Almost a year ago a vote was held, and it was decided to nerf ward. According to developers almost 70,000 people voted and the outcome is that 74.3% of people wanted “OP skills and items fixed.” However, 71.9% “disagree with nerfing skills or items that are OP if it’s not due to a bug.”
The developers decided to nerf ward by calling everything bugs instead of balancing. That left me bitter about the game because I had come up with a not-so-well-known Void Knight build that was a lot of fun and depended on high amounts of ward to survive. Today, after even further nerfing ward, SteamCharts says 2-3 thousand people play daily; it was 14,000 on a good day before POE2 came out.
Just pointing out that the developers satisfied the will of 22,158 voters that agreed with “During a Cycle, you would like us to nerf skills or items that are highly overperforming, even if it is not caused by a bug,” and left the 37,466 voters that disagreed unsatisfied.
Finally, are there any players left that had a build get nerfed, and should the developers have just buffed other builds instead, giving players a reason to play new classes instead of walking away from a turd sandwich they don’t have to eat?
The post above is a great congregation of common player fallacies. Paraphrasing a bit:
“The developers nerfed a skill/mechanic/build I was using!” - players often gravitate towards overpowered builds, and those are exactly the ones which are nerfed. So it’s little surprise that someone would come here saying that the overpowered mechanic he was using - the one a lot of people were using because it was overpowered - got the nerf we all knew it was going to get.
“The developers nerfed the skill I was using and buffed a bunch of skill no one likes!” - similarly to the point above, just like players gravitate to overpowered skills, they tend to avoid underpowered skills. So when the developers buff those skills that were lacking in power, some players only see buffs to skills nobody had been using (…because they were too weak).
“I have issue X with the game, and there’s a lot less people playing now, so of course everyone who’s not playing also shares issue X” - which ignores how different people have different reasons for not playing a game anymore. In the absence of any kind of evidence about what those reasons were for most players (and no one has this information right now), saying that players left for a single specific reason is just projecting.
So no, the poster above does not know why those 12.000 players aren’t playing Last Epoch anymore. The poster above also does not know if those 37.466 players are satisfied or not with the nerf to ward. It’s just one more person annoyed because his build was nerfed, and projecting his feelings on thousands of players.
Nope, not what happened. Also the ward changes came in 1.1 and not during 1.0 where the vote was held.
The bug related to ward was a 10 times multiplied node majorly, causing builds to create… well… 10 times as much ward as they were supposed to.
Kinda obvious to be a bug.
Nerfing overperforming content while buffing underperforming content is not mutually exclusive.
Both are important to do.
You can’t just buff buff buff all the time since it leads to number inflation which swiftly goes into a direction which makes it hard for the brain to differentiate if you’re getting more or not, depriving it of a form of enjoyment (which has been proven with scientifically by now), hence why developers try to avoid it.
Also it leads easily to reaching the limits of the maximum possible numbers in the program for respective tasks and hence causing overflows worst-case… or needing more resources best-case. This is a severe hit to performance and needs to be avoided.
It’s overall called ‘power-creep’, you could counter it by making enemies harder afterwards but the perception of people is the same as if builds get nerfed/buffed when that happens, just for every single build.
The poster above also does not seem to understand that the nerf to ward was at the high end but a buff on the low end.
It was also for a specified skill not ward in general, though high end ward decay was increased (a nerf) while low end ward decay was reduced (a buff).
The only ward nerf that happened mid-cycle was to Profane Veil (which was a bug), so that shouldn’t matter to your VK. The ward nerf (as Llama pointed out, it was also a buff at the low end) was with 1.1.
You must have had access to a very early PoE2, because the last time LE had 10k players was 4 months ago, when it was still in the downward trend of no new content.
I also wonder what you think PoE1 did wrong, because they now have 10k players daily when they had 20k+ before PoE2 came out.
Unless… maybe it’s a natural reflection of players switching games to try out the new things. Seems weird that ARPG players would do that instead of no-lifing the same game for ever and ever and ever, but it might be a new thing.
1- They did buff others. Which is why you got builds that weren’t even viable in 1.0 and were suddenly pretty good in 1.1, like Shield Bash and others that became a lot better like animate weapon.
2- No build that was nerfed became a turd sandwich, except for the Profane Veil abusing one, which was obviously a bug, and the Ballista radius abusing one, which was also a bug. Every other build that was nerfed was still very strong and will likely be nerfed again.
Divine bolts ward still does 1k+ easily, lots of falconer builds still do 1k+ easily, etc.
