None of those were fixed because they were not bugs. It has nothing to do with balance. And they were all still playable, just not as strong. Even exploding ballista. Except that now, instead of placing one per screen you have to position them better.
And I’ll admit that the ballista build took a big hit, but all the others are still a lot stronger than the rest. And there are still plenty of strong ballista builds.
On PoE, though, there have been nerfs mid-league due to both balance and bugs. Even as recently as last year. It’s not unheard of. Because game balance affects way more people than the ones that are upset over a build that gets nerfed.
It should not be done just because they feel like it, but it happened in D3, it happened in PoE, it happened in D4. Sometimes that nerf even led to leaderboard wipes.
Also from last year, and it’s a video by a resonably succesful streamer.
I won’t even bother going further back. There have been mid-league nerfs in PoE for a long time. You might not be aware of them if you didn’t play those builds, but they existed.
EDIT: apparently the youtube video wasn’t linked for some reason.
I was going to point out these exact two build, but I’d have added that the warlock interaction was actually a bug (like the Falcon bug crashing servers) where as the HH build is working as intended it’s just WAYYY over-tuned.
So they didn’t nerf builds that were over-performing as Coil seems to claim because if they’d been doing that HH would’ve definitely got the nerf hammer (as it so clearly will for next season.)
This is a sobering reminder that games do not succeed by chance and successful indie games that can grow until they have the resources to make an AAA sequel is one in a million. Last Epoch is on the right trajectory now. Hopeful they will continue to do so and avoid Wolcen’s fate.
Fixed a bug where Wave of Conviction, when supported by Arcanist Brand, was hitting more often than intended against stationary monsters.
Version 3.10.1c
Reduced the value of “Auras from your Skills grant 0.2% of Life Regenerated per second to you and Allies” found on the Replenishing Presence notable to 0.1%.
The Purposeful Harbinger notable now grants “Aura Buffs from Skills have 10% increased Effect on you for each Herald affecting you”.
All sources of “x% increased Effect of Auras on you” now instead grant “x% increased Effect of Non-Curse Auras from your Skills on you”.
Mid league nerfs. one of which was a bug fix, the second batch was straight up “this was too powerful during league so we nerfed it”
It happens all the time.
Version 3.23.0c
Fixed a bug where Storm Rain ignored its limit of arrows in the ground when fired by a Totem, Trap or Mine.
literally last patch even, if you were bypassing arrow limits with totems, your build got mid league nerfed brother.
it happens all the time with skill based bug fixes, later in the 3.23 cycle, they nerfed a forking bug with burning salvo, which was causing it to do extra damage.
The difference is most PoE players have learned to get over it at this point and understand if they find a greasy little trick to bypass a limit of something they risk getting bug fixed.
It should also be noted that, according to EHG, almost 70k people voted on the poll. That is a very respectable portion of the playerbase. Especially when you consider that by the point LE was just a little over 100k active players.
I dont think 70K people voted because steam accounts are free. You can make 100 alts and alter the polls as a way to alter the game. I know there are members on this forum who have 6 different alts, and go around flagging stuff. So the actual numbers of players who did this is lower then 70K. I will suspect that number to be at most 30k. Maybe even less.
Even if a few people do this, I highly doubt that it’s as big an impact as that. Especially just to vote on a poll. I even doubt if the real number of actual people was below 60k. Someone making 1k votes on a poll via alternate accounts seems like too much effort for too little.
You would be surprised how boredom, anger, frustration and just pure bad will can motivate people to do a lot of none sensical things.
People who are on the forums are well invested into the game, they got both the intent, desire and motivation to alter the game to fit what they want to benefit them and only them. Why devs should listen to feedback but realize all feedback is self interested.
I may be one of the few to openly admit to being a selfish and self centred. As as I said before. Such is in my self interest to expose the fact that others here use alts, and a lot of alts. Because my word is the most important in every room. Be that as it is, I hate polls and I said so before. Let the devs just make decisions they need to do. Polls have no place for such decisions
I’m somewhat worried about how their finances are.
It feels like the decision to release Last Epoch was due to lack of resources to keep early access going (considering how the campaign isn’t finished and was stopped in a somewhat nonsensical place, the older masteries still need a few polish passes, they are still toying with base mechanics like the addition of a dodge roll, etc).
And I don’t blame them for it - developing a game is incredibly expensive, and early access money can only take a studio so far.
But I’m worried about their long term plans for monetizing Last Epoch. I’m not sure the systems they have in place right now will be enough.
I’m pretty sure the launch gave them a pretty comfortable cushion to rely on, which is why they’re not pushing MTX just yet.
When they need it, MTX should be expanded upon so it becomes the primary source of income.
If they have 100 employees, let’s do some basic math.
They sold the game for around 35$. The website suggests they sold around 1m copies. So let’s roughly say 35M, steam would have taken around 25%. That comes out to around 26.3M$
Not sure how Tencent deal works here. Gonna guess here either they take the cost of employees for entire project (3? Years) that they funded + negotiated fee OR they take all the money and just pay the staff the wage.
I will assume it’s it’s the second scenario. If that is the case, we can somewhat calculate their employee costs. This assumption assumes all employees get paid the same because they all do all the responsibilities and rotate depending on current needs.
Now from google, regardless of what I found: environmental artist, game artist, digital designer, combat designer, sound engineer, coder, programmer the pay ranged from 55-65k. So I am gonna assume it’s 60K for each employe. 100 employees, for a total of 6 million.
26M/6 is roughly 4. So we can expect around four years of development support if this hypothetical is correct. This is of course just me guessing.
