I just don’t understand why developers so consistently tear down the best performing builds, and most fun because players prefer feeling powerful to feeling weak. This is a game, it is supposed to be fun, not a struggle.
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Because they want to have a balanced game.
If you have a single build that is more powerful than everything else, players will feel like they have to use that build or be left behind. Players using other builds will complain that they are weaker than the meta. Progression will be uneven - for things like the trading faction, those with the more powerful build will be more efficient than everyone else.
“Ah, but the game will never be balanced!” - Don’t think of balance as a “yes” or “no” condition. It’s a matter of how much imbalanced the game is, which often means nerfing the outliers, the most powerful skills, and buffing the least useful ones.
“But they nerf all the popular skills and only buff a few skills that nobody uses!” - In other words, they nerf the skills that are more powerful than all the others (and so are more used than the others, since players gravitate to the more powerful skills), and buff the skills that are less powerful (and so are less used than the others, again because players gravitate to the more powerful skills).
“But this is a single player game, who cares if someone is more or less powerful than me!” - Other than players feeling that their favourite class is weaker than another (which is something to take into account), there’s the matter of how quickly players progress through the game. Games are designed aiming at a specific difficulty - how much damage enemies do, how much health they have and how many enemies are there all work to create specific conditions. If those are too easy, players will feel bored and reach the end of the game too quickly, reducing its longevity. If those are too hard, players will feel frustrated and leave, also reducing the game’s longevity. Not only this require a lot of fine tunning, but also all this work goes through the window if you have a build that is a lot more powerful than everything else - should the developers balance the game around the overpowered build (and so the game would be harder than intended for everyone else) or around everyone else (and so the game would be easier than intended for those with the overpowered build)?
Due to all those factors, it’s important that the game becomes as balanced as possible. Thus the nerfs (and buffs).
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I have absolutely no regard for meta-slaves who physically cannot enjoy themselves unless they can brag to a multitude of people about how their e-peen is the biggest. If someone else’s build can beat T4 Julra in a minute and reach 500 Corruption, nobody should feel upset about someone who can do 15 seconds T4 Julra and 1,000 Corruption.
That being said, there are two major factors that go into balancing:
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The LE team has specified what corruption level it feels is appropriate, so that it can determine a good length of time people progress from farming their items to feeling their build is complete. Try to imagine how many monolith runs it takes to get to 1,000 Corruption, even with the new Monolith changes that allows a player to rise 48 Corruption at a time. If players have to grind that much until they reach something approximating a challenge, they will get bored easily and feel that the devs are “artificially padding the game to make up for a lack of decent content,” which is a legitimate issue, especially for a game as new (relative in the genre) as LE.
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The LE team has done a fantastic job in weaving their passive and skill trees to provide multiple approaches to fun gameplay. Yes, if some interactions suck, it’d be wise to buff them to give more playstyles a fun way to play the game. But if meta-slaves feel like the game is “solved” in that only one single path leads to fun and every other skill / interaction that isn’t the meta is a “trap,” it provides the “illusion of choice” fallacy (there was already another poster complaining about PoE in that “depth of gameplay is a lie” and you’re either a meta player or why even bother playing). In that, the game has this beautiful and illustrious choice tree, but meta-slaves chop down anything that isn’t meta and then mock the game for having “hurr-durr only one choice is relevant” playstyle. That hurts the game’s perception in both devs’ eyes (who went through all that effort to make multiple gamestyles fun) and in players eyes who like making multiple characters and seeing all of them flourish.
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From a coding pov and overall balance its actually better to nerf then to buff everything, because when you buff everything you aren’t actually going to know what the numbers are like until the players test them, but nerfing however you can know what the numbers will be prior to players getting hands on it.
So actually its far better to nerf across the board then to buff.
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You’ll be able to access your stash from the Nemesis menu itself when selecting to replace an Egg of the Forgotten with an item of yours. So you won’t have to go back to town or have the item on you in order to Empower it.
You can briefly see the little stash icon after clicking ‘Replace’ on the Egg of the Forgotten in the following clip:
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Nice with some needed bugfixes. Meningful nerfs to good mana regenration and no new tools for gaining mana means the meta will be stale and game will continue to seem complex at first glance but actually lack build creativity because mana regen shohorns you into developer premade builds. If you want there to be premade builds like d3 thats ok but thats not whats being communicated.
Personally my favorite class is and has always been, since I started playing rpgs, a necromancer. I’m pretty sure that isn’t a meta-slave, and it certainly didn’t play anything like some of the powerful builds seem to.
I don’t disagree with you and understand your points. That said, the sheer volume of changes in the upcoming patch makes it clear this isn’t a refinement but a major shakeup. I don’t think that bodes well for the game.
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Diablo 4 did the same thing and tanked their game so hard they had to come out with an expansion one year after release of the base game to attempt to recoup some of their losses. When you nerf perceived fun, you lose players. Especially if you are only making balance changes once every cycle. There are no mid-cycle updates, and they last 6(?) months? It’s bad from any perspective.
