But I thought I should also post it here because the wizard discussion here is good. Its very long, sorry, but there's a TLDR at the end.
Blizzard has made a number of announcements this week regarding proposed changes to Inferno which are intended, among other things, to encourage ranged classes to build more defensively. Overall, it seems the purpose is to reduce the gap between melee and ranged classes. I’ve been thinking about these changes a great deal and the effect that they will have on my wizard, and I do not think that they are likely to have the intended effect of encouraging defensive builds. For context, I play a wizard who has fully completed inferno and farms act 3.
The two primary changes which have been announced that are intended to encourage more defensive builds are 1) Reducing enemy health and damage in Acts II, III, and IV of Inferno, and 2) severely increasing repair costs. See http://us.battle.net...ic/5590647017#8
The developer in that post stated that “For the ranged classes, I'm hoping that the incoming damage reduction will make some survival stats more appealing to ranged classes.” With regard to repair costs, the developer stated “ I don't think the answer is to make death-zerging more attractive for melee; I'd rather make death-zerging a less profitable strategy for ranged.”
I’ll address these one at a time.
Reducing enemy health and damage in Acts II, III, and IV of Inferno
We start from the premise that the most popular current build for wizards is to equip a minimum of defensive stats sufficient to allow Force Armor to function to reduce most incoming hits to near 35% and then to devote the rest of their stats to DPS. This is confirmed by the developer post above which directly addresses this type of build, as well as watching any number of streams of wizards in act 3/4. The reason that this is the optimum build is addressed by the developer in the above linked post: “[I]t just feels like the minimum amount of survivability to avoid the 1-shot is so large it's unattainable. That's one of the things 1.0.3 seeks to address.” Why is this?
A large number of monsters in act 3/4 hit for at least 170k raw damage. This includes armaddons, phase beasts (acts 3&4), soul lashers, and tremor demons. This means that at approximately 126k EHP, force armor will reduce that hit to 35%, meaning you can survive 2 hits and will die on the third, not considering any source of healing. I outlined this in a previous post: http://www.reddit.co...ent_use_out_of/
However, without force armor, in order for the 170k raw damage of the act3 mob hit to do 35% of your life, you would need to have 485,714 EHP, or nearly 4 times as much! If you instead wanted to survive 6 hits without force armor, by building defensively and using prismatic armor, you would need 1,020,000 EHP, or over 8 times the EHP you need to utilize force armor. For context, to achieve this you would need (for example) 50k HP, 10k armor and 1200 resist all including buffs from prismatic armor and the enchantress, or said another way 1260 vit, 6000 armor and 925 resist all *unbuffed*!
Now, this is exactly what they’ve said is a problem and that they intend to address by reducing enemy damage in inferno. However, lets look at how enemy damage reduction will effect the use of force armor. Since we don’t know how much they will reduce the damage by, let’s look at it with a 10% reduction in damage and a 25% reduction in damage.
10% Reduction - Mobs now do 170,000 x .9 = 153,000 damage per hit. To survive 6 hits you would now need 918k EHP, but now you only need 113k EHP for force armor to reduce these hits to 35%. For 918K EHP you still need 50k HP, ~9k buffed armor and ~1200 buffed resists.
25% Reduction - Mobs now do 170k x .75 = 127,500 damage per hit. To survive 6 hits you would now need 765k EHP, which still requires ~50k HP, ~8k armor and ~1000+ resist all buffed. However, now for force armor to reduce these hits to 35% you only need 94.5k EHP. For context, 94.5k EHP can be had with roughly ~29k HP, 180 resist all, and 3400 armor buffed from energy/force armor. Basically, you can expect to get this amount of resist all / armor baseline from int gear, and then you only need about 725 vitality.
Essentially, even with a 25% reduction in damage (it seems unlikely that the reduction will be this drastic), you still need a very large amount of defensive stats to take a reasonable number of hits. Now, lets consider that they have also said that they are reducing the **health** of the monsters as well. Since the survivability of a glass cannon wizard basically revolves around burning down the monsters as quickly as possible (while avoiding their attacks), this actually increases the survivability of the low defense build.
