PoE2 has very few viable builds, why are patch notes nothing but nerfs?

Seems some here need a reminder:
Playing sub-optimally is, itself, unfun.

Humor me, take in the following without attaching your judgement to the game's current balance at the time you read the comment. I'm not reviewing .4 or .5 here, this is about design goals and the experience of playing games:

The game at a point in time exists in a given state.
In that state, there is an ideal level of build effectiveness, where the balance between player power and game difficulty puts the build at its most fun, the game at its most enjoyable.
This is also the build you're playing, the one you want.

Suppose, for discussion;
This ideal level of build effectiveness is also the maximum effectiveness the game offers. The power achieved by a fully optimized build.
This would be the ideal state of the game.
You can fully optimize your build, play it at it's most fun, and experience the game at it's highest enjoyability. Win-win-win scenario.

Now suppose the game gets an update.
After the update the game's own difficulty is the same but player power can get higher. Now there are builds that are 30% more effective than what you've been using.

Those builds are less fun, and make the game less enjoyable, because player power goes above the ideal level for the game's difficulty. The balance is off.
If you improve your build to the new optimized form, you will have less fun.

Some of you are making the mistake of thinking "so don't improve the build, leave it at the ideal effectiveness level."
That thought is a mistake because, again, playing sub-optimally is itself unfun.

The fact your build could be made 30% better, but you are allowing it to be worse, makes the build less fun, makes the game less enjoyable.
It was only the ideal effectiveness to use when it was also the highest effectiveness you could get.
You will have less fun whether you improve the build or not.
There is no longer an ideal level, not really.

The win-win-win scenario of fully optimized build, ideal effectiveness & fun, and most enjoyable state of game;
has been replaced with a lose-lose scenario where improving and not improving both make the game less fun.

On top of those direct gameplay balancing concerns, there's also the economic factor of the gap between people using those builds and people who don't.

You can't just tell people to self impose challenge, accept that their preferred build is just worse, or make a point of playing a weaker build instead of the overpowered ones.
Those things all feel bad and reduce enjoyablity, roughly as much as playing an overpowered build would.

The entire game has been made worse by the existence of the more effective builds, both for the people who use them, and the people who don't.

That is just not true .

if you are a meta chaser , nothing matters , you gonna be playing the one meta skill every league for the rest of your life anyway .

and if you are not , then you are just wrong , 90% of skills can be taken into endgame , and about 70% can kill arbiter and all endgame content .
are they fast and give you everything like meta builds? no

so your question is just wrong from the start , they are all Viable , just not for your meta chasing standards .

Does it really matter that much whether you kill the boss in 4 seconds or 20 seconds?

The problem with buffing and buffing skills is power creep. Every time there is a new ceiling, you have to stack on another and another to keep up with power creep. We just got more pinnacle bosses because of too much power creep already. If they don't nerf things every now and then, we just scale higher and higher until we reach a point where everything is just too bloated both in difficulty and in content.

I can agree with nerfs. What I can't agree with is killing entire interactions for no apparent reason. I'd like to know what the main offender was that got Blackflame changed to what it is now. Perhaps, if they didn't make Ignite so shit on its own without massive RR, we wouldn't be having this problem.

From one ascendancy, I've been able to make 3 viable builds, between 4 different classes I've played, 10+ ascendancies, I've made at least 20+ viable builds, some patches will nerf certain aspects, but you gotta adapt

Idk what your really talking about, it sounds to me like its more or less and issue with specific classes like spellcasters, And they have a lot of variety, please elaborate as to why you've come to this conclusion?
I've found the complete opposite just curious

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damir21#1543 wrote:

That is just not true .

if you are a meta chaser , nothing matters , you gonna be playing the one meta skill every league for the rest of your life anyway .

and if you are not , then you are just wrong , 90% of skills can be taken into endgame , and about 70% can kill arbiter and all endgame content .
are they fast and give you everything like meta builds? no

so your question is just wrong from the start , they are all Viable , just not for your meta chasing standards .

+1 extremely well put, "Oh no theres only a few builds that can insta kill uber bosses wah wah wah"
The builds and classes that can do that, are very few, combos of insanely powerful supports, lineage supports etc, its not like its just easy, at same time, you shouldn't be able to kill an uber boss in seconds, it should be a challenge, we need alot more balance changes to bring other classes/skills up to par, and busted strats nerfed

No average player is going to spend every hour of their day min/maxxing to absolutely break the game, its only possible due to the amount of different skills and supports, new meta strats will always be discovered because of how much is in the game, then nerfs take place due to oversights on devs, just to release more content with more oversights that allow even more busted builds!

Major balancing needs to be a priority before releasing subsequent seasons, and what they add in those seasons, they need to take alot more time and consideration before releasing, it aint easy, even engineers make oversights and small mistakes, there is so much involved, its not about there not being enough viable classes, its a deeper rooted issue, and people trying to compare their experience playing the game to "others experiences and streamers"
Put the streams down, experiment yourself, and play the game have some fun, its not a competition.......

"

Jobama#9902 wrote:

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damir21#1543 wrote:

That is just not true .

if you are a meta chaser , nothing matters , you gonna be playing the one meta skill every league for the rest of your life anyway .

and if you are not , then you are just wrong , 90% of skills can be taken into endgame , and about 70% can kill arbiter and all endgame content .
are they fast and give you everything like meta builds? no

so your question is just wrong from the start , they are all Viable , just not for your meta chasing standards .

