On Balance Feedback and Charge Changes

Frenzy nerf change kinda rekt decay support and after the nerf it already wasn't in the greatest place. The trickster buff is nice but doesn't really make up for all the 'more' damage that was lost. Same goes for poison builds, you already nerfed assassin by a big margin which is fine imho but pathfinder poison took a huge hit aswell now.

It's certainly reassuring to know that the balance team is composed of competent people and I will not dispute that. However, hopefully one can be forgiven for assuming they weren't given that the proposed changes to power and frenzy charges would make some unique items (one of which, Tinkerskin, you announced this week, for Christ's sake!) borderline worthless and adversly affect Power Siphon. I would not blame anyone for forgetting the skill existed given its current state but GGG's balance team should be held to a higher standard.

I do not have a clever solution to the issue of frenzy charges feeling mandatory in pretty much every build but removing their interactions with spells is not the way to do that because it limits build options. I welcomed the addition of ascendancy classes though many held the opinion that it would limit build diversity. It certainly did the opposite. The change to frenzy charges, however, would push the balance dangerously close to being allowed to play only with the toys you chose for us (Raider no longer being a viable choice for spell builds is but one example).

So instead of having a reliable shock effect of 50%, builds that focus on hitting more often rather than harder some of those builds won't even be able to shock anymore and to come close to the same effectiveness of shock effect you'd have to hit for 50% of boss life which doesn't even make sense because if you can hit for 50% of their life without shock then why the hell you even need it? Considering map boss life pools were tremendously increased in 3.0 shock becomes in addition by the same margin less effective. Considering all that shock is worthless now.

We had fire build meta and we still do have it now with so popular SR and RF builds, ignites and DoT were also getting a lot of attention and so we were expecting positive changes to chill and shock and instead you basically remove those from the game thanks to the mechanic that doesn't even work with majority of the builds.

WTF???

Wall of text incoming about interactions/etc.:

So I really like the charge changes, from a flavor perspective. The problem is how they're going to play out on most meta builds.

1) Power charge generation is poor for noncrit builds. Power charges are as necessary for noncrit casters as frenzy charges are for dex-aligned attack builds but they're harder to generate. The only ways that "feel" consistent are Romira's Banquet and The Blue Dream/Nightmare. One of those is a chase unique; the other randomly turns off its bonus damage with no warning. PCoC is hard to use on low-crit builds, from experience (I use it start off maps on Void Battery Assassins with little crit from non-charge sources). Gating this behind uniques provides a massive accessibility problem; Frenzies are just as necessary but Blood Rage generates them easily for an Alteration compared to Blue Dream's multiple Exalts AND 3-5 skill points.

2) This hurts what made crit feel unique to PoE compared to other games: consistency. Part of the reason that I liked playing crit in PoE is that you could build for 95% crit chance, though it would cost you damage (moving investment around). Now, that's harder. One fix would be a unique that doubled the base crit of *spell* skill gems (and not the crit added from other sources, ie Assassin) and halved the damage dealt by critical hits (*not* halving crit multiplier, because that would benefit things like Elemental Overload which this is not intended for). Crits do less damage overall but feel more consistent. Call it "Lunatic's Technique" or something, to parallel Resolute Technique--consistency over potential.

3) The interaction with spell DoT builds is poor. Frenzies used to provide bonus damage to Flameblast ignites; now they don't. Power Charges should provide 4% more damage with spell skills to handle these edge cases.

4) Attack builds, already poorly motivated to invest in power charges, now care even less. I'm not sure how to fix this outside of a keystone with "power charge crit is doubled and only applies to attacks" but that's way too specific.

