Blizzard should take a better look and reconsider the current state of class balance in season 5 before launch. The current season 5 state of class balance is in dismay. I do not want to play an ARPG where 90% of players only play one class or one build on that class, and all other classes are useless and unviable. Sorcs and Druids either do no damage unless there is a bug and are hitting for trillions of damage. Barbarians keep getting buffs with little nerfs while they are already and always have been the strongest class in the game. Necromancers had been nerfed hard and are practically uncooperative against barbs. Blizzard, please make most builds endgame viable and donât allow bugs or class inequality in a class-based game.
42 Likes
You even forgot Rogue 
thats unbalance, S4 rogues are all keeping biubiubiu to launch basic arrows, what a boring season.
This rhetoric has to stop.
Every barb build that was popular in S4 is heavily nerfed in S5, and barb has a ton of skills that are absolute trash
7 Likes
I honestly wonder how they do balancing.
From the outside it looks like itâs just done purely on metrics and not actual play testers running them. Obviously they canât run every possible build but they can run the ones from the bigger build sites.
Plus they need to look at more than just damage numbers. Survivability for example.
7 Likes
It certainly seems balance is purely done without any testing whatsoever. They change numbers and then are baffled why the numbers donât add up at the end result the way they thought they would.
This is what happens when your new boss lays off your QA department in âcost cutting measuresâ. Iâm assuming thatâs what happened.
They rely WAY TOO MUCH on metrics. They donât seem to know how the different metrics interact at all.
Also someone elsewhere mentioned balance is done with AI. AI doesnât always get things right.
1 Like
check youtube⊠bash still hitting for billions just from new uniques⊠nerf barb to be on lvl with everything else sense they cant seem to get everything to barb lvl
5 Likes
Bash and WW are still top builds out damaging most other classes by magnitudes (ignore the bugged Chain Lightning). Barb still has 3x more hp than other classes. Everyone that has tested PTR agrees Barb is still the best class by a landslide. It has it all. You can basically throw anything together and get it to perform somewhat decently.
6 Likes
No. a bunch of people like you want to repeat the same line. So lets take a look at what happened to bash. Wudijo has a great video on it
Barb health got nerfed. imposing presence was nerfed by about 18%
Bash got ~ an 80% nerf
The new uniques (which are available to all classes mind you) Helm and sword, bring it up to an overall direct damage buff to bash. Remember, that direct damage was not the strongest build for bash, bleed was. Direct damage was a number of tiers behind.
Bleed also had its own large nerf with the cap to hemorrhage. That change also nerfed flay, and basically every other build that used it, like WW for example.
In season 4, WW was not pushing pit 170 like sorc, it was around the 130-140 area, and that is with extremely exceptional gear. WW is not outdamaging other classes by magnitudes.
The only outlier, is flay. Iâm not sure how strong it will be, considering that its duration tempers were moved off weapons, and will not last as long.
the key takeaway here, is that the buff to bash is associated with 2 uniqueâs, that all classes have access to, and all basic attack builds from all classes will benefit from. Not all basic attacks received a separate nerf life bash.
its become far to easy to regurgitate this âbarbs were buffedâ crap, without having any concrete knowledge of what is changing. Bash was nerfed heavily, bleeds were nerfed. ALL BASIC ATTACKS WERE BUFFED FOR ALL CLASSES WITH THE NEW UNQIUES.
I think the real issue here, is the class and skill that you like to play doesnât perform well. Shocker. You might be surprised to know that barb has a bunch of these same problems with all of its skills except bash-flay-WW in S4.
6 Likes
Omg poor WW, itâs not competing with a bugged Sorc shatter build. The best Druid clear was around WW ranges. FO sorc below that.
Stop trying to act like Bash was nerfed to the ground, it requires a new unique like all the basic attack builds. Btw it wasnât my post that said it got buffed (Altho it was with the new universal uniques, which Iâm not mentioning since most classes could run them). But WW is absolutely doing decent with Gushing Wounds.
Go try Shred Druid or a Meteor Sorc, itâs not nearly the same level as the âbadâ Deathblow Barb can pull off. Barb is still the best class as many can tell by just playing it. *and sure some Barb skills like upheaval or double swing could get some love but in general Barb performs better than most by a lot.
5 Likes
Amazing how you went from âWW is ahead by magnitudesâ to âits doing decentâ. That is exactly right. WW is doing decent and is in a fine spot. Guess what. There are a lot of builds pushing 130 with exceptional gear.
You come to the forums to scream about Bash, but dont mention any other basic attack build? They all got the exact same buff. They didnt all get nerfed. Bash was nerfed into the ground. Get that through your head my man. It got an 80% nerf. thats what happened to bash. The new unqiues buffing it buffed all builds, and because of the nerf to bash, it buffed all other basic attacks by far more.
