Who is balancing this game? Lmao

"

astraph wrote:

Some "balance" issues are definetely quetionable. Using Path of Building (which we assume for the most part is accurate), seems like i can peak my Shaper single target DPS at 10.5 Million fully buffed with Blade Flury. Then i tried for science how much could have i peak my DPS with Dual Strike, if i had 2 Loath Banes(mirrored daggers), and i could not get it higher than 6-7 million. LMAO, a ranged AoE skill using one weapons did 50% more single target damage than a dedicated dual weilding, single target, namelocking skill, even on a theoritical character that went as far as to use 2 mirrored daggers. Man it is BEYOND REDICULOUS.

Now i am not advocating ANY nerf to skills from melee weapons because melee vs ranged has always been the most pressing issue, but it is clear that some melee skills, especially single target ones need MASSIVE buffs. Like MASSIVE. For instance I do not think that ANYTHING should come close, in terms of single target DPS, in this game to Dual Strike with 2 mirrored weapons. I mean, come on....

Heh, not paying attention to "balance" even regarding single target namelocking melee versus "AoE/ranged" melee, disregarding the status of melee vs ranged/cast got us here.

When you don't even watch closely the bigger picture and address problems, and you keep addressing issues only at very large time intervals and not doing "balance passes" as soon as needed, this stuff happens.

At least they introduce regularly "moar" damage multipliers on support gems, and new skills are also half the time "opie-op" level comparing them to all the current ones...

It would be so great to keep the "moar" damage on the goddamn links of the items, so you never surpass 150/180% "moar" damage and address skill damage increases/reductions from that point forward. It would then help all those supports that are constantly unused to get some breath, and not contend only for "moar" efficiency, but also "moar" fun.

Alien concept, I know, but if we got all these "meme" regarding PoE, we might also "deserve" some "proper" investments regarding "balancing" in this game.

And the biggest problem is the unlink of danger/reward ratios.

It's asinine to keep 0 danger "drop" mechanics like rolling items in town or RNG crafting as a better way to obtain "mirror worthy rares" than going and killing stuff.

Just like it's as asinine to not link properly the difficulty regarding leveling to 100 to the dangerous content.

On softcore, you should be persuaded not to use automatically "opie-op meta" to "insta kill" bosses with phases and interesting mechanics as you only have a binary alive/dead status encouraged by instant leech/log out etc.

Just imagine providing fair danger/reward regarding loot - drops should already be at least halved and most items that are hidden by filters shouldn't even drop - but making it so that you would have a better chance to get a "chase" unique/rare after you put some effort into fighting "the good fight" and vanquishing your "difficult" foe...

Add to that the foreign concept of granting more EXP for "tougher" enemies and keep the current level for casuals, if the death penalty is to be kept as it is on softcore. Even those casuals might be enticed then to make an effort to push through, think and improve - be that on gear side, skill side, build side etc.

But it would also require more investment from GGG into proper "balancing" and addressing all "broken" level "opie-op" stuff, supervising the "market" if trade becomes the "go to" solution for everything and even additional work on all unfinished and QoL missing features.

It's a longshot, but hey, I'm a dreamer that still hopes that PoE will improve. RNGesus knows that it has all the potential...

I think the approach of GiGiGi is too drastic

I remember one old game I used to play where there was a unit "Paladin" who was basically Op Op tanking unit that was expensive but clearly on top of the chain. And people complaint about it a lot
So every release notes, there was mentioned Paladin at least once

1. once people considered to be too expensive and too weak
- in the patch they buffed paladin .... by 0.1%

2. during next round people complainted after the buff the unit was too strong
- in the patch they nerfed paladin .... by 0.1%

And the cycle repeated and it was connected to one single thing - the amount of TOP players who played that class and was successful with it - every time they rulled the game with Paladins - people complained. Every time noobs tried to replicate the strategy and failed - they complained how weak it is.
But over 5 years, the unit stays within 1% the same :)

THIS IS HOW BALANCING WORKS when surrendering the pressure of a loud crowd.

You know, I've been thinking of something. The impression we're getting of a growing skill balancing issue might be only a problem with perception, or more precisely with our ability to compare skills better. These days the game has a lot of skills so there's a lot of mechanical overlaps too and also many situations where the build is practically identical for two skills so you can freely swap the main skill around with little to no change. As a result, any balance gaps seem a lot more glaring than they would otherwise be, and really, why would you go back to the first skill if you socketed the second one and it performed better? Right, even if the gap is fairly low, you wouldn't.

