It’s a hack slash and smash game. Always was and always will be.
D3 committed the cardinal sin of “Upward Balancing”.
That’s why it’s, D3, a cliche meme.
If all Skills were balanced within 5%+/- of one another as a baseline - Items could be added to favor 2-3 Skills/Builds per season to keep things interesting.
They could make said Builds/Skills perform a SMALL 5-15% better than the aforementioned Baseline.
Not messing with the Classes and Skills themselves except to keep parity and overall balance within Class and Skill Node(Basic/Core/Mastery).
The problem is this: Content voraciousness from the Community and Playerbase.
D3 fell into this trap by adding adding and adding without checks and balances.
Everything went Season by Season.
D4 Devs could be brave and simply - Have crazy items be Seasonal - ie. Meta Builds are based on Seasonal Items that can be rotated at any time(vs Seasonal Themes)
It’s a no win situation for the Devs.
Give strength - take away and they’re doomed.
Don’t add new content - They’re doomed.
Give Strength 1 Season and come the next Season - only bigger Numbers will Shift the Meta.
What they’re doing is Keeping items relatively static and Changing the Classes on a fundamental level in an attempt at Meta modulation and keeping things in Check.
That’s simply backwards.
I don’t know a solution to things getting out of hand but not knowing my Class or Classes through and through(See D2 and class identity for example) - is driving me and I’m sure many others crazy.
Are they? Mac has a ton of builds he tracks, most of which can clear top content. Any build that can farm neathiron and the tormented bosses is a strong build. Tons of builds that can’t do that are still fun builds. Maybe you want to have an S tier build around for farming mats for your fun builds, but when every other build is considered bad because 1 or 2 builds are much much stronger than them, that’s bad for the game.
What’s even worse for the game, though, is when every build is made better by equipping a specific aspect or unique. They said they wanted to curtail that and you see some of the effects here. Grasping Veins is on almost every Necro, which also means they are all running tendrils. Blighted Aspect was so much stronger than all other options it was forcing shadow builds to use a 2H with that aspect rather than any unique or other weapon setup.
If the end result of all this is that game gets harder across the board because the top tier builds are all weaker, that seems like a good thing. They can increase the rewards if farming is now too slow. They can tweak boss HP if those fights get boring. It doesn’t make sense to buff every aspect and unique to be as strong as Grasping Veins and Blighted Aspect when people are already deleting content at all levels except the extremely overtuned end of the Pit.
Why do people always come with the only hard (or even impossible) content in the game when it comes to difficulty discussions?
Only because Pit200 exists the rest of the game should be so easy, that even a ape who scratch himself with the keyboard can achieve everything?
The keyword is “endgame diversity”…If higher pits are the only challange in the game and the other 99% way to trivial, the game becomes boring very fast.
There’s currently no middleground difficulty vise…it’s either way to easy or in Pit200s case impossible, nothing inbetween.
Ye but 60-150 are still Pits and the same content as Pit LVL 1-59 and 151-200.
Why isn’t it allowed to have multiple challanging activities instead of just 1 called Pits?
Or even a possibility to make all content challanging, f.e. “profane mindcage” but with the possibility to raise the monster level up to +100 instead of only +10. ( So everyone can adjust the difficulty to his needs, in the ARPG community we call this “juicing”.)
This way ALL content & areas in the game stay relevant, even with very good gear…Not only Pits over and over agian.
You can’t keep buffing up, one up’ing each build without trivializing everything into worthlessness about the game but the the most difficult content that you’re trying to buff things up to.
Because that’s the ONLY content that shouldn’t do doable by all classes, and most reasonable builds. ALL the other content in the game should be doable by the average-skilled player, not 5 or 10% of the playerbase.
For some players, the game will never be too hard. Fine, those players have upper level Pit.
EVERYTHING else should be accessible and doable within a season of play.
Noone talks here about making all the other content in the game as hard as Pit200.
But the current difficulty outside of Pits is so trivial atm, they could replace all monsters with zDPS bowling pins and it wouldn’t make any difference.
That’s why I’ve suggested to expand the profane mindcage idea…Those who want more challange outside of Pits can juice the world with a +100 mindcage.
Others who hate mobs who actually fight back can simply ignore it and play without mindcage.
In games like Diablo it’s all about farming loot, as more engaging activities as better…If you have just 1 activity in endgame where you don’t faceroll everything without resistance the loot hunt becomes boring prety fast.
