Is Season 10 a capitulation on game balance?

PTR Feedback
1

There is a lot of positive feedback now, but I worry whether Blizzard will learn the right lessons from it. Season 8 made difficulty tiers and progression slower; Season 10 is very likely to do the opposite with overall game balance. What is the purpose?

Increasing damage numbers further is not a sustainable design choice to motivate players

Player motivation and good balancing goes hand in hand. The question is: why should I visit upcoming Seasons 11, 12, or 13 if I already saw the peak of this game 3 months ago (multiple times), thanks to some steamrolling superpowers?

I mean, if the game is too easy you can manage 6 different classes to reach the endgame. There is no new class to play next time, just a handful of more or less exciting changes that slightly alter what you already know.

That is why I think the devs dont do themselves any favors by letting players rush through their content.

Chaos Armor is mostly fun because it expands Diablo 4’s weak item pool

To me, the new Chaos Armors hit the mark by providing many more items to collect and further increasing loot RNG. I love this because it creates more ways to experiment with equipment and usually has a positive effect on build diversity.

On the other hand, I dont see Chaos Armor as a major plus in that regard, since the new combinations mostly just open up more damage synergies with the same abilities and affixes we had before. It is a cool idea regardless.

Is Blizzard done with balancing the game?

Beyond that, Season 10, as introduced on the PTR, feels to me like the devs have completely surrendered when it comes to balancing this game. Multipliers are bigger than ever, and it is hard to believe they were chosen with care or adjusted after proper testing.

I want to hope this programmed “number chaos” wont push Diablo 4’s damage to permanently higher levels and will instead lead to greater creative chaos in how the devs use the systems.

2 Likes
2

It’s the PTR. We haven’t seen final tuning yet. Not to mention, this is just another season. They’re likely placing their eggs into an expansion pack basket.

3

The PTR is almost always inflated. They like to test the extremes and tune down from there.

4

Pretty sure, S9 was overall fairly balanced between classes =o

Except SB/Sorcs being a little superior in terms of meta ranking for pits =p

5

Season 9 introduced several items that became the best build options for certain classes, even after PTR. This has been a recurring issue since Season 1 for a reason. Season 10 takes this to an extreme, especially with seasonal perks where multipliers are applied excessively, and with Chaos armor increasing damage even further.

My issue is that fine‑tuning numbers isnt Blizzard’s strength, and with such bold values a single PTR data iteration is certainly not enough to create a somewhat balanced experience for T1–T4.

6

Sorc is not superior but Barb and Rogue are underperforming. SB is much ahead.

1 Like
7

Even with Chaos armor you cant go further than PIT 110 unless you are using a bugged build, Like the sorc Mana Shield which makes any sorcerer build immortal.

8

In my opinion, S4 is still way too easy after we reach a certain level. S4 should be equivalent PIT 75 or even 80.

1 Like
9

At first glance it seems like that, but the chaos perks have significant drawbacks. Furthermore, we’re not only not getting convenient access to things like Attack Speed and Crit Chance but the affix slots those are in are now competing with the defensive stats we’re giving up by wearing more offensive chaos armors. We’re still just reshuffling deck chairs here. We were not given five extra slots for chaos armors so every one of those we slot has a replacement cost.

Obviously everything depends on how they fine tune things and how many bugs they squash, but I think the overall power level will be similar to past season mythic builds. It’ll just be easier for the average player to approach that power level without needing mythics.

2 Likes
10

This appears to be a crazy season before they start doing the actual reworking.

11

To me it appears just a continuation of the same (imo) failed balancing of the game, not just characters and that is one of the biggest reasons I think the game is getting more boring by the interation, along with the hunt for items.

When You can obliterate a given tier yet only scratch the lair bosses, something is out of whack. Either the difficulty of the world of a given tier needs to be raised an order of magnitude, or the lair bosses need to be brought down to a level appropriate for the tier they are on.

The item hunt is another sore spot in the game to me. The early part of the game is decent if not a little too generous (legs and unique at lvl 5 seems a little much to me) finding items that benefit you come along frequently enough as you progress. Difficulty is pretty well balanced for your chosen pre-torment tier. But it all falls apart shortly after you hit the torment levels and you are begin gathering GA ancestrals/uniques/mythics. Now maybe the problem is we get them too quickly and you are pretty much done by the time you hit T4 (or even T3), nothing better is going to drop and your character is what it is at that point.

You can farm for a meta, but till then you are back to obliterating the tier, but have to drop down a tier (or more) to do lair bosses. Ad nauseum…

Just my thoughts, YMMV.

12

drood one shot boss pit 150. Evrything is fine.