Upcoming bug-fix to Ballista

Announcements
104

You are, because you create a strawman about stuff I never said. I never said you have to carefully study every single detail that adds minuscle increases to the overall performance. It’s about something with an obvious disparity that can be seen and that relies on very few factors.

The fun part of min-maxing (for me) is actually crunching numbers, investigating interactions, making spreadsheets, testing my ideas, etc.

Reading and copying someone’s guide isn’t min-maxing, it’s just copying someone’s guide. The lazy approach to a fine art.

If you were min-maxing yourself, the discrepancy between area and radius should have been really obvious. Believe me, I would have a spreadsheet, adding all sources of increases and multipliers to see how far I can push it vs how much I really need. :wink:

It’s true that I don’t min-max in LE and have pushed to only about ~150 corruption. I discovered a long time ago that min-maxing often leads to optimizing the fun out of the game for me, so I play this way by choice to prolong the time I have fun.

You have 1 passive node for increases up to 25% and the 1 node scaling with dex in the Ballista skill tree, correct?

Your ballista is a minion, so it should not scale with your character’s increase to area, so affixes on amulets and gloves should not count, I assume. I didn’t check this, but this is my expectation.

This is not a complicated skill interaction that’s easy to miss.

No one has objective opinions on this - especially not by entitled people that feel invested.
I give objectively observable examples and have the subjective opinion that people should be able to perceive the difference between +100% increased and +300% increased area at 50 dex.

I don’t claim there is a better or worse stance for bug-fixing and balancing mid-season. That’s subjective, and I don’t really care. If they change my latest toy, I adapt.

2 Likes
105

Min-maxing is gearing your character and to push the difficulty to the limit. Crunching numbers is theorycrafting. Two separate things.

This is not an answer to my statement. Take a look at divebomb build from Allie:

This is just an example of what i said, “fix” one of this multipliers and the build damage output is completely different.

Is the average player supposed to do all the tests required, to have the mathematical skills and the willingness to process all this stuff before deciding to invest all of his time before going all-in in a build to be sure that it’s not going to be heavily nerfed?

This is the developers job and not a single player must be punished in the middle of a league for their mistakes. PERIOD

106

This is great, keep the bugfixes coming :+1:

5 Likes
107

I don’t play this build, but I’m afraid that my build is also “bugged” because it also has a ~150% screen size area. Perhaps I should take out my ruler and measure it to prepare for the worst.

Seriously, I would recommend fixing bugs that cause builds to underperform first, rather than keep fixing bugs that cause builds to overperform. The outcome is pretty similar (fixing bugs and making builds more balanced), but would greatly help build diversity and encourage players to find bugs in their underperforming build.

Three bug-fixing nerfs in a row is not fun. While I don’t play any of them, it makes me really worry that my build is next.

1 Like
108

Pushing builds to the performance of build that is doing 10 times better then intentioned is powercreep. You maybe know how well this worked out for D3 and I don’t want D3.5.

109

I’m sorry, the idea of simply copying a theorycrafter’s work - at least without analysing it myself to adapt it to my preferences - isn’t familiar to be. For me, those two things are inseparably connected, but that’s probably wrong.

Your initial question was targeted at Ballista.

My answer is based on this, specifically. I was not talking about Dive Bomb or any other skill. Please don’t read into this that I think people should be expected to carefully check each possible interaction. That’s the exaggeration or straw man on your part.

I agree that more complex interactions are not obvious. The explosion radius is.
Someone messed up testing it properly at EHG after the node was implemented :slight_smile:

You aren’t punished, you just feel that way. A punishment, for example, would be to ban you for exploiting a bug, which they don’t do.
Some people knew that profane veil was bugged (participating in forum discussions about the topic taken as proof) and still used it - and aren’t punished.

I knew it would come to these discussions. EHG was in the unfortunate and self-inflicted position where part of the players would be pissed, no matter how EHG had handled it.

Testing stuff is time-consuming, but it is important. I hope EHG will up their efforts, but having worked in test and validation, I know that not all bugs will be found by an internal QA team.

3 Likes
110

Yeah, that’s your choice, but if you’re not going to do some basic research (& I do mean basic), do you have a right to complain?

They are, but they won’t think of everything.

They do, they even have a large group of Community Testers. Have you thought of applying?

