There is nearly zero balance changes and buffs to skills.

"

e1337donkey#1437 wrote:

You don't need to play the very top meta skills to have fun in this game.. you'd be surprised how much patch notes don't really matter when you just go into a league playing what ever you feel like and making it work with all the tools available.

This

While I'm also fairly disappointed with the lack of "general skill skill balance", I think there's enough of new stuff to spice both the gameplay and the meta up. We still have 7 Bloodline classes to discover, and we don't really know how the attached hands will compliment certain builds.

And as other have said; there's also new skills and supports.

"

e1337donkey#1437 wrote:

You don't need to play the very top meta skills to have fun in this game.. you'd be surprised how much patch notes don't really matter when you just go into a league playing what ever you feel like and making it work with all the tools available.

Hello, sorry, this is how I've felt since I started playing:

You will have fun until the build can't handle certain content except by investing tons of currenty into it. Then is when you will regret not having played a meta build to make tons of currency/level way faster so that later you can actually play whatever you want in whatever context you want.

That happened to me two leagues in a row when I started playing the game in Crucible. I liked frost blades but without a huge investment the build could not progress further than t16 or delve ~300 depth.

Last league I played was settlers with archmage + coc (meta) and I did more currency in 2 weeks than in 2 entire leagues. Could farm whatever I wanted, with as many scarabs I wanted. This was the first time I could actually use everything the game had to offer without restrictions at any point.

Same with leveling given the xp penalty. The initial choice matters a lot in terms of defining what is fun in the mid/long run.

As the author stated, as of now, there is not much diversity in terms of skills. The differences are too abysmal. As some examples: templar totem level 1, 2 hand weapon sunder or slam against take for example frost blades level 1.

It is way faster to create a templar to get the totem start gem then delete it and play whatever you want than actually playing whatever you want.

From infinite theorical combinations less than 1/10 actually allow a character to scale consistently while sustaining the currency needed for it.

Not saying I am right or wrong, but that has been my experience so far.

Mostly agree,

Imagine a world where ggg understands this game and let players have fun, this game is supposed to be "play what you want", but hell, there are 10 reliable skills per league, everything else are just memes, tuning down overperforming new skills is fine, but what's with this mentality of destroying, "this skills are too good", every single damn skill should be too good, every single player should want to play every ascendancy, this meta controlling is so against the basic idea of having an enormous skill tree, at this point this system makes no sense.

Pathing over the tree is so standard, many just go over the "good places" and call it a day, the illusion of choice raised another level.

ima try it thought, just because there's nothing else.

Don't worry, they are watching streamers making some builds over the next days and then nerf some more stuff before leaguestart.

Then you have more "balance" changes ;)

"

nhull17#5978 wrote:

"

Aldonés#1294 wrote:

You're forgetting one teeny tiny change. There are 10 (If I recall correctly) new bloodline Ascendencies that are core to the game. Everyone has the ability to select one of these to shake up the meta.

There are new skills too, it's like none of them paid attention.

He said he hopes new skills are at least good, seems you did the same and didn't pay attention to his post.

you mean like the total meta shifts of the last leagues?
like making trickster finally as good as trickster?
and finally trickster got his moment at the sun. Or remember when trickster was finally nerfed to still be the most op class?
or maybe we're talking about ES, the old new meta in def?

I far more annoyed on them nuking all farms, and not even fixing sanctum which they nuked last league

"

Baroc#2678 wrote:

Don't worry, they are watching streamers making some builds over the next days and then nerf some more stuff before leaguestart.

Then you have more "balance" changes ;)

Also known as the fun police method of balancing, everything feels terrible.

Bonus points if you introduce some DARK SOULS gameplay.

How about having all skills in the game at an APPROXIMATE power level so we can play something different each time without waiting on GGG to buff/nerf things.

I'm aware that perfect balance can never be achieved, it just doesn't work like that, but you can have all skills perform well enough to not need the whole "meta shake up" thing. And before you say anything....no, I do not believe that having to invest mirror tier gear into one skill to make it perform as well as a meta skill that levels you while naked, is anything near to "all skills are viable".

"

caboom#7201 wrote:

what are you talking about, Total meta shift with:

"Chieftain: The Ngamahu, Flame's Advance Notable Ascendancy Passive Skill now has Non-Unique Jewels cause Small and Notable Passive Skills in a Large Radius to also grant +4 to Strength (previously +3)"

definitely went ballistic on this one. expecting nerfs next league.