Nerf vs. Buff

I was looking at the long list of legacy vs. current uniques (found here: http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Legacy_Items#List_of_Legacy_Unique_Items) and I was thinking, it's a shame some items got heavy to light nerfs. On the other hand, I'm happy about a number of the buffs.

Shave some off the top, pump some in the bottom. I get that.

However, I personally feel like only buffing garbage/nearly garbage items is a better way to balance than to nerf and buff. Part of my reasoning is that making some small portion of legacy items less valuable keeps the wealth from stagnating and would circulate said less desirable legacy items.

What do other players think?

You need both... otherwise the game experience power creep, and eventually everything will need to be balanced, again and again.
That's how you end up with games that deal stupid amounts of damage (start with 2000 when the game is new, end at 200000 later... and so on).

It is far better (and cheaper) to adjust a few under- or over-powered items/mechanics than having to do everything...

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Cyzax wrote:

You need both... otherwise the game experience power creep, and eventually everything will need to be balanced, again and again.
That's how you end up with games that deal stupid amounts of damage (start with 2000 when the game is new, end at 200000 later... and so on).

It is far better (and cheaper) to adjust a few under- or over-powered items/mechanics than having to do everything...

That makes a lot of sense. I think that happened in Diablo 3 (as I heard, I stopped playing that garbage 3 months after release).

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Cyzax wrote:

You need both... otherwise the game experience power creep, and eventually everything will need to be balanced, again and again.
That's how you end up with games that deal stupid amounts of damage (start with 2000 when the game is new, end at 200000 later... and so on).

It is far better (and cheaper) to adjust a few under- or over-powered items/mechanics than having to do everything...

I agree. But i don't think it is good to only nerf new drops. This way you enlarge the gap between the poor and rich and give them an unfair advantage. For example a legacy Kaom's Heart isn't just slightly better. Every build with this item is significantly better.

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Tigrinho1 wrote:

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Cyzax wrote:

You need both... otherwise the game experience power creep, and eventually everything will need to be balanced, again and again.
That's how you end up with games that deal stupid amounts of damage (start with 2000 when the game is new, end at 200000 later... and so on).

It is far better (and cheaper) to adjust a few under- or over-powered items/mechanics than having to do everything...

I agree. But i don't think it is good to only nerf new drops. This way you enlarge the gap between the poor and rich and give them an unfair advantage. For example a legacy Kaom's Heart isn't just slightly better. Every build with this item is significantly better.

That is definitely true. Should all nerfs be applied retroactively then? I know some things, like the life and mana leech did.

Speaking of Kaom's heart, it did get that fire damage buff to go with it, so with that in mind, should every nerf be accompanied by balancing (if unrelated) buff?

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YariChinMaiNichi wrote:

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Tigrinho1 wrote:

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Cyzax wrote:

You need both... otherwise the game experience power creep, and eventually everything will need to be balanced, again and again.
That's how you end up with games that deal stupid amounts of damage (start with 2000 when the game is new, end at 200000 later... and so on).

It is far better (and cheaper) to adjust a few under- or over-powered items/mechanics than having to do everything...

I agree. But i don't think it is good to only nerf new drops. This way you enlarge the gap between the poor and rich and give them an unfair advantage. For example a legacy Kaom's Heart isn't just slightly better. Every build with this item is significantly better.

That is definitely true. Should all nerfs be applied retroactively then? I know some things, like the life and mana leech did.

Speaking of Kaom's heart, it did get that fire damage buff to go with it, so with that in mind, should every nerf be accompanied by balancing (if unrelated) buff?

I think they should do it retroactively. They do it retroactively for gems so why is it diffent for gear. People level their gems to 21/20 and GGG decides to nerf it. For example Increased Critical Damage from 109% to 69% and quality from 5% to 0.5% per quality. Now it's 'crap'.
Sure that gem was overpowered, so they decided to nerf it because it causes imbalance and makes crit builds way too superior when it comes to damage. I really liked that gem but i totally agree with GGG. If they just nerfed the new ones this wouldn't have helped because that would have been an unfair game advantage for people who own the old one or are just rich.

With gear it's exactly the same thing but GGG decides in the opposite way.
Some people argue that they payed money for their gear so they would be pissed off. Yes, that's true but people also invest time for leveling or currency in their gems and good gems can be expensive. Of course at first I was not amused about that change but to be fair: they were right to do so.

So I really don't get the logic behind that. It's 1:1 the same thing but they do the opposite.

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YariChinMaiNichi wrote:

It is far better (and cheaper) to adjust a few under- or over-powered items/mechanics than having to do everything...

I think this is a good idea for some situations. In that way they could also add more options to uniques and make them interesting for different builds than before or support new mechanics that people can adopt to their builds. But I don't think that it is possible to do so for every nerf.

Yes I agree that the approach should be ubiquitous. Making some changes retroactive and not others often wildly tilts value to the benefit of player who already had such desirable items. Legacy Mjolner, even poorly rolled ones, are 50%-100% more expensive than current ones and so on.

But then there is the issue of item base types, like infernal mantle (I have a 6L legacy so I'm not too upset it hasn't been retroactively changed :). I don't know anything about coding or whatever, but maybe that would be more complicated to apply a retroactive fix to as opposed to just a stat.

In any case, it's good to see some thoughts. This game has got a ton of great going for it so these issues aren't game-breaking either way.

I think all gems are the same, sort of, while items are unique instances.
So retroactively changing something does only partially work, f.Ex. requiring a Divine Orb being applied, or not being able to get new stats on an item.

Usually, when a legacy item is created, it happens because for some reasons it would be very difficult/impossible for GGG to make the change effekt the old versions of the item.
At some point (dunno when anymore) they stated in a post that legacy uniques only exist because it would be way too much work to make the nerf apply to the legacy version. Can't remember why exactly, it had something to do with the interaction of mechanics.
Just as an example: For the nerf of

some time ago they had to adjust the whole mechanics of the Pain Attunement passive keystone because they could not just simply change the item's mod.

It does not happen because they like legacy items/want players to keep them.

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Tigrinho1 wrote:

They do it retroactively for gems so why is it diffent for gear.

This was explained a little while ago by GGG...

Essentially, each gem only store two values, the XP level, and the quality. How those are then applied is determined by the master data for the gem, which is common for all gems of that type.
So, if they change the effect of for example quality, that'll apply to all gems of that type in existence.

For unique items however, the individual affix are generated at the time the item is created, and is applicable only to that instance of the item.
So changes (nerfs or buffs) to the base item type of a unique will apply to all existing uniques of that base class, but changes to the generated affix will only apply from the time the affix template for the unique is changed.

An example was the Crest of Perandus shield that was changed in 1.3. It had its extra block chance affix changed from 10% to 5%, and at the same time the base item (Pine Buckler) had its blocking chance changed from 28% to 25% (I think the wiki is wrong and this was 30% to 26%). Legacy Crests still have an extra block chance of 10%, but they didn't keep the 28% (30%?) base blocking chance.
http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Crest_of_Perandus
http://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Pine_Buckler