We need regular and frequent Combat Balance focused patches

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JODYHiGHR0LLER#6171 wrote:

I would welcome mid league buffs.

Mid league nerfs are absolutely unacceptable.
GGG has a years long track record of being unable to reasonably nerf things.
They need to build some trust between leagues before mid league nerfs are even up for discussion.

Also, focusing too much on balance right now is silly.
We are still waiting on a shit load of weapons, skills, supports, classes... Everything.
All those things will bring more interactions with eachother ect.
Too much dev time on balance right now is essentially pissing into the wind.
LoL is a bad example because it's an established game, we are playing something mid development.

Classes all need to be viable right now, which they are.

Honestly, any balance changes that are on frequent schedule would be amazing. I see your point of nerfs being hard to swallow, but GGG really could just try to make these changes subtle, you know? Like up to 5% nerf of the most popular/broken abilities would only bring them down to the rest of the pack, which in my eyes would be healthy.
I cannot speak of GGG history, as I wasn't here - I dislike poe1.
What I can do, is to give feedback, which I am doing here.
Your defeatism might be reasonable, but I am still full of hope for some good changes.
I stand my ground and sustain my feedback points of this post.

GGG needs a team dedicated to balance tuning for PoE2 instead of the current juggling of their staff between multiple platforms.

Their implementation should always be league-agnostic and, ideally, they could make a Q/A forum post once a month or so on what they're working on.

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JODYHiGHR0LLER#6171 wrote:

Can you provide one singular example of this being a meaningful change in the history of POE?

Why PoE1, though - they are even "trying" to move away from? This is how balanced games/modes are made - it's a well established practice. Bumping skill damage by 40%+ is no balancing (e.g. nova projectiles), it's just throwing stuff to see what sticks. Another blatant example how not to do it - "rakiata's flow".

Examples of reasonable balance, atlas nodes for 3% quantity.
If they want a balanced game where all (most) weapons & classes are viable overbuffing/overnefing stuff every 4 month is not going to work. They have to start somewhere, try something.

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bestsss#7863 wrote:

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JODYHiGHR0LLER#6171 wrote:

Can you provide one singular example of this being a meaningful change in the history of POE?

Why PoE1, though - they are even "trying" to move away from? This is how balanced games/modes are made - it's a well established practice. Bumping skill damage by 40%+ is no balancing (e.g. nova projectiles), it's just throwing stuff to see what sticks. Another blatant example how not to do it - "rakiata's flow".

Examples of reasonable balance, atlas nodes for 3% quantity.
If they want a balanced game where all (most) weapons & classes are viable overbuffing/overnefing stuff every 4 month is not going to work. They have to start somewhere, try something.

Because POE1 & POE2 are made by the same company.
That company has a history of NOT being able to do nerfs reasonably.

For the THIRD time, I'm not saying they shouldn't. I'm saying they need to show us that they are capable of it before they are acceptable mid league.
If you were actually reading that would be perfectly clear.

There is no 'us'. It's just you and what you want. GGG doesn't need to show you anything.

bump

I think it's a fair bit more complicated than it seems like.

Consider:

League-based ARPGs have most their activity in the 1st month after the league. In PoE1, 75% to 90% of players are back to inactive by 2 months into the league. So it of course makes sense to mostly focus on creating the patch for the next league. That's where the activity - and thus the money - comes from.

What's the actual impact of modifying a skill by say 5% damage up or down? Does that make players switch to that skill mid-season? I'd imagine; no. If you're nerfing it down, you just annoy the players who built around that skill and invested into it. So the reward is pretty low.

You may also inadvertly affect your statistics for the next major patch and you make it tad bit harder for players to follow changes and theorycraft, since they need to now follow balance patches in-season rather than go through a single patch for the next season.

And finally, you want to keep the league patches big, because part of the point of a new league is to basically reshape the build landscape to a degree; both enabling new builds, and dropping down the highest-performing builds. If you spread the balancing efforts towards that through the league, you'll have a smaller patch for league start and that's not necessarily good for a couple of different reasons.

As a sidenote, I don't think it makes much sense to compare how non-PvP games do balancing versus how PvP games do them. Very different goals and even slightly different definitions for what balance means.

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bestsss#7863 wrote:

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JODYHiGHR0LLER#6171 wrote:

Can you provide one singular example of this being a meaningful change in the history of POE?

Why PoE1, though - they are even "trying" to move away from? This is how balanced games/modes are made - it's a well established practice. Bumping skill damage by 40%+ is no balancing (e.g. nova projectiles), it's just throwing stuff to see what sticks. Another blatant example how not to do it - "rakiata's flow".

Examples of reasonable balance, atlas nodes for 3% quantity.
If they want a balanced game where all (most) weapons & classes are viable overbuffing/overnefing stuff every 4 month is not going to work. They have to start somewhere, try something.

It's not really throwing stuff on the wall and seeing what the sticks; it's deliberately shaking things up a major time when starting a new league.

In my experience, basically all ARPGs, shooter-looters and MMORPGs are imbalanced, and there's specific builds and setups that overperform, while most builds are basically not played.

That probably is telltale of that when you have sufficient complexity, balancing things is simply extremely hard.

GGG has deliberately chosen that rather than try to reach a great balance via gradual slight tuning, they instead basically do a soft restart for build crafting via massive changes every 4 months. Which, IMO, is probably more interesting, since it's always exciting to see what builds are gonna work well and what not when a new league starts. If time over the year was instead put to getting the current balance great while avoiding shaking things up massively (which would unbalance things) the game would be less exciting.