If you don’t understand why balance is important in games, just google it. Discussing this is kind of pointless. No serious developer would ever consider leaving broken stuff in the game because “it’s fun.”
What I don’t understand is why people, EHG included, get so fixated on the source of imbalance. It doesn’t matter in the least whether something is broken because of bugs in the code or the miscalculations on the part of the balance team.
Most of the time, it’s not exploiting but simply just a cool skill to many people. If more people knew the power was caused from a bug abuse or such that violates tos, they would less use it in fright of being in trouble. This also applies in general. Many things people don’t do, not because of morals sadly, but instead, because fear of consequences.
If anyone is thinking leaderboard for the current state the game is in, they shouldve seen they signed up for the wrong game early into release.
And if we are talking about just overperforming and people complaining about unfairness from that, that will never end. There will always be meta where builds will be heavily ahead of others. I’m sure there are so more lowkey builds in this game that is even stronger than what we see so far, just not “viral” and publicly widespread yet.
P.S. still playing my explosive ballista postpatch but definitely still plausible. Just have to play more careful and a lot slower. Warding on the other hand, needed a hotfix. Clearly not how it was intended.
A full screen explosion build was a cool idea but with the dmg you can scale to makes it pretty op for sure but that’s part of the fun for such a game. The whole point of arpgs is to hack and slash and speedrunning and grinding/mfing is a big part of that fun satisfying factor.
I’m okay with where the character is at now to balance the class but I would hope to have that same full screen play if possible which I think was the original plan for the build since egh mentioned skill without any area boost items. Hope they can make the area affix work properly with it to improve the range to help us get back that similar sweet spot of where it was previously at.
Hang on, I’m confused. What you’re saying sounds very similar to “bugged skill I was playing was OP/bugged, but it was fun so that’s ok, but the other bugged skill was clearly OP/bugged in a bad way so the fix was totes justified”. That sounds just a teensy bit hypocritical to me & quite tonally jarring compared to the rest of the post…
It was never supposed to hit the entire screen, that was rather the point & why it needed to be fixed.
No, it wasn’t.
I am agree that bugs are fun, but disagree on everything else. Its fun when you play that build, but when I play on something else… hp build for example, or not so super-crazy performing lich build. I feel dissapointment a little and some other not so good feelings. Because I know that guys making 40k ward builds with 1 m dps and I am here with my 3k hp and 100-200k may be. Thats annoying at least, and make me feel bad, I dont want to feel bad.
More than than, coz of those guys community standards for “high level monolith” rised that overpowered standards and people thinks that if I am not doing 1k so my build is weak etc
They went further and nerfed the radius more than it should I believe… This is all though self testing, from what I remembered. The main probably was the scaling of Radius increase was replaced by area, not even sure exactly what that means but i’m guessing radius > area calculations? Similar to spell crit > crit affix.
The dev mentioned that it never directed mentioned it but he did say along the lines, it shouldn’t without any area increase skills. Sounds like its implying they wanted and planned for a full screen build.
Imo, it’s a fun build. Should it be exist? Yes. Should be be as powerful as it was and allow you to push as high corruption as other builds? Definitely not.
It should be an viable for things such as flash farming easier area’s, power leveling, etc. Not as a solo but end game class. Hence mentioning why I still play my char post nerf (although i’m only at around 6xx corruption with it), its enjoyable… And it definitely is still viable as the damage is still there, just ideally to play with a party.
I am definitely not against bug fixes and they need should be handled asap but balances or nerfs should never happen mid way.
There’s no need to guess at what was said, or twist it. The full text is available here:
Upcoming bug-fix to Ballista - Announcements - Last Epoch Forums
In a circle, the area scales to the radius with the power of 2.
Meaning doubling the radius (+100% increased radius), quadruples the area (+300% increased area). Basic geometry back from school.
I had quickly created this little graphic to show the difference between increased area and radius. Green is the base radius. Red are +200% and +400% increased area, equalling 50 or 100 dex. Blue circles are +200% and +400% increased radius.
It’s ugly, but it is to scale. Just to give a reference: the green circle would roughly cover the area of a waypoint in game. Same size as the base area of Judgement.
Thanks for the description. Yes, it’s ugly.
So basically, even with increase area affix helping, it will not barely do a dent on anything as you can not get much increase area %.
One of the comments from EGH I saw was the mention along the lines of “not possible for full screen, at least not without increase area help” but then, there’s another post that says they do not intend and want full screen kills…
Really need to make up their mind on what direction they want the game to go. > 10k players or <10k players.
