Also the Osprix Firecaller I referenced earlier is actually known as the “Ascendant Embermage” – And to quote Conan: “To Hell with You.”
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There are most likely always spiekes in class choices. I was a happy Druid and played several builds and had fun and then there was “Druid OP!” and “This build is on the top of the leaderboards” stuff going on that lead to nerfs the class is suffering from today. Is Druid viable? Yes! Has Druid an equaly high tank and dmg potential like other classes? No!
From my point of view a lot of work needs to be done in the balancing department but then again the game is pretty easy and I wouldn’t mind if they nerf all the classes so much that corruption 300-400 is the equivavelent of 1k corruption.
I don’t think a single person that’s put in over 1k hours into LE, that isnt a dev on the game, at this point believes they have any abiltiy to balance the game in remotely anyway that would be good for the game.
I could make changes to the game that benefit me, but literally everyone would hate them.
This entire thing misses the entire point of games, they’re about fun, not about numbers being aligned. Those of us who play theg ame way too much, and like to push for achievements and competition are gonna focus on the numbers, becuase that helps us attain our goals. But the game isn’t, and shouldnt, be designed around that. It should be designed around what the vast majority of people want.
The vast majority of people don’t want to see a bunch of us sweaty nerds telling the devs exact changes that are needed to make every build viable.
We’d also be so terrible at it it’s not even funny.
Not to mention that as soon as anything competitive actually exists, it’s not in anyone who’s competing best interest to bring up broken things.
But on a less negative side, can you share some examples of specific balance changes you’d make to the game to make it better trundle? Your idea only works if the capability of it can be shown in some aspect, if you have the insight to match your idea, I’d love to see what you’ve come up with. I know theres things I think need changes, but i know that any ideas ive had are pretty terrible.
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I wish I could give this a hundred likes. Games shouldn’t be designed around people who have forgotten how to have fun unless they’re using the game as a proxy UI for a spreadsheet, endlessly wringing their hands over how balanced or equal or fair the imaginary numbers are.
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Personally the first suggestions I would make would to look at all the skills that have the least playrate and find out why nobody is playing them. I would probably suggest that things like Acid flask, static, tempest strike, cinder strike, volcanic orb and so on would need some adjustments (buffs) and some changes made so they can become more competitive skills and be included in more builds, other than not used at all or as an afterthought because a build had a spare skill slot.
I would revert the change that made targeted glacier unplayable because you cannot get crit damage. Targeted glacier was one of the builds I enjoyed a long time ago; now if you want to go targeted glacier, you have no crit damage- this is essentially a dead end because you cannot scale damage no matter what direction you go currently as non crit. Changes like that which effectively make a specific playstyle obsolete (like targeted glacier) I think should be avoided because it removes builds from the game. For me, I really enjoyed playing targeted glacier, but having to play regular glacier where you are pseudo-half-melee and get close to monsters, I cannot stand that playstyle. So while even glacier is one of the strongest builds currently, I don’t play it because I don’t find it fun when its not targeted. It feels inconvenient having to run close to every mob when you are supposed to be a ranged class.
I think non-crit builds need way more support other than one 1x1 idol for 20% more damage. Right now non-crit builds do not exist and there should be more support for them as an alternative to going crit.
There are also other changes that pidgeonhole a player’s options when deciding how to play a build that I am not a fan about. One example is judgement- most of its best nodes, more damage and removing cooldown, are put behind a node that consumes so much mana that the player basically has to play at negative mana most of the time, yet there is no alternative way to build judgement for the most part. Having the player be forced into a manaless playstyle instead of giving them different options and directions for them to build the skill in ways they prefer with variable strengths and weaknesses I think is not a good design. I also do not like the fact they have also ‘forced’ all judgement players to gear for healing effectiveness when there isn’t even enough item budget to gear for both healing effectiveness as well as crit / crit multi. Personally I have been pushed away from that skill, a skill I played for a long time, because the manaless playstyle has been forced, as well as healing effectiveness requirement forced onto me.
I think there should be more defined class/mastery identities, and bigger and obvious strength/weaknesses across certain masteries / skills. Capping block or glancing blow or stacking alot of ward is universally useful, but I think that masteries that are built around that identity should excel much more at their core identity than others.
This is already known, but more power should be put into the player’s equipment and idols, and pulled from the character itself. Lizard has already made a video in the past where taking off all his gear and even taking major points from his skills, his character was still able to clear what is supposed to be very difficult content, because most of his character power was coming from his talent tree.
