It’s a forum, agree to disagree. Never said (neither you said) that every build should be able to clear all modes w/o ‘issues.
If I’m repeating something that you’re saying, it doesn’t mean that I’m trying to invalidate you. On the contraire, it means that I agree with you and want your idea to succeed. The fact that I’ve put so much energy into this thread should mean that I’m making efforts to support you and that the attitudes such as that of the OP should not be prevalent.
I was not part of the internal testing for FoA, so I can’t say whether whichever threads that were made regarding FoA balancing and testing made any headwinds or not. All that we could do was speculate what could be done regarding FoA, but the internal testing people were certainly making their own threads and responses. They’re just hidden from public view.
The devs are not mindless automatons where simply because a group posts ideas into a forum, the devs just mindlessly follow them. I’ve posted loads of feedback threads over the years, particularly on the pet side of things. Sometimes, my ideas get implemented; sometimes, they get ignored; and sometimes people post “delete pets from the game.” That’s just the nature of sharing ideas.
Of course, that doesn’t answer the central question of “how should skills / items / legendary sets be compared to one another?” The Top 20 crowd has their own methods, the OP in this thread has their own methods, and people like you and me have their own methods. We can say “this method is bad,” but if we don’t pitch an alternate idea to the devs, how can they say, “oh, okay, we’ll switch to this method now?”
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- Average player suffers because they have limited time to farm/get all the items for a powerful build they saw.
- Build gets toned down - player isnt happy because he wanted to play a more powerful build/farm faster / harder content with it
- Player gets disheartened because he just got his 10-20 or whatever hours deemed 'lost" as in the end he didnt achieve what he wanted to achieve
- Player looses interest in the game and moves on.
If you come to a game that gets consistent balance patches, and not expect that something you use might be touched, you have the wrong mentality.
If a player loses interest in a game that easily, maybe they weren’t that interested to begin with,
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If you are deleting your builds out of spite after investing time in assembling them, just because you overreacted to some patch notes, isn’t that entirely your problem/wasting your own time? I don’t even have words for that kind of behaviour btw, not once in like 8 years has a nerf made me delete anything 
Well if you go around saying shit like Belgo is a dead build or
I’m gonna be brutally honest mate, it’s not surprising you’re met with pushback since the things you’re saying simply are not true. And if you are the type of person to just give up and delete builds after any nerfs instead of adjusting/playing them to see their performance, it does suggest you don’t know what you’re talking about…since you would actually need to continue playing said builds to understand if they are ‘dead’ or not. So far this whole topic has been a whole lot of “well some builds years ago, can’t remember/deleted them, definitely got killed, just trust me bro” without any direct comparisons
Whenever someone comes in listing off grievances on behalf of an entire category of players, uses phrases like “lots of people” in making their point, or, god fordbid, says they are a dev so they know all about this, it’s a pretty safe bet they aren’t the voice of authority on the subject they think they are.
You are welcome to post your personal opinion, but give me a break with the “many people” rhetoric.
We are not beholden to any group of people in our community, we do not design by committee and we absolutely do not balance the game only around the top %.
The number of times I’ve told off the so called elite you are convinced we make this game for that something won’t be changed because it’s going to negatively impact the average player is astronomically higher than any changes we’ve consciously made that hurts the casual players you’re so concerned with. The game had only gotten easier over the past decade, which serves the casual player most.
Telling me we can’t balance the game properly cause someone might see an OP endgame build and want to hypothetically play it too someday is painfully naive.
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Personally, don’t see what’s exactly fun about having an handful of broken builds that completely shit on everything else.
Imagine a new player asking what build they should do and they get recommended the same five builds over and over because they are just better than everything else. To me that would paint a picture that the game is an unbalanced mess that the devs clearly don’t care much about.
And that reputation would seep everywhere, contaminating the discourse around the game.
