I wonder how many of these failed leagues will it take GGG for them to learn, if ever?

I really prefer crafting leagues to loot pinata leagues. Leagues like affliction are fun for a short while but don't have much longevity, whereas crafting leagues let me do a lot of cool shit and make plans for longer. Necropolis to me was a real success as I thoroughly enjoyed it, and still am. :)

I honestly prefer the leagues that are neither, most crafting leagues have been full of potential but atrociously executed with absolutely awful UI's and multiple layers of utterly obnoxious busywork that completely kills most people's interest in using it and makes it horribly frustrating to try crafting with given the games insistence on multiple massive layers of RNG for everything. Loot pinata leagues have a tendency towards burn out and massively distort the economy whenever there is one strategy better at abusing the loot pinata aspect.

Leagues that are neither and instead add new content to the game, like Sanctum and Ancestors tend to be better executed (Ancestors was really poorly executed but had the bones of something potentially great and was still better executed than Crucible or Necropolis) and are less likely to devolve to everything being abusing a singular mechanic as much as possible the way Affliction and Necro have gotten.

I like variety. I like that they take chances and try stuff. If all leagues were crafting leagues? Meh. If all leagues were loot pinatas? Meh. In my eyes, we need variety - and we need different.

Now, we've never had a league where you could deterministically FARM gear. Where GOOD rare gear actually DROPS. It's about time.

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Phrazz wrote:

Now, we've never had a league where you could deterministically FARM gear. Where GOOD rare gear actually DROPS. It's about time.

Are you playing d3/d4 secretly lol

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hasatt0 wrote:

"

Phrazz wrote:

Now, we've never had a league where you could deterministically FARM gear. Where GOOD rare gear actually DROPS. It's about time.

Are you playing d3/d4 secretly lol

Let's see...get gear from stuff that I kill while playing the game or collect orbs and play a mini-game/farm sim/graveyard manager after studying a spreadsheet and youtube tutorials with layers of tedious gambling RnG.

I'll take the former.

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Raycheetah wrote:

Every build can't be the "best." Melee has all the built-in disadvantages mentioned in the post above, so it really can't compete for "best" at all. But there is another way to play these games than seeking the most optimal build, and that is to play the best of a given paradigm.

Melee can't compete with ranged? Then play the best melee build you can. Play for the journey, not to compete with other, more "effective" builds. You really want a build you can be proud of? Make something which, while not the top of the heap, is top of it's own heap. ='[.]'=

believe me.....I agree with ALL OF THAT. I'm just responding to an incorrect description of melee in arpgs.

Even I still regularly play melee in this game, despite all its flaws. And I'm talking non-meta, non-artificial ranged melee...

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jsuslak313 wrote:

"

Izrakhan wrote:

Not two completely different points. Melee is disproportionately popular in ARPG games. That's it.

So if melee is comparable to ranged in terms of power melee will be over represented. If it's somewhat less powerful it'll still be over represented.

If you nerf melee into the dirt then it'll just be less popular and the game overall will be less popular too. That's where PoE seems to be right now.

So it's true of all ARPGs whether PoE, ER, DS, Diablo, etc. 20 years ago you could query bnet and find many more people playing zealadins, smite and barbs than anything else. Some things just don't change.

I mean this is just plain not true......the most popular classes in Diablo were amazons, hammerdins, and sorceresses. Smiters were only popular for tristram runs and basically nowhere else. It was commonly known that the melee classes were LESS popular because they were generally slower. Frenzy and WW barbs, wolves, and zealots were meme builds and not even close to overrepresented. WW shouting barb was more popular as a support character than as an ACTUAL character, and even that was supplanted by hammerdins using HOTO. Melee was slightly more popular for PVP, but that was already niche within the game.

Same with PoE. Melee is NEVER "disproportionately popular". In fact, it is almost always the opposite. Unless melee is really really really good.....it tends to be UNpopular in arpgs because of positioning and speed issues.

In order to be even remotely competitive against spellcasters, necros, and ranged play, melee in ALL arpgs has faced the same problem: the need for either special defenses or WAY MORE damage than the other archetypes. That is the ONLY way to make melee ACTUALLY even proportionally popular, let alone "disproportionately" lol.

