I’ve been thinking quite a bit about the difference in effectiveness of your primary (and secondary) damage stats versus the effectiveness of CON stacking… TL;DR at the bottom.
To start, there are pretty significant diminishing returns on your damage stats… to the point where, even with a 0.65 scaling on your secondary stat, it is more effective to put points into your secondary after the first 150 points in your primary, up until you hit 100 points in your secondary. That’s pretty wild. Now, looking at CON - I can understand why they made it a “flat” scaling. It just makes more sense, given the pve vs pvp aspect of the game. You need enough health to do the job and survive some big hits, but not so much that you’ll never need to be healed, and that was more easily (and better balanced when considering low levels vs higher levels - more later on this) done with a “flat” system. What does this mean, though?
Well, your CON stacking is actually more effective at earlier levels than it is at later levels, if you want to look at the percentages of health gained per point, and damage is fairly consistent (when compared to pve encounters - pvp is a different story for multiple reasons) over the levels. This is not taking into account anything over the 300 threshold, where damage scaling is negligible (imo, it becomes negligible compared to CON stacking at 250 - comparison later). If I’m a DEX build using a Bow, my damage will only slightly increase at level 60 with each point of DEX that I am able to squeeze out (mmm, foooooood). Whereas CON doesn’t see this problem… because there are higher multipliers for damage numbers with attacks/abilities than there are health, not to mention your base health is a pretty hefty chunk. That’s why you see a more linear increase in health per point than you do this weird exponentially decreasing increase per point in your damage stats.
So, let’s compare the effectiveness of the stat point thresholds (that go into combat only, because we all know that 25% full chop of a tree and 25% chance to mine an entire ore vein is just dummy good). At 300 INT, for instance, we see a 30% damage increase that is only effective when your opponent is at full life. Okay, cool. That’s a nice buff… but here’s where it gets funky. Compare that to, at 250 CON, getting an 80% damage reduction when at full life… wait, what? You’re telling me that, at 50 points LESS investment, without a diminishing return on the stat, the threshold bonus is literally more than twice as good as the INT bonus at 300 points? Yeah, that’s exactly right. And this is just as terrible as you think it is… there’s almost no balance put into these thresholds, and the damage stat effectiveness is pretty minimalized by CON stacking, not to mention when combined with LS. Granted, damage stacking is still better overall IF we compare the number of hits to kill in an ideal situation where our opponents don’t move and we just count the number of light attacks to kill, but these, imo, need to be rethought. Especially when you consider how strong self-healing is (hard LS nerf for pvp is needed, keep it probably 80% current effectiveness for pve). DEX at 300 is a situational guaranteed crit, which while it does overall give more effectiveness than the 300 INT bonus, is still a situational thing - if you aren’t dodging constantly, you aren’t getting any effect. This makes you expend stamina even if you aren’t in need of doing so to avoid damage, to gain it’s benefit - which can be a very detrimental thing. STR is interesting, though - grit on all light and heavy attacks. Very interesting choice here… no increase in damage, but a way to more reliably deal damage with only your basic attacks, with no downside (as long as you don’t consider becoming a lmb spamming zombie an issue). I feel like this is more useful in pve than it is for pvp, but the balance still needs to somewhat be there… I just don’t get what the thought process behind that bonus is. It’s damn near useless. And then, there’s the 300 FOC bonus. The most ridiculous bonus, I think, in the game, especially considering the state of self-healing. Expend all of your mana to (effectively) get all of your mana back… thinking about this, and going 300 FOC/200 INT with FS/LS, you have one of the most busted combinations in the game when stacked with heavy armor, and to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure why more people aren’t doing this. You have the most effective increase possible out of your INT, you get 15% more elemental damage, 10 mana per dodge, if you expend all of your mana you get a massive boost to mana regeneration, you have massive armor, the ability to lay down an aoe heal over time to sit in while your mana regenerates and you can block while doing so… like, this seems too good to be true. Socket a FOC gem into your FS and you’re golden. Interesting choice there as well, but I suppose listening to the playerbase on balance issues has never been a strong point in most MMOs. Usually they hit the wrong things with nerfs or give unnecessary buffs to places that don’t need it, when all along the answers were being pleaded to them by the community.
TL;DR: Overall, we see that damage effectiveness per damage stat point is worse than CON stacking, although going full damage, in a perfect world, where nobody heals or pots is still “better”. Diminishing returns need to be reduced a little bit. Stat threshold bonuses don’t make sense and need to be rethought/rebuilt. LS needs a pvp nerf (specifically self-healing). Why aren’t more people going LS/FS 300FOC/200INT heavy armor with FOC gem in FS?
thanks for the love. Happy hunting!