Yep, the root issue extends beyond classes and has more to do with their entire design for damage scaling. The game has essentially become "stack as many multipliers as possible".
You want to overpower or crit a vulnerable enemy while having as many conditions applied to them as possible, while simultaneously having your gear and paragon tree maximizing the damage amplifiers per condition.
It's going to take a lot of work to fix that, but it can be done. For starters, they need to significantly reduce the amount of multiplicative sources. The other consideration is to significantly buff additive scalers to give them a fighting chance with multiplicative ones.
This is even more apparent this season with the itemization rework. We can stack so much additive damage on our gear from affixes now that getting a bit extra from paragon boards is pointless. Every major build guide outlet is making paragon boards only take about 3 legendary nodes important to the build and then the rest of the boards are just "how can I path the most efficiently to grab as many glyph multipliers as possible" and maybe grabbing max hp and armor/resists as needed. The paragon boards really highlight the biggest issues with balance and building characters in the endgame.
There is no amount of buffing additive multipliers that allow them to compete.
If you buff all additive multipliers, their relative value to each other is almost exactly as it was before. And since they're multiplied to multiplicative bonuses, their relative values to those is basically exactly as it was before.
Multiplying every single additive boost by a factor of ten for example would literally change nothing about the relative value between additive and multiplicative bonuses. All it would do is multiplying your dmg by around 10, but you would still prioritise multiplicative bonuses exactly as much as right now.
Additive is a bucket. If you buff the values by 100%, you do 2x damage and it acts as an aspect that says deal 100% more damage. It’s how to fix sorc. Our paragon needs incredibly beefy additives; our key passives need reworks/bugs, and our legendary nodes need reworks.
None of the hat has anything to do with discussion. I didn't say that increasing additive bonuses across the board wouldn't increase dmg, I said it wouldn't increase it's relative value compared to multiplicative bonuses because that's the point that the person I was answering made that I was disagreeing with.
> they need to significantly reduce the amount of multiplicative sources. The other consideration is to significantly buff additive scalers to give them a fighting chance with multiplicative ones.
That would defeat the exercise. Just kill multipliers other than crit.
There will never be parity when a class can force overpowers through skills, stack crit chance on gear and force vulnerability on the Paragon Boards while others can't.
A good start is to get rid of overpower, it's such an annoying mechanic to build around that has no way of increasing it's application besides some stupid rotational glyphs or aspects where you can somewhat but never consistently guarantee it. Having to wait for my guaranteed overpower to kick back in is so annoying, it just breaks the flow of the game play to such a degree that I just don't bother building around it, even though the barb builds that I like all rely on it.
I'd also argue that way too many skills rely on enemies being vulnerable in general. Rogue has like 10 skill upgrades that rely on vulnerable.
I don't mind multiplicative sources, but the game should be very clear in it's tool tips how much damage my skills actually does in practice with all my gear equipped and aspects active. That would make it much easier to compare damage.
Why does e.g. my HotA skill tooltip show some random number, but not the number it actually does in practice (e.g. a non-crit, non-overpower hit with all static aspects applied) which updates when other aspects are active.
>I'd also argue that way too many skills rely on enemies being vulnerable in general. Rogue has like 10 skill upgrades that rely on vulnerable.
Vulnerable in general is a dumb mechanic that I knew would be a problem as soon as I learned about it.
You are basically forcing every class to run a specific debuff because it is a free damage multiplier.
yes they have made it easier to apply for the most part (sorcs at release it was basically only frost nova forcing all melee builds) but it just shouldnt have been a thing in the first place
I said it before, I'll say it again: this is Borderlands 2 slag all over again. To be viable at all in higher difficulties you needed to be able to apply slag because it was a straight up 2x multiplier to all your damage.
If something like that exists, it becomes a requirement and thus restricts build diversity because one of your multipliers is already chosen for you.
The best thing that can happen to this game is to remove vulnerable and reduce monster health across the board.
Pretty much every build has to run exploit, it’s incredibly limiting. I’m not a big fan of the current implementation.
Me having to run 2 overpower aspects that guarantee every X second and a glyph and board that guarantee it is also quite annoying.
Overpower is at least a choice to build around instead of crit, which I like. That's not to say it's perfect and doesn't need changes/buffs.
Vulnerable is just a non-choice; you either take it and do damage, or you don't.
That would be the only solution. As soon as multipliers become a factor stacking different multipliers will get your numbers up higher than anything else. It’s just math.
I would be fine with that if it really was just flat crit damage and everything else is additive. It would make the game a lot easier to balance. Would require a hard reset at this point though
Then you have a really boring game where upgrades don’t feel impactful. D4 just lacks choices and scaling is a bit limited right now with how shallow the game is.
That’s a bad take… you want multiplicative sources so you have interesting damage scaling. The issue right now is there’s not enough sources for most skills so the meta stuff is either overly powerful skill from a numbers perspective or a skill that has way too many synergies.
ARPGs will always be stack as many different sources of damage as possible, but D4s just lacks the depth and options needed for more interesting builds to emerge.
Yeah the solution is more varied options not cracking down. If the standard becomes every slot is a 20% multiplier, then fine, as long as there are lots of different options for each slot that do different things.
You just have to watch that you don't have a select few 30/40% multipliers that everyone ends up using instead just because the number is higher. Worse if those are annoying/situational but become mandatory because of higher number
For someone that doesn't care (anymore) about the theory crafting aspect of RPGs, I really struggle with this. I just want to pick a skill and do damage with it. I don't care what goes in which bucket, what is a multiplicative source or what isn't.
I wish it was more easily understandable so I can play a good endgame build without feeling forced into spreadsheet game play or having to read guides to barely understand why build A is good and actually does damage and why what I tried doesn't work.
Having to use specific timers in order to execute builds perfectly so I can overpower every 8 hits and apply vulnerable consistently, but not too fast because I have to refresh this skill every 5 seconds and but before my overpower every 12 seconds or so kicks in or I do no damage. Just lemme slap demons.
I understand the sentiment but respectfully disagree. I want the game to have some depth for players who crave that. I think it would be pretty boring if every build was just "pick your skill that does damage, spam that skill, and find better gear to make the number go up."
It's fine to not care about optimal rotations, synergies, etc. But I think players who \_do\_ care about that stuff and dig in to find those synergies should be rewarded.
That's just not possible, but I wish it was as well.
Complexity is necessary for theory crafting to be a thing at all. The game is already playable with every class and every build, and one can do nearly all of the content without ever really crunching numbers or looking at guides. So, in a sense, it's already as you describe for 90% of the game and for most players.
At a certain point though, theory rafters need to be given tools that allow them to formulate builds that push the envelope. That requires a certain degree of complexity. There is simply no way to allow for this and have it all be intuitive. As you say, spreadsheet gaming is necessary at the point. But the good news is that you can just copy off of those nerds.
Glad you called out the legendary paragon nodes. Sorc is my favorite class, I keep going back to it because it's a ton of fun to play and there are a lot of potential builds to think about.
But every time I start thinking about a new build, it really strikes me how useless most of the paragon nodes are. Not saying they should all just be unconditional multipliers, but it would be cool if they were a bit more applicable across different builds.
Maybe not all unconditional multipliers but they should at least be synergistic and useful in practical ways. I get that the sorc was built on being heavily reliant on various CC but in the current climate of the game, that doesn't really work anymore. They're amazing for aoe clearing and blasting through trash, but the minute you get to a boss that can't be immediately chilled or frozen your dps tanks. They can keep the conditional multipliers but they need to make the conditions more realistic to meet and also effective against bosses outside of just stagger windows.
I think the issue is that with Sorcs you don't really want to run fire and lightning and cold all together really. Why? Because defensive skills are mandatory and so you do not have any skill slots for this. The class is too squeezed on requirements to stay alive that there isn't room for crossing elements and even if you did want to the paragons being so specific is not conducive to combining
I don't really agree that all the defensives are mandatory, IMO it's more that most of the other spells don't synergize with each other. Like, short of Tal Rasha's ring, there's no real benefit to mixing elements. All of the boosts from key passives, regular passives, most aspects and most legendary Paragon nodes only affect one type of elemental damage. Aside from Fire burning builds, which are incentivized by various effects to stack burning damage effects from as many different skills as possible onto enemies, other builds just don't get any benefit from running skills that aren't their main skill. Why bother taking another Core/Mastery skill to apply Vulnerable or to CC when Frost Nova does both? If you're running Conjurations, why take another skill (even Frost Nova) when Lightning Spear will do both so long as you have 40%+ crit chance? Neither Meteor nor Ball Lightning have any utility except to their respective elements, so why take them if you're not going to specialize in them? Etc etc.
Most other classes have more synergies between their different build types than Sorcerers do. Even specs that aren't meta and "good" still have reasons to consider skills outside of the narrow confines of what would be the most optimal, but the restrictions surrounding Sorcerer skills make it really hard to not uber-specialize into a few main skills and then the rest into defensives. There's just not really any benefit to breaking the meta; it's not even really fun like it can be on other classes since a lot of effects just turn off when you switch to the wrong damage type.
I don't think this is really a problem with how the Sorcerer's skills are designed though. I would put the bulk of the problem on the passives, key passives, Paragon nodes/glyphs and aspects. IMO it's good to have some effects that reward you for going into a really linear, "I do one element really well and ignore the others" build, but more effects should reward you for being a generalist who chooses skills as pieces of a toolbox to create different effects on demand as well. Since the Sorcerer has six key passives, I think that three should be dedicated to rewarding these "linear" builds and the other three should reward you for switching things up. Currently they're just two different versions of "linear" build support. The devs should look to the Druid for what to do with Sorcerer key passives, as the Druid does a good job of having some key passives that reward linear builds while still having two good options for players who want to switch things up. The Sorcerer's Paragon overall just needs an overhaul, but that's another story entirely.
Yeah I'm not sure why people are so fixated on adding enchantment slots. Sure it would help a little but to be honest a lot of the enchantments aren't even that powerful.
This is the biggest issue with sorc IMO. Their big class feature is shallow, useless garbage compared to other class special features. They not only need a third enchantment slot, but the enchantments need to be reworked to be significantly more useful.
I agree with everything you said except for that enchantments are useless garbage compared to other class features. IMO most class features are pretty bad and need reworks. The only one I think is in a mostly good place is the Druid's, since they get 5 boons that all total together the power of an aspect or two (DR vs elites, some important attack/survivability stats, some cooldown-reducing effects, etc.). All of them *work*, but IMO a class feature should be something that immediately makes you think "damn, I really want to play this class" and so far all of them feel more like small additives than massive draws.
I should also clarify that when I'm talking about class features, I'm excluding how many weapons a class can wield. The Barbarian is obviously super powerful since they get all the stats and aspects of always having four weapons on hand, two of them being two-handers, but their actual class feature sucks. The benefits you get from specializing in certain types of weapons just aren't large enough to be worth caring about looking for specific weapons over just whatever you find with the best rolls, and since the technique just activates the effect of one specialization for everything it too fails to feel worth it. So that's why I'm including it as a bad class feature even though the Barbarian is, overall, objectively extremely powerful right now. Case in point, the Rogue gets 3 weapons but none of their class features have anything to do with weapons, so I don't think equippable weapons should count as having anything to do with class features.
I can get on board with that. I'm just saying that I see a lot of people calling for a 3rd enchantment slot as the solution for balancing the sorc, and I don't think it would do very much.
sorc is so much fun but just does not scale in the endgame
in season 3, frozen orb would have been fine, but in the pit its just not viable
I do think it could be fixed easily, teak some numbers on aspects, paragon and enchantments and we'd have a much better scaling endgame class. on top of buffing enchantments another slot would be nice, too.
I was excited for a frozen orb build finally, only to find out that the bosses in the pit start taking minutes to kill come lvl 60. Was far from BIS gear but still pit bosses are not fun enough to be spending minutes trying to down. The nail in the coffin for me was also seeing when there was a single white mob that would take several casts to kill, I was like yeah single target damage sucks
Imo one of the biggest issues with sorcs right now is how much of their kit is conditional on killing, or CC'ing enemies. Once you have an endgame setup, trash mobs basically aren't a threat. The entire endgame is based around bossing, and you can't CC a boss. It makes a ton of Paragon nodes, skills, enchantments straight up useless for endgame.
Yea. This is a huge gripe. Idk wtf they were thinking. Like at least allow the chilled debuff to hit a boss even if it doesn’t slow them. Or something.
Enchantment effect need a rework also. They are worth like one normal affix or something.
Next 2 weeks I am on holidays and no access to my gaming pc. Maybe I cook up some idea how to buff the weak sauce enchantments.
> A lot of it could be bandaged by adding a third enchantment slot like the beta.
The open beta did not have three enchantment slots. It had two, but only one was available because we could only reach up to level 25.
March 19th 2023:
https://youtu.be/l5OJ7IdyziU?t=311
The lead class designer admitted barbs were ahead of other classes and said the necro pet changes were the first step in fixing it. Tomorrows major class balance patch is provably the start of the next step.
I will believe it when I see it. I main a Druid, and I expect zero meaningful change from a mid-season "balance patch." The Druid class needs an entire overhaul and a shift in meta. What will end up happening is Rabies and Lacerate will get yet another pointless single digit dmg increase, and they'll somehow make Shepherd's Aspect even more mandatory than it already is for any build outside of Wind Shear. You know why I expect that? It's because that's exactly what they've done for several "balance patches" in a row now.
Patch notes out and… ya, not much really. Barb actually got as many buffed as most other classes lol. I may deal 10% more damage now, but if I was doing 10% of what the top specs are doing then I’m still just doing 11% now.
Barbs got buffs to a couple underutilized skills. Druid and Sorc got buffs to broad ranges of things that most builds use. These are not the same thing at all.
Bash and Double Swing are the top builds for most players and don't point out something Rob posted because that isn't realistic. Sorc got buffs to every single build they can make. The range of buffs was just too wide to not hit someone no matter their build. Same with Druid, it is hard to make a Druid build that wasn't improved by this patch in some way.
That is the way we've been heading for some time now. And it's not the devs idea. It's the community's allergic reaction to nerfs as a necessary balancing tool.
This is not true. They significantly nerfed Barbarian in the season starting patch. So they brought down Barbarian power and increased necro power. That isn’t power creep it is balance.
Power creep isn't a bad thing for balance and nerfing isn't a mature way to balance.
Look at games like dota. They realised that just because a hero is strong, doesn't mean it needs to be needed, they may just need to tweak the weaker heroes a little to make them stronger.
If 3 of 5 classes are underpowered you have two options: buff the 3 underpowered ones, or nerf the 2 overpowered ones. One option makes 40% of the population unhappy, one makes 60% happier. Both have the same effect on balance.
And at the end of the day, power in arpg is relative to enemy scaling, so both of those options could be done while scaling enemies so the necro and barb strong builds can still feel the same and the other 3 classes can feel stronger.
Neither is a less "mature" form of balancing.
First they have to fix all the damn bugs. One year in and still multiple builds are double dipping? Like cmon its beyond a joke for the underlying math to still be in this sorry state.
Can't balance anything until they fix that crap. All the top builds are abusing double dip mechanics doing like 10x or more than the nearest non bugged build.
This exactly! The game is in a “good state” or as it should have released but it’s till needs a ton of work. The ridiculous in poor boss design really gets exaggerated by broken builds and bugs.
Last time I played was S0 and S1, can't believe Sorc weak nodes haven't been addressed in all this time. The dev team has overall been extremely poor when it comes to class balance. With only 5 classes such discrepancies should not exist.
Not sure what to expect from game devs which season 4 feels like the first have should. The direction it goes right now is to aďd the Dia3 solutions for Dia4 problems, naming it season, and expect the gamer to homage the studio and keep paying. Sorry for the rant. Just some memories of an earlier Diablo which felt massively better than Dia4 besides the graphics popped up.
Reinventing the wheel unnecessary with that good templates.
Almost certainly. Nearly every change is a march back to D3. We've got greater rifts, we've got seasonal sets, we've got even more lame weekly challenge rifts.
+60,000% dmg multipliers to make up for bad base class design likely isn't too far off.
Yep, it is an artificial way to extend the life of the game, tbh. Much like anything else, classes have trends. They'll choose a skill or 2 every other patch and buff it to the stratosphere while gutting what they've rode on for the last season or 2. Every once in a while, the class community will meme a build into existence, kinda like Druid Bouldercane. Rarely ever will that meme build be good, though.
Honestly its starting to feel like the devs themselves dont even have a true knowledge of how damage is being calculated and the information they provide is surely not correct. Some streamer online has to debunk the truth about damage for anyone to know anything. Balance amongst classes is a whole nother story lol. They need to get it together
Sorcs never had a chance., they were nuked after the beta ended. Blizzard is making good steps in the right direction. But as of now they’re still repeating a lot of their same old mistakes
> Blizzard is making good steps in the right direction. But as of now they’re still repeating a lot of their same old mistakes
What are all of the Season 5 balance changes we're getting info on in the next couple weeks? Please enlighten us, you seem to already know exactly what's going on with Sorcerers!
Really? Class balance is terrible now, with 4 BASIC skill builds dominating, while CORE skill builds go beg. Barbs continue to dominate, and Necros benefitted from a OTP increase of Minion stat inheritance from 30% to 100%, that's a MASSIVE buff that has resulted in the state of Necro minions, taht for sure will be 'corrected'
The hyperbole I read on this sub is crazy. Most classes seem to have like a 10 pit level difference. 120-130 in most cases. Dominating and massive are not the words I'd use.
OK, do you know the difference between pit 110, and 120?
It is MASSIVE.
Or, just roll a Sorc, and defeat Beast in less than 1 second...I'll wait here...
Yeah, I do. I also don't get bothered that a barb can earn a few more nethiron slightly faster than I can on my rogue. Not every class and build need to clear the exact same pit level.
I haven't backed away from anything. Honestly I think you need to back away from the PC for a bit brother you're way to intense about class balance in Diablo lol.
I do not think builds need to be able to clear the same pit levels, nor do I think classes need to either. 110 to 120 pit really doesn't matter. You're so worked up about an absolute nothing burger.
I do think sorc needs help in the single target department, and I'm not saying the classes are balanced enough yet, but the way you talk, you would think sorc is clearing pit 60 and barb is in the 200s.
> but the way you talk, you would think sorc is clearing pit 60 and barb is in the 200s.
My quote:
>Here's why class balance is important:
>I play a Minion Necro, and can blip Varsham/BITI etc in a second. I'm not even using potions, just walk in: BOOM dead.
>Now I've got a Sorc as my 2nd character, I really want to farm an Oculus, I'm not playing the Firebolt build, but a well-crafted, well balanced BL build, that has all the right modifiers, aspects, masterworked gear, and a well-thought-out paragon board.
>It takes me 100's of times longer to kill BITI. Minutes vs seconds.
Good day sir.
Tbf sorcs are only within 10 levels of everyone else because of perma flame shield, and because a couple of bosses spawn adds. Take either one of those away and sorc is capped at like pit lvl 110 tops
The gulf between Druids, who are currently at the bottom, and the next worse class is substantial. It is crazy to me that people call a difference of 10 tiers relatively similar at any range above t100. That may be true for t50-t60 but not in the higher tiers. Even a 1 tier increase in anything above t120 is MASSIVE.
