Clarifying the Ascendancy Changes

'''One of the tricky parts of game balance is that when you remove familiar past options, and replace them with powerful new options, until you become familiar with the new options it's going to feel like a loss. Add to this the concept of loss aversion where people feel losses much more strongly than gains, and we can totally see why some players' first reactions to the changes are negative. ''

There is nothing tricky about this; take stuff away and people aren't happy. If you don't want this effect, dont do it at the same time as when you add new content. Don't try to mitigate damage by giving unknown stuff back. That's not how you deal with ''loss aversion''.

Sincerely, a therapist who is both angry at the amount of these nerfs which were baited as buffs and your misuse of psychological terms on the players side to justify behaviour on your side.

I'm just happy that my PF/Jugg Scion only got buffed.

You can tell the difference between players who actually know the diversity of the mechanics in the game and those who just ride whatever is strong and get comfortable with their understanding of it. I don't know why these types are worrying so much, you're going to have a dozen build guides professionally made by the streamers by this time two days from now.

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Nizhidrhamannit wrote:

Pay no heed to those crybabies, it's a thousand times better to nerf powerful builds, classes, ascendancies than to give in to their absurd demands and raise all monster levels, stats, hitpoints so that they don't delete 3 consecutive screens of monsters with a single click.

YEAH u know what u r talkin about?

Hierophant totems were so powerful! Most powerful build in the game! Top tier clear speed!

Such comments are just pathetic.

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Winkers91 wrote:

You can tell the difference between players who actually know the diversity of the mechanics in the game and those who just ride whatever is strong and get comfortable with their understanding of it. I don't know why these types are worrying so much, you're going to have a dozen build guides professionally made by the streamers by this time two days from now.

And all of them will be builds we don't want to play.

Great job GGG, simplifying the ascendancies is a great thing. Many of my friend that began the game were already lost in the passive tree and couldn't understand what was going on with somes nodes without looking up to it for hours.
I think that's good to simplify it, people will always complain but at the end it's ingame that we will see the difference. You create so much HYPE each league that people forgot that the league isn't out yet and that they didn't even test it...

RIP Poison BV Assassin unless they add something via the passive tree/gems to compensate for loss of DOT multiplier for poison and over 30% loss of Movement speed increase. 50% elusive effect ye that's ok but it only increases the MS by a fraction of where it was previously, not to mention Elusive being canceled out if another skill is used. Refresh Elusive on Crit Strike (and where it doesn't get canceled out) would be a welcome thing for an Assassin build that relies heavily on MS for part of its defensive playstyle. Taking away movement speed from 2 ascendency notables was just overkill otherwise.

So to sum up that pathetic attemp at an explanation:

We suck at balancing, have no clue how to create content not aimed at the 0,1%, cant be bothered to ask the actual playerbase what they want and hope you can deal with it.

This is not good game design, you literally failed at what you yourselves set out to do. The new changes WON'T change up the meta it will just make current builds feel weaker and less enjoyable, which in return will force most players to leave the league even faster than normal.

Well done GGG, keep the good work!

Ok, so after re-reading the Pathfinder Ascendancy as a whole, i begin to understand what you've done here. I'm still not sure 100% of some losses like the Virulence slower decay that is gone or the 20% AoE nerf... Will test the change, i might don't like it though...

Omg the assassin is literally murdered, i do understand the nerfs but against way more powerful bosses, ggg what philosophy is that?