Constitution Needs Buffing

[NerdCommando]

Right now, Con is one of the weakest stats in the game. While those +5% of health per attribute point may seem like a lot (and indeed, it was a buff from even weaker +3% per attribute point), in reality, two factors ruin its usefulness:

 

1. Now that health/endurance system is out of the window, Constitution is no longer controlling how much regeneration you can receive. And lots of healing happens in the combat. And every time it happens it's, like, receiving a bonus to your starting health pool - there's no real difference. So 80 hp versus 120 hp might seem like a colossal difference. But 180 vs 220 is an entirely different thing. And 100 hp of healing is not even that much - between moon godlike's procs, paladin lay on hands and druidic regeneration, you can restore so much more than that. In sight of this, basic con becomes a non-factor. And it never scales, it's just a fixed number - that's the biggest issue here.

 

2. Con is naturally weak because it's a passive and reactive attribute. Those aren't really positive traits. Even if you have high con, it's not that easy to force the foe into attacking you. Maybe one or two tanks in front of the party, but you can't just have a, say, full 18-Con party and make the enemy party attack you evenly so each of those 18 cons is working. You can also use tactics to supplant the need for the Con - just keep your glass cannons far out so no one is striking them. Whereas it's much more difficult to use your tactics to supplant the need for the offensive stats, for example. Also, since it's passive, it depends on your foes to be actually acting whereas one of the main supported playstyles is mass disable spammage that has zero synergy with constitution.

 

After some consideration, I will also add a third factor here which is a bit more global:

 

3. Offensive play just has more multipliers than defensive play. These games are often won by stacking lots of multipliers to produce some serious results. I.e., we have 30% strength damage bonus, 30% dexterity and 20% perception one. But they don't total to 180. Instead, it's 1.3x1.3x1.2=2.028. It's not that big of an advantage yet, but once you add all other attacking abilities, the difference does truly show. Of course, there's also the HPxDeflectionxArmor multiplication going around, but it's just not as prolific as the offensive abilities. Just count the amount of aggressive and defensive ones. Only Paladins and Wizards can truly stack deflection, whereas much more classes have all kinds of damage bonuses. There's Rage & Frenzy, Lightning Strikes, Coral Snuff, various marks, but what are the self-buffs for the protection? Not to mention that offenses are universal whereas defenses and armor are specialized.

 

So what can be done about Con? One of these:

 

1. Make it act as a healing received multiplier. Something like +5% per point - to match the health gain. This fixes the scaling issue.

 

2. Make it act as a buff amplifier. For every point of Con, positive effects last 5% longer. Doesn't matter if they're innate or external. This allows to use constitution proactively.

 

3. Switch deflection from Resolve to constitution and give something else to resolve (maybe the same buff amplifier or give it hostile effect resistance - i.e., hostile effects last 4% shorter for each resolve point).   

[dunehunter]

Voted, I suggested in a similar thread that Con should get something like bonus to healing.

 

Actually It’s just recently that I realize all Str, Dex, Per and even INT has multipletive effect on offensive side. However for defensive side there only Res and Con. And sadly Con has a diminishing effect on survival depends on how much heal power you received, the more healing u get, the less effective Con is.

 

I think it makes total sense to give healing bonus to Con, and give buff/debuff duration bonus/resistance to Res.

Edited December 26, 2017 by dunehunter

[MaxQuest]

So what can be done about Con? One of these:

1. Make it act as a healing received multiplier. Something like +5% per point - to match the health gain. This fixes the scaling issue.

This is exactly what I was thinking.

Having MIG or RES provide a bonus to Healing Done. While CON providing a bonus to Healing Received.

Although 5% is a bit too much. I am thinking 3% should be enough.

 

 

Also when Josh mentioned that there are no resolve-based ranged casters, I've immediately thought that there are no constitution-based ranged casters either. And tbh that was one of my favorite playstyles in WoW (during TBC expansion). It was really fun having a warlock with health pool higher than that of pvp warriors, and constantly draining and using hp as resource. So I can easily see few new spells that allow tapping for extra damage; or percentage-based self-healing which all would indirectly increase the importance of CON.

