On Balance Feedback and Charge Changes

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allbusiness wrote:

I'm still confused as to how you say that you have two players that are incredibly strong players at the game that claim that you needed to nerf the Assassin when the Pathfinder is clearly over represented in the top 100 in both HC and SC, and arguably in power levels is even stronger than ever before simply because they are the only class that can now flat out abuse flasks despite the fact that flasks are weaker (marginally weaker).


So you nerf one of the worst defensive ascendancies in the game, give him no utility in return, and then proceed to just ignore the Pathfinder. Ok.

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Crackmonster wrote:

When i get home from this holiday i'm going to play 3.0 like i haven't played PoE in some years.. then after a bit i will get a part time job next to my school so i can buy kitava pack.

Cheers GGG i like reading this

About charges: Don't mind the whiners they cry because they lose more more power. It's just numbers that they lose and frankly it's overreacting greatly. These are good changes that give more identity to casters/attackers rather than generic increases used by all builds.

So why don't we just lock portions of the tree to certain classes then? More identity right?

Told you they don't play their own game.

Go read the thread in feedback if you want my longer reasoning. Not gonna repeat it all here.

Wanted to add to my post here(not reply to ya):

I'd caution that assassin nerf. I said from the very start of ascendancy classes, even when other players weren't playing assassin i called it out as being too much power to crits and that it would make crit capping too easy and it was too powerful for scaling damage. Finally meta caught on after some leagues and now you adress it - however that change.. i don't think i will touch assassin looking like that. It has been too nerfed - now it's more about poison/bleed and since those suck the whole thing sucks, and even before they weren't that big of a deal. Just my 2c.

Several Righteous Fire builds did use Frenzy charges in Combination with Blood Dance Boots.
The main reason was the extra Life regeneration, but it also provided up to ~15% more damage which are now missing.
Burning Damage was changed towards a nice buff, it was then nerfed but still provided a decent buff.
Then Righteous Fire base Damage got reduced from 50 to 40 % Damage which ment that with a decent geared RF build you still would have had around 10% more damage.
Now with the loss of Frenzy charge damage another ~ 15% of the damage is gone.

So all together we would be damage wise currently in a worse place at 3.0 than we were in 2.6 and that is all Life based which was never in an exceptional state anyways, it did work but thats it.

Yes sustaining will become easier than ever due Pantheon and 1% Life reg from oak, but doe sthat make up for a build which already had to kite around at endgame content for a long ass time due no real single target possibility?

@chris

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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.

Nerfing total crit chance available is not the right choice because there really isnt THAT much crit on the passive tree.

Maybe spreading out the crit nodes or adding more to certain areas because at this point only a few builds/characters can actually get crit let alone crit cap.

You cannot compare a shadow assassin and look at the stats and see - wow this is hitting crit cap easily. So we should remove crit on the tree.

All you have done is made it worse for non-assassin characters


Nerf the Assassin - okay this is fine. Instead of attacking the passive tree you make changes to a specific ascendancy

Provide more uses for power charges - Thats awesome, creating more build diversity by promoting charges into benefiting more then just flat crit chance.


Make it less mandatory to invest in frenzy charges - woah wat?

Since when do generic builds feel that using frenzy charges is mandatory?

Only Raider ascendancy and a few others really actually "go" for the frenzy charges....

Then you did the opposite by making frenzy charges for - attack skills only?

That kills build diversity.. that is not what people want.

That change alone basically says - hey all you raider players who arent using attacks? Yea guess what
your build doesnt work anymore.

It makes no sense to do this.

Im pretty sure this is the 1 change that is horrible.

The rest are fine imo

People need to stop having over the top reactions to needed nerfs to op things. In the case of the backlash to the charge changes, charges weren't overpowered per se, but they were damn near mandatory in terms of frenzy and power charges. A literal ton of builds incorporated one or both of these for maximum benefit. So everybody already generates the charges they need, so what is the point of Conduit node? What is the point of doing anything less than making sure those charges were there, they were better than any other skill tree option. Note, not spectacularly OP, but they had become a massive staple that couldn't be overlooked.

So the backlash isn't that people are complaining about it being nerfed to oblivion from an OP state, it is just that this community has a tendency to overreact to changes that needed to happen, had it a long time coming, but are so comfortable in the overarching meta of the game state (not a league-based meta but long term league after league after league meta) that anything that threatens it, like the charge changes, are deemed a threat to the stability of the game.

