Is there any gain for GGG in putting out shit balance patches?

Diablo 2 also had retardedly OP stuff, still played every single build I could think of.... thrice. Because the mechanics of it were fun. The mobs were at some point just sound since I kept killing everything off screen and was playing the game while watching a television show. Had played enough hours to navigate every single screen without needing to look.

Same reason as to why people still play dota 2, everything is overpowered as fuck, but the base mechanics are solid as hell.

Diablo 3 at it's core(besides the whole rmt auctionhouse horseshit) was an empty feeling game. You didn't actually feel like you were hitting enemies or doing anything, you were just taken along for a carnival ride. So no matter how much eldar elder super duper legendary of the beastbane dragonslayer +7 shit they put in it, it still felt like an external experience.
Try hitting a club without skills in D2, POE and D3 and tell me what gives the best feedback(for me it's still D2)

Now before ascendencies hit, poe was becoming a pretty tedious game. They managed to get somewhat of the same feel of D2 when it came to feedback(with a few skills), but since there were masses of enemies everywhere that hardly dropped any loot or experience, people got disconnected out of boredom. Which people managed to fix by creating the speedclear meta. Now it didn't matter that the XP and drops were shit if you could go a million miles an hour. The game felt great again, it felt like a constant cows farm in D2. Since there was still this nice visual/audio feedback while introducing something new to the arpg genre.



And now they're going to shit all over it by removing all the fun stuff and forcing us to go back to the boring old days. It's a bad design decision, but ggg wants to force people to reroll different builds. They think diversity and complexity is what keeps people here, it isn't. Solid base mechanics(even with a very, very shitty graphical engine) and good audio/visual feedback is what keeps people here as well as a solidity to choices made in a character. Adding OP items or speedclear builds just makes these core assets shine.

Instead of nerfing ES, they should have buffed life builds and spent every single penny they have on optimizing their engine to run on every shitty pc.

inb4:"But they're already doing that".
=> Not enough, not fast enough and they don't have enough competent people on the job yet. They've filled their offices with a lot of filler because of a badly chosen focus on pumping out new content by the barrel load.

Hence why you get a lot of half-assed ideas that get ruined at conception.
Leaguestones were a great idea, so were masters and strongboxes.
Get a stone, put it in and hey, different league. Now we're forced to maintain every shitty single stone(if we manage to find the ones we like at least) every 5 turns. It's become a drag, not additional value to the game.
Masters used to be incredible for streamlining gear in the game. Made rare gear so much more enjoyable to use, rather than force us to use uniques in nearly everything since the stats were clear. Nope, also nerfed into the ground. 3.0 will have even more nerfs.
And eventually strongboxes, a concept somewhat saved because of diviners, but mostly seen as an extra enemies box at this point. Unless you're running a map that's sextanted up the wazoo, you're not going to bother rolling these things. Also, 1 extra strongbox per map on leaguestones? F off.

All in all, I'm going to enjoy my ES build until 3.0 and then find a game that doesn't F over it's userbase every patch because of bad leadership.(I'm looking at you Chris).

I do agree, that nerfing ES doesnt fix fundamental problems such as poor life scaling and uselessness of armour/evasion.
But at least, GGG tried to reduce power-creep.

"

Hyskoa wrote:

Diablo 2 also had retardedly OP stuff, still played every single build I could think of.... thrice.

Yes, and Diablo 2 also had almost mandatory items like Enigma for non-Sorcerers and Infinity for mercenary for elemental casters (removes a lot of immunities).

No instant leech, but with good character you have enough HP to sustain with flasks + you have instant full recovery flasks.

The so-called "clear speed META" has fucked up people's definition of the word "viable".

Will you be able to clear all content after the ES nerf with an ES build? Sure. Were you able to beat all content with a life build before? Of course. But as long as you cant beat Guardiands + Shaper in a matter of seconds, shit isn't "viable".

Some "oldies" in here talk alot about "dumbing down the game", but NOTHING dumbs down a game more than too much DPS, letting you ignore every single boss mechanic in the game.

The worst thing I've ever seen get out of control in the games industry is the expectation that a game has to be, at some point, balanced.

