You know I’ve been mostly pro Zantai when it comes to these nerf threads but please don’t point these things out. I feel like if Stormfire is nerfed it takes away some factors of the minmaxing aspect of the game. I mean it’s just a single component 
Are you serious? And keep the broken builds? Have Retal Warlord and various variants of Infiltrator trash all the endgame content with no effort? Yes, that is a very good idea (sarcasm obviously).
And please show me how Deathmarked is “garbage” and has “less stats than epics”, because these are two completely insane statements. The way i see it, Deathmarked is still one of the best sets in the game.
Fluff burned out from the game and not because of nerfs; he just got tired of playing.
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Clearly because he can’t do SR 89 and consistent sub 6min crucible clears with putting MIs on the build it’s trash.
Really only an handful of people are frustrated. Most of the people are either receptive to the changes or don’t care and keep playing.
This is a statement just makes the devs and a lot of other people not take you seriously. These overly dramatic “my build is dead” with no evidence helps no one and just makes it seem the devs have some sort of vendetta. And if your build actually became much worse, then give feeback to the devs instead of just throwing your hands in the air and say it’s dead for good.
Also, the “it’s a single player game with no competition of any kind” is a moot point. There’s such a thing healthy ingame balance, something that can exist in single player offline games. There’s no such thing as perfect balance, but it should be something that the devs should strive for to get as close as possible.
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And you base your assumption on what, feedback on this forum? In my group alone there are 25-30 people and nobody (myself excluded) cares to post here. But people do see build posts and try to follow gtools links of interest. They seldom read patch notes but notice performance increase/decrease right away. They don’t care about this game enough to campaign, complain and wait for fixes. They just shrug and uninstall GD. And forget about buying the next loyalist pack or expansion.
What if it’s the other way around: You and devs are working too hard to crusade for balance fixes that are NOT really needed. I bet if there was a global poll regarding OPness of certain builds - most players would gladly keep it. Big surprise? Not at all. Couple examples:
Baldur’s Gate 2 (top 1-3 RPG game of all times):
Kensai/Mage + Staff of magi + robe of vecna = one of the most OP combos of the game - Left untouched to THIS DAY! Best memories of epic adventures shared among thousands, if not millions of players.
Dragon Age:
Arcane Warrior - OPness of ridiculous proportions - left unfixed for years. Best experience (IMO)
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So just because some games didn’t get fixes to OP builds Crate should follow suit? Strange logic there.
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BG2 had tons of mod to make enemy AI better and harder. BG was about the adventure and being true to 2-3.5 version D&D. The ultimate amount of mods made it barely resemble the vanilla version.
Apples and Oranges.
Edit: sorry to OP for off-topic. And now back to Pyran and Mortars.
This.
Sure, some builds get weaker/stronger than might be inteded with every patch. But keeping imbalanced builds like Aikimox suggests, whilst fun for some, can also lower the enjoyment of the game for others. Both because god-mode can become awefully boring very quickly, and because having e.g. one OP caster build around might compell someone to run with it even though he/she would, without knowledge of it, prefer & enjoy playing melee chars much more.
The fact that Crate follows the ideal of a game that promotes every possible end-game build equally is one of the biggest reasons I like their game so much.
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The others you are talking about is the absolute minority, the veterans and perfectionists.
Alas, you and others don’t seem to get my main point:
If you really care about balance, do a better job testing the game before each patch, but AVOID frequent balance changes between major game updates. The majority of players are casuals. Imagine, you only had 10 min a day to play this game. That’s 70 min a week. Imagine you were looking to make this Pyran build starting today. Without a great farming spec it would take you months to get there. Now imagine, 2-3 months into the grind, the set is reduced to below average performance. Your action? That’s what I’m seeing right now in our HC community. People give up playing because nothing is stable anymore. And could you blame them? You wouldn’t care anyway. You only care about your own pace, your own enjoyment of the game and your own opinion about balance. Same here. I don’t care if Pyran is nerfed or buffed. I got my 3-4 OP builds that are not on the watch list here (because we choose to keep these builds off the radar for this very reason). So why do I even care?