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Well, now I’ve seen the Shaman patch notes and I’m still disappointed.
Definitely we’ll need to be playing with totem/totems.
Definitely will need to recast totem every three seconds.
If playing with Maelstrom, definitely will need to maintain that with constant attention as none of the nodes/changes allow for a way to sustain Maelstrom via other means.
And I’ll have to do all that while trying to melee.
I don’t need that headache. My hands/wrists will thank me.
I think I’ll just sit out this season, I find myself just not able to give a shit.
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Yeah good luck with that, lil’ bud.
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Not cool, Squishy. Let’s behave. 
Objectively, it is playable, as Mr. Psojed told you. Just imagine there are other people with other motivations playing the same game. That is OK.
Getting a medal for performance is perhaps not something they are striving for.
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Perhaps there is another solution? Why not try it out?
Perhaps, other mastery? You know, there are 15 of them?
Shaman or nothing… It is a bit reductive take on the game…
Your item: You get it and your minions get it.
Your minion that gets stats from the item on you: ‘for you’ in this case is the minion, so it gets it. Your minion however does NOT have minions so the ‘your minions’ in this case is the minion’s minion. If it doesn’t have any they won’t get it.
so essentially you get it once. Your minion gets it twice. If your minion has minions (only one I know of that does this is scorpions) they get it.
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No. The priority system isnt changing. It still goes from top to bottom priority wise.
Those numbers are nothing more tha. A QoL to help players see the priority order better. Lower the number is the higher on the priority list it is.
Ur filter will still work the way it is
You say that but your “perspective” still doesn’t change the fact that from a developing and coding pov its better to nerf across the board then buff across the board, which is literally all i was talking about.
I don’t know why you would use “tanked numbers” for the reason Blizzard announced a DLC 1yr into D4, because the EXACT same thing happened in D3 and in D2 aswell, they always bring out an expansion 1 year after a diablo game its kinda stock standard so im just going to guess that you aren’t an older gamer like myself whos played ARPGS since the dawn of there creation.
The fact of the matter remains.
It is far easier for a dev team to nerf across the board then buff across the board, literally talk to ANY dev team that has EVER EXSISTED and they will say the same thing.
I just find it funny that heaps of you are crying about this patch when this is one of the most detailed and biggest changes ive ever seen for a .1 FIRST PATCH after release.
The devs made the right choice in nerfing everything, the game is FAR too easy and its good that they understand that.
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If that were actually true, the players you’re claiming to speak for would be perfectly happy taking any build and demolishing the 300 Corruption timelines that the Devs have stated is their balancing point. If they couldn’t see their damage numbers and Corruption level, there is exactly zero difference in the actual gameplay experience of “feeling powerful” between demolishing 300 Corruption Echoes and 1000 Corruption Echoes. If just “feeling powerful” were the actual goal, the arbitrary damage numbers and Corruption level that you get it at are irrelevant. If you’re blasting through 300 Corruption echoes, find a massive upgrade, and can now blast through 600 Corruption echoes, what is actually different in your gameplay experience? The answer is nothing.
The truth exactly what @Tree said - What the players you claim to speak for want is not the raw experience of power in gameplay. It’s to compare their fake numbers to the fake numbers of other players and come out on top.
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I agree with you 100%.
What this game needs is proper endgame with challenging bosses and encounters. Not numbers game where you grind corruption to thousands fighting trash mobs with more %hp playing cookie cutter build.
No wonder people were complaining about campaign and normal monos if they saw that endgame starts at 1000 corruption lol.
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Yes, “pal”, but that’s a giant leap (for mankind) to get from there to “the devs don’t want any build to be able to go past 300c”. Especially given what they’ve said about builds hitting >1k corruption.
Given the OP builds are reaching way too high compared to what the devs intend, yes. How’s balancing your game going BTW?
No, that’s why you don’t leave the instance if you don’t need to (ie, have finished the mono).
Nope, that’s not how it works.
Sure they did & you would know since you’ve tried them on the CT server.
Yes.
Absolutely! But if every build could reach X with a similar amount of effort, then where X is is entirely arbitrary. It could be 10, 100 or 1,000, it really doesn’t matter. If you want to feel more powerful then you stay at a lower X, if you want to see how far you can get you go for a higher value of X. What if that arbitrary value of X was constantly dropping items that the player felt were upgrades?
Sorry, how did they nerf mana regen?
And more variety in endgame.
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I’m not saying this to say I disagree with you, but I do think it’s worth pointing out that 1000 Corruption being “the start of endgame” is more of a sweatlord standard than the one most people are likely playing against, and one that could only be set because of wildly overperforming builds.
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I also don’t think that. But most people saw streamers doing 1000s on falconer or warlock and probably wanted to do the same.
For me endgame starts as soon as you get to end of time zone 
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