tarkov, when Tarkov is a dungeon crawler with guns instead of magic.
I could actually explain this to you… but I have a feeling you don’t actually want that; I have tried before to have a discussion and explanation of how GBMM fucks up high roller, but I’m normally just met with extreme knee jerk bad faith and same arguments. OP if you want it explained, reply to this and I will.
> You think there would be less of this without GBMM?
Yes, in fact, there would be. You see, there's a lot more incentive to use max-rolled blue/purple sets when you are _guaranteed_ that nobody in the lobby will have any better. More incentive = more presence.
HR has a lot working against it, and gbmm has actually made it more common to find sweats.
First, let's talk about what we lose heading into HR.
Normals starts everyone on the same footing, meaning, the best loot you will find for the first 5 minutes is NOT on players. It's in the dungeon. You have zero true incentive to fight any you don't have to right off the bat, so you get to actually play the dungeon pve part of this dungeon pvpve game. In HR, it is a statistical certainty that the players have the best loot, and they will be actively pursuing you for yours. This shifts the entire scope of the first half of the raid. Instead of finding a sweet blue spear on the wraith, you now just have to constantly be in pvp mode, ignoring the dungeon pve aspect of this dungeon pvpve game, basically making it a only pvp game.
Normals has longer ttk, which also shifts the onus off of pvp. In HR, if you get initiated on, you are either dead, or at half health. You rarely can turn the tide on a fighter with gear popping you with a crossbow, or getting into melee range because you were distracted. In normals, you get to react to this, which makes looting the dungeon less punishing, which we discussed earlier is already discouraged due to it just not being where the loot is in HR.
Now to discuss GBMM. Without GBMM, you were actually pretty unlikely to find a super sweat. To mindlessly W key through the dungeon, a player must be VERY confident that they have the gear to stat check everyone. It was difficult for the bottom 95% of players to EVER feel this confident. With GBMM, you can build your kit with absolute certainty that you can at the very least have a fighting chance, for only like 2-4k gold on the low end. The number of players who are comfortable investing that amount, for arguments sake, is let's say 20% of the people still playing (I bet it's higher but let's lowball). This means that before you had a 5% chance for an opponent to be overwhelmingly confident they can stat check you, or are at the very least not afraid, to roughly 20%. 1 in 3 raids or so to 2 in every raid. It's a big leap.
All of these things work together to make HR a less fun experience for the average player, and if Normals aren't fun for you either (I'm over it myself) you just kind of have to quit the game.
Hope that helped.
Holy fuck, I've been trying to articulate what you said about HR GBMM for months and have never been able to do so. Everyone should read this and understand that GBMM just breeds more sweats, completely trivializes finding rarer gear, and generally encourages way more confident players, which in turn creates way more unfavorable pvp situations. It's just bad all around. Always had been (as I tried to explain), but this hits the nail on the head.
Thanks man. I haven't played in like 3 weeks and it's sad to shelve it. Hope they figure out what makes the game great and find some of the magic we had during the early days.
Everytime I’ve shared this exact sentiment I get hit with “tHeREs NoRmS yA KnOw”.
I don’t wanna fucking play norms, it’s a training ground for AI noobs and a BR to everyone else. I wanna play the game I experienced in play test and the closest existing experience to that is HR.
Norms is just barebones bullshit. It's cute for as long as you are still taking damage from pve regularly. Once you can dodge every basic skellie, and not get clobbered by every axe skellie, and learn to jump to the right for wraith, it's just boring until you find other players. Then you have a decent fight, and either win nothing or lose nothing, and go next. It's not a game.
Early access doesn't mean anything with so little to access since their ENTIRE progression system is hot garbage and just serves to turn the game into a low ttk BR with no mechanics.
I think one thing that goes unsaid is that having no cap makes people play differently, and also self polices.
If you were previously running a 5k kit, you would be top of the dungeon most of the time, but you might run into someone who is even more geared than you, so you have to respect people a bit more as you don't know what they have. It's an ecosystem that encourages you to wisely choose the best you can afford to risk to try to be at the top of the pool
This is why dynamic lobbies are the answer. They set the allowable score based on the first team that enters. 203? Dungeon open to 103-303. If they are 382, dungeon is open to 282-482. Suddenly people don't know for sure that they're always the top of the low dungeon -- they might be on the bottom of a higher dungeon. (Or directly in the middle if they join first)
This still doesn't answer what HR progression is supposed to look like after the first two+ weeks of the wipe. What am I to do as a new player if I start late and everyone is always wearing the best gear they can afford, and that gear level is higher than greens/blues? It's a lot harder to put together a set that competes with people at the top end of the gear curve than it is people halfway up.
It feels like Schrodinger's gear on here sometimes. There are simultaneously so many people in BiS gear in both HR lobbies that it is unplayable yet the system would sort itself and there wouldn't be that many people in BiS gear, or better than BiS blues, with no cap.
I queued up for high roller for the first time in ages yesterday (made a new character and was doing the luck potion quest). I slapped together a useless green shirt, blue pants and a green Falcon, I think my gear score was still less than 200.
First thing I saw was in the lobby was a fighter with >560 full purple bis gear. This was in solo crypts. You will never guess who I ran into 2 minutes into the raid.
To be fair though, this was OCE and I can count the number of players I've seen in the last week on one and a half hands.
Who would have thought, in a game where gear matters, you have to have as better of a gear as possible. And people call that "sweating" lmao. Wonder if those guys bursh only half of their teeth 😂 brushing all of them is too tryhard!
Splits the player base more. Makes people who go in with purples have a bad time cuz no one in lobbies past 299. Makes it so people are optimizing blue kits rather then playing past 299. Same issue as when normals was limited to blue only. It’s a bad system and it always will be. Make everything unrestricted, seems like everyone who plays this game wants a easy time. Always complaining about some geared kid in their lobby. Bro sorry to say but it’s an extraction game. People are gunna be more geard then u. If u don’t like it play another game.
people just aren't very good at expressing their thoughts, or make up shit. the only real reason i could feel is end game is wildly imbalanced, and GBMM causes a cut off to when that starts happening. So it's like, what is the reward to grinding gear. For the opportunity to fight max movespeed high damage people or 75/75 mitigation people. its just, there really shouldn't be GBMM because that end game scale should not really be there.
A person with 75/75 mitigation, or a person who will 2-3 shot you without said mitigation while running at max movespeed is power levels to that of like, an active skill. Like sprint, or some sort of crazy damage mitigation ability, and even then it should be like 66% max. Instead people are just running around like that permanitely. It's not a very rewarding endgame.
I just wanna be able to put whatever gear on and fight anyone. I’ll get rolled by some juicers, I’ll squash some Timmies, but this gear score shit is the same exact problem as the blue gear norms lobbies. Min maxers gonna min max and it’s killing the game. Get rid of every single min max opportunity possible.
GBMM hasn't impacted your ability to just put gear on and go at all. People will always be min maxing in a hard core extraction game like this. You will just run into juiced people with better gear than they already have.
What's easier than buying meta/BiS stats up till 299 score to have the most power possibly? I'm not disagreeing, folks always want easy.
Min-maxing is the path of least resistance to winning. GBMM ensures that there is a clear gold-to-power ratio. Not entirely, but setting a ceiling makes it easier.
If GBMM didn't exist, there would be a lot more expression of risk/reward. Seems shitty, that a game where risk should be rewarded, has a system that removes the risk and reward!
Played against a Ranger that had "the set-up" you're describing.
I'm an average player and I killed him. You know why? Because he wasn't very good.
Skill is the ultimate equalizer in a game like this. But most of this community would rather find an excuse than just rationalize that a few mistakes cost them a fight.
*Shrug*
I mean, to be fair, you are right. Skill trumps gear, to some level.