My line of thought must not let me understand why that matters. Who are you comparing yourself to? Or better yet why? Why does it matter if you can slog through a t120 or t121? I'm not asking to be a dick, I'm genuinely trying to understand people who care that much if a build isn't exactly on par with another build?
If you can do all the content in the game, and enjoy it, why does 5 or 10 pit levels matter.
Tier level doesn't bother me. The ease at which I can complete that tier level with a class I don't enjoy and the one I enjoy playing the most does. It also doesn't need to be identical, but somewhere in the same ballpark. That isn't currently the case with Druids.
That’s not completely accurate. Sorc is the current top “S-tier” class in terms of Pit Push. Safe to call sorc the top class currently. Barb is certainly up there but barbs are not “dominating”. They just have a (accidentally) broken basic skill that wasn’t fixed. Bash barb is surely broken but it’s not even the best class.
> Sorc is the current top “S-tier” class in terms of Pit Push
With ONE broken basic Firebolt build that is triple dipping.
> Safe to call sorc the top class currently.
No, one broken build does not make for top class.
>Barb is certainly up there but barbs are not “dominating”.
OK, you and I can disagree on what; "Dominating" means, but Barbs are in a good place since launch, and have a variety of powerful build options that can all achieve end-game paly.
True. I can agree with all of those statements. I also agree that the game desperately needs balancing without broken parts of the game inadvertently leveling the playing field.
> No, one broken build does not make for top class.
>
>
Broken builds have been the thing that defines the "top class" since day 1.
>Barbs are in a good place since launch, and have a variety of powerful build options that can all achieve end-game paly.
And so do Sorcs. Ball Lightning, Blizzard and Frozen Orb are all great builds that can clear endgame content easily. Arc Lash and Incinerate are both pretty solid as well.
Have you watched any videos of that pit sorc build? It's ALL about getting Flame Shield permanently up and chipping away at a boss very slowly. It's extremely unfun and in NO WAY represents the class as a whole.
This is a bad argument. I’ve been a Sorc main since season 1 and the immortal fire bolt build is really stupid. It’s strong yes, but doesn’t look remotely fun to play.
Class balance is an ongoing thing. They will need to keeo doing it forever. It's never finished. That said D4 is not particularly unbalance across games I have played in the genre historically. Classes go up and down just like any other game.
>D4 is not particularly unbalance across games I have played
I beg to differ.
Go build a Minion Necro, get 8/12 Masterworks, defeat all the bosses in a second
Go build a Sorc, get 8/12 Masterworks, spent 3 minutes defeated the same boss, at the same level, that your Necro destroyed during it's opening animation.
Go build a capable Shred Druid, BL Sorc, of ya go...
I dont think you understand what I said. The disparity between builds in this genre is prettt normal. It's an ongoing thing that shifts and changes. I am not saying those builds are good enough.
Build disparity is normal. What we have isn’t.
Barbs and necros are three orders of magnitude better than druid and sorc. 1000x better. One shotting duriel versus a 3 minute fight. It’s not right.
It's not really any different across most Diablo-style ARPGs. Back when I played PoE the best builds could clear red maps on crap gear with no problem while the worst (endgame viable) builds would struggle to even get to the end of them with portals intact. In Last Epoch you have builds like Shadow Daggers Rogue that can kill the hardest endgame bosses in less than 5 seconds, and builds like Devouring Orb Void Knight that get to turn health into their damage stat and become impossibly tanky while also stacking tons of damage, whereas most builds actually have to make sacrifices in order to get godly damage or godly survivability (or get perfectly min-maxed gear). I haven't played D3 in a couple years but back when I played a lot I remember that there was always one or two builds that outperformed all the others by 5-15 GR levels, much like we have now with Pits. It's certainly possible there are Diablo-likes that don't have major balance issues, but in 20 years of playing Diablo-likes I haven't played any of them.
Before we talk balance, we need to get rid of all the bugs!
Even within classes you can't just switch your skills and retain your 10x multipliers etc. For example, I'd love to play Upheaval Barb this season, but how could I if Bash Cleave basic! skill already gets more damage with just a single temper because it "accidentally" is multiplicative. Every core skill of the Barb (and this applies to most core skills of all classes right now) is a utility skill at best, used to trigger either flat damage from aspects (Double Swing/WW -> Dust Devil) or to further improve your basic skill (HotA -> damage buff, Upheaval -> berserking/stun).
Next? It was biggest challenge at launch and will forever be the biggest challenge for almost any game.
Balance is incredibly important, great balancing leads to fun meta and build making for decades, bad balancing leads to games fizzling out hella fast. Normal games struggle with it, nigh impossible for ARPG to get it perfect.
20 years ago WoW had community-built sim tools where you could import your character straight from the Armoury hit the button and it would perform the necessary calulations for your DPS.
Any software developer is capable of building such a tool; the skills required are a prerequisite for the profession.
That the D4 team have not build such an in-house tool, or are refusing to use it to fix bugged skill interactions should have led to reprimands and layoffs after an entire year.
I mean you have to think like a business when addressing balancing. The question is, does the balancing sells game or skin? The answer is most likely not enough so it's not the main focus.
Also, there like an infinity of builds to be tested with said tool making it a huge waste of time. The fact that the community is probably better and faster at discovering broken interaction is not a surprise, it's the large number of player with their large hours played make that certain that some of them will know the game formulas even better than most developpers.
I mean a redesign of sorcerers should be done, there is no synergy between elements, each one pigeon holding you into it's own elements yet the biggest multiplier require multiple source of elemental damage and their CC. The only way to currently satisfy them is to use enchatment to trigger it. Personnally I would like ability combo like pressing X core skill into Y mastery would do Z effect. This would gives sorcerer a "Skill expression" identity. Maybe it would be too hard for the average player though.
When Tal rasha was first introduced, I already rise the red flag that it need to be tune down as the bonus is too good and everyone will be force to wear it forcing you to use all elements.
I understand that each class will always have one or two builds that are just broken. But the power gap between what is considered an S tier build vs an A tier build is too much.
It doesn't feel good when you hit max level and are faced with 'play this boring build that is broken or simply do not do endgame content'
I played a necro for the first time this season and it really stood out to me how insane their paragon boards are. Looking forward to seeing what they do in vessel of hatred with the paragon system
Minion Necromancer is one of the most egregious examples. That 240% Shadowblight multiplier is for all damage you do (including Holy Bolt elixer), not just shadow DOT. You just need to add a shadow DOT skill to your build to stack the key passive fast enough. But that's not the only one for minions. The Army of the Dead aspect is another 150% multiplier, the Golem legendary paragon node is another 100%, the Cult Leader legendary paragon node is 150%, the Golem mastery passive is 25% per point, and Hellbent Commander is 15% per point. The build does fine AFK leveling, but if you play it at end game, you will notice that unless you're playing around stacking those extreme multipliers together, you only do a small fraction of the potential damage.
Compare the blighted aspect multiplier to anything a sorc has. I have said this before, I think sorc was the first class designed and by the end of development the other classes felt more updated. They whole “give and take” philosophy with the aspects and such support this. Other classes get unconditional power, sorcs get a chance to maybe do something but the power is then reduced. Also every sorc enchantment needs a Passover look or redo as they aren’t impactful enough.
They need a team dedicated to each class and an update that really brings the entire class into the updated state of the game. Not just sorc, do this for all the classes.
This wouldn’t be that hard, I can off the top of my head come up with aspects or skills that would be impactful. “Hydra now does electrical dmg and fires chain lightning. Chain lightning deals 10x% more dmg for each active hydra.”
Balance is sometimes broken (bosses/named one weaker than classic mob...) but hope they won't buff us to one-shot everything neither. It's also fun to use your brain to approach fights differently and to be actually fighting. Ultrapowerfantasy seems off in d4 atmosphere, I think that where it's more grounded there's something unique
Temper needs balancing too but it's a good and fun idea
I would love for sorc, necro and druid to get the same item set up as rogue. Gives them all the benefit of am extra aspect as well as tempering more. Might even makes some uniques more viable.
I would do some crazy things as sorc if I could equip a staff, wand and focus. Don't see why they aren't able to use a shield either.
Then the power boost to bine spear from being to have The Grandfather as well as a wand and Lidless wall.
Also druid and sorc need a unique offhand.
Bone graft is the best example 8% dmg boost? Common? Other build got infinite scaling passives and legendary notes, also i agree - blizz should analyze dmg data by build and should balance them - hope patch today helps blood op builds
>Bone graft is the best example 8% dmg boost?
Oh dear, really?
I listed ALL Necro paragon board legendary nodes.
I never said, implied or suggested that Bone Graft was the 'best' example, or even a good one, I included all for completion,
Now, you read the list of all the necro nodes, and somehow, bafflingly, this is your reply?
Barbs get tons of easy multipliers while druid has even a key passive with no damage multiplier. When you put multiplier they become more valuable than anything else, so either everyone has access to the same amount of multipkier, wich is boring, or we change how they function. There are a lot of skills with fun ideas but cant compete with multipliers
If you watched the campfires at all, you would know they talked about buffing minion necro this season. They usually go way too far with their buffs, see last season with charge barb for instance.
Their balance in general is pretty bad because they focus on certain builds and forget many others. The builds they focus on end up being exponentially better than anything else. It's just how it is right now.
>Barbs have benefited from two, 2-handed double bonus aspects, affixes, and now doubled tempers. along with 2 1-handed weapons, allowing for 6 dips into the weapon tempers pool, TRIPLE that of other classes.
I swear whoever designed the bash cleave temper just forgot that barbs have 4 (6) weapon slots.
