Why are stat sticks bad?

It really feels like those advocating for the stat stick nerfs want to ruin the enjoyment of other players. Why not advocate for buffs for your items instead?

I'm also an on and off player (probably still a noob) so if you could fill me in on the details it would be nice.

From what I've gathered it doesn't make sense thematically for dual wielding characters to smash monsters with their main hand and scratch their ass with the other.

I've also gathered that they could replace stat sticks with something better and more interesting.

Something something melee is dead.

It is just unhealthy for the game overall to have these kind of stuff around, as when balancing comes in we have to take them into account and start being extreme (on for exemple monster life or damage) which affect other builds.

for exemple, when vaal pact was instant leech, what was the ONLY way to kill a well geared vaal pact user? -> one shot. So the devs balanced the game so that these characters would have a challenge and thus the one-shot mechanic became the norme. Now, vaal pact got nerf to reason but an unhealthy part of that overpowered mechanic remains and affect every builds.

How would you feel about a skill gem that let you kill all monsters including the map boss just by zoning into the map? How would you feel playing builds that didn't do that? Why not just buff everything in the game up to that level?

What you really seem to be asking is, 'why are nerfs healthy for a game?'.

But how did they buff melee to compensate?

"stat stick" and "shaper mod weapon" became synonymous in the reddit echo chamber and GGG swallowed it rather than listen to individual informed people.

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Hornybull wrote:

It really feels like those advocating for the stat stick nerfs want to ruin the enjoyment of other players. Why not advocate for buffs for your items instead?

I'm also an on and off player (probably still a noob) so if you could fill me in on the details it would be nice.

From GGG's perspective there are probably multiple reasons, the most important oneis probably that a removal of the extreme outlier will make it easier to adjust every other skill/playstyle in the future, without always having to keep the outlier in mind.


But the most important thing for me, and what should also be the easiest to understand, is the fact that stat-sticks made true-dw(aka actually using both weapons to attack) obsolete. Simply because fake-dw profits from all the advantages that true-dw has, while havin the stat-stick boni on top. Thus any buff for true-dw would also buff fake-dw by the same degree making it the better option for ever in every situation that allows it.

The only way to to reach a parity between them is thus a nerf for stat-sticks/the fake-dw concept. The,imo, best way would have been the removal of the offense dw boni if you use a stat stick and a nerf for all dmg stat sticks, so their values don't exceed the dmg bonus (~30%) provided by the dw dmg bonus. Because as long as they deal more dmg than true-dw there is no reason to choose true-dw because fake-dw offers more flexibility and the possibility of actually getting unique effects (e.g. Ewars Mirage).

But GGG decided on an easier approach, which i'm also fine with and happy about, but it is not the optimal solution.

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ladish wrote:

"stat stick" and "shaper mod weapon" became synonymous in the reddit echo chamber and GGG swallowed it rather than listen to individual informed people.

Yeah...no.

People were pissing about it on the forums for just as long as they have been on Reddit. From what I understand it was never intended to begin with, so it was bound to happen...

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Nephalim wrote:

But how did they buff melee to compensate?

Impale

Ah yes, impale, the new buff to starforge brutality builds :)