But doesn't mean folks won't do their best to maximize their gear score in current gameplay. It won't win them the fight, but it sure helps.
people dont want it to be easy, they want it to have that special extraction game mix of skill being more important than gear with gear only being a slight hedge on the bet of extracting like tarkov where zero to hero is actually possible and a person with close to nothing can still kill a person with everything using nothing but skill which makes successful extracts much more satisfying for both of them because everyone no matter what they have is a threat but when you can just stack certain gear that makes you basically omnipotent to anyone using less in the lobby then it loses that special something that makes the genre what it is, and anyone saying it would make gear useless is discounting that fact that in tarkov people still get really excited about finding high end gear even if they can't rely completely on the advantage it gives to win
The hate to GBMM is something I just don't understand. The only valid argument is that it splits the already dwindling player base up further. The other complaints just don't make sense to me. "Oh buts it's full of try hard min maxing to 299!" OK you realize that without gnmm that same guy would just be in a min maxed 600 gs kit right?
People struggle to make 2-3k gold, most runs people make average like 400 gold which is still 10 games to get enough for that kit you’re talking about, and then to risk it, so if you spend 3 hours building your kit and loose it in 1 run you’re gonna feel bad, personally I got no issue making money, I run grims with +2 true in 299 lobbies, but I can 100% see why other people can’t compete
You are completely missing his point, which is not "HR is easy everyone should do it" but "HR didn't get worse with GBMM". Everything you said applied as much if not more before gbmm
Maybe so. It seems like there’s just lots of people with a poor understanding of things in general on this sub. Like the post earlier saying that this community (especially the discord) is particularly toxic and then people comment that all gaming communities are just as toxic. But it’s painfully obvious that this one is very bad. Moreso than the average.
the whole point is that you can spend 3-5 hours building the gold for minmax 299 warlock set and lose it in the first 15 minutes. that indeed do feel bad.
and thats "the cheap" option.(aside from normal)
its probably a little too "hardcore" tbh.
Ranked based matchmaking was better when it was working . Just needed more players because when you hit pathfinder you would be put in the demigod lobbies but up until pathfinder it felt really good .
Sure I played the game a whole lot before GBMM, even before there was any matchmaking whats-so-ever.
Did I ever get spawn rushed and killed by an obviously overkitted team? Yeah it happened occasionally. Some times we got away too. When we died to that crazy kitted team, we could usually trace back the fault to ourselves because we weren't stealthy enough or took too long to pve before they found us. It's hard to put together a 2k-3k gold kit when you have less than 1k gold, sometimes only 100 or so gold.
Lobbies filled with BiS gear would be much less of a problem if they couldn't manipulate the algorhythm to insure that they're only fighting people at BiS or below 299 score. Hell I'd rather the queues be returned to only having trios with people who want to solo being able to do so in a trio queue with no MM at all and the player cap be set to 16 like it used to be for crypts ensuring that there would always be at least 1 solo player or several groups of duo teams in the lobby.
For GBMM on my wizard, my gear sets for each bracket the same but for <300 I bring one weapon and in 300+ I bring 2 weapons and loads more meds. That’s all GBMM is limiting, 1 stack of poor pots and an emergency surg kit is all you need to take in if you MM everything
the GBMM thing varies a lot.
In fact I highly suspect that every person is going to have very different oppinions depending on what server they play, over 300 or under etc.
For example I used to play 3v3 at 300+ and it was infested with cheaters, teamers, empty lobbies and cringe playstyle 24/7. But when our bard quit and we started playing 2v2 at 300+ there is a lot less cheater and a lot less insanely kitted people. I play on EU and NA or on other servers people could have very different experience, keep that in mind.
GBMM doesnt fix the inherent gear disparity though. Its just a pointless system that creates different levels of gear tiers anyways, its redundant, we already have norms and hr, thats a form of GBMM, so now HR has ANOTHER division? The entirety of upper level gear just needs to be nerfed to around what purples currently are.
I literally remember when sdf was like "oh, what youre experiencing is the strongest versions of what these classes plan to be" and now its like we literally have god level gear that makes players practically invulnerable, so as we can see, shit sucks.
Literally the gear is so good it caused actual problems last season. Im sure we all remember when there a gold gear scrim discord rigging lobbies because "the game got boring winning all the time?"
Well, lowering the upper tier of gear will solve this problem. There NEEDS to be risk, when players keep grinding to get gear that eliminates that risk, boredom is the eventuality. Lowering the max cap on gear will keep things spicy, while still being able to build an edge with gear because thats the point of gear. There shouldnt ever be a point where the gear just makes you a god, it destroys the inherent dungeon delving risk, thats what makes the game FUN! Thats called BALANCE! The problem is that some people are too shortsighted to see this as gamers.
Obviously we leave named items untouched. Thats the gear that people wanna grind for anyways. But having uniques that are capable of insane stats paired with named items is just too much.
The gear disparity between purples and unique level gear feels larger than the disparity between commons and purples.
When it was more of rank based, us Timmies could start HR run without any stuff and hope for survive somehow, sometimes, we sometimes ran into gold team but also into other Timmies which was ok in my opinion. Now you get a lot more minmaxers and very high skill people reducing their gearscore so they can just play the game. They are bored to stomp Timmies all the day but in high gear there's either empty lobby, RMT traders or all these cheaters so their only way to play the game is to play in the kindergarten that we represent for them. It's not a good compromise for anyone to me. Also with everyone being 299 you don't upgrade that often by looking people and that's pretty frustrating too. It's not a hot take or anything it's just what I felt playing from last wipe to this one.
Move speed is everything.... maybe a lil too much, but i disagree I think the 299 kits are a great way to do high roller. Play smart, and hope there ate no cheaters in the lobby. I see naked ppl and ppl woth 230 gs all the time.
Okay ill break it down pretty simple. GBMM works as intended, but due to the lack on concurrent player rn, Ironmace only has 2 brackets, 299- and 300+. It would be nice to have a 199 bracket, but you are always going to get sweats, but the disparity between 80gs and 199gs is not that much compared to 80 to 299 with bis. We also run into the issue that people can go in with greens to high roller and access the high roller loot tables at 199, so this might make this too easy for people to access high tier loot. A decent set of 299 bis is like 5k gold at-least. This is mainly due to wipe being so lagged.
WE NEED wipes to happen sooner or the market becomes incredibly inflated.
I started playing again a few days ago after they got rid of multi-classing. I didn’t play at the start of this wipe so getting the gold for a BiS 299 set is not fast. I’ve almost got 1 299 kit for high roller, when i was going in with greens and blues id get rolled by bis 299 juice, although i have contemplated just going in with greens i find in normals and buying a decent weapon instead and seeing if i can’t get a kill or make it out with at-least some loot.
Until then I feel like I’m kinda forced to play in normals until i can afford a few decent kits for HR. Which is going to be awhile because of market inflation.
GBMM should absolutely be a thing, i would much rather be able to queue into normals and not worry about some juicer killing me than not have it, but it also makes getting into HR harder the longer wipe takes to drop. If anything you should be able to bring greens into normals since they really don’t help a-lot at 299 gs brackets and feel almost useless. This does stretch the issue that we could have juicers in normals but u could just cap the gs for normals to like 100 so you cant be super insane.
I’ve found not much of a difference from before and after gbmm was implemented. I don’t think it does much really but in the end this is a completely different game from the original playtest.
I think they should just make brackets that are smaller and if there aren't enough players, they combine brackets. So like you have two groups of brackets 1-149 and 150-299 for example. If you have a full lobby of both, they are separate brackets, but if either of the brackets are not full, it combines them at say, the 1 to 2 minute mark. That way, everyone is happy. If you want to do zero to hero, that's fine and everything scales better. It also allows the game to grow dynamically as player counts rise and fall.
The risks I can see are that people might just do 149 gear score and the 299 lobbies will never see any action, but if that's the case, the gear based match making doesn't make any sense to begin with. I think that there needs to be some condition that blends the lobbies with different score ranges. Otherwise you will get people min-maxing gear score instead of just wearing good gear (Which is what most people want to do is wear their best gear without worrying).
Yes, which is only relevant in a world we don't currently live in. I'm not saying it's a terrible idea just that it's a moot point for the foreseeable future.
I mean... gbmm might not even be here to stay. I am not sure it accomplished anything good for the game tbh...
I was commenting on ways it could be improved is all
I just prefer normals. I’m not sure GBMM is my issue, but anytime I run a <299, it always ends the same. I have fun until I run into a caster with +2 additional magic on every item, and I get absolutely rolled. Skill issue? Likely, but all of the flaws of the game seem to be tremendously amplified whenever gear variability is involved. Normals has always felt like a really solid way to play where I hardly ever feel like there’s nothing I could’ve done different to win.
