Path of Exile

Pyros

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
11,098
2,292
They released the patch notes for 10.2, it will go live later today or tomorrow if they run into a bug stopping issue.

http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/227309

Quite a few melee buffs, mostly via improving the duellist area a lot(which will improve most melees around it), slight dmg boost on all melee abilities. The Duellist changes look pretty fucking good, will need to see but seems strong.

This will be deployed to Beta within 18-48 hours depending on whether any last minute problems are found. These patch notes are not final.


Version 0.10.2
Content:

Added a new Intelligence Skill - Incinerate: Launches a torrent of fire from your hand. The longer you repeatedly cast the spell from the same location, the larger and more damaging the flames become.
Added a new cosmetic microtransaction effect - Blue Flame Incinerate: Replaces the standard flame of Incinerate with a ghostly blue fire.
Added a new cosmetic microtransaction effect - Tiki Totem: Replaces the standard Spell Totem or Ranged Attack Totem with a coloured totem that has carved tiki designs.
Added four new Unique items, three of which were designed by our Diamond Supporters.
Added a new flamethrower ability to Snakes in the Dark Forest.
Monster packs in end-game Map areas have had their size variance increased.
The Solaris/Lunaris Temple tilesets have been improved and should now have higher performance.
Added a new 3v3 PvP arena. One of the other arenas has been disabled temporarily while we fix a problem.
Improved blood effects.
Improved the Ice Spear and Lightning Arrow effects.
Improved the performance of Ground Ice and Ground Tar.
Improved the gem icons to be slightly better from a colour blindness point of view.
Continued to incrementally improve the art, effects and environments.



Features:

The passive skill tree now requires confirmation before changes are applied. This prevents accidental misclicks. If you want to skip this confirmation, ctrl+click the passive and no window will be displayed.
We've added a "Lost Password" button to the main menu.
Pressing Ctrl+up in chat allows you to cycle through previous players you've talked to via whisper in this session.
Chat messages that are more than one line long now indent subsequent lines so that it's harder to confuse other players with fake messages.
There's now a /clear_ignore_list command that will remove all entries from the list of accounts you are ignoring chat messages from. Better management of ignore lists is coming in the future.
Players in an area are now always granted the quest status of having killed a boss regardless of who killed it.
The performance statistics overlay (F1) can now be bound to other keys.



Audio Changes:

Added PvP announcer audio for various events in matches.
Added personalised introductions for Nessa.
Added a few more Nessa greetings.
Added new Tarkleigh greetings.
Added some improved Marauder combat vocals.
Added improved Marauder comment dialogue.
Added new ranger dialogue and improved some existing ones.
Overhauled the audio of the Lion and Beast monsters.
Improved the audio for ground effects, gore effects and Pyromaniac projectiles.



Quest Reward Changes:

Gem quest rewards were reshuffled so that caster classes have access to Incinerate around level 10.
The quest reward for the Kraityn quest on Cruel difficulty has been changed from 4% to 6% increased attack speed.



Item Balance Changes:

A set of vendor recipes related to handing in complete sets of rare gear have been changed. The rewards are now based on the item levels of the gear and can range from one Orb of Chance to three Regal Orbs under certain conditions.
Itemlevel 78 and 79 mods are now available on items.
Reduced the movement speed penalty on Ebony Tower Shields. This will only affect new shields that are dropped in 0.10.2 and above.
Increased the base armour on Pinnacle Tower Shields. This will affect existing ones.
Gloves and Boots can now have up to the "Seething" increased energy shield mod. They were previously limited to "Radiating" and below.



Active Skill Balance Changes:

Glacial Hammer's physical damage now increases by 4% per level rather than 3%.
Cleave's damage physical damage now increases by 4% per level rather than 3%.
Double Strike's physical damage now increases by 4% per level rather than 3%.
Infernal Blow's physical damage now increases by 4% per level rather than 3%.
Heavy Strike's physical damage now increases by 5% per level rather than 4%.
The Portal gem is now treated as a spell, so it is affected by things like cast speed and can exist on a Spell Totem.
Early levels of Fire Trap have had their damage reduced by around 35%.
Early levels of Poison Arrow have had their damage reduced by around 35%.
The mana cost of Detonate Dead has been reduced at early levels so that it's around 40% cheaper. It ramps up to the same mana cost as before for high levels.



