It seems like after two years there’s still builds that deal 10x more damage than others. Oh I forgot to add a zero, oops.
It’s not like the loot is all that complicated in this game. How hard is it to balance all commonly used abilities to be similar damage to each other. God forbid you wanna play something like double-swing barb with your friends.
You’ll be running a pit together and they’ll be zooming through the encounter. Meanwhile you’re still at the entrance trying to kill the 2-3 mobs they didn’t kill. By the time you actually kill those mobs the boss is dead. Great balance
It’s hard to tell if they’re doing this intentionally or if it’s just incompetence. There are some inherent flaws in class and ability design that make it harder to balance, like rogues and barbarians getting 2-3 extra offensive aspects on weapons. It was a terrible idea not to give all classes the same number of equipment slots. They also introduce massive bugs every time they add new items. It’s a mess.
If everything was perfectly balanced, what would the class balance team do for next season? ARPGs NEVER have perfect exact balance between every skill. That is just a silly bar to set. Plus even if there was hypothetical balance in power, you’d still have certain skills outperforming others simply due to their nature. A teleporting sorc is always going to go faster than a melee barb.
No one is asking for “perfect” balance. Stop with the strawman . The class disparity in this game is jarring to a degree that some of that classes just feel downright awful to play. Thats bad design and balance.
Look it normally takes Blizzard a long time to find and patch exploits and bugs and refine content so it works well. Look at azerite gear in BfA and see how long it took them to redesign and improve on it after everyone told them various issues they had with it.
Now imagine systems like that but they only last one season and introduce new exploits through new seasonal systems. You then have a recipe for balance disaster every single season due to how long it takes to find and fix each one of these. So the cycle likely will never ever be over unless they try a new method without all these temporary seasonal powers that help break things in combination with all new items and/or rebalanced stuff. You would think though the PTR data would likely pick up on the outliers in the least.
This is purposeful just like d3 the meta is stipulated by a spreadsheet. See hydra just one item, the amulet we have a 100% multiplier per head, 12 heads and 2 hydras is 2400% or a multiplier of x25. This is an extra zero. Apart from other buffs they received. They just don’t want everything to be balanced, they have metrics most players are with the meta builds.
Imbalance is a feature of all class-based games. Getting closer to balance means things like adding caps to scaling values (note they already moved in this direction), removing many multiplicative scalars, homogenizing the classes, etc.
This is why games like No Rest for the Wicked just go classless and the player chooses how play based on what weapons they use. What is funny is that even they struggled with balancing weapons, and got lots of crying about how item X was doing more DPS than item Y.
Bottom line is that it takes a lot of time to balance everything out without making it feel like you’re playing essentially playing the same class regardless of which class you pick, all while adding new content alongside the balancing act. Saying things like “trash game is trash” simply means you’re ignorant of this fact, akin to yelling “racists” as a means to brush aside the complexity involved.
I’ve seen my barbarian hit for between 13K and 1.3 billion and that’s without fists of fate. Thats a 100,000x difference from one attack to the next on a singular build. There is no consistency with the game right now. You either proc the giant numbers or your build does no damage at all. Nerfing overpower changed none of this because it’s a core design issue with the game.
The game has been out for two years , including a paid expansion.
The game has been through several lead developers in charge of both class design and balance.
The game has received several reworks of core systems, including but not limited to: Resistances, Overpower, itemization , Crit and Vulnerable Damage to name a few
. The current development team , those in charge of balance , live on their own stream couldnt name the damage types in their own game .
The " it takes time " defense is all used up. Cant play that card anymore . Especially when they continue to sell everything at AAA studio prices game and MTX included. Theyve had the time, they HAVE the resources, yet we continue to get a mediocre half baked product.
So, I repeat, and a little louder for those in the back:
There will always be this disparity. They need broken/overpowered builds to draw in sales and give lamer partners something to get clicks. It is part of their marketing strategy. I have been saying it for quite a while now. There will ALWAYS be broken/overpowered builds. Which one depends on which class has new cosmetics to sell.
So, yeah, there will always be a handful of builds each season that push significantly higher in the pit (110+). Groovy. If you’re afraid you’re S-tier FotM builds are on the chopping block, chill.
That doesn’t mean the devs are powerless to buff up the lower performing builds so that they don’t stall out at pit 70-80.
I don’t think the player base will revolt if the standard average is being able to do pit 90-100 (note: there’s still variability, it doesn’t need to be perfect).
The devs absolutely can, and should, aim for most builds being eventually pit 90-100 viable, with the few outliers that push higher… THAT’S what we mean by balance
