An elegant way to balance Cast When Damage Taken

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ggnorekthx написал:

This thread is still a thing? I wanted to report some findings after using the gem for awhile.

1. I don't like the loss of control over my defenses. I also don't like that I have to get hit for them to trigger. Not reliable enough for my tastes, I will be removing the gem here soon, or leaving it on only to trigger a curse.

2. I don't like the loss of a gem slot in order to automate things. I think the gem is pretty balanced as-is.

3. In general, this is a gem that works really well at level 1. However, it is nice to have gems that work well at different levels. 99% of gems are best at level 20+, having some you don't level is cool. Also, leveling Clarity past level 3 or 4 is 99% of the time a waste and actually bad, but that is okay. Again, variety is nice and I can guarantee that a level 20 CWDT is going to see some good uses once the streamers find a good combo and the rest follow suit.

4. CWDT triggers my abilities a lot, but not usually when I need them. EC and MS work really well as prebuffs to duking it out with a boss, and this gem requires me getting hit first.

5. I don't get why people are scrambling to get the gem "changed." After further reading, I really think this thread is a clever trolling.

6. I have not had a chance to use the other gems as they are more difficult to obtain, so I have no opinion on if they are as balanced as this one is.

7. Lastly, I feel people are jumping to conclusions and have not even tried using it at higher levels. Not sure what the fuss is about.

Maybe it is fun for Kripp to use on a new league, but I find my end-game characters have no real use for it. Only exception is CWDT linked with Temp Chains. I will probably be using that combination here shortly.

This is exactly what I am talking about. They keep saying there is 0 drawback to CWDT when there is. The inability to cast your spells when you want to. That's a massive drawback, especially if your endurance charges so happen to run out when you need them up.


It's not a be all end all defensive gem; all it does is automate defenses for a melee character.

I hated playing melee prior to this support gem. Not because pressing the extra buttons was too much work but, because having to spam your defensive skills ALL the time is boring. It's not fun. GGG acknowledged that it wasn't fun and added a way to get around it while still taking up sockets. Buffing passive defense for melee is hard to do with out impacting ranged classes a buff to Armour is going to be a buff to anyone in the game not just melee characters. While it certainly can be used by ranged characters unless you're already a tanky character I'd reckon waiting to be hit to activate your defensive skills is a pretty bad idea. There for it being a requirement to ranged characters sounds kind of silly, IMO.


The biggest negative to cast on dmg taken as a melee character (which I certainly feel it is aimed at) Is having to use 2 enduring cry gems and not to get around the cooldown but to keep up your endurance charges inbetween packs. Leap slamming into a pack of mobs to get your endurance charges up is rather dangerous. So you have to maintain 2 of the same skill gems for any situation that may require you to be "buffed" in advance.

Kole isn't the heavy hitter king anymore but, I'm going to use him as an example. Cast on dmg taken regardless of the amount of dmg taken requires me to get hit. You don't want to get hit by kole with out your physical mitigation stacked high so you'd want to already have your molten shell up and your endurance charges. The same applies to almost any boss fight/heavy hitting mobs. Effectively requiring you to maintain 2 of anything you have linked to cast on dmg taken equiped or requiring you to open your character screen and remove the support and put it back after you cast your skills.

Adding in animations and mana costs defeats the entire purpose of this gem existing.

Not being able to cast enduring cry doesn't seem to be a big deal. You take 400 damage and your endurance charges are right back up. On high level characters, 400 damage is NOTHING!

I likely take much more than 400 damage when casting enduring cry, spell totem, molten shell and curse. But now, I can leach life instead of casting all of that stuff. With cwdt, now my endurance charges are guaranteed to never fall off when I need them due to user error.
This is win win win.

You guys must not play solo, if you think this gem has any downsides. Reserving the mana cost of all the gems linked to this gem, imo is not a big deal but would actually give the gem some kind of drawback.

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ChannellockJon написал:

On high level characters, 400 damage is NOTHING!

Yup, and that's why on my templar CoDT procs not so often I would like it to proc, even on lvl 1.

Gem works the best on undergeared chars or in very hard encounters. If you farm less dangerous areas with nice character, it can almost not proc.

Why the hell don't you think that GGG didn't wanted it to work that way?

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Real_Wolf написал:

Emphasy, I don't think you are quire understanding my problem.

I have no problem with different levels of the gem being more effective, as in your example for immortal call.

My issue is that its only a very small subset of skills that you don't want cast as often as possible.

And that based on the fact you primarily want your skills cast as often as possible, a level 20 gem is going to be terrible (and indeed I know of no one who has a use for it).