Edited December 26, 2017 by MaxQuest

[dunehunter]

While all of us are thinking a way to give Con more bonus. I’m trying to think it in another way.

 

So we all know that Con = health now. When we complain/discuss Con’s usefulness, we are actually talking about the usefulness of health.

 

As Neocomando mentioned, on defense side there are multipliers as health * deflection * armor. And health can be divided into the health pool we have at the beginning of combat and heals we recieved.

 

All the earlier discussion is about how to give Con ‘more’. While I’m asking, can we make health more important? By saying make health more important I actually means, to nerf the efficiency of the rest 3 factor.

 

So If we make deflection, armor and healing less effective, health/Con becomes more essential . Then to make a sturdier character, we have to raise Con. Thus the Con problem is solved.

Edited December 26, 2017 by dunehunter

[AndreaColombo]

^ this way characters who don’t invest in CON are penalized, which shouldn’t be the case.

 

The purpose of making stats appealing or useful is not to encourage average stat distributions where characters with 13 to everything are optimal. It’s to avoid a situation where investing in a given stat is always subpar compared to investing in the others.

 

In other words, investing in CON should be about as attractive as investing in, say, DEX for different reasons; not investing in CON should be about neutral; dumping CON should be about as bad as dumping DEX (again, for example) for different reason.

 

If all defenses are suddenly made less effective, investing in CON becomes the norm to offset the nerf and not doing so penalizes you.

Edited December 26, 2017 by AndreaColombo

[dunehunter]

^ this way characters who don’t invest in CON are penalized, which shouldn’t be the case.

 

The purpose of making stats appealing or useful is not to encourage average stat distributions where characters with 13 to everything are optimal. It’s to avoid a situation where investing in a given stat is always subpar compared to investing in the others.

 

In other words, investing in CON should be about as attractive as investing in, say, DEX for different reasons; not investing in CON should be about neutral; dumping CON should be about as bad as dumping DEX (again, for example) for different reason.

 

If all defenses are suddenly made less effective, investing in CON becomes the norm to offset the nerf and not doing so penalizes you.

I think it really depends on how much u nerf other defense factors, if they are nerfed too much, then Con would become a penality to not invest. But slight nerf will make Con more important but not a must stats.

 

It’s just another solution devs can explore to make Con better. Without moving one bonus from a stats to another.

 

For example you see that by split Might’s bonus into Str and Res, it causes a lot issue and disagreements among us. But for Con, boosting health seems to be a solution that solve issues from root, instead of fixing things on surface.

 

If someone can make a formula on total damage/hit one can get before die to health/healing/defense/armor rate. I’m pretty sure the health pool/Con only take a small part in that formula. If we can make the factor bigger, of course Con will become more attractive then it is now.

Edited December 26, 2017 by dunehunter

[eisenschwein]

Raising CON = raising the injury/wound limit, as suggested in the Health vs. Endurance/Health thread.

 

My preference still lies with the endurance/health system from POE1 as well and I can't see the current one in the Beta doing things better in any way. If anything it does things worse than POE1 with the often mentioned

a. fixed number of injuries and
b. the missing strategic component of balancing and maintaining short-term endurance vs. mid-term/long-term health.

I also wouldn't know (yet) how to bring back b. without completely replacing the current one with the endurance/health system from POE1, which of course would be the most preferable solution, but for a. it may be merely a matter of very minor GUI redesign with a small change to how one of the primary attributes affects the max count of injuries.

As already suggested by @eisenschwein and others it would only make sense to let Constitution control how many injuries a character can receive before dying.

My suggestion:

Increase the max injury count by 1 every 2nd point in Constitution.

Starting from:

CON 1 -> max injury limit: 1
CON 3 -> max injury limit: 2 (CON 3 was the lowest you could go in POE1, I believe it's still the same in the Beta character creation?)
CON 5 -> max injury limit: 3
...
Con 11 -> max injury limit: 6
...
CON 19 -> max injury limit: 10
...