Therefore, with even a 25% reduction in damage which is likely the best case scenario for a high defense build, you have a choice between needing to increase your HP by 2/3, your resists by 4-5 times, and more or less doubling your armor in order to survive 6 hits, or using all of that stat allocation for increased damage, which will kill mobs more quickly especially with their reduced health. This seems like a clear decision.
Increased repair costs
But what about increased repair costs? Won’t this discourage low defense builds? No, I don’t believe they will, and here’s why.
The goal for people who are farming in inferno is to farm whatever has the highest expected profitability - i.e. will result in the most gold to them over time. Now, obviously increased repair costs will decrease profitability IF a player dies a lot attempting to farm an area. The developers appear to think this will encourage people to build more defensive in an effort to farm acts 3/4 while dying less. However, the same patch is also introducing the drops of acts 2/3/4 drops to act 1 and 2, and reducing the health and damage of act 2 mobs which are already significantly easier than act 3/4 mobs. It is already trivially easy for a low defense wizard who is capable of farming act 3 to clear whatever parts of act I they wish, in incredibly quick fashion, without dying at all. If the health/damage of mobs in act 2 are reduced, I expect it will be equally easy to do this in most of act 2. Building defensively merely slows these clear times, and it slows them even more in act 3/4 were the mobs have more health.
Therefore, I expect that the actual effect of increased repair costs will be to encourage players to simply farm trivial content as quickly as possible, rather than to slowly farm more difficult content while building defensively. This is the change I am most worried about, because I am afraid it has the possibility of making the game boring to farm.
The second major problem with the increased repair costs as a disincentive to low defense builds is that there are two types of players farming inferno - new players who have hit 60 and are just beginning to farm, and established players who are already capable of farming inferno. The new 60 is likely relatively poor, while the established farmer likely has millions of gold which he has earned from farming inferno. The problem here is that the increased repair costs have a much greater effect as a barrier to entry for the new player than as a disincentive to the established farmer. If the repair costs are very low, as they are now, they can be essentially disregarded by both types of players. However, if they are raised significantly, they provide a difficult barrier for entry to a player who is barely geared enough to begin to farm inferno, while an established farmer can realistically disregard these repair bills because he has large gold reserves to absorb them and is farming content where he has a chance to obtain drops worth multiple millions. In a sense, they are “regressive,” in that they have the greatest effect on the least well off players and the least effect on the most well off players.
I apologize for the extreme length. I hope somebody found this worthwhile.
TLDR:
1) Decreased mob damage/health encourages, rather than discourages, low defense builds, because of the nature of force armor and because a low defense ranged player’s survivability increasing with increased dps and lower mob health - i.e. mobs die faster and they therefore have less chance to get hit.
2) Increased repair costs merely encourage players to farm trivial content, i.e. act 1 inferno, rather than to build defensively and attempt to slowly farm acts 3/4. Moreover, increased repair costs provide a barrier for entry to players entering inferno while having a much less pronounced effect on established farmers.
Increased repair costs encourage you to not die and zerg yourself through content what wizards and demon hunters are doing atm. Great changes from Blizzard.
1) Decreased mob damage/health encourages, rather than discourages, low defense builds, because of the nature of force armor and because a low defense ranged player’s survivability increasing with increased dps and lower mob health - i.e. mobs die faster and they therefore have less chance to get hit.
Because of the nature of force armor, low defense is a terrible idea in later acts because you'll still get one shot. Sure you can stack as much DPS as you want. But it still needs to be balanced. It comes down to if you get hit without defensive stats, you get one shot. If you can manage to not get hit, force armor is irrelavent.
Edit: I guess I see your point? I had to reread a few times. it really comes down to just not getting hit if you can avoid it.
Increased repair costs encourage you to not die and zerg yourself through content what wizards and demon hunters are doing atm. Great changes from Blizzard.
The OP is right - increasing repair costs, coupled with the change that will make elites drop guaranteed rares with 5NV, will turn Inferno into the "World of A1-farm", since it's safe and with decent DPS it's possible to clear Inferno A1 in one hour, which will give 20-25 guaranteed rares. Probably a lot more.
Because of the nature of force armor, low defense is a terrible idea in later acts
Wrong.