+1 extremely well put, "Oh no theres only a few builds that can insta kill uber bosses wah wah wah"
The builds and classes that can do that, are very few, combos of insanely powerful supports, lineage supports etc, its not like its just easy, at same time, you shouldn't be able to kill an uber boss in seconds, it should be a challenge, we need alot more balance changes to bring other classes/skills up to par, and busted strats nerfed

No average player is going to spend every hour of their day min/maxxing to absolutely break the game, its only possible due to the amount of different skills and supports, new meta strats will always be discovered because of how much is in the game, then nerfs take place due to oversights on devs, just to release more content with more oversights that allow even more busted builds!

Major balancing needs to be a priority before releasing subsequent seasons, and what they add in those seasons, they need to take alot more time and consideration before releasing, it aint easy, even engineers make oversights and small mistakes, there is so much involved, its not about there not being enough viable classes, its a deeper rooted issue, and people trying to compare their experience playing the game to "others experiences and streamers"
Put the streams down, experiment yourself, and play the game have some fun, its
not a competition.......

It is a competition, and because it is I’ll just let everyone know there’s nothing stopping you from doing 6x chronomancer party and using time stop tactically to negate the chance of damage. Have fun boys. Fair and balanced. Party of 6 chronomancer can focus on nothing but dps and still clear everything deterministically. Seems fair. That allies scaling was too much tho.

All that happened was the average player would have had access to a way to actually clear everything in a season using builds the devs didn’t account for existing. To put them in the dirt they just delete allies scaling.

Trust me, the large groups of players that play together get it, you don’t care about that aspect of the game existing so we will just default to what does most damage and “can’t die”

Most of the builds that were killed were not optimal for clearing. They just had a very enjoyable element to how they functioned if the party actually played together.

Optimal farming is called negative rarity farming/3 player group rarity farming. Far less people to split drops with.

Eventually it’ll sink in that all they did was funnel us into having less actual decisions at the end of the road.

Yes your class/build can get new mods that didn’t exist and new unique bonuses in sockets and such, but all that only raises your individual power. It’s now a heavily gated community at the top. You are either first to a homebrew that is cracked or you are paying 30-50x premium on any gear for that build. Everyone is now competing for the same items.

Allies scaling grips and items with allies scaling being nerfed represents the death of thousands of builds and every player being funneled into generic items as the whole identity of bis rather than having competitive group compositions that could function on unique rings that are fairly easy to farm as a group.

Enjoy every player fighting over the same rings, gloves, etc to another level you haven’t seen since
.1.

Everyone funneled into the same bis identity is insane diversity Strat. Let’s see how it plays out though, maybe they are cooking.

"

damir21#1543 wrote:

That is just not true .

if you are a meta chaser , nothing matters , you gonna be playing the one meta skill every league for the rest of your life anyway .

and if you are not , then you are just wrong , 90% of skills can be taken into endgame , and about 70% can kill arbiter and all endgame content .
are they fast and give you everything like meta builds? no

so your question is just wrong from the start , they are all Viable , just not for your meta chasing standards .

Brother. No one is saying you can’t clear with sub optimal builds. The allies scaling thing as it pertains to grips of kulemak was not optimal strategy for team compositions. It wasn’t the meta set up, none of the compositions were. Some of them were cracked, but there is way more cracked shit in the game still.

What everyone fails to understand is that player that wanted to do support role is now just told to kick rocks.

The demand for the support role just went into a crater.

Feel however you want about it, they gimped an already gimped but fun strategy that you couldn’t even use till a few weeks in realistically.

A lv 1 can still equip a 14% extra lightning 14% extra cold 14% extra fire 40% crit chance grip. It’s not like they aren’t warping the progression. But i mean if that’s what they want them to function as, basically just used for leveling through campaign even tho you need post campaign build to farm efficiently. And if you are farming them to reroll a new char everyone is already a whole char ahead?

The grips nerf should have been a capped party nerf of like 120% bonus of the given stat across party. As it stands you can’t get above 100% bonus of any stat other than accuracy rating now.

That last 40% to get to 120% cap doesn’t seem like much but it represents so much build diversity still in game and in party without being forced to do meta. And 120% seem like fair cap considering most of them could go over 280-300%

It is effectively a 500% nerf to grip stat stacking in party btw.

I asked once, I’ll ask again, show me another instance of something in Poe or poe2 being nerfed 500%+

Id love to see it. Because if you can find something it’ll represent a micro niche amount of builds. These grips and allies scaling was a whole way to play the game. As a group of multiple highly engaged players.

I don’t think I’m as bad at math or common sense as everyone else thinks which leads to me to
a conclusion that no one else likes to hear.

This league there is tons of builds to play.

"

Lore#3772 wrote:

I asked once, I’ll ask again, show me another instance of something in Poe or poe2 being nerfed 500%+

It doesnt matter if its 500% or 5000%. it was not intended, broken things should be fixed no matter how many people are using them or what arbitrary number you think it nerfs it by or how fun the broken thing was to you.

You guys just slow down the necessary development of the game, they should be much more proactive and aggressive in fixing and nerfing things.