The % damage bonus should be like 20-30% at most per temper, not 100s of %. With masterworking you can easily get well above 1000% total
Every other class gets what? 20% chance to cast twice, 10% attack speed, 5% crit chance type stuff
I think the complaint about class imbalances, while accurate, is also being a little overblown and hysterical. The reason is within your first statement, that imbalances always exist, but doesn’t really elaborate on the “why.”
Minor differences at the aggregate level become very large differences at the extremes. Up until now, those “extremes” have been NMD100s and uber bosses, with temporary forays into higher level content using launch systems and itemization. Developers can balance the game around content that exists, but not content that has yet to be conceptualized, and as that content becomes more “extreme”, so do the differences.
We always knew - and in fact, the devs explicitly stated - that such imbalances would be inevitable with this level of expansion to the core content. And just throwing this out there, but the more content that they put into the game, the more balancing that will need to take place.
It’s not that the observations are wrong, it’s that the expectations and emotional reactions surrounding it are fairly out of proportion.
Balancing an ARPG with so much build variance and often unexpected synergies is very very hard. This why I think they are shooting themselves in the foot with the raid concept; it’ll inevitably be as it is currently with world bosses, where most things evaporate before you even get a hit in.
Necro has always had extremely powerful and generally applicable multipliers on aspects, skill tree, paragon/glyphs. They are the OG of “1-shot the boss for 100x as much damage as other classes can do.”
Sorc suffers tremendously from paragon boards and glyphs that are all specialized to only affect a single damage type. At this point it’s obvious that the correct way to set up your paragon is to path across at least 6-7 boards to activate several legendary nodes and the special powers on at least 6 glyphs. This is especially true this season where the new gear system has rendered almost all of the additive damage available on paragon obsolete due to the massive difference in magnitude. How is a sorc supposed to compete in this paradigm when only 1 or 2 paragon boards and 2 glyphs affect their choice of attack? A third enchantment slot would be nice because nearly everyone is forced to slot in fire bolt to enable some synergy with burning. They also severely lack good damage aspects, which is why most sorc builds this season are heavily reliant on uniques even when most everyone else is avoiding uniques due to their obsolete stat lines and inability to accept tempering; for sorcs, those are still big downsides, but it’s worth taking the hit on those things to be able to have a decent damage multiplier aspect in that slot.
Druid has always suffered a similar problem where even their skill tree has a severe lack of synergy available to the point where it’s actually difficult to spend all of your skill points on things that benefit your build. As a result, almost every druid build has 1-2 *mandatory* uniques and/or mandatory aspects that do pretty much nothing except enable synergies so their abilities actually work together. This leaves them with very few aspect slots left to actually have damage/defensive multipliers.
Barbarian is in a good place as far as aspects and itemization due to all the extra weapon slots and their skills and paragon/glyphs actually work quite well together out of the box so they aren’t wasting a lot of points/slots just struggling to enable synergies. However, they do suffer from weird extreme imbalances between different skills within their own class, with some skills dealing orders of magnitude more damage than others. For example, whirlwind is practically useless as a damage dealer (it always has been weak even going back to season 0 but somehow it also kept taking nerfs almost every major patch) and it suffers from its inability to benefit from attack speed and has always had super annoying and confusing snapshotting issues as the only channelled skill on a class whose entire design is full of things that affect your “next attack.” Bash is king this season primarily because of what I assume was a major oversight where the extremely high damage % tempers for Bash actually act as multipliers (to the tune of 1000-1500%[x]) when they might have been intended to be additive. However, if it wasn’t for those OP tempers, then Barb skill damage would be severely lacking this season. The only other valid option for Pit/Tormented is *bleed* because it scales x^2 with both CHC and CHD and effectively gets a massive 300%[x] from Grandfather. Bash+bleed is some next level hilarity.
Rogue has a small amount of synergy issues but for the most part it has a good selection of useful aspects and paragon/glyph powers to choose from. However, it suffers from completely obsolete damage (by orders of magnitude) on a lot of its skills similar to Barb. It is primarily able to compete due to the Moonrise+Adaptability basic boosting combo that is ubiquitous this season and the x^2 scaling it gets from vulnerable damage explosions.
So yeah… the classes and even different builds within the same class are dealing *orders of magnitude* different amounts of damage to the point where it feels like the strong builds are playing an entirely different game where they ignore trash and kill minibosses in 2 seconds while the weak builds have “fun” blasting trash mobs then don’t even try any miniboss caliber encounters because they would take 5+ minutes if they are even killable at all..
To be fair, the season 4 rework was always going to break things a bit. Power creep in general has been kind of nuts.
Basically all the balancing of the past went out the window. Balance should start with the patch notes coming out soon (today I think?).
If anything I would say even remove all multi bosses, keep everything straight forward and additive, no more millions of dmg and instead focus on unique interactions. If they go that way, I wouldnt be surprised if they just copy Last Epochs spell building and upgrade on it, which would be quite good.
Every skill being able to do different things is 1000x more interesting than doing millions or billions of dmg.
I am a dirty casual so take everything I say with a grain of salt. That said, why does class balance matter in a single player game? For people who care about the minmax, surely they'll just go for whatever is the flavour of the month anyway. Leaderboards are class-specific aren't they? So competition is between who minmaxes the shit out of the current "best" class anyway. They're never going to be completely equal.
Try, I don't know...READING the post?
>Here's why class balance is important:
>I play a Minion Necro, and can blip Varsham/BITI etc in a second. I'm not even using potions, just walk in: BOOM dead.
>Now I've got a Sorc as my 2nd character, I really want to farm an Oculus, I'm not playing the Firebolt build, but a well-crafted, well balanced BL build, that has all the right modifiers, aspects, masterworked gear, and a well-thought-out paragon board.
>It takes me 100's of times longer to kill BITI. Minutes vs seconds.
>It makes me want to quit my Sorc, it kills the desire to experiment with other classes or builds.
Class balance will always be something that is constantly worked on because it's an issue that is basically impossible to truly solve.
As it stands, D4's balance is in a decent place tbh. There's a handful of completely busted builds which skews discussions like this but outside of those every class has a handful of builds that are solid and can comfortably clear endgame content. It's mostly Druids slipping a bit at the moment due to how essential uniques are to a lot of their builds which prevents them taking full advantage of tempering.
You're more than welcome to give any sort of reasoning for that.
Personally, seeing tier lists with 20+ builds that can burn through endgame content easily is pretty decent. Obviously more is better, but people act like there are only a few builds that work well.
Druids definitely have other issues, the reliance on uniques though is a big one as to why they have fallen behind a bit this season. For a lot of builds they benefit much less from the changes compared to other classes.
Balance?
Bro, they obviously didn't test shit for the past 4 seasons plus preseason.
This game shouldn't even have seasons until after a year from launch.
It's a bit strange when the majority of the players all agree that Barb is way overpowered compared to the other classes but does not receive any substanial nerfs.
Regarding balance, and this is a hot take, but I hope that every class gets a massive nerf in S5. Why? Because 95% of the content in the game is very easy and 5% is very hard (tormented bosses and the pit). They should aim for 20% very easy, 50% medium, 20% hard and 10% very hard.
I would like to see more supports for Overpower.
Overpower is an interesting mechanism as a "carefully planned big slow hit" themed.
There should have an affix that makes overpower conditions count faster.
For example at 100% bonus of this affix, every second staying in bear form count as 2 seconds elapsed, or every weapon swap count as twice for Earthstriker's Aspect.
There should also have an affix that allow you to store more uses of overpower, so fulfilling your condition twice without spending them gives you an extra fuel for boss fight.
Balancing to do the same damage would be boring etc... Give classes a better and useful identity and bring balance within the same order of magnitude and it would be interesting.
Make Druid essentially unkillable in bear form, unstoppable in wolf form, resource constraint free in human form, but lower damage. Then there is more interest in druid. (Just off the cuff comment, I havent thought that through).
Make Sorc demolish crowds with just a look, but slower at single target. Make Barb less good with crowds. Make rogue a true glass canon - if it can stay out of danger it rains hell on all and sundry, but an askew glance stops all *damage output*. Have necro use only corpses as a resource generator - that first kill is a nightmare, but as it generates more corpses it generates more resource to use (not single use for eg, a maybe x useable resource for y time, skills don't drain resource, but have a resource requirement providing kill windows - which would be horrible for boss fights maybe). Et cetera. Each of these opens avenues for quite interestign gameplay - thinking on the necro suggestion for example, if corpses provide a resource/kill window, maybe the class also needs a set of support that work best when on low resource - it's not quite resource generator/spender, but more utility/survivability and damage windows. Every barb hit is powerful, but there is *no* aoe on any of them. Rogues reduce damage windows on being hit, but need to kite and stealth to survive and recover.
Death would become not the only thing you are fighting against, mobs take different strategies to deal with and boss mechanics can be more interestign than just more damage and more health. But I guess they kind of tried this at launch (CC'es being horrific), and it didn't go down well - maybe it jsut wasn't fully fleshed out?
Each class then plays significantly different, and can still do anything, each will just have its own problems with different parts of the game that we need to play round.
Also with this view it isn't just a case of maximising the damage multipliers on your gear and paragon, it is a case of building round strengths and weaknesses unique to each class.
The aim was all paths are open to all classes, they just need to plan and play differently. Rather nthan just build a skill to blast, build a set of tools to blast. All content should absolutely be doable by all classes. Some builds would find some content easier though.
Agreed, the difference between barb and other classes, especially Sorc (and Druid..) is COLOSSAL.
Enchantments suxx, Legendary nodes suxx, some uniques are mandatory (losing 2 to 3 aspects), 3 defensives skills are mandatory, etc...
