What is the actual goal of balance?

PC General Discussion
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I’ve seen this balance and long term health of the game mentioned a bunch by the devs, but I don’t think we’ve ever had them define specifically what these things mean to them. To this point, from a high level what we’ve mostly seen in hotfixes and patches is a cycle of taking things away, and then subsequently giving a little bit of what was taken away back. There’s certainly more nuance to the changes they’ve made so far, but from my perspective this roughly describes what they’ve done so far. I think it’s pretty clear that the devs are fighting against the prospect of power creep while simultaneously working to normalize power for all classes and abilities in a pretty aggressive way. My question is this - should they be?

What should the ultimate goal of balance be?
1.) To create equality across the board or
2.) To make things as fun as possible

There are always going to be certain skills players gravitate towards, and blizzard should know what those are by this point. What is the right thing to do with that knowledge? Do you leverage the skills you know your players tend to think are awesome to use by finding ways to keep encouraging their use, or do you try to bring them back to the mean in effort to force people to try other things? I think we can safely assume by now that these guys are very worried about power creep, so if their goal is to push things towards a mean, then nerfs are going to be a way of life that players will need to be at peace with.

I do understand wanting to avoid power creep, but I also think it’s important to concede that some power creep is fine over the course of a games life. There is more than one way to make adjustments to bring the end game into step with power creep. This is especially true due to the relatively short seasons Blizzard is using - this gives them built in agility to change things up if they notice player power is trivializing their content. Right now, I don’t think that is something that is being leveraged at all. To me, it sort of feels like the current dev team is implementing scared, which is especially odd given the fact that leaderboards aren’t even out yet. My basis for this thinking is rooted in the following:

  • very reactionary, heavy handed nerfs have occurred multiple times in the games first two months
  • outrageously conservative itemization. Small, bland mod pools and very shallow loot tables
  • very flat progression curve in the end game. Chase items are horrendously implemented (not findable) and with only a few exceptions, unique items that players do have the opportunity to play around with are static and include painful trade-offs
  • way too much disparity between the quantity of additive and multiplicative damage buckets

My brother has been on me about playing this game with him, and tonight he challenged me to explain why I’m frustrated with it. After dropping the salt and thinking about it, I think what I’ve described above pretty much encapsulates why. I just don’t feel like these guys are looking at game balance from the lens of “what can we do to make this as fun as possible,” but instead are choosing to look at in from the perspective of normalizing performance as tightly as possible.

They keep telling us they are taking an iterative approach to developing this game, but in my opinion what we’ve really seen are a whole lot of nerfs and road blocks sprinkled in with incremental apology buffs, all in pursuit of an overarching design philosophy that doesn’t very often result in implementations their players are asking for.

Ultimately, what I’d like to see is more aggressive implementations in the opposite direction. Give us a bunch of challenging things to do. Give us those omg drop moments every few hundred hours like PoE and D2 do. Don’t balance the game in a way where you normalize your players experience - balance it in a way where you electrify it. Swing for the fences and when you make changes, start by asking a simple question - is this fun?

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“world of warcraft” has received balance “patches” for 20 years or whatever now

most of the “hardcore” wow gamers realized after a certain point that blizz is not actually for balance, but to give an artificial feel of progression in their games by nerfing classes and buffing others, they do this… for 20 or so years… up down up down up down… and after you realize this … if you care so much about the game… like warcraft… you eventually are “forced into the meta” to max out content - the way blizzard wants you to play at any given moment

you are a passenger in a theme park, you have no free will other than the price of admission, which is a contract binding you to the linear ride of up and downs, which you agreed and signed for, and if you have a problem with this?

leave the park. - blizz

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It’s all bs. They just want publicity and money.

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It is very very clear that blizzard absolutely has no clue what they are doing or how to balance. Why are they still trying to figure out how to make barb and sorc playable in season 1???
They have no direction. They are guessing. Just leave this trash game

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i clarified this in my reply.

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To get people to play other classes and hopefully make cosmetic purchases for those classes.

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With all due respect, I think you’re giving blizz to much credit. Or at least this particular D4 team. In no way shape or form do I believe they can even come up with a plan like that with how I see they are attempting to balance these classes.

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Balance is every class but barb clearing uber lilith in 1-3 minutes while the best poe players in the world take 11 minutes on barb.

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I think it’s an interesting point and critique that the devs might be getting “lost in the sauce”. If the point of balance is to get all the classes in parity, then my immediate question is “why?”

All classes should have a reasonable ability for the vast majority of players to complete content in a way that delivers class fantasy and a variety of build fantasies (ie. if you wanna be a frost sorc you’re not forced to be a fire sorc to do end game content.)

I also think game breaking play styles should be removed from the game. But I am conflicted on that point because maybe the chase of getting a character to the point of being able to single phase Uber Lilith is a chase that keeps players invested in the game, and maybe every class should have this chase.