I'm currently in Inferno A4 with 33k HP and native resistances (~170 res from Int) and doing fine. Stacking resistances is pointless for me, because I don't have enough money to get them to the point where I can actually soak incoming hits. Reducing mobs' damage will not change that at all. At the same time stacking DPS helps tremendously, since faster face-melting = less kiting = less deaths. OP is 105% correct on that point.
Increased repair costs encourage you to not die and zerg yourself through content what wizards and demon hunters are doing atm. Great changes from Blizzard.
The OP is right - increasing repair costs, coupled with the change that will make elites drop guaranteed rares with 5NV, will turn Inferno into the "World of A1-farm", since it's safe and with decent DPS it's possible to clear Inferno A1 in one hour, which will give 20-25 guaranteed rares, or even more.
Because of the nature of force armor, low defense is a terrible idea in later acts
Wrong.
I'm currently in Inferno A4 with 33k HP and native resistances (~170 res from Int) and doing fine. Stacking resistances is pointless for me, because I don't have enough money to get them to the point where I can actually soak incoming hits. Redicing mobs' damage will not change that at all. At the same time stacking DPS helps tremendously, since faster face-melting = less kiting = less deaths. OP is 105% correct on that point.
33k HP and 170 res are defensive stats one way or another. They increase your EH. I mentioned the extreme of 0 defense and 0 vitality on gear. Youre saying "I am in inferno doing fine with my defensive stats therefore having them is wrong".
Either way, I reread his post while you were responding to me. It still comes down to if you are face tanking or kiting. Obviously kiting wins. And if you are kiting properly, you won't get hit. And if you don't get hit, force armor is, again, irrelavant. By lowering the damage and the required effective health needed to survive, one requires less gear to completely forgo Force armor.
At the same time it makes force armor seem like a no brainer as it becomes more effective in less gear. So it is still a player choice and I think, after this change, more and more wizards will be inclined to give up force armor.
I'll go back to the quote, regarding the extra bit of dps helps, why not replace force armor and get a familiar with spark flint for an extra 15% damage? Maybe the optimal build will be just that. Give up and force armor and nuke the hell out of everything before it even reaches you.
I'll go back to the quote, regarding the extra bit of dps helps, why not replace force armor and get a familiar with spark flint for an extra 15% damage? Maybe the optimal build will be just that. Give up and force armor and nuke the hell out of everything before it even reaches you.
I think where we are disagreeing, if we are at all, is in the value of force armor allowing you to take 2 hits without dying. I think there is a very big difference between any hit being a 1 hit kill and being able to take 2 hits without dying. Likewise, I think there is a much smaller difference between being able to take 2 hits without dying and being able to take 6 hits without dying. Some hits are very difficult to avoid, particularly at the beginning of a pull when there might be multiple ranged mobs shooting things at you. Being able to not have to play 100% perfectly and eat 1 or 2 of those hits without dying really makes a difference.
Basically it is a whole lot harder to avoid getting hit with anything, ever, than it is to avoid getting hit more than 2 times in rapid succession. After the pull has started though, you are aware of the location of all of the mobs and probably have them slowed one way or another. At this point its much easier to avoid their attacks and you shouldn't keep taking additional hits, so the benefit of being able to take 6 hits for example is lower. Especially when you consider that with the additional dps you have from using a low defense force armor build, you are doing more damage to the mobs and therefore killing them more quickly, so there are less attacks to avoid.
33k HP and 170 res are defensive stats one way or another. They increase your EH. I mentioned the extreme of 0 defense and 0 vitality on gear. Youre saying "I am in inferno doing fine with my defensive stats therefore having them is wrong"..
Also, I don't think anybody is suggesting going 0 vit. In that case, yes, obviously not having force armor at all would be better. The point is to get the minimum amount of EHP such that force armor reduces most hits to 35% of your life, thereby allowing you to take 2 hits without dying. Thats what I mean by a "low defense build," as opposed to a build that attempts to stack armor/resists/HP and use prismatic armor to be able to take more hits than they can take with force armor.
More than all of this, the major problem is that once you "soak" some hits how are you going to get that health back?
The biggest miscalculation blizzard seems to do here is that unlike melee classes, wizards at least do not have any possibility aside from a potion to regain health properly and thus still do not want, or cannot take hits.
Health globes, life after kill, regen, LoH (does this work for wiz?)...