I care, because it makes me sad seeing people leave due to this constant re-balancing.
I care, because it makes me sad seeing some of most creative builders stop sharing their masterpieces
I care, because GD is one of the best games of its genre and I really want it to succeed. But it’s currently stuck in a vicious cycle of self-destruction through over-optimization. There’s a golden rule - too much of a good thing is bad! When the devs become so deeply involved in balance changes, the majority of players get the feeling that it’s not mature, not finished, unstable. These are the thoughts people express on our discord server.
And finally, WHOM does it REALLY hurt to have some OP builds left untreated? Would it make your life hard? Would you quit this game if Cyclone or Overguard never got nerfed? Seriously? But you know when people really rage quit? When in MP HC game two classes with the same aura canceal each other out and they both get oneshot and RIPd. Or when some of the stash they had been collecting for months suddenly disappears. Or the game keeps crashing in SR boss rooms with certain skills active. Some of the bugs have been there from the launch of the game, but all we are obsessed about is 20 sec difference in crucible? C’mon.
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To be fair, unless it is a target-farmable set, if you farm for one, you basically farm for them all (not counting crafting mats; but you can always just wait with slotting in your components until you actually have a build almost finished & ready to go). Loot is random, after all.
With this I actually agree. Keeping an OP build for just a month or two would probably be worth it for those players you mentioned with little time to spare (which are a lot, I imagine).
Not mine, no. But:
This I have actually experienced, so…
Those are pretty much still my arguments.
Kind of true. I would wager though that the amount of casual softcore players is actually much higher than the amount of hardcore players (no offense to you or your playgroup). And those people really don’t care too much if they die once or twice due to a bug that’s pretty rare anyways (I think).
I think @Aikimox is making very valid points but I am afraid that devs and some praetorians have this tunnel vision about how balancing should be done and won’t listen to it.
I honestly feel this frustration more and more every patch where the balance gets changed in a way that I have to reconsider most of my builds (and I have made a lot of them).
This is also hurting this forum community: like Chinese guys who always had some crazy non-standard specs just stopped sharing their builds altogether, we don’t see their posts anymore. My fellow builder @John_Smith stopped playing in part due to frustration caused by this and shared his last build (pretty cool one) only to few people in a secret chanell in Discord.
Or when @thejabrixone posts his new cool build (a pretty creative one too) first question @adoomgod asks him in his guide is “Can you help me to nerf this”, lol.
And what’s more frustrating, every time we raise this issue we are getting ridiculed by Zantai and/or Praetorians with b/s like “#deadbuilds” or “boohoo, my build got nerfed”.
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Balance is something, which is never done, it’s a open process. But in order to achieve it, you need to sacrifice something yes. Still there’s reasonable boundary how big nerfs should be and how they will affect on performances. You know, the so called butterfly effect.
And some builds are really glassy or skill dependent. They shouldn’t be judged at same standards as tanky “unkillable” builds. Builds like Pyran without their offensive prowess will just suck, unless are provided with enough defense to compensate. Sometimes it’s hard to help some sets/classes with changes.
Crate team and Praetorians are doing splendid job implementing new features and QoL features. Their patch changes, nerfs and buffs are vital to keep long time the interest in game for players. But there come the other party involved, the players.
Forum veterans and Crate are in symbiotic relationship. Players buy and play the game, write in forum, create topics, guides, tools. So they are valuable resource, you can use their opinions to thrive game forward 
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The fact that someone gets frustrated when someone asks them how to best nerf it in a healthy way is an ailment of the mind only shared by a few members here. Any sane person would take it as a compliment. I’ve said it before, you guys had 10 minute crucible builds, then 8, then 7, then 6… whine elsewhere and don’t tag me on stupid shit like this.
