I refuse to give in and have pushed my Theory Crafted/Homebrew WW build to Tier 100 pit.
Sure, it probably won’t scale a whole lot higher but I feel like that in itself is an accomplishment.
No I’m not using Dust Devils.
Its nice when they actually work, I mess with builds try them in the pit thats about it. No real interest in the pit other then seeing how high i can make homemade builds go.
Not even close. That much is clear.
Another strawman. The issue is the degree to which off meta is less powerful, not that it is less powerful.
The build not being a flurry build is not a matter of aesthetics. It is clearly nota flurry build. You might call it a puncture build, but I would not go that far either. Regardless, there are no systems in the game that will multiplicative scale flurry anywhere close to this.
You seem to be falling for the blizzard trick of hiding an exponential difference in power behind a linear tier. I would also argue that 61 is not the top tier of meaningful progression. 20 Neathiron is too slow.
Anyway, I don’t know why you are taking the opposite position. What do you have to gain from a game with such a ridiculous power differential among builds? Since preseason, I have been able to pick skills and make them work reasonably well compared to the meta. This kind of homebrewing is becoming less and less possible. The game didn’t magically become too complex for homebrewers. It’s not PoE. The devs simply decided to hand out an uneven distribution of stacking multipliers. I will vote with my feet if the game continues in this direction and you can have your meta-dominated game where Blizzard decides what new skill gets relevant scaling. Just like D3.
My position is that there are a few bugged builds, a bunch of solid builds, and then a large number of weaker but still viable builds. I want them to fix the bugs and try to avoid bugs in how a skill or affix or aspect or paragon node functions, but other than that I want them to keep balancing the way they have: push hard on underutilized skills so that there’s a reason to try them out next season, reign back over performing skills, focus on adding more tools for the community to try to break the game with.
I think one of the bigger issues with D4 at launch / S1 was that they were so scared of things being out of balance that they removed all complexity from the game. Builds were roughly in balance (again, aside from bugs) because every build had to do crit, vuln, and main stat/attack speed. I don’t want to see that repeated
But you are comparing only against the bugged builds. Devs didn’t “hand out” the bash multiplier or the heart seeker double-dip or even the power of holy bolt elixir (especially with minions).
Every season there are bugs that are defining the meta. And every season they refuse to fix them until the next. They were even shameless enough to blatantly lie about bash. There is no reason to assume season 5 will be any different. The competence differential when it comes to the coding and implementation of the math is staggering when compared to PoE and Last Epoch. Absolutely unacceptable from a company as large as Blizzard.
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On which class?
My Druiabetic LS feels really good.
I think the new Moon aspect is one thing making basic skills feel very strong currently, relatively stronger, tempering options is the other.
Its frustrating to theorycraft a sweet build only to find that
- 99% of the game is trivialized to the point you do not need to craft a sweet build.
- half of the skills you like and wanna use are unecessarly limited by blizzard so you cannot use em in your thought out build.
- The tempering system is mandatory and you know that at least 50% of the items you find will be bricked anyway.
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The number of bugs where something doesn’t function the way the tooltip says or is just non-functional definitely surprises me because those seem like things you could build unit tests for. That said, I have no idea what their dev environment or code base looks like. Maybe they would have to revamp their tools for designers to have any way to implement automated testing.
And clearly they are working with tight deadlines and probably overworked staff trying to salvage this game. PoE was a mess at launch too, and D4 has been scrambling just to get a little leeway from the fan base. Maybe now that people are happier with it, they can start to scope each patch correctly.
But none of that is balance. The bugs are not design decisions and leaving them in once a season has started is far better for the players, as people will have already made builds and customized items toward them. So looking at that and saying, “why is there no bug to 3x the damage of my homebrew?” Is absurd.
No doubt they are overworked, but I don’t care. They are understaffed, and a lot of the code was probably outsourced, due to the penny-pinching policies of corporate.
They are well within their rights to keep up this incompetence, and I and many others who agree are right to criticize them for it. These are not one-off bugs. They are happening consistently every season and if they dictate the meta because they are allowed to remain, that is most certainly an issue of balance.
And yes, I expect them to fix bugs. Getting nerfed is a part of playing a live service game. It’s not a big deal, especially in a game like this.
As far as i know PoE started as a pretty small but ambiotious Fan/Indie project. Or am i wrong here i am not sure it is so long ago this started.
D4 on the other hand is a billion dollar Project and there is simply no excuse to deliver such a poor state of a game.
This game clearly needed 1 or 2 more years to shape up.
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Whut? So lately I have been running a homebrew rogue build that revolves around poison. Puncture, rapid, moon, poison trap, etc and am crushing 61 in the pit at level 95. I have a few tweaks I plan on working out, but so far its killing. Pretty decent even in pvp, over confident barbs getting demolished…and if they don’t immediately they succumb to the poison.
Im not gonna lie, I have a pretty busy life and do turn my brain off directly at the start of the season by hopping on to Maxroll and crushing all the content first, then just homebrew a build later. I cant remember a build that I didn’t just crush the game with yet…wait, thats not true. I did make a melee human druid that I kinda ended up hating and respecced in season one.
