Getting real philosophical in here.
At no point have we ever Not cared about endgame balance. It genuinely amazes me that the opposite is even suggested on this forum after nearly 5 years of endgame focused content updates and balancing. It also disappoints me after all these years of patch notes filled with player suggestions to hear we are ignoring players or only listening to certain individuals. Gods know it would be trivial to create an echo chamber by using bans and the ignore feature, but that’s not, nor has ever been, what we are interested in.
Considering what a small subset of our customers balance changes even affect, one could even say we are distributing our efforts poorly, but we are hardcore gamers ourselves and there are certain things we value and consider important. Where we tend to disagree with some players is where the goalposts should land, and the stubbornness we’ve faced in light of that also never ceases to amaze me.
We are addressing a known exploit, one we’ve tolerated for a long time and made clear over the months that it was one we could very easily fix if a certain attitude around the Shattered Realm remained. And here we are…We are not incapable of reading the room though and where the community’s views on the game mode have landed. Players set their sights on SR75+, largely our own fault for having Celestial Waystones, and anything we say be damned. Players want to push even higher SR clears, but they can only do so with the exploit.
Fact is, builds quickly start to fall off the radar above SR65 when they have to contend with 4 bosses at once (as in, the intended way). Shockingly, loot in the Shattered Realm was balanced for this. It doesn’t even scale past SR87 because mathematically nothing should be surviving that high (hint, anything that can pull all 4 bosses at SR90 and survive is, how do the locals put it…overtuned).
But then came the camera abuse and all that went out the window. Suddenly we needed Deathly Waystones for the SR pushers to be challenged because, to nobody’s surprise, pulling bosses one by one makes it way easier. I’m not sure if we didn’t make a mistake by not addressing the exploit when requests for higher checkpoints started coming. Hindsight is 20/20 I guess. But we didn’t, and here we are now and you can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
So we are not going back to the 4-boss gang-up. We don’t feel that 1 boss pulls are conducive to the game mode though. At that point, the boss rooms might as well just be 1 boss. The other 3 are just delaying the inevitable.
I’m not entirely sure if 1-2-1 setup is right. Maybe 2-2 is a better one. Time will tell I guess and we’ll go from there. The important thing is that an exploit not known to all players and not universally abused is going away, and that takes one variable out of the equation in looking at build performance in SR objectively.
It’s no question that those getting to SR100+ are skilled players, but there’s also no question that very very few archetypes can push that high and there’s a takeaway there. Unfortunately oftentimes, as is the cliché player reaction, rather than the response being “wow, this is overpowered, it should get toned down”, instead it’s “this is great and balanced, every build should be able to do this, the devs are stifling build diversity by not embracing it”.
How anyone looks at RATA builds and a handful of pet builds pushing past 100, while virtually nothing else can, and thinks the problem lies in everything else is beyond me.
P.S. Frankly, for those that enjoy the “Dark Souls”-esque nature of fighting individual bosses at high SR would do well with a boss-rush style game mode where you just fight boss after boss with ever increasing scaling. It’s an entirely different beast than the Shattered Realm, though it actually would not be that hard to mod in (hint hint 
).