Elemental/Templar nerf?

For the health of the game we have to make changes that may invalidate builds that people have made in this temporary Closed Beta.

In Open Beta, once we're not wiping any more, I can definitely see the argument for wanting to minimise the disruption to people's builds.

Changes we make right now though help us reach a balanced Open Beta faster.

Remember the cycle that happens if we refuse to nerf something:

• We have to buff everything else to make it feel as powerful as the cool broken build.
• People complain the game is now too easy.
• We make the monsters harder so that it's still challenging in the right places.
• Later, we realise that there has been arbitrary inflation of damage values. We scale them all down without affecting balance, to keep numbers reasonable.

At the end of the cycle, it's exactly like we did the correct fix in the first place, but it took ten times as long and left the game in a bad state for most of it.

Having said that, the 0.9.11 changes aren't really very disruptive. I just wanted to rant about nerf philosophy during Closed Beta.