Let me start by saying that I don’t think this is a bad decision.
That said, I disagree with it, and the reason is fairly simple: The precedent set here will, over time, cause more people to be upset with changes than are made happy by them.
There will be many, many more bugs throughout the seasons. Some of those bugs will be minor, some will be major, and many more won’t affect game “balance” at all. Those that do, however, are going to affect players. This season it might not have been me, but next season it might. This season it might affect you and it may very well cause you to rethink which game you put your time into moving forward.
Each character we choose to level and gear takes time, and that time isn’t something that we can get back. It’s gone. If that time has been put into a build that works because of a bug – even a minor one (and I think we can all admit that the Profane Veil one is a bit more than minor), well, that time is gone too.
I understand why it’s so easy to say “well, just don’t play the bugged classes!” but it should also be easy to see that not everyone who plays a game like Last Epoch is glued to the community discord, the forums, or the patch notes. Not everyone is looking at build guides to find what they want to play. Not everyone is exploiting these bugs intentionally. Those are the players that are going to be hurt by this.
And now, those players are potentially going to be hurt every time a bug turns up.
Bug fixes are good. No one is going to argue that Profane Veil is working correctly and it shouldn’t be corrected.
The timing is bad. This is what seasons are for. If a build is broken for a few months, it’s not a big deal. Nerf it (fix it, in this case) into the ground next season and we’re good to go. I’d even say that fixing something like this within the first few days of a season is fine. But not once people have sunk hours and hours of playtime into a character.
If I’m pushing 1,000 corruption and suddenly my character can’t do 1,000 corruption, I’m going to be upset and I’m probably going to quit. I don’t think I’m in the minority there.