More than all of this, the major problem is that once you "soak" some hits how are you going to get that health back?
The biggest miscalculation blizzard seems to do here is that unlike melee classes, wizards at least do not have any possibility aside from a potion to regain health properly and thus still do not want, or cannot take hits.
Health globes, life after kill, regen, LoH (does this work for wiz?)...
Health globes work very well especially with pick up radius gear, life after kill & regen are too insignificant to help, and not sure on LoH.
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Playing Diablo since 97. I know nothing and having nothing good to say, I be a troll.
Increased repair costs encourage you to not die and zerg yourself through content what wizards and demon hunters are doing atm. Great changes from Blizzard.
And how would you suggest we fight these packs otherwise? We need to at least farm act I to get gear, but of course, it doesn't drop great gear (until 1.0.3). We can't get anywhere near melee range because we just fall over and die, regardless of whether or not we stack res and vit. So, our only choice is to do a lot of damage and run away, dying often in the process. Trust me, that's not fun for us either.
Hmm, wouldn't the nerf make Force Armor + health regen build more viable? If there is a 10% damage nerf, now you need about 114k EHP for Force Armor. Playing around here and assuming glass cannon and not blur, this could be achieved with 10k life, 5000 armor unbuffed (buffed to 8500 with enchantress and energy armor) and 725 resist all (physical comprises the biggest hits from what I understand, so others could be a bit lower). 1000 health regen per second gives you a full heal every 10 seconds with this build.
If the nerf were 20%, we're down to only needing 101k EHP. That can be done with something like 4500 armor unbuffed and 680 resist with the same 10k hp. Also, since all of the really high-damage mob attacks are melee as far as I am aware, blur and/or melee defense items (and/or dropping glass cannon) would further lower the EHP threshold.
What's nice is that you can start with a normal higher vitality force armor build and drop some vitality as you increase your armor and resists (and life regen), and the further you take it, the faster you full heal. What's less nice is that you'll still always die to three big, simultaneous hits, but as the OP lays out, it takes a really significant sacrifice elsewhere to make prismatic armor significantly better than force armor.
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...and if you disagree with me, you're probably <insert random ad hominem attack here>.
if the nerf goes down to say 20% of the damage, then I think builds with prismatic will be a lot more easy to build, as it stands you need the best of the best and still not as good as force armor build because then ur dps blows....
I have a feeling that Blizzard expects all classes to eventually get to a high enough EH level for them to take 3 hits without dying, as the OP and others have suggested is required. This is supposed to happen naturally, as you get better gear with a higher ilevel that has higher base armor.
The thing is, right now there isn't a huge amount of gear that could be considered the "best". That leads you to have to choose between offensive or defensive stats. Eventually I want the majority of my gear to have 3 dps stats, vit, and resist all. Then, I don't have to choose.
If things shake out the way I expect (and I could be wrong) at a certain gear level you simply drop Force Armor for Prismatic. This leads to you being able to take 3-5 hits before dying, allowing you to stand and take damage while still dishing it out. After all, if you lose 15% dps by gearing more defensively, but it allows you to move half as much, you end up with a dps gain. Similar to how movespeed becomes a direct dps increase.
I don't die much unless I stubornly want to kill something like fast soul rippers, I don't care about the increase in repair costs it won't make me take more than 300res.
Oh and since coop is playable again in 1.0.3 the barb/monk will take half the hits.
if you are kiting properly, you won't get hit. And if you don't get hit, force armor is, again, irrelavant.
In an ideal world, yes. But everybody gets hit from time to time. The main reason why I take FA is that it lets me live through occasional screw-ups.
The second reason is a simple math. As of now, to make a tanky wizard with at least semi-decent DPS, you have to invest XX millions of gold into "int + all resists + vit / haste / crit" gear and 1 spell slot for Prismatic Armor. To make a pure DPS wizard you only need like 2-3 millions for "int + haste / crit + a bit of vit" and 1 spell slot for FA. If both work well in Inferno, why bother and choose go the expensive route?
Anyway, I understand that in the end it's a matter of a personal preference. Some people just hate to die. Even if repairs were free, such people would still avoid dying and go the "tanky" route. Some, like me, only care about end result and don't give a crap if they die multiple times in the process.