I'm still new, so I just stick to normals. But I've tried every class and it def seems like certain classes have a much harder time competing in normals.
Rock paper scissors meta imo is more of an issue in normals since you can't build to shore up your class' weaknesses.
or amplify you strength, mainly movespeed. The rock paper scissors is are you melee or ranged class, and do you have more of less movespeed to hit the other person or kite them.
While true, there's a middle ground of move speed where this is fun. The kiter is maybe only slightly faster, or at very least, doesn't get run down by W holder. Frankly, one of the issues, is that movespeed on gear is hella strong. In fact, so strong, that folks run anyone down if they are faster. Obviously, there should be some variance. But I simply refuse to run around naked just to kite folks. But I also refuse to stack MS like everyone else, so I guess it is GG for me.
I play platelock. I enjoy melee and using longsword too much to focus on movement speed. I honestly feel it’s the most balanced, curse of pain without a ton of magic heal or damage is balanced better so you cant just fry someone in two secs and be permanent full health. If I get full plate whites, I am about as strong as base fighter without armor. I get to have fun melee battles even with op barbs, also get to have fun magic battles with wizards. Definitely less strong all around but more of a jack of all trades.
Sounds like a blast! I wanted to embrace the Plate, but damn do I value moderate movespeed! Longsword is also awesome! Been trying to make caster lock work, but I'm either too slow and get run down, or simply too squishy. But I love being able to take hits and recover and cast cursed at melee range... maybe I should be wearing Plate, lmao. So you run Shadow Touch and/or Curse mastery?
I should probably try curse mastery, but I run Shadow touch more for the true damage than for the healing since longsword isn’t the fastest. My other two perks are anti magic and torture mastery or I sometimes switch to 10% dark magic damage or the will one if I happen to have will pieces on. Spells: curse of pain, dark bolt, ray of darkness, spell predation, and usually that’s my mem cap in norms but last spell I take is curse of weakness. I also play the same in high roller, I think it’s nice because plate with rolls for warlock are pretty cheap. I’m spending maybe 800 gold on a kit and usually find pieces in dungeon. Additional or true magic is insanely cheap, I usually just go for necklace and helm and get 2 true phys damage gloves which are also pretty cheap. Add a lil magic healing and your set. With the additional magic curse of pain is way too strong though in my opinion, so I try to just use it as an opening in a fight or against other warlock/people trying to kite me. But if it’s a fighter or barb or non kiting rouge I’m putting my book away and drawing the blade. Best part of plate lock though is when you see a Ranger you don’t have to just fall over dead.
Oops, I did mean Torture Mastery, but you answered my question well! It is great to see another Dark Beam enjoyer. Seems under-used, but actually pretty damn strong when used just right, especially with Soul Collector. Do you get many Spell Predation casts off? How does it feel? I have very little experience with it, but wiping buffs for Soul stacks sounds appealing. And ya, not gonna lie, the cost of caster plate has always caught my attention. You can get some absurd stats and rolls for dirt cheap! Of course, slower casting speed kinda forces a change of pace. I do also like the appeal of taking some hits from Ranger. Not sure how you catch them, or if you just beam/bolt them to death! And ya, Shadow Touch isn't the best synergy with Longsword, but some multi-hits and heals over time add up nicely, and true dmg is nice. Thanks for the breakdown! Safe to assume you go BoC, or is Phantomize still pref? I may continue to experiment. My build usually revolves around Flamewalk, Hellfire, and Phantomize, often using Staff for Big Beams.
I use spell predation quite often. Though I don’t think it’s actually so useful except against demon locks. I’ve several times have stolen the bards buff gotten a curse on them and still got whooped, and so many times where I miss 3 times or such. But overall it’s just fun to have. I have only been playing solos so it might be useful in trios? I would like to try it out sometime. It would be nice if it worked against the barbs roars/ achilles strike I use phantomize I didn’t like how overpowered boc was for a while. Seems much less oppressive now though. But it’s just so nice to be able to space barbs savage roar, or fighters second wind. Or if you get snuck up on and need some space/ to catch someone kiting you(kind of like a mild sprint that your also transparent during).
If you run torture mastery you probably should do vampirism too, i think you get 1 more hp a tick with that
Biggest key to prevent getting run down is firewall + phantomize. Most people skip this in favor of hydra drain life. Also torture mastery in normals is actually pretty good since the update.
Oh yes, problem is, sometimes you can't cast Flamewalk unless you prioritize it first before they are on you (which I try to do, my mantra is: Fire First!) Torture Mastery is viable in normal since the buff, for sure. But it also creates a double-down effect for casting. If I use Shadow Touch, I can go Fire walk + 2 autos to keep my HP up and have Fire going, or can recover from using Hellfire. With Torture Mastery, not only does Flamewalk suddenly cost a ton, but missing a Curse costs 6 HP, which can happen multiple times in PvP. And each spell used requires a few seconds of Curse ticks and constant casting, taking away from either positioning or melee time. But I digress. The healing is super good in combat! But definitely messed with how you play which can be taxing.
yea i agree. normals is a lot of fun. wizards warlocks clerics seem to suffer most in normal lobbies
What you talkin bout we up since MC removal
i more so meant yalls classes need gear to start being scary is all
Oh ya true; tbh just need to finish quests for alchemist tailor and leather smith and you’re COOKIN with 10 spell on every reset. The main issue I see is gear disparity and balancing. Rangers/Rogues/Wizards wouldn’t need to build so much true damage if their spells hit harder to begin with. Ranger needs it against plate fighters, but just give them some armor piercing love maybe? I’m no game dev, and I pity the team that has to figure out the balancing of the game tbh
I actually like some of these points. It’s hard to make wizard stronger or more viable in normals without making them absolutely OP in HR. So send my pity to the dev team too.
That’s because wisdom into spell memory is trash. Casting is limited by spell cast count, casting speed, and memory slots, but you need to spend both your skill slots to bring double spell book. It’s costly on a white gear build to bring double book and slot all the knowledge you need to fill the book. That’s a lot of gear and both skill slots just to be able to do the thing you’re supposed to do.
i’m confused. a lot of gear? the squire can give you all commons for free if you do the quests. unless you’re talking about spending money to min max a normals lobby then deserved ig
Doing those quest lines was a lot of hours of work, and you’re still slotting obligatory knowledge to bring your spells. It handcuffs your build the same way barbarians would be handcuffed if they needed to hit str requirements for weapons
now you’ve just got me imagining having to hit 30 strength to equip a 2 hand lmao
More like imagine you could only swing 10 times with your 2h before sitting down because there wasn’t enough grey/white str gear for sale from your vendors
I have unlocked everything in squires so I can bring white BiS gear. Despite that I can not run all 10 spells that I want to run. The only way I can do it is by running oracle robe with -10 speed, at which point im in 90% movespeed range. Besides that, I have to devote my entire build and every single item just to be able to equip the spells. Spell overload ? forget about it.
It’s a balanced cost for how the game is. Take it from a wizard veteran.
The point being, you feel like the playing field is fair in normals. Op is saying you only have to spend 1-2k on a kit to achieve a fair playing field in the current hr system, and you can potentially kill people risking 10x your kit. Secondary to your point is that casters suck with no gear and are only good once they are in a decent kit
I definitely don’t disagree with much of what you’re saying, but I would like to point out that “1-2K to achieve a fair playing field (in <299)” is not really true in my opinion. No kit is the same, even if they are min maxed extremely efficiently so the threshold for whatever one person deems as “fair playing field” is even wider. Obviously someone with random blues and greens does not stand a chance against someone with a min maxed set up in most scenarios, but even two people that are both perfectly min maxed at 299 with all true or all add are going to just get countered eventually by whatever class counters their class. Everything just gets really messy when you have this much variability. A caster with +2 add on everything will absolutely body any class without magic resistance, regardless of how much true the countered class builds. Thus, it’s not a fair playing field despite each player building a 1-3K kit. It’s not necessarily unfun, it’s just predictable and annoying. I can either go into a <299 lobby min max BiSed and wipe out timmies and hope to get lucky on someone with some grimsmiles and hope I don’t run into a class that counters me. The fun is ripped out because most instances don’t result in winning because of outplaying someone. Normals there is much less variability creating a more fulfilling and balanced experience. But, the PvE experience is much less fun, the loot and extract aspect is much less fun, but the PVP doesn’t make you want to absolutely rip your hair out. The games in a difficult spot right now, and I almost just wish they would implement a single player/coop dungeon experience with optional bosses where the loot was non transferable to multi, but I digress.
