At the risk of sounding rude rather than blunt, who cares what the developers want? The customer is the one who decides if something feels good or not.
What the developers really want, at the end of the day, is customers’ time, attention, and money. If they want that, then the only thing that matters is what the customers want.
Probably gamers that want devs who give a shit about what they’re doing rather than dialling it in & basing their decisions on metrics, large data sets & shudder marketing or focus groups.
That’s not the only thing the developers want though, they also want to be able to make the game they want to make, not have it devolve into the lowest common denomentator in order to chase the “wider market”.
Also, the customer is not always right, sometimes the customer is being an entitled arsehat (not that I’m saying you are, but sometimes some people are).
Hype 
Fact. A lot of times they have no idea what they want until a dev gives it to them and they go “Woah this is so cool.” Devs are usually pretty smart on what’s good or bad.
In most video games discussions customers is most of the time not right.
I love direction they are taking with game, while EHG are clearly newbies in making video game and being a developer. I can clearly see that they are arpg players with actual knowledge and don’t want to repeat same mistakes some other games did.
This changes are made not for just 1.1 in mind but later cycles. In road map there is info about monolith rework. So grinding corruption to absurd amounts is probably going to end either way and we will progress entirely different.
raises hand
I do! Games are ultimately better when both player feedback is listened to, appreciated and occasionally implemented & when Devs have a clear vision and understanding of what their game wants to be and do.
If gamers had their way 100% of the time, most games would be utterly ruined.
I’m 100% an outlier in this, so that’s a full disclosure, but this is exactly why I can’t stand pop culture. Because to cater to the largest number you have to reach the lowest common denominator.
In my films, in my music, in my books, in my games, I want a director, a songwriter, an author and developers that have a vision that they want to tell and go for it. If it fails because ‘enough’ (that’s key for me) people don’t play, than it fails. I’d rather have that than the soulless grind of pop music, marvel movies and what not.
One of the reasons I love Crate Entertainment is that very early on with Grim Dawn they had a chance to do some things that could have made them a AAA. But they said, no, we’re making enough money, and this way we can stick to dream of creating the game we want.
So far EHG has demonstrated that to me. I hope this continues. Not that they shouldn’t listen to the players that play the game, but always with the goal of them creating the game THEY want to play.
They’d also likely grind to a halt since group A wants X & group B doesn’t want it with equal passion, who’s right? 
Askin’ the big questions all the entitled gamers fail to grasp, I like it.
I mean, what did you expect for shaman?
Those are sorta core themes with shaman.
Shaman summons totems and gets in the fray, maelstrom can be cast both with warcry and letting you cast it every few seconds but getting several stacks. you can maintain 8-12 stacks without ever casting more then twice every 5 seconds.
I dont think shaman is that great in general, but it def has gotten enough tools to be more then good enough now.
I think if you dont wanna use totems or maintain buffs shaman just isnt for you and wont ever be, totems are one of if not its core identity.
Season of the nerf, cant wait.
Cool. What I - a customer - want is a game where extreme outlier builds, skills, items, etc are brought into line, regardless of their popularity, including and especially without regard to meta-slaves and people playing Last Spreadsheepoch instead of Last Epoch. So I - a customer - am getting what I want. So you should be on board with that, right? Because I’m a customer, and what I want is the only thing that matters. Right?
But of course you’re not on board with that, because when you say “The only thing that matters is what the customers want”, what you actually mean is “The only thing that should matter is what I want”.
Nice work on the balancing part of things. I’m not that impressed by everything else and other stuff looks rather bad. I think this Season is a hard pass for me.
The Healing Hands nerfs are an example of what I don’t like to see in game design; multiple simultaneous heavy handed nerfs to the same thing, the “nerf it to the ground” / nuke it from orbit approach. It was OP, by a lot. It Needed a heavy handed nerf, and I think any reasonable person expected it to receive one. But we get the updated ward decay formula:
Which combined with the nerf to Frostbite Shackles takes the theoretical, all T4 Legendaries with T7 perfect affixes version of the build from 220,000 ward (stable) to 40,000.
Then, it gets the base healing cut in half (along with the increased healing node).