They’re in this mess cause they listened to absolute idiots that didn’t even like the original game
- This isn’t my “daily dose” of D3 with better graphics Blizzzurd (despite the initial score scoring in the community as much as 9.4/10 back at the time b.t.w.)
Regardless, they had to split the effort into 2 groups/games… I mean they publicly admitted that “feedback to completion” cycle is 6 months and season-release cycle is 3 (meaning they’re working on 2 games at a time)
It’s no wonder that “horse stucks again”, they forgot to merge all that (and the scaling is back to S1-ish)… I know, we’re speculating stuff and we have to give credit where credit’s due with all that damage control BUT we also have to recognize that there wasn’t a need for such an amount of excessive work in the first place (had they been listening to actual feedback instead of cries for convenience and impatience, and publicly/properly dealt with them)
AND, we might argue that the team is now split into 3 because of the need to dedicate some workforce to work on the Exp…
Now tbh I don’t know where we are, I’d argue the game’s not fun (or at least not as fun as could be) but surely is addictive… I know I’m not a fan but the “proof is in the pudding” (more or less). I mean who knows, perhaps it’s a goal they’re actually satisfied with (I guess)
It can’t if you don’t use obviously broken or outright overpowered mechanics of the class. I watched AceofSpades trying to make a Werewolf build work. He was doing 90+ NMD and sitting already there like a couple of minutes on the boss fight. We talking about arguably the best druid theorycrafter out there right now btw.
The problem is, that some Skills/paragon nodes and/or interactions are extremely mandatory right now, cause they multiply your damage by hefty amounts. One thing is Thunderstruck (i think that it was called that way) Paragon node for Druid is kind of a “must include”. For barbs you have to go for bugged bash and/or scale bleeds + get all the double dip paragon legendary nodes and capping them out (damage in berserk, vulnerable damage). Any build that is not doing exactly that is not like 20-50% in dps behind but more in a 90-95% behind state.
Sorcs atm depend on 2 things for high perfoemance. They need to use (i think the only that exists in the game) AE damage ability with shatter and have to massively invest in gearing to get perma immune. Then the fishing for Bosses with ads begins. But just to pt that in perspective - to get the perma immune part going smooth you need a +4 flame shield vest with a high roll flame shield duration temper on it and 3 crits preferably on flame shield, while you may be able to egt away if one hits duration. Additionally you need almost max to max flame shiuld duration on pants + masterwork crits. If you dont run a frozen orb build (which high clears dont) you also need that on an amulet. In addition you need offhand, Tal rasha, amulet GA CD reduce pretty much and masterwork crits on that. We are not done yet - to get enough resets, you also need high amounts of attackspeed, so attackspeed wherever possible and as GA stats + some masterwork crits. There is rrom for some exceptions but not a lot. And it works this way: as long as you dont manage to get ALL that, you cant run that build AT ALL. This is beyond stupid and the required gear for most players not reachable.
Do this tweaking through enough iterations and you too can end up at the maxroll S tier builds that were out day 1
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Lolol i mean i dont have a whole discord/twitch group, srry
D4 wasn’t a billion dollar project, that’s absurd. But yes, it was higher budget than games like PoE and LE and BG3. Yet those games got to spend years having the fan base thoroughly test them, whereas D4 was shoved out the door without even much of a beta (and despite the clear issues beta testers have reported) because the corporate folks wanted a big release that year and didn’t care much about the future since they were about to be bought.
Being frustrated with bugs is reasonable. Claiming that because there are bugs that allow certain builds to be too powerful that means the devs are dictating which builds we should play is silly. You can play the bugged builds or not play them.
D2 went through a couple years of “flavor of the month” builds as the devs tried to get the balance right and fix bugs that affect certain skills. The only sure way to not have that is to stop adding features to the game and just bug fix for a year.
If you don’t want to play them, the fact that they are bugged doesn’t affect what your build can do. If they nerf builds like that mid season thousands of players who have worked hard to get the items for those builds will feel cheated.
There’s probably a very narrow window at the start of the season where they could announce that an interaction is bugged and that it will be fixed mid season. But even 2 days in might mean some people have spent 40 hours farming gear for a bugged build.
I thought I could get 100% crit on the sorc and break the class but was defeated by Blizzard’s voodoo math.
Lots of good starter builds,who do just fine until actual endgame.
I loved playing Decompose Necro,i tbh didnt have to use any other ability. Whole screen full of explosions and dead mobs.
But the moment you face 160+ level mobs,most builds become obsolete,actually some builds cant even handle 120+
No it is not absurd. This is a huge project. A game as a service with several years of development and several years yet to come.
I am pretty sure in it’s entirety D4 is billion dollar project. If not then it s close to a billion. In the end it doesn’t matter the point is that D4 had a massiv budget and can’t be compared to Poe or Le.
Not only reasonable but mandatory.
That’s not our problem is it though. It was blizz decision to throw out 3 months seasons. If they can’t handle it they are to blame.
Honestly I thought it was odd they did not even thought they need PTRs… With their history of patch day issues and balancing issues.
Again their decision and a bad one at that.