I generally agree that class and skill balance is often way off.
I have not tested Shield Rush a lot, but my impressions are that it is not a good skill to use overall. While it is fun to pace around the map with it, it has too high mana cost.
About the other skills: They don’t deal spectacular damage, but the skills weaponize your defences. 100% block chance with 70 to 80% block mitigation, pushing your armour to 70 to 80% mitigation. If you can manage to squeeze in some decent armour mitigation applies to dot, you get a pretty good tank.
Push your block mitigation, push your damage via added damage or crit multiplier. Push your block chance, push your attack speed and damage.
Is this enough to make this a decent build for 300 corruption and killing Abberoth? I honestly don’t know, I don’t read guides usually and rather experiment with skills and items to find out what the limits are. Perhaps EHG needs to up a few numbers a bit. Shield rush, imho, needs a complete overhaul.
I really like your idea that shield throw benefits shield bash. Having characters that can fluidly change between melee and ranged attacks and have a mechanical incentive to do so is my dream class.
But in general, yeah. A lot of stuff seems outdated. And this looks even worse because of all that other stuff that is utterly busted, and some people think that this should be the norm or goal to strive for.
What you describe as decent is what I would call a good build, and there should be many builds that can reach this. Topping it by a vast amount should be the exception by highly optimized and geared builds.
Right!? Soften the mob up a bit from range while also boosting your melee, hit your turbo buttons, leap (or charge!) in, smack it with the big hit, then back out to start over. It just sounds awesome.
In theory I agree with what you are saying here. Definitely. In practice, I’m kind of trying to throw EHG a bone. There are builds that clear 1000. Their are people who will become very vocal if those toys and that power level is taken away. Their are other people who will be strident in defense of EHG because, “for the good of the game!”.
Some people will stick it out. Some people won’t. The thing is, everyone knows in the back of their head that the reason the game is like this is because the developers messed up. Given how many developers, some with decades of experience, have messed up in the same way, we really should, as players, have a bit more empathy for the devs.
But, at the end of the day, if you as a player were having fun before, and you are no longer having fun, all that “for the good for the game” talk doesn’t mean anything. Devs need to be very careful when making these changes. And that’s why I say that a decent build should be able to pretty easily clear 300. The new ‘good’ is 600.
I got back into ARPGs a few years ago and this is ALWAYS one of my biggest gripes. I feel like (not just this game) which each patch, one build gets pumped and the others get thrown in the ditch. It’s like no one is there making sure multiple builds get brought up each patch and they just expect you to play build x or build y within each class for the season and be happy about it.
Again, not just casting shade on this game for it and I’m also not a dev so I don’t know what all is involved but this trend is so disheartening!
1.1 buffed a bunch of different classes though. I expect it feels that way to you because of the ward nerfs, which affected many builds, but overall most classes were buffed in 1.1.
I actually have a different perception from you regarding that, especially for PoE, where they tend to nerf the crap of whichever meta build was ruling last league, then slightly buff pretty much everything else and see which one comes on top (which will then get nerfed in the following league).
One thing is player expectation. There are players out there who want regular re-balancing even in the old content, so things don’t go stale. There was some league when PoE said they will not make any balancing changes, and they got quite some heat for it, IIRC.
One point that was brought up in discussions about the balancing in D&D - and I don’t know if this is actually true - is that one of the designers said some options are bad on purpose. It’s done so that players can identify good and bad options and feel good about finding the good ones.
I don’t know how difficult it is to actually design a whole game and keep it balanced - with 15 masteries and 120+ skills with their own trees, passive trees, and complex itemization options with uniques that shake up the game. I imagine it is actually f"§$"§$g hard to do. And I don’t think all the armchair devs here in the forum have solutions that would lead to this end - they (me included) are just usually full of themselves with quite some hubris.
If balance was so easy why would almost every game have problems with balance?
If balance is so hard, and yet so important to players (well, at least forum-going players), why would seemingly every dev leave it on the back burner?
Is the U Michigan course any good? Is it full of shit? How would I know? I wouldn’t.
What is my point? I don’t know that I have a point other than, “Yes, this is hard. If you don’t make more progress here I won’t keep playing your game”.
To be fair, I don’t think devs do that. The biggest problem with balance is that you only see the full results with large numbers. You can test it with a few hundred people or even more, but only when it goes live do you see the impact of stuff, because some players will always find some interaction you weren’t considering.
So balance is done in waves. You make a bunch of changes which you think will bring you closer to balance (like EHG did with 1.1, which we have to admit is much more balanced than 1.0), see the effects, then make a whole bunch of other changes, see the effects, etc, until it’s sort of balanced.
This is what happened in PoE. It was also very unbalanced for years, until slowly they tightened it more and more and now, I think, it’s reasonably balanced.
You’ll always have meta builds and underpowered ones, but as long as the disparity isn’t too big and the underpowered builds can still do content, players are ok with it.
Just consider a game like Starcraft that is much more reduced than a game like LE or PoE. They only have 3 factions, where each has a bunch of units/buildings. It seems like it should be much easier to balance, right? And yet it took them years of balance patches and an expansion to achieve a pretty good balance.
And, as far as I’m aware, Starcraft 2 isn’t there yet either.
So a game that has a much reduced state of possiblities (combinations of units/buildings) is still very hard to balance right, let alone a game that effectively has billions of them.
