The Balance Team needs a shake-up

@Sid, my thoughts summed up in a tl;dr are

Your arguing that the balance team is responsible for design choices, but that's not the reality of things.

They get a tool-box and are then ordered to make them balanced in relation to one another
"as best as possible within the constraints given", but they have no real power over those constraints.

- class overlap/identity crissis
- exponential scaling

To give a few well known "design decisions" have an impact on balance, but are not factors the balance team has any impact on.

Which puts the blame on the wrong party in my opinion.
The OP seems to fundamentally misunderstand what the balance team their job is.

I don't particularly disagree with your post in overall, i'm just not inclined to shug it all up on one
black sheep.

Peace,

-Boem-

"

allbusiness wrote:

In my humble opinion, the current balance team needs a shake-up of some sort. Either someone needs to go, or there needs to be someone new put in charge of balance with the current existing team.

Nooooo, they are doing a great job. Come take a look yourself:

The problem, as I see it, is that GGG feels obligated to push out new content too often. They feel the need to create new META's, introducing new, powerful monsters - and new powerful items to deal with said monsters. And maybe they're right, maybe they HAVE to do this to keep their player base "satisfied".

But this directly hurts other aspects of the game. Old skills, old areas, old bosses, old uniques. We can name A LOT of unique items, being indirectly nerfed because of tree changes, without GGG touching those uniques. When they nerfed block across the board, why didn't they touch items scaling based on block, as Cybil's Paw? When they nerfed life across the board, why didn't they touch items with +% or -% to max life, like Carnage Heart?

Outdated, underpowered and rusty. It's... Sad.

The balance team should work to create build diversity, not work to limit it. IMHO!

Well the use of switching metas is basically universal in game balance. Because once you try to achieve real balance you notice that this goes at the cost of diversity. If players have a tons of choices you usually run into issues. There are hardly any complex games that are not just switching around the current meta instead of actually aiming for perfect balance. So you always end up with outliers and for an ARPG it is even harder, because in the end it is hard to messure the quality of skills and builds. If in LoL or Dota a champ has a clearly superior winrate it is obvious that something is off, but in Path of Exile it is hard to messure. Some players might want more safety, others more power and they don't care about the risk, others want good skills on a budget again others want scalability.

So overall there isn't a clear messurement, some skills are too strong in all of those categories (like Warchief) so I feel they will do something in those cases. But other skills all have disadvantages in some of those categories.

"

sidtherat wrote:

it is funny that you havent once touched the aspect of 'player has too much power' - but all you do is defend the easy way and ask for an easy way

balance is a 'balance of power' not 'players have all the power'

'All you do is defend the easy way and ask for the easy way'


I play HC and have played plenty of characters into the 90s in HC every, single, league. Without macros, no exploits, nothing. On really awful characters too I might add, pushing into red maps with many of them. Because clearly I am asking for the easy way.


And it's funny because players have none of the power right now. Currently it's a binary choice of if you picked this you win, if you picked the other 80-90% of the other shit you lost. I've always criticized things that are just blatantly way too strong that require minimal investment, such as Voltaxic and Reach of the Council. However, what I don't enjoy is bullshit statements like yours saying you're doing red maps with 5.5k hp just to make yourself look like an elitist. Any red map boss that casts any elemental damage spell is going to basically instantly kill you.

"

Emphasy wrote:

Well the use of switching metas is basically universal in game balance. Because once you try to achieve real balance you notice that this goes at the cost of diversity. If players have a tons of choices you usually run into issues. There are hardly any complex games that are not just switching around the current meta instead of actually aiming for perfect balance. So you always end up with outliers and for an ARPG it is even harder, because in the end it is hard to messure the quality of skills and builds. If in LoL or Dota a champ has a clearly superior winrate it is obvious that something is off, but in Path of Exile it is hard to messure. Some players might want more safety, others more power and they don't care about the risk, others want good skills on a budget again others want scalability.

So overall there isn't a clear messurement, some skills are too strong in all of those categories (like Warchief) so I feel they will do something in those cases. But other skills all have disadvantages in some of those categories.

No, switching metas is only useful when the meta has become so broken/stale that it NEEDS to be switched. However, that type of balancing only works in an actual competitive environment. The only time you should touch things in a single player driven ARPG is when something is so absurdly and insanely broken that you have to bring it in line with other skills to keep some semblance of choice. Otherwise, you should be working on bringing lower end skills into line with the higher skills, not nerfing the working skills that aren't even broken (i.e. see Cyclone).


That's another major problem, GGG is balancing Path of Exile like a card game (i.e. magic the gathering). Except, card games are PvP encounters. Why you would use the same philosophy and try to apply it to a primarily PvE experience is totally beyond me.

"

Boem wrote:

@Sid, my thoughts summed up in a tl;dr are

Your arguing that the balance team is responsible for design choices, but that's not the reality of things.

They get a tool-box and are then ordered to make them balanced in relation to one another
"as best as possible within the constraints given", but they have no real power over those constraints.

- class overlap/identity crissis
- exponential scaling

To give a few well known "design decisions" have an impact on balance, but are not factors the balance team has any impact on.

Which puts the blame on the wrong party in my opinion.
The OP seems to fundamentally misunderstand what the balance team their job is.

