not really from what i saw. they just did what they assumed the community wanted.
which is why it didnt work.
affixes, skills and classes are different.
the affixes depend on skills from classes to actually work properly.
the balance people have been asking for is mostly skills and/or masteries, most of them being fairly specific on what needs to be done ‘e.g. small increase/reduction to the numbers already there’.
i agree, but i will elaborate on some of the balance issues since you brought up a lot of things not really in the direction of what i mean by balance.
its just not reasonable when devs make something like converting HP to ward regen + retention + other ward generators, any sort of testing on this and you will clearly see its broken, which they knew before launch but didnt do anything about it.
a “reasonable balance” i would have expected would be just flat conversion,
e.g. 20% HP converts to ward based on amount converted (1k hp converts to 800 hp 200 ward).
a “reasonable balance” i would have expected would be 0 cooldowns and lower mana costs on melee skills.
instead, you have to build for these, which uses stat slots that could be used for more damage or defence.
so, yes, melee rogue has more defensive passives, but they are negated by the fact you have higher mana costs and cooldowns.
basically, LE has systems that are working against each other and i can see it.
just look at the rogue bladedancer mana costs and cooldowns, its as if that mastery is some sort of melee mage, even the specialization skill has a 0.7 cooldown on melee when both other masteries have 0 cooldown on their ranged skills.
how many builds actively use ‘shadow cascade’, none, why, because it can be triggered by other skills (mainly shift) and it uses too much mana to consistently use.
multishot can hit pretty much the entire screen and it has half the mana cost of shadow cascade which doesnt hit the entire screen and you have to be right next to the enemy to use it properly.
Hail of Arrows ‘is not a hit’ skill, majority of passives and affixes are ‘on hit’, which means this already has extremely limited builds and because of that, will always be behind compared to any other build.
it has extremely high mana cost and the damage doesnt even come close to multishot without using multiple other skills to buff the damage from the node ‘Skystrike’, and thats because that node has a 1 off ‘hit’ trigger.
Dark quiver, this skill… just wow… i cant even begin to believe that this idea would be accepted in this kind of game.
i have never seen a game that you have to first wait and then run around collecting your buff and its only a 1 off, which means you have to keep collecting after each attack.
this should have been at least a 5 second buff after each collection or x uses without collection.
imagine if they did the collection with all other skills ‘e.g. use a skill and then wait for it to drop only after you pick it up, then it activates’.
just thinking about it in that way, will help anyone understand how inconvenient it is, even worse when you are surrounded with enemies that have aoe skills.
these are just some of balance issues with skills that are as clear as day.
once you get 1 system stable, then you work on the next.
nobody is saying balance the game over night or balance everything all at once, but when you can see issues that are clear as day in a game that literally just launched, thats something else, then you see nothing changing for multiple months and devs hiding behind ‘no balance mid-cycle’ excuse.
if you try put an entire pizza in your mouth all at once, of course it wont fit, but if you eat it 1 bite at a time, you will finish it, but when it takes 3-4 months for each bite, thats a different story.
a big part is not about the unforeseen combinations, its the ones that you can outright see in front of you, and anyone that wants to say certain issues are unforeseen combinations, they are just looking for a justifiable excuse.
when i started as rogue, i didnt even know what ward was or even how it worked and thought it was just like a shield for mages but it was weaker than hp because they dont have armor, so i ignored it and all items that gave it, then i started dying a little more often than i expected.
so, i started looking for where i could increase survivability, then i had a look at ward and found out that all defensive stats except endurance/threshold applied to it as well is it not having a cap, and i thought, they cant be serious.
i had a set ring that gives ward on hitting a shocked enemy and 1-handed swords that give ward on hit, all of a sudden my 1k hp went to 1k hp and 2k+ ward as long as im hitting enemies, i can basically have over 5k hp without investing anything into hp stats because they are almost redundant and take up suffix space.
started a new character equipped those swords and rings with something that shocked on hit, then i walked up to Lagon and face tanked him, then through everything 100-200-300-400+ corruption no problem, hit enemy and basically get endless hp, more attack speed = more hp.
as you can see from above, this is a very very easy to see issue.
the worst part is that they knew about it and didnt do anything like put a cap while they work on balancing it.
