Path of Nerfs

As a hobbyist game designer and programmer, and hopefully soon to be working professionally at Jagex, I have got to throw my hat into the ring on this XP gain thing.

GGG I believe you are making a horrible mistake. This path is an attempt to cater to the 'whales' of your game, those who spend the most time, and the most money, on it. You've told yourselves this is OK because the vast majority of people never have, and never would have approached level 100. Nobody with a day job or family has the time.

While you are correct in that, you miss that almost every player wants a chance to reach level 100. It's the dream. It's as 'complete' as PoE can get. Ultimately these players are limited by the time they have, so if the grind is too high they just won't bother. The fact so few of the community reach level 100 is a sign that the grind needs to be reduced, not a sign that most of the community don't care about, or aspire to reach, level 100.

Might I suggest reducing the grind while exploring various changes that would reward skill with XP rather than time? That would reduce the gap between the racers and the average players, increase the difficulty and time taken for the racers, and make the grind more rewarding.

I hope you read this, and reconsider the XP changes. The response here has been consistent and overwhelming. People care.

im in agreement with these nerfs, why? because i have to be, lol. i'll make builds around them for sure.
nothing really effects my 3.1 planned build too much, other than the QoTF nerf (which is justifiable).

anyway, im really curious about the new vulnerability. is the Punishment curse going to be changed or altered in any way with the addition to vulnerability?

Taking XP Nerf requests into consideration from the top racers is complete and utter bull shit. Just because .00001% of the player base can hit 100 in an entire damn league doesn't mean it needs to be nerfed.

This is like making a hockey net smaller because one person in the entire damn league scores 60 goals.

I love this game and consider myself somewhere in the top few % of players (in playtime) but why you balance this game around the top 2% is f'ing ridiculous!

I stopped playing HC because of the focus GGG placed on SC play.

I stopped playing much of the game because skills were nerfed, game balances made, and no afterthought to buffing the skills (here's looking at you Incinerate).

I usually stop playing the game at level 90 lately because... why bother?

These changes make the game... NOT fun.

Funny thing is, the fastest most night unkillable build that was featured in Mayhem SSFHC. Got 0... count em 0! nerfs.

Righteous Fire for uber damage abusing Occultist Ascendancy and not caring for RotP, Shield Charge spam for god tier mobility with a Brightbeak. And the danged thing was exploding T13 maps and running through them in a blistering pace.

Actually am shocked how after a new account completely obliterated that race, that 0 nerfs came to its build.

How middle of the pack got neutered, while top end HC unkillable gods got no nerfs... just feels weird GGG, REAL weird.

WOOOOW. Not afraid to rip that Bandaid right off, huh guys? Heh...honestly it's probably for the best that this hits before the patch notes. Concentrate all the Haterade in one(ish...) spot and let the patch notes be a Happy Funtime experience instead. That said, because hey why not write a bunch of words nobody cares about at work...

>Vaal Pact Keystone
This has needed doing for the longest damn time, and I'm quite glad to see it finally happen. Thanks for giving us a chance to see what the game looks like without Captain Insaneballs Ubahleech ruining every other balancing decision in the game. It is still pretty potent, despite all the naysayers.

>Atziri's Acuity
Did not actually see that one coming, but you know what? I kinda like it. It works for having-VP when VP matters most, but you still get regen to top off between fights. You also don't need to be nearly so bonko invested into crit to make the things work. I didn't really care about Acuity before this but I honestly want to play with this version. Awesome.

>Mind over Matter
Very sad face, but I suppose. I just hope it wasn't reduced to trivial levels, because it's actually kinda super difficult to get more mana in the tree. There's not a lot of it and it's scattered to the four winds. Having a nice big fat chunk right there behind Mind Over Matter itself helped a lot, but I suppose there were too many folks hitting the blue sauce. I would have hoped that having to avoid reservations was enough of a drawback but I guess not. Ah well.

>Vulnerability, Despair and Wither
I'm a little cheesed off over the change to Witchfire Brew; I knew a lot of players who used Witchfire as a nice strong-Curse option on characters that didn't otherwise have access to a useful curse. Imagine the new version is going to be mostly pointless given that the characters which deal Chaos damage and/or Chaos degen have never had any trouble applying curses to things. Glugh. Oh well. I suppose I can't manage to slip by every nerf in the list without incident, and at least I dodged the VP hammerblow.

New Vuln had best be pretty potent to make up for losing its DoT effects and the Witchfire Brew thing, though.