You live in a different world than the rest of us do. Just do a quick AI search on "Most played class in Diablo 2 Resurrected" and you'll see Barbarian is the most played.

It was also the most played in D2. In D1 the warrior was the most played.

This inverse reality has been dispelled.

When talking of D2 you need to consider the particular patch.

Talking of D2:LoD, pre patch 1.10, melee/physical and elemental damage types were very much on par and physical builds were more popular (builds like ww barb, burizon, tiger-strike assassin, feral druids).

After they added skill synergies, these benefitted more the elemental builds (popular builds being hammerdin, blizz sorc, javazon). Also, 50% physical damage reduction was added to all hell monsters. This severly gimped physical damage builds and you could no longer do the same kind damage with just uniques. Physical damage was sill possible but you needed astronomical amounts of investment into end-game runewords. Smiter was popular because it relied on deadly strike to quickly bring down bosses and still having enough physical dps (from grief runeword) to finish off bosses while having lifetap from dracul's for sustain.

The point is that people disproportionately choose melee builds over ranged. Even when melee isn't as good as ranged.

In PoE this is extreme. Nearly all melee builds are utterly useless. So PoE suffers for its design.

All of these nerfs 3.15 onward were predicated on the idea that overrepresented builds needed extreme nerfs. For what purpose? Nothing other than getting the meta shuffled up. That was the point. Slowing the game down was the other point which I agree affected all builds but not equally.

So you can see where the design started to turn on itself. It was no longer important to value what players wanted instead to hit some arbitrary goal that was pyrrhic.

The right way to handle the slowing the game down would have been to equally hit all the supports. Instead we got +50% magic damage and spell suppression because casters didn't pose enough of a challenge with most of the melee supports heavily nerfed.

Is the game in a better place than it was in 3.13? Objectively no. Still not as bad as it was two years ago. I'm not against slowing the game down. Just against the clubbing melee to death over some annoying inaccurate idealism that melee overrepresentation means melee OP.

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Izrakhan wrote:

The point is that people disproportionately choose melee builds over ranged. Even when melee isn't as good as ranged.

In PoE this is extreme. Nearly all melee builds are utterly useless. So PoE suffers for its design.

All of these nerfs 3.15 onward were predicated on the idea that overrepresented builds needed extreme nerfs. For what purpose? Nothing other than getting the meta shuffled up. That was the point. Slowing the game down was the other point which I agree affected all builds but not equally.

So you can see where the design started to turn on itself. It was no longer important to value what players wanted instead to hit some arbitrary goal that was pyrrhic.

The right way to handle the slowing the game down would have been to equally hit all the supports. Instead we got +50% magic damage and spell suppression because casters didn't pose enough of a challenge with most of the melee supports heavily nerfed.

Is the game in a better place than it was in 3.13? Objectively no. Still not as bad as it was two years ago. I'm not against slowing the game down. Just against the clubbing melee to death over some annoying inaccurate idealism that melee overrepresentation means melee OP.

I hesitate to point this out because you appear to be dug in on your opinion and we won't get anywhere.....but you are "objectively" wrong. About melee and about the state of the game.

"Is the game in a better place than it was in 3.13? Objectively no." I actually laughed out loud at that one. Please re-read this comment. It's just all wrong. Demonstrably and provably the exact opposite. Very much like your thoughts on melee disproportionality. You might subjectively feel like the game was better in 3.13 but it most certainly isn't OBJECTIVELY better by any metric you choose. Player count? Up since 3.13. Company money? Up since 3.13. Peak players? Up since 3.13. These are OBJECTIVE measures of the game.

D2R....where in the world are you getting your data lol! I just literally googled and on pretty much every single list, sorceress and ranged/hammerdin are over-represented as the top classes both in popularity and in power. Barb whirlwind is on there which I already said is popular because it combines mobility with tradition (but its NEVER at the top), and Paladin smite is on there because uber tristram basically requires it.

You are also wrong on PoE and the reasoning behind 3.14/3.15 nerfs. Again very easily and provably wrong based on GGG's own statements. The nerfs were an attempt to clamp down on GLOBAL power creep, hence the massive nerfs to ALL support gems and ALL potions. These particular actions had absolutely nothing to do with "messing with the meta". In fact, this was one of the few times in the entire history of the game where the major balance changes were directly NOT about meta shifting.