All I'm trying to say is that OP has the point - 1.0.3 will not change gear choices, at least not in the first month or two. If Blizz won't revert the 5NV change, later at some point even the best gear will become so cheap, there will be no reasons to skip resistances, so everybody will stack defenses. Until then (or if the 5NV change will be reverted), a lot of people will still use "FA + full DPS" gearing strategy.
However, without force armor, in order for the 170k raw damage of the act3 mob hit to do 35% of your life, you would need to have 485,714 EHP, or nearly 4 times as much!
This is really the main issue caused by FA in general. I'm farming A3/4 just fine with my current "taking a 3rd hit means death" approach with 75k-85k damage and FA. Why would raising my death tax deter me from farming nerfed mobs that will drop even more loot when I'm already make 50x more than I pay in repairs from more difficult mobs today?
I feel further nerfs coming to FA on the order of it not preventing 1 shots anymore, but only damage you would normally survive being reduced to 35%. Or in other words, FA becomes a high-end defensive ability instead of pretty much required from start to finish, in reference to inferno progression. It'd still work fine for A4 Hell and below farmers.
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"Anything I say can't, and won't be used against me because if they understood my point, they'd have given up theirs." -Christopher Hitchens
1) Decreased mob damage/health encourages, rather than discourages, low defense builds, because of the nature of force armor and because a low defense ranged player’s survivability increasing with increased dps and lower mob health - i.e. mobs die faster and they therefore have less chance to get hit.
It comes down to if you get hit without defensive stats, you get one shot. If you can manage to not get hit, force armor is irrelavent.
You really can't avoid things like oppressor charge, so Force Armor is the best, most important wizard talent by far.
It seems to me Wizards lack some kind of tool to counter things like reflective damage/mortar/jailer /vortex type things. The class would be better balanced if we had some kind "smokescreen" of our own; It really feels like we lack an effective way to deal with certain affixes.
Changing a Diamond Skin rune to something like "Diamond skin no longer absorbs damage, but instead removes you from sight for 4 seconds, 30 second cooldown." would just be awesome and fill a much needed gap.
Idk I don't think the changes won't do any diffrence. I clear siege in 20min atm. A1 needs to be 3x faster (2% vs 6% droprate) to be profitable.. not sure if it is. I think the only change is you do siegebreaker but clear till azmo.
How do you get to 110k damage Smoort? Could you please post your gear? The highest i could get with going balls out damage was about 65k, currently i am sitting at 50k dps, 650 all res, 45k hp (in anticipation of the patch and eventualy pvp - i want to try the prismatic armor route).
But I thought I should also post it here because the wizard discussion here is good. Its very long, sorry, but there's a TLDR at the end.
Blizzard has made a number of announcements this week regarding proposed changes to Inferno which are intended, among other things, to encourage ranged classes to build more defensively. Overall, it seems the purpose is to reduce the gap between melee and ranged classes. I’ve been thinking about these changes a great deal and the effect that they will have on my wizard, and I do not think that they are likely to have the intended effect of encouraging defensive builds. For context, I play a wizard who has fully completed inferno and farms act 3.
The two primary changes which have been announced that are intended to encourage more defensive builds are 1) Reducing enemy health and damage in Acts II, III, and IV of Inferno, and 2) severely increasing repair costs. See http://us.battle.net...ic/5590647017#8
The developer in that post stated that “For the ranged classes, I'm hoping that the incoming damage reduction will make some survival stats more appealing to ranged classes.” With regard to repair costs, the developer stated “ I don't think the answer is to make death-zerging more attractive for melee; I'd rather make death-zerging a less profitable strategy for ranged.”
I’ll address these one at a time.
Reducing enemy health and damage in Acts II, III, and IV of Inferno
We start from the premise that the most popular current build for wizards is to equip a minimum of defensive stats sufficient to allow Force Armor to function to reduce most incoming hits to near 35% and then to devote the rest of their stats to DPS. This is confirmed by the developer post above which directly addresses this type of build, as well as watching any number of streams of wizards in act 3/4. The reason that this is the optimum build is addressed by the developer in the above linked post: “[I]t just feels like the minimum amount of survivability to avoid the 1-shot is so large it's unattainable. That's one of the things 1.0.3 seeks to address.” Why is this?
A large number of monsters in act 3/4 hit for at least 170k raw damage. This includes armaddons, phase beasts (acts 3&4), soul lashers, and tremor demons. This means that at approximately 126k EHP, force armor will reduce that hit to 35%, meaning you can survive 2 hits and will die on the third, not considering any source of healing. I outlined this in a previous post: http://www.reddit.co...ent_use_out_of/
However, without force armor, in order for the 170k raw damage of the act3 mob hit to do 35% of your life, you would need to have 485,714 EHP, or nearly 4 times as much! If you instead wanted to survive 6 hits without force armor, by building defensively and using prismatic armor, you would need 1,020,000 EHP, or over 8 times the EHP you need to utilize force armor. For context, to achieve this you would need (for example) 50k HP, 10k armor and 1200 resist all including buffs from prismatic armor and the enchantress, or said another way 1260 vit, 6000 armor and 925 resist all *unbuffed*!
Now, this is exactly what they’ve said is a problem and that they intend to address by reducing enemy damage in inferno. However, lets look at how enemy damage reduction will effect the use of force armor. Since we don’t know how much they will reduce the damage by, let’s look at it with a 10% reduction in damage and a 25% reduction in damage.
10% Reduction - Mobs now do 170,000 x .9 = 153,000 damage per hit. To survive 6 hits you would now need 918k EHP, but now you only need 113k EHP for force armor to reduce these hits to 35%. For 918K EHP you still need 50k HP, ~9k buffed armor and ~1200 buffed resists.
25% Reduction - Mobs now do 170k x .75 = 127,500 damage per hit. To survive 6 hits you would now need 765k EHP, which still requires ~50k HP, ~8k armor and ~1000+ resist all buffed. However, now for force armor to reduce these hits to 35% you only need 94.5k EHP. For context, 94.5k EHP can be had with roughly ~29k HP, 180 resist all, and 3400 armor buffed from energy/force armor. Basically, you can expect to get this amount of resist all / armor baseline from int gear, and then you only need about 725 vitality.
Essentially, even with a 25% reduction in damage (it seems unlikely that the reduction will be this drastic), you still need a very large amount of defensive stats to take a reasonable number of hits. Now, lets consider that they have also said that they are reducing the **health** of the monsters as well. Since the survivability of a glass cannon wizard basically revolves around burning down the monsters as quickly as possible (while avoiding their attacks), this actually increases the survivability of the low defense build.
Therefore, with even a 25% reduction in damage which is likely the best case scenario for a high defense build, you have a choice between needing to increase your HP by 2/3, your resists by 4-5 times, and more or less doubling your armor in order to survive 6 hits, or using all of that stat allocation for increased damage, which will kill mobs more quickly especially with their reduced health. This seems like a clear decision.
Increased repair costs
But what about increased repair costs? Won’t this discourage low defense builds? No, I don’t believe they will, and here’s why.
The goal for people who are farming in inferno is to farm whatever has the highest expected profitability - i.e. will result in the most gold to them over time. Now, obviously increased repair costs will decrease profitability IF a player dies a lot attempting to farm an area. The developers appear to think this will encourage people to build more defensive in an effort to farm acts 3/4 while dying less. However, the same patch is also introducing the drops of acts 2/3/4 drops to act 1 and 2, and reducing the health and damage of act 2 mobs which are already significantly easier than act 3/4 mobs. It is already trivially easy for a low defense wizard who is capable of farming act 3 to clear whatever parts of act I they wish, in incredibly quick fashion, without dying at all. If the health/damage of mobs in act 2 are reduced, I expect it will be equally easy to do this in most of act 2. Building defensively merely slows these clear times, and it slows them even more in act 3/4 were the mobs have more health.
Therefore, I expect that the actual effect of increased repair costs will be to encourage players to simply farm trivial content as quickly as possible, rather than to slowly farm more difficult content while building defensively. This is the change I am most worried about, because I am afraid it has the possibility of making the game boring to farm.