This only began when online mechanics took hold; When it was just a single player game that everybody didn't know they were having a competition to get somewhere for a very long time over balance for all.

You're being milked just as far as the game industry can take it without themselves throwing up just doing what they have to do to make money out of nothing at all.

The second worst is knowing that Blizzard Entertainment's only development for World of Warcraft is several hundred balance patches and little else toward the game's appeal that it once had.

This problem stems from one source.
Mindless stupidity of gamers in general for these sorts of games where you're trying to get somewhere, when you had already arrived at it several months before.

There is no other way I can put this across without blatantly lying about this issue.

I'm surprised that players being here for so long can't see the picture.

GGG intentionally practices yo-yo balancing. It's strictly related to the business model.
There's a massive power creep injection in every patch: either a skill or a group of mechanically related skills, or recently - they play big with whole mechanics.
The point is to attract the masses and the casuals to actively play for at least two weeks at the beginning of a league. It's the time they are more willing to visit the shop. If we take a look at the graphs about the peaks of the player retention before participants begin to leak, it becomes clear.

Later on, they nerf to the ground the overused recent cash cow, and replace it with a new one. This way they bury both the power creep they intentionally created, along with the disposable content. These become meaningless, as everyone have already switched to the new meta. And as long as they implement more new content, power creep and disposable content become meaningless, harmless, and forgotten.

That's why they focus on the leagues, where this marketing strategy can effectively work. And are trying to suffocate the perma leagues, where it can't.

In a similar way is balanced another F2P game - Dota 2. Not identical, but similar. Though there are differences and PoE approach in balancing is way more extreme and aggressive, some basic principles remain.

At times I feel bad about the PoE balance team (though not the best team got to admit), as they are forced to take actions and decisions which are commercially motivated, defined by the marketing department.
That's why D2 will always be more balanced, along with TQ/GD, or sometimes even D3 - these are all P2P and the major income came/comes mostly by selling copies.

TLDR

PoE will never be a balanced RPG, because of the business model it follows. And developers are not even trying to.
A direct answer to the question in the title - yes, there is gain.

"

Phrazz wrote:

The so-called "clear speed META" has fucked up people's definition of the word "viable".

Will you be able to clear all content after the ES nerf with an ES build? Sure. Were you able to beat all content with a life build before? Of course. But as long as you cant beat Guardiands + Shaper in a matter of seconds, shit isn't "viable".

Some "oldies" in here talk alot about "dumbing down the game", but NOTHING dumbs down a game more than too much DPS, letting you ignore every single boss mechanic in the game.

No DPS fucked up the whole game actually not just viables
Its the root of all evil
The double dippig problem
The Vaal pact problem
The exp nerfs problem
The fall asleep playing game problem

There are no real fights until big 6 and even then can be trivialized with enough DPS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAcDdlje-S8

Whats next we do shaper/uber like sub 1min strands?


If it were me I'd multiple every skill gem by .05 (a 95% dps nerf) and cut monster damage by 30%. Because this one shot or get one shot meta sucks.

"

Aim_Deep wrote:

"

Phrazz wrote:

The so-called "clear speed META" has fucked up people's definition of the word "viable".

Will you be able to clear all content after the ES nerf with an ES build? Sure. Were you able to beat all content with a life build before? Of course. But as long as you cant beat Guardiands + Shaper in a matter of seconds, shit isn't "viable".

Some "oldies" in here talk alot about "dumbing down the game", but NOTHING dumbs down a game more than too much DPS, letting you ignore every single boss mechanic in the game.

No DPS fucked up the whole game actually not just viables
Its the root of all evil
The double dippig problem
The Vaal pact problem
The exp nerfs problem
The fall asleep playing game problem

There are no real fights until big 6 and even then can be trivialized with enough DPS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAcDdlje-S8

Whats next we do shaper/uber like sub 1min strands?


If it were me I'd multiple every skill gem by .05 (a 95% dps nerf) and cut monster damage by 30%. Because this one shot or get one shot meta sucks.

Why not just nerf skills that give high dps? Blade Flurry is ridiculous for example, I just went with 4 link this league and I was able to do most of content except ofc the guardians and bosses, I can prolly do them easily with 6 link.