Passive Skill Balance Changes:

An additional group of mana passives has been added near to the Ranger area.
The Duelist starting area has been extensively reworked. Characters who had passives that have been affected by pathing changes have received refunds to their passive skills.
The first Duelist damage node now has +12 maximum life.
The Mana Flows group has been moved within the Duelist area. Regeneration was increased from +20% to +40%, +10 intelligence was added and the maximum mana granted was reduced from +20% to +16%.
Dual-wield-specific damage and attack speed passives have been improved.
One handed and two handed Duelist passives have been merged into a general melee track.
The Might notable passive has been changed to Master of the Arena (+20 strength, +2 melee range, +8% melee damage).
The Agility notable passive has been changed to Acceleration (+20 dexterity, +12% attack speed).
Berserking has been moved closer to the Duelist part of the tree.
The early Duelist life group has been moved onto the opening path and consolidated into 1% life regeneration, 12% maximum life and 8% maximum life.
The Armour Master notable passive has been removed, with its power added to the Leather and Steel nodes.
The Duelist Dervish passive has been increased from +8% block rate to +10%.
Increased the block on the Shield Mastery passive for the Duelist.
Added a new set of mana gained on kill passives near the Duelist area.
The Duelist Bow attack speed node has been increased by 2%.



Monster Balance Changes:

Reduced the damage of Flamebearers.
Reduced the damage of Alchemists, especially in earlier difficulties.
Increased the damage of Piety's Arc skill in higher difficulties.
Various balance adjustments have been made to Map bosses.
Undying Incinerators now display that they will explode on their targets when on low life.



Bug Fixes:

Fixed a bug where Culling Strike would prevent the Item Rarity/Quantity support gems from applying.
Fixed a bug where Shield Crabs would not drop items when they died if they were hit by enough cold damage to freeze them and kill them in one hit, if they were not already frozen.
Fixed a bug where map pins on the world screen would continue to pulse after hovering a waypoint.
Fixed some walkability problems in the Promenade and Collonade end-game Maps.
Fixed a bug where using a currency item sometimes played the sound effect twice.
Fixed bugs related to scrolling the Options panel with the mouse wheel.
Fixed a bug where long names could overlap the league icon in the character selection screen.
Fixed various problems related to sounds from inventories stacking.
Changed the spawning of large chests so that they're less likely to spawn right up against another object, making their items inaccessible.
Fixed a bug where the text on the social panel could be the wrong size after resizing the window.
Fixed a bug where Piety's Crematorium guards could get stuck non-aggro.
Fixed some bugs related to text wrapping.
Fixed a server crash related to bandit fights.
Fixed some bugs related to whether players are counted as in or out of a bandit fight.
Flasks will no longer be consumed when typing in chat if you have rebound the keys for those flasks.
Fixed a bug on the character selection screen where the up/down arrow keys were not working properly if your list was filtered by league.
 
Dashivax

Dashivax

N00b
114
3
I'm really disappointed in the small buff to damage on some of the melee attacks. The damage of those attacks doesn't even begin to explain to problems with melee. I hope this isn't all they had planned (plus the new aoe attack next week.)
 
Korrupt

Korrupt

Blackwing Lair Raider
4,832
1,228
Default my bad.

I dont have much experience crafting maps etc either if someone knows more than me i'd gladly do it. I've been saving the 68 and 69 ones white until I look into it more.
 
Pyros

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
11,098
2,292
Dashivax_sl said:
I'm really disappointed in the small buff to damage on some of the melee attacks. The damage of those attacks doesn't even begin to explain to problems with melee. I hope this isn't all they had planned (plus the new aoe attack next week.)
Click to expand...
I think they were just normalizing those/making them more balanced. For example now Cleave is the same as ground slam. Ground slam being 4% and Cleave being 3% didn't make much sense for example. It's still a buff, and an easy to do one so that's nice. It's obviously not the main issue with melees but the problem with melees is a bit harder to fix than just tweaking numbers. Interestingly, they left Dual Strike out of the picture. Maybe because it does more damage already than most stuff, but Heavy Strike being buffed to 5% when it has 150%efficiency for example makes it even stronger.

They either need a passive, a support or an active that makes melees and melees only more tough to kill, or they need to make a change to the game mechanics or they need a combination of various stuff. It's not as easy as say in TL2 or D3 where they can say "ok marauder duellists get 35% dmg reduction, shadows templar and ranger get 20%, witches get 0%" because classes don't actually represent jackshit so being a marauder doesn't mean you're melee. That makes the problem much harder. If you make it a support or a skill or even a passive, then melees HAVE to get it, and it's also bad design. It'd work and they could for example put the passive in every starting area for each class(non stacking, basically "Witches now have 35% dmg reduction for 3secs after hitting with a melee attack" in the witch area, same for every other). That'd still cost 1pt but I guess that's a good price to pay to enable melee play.

Otherwise, they'll either need to roll that type of bonus into every melee skill, with the complication it could have, or rework defensive stats entirely or whatever. It's not an easy fix really. The main issue is making sure ranged can't benefit, otherwise it's a totaly pointless buff and that's the hard part of desigining this fix.

