Higher Shards are tougher I would argue than they were. But a lot of buffs carried up weaker builds and SR 30-31 is too easy.
I would rebalance the Shards below SR36 to make them tougher and SR 36+ should stay the same. It got tougher.
it’s not an assumption…
have you not been here through the last years and PTRs and seen that very concept in action? it’s always buffs to bring parity, and nerfs to outliers… and it’s always more buffs than nerfs, because there are more non meta meta builds outside the parity baseline
i would guesstimate we will never see this happen 
- people can’t accept that for some reason, unless it’s like mega cursed meme to start with “obviously this was meant to suck”, like chaos OFF or something…
that just changes/reduces the gap between 31 and 36, which seems silly or redundant no? - what’s the point of it if its only 10% different in the end, it’s like incrementally raising the floor anyway
Well, do you have any better suggestion?
i believe i already said what should happen, and i have for several years even? 
- you guys just dont’ like it because you’re attached to the nr of 36 for some reason
whatever outcome, imo, it can’t result in more powercreep to accommodate the baseline, a “hard” line must be drawn in the sand soon… - where the acceptance of not everything is the same gets accepted…
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I actually played SR 80-81 for years. But since 1.2 I moved to SR 36+.
Yeah this needs to stop. Outliers are “okay” people need to okay with it. Not everything has to perform in that area hence:
People need to be okay with stuff capping out pre meta. Then I’ll agree with leaving the floor as is.
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Isn’t that the same thing? I fail to see how it’s different tbh.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean. The context of the thread is a bit confusing. But if you are saying that Crate should stop trying to maintain an approximate equality between masteries and skills, I couldn’t disagree more. That rough level of balance - the fact that there are hundreds of builds that are not identical but relatively close in power - is by MILES the single best thing about Grim Dawn.
But perhaps you are talking about this specifically in the context of very high SR shards as opposed to whatever ends up being the new farming tier. If the former - sure, it’s fine that some builds are much more viable for that than others - if the latter, I think the rough equality is very important.
IDK, I’ve been benching my characters against SR36 ever since we got that waystone. Was the obvious highest reasonable point. It’s also something SR31-advertised builds were generally capable of already, before FOA power budget.
The real tricky part is clearing on timer. That high, it’s so easy to lose it to some random bullshit that I can’t say if clearing on time signifies any merit of the build, or just luck.
I’d argue it was already moved by devs. Quite some time ago too, speaking of SR.
^
This. Not everything needs to do SR 36+. You want everything to be able to SR 31? 
great But having something not get there and then coming here to raise that ceiling? Naw I never have and will never ever agree with it.
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wasn’t, Z reiterated 30-31 was it in v1.3 ptr, even “moments” before FoA release, tho considering what FoA brought makes one wonder what pre foa 1.3 ptr balancing was meant for
Shouldn’t have released that waystone then 
Wasn’t that more of a QoL thing so people could start higher up?
waystones higher than 31 (76) was originally added when players broke the intended “this is not balanced barrier” on a handful of unique chonk builds (specially pets or exploiters)
Since it was rather tedious to run from 75 to 90 + Death’s Waystone got added to cover the rest from 80 onwards; however you got no loot. - mind you Crate hadn’t expected this so the stone wasn’t even there initially.
Then ofc some high SR players started moping about there being no loot after… 82? at the time. And so loot got added and eternal stone was shuffled in between, while 75-76(30-31( still insisted on being the centre of feedback
^what i predicted and voiced already back then was; this will make that group of people gradually shift the goal, because loot “incentivizes” you.
But still 30-31(75-76) kept being the expressed baseline for balancing after, even as more and more buffs got added on the regular front, and from backdooring in 32, then 36, feedback
*i’m not remotely trying to act like it’s me that decides this floor Serafim, i just don’t wanna keep going higher and higher until Z actually/“officially” moves it, while then obv prefers it doesn’t get moved at all considering what already happened before
If Z comes out in X upcoming PTR and says 36 is the feedback target, i’ll mope about it, but have no choice to accept it either way then. Until that happens, i can only cryworry about such floodgates being opened, looking at the past years of “metrics” shift when X other performance got normalized.
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It should be 20-21.
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OK. What I think is that great majority of builds (if sensibly put together) should be able to do the standard farming SR tier (again, if piloted with reasonable skill, but not black-belt level). It’s fine for there to be some outliers that can go higher and for there to be a try-hard/pushing tier.
The deal has long been that that standard tier is 30/1. All good. If Crate intend to raise that to 34/5 or 36/7, then that whole mass of builds need to come along for the ride. But in that scenario, the try-hard tier would go to something like 42 and, again, it would be fine if that were exclusive to some subset of builds.
When I talk about a rough equality of builds, I mean that for a long time now, in the FG epoch, there have been hundreds of builds that could do pretty all the things that were practically useful (in terms of acquiring gear). I think that’s a fantastic thing that no other ARPG, to my knowledge, has had and it needs to be preserved. Alongside that, I don’t have any problem with their being a niche for a few builds that can push higher. The point is that that has not been done for loot acquisition, just for the challenge.
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I just want to make the argument that the idea that SR36-37 has become the new SR30-31
because of FoA powercreep is completely wrong and it is not even close.
you could maybe make an argument for 31-32 being the new 30-31, but 1.3 also included a +32% Hp buff to bosses and some new chucks with FoA mobs are harder.
(if you only play SR36+ builds in Sr30-31 you may not feel this, but on builds that can do max SR30-31 it is noticeable)
So for these reasons I think SR30-31 actually remained pretty equal to what it was in 1.2,
and I think for budget builds it got harder. Why? because budget builds do not benefit from ascended affix powercreep, since you can’t expect people to waste their celestial lotus and soul fragments to ascend their faction gear that is going to replaced by legendary gear. So compared to 1.2 budget builds have to kill the tankier bosses without benefit from asc affixes.
If you want Sr36-37 to be the new standard (whatever that means), then you want the standard to be much harder to play than what Sr30-31 was (even 3 years ago).
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Agree with this. I think the whole 36-is-the-new-30 idea is getting ahead of ourselves. 32-is-the-new-30 is more likely.
Nah, it should have been the norm since 1.2. FoA made it slightly more difficult actually for existing builds. But brought more builds up to it as well.
SR 32-33 (or 80-81 in the old) was meta for years due to waystones for posting builds. Speedrunners are just stuck at 30-31(75-76) who knows why… It allows them to bypass defenses that they otherwise could not in higher shards.
SR 32-33 is actually the best and should be the main thing. It has the old enemies in SR 32 and the new Shattered enemies in SR 33. Best of both worlds… But even then I think the difficulty of lower shards needs a bump up.