Can we get an explanation about the skill balancing..

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Shagsbeard wrote:

There has to be choice. If everything had the same potential, it wouldn't matter what you chose. "Balance" is boring.

This is literally the opposite of reality.

Balance does not mean homogeneity. Balance means a choice between playstyle, rather than a choice between performance (or lack thereof).

Furthermore, balance doesn't mean everything is exactly equal; it means there isn't a gulf of hundreds and hundreds of times the performance.

The majority of builds require too much effort for the majority of players to make them work in a timeframe they are likely to play the game, so everyone flocks to the meta skills that have been recently overbalanced.

Skills are either blatantly so strong that they work instinctively and require little effort, or they aren't and people wait for a streamer or someone with significantly more time to work out how to get them to work, or they are so weak that nobody bothers.

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Xyel wrote:

Got any better data to go from?

And in terms of interpretation, that something has low % of usage doesn't mean it's shit, it might be, it might not be, can't tell, but that something has a high % does mean it's really good, hence it's fair to call the high used skills meta. And it's because skills are substitutable - fire trap might be used as a support skill to rf, but there are dozens fire skills that can be used for that. That everyone uses fire trap for it is because fire trap is significantly better than all the other substitutable skills.

There aren't a dozen fire skills that can support RF there are 4 because only 4 scale their dot from spell damage and 1 is channeling, 1 is support (flame wall), 1 is a totem and only fire trap actually does what its required to.

This is exactly what I mean about interpretation, numbers without knowledge is useless and no there isn't better data to go on but that doesn't mean people should parrot ninja as why balance is bad.

They should be saying balance is bad because when they go play infernal blow its shit when they are perfectly capable of succeeding on other skills they played.

Good for a popularity measure though

To circle back round rq if you wanted to use the firetrap numbers to argue that scorching ray needs to be better because somebody should be using it I think that's a pretty reasonable argument to make, but it takes analysis to get to that point. Scorching ray is a reasonable skill but channeling automatically hoses any usage values for a skill :P

PoE used to be "play whatever you want" even not that long ago(around 1.5 year ago I played Lightning Warp Traps). Sure, you were slower than if you would some op meta skill, but you still were fine. Nowadays you pick anything thats off-meta, and unless you put 50ex into it (or are extremely lucky with crafts) you will just suffer.

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Aynix wrote:

PoE used to be "play whatever you want" even not that long ago(around 1.5 year ago I played Lightning Warp Traps). Sure, you were slower than if you would some op meta skill, but you still were fine. Nowadays you pick anything thats off-meta, and unless you put 50ex into it (or are extremely lucky with crafts) you will just suffer.

Its because not balancing the game properly you literally remove the choise from the players.

I second your opinion absolutely tried about 20 different builds and ANY non meta was frustrating as hell to play ,specially when bossing..

Sadly GGG decided to go back to its "roots" and cater to hardcore community leaving us "casuals" with choice: leave or embrace the meta.

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Xyel wrote:

Also, that a strange build can kill a specific boss says nothing about the build's ability to actually get there by itself, which is kind of the problem. A ton of builds have horrible weaknesses, which aren't visible in a video that runs content that cannot exploit them.

I played bladestorm in ultimatum. I know how it perfromed back then, it got nerfed but only a bit. Will still do fine. Hell i was doing 10 waves on t15 with 5l and jack the axe.

Also you are kinda missing the point on why CF is meta. It is meta because its free damage, just like scorchirng ray used to be with RF or blood rage for any attack skill that need speed.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

There aren't a dozen fire skills that can support RF there are 4 because only 4 scale their dot from spell damage and 1 is channeling, 1 is support (flame wall), 1 is a totem and only fire trap actually does what its required to.

This is exactly what I mean about interpretation, numbers without knowledge is useless and no there isn't better data to go on but that doesn't mean people should parrot ninja as why balance is bad.

Notice how the interpretation has zero impact on the conclusion?

Whether it's played because it's self-sufficient, or because it's the best from alternatives, or because it's the only mechanically viable alternative doesn't matter at all - it's highly played in either case, so the skill is good.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

They should be saying balance is bad because when they go play infernal blow its shit when they are perfectly capable of succeeding on other skills they played.

Good for a popularity measure though

To circle back round rq if you wanted to use the firetrap numbers to argue that scorching ray needs to be better because somebody should be using it I think that's a pretty reasonable argument to make, but it takes analysis to get to that point. Scorching ray is a reasonable skill but channeling automatically hoses any usage values for a skill :P

This has two problems -
the first one is that it invites "git gut scrub" replies, which are very popular around here.
The second one is the issue of progression and budget - it's pretty easy to find a vid of a random skill destroying some part of PoE's endgame, which offers the argument that the skill is fine, while the reality often is that doing that requires a budget that has been farmed on another, actually functional skill.

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kuciol wrote:

I played bladestorm in ultimatum. I know how it perfromed back then, it got nerfed but only a bit. Will still do fine. Hell i was doing 10 waves on t15 with 5l and jack the axe.

Also you are kinda missing the point on why CF is meta. It is meta because its free damage, just like scorchirng ray used to be with RF or blood rage for any attack skill that need speed.

That doesn't mean anything - anything a ton of builds worked in 3.14- and became unplayable when 3.15 hit. And a lot of builds "should" work, but don't, because there's some problem that's not visible until it's played.

Yeah, it's free damage, which happens to be necessary because the skills themselves don't do enough damage.

You can't claim someone is wrong simply by changing the meaning of words to suit yourself.

The problem isn't "balance"... what ever you think that might mean. It's that GGG includes content that is designed to challenge players. Players set the false metric of "has to be able to clear all content easily to be good" and find that they're limited in their choices.

Players are the problem, not the game design.

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Xyel wrote:

Notice how the interpretation has zero impact on the conclusion?

Whether it's played because it's self-sufficient, or because it's the best from alternatives, or because it's the only mechanically viable alternative doesn't matter at all - it's highly played in either case, so the skill is good.

No it doesn't it changes from case to case, in the circumstance you highlighted there aren't additional answers and you can't draw balance conclusions from it.

There have been leagues where spark was very highly represented, on 200ex + aura stackers.

Is spark good? Nope, got buffed this league like everything else.

Also git gud scrub shouldn't be invalidated as a response, some players can't get anywhere because they are bad not because the balance is bad. I don't say that to be toxic its because skill cap and efficiency are always part of balance criteria.

Much of the shit people complain about as OP Meta shit was OP prior to it being meta, meaning there were leagues of it being superb but not popular so it doesn't appear on your metric

popularity =/= power, characters at 100 using it =/= power.

You have to do the numbers or have played the characters with a certain level of experience. Ninja might help you look at what the tallest nails might be but it requires interpretation.

Here's another example, is everything that uses omniscience a good skill? By numbers the answer is yes, but the actuality is omniscience props up a bunch of non viable skills that require a buff.

tldr : if you balanced using PoE Ninja the game would be much shitter than their already poor balance is :p

You should forget the notion of "balance" especially in the terms you want it to mean.

No game should ever strive to make everything the same in terms of damage/defence

There is a rough sort of balance here,but it is more of a sine wave than a flat line.

As for why some are hitting much harder in comparison, effort put into a build for one (unsurprisingly the ones that get nerfed most often are ones that require next to no effort to hit those tens of millions dps), you then have this group delirium about what skills are optimal, the ones that are deemed not to be are not really played and as such all the min/maxing is not done on them and they look far worse than they actually are.
You then also have to factor in that the game is fucking complex, and while they do have testers (some top end players even) there is far too much shit going on to realistically catch everything that should be nerfed.