Why nerfing good skill’s or items (mostly uniques) ? I agree on fixes skill’s that work incorrectly and player get’s bugged advantage in that case good. Good skills should not nerfted that work good as intended .
I suggest instead nerfing good skill’s, please buff bad skill’s (skill’s that not deliver good damage ) . Rip Blood is one of example , also all cold based skill’s too ( bad scalling) . Each skill need to have max 25 (not 20 like now) + levels from items.
Same goes for uniques items that should have 6- 9 affixes on it and at least one affix improving one of many classes random skill + levels and improve damage.
These improvement’s make game better to play and easier time to understand game.
While I agree generally with the concept of improving bad skills rather than nerfing good ones, balancing skills and items in an arpg is very hard to do and its never as simple as we players think it may be because we do not understand the affect on back end calculations and secondary effects changes to skills/gear might have… especially unforseen ones.
Unfortunately bugs also play a part here - for example, the recent change to Flurry was not a nerf… it had a bug that wasnt reducing the amount of poison applied on each hit as it was supposed to. Thats not a nerf, its a bugfix… but it made a noticeable difference that make it seem like a nerf…
Another example for the shield Bastion of Honour nerf - it was so good that virtually no one used any other shield - so it was either buff ALL the other shields in the game (a lot of them) or change Bastion to make it so that people would use other shields… and even then, the change to Bastion is not as bad as some people think… its still arguably the best shield if you have a shield / block based build - its just not that useful to other random builds anymore.
For me the thing here is that is not simple to balance anything and while increasing other items/skills to match powerful ones might initially seem like a good idea, it could inadvertently cause more problems down the line…
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I dont really know what i should think about balancing the game in its current state.
The game needs mp and the other 3 missing masteries asap!
Once those core features are released we can start talking about balancing, because it will be an online game with seasons and ladders.
LE will be absolutely broken once mp releases in its current state.
When we are able to play with 3 other players and can test all the possible interactions also with the 3 missing classes, then it makes sense to give proper feedback on all the mechanics/skilltrees/passives.
Now, all we need is bug fixes and performance upgrades.
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Agreed… I wasnt even going to touch on the incompleteness of the game or MP but you are definitely right…
Its sort of a catch-22 situation… finish everything and then balance for single/MP or balance as you go… either way I think that you are still going to be balancing till the cows come home - especially as more is added to the game… seems to be the nature of arpgs…
The problem with only buffing skills and never nerfing skills is that eventually every skill is so strong that it makes everything trivial.
For example, if we look at sorc then static orb is outperforming while fireball is lacking (not really but when we compare orb vs fireball then orb is the clear winner here) now if they buff fireball by 50% then fireball is too strong due to the infinite mana so now orb needs a slight buff etc. The loop keeps repeating itself.
Usually, devs have skills that are perfectly balanced and usually those are used as a meter for nerfs and buffs to keep everything viable and close, being perfectly balanced.
There will always have to be buffs and nerfs or everything will just trivialize the content and i don’t think that is what EHG is aiming for.
Another issue here is MP as pointed out by other people since certain things will absolutely own in MP environment while they lack in single player.
I could throw in one example of something that will be truly broken with MP 
4 rogues with perfect smoke bomb + decoy rotation to have 100% uptime dodge/gb/leech while they have decoy taunting everything, so the monsters aren’t even interested in killing players.
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Yes, but no. Adding the 3 other masteries doesn’t mean you can’t have a conversation about balance for the rest of them. MP is a bit of an odd thing, since the game “should” ideally be balanced for both solo & party play, which I imagine would be quite challenging (over & above just chucking on a HP modifier for party play).
That’s when you either buff mobs (to undo the effect of all the buffs you gave the player).
Wouldn’t the mob affix “focuses on players” act as a bit of a counter to that? Or “just” have the mobs ignore taunts for X seconds after a taunt has ended.
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They could for sure, but wouldn’t that act as a nerf to how skills feel? Say you one shot everything and now you need 3 hits before everything dies so now it feels worse than pre monster buffs.
“Focuses on players” would work as a counter, however that affix isn’t working like you’d expect it to work. Here is a quick video showing how useless the mod is against taunt in general. They could make taunt work like fear does that you can only taunt monsters once and that’s it.
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It would, but that’s the only other way to get back to a putative dev’s view of where the balance should be. Or you could nerf the over-performing skills (& buff the under-performing ones)…
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But it’s not just nerfing and/or buffing. I think everyone is fine with tuning… but tuning implies a more precise approach. If an item is so OP, that it requires a neutering with a machete, one has to wonder how dafuq it got into the game in the first place.
