It’s a community effort to realize a fair enviroment. With communities like AoW, D2.de and Euro PvP, Diablo2 had three competitive, working leagues. We had such a blast, so much fun in 1vs1 or Team fights. If you haven’t played it’s hard to imagine how rules were enforced and that it actually felt fair across classes but it worked very well.
So I still have my hopes up since it is, like you hinted, another game of it’s own and free for everybody to join, contribute or ignore that aspect.
BTT: Making specific class skills available to all classes is a bad idea IN MY OPINION for stated reasons.
I think we’ll see more affixes in the future but I like EHGs approach to get them out in small ammounts and keep the balancing in check. A lot of the affixes you mentioned might ruin the game if they were introduced like we know it from other games.
On top of it they could implement a loooooot of stuff but right now the game is working and at least I think it’s better to shove all possible ressources into the braches that develop the stuff they mentioned in their forecast.
In the future they can add more stuff for sure but additional affixes could twist the meta a bit so it might be a good thing for future content.
I personally think balancing should be based on enemies rather than gear, because gear is the name of the game and more variety in gear means more viable builds for experimentation - something that truly extends the game’s life span and player retention. GD is a great example where players would want to level alts because they will always have new builds to look for (And its like an entire new game every time because each build have such drastic difference in play style). In addition to new builds, having a huge variety of affixes means the better one for your current build might just around the corner, you’d never get bored with farming.
Speaking of difficulty - POE and GD managed this very well, in that even with top gear you still need the awareness and game mechanics to survive the hardest encounters. Both maps and SR/Crucible require you to stay alert to various things despite the best builds and dps, and thats great balancing, because no game mechanic is rendered obsolete with just gears alone. We are doing great with this aspect already especially with nice telegraphs on bosses. Even with best gears that you farmed for hours, the challenge is still there: can you make this run faster or can you make this run with 0 deaths etc.
Now i do agree that the best affixes should be rewarded by the hardest content, but affixes aren’t a number’s game. Well designed affixes would encourage build variety without being op - and that can be constantly tweaked.
Oh that’s why I can’t “Facetank everything” builds for… oh wayit I can ^^. Balancing at this game stage is useless untill there are some stupid broken things out there. I’m not against more affixes but right now i think it would be a step in a not so great direction. Sure they can handle things like star citizen but I rather want to play the full game next year and not a beta after another to get a game in about 10 years ^^.
On top of that I don’t think shards should be content gated outside of level requirement to make them even drop or appear on items. A good affix for class X might not be equaly good on class Y.
So far the only thing that bothers me about additional affix shards right now is the possible workload that might be spend in a better way.