I don't particularly disagree with your post in overall, i'm just not inclined to shug it all up on one
black sheep.

Peace,

-Boem-

There is nothing that stops the balance team from tuning down new content numbers. It's been pretty clear that the balance team literally doesn't test shit ever. Like literally since Invasion league, they don't test shit. If they did, none of the overtuned content would have ever made it into the game.

"

Boem wrote:

"

sidtherat wrote:

it is funny that you havent once touched the aspect of 'player has too much power' - but all you do is defend the easy way and ask for an easy way

balance is a 'balance of power' not 'players have all the power'

It's pure subjective feedback, since objectively they do a "good" job.

don't misinterpret that as "there are no issue's", but in therms of keeping the game alive and funding the project so it can continue to exist allowing future balance.

Balance is off-point, but not to a degree that the game is unplayable, which would constitute a failed balance team.

Considering the many factors that are "The Balance" in PoE, there not bad.

And that's coming from somebody that has found flaws in "the balance" pretty continuously in every content/patch update released so far.

Peace,

-Boem-

I would say the fact that they have not been able to produce a reasonably balanced patch despite years and years of experience and feedback would constitute as a failure of a balance team.


I'd also like to add in that they really need to stop balancing around the presence of tp scrolls for escaping and alt+f4ing. Players are abusing macros, and the devs are increasingly trying to kill said players through burst damage. What they need to do is just remove the ability to escape instantly via portals, and the ability to instantly DC and get out of jail cards.

I see PoE more as a game of creativity than skill.

The problem is, even if you are creative. The game still isn't very engaging. Though even if you somehow manage to make a build that is creative and requires skill to play, it will lack or deal too much damage, trivializing your creativity.

This is the issue Diablo 3 had with skill. They have this awesome structure for skillful play, but scaling effectiveness with basic stats has made finding that magic zone near impossible to find.

Further still, the problem is that testing this creative build that you want to create takes 12 hours to setup. With 3 repetitions of same content... the story and now labyrinth.

The only reason they still have players is because this takes so long to realize. . .



Perhaps when they have all 10 acts in place they will completely restructure balance and mechanics in a better way. So we only need to wait around 4-10 years guys.

"

Boem wrote:

- class overlap/identity crissis

With Ascendancy, every class has its identity. Balancing classes became easier than ever.

"

Boem wrote:

- exponential scaling

I dont understand that. So you claim balancing team cant just multiply few numbers and see what result will be? Also, there isnt so much of exponential scaling in PoE to claim that it's the main source of imbalance.



If you think that fixing current balance in PoE is a VERY hard task, i'm going to dissapoint you with few simple suggestions:

1. Add few more life mods ("X% increased life, hybrid "+X life and stun recovery"), and add "+X life" implicit to few armour/evasion/ES base item pieces at the cost of reducing their armour/eva/ES values.
So, life characters will get more ways to scale life with gear, not just one puny life prefix.

2. Surgeon prefix on flasks and Pathfinder's "master surgeon" ascendancy node must go away. It's totally imbalanced. It could be replaced with something like "flask gains 1 charge every X seconds" (X most probably varies from 5 to 10). Master Surgeon should be replaced with something like "you gain 1 flask charge every X seconds if you've hit recently" (X should be 2-3). Then, you may add a bit of power to Pathfinder, if she gets too weak after those changes.
Maintaining even the most powerful flask all the time in boss fight is too powerful. Flasks werent designed to be used like that.

3. "double-dipping" for DoTs must go away. DoTs should be increased on with increments, that dont affect base damage type cause them (e.g. poison from physical damage should be increased by chaos damage increase, but poison from chaos damage - dont).

4. Damage done by various skills should be brought in line with each other. AND I MEAN THAT! It's very simple to calculate, that DPS from Ancestral Warchief is much hgher that from Ancestral Protector. It's very easy to calculate, that many AoE abilies have the same or greater damage, than single-target ones. AoE abilities should deal 2-5 times less damage that single-target ones, depending on AoE. The list of abilities is to vast to put it here, but i think we all know what skills should be rebalanced.

5. Insane multiplicative damage scaling from various map mods should go away. Really, it's isnt even fun when enemy's damage scales up by factor of 3-5 total. Solution? Replace them with "additive" damage mods, so enemy damage will be under control. Also, map's mod system could be changed so let's say, prefixes will increase enemy "offensive" stats (or reduce player's defences), while suffixes increase enemy's "defensive" stats (or reduce player's offence). So, only 3 "damage mod can be on the map, and that's far easier to control. Also, the pack size mod should go away, and be replaced with straight "+X% experience gained" bonus.

6. Experience bonus for slaying map boss should be increased by a factor of 100-1000, or something like that. Boss should earn ~20-30% of total experince gained in map, not ~0.03%.

7. Instant logout must go away from all zones except towns and hideouts. If you logout, your character stays in game for 5-10 seconds, and only then disconnects. Surrounded by enemies? Your trouble! Game shouldnt be balanced around instant log-out, it turns hardcore into a joke.

And i can continue the list...

I'm amazed if nothing is done for Pathfinder / BV / Vinktars and huge cap between Life&CI

Need new bromance team agreed D: