I’ll never understand why you can’t start small and work your way up when it comes to balancing.
Twisting Blades was one of the most fun builds Diablo has ever seen. Sure, it was slightly over tuned. It could have used some adjusting. Instead? You absolutely gutted it. I haven’t seen a single Twisting Blades Rogue in-game in the past 6 months.
Ball Lightning Sorc?
HoTA Barb?
Minion Necro?
All great. Then, trash. Now, instead of giving Lightning Spear the adjustment it sorely needed, you pimp slap the build with quadruple omega nerfs.
If you want to achieve true balance between classes and builds - and you SHOULD want to achieve that - then you need to make small adjustments and test them until things are right. You constantly use a sledgehammer when a rubber mallet would do. It is absolute stupidity.
I have to admit I don’t understand their desire to make S-tier builds C-tier in the following season. If something is overpowered, make adjustments, but leave the build strong. Then go look at underperforming builds to make them stronger. Do that enough times and every build in the game will be viable.
We as players should be able to pick whatever core skill / archetype fantasy we want to play. If I want to play a bow Rogue or a melee Rogue every season, I should be able to do that. Having to wait until my favorite build is meta again sucks.
They do it on purpose. It’s one of many ways including:
Temper bricking (get used to your items being thrown away)
Constant reworks to itemization (same as above)
Flavor of the month OP builds (yes, this is on purpose)
that are done to drive the eternal players away, or more preferably, drive them towards seasonal, where MTX battle pass is right in your face the whole time.
All these constant shake ups are purposeful, to let all players know that seasonal restarts (and thus constant reminders that you can buy stuff) are the only way to play without constant aggravation.
I’m pretty sure they said they’re buffing TB and Flurry for that matter, i.e. melee Rogue. Just mentioned that in the video that they were satisfied from the Rogue performance in general except the melee builds that fell behind
Then they showed that they’re buffing the Full Circle and Bladedancer aspects (at the very least)
This is true, but why did they gut it in the first place? Why was melee Rogue absolutely terrible for 6-9 months before they paid attention to it? It was awesome before. They ruined it.
Building things up only to knock them down so you can build them back up again is insane.
I discovered how good D4 is on controller due to TB. I started playing it with mouse and keyboard and my wrists were killing me. Got a controller for my PC and loved it. Not only did it make TB better, but it’s made the entire game better. Blizzard did an awesome job with controller support on D4.
The risk undershooting the nerf is higher than the risk of overshooting it. If you undershoot the nerf and the same build is dominant again the next season, then the game feels stagnant and the new stuff you introduced seems pointless. If you overshoot the nerf and the build ends up in C tier instead of A tier, then the total number of people having fun with it isn’t greatly affected. People who are chasing the meta won’t touch it either way, and people who just played it in the previous season are also going to try something else. So the number of people who care enough about relative build power enough to play it as an A tier build the season after it was S+ but not play it as a C tier build is pretty small.
Well as far as I’m concerned I’d never have allowed a single “Tier S” build to remain tbh
If I were to guess their “methods” I think they’re “chasing and analyzing metrics”, i.e. nerf overused and buff underused things, i.e. in other words
Balance based on popularity
Was never a fan of this idea for this particular game cause single-player games aren’t MOBAs and lack or excess of popularity doesn’t automatically mean bad/good
But can also understand the repercussions of the other/reverse approach i.e. having devs actually play the game and be engaged in balancing based on personal experience more of their own
I guess that’s the nature (one way or another) of having a job
oh ya i play with a ps5 controller on my pc, but even so tb gameplay killed my old hands. i did tb rogue in s0-1. halfway through s1 my hands just couldn’t take it anymore, enter the pulverize druid. my hands were never happier
They want to choose the meta. If everything is balanced, no one will play with the meta. Hopefully with the smaller numbers we will have a smaller difference between the builds.
LS Sorc nerf is a good thing, it is aligned with other sorc builds now. Not overpowered dumb clicker like it was before. stop crying, find another build and enjoy.
I disagree with this wholeheartedly. As the OP mentioned, no one’s playing Twisting Blades anymore. Not for almost a year. The total number of people having fun with it has plummeted.
People probably aren’t going to play the same build over and over and over again even if it’s strong. I’m sure there would be a small minority of LS Sorc “mains”, but I doubt people would continue playing it season after season if it were just a solid A-tier build.
Imagine if every build in the game were A-tier with a couple stronger S-Tier builds per season. How could they possibly consider that a bad thing?
The way they’ve gone about this in D4 (and WoW most of the time) makes it seem like they’re intent on punishing people who want to play specific builds. From a player retention standpoint it makes no sense.
Every single broken build in this game’s short existence has never been intended to be that way.
That is why they are and must be gutted. Preferably it should be done as soon as it’s found out, but we all know how well that would go with this community. Hence out of fear they let all the broken builds alone - which ruins the whole season - since everyone and their mother feels compelled to gravitate towards them.
The only solution to this dilemma would be to do what LE developers did - run a poll asking their player base if they’d prefer they fixed unintended mechanics asap, or left it for in between seasons. Regardless of the outcome, at least people like you would be informed enough to understand why they are forced to fix these things eventually.
The classic downside of evening out and “synthesizing” power and fun
I can get some players get blinded into it but could never understand devs blinded by it also
It’s like the #1 game health and balance killer and also the #1 thing to prevent overall… Fun is allowing people do exactly what they want to do and how they want to do it, power is just (or at least should be) there to keep fun viable
In other words power should SUCCEED fun NOT PRECEDE the fun and options available. The steps of “specialization” are (or at least should be) there to specialize not to “generalize” and trivialize
Tbh I don’t get how some can mess with that one up so hard but whatever… At least I think they did well for S6 by buffing T4 and making it aspirational by nature a bit more
sorc was absolute trash? not. it just was not overpowered.
FO, Blizzard sorcs are still very strong.
chain lighting has a good potential.
I myself tried Incenirate/Hydra build on PTR and had lot of fun, was able to push T80 without overpowered gear or 3xGA mystics.
And there will be more options this season, thanks to nerf of stupidly overpowered LS, which was the only build for all the hamsters.