If for example we changed the scaling around to hte opposite, then you would still have the same dynamic interactions you have a tt hemoment that you enjoy.

Lets say that level 20 is 400 damage taken, level 10 is about 1500 damage taken, level 1 is something like 2000 (random numbers)

This would mean in your example, you can have the gem at level 10, for your imortal call. it won't activate all the time every 400 health, but it will still activate when you want it, after a ton of damage.

And for the enduring cry/whatever you want as often as posible, it casts ever y400 health

But lets say you can only level the gem to level 18, because youa re a low level at the moment. Your enduring cry activates every 700 health. Thats still okay, but not nealy as much as you want. So you want it to reach level 20, and you are encouraged to get that level for the gem.

Most skills work this way, where you are encouraged to level the gem as it gets better.

But htis one isn't. At the moment, using the same numbers, if your enduring cry activates ta level 400, you do not want to level the gem because it would activate at health 700, which is far less often, and would suck.



And thats the same for 90% of gems, with few exceptions of immortal call, or molten shell if you want the explosion effect

The point is... thats simply not possible due to balance. Just imagine even a marauder with 0 spell-damage at all to run around with 2 cwdt gems linked with arctic-armor, molten shell and firestorm and the other one with enduring cry, firestorm and frost nova. All at 100% damage-effectiveness.

Also I said that leveling the gem was never the point. They could have simply implemented it to be a one level gem which 30% damage-effectiveness and procs every 400 damage taken. They decided to allow the players more variance by increasing the cap with leveling the gem. And since this means less procs they allowed the gem to do more damage in that case.

On another note... have you ever thought about it starting at 2000 damage? It would be the first gem that is actually useless once you get it. A lvl31 char will most likely not even have 2000 HP to use the gem. But with 400 it is already useable for nasty situations. Well the second gem, since empower also is useless, but it does at least not have stats pretending it is of use.

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ChannellockJon написал:

Not being able to cast enduring cry doesn't seem to be a big deal. You take 400 damage and your endurance charges are right back up. On high level characters, 400 damage is NOTHING!

I likely take much more than 400 damage when casting enduring cry, spell totem, molten shell and curse. But now, I can leach life instead of casting all of that stuff. With cwdt, now my endurance charges are guaranteed to never fall off when I need them due to user error.
This is win win win.

You guys must not play solo, if you think this gem has any downsides. Reserving the mana cost of all the gems linked to this gem, imo is not a big deal but would actually give the gem some kind of drawback.

It does not have drawbacks for enduring cry and curses for melees. And thats what this gem is made for. It only exists to actually eliminate the drawback of ensuring the uptime of endurance charges and curses. It definitly has drawbacks for ranged chars, since they don't want to get hit in the first place and getting hit just to get the survivability to tank more hits seems awkward in this regards. Also BM is totally different here than a Mana-Caster. A fast attacking mana-based char already can run into trouble maintaining his normal attacks (exspecially skills like frenzy are a beast), uncontrollable loss of mana in addition to that would hurt this chars a lot more than BM-Melees which is propably not desireable.

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allbusiness написал:

They keep saying there is 0 drawback to CWDT when there is. The inability to cast your spells when you want to. That's a massive drawback, especially if your endurance charges so happen to run out when you need them up.

As bbblame pointed out above, linking a spell to CWDT does NOT prohibit you from manually casting the spell as well. If you want to both automatically and manually cast a certain spell, you just need two copies of the gem - one linked to CWDT and a second bound normally to a hotkey. There is no drawback to doing so, if that's the way you want to use your available sockets, it's simply a restriction that GGG chose to implement on gem usage. With patch 1.0.0, you can cast a particular gem either manually or automatically, but you have to choose one way or the other.

Given that flexibility in gem usage, it's hard to see how you can complain that the zero-mana, zero-delay automated casting service that CWDT provides is a "massive drawback". If its functionality doesn't suit your needs, there's no case where you're forced to use it.

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ChannellockJon написал:

Not being able to cast enduring cry doesn't seem to be a big deal. You take 400 damage and your endurance charges are right back up. On high level characters, 400 damage is NOTHING!

I likely take much more than 400 damage when casting enduring cry, spell totem, molten shell and curse. But now, I can leach life instead of casting all of that stuff. With cwdt, now my endurance charges are guaranteed to never fall off when I need them due to user error.
This is win win win.

You guys must not play solo, if you think this gem has any downsides. Reserving the mana cost of all the gems linked to this gem, imo is not a big deal but would actually give the gem some kind of drawback.

You seem to be more speculating than actually testing.