Zantai has made clear enough what he feels is appropriate for crucible. Take it or leave it, but maybe learn to not beat the dead horse. I asked jaxbrixone out of respect to him being the one to discover it.
Not everyone who makes builds that they already know performs well over the developer’s standards is frustrated when they get tuned down. Some learn to expect it and just find the thrill in the discovery itself. I find myself giving less and less of a shit what placates those who are never pleased no matter how much the developers compromise.
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The lesson here is that when people see an OP build, they should not try to build if it is going to take time to get the gear, or level the character. When I saw the OP nex/ortus builds, or cyclone builds, I made sure not to make those builds knowing that they would soon be nerfed.
I do think there is a middle ground here, though. I think there should be balance but that it shouldn’t happen so quickly with hotfixes. Bug fixes should happen whenever and as soon as possible. But balance should happen only once in a while, because it may hurt other builds that aren’t overpowered. This is especially the case when balancing skills vs. gear.
I have had those kind of “compliments” for most of my builds and somehow they don’t feel like compliments or like anything positive at all. Pretty sure @thejabrixone agrees with me here. And you should read Aikimox post about how a lot of people who play the game don’t actually vent on forums they just shrug and unistall after a certain point. “Few members here” who you are calling “retarded” are actually few passionate contributors that are left on these forums who you keep ridiculing. It seems like a lot just left or leaving party due to frustration caused by constant balancing crusades.
I have already said and I will say it again, I think it would be great if Zantai himself would try and play Crucible or higher Shards once in a while. Because right now it looks like a lot of balancing changes are coming out untested.
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Knows Z’s cut-off point for crucible is 6 minutes barring extreme circumstances like reliance on perfect MI’s
posts something well under that
Flips out online because it gets nerfed
Spare me your sophistry. There are plenty of people passionate about the game and all the buffs that keep coming in and aren’t hyper focused on the nerfs like you. You guys always skirt around the fact that crucible times got lower and lower. You’re the “GIMME MORE POWER” party with zero care for the negative effects this power creep has.
Furthermore: “My fellow builder John_Smith stopped playing in part due to frustration caused by this and shared his last build (pretty cool one) only to few people in a secret chanell in Discord.” Exposes how radically narrow your view is on the game. You guys think only the OP OP shit is cool. It’s one of the reason builds on the forum are so extreme. Nobody is comfortable posting a build they just think is cool for what it is because they get shit talked for having stuff that isn’t “optimized.” If the only cool builds to you are the ones you know are overtuned, that’s your problem.
Of my 135+ characters, most of them are well over 6 minute crucible clears and most of them are pretty cool and fun to me.
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Sorry doomgod. I actually don’t enjoy if my builds got nerfed. Especially that this kind of “balancing” things come in such a fast cycle, making all of my works obsolete.
Previously in the past, I still enjoy these patches as this come in a quite long cycle and not really break things but give much more opportunities in playing more wacky stuff. And I used to thought that the dev still let this fast cruci clear happen and I am striving myself to make my build fast with “different” build just to show the community I can.
But after knowing how absurd the devs’ standing are, which is not inline with what the community want, I got frustrated and really think to finally move on from this game altogether. Because all of my builds seems to not be “inline” with the dev vision of the game and doesn’t suppose to happen.
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That’s a shame. Conversely, the vast majority of people on the Discord server want nothing to do with the forum because of the extreme power craving required for builds to be accepted here. What would be enough for you? 5 minutes? 4? 3? 2? 1? 1 shot everything builds?
Woe for the person who never considers that they might be the extreme one. That never considers the other side. That never considers that they may not represent the majority just because they like what they like.
Dramatizing things like Zantai is against the community… He’s compromised to the demands for years and years now and it is never enough. As many others here and elsewhere have admitted, there can be good reason to draw a line in the sand on how far power creep should go. Even you mad_lee have accepted that the 5 minute builds are ridiculous to me privately. But then you act otherwise here.