Because you either have to run Pit 24/7 who offer challange but not that great loot or you run the other 99% who partialy give better loot (Helltides f.e.) but are boring a.f. because they don’t offer any challange.
A good ARPG offers endgame diversity, in D4 we currently only have 1 and it’s mediocre at it’s best.
I mean can you explain me why Diablo 4 shouldn’t have more endgame diversity in your oppinion, so all content stays relevant even with very good gear?
Couldn’t agree with this sentiment more. Well said, I haven’t canceled my preorder yet however unless they reverse these nerfs I’ll be doing the same. It seemed like they’d finally figured out what made D4 fun then they released those patch notes and I realized just how poorly this game is being run.
Doesn’t anyone find it funny that they had a campfire chat and neglected to mention the massive nerfs they were sitting on dispite promising they wouldn’t do that again.
There’s something about it that feels very very sleazy.
End game diversity? Great. So long as the average skilled player with average gear can do it ALL. ALL of it. Every Tormented boss, etc. For those that like to push it, there can be high level pit or NMDs. Nothing else should be beyond the average player to complete.
No have only bought season pass at season 1. All their cosmetics are ugly as hell and waste of money. I will not play season 5, and i yes not playing season 3 as well.
I do what i say so don’t use that standard reply on me, like you know what players do. Some might say one ting and do another, but i don’t.
They do not need to do such a huge nerf to Blighted Aspect, if at all. Taking it from 120% to 100% is as far as that should ever drop.
What they need to do is rework Kalan’s edict, so that there is a better option for minion builds than Shadowblight. They need to bring up other things to make shadowblight with blighted aspect not the only choice. It isnt that shadowblight and blighted aspect is busted. It is that the other tools are too underwhelming.
Also, they need to fix how core skills scale. Buffing up skills that do such little damage on their own, is not going to be the proper replacement for nerfing Blighted aspect and Wither.
Putting a cap on Wither is such a dumb move. It is fun as a player to have something like that for DoT builds. When crit is all the rage, something like Wither should be left alone.
Disagree. S1 nerfs cut down power for everyone before they changed all the combat math like crit/vuln etc. That’s why those nerfs weren’t good. S4 with tempering has made the game a joke in terms of power and absolutely, outliers like bash/flay and any other of these builds doing ridiculous damage, need to be nerfed, to be brought down to more sane levels. If not, where does this insane power creep end? The game is now so unbelievably trivial in all areas, except high level pit, even for non S-tier builds, and it’s mind blowing people would want to “buff underperforming classes/builds” to that level.
I do agree the current strong builds shouldn’t be nerfed so hard, only to then replace them with new builds/items next season that are ridiculously OP instead. A better balance has to be found by the dev team. This for me is the biggest flaw/problem in the game right now. It feels like D3’s sets and Flavour of the Month design all over again.
The problem is that they havent fixed the base game and made it stable.
Seasons are supposed to run ontop a stable eternal base.
Eternal people are expecting to be able to speed 101s next season/major patch.
If they get nerfed under this benchmark, it will just be beyond expectations and have a bigger backlash.
Season stuff doesnt matter so much since each is their own microcosmic game, but the eternal side is what tracks longitudinally and if its not stable, you have worse variance.
That’s due to lack of endgame. Helltides is not end game. It’s farm content for the masses. Can’t make helltides like 100+ pits because it’s leveling content through the entire game.
The upcoming content tier 8 took a guy over an hour to kill the boss and that was without deaths on a well geared bash barb.
I hope you stay true to your convictions. I didn’t mind the season 4 affix overhaul, but got bored of it very fast because the skills are just getting a bit tiresome now. If sorc is destroyed for season 5, i won’t bother.
Actually, the ideal method would be to reduce what the current overpowered builds can do, then tune the content downward to match the new ceiling. That would leave all builds in a better spot than simply buffing underperformers to the moon. Yes, this means we’d have to trust the devs can balance their content better, but it is the ideal path to do so. However, given the track record for balance I wouldn’t hold my breath on this one.
As much as I’m sure people aren’t going to want to hear this, Season 4 was meant to be a gigantic season long beta test of the itemization overhaul. That’s why there is no real season theme other than the Iron Wolves (which I hope stays so that people that have lives can at least grind toward mythic uniques rather than never getting one via drops).
They could also adjust the pit’s reward curve again to better match what the classes can do in S5 going forward. Yeah, I know, I shouldn’t be holding my breath here either, especially with an even shorter PTR than S4 got.