I do nothing except solo at the moment, and I've been running 70+ maps, Tower runs, and Piety runs on my cyclone duelist. So I'm in (most) of the hardest areas, and I'm in the thick of it. That 400 damage may sound like a lot, but it really isn't. It might proc a lot more for rangers and es characters, but they don't get a lot of the utility that melee characters do and they can put the sockets to much better use. The only reason I even bothered to link it up was to test it out and I have 6 End Charges so it is mildly worth it to me. But the charges aren't usually maxed out, even when fighting Piety or map bosses.

So the damage an actually geared melee takes is a lot lower than you are expecting it to be. This gem absolutely has a slew of downsides, most of which several of us have reiterated a bunch of times. I don't have room to run two four links for utility skills, just so I can manually cast AND have CWDT going off - and CWDT does not proc enough to need a "change" or "nerf."

So the characters who are intended to use this have the drawbacks listed above and also take the least overall damage (assuming we're letting our es and rangers get pummeled for arguments' sake), causing less procs.

And I doubt most CI and rangers are running 150+ strength just to use these gems. Totally not worth it for 3 charges that will likely not stay up, a nerfed molten shell, and an IC that lasts 2-3 seconds.

Again, I have no idea why people take issue with this gem.

This gem is the single most effective reason to NOT play a totem build and is a direct balancing measure to totem builds.

Totem builds take very little damage compared to any other ingame build. That's their main strength and the reason you can go full on MF gear without much worries about survivability, something other builds can't do as easily.

Along came Cast on Damage Taken. It is not as useful for totem builds as it is for builds that actually have to fight mobs in person and not by proxy. It automates tedious defensive stuff with proper drawbacks (you can't start off a map kole with him enfeebled, for example, which matters a lot, unless you run another instance of the gem unlinked from CoDT, a pretty hefty drawback). I don't think making the player OOM is warranted.

You no longer have to find a way to take 0 damage (totems, full on evasion+enfeeble+blind+dodge, play in group, massively outgear everything, spend most of your time recasting defensive abilities) to enjoy most builds the game has to offer. It's a wonderful thing.

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ggnorekthx написал:

So the damage an actually geared melee takes is a lot lower than you are expecting it to be. This gem absolutely has a slew of downsides, most of which several of us have reiterated a bunch of times. I don't have room to run two four links for utility skills, just so I can manually cast AND have CWDT going off - and CWDT does not proc enough to need a "change" or "nerf."

While that may well be your case, I don't think you've demonstrated that it's universal to melee builds in general. I'm using CWDT on two very different types of melee builds (DoT vs Dominating Blow), and neither of them need to have both automatic and manual versions of Enfeeble.

Before 1.0.0, I was micromanaging offensive and defensive curses manually, and both builds were soloing fine in Merciless. With CWDT, I have Enfeeble on autopilot, and that enables me to focus much more aggressively on offensive tactics and cursing. That's exactly the kind of thing CWDT was designed to handle, and I don't think anyone has issues with the way it automates your spells with zero casting delays.

The sole aspect of CWDT that I think is unbalanced is giving you an overly generous 100% discount on casting costs. A deal that sweet makes it a major disadvantage not to use CWDT. With my melee builds, the only downside of using CWDT is the socket it occupies, but that's no different than any other support gem. Where CWDT is way over the top is that it effectively has an infinitely negative mana cost multiplier - instead of increasing the casting cost of the spell it's linked to (like most other support gems), it reduces casting costs to zero. And for my low-mana melee builds, that overrides all other build considerations, making CWDT a mandatory choice, if only because of the free lunch it offers.

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Real_Wolf написал:

It does not have drawbacks for enduring cry and curses for melees. And thats what this gem is made for. It only exists to actually eliminate the drawback of ensuring the uptime of endurance charges and curses. It definitly has drawbacks for ranged chars, since they don't want to get hit in the first place and getting hit just to get the survivability to tank more hits seems awkward in this regards. Also BM is totally different here than a Mana-Caster. A fast attacking mana-based char already can run into trouble maintaining his normal attacks (exspecially skills like frenzy are a beast), uncontrollable loss of mana in addition to that would hurt this chars a lot more than BM-Melees which is propably not desireable.

Not only does it not have a drawback, it gets a huge bonus of making your mandatory defense skills free in mana and time.
I'm not suggesting uncontrollable loss of mana, I'm suggesting a flat reserve like clarity. We're talking like 150 mana when you factor in a curse ~60mana, enduring cry ~40mana and rejuv totem ~40mana. Blood magic will obviously get a 30% discount.

I really like this gem btw, please don't think I'm against it.