You know what I have told you in that other thread.
What starting to flip flop on the issue.
There are two sides to the coin of nerfing and buffing.
If you never nerf when it is indeed needed and only buff.
While it might make the players feel great playing an OP build the damage to the game is not good. Players tend to gravitate towards those builds because they are the strongest. Leaving behind other good builds due to the fact that they are much weaker. It gets worse if the OP in question is of a play style that has either gotten boring because of lasting so long. Or is just not a fun play style.
Further it limits build diversity as well. Not having a baseline that is constant and never changing means that you will always keep upping the bar of performance with the next OP build till the day when All builds will be able to perform at GR150 at 5k paragon. When that happens there is no more challenge at all.
The leader boards will reflect it by showing all 1,000 spots as ones that have cleared a GR150. The only difference between all of them is how fast they have done it.
Instead of having damage multipliers in the tens of thousands we might have them in the hundreds of thousands.
This is what happens when you use the OP builds as a base to buff all other existing builds to. Power creep hits high gear as far as speed goes until the above is quit true.
Buffing the content won’t work either due to other game companies have tried it and it failed miserably. The shutdown game of City of Heroes had a similar issue. After level 32 everything was easy. Blasters where able to hit their damage cap. Tankers and Scrappers their defensive and damage resistance caps. Controllers had their holds. Empathy Defenders (healers) were not needed at that point.
NCsoft tried buffing the content, making the enemies harder to kill. All that did was punish the weaker builds of the game. Pushing those players to play the strongest builds in the game. That was no fun, and since they already told players that they won’t directly nerf the powers anymore. Plus add in the fact that they knew that they were gonna make playable villains archetypes. They decided to nerf the enhancements that buff the powers. The system that did that was enhancement diversification.
There is no other way to get the builds to perform at the baseline level of performance without nerfing. In the case of D3 that means a nerf to the items since it is the gear that makes our build what it is.
Now I mentioned in my comment that it isn’t the nerf that is the wrong way to go for Blizz. While a nerf was needed it is the way that they choose to do it that was wrong. What they needed to do was the make the items in question only work for channeling builds like the shoulders (Mantle of Channeling). Then make other legendaries that will buff other skills like Meteor, Hydra, Blizzard, etc…
To me the Wizard class seems to be a class that Blizz cannot understand how to capture the fantasy of a powerful spell caster. They have to add a bunch of quirky mechanics that doesn’t make some set fun to play imo. The only one that I would consider is the DMO set. Now if they give a lot of loving to Wizards in the future that can change. But till then that is the only set that I will play.
I guess you never seen how I would’ve handled the killing of the bazooka build. It is far easier than you think. Just make it where Death Wish and Etch Sigil only apply to channeling skills and maybe have an auto teleport on the Sigil.
It is because I don’t play the Yes Man/No Man game. Where I have zero opinions, thoughts, feelings, ideas, etc… on the matter. Sorry but I am no ones yes man or no man.
My experience that comes from playing more games than just the Diablo series. I have play a number of MMOs (martial art based ones), Runescape, City of Heroes, Marvel Heroes, Secret World Legends, etc… that I have seen things in those games. Things that have proven that the idea of never nerfing doesn’t help a game at all.
It just speeds up the power creep or punishes other under performing builds, hurts build diversity by keeping the OP build untouched.