Why Nerfs insted of global caps?

I like how everyone is ignoring the "Nerfing skills instead of imposing a cap, resulting in many builds getting nerfed instead of only the over powered build."

why not

One day a developer will finally get it and buff up instead of nerf down.

One day.

Compare the game now to the leagues before Conquerors of the Atlas, like Legion, Synthesis and Blight. Bosses have been buffed, mobs have been buffed, basically every meta skills have been nerfed, and now every ascendancy have been nerfed, some more than once.

Was all this really necessary? I think they kinda sucked the fun out of the game wth all this boring, RTS/PVP style balancing. Let us be OP. Let us have fun, GGG.

Completely agree. GGG nerfs the bottom end of builds, things that everyone can get, like skill gems and passive points. They don't nerf the top end, like the mechanics, and the OP items and mod rolls themselves.

I'm glad i quit this game long ago. The build balancing is just horribly bad and even things that should be legacy untouched on standard are nerfed anyway.

The simple ancient answer to the OP's question is to just never get attached to a playstyle/build. Play whatever is gonna be strong in the current league/patch and abuse the fuck out of it so you won't feel you missed the chance.

META (Most Effective Tactic Available) is the way to go, it's the secret mindset of hopping without second thoughts to the most OP shit in the gaem, take the only opportunity to play that skill or class at it's finest vs the current difficulty and avoid HC/SSF mode like the plague.

If you don't like the volatility of the viability of builds in this game then it's just not for you unless you can man up and swallow the nerfs/build neutering patch notes/dev manifestos. Besides, as someone alredy stated, what is targeted are the things everyone gets easily (budget parts) like the skill gems/ascendancies/passive tree.

PoE is an "Icefrogged" gaem when it comes to balance because it apparently is good for sales longterm.

This needs a serious bump nowadays.

Much of the endgame is about minmaxing your gear. If you run into a hard cap at some point, there is no need for further improvement. In order to make an car comparison here: why should you try inventing a car that's able to do 300 km/h if you have to add a hard cap 200 km/h anyway?

Besides that, with the complexity PoE has, with triggers, conditional effects and stuff that works together, it would most likely be a very hard job to implement a working DPS cap, unless they add a limit of how much damage a mob can get per second (or server tick). But even this wouldn't really solve the problem and in stead shift the meta towards DoT, since you could simply stack the dps up to the cap and then fully focus on not getting hit while the boss is smelting down.


Besides that, it may be my subjective impression, but I got the feeling like more and more of the community developed a "skip everything until t16" mentality over the last years, which seems to bug GGG. And to be honest: I can understand that. I still remember my early times (2016/17) where there where only 3 acts and people have done party boss runs on the act 3 bosses (mainly piety and dominus) because it was profitable. Now just imagine today doing A10 kitava runs. Sounds absolutly ridiculous right? Well, that displays how the game has changed over the years.

We could now spend hours in order to argue about what's good/bad about the evolvement the game has done since then, but I don't want to do that right now (especially since there are already lots of other topics about that). I just wanted to point out that PoE is a different game than it was a few years ago and it seems like GGG wants to go a step toward their roots again.

guys global caps are a cop out for proper design, they belong in pvp games where parity is crucial to the way the game plays they are literally anathema to a traditional PvE ARPG because they directly block character progression.

The whole point is to be able to make your character stronger with respect to the content, once that is no longer possible you are playing cookie clicker with a different skin as the fundamental gameplay design is entirely predicated on facilitating character upgrades in a variety of ways.

Note that doesn't mean that GGG shouldn't balance better they should, the fact a majority of buffed skills got a flat 25% indicates to me that they didn't look at them independently at all and just provided a blanket buff. Many skills in the game require expertise to understand their strengths or limitations and the numbers you can produce from them.

But frankly i'm not surprised they ignore reddit/forums a majority of the time, the number of players that unironically whine about minions being nerfed into the ground should be a meme but I think these players really believe it. Pretty much every league regardless of actual patch notes.