Its hard to give suggestions in such a general scope, but approaches towards some things that get alot of attention such as when a new, powerful build emerges which tops leaderboards and is being played by alot of players, is seen and probably is overperforming to a large degree, to look at why the skill/build is being played so widely and whether it has some novel factors which players enjoy before ‘curbing’ its power. There are many skills that are so far behind the power curve that even significant buffs could not bring them to an overpowered state, so constant adjustments patch to patch would be very interesting to see how players start to incorporate them into builds.
Higher corruption and beating generally very difficult content should yield better rewards than simply ‘more rarity’ or ‘more drops’. Alot of player satisfaction and excitement comes from overcoming a difficult hurdle and reaching an impending expected reward. I think with higher corruption should introduce different things you would not see in lower corruption, such as more powerful shrines with more powerful effects, for example.
This makes no sense to me. More builds being viable and more possibilities is going to give players more things to do, more possibilities to theorycraft, which is half the game, designing your character. The numbers skills do don’t correlate to a spreadsheet, but more whether people are going to bother playing those skills because they are viable in the first place. Why would anyone play volcanic orb in its current state when glacier is on offer? Anyone new to the game with an ‘idea’ to create a poison flask build is going to have a very bad time, no matter which direction they decide to pursue or how much research they do into gearing or planning their build.
Everyone is going to have their own opinions for what is good and bad for the game and that’s the point of a discussion group, to discuss it. And obviously the suggestions are going to be made for the good of everyone, for a diverse meta, not some imagined ‘gatekeeping’ or ‘elitism’ because somehow insight coming from players with alot of experience is somehow going to be detrimental to someone who is less experienced or impact them in some negative way. Or shooting down an entire idea because your projection is that a group of people coming together for the purpose of improving things would somehow become a selfish group only pursuing personal interests, politics, or elevating themselves in someway over everyone else. It just seems to me like imagined scenarios that don’t need to be addressed until they happen, IF they happen, in full view of everyone without everyone objecting in some way.
Of coarse I am trying to say this with full respect to the developers and still respecting that it is their game, at the end of the day it was just a suggestion and an idea/solution to what I saw as an ongoing trend that I don’t see ending anytime soon- new build/direction/idea/approach appears, → said build is percieved to be too strong, → said build nerfed, entire archaeotype disappears along with whatever novel idea that propogated it into the spotlight because players were enjoying it for whatever reason.
Similar philosophy with weak/underrepresented builds. Nobody plays said builds because fundamental/inconvience problem/no way to scale/not fun to play, → nobody continues to play said builds, → said related skills and archeotypes recieve no attention because they are not on anyones radar, → months, years later the skills are still not included across any major build guides, videos or anything that anyone is regularly playing or is popular.
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So this isn’t about balance then? You just want to change a skill because for you personally it’s not fun anymore.
Do you think the devs don’t do this?
Agreed. This isn’t some balance idea though, it’s just a general point. You could leave feedback on that in the forums or discord for sure.
Again, this isn’t balance. This is something you personally don’t enjoy you want changed.
Devs have already referenced this and are slowly working towards changing it to be this way, last patch made some small steps towards it (not enough yet for sure, but it’s not an overnight process).
Agreed again. But again, that’s not about balance.
Like overall I don’t disagree with like, anything you’ve said with these ideas. Either it’s a thing I agree I’d also like changed, in regards to where power is, where loot is rewarded etc… Or it’s just somethign you personally don’t enjoy as much now, and want the playstyle changed/a playstyle added, so you can have fun, which I can’t disagree with because your opinion is your opinion. But none of that has anything to do with balancing things, it’s just general points about things you’d like to be different, becuase you’d enjoy them more if they were.
Nothing you’ve suggested, outside of looking at why certain things arent played as much (which the devs obviously are working on), has anything to do with balancing stuff to make thigns more equal. And that’s the point people are bringing up against you before this, that this overall idea you’ve had about some balance council, wouldn’t work. Because we’re people just gaming, we don’t know anything about game design, all we know is what we personally vibe with, and what we don’t personally vibe with. And that feedback is welcome, theres multiple places you can post that now, what does a balance council thing even add, if all that it comes up with is ‘well I can’t play this skill how I use to, and I miss that, can we have it back?’
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The horrible sentence was supposed to mean is this; that there are plenty of folks already that play this game like it was their job and give lots of feedback. I don’t want to one of those because I already have a job.
I think the question everyone posting to this thread should be asking themselves is; are the devs at the point where they are ready to have these in depth balance discussions? What might be higher priority for the devs right now? What might be higher priority for the players right now?
