That’s good to know, thanks–I myself am engaging in feedback to better the game, but doing so in unproductive outlets is a waste of my time.
For this topic, I am not sure that it should be a problem that they’re doing major slashing now… better now than when there’s an economy to shatter. I think excessive negativity will shut people’s ears, too.
False. They talk to us. They respond to us (not to all questions or topics, but they respond). They sometimes talk personaly to us (or at least some of us).
EHG devs are the most active ive ever seen, i know of 4 people at GGG. I’ve chatted with at least 3 developers and i think that is SO cool! Ive seen them in streams, on discord, on reddit and here on the forums and its not just one or two people. Its closer to 10 or 20 different devs interacting in the community.
Oh, one other thing occurs to me in this topic!
For the longevity of the game, I hope builds that are viable and not OP in League 1 remain viable in League 2 all the way to League 10 if possible.
POE aims to lower top-end and their nerfs hit collateral damage and low-end creative builds. They have systems that create exponential multipliers and then do across-the-board changes that make the top end laugh and the bottom end cry.
I think cycling skills from League to League is not only unfun, but a moral hazard for business practices. Your fancy MTX for Skill A is no longer going to be used so you’re more tempted to buy fancy MTX for Skill B.
I think it’s the right time to do slashing right now. If not now, then when? I wouldn’t want them to do the slashing after the game has officially launched and you have your online character stored on their servers permanently.
Just give the feedback in a constructive manner without too much drama; they do listen but they are a small studio, and their resources and time are very limited compared to bigger studio. So I would rather they spend time working on solutions rather than debating with people up here.
Because no matter what the devs say, many vocal people on the forum won’t be satisfied, leading to endless debate.
I understand that a lot of people who come to LE have POE-TSD but three obviously broken builds getting nerfed in the middle of numerous other buffs is not a reason to act like the sky is falling.
Shadow Dagger BD is still really good too from personal experience… and this latest patch added a bajillion buffs through the new uniques and new sentinel skills, let alone the actual number buffs of which there were a ton. This ain’t it chief.
I haven’t really been following the balance too closely since I’m fairly new to the game, but I think there’s a worthwhile side discussion to have here: What does “balance” mean for the game?
I think really broadly speaking, for the sake of a balance discussion, games can be broken down into 3 main categories: Competitive Multiplayer Games, (not necessarily esports, just things where players are directly opposed to each other.) Cooperative Games, and Single Player Games.
In a competitive game, you absolutely need to keep the various options balanced in some way (not always necessarily making them equivalent, but that’s a deeper discussion) because if not, players playing OP strats ruin the game for everyone else.
In a Co-OP game, you need to keep choices reasonably balanced because otherwise you risk players playing weak builds ruining the game for their teammates and players who care about the meta policing others who just want to play what they want to play.
In a single player game though, (which aRPGs essentially are) you can’t ruin anyone else’s fun but your own. To be clear, that can still be a problem. Players will optimize the fun out of a game if you let them, but I think it’s a worthy starting point to recognize that some builds being too good doesn’t really hurt the game in the same way it hurts the other categories.
I think the critical questions to balance around in a single player game are:
Are there a variety of viable choices for playing at least the main intended content? People can push themselves with crazy builds all they want, but for most people, a good build will be one that can get to and run lv 100 content competently. Key to this point is actually more on the content side than the build side of balance. The main challenge of the game ought to be balanced around the intended power level of average builds, not the super OP ones and not the weakest. Otherwise the experience for most players will suck.
Does any build or style of play fundamentally trivialize the challenge or fun of the game? If you were playing Mario, and there were a power up that let you just walk to the end of the level without platforming or dealing with enemies, that would probably be pretty boring, especially if you could use it for every level. It would be especially bad if then the levels started being built around using this power up so that became the only way to play. See: PoE and how everything that can kill you pretty much just one shots you because otherwise players with screen clearing damage and infinite regen would never die.
Beyond those considerations… who cares if there’s some build out there that’s a decent bit ahead of the pack?
then they should just delete this forum and make the link take us all directly to reddit if that’s how they want their feedback.
same as above, but discord.
They already said that they read here. And they already prove it. We don’t need a formal response each topic. If they read, that’s the most important. Then, they decide what to do.
Trying new builds is part of the fun of an ARPG. There will always be something busted, because it’s all relative. Something will always seem OP. Just go with the flow, idk why people get so attached to builds.
That being said, I do agree that PoE screwed up nerfing things in the past. Builds should never become unplayable, but a lot of the nerfs cause people to overreact, in any game, not just PoE or LE. I don’t think every build should be able to complete the hardest content, that’s not a realistic goal to shoot for. It’s probably ideal but I don’t think its realistically possible to balance that well.
present the proof sir, because i have one increasingly dysfunctional class that gives counter-evidence to the idea that they read here.
Ha ha, no, don’t invert the charge of proof.
Many of us have seen devs interventions here, it’s up to you to prove that all this does not exist.
You are putting the accusation, I am not.
then don’t claim that there is any. you said “IT’S BEEN PROVEN”
and then said you don’t need to produce any, that is the same as expressing a religious belief in the devs as gods.
produce the proof.
I will not go further, hacve a nice day! 
I won’t have a nice day until they fix my class.