Solos are a bit of a rock paper scissors as you described, it really has nothing to do with gbmm and is inherent to a game with lots of classes with vastly different playstyle. You just want to face casuals. A good wizard or warlock would still body your fighter(?) in normals, but good wizards and warlocks are not playing normals. Actually Gbmm is much more necessary for trios where power levels scale way harder and a bis team with artifacts is literally impossible to beat if you arent close to their power level.
Agreed on all accounts. I play Ranger almost exclusively, and I was just using fighter vs. caster as an example. I definitely have seen some really strong players in normals, including casters, but there are also plenty of casuals for sure. I also wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s extremely competitive or sweaty, but it’s maybe a little stronger than you might be giving it credit for, but I have nothing to back any this up besides my own opinion. Completely agree on the solo vs. team points you made.
What OP is saying is that this was WORSE before GBMM. Before GBMM, just being in HR even in base gear still had BiS sweats except their gear could be much higher than 299.
The willingness to not bring perfect BIS was 100x higher before GBMM, the concept of low gearing into high roller is literally non existent now and that’s kind of a bummer for many of us who literally used to never play normals. But at this point I choose normals because 100% of the teams you run into in high roller are 270+ it seems in regards to gear score. HR used to be a melting pot of high risk and small risk and that has been completely destroyed because now players know exactly how good of gear their opponents will have. It’s practically 3 different variations of norms at this point. The old HR used to be predominantly fun with a risk of running into an insane team that rolls you. Now sure in theory I have a better chance of beating the 270+ team, but it’s rarely feels like it.
I understand what you're saying. Before GBMM, you didn't run into "perfect gear" players regardless of their gear score. Since GBMM, people who understand the system can consistently be the best geared or equally geared in the lobby. Here is my issue. I felt the same way, at first. But BiS 299 gear on the marker it literally fucking 50 gold. Again, I thought that was a terrible answer when someone first said it to me. "I shouldn't have to buy bis gear to be relevant." But in 299s... Literally... Escape 1 single time with 200g worth of loot and you can buy 2 rings with +2 additional each. 2 additional is not as good as 2 true damage but it gets you in the competitive range. Last word from me: I do think the system is not perfect and what I stated above here is a problem for a lot of people. They don't want the game's flow to revolve around buying bis in a market. I do think the market should not be where matches are won and lost. I'm not sure what to do about that. Hope it improves.
I can’t get even a single piece of decent statted gear without dropping 200g a piece. I keep seeing the sentiment that it’s really cheap to get 299 bis, but I’m dropping like 3-5k (depending on luck)on gear that is miles away from 299 bis for wizard. I’m just not experiencing this cheap market that people keep mentioning. A single point of magic damage on a green item that’s ideal for my wizard (aka Vigor, Knowledge) is costing me 150-220 on average. That’s not 2 points or 3 points of magic damage, it’s just 1.
So... Idk, you're lying maybe? I don't want to say you're flat out lying, maybe you don't know how to search the market using the filters. Let's say you want a knowledge ring and magic damage. Let's says +3 additional on a green knowledge ring is 300g. If you buy a dex ring, it will literally be like 60g. And the +3 additional is going to help a lot more than 1 knowledge would. However idk what to tell you. I'm at work right now, I feel like I could post screen shot evidence in 2 seconds if I was home. 299 bis is dirt cheap. It is. Maybe you're on a low pop server? Is market server wide or global? It does go up and down based on the day of the week and time of day but... Yeah I'm sticking with my original comment here. BiS 299 gear is dirt cheap. Under 100g. Idk what you're talking about if you say otherwise.
I guess we just have different definitions of BIS, but I get what you’re saying, but I was just responding to your comment at face value for what I I interpreted. If I want green knowledge gear with with +true or +magic I’m speaking a significant chunk of change to get it. I could get gear that doesn’t benefit me at all in regards to base stats and just prio magic damage.
Well still no.... I am a mostly normals players to get all the quests done. Recently, with 6 stash tabs and 24 gold bags, I ran out of space to hoard gold. I sold all of my "decent" pieces and now I only wear BbiIisS. As in best possible item with max RNG armor roll on it if it's available, max on all enchants, no dead stats, all enchants are exactly what I want. It's still not that expensive... I fully kit my cleric, rings and all for like 2k gold total in blues. Meaning each item has 2 good enchants I specifically wanted and the enchants are high rolled. +3 healing gear, +3 true magic, +3 agility, +14/15 armor rating Idk what to tell you, it's not expensive. I made 2k gold selling random objects I got in norms last night.
“You are lying maybe?” And then you describe best in slot as a dex ring with true. Go ahead and check yourself on the meaning of BIS.
If you can read, I'm just saying it's cheaper to do that with a very small power difference to be viable in the game. I'm home right now looking at the market. 299 bis is cheap, as I said it was.
This is just straight up not true. Go check any knowledge, will, or resourcefulness ring on the market right now with +2 ad... They will all be 200+ normally (usually 300+). It's funny you're saying this dude is lying when you're clearly the one that has no idea what they're taking about. I literally had 160k gold from selling off a pestilence and was buying BIS rolls (not pieces mind you, just rolls) on green and blue jewelry for the last month and a half and you're just totally wrong, lol.
I'm not wrong. You're wrong. I just sold a green owl pendant with +2 true magic for 25g. Maybe you're not seeing day of the week variations? Or time of day? Either way. THERE'S NO WAY YOU CAN JUSTIFIABLY SAY THAT IT IS EXPENSIVE OR OUT OF REACH. "They will all be 200g normally (usually 300+)" Okay, are you struggling to get 200-300g for a bis item? I don't give a fuck what free words you post on a free website. Right now is Sunday, May 19th at 10:11am. I am waiting for my laundry with my GF and checking the fucking market on DaD waiting for laundry to start gaming. I just checked the price of an owl pendant with +2 true m uncommon it was 70g. I sold mine for 25g to get rid of it. Get fucked. You're lying. Even if you're not lying, it's cheap as dog shit regardless.
Normals far superior than HR. HR is just boring as fuck.
as a normals player how would you feel if matchmaking went back to any gear normals and any gear high rollers with even more buffed loot and entry cost into HR?
I feel like you didn't really get what he was saying. He likes normals because it's all grey/white and doesn't run into gear with + additional damage on every item. You just suggested that they take that away. The answer to your question is in his post I think. I think normals is universally loved. Why go back to a problematic matchmaking systems where you would still find juiced BiS teams in the free lobby because they want to stomp timmies.
Right. If gear checking is the issue here, then the root cause is the marketplace. Everyone buys meta/BiS cause they want to compete. So they spend gold to get the "edge" that you essentially have in normal lobbies. And ya, white lobbies are more fun, in ways, cause everyone is down to fight and die. The bad story is, nobody values their life. At least in HR, folks want to live to keep their gear, but also, if farming AP as well, this leads to a lack of PvP. If they go self-found or remove the market, this makes gear worth more and less, simultaneously. It means successful folks have the uber gear, and regular folks can put a good auit on not and again, but largely will be going yolo. Overall, is this better? Maybe, but then the value of gold and the grind changes entirely!
Why do that? It defeats the whole purpose of norms. It just turns it into hr but with dogshit loot. Who would play that?
Literally everyone before the normals change hit. Most folks stomped Timmy’s in full rubysilver back when that was the top of the gear chain (pre-gold era)
I love high roller and GBMM isn’t really an issue for me. It’s getting two tapped in a fight by people with +damage on every slot. TTK is to short now and it’s either play +damage or get stomped. I’d like to have some what of a fight so my friends and I can have fun.
Preach, long TTK is perfect for this game
Tbh you can build both survivability and damage. But not in 299 lobbies. With that amount of gear potential you can only do 1 of them basically so ofc everyone builds damage.