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that’s the exact same gripe i have with/when people tell newcomers to level the same primal strike warder/forcewave warlord or pet conjurer for 1 billionth time as usual too 
- it transferring directly to endgame ofc no less sadge either, in a game like GD with so many builds, but unfortunately no less common in such games ofc (both level or end ofc)
Absolutely. Never claimed to be the voice of authority. Anything said here by anyone, including veterans, builders, devs and yourself, - belongs in the category of opinions. Being a dev and modder doesn’t give any authority, it only gives me tools to tweak the game to match my own perception of proper balance, for example. I only shared my opinion based on feedback from people I’ve had interactions with during the past 10 years. But, like I said earlier, I encourage you and those who claim to have a clue about GD balance and what its player base want, to join active streams where people discuss these topics. See for yourself what they are excited about and what annoys them. And then go level a melee cadence solder, or callidor tempest arcanist 1-100, try to get in the actual player shoes and see what they see.
I’ve just tried inviting one of these communities over here, but their leaders brushed me off saying “Don’t bother, they don’t care and would never listen to us, been there, done that. Let’s just focus on playing these new builds before they’re all got nerfed.”
Anyhow, I’ll do my best not to share my opinion here anymore.
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Going to go on a rant here…
I will not name any builds because my (original) builds aren’t worthy of discussion. For sure.
But I will talk about something else that is along the lines of what the OP is talking about — namely that certain people have the ears of the devs in that their ‘suggestions’ seem to carry more weight. If certain people cry about a skill or equipment combo being over powered it seems that those certain people are more likely to get a permanent dev response to their concern.
The example I always talk about here is when somebody on the ‘in’ list complained about how rare Chthonic Seals of Binding were. And also about how many of those Seals of Binding it took to craft Oleron’s Blood. The very next release 2 things occurred:
- The Seals of Binding drop rate noticeably increased
- The amount of Seals of Binding for Oleron’s Blood decreased — very noticeably.
And the reason I know that is because I am always trying to craft Seal of Ancestry for my BIS amulet component. All of a sudden Seal of Ancestry was MUCH easier to craft. And I thought that this is indeed a good thing. But then I thought of all the time spent - literally hours - running Tomb of Korvaak to get Seals of Binding for my Seals of Ancestry. In all the time I was doing that it never in my wildest dreams occurred to me to complain on any forum about it. I just thought that is the way the game is and – like it or not – should be played.
Since that occurred I have mentioned in various other threads about the similar rarity of Manticore Eyes. I don’t recall anything ever even remotely being done about that. Mythical Beastcallers Cowl still requires 8 of those eyes last time I checked. So an entire Beastcaller set will require 32 of those things if you only have the BP. And they are FAR FAR less likely to drop than Seals of Bindings WERE before the buff to drop rate. I have spent orders of magnitude more time in Jagged Wastes farming Eyes than I EVER spent in Korvaak’s Tomb for Seals. And that is before the Seal buff.
So I should not be held accountable if I (sometimes) entertain the thought that if an ‘in’ person made the same suggestion/complaint that something might be done about the Manticore Eye drop rate or the amount required to craft things.
I could go on about Ascendant Cowl in Malmouth but I think you get the picture.
Anyway - I am done ranting. I really enjoy GD and I especially enjoy leveling characters. Once I get to BIS setup and can take out Lokaar/Mogdrogen/Ravager I really lose all interest in that character and want to try something new. Even to the extent that I will take gear off of that character to put onto another character once they reach that level - much easier than farming for sure.
Apparently Zantai never listens to player feedback outside of the top 20 crowd and yet, we have perma wind devils now, which the top20 crowd were actually against 
.
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The whole “woe is me Z doesn’t listen to the plebs feedback so we don’t bother” diatribe is hilarious, ngl. almost choked on my coffee.
eye drops was literally increased, twice even iirc; they just aren’t on seals frequency, on purpose/“it’s still considered a rare mat”… but it’s very noticeably increased now (even if you don’t look at GT)
*seal, and eye, and crystal change was also not based on the top20 gang, because they simply do not farm it and never cared about mats because of it… so that’s just… a very weird argument
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Never said top 20 gang. I said ‘in’ crowd.
