From the Barb Community: DO NOT NERF REND

Prokahn-1764 · November 4, 2019, 8:11pm

FYI: I made an update in my thread

Limit Player Paragon and Gem Level in PTRs

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 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