[level 87, tier 50] Never followed any guides and was really proud about making my own custom build. Told my friends that Diablo 4 is a game where you can play how you want and still be efficient, unlike in previous entries or PoE where you had to read a dozen guides to kill at least something at high levels and spam skills that you hate to reach end-game. After recent update it seems I was wrong, devs are clueless about what they are doing.
What they are nerfing was indeed broken (like infinite screams or billions of damage to world bosses) and I am wondering how that even went into release, but they only nerf without rebalancing or buffing semi-useless skills that no one uses. By nerfing shouts people will not stop using them because they simply have no good alternatives. Start buffing other skills so people can actually choose how they want to play the game.
Imagine a doctor that instead of healing illnesses just amputates and cuts everything out without even considering how to fix it. That is what Blizzard right now on Diablo 4.
Now personal subjective opinion on skills that need rework or buffs. You can completely skip this if you want, it’s relevant to the topic, but main idea is already pronounced.
Iron Skin requires good reaction like any parry mechanic and gives player more benefits when they use it at low HP while being less effective than just pressing Challenging Shout at the beginning of the battle. It also requires a very important armor aspect slot to provide Unstoppable and 20% damage reduction to be semi-efficient, which can be used otherwise to provide a strong defensive buff. Shouts require no aspects and can be used with either Glyph Socket or Marshal or take much less important aspect slot on the ring. [Buff damage reduction on it, move Aspect of The Iron Warrior into skill tree (replace Tactical Iron skin with 10% hp per second heal, keep Fortify bonus under 50% hp) or increase amount of barrier by substantial amount, because it doesn’t survive even a second on higher tiers right now, which will enable use of other aspects related to barrier and create an alternative way to survive without shouts]
Rupture was finally good and playable, because it applied Two-Handed Sword Mastery or/and Aspect of Berserker Ripping after explosion as Bleeding Damage, making it a key ability in the pure Bleed builds that combined really good with Weapon Master’s Aspect and Fields of Crimson. Now because of the mistake in code, that allowed for you to stack damage infinitely, devs completely disabled any before-mentioned effects on Rupture and made it into a waste of the time that provides a laughable 15% hp heal or 20% attack speed boost for 4 seconds (2 seconds of which you will use for that extremely slow skill animation). It’s much easier just to stack rend or kite enemies than to use it and make yourself vulnerable to enemy attacks. [Either buff damage on Fields of Crimson passive proc or allow for Rupture to apply Two-Handed Sword Master and/or Berserker ripping with a cooldown. This way it will make pure bleed builds strong but not broken, because even before they lacked initial burst of other classes or ww and required some preparation.]
Right now it feels extremely weak to play barbarian compared to other classes, because two strong builds were already nerfed into the ground, while other classes remain mostly untouched and broken (like druid or rogue).
Also please stop nerfing builds based on mainstream streamer experience, they do not speak for the entire community and don’t show the state of game. To understand what is broken you need to compare community feedback to personal experience and actually play your own game at high levels or hire a team of testers to do it.