Do you find GGG balance strategy acceptable?

I find it very annoying, that league after league they pick 1 skill, buff it over the top, nerf some old ones, to keep rotation and meta not stale. Why not just balance it properly. It doesnt take genius, to even out damage values. I can see why they are doing it, many games are doing, league of legends being one of them.

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Aetherium wrote:

I find it very annoying, that league after league they pick 1 skill, buff it over the top, nerf some old ones, to keep rotation and meta not stale. Why not just balance it properly. It doesnt take genius, to even out damage values. I can see why they are doing it, many games are doing, league of legends being one of them.

Comparing POE balancing to a game that is purely PVP is a bit silly. In a ARPG a skill being OP is perfectly acceptable because everyone can use it and do equally fine without detriment to another player.

Also if you are implying arc being OP you are incorrect. It's just over hyped. It has been merely brought to the same level as many other good skills that also perform very very well.

I am sorry for having to speculate what you mean but it's only because you fail to be explicit about what skill you are talking about.

Wait a second. If balancing is so easy as you imply here than how is it possible that no game ever got it right?

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kuciol wrote:

Wait a second. If balancing is so easy as you imply here than how is it possible that no game ever got it right?

they dont need to be exactly equal. But ever since the start of the game some of the skills have 2-3 times the dmg of others, looking at blade blurry, molten strike, this patch they added double strike. Literally all melee skills use essentialy same template builds. Yet most are unusable due to being less dmg, as well as no aoe, because they gutted aoe for no reason, even when projectile skills were better.

Same thing about arctic breath and ice spear, both could be very good skills comparable to freeze pulse and frostbolt, so long the damage was buffed about 40% more than it currently is(would still be worse than freeze pulse or frostbolt, but at least to some extent comparable)
Then of course theres plenty of bow skills, that havent been touched league after league, all it would take is to buff them by 50% across the board, and even with that they would still be worse than tornado shot.

It doesnt even take much time to balance, open pob, take a skill , compare its damage to its equivalents. Some are just straight up worse versions of reskined skills, as their mechanics are identical.

wait... this is about Dual Strike? Not the other half dozen skills that people are currently obsessed with?

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kuciol wrote:

Wait a second. If balancing is so easy as you imply here than how is it possible that no game ever got it right?

Its impossible to get right because everytime they add anything it changes what is good and what isn't, that doesn't mean that they can't do a better job and some of the skill changes really are easy.

For example, stat sticks as soon as they were added inherently nerfed any skill which switches hand, Reave god an enormous buff if your playing one particular style but say lightning strike didn't gain anything, the Irony there is lightning strike was already worse than reave :p

Any player with any kind of experience in the game can easily view the skill list and highlight probably 30 skills that are currently trash even if you have a low bar, the fact that its easy to highlight them is why its easy to say they could do better.

Another good example is double strike vs lacerate,

Lacerate got 25% more damage if target is bleeding, modest but pretty useful seems ok.

double strike got 113-169 flat phys if target is bleeding, which makes an attack speed jeweled foil have the same dps as one with a perfect merciless + flaring roll pretty much.

If you combine the two you end up with something pretty broken, like a 800 dps one hander its no wonder its unbelievably broken with a stat stick (again it doesn't switch hands so its rife for abuse)

I only mention these together because they are two different approaches to a conditional modifier, one of them is a sound way to reward you for triggering it, the other is so ludicrously high your getting to the white weapon meme builds.

Single target skills clearly need higher dps than aoe ones i've got no problem there, but double strike is so much higher you can run it with ancestral call + melee splash and it will still outdps lacerate on single target and clear faster :/.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

wait... this is about Dual Strike? Not the other half dozen skills that people are currently obsessed with?

double strike, dual strike is somewhat lackluster once you get to endgame gear, as it cant scale with statsticks. Double strike however has massive flat phys dmg from gem lvl + statstick scaling.

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Aetherium wrote:

I can see why they are doing it

Can you? Really?

In a F2P model like PoE, they HAVE to change things up every now and then. They are dependent on returning players as well as new players. People that have played this game for years, need "something else" - in addition to a new league mechanic. They don't have billions of dollars in the bank for the full priced, AAA-title sale. New league mechanics and reworks/balance changes create fuzz. Fuzz creates money in the bank.

They force a new META, and people come back to discover.

Gotcha. So this isn't about skills, but about stat-sticks.