Some notes on balance - part 1.

Hi Qarl,

I personally like having unique as an integral part of a build.

However, some uniques are just too good. "too good" divides into the two following categories:


Expensive Uniques that enable too many builds

These include Dream Fragments, Shavronne's, Alpha's Howl, Auxium, and Kaom's Heart.

If you want to go Health 2H, you have to get Kaom's Heart to compete in the end-game. If you want to get ES in general, you have to get Dream Fragments/Alpha's Howl/Auxium. If you want to go low-life, you have to get Shavronne's. What happens is that the uniques become so desirable and expensive, that they end up limiting a lot of builds to a very small population of players.

Uniques so powerful that they limit options instead of giving more options

These include Soul Taker, Kaom's Heart, and Rainbowstrides.

Soul Taker's damage and 0 mana requirement makes going phys melee with any other 1-hander pointless in the long run.

Kaom's Heart is a must-have for any Health 2-hand build, limiting the skill choices of 2-hand builds because of the loss of gem slots.

Rainbowstrides is hands down the best pair of boots an ES build can get. There are a lot of unique boots with interesting mechanics, but because of the power of Rainbowstrides there's no reason to get them.

What about items that are balanced around their rarity rather than having drawbacks? The new Soul Taker axe is one example, and Shavronne's Wrappings is an extremely egregious one.

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Charanjaydemyr wrote:

I found out today not only who funded Soul Taker but which dev is responsible for its ridiculous power, and I am absolutely surprised to say the least.

Who's the fuckin' rat.

Thanks for the post Qarl, obviously took some time and we appreciate it.

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Xendran wrote:

The fact that you have a level 8 wand that you actually very well could map with (albeit nowhere near optimally) screams to me "the implicits are all fucked".

not really though cause spells get most of their damage from the level of the gems. Casters are very gear dependant for shield, resist, armour etc compared to a leapslam marauder, who can get a ton of survivability from just levelling. The marauder is very gear dependant for damage though, so the situations are reversed.

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Dreggon wrote:

What about items that are balanced around their rarity rather than having drawbacks? The new Soul Taker axe is one example, and Shavronne's Wrappings is an extremely egregious one.

The high end uniques are already very rare but with so many players playing 10 hours or more a day, it doesn't really matter if its very rare or not. Eventually the game will become saturated and the problems that people bring up about these OP uniques will always be there.

So no I don't really see rarity as being a legitimate downside any given unique.

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nheowitzki wrote:

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SL4Y3R wrote:

To a point yes. And that point is when one can actually.get an amazing weapon. Which is no easy feat.

I actually joked, somewhat, with someone earlier that I had found a lvl 8 wand that i could use in maps.

i thought i had the best lvl 8 wand :(

Wow, my characters have to wait 10 more levels for an upgrade...



(and BTW this sceptre have seen maps, when I found it on A2 normal or cruel just after OB start, I haven't found upgrade to late 70 lvls...)

[double post]

quick note on balance

I think you guys (GGG) do a good job at recognizing flaws (well, to be fair, flaws tend to expose themselves more or less- like my VP at work says, once you go cloud, you dont need QA testing- customers will find bugs much faster :))

however, I think your decision as to what to do to fix balance flaws needs a bit more decisive direction and not cater to the masses' mistakes.

I was disappointed by the life node nerfs, because all it did in the end is make the CI preferrable pool to stack. I think you guys recognized that the reason this game was such is because of inherent mechanics. stacking a pool of hitpoints, be it life or ES will always be the best possible survivability technique until the core of game mechanics will change. yet the nerf was still made due to a badly designed unique (koams) and lots of qqing about 'path of life nodes'. at the end of the day all the nerf did was tip the scale insanely in CIs favor.


again, you guys made the right move to recognize IR is overpowered, but then chose the less impactful change that did little to actually address the main problem of IR- flat evasion bonus from grace which anyone can cast.


seems like GGG knows the problems and knows the ways to somehow alleviate them, but is hesitant to make big changes. the life nerf was the only big change that wasnt a success imo. the melee damage buff, duelist tree rework and melee gems were successes in that at the very least they made good progress towards the main idea behind the reasoning for rebalancing

TL;DR= dont be afraid of making big changes if you feel like they are right; if they are mistakes they will be glaring and you will be able to fix it until beta ends.

Thank you for these notes. Very much appriciated, Qarl.


One thing that specially hit my mind was your

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We are sometimes told that there are only a very few builds that work in high-level play, but when we look at high-level characters, there are more builds represented here than in many similar games.

Have you considered that certain people choose to play certain builds knowing very well that they are far from the most efficient builds? Personal stubborness such "I refuse to play cookie cutter this and that" or "I will try to take this as far as possible despite being far less efficient compared to other builds" can be powerful motivators.

And yeah, I think also you shouldn't compare too much to the competition when it comes to endgame diversity. This is the best online action rpg out there currently; you are in my opinion already on a higher tier. Therefore, it shouldn't be enough to compare to how it is in other similar games.

Thanks Qarl for the post, it was a nice read.