That’s my biggest gripe with the theme. That and the horn. 3 in the morning spacing out and that horn goes off, damn near killed me IRL.
How many accounts do you use to flag though?
Not just that build but others as well. Unintentional side effects and all that.
I nearly spat my drink across my desk…thanks for that 
Actually the horn doesn’t really bother me that much, I mean sure, it’s annoying.
Byt when you’ve got a three man group consisting of two GoD DH’s, and a WW/Rend Barb, there is already a lot happening on the screen, seeing whats on the ground, or flying towards you becomes nearly impossible at times.
And when the screen goes dark 
Not sure who that that was a good idea.
It is my understanding that using multiple accounts to mass flag a post violates the CoC, thereby risking all accounts. I am pretty sure that it would be silly for anyone to do that as Blizzard keeps track of who hits the flag button, according to MissCheetah. If you look at your profile json (yours but not others), it tracks the IP address and your physical location of your computer/phone as we interact on the forum.
Go into your Activity page, remove anything after your name-number and then add “.json” to the end of your name-realm like this:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d3/u/MicroRNA-1507.json
This fact is often ignored by people who think mass flagging happens. Moreover, if someone is forum suspended, it goes through a review by a forum moderator, who have to deem it as violating the forum rules, resulting in a sanction.
For me personally, it takes something pretty egregious for me to flag a post.
I want to be fair to all parties, Micro included, and say I don’t think the friction between him and the Barb community has anything to do with real life politics. I don’t know anything about his political leanings. As for me, I’m an outspoken far, far, far, far leftist, and when I see right-leaning politics, I call them out. But again, I don’t think real-life politics has anything to do with what’s going on in this thread; if you have a different take, that’s cool–I don’t think you’re going to get much friction here.
It’s possible that were Micro and I to compare real-world politics, which matter far more to me than views on a game, we might closely align. That would be cool. Again, I don’t know, because I don’t know him in real life, and I don’t like to assume things about the lives people lead outside of these forums.
An excellent summary of the friction between Micro and the greater Barb community (or perhaps the vocal minority of the community, but I doubt it). I’m guessing he would argue it stems from different ideas about “balance,” but his points about balance have been perforated in the past, both by fellow forum-goers and by Blizzard, and his attempts at using alts to swing public opinion have, to date, failed.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I think D3 is more fun now than ever. I don’t play it much these days because I’ve played it since 2012, and I’m generally bored with the endless grind of Paragon, gear, and GR tiers. What little time I have to play games, I spend on Doom Eternal (an absolute masterpiece of a game), though the majority of my time is spent on curating and helping the community and working on my doctorate.
I was referring solely to the interactions between players, and how they go after one another, not to debate a position or argument, but to attack the character of the person. IRL Politics is another issue I refuse to discuss, as are religion and history. The ground is too fertile for pointless anger and positioning, and too many people will be too eager to try to establish the dominance that they should know by now they will never have over me. Should…but don’t. Or…whatever…choose not to. Doesn’t change the outcome.
My original point was that people do not debate position or point; they attack credibility or outright slander each other, because it’s easier than establishing a defensible position on a topic. That is an admission of weakness in my eyes, but we already know that changes nothing. So I do the only thing I can: I say my piece and walk away.
Not exactly.
During the PTR patch 2.6.7, Blizzard nerfed both wizards and thorns necromancers. The top worldwide non-season wizard clear was GR 148 (rank #2 GR 146) and thorns necromancer was GR 147 (rank #2 GR143). They also made a new build ww/rend where the lamentation belt had a new 150%-200% rend damage modifier. The prior version of lamentation lacked this damage modifier in its entirety.
During the PTR, a 10K paragon player in the first few days cleared GR 140 with suboptimal gear and greater rift. A few of us predicted that if the build went live as is, the top worldwide potential was GR 144-146. I was one of those. I presented numbers to back up my hypothesis using the PTR leaderboard data. As you can imagine, this was an unpopular opinion and there was much animosity expressed to anyone who held that view.
I advocated for the rend damage buff being a flat 100%. Needless to say, the majority felt that the GR 144-146 prediction was way too high. During Blizzcon, it was discovered much to everyone’s chagrin including my own, that Blizzard decided not to buff the lamentation belt at all that went live in patch 2.6.7. In patch 2.6.7a, they buffed the belt to 100-150% rend damage modifier. As of today, the ww/rend build has cleared GR 148 with a weaker version of the lamentation belt that was tested on the PTR. My supposed “lie” was a prediction about a build where my thought of the top worldwide clear was GR 144-146 that was considered outrageous. The real data proved that the ww/rend build was even stronger than I predicted.
You can read what I posted about the rend damage modifier here that gives some numbers and my thoughts at that time.
The fact of the matter is I consider balance between classes good game design and dislike the idea of an OP class where the other classes are weak in comparison. There also is a widespread misperception that I main a wizard. This is not true. My 3 main classes are DH (31%) = WD (29%) > Barb (12%). I support the nerf to WD that cleared GR 150 in non-season and also a nerf to DH GoD build. I take an unbiased and consistent approach to my ideas on balance. I do not play favorites when I analyze the leaderboard data.
https://us.diablo3.com/en/profile/MicroRNA-1507/career
I do not discuss politics on a video game forum as I consider it inappropriate and not in accordance with the forum guidelines.
