Weapons profficiency modals +50% recovery time, isn't that little too much?

[Farsha]

 

 

I half-suspect that "rebalancing all the weapon modals" was planned but might not happen before release. They've felt like placeholder values from the start. 

 

I think a lot of them might find a use once we get into the full game though and can compensate for their downsides. For example I can see the pistol modal becoming very useful once and if people figure out how to stack accuracy super-high, because accuracy has a ceiling where it stops adding to damage.

 

Similarly, if people figure out how to stack recovery bonuses to get super-fast (which was the dominant strategy in the first game) then all those recovery penalty modals might turn out to be great (what's +50% recovery if your recovery is down to a single frame anyway?). 

 

Like a lot of other things it's gonna all depend on what gear etc. is available in the full game and that's probably part of why they're waiting on the rebalance.

 

What's the ceiling for accuracy?

 

 

 

I should have said "soft ceiling". It varies by monster and difficulty level (PotD). Basically, each point of additional accuracy shifts misses to grazes, grazes to hits, hits to crits, etc. Thing is, converting a hit to a crit is just +25% damage, but converting a miss to a graze is +50% damage! 

 

So when accuracy is low you're converting a  lot of misses to grazes and grazes to hits, which is a big damage boost. Once you have +25 accuracy over target's defenses, though (which isn't hard to hit at all on normal difficulties for most enemies, if you use debuffs), the bonus from Per drops off, and if you get enemy defenses low enough / your Accuracy high enough (remember, Devotions for the Faithful adds 20 by itself!), the relative value of more accuracy keeps going down. 

 

There is a theoretical hard ceiling if you were +100 accuracy over target's defenses, where every hit would be a critical and then additional accuracy would do nothing at all, but that actually is pretty hard to reach.

 

To bring this back around to the Pistol modal though, if you've got a priest in the party and they cast Dire Blessing and Devotions for the Faithful, that's +25 accuracy right there, and those are both Beta powers, nothing more. Turn on the pistol rapid fire modal then, and you're still +10 Accuracy above your baseline, not counting Perception etc. or any debuffs on the target.

 

It should be possible to calculate mathematically what the "break point" is for +accuracy where the pistol modal becomes useful (because the increased reload speed gives more of a bonus than you lose from the lost accuracy).

 

Well that would assume that our characters accuracy will raise more quickly than enemy defenses. From what we've seen in POE specially on POTD there are some tough bastards out there in the POE world. So I don't think that will work all that great & 15 accuracy penalty will be still a lot even near end game.

[dunehunter]

If you don’t have any recovery bonus or penalty, -50% recovery time from pistol modal will half your recovery time. Which is very powerful imo. But if u already have a lot -recovery time bonus, it’s not so good. So it’s very situational choice. And also the original design for modal is not a no-brainer on or off, you have to decide when to turn on and off.

Edited April 10, 2018 by dunehunter

[Dr. Hieronymous Alloy]

Right right -- I was just mentioning the pistol modal as one that might be situationally useful. For example, if a few more things were scriptable than are currently, you might set it to if (self: has perception inspiration) AND if (self: has Devotion s for the Faithful) then (set buff to On).

[draego]

The axe modal is useful for ranger to proc predator's sense. Unless there are unique weapons with wounding on them.