When/if they get to the point where they have the luxury of focusing on ‘balance’ (they’ll need to understand what they want balance to mean first), they’ll have to ask themselves at least two questions; 1) has any other developer done balance successfully, 2) do we have the skill set to do balance successfully.
And finally, hurtfully, my opinion is that getting the opinions on balance from 50 or 100 or 500 people is probably the worst possible way to do balance and no one, with all the modern tools available to dev shops, should be thinking that is a good idea. Feedback from players is just one part of making games better.
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@AuroraClaire has said it very well in the last post. I personally like the current version of Judgement very much. I play it alongside other skills as a heal and DoT skill or as main skill with maximum mana consume to elevate CG damage into the sky. It feels really nice. The skill is awesome and I don’t want it to be changed. Nothing is needed in terms of balance since the skill us performing great.
The most important balance discussion for me currently would be how to bring ailments into line with each other by simultaneously make them stand out against each other.
Frostbite seems to be really weak. Damned is hard to build around. Poison got hit really hard. Bleed seems ok while ignite is said to be underperforming. What should I do with all the shock chance nodes that are everywhere on gear, passives and skills, when there’s only max 10 stacks now and I can reach that cap with minimal investment?
But everything regarding ailments is new since the 0.9 patch. And so it has to settle down a bit before it makes sense to talk about. There are already discussions going on here that people are welcome to join.
Also an inportant balance discussion imho is about mana management on Mage.
Regarding weak skills, I’d imagine the devs have an internal list of skills that need a rework.
Everything I get from your post is personal preference and that you want a tool to be able to change it in your direction. But you already have that tool. Pick a topic and write down your suggestions. If you can get enough support, things could change.
But there’s no way an external committee will help the devs to save resources. They would have to put in a lot of resources to manage that stuff, to review the feedback and moderate the group, as already seen with the CT.
It’s impossible that a committee would be able to suggest balance changes that then go into the game unfiltered. You still would have to have test cycles. Put in more people with more ideas and the dev time will explode. We would never ever see a 1.0 release. Not everybody can be a Chieftain.
On top of all that I can just imagine the shitstorm on the internet when EHG would post these plans. Content Creator A will rant when Content Creator B got chosen but A wasn’t. Who would judge and explain who got chosen and why? We also saw that with the CT programm. Thats one reason there are no forum batches for CTs anymore.
As a final note I want to underline that EHG always appreciates the feedback of the average Joe. It’s not the goal to develop the game towards the 1% that live in the game.
Yeah, and still people don’t run around naked and throw away their equipment. There’s some dude on steam forums that spams the video link at any given moment.
I don’t say that this is a non issue. But if you’re not able to present me 3 players that play different masteries without gear in empowered mono while they have fun, I’d say its not that big of an issue.
Foe has beaten Rayeh naked. So the Boss should be massively buffed, I guess.
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I know it doesn’t, because you’re the kind of player that @AuroraClaire is talking about, around whom the game should not be designed or catered, because you are the minority. And the reason you can’t understand this is contained here:
Because they like Volcanic Orb, and don’t like Glacier.
I know this is probably super hard for you but believe it or not most people do not spend their leisure time with their leisure activity mired in obsessions with what is most viable, most optimal, or most powerful. Their idea of fun is not based entirely on getting the biggest numbers even if they hate how they get them. They make decisions based on what appeals to them, and what appeals most to them are things like “Skill X looks cooler than Skill Y” or “I like Fire, Ice is lame”, and not “That skill is QuadraPlatinum-S Tier Omegalulz Pogchamp Julra DPS Over 9000 instead of only Scrub A+ Tier Julra DPS 8999.67”. Someone like you says “viable” and it means something wildly different than what someone like that would mean, if they even think of the concept at all, which they often don’t.
You could not be living in a higher Ivory Tower but you want a group of players like you, who don’t get, can’t get, about how the majority of people just play games - without consulting a spreadsheet or tier list or viability heat map or Casey Kasem - to be the ones with the loudest voices about balance, and you’re sitting there baffled that anybody would think that group could only speak in its own extremely narrow interests.
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I’d also add that ANY discussion of balance, in any shape or form, must come with an actual statement/measure of what BALANCE means/looks like for the Devs. Otherwise, you have no gauge at all for what is or is not over/under balanced.
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Ah man yeah kinda off topic but, I really don’t like that video or the idea of pushing power from trees to equipment. Try doing that same thing with a melee skill like Rive or swipe, do it with Detonating arrow, do it with a Disintegrate build and remove Ignavar’s head.