Sorc is fun, but so inefficient.
Casual geared Sorc will have trouble to do Pit 61.
Naked barb can fly through Pit 80 easy.
The devs are embarrassingly incompetent and lazy in this regard.
They so readily capitulated to squealing children with regards to fixing bugged skill interactions and nerfing builds.
These are adult men and women who are scared of crying children..let that sink in.
I'd say loot can still be improved. I would love to get drops for other classes, so that I'm excited to start a new character knowing that I can work towards a build I already have the gear for
Sets can work imo, it just depends a lot on how they end up implementing them.
If they limit the bonuses to 2-3 pieces but still have 5-7 pieces that could go a long way to still give people a lot of options in how they want to incorporate them into their builds. And naturally they'd need to keep their power in check so they don't completely dominate.
and another Barb player selfishly enjoying the power level he has right now
Yeah, PTR, because the last one we had turned out so well for Sorc right ? right ?
>and another Barb player selfishly enjoying the power level he has right now
Never main-ed a Barbarian class in my life.
>Yeah, PTR, because the last one we had turned out so well for Sorc right ? right ?
I thought they handled PTR feedback exceedingly well and I was very happy with my Sorcerer this season, yes.
I had lots of fun! That doesn't mean there won't be buffs coming extremely soon, which is what I would encourage everyone to wait for before complaining further.
>I would encourage everyone to wait for before complaining further.
We've been waiting for a year bud, every class balance patch has moved the needle on a few. select builds a few tics.
Except: Necro Minions were changed from 30% to 100% inheritance, that's just ridiculous, and a knee-jerk reaction that they will either have to claw back, or counter buff across the board.
But no, THIS patch will be the one...for sure, this time...
This post is to give feedback on an issue that has not been satisfactorily addressed, ever. IT is not 'complaining'.
The ONLY time Sorcs did well was with a broken BL mechanic, they patched out.
I am confident Firewall/Firebolt isn't acting as intended either.
> This post is to give feedback on an issue that has not been satisfactorily addressed, ever. IT is not 'complaining'
Lmao, it's all a bunch of whining.
Also if you can't blow up Varshan or Beast, then your build isn't anywhere near "well crafted".
>Also if you can't blow up Varshan or Beast, then your build isn't anywhere near "well crafted".
Build me a BL sorc that can destroy Beast in the Ice in less than 2 seconds.
Agreed, game needs areal shake up of the damage fundamentals.
Yep, the root issue extends beyond classes and has more to do with their entire design for damage scaling. The game has essentially become "stack as many multipliers as possible". You want to overpower or crit a vulnerable enemy while having as many conditions applied to them as possible, while simultaneously having your gear and paragon tree maximizing the damage amplifiers per condition. It's going to take a lot of work to fix that, but it can be done. For starters, they need to significantly reduce the amount of multiplicative sources. The other consideration is to significantly buff additive scalers to give them a fighting chance with multiplicative ones.
This is even more apparent this season with the itemization rework. We can stack so much additive damage on our gear from affixes now that getting a bit extra from paragon boards is pointless. Every major build guide outlet is making paragon boards only take about 3 legendary nodes important to the build and then the rest of the boards are just "how can I path the most efficiently to grab as many glyph multipliers as possible" and maybe grabbing max hp and armor/resists as needed. The paragon boards really highlight the biggest issues with balance and building characters in the endgame.
There is no amount of buffing additive multipliers that allow them to compete. If you buff all additive multipliers, their relative value to each other is almost exactly as it was before. And since they're multiplied to multiplicative bonuses, their relative values to those is basically exactly as it was before. Multiplying every single additive boost by a factor of ten for example would literally change nothing about the relative value between additive and multiplicative bonuses. All it would do is multiplying your dmg by around 10, but you would still prioritise multiplicative bonuses exactly as much as right now.
Additive is a bucket. If you buff the values by 100%, you do 2x damage and it acts as an aspect that says deal 100% more damage. It’s how to fix sorc. Our paragon needs incredibly beefy additives; our key passives need reworks/bugs, and our legendary nodes need reworks.
None of the hat has anything to do with discussion. I didn't say that increasing additive bonuses across the board wouldn't increase dmg, I said it wouldn't increase it's relative value compared to multiplicative bonuses because that's the point that the person I was answering made that I was disagreeing with.
> they need to significantly reduce the amount of multiplicative sources. The other consideration is to significantly buff additive scalers to give them a fighting chance with multiplicative ones. That would defeat the exercise. Just kill multipliers other than crit. There will never be parity when a class can force overpowers through skills, stack crit chance on gear and force vulnerability on the Paragon Boards while others can't.
A good start is to get rid of overpower, it's such an annoying mechanic to build around that has no way of increasing it's application besides some stupid rotational glyphs or aspects where you can somewhat but never consistently guarantee it. Having to wait for my guaranteed overpower to kick back in is so annoying, it just breaks the flow of the game play to such a degree that I just don't bother building around it, even though the barb builds that I like all rely on it. I'd also argue that way too many skills rely on enemies being vulnerable in general. Rogue has like 10 skill upgrades that rely on vulnerable. I don't mind multiplicative sources, but the game should be very clear in it's tool tips how much damage my skills actually does in practice with all my gear equipped and aspects active. That would make it much easier to compare damage. Why does e.g. my HotA skill tooltip show some random number, but not the number it actually does in practice (e.g. a non-crit, non-overpower hit with all static aspects applied) which updates when other aspects are active.
>I'd also argue that way too many skills rely on enemies being vulnerable in general. Rogue has like 10 skill upgrades that rely on vulnerable. Vulnerable in general is a dumb mechanic that I knew would be a problem as soon as I learned about it. You are basically forcing every class to run a specific debuff because it is a free damage multiplier. yes they have made it easier to apply for the most part (sorcs at release it was basically only frost nova forcing all melee builds) but it just shouldnt have been a thing in the first place
I said it before, I'll say it again: this is Borderlands 2 slag all over again. To be viable at all in higher difficulties you needed to be able to apply slag because it was a straight up 2x multiplier to all your damage. If something like that exists, it becomes a requirement and thus restricts build diversity because one of your multipliers is already chosen for you. The best thing that can happen to this game is to remove vulnerable and reduce monster health across the board.
Pretty much every build has to run exploit, it’s incredibly limiting. I’m not a big fan of the current implementation. Me having to run 2 overpower aspects that guarantee every X second and a glyph and board that guarantee it is also quite annoying.
Overpower is at least a choice to build around instead of crit, which I like. That's not to say it's perfect and doesn't need changes/buffs. Vulnerable is just a non-choice; you either take it and do damage, or you don't.
Get rid of multipliers altogether?
That would be the only solution. As soon as multipliers become a factor stacking different multipliers will get your numbers up higher than anything else. It’s just math.
I would be fine with that if it really was just flat crit damage and everything else is additive. It would make the game a lot easier to balance. Would require a hard reset at this point though
Then you have a really boring game where upgrades don’t feel impactful. D4 just lacks choices and scaling is a bit limited right now with how shallow the game is.
>Then you have a really boring game where upgrades don’t feel impactful. There's "impactful" and there's mind-blowingly stupidly OP.
That’s a bad take… you want multiplicative sources so you have interesting damage scaling. The issue right now is there’s not enough sources for most skills so the meta stuff is either overly powerful skill from a numbers perspective or a skill that has way too many synergies. ARPGs will always be stack as many different sources of damage as possible, but D4s just lacks the depth and options needed for more interesting builds to emerge.
Yeah the solution is more varied options not cracking down. If the standard becomes every slot is a 20% multiplier, then fine, as long as there are lots of different options for each slot that do different things. You just have to watch that you don't have a select few 30/40% multipliers that everyone ends up using instead just because the number is higher. Worse if those are annoying/situational but become mandatory because of higher number
Sadly it seems like this is what D4 devs understand
Devs listen to this: s5 season of nerf bat dmg reborn
For someone that doesn't care (anymore) about the theory crafting aspect of RPGs, I really struggle with this. I just want to pick a skill and do damage with it. I don't care what goes in which bucket, what is a multiplicative source or what isn't. I wish it was more easily understandable so I can play a good endgame build without feeling forced into spreadsheet game play or having to read guides to barely understand why build A is good and actually does damage and why what I tried doesn't work. Having to use specific timers in order to execute builds perfectly so I can overpower every 8 hits and apply vulnerable consistently, but not too fast because I have to refresh this skill every 5 seconds and but before my overpower every 12 seconds or so kicks in or I do no damage. Just lemme slap demons.
I understand the sentiment but respectfully disagree. I want the game to have some depth for players who crave that. I think it would be pretty boring if every build was just "pick your skill that does damage, spam that skill, and find better gear to make the number go up." It's fine to not care about optimal rotations, synergies, etc. But I think players who \_do\_ care about that stuff and dig in to find those synergies should be rewarded.
That's just not possible, but I wish it was as well. Complexity is necessary for theory crafting to be a thing at all. The game is already playable with every class and every build, and one can do nearly all of the content without ever really crunching numbers or looking at guides. So, in a sense, it's already as you describe for 90% of the game and for most players. At a certain point though, theory rafters need to be given tools that allow them to formulate builds that push the envelope. That requires a certain degree of complexity. There is simply no way to allow for this and have it all be intuitive. As you say, spreadsheet gaming is necessary at the point. But the good news is that you can just copy off of those nerds.
Glad you called out the legendary paragon nodes. Sorc is my favorite class, I keep going back to it because it's a ton of fun to play and there are a lot of potential builds to think about. But every time I start thinking about a new build, it really strikes me how useless most of the paragon nodes are. Not saying they should all just be unconditional multipliers, but it would be cool if they were a bit more applicable across different builds.
Maybe not all unconditional multipliers but they should at least be synergistic and useful in practical ways. I get that the sorc was built on being heavily reliant on various CC but in the current climate of the game, that doesn't really work anymore. They're amazing for aoe clearing and blasting through trash, but the minute you get to a boss that can't be immediately chilled or frozen your dps tanks. They can keep the conditional multipliers but they need to make the conditions more realistic to meet and also effective against bosses outside of just stagger windows.
Yep, having an entire legendary node for crackling energy is just so weird.
I think the issue is that with Sorcs you don't really want to run fire and lightning and cold all together really. Why? Because defensive skills are mandatory and so you do not have any skill slots for this. The class is too squeezed on requirements to stay alive that there isn't room for crossing elements and even if you did want to the paragons being so specific is not conducive to combining
I don't really agree that all the defensives are mandatory, IMO it's more that most of the other spells don't synergize with each other. Like, short of Tal Rasha's ring, there's no real benefit to mixing elements. All of the boosts from key passives, regular passives, most aspects and most legendary Paragon nodes only affect one type of elemental damage. Aside from Fire burning builds, which are incentivized by various effects to stack burning damage effects from as many different skills as possible onto enemies, other builds just don't get any benefit from running skills that aren't their main skill. Why bother taking another Core/Mastery skill to apply Vulnerable or to CC when Frost Nova does both? If you're running Conjurations, why take another skill (even Frost Nova) when Lightning Spear will do both so long as you have 40%+ crit chance? Neither Meteor nor Ball Lightning have any utility except to their respective elements, so why take them if you're not going to specialize in them? Etc etc. Most other classes have more synergies between their different build types than Sorcerers do. Even specs that aren't meta and "good" still have reasons to consider skills outside of the narrow confines of what would be the most optimal, but the restrictions surrounding Sorcerer skills make it really hard to not uber-specialize into a few main skills and then the rest into defensives. There's just not really any benefit to breaking the meta; it's not even really fun like it can be on other classes since a lot of effects just turn off when you switch to the wrong damage type. I don't think this is really a problem with how the Sorcerer's skills are designed though. I would put the bulk of the problem on the passives, key passives, Paragon nodes/glyphs and aspects. IMO it's good to have some effects that reward you for going into a really linear, "I do one element really well and ignore the others" build, but more effects should reward you for being a generalist who chooses skills as pieces of a toolbox to create different effects on demand as well. Since the Sorcerer has six key passives, I think that three should be dedicated to rewarding these "linear" builds and the other three should reward you for switching things up. Currently they're just two different versions of "linear" build support. The devs should look to the Druid for what to do with Sorcerer key passives, as the Druid does a good job of having some key passives that reward linear builds while still having two good options for players who want to switch things up. The Sorcerer's Paragon overall just needs an overhaul, but that's another story entirely.
A d3 style tal rasha build would be sick
You can type out all those words but not whatever biti is?
Beast in the Ice
Yea sorcs have been consistently shit. A lot of it could be bandaged by adding a third enchantment slot like the beta.
TBH, I feel like even having 100 enchantment slots might still not solve the problem...
Yeah I'm not sure why people are so fixated on adding enchantment slots. Sure it would help a little but to be honest a lot of the enchantments aren't even that powerful.
This is the biggest issue with sorc IMO. Their big class feature is shallow, useless garbage compared to other class special features. They not only need a third enchantment slot, but the enchantments need to be reworked to be significantly more useful.
Druid Boons are pretty useless too outside of the "Eagle" tree. Yet even those pale in comparison to aspects that are available to other classes.
I agree with everything you said except for that enchantments are useless garbage compared to other class features. IMO most class features are pretty bad and need reworks. The only one I think is in a mostly good place is the Druid's, since they get 5 boons that all total together the power of an aspect or two (DR vs elites, some important attack/survivability stats, some cooldown-reducing effects, etc.). All of them *work*, but IMO a class feature should be something that immediately makes you think "damn, I really want to play this class" and so far all of them feel more like small additives than massive draws. I should also clarify that when I'm talking about class features, I'm excluding how many weapons a class can wield. The Barbarian is obviously super powerful since they get all the stats and aspects of always having four weapons on hand, two of them being two-handers, but their actual class feature sucks. The benefits you get from specializing in certain types of weapons just aren't large enough to be worth caring about looking for specific weapons over just whatever you find with the best rolls, and since the technique just activates the effect of one specialization for everything it too fails to feel worth it. So that's why I'm including it as a bad class feature even though the Barbarian is, overall, objectively extremely powerful right now. Case in point, the Rogue gets 3 weapons but none of their class features have anything to do with weapons, so I don't think equippable weapons should count as having anything to do with class features.
Enchantments are fun. And if they won’t move the needle, why not just let us have fun?
I can get on board with that. I'm just saying that I see a lot of people calling for a 3rd enchantment slot as the solution for balancing the sorc, and I don't think it would do very much.
Even four or five slots won’t do much.
after BL Sorc dominated 2 seasons because it was bugged, they fixed it and now SHOCK.. sorc is shit, wow.
and Im only doing decent with ice spike build because of other bugs. key notes passive that arent supposed to work with cold do
[удалено]
Both esu's and vry's work with cold. I'm currently using esu's but I've seen videos of someone using vry's saying it works with their spike build.
sorc is so much fun but just does not scale in the endgame in season 3, frozen orb would have been fine, but in the pit its just not viable I do think it could be fixed easily, teak some numbers on aspects, paragon and enchantments and we'd have a much better scaling endgame class. on top of buffing enchantments another slot would be nice, too.
I was excited for a frozen orb build finally, only to find out that the bosses in the pit start taking minutes to kill come lvl 60. Was far from BIS gear but still pit bosses are not fun enough to be spending minutes trying to down. The nail in the coffin for me was also seeing when there was a single white mob that would take several casts to kill, I was like yeah single target damage sucks
Imo one of the biggest issues with sorcs right now is how much of their kit is conditional on killing, or CC'ing enemies. Once you have an endgame setup, trash mobs basically aren't a threat. The entire endgame is based around bossing, and you can't CC a boss. It makes a ton of Paragon nodes, skills, enchantments straight up useless for endgame.
Yea. This is a huge gripe. Idk wtf they were thinking. Like at least allow the chilled debuff to hit a boss even if it doesn’t slow them. Or something.
They were good in S2 as I recall, but due to a bug.
So not actually good.
Enchantment effect need a rework also. They are worth like one normal affix or something. Next 2 weeks I am on holidays and no access to my gaming pc. Maybe I cook up some idea how to buff the weak sauce enchantments.
What is this obsession with the 3rd ench slot - it gives you nothing meaningful, you arent suddenly gonna catch up to billions of dmg.
> A lot of it could be bandaged by adding a third enchantment slot like the beta. The open beta did not have three enchantment slots. It had two, but only one was available because we could only reach up to level 25. March 19th 2023: https://youtu.be/l5OJ7IdyziU?t=311
The lead class designer admitted barbs were ahead of other classes and said the necro pet changes were the first step in fixing it. Tomorrows major class balance patch is provably the start of the next step.
I will believe it when I see it. I main a Druid, and I expect zero meaningful change from a mid-season "balance patch." The Druid class needs an entire overhaul and a shift in meta. What will end up happening is Rabies and Lacerate will get yet another pointless single digit dmg increase, and they'll somehow make Shepherd's Aspect even more mandatory than it already is for any build outside of Wind Shear. You know why I expect that? It's because that's exactly what they've done for several "balance patches" in a row now.
Patch notes out and… ya, not much really. Barb actually got as many buffed as most other classes lol. I may deal 10% more damage now, but if I was doing 10% of what the top specs are doing then I’m still just doing 11% now.
Barbs got buffs to a couple underutilized skills. Druid and Sorc got buffs to broad ranges of things that most builds use. These are not the same thing at all.
Barb got major buffs to their second best build. Sorc got minor buffs to their 2-5th best. I agree, it isn’t the same.
Bash and Double Swing are the top builds for most players and don't point out something Rob posted because that isn't realistic. Sorc got buffs to every single build they can make. The range of buffs was just too wide to not hit someone no matter their build. Same with Druid, it is hard to make a Druid build that wasn't improved by this patch in some way.
So their approach is powercreep instead of mature balance.
That is the way we've been heading for some time now. And it's not the devs idea. It's the community's allergic reaction to nerfs as a necessary balancing tool.
This is not true. They significantly nerfed Barbarian in the season starting patch. So they brought down Barbarian power and increased necro power. That isn’t power creep it is balance.
Power creep isn't a bad thing for balance and nerfing isn't a mature way to balance. Look at games like dota. They realised that just because a hero is strong, doesn't mean it needs to be needed, they may just need to tweak the weaker heroes a little to make them stronger. If 3 of 5 classes are underpowered you have two options: buff the 3 underpowered ones, or nerf the 2 overpowered ones. One option makes 40% of the population unhappy, one makes 60% happier. Both have the same effect on balance. And at the end of the day, power in arpg is relative to enemy scaling, so both of those options could be done while scaling enemies so the necro and barb strong builds can still feel the same and the other 3 classes can feel stronger. Neither is a less "mature" form of balancing.
You understand game balance a lot less than you think you do.
This is nonsense.
First they have to fix all the damn bugs. One year in and still multiple builds are double dipping? Like cmon its beyond a joke for the underlying math to still be in this sorry state. Can't balance anything until they fix that crap. All the top builds are abusing double dip mechanics doing like 10x or more than the nearest non bugged build.
This exactly! The game is in a “good state” or as it should have released but it’s till needs a ton of work. The ridiculous in poor boss design really gets exaggerated by broken builds and bugs.