Nerfs aren’t fun for sur. Bugfixes aren’t that greate either most of the time :). On the other hand this patch completly opened VK up for me and that’s a big gain. On top of this I like to play Druid even while i call the class shafted since the first time I’ve seen the Werebear tree. I just make it work somehow and can have fun with builds that aren’t fotm, over performing or broken.
Is Rogue realy fubar because of all the changes? I realy don’t think so and the devs revert some stuff sooner or later. I think it’s good to do such changes in a not released state but sadly some stuff lands on the cutting block.
Not sure whom you were referring to here, but it’s just as non-productive to condescend as it is to whine. Let’s stay on topic.
Werebear wasn’t working correctly and is still strong, I don’t think anyone is debating that. My biggest concern was wandering spirits (and isn’t even a build I play anymore); it wasn’t nearly as powerful as the “top” builds right now. Or maybe I built it wrong, I was using the interaction with spirit plague and death seal+WS but perhaps I missed something that pushed the build even more. It certainly never had infinite stacking for me, DID I miss something? It was nothing comparing to the current paladin javelin build, or the flame reave>sunwreath build, shaman avalanche autobomber, lots of rogue builds…
My complaint/concern/feedback is, considering it is early access/beta testing, I’d like to know if the level WS is at now is the expected power level for all builds to wind up at. If it is, I disagree with it and woopdy-doo, not my game and not my choice but I’d like to know before I invest more time into testing a game that I won’t want to play (and I believe this to be how many players feel when you say they’re whining). Is that so bad?
Really, we just like to be aware of where the game is headed during development, and completely slaughtering builds out of viability either 1)doesn’t affect you, you don’t play it or 2) feels bad for the people who are playing it. I’d certainly be more upset if I was still playing it, I’d feel like I wasted my time. Why do nerfs have to be so complete and destructive, rather than “balanced” which is what the aim is anyway?
For clarification, no build is considered “viable” by players if it can’t do at least SOME pushing in arena (100+)/push SOME corruption in monoliths (200+). Why? Because those are the endgame systems with recognition (arena) and gated loot (Orobobo).
The issue wasn’t so much with the core power of Wandering Spirits. It was strong, but not necessarily over the top. However it did have several issues that prompted us to rework it.
The number of spirits it kept up on average caused a lot of visual noise, especially in multiplayer, and especially with the spirits all casting Spectral Putrescence. This was particularly concerning in a class that also had other visually noisy options that could be used at the same time, such as large numbers of minions. We have to take edge cases like that into consideration, even if they’re not necessarily popular.
Because it could keep generating spirits constantly if used whenever it came off cooldown, it was often best to use it just press the button whenever it came off cooldown, or auto cast it. We prefer active abilities that go on the ability bar to either have an active component where there’s some decision making that goes into when or where to use it. Otherwise it may as well be a passive skill. This doesn’t mean we want the active component to always be something that you use frequently (e.g. it’s ok if skeletons rarely need to be re-summoned), but we don’t want it to be something where it’s best to just auto cast it a fixed interval, regardless of the situation.
The power of the Spectral Putrescence nodes warped both the power of the skill and the power of Poison Lich in general (alongside Spirit Plague’s stacking buffs). This meant we couldn’t buff other underpowered poison Lich skills and options without making the build as a whole overpowered.
Because of these reasons we wanted to shift power away from the average number of spirits, the uptime of the skill, and the Spectral Putrescence node, and move it into the damage of the individual spirits. As it turns out, we didn’t increase the power of the individual spirits enough and as a consequence, the long cooldown and the random nature of the skill can make it feel very underwhelming. It’s definitely not at the power level we’re aiming for right now and there will be more buffs for it, either in subsequent hotfixes or in 0.8.4, or both.
It certainly never had infinite stacking for me, DID I miss something?
The infinite stacking for damage over time Lich builds came from the Pestilence node on the Spirit Plague tree. This was originally intended to give a global stacking buff of 15% increased damage over time when you cast Spirit Plague, but due to a miscommunication ended up applying whenever Spirit Plague was applied to a new enemy, which could happen very frequently as Spirit Plague spread on death. The increased damage led to Spirit Plague killing more quickly causing it to spread more quickly and give you stacks of the buff more quickly. This all resulted in some people gain astronomical amounts of increased damage over time.
To resolve this issue, we put a cap on the buff and reduced the amount of damage over time it gave. Unfortunately that change has had a knock on effect on the power of a lot of other damage over time Lich skills, including the new Wandering Spirits, which were otherwise pretty weak. Some of those were buffed in 0.8.3’s hotfixes, but are probably still not up to the correct power level. We want these skills to be good in their own right rather than their power depending on something like the Pestilence buff.
Really, we just like to be aware of where the game is headed during development, and completely slaughtering builds out of viability
When an individual skill or build is a long way above the right power level, it can be very difficult to know whether it’s power needs to come down by 40% or 70%, and if we pick the wrong one two things can happen
When we do pick the wrong one, we try to make corrections to it, but both can still cause people to feel bad after the initial patch, because we’ve either had to make multiple nerfs in a row, or their build that used to be really strong has ended up underpowered. The best approach of course is to try to avoid builds ending up crazily overpowered in the first place, but with so many interconnecting possibilities it can be challenging to achieve this consistently.
Good thing we can say that they never talk to us or explain their reasoning or anything. That’s just crazy talk!