An elegant way to balance Cast When Damage Taken

"

ggnorekthx написал:

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.

First, I've run this gem on 2 characters through most of merciless act 3. Second, if you're not taking 400 damage in boss fights, then why do you need enduring cry? Please give me some gear. For characters that actually take damage, this gem makes life wonderful.
And D: Level 9 cwdt requires 48 str.


*maybe I just don't know how the 400 damage is calculated, cause I don't understand how people's enduro charges are falling off. Lets say you have health of 2000. You take 400 damage and you get 3 endurance charges. Within the next 10 seconds, you have either taken 400 more damage and still have endurance charges or you have used a level 20 flask and are back up to full health.

I prefer it the way it is. Mana reserve would make it worse. Why would you want to make it worse? If it used mana reserve I would definitely not use it, I am blood magic on most chars and I need my life. If I were a mana user than maybe, but, with great damage comes great mana cost and a lack of mana nodes and probably one socket for mana leech gem. So no, gem is fine. If anything, it needs lower threshold at lvl 1, say 300dmg instead of 400dmg.
Maybe even give it ability to cast temporary aura (1 would be global limit no matter how much gems you have) on dmg taken :D Like, auras last 10 secs on lvl 1, 10.5 on lvl 2 etc (keep in mind that your are moving the dmg threshold up as well). That be very cool, might offset that 60% mana reservation a little bit

"

ChannellockJon написал:

For characters that actually take damage, this gem makes life wonderful.

Which is kind of obvious, right?

Taking damage is generally a bad thing and a harbinger of death. For example, I've been playing Nemesis (currently level 59), and I can't help but agree with ggnorekthx's appraisal of the gem from the Hardcore perspective. Taking damage is bad, preventing damage is good, you want to use your defensive abilities prior to taking damage, not after... it makes CWDT a lot less attractive. I might be melee, but I'm Acrobatics melee/traps, so I'm not taking much damage at all, and have little interest in CWDT for that character.

Conversely, I think CWDT is very strong on a completely different build skeleton, one which focuses less on preventing damage and far more on leech, regeneration and/or life gain on hit. With those builds it's not about preventing the damage, but out-healing it, and with those builds CWDT is exceptionally strong. However, as a lot of Hardcore veterans will tell you, those builds are always tricky because if you stop spamming, you stop leeching, which means you stop out-healing, which means you lose a lot of positioning power because you can't stop attacking, and encounters become more of a gear check and less of a skill tester.

In particular, I feel that the strongest CWDT builds are not those which stack all these defenses, like EC and MS and IC, but instead those which go CWDT + Life Leech + [damage spells]. This fits more into the core philosophy of the build, out-healing rather than trying to prevent damage. Obviously, Vaal Pact is very handy, if not flat-out essential, in these situations, so I feel this is more of an ES niche, coming in both CI and Shav's flavors, both of which can abuse Cast when Stunned as well.

So I find myself in this situation where I pretty much agree with ggnorekthx's points... yet I think the gem is still too "something for nothing," and potentially OP. This is because I see it being OP in a completely different situation than the majority of those on this thread. I mean, come on people, it's a support gem that automatically casts spells, did you really think the primary abuse wouldn't be on a spellcaster?

"

Emphasy написал:

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.

I have thought about starting at 2k damage. It is a made up damage. I have also said I would much prefer it if they made the change, to have it be based on a % of damage taken, so when you lose 50% of your health it activates. This makes it much less of a 'once you levelled enough the requirements are a joke' and more of a '10% damage is a lot, do I want to have to take thatm uch to use this freemanaautocast'

If they made it a one level gem, that would also be something with very little thought behind it. Name one other gem that has only one level.


I don't understand the idea that we should have gems that are level 1, and it has levelling features that just aren't worth using.

Empower is a gem that has an unusual levelling situation that it doesn't go to 20, BUT it does get better as you elvel it, and indeed does nothing as its unlevelled.

Why is it good to have a gem that becomes less effective as it levels

"

ScrotieMcB написал:

I think CWDT is very strong on a completely different build skeleton, one which focuses less on preventing damage and far more on leech, regeneration and/or life gain on hit. With those builds it's not about preventing the damage, but out-healing it, and with those builds CWDT is exceptionally strong. However, as a lot of Hardcore veterans will tell you, those builds are always tricky because if you stop spamming, you stop leeching, which means you stop out-healing, which means you lose a lot of positioning power because you can't stop attacking, and encounters become more of a gear check and less of a skill tester...

In particular, I feel that the strongest CWDT builds are not those which stack all these defenses, like EC and MS and IC, but instead those which go CWDT + Life Leech + [damage spells]. This fits more into the core philosophy of the build, out-healing rather than trying to prevent damage. Obviously, Vaal Pact is very handy, if not flat-out essential, in these situations, so I feel this is more of an ES niche, coming in both CI and Shav's flavors, both of which can abuse Cast when Stunned as well.

Those are very insightful points, though I think CWDT can be just as strong on softcore HP-based melee builds as on ES builds. With a decent Life ball and an appropriate weapon, leech and/or LGoH can readily out-heal Merciless and low-level map damage, as long as you're well-defended against Stun, Shock, and Freeze. Combine that with a high Block Chance, and there are few threats that can easily take you down before CWDT throws up your defense spells.

Since the 1.0.0 release, the only time I really got caught off guard was once when a Devourer boss popped up right under my feet. However, I've not yet taken on Dominus with CWDT, and I'll be interested to see how that turns out.

"

RogueMage написал:

"

ScrotieMcB написал:

I think CWDT is very strong on a completely different build skeleton, one which focuses less on preventing damage and far more on leech, regeneration and/or life gain on hit. With those builds it's not about preventing the damage, but out-healing it, and with those builds CWDT is exceptionally strong. However, as a lot of Hardcore veterans will tell you, those builds are always tricky because if you stop spamming, you stop leeching, which means you stop out-healing, which means you lose a lot of positioning power because you can't stop attacking, and encounters become more of a gear check and less of a skill tester...

In particular, I feel that the strongest CWDT builds are not those which stack all these defenses, like EC and MS and IC, but instead those which go CWDT + Life Leech + [damage spells]. This fits more into the core philosophy of the build, out-healing rather than trying to prevent damage. Obviously, Vaal Pact is very handy, if not flat-out essential, in these situations, so I feel this is more of an ES niche, coming in both CI and Shav's flavors, both of which can abuse Cast when Stunned as well.

Those are very insightful points, though I think CWDT can be just as strong on softcore HP-based melee builds as on ES builds. With a decent Life ball and an appropriate weapon, leech and/or LGoH can readily out-heal Merciless and low-level map damage, as long as you're well-defended against Stun, Shock, and Freeze. Combine that with a high Block Chance, and there are few threats that can easily take you down before CWDT throws up your defense spells.

Since the 1.0.0 release, the only time I really got caught off guard was once when a Devourer boss popped up right under my feet. However, I've not yet taken on Dominus with CWDT, and I'll be interested to see how that turns out.

I really don't know if life-based CWDT caster builds are viable; things like reflected damage and Lightning Thorns become a major issue. Vaal Pact is almost required. This video is a good example why... keep in mind that with Vaal Pact that sort of setup likely would survive while killing all enemies in a similar manner.