From the Barb Community: DO NOT NERF REND

[Prokahn-1764]

@Oblivion-1520

Well Barbarians are upset and honestly I can’t necessarily blame them. Even if the developers believed that they overshot the barbs buffs, how in Sanctuary would that be a bad thing? For future ptrs, please considering capping players paragon since choices seemed to be made based on outliers.

Exactly what I suggested as well. Here some more depth. Nev please have a look. The Dev team needs to consider this. Very important (Thanks):

@Nevalistis

We’re trying to set up Barbarian to be in a better place with more individual knobs to turn so we can tune it better once we get to their new class set and balance pass.

@Prokahn-1764

As you know, D3 playerbase ranges from low level players to high level players.

On top, there are players with 10000 paragons, 150 calsessans and 150 gems. These players play the game at a very high level (1% of the playerbase).

On the other hand, average player base 80% of all players, compete below 120 GR at most.

It should also be remembered that power curve starts changing significantly after a certain paragon and at high GR levels.

The problem is that PTRs are about testing the new versions of the game for bugs and balance changes. However, this high level playerbase can unintentionally cause wrong observations about the power potential. Considering the power efficiency curve at average playerbase and top players are so different, what is valid at highest GRs might not be good for average players.

As PTR by name is a testing realm, like in any experimental work, variables must be well defined and controlled. High level playerbase skews the outcomes of PTRs in this regard.

Therefore, in PTRs I suggest:

• Limit the top paragon level to 800 for all players
• Limit the legendary gem levels to 100

This should eliminate any bias caused by very high level players and should give more logical testing grounds for everyone’s benefit as what is a well working buff for average players will be better for top players.

Regards

Prokahn

Appendix

A comment below calls this out being emotional so I would like to clear this doubt by putting real time example from Era 11 solo leaderboards.

• I carried out this statistical observations in another thread https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/d3/t/analysis-balance-why-wwrend-nerf/5298?u=prokahn-1764
• Here I would like to take out two example classes: Wizards and Barbarians. Below you can see the distribution of the GR clears by these two classes

• If let’s say, the developers decide to balance according to the top clears of these two classes, which are 131 for barbarians while 141 for wizards. Let’s assume that they buffed barbarian resulting in +10GRs. The resulting distribution of the GR clears may look like below (not certain as in reality we may get real balance and the following distribution may be different as my efficiency assessment shows. For this we need new data, but let’s make a crude assumption here). If you look at this new clear distribution, the top clears match perfectly, which constitutes less than 1% of the whole playerbase. In other words, balance will be felt only at the very high levels. However, if you go towards the median, which now lies at 120 GR, Wizards are still 4 GR more powerful. Note that this GR level constitutes about 80% of the whole player base. Therefore, the game is still unbalanced for most of the average players.

• Now let’s assume that the developers decided to stop looking at the very top clears and decided to look for the median clears. As a result, instead of buffing barbarians +10GRs, they buffed them +14GRs. The resulting distribution may look like below. As you see in this figure, not only the most of the playerbase clear distribution across most of the median GRs the same, but also the top clear lines are almost the same. However, there will always be either wizard or a barbarian pushing for the highest possible rift. There will be a real competition in the leaderboards. Moreover, more than 80% of the playerbase will also feel the balance with the top class (Wizards in this case). In this example, the barbarian and wizard distribution overlaps very well thanks to the past balancing efforts on barbarians, but this exact overlap will not be observed in every class. As long as the median values are matched, the feeling of balance should be similar.

I hope this clarifies that the intend to balance the game considering the average playerbase is actually a good thing for everybody playing this game and the PTR adjustments must be made accordingly. This will only be possible if paragon is limited to a typical 800 value and the legendary gems are limited to 100, which is pretty achievable by most players (solo or group).

Cheers