The Forum Code of Conduct Description starts with:
“Welcome to the Blizzard Forums! These forums are here to provide you with a friendly environment where you can discuss ideas, give game play advice, role-play, and converse about any other aspects of Blizzard games with other players. Community forums are at their best when participants treat their fellow posters with respect and courtesy. Therefore, we ask that you conduct yourself in a civilized manner when participating in these forums.”
This is why my “sentence structure” sometimes is weird as I try to make sure that if I disagree with someone, I discuss the merits of their arguments and not the person. I do my best never to attack forum members personally or use an insulting pejorative.
I play this game since release and i’m still at 1.5k paragon. Maybe i should put rubies on my helm.
I can highly recommend giving the GoD set a go, even in non-season. It makes for quite an interesting change, with plenty of options for variation.
It does look fun, but . . . Doom Eternal is too good. Every play through is unique and rewarding in a way that I have never quite felt with a game–not even its prequel. I’ve barely touched the multiplayer, but the campaign is so good.
Y’all, if you haven’t played the newer Dooms, you’re missing out.
I’m also too busy working on my dissertation, article revisions, and engaging in some limited activism.
Oh noes!!! It appears we have lost Free to the Doom 
I’m not saying I’ve clocked 110+ hours with Doom Eternal since it released, but . . .
I think you just did…
There is so much wrong with this I don’t know where to start. You continue to push your “data” as facts even after being told by mutiple people, including a blizzard mod, that they are not only wrong but blatantly so. Blizzard will do as they see fit with correct data and the rest of us will have to deal with it. Pushing for nerfs just because it fits your idea of what you want in the game means nothing. The only thing you accomplish is pissing people off. And maybe that’s your kink but honestly don’t you think you would have a better time in game and on the forums if you had less animosity towards you?
Seriously man, it’s easier to just flag his posts, ignore it, and go on with your day. Your brain will thank you for the less damage it’s receiving.
Yeah. He cites the COC as the reason he doesn’t discuss politics–as if politics doesn’t thread through everything (cough Acti-Blizzard gives CEO record bonus while laying off workers cough) in a forum where we occasionally have to crawl through someone lamenting how the SJW Soy Boys are ruining X or Y.
Err, Phoenix has it, though. Flag, move on, enjoy your Doom Etern-- err, day.
Edit: Lodestone is dropping the mic in here. Bravo, sir, ma’am, or they. I salute you!
Argument in favor of balance is not wrong, especially in a competitive format. What could become a grey area is when an argument does or does not advocate actual balance, and there are many variables to consider when making that determination. Because I am not Rain Man, I don’t get that deep into it. I have to trust the people with more knowledge than I have to make those decisions. All I can do is state my admittedly subjective opinion, based on an in-game experience.
As for the continuation of a theme, which I now see will be a thing, I regret my choice of the word “politics”. It seems to be taken as only which way the government should run, and not social interaction as I originally intended. Therefore, let me correct myself and (again) state that my original intent was to flag the person-against-person tactics as the target of that post, and not any system of managing state resources, law, or any other associated subject.
The statement could now read “I don’t care much for infighting and personal vendetta” instead of “I don’t care much for politics”.
Is that more clear?
I think that you must have missed Nevalistis follow-up post on February 14 where she acknowledged that I was justified to be concerned about Blizzard numbers in the game balance blog post.
The data I used was publicly available through Blizzard’s API and it was taken at a later date than what was used in the blog post and more accurately reflected the reality at the time.
https://us.diablo3.com/en/blog/23290575/[d3]-developer-insights-balancing-class-set-design-1-28-2020
As you may know, the blog post presented season and non-season data. The season theme was considered OP by many. Using their 5k paragon metric, most classes (4 of 7) had lower clears in season than non-season. This difference was 1-10 GRs. I think we can all agree that the seasonal theme did not weaken character’s ability to clear GRs.
From Blizzard’s blog post, they state that both buffs and nerfs are in their arsenal to balance the game. I think that this strategy makes sense to me.
I agree with this. We can respectfully disagree and be civil. I think this thread clearly shows that there is a diversity of opinions on the importance of game balance and what people consider fun. I waited many, many days before posting in this thread, due to this thread’s initial posts.
And she may have but no where in that statement is a retraction. Being concerned about blizzards numbers and yours being wrong are two different things. They do not balance the equation suddenly making you right. Your data is still wrong!
You had some of the data not all, blizzard does not release all of the data and never will. You were told this already and at this point I believe you are wilfully acting ignorant. You have been slapped in the face with facts mutiple times and still fail to grasp that you are wrong. You are drawing conclusions for what you feel is correct and good for the game with data that that fits your narrative.
Enjoy living in your world. When you decide to join the rest of us in the real world maybe we can chat again till then I’m out.
You can disagree intellectually with my data analytics and the choice of datasets; however, the data itself is directly from Blizzard and was not wrong at the time. I clearly stated that I only looked at the Amercan region leaderboard that was directly downloaded from Blizzard. Also, I stated how I analyzed the data. I even acknowledged that Blizzard had more data, explicitly mentioning they had worldwide leaderboard data.
I used the actual solo GR clears for players between 4.5K paragon and 5.5K paragon. Blizzard scaled/transformed their data for the leaderboard to bring up/down to a 5K paragon level. As you can imagine, when you scale data you potentially introduce artifacts/“byproducts” that skew the data analytics.
Their tables on 5K paragon clears (season vs. non-season) speak for themselves.
I’m getting a clearer picture by the second.