The second major problem with the increased repair costs as a disincentive to low defense builds is that there are two types of players farming inferno - new players who have hit 60 and are just beginning to farm, and established players who are already capable of farming inferno. The new 60 is likely relatively poor, while the established farmer likely has millions of gold which he has earned from farming inferno. The problem here is that the increased repair costs have a much greater effect as a barrier to entry for the new player than as a disincentive to the established farmer. If the repair costs are very low, as they are now, they can be essentially disregarded by both types of players. However, if they are raised significantly, they provide a difficult barrier for entry to a player who is barely geared enough to begin to farm inferno, while an established farmer can realistically disregard these repair bills because he has large gold reserves to absorb them and is farming content where he has a chance to obtain drops worth multiple millions. In a sense, they are “regressive,” in that they have the greatest effect on the least well off players and the least effect on the most well off players.
I apologize for the extreme length. I hope somebody found this worthwhile.
TLDR:
1) Decreased mob damage/health encourages, rather than discourages, low defense builds, because of the nature of force armor and because a low defense ranged player’s survivability increasing with increased dps and lower mob health - i.e. mobs die faster and they therefore have less chance to get hit.
2) Increased repair costs merely encourage players to farm trivial content, i.e. act 1 inferno, rather than to build defensively and attempt to slowly farm acts 3/4. Moreover, increased repair costs provide a barrier for entry to players entering inferno while having a much less pronounced effect on established farmers.
Because of the nature of force armor, low defense is a terrible idea in later acts because you'll still get one shot. Sure you can stack as much DPS as you want. But it still needs to be balanced. It comes down to if you get hit without defensive stats, you get one shot. If you can manage to not get hit, force armor is irrelavent.
Edit: I guess I see your point? I had to reread a few times. it really comes down to just not getting hit if you can avoid it.
Wrong.
I'm currently in Inferno A4 with 33k HP and native resistances (~170 res from Int) and doing fine. Stacking resistances is pointless for me, because I don't have enough money to get them to the point where I can actually soak incoming hits. Reducing mobs' damage will not change that at all. At the same time stacking DPS helps tremendously, since faster face-melting = less kiting = less deaths. OP is 105% correct on that point.
33k HP and 170 res are defensive stats one way or another. They increase your EH. I mentioned the extreme of 0 defense and 0 vitality on gear. Youre saying "I am in inferno doing fine with my defensive stats therefore having them is wrong".
Either way, I reread his post while you were responding to me. It still comes down to if you are face tanking or kiting. Obviously kiting wins. And if you are kiting properly, you won't get hit. And if you don't get hit, force armor is, again, irrelavant. By lowering the damage and the required effective health needed to survive, one requires less gear to completely forgo Force armor.
At the same time it makes force armor seem like a no brainer as it becomes more effective in less gear. So it is still a player choice and I think, after this change, more and more wizards will be inclined to give up force armor.
I'll go back to the quote, regarding the extra bit of dps helps, why not replace force armor and get a familiar with spark flint for an extra 15% damage? Maybe the optimal build will be just that. Give up and force armor and nuke the hell out of everything before it even reaches you.
I think where we are disagreeing, if we are at all, is in the value of force armor allowing you to take 2 hits without dying. I think there is a very big difference between any hit being a 1 hit kill and being able to take 2 hits without dying. Likewise, I think there is a much smaller difference between being able to take 2 hits without dying and being able to take 6 hits without dying. Some hits are very difficult to avoid, particularly at the beginning of a pull when there might be multiple ranged mobs shooting things at you. Being able to not have to play 100% perfectly and eat 1 or 2 of those hits without dying really makes a difference.
Basically it is a whole lot harder to avoid getting hit with anything, ever, than it is to avoid getting hit more than 2 times in rapid succession. After the pull has started though, you are aware of the location of all of the mobs and probably have them slowed one way or another. At this point its much easier to avoid their attacks and you shouldn't keep taking additional hits, so the benefit of being able to take 6 hits for example is lower. Especially when you consider that with the additional dps you have from using a low defense force armor build, you are doing more damage to the mobs and therefore killing them more quickly, so there are less attacks to avoid.
Also, I don't think anybody is suggesting going 0 vit. In that case, yes, obviously not having force armor at all would be better. The point is to get the minimum amount of EHP such that force armor reduces most hits to 35% of your life, thereby allowing you to take 2 hits without dying. Thats what I mean by a "low defense build," as opposed to a build that attempts to stack armor/resists/HP and use prismatic armor to be able to take more hits than they can take with force armor.
