I absolutely agree. They have to decide the limits and goals. At this point it feels like the player base cares more than the devs.
The obvious pain is balance and here we are. People have their favorite classes. I don’t know the percentage of players that will only play meta builds, but it sounds like the majority are players that have their preferred class and are hurt that they’ve been ignored.
They said they don’t want to come out with generic uniques for all builds, but then release those new mythic uniques that everyone will need to have. I just don’t know. We shouldn’t care, or put any mental energy into any of this, because they are going to do whatever it is that they do. We have no control and will probably wind up being even more frustrated.
My favorite is the druid and have made many suggestions for improvements. I’ve played the broken PTR. Can’t tell the relative power level of myself or the monsters, because I die and then it seems like everything gets too easy. Rabies either does no damage or seems to be doing too good against them. That doesn’t seem right either. All my suggestions are chasing the wind. Wasted energy. Going to detach and see what they do.
its clear as day that it is NOT FUN (the beloved casual argument) if one class can clear ALL the content in the game better, can farm all the gear faster and more efficient, crushes ingame leaderboards without the same effort other classes have to go thru, reaches numbers others can only dream of etc
if u still dont understand that it hurts a game when the content itself is gated to where the players can not expierence all the game in similar ways, no one can help u really. its not a particularly difficult concept to grasp also.
no cap no nerfing!!! we need 50000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 crits right now!!! the game need that numbers!!! i must oneshot everthing!!! THIS IS REAL GAMEDESIGNE!!!
In fact, it would be funny, but the game would simply not be possible to play anymore.
Let’s imagine that there were only buffs and no nerfs or caps.
We would have a Bulwark Druid, completely invulnerable with infinite damage.
We would have a Ball Lighting sorcerer, completely invulnerable with colossal damage.
We would have a HOTA barb with incredible survivability and a button to kill everything.
We would have a Whirlwind barb with incredible survivability and a kill everything button that is always active.
We would have a Shadow Corpse Explosion Necromancer, completely invulnerable and with colossal damage.
We would have a Shred Druid with incredible survivability and incredible damage.
I can go on and on, it would probably be easier to write which assemblies would be crap.
My opinion, I don’t know what the developers are guided by, why they improve one thing and also nerf it. This is their game, our business is simply to say what we don’t like or like it, whether they will listen to it or not, it depends on them and their interest in it.
That would be closer to the game I used to play 15 years or so ago. It was a great game and they even did a remake of it and it’s called soemthing resurrected I think. I still remember my hammerdin was so op that i used to farm items and then made more new characters to try those items out and it was quite fun when they actually worked and felt OP too.
Thats the intended expectation of pretty much every popular ARPG. Feeling powerful and, dare I say it, maxed out and able to complete all content at max level. perhaps repeat the process a few times before starting fresh the next season. I think the developers are too committed to nerfing around the GAAS (live service) business model that tends to always fail.
They recovered from the first player drop as a result of the initial nerfs. Were getting an expansion before the game can reach a baseline, here comes the expected second player drop at the release of the expansion with minimal fixes, if they don’t recover their numbers at the second and third rounds of new character reveals, the games going to fail if Blizzard does not get on top of this pattern.
To answer your question the devs are guided by the GAAS framework, which explains the constant nerfs, the philosophy is to keep players from getting too strong to maximize their playtime. Marvel Avengers hit a similar pitfall from nerfing too aggressively)… Blizzard originally pledged to reinvent GAAS or live services as a AAA studio but are following along the cycle, not reinventing how the cycle works as they originally promised, but this time it has pretty cinematics! Live service is a sham. I hope they can prove me wrong and kick whoevers overseeing and pushing this doomed to fail live service model as “business as usual” the heck out of the decision making. The inevitable fate is total service failure by the third round of new characters, The failure point will be going free to play with more aggressive monetization.
Looking at this as a GAAS, The game, like most failed live service games are not supposed to be too much fun, its supposed to be juuuust fun enough to keep us playing longer to remain profitable, but not too fun, because live service! That explains why they have been leaning so heavily on slot machine mechanics (tempering) and nerfing after buffs. This games slowly shifting and degrading towards being run like Madden Football with swords with these yearly “expansions”
I truly hope the devs team can resist and break this cycle of doom before getting too entrenched in this failed business model.
i just dont like that barbarian (and im a barbarian main, only played barbarian since season 1) is the go to class. It seems this game revolves around barb, while i love it i want more build diversity , more classes that can push and not get oneshotted like sorc unless you use a broken immortal build.
This game is completely unbalanced, druid feels a pain to play, almost all classes can do pit 100, but thats it, only few can push trough with an immense amount of time sink to masterwork and gear, and for what? just a brainless climbing for no reason
you actually copy pasted the worse thing in diablo 3 which was Greater Rfits and now we have this abomination plaguing us in d4 too, just because you can not really come with something unique and fresh…
If you sit down and analyze d4 and d3 you will find out that they are exactly the same game, with just better graphic.
agree, s5 ptr destroyed cl enchant, was never that great anyways, and hydra enchant bein super low value since ur cast hydras now have trice its dmg potential.
Whats left is only a couple viable options, its in an abyssmal state and needs a full rework.
But for barbs the weaponslots it the core of the problem, what they get here outscales every other class mechanic by miles. and tempering made it worse. Barbs can equip uber weapons, while still retain their full potential for their chosen main spell, they can still use 2 or 3 weapon tempers onto the skill. if necro uses gf, all weapon tempers are gone.
i agree that caps in the way they are putting them in D4 are bad, if the possible tools (items/paragon/skilltree) allow me to put everything in for example movementspeed why shouldn’t i be allowed to do it? If movementspeed becomes a problem lower the tools, don’t just say “25% is max, deal with it”.
in a sense everything is already capped, by the tools we can use, those “hidden” caps are all that should be needed.
also it’s fun trying to get some interaction working by focusing on one stat.
(i agree on caps for resistance and the like, becoming immortal should not be possible. super tanky sure, but ont immortal)
but hard disagree with the “no nerfs” stance.
if you only buff you’ll end up with D3 where the Bosses reached “integer-limit” HP and people were doing quadrillions of DPS.
if out of 5 classes 4 deal 100dmg a hit and one deals 200dmg a hit, it should be obvious to lower the 1 outlier than to buff the other 4.
and to those asking whats the point of balance in a (for most) single player game: it’s simple:
A) options.
if you have 3 builds: one easily clears everthing. one struggles a bit, and one is so bad it cant manage it. the “choice” is more or less already predetermined. unless you want to do a challenge run you’ll pick the best one.
B) people like to compare:
everything and everyone is always (more or less) online, and therefore people will compare themselves. in times of social media and everything, even singleplayer games need a semblance of balance between their classes.
It should be obvious, and it is obvious to most everyone here, but for some reason the 200 in your example is getting buffed to 250 while the 100s are getting nerfed to 75 or lower. Blizzard’s aim is way off.