Info Item Team Update Thread - Latest Updates, Rebalance Changelogs & More - Update 28/6

Is there a particular reason why Nether-associated items are Thunder/Fire but Corruption-associated items are Earth/Thunder? I would think they would share a theme, but after noticing Black, Nether's Scar, and Stalagmites I investigated a bit and this seems to hold for all Nether/Corruption items.

 

Just turned out that way, really.

 

i want to see this in the next patch kthxbye

 

Choose one from this

- Poison rte
- Lament buff

 

Oh oh I'll take number 3!

 

fuck

 

Hi everyone hows everyone been doing,

It has been a while where we've done any sort of update on what the Item Team is up to, well thanks for asking that's very nice of you. I for one enjoyed a 2-weeks vacation travelling across the UK with my dear mother. But you're not here for that coz you don't care about me, you're here to see what the Item Team is actually up to in terms of updates, fine here we go, apologies in advance we don't have much exciting stuff to reveal.

As promised a month or so ago, the Item Team will be pushing the latest raw stat rebalance for one of the stat in game, and I've teased it in the past that it will be a "much-welcomed buff". Well @jptheflip has made some progress on the project and in order to give him more pressure lets reveal what it actually is. The stat that will be receiving a buff would be - Health. More specifically, health bonus and base health on endgame items.

This is because, in the past, the health of items kind of hit a plateau after reaching level 80, this has created a lot of issues since crafted armors don't work that way, creating what we now see that is end game crafted armors having significantly more health than normal armors. So in the base health buff, we will be re-examining all armors of level 80-100 and rebalance their health to match the "baseline" of what the item should otherwise be receiving based on their elemental combos and how offensive/defensive the items are. tl'dr, endgame armors and certain weapons with health IDs will get health buff and tanky items will get more.

Furthermore, the team is also working on two other item projects that are unrelated to raw stats, we'll tease that when more progress has been made.

[Insert cool ending phrase and be sure to like and subscribe]

 

If you do that you'll also have to look at the health bonus on certain endgame weapons, as with armor health being heightened they will also have to be adjusted in relation.

 

yes certain weapons may get adjusted as well, i did include health bonus on the post, but i'll rephrase it better to avoid confusion

 

That's interesting. Welcome in the sense of balanced crafted items, but if I'm interpreting correctly it will probably shrink the meta of items by quite a lot since currently upper 80s items form a big part of the existing meta (or for that matter, lower 90s items) - we may end up in a situation where it's extremely difficult to use non-glass items below around level 95-93 because the relative health penalty is too much, essentially going back to a sort of early Gavel state where there are much fewer items in play at endgame.

 

The variance of elemental combo/offensiveness of the health is larger than the baseline difference. What I mean is that a tanky lv 80 item is likely to have higher health than an offensive lv 90 item, and level 90 offensive item will have a higher health than a lv 80 offensive item. Main point is overall will see an increase in average health, but the items themselves will scale accordingly with each other for the most part to avoid the issue you suggested

 

Guess that means offensive fire won't be getting much of a buff from this.

 

Honestly I think the only major problem with offensive fire is that Conflagrate is too punishing to use.

 

Yeah . . . but after using offensive fire for a bit I think there's more to it; for one, when running offensive fire your hp is ridiculously mediocre, usually around 10k-12k which just isn't enough for how much damage you'll be taking. Defense doesn't affect elements and building up elemental defenses while going offensive is incredibly hard, at least to the amount you'd need to nullify most rainbow attacks, and those elemental damages add up to a lot, looking at Qira; Qira does rainbow damages for average of 400 each, let's just assume you'll be able to completely nullify fire, you'll still be taking 1600 damage average from her attacks in just elemental alone, add the neutral damage which you're countering most of and you'll be taking around 2k-2.5k average, not all that much as opposed to without defense but still massive if we consider 10k-12k health as I proposed before. Last of all, offensive fire has complete shit sustain, you can't really get good amounts of ls on an offensive fire build, at least not as much as you should, I understand why though, it's because apocalypse exists, and if fire had more amazing ls items apocalypse would be incredibly overpowered, but I don't think that's a good reason to punish all of fire, it doesn't make any sense because fire/thunder is potent for ls yet no good fire/thunder items exist that give ls.

Defense being shit, hp being low(For a fire build) and terrible sustain makes offensive fire underwhelming. I just can't really understand why air has so many amazing offensive items on top of just having a much stronger skillpoint as opposed to fire. They're both defensive in nature mind you.

 

Offensive Fire Warrior can be pretty good. Granted, I've never tried out those builds since I don't have a high-level Warrior, but the last one I posted gets good damage, plenty of health, all positive elemental defenses, good sustain, etc. (for a non-mythic alternative use Greaves of the Veneer and like Scaldsteppers or whatever.

Defense not affecting elemental defense is really annoying, agreed. That said, according to one of Salted's posts it's intended to do so - hopefully that will be made working eventually.

 

That's not a good build dude, 10k uppercuts might look good but uppercut is drawn out for like 3 seconds, it's not a lot of dps, your generic fire melee tier stack gets much higher dps and has similiar survivability. and as I've said before, all positive defenses don't matter, you need to actually build defenses or else you'll take elemental damage that you can't avoid and that adds up. I don't think anyone can even debate that fire/thunder is incredibly underwhelming, pretty much unusable outside of black, it has no good armor except for cinderchain, or anima, it has hardly any pieces that take advantage of one of the most amazing parts of fire/thunder, that being the lifesteal. Defense has been broken since gavel came out, like 3-4 years ago? Salted say it's broken but he doesn't seem to care enough to fix it.

 

I mean Black is pretty strong so...

With that much mana I can easily chase with Charge to make Bash effectively spammable regardless of knockback (or just corner them and do Bas-Bash-Uppercut). Should be pretty straightforward to do something like Bash-Warscream-Charge-Uppercut-Warscream in a cycle, occasionally skipping a Warscream to regenerate.

Don't exactly need 15k uppercuts to be a viable build. 12k uppercuts is quite a lot.

 

if you want 15k use guard

 

So the new Braker looks pretty fun at first glance, except you can't actually do much with it. It's beaten in spells by Hive Spear or good legendaries (in damage alone, and that's not counting the loss of health, walkspeed, and often mana), and in melee it's basically just Diaminar without lifesteal and with a health bonus (similar damages). Slow speed means it's limited in tierstack, and the spell penalty is high enough that while it's technically viable in spells, other options still beat it out pretty easily.

 

Black is like, the only good fire/thunder weapon in the game, and it's only good because it has mana on it which is something fire/thunder struggles with because of the lack of support.