Health globes, life after kill, regen, LoH (does this work for wiz?)...
Health globes work very well especially with pick up radius gear, life after kill & regen are too insignificant to help, and not sure on LoH.
And how would you suggest we fight these packs otherwise? We need to at least farm act I to get gear, but of course, it doesn't drop great gear (until 1.0.3). We can't get anywhere near melee range because we just fall over and die, regardless of whether or not we stack res and vit. So, our only choice is to do a lot of damage and run away, dying often in the process. Trust me, that's not fun for us either.
If the nerf were 20%, we're down to only needing 101k EHP. That can be done with something like 4500 armor unbuffed and 680 resist with the same 10k hp. Also, since all of the really high-damage mob attacks are melee as far as I am aware, blur and/or melee defense items (and/or dropping glass cannon) would further lower the EHP threshold.
What's nice is that you can start with a normal higher vitality force armor build and drop some vitality as you increase your armor and resists (and life regen), and the further you take it, the faster you full heal. What's less nice is that you'll still always die to three big, simultaneous hits, but as the OP lays out, it takes a really significant sacrifice elsewhere to make prismatic armor significantly better than force armor.
The thing is, right now there isn't a huge amount of gear that could be considered the "best". That leads you to have to choose between offensive or defensive stats. Eventually I want the majority of my gear to have 3 dps stats, vit, and resist all. Then, I don't have to choose.
If things shake out the way I expect (and I could be wrong) at a certain gear level you simply drop Force Armor for Prismatic. This leads to you being able to take 3-5 hits before dying, allowing you to stand and take damage while still dishing it out. After all, if you lose 15% dps by gearing more defensively, but it allows you to move half as much, you end up with a dps gain. Similar to how movespeed becomes a direct dps increase.
Oh and since coop is playable again in 1.0.3 the barb/monk will take half the hits.
So yay !
The second reason is a simple math. As of now, to make a tanky wizard with at least semi-decent DPS, you have to invest XX millions of gold into "int + all resists + vit / haste / crit" gear and 1 spell slot for Prismatic Armor. To make a pure DPS wizard you only need like 2-3 millions for "int + haste / crit + a bit of vit" and 1 spell slot for FA. If both work well in Inferno, why bother and choose go the expensive route?
Anyway, I understand that in the end it's a matter of a personal preference. Some people just hate to die. Even if repairs were free, such people would still avoid dying and go the "tanky" route. Some, like me, only care about end result and don't give a crap if they die multiple times in the process.
All I'm trying to say is that OP has the point - 1.0.3 will not change gear choices, at least not in the first month or two. If Blizz won't revert the 5NV change, later at some point even the best gear will become so cheap, there will be no reasons to skip resistances, so everybody will stack defenses. Until then (or if the 5NV change will be reverted), a lot of people will still use "FA + full DPS" gearing strategy.
This is really the main issue caused by FA in general. I'm farming A3/4 just fine with my current "taking a 3rd hit means death" approach with 75k-85k damage and FA. Why would raising my death tax deter me from farming nerfed mobs that will drop even more loot when I'm already make 50x more than I pay in repairs from more difficult mobs today?
I feel further nerfs coming to FA on the order of it not preventing 1 shots anymore, but only damage you would normally survive being reduced to 35%. Or in other words, FA becomes a high-end defensive ability instead of pretty much required from start to finish, in reference to inferno progression. It'd still work fine for A4 Hell and below farmers.
You really can't avoid things like oppressor charge, so Force Armor is the best, most important wizard talent by far.
It seems to me Wizards lack some kind of tool to counter things like reflective damage/mortar/jailer /vortex type things. The class would be better balanced if we had some kind "smokescreen" of our own; It really feels like we lack an effective way to deal with certain affixes.
Changing a Diamond Skin rune to something like "Diamond skin no longer absorbs damage, but instead removes you from sight for 4 seconds, 30 second cooldown." would just be awesome and fill a much needed gap.
stats:
250 res
42k hp
110k damage
I posted it in here
http://www.diablofans.com/topic/50218-anyone-clearing-inferno-give-a-gear-list-ss/
cba uploading tiny pics for every part