Everyone has their own tastes, but the developers have to consider what’s good for the whole of the community, not just the power gamers.
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If it’s narrow and we are the hardcore few and everyone else is fine with playing sub-optimal specs (which I easily believe in) then why game’s balance is based on our specs and our runs? I am not flipping out when some of my stuff gets nerfed and I agree that some nerfs are very reasonable. But Jabrixone made a good point of short cycles have become. Before it used to take months before Crate was considering all the outliers and the reasons behind some stuff overperforming, now we post a great spec and dread the hotfix that will surely come like in the next week or so.
And I did. But was my Witchblade Physical Blade Arc overperforming for example? No, it was a sturdy 6:30-7:30 build, one of the very few 2handed builds that actually worked and probably the only prominent Witchblade build capable of farming endgame. Why was weapon damage to Blade Arc on Grasp of Unchained Might nerfed? Was it really necessary? And add to that buffs to game’s difficulty and build is not so hot anymore.
Also, all those 5 minute builds that are being posted are very glassy specs piloted by best pilots recorded with best mutators and monster spawns. Like survivability and consistency of such builds would be way below my standard as a builder so I wouldn’t even bother with them.
It’s very much what happened to Spellbinders - some hardcore gamers/builders created few super offensive specs with like 2500 DA and posted some videos of their very best runs. Yet nerfs were based on those very specs and videos.
Or when @ya1 posted his Aether AAR Spellbinder with some off-beat pieces like gdstashed double rare off-hand and Dawnshard shoulders and Anasteria helmet - a bit of glass cannon spec that is not easy to pilot - well, instant nerfs to Dawnshard shoulders and Anasteria helmet.
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Narrow view on what’s fun. That’s what I was referring to. Not sure what you’re talking about as it was pretty clear what I meant. Your definition of “cool build” is extremely narrow since it excludes the vast majority of sets and items etc. Short cycles is a point I didn’t address. I can see the frustration there. As for every single nerf or buff, I can’t speak for them, only Z can. I don’t suggest that much behind the scenes anymore. I do most of it publicly.
Z would prefer if the glassy builds are 6 minutes. You prefer 5. (I’d prefer 7, and I don’t even advocate for this) This is simply a case of you like what you like. There is no argument here that it is good for the health for the game. You keep bringing up that the nerfs are based on them as if it counters something I’ve said? Why are you stuck on this? Anything that publicly shows up as overtuned get looked at and Z does his best to bring it in-line.
Extreme outliers make the bulk of stuff in the middle look worse by comparison. It’s that simple. Not every nerf or buff is perfect. It’s an iterative process but you keep moving the discussion.
6 minute glassy builds non dependent on purples. Somewhat sub 6 is allowed for extremely MI dependent glassy builds. That’s the current line. Not mine. The developer’s. I could personally care less but as a playtester try to give feedback in the direction of the developer’s intent.
I am fatigued by trying to have a conversation with you because you simply ignore the points I make that you can’t refute and always make long statements that boil down to, “WE ARE REALLY GOOD AT MAKING BROKEN BUILDS, SO LET US KEEP THEM OR YOU’RE A BAD DEVELOPER!”
You like what you like. I like what I like. The developer likes what the developer likes. These talks would be a lot easier to have if everyone admitted that they are arguing for their personal benefit and nobody else’s, and also tried to understand that the developer has to keep in mind what kind of experience they want to create for the silent majority we never see here.
Before the rest of you jump down my fucking throat. If you want to ask about a SPECIFIC nerf you didn’t like, ask Z not me. I am simply explaining in a broad way why nerfs are attempted and where the line is. I’m not even telling you to like it. I just want the bullshitting to stop. Frankly if you attached your save file to your build so Z could quickly jump in and play it and make tweaks and see how it impacts the crucible run, you might also get healthier nerfs.
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