That makes specs that are pseudo ranged very strong regardless, stuff like groundslam with double aoe passives has basically bigger range than EK or Freezing Pulse for example, if they got a massive defensive boost passively, then it'd be worth it to make "melee casters" instead of current. Unlike Lightning Strike which can be split into melee and ranged so the melee bonus wouldn't apply to ranged, ground slam is harder. Even other than ground slam, cleave or sweep with full aoe passives have pretty big range.
 
Dashivax

Dashivax

N00b
114
3
Downside to Heavy Strike (over Douple Strike) is the knockback part. Really cuts the dps down on it since you have to keep moving forward, unless you get the mob near a wall which doesn't happen that often, so it makes sense it hits harder than anything else at least.

I'm not sure what they can do about melee either, because like you said the starting class doesn't mean shit really. Most good builds you can start from at least 3 different classes sometimes even 4, and do the exact same thing.

I'm doing max aoe increase on my marauder currently with ground slam and you are right it isn't really "melee" since I am filling the entire screen basically. I'm happy with the build though don't get me wrong, absolutely rape shit at max range and have started stacking stun threshold reduction to keep bosses stunned so my survivability is high, but I look at the top builds with LA and freeze pulse and just don't see how melee can compare to any build with crits that can stack shock or freeze.
 
P

plaeroma_sl

shitlord
16
0
M aelee shouldn't be too hard to fix. Make endurance charges last 30 seconds base and have it lock out ranged skills. That way you actually help melee builds and don't arbitrarily punish/buff classes that have ranged and melee builds.

Melee also needs support gems that are comparable to chain, fork, and lmp/gmp in terms of effectiveness. Granted, this is a bit more complicated to execute.

Fixing desync issues will also do loads to improve melee viability.
 
Pancreas

Pancreas

Vyemm Raider
1,125
3,818
If you want a buff to only effect melee characters, then attach the buff to equipment only melee would really use, their weapons. Have melee weapons trigger defensive benefits every time they are used in a melee attack or with a melee skill.

Each weapon could be given a different flavor of defense. Rapiers, daggers and claws increase evasion by x% stacking up to X times; Swords, maces and axes increase armor the same way; 2 handed weapons have an innate debuff to stun thresholds so most enemies will get staggered when they get hit, that sort of stuff.

It's not a passive skill, it's just on the weapons themselves. It's not a passive bonus and requires being in melee combat to gain the benefit.
 
Deruvian

Deruvian

Lord Nagafen Raider
649
119
plaeroma_sl said:
M aelee shouldn't be too hard to fix. Make endurance charges last 30 seconds base and have it lock out ranged skills. That way you actually help melee builds and don't arbitrarily punish/buff classes that have ranged and melee builds.

Melee also needs support gems that are comparable to chain, fork, and lmp/gmp in terms of effectiveness. Granted, this is a bit more complicated to execute.

Fixing desync issues will also do loads to improve melee viability.
Click to expand...
Maybe a gem that lets you attack 3 times instantly per swing with 30% less damage, which is effectively LMP. For chain, maybe add 1 instant swing per mob in melee range? Melee would shred then.
 
Penance

Penance

Bronze Baronet of the Realm
5,308
5,378
Flicker strike could become a support? Flicker strike ground slam wtf....
 
Pyros

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
11,098
2,292
Penance_sl said:
Flicker strike could become a support? Flicker strike ground slam wtf....
Click to expand...
They could make a bunch of the skills into supports instead but I guess they're not interested in reducing the amount of skills until they add more. Puncture for example would be a great support, currently it's just a shitty skill, it's only good with a bow and even then it's not that good.

They definitely need to add some melee supports, there's a bunch of ideas, they don't need and shouldn't make the skills into massive aoes as that basically makes every melee a caster with shit range which is boring, but they should have more melee options, especially utility options. Ranged get utility from their supports like LMP/Chain by propagating effects from single target skills on multiple targets. For example ice shot with chain or fork will create large patches of ice everywhere on the screen and LA with chain 3stack shock a lot of stuff. Melee on the other hand doesn't benefit from these and even if they did there's not that much utility in melee skills. Glacial Hammer has utility, Sweep and Ground Slam have some too built in but they're already AoEs. I guess Viper Strike could be considered utility too. Adding supports that let you spread Glacial or Viper Strike more efficiently would be useful though. You can elem prolif Glacial but it's not the same because you still only deal damage on a single target. If you had something like a Penetration support that lets you hit every mob in a line behind the main mob(think Lightning Strike middle projectile, shorter) you could line mobs up and get stronger freezing/chill procs which could still be spread with prolif.

