Powers should come more from items. Having perfect items should really make you stronger, which doesn’t happen with 1000% redundant damage, you can have the perfect weapon that will have 1% less damage increase. I think every build should make final content, if you have the skill for it or the right items. The game should favor those who have good items, those who dedicated themselves to fine-tuning the construction as much as possible. Then comes some player with all the bad items, killing Duriel in just 5 seconds because of your electric balls. That’s not fun. I know that not all builds will be able to do all the content, but good items should make a difference.
This is all Tetris’ fault!!! Unbeatable end game. You play, and eventually the game gets to a point where you NEVER win!!! Ever! Even with a leader board, you can still never win the game. Even the Mario version had this problem.
Look at the curse Tetris has brought on all of us by setting that precedent. Generations of gamers to come will all be doomed by D4 building on this precedent. 
Or the streamers will help us find some cheese and show that the in-house game testers don’t actually play the game.
No, they’ll just say they found an error in their damage calculation formula and “fix” that, nerfing the broken builds that exploit it and not really affecting the builds that didn’t.
If there weren’t players crying that their build cannot do everything the game has to offer, the players who work towards viable end-game builds would not have that sense of accomplishment. So my 5 characters from different classes which all are t100 dungeon capable want to thank you for giving me the sense of accomplishment that you cannot handle even with 1 character.
You are on the right track
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That’s not the issue, most builds can do that, even relatively mediocre ones. The issue is people running in and oneshotting everything/bosses in level 100 nmds, world bosses and uber lilith. That’s not skill or accomplishment, that’s bypassing mechanics which makes the fights easier or even trivialized. Gotta remember, they are adding in leaderboards soon… It’s just going to be the same three builds on the entire board.
If they really want this game’s health to survive, they need to rein in broken builds. I played a ton of D3 and did the whole leaderboard climbing thing for plenty of seasons and even I can’t stand meta spam every season… Your average player doesn’t want to be a metaslave.
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No, you’re fundamentally misunderstanding my point I think
If they make the upper tiers of AoZ brutal AF then fine, sure whatever. What’s currently unknown (only assumed) is the difficulty of the entry level
If that is based on the busted meta builds, then that’s just bad design, much like NMDs (though at least the Blood Glyph is worth grinding out and feeds the cycle of progression)
I’m strongly against them adding any content that is purely balanced around outliers. Adam Jackson himself said they don’t wanna do that, so I’m withholding judgement until we get to play AoZ but I remain skeptical.
It brings back bad memories of StarCraft being balanced around the top Korean players - it often made ladder miserable for anyone below Masters, though admittedly that’s not exactly a fair comparison either given SC is a competitive game.
So am I to understand, then, that the Abattoir of Zir is difficult to the point that a group of 4 level 100 characters running meta builds of random classes would usually fail to beat him?
I heard Tier 1 is NMD 100 equivalent. Is that not the case?
OK so meta only then, awesome…
People clear NMD 100 with non meta builds. 
My point is that every skill should be capable of beating the content with a build. Making BL ungodly awesome while other skills are completely lackluster like incinerate is not a good thing. We need all skills able to have a good time in the content with a capable build. We dont want to pseudo force every single sorc into being a BL sorc or whatever the next flavor of the season is because all the other skill suck. I want true balance for skills fren!
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keep ball lightning attack speed scaling, nerf the damage into an A+ build isntead of an SS build.
The build is fun, it doesnt need to be gutted.
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Doesn’t change the fact that enemy damage is too damn high due to level discrepancies.
I can damn near faceroll Duriel on my Thorns Barb without even touching my controller (I’m exaggerating a bit but it is pretty brain dead) but 75+ nope, I have to actually pay attention, and 85+ I’m dead in seconds if I’m not careful even though other than the Thorns my gear is pretty much 100% defensive and I run triple shout.
It’s nonsense.
It’s so obvious how so many people in the d4 community have never played an mmo where if you want to play end game content you play the meta. I’m not sayin it needs to be like that but sadly that’s how it works. If your build can clear nmd 100 why are you here and worried about it? Trust me bad players who are playing meta builds won’t get far in AoZ.
I’ve pulled off many 90+ parses in WoW with non-meta builds. The issue in MMOs, like WoW, is the magnification effect where some people do well with some build, then other people check raiderio or warcraftlogs to see what the top players are using, so they use those same builds without question, rinse and repeat. Basically, it causes an extreme bias that makes it look like it’s the only viable thing due to a bandwagon effect. D3 had a lot of this as well, you’d see early on in a season some build filling the top 1000 but toward the end of the season, you’d see all kind of other random builds on there too as people started screwing around more due to being bored of whatever meta build was up there.
But there are always outliers in terms of some build being well above the curve and in MMOs, they correct those usually. Some margin of spread is fine though, like +/- 5% dps or so. But in WoW, if a build pulls 10-20% above the rest of the pack, they get nerfed. Here in D4, you have some cheese builds pulling 1,000 to 10,000% above the pack by being able to oneshot bosses like uber lilith vs spending 3-5 minutes doing the actual fight. That’s unacceptable for the longevity of the game’s health.
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Exactly. I mean look at how many nerfs Barb got just inside the first week or so of launch it was crazy…
But I still maintain that the devs need to dial back enemy scaling. It’s absurd to expect every single build have 13,300 armor and 70 all res. Not that we shouldn’t ever get punished for having low defenses, but my Barb (with no bonus armor rolls) sits at around just shy of 9k armor, resistances are decent (not all are maxed but most are at least 40) and as long as I’m fighting anything within 20 levels I’m fine.
But beyond that it just gets to be too much, and I don’t get how squishy builds tolerate being one shot by trash mobs, nevermind elites. Like even Diablo 2 on Hell difficulty wasn’t that harsh (not that LoD was a Paragon of balance to begin with mind you)
For me, meta builds have their unavoidable (but necessary) place in a competitive environment…the true judgement of skill not being no.1, but who can do it with a no.2-type build. Satisfies my so-called “tetris” urges since there will always be a BL sork to be the next rung on my ladder. I assume in ladder you will be able to see what build they are running?
I can’t wait…this is coming to Eternal right?!?
I heard that on the forums once or twice but I never seen a source. So not sure if someone from Blizzard said that or someone on the forum just made it up.
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I doubt 1 = 100 as that would make it very difficult. More like 1 = 80, 2 = 85, 3 = 90, … 25 = 200