same deal
i think the issue is people see “a” post, by a semi familiar name, and attribute “a” change, to that post/name; ignoring the dozen or hundreds of other identical posts by “no names”
Seal/eye/wind devil change being good examples of that
^“lest you forget”, Maya was literally banned over wind devils… 
- best pikachu face ever telling her it was then added to the game, while she was still banned over that debate 
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This discussion will come up again, as I suspect you prepare to nerf the berserker in upcoming patches. And because, on these forums at least, the conversation around the OP nature of the mastery started to gain traction a couple of weeks ago, the accusation of devs caving in to elite players will continue. Were it not part of the culture…
The funny thing is that only two weeks after the expansion came out, I explicitly remember you saying on the Steam forums “I think the Berserker class is too strong” (word for word, if I’m not mistaken). You said this way before any player, and in a reply to someone over there when the passtime at those forums was giving Steam awards to whoever whined the loudest about how weak the Berserker class was.
So yeah… It’s common knowledge that part of a game dev salary is in the form of compensation for this type of mental grievances, along with mandatory therapy vouchers.
i’m not even a Praet(FoA tester), and guess what i did, multiple times before FoA relaese? - predicted zerker would be broken on release and the most busted class added to the game “yet”.
Now, how could i possibly and accurately make such magical guesswork without inside knowledge?
Because it’s the exact same pattern as 2017 and 2019…
Nothing about FoA release is different in that fashion… but people are somehow extra surprised at what’s happening on release and following up - why ? 
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Will not argue semantics with you (except for this post here – haha). Top 20 people don’t have to go through the pain of farming mats because they GD Stash their characters. I went through a phase years ago where I GD Stashed builds and had a real hoot destroying end game content. That lost its allure for me real quick. I prefer the zero to hero SSF experience.
The good is the satisfaction of zero to hero. The bad is the farming. Or good if you consider the dopamine upon finally having the mats to craft something or finally finding the elusive item, etc.
I didn’t know that Maya got banned over Wind Devils. I would accept a ban if Manticore Eye and Ascendant Cowl drop rates were noticeably increased (LOL).
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Also some other changes that were not related to any of the usual suspects -
Ice King set (I along with a few others wanted Winter King to be a full set and Ice King was Zantai’s answer to that). It was specifically asked to conflict with the usual items you see paired with the likes of Beastcaller so that it would be something unique. I wasn’t expecting a Hybrid set, but it has proven to be not bad by any means.
Replacing Pet Pierce damage in components and also Primal Spirit with Physical damage.
Briarthorn getting its Internal Trauma DoT replaced with Bleed because Pet Bleed was unviable back then.
Removal of the various Pet Retal bloat in items.
Tons of pet resistance on various items and augments. Pet Pierce resistance was notoriously hard to get once upon a time.
Proc on Crit in pet items changed to Proc on Attack since pet builds don’t stack player OA.
4x Blightfiends were outright removed as an option (the blightfiend bomb build was considered too strong and cooldown on items were swapped around to make it possible to summon only a max number of 3 at any one time). But it got added back later on.
Hellhounds were once terrible, especially for the point investment needed to max them out. They were buffed multiple times to get them to their current state.
Briarthorn and Hellhound getting Taunt with 12/12 points invested into their respective aggro skills when previously you needed like 17 points.
Halion’s Crest - This medal getting added into the game, which at first might not seem like much, but that mind control resistance can play a crucial role in making sure that your pets don’t get insta-killed against certain enemies.
Callagadra getting multiple nerfs against pet builds because it used to absolutely delete pets (way more compared to how things are atm) when Forgotten Gods was new. I remember complaining a ton .
Now for something not Pet based - There were some people including a streamer or 2 who shall not be named who wanted the Dark One set to be nerfed. I was one of the people who argued against it and ultimately Zantai decided it didn’t warrant the nerf.
Imo, ultimately it comes down to whether or not you can convince Zantai that a change is good/bad, regardless of how anyone else in the community feels about it.
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Anyone that jumps into a livestream is already way beyond the level of effort the average player puts into playing a game.
The vast majority of people don’t write reviews, they don’t participate in forums, and they don’t engage in online discourse. The literal silent majority.
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