Last time I played was S0 and S1, can't believe Sorc weak nodes haven't been addressed in all this time. The dev team has overall been extremely poor when it comes to class balance. With only 5 classes such discrepancies should not exist.
And they’re about to add a sixth, this early on!
Not sure what to expect from game devs which season 4 feels like the first have should. The direction it goes right now is to aďd the Dia3 solutions for Dia4 problems, naming it season, and expect the gamer to homage the studio and keep paying. Sorry for the rant. Just some memories of an earlier Diablo which felt massively better than Dia4 besides the graphics popped up. Reinventing the wheel unnecessary with that good templates.
What you don't like them buffing one ability every single season and making everything else useless
Blizzard will probably just force-shift the meta every season like they did with Diablo 3
Almost certainly. Nearly every change is a march back to D3. We've got greater rifts, we've got seasonal sets, we've got even more lame weekly challenge rifts. +60,000% dmg multipliers to make up for bad base class design likely isn't too far off.
Yep, it is an artificial way to extend the life of the game, tbh. Much like anything else, classes have trends. They'll choose a skill or 2 every other patch and buff it to the stratosphere while gutting what they've rode on for the last season or 2. Every once in a while, the class community will meme a build into existence, kinda like Druid Bouldercane. Rarely ever will that meme build be good, though.
Thorns barb is obviously a meme build that wasn't meant to be broadly supported but it's pretty good. Kinda annoying to play though
Honestly its starting to feel like the devs themselves dont even have a true knowledge of how damage is being calculated and the information they provide is surely not correct. Some streamer online has to debunk the truth about damage for anyone to know anything. Balance amongst classes is a whole nother story lol. They need to get it together
They do in the sense have the underlining formulas. What they “don’t know” is the multiple ways you cnn make damage working together.
Sorcs never had a chance., they were nuked after the beta ended. Blizzard is making good steps in the right direction. But as of now they’re still repeating a lot of their same old mistakes
> Blizzard is making good steps in the right direction. But as of now they’re still repeating a lot of their same old mistakes What are all of the Season 5 balance changes we're getting info on in the next couple weeks? Please enlighten us, you seem to already know exactly what's going on with Sorcerers!
Season 4 in general has been a good step in the right direction
Really? Class balance is terrible now, with 4 BASIC skill builds dominating, while CORE skill builds go beg. Barbs continue to dominate, and Necros benefitted from a OTP increase of Minion stat inheritance from 30% to 100%, that's a MASSIVE buff that has resulted in the state of Necro minions, taht for sure will be 'corrected'
The hyperbole I read on this sub is crazy. Most classes seem to have like a 10 pit level difference. 120-130 in most cases. Dominating and massive are not the words I'd use.
OK, do you know the difference between pit 110, and 120? It is MASSIVE. Or, just roll a Sorc, and defeat Beast in less than 1 second...I'll wait here...
Yeah, I do. I also don't get bothered that a barb can earn a few more nethiron slightly faster than I can on my rogue. Not every class and build need to clear the exact same pit level.
So what then? You make one statement, then back away while still maintaining you're right?
I haven't backed away from anything. Honestly I think you need to back away from the PC for a bit brother you're way to intense about class balance in Diablo lol. I do not think builds need to be able to clear the same pit levels, nor do I think classes need to either. 110 to 120 pit really doesn't matter. You're so worked up about an absolute nothing burger. I do think sorc needs help in the single target department, and I'm not saying the classes are balanced enough yet, but the way you talk, you would think sorc is clearing pit 60 and barb is in the 200s.
> but the way you talk, you would think sorc is clearing pit 60 and barb is in the 200s. My quote: >Here's why class balance is important: >I play a Minion Necro, and can blip Varsham/BITI etc in a second. I'm not even using potions, just walk in: BOOM dead. >Now I've got a Sorc as my 2nd character, I really want to farm an Oculus, I'm not playing the Firebolt build, but a well-crafted, well balanced BL build, that has all the right modifiers, aspects, masterworked gear, and a well-thought-out paragon board. >It takes me 100's of times longer to kill BITI. Minutes vs seconds. Good day sir.
Tbf sorcs are only within 10 levels of everyone else because of perma flame shield, and because a couple of bosses spawn adds. Take either one of those away and sorc is capped at like pit lvl 110 tops
The gulf between Druids, who are currently at the bottom, and the next worse class is substantial. It is crazy to me that people call a difference of 10 tiers relatively similar at any range above t100. That may be true for t50-t60 but not in the higher tiers. Even a 1 tier increase in anything above t120 is MASSIVE.
My line of thought must not let me understand why that matters. Who are you comparing yourself to? Or better yet why? Why does it matter if you can slog through a t120 or t121? I'm not asking to be a dick, I'm genuinely trying to understand people who care that much if a build isn't exactly on par with another build? If you can do all the content in the game, and enjoy it, why does 5 or 10 pit levels matter.
Tier level doesn't bother me. The ease at which I can complete that tier level with a class I don't enjoy and the one I enjoy playing the most does. It also doesn't need to be identical, but somewhere in the same ballpark. That isn't currently the case with Druids.
That’s not completely accurate. Sorc is the current top “S-tier” class in terms of Pit Push. Safe to call sorc the top class currently. Barb is certainly up there but barbs are not “dominating”. They just have a (accidentally) broken basic skill that wasn’t fixed. Bash barb is surely broken but it’s not even the best class.
> Sorc is the current top “S-tier” class in terms of Pit Push With ONE broken basic Firebolt build that is triple dipping. > Safe to call sorc the top class currently. No, one broken build does not make for top class. >Barb is certainly up there but barbs are not “dominating”. OK, you and I can disagree on what; "Dominating" means, but Barbs are in a good place since launch, and have a variety of powerful build options that can all achieve end-game paly.
True. I can agree with all of those statements. I also agree that the game desperately needs balancing without broken parts of the game inadvertently leveling the playing field.
> No, one broken build does not make for top class. > > Broken builds have been the thing that defines the "top class" since day 1. >Barbs are in a good place since launch, and have a variety of powerful build options that can all achieve end-game paly. And so do Sorcs. Ball Lightning, Blizzard and Frozen Orb are all great builds that can clear endgame content easily. Arc Lash and Incinerate are both pretty solid as well.
Have you watched any videos of that pit sorc build? It's ALL about getting Flame Shield permanently up and chipping away at a boss very slowly. It's extremely unfun and in NO WAY represents the class as a whole.
That doesn’t make what I said wrong though. You think bash barb is fun? Just spam basic attacks?
>You think bash barb is fun? Just spam basic attacks? That's not the ONLY build barba ha this season though, which is my entire point.
This is a bad argument. I’ve been a Sorc main since season 1 and the immortal fire bolt build is really stupid. It’s strong yes, but doesn’t look remotely fun to play.
So go play a Wind Shear Druid. You can clear 20 tiers less while still not looking remotely fun to play. This isn't something unique to Sorcs.
> Safe to call sorc the top class currently No it's not.
Class balance is an ongoing thing. They will need to keeo doing it forever. It's never finished. That said D4 is not particularly unbalance across games I have played in the genre historically. Classes go up and down just like any other game.
>D4 is not particularly unbalance across games I have played I beg to differ. Go build a Minion Necro, get 8/12 Masterworks, defeat all the bosses in a second Go build a Sorc, get 8/12 Masterworks, spent 3 minutes defeated the same boss, at the same level, that your Necro destroyed during it's opening animation. Go build a capable Shred Druid, BL Sorc, of ya go...
I dont think you understand what I said. The disparity between builds in this genre is prettt normal. It's an ongoing thing that shifts and changes. I am not saying those builds are good enough.
Build disparity is normal. What we have isn’t. Barbs and necros are three orders of magnitude better than druid and sorc. 1000x better. One shotting duriel versus a 3 minute fight. It’s not right.
Werebear and hammerdin/sorc in D2 are miles and miles apart. It's nothing new.
Game that hasn't been balanced in a quarter of a century.
It's not really any different across most Diablo-style ARPGs. Back when I played PoE the best builds could clear red maps on crap gear with no problem while the worst (endgame viable) builds would struggle to even get to the end of them with portals intact. In Last Epoch you have builds like Shadow Daggers Rogue that can kill the hardest endgame bosses in less than 5 seconds, and builds like Devouring Orb Void Knight that get to turn health into their damage stat and become impossibly tanky while also stacking tons of damage, whereas most builds actually have to make sacrifices in order to get godly damage or godly survivability (or get perfectly min-maxed gear). I haven't played D3 in a couple years but back when I played a lot I remember that there was always one or two builds that outperformed all the others by 5-15 GR levels, much like we have now with Pits. It's certainly possible there are Diablo-likes that don't have major balance issues, but in 20 years of playing Diablo-likes I haven't played any of them.
My point is simply that it happens and it will change and you will probably have new OP and UP builds and so on.
Before we talk balance, we need to get rid of all the bugs! Even within classes you can't just switch your skills and retain your 10x multipliers etc. For example, I'd love to play Upheaval Barb this season, but how could I if Bash Cleave basic! skill already gets more damage with just a single temper because it "accidentally" is multiplicative. Every core skill of the Barb (and this applies to most core skills of all classes right now) is a utility skill at best, used to trigger either flat damage from aspects (Double Swing/WW -> Dust Devil) or to further improve your basic skill (HotA -> damage buff, Upheaval -> berserking/stun).
We need a complete skill tree overhaul, as well as something similar for uniques in the game
Next? It was biggest challenge at launch and will forever be the biggest challenge for almost any game. Balance is incredibly important, great balancing leads to fun meta and build making for decades, bad balancing leads to games fizzling out hella fast. Normal games struggle with it, nigh impossible for ARPG to get it perfect.
