We need regular and frequent Combat Balance focused patches

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FruitLord#0833 เขียน:

Game isn't PvP and doesn't need to be balanced.

With such approach why do we even have different abilities and stuff? We don't need it, we can play with one build, because it is not pvp, right?

Tbh I really feel like there isn't a common understanding here about what balance is.

In PvP games, balance has very thin margins, since if one option is even slightly more powerful in the majority of game situations, then that option is going to be picked significantly more often than others.

Balance in those games is basically never quite perfect. For example, in DotA2, there's around 40 heroes with pick rates at under 5%, and there's 6 heroes with pick rate above 20%. The winrates range from 41% to 55% (and consider that it's a 5v5 team game, so an underperforming hero pick can still be compensated by the others in the team playing particularly well or having made just the right hero picks).

There's also myriad of ways to approach PvP balance. For example, there's essentially only three weapons players pick in Counter-Strike if they can pick any weapon. AWP, AK and M4. Desert Eagle maybe as the 4th.

But people don't generally claim that CS is imbalanced because of this. Other weapons are used situationally, when the economical cost-benefit is there. Except shotguns, they just suck.

For PvE, balance typically means that many build, skill and gear options are viable. At the moment, like +90% of end game builds are ES. And at the moment, there's about 10 primary damage skills with notable representation, with the rest being very marginal. This is of course a bit problematic in a game that has - depending a bit on how you count them - around 60 primary damage skills (skipping utility skills and some very situational skills). So only 17% of skills are seen as being "good", with the rest not being worth it to use.

Realistically, I think PoE2 can reach a point in balance where say, 2/3 of builds have the same defensive setup and 1/3 doesn't, and where 40% of the primary skills appear in the common builds and on the extended leaderboard.

Calculated like that, PoE2's balance can be roughly 3x better than it is now. Combine that with the new classes, new skills, and small expansions on the passive skill tree etc, and you'd really have a very wide amount of options to choose from already.

Mid season nerfs are 100% ACCEPTABLE and expected. This is not a finished game, its beta. BETA do you understand what a beta is? They could straight delete a class and it would be fine ITS THE FRIGGIN BETA.

Listening to players in terms of balance is the worst idea. 90% of the time player's are just giving feedback based on what will benefit them or make them feel better. And the suggestions don't actually benefit the game overall (typically).

The game does need more updates. Although performance and general polish is what I would look for at the moment. In terms of balance they should buff certain ascendacies to make them worth-while using. But I do not agree with nerfs in general. As nerfs in a game which does not feature pvp, is just taking away options and not adding them. For example if they nerf Deadeye into the ground that isn't going to make all of the shit ascendacies suddenly worth-while picks. It will just mean players will bandwagon onto bloodmage or ritualist or whatever.

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Icesinnox#6517 เขียน:

Listening to players in terms of balance is the worst idea. 90% of the time player's are just giving feedback based on what will benefit them or make them feel better. And the suggestions don't actually benefit the game overall (typically).

The game does need more updates. Although performance and general polish is what I would look for at the moment. In terms of balance they should buff certain ascendacies to make them worth-while using. But I do not agree with nerfs in general. As nerfs in a game which does not feature pvp, is just taking away options and not adding them. For example if they nerf Deadeye into the ground that isn't going to make all of the shit ascendacies suddenly worth-while picks. It will just mean players will bandwagon onto bloodmage or ritualist or whatever.

GGG has so many developers that surely balance changes - even pretty large ones - are not something that is necessarily away from polish and performance fixes and whatnot. Ultimately, you can effectively have only x many people work on e.g. a performance update before you hit some pretty extreme diminishing returns from asking more and more people to work on it.

And IMO clearly overperforming skills and builds do need nerfs. There's the psychological aspect - if one build is clearly a lot better than others, players who don't play it feel like they are being hindered. While it is a PvE game, there's aspects where performance of players and builds matter for others too, like trade and for a small amount of players, leaderboards. And there's the overall game balance. If the devs want to make something harder or easier or want to balance a piece of new content, they would have to decide whether to balance it from the perspective of those overperforming builds or mid tier builds. It just makes overall balancing harder.

It's flat out impossible - and perhaps not even all so desirable or useful - to have all skills, ascendancies and so on, perform equally well. But a situation where, let's say, a fight is designed to take 90 seconds, and some skills/ascendancies/reasonable builds clear it in 15 seconds and others in 180 seconds, there's clearly an issue.