As for Wither? I suppose. It did seem a little redonk, but then again the chaos skills it was meant to help augment are all kind of super weak. Dark Pact is an obvious exception but that didn't exist when Wither was tuned. We do have Blight w/Thresh jewel though, and MAYBE Despair will be worthwhile to use but I doubt it. Ah well. It's still a very useful skill with a lot of interesting applications, and it's best to combat power creep in smaller increments like this rather than waiting for one 3.0.0, doing it all at once, and blowing up the community.

>Dark Pact
Did anybody really not see this coming, given how bonko Dark Pact was? The answer is no.

GIT YER SKELLINGTONS OUT, BOIS. DP THE WAY GOD INTENDED. But yeah. Lower bonus damage and no AoE radius seems fine.

>Barrage
While on the one hand I agree that +2 Barrage projectiles was just too damn strong...part of making sure bow builds have other options is giving us single-target options for our bow characters that aren't fisking awful. Bow single-target outside amplified Barrage is kinda total butt, Grinding Gear. We have nothing built to lay into heavy bosses, and no, you don't get to say Siege Ballista. Could we maybe get a new skill that actually does damage to single large targets instead of being even more ways to obliterate packs? We've got pack clearing covered, really we do.

We're even willing to share with wands! Those guys haven't gotten a new skill in literally ever, we could both use some new-hotness single target damagae! Pretty please, GGG? For Christmas?

>Doomfletch and Doomfletch's Prism

Okay yeah, high-budget Doomprism builds were going a little bonko. I can understand tuning the bow down some, though this feels a bit double-whammyish after Barrage took its own justified hit. I'm not really sure the loss of crit is going to slow it down that much, but eh. Doomprism was outside the budget of ninety-eight percent of the userbase anyways. Maybe steel rings will cost less than half a soul if people fall off the Prism bandwagon and we can get some love for Facebreakers finally.

>Queen of the Forest
Yeah okay, Queen of the Forest was getting kinda stupid. The Evasion hit really sucks, I feel like maybe letting Queen of the Forest still actually be useful defensively whilst capping its admittedly ridiculous movespeed bonuses might have been okay, but I suppose we'll see. Definitely going to cause a lot of rage, though. Frankly I'm almost expecting folks to get more volcanic about this than they are VP.


>Rise of the Phoenix
And non-totem Righteous Fire immediately stops being playable without a billion-exalt investment! Yowzas. Poor RF. I mean I get it, taken by itself and not linked to specifically-Righteous-Fire, +8 maximum resistance on one item is probably too much. But the RF guys are going to start taking, like...double the damage they used to without that resistance. Maybe throw 'em a bone and put the extra max res somewhere else? Even just a point or two? level 21 Purity of Fire costs a billion exalts already.

>Experience changes for high-level characters
The vast majority of the playerbase doesn't care, and anyone who says otherwise is silly. Less then a percent of a percent of the playerbase ever gets above 90 anyways, and you guys can deal with taking an extra hour to cheesefarm your way to 100 with your party of aurabots. At least the 80-95 stretch is the same.

>Conclusion
Actually better than I was expecting, despite a couple of painful hits. The RF guys are going to take it square in the johnson and that bites, but the VP thing has needed doing for years so huzzah for that! The Vuln/Despair bit came out of nowhere and I don't like the functionality on Witchfire Brew being thrown out the window and replaced with nobody-cares-a-whit 'Despair', but on the whole it seems like more healthy changes than not. Numbers dependent, of course. Perhaps one of those shiny new uniques will be a flask that delivers Vulnerability so people who used WItchfire to debuff physical resistance LIKE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO don't also take it in the johnson...but eh.

We'll have to see if any of tomorrow's buffs clean up after some of the holes these are making in the less Speedclear Stupidity Meta builds. Until then, nice to know where the pain is, I suppose.

At least there was no nerf to bisco :)

Its funny how they say "WE'VE RECEIVED MASSIVE FEEDBACK" and then you go on the replies on the manifesto and you see that 95% of the players are posting comments disagreeing with the changes, mostly hateful comments (for a reason).

GGG did u not Learn about the Kids who already died from non stop playing ?! Do u seriously want us to DIE during Races?!

I´m talking serious rightnow. We´re already playing 30-40 Hours till we get 6 hours off sleep. DONT ENCOURAGE PEPOPLE to KILL THEMSELFS.

What are u thinking?!

A good balance patch.
Could be better? YES, IT COULD.
But everything on it's own time.