I believe that these middle patch cycles that come with events should bring experimentals changes, such as increase defenses, node ideias, mechanics that would be scraped from the next patch, this would make people less noisy about these Cycles restarts before the patches.
Players react very negatively to nerfs, and this does not change depending on whether we are talking about a change that was introduced in an experimental patch or a normal one.
I hope they will make a balance pass to buff the various underused skills and masteries, but even as a mid-cycle patch, the cylce is not the place for things that are too experimental or meant to be scrapped later, because, well, players will not see it the same way.
Mike has said that there will be no balance changes for the event. Those are reserved for next cycle.
That’s is PoE’s whole model, though, and it seems to work out for them.
For now LE is only adding core stuff, so at least until cycle 4 I expect cycle and legacy will remain the same. But I do expect them to eventually start adding cycle-exclusive stuff.
People usually call it borrowed power, which is great, but it is not really suitable for iterating on the core mechanics of the game. It is more suitable as a cool add-on on an already robust system. LE unfortunately is not there yet with its base systems.
The last thing that i think about when saying “experimentals changes” is to nerf stuff, that is normal balancing, i’m talking about changing a node that is just “gain movement speed” to " while under x conditions gain x"
But that is exactly what they are doing???
I don’t think they only doing these changes, because they want people ot catch up faster. I really think they want to use this as a experiment on how much they can push the boundaries.
Espcially the faction reputation gain increase will be interesting to see.
I personally don’t think it takes too long, but lots of people gave feedback about it.
But I do think too much will impact the system very negatively as well, beause it will kinda become meaningless.
So they are just testing the waters here how much they can improve it.
And yet it works just fine for PoE. It gives them months of dedicated testing on the mechanics with a large body of people, why wouldn’t you use it to test a thing for the core game? If it’s not going to play well with the core then you don’t keep it, if it will then you add it.
They are obviously only adding those modifiers to entice players back for a short thing.
Maybe they are doing it to test how the economy would work with these buffs, but they could try to change or add somethings to unpopular nodes and skills.