I don’t need to bet anything. You made an asinine claim and if you can’t back it up, then that is on you. Burden of Proof is a thing.
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Hold my beer… BRB
it wasn’t unplayable… it was dmg toned down
And other retal nerfs had much larger impact than losing 2 projectiles.
It was an overreaction by Z hammering all retal because archetype dominance then, not “streamer/top20” privilege. Not only isn’t lee a streamer, top20 didnt’ exist back then, and he and others had been asking for nerfs and buffs for years… /“Lee has no special attributes” (so much so he still got banned even)
So the sole objection you can possibly have to be interpreted from this is any request for anything dialing anything back instead of up is bad and shouldn’t be done/adhered to - and that’s just a bad take/difference of PoV, and has nothing todo with XY privilege or stuff getting killed… You simply just don’t want any type of balance in the game for your own reasons/“SP offline doesnt’ matter” whatever - and Crate does.
so yea, again, toning down doesn’t equate to removed from game, so vast majority of even that slim 1% of new players that even make it that far, don’t actually miss out in that sense as you try to paint it… - most top builds are still plenty strong enough/ “busted”, even after getting dialed down a lil…
I can only imagine how much of a shit storm it is trying to keep your massive wall of minions alive through all the ground effects, AoE, and monster leech. 
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The build was doing SR90 back then, went down to a snail pace at SR40-50s tops. That’s toned down? Back when meta was racing 75-76. Guess we have different view on the very concept of toning down.
20K hours is now casual? What are reasonable expectations?
Who gets to determine what an AVERAGE build is compared to a STRONG build? Because I’ll tell you right now, AVERAGE doesn’t mean what you think it means. The fact that you think that only the “top 20 builds” matter means you don’t even have the slightest idea of what “average” or “powerful” means.
There are hundreds, if not thousands of builds that were capable of beating all content pre-FoA, and FoA is only going to add to that number. Top 20 is practically the top 5% of the 5% of people who actually bother to beat something like Ravager.
Put simply:
This game does not need meta-slaves.
We do not want meta-slaves.
Meta-slaves don’t improve games. They kill them.
Ask any developer whether their enjoyment in creating and maintaining games was heightened by the presence of meta-slaves.
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Yeah, that “afk” claim with a pet build is only possible vs callagadra if cheating or using mods or the session bugged somehow.
You can get close to that number with non-pet, not afk build though, as linked below (the build for some reason has 1 extra skill point, which I assume was the result of GDstashing the setup and then something like the Dread kill giving additional point).
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like hell it was gated off to sr50 after losing the projectile 
it still did 75 i know because i still used it post nerf.
Again, it lost 1(x2) projectiles that’s it, that’s 2x rata every 1 attack per second(33% trigger 2rings) on avg… “that’s it” dmg tone down, not unviable, not killed, and not the sole responsible factor by a country mile…
The ring was a fair deal since it wasn’t intended for retal, the complete retal overhaul was not, and put every non abuse retal in the gutter because of it; and they weren’t using jaxxons and still got toned down…
Reading comprehension issues? Or did you just wanna argue for the sake of arguing? I explicitly said that this is NOT my issue. I don’t have a problem with pausing game updates, using mods, and playing the way I see fit. Your view on meta doesn’t affect me in any way, mate. My message was based on countless complains from casual players over the years.
Your statement about what YOU want or don’t want regarding meta shows that you don’t care about what players want. If you don’t care about the main audience, - we have nothing to discuss.
Guess you are a better player / builder than all those guys who tested it later on and found unplayable
Hard to call the players affected by the nerfs to endgame setups as the main audience when less than 10% have even managed to reach level 100 according to steam achievements 
.
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don’t need to be a better player, just need common sense not overacting or hyperbole “as usual”
#deadbuilds is literally a meme for a reason, and it’s not from actually killing builds 
again, jaxxon change did not kill this, not even then, and the biggest factor was the total retal overhaul affecting all builds, not losing 2 bullets’ rata application once every second…
So yes;
toned down /= dead or unviable…
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If it wasn’t your issue, you wouldn’t be posting about it in the forums.