5) Certain skill/item interactions have been gutted in the aftermath. People are already talking about things like Power Siphon and the dead of Raider casters so I'll put that aside.
a) There is no point to stacking frenzy charges on Surgebinders casters or power charges on Surgebinders attack builds. The DoT changes already hurt all seven people who used it, this is just further injury. The best way to fix this (imo) would be "10-15% increased damage per the lowest of your power, frenzy, and endurance charges." 7/4/3 P/F/E charges would give 30-45% increased damage--it seems reasonable.
b) Tinkerskin is DoA. A simple fix would be "Socketed traps deal 5% more damage per frenzy charge," making the chest a pseudo-7L and throwing it a much-needed bone. This effect on traps also applies to The Restless Ward though it's not as bad there.
c) The Aylardex doesn't reduce the effect of charges, it flips them around. A simple numbers buff (40% reduced -> 25% reduced) would fix this.
d) Victario's Acuity is weaker since you're somewhat disincentivized from using one of the charge types. I doubt people will use the item. If it had a life roll or if the charge generation was higher (15-20% each instead of 10% each) it would be much better.
e) No frenzies for casters means that Rotgut is much worse. No idea for a good fix.
f) Do these charge changes apply to enemies (and therefore minions)? If so, poison spectres using Victario's Charity could feel an impact.

There are a couple of other odd gem/item interactions but they're relatively minor.

There are also a few builds that stand to benefit quite nicely from the change. I'm liking the look of that juicy 32% more damage on my Void Battery Essence Drain Occultist.

Whatever limits build diversity, you will find me against it.This game is build on freedom of choice.Limiting frenzy charged in this way is a no-no.

It might look cool sweet and sexy the idea of having a charge taking a certain role.However when skills and items contradict design purposefull changes,something is wrong.And when changes don't happen in items/skills to compensate said changes,its bad.

Its not just a circle jerk.You will have some days to make adjugements but changes like that would be best in first days of beta.I appreciate you Chris and the transparency on the matter.

I am not in the flock that believes everything you do is wrong,cause there must be done something right to reach here.However take extra caution here.Limiting diversity is never good.

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Chris wrote:

We make this game for you guys, so if you don't want the change, we aren't going to force it in purely to solve long-term problems.

This is the part that bothers me. You should just make a game that YOU first and foremost would want to play. If you just try to cater to community, you'll end up sacrificing integrity and lose players anyway, because you can't satisfy everyone. Or just decide who you want to cater to, because you keep doing super confusing things, like stating that economy is important, game is not balanced around SSF and then adding a jewel vendor with a fucking 1 alch price tag on jewels.

Ty Chris for this thread on the early day of Saturday,
I have experienced a lot of balance changes that make ones game community gone crazy aka Dota. The balancer that the Dota community worship is Icefrog, he single handedly drive the Dota from just a small community of a custom map of warcraft 3 to a stand alone game. I hadnt played any mmo game until 2013 and i got stuck to the ideal of moba balancing till like around 2016 and realised that u guys balance team is the best of all games in the mmo/rpg genres. U guys area just like Osfrog of Poe to me.
Have a nice weekend to u guys.
P/S: Well things that i really really want about Poe is party/guild driven activities. My guild discord as well as my country mate main discord gone nuts in just 2,3 days then became a silence hill. Most of my friend quits when they got 36 challenges or archived their goals.

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Chris wrote:

We have people with level 100 hardcore characters, multiple famous community members who have come to work for us and you may not even know it. The minimum requirement to join our QA team is 1000 hours of PoE experience, and we still turn people with that prerequisite away if they're not good enough at the game. Our design, balance and QA team are experts at Path of Exile. I would not accept any less.

But 1000 hours is just one league, two at most if you play casually. Anyone who came after 2.0 will have that and in my opinion game went downhill really fast after that. I am convinced with every change that your development team lost their way. To make hardcore ARPG for hardcore gamers was the proclamation in many of your original closed beta manifestos, but somehow I feel you really did switch the direction and started to develop the game for more casual crowd.

Though I do agree with all the nerfs, they are all much needed, but you still need to do more. I'd also suggest increasing white and monsters life about 4 to 5 times and non-tanky rares(necros, skele cages, rakangos etc have balanced life) about 3 times. No matter how much you nerf certain things as it stands now there will always be some build not actually playing the game but just spamming movement skills and looting. Oh right, movement skills are deserving of some balance too I believe and so does the amount of movement speed you can easily get.

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Chris wrote:

There's a common misconception in the community that our balance team doesn't play Path of Exile. They actually do play it, a whole lot. We have people with level 100 hardcore characters, multiple famous community members who have come to work for us and you may not even know it. The minimum requirement to join our QA team is 1000 hours of PoE experience, and we still turn people with that prerequisite away if they're not good enough at the game. Our design, balance and QA team are experts at Path of Exile. I would not accept any less. They put substantial work into each change, planning out not only what it affects now, but what it affects in the future. These changes are all considered in the big picture of the other planned changes.

