So Traits and Properties are always a hot topic round here, and I wanted to post some thoughts on specifically necklace properties.
It seems to me like pitting damage reduction vs +% health will always come down to effective health, with one coming out as a winner, making the other borderline obsolete as a result. Originally I was against the idea of removing the health property entirely, upon further consideration I’ve pretty well come around to it. The positive I see is allowing the damage reduction options to be much more potent to compensate.
I would change the categories for damage reduction to vs hordes: covering all chaff enemies you’d expect
vs specials: which would include gas and storm damage with the vs AoE category removed
vs elites: what you’d expect really, SV, CWs, Maulers, Bestigors, berserkers
vs bosses: this would include all monsters and end event bosses
Regarding specific percentages, after some number crunching with and without barkskin, this is what I’m currently thinking:
Vs Specials - 20-25%
Vs Horde - 30%
Vs Elites - 30%
Vs Bosses - 40%
These values were tuned to give you better effective health than the +health property would against that category of enemy, to compensate only working on one category of enemy. Numbers for each category are also varied from one another to reflect the relative threat of that enemy type e.g. the vs special value is lower than vs horde value because protection against specials is generally more important. This is to help balance the damage reduction properties against one another.
Some of the values might seem a bit high, but this is assuming the health property were removed, so the end result compared to the current situation is a good bit more effective health against the enemy type you’ve selected, a fair bit less against all the other enemy types. Vs bosses especially is so high since it’s value will always be limited greatly in QP.
If removing the health property is too extreme for the community, I’ve seen the idea of it being a flat health increase instead, might be easier to balance but still not sure about that idea either TBH.
Regarding +Stam vs +BCR, I really have no idea how to better balance those two against each other Not sure what’s even worth running +Stam on these days other than Dual Daggers, even then I’m not sure.
Lastly, this is not a new idea, but I’d add extra push radius to the effects of the push/block angle property to make it more competitive. Probably about 10-20% more range would be reasonable.