Who said power charges and frenzy charges were in a good state and never needed to be nerfed at all? Nobody. But the community is too willing to take changes that happen abruptly after years of remaining relatively the same as an unspoken endorsement that the mechanic is "perfect" from GGG. So now that GGG finally decided that it was time to do something, people cry about their damage loss and don't even consider the fact that maybe GGG didn't envision charges being mandatory build mechanics and instead encourage builds to diversify. Now we might see a frost blades build that can either go charge heavy, or take flat passive nodes that make those two variants roughly equal when the charge based one is at max charges. But no, people want to freak out because they can't wrap their head around a nerf being a bonus to the game. They are too used to stuff like D3 existing where it is continual power creep and your damage should always get higher and higher with each new build change, gear upgrade and seasonal patch notes.

Let's be honest, as soon as 3.0 harbinger short term meta is found, people won't even remember these changes after the theorycrafters post their OP builds and everybody copies it. Then the next big nerf comes in and we start all over again.

And if the other changes were controversial, same analogies can be made to some extent. Only heard and saw people complaining about charges so that is what frustrated me that people are always blindly defending OP or mandatory build designs. Kills diversity. There may be reason to debate how much and how far these changes go like for example a fully charged build should probably irk out the same build utilizing no charge mechanics, but there needs to be more versatility to gear and skill trees. We all know the big joke of the game is that it gives you freedom to choose whatever you want, but only certain builds will actually work. I would anticipate that a game where all well designed builds are good instead of "did you utliize this mechanic? No? Then its objectively crap/significantly slower/weaker versus this variant" would be better for everybody.


Edit: I guess I didn't really notice the whole problem with power charges focusing on spell damage and frenzy being attack only making some uniques useless or... weird to say the least. The above still stands that I think people are scared charges won't be worth using anymore even if the specific changes become less odd. But now I do see why some of the complaints are valid that the changes are stupid so to speak.

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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.

from the ceo himself, ggg best company in the world. much love.

Instead of nerfing skills etc why not just make the game harder by making monsters stronger?

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Crackmonster wrote:

Go read the thread in feedback if you want my longer reasoning. Not gonna repeat it all here.

Wanted to add to my post here(not reply to ya):

I'd caution that assassin nerf. I said from the very start of ascendancy classes, even when other players weren't playing assassin i called it out as being too much power to crits and that it would make crit capping too easy and it was too powerful for scaling damage. Finally meta caught on after some leagues and now you adress it - however that change.. i don't think i will touch assassin looking like that. It has been too nerfed - now it's more about poison/bleed and since those suck the whole thing sucks, and even before they weren't that big of a deal. Just my 2c.

Your feedback means nothing in the face of empirical evidence.



Literally every ladder, every race recently for the past couple of months after the discovery of abusing Flasks has resulted in Pathfinders being clearly over represented every, single, time. The class was completely left alone despite having offensive and defensive scaling that is far beyond anything the Assassin himself can manage. How GGG justifies nerfing the Assassin's crit is beyond me.

Oh don't worry PF nerfs are coming the last min I wouldn't even be surprised.

I'm playing PoE since nemesis and it was way too easy, than expected(so many broken builds, double deeps, tons of poison builds). When u first release Atziri(and after nerf to shotgun) not many players could farm her on hardcore temp leagues, but after ascendancy the game become waay too easy again, and tons of players started to farm her. I'm just trying to explain my thoughts. All the ggg team was doing it's just nerf to bosses/mobs, I remember how fun and hard were beyond mobs before nerfs, how fun and hard were Invasion bosses before nerfs, etc. I know u have to listen, what majority of players telling u, but the game in 2.6 was just really easy and simple, when u can turn ur brain off and just farm shaped strands 24/7. And still many players manage to die this way. Right now they have to think, how to play, what to do on map, not simply pressing 1 button to destroy the whole screen. People have to stop comlaining about OP things, they should be nerfed and they got nerfed.

Right now i'm soo happy about all those changes, they're logically correct, keep the great job u doing, the more harder the game become, the more fun u'll get. Wonder why GGG team forget to buff Izaro/Atziri health pool by twice, others bosses recieve it. Btw could Atziri get some more mechanics? Or get more damage? Thanks to all GGG team for everything, keep it up!

P.S. Sorry for my terrible english.