Why are we afraid of nerfs?

My title was unfortunately autocorrected and I can't seem to fix it... My apologies to all of us nerds, we are not to be feared :D


Never played the first game before this new character I am working on for the event. I immediately noticed, as I am going in blind on purpose to see how much of my PoE2 experience translates to that game, that if anything, we will be seeing balance in the form of buffs to skills to bring them up the level of, for example, the heralds in this game.

PoE 1 give you many ways to be massively overpowered very quickly, very easily - easier in fact than PoE2 in my experience so far.

So I am wondering why the fear mongering regarding massive, build breaking nerfs (assuming your builds use intended mechanics and not glitches or bugs to be strong)?

Any insight would be appreciated because I am still relatively new to these games (1000 hours in PoE2 is the extent of it).

PoE1 has 12 years of powercreep added to the core game and PoE2 cant hold a candle to that - yet.

If I had to guess, Id assume GGG is trying to release a barebone version, so they can add powercreep later thru leagues same as in PoE1 and likely also have an easier time to identify issues with the PoE2 basegame right now.

If we go back to PoE 1, and look at the introduction of new bosses (such as shaper), we can see that most of them took weeks on very specialised builds to be able be beaten.

This is not the case in PoE 2. All the bosses introduced where beaten in the matter of days, and even the most difficult boss, T4 arbiter was beaten in the matter of seconds.

I'm not saying this should not be possible, but it should NOT be the norm. If you start at such a high power level, where all the content is trivial, then it diminishes the game as a whole.

The devs stated they wanted a 60-180 second kill time on pinnacle bosses (give or take). We'd need to nuke things to oblivion to achieve this (which I'm for).


SSF BTW