Tuning is more along the lines of: “Skill XYZ has had it’s based damage increased from 13 to 15”
DaFuq Nerfs are something like: “Skill XYZ has had it’s base damage reduced from 5000 to 25”
Stuff like that just puts into question the QA process, and how things that over/under the balance line get through in the first place. Much less, stay in place for a couple patches before being noticed. And, going back to Bastion, it was more of a DaFuq Nerf, not a balance tune. That along with it obviously being a crowd-favorite is what upsets people. Blizzard was (read as: still is) notorious for that kind of thing, and it drove(drives) people absolutely bonkers.
edit: and before someone counters with the ‘bugs get through sometimes’ stuff – yes, they do. And when they are ‘fixed’, they are labeled as such. Balance changes are not the same thing, and are addressed differently in patch notes.
The nerf to Bastion was obvious to come and good, even after the nerf its still BiS for many builds.
The so called DaFuq nerf was happening to Ravenous Void. The unique lost alot of its identity, and doing that to a chase supporter unique most of the playerbase hasnt event seen yet, i think that was a bad move by EHG.
(EDIT: nvm i just saw the 0.8.5b patchnotes to rv)
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The funny thing here is that bastion was buffed against things that tickle you since the health on block is more valuable if monster hits you for 50 dmg than the DR was but against higher hits the DR was better.
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I don’t understand why people keep complaining about the RV “nerf”.
The 0.8.5b version looks like a nerf to me, the 0.8.5 version not really.
Also, what part of its “identity” did it loose in 0.8.5?
A real DaFuq nerf to me is what they did to Flurry.
I mean having only around like 30% of your damage left after the patch is insane.
Edit: Seems like having only around 10% of your damage left after the patch is more accurate lol
There were two bugs, first, the Force Wave wasn’t inheriting Flurry’s 40% less chance to apply ailments as it should have (so if you had 900% chance to poison, it would apply 9 stacks per hit when it should have been 5.4 stacks per hit) & secondly Flurry as a whole as having any attack speed modifiers applied twice instead of once.
Whether poison channelled Flurry is or is not “competitive” now that it’s actually working is the question that should be asked & comparing the poison stack/damage ceiling compared to other poison skills to see whether it’s still massively overperforming or whether it’s comparable to the others.
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I do understand what they fixed but I can’t really understand why they fixed it in that way.
They pretty much gutted every (channeled) Flurry build when their target was clearly melee poison Flurry.
To me part of the whole Flurry + Poison identity was the ridiculously fast attack speed to apply Poison which has a rather low base damage. It made the skill “feel” good (at least to me) so I don’t know why they “fixed” that. The Force Wave fix would have been enough imho. Flurry with a Bow feels even worse now. To me all my Flurry characters are dead now. I’m not mad about this (none of them was my strongest character) but kinda sad because they “felt” good playing and I really enjoyed it. Like some dude in the forum once said “Poison flurry is one hell of a drug.” At least it used to be, now it’s like cough syrup…
Because they weren’t working properly. What they should then ideally do, as I suggested in my previous post, was to review how non-melee channelled flurry sits compared to the other options & if it needs some buffs then they can work out what to do to buff them without getting back to melee poison channelled flurry being able to do ~120m per tick (with top notch gear). That’s why they reduced the mana cost for the Multishot proc, now they “just” need to have a look at the other builds & improve them where necessary so they’re not collateral damage from the melee flurry fix.
That’s fair enough & good feedback & the more details as to how & why you feel that way the better.
They have in the past “fixed” bugs then added “proper” ways of getting what the bug did (though to be fair, only the freeze beetle being spawned in pairs actually comes to mind).
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Not sure if you are exaggerating, but my Poison Flurry only did around 6,5m-7m on the dummy (no buffs like acid flask or anything) and my gear was pretty decent.
But if you are serious and someone was able to do ~120m with their gear then they kind of deserved it in some way… can’t imagine the pain of farming such perfectly rolled equipment. 
It’s hard to explain. I don’t know if you played a Bow Flurry character (I’ve had 3 of them: Phys, Poison, Bowmage), it’s sometimes hard to explain how something feels gameplay wise.
If you play retro games you know what I mean when talking about how the controls in those games some “feel”.
It just feels sluggish and wrong… like there is barely a difference between channeled and non channeled.
But I don’t want to be a slug. I want to be a machine gun. 
Yup, they posted pics on discord in the Rogue channel…
I’m currently playing a lich with aura of decay (first playthrough) and was feeling pretty good about the high-risk, high reward of my aura of decay build (“high” poison, but also poison you, so I’ve died to my own spell a few times).
But damn, 120m per tick (or even 2-3m) without the downside of killing yourself if you’re too greedy is very disgusting.
But back on the topic of “nerfing” vs “buffing”, I think you need a bit of both. If you’re constantly buffing, you end up with power creep. Because there are so many variables, synergies and builds, it’s impossible to have everything being equal.
if you constantly bring the back of the pack at the top, you’ll always be pushing the ceiling.
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For the record, rip blood is a grossly powerful skill if you use it the right way. I think it badly needs to be remodeled (blood splatter area not mingling with rip blood for example, and the minion area off if lala land), but it’s NOT weak.
Having skills go up to 25 is just going to power creep; sounds great, but won’t ‘do’ anything concrete to change the game.
Not quite sure what you mean by that?