You are nowhere even remotely close to “the main audience.” You can claim you’re the main audience until you’re blue in the face, but in reality, you’re more akin to those Pokemon Card scalpers that accomplish nothing but ruin things for the rest of us.
So I’ll ask again: prove to this forum that your presence benefits the playerbase in any way. There are numerous posters who barge into here and state exactly the same words that you do: “if this build doesn’t kill the top 1% of content in 15 seconds I just move onto a build that does.” Why do we need to cater to these people again?
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Common sense also suggests careful changes. It suggests treating your player base same way you would treat your business clients. But I guess, you only care about your top 20 builder group. It doesn’t matter what change killed that guy’s fav character. Okaloth rework, global retal rework, rings? That’s irrelevant. The client, the end user came to the builder complaining about build performance hit after the changes. Period. They don’t care who did that, they blame the devs. And they may ragequit or whatever. The business made a mistake. Problem is, people in charge listen to a small group of builders instead of actual player base, like Maya said, rightfully so, who barely ever complete the game. Maybe if their feedback was prioritized, more people would play and for longer? Imagine if that’s the case. Think about it.
I happened to listen to several streams in the last few days and pretty much every single one of them had heated discussions about this very topic. It’s not my issue. You can’t change the way I play, not even Artur can. I’ve been using mods for a long time, tweaking balance the way I see fit. Why would I care about anything you do, say, or think. I came here, conveyed the message to Zantai (hopefully Artur gets to see it too) based on latest feedback from those streams and am going back to my stuff, adios amigo
which has what to do with privilege or special notoriety consideration factor? - that’s on the devs’ to apply.
And Z doesn’t even need direct feedback/nerf requests to nerf something; he just needs to be aware of something existing that falls outside his guidelines or deemed exploitable… - stuff gets nerfed Lee or top20 buildsers also don’t post or request… because Crate wants a balanced SP game…
“what got killed”; because if you’re still referring to jaxxon rata then i already told you you were wrong, it was not killed… - and it’s objectively bs to claim so, hence it being hyperbole, exaggeration and #deadbuilds meme…
like hell it is when you’re making specific attributions and direct and indirect accusations because of it, ie privilegue and special player consideration, which doesnt’ exist.
It gets changed not just from being asked, but because Z has his idea/metrics of what’s applicable, and they were even outright expressed back then of why XY stuff got nerfed, be it pets or retal etc… - like i said, something doesn’t need to be requested to be nerfed, Z just needs to become aware of it existing and disagree with its performance/metrics…
You can disagree with balance concept in a SP game, my gripe is the nonsensical attribution to a handful of people/streamers and the gross exaggeration of application or #deadbuilds/“wont somebody please think of the noobs”
Both which are misguided or hyperbole or best…
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Then post those streams - with time-stamps - so we can see these heated discussions for ourselves. I’m not the one you need to convince, Zantai and the other developers are the ones you need to convince.
Posting walls of text that take 1,000 words to basically say, “wah, I can’t beat the hardest boss in the game in 15 seconds!” isn’t going to convince Zantai of anything. Review-bombing or personally harassing the developers - which has already happened in the case of FoA - isn’t going to convince them either.
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Calling MrLlama low tier Diablo 2 youtuber is diabolical . He used to speed run Diablo 2 for charity in GDQ before YouTube was invented , he is the most recognisable name in Diablo 2 genre , 11 K views are actually small numbers when it comes to him , do some research before doing such a bold claims. I don’t know in what Diablo 2 game you spend years but Zealot Paladin has never been meta
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This just comes down to the game being actively maintained. If you want to keep laughably broken builds, play a dead game like Torchlight 1 or 2.
I also completely disagree with the notion that the balancing efforts by Zantai and the community result in anything that would resemble actual equity. That argument sounds nice as a talking point but it’s simply not true. Some things always just work better than others and it’s basically impossible to truly balance out a dual mastery system where every mastery has to somehow work with another, supported by thousands of items.
Yes. Strawmanning new players doesn’t work in this context at all. Sure, they will obviously look up strong builds. And then they will stop playing before they reach level 100. 
That’s the majority of players in a nutshell. They certainly don’t drop the game because Crate decided to patch it, that’s just normal behavior for most casual players. I was one of them back when playing TQ and I did exactly the same thing.
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