Stop messing with people's builds mid league GGG

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CanHasPants wrote:

How many players used M/BA and for how many hours, before somebody discovered this interaction?

Let's use a conservative estimate of 600 players, playing for an average of 50 hours each; that's 30,000 hours invested into the discovery of this mechanic. Now, divide that by the number of developers (3?) responsible for internal testing. That's 10,000 hours per developer, to discover an obscure interaction that took an army of players to discover.

Fact of the matter is, it is GGG's fault for allowing it in the first place, but that tells nothing about their diligence or capability; what would, is all of the other things you never see because they are fixed prior to release.

I can't speak for him but let's look how this actually panned out.

About 2 months after the gems are introduced this pops up on reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/2vkp86/guide_llbm_mirror_arrow_burnprolif_truncator/

Shows the concept of the build and how it's covered in bugs, doesn't work sometimes, crashes instances and all that shit.

Then
Fixed an instance crash that could occur when Blink or Mirror Arrow was used with Trap. The next day.

So what we see is while they probably didn't INTEND for this to happen, they busted open the door so it's possible. They could have left it alone, just like shield charge, which had some desync issues fixed in the same patch, shield charge is years old compared to MA's months.

They also had the opportunity to test it's life right then and there. Maybe the fix bugged MA, which resulted in the nerf or whatever. But before the OP video showed up, this build was already theorycrafted, allowed through then nerfed heavily.

While I don't expect GGG to be on top of literally every combination introduced to the game, this came at a slow time during the league, I doubt it got by someone like Bex whose job is to see what the community is doing. Even if it was just thrown into alpha, guy can you test this out, we want to try balancing this out a little better.

I'll even take 60% ffs, I'll keep saying it 80% is too high and just seemed rush through without testing.

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grant_m wrote:

It was done for the longterm overall health of the game. Things like this will definitely happen again if needed.

Everyone opposed to how the issue was handled needs to see past their own selfishness and look at the bigger picture.

The bigger picture being proliferate?

Which is the real culprit here and in so many other abusive cases.

Or just except this skill/build got butchered because GGG is postponing a rework of proliferate for a year now?

My concern is always with the overall balance, that much should be obvious. This build should have been kept viable as a summoner nuke strategy, while prolif should have been nerfed to neuter its AOE potential as in many other fire burns.

A 30% nerf on this skill should have done the trick, with a nerf to how prolif functions to attain a similar "overall" nerf, while keeping the skill/build playable at different investment levels.

Peace,

-Boem-

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grant_m wrote:

It was done for the longterm overall health of the game. Things like this will definitely happen again if needed.

Everyone opposed to how the issue was handled needs to see past their own selfishness and look at the bigger picture.

I agree, but that doesn't seem to be the issue here.
Balance "NOW" and balance at the end of league/cycle/season are two very different things.

GGG could have very easily made this the next BOTW and announced that the build will be severely [insert magnitude here] nerfed when appropriate. This is just one example of how they could effectively manage the expectations of a wide percentage of the player-base.
In fact, this is precisely what they did concerning "snapshotting".

That's a good point.
So GGG are wholly recanting their stance on PvP affecting PvE?

After getting smacked down by Mark_GGG I find it hard to believe they couldn't isolate the issue in PvP if they chose to.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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Ashen_Shugar_IV wrote:

Stop these filthy lies.

The systems GGG have in place right now are not able to specifically adjust Vengeance if someone happens to be wearing Facebreakers.

Yes they are. I could do it right now in a few minutes should one of the designers decide that was the route to take, and it could be in the next patch.
It's a horribly inelegant thing to do, and better alternatives exist anyway, so we're unlikely to do it - rather than checking specifically for facebreakers, we'd be much more likely, were we to want to adjust their interaction, to simply adjust how much damage vengeance does while unarmed. And that would be even faster to do.