This way the player character's chosen class (and accordingly distributed attribute points) as well as the NPCs/companions' classes would also be properly reflected in their different max injury limits. There would be not only distinction in how the different classes or builds participate in combat (melee, ranged, magic) there would also be distinction in how much they can take and absorb before reaching the limit and dying the final death.

Should Maneha, a Barbarian (CON 19 in my last playthrough of POE1), not be able to soak up considerably more damage or accumulate significantly more injuries than Aloth, a Wizard (still base CON 10 in my last playthrough of POE1)?

Two concepts for the corresponding redesign of the injury meter necessary to support the proposed revision:

 

[blotter]

I haven't spent much time considering the overall implications of this idea, but I do recall reading some complaints about Athletics being *too* useful in Deadfire, to the point that investing in it to some degree is mandatory: what if Second Wind became a feature that was tied to Constitution instead of Athletics?

 

With the change, Athletics could boost Stride and Disengagement defense instead, kind of like the Tumble skill in d20, and mitigate terrain-based penalties/impediments. The latter steps on the Island Aumaua's toes, granted, but that's another thing I've seen a fair number of complaints about.

[Wormerine]

I haven't spent much time considering the overall implications of this idea, but I do recall reading some complaints about Athletics being *too* useful in Deadfire, to the point that investing in it to some degree is mandatory: what if Second Wind became a feature that was tied to Constitution instead of Athletics?

 

With the change, Athletics could boost Stride and Disengagement defense instead, kind of like the Tumble skill in d20, and mitigate terrain-based penalties/impediments. The latter steps on the Island Aumaua's toes, granted, but that's another thing I've seen a fair number of complaints about.

That... would make sense. To be honest “second wind” seems like the best sustain ability, with high level athletics giving you pretty much second life in combat. Considering I found It almost mandatory for everyone to have at least a bit invested in athletics (even west level second wind can mean a difference between surviving and being knocked out) giving everyone second wind and scaling it based on constitution seems like a solid idea to me.

[dunehunter]

 

I haven't spent much time considering the overall implications of this idea, but I do recall reading some complaints about Athletics being *too* useful in Deadfire, to the point that investing in it to some degree is mandatory: what if Second Wind became a feature that was tied to Constitution instead of Athletics?

 

With the change, Athletics could boost Stride and Disengagement defense instead, kind of like the Tumble skill in d20, and mitigate terrain-based penalties/impediments. The latter steps on the Island Aumaua's toes, granted, but that's another thing I've seen a fair number of complaints about.

That... would make sense. To be honest “second wind” seems like the best sustain ability, with high level athletics giving you pretty much second life in combat. Considering I found It almost mandatory for everyone to have at least a bit invested in athletics (even west level second wind can mean a difference between surviving and being knocked out) giving everyone second wind and scaling it based on constitution seems like a solid idea to me.

 

 

Second Wind is a healing power everyone can access to, problem of Second Wind is same to the problem of healing. If there are too much healing in the game, Con will be less useful.

[Mittomain]

Finally a topic like this was made, I was always too lazy to do it myself.

 

In case they'd like to keep Str/Res changes I think the most obvious and easy Con buff would be to move deflection from Res to Con, which was already suggested in other topics.

 

I also like the idea of Con increasing healing but not like Res does it now... at least for me it feels weird that e.g. a priest healer is buffing his outgoing heals with Con.

I think it'd be better to make heals %hp based (like in Tyranny). Probably this shouldn't be done with all the healing spells, but for things like Fighter or Barbarian healing abilities this would be a welcome change in my opinion.

Other option would be to make Con increase Healing on self only (this actually kind of translates to %hp healing, but this way abilities and spells don't need to be updated).

[Roda]

Turn back to might (decreasing the damage you gain to spell and weapon damage) and add the next one:

 

CON: increase weapon damage (stamina to maintain the quality of physical attacks or something like that)

RES: increase spell damage

 

Just an idea.