And by your logic, go try upheaval barb, or rend, or hota. They are âmagnitudes behind most builds from many classesâ. They are actually worse than shred druid and meteor.
and your comments was:
These are both wrong, and the former is misleading. An average barb build now has ~50-60k health. My druid has 55k. Im not sure if your comparing the average gamer with limited time to play that has 1 Ga on most items and maybe 2 on others to someone like Rob on his barb with every item tripled GAâd and perfect tempers, but it seems like your using the top 10% to justify an opinion about the other 90%
2 Likes
Technically Victimize was nerfed so yes some other basic builds got hit. But sure if the ground is 500m+ hits then Iâm willing for all classes to be nerfed into the ground. Imagine what it would be doing without the nerf.
Again, I would like to see other skills like Rend/Upheaval buffed rather than them continuing to make basic builds with the new unique. So if Barb isnât the best class, what currently is in your head?
I feel like you havenât played many of the other classes at this point if you think HoTA is worse than Shred.
2 Likes
Donât use robs gear to set the bar for what all regular players (who arent getting paid to play all day) can do. He has perfect gear. There is a huge difference between hitting for over a hundred billion and hitting for 2-5 billion with perfect gear. I think most skills in the game need to be buffed. If you have perfect gear, you should see occasional crits when buffs line up for 1-5 billion. It takes a lot of time to get that gear with the right tempers and masterwork hits.
I also didnât say barb was or wasnât the best class. barb and rogue right now are the top classes and have the most S tier builds. Druid is the weakest class and needs a large buff. Bash was already nerfed, it doesnt need to be touched again. Other skills need to be brought up. Overall, players are not at their caps, There are no builds solo clearing pit 200 on live servers.
I have 1 of every class at 100 this season. Ive played them all.
I just disagree with this ânerf barbâ crap, because, like you mentioned, skills like upheaval, rend, hota, double swing, need to be buffed. They suck. just like most druid skills, and most sorc skills.
2 Likes
Are you kidding me? Barb is still strong. It is even stronger now. Barbablo IV is a great game. 
Not to mention necro is so stupid, it canât even use a stick. I mean stafâŠ
Sounds about right, so they decided to finally give us PTR, but there is a catch. We have to waste time farmingâŠ
Gotta love how you are basing your âbarb is stronger nowâ on a bugged interaction with uniques. Same bugged interaction making Druids and Sorcs crit Quadrillions. Pure outliers.
That being said, from what iâve gathered there seems to be issues with alot of things during this PTR, alot of weird double dipping among other things.
They are looking at the outliers and squashing them. It would be better if they set a baseline like all builds can kill Pit 100 boss in 2 minutes or faster. Then test with 5 or 6 builds per class. If it takes 5 minutes buff the skill. If it takes 10 seconds nerf the skill. Nerfing cooldown, crit, vuln, overpower used by multiple builds is too wide ranging and over nerfs many unintended victims.
5 Likes
I donât see such things on necros, e.g. bone spear can barely do 6 mil dmg with wand and shield. LOOL A cast may hit up to 8 times, though⊠Does not really make up for it. 
The meta build(s) will always be a thing as the majority of people are lazy and want to be told what is best to run. However, the current state of balance in this game is quite bad. Not just from a Class perspective, but from the skills themselves. They never had a chance going into this season to even properly figure out what could be done, as the bugged Holy bolts elixir carried so many builds.
Then they changed some of the core game features again in the PTR, with Boss HP bugs and Tormented stacks now applying from ghost bosses. Thereâs no way to even get a a good reference point if you keep making changes. Not to mention everyone has to try and farm up any new unique and/or temper manuals to get it all to fit together to see if its even viable.
The PTR should have been just an introduction to the new temper manuals, uniques (all of which should have had a vendor to be used for testing) and the season mechanic to makes tweaks (im looking at you Rewards after completion).
Hopefully they will do a pass on Core+ skills because they are mostly all quite bad now. This season, just to get a Ball lighting Sorc to function required resource reduction, generation, mana per sec, which (given the reduction in mods on gear) leaves you with less damage and/or life. In the end i gave up at pit 50 because the time required was just too much and it was quicker to just reroll a minion necro who needed basically no tempers or masterworking to do 70-80+ comfortably.
The so-called âbuggedâ ball light build from season 2 is probably doing only a fraction of the damage of some of the current meta builds.
1 Like
They should look at how damage is calculated.
Way to much variables and inflated numbers.
If you invest $ 4.000 you dont expect a return of billions or trillions.
But that is what D4 is doing with weapons with 4K base damage.
The problem is they think they can balance it, but season 1 to 4 proves otherwise.
1 Like
And like a bazillion weapon slots to make up for those trash skills.
Sorcs and Druids have nothing to pick up the slack for the lackluster skill trees and paragon boards.
2 Likes
Itâs kinda wild. I remember how pissed off people were when D3 launched because the loot sucked, the RMAH sucked, and there was no end game. The classes had problems as well, but I canât remember it being this bad at any point.
Undoubtably someone will come in and tell me I have a bad memory, and I do, but I donât remember thinking my caster was the complete disaster this iteration is.
1 Like