Right now, lots of builds feel just silly to play after having tasted the power of some lightning nonsense or whatnot. Your clear speed is like one fourth of what those other builds might have, even if that much.

The notion that balance doesn't matter in a PVE game is silly. It definitely matters. For example, right now, the Atalui's Bloodletting + Tecrod's Undying Hate combo is so far above everything else in damage, it's kind of crazy.

It's not like we need everything to be perfectly balanced, but way more skills should at least be in the same realm as each other. Right now, there are a lot of skills that are in completely different universes.

Gr8 ideas. Game needs something to happen I had zero friends and guild members online in 2 weeks. I’m the only one still playing.

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Icesinnox#6517 เขียน:

Listening to players in terms of balance is the worst idea. 90% of the time player's are just giving feedback based on what will benefit them or make them feel better. And the suggestions don't actually benefit the game overall (typically).

The game does need more updates. Although performance and general polish is what I would look for at the moment. In terms of balance they should buff certain ascendacies to make them worth-while using. But I do not agree with nerfs in general. As nerfs in a game which does not feature pvp, is just taking away options and not adding them. For example if they nerf Deadeye into the ground that isn't going to make all of the shit ascendacies suddenly worth-while picks. It will just mean players will bandwagon onto bloodmage or ritualist or whatever.

Correct, nerfing Deadeye would most likely have the effect you described. The problem is, there have been numerous skills / ascendancies that are just trash compared to it [Removed by Support] to not buff those but buff Deadeye. There is no logic to that decision at all. This has now made many players say nerf it then since you refuse to buff the unused stuff.

This is where the calls for balance come in even more loudly since they don't want to nerf mid league (I'm ok with this) but at the same time refuse to do mid league buffs for under played skills ascendancies. Mid league is the perfect time to buff them heavily because there is only a short time remaining to where it can be toned down if over done. There are so many skills ascendancies with 1% or less use rate. That should be so over the top obvious they need tweaking / buffs.

If they did mid league buffs, the REPEATED calls for nerfing of ES and Deadeye would slow down or vanish because new doors opened up instead of staying closed.

GGG is shooting themselves in the foot repeatedly by not treating this like a BETA when they can. I know people keep talking about player counts don't mean anything after a month in the league but the league start numbers are steadily trending down, not holding level or increasing.

I understand the decision to not nerf mid league due to peoples investments into a build but there is ZERO reason they cant do something to buff / tweak undesirable skills / ascendancies because news flash... until players use them, they wont get the data they need to balance it.

Look at all the top skills and ascendancies... they all have some scaling or buffing element along with ease of use. This is why LA Deadeye and LS Amazon are/were so dominating. Now look at something like Incend Shot on the crossbow. .01% usage on POEninja. There are dozens more like it. Why are they not buffing or tweaking them. Some need just base damage upgrades. Some need tweaks to size/length of the skill. Some need complete overhauls on how they work. There is no reason they cant mid league buff the first two types. The complete overhaul skills might need to wait for a new league but I am fairly positive they can be done mid league as well.

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Soulsniper1313#7576 เขียน:

Look at all the top skills and ascendancies... they all have some scaling or buffing element along with ease of use. This is why LA Deadeye and LS Amazon are/were so dominating. Now look at something like Incend Shot on the crossbow. .01% usage on POEninja. There are dozens more like it. Why are they not buffing or tweaking them. Some need just base damage upgrades. Some need tweaks to size/length of the skill. Some need complete overhauls on how they work.

That would be my dream job. I am an excel dweller and I love min-maxing stuff or optimizing for balance.

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Evergrey#7535 เขียน:

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Soulsniper1313 เขียน:

(...) Now look at something like Incend Shot on the crossbow. .01% usage on POEninja. There are dozens more like it. Why are they not buffing or tweaking them. Some need just base damage upgrades. Some need tweaks to size/length of the skill. Some need complete overhauls on how they work.

That would be my dream job. I am an excel dweller and I love min-maxing stuff or optimizing for balance.

They might take a look at your work if you made something polished and concise. Whether it be a Youtube video presentation or literal Excel document. What they do with that information? Well, that's a bit different... But I've noticed game changes that directly reflect specific player feedback that I've seen in the forums, they just don't announce every little change or tweak. But they do be tweakin.
I seent it.