While processing player feedback in preparation for 3.0.0, we found four requests that we could address simultaneously with our proposed charge changes:

• Nerf total crit chance available. It was getting too close to cap, too easily.
• Nerf the Assassin. This was frequently requested.
• Provide more uses for power charges on spellcasters (especially non-crit ones).
• Make it less mandatory for general damage dealers to invest in frenzy charges.

We recently made these charge changes in the beta, and received an immediate negative reaction from a vocal portion of the community. While we firmly stand behind the intention of this change, it's very clear that the community not only misunderstood a lot of the consequences, but also generally didn't like the direction of the change.

We make this game for you guys, so if you don't want the change, we aren't going to force it in purely to solve long-term problems. The short-term and build continuity do matter as well. We hope to get feedback from your playtesting in the next few days of the beta, so that we can make a decision this week about whether it remains in this form, is reverted, or is made in another form.

We communicated poorly about the changes and their motivation. While we may lament the community misunderstanding the consequences of the change, it is clearly our fault for confusing the community. While it has been crazily hectic recently, we do need to stop and take the time to more clearly explain what we are testing, and why.

Almost all of these changes are on Beta. Please playtest them and let us know the results of what you find. We'll post again after the weekend with our findings also.

Thank you for your time, support and occasional overreactions. We expect nothing less <3

- It's not all about the "quantity" of hours spent on the game. It's about the "quality" of hours spent playing the game. Almost anyone can rack up 1000 hours of playtime and get to level 100 hardcore farming low/mid/high tier maps with easy mods (or even white maps for that matter). There are MANY people who have thousands of hours under their belt playing this game yet still do not understand the mechanics of the game fully. Any change should be reviewed critically. Changes should not be put in place because of a certain tiny population of the playerbase that voices their opinions which probabilistically are that of those who do not fully comprehend the game mechanics. Thus, these "changes" have a net negative impact on the entire playerbase. (data for my claims: will provide it sometime next week).

- It's about the context of the changes (or as everyone else calls it "nerfs"). If you keep nerfing things into the ground you will reduce the variety of builds that are viable. If you reduce the variety of builds, you in turn reduce the number of "options" a player has to "customize" the build(s) to their liking. Every patch since the Big Bang we seen these nerfs, they are getting to the point where a lot of the community is doubting your "balancing" team. This is one of the main reason why we requested, on several occasions, real data to back up the public claims. We have yet to receive actual real data/numbers. An example of a public reddit request:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/6ophzh/contesting_qarls_claim_regarding_poisonbleed_in/

We want actual data of these "builds" that do this crazy amount of damage with poison/bleed. Even if they do exist, what % of the TOTAL playerbase does actually play them?

- Now, let's add some context. You have claimed that poison/bleed is able to do "millions of damage a second without compromising survivability", we want actual data/builds where you can back up this claim as we do not believe you. Now, compare these "poison/bleed" builds to elemental attack based builds that are able to do 20+ Million Damage Per second (no ramp up), literally 20+ million damage per second at the moment you start any battle. So, comparatively speaking shouldn't you also nerf these elemental builds into the ground? How do I know these 20+ million DPS elemental attack builds exist? I have made them in the Beta.

- These "balance" changes are reducing the variety of builds and thus giving the players less options to customize the builds to their liking. It seems that you always nerf existing builds to promote new skills/items that come out each patch. How about stop nerfing everything into the ground and buff other builds and balance the game content instead? If the boss is too EASY to kill then perhaps give the boss more HP, more resistances...etc.

- I want to make this very clear. With these changes you are giving the players an illusion of choice, making existing builds unviable while promoting new skills and thus "forcing" the players to play certain builds. Why not have both (leave existing builds alone, and promote new builds)? Build diversity is going down, when it should be going up and flourishing which should result in attracting many MORE players to this game.

- Don't get me started on the murder of ES/VaalPact.

- Even if you take all of our current posts in this thread, it still does not represent the entire playerbase. So far we have about 35 pages (10 posts per page) that's about 350 people. That's not even 1% of your entire player base.

In conclusion, I really hope this game flourishes and grows. I'm hoping that you take the above points seriously.