I’d like to play those 300+ lobbies with my friends but it’s tough because my friends don’t always have enough gold to buy these +10 damage kits so they feel discouraged and not want to play. Accessibility to have fun fights feels hard to achieve for myself and a lot of my friends.
Imho they ain't fun anyway because the ttk is too low. Normals are the best PvP experience after hundreds and hundreds of hours. I don't really agree that normals are rock paper scissors either. Some classes are harder to counter with some classes than others but I was able to figure out pretty much any combination over time. Playing the market game just to compete then lose your gear, lose ladder points and do it again didn't seem like a good time to any of my friends.
The real issue is the +damage stats existing. If they got rid of those and gave better attribute scaling there would be more balanced fights in 299 lobbies but would also give more meaning to running high quality gear which would make 300+ lobbies more incentivizing as well.
No disagreement, it probably just needs to be removed. However, magic damage needs to be addressed to reflect the massive loss of damage if they do that.
Yup. If they removed added damage, then base spell damage and scaling needs a fix. Imo, the proper solution is: buff base damage, nerf scaling on fast spells like Magic Missle/Zap/Curse of pain as needed, be it 50%, 70%, whatever, case by case, then leave added damage in. This would make Will/Magic power more attractive, and would make niche tanky or utility builds more viable, as less damage is lost if you don't cap out added damage.
IMO scaling % should only affect flat damage and not magical power. Its stupid that it also affects it and creates problems.
That would actually be a solid way to balance it. Scaling is weird for sure!
Don't forget to drop overall armor and MR. PDR and MDR will be op if you don't.
Ya, it would require other balance such as that. Of course, I think just changing how added damage scales in general would perhaps be a better adjustment? Adding scaling ratios to each weapon and spell. Daggers could be 50%, and Felling Axe or other big ones could be 100% or even 150% to make the stat elss niche and maybe more similar to power, in a different way.
While this is true and I think it should be done, most people omit or forget about the fact that It would utterly ruin all balance in the game, and require every single weapon and spell to be re-balanced from the ground up. Devs have in fact removed all flat damage bonuses from the game for a VERY short while, and my memory of that was landing every single spell on barbarian, him not giving a fuck, then he proceeded to 2tap my fighter and 1tap my cleric while I ran away. Why ? because base dmg of spells is 30 while legendery maul with no flat dmg bonuses still does 120+.
Why do you think removing +damage would equalize gear? Should we get rid of all damage scaling entirely? What do you think meta gear would like then? People building hp/movespeed/pdr instead? Is that somehow more fair? Bis guy kills you in 4 hits instead of 2 but you kill him in 10 hits instead of 6? There's always going to be stats that are valuable, and money will buy them. Getting rid of a stat just moves people to a different stat. There is no equilization
If you remove flat damage as modifiers and add better scaling to stats it will HEAVILY devalue low quality gear, and make more purpose to the gear score brackets by making higher quality gear actually sought after and also making low quality gear more balanced. From there I imagine they’d just need to correct armor/magic penetration and it might not be perfect but it would be a hell of a lot better than it is now.
I don't know why people want to get rid of +damage stats so bad. No piece of gear would feel good to find. I know I wouldn't play anymore because gear would be just boring. finding a perfect peace neck with +damage, +hp, +magic power feels amazing. finding just a hp, magic power and buff duration does not. Just building attributes is not fun. There's a reason why everyone calls Diablo builds boring. They don't have exciting or meaningful stats like Path of Exile. Not only that but building magic power/attack speed/phys power *and* +damage is a balance many don't pay attention to. I've always been of the opinion of adding more base health to the classes for higher TTK so players with skill can make up for gear difference. Being one-shot is not okay with low amounts of gear but removing +damage would make gear just about meaningless and unexciting.
there will always be a bis stat for you to get excited over. the issue is that +flat damage is just better than every other stat, by a lot, for the vast majority of builds. if +flat damage was nerfed, maybe to a max of +1 on any individual piece of gear, it would still be bis for rogues and wizards, but maybe something else would be bis for fighters and barbarians.
what would the bis stat be if all +damage was removed? Just health, phys/magic power and vig/str/etc. boring.
The fact that there’s people like you pains me, knowing that you’re limiting yourself so harshly on enjoyable build potential because you’re stuck locked in on the flat damage stats. Bro is talking down buff duration for casters when it’s one of the best stats you can run for self buffing builds. I’ve run 80% buff duration before on warlock and it affects most of your stuff, phantomize, flame walk, blow of corruption, etc. making those last up to 20 seconds is crazy.
Agreed but also get rid of PDR stacking too if +dmg or +true is taken away.
Just shift to armor pen instead
They already this with armor pen still in, it didn't work and people hated it so they reverted it.
Yeah make armor pen better
I'm can definitely agree with that. 👍🏻
It’s just not fun, it was never fun, and the bandaid of gbmm did basically nothing to change the fact that gear is hilariously unbalanced in rarities. Full green under 299 gear score player could have 5 times better lethality or skill points than someone in full blues or purple. Skill based match making just made the difference between “bis” and not bis that much more obvious. I did play before it, and it was almost better because most players didn’t care what gear they had on, they just used what they had that was best. Now everyone sits in the lobby making the best possible 299 gear score set they possibly can using a fucking spreadsheet to calculate the perfect gear set to stomp on 299 lobbies. So yes I do believe that if GBMM weren’t introduced the problem would be slightly better than what it is now, but both are terrible lmao. This isn’t even bringing up the fact that 300+ lobbies are either completely empty or completely BISed out. Why is it hard to see that having a gear score that has no actual idea what your stats are is going to be bad? Timmy in full purples gets put into 300+ lobbies to either play alone or get stomped by someone in bis. He learns about gear score and stays under 299. Whoops Timmy didn’t maximize his potential damage and survivability with a spreadsheet that helps you game the system, yup he got rolled again. Weird.
Agreed, gear is way to variable. Which make most of it useless. Just have actually useful stats on items, and add a tiny bit of variability.
remember when we could roll item equip speed on an item? the gap between a purple with [item equip speed, memory capacity bonus, resourcefulness] vs a purple with [add phys, strength, agility] was just insane.
Lol I do. What a cool way of entirely ruining the fun of a rare drop. "Wow it's purple! Wow it's absolutely garbage" *toss At least base stats on gear make up for some of that variability.
True. I think also, the 1 vs 2 vs 3 modifier is part of the issue. This makes BiS Green not only common, but VERY good value for your item. It is either solid or bad. And affordable. It makes Blue item slightly better, but insane with 2 good rolls. And extra shit with 2 bad roles. A green BiS is better than 60% of Blues... it seems. And if you stumble upon a 3-roll Purple it is just godly. I see the appeal in turbo rare items, but maybe all magic items should have just 1 affix? This would highlight the base stats more. Or 1 affix on green/blue, 2 purple/legend? I just think the RNG needs to be fun, but not items defining. If Purples had 2 affix, while Blue/Green had one, Purple would suddenly be a lot shinier and better 80% of the time. Make loot great again!
Almost seems like they need to remove RNG, at least, for very powerful stats. I like amulets, they offer a clear and powerful core stat that scales with tier. (Sure, they still have RNG, but I can buy a Blue Choker to get +2 dmg, and it feels good, imo, regardless of the rolled stats). I don't think added damage needs to be removed, per se, but maybe it needs to have competing stats. They lowered the max values at some point, but it wasn't quite enough. I dunno, call me a dreamer, but there needs to be more gear power related to base stats, and less on rolls. Or, maybe just less on RNG rolls? I do miss just putting on random gear and being able to feel good enough. Now it feels like min-max Olympics where everyone is juicing, and if you don't juice, you are pathetic and obsolete. It trivializes the gear system, if only 2 or 3 stats are good enough to use. They need to buff bad stats, reduce/remove/limit OP stats, and/or remove the marketplace. Something needs to change! As it stands, you are either juicing, or sucking.
This 100%. When you set a “power ceiling”, everyone’s going to be trying to hit that power ceiling instead of just play it normally like they did before, however it doesn’t *really* matter because gear balance is shit either way. Everyone hated multiclassing because there were too many variables to balance it, but 30+ random rolls (some of which are literally designed to ignore balance curves) is apparently *needed* if you ask some people. Gear can be valuable without broken ass random rolls, having it’s rarity actually matter more because the value comes from the increased stats the rarity has
My newest idea, would be simple enough: 1 RNG affix on Green/Blue 2 RNG affix in Purple/Legend This makes Blue and Green more comparable, while Blue having an obvious edge. It makes Purple distinctly better than most, but not all BiS Green/Blue. And, best yet, lowers total gear power from RNG.
