I’ll put the foundation of my thoughts first and foremost: every piece of gear with endgame level requirement should be at least of some use and every build at it’s maximum strength should be able to clear generic endgame content. Or uber content with good skill level.
But there are endgame legendary items like morgoneth set that I have never seen anybody using. And there are also builds that cannot clear uber content even if their gears are maxed. For example, dreadscorcher Defiler, an already bit-below-average build created around v1.2.13 if I remembered correctly, have problems clearing regular ascension mode even when it’s maxed, but where else can I use this two-handed gun? And when can those off-meta classes shine in ascension mode?
Also I always feel sad when I see good builds get nerfed, it’s as if denying the original creator to relish the fruit of their labor. As far as I know, the Chinese community has been quite angry as of late because some people has been continuously marking builds that they believed to be strong and reposting in this forum to urge the devs to nerf them, even if the build is not strong but still successful. I don’t know if it’s true but that’s really what they felt and people in Chinese community are kinda scared and reluctant to post their builds now since they’re afraid of the build being nerfed right after they post it. And a good Chinese content creator actually received this kind of “treatment” from those people ever since v1.1, I wasn’t playing the game at that time but I did see people saying that it is a shame when a good build get instant nerfs.
And the truly OP builds like summons never really received any nerfs and have been quite broken for a long time.
(Again something off topic: The Chinese community are also very unhappy about bugs, unreleased new dungeons and mob balance. For most people in china playing this game, Grim Dawn is still a loot-farming game that shouldn’t be very challenging—it’s also why many people choose to play summons, it’s pretty good throughout the playthrough. And please don’t nerf this or people in Chinese community will get so very upset about the devs)
And some old builds do need buffs too. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen people using Pyran set Mortars , light’s guardian set stunjacks or lightning mortar elementalist. They need some love.
I know some of my words would be unfavorable to some people here but it’s how I feel from the people around me and in the Chinese community who plays this game. Most of the people in that community don’t speak English and there’s no friendly devs like zentai to receive reports and comments from the player.
We work with the players that work with us and post builds that both need buffs and nerfs (every update ever has had more buffs to underperforming builds than nerfs to OP ones), but we also have our own metrics for what is considered balanced. People that hoard OP builds like some treasure don’t seem to understand that we will inevitably stumble on them anyway, and the end result typically is that we hit them harder than may be necessary because we don’t have player data to baseline against. So that behavior does nobody any favors.
We’re also not going to stop nerfing builds that are outside of the range we believe is healthy for the game because someone out there is going to get mad at us about it. Sorry, but this isn’t game dev by committee and never has been. The September v1.3.1 update is going to have nerfs. It’s also going to have a lot of buffs. That is the way of things.
As for the unreleased dungeons, when we announced Fangs of Asterkarn 3 years ago, we literally said that 2 roguelike dungeons would come post-release. This is consistent with how we released the Ancient Grove for Ashes of Malmouth and Tomb of the Heretic for Forgotten Gods, except Fangs of Asterkarn is getting TWO.
I get that there are some strong feelings about how easy to play pets are, but in terms of raw performance, their damage is not really out of line. Pet durability overall is too high, as evidenced by how many bonus versus pet modifiers we’ve had to add to boss attacks over the years to compensate for that, but pet builds being a safe playstyle is kind of…the entire point of them.
then you missed out ⭐ Top 20 Softcore builds, End of Forgotten Gods Edition with HC section by RektbyProtoss [1.2.1.6]
*also that set was used before/several times, including on some stuff resulting in nerfs back then
We had a dedicated cold SS set, Morgo, produce the fastest build in the fame at the beginning of FG OP things_
“point is”, just because you didn’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not necessarily there, or it depends where you’re looking atleast
it’s been my understanding that not everything is meant to shine equally in Ascendant, hence it being optional and differently tuned, just like not everything is meant to shine in high SR.
If all Defilers suffer in Ascendant, that would likely be a problem,
but a 1 specific item build struggling more than another itemization outfit, might just be intended of the separation gap in scaling, similarly like for SR or cruci 200 /not everything has to be equally equal
I do agree with you, somehow it feels more like a “strength vs. creativity”kind of thing, if people aim to create strong builds then their fulfillment will surely plummet after their build have been nerfed……and again of course, those of “worked with” nerfing builds are considered as perpetrators, so far two were “exposed” and since they were also rumored to be really toxic and caused a ruckus in the Chinese community I have little sympathy for them.