A melee range 360aoe support would be nice too, it wouldn't be OP because the range would still be melee range which is pretty poop, but it'd benefit from going right in the middle. Imagine Viper Strike with such a mod on a high block/eva char, Whirling blades into a pack, Viper Strike twice with high attack speed, then WB out, all mobs dotted, now just run around while they die. I guess the issue comes from balancing very strong single target skills like Dual Strike in an aoe fashion. Also Heavy Strike with a 360aoe support would shit on Sweep since it has guaranteed knockback, the range would be shorter but guaranteed knockback is very strong with kb passives, a lot of mobs will simply miss you cause they're not in range and using a fast attack weapon like a 1.65 2H sword would almost guaranteed kbing everything before they hit.

Part of the issue is probably the lack of tech to do such things though. If anything I'd like melee specific supports that would be pretty easy to implement. For example Chain Lightning, adds a % to proc a chain lightning on your melee attacks. That's simple and easy to make since it uses the Arc code, simply with weapon dmg% as the damage. Infernal Blow should be reworked and the explosion on death should be added as a support, with lower damage(since it could be used on like Cleave). Alternatively making a technicaly differentiation between single target and aoe melee attacks, similar to the AoE tag, would be useful to make supports more balanced. Like Dual Strike would be Melee, Attack, Single and Cleave would be Melee, Attack, AoE, Multi. Multi wouldn't benefit from certain specific supports like the corpse explosion one I mentionned while Single could benefit from the stronger supports.
 
N

Nutron_sl

shitlord
712
0
So i'm working on my new duelist build since I got a free respec, and am currently looking at:

http://www.pathofexile.com/passive-s...On_E4IsedSVEk=

Still gonna be running elemental hit + WED + Faster attacks + life leech and LA + LMP + WED + LoH. I got less life nodes than before (not going all the way up to templar), but I also dropped the always hit never crit in exchange for 60% added crit chance node on the right side of ranger. I thought about what you said about where my damage was coming from and I just wasn't satisfied with the damage I had... Any thoughts? Do I have enough survivability for end game?
 
Pyros

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
11,098
2,292
The Dauntless One_sl said:
Do you guys think a dual wield Duelist will be viable with the new patch?
Click to expand...
The issues with melee aren't fixed. It was viable before and is viable now, it's just not efficient and a lot riskier than anything not melee. It's certainly better though, get 2% block out of it, a lot more damage, some good health and some insane mana regen so you can skip blood magic and run actually good auras plus berzerking is closer and you get "free" movement speed from the leather and steel change, so overall it's a lot stronger start as a melee than it was before.

That still doesn't help melees being meh though, nor will next week's skill which looks very meleeish. Skill looks good though I'm probably running that with 1H claw+shield, tempest shield and whirlwinding into packs of mobs with 50-55%block and blind/LoH on it. Going to be grandiose. Probably shadow though, or Ranger if I can get make it work point wise since I'd prefer playing the lesbian than the emo necrophile.
 
F

Falmer_sl

shitlord
160
1
Think the 3 mana nodes in the duelist tree are going to be enough to let you skip BM? I like the changes, wish they'd thrown in some more resist nodes though.
 
N

Nutron_sl

shitlord
712
0
Falmer_sl said:
Think the 3 mana nodes in the duelist tree are going to be enough to let you skip BM? I like the changes, wish they'd thrown in some more resist nodes though.
Click to expand...
I was actualy wondering the same thing... would mean saving 4~ nodes i could put elsewhere
 
Pyros

Pyros

<Silver Donator>
11,098
2,292
Well it depends on the skill you're using and the supports. Might need to grab 1pt in the mana on kill passive they added at the bottom right, or grab arcane efficiency or another mana% node. Alternatively using mana leech on your skill should fix a few issues.

I don't think it alone can sustain full auras/endgame build but it does most of the job, and you have to consider the other cost of blood magic, which is losing purity at least, as well as 300ish hp from running grace/anger/wrath on your health instead of your mana. With 600 mana, which is doable with those as well as some mana items or more nodes as I said, you can run those on mana as well as purity(180mana with reduced mana) and still have 120mana to play around, which is enough if you have mana leech % on your amulet or weapon and such. It's a bit more annoying to balance out, but Purity is a pretty big deal I find as the max resists is great and the normal resist gives you a lot more freedom in your gear choices. Matter of taste however, and I was considering a melee more than an archer build, since melee attacks and supports are cheaper than ranged attacks. I don't think it's easy to run LA+WED+Chain+LoH on mana for example as the cost skyrockets with all these high multiplier supports. Mostly Chain which you don't need as a melee.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.