Then, it gets the conversion set to 20% of what it was.
All told, that’s 1/10th the ward generation of the previous amount. Which, when plugged into the new formula, means the theoretical, pie in the sky perfect version of the build is able to maintain a stable 9,000 ward.
Now, that’s fine-ish, certainly. But my lowly level 90 with imperfect gear healing hands paladin goes from being able to maintain 9,000 ward (stable) off 3,000 ward per second to being able to maintain 1,350 ward off 300 ward per second. Which, needless to say, is a huge nerf, to the point where I do not expect that character to be viable and to be able to clear dungeons and empowered monos any longer.
I get the idea of ‘it was way OP for a cycle, we’ll make absolutely certain it isn’t for a second one’, but nerfing builds into the ground to where they’re not just no longer OP but no longer viable at all isn’t what I’m personally looking for from a balance standpoint.
The portion of my post you quoted is self-evident. The word for those who prefer feeling weak would be masochist, and they are extreme outliers in society.
I have 7 characters.
Paladin - Was playing a Smite based Paladin using Healing Hands for survivability. Nerfed into the ground, expected, but regardless, absolutely gutted to the point where that character I expect isn’t viable any longer.
Necromancer - Was playing a fire based “zoo” necromancer with skeletons, skeleton mages, golems, volatile zombies, and infernal shade. I got a buff to the HP of Skeletons and Skeleton Mages but they weren’t dying anyway, and with Impatience getting removed I lose 1/2 the ROF on Skeleton Archers firing off Fire Arrows. All told, a major nerf.
Druid - Been playing around with a few different builds here, Spirit Thorns Spriggan and Werebear (lightning or physical) being the primary ones. Warcry’s cooldown was massively increased, and the Boar passive being locked away means survivability drops significantly. All told, a major nerf.
Sorcerer - Running a Meteor / Spreading Flames Sorc. Huge buff in damage from the mastery change. Significant increases in ward generation. Specific buffs to Spreading Flames insteractions. Got buffed by a fair amount.
Marksman - Running a Puncture / Hail of Arrows bleed build. The concentration change is actually a nerf for that character. Barbed arrows looks like it could be a buff. Nothing else has really changed for that character, who was struggling mightily compared to everyone else. Overall, neutral.
Runemaster - Was running a Glacier / Frost Wall Cold DOT Runemaster. Significant drops in ward generation and reductions in freeze chance mean it’s massively nerfed, caught up in the crossfire of Frost Claw Runemaster even though that wasn’t my build.
Spellblade - Playing a Fire Aura stacking Flame Reave Spellblade. The Flame Walker helps max fire res shred and frees up a blessing, thus a buff. The Incinerating Aura change is a major nerf at his current Int level. Huge reductions in Ward generation across the board, less optimal passive point usage needed to replace the survivability losses, all told a nerf.
So, across 7 characters, you have 5 which were nerfed, one which is mostly neutral and might have a small buff, and one which received significant buffs. Ironically the buffed character was my 2nd strongest, but it was not popular and thus the buffs. I expect to see a lot of meteor / spreading flame sorcs next cycle, and I expect it to be nerfed into the ground afterwards.
Regardless, my point is this: Yes, there are buffs. Yes, some builds were buffed. But based on what I’m seeing, it’s far more likely that a given character and build was nerfed than it is that it was buffed, even if it’s off meta.
It is interesting to me that what you want most, based on your post, is for other players to not have fun unless you approve of their playstyle. Even more interesting is how prevalent your point of view is, not only in regard to games but in regard to life. I find that viewpoint to be extremely disturbing.
Have I missed a line like “we adjusted the favor costs of prophecies”?
Exalteds were way overpriced in those. Also it seems like the bad base type rare prophecies stay (mostly) the same?
What’s interesting to me is you completely do not understand irony. He wasn’t “claiming” anything. He was pointing out to the previous comment that blanket statements and mass generalizations tend to bite you in the derrière.
But, please, do continue.
50k ???
my paladin HH was able to generate 200k ward 
BTW the new ward formula will block every attempts to troll the mechanic at around 20-30k, after that the decay will be too hard to counter.