The recent nerf to Thicket of Blinding Light went wayyy too far. Halving the damage or reducing the range would have been reasonable. Doing both AND adding the damage fall off makes the build unplayable.
Because of that, I want to talk about how retroactively nerfing items so that all versions of it, including existing ones in legacy league, feels awful to the players. I had a fun build but immediately as the patch dropped that build is completely and utterly unplayable beyond 0 corruption without giga investment. And even with investment it feels awful to play.
Builds shouldnât be rendered unplayable.
One might point out that not retroactively nerfing the item can greatly affect legacy leagueâs economy but to that I want to talk about other arpgs like Path of Exile where legacy items remain untouched and unnerfed. Rather than harming the game, this actively incentivizes players to play in the new fresh league every time since they can get their hands on valuable items that may or may not get nerfed in the future and thus gain value.
A large portion of Last Epochâs player base plays Circle of Fortune (based on an unofficial reddit poll showing 71%). I know its not fair to say âbecause most people play CoF who cares about the merchant guild playersâ but the fact that a massive amount of players donât engage with the economy definitely needs to be taken into account.
The last thing I want to mention is the impact of these nerfs on offline play. With no merchant guild at play, there is absolutely no downside for letting players play with unnerfed items. Anything players do in offline mode has absolutely zero impact on other players so why shouldnât they be allowed to actually have fun and play a build they enjoy?
I hope this gets at least some sort of consideration. Thanks for reading!
I agree the nerfs to this build went too far. I donât agree with numerous versions of the same item. Especially when you canât tell that the items mechanic changed like with this item. Description doesnât mention range and damage dropoff.
I disagree because you wonât end up with original item and nerfed item. You will end up with original item and several verions of the item over gameâs lifespan. That clutters the database and game code, makes debugging more troublesome. And what about buffs to items? Apply to all versions, some of them or just newest? What about bugs in items? Leave them be? I donât think so.
Applying changes to all versions is the cleanest and simplest solution here.
The way items are stored prevent legacy versions of uniques. You can look at the files in offline to see this. Uniques are stored using values for the percentage of the rolls for each affix. That means that when you change the affix rolls, your old item adjusts automatically. If you had a max roll (100%) on the old affix, you now have a max roll on the new affix.
This works both ways. Items that are buffed are also immediately updated as well.
To keep legacy versions youâd need to change the whole code on how to store items, which would be a lot of work for little return, since most uniques tend to get buffed over time, rather than nerfed. Usually unique nerfs happen in the league after they get introduced, whereas unique buffs happen all the time.
When I gave a (very) cursory look through the files to confirm this some time ago, it seemed that every item is stored this way, whether itâs unique/legendary, set, common/magic/rare/exalted or idols.
I imagine it was done this was in order to keep legacy in check and try to keep the balance there similar to the balance in seasons.
I know PoE lets you have legacy items of absurd power, but GGG never cared about standard anyway, soâŚ
Yes was always the case. A recent example with this patch where this also applies is Omnis. It went from +1 to +1-2 to all skills. So even the +1 had a roll from 0-100 and once the patch dropped all your Omnis had either h1 or +2 depending on the roll.