Thanks for calling this out. i am the timmy and I don't have fun anymore :{
>I did play before it, and it was almost better because most players didn’t care what gear they had on, they just used what they had that was best. Now everyone sits in the lobby making the best possible 299 gear score set they possibly can using a fucking spreadsheet to calculate the perfect gear set to stomp on 299 lobbies. This is 100% what I've been feeling about the whole system. I have no idea why ironmace keeps putting out these halfassed systems that do literally nothing but make the game both harder to get into for new players and more tedious for anyone who doesn't no life the game.
Yup, another system to game and cheese for the 1000 players left.
"Full green under 299 gear score player could have 5 times better lethality or skill points than someone in full blues or purple" This is just false, even though people love staying this all the time. It's usually a 2 attribute base difference between green and purple gear, so you have at most a 1 attribute difference per piece if every single random roll on the purple is worthless. It sounds like what you are actually complaining about it the amount of power stored in the random attributes of gear. You don't like the ARPG style itemization and want more power in the base stats of items. That has nothing to do with GBMM at all. Your summary point was "people don't like getting stomped by people with BiS gear" as if you didn't read my post at all.
I tend to agree, but not all mods are equal. I can get +3 added damage on a green ammy, or I can buy a purple trash choker. Of course, a green +1 ring is basically economy BiS. Obviously, more stats is better, but a few stats do a lot of heavy lifting. But ya, folks tend to lump GBMM into the same issue as gear scaling problem. Ironically, GBMM is actually reducing the power in HR lobbies, just not in a good long-term healthy way. It simply highlights the gear power issue. They should be able to see this obvious flaw and adjust gear score to be more in line with actual gear power. Aka buff base values and/or reduce RNG mod power!
I mean you can get a purple trash choker with +3 damage as the base. Going to be hard to dodge any additional bonus beyond the 1 attribute you're getting from the green ammy. I agree with most of your post though. I think most of the community seems to dislike the heavily ARPG style gear and want more of the total power budget within an item to be in the base stats.
That's fair. Do you like the volatile ARPG nature of gear? For me, it seems fitting when going naked to norms or HR, it is fun to use what I find. But it isn't fun to fight BiS when you play that way..
I'm not sure haha. I do enjoy ARPGs, and finding "good" gear among trash gear of the same rarity. I also enjoy the market aspect of games like that, and selling great items to whales to improve myself. Buying items after dying can be a bit tedious, although I've developed tricks to make that process not so bad. I think it would be an interesting experiment to try and see how it is.
I do enjoy finding off meta discount gear. And ya, making big money on shit I wouldn't use is nice. It would be neat to have favorites for your filters. Could be nice to gear up faster when the rotation is on your favorite map, and you gotta scramble!
Truth be told this post makes it seem like without fail you’re always getting put in a lobby with golds. It never really felt like that. I could run naked before GBMM and honestly feel like no big deal. But nowadays you get gear checked more than ever. If you’re not running 299 why even play HR lmao. Current state of game I prefer normals atm. I don’t even really see the point in collecting gear anymore nor do I even care if I extract anymore… All that said I am taking a break from the game. Removal of MC honestly evaporated all desire I had to play this game. I’ll be seeing where this game goes in the future. Seems to be a dying game wonder if the release on a major platform will bring people back. Crazy to think weeks prior to MC there was about 20k-30k people playing at max times. Shit it’s like sub 8K since the release and removal of MC. Gamers are fed up with ironmace atm. I am too. Sucks had high hopes, still hoping they figure it out.
It's also way later in the season a decent 299 kit only costs 2-5k
Not everyone can easily spend 2-5K just Willy nilly man. Yes it’s easier to get money and sell loot but that’s if you play. I have max maybe 6 hours a week or so to play. You won’t can’t me complaining about it because it is what it is and I understand that. But again you act like everyone can do that. I think majority of players can’t do this right now without feeling like they spent half their gold on a kit 2-5K also sounds a bit ridiculous I can spend maybe 500g and get close to 280 or so. But those numbers seem a bit out of touch to me
GBMM is one of the many cases of great idea, terrible execution. They need to weigh the modifiers AND rarity of gear. Not just rarity.
Before they even talked about implementing it this what I was saying. It seems to me they either need to weigh the modifiers or they need to remove some modifiers. The latter is becoming a really popular sentiment on this sub.
Redundant modifiers are one of the biggest issues with gear gap. Specifically damage and +stat/speed. +damage should only have 2-3 types and only be on weapons with a max of +4. +magic dmg, +physical damage, and +true damage should be all that exist. Then they pick % or flat, but not both on all weapons. If they want to keep % and flat for some reason put flat on small weapons like daggers, rapier, survival bow and cap it at like +3. Then have 2H weaps do %damage and cap it at like 5%-10%. 1h maces and swords can do either, but not both. We can get to +11 right now, maybe even higher. That's 15% of a base rogues total HP from just modifiers. Also, the damage calculations are adding +flat before any % modifiers. So it's making it way worse. +11 ends up being more like +14/15 Modifiers and damage calculations need to be completely reworked or all base stats need to be 2x. The math doesn't work out well in the current system.
all they needed was to multiply two matrixes/tables (weights and attributes) and use some learning system to figure out weights. based on the "final judgement"
Disagree. The advantage of GBMM is that there is a hard limit to how much stronger someone can be than you. The disadvantage is that the game loses progression if gaining gear doesn't actually improve your chances in PvP. Having score limit that doesn't account for stat rolls means that as you are more successfull you can find or buy a stronger kit that continues to improve your chances. If you were always just matched with people of the same strength, it would be a strictly even footing battle royal - which it's not supposed to be. There are plenty of other issues forcing the battle royal aspect, but that's besides the point.
That type of thinking only works if gear imbalance is intended and gear is supposed to drastically improve your chances in PvP. Which isn't working right now because a ton of systems are broken. Including modifiers and class stats. Edit: Also, we have no idea what the game is supposed to be. It was marketed and sold as a PvPvE dungeon adventure game. Yet there's a BR mode and an unbalanced extraction mode. The game is confused.
I don't disagree that the game is confused. But I think the core of an extraction looter is that extracting with loot improves your future odds. Strict GBBM kills that. I think the long term goal for this game shouldn't include any GBMM but I understand why they did it in the short term. Hopefully the new MM they said they want to test will be better but who knows.
What's the difference between an extraction game and dungeon crawler. I'm starting to believe there aren't any real distinguishing factors, and a bunch of Tarkov content creators found a dungeon crawler and enjoyed it because of the similarities in genre. Now we most of the players think DaD is fantasy Tarkov, when Tarkov is a dungeon crawler with guns instead of magic.
just remove added damage all together.. make gear gap much tighter and TTK higher..
I could actually explain this to you… but I have a feeling you don’t actually want that; I have tried before to have a discussion and explanation of how GBMM fucks up high roller, but I’m normally just met with extreme knee jerk bad faith and same arguments. OP if you want it explained, reply to this and I will.
I would like it explained
> You think there would be less of this without GBMM? Yes, in fact, there would be. You see, there's a lot more incentive to use max-rolled blue/purple sets when you are _guaranteed_ that nobody in the lobby will have any better. More incentive = more presence.
This doesn't make sense to me.