So, to paraphrase you, what is my point?
Devs continually work on it, but they have to do it in batches. Balance is something which you continually tweak all the time, always working to close the disparity between upper and lower bounds (OP builds and underpowered ones).
EHG did a good job with 1.1 (even if some builds should have been nerfed a lot more, like some falconer/warlock ones, and wraithlord). I expect they’ll keep it up with each major patch.
Starcraft is pointed to as being the most amazing balancing act in the history of games. Three completely different factions, with different playstyles, and they made them competitively balanced?! Madness. Unpossible. A horrible example for you to use because they made it look easy, and clearly it was a work of art.
LoL is a better example. They constantly pour a torrent of effort into balancing their game. I haven’t played in years, but it’s obvious that they still put a massive amount of effort into it. And they got good at it. And that makes sense because in a PvP game, competitive balance is the bedrock of your business. Balance = money.
PvE games? Content = money. Excitement = money. I don’t think the balance problem become obvious until you have co-op. Or leader boards. Or any type of competition between players. Then what you have been able to ignore is suddenly a big problem.
Completely agree. PoE didn’t have money problems, so they were able to put effort into getting better at the art and science of balance. I hope EHG has the resources and bandwidth to make that leap.
It’s less that they’re useless, and more that other options are much better. They can have some pretty fun effects and synergies, but you’re not going to be as powerful as if you didn’t use them.
No, that was exactly my point. They have perfect balance NOW. But it required lots of balance patches and an expansion to reach that point. It wasn’t that way when it was released.
So if you have a game which has a way way way reduced combination space and it still took a lot of effort to balance, it’s a lot harder (magnitudes harder) for a game that has combinations in the billions.
The way that I remember it was (and this is just me, and it’s been a long time, I definitely could be full of shit)
launch - game is viewed as pretty surprisingly balanced, given that all the factions were so different
optimization kicks in, Protos are king, Zerg kind of suck (not as sure about the Zerg, but that is the way I’m remembering it, might just be because I didn’t care for the Zerg)
Balancing does an ok job
Brood war releases, things get thrown in the blender, one faction is kind of better than the others. Humans because of medics? I can’t remember
Another balance pass (I don’t remember many balance passes, but I might be forgetting), and things are pretty solid.
Optimization of player strategies, yes, exposing the existing problems. Yes, Protos top, Zerg flop, that’s how I remember it, too.
I don’t remember that much balancing happening before Broodwars, honestly. But as said, was a quarter of a century ago. I am sure somewhere we could find the exact balance patches.
4+5. yes. It needed a while to cook, and I am sure blizzard gathered lots of data.
I think if one formally researches the complexity of Starcraft and your typical ARPG in terms of balance, Starcraft looks much less complex in comparison - though that is only a guess of mine.
That’s why I think making comparisons and judge the capabilities of EHG’s devs is potentially very unfair. Could they do better? I think so, by a long shot. Do I think that they are simply incompetent? Not more incompetent than you, me, and all the other folks here on the forum.
I disagree. I think the margin of error in balancing a game between professional human players competing on the level of 10s of milliseconds and hundreds of APMs is far more difficult than, “don’t piss your friend off because they are struggling to kill a few mobs before you obliterate the screen”.
Other than arena leaderboard, LE doesn’t actually have a competitive space. The ‘play with you friends’ bar is so f’ng low, they have to make balance progress to clear that hurdle. Certainly before they go any further and do something like D3 rift runs (which were fun. good way to see how your build/ability stacks up against the good players).
Do I know what I’m talking about? Lol, no, that’s why I’m here shooting the shit with you.
To be fair, starcraft is only the huge sport it is today because it actually managed to be extremely balanced. If it hadn’t, it wouldn’t have grown to such a height as an e-sport. You’re looking at it backwards, I think.
I’m looking at it like, “if it didn’t have enough balance to provide for a ‘fair’ game between two competitors of similar skills level, it wouldn’t be a fun competition, and people wouldn’t have played it”.
Which is why I listed out the steps of how it started out pretty decently balanced (as compared with other RTS games that took a much more symmetric approach to factions), and got better as more pressure was applied, i.e. people developing better strategies, getting better at micro-management, etc. To the point now where there are players of almost super-human level of ability and ‘solved’ strategies for build order, expansion order, scouting, etc. No one had near super-human level of ability or solved strategies when the game launched. They both evolved over time. And they wouldn’t have if the balance had remained stagnant.
And that’s an important point for the business; you need enough balance to support the play modes you have, and no more. Eventually, StarCraft needed an absurd level of balance. It didn’t start out needing that level of balance.
Currently LE doesn’t have enough balance to keep friends from hating to play together.
That’s a general problem of fast-paced games where enemies die too fast. Warframe is the same, for example. If some Saryn clears the whole map, everyone else gets bored fast.
To reasonably support group play, monsters need to last a few hits, and players have to combine efforts to win. And group play for me is not ‘everyone moves in another direction to clear the map faster’.
Balance being off just aggravates this core issue - LE is not designed as a multiplayer game. I think there isn’t even a health-scaling in LE for multiple players in a party, isn’t it?
Right!? Soften the mob up a bit from range while also boosting your melee, hit your turbo buttons, leap (or charge!) in, smack it with the big hit, then back out to start over. It just sounds awesome.