Most of the builds flat damage came from vitality, even after removing the gear he had like 50 vitality which was more base dmg than his weapon.
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Suppose this committee exists. Suppose all 300 members are the absolute pinnacle of human intellect and gaming ability. Nothing but the best of the best. No average joes allowed. No softcore players either. In fact, even hardcore account found players aren’t allowed. If you play anything other than hardcore character found you are inferior and your opinion is rightfully dismissed. Oh also no lich, bladedancer, or druid players. Those classes are easy mode and for average joes only.
This committee of the gaming elite gathers to begin their work. Obviously I am on this council. I step forward, shoulders broad, eyes glistening, pants tight, temple veins rapidly pulsating to provide my fearsome intellect with adequate nutrition. I unfurl a weathered papyrus scroll. My high test alpha male voice booms, “Bhuldar’s Wrath nerfs will be reverted and earthquake will be buffed!” The reasoning for this proposed change needs no explanation as all 299 of the other members instantly understand its implications and foresee all ends. Without even a moment of deliberation the motion is passed 300 to 0 (disagreement is impossible because of our high IQ’s). There are two possibilities:
1) EHG can’t reject our proposal.
This is obviously nonsense. In no world would the developers completely relinquish control over their own game, leet though the council may be. Which leads us to:
2) EHG retain the right to reject any and all proposals.
In which case this elite gaming committee exists in no greater capacity than the Feedback and Suggestions forum. You may handwave about how the gaming prowess of the committee would lend more credence to its suggestions and consequently result in more actionable changes by the developers, but so long as they retain the right to say “no” the committee would not serve any useful purpose.
Bear in mind this is all assuming “perfect” functioning of the committee. The reality is that there would be no shortage of disagreement between members and, if any power is given to the committee, no shortage of politics. I want Tempest Strike buffs as much as the next guy but as @BroncoCollider already pointed out, this is a well-meaning but flawed idea.
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Wow, Bronco. It’s almost as if you’ve been watching in-game chat… or reading the forums… XD
If I had a nickel for every time I have seen something like that… well … I could cover a Tesla in nickels.
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A Tesla covered in nickels would be a pretty funny art installation
Only if it were floating through space playing any of the various Spaceman songs.
I have basically the same experience with Blade Dancer (I mostly play Rogue builds) and the utter evisceration of the Shadow Cascade Shadow Dagger build and then the Crit Shadow Cascade one and then the Flurry Bleed one and then the Lightning Shruiken Shotgun one and then the Umbral Blade Poison one and then every single Marksman one, due to crit vulnrability being utterly trashed for no reason. 
Side note, I know Shadow Dagger is still a great build, even after the 500 nerfs to it, thanks to Umbral Blade now days. But before the skill was introduced, the archetype was effectively dead, after the Shadow Cascade nerf.
There is nerfing an OP build/mechanic and there is utterly destroying an archetype.
That said, “elite” players often are tunnel visioning and are unreliable for unbiased balancing opinion. Many games have fallen in the trap of listening to the 1% of the 1% players and have payed the consequences. PoE is just that case. Because 1% of the 1% make all the “viable” builds, GGG balance the game around them and from over 200+ skills end up having like 10 viable ones.
League of Legends and Dota2 have been the same way for years. They have idk, at that point over 100 heroes? And 90% of them are utter trash, compared to the meta, because they balance the game around the professional scene.
Let the devs make their game and smack them on the head when they do something stupid (metaphorically 
).
I agree with you general point, but dota 2 is renowed for just how many heroes are viable, the approach the devs have to that game is really not supporting your argument, dota 2 is the exception.
Actually, it is perfectly on topic: the 0.1% full time players trying to push their view and unable to realise it doesn’t concern the 99.9% “average joes”.
If you’re not sure where you stand, check your character. Is he still using any kind of equipment? Then you are an abject average joe casual and your opinion doesn’t matter.
That, or Lizard’s video is utter bullshit.
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I don’t think that 1 Rogue with 10 passive points allocated giving everyone free crit cap is no reason. Now if the revised crit vulnerability worked with your %increased crit then it’d probably be ok. Rogue would still hit crit cap fairly easily and other classes would have a much easier time.
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So there already being a CT program that most people dont know about where they get insider info, then ontop of that a Discord channel where you can pester devs and get insider information and then ONTOP of that again this person wants to create a LE council for even more hidden political bullshit?
no thanks
I only skimread the post/thread as its garbage, the devs already give ‘certain’ people already too much info/power
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