“No one is not arguing with it”, except they are, there are some people who are arguing that this should have been fixed before 1.0 (fair), or not fixed until 1.1.

I believe there is this thing called “Google” & “Search”.

Then how do you know there’s actually been a change?

It wasn’t, you’ll still be clearing half a screen rather than an entire screen.

And yet if you don’t do the latter you can’t do the former.

2 Likes
111

No, one can outsource the theorycrafting by copying from a guide of someone who did some theorycrafting. Without theorycrafting, there is not min-maxing, I guess.

Maybe one could consider brute force a valid min-max strategy - but it usually leads only to the least effective solution.

1 Like
112

If you are so much of a rookie assuming you know not what you talk about, then you just accept when more experienced players point out the bugs and thank the company for taking their time to fix the game.
Instead you choose to inflamate the thread on the forums, like an adult does, right?

2 Likes
113

Every player plays the game in different ways, invests his gaming time differently and has is own goals. Each approach must me equally respected. Mid league balances will not harm a player like you who likes to play a different build every 3 days but will for sure completely destroy the gaming experience to players like me.

We are not talking about ballista anymore. This will affect everyone sooner or later.

I’m have no problems with you and i never intended that you specifically think that every player is expected to do all the tests about the multipliers and interaction, what i’m saying is that this mid league bug fixes direction that the developers are taking is going to DE FACTO force everyone to execute the EHG JOB.

I did not expected to have to explain this. Being punished doesn’t mean necessarily being banned or timed out of the game. Being punished in this context means being penalized for certain choices.

Said this, the previous developers statement was against mid-league changes and obviously the best time to switch the game direction in that sense is in the middle of the damn league, gj.
I made spend money to a bunch of a friends telling them that mid league nerfs were not a thing when i was asked. They would have not bought the game otherwise, i just feel bad for them.

I’m just disappointed because the game is very good and i enjoy it but i’m not going to play it if this is the definitive statement about mid league balances.

1 Like
114

We are having a conversation, thank you for adding value.

115

Tbh good. they can refund if they are able, if not, tbh this idea of “oh ill only play if midleague nerfs are not a thing” means they are the type of players I dont want around. They are the type to exploit early and exploit often. They are munchkin power gamers.

Cry me a river tbqh.

3 Likes
116

Yeah we want to be sure to farm for the right exploit. We are all hackers and we run a gold farming bots farm then rmt all day/s. bye

117

Fixed a bug where Ballista’s Armed Construction node was giving 1% increased radius per Dexterity instead of its listed 1% increased area per Dexterity

That’s how it was bugged. If the UI is saying it scales one way but it unintentionally scales a different way, that’s a bug. It’s the same with Profane Vail where it was doing 40% rather than the listed 4%.

118

Yep, something so obvious that no one notice it since ver. 0.8.4 until now.

119

Fun part, it wasn’t obvious at all.

120

And part of the playerbase was not happy with it - I leaned more into believing that people who would call for mid-season changes even for bugs were a vocal minority. My expectation was wrong, according to the survey.

We could argue the validity of the survey. I have the strong belief that people who are unhappy are much more eager to interact with forums and surveys to complain.

It’s worse, I enjoy playing 3 builds a day. Running a few echoes with my paladin, then I get tired of seeing yellow flashes, so I change to the druid to see some blue flashes. Ending the evening strong on my falconer that is so strong that it is fun for 10 minutes before sleep.

Perhaps. I reserve the right to change my mind in the future.

I have a hard time believing that nobody did make the observation.
Comparing it with the increased area scaling of other skills in the game is a very strong indicator that something can’t be right.

I might accept that someone who never played another class and never tried to scale another area skill is oblivious to the extreme area scaling.

121

They never promised that. Lol. Y’all only ever read what you want to read. They said their stance may change based on community feedback. Promises not to change things never happened. Developers are doing exactly what their community poll had told them too, the majority of us wanted bugs fixed. Get over yourself.

5 Likes
122

It looks like this community is full of people that can’t play a build for more than a week and the developers are not able to make a finished league release. I, like many old arpg players, was hoping for some poe competitor. This choice is a failure in that regards. This is disappointing.

123

The vast majority of players did not even know about this survey. A minority (loud) from the forum was voting in it.