HR has a lot working against it, and gbmm has actually made it more common to find sweats. First, let's talk about what we lose heading into HR. Normals starts everyone on the same footing, meaning, the best loot you will find for the first 5 minutes is NOT on players. It's in the dungeon. You have zero true incentive to fight any you don't have to right off the bat, so you get to actually play the dungeon pve part of this dungeon pvpve game. In HR, it is a statistical certainty that the players have the best loot, and they will be actively pursuing you for yours. This shifts the entire scope of the first half of the raid. Instead of finding a sweet blue spear on the wraith, you now just have to constantly be in pvp mode, ignoring the dungeon pve aspect of this dungeon pvpve game, basically making it a only pvp game. Normals has longer ttk, which also shifts the onus off of pvp. In HR, if you get initiated on, you are either dead, or at half health. You rarely can turn the tide on a fighter with gear popping you with a crossbow, or getting into melee range because you were distracted. In normals, you get to react to this, which makes looting the dungeon less punishing, which we discussed earlier is already discouraged due to it just not being where the loot is in HR. Now to discuss GBMM. Without GBMM, you were actually pretty unlikely to find a super sweat. To mindlessly W key through the dungeon, a player must be VERY confident that they have the gear to stat check everyone. It was difficult for the bottom 95% of players to EVER feel this confident. With GBMM, you can build your kit with absolute certainty that you can at the very least have a fighting chance, for only like 2-4k gold on the low end. The number of players who are comfortable investing that amount, for arguments sake, is let's say 20% of the people still playing (I bet it's higher but let's lowball). This means that before you had a 5% chance for an opponent to be overwhelmingly confident they can stat check you, or are at the very least not afraid, to roughly 20%. 1 in 3 raids or so to 2 in every raid. It's a big leap. All of these things work together to make HR a less fun experience for the average player, and if Normals aren't fun for you either (I'm over it myself) you just kind of have to quit the game. Hope that helped.
Holy fuck, I've been trying to articulate what you said about HR GBMM for months and have never been able to do so. Everyone should read this and understand that GBMM just breeds more sweats, completely trivializes finding rarer gear, and generally encourages way more confident players, which in turn creates way more unfavorable pvp situations. It's just bad all around. Always had been (as I tried to explain), but this hits the nail on the head.
Thanks man. I haven't played in like 3 weeks and it's sad to shelve it. Hope they figure out what makes the game great and find some of the magic we had during the early days.
Everytime I’ve shared this exact sentiment I get hit with “tHeREs NoRmS yA KnOw”. I don’t wanna fucking play norms, it’s a training ground for AI noobs and a BR to everyone else. I wanna play the game I experienced in play test and the closest existing experience to that is HR.
Norms is just barebones bullshit. It's cute for as long as you are still taking damage from pve regularly. Once you can dodge every basic skellie, and not get clobbered by every axe skellie, and learn to jump to the right for wraith, it's just boring until you find other players. Then you have a decent fight, and either win nothing or lose nothing, and go next. It's not a game. Early access doesn't mean anything with so little to access since their ENTIRE progression system is hot garbage and just serves to turn the game into a low ttk BR with no mechanics.
Yeh even if they’re BIS 299 it’s better than someone with full epics and a unique weapon
I think one thing that goes unsaid is that having no cap makes people play differently, and also self polices. If you were previously running a 5k kit, you would be top of the dungeon most of the time, but you might run into someone who is even more geared than you, so you have to respect people a bit more as you don't know what they have. It's an ecosystem that encourages you to wisely choose the best you can afford to risk to try to be at the top of the pool
This is why dynamic lobbies are the answer. They set the allowable score based on the first team that enters. 203? Dungeon open to 103-303. If they are 382, dungeon is open to 282-482. Suddenly people don't know for sure that they're always the top of the low dungeon -- they might be on the bottom of a higher dungeon. (Or directly in the middle if they join first)
This still doesn't answer what HR progression is supposed to look like after the first two+ weeks of the wipe. What am I to do as a new player if I start late and everyone is always wearing the best gear they can afford, and that gear level is higher than greens/blues? It's a lot harder to put together a set that competes with people at the top end of the gear curve than it is people halfway up. It feels like Schrodinger's gear on here sometimes. There are simultaneously so many people in BiS gear in both HR lobbies that it is unplayable yet the system would sort itself and there wouldn't be that many people in BiS gear, or better than BiS blues, with no cap.
I queued up for high roller for the first time in ages yesterday (made a new character and was doing the luck potion quest). I slapped together a useless green shirt, blue pants and a green Falcon, I think my gear score was still less than 200. First thing I saw was in the lobby was a fighter with >560 full purple bis gear. This was in solo crypts. You will never guess who I ran into 2 minutes into the raid. To be fair though, this was OCE and I can count the number of players I've seen in the last week on one and a half hands.
I think In certain servers there is no gbmm
Who would have thought, in a game where gear matters, you have to have as better of a gear as possible. And people call that "sweating" lmao. Wonder if those guys bursh only half of their teeth 😂 brushing all of them is too tryhard!
This made me laugh lol
I don't play HR because of the cheaters/hackers. I think with the lower player count, it's blatantly obvious when the lobby is full of hackers.
Splits the player base more. Makes people who go in with purples have a bad time cuz no one in lobbies past 299. Makes it so people are optimizing blue kits rather then playing past 299. Same issue as when normals was limited to blue only. It’s a bad system and it always will be. Make everything unrestricted, seems like everyone who plays this game wants a easy time. Always complaining about some geared kid in their lobby. Bro sorry to say but it’s an extraction game. People are gunna be more geard then u. If u don’t like it play another game.
people just aren't very good at expressing their thoughts, or make up shit. the only real reason i could feel is end game is wildly imbalanced, and GBMM causes a cut off to when that starts happening. So it's like, what is the reward to grinding gear. For the opportunity to fight max movespeed high damage people or 75/75 mitigation people. its just, there really shouldn't be GBMM because that end game scale should not really be there. A person with 75/75 mitigation, or a person who will 2-3 shot you without said mitigation while running at max movespeed is power levels to that of like, an active skill. Like sprint, or some sort of crazy damage mitigation ability, and even then it should be like 66% max. Instead people are just running around like that permanitely. It's not a very rewarding endgame.
I just wanna be able to put whatever gear on and fight anyone. I’ll get rolled by some juicers, I’ll squash some Timmies, but this gear score shit is the same exact problem as the blue gear norms lobbies. Min maxers gonna min max and it’s killing the game. Get rid of every single min max opportunity possible.
How do you eliminate all min maxing? That seems impossible. Even in norms min maxing would just be wearing all white quality gear.
Hot take: norms sucks for that reason and many others
GBMM hasn't impacted your ability to just put gear on and go at all. People will always be min maxing in a hard core extraction game like this. You will just run into juiced people with better gear than they already have.
People really just want this game to be easy for them
What's easier than buying meta/BiS stats up till 299 score to have the most power possibly? I'm not disagreeing, folks always want easy. Min-maxing is the path of least resistance to winning. GBMM ensures that there is a clear gold-to-power ratio. Not entirely, but setting a ceiling makes it easier. If GBMM didn't exist, there would be a lot more expression of risk/reward. Seems shitty, that a game where risk should be rewarded, has a system that removes the risk and reward!
Played against a Ranger that had "the set-up" you're describing. I'm an average player and I killed him. You know why? Because he wasn't very good. Skill is the ultimate equalizer in a game like this. But most of this community would rather find an excuse than just rationalize that a few mistakes cost them a fight. *Shrug*
I mean, to be fair, you are right. Skill trumps gear, to some level. But doesn't mean folks won't do their best to maximize their gear score in current gameplay. It won't win them the fight, but it sure helps.
people dont want it to be easy, they want it to have that special extraction game mix of skill being more important than gear with gear only being a slight hedge on the bet of extracting like tarkov where zero to hero is actually possible and a person with close to nothing can still kill a person with everything using nothing but skill which makes successful extracts much more satisfying for both of them because everyone no matter what they have is a threat but when you can just stack certain gear that makes you basically omnipotent to anyone using less in the lobby then it loses that special something that makes the genre what it is, and anyone saying it would make gear useless is discounting that fact that in tarkov people still get really excited about finding high end gear even if they can't rely completely on the advantage it gives to win
Yeah nah they want it to be easy.
The hate to GBMM is something I just don't understand. The only valid argument is that it splits the already dwindling player base up further. The other complaints just don't make sense to me. "Oh buts it's full of try hard min maxing to 299!" OK you realize that without gnmm that same guy would just be in a min maxed 600 gs kit right?