For people who aims for creativity, nerfs and buffs doesn’t really matter as long as they don’t impact their build that much.
For the dungeon part, most people in Chinese community don’t read English and the result of relying on translators is heavy misinterpretation, like “two new dungeons will be released along with the new dlc” without addressing the date.
I myself doesn’t really have any difficulty problems with the current state of the game but I do hope that some unused items can shine once in a while.
The store page is localized in Chinese. Are you telling me it’s mistranslated?
I’m sorry that I didn’t respond clearly……it is that, before FoA launched, some Chinese content creators translated the news of the dlc and misinterpreted that two rogue dungeons will launch alongside the new dlc and posted that info online. For other people, they are just confused why they can’t be launched at the same time and considered the dlc to be unfinished due to that reason and got upset about it, the prior dlc FG was launched 7 years ago and a lot of people joined the game during that 6 years and 10 months time pocket without knowing that rogue dungeons are released later than the actual content.
Again I’m sorry if some of my words earlier didn’t make sense……it’s 3am
in china rn:(
I mean, regardless of when they joined or who said what. The Store page for FoA says these dungeons are coming post-release.
So any misunderstanding outside of that is out of our control.
Do people in Chinese community realize that they’ve been upset because they thought that posting the builds would get them nerfed?
As far as I’m aware, there was no nerfs whatsoever (except Harbinger, but that was waay too strong and it remains strong even after the nerf).
And speaking of pet builds, if they are so much OP how come that in the recent years out of 60+ builds that made into top20 only two (!!!) of them ended up on the list?
Tbh as much as I respect all the builders and creators working on the top 20 and while I know they try to make their builds not all too glassy, generally top 20 is still pretty biased towards pure SC clear speed and there’s a lot of other builds that many people would consider stronger, less risky and more comfy even if they are a couple seconds slower. A lot of those builds are pet builds.
Top 20 build creators have a formula they use to determine eligibility. Don’t know if it is weighted toward SR clear times or whatever else. How exaclty do you measure ‘comfy’ or ‘less risky’. A year or more ago there was a longish thread about GD Stashed builds in the top 20 and I made the comment that watching your HC character’s health yoyo all over the place was not a play style that I particularly enjoyed. I was admonished by the top 20 creators for supposedly crapping on their builds (which I didn’t do). It is just a matter of what play style you enjoy.
Maybe that is why they are softcore top 20 builds. Playing HC exclusively and losing lots of characters over the years tends to make one gun shy about yoyoing health bar. Now I find out that pet builds in general are not in top 20 due to seconds difference? Who knew?
sounds like a chinease issue not a crate issue…
Yeah, I’m just sharing what I’ve perceived from the community and Chinese content creators……again I’m pretty satisfied about the current state of the game
true…I should’ve searched more 
I’m sorry about the rush judgement
I kinda want to try out some Fleshwarped strike death knight/spellbinder/battle mage in ascension mode 
somehow I just love to use things that people normally won’t use……
It’s not an exclusive of the chinese community. Misinformation starts and spreads with someone saying something false because they think it’s true, don’t know better and never cared to know better. Then a group of people complain about the false thing, solidifying the falsehood. Then it spreads out of the original thread.
Case in point: For how long have we seen people complaining that they spend resources at the altar and their rerolls still come out unbiased? To be clear, because I don’t know who might be reading this, it’s been officially stated the altar does not affect rerolls but it is still being said in the community (or was until last week) that it does.
I would like to give my opinion regarding movement. I feel that there is too much of a difference in comfort between builds that can have multiple movement skills and builds that have none at all. Could you please take measures to increase the movement speed for classes that do not have movement skills?
Personally since the majority of players play SC so I don’t see a problem with that metric. Pets have quite worse aoe compared to many non-pet builds and that’s perhaps the reason they have worse SR clear time. The advantage of pets is bossing where they shines the most. In fact, it must be so. It would be extremely uncomfortable if pet can’t tank the boss and die a lot of times (at least conjurer pets don’t have this problem so nerfing their defense a bit might be OK). Also, if pets will be nerfed to kill bosses slower than other builds, then they are worse in both single target dps and aoe dps which will also be a big disadvantage for them. The best defense would be kill enemies before they harm you so I don’t want to consider a tanky or safe build but takes a lot of time to do contents.