Why are we afraid of nerfs?

My title was unfortunately autocorrected and I can't seem to fix it... My apologies to all of us nerds, we are not to be feared :D


Never played the first game before this new character I am working on for the event. I immediately noticed, as I am going in blind on purpose to see how much of my PoE2 experience translates to that game, that if anything, we will be seeing balance in the form of buffs to skills to bring them up the level of, for example, the heralds in this game.

PoE 1 give you many ways to be massively overpowered very quickly, very easily - easier in fact than PoE2 in my experience so far.

So I am wondering why the fear mongering regarding massive, build breaking nerfs (assuming your builds use intended mechanics and not glitches or bugs to be strong)?

Any insight would be appreciated because I am still relatively new to these games (1000 hours in PoE2 is the extent of it).

PoE1 has 12 years of powercreep added to the core game and PoE2 cant hold a candle to that - yet.

If I had to guess, Id assume GGG is trying to release a barebone version, so they can add powercreep later thru leagues same as in PoE1 and likely also have an easier time to identify issues with the PoE2 basegame right now.

If we go back to PoE 1, and look at the introduction of new bosses (such as shaper), we can see that most of them took weeks on very specialised builds to be able be beaten.

This is not the case in PoE 2. All the bosses introduced where beaten in the matter of days, and even the most difficult boss, T4 arbiter was beaten in the matter of seconds.

I'm not saying this should not be possible, but it should NOT be the norm. If you start at such a high power level, where all the content is trivial, then it diminishes the game as a whole.

The devs stated they wanted a 60-180 second kill time on pinnacle bosses (give or take). We'd need to nuke things to oblivion to achieve this (which I'm for).


SSF BTW

Im all for slower kill times, I've got a 1 shot char and I've got a poison build mind you he's probably in the 10-15 second realm but also they need to factor in mechanics that allow us to stay alive 180 seconds haha

Warrior vs arbiter for example, nope not with our move speed and his attacks..

I think nerfs are good but sometimes the build that gets nerfed spent fk loads of money on things, other times not - they dont balance their nerfs they just destroy classes so people stop playing them, again they need to balance.

So after a little more time in the first game, I'm honestly pretty encouraged about the build potential in PoE2.

I honestly think the the majority of bosses in PoE 1 are absolute garbage, like the tentacle guy (Malachi or whatever I think). They are just potion spam (which I assume given we have 5 flasks, is intended), run around a dodge arena spanning, uncreative, simulated difficulty mechanics while just hitting whatever 1 button you chose to put your skill that your whole build revolves around on (and hope it isn't resisted by the boss/monsters).

BY around act 6, the whole game just feels contrived, and like they farted out a few more acts just to make it seem longer, when they should have just given us maps at that point. That one section where you have to move the batteries or whatever they are into position to essentially unlock a pirate ship to ride to another location, while trying to fight infinitely spawning spectral whatevers, and the stupid blue flame thrower monsters, ALL WHILE trying to stay inside a stupid little circle (like a dumpster fire version of the trial of chaos challenge) - absolute garbage.

With all that said, the build variety, power and upper limit seems very well thought out - but is hindered completely by the idiotic skill gem in the armor system.

I find it hilarious people incessantly complain about crafting in PoE2, and yet say it's just dandy in the first game... In the first game not only is it gambling, just like 2, but you have to gamble with 14,000 different orbs and materials... Gimme the simplicity of PoE2 any day, even if the stakes are higher with the way gear rolls.

Not trying to dog the first game, just saying my point is that we don't really need to fear hardcore nerfs. Even the heralds in the first game behave just exactly the same, albeit with lessened visual representation of what is actually happening.

Well it isn't "fear of nerfs" really. If you consider many will have poured hundreds of hours into understanding and grinding for a particular build only to have one seemingly small nerf make the build completely garbage. Happened a lot in POE 1 when I was playing before the convolution started to bore me to tears.

There aren't many builds in POE 2 that can actually do endgame realistically. 85-90% of builds at endgame have 3 classes. Stormweaver, Gemling and invoker. Gemling can do what the invoker and pyromancer can do while barely changing the skill tree. As lightning is the primary element used in all these builds due to specific unique items and skills that scale lightning.

When the current meta gets nerfed, it will, making a new character and levelling them to 90 only to find you need 500 divines to make it work is very very discouraging. Then you say to yourself "what's the meta now" and have to spend 50 hours looking though Wikis and mechanics while the economy runs away from you.

I don't mind mixing the build meta but POE 2 is lacking ways to scale damage organically and has to rely on hyper expensive pinnacle uniques. The rewards only start to matter when you can bust out T15+3 delirium-breach maps with a fat chunk of MF. Even then by the time you get to this point there is not much point farming as you already have all the gear/currency.

As the build diversity is so dire, builds outside the meta that work are clunky and annoying because they rely on 4-5 different mechanics or weird interactions that are at best inconsistent.

Basically people that spend 2-3 months perfecting a build, grinding and trading hundreds of divines in currency for a build they really enjoy only to have ONE nerf completely destroy it is infuriating. GGG done this all the time in POE 1, granted sometimes they waited until the end of the league but sometimes they would do it mid season wasting many players time and effort.