Honestly? Don’t be so afraid of power creep. I feel that your fear of power creep has severely limited your capabilities on giving players FUN items with creative and powerful build-altering gameplay changes. Make uniques more powerful; make aspects a bit more powerful and synergistic. Look at Eaglehorn for example… you tweaked this from up to 80% bounce rate on pen-shot to a fixed 25% bounce rate on pen-shot… changes like this are unfun and demonstrate your fear of power creep.
Your fear of power creep also seems to be impacting builds and skills themselves. Most of your balance changes are 1-2% changes here and there. Really nothing major. Meta builds remain meta builds, and abilities that are not powerful perpetually remain unused. Again this comes across like you’re afraid of power creep, when ultimately it makes players feel kind of weak when they are having a hard time clearing even trash mobs. As it stands now, because the core gameplay is devoid of powerful and fun skill/abilities/uniques, then when you release a dud of a Season, everyone is going to riot (as we are seeing here in S3). You can’t rely on releasing good seasons to cover up the fundamental flaws of the game.
Players will play your game and love your game if they feel powerful, and if the items/uniques/seasonal abilities make them feel even more powerful (and those things all creatively synergize). It’s honestly as simple as that.
Uh D4 is almost the EXACT same core as D3 outside of massive power creep. No campaign, straight to end game grinding dungeons and doing boring bounties. It’s copy pasted from D3 like everything else in this game.
I think they should be afriad of power creep, but the game feels too designed on paper and never actually tested. Things they are afriad of aren’t actually powerful. Temerity being an infamous case.
I’m also sure the code is so spaghetti at this point they don’t fully understand interactions at this point. There is an example of a new Selig found on reddit where the movement speed is not max rolled. For this to happen, it really gives you an idea of how bad the architecture of the code must be between feature updates.
The impact that we clearly see and feel as players is bugs everywhere.
Was the movement speed actually implemented? Is it only available on newly found Seligs? This isn’t a situation where previously dropped Seligs have the old stats but the new ones have the new stats is it? I mean, the unique aspect changed on my previously dropped ones, but all my Seligs still have Core Skill damage and don’t have movement speed.
So in this case, this is brand new Selig dropped on 25th, everything else is max rolled EXCEPT for the movement speed which is a new affix. The movement speed rolled within a range just like any other unique or just like how ubers dropped at beginning of S2.
People are still playing D3, wasn’t there a new season just released. How long ago did that game come out?
D3 certainly has its problems. I’m not asking for D4 to be what D3 is, and personally I think there is a middle ground where devs can release a bit of their power creep caution, build the game for powerful, creative synergies which are fun. Then… if anything proves too powerful to the point that it’s negatively impacting the fun of others, dial it back.
Instead like another person on this thread said, it seems like their changes are actively slowing everyone down, weakening everyone, making the game more of a slog instead of empowering players to mow down mobs of demons in creative and fun ways. They can’t let this fear of power creep dictate how they update builds so slowly… this wastes their time and the devs resources. Look at Ball Lightning on Sorc for example… it was broken last season, so they fixed it this season. And they decided to try and buff fire with a new unique for meteors. Well, Ball Lightning is still upper echelon and Fire skills don’t really compete with Ice and Lightning skills. Stop being afraid, and if you want to make lesser used skills viable, stop wasting your own time with 1% increases and just buff the lesser used skills. Make the players powerful.
Blizzard should be way way more afraid of power creep. It is already bad in D4.
Note that making uniques stronger isn’t necessarily power creep. But they shouldnt do that either. All item types should be balanced around the same max potential.
They should add a setting called “hide power creep” and it’ll divide your damage numbers by some order of magnitude before displaying it. Seems like the obscenely large damage numbers is what is pissing people off more than the proportional damage they’re doing anyways.
I think it was death must die that had the opposite option. It had a damage slider that would just add however many zeroes you wanted to your damage number, but would multiply enemy life by the same amount.
What more power creep do you want? You want an aura that just kills everything on the screen instantly? Game balance is still a joke and we are waaay too powerful, especially against bosses.