This is something I’ve also notice : rip blood seems to be better at generating ward versus soul feast. Which is crazy, because one cost close to 0 MP while the other requires the targets to be cursed and cost 20 MP
I’m not saying I don’t believe you or they used edited characters to achieve those numbers, but I’m always doubtful about some random person on the internet showing me an image. You know… because of the pixels and stuff… 
Of course it could be legit, but I feel like ~120m might be a little inflated when someone who claims to have BiS daggers says their damage went down from ~12m to ~300k. Then again those numbers also seem exaggerated, but on the other end of the spectrum, so who knows. 
All I know and care about is that the character I had the most fun with in the two or three weeks prior to the patch now feels like shit, at least in my opinion, as the whole charm of the character is gone. But of course that’s totally subjective.
I want to say @Arborus had a similar character as well. So not just a rando on the internet with an edited character.
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Because the developers have an idea as to how quickly you should progress, and if the players find something that enables them to reliably progress faster you catch the nerf.
Also something about modern game design placing such a high priority on player engagement as the gold standard to judge games by.
Right? Wrong? It is what it is.
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I mean it exactly as I have written it I suppose. I don’t have my game up but blood splatter states something like “does not work with rip blood in other parts of the tree”. Thus, to use blood splatter with any effect, you can only use the handful of nodes on the tree at the bottom of the page, which used to be fine when you could go 7/7 in I think it was damage, but now you max out too fast so you have to put points into either poison or minions, which might make no sense based on build (such as mine).
The real issue is that instead of a minor nerf - they nerf certain things INTO THE GROUND.
Smite Hammerdin for instance used to get idols that gave mana on smite smite and they worked on smite procs. Now the idol is useless as it only works on direct smite and the playstyle is nowhere near as powerful as it used to be.
It was never supposed to work with proc’d smites, that’s not a nerf, that’s a bug fix & it was necessary given how easy it is now to get Smites (on Warpath, on an entire pack with Lunge, with Javelin, etc). It trivialised mana which is something the devs have always been against.
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The description never mentioned it back when it did that, it just said it refunded mana from smite - it wasn’t a bug, it was a exploit. It also enabled a ton of builds.
I get that “oh but we want people to care about mana” but the fact is that most of the good builds do not use mana or have a way to regenerate it fast.
You can safely assume that EHG has a pretty specific idea of how they want the game to be played, how much damage they want players doing, and how strong they want skills relative to each other. Every balance decision they make, whether it comes to items or skills, is probably done to keep as many things as possible within that realm of how they want the game to be played.
Sometimes that means nerfing overpowered things because those overpowered things don’t fit within that realm. That said, I think developers should be a little more relaxed about buffing under-used and under-powered mechanics.
If you’re playing an ARPG, expect nerfs to strong builds. It’s not a new concept, yet everyone acts shocked every. single. time.
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I think a lot of people are more concerned about builds being made “unplayable” and not necessarily a simple drop of numeric values of the damage.
There are a few examples where builds got “nerfed” because the interactions did not work as intended. Those nerfs are usually justified but sometimes it makes you think if in those cases numeric changes would actually solve the issue instead of getting rid of the interaction all together. For example the Necrobomber build.
In other cases the removal of certain interactions won’t break the build but makes it very hard to play the build smoothly if you don’t have top tier equipment. For example some people complained about the mana gain on smite change because now they actually would have to think about mana management on their Hammerdins. Unlike the Necrobomber this build is still playable, like the core mechanic didn’t change, it’s just not as easy to sustain mana as it was before.
Then there are cases where a nerf affects more than the targeted build (or few builds) like the channeling Flurry nerf. I think we all agree that the change was targeted towards the melee poison Flurry builds because their damage was “too high”. The problem is that every build that uses channeled Flurry was affected and a lot of builds couldn’t sustain mana after the nerf and just felt pretty shitty to play.
So yes, strong builds will most likely get nerfed (or rather builds that are “too strong”).
But the reasons for the nerf as well as how the nerf is realized should be the most important thing.
Does one specific build that uses skill X deal too much damage?
Does it use a certain interaction that puts its numbers above other builds that use skill X?
If yes, then nerf that specific build/interaction and not EVERY build that uses skill X!
Do 90% of the people that play class Y use a specific build?
If yes then maybe don’t force build diversity by nerfing that build to the grave but instead try to encourage build diversity by buffing the other builds!
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True, but I cant recall game developers that implement such design goals. Maybe I am having a sometimer moment?
Did you just read 8.3 patch notes and delete your hammerdin or something lol? The build got MORE powerful the same patch they nerfed the smite gain helmet mod. Paladin and VK both got reworked and got huge scaling from Devotion and Vitality respectively. Did this require adaption into actually trying to cover the cost with -cost rings, mane regen, and/or volatile reversal? Yes.
The helmet mod just trivialized the resource management. The real nerf to those builds was future strike being gutted.
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By that I assume you mean that it was changed from a hit to a DoT so that it can no longer inherit the throwing tag and thus proc Smites via the idol?
That is exactly the change to which I was referring. It was a fair nerf really. If that node wasn’t bugged, it was limiting future proc design space.
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