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ideally all builds should work and perform well the same (all reasonable and reasoned builds, of course, not all “possible” ones, by simply putting skill points in any random ability even if it has no synergy with any other one you should not achieve same good results as a nicely studied build).

problem is that here few builds per class are feasable, most others are underperforming, and of those few feasable builds some of some classes perform better than those of others anyway. now, to balance that, you can either nerf the overperforming ones, or boost the underperforming ones.

problem with former solution is that aligns to the lowest denominator, making all builds lousy.

problem with the latter is that makes all builds overperforming, which can seem good at first, but once you realise balance is never achieved in full, you know you’ll have to balance other things all time.

and then by upping the scales all time, you see that things will go soon through the roof (d3 numbers way, for example), out of control, with lot of negative effects on countless other things, potentially even worse than in the former case.

to the day, right or not, they have chosen the nerf solution.

the fact they have said in the future they are going to boost instead of nerf, while can seem pleasing to those playing the underperforming classes and builds, isn’t a good sign.

it tells everybody that after all, at the lead of the design there’s no clear thinking in taking sound consequential decisions based on a reasoned vision, and all the potential for confusion and further problems.

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Or they can just balance in a way where uber lilith is still beatable with non-meta builds ONLY if you invest enough time into building your character with proper itemization.
That would only work if they fix itemization first.
Also there is no end game content to even make class balance have a purpose.

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why do all builds have to perform the same? What purpose does that serve except to create an impossible work load on the devs that could be spent elsewhere?

builds should be balanced to the content, not to each other, unless you plan to homogenize the game.

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every build performing the same = class is irrelevant = poe2… when can i play cuz im waiting 4 u

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didn’t say they have to perform the same. said they have to perform well the same. ie, they have to give same good results, in perception, to players. if they didn’t, players would never play a build, and only play the rewarding pleasing ones. in little to no time, nobody would play some classes and builds, everybody would play few classes or taking it to the extreme, even just one, all same build. if you don’t see any problem in that (spending lots of money to create a game with many classes with countless different builds, marketing it to customers with the legitimate expectation of a pleasing experience in playing a class and build just as they would have playing others, actively doing your best to have players all ignore the largest majority of that or be highely disappointed by most of that content when realising great part of it is not pleasing and rewarding at all, especially in comparison to tiny parts of that), then there’s little to no point in explaining it.

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“few classes” = 5 classes = d4
poe2 = 30+

“if there was only a few builds, people would play few classes”

brah, the game only has 5… brah? listen to yourself

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If you go to a restaurant with your wife with the goal of having a good meal, and you want a 10 dollar burger and she wants a 40 dollar lobster roll, you have 2 options:

1: You each have the meal you want and have a good dinner.
2: You tell her she needs to get something cheaper because her lobster roll is unfair compared to your burger.

Problem with saying that all builds should play well the same, is that it leads to “no fun allowed” just like in the analogy. And we have ALREADY seen that play out. Barb has a cool tool to kill monsters with, and it gets taken away because a sorc’s fireball isn’t as good, hypothetically.

If class balance is shifted enough to create a rotating meta where everyone gets a turn, then devs have more time to focus on content and gamebreaking issues, and players can spend more time discovering fun builds knowing that they haven’t all been nerfed away.

Thats how I see it anyways. If players only want to play meta builds (which many do), then that’s completely fine. Because there’s many players who don’t give a crap about the hottest maxroll or Alkaizer build and just wanna be a frost sorc.

WoW uses this philosophy but with sloppy execution because some classes and builds spend a little too much time at the bottom and top.

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Balance ? or Blizzard balance ?

Balance - all classes should feel fun to play

Blizzard balance - all classes should feel same bad to play

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At a basic level ,

Reduce being cheesed and one shot by monsters.

Reduce being OP at non intended moments in the game.

Reduce player being overly damaged or one shot, where not intended.

Offer classes obtainable power and equal level of reach , without making them feel the same. (class tunning)

Basically nothing that they have done since launch.

That is what i see as really bad balancing that creates more problems across the board than it fixes.

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The problem with balance in this game is that there was none. They want many builds with a different focus to be viable. Take my mostly shadow DoT focused necro for example. DoTs cannot crit nor can they overpower at all. The only way to get a DoT to act like a crit was via the Wither node in the paragon board for Necro by having more Willpower than what others might care to have. DoTs take time to do damage however and can only be sped up via attack speed. They can also do bonus damage via vulnerability I believe as well. Trying to kill Uber Lilith with a build like this is a bit tricky but doable if you’re great at dodging.

It’s a zero cheese build that also use to be pretty tanky before the defensive nerfs. But anyway with that in mind that is merely one type of balance that this game needs more of to open up various new builds in the game. The other problem with balance is the classes themselves via builder/spenders, utility, passives, cds, and ults are not always well balanced. On top of this gearing is a slog and some uniques, stats, and more need more tuning I think. And lastly pets/minions need more work in this game as well.

So the overall goal is to make it viable for tons of different builds in the game by slowly readjusting balance. But yeah getting there feels like it’s going to take several months if not a year at least due to how slow Blizzard is and this game feeling like a beta.

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What if I play necro and demand both the burger and the lobster roll?