Imo, full screen clear is fun and beneficial build for most, a well put out option for speed clearing lower easiest things and/or plvl… Being able to push end game content solo? Absolute not okay. With a party? Mostly all builds will be capable. it’s just another glass cannon build. Someone will always over/under perform just like with items/classes/builds.
Alright, let me try to remember how to use GIMP…
Didn’t work out exactly how I wanted it with the 3d translation of the circle to compensate for the camera angle, but it should be close enough.
Waypoint: approximate base radius
red:+300% increased area (75 dex)
clear in between red and blue: +600% increased area (150 dex)
blue: +800% increased area (200 dex)
That’s how you can expect to scale the ballista explosion, approximately. That’s more than a dent, right? 
I don’t much care for balance because these types of game NEVER are and NEVER will be but, when some abilities are so overwhelmingly broken it does indeed spoil the game. There are plenty of skills that are broken that I don’t feel I can play with any degree of fun, as walking simulator is a very stale form of gameplay imho. I appreciate that ARPGs are typically the easiest genre to play in but being completely invincible is ridiculous! Veil, ballista or any other ability that 1 shots bosses are all abilities I’ve stepped away from in order to have fun.
As a result I’m playing a melee poison warlock (Nurgle Knight aka Death Knight in WoW) and I’ve been having great fun, though gearing is extremely difficult, especially in the weapon department. Hopefully after they’ve balance the abilities, they’ll spend some time to make some new items that support more play styles. 
Yes, though this is very basic maths, area = pi x radius squared, so if you double the radius you quadruple the area, but if you double the area the radius only increases by a factor of 1.414 (the squate root of 2).
No, not really, since 10% increased spell crit has the same effect on spell crit chance as 10% increased crit chance.
That’s not quite the same thing. You’d need an awful lot of increased area to get back to the original size & I’m not sure you can get something like an additional 140% increased area stat (which is roughly what you’d need).
Yeah, that’s fair & that’s what they did, significantly reduced the area. The build is still functionally unchanged, it just has smaller area.
I wasnt talking about dex 
But for the are affix, atm u can only get gloves and amulet if i remember correctly and maximizing t7 on both those only adds a total of about 90% which in theory, does a dex, equivalent to around 25 dex of radius without the dmg. Is that correct?
If i’m correct, according to the @horusKBZ work example (https://imgur.com/a/HD8AjQO), 100% worth of area increase would equal to 25ish dex … atm we can only get increase area on gloves and ammy for a total of about 90%? That is about 1/3 of with the calculations from @HorusKBZ , 300% area<->75dex
But that is if they choose to add the scaling tag to ballista which seems like it is intended to work with that tag basing on one of the comments on EHG stating along the lines, that the radius should no way be full screen without any area increase
Yes, it’s only amulet and gloves with 2xT7 and an additional 25% from passives for a rogue.
+90% area is noticable on every skill. (~38% increased radius, if you have only the +90% area, nothing else).
But for my Hand of Judgement Paladin in beta (2% increased area per attunement) I decided that the affixes on gloves and amulet don’t add enough on top, so they would be better used with other affixes.
They didn’t say it should be full screen, period.
They also didn’t say you cannot get similar but when they said without area increase, i took it as implying they had the intention of similar larger radius build in mind which if it was even possible with area increase (currently does scale with that) and if it were to be maxed ou (around 90% total from glove/ammy), it will still be no where close to near full screen.
Why would you even bring up area increase effections if its not one of the tags for the skill? Could be a simple error but I have hopes for a bigger radius from current… Even with pumped out dex, it’s not nearly as satisfying
Builds I had looked up have around 150 dex. Nyczalex’ has 145 dex.
So let’s calculate +600% increased area.
To get +600% radius, you would need a total of +4800% area.
So to get the fixed size back to the bugged size, he only needs +4200% increased area on top. 
With my screen resolution, I would need about 680% increased radius (~6000% increased area) to reach the left and right border of my screen. It leaves a bit on the corners uncovered.
To cover every pixel up to the farthest corner, it would need about 740% increased radius or 7000% increased area.
Thanks for the breakdown…
Yes, even if the area effect were to get added to a skill (ballista for my concern), that 90% we can obtain from t7 affix is miniscule sadly…
I hope they can scale radius more for fun factor don’t mind losing hundreds of corruption power to get a better, more fun, radius …
The TLDR I’m getting from that is that it’s not happening. Like, ever.
I see a fair chance that your deduction is correct 