It's not worth sacrificing the integrity of the combat systems for a fake 'power fantasy'

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Gilvado#3954 wrote:

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Acts is currently good, at least to the point you can sort of see some coregraphy going on between you and mobs. But maps already ran away from that and I dunno how you would get it back without making the entire skill tree and item scaling provide much lower compounding percentages, which they then have to scale the mobs around. At that point, in maps and boss fights, I pretty much feel like I spam roll out of the circles a lot and blast everything. There would probably need to be some major system changes to avoid it.

The systems are already there and functional during acts. Literally the only thing you have to do is rescale monster damage, health and pack size. They choose for enemy life to not scale as fast in the endgame as player power does. They could just... change that. They can make so that as you go up in ilvl monster health scales faster and pack size scales slower. And damage does whatever it needs to, to feel good (which is hard to judge when we can only play stuff with massive pack size).

I guess the only thing would be that they'd need to tone down the damage spikes as well, which would be piecemeal balance of individual abilities and rare mods.

I'll take your word for it, not a dev, but they need to mellow end game out to bring the pace more in line with acts by a fair bit, I would assume that would include item scaling, which I dunno if that is something they can do globally? Maybe improve some drop rates too depending on it, if people can't rip maps. It seems like maps would be really pointless if they were half as fast with the same drops, which seem to have an insane propensity towards stats like accuracy and reduced attribute requirements... but sure, I'm happy with fast or slow.

I think they did maintain it as long as they could, however, that was only for three acts in normal difficulty.

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I think they did maintain it as long as they could, however, that was only for three acts in normal difficulty.

No, they deliberately balanced it the way they did. They could have pack size scale slower, life scale faster, and damage... maybe stay the same or scale slower? Tough to tell since we can't test it ourselves. That's all that they need to do.

The scaling goes wonky into zoom zoom explode because that was their intention.

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maquino85#7657 wrote:

I think they did maintain it as long as they could, however, that was only for three acts in normal difficulty.

If that's the case, then GGG has no clue how to playtest and balance their own game.
It's not even hard considering they have a development team working full time on the game:

1) Grab a build and list the desired mods from any build website (not much actual knowledge of the game is required)

2) Create characters for each stage of the game with the desired mods at different tiers, sometimes leave a mod out, etc.

3) Do this for a few stages of the game changing the mod tiers

4) Test the DPS and per-hit damage on a dummy. Add variations to test out exploding builds like Herald of Ice.

With this you have a damage curve for an average character.

Also test out character HP and defenses at each stage so you can model the damage curve for your mobs.

With both of these curves, you have your whole game's balancing figured out. You know how much damage an average player can do and absorb, so you can calculate everything from there: pack size, average mob damage, average mob HP, etc, based on how fast you want the gameplay to be.

Considering how easy and deterministic this is to do, I do believe GGG designs things the way they do on purpose.
This is intended to be a live service game, so they are required to keep changing the meta with each league and whatnot.