Balance Sucks, do it Better

PC General Discussion
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I think it’s pretty well understood by anyone who has played this game for more than a few hours that balance is all over the place, on top of the endless bugs that completely ruin certain builds. I don’t need to harp on that too much, because I’m sure Blizzard already hears enough noise about balance.

What I struggle to understand, though, is why balance is not handled more proactively during the season. Why are major bugs not being actively resolved? Rogues have been allowed to free-roam Pit 150s because of multiple infinite damage bugs. Meanwhile, there are critical balance issues everywhere: Sorc defenses being forced onto Raiment, Barb core skills feeling awful, Spiritborn barely functioning in any meaningful way, Paladins being terrible across the board, and the list goes on.

The point is, I don’t understand why there isn’t more active tuning throughout the season. Obviously, nobody wants a build they geared toward to be completely destroyed overnight. But there has to be a middle ground where insanely broken builds are scaled down without being nuked, while completely lackluster builds are brought up enough to allow actual build diversity.

Right now, the cycle feels terrible. Every season, there are 3–5 broken builds across the entire game. Those builds dominate everything, then eventually get completely nuked. Meanwhile, the builds that were already bad barely get meaningful buffs because their problems are deeper than just numbers: bugged uniques, clunky interactions, broken scaling, or mechanics that simply don’t work well. Then the next season comes along and introduces another batch of bugged builds that immediately shoot to the top of the leaderboards.

That is an unhealthy cycle for the game.

It also feels awful when you happen to gear toward a normal, non-broken build. You can put real time into your character, farm gear, improve your setup, and still watch someone else do a trillion times more damage essentially for free. Not because they played better, geared better, or built smarter, but because their build happens to be using something broken that will remain unresolved for three months.

I’m not saying every strong build needs to be deleted mid-season. I’m saying the game would be in a much healthier place if Blizzard made smaller, more proactive adjustments throughout the season instead of letting bugs and outliers define the meta for months, then overcorrecting later. The overcorrections need to stop, it’s exhausting.

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Get ready , you’re about to be told that you’re wrong and somehow you’re opinion isn’t valid because of some nebulous thing that the forum police will point out and harp on completely derailing the topic.

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I think no one really likes the D3 bait and switch seasonal meta approach. Sadly the game was designed to be this way

Let me tell you what blizz said in there promo video when balance was brought up..

“Its hard” ~ blizzard.

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Sincere answer: there is no baseline to balance against. It is a 4D (no pun intended) not a linear 2D problem.

There are two teams working rotating seasons. Do they balance against the last season the other team did? the last instance of their own season they worked on?

and that’s before someone higher up unplugs all the plumbing like limitless rages being capped or uncapped. How many times has this flip flop been made?

You don’t expect the government to balance their check books and you don’t expect D4 to balance classes. Sadly.

Also as a bonus; you don’t expect mythics to be mythic. Only purple. Because you know, itemization 4,0

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Yeah, Rogues smashing Pit 150 because a bugged mechanic is disheartening,
Sorcs have several defensive options. Several builds do not rely on Raiment for toughness–rather, skills in their kit, like Ice/Fire Armor.

Barbarian core skills, like what, exactly?

Spiritborn barely functioning? Then explain why players use Spiritborns to speed clear/farm NMDs and Pits?

I really wish Paladins were in a better spot. This subject is frustrating. They go from top dog to middle to the lower end of the road.

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Yep.

Not sure I would call it overcorrecting, since all builds in the game could use massive nerfs, to being damage down to something sensible, like no build ever doing more than 1 million DPS.

But the weird flavor of the month design in each major patch is just terrible.

Balancing should happen frequently and swiftly.
In a scenario where the game had good baseline balance in the first place, mircro-balancing should be used, small changes in either direction over time. Also see how Grim Dawn tends to balance. Their patch notes are full of 1-5% changes to skills and items.

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A long, long time ago they promised not to. That’s it.

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And this was a massive mistake

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A mid season balance patch would have done wonders for player faith.

At this point let’s just log into season 14 and see if this other team handles anything differently. If they do that team will become the favoured team. We will know not to trust the other team to not be lazy couch dwellers.

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Its by design, they want a new meta each season….FOTM and then some

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Whirlwind and ancients are still BIS next season so they didn’t new meta worth a shiat. “They want a new meta” is also an excuse for them to just be lazy.

Blizzard:Ah ya, new meta..that’s it…

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Agreed, I feel it’s just marketing…akin to “maybe ur favorite class/build will be meta this season…log in to find out..”

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I’m not too concerned about balance, provided that all classes have a couple of viable builds. Which I think they did in s13. Yes, Sorcs and Rogues were speeding through pit 150 at different points but it didn’t bother me.

The flip side to the obsession with balance is that blizz nerfs the fun out of the game. I would wager that most players don’t enjoy a slow, tedious grind season right after they got to blast at crazy efficiency in the previous season.

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because a 100x more people complain someone moved their cheese.

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It’s Blizzard, it’s 1 or 11 when it comes to balance. Yo-yo balance at its best. Something is too strong? They reduce its damage tenfold. A skill is too crappy? Lets increase the base damage by 150%, add an Unique item that cast the skill twice and make it map-wide AoE.

I think that when they tried nerfing/reducing skills mid-season, they got death threats and might not try it again, but considering we now get Transfiguration, I think that if they nerfed skills, Aspects or Unique items mid-season, it would be even worse as Transfiguration would lock your items and prevent you from swapping your skills/tempers/MW around. I’m not sure I would change my entire build over a 5-10% damage reduction, but some people would I guess.

What they could do is buffing the underwhelming skills with mid-season patchs, something they sadly didn’t do. It wouldn’t do anything for the overpowered skills, but at least it would bring some other skills up a little bit.

Still, they really need to fix the Rogue infinite damage glitches or totally disable The Umbracrux until S15 PTR.

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Balance is important…but smoothies are more important and delicious. Once the smoothie hits the brain, you can no longer do other things. :hamster: :popcorn:

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Its because many players freak out if something gets nerfed. They lack the capacity to understand that this is the right answer and only respond with unbridled childish emotional outbursts.

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One thing i might type differently is, Instead of comparing another class, I would point out the only weakness or short commings of the class (s) that one feels is under performing. Comparing another class that is out performing the class you wish to play will only distract, And could lead to the class that was performing well to nerfs. Now we will have all classes nerfed and that will translate to a balance short cut. We humans have a nack for taking shortcuts.

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Or better yet, have a skill that your normal non-broken build is based on be nerfed into nonexistence because some youtuber was abusing the way it works with some obscure combination of greater affixes on every piece all masterworked to the highest level and completely unattainable by any casual player (at least prior to S13) because its easier to just reduce damage of skills and unique items than it is to redesign those certain affixes and skills to prevent them from boosting one another in rediculous ways.

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Blizzard only knows how to nerf, and nuke. IE, sorc is nuked. not worth playing in s14 in any capacity.

Go play it in PTR and bang your head against the wall. Smdh

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