That brings me to another issue, and that's poebuilder, probably the greatest character planner that was ever created for any game, or at least I know of none nearly as effective. However, it's a double edged sword of sorts. Once upon a time even an experienced player would have only a general idea of how a build would perform, he would have to assemble it to be sure and see how it stacks to his other builds. And that was good, as the complexity of game mechanics and exploration was a huge selling point for PoE and also the reason for fairly costly respecs.

With a way to easily and accurately compare vastly different setups we can see in greater detail how certain skills stack to each other, and that means the balance team needs to do a lot better job to keep mid and low tier skills afloat. Players always flocked to the stronger options, sure, and that's the way it should be, but I don't think low tier skills were ever abandoned to quite this degree, the reason just might be that we now know exactly how bad they are comparatively. If anyone was wondering why we never got practice dummies or floating damage that just might be the reason, if players have limited options of comparing different setups you can get away with doing only the big balancing sweeps and practically no finetuning.

One other thing it affects are those forced meta shifts that GGG is often accused of, and with good reason, it's a legit tool to keep the game fresh for a long time, we may bitch about it (especially standard players) but it works. The problem with that one is that the freshness doesn't last as long anymore, once it would take half a league for the top players to test new setups properly and spread it to the public, now it's known to happen before the league even starts, as we saw with Dark Pact.

I suppose we saw a lot of those threads over the years, GD will kill PoE, D4 will kill PoE, some korean action rpg or other will kill PoE and so on. I don't think anything ever threatened it the way path of building does.

"

MortalKombat3 wrote:

You don't use two-handed claws? :P

My god that is actually genious. I want a bat'leth. Let's make that happen people.

"

jgyoung wrote:

Let's make that happen people.

There you go

"

Marxone wrote:

I think the approach of GiGiGi is too drastic

I remember one old game I used to play where there was a unit "Paladin" who was basically Op Op tanking unit that was expensive but clearly on top of the chain. And people complaint about it a lot
So every release notes, there was mentioned Paladin at least once

1. once people considered to be too expensive and too weak
- in the patch they buffed paladin .... by 0.1%

2. during next round people complainted after the buff the unit was too strong
- in the patch they nerfed paladin .... by 0.1%

And the cycle repeated and it was connected to one single thing - the amount of TOP players who played that class and was successful with it - every time they rulled the game with Paladins - people complained. Every time noobs tried to replicate the strategy and failed - they complained how weak it is.
But over 5 years, the unit stays within 1% the same :)

THIS IS HOW BALANCING WORKS when surrendering the pressure of a loud crowd.

you have basically explained every MOBA


in league YI always wrecked new players but was useless in highest skill tier play so they couldn't balance him to make both happy

"

raics wrote:

"

jgyoung wrote:

Let's make that happen people.

There you go

You forgot the torch! We can't properly riot without it.

"

jgyoung wrote:

You forgot the torch! We can't properly riot without it.

That's no pitchfork, that's a two-handed claw!

"

raics wrote:

"

jgyoung wrote:

You forgot the torch! We can't properly riot without it.

That's no pitchfork, that's a two-handed claw!

Ha, indeed it is i guess. My only issue is the image's name is main_pitchfork.png lol.

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1985677

this is the unshaper build, its got 3 core items , 1 2h sword and 2 jewels , and is the most efficient shaper eraser in the game afaik

and it lets you get lots of res and life easily, you can literally use w/e u want and still get the same result more or less of absolutely destroying one of the end game bosses


by contrast, if i wanted to have as many minions as possible i would need to dual wield midnight bargains and lose 60% of my hp and remove my ability to get CI

even if ES didn't get nerfed to oblivion i would be forced to choose Shav wrap or my other minion from Vis Mortis or attempt to get high chaos res on top of regular res on top of ES on jewelry


not only will this never come close to getting me to unshapers level of damage, it will absolutely cripple my ability to live , which is already really low considering bones of Ullr has almost 0 defense value and Minion related uniques are also 0 Survivability for the player


so i either need to be stupidly rich to become a regular player
(to buy crazy high tier survivability items),

or play glass cannon die from a sneeze mode , to play a fun build that i am actually interested in, do i want to have lots of minions or do i want to be viable?

why must my class pay an absolutely ridiculous penalty to do something others can do 10x better than my class can even if my class didn't have handicaps?


on the other end of crazy, my golemancer can do uber atzis, ,guardians, breachlords, almost every boss in the game with ANY mod, Cheese no damage challenges for insane money , with a tabula

all of which while being dead



Balance