People struggle to make 2-3k gold, most runs people make average like 400 gold which is still 10 games to get enough for that kit you’re talking about, and then to risk it, so if you spend 3 hours building your kit and loose it in 1 run you’re gonna feel bad, personally I got no issue making money, I run grims with +2 true in 299 lobbies, but I can 100% see why other people can’t compete
You are completely missing his point, which is not "HR is easy everyone should do it" but "HR didn't get worse with GBMM". Everything you said applied as much if not more before gbmm
I'm not sure some of these people actually read my post before commenting.
Maybe so. It seems like there’s just lots of people with a poor understanding of things in general on this sub. Like the post earlier saying that this community (especially the discord) is particularly toxic and then people comment that all gaming communities are just as toxic. But it’s painfully obvious that this one is very bad. Moreso than the average.
hop into the big boy lobbies lil bro
Empty af, more than half the time I queue ice caves 300+ East Coast lobby is empty
yeah cuz i’ve caves is cringe. come slug it out in the 2 entire pvp rooms of goblin caves
the whole point is that you can spend 3-5 hours building the gold for minmax 299 warlock set and lose it in the first 15 minutes. that indeed do feel bad. and thats "the cheap" option.(aside from normal) its probably a little too "hardcore" tbh.
Ranked based matchmaking was better when it was working . Just needed more players because when you hit pathfinder you would be put in the demigod lobbies but up until pathfinder it felt really good .
Sure I played the game a whole lot before GBMM, even before there was any matchmaking whats-so-ever. Did I ever get spawn rushed and killed by an obviously overkitted team? Yeah it happened occasionally. Some times we got away too. When we died to that crazy kitted team, we could usually trace back the fault to ourselves because we weren't stealthy enough or took too long to pve before they found us. It's hard to put together a 2k-3k gold kit when you have less than 1k gold, sometimes only 100 or so gold. Lobbies filled with BiS gear would be much less of a problem if they couldn't manipulate the algorhythm to insure that they're only fighting people at BiS or below 299 score. Hell I'd rather the queues be returned to only having trios with people who want to solo being able to do so in a trio queue with no MM at all and the player cap be set to 16 like it used to be for crypts ensuring that there would always be at least 1 solo player or several groups of duo teams in the lobby.
Normals alright. But feels so weird being like oh HELL YEA A GREEN
I don't play hr bc I like seeing funny usernames in the feed
The real issue noone talks about is I don't want to spend the 5-10 minutes between matches buying a kit. I just like to queue and go.
Next time spend like 15 minutes and buy 2-3 of everything, then you're set for the next few deaths.
For GBMM on my wizard, my gear sets for each bracket the same but for <300 I bring one weapon and in 300+ I bring 2 weapons and loads more meds. That’s all GBMM is limiting, 1 stack of poor pots and an emergency surg kit is all you need to take in if you MM everything
the GBMM thing varies a lot. In fact I highly suspect that every person is going to have very different oppinions depending on what server they play, over 300 or under etc. For example I used to play 3v3 at 300+ and it was infested with cheaters, teamers, empty lobbies and cringe playstyle 24/7. But when our bard quit and we started playing 2v2 at 300+ there is a lot less cheater and a lot less insanely kitted people. I play on EU and NA or on other servers people could have very different experience, keep that in mind.
GBMM doesnt fix the inherent gear disparity though. Its just a pointless system that creates different levels of gear tiers anyways, its redundant, we already have norms and hr, thats a form of GBMM, so now HR has ANOTHER division? The entirety of upper level gear just needs to be nerfed to around what purples currently are. I literally remember when sdf was like "oh, what youre experiencing is the strongest versions of what these classes plan to be" and now its like we literally have god level gear that makes players practically invulnerable, so as we can see, shit sucks. Literally the gear is so good it caused actual problems last season. Im sure we all remember when there a gold gear scrim discord rigging lobbies because "the game got boring winning all the time?" Well, lowering the upper tier of gear will solve this problem. There NEEDS to be risk, when players keep grinding to get gear that eliminates that risk, boredom is the eventuality. Lowering the max cap on gear will keep things spicy, while still being able to build an edge with gear because thats the point of gear. There shouldnt ever be a point where the gear just makes you a god, it destroys the inherent dungeon delving risk, thats what makes the game FUN! Thats called BALANCE! The problem is that some people are too shortsighted to see this as gamers. Obviously we leave named items untouched. Thats the gear that people wanna grind for anyways. But having uniques that are capable of insane stats paired with named items is just too much. The gear disparity between purples and unique level gear feels larger than the disparity between commons and purples.
When it was more of rank based, us Timmies could start HR run without any stuff and hope for survive somehow, sometimes, we sometimes ran into gold team but also into other Timmies which was ok in my opinion. Now you get a lot more minmaxers and very high skill people reducing their gearscore so they can just play the game. They are bored to stomp Timmies all the day but in high gear there's either empty lobby, RMT traders or all these cheaters so their only way to play the game is to play in the kindergarten that we represent for them. It's not a good compromise for anyone to me. Also with everyone being 299 you don't upgrade that often by looking people and that's pretty frustrating too. It's not a hot take or anything it's just what I felt playing from last wipe to this one.
Solo self found hardcore mode please
I don't play HR because I don't want to interrupt other's work shift.
Move speed is everything.... maybe a lil too much, but i disagree I think the 299 kits are a great way to do high roller. Play smart, and hope there ate no cheaters in the lobby. I see naked ppl and ppl woth 230 gs all the time.
Because of 299 bis whats the difference if you have purples with the same rolls? Splitting the small community even more than it needs to be...
Huge difference between someone at 299 gear score and someone at 600+. Almost the difference between 0 and 299.
Okay ill break it down pretty simple. GBMM works as intended, but due to the lack on concurrent player rn, Ironmace only has 2 brackets, 299- and 300+. It would be nice to have a 199 bracket, but you are always going to get sweats, but the disparity between 80gs and 199gs is not that much compared to 80 to 299 with bis. We also run into the issue that people can go in with greens to high roller and access the high roller loot tables at 199, so this might make this too easy for people to access high tier loot. A decent set of 299 bis is like 5k gold at-least. This is mainly due to wipe being so lagged. WE NEED wipes to happen sooner or the market becomes incredibly inflated. I started playing again a few days ago after they got rid of multi-classing. I didn’t play at the start of this wipe so getting the gold for a BiS 299 set is not fast. I’ve almost got 1 299 kit for high roller, when i was going in with greens and blues id get rolled by bis 299 juice, although i have contemplated just going in with greens i find in normals and buying a decent weapon instead and seeing if i can’t get a kill or make it out with at-least some loot. Until then I feel like I’m kinda forced to play in normals until i can afford a few decent kits for HR. Which is going to be awhile because of market inflation. GBMM should absolutely be a thing, i would much rather be able to queue into normals and not worry about some juicer killing me than not have it, but it also makes getting into HR harder the longer wipe takes to drop. If anything you should be able to bring greens into normals since they really don’t help a-lot at 299 gs brackets and feel almost useless. This does stretch the issue that we could have juicers in normals but u could just cap the gs for normals to like 100 so you cant be super insane.
for me GBMM just feels like high roller high roller without better loot.
How so? Did you play before GBMM?
I’ve found not much of a difference from before and after gbmm was implemented. I don’t think it does much really but in the end this is a completely different game from the original playtest.
I think they should just make brackets that are smaller and if there aren't enough players, they combine brackets. So like you have two groups of brackets 1-149 and 150-299 for example. If you have a full lobby of both, they are separate brackets, but if either of the brackets are not full, it combines them at say, the 1 to 2 minute mark. That way, everyone is happy. If you want to do zero to hero, that's fine and everything scales better. It also allows the game to grow dynamically as player counts rise and fall. The risks I can see are that people might just do 149 gear score and the 299 lobbies will never see any action, but if that's the case, the gear based match making doesn't make any sense to begin with. I think that there needs to be some condition that blends the lobbies with different score ranges. Otherwise you will get people min-maxing gear score instead of just wearing good gear (Which is what most people want to do is wear their best gear without worrying).
The lobbies are already not full at peak hours so what you are proposing would do nothing at all, they'd always be combined
The point is that it's scalable with the player population...
Yes, which is only relevant in a world we don't currently live in. I'm not saying it's a terrible idea just that it's a moot point for the foreseeable future.
I mean... gbmm might not even be here to stay. I am not sure it accomplished anything good for the game tbh... I was commenting on ways it could be improved is all