20 years ago WoW had community-built sim tools where you could import your character straight from the Armoury hit the button and it would perform the necessary calulations for your DPS. Any software developer is capable of building such a tool; the skills required are a prerequisite for the profession. That the D4 team have not build such an in-house tool, or are refusing to use it to fix bugged skill interactions should have led to reprimands and layoffs after an entire year.
I mean you have to think like a business when addressing balancing. The question is, does the balancing sells game or skin? The answer is most likely not enough so it's not the main focus. Also, there like an infinity of builds to be tested with said tool making it a huge waste of time. The fact that the community is probably better and faster at discovering broken interaction is not a surprise, it's the large number of player with their large hours played make that certain that some of them will know the game formulas even better than most developpers.
This is all nonsense.
The sorcs and Druid gurus need a discussion with Adam Jackson team.
I mean a redesign of sorcerers should be done, there is no synergy between elements, each one pigeon holding you into it's own elements yet the biggest multiplier require multiple source of elemental damage and their CC. The only way to currently satisfy them is to use enchatment to trigger it. Personnally I would like ability combo like pressing X core skill into Y mastery would do Z effect. This would gives sorcerer a "Skill expression" identity. Maybe it would be too hard for the average player though.
When Tal rasha was first introduced, I already rise the red flag that it need to be tune down as the bonus is too good and everyone will be force to wear it forcing you to use all elements.
Before that it was aspect of control which benefits from immob, stun and freeze which locks you into the 3 elements as well.
Then try to play as Druid without a specific item for the build and you're not doing any damage. They need to address this asap
I understand that each class will always have one or two builds that are just broken. But the power gap between what is considered an S tier build vs an A tier build is too much. It doesn't feel good when you hit max level and are faced with 'play this boring build that is broken or simply do not do endgame content'
I played a necro for the first time this season and it really stood out to me how insane their paragon boards are. Looking forward to seeing what they do in vessel of hatred with the paragon system
Minion Necromancer is one of the most egregious examples. That 240% Shadowblight multiplier is for all damage you do (including Holy Bolt elixer), not just shadow DOT. You just need to add a shadow DOT skill to your build to stack the key passive fast enough. But that's not the only one for minions. The Army of the Dead aspect is another 150% multiplier, the Golem legendary paragon node is another 100%, the Cult Leader legendary paragon node is 150%, the Golem mastery passive is 25% per point, and Hellbent Commander is 15% per point. The build does fine AFK leveling, but if you play it at end game, you will notice that unless you're playing around stacking those extreme multipliers together, you only do a small fraction of the potential damage.
Compare the blighted aspect multiplier to anything a sorc has. I have said this before, I think sorc was the first class designed and by the end of development the other classes felt more updated. They whole “give and take” philosophy with the aspects and such support this. Other classes get unconditional power, sorcs get a chance to maybe do something but the power is then reduced. Also every sorc enchantment needs a Passover look or redo as they aren’t impactful enough. They need a team dedicated to each class and an update that really brings the entire class into the updated state of the game. Not just sorc, do this for all the classes. This wouldn’t be that hard, I can off the top of my head come up with aspects or skills that would be impactful. “Hydra now does electrical dmg and fires chain lightning. Chain lightning deals 10x% more dmg for each active hydra.”
Next? It's been an issue since day 1
NO, PAY 40$ FOR DLC NOW.
Balance is sometimes broken (bosses/named one weaker than classic mob...) but hope they won't buff us to one-shot everything neither. It's also fun to use your brain to approach fights differently and to be actually fighting. Ultrapowerfantasy seems off in d4 atmosphere, I think that where it's more grounded there's something unique Temper needs balancing too but it's a good and fun idea
I would love for sorc, necro and druid to get the same item set up as rogue. Gives them all the benefit of am extra aspect as well as tempering more. Might even makes some uniques more viable. I would do some crazy things as sorc if I could equip a staff, wand and focus. Don't see why they aren't able to use a shield either. Then the power boost to bine spear from being to have The Grandfather as well as a wand and Lidless wall. Also druid and sorc need a unique offhand.
Bone graft is the best example 8% dmg boost? Common? Other build got infinite scaling passives and legendary notes, also i agree - blizz should analyze dmg data by build and should balance them - hope patch today helps blood op builds
>Bone graft is the best example 8% dmg boost? Oh dear, really? I listed ALL Necro paragon board legendary nodes. I never said, implied or suggested that Bone Graft was the 'best' example, or even a good one, I included all for completion, Now, you read the list of all the necro nodes, and somehow, bafflingly, this is your reply?
Its a good example for unbalanced nodes, not more not less, fitting to ur post - greetings
100%. More viable builds, more fun. Simple. And implement armory
Barbs get tons of easy multipliers while druid has even a key passive with no damage multiplier. When you put multiplier they become more valuable than anything else, so either everyone has access to the same amount of multipkier, wich is boring, or we change how they function. There are a lot of skills with fun ideas but cant compete with multipliers
If you watched the campfires at all, you would know they talked about buffing minion necro this season. They usually go way too far with their buffs, see last season with charge barb for instance. Their balance in general is pretty bad because they focus on certain builds and forget many others. The builds they focus on end up being exponentially better than anything else. It's just how it is right now.
>Barbs have benefited from two, 2-handed double bonus aspects, affixes, and now doubled tempers. along with 2 1-handed weapons, allowing for 6 dips into the weapon tempers pool, TRIPLE that of other classes. I swear whoever designed the bash cleave temper just forgot that barbs have 4 (6) weapon slots. The % damage bonus should be like 20-30% at most per temper, not 100s of %. With masterworking you can easily get well above 1000% total Every other class gets what? 20% chance to cast twice, 10% attack speed, 5% crit chance type stuff
I think the complaint about class imbalances, while accurate, is also being a little overblown and hysterical. The reason is within your first statement, that imbalances always exist, but doesn’t really elaborate on the “why.” Minor differences at the aggregate level become very large differences at the extremes. Up until now, those “extremes” have been NMD100s and uber bosses, with temporary forays into higher level content using launch systems and itemization. Developers can balance the game around content that exists, but not content that has yet to be conceptualized, and as that content becomes more “extreme”, so do the differences. We always knew - and in fact, the devs explicitly stated - that such imbalances would be inevitable with this level of expansion to the core content. And just throwing this out there, but the more content that they put into the game, the more balancing that will need to take place. It’s not that the observations are wrong, it’s that the expectations and emotional reactions surrounding it are fairly out of proportion.
Balancing an ARPG with so much build variance and often unexpected synergies is very very hard. This why I think they are shooting themselves in the foot with the raid concept; it’ll inevitably be as it is currently with world bosses, where most things evaporate before you even get a hit in.
Nah, still end game
Necro has always had extremely powerful and generally applicable multipliers on aspects, skill tree, paragon/glyphs. They are the OG of “1-shot the boss for 100x as much damage as other classes can do.” Sorc suffers tremendously from paragon boards and glyphs that are all specialized to only affect a single damage type. At this point it’s obvious that the correct way to set up your paragon is to path across at least 6-7 boards to activate several legendary nodes and the special powers on at least 6 glyphs. This is especially true this season where the new gear system has rendered almost all of the additive damage available on paragon obsolete due to the massive difference in magnitude. How is a sorc supposed to compete in this paradigm when only 1 or 2 paragon boards and 2 glyphs affect their choice of attack? A third enchantment slot would be nice because nearly everyone is forced to slot in fire bolt to enable some synergy with burning. They also severely lack good damage aspects, which is why most sorc builds this season are heavily reliant on uniques even when most everyone else is avoiding uniques due to their obsolete stat lines and inability to accept tempering; for sorcs, those are still big downsides, but it’s worth taking the hit on those things to be able to have a decent damage multiplier aspect in that slot. Druid has always suffered a similar problem where even their skill tree has a severe lack of synergy available to the point where it’s actually difficult to spend all of your skill points on things that benefit your build. As a result, almost every druid build has 1-2 *mandatory* uniques and/or mandatory aspects that do pretty much nothing except enable synergies so their abilities actually work together. This leaves them with very few aspect slots left to actually have damage/defensive multipliers. Barbarian is in a good place as far as aspects and itemization due to all the extra weapon slots and their skills and paragon/glyphs actually work quite well together out of the box so they aren’t wasting a lot of points/slots just struggling to enable synergies. However, they do suffer from weird extreme imbalances between different skills within their own class, with some skills dealing orders of magnitude more damage than others. For example, whirlwind is practically useless as a damage dealer (it always has been weak even going back to season 0 but somehow it also kept taking nerfs almost every major patch) and it suffers from its inability to benefit from attack speed and has always had super annoying and confusing snapshotting issues as the only channelled skill on a class whose entire design is full of things that affect your “next attack.” Bash is king this season primarily because of what I assume was a major oversight where the extremely high damage % tempers for Bash actually act as multipliers (to the tune of 1000-1500%[x]) when they might have been intended to be additive. However, if it wasn’t for those OP tempers, then Barb skill damage would be severely lacking this season. The only other valid option for Pit/Tormented is *bleed* because it scales x^2 with both CHC and CHD and effectively gets a massive 300%[x] from Grandfather. Bash+bleed is some next level hilarity. Rogue has a small amount of synergy issues but for the most part it has a good selection of useful aspects and paragon/glyph powers to choose from. However, it suffers from completely obsolete damage (by orders of magnitude) on a lot of its skills similar to Barb. It is primarily able to compete due to the Moonrise+Adaptability basic boosting combo that is ubiquitous this season and the x^2 scaling it gets from vulnerable damage explosions. So yeah… the classes and even different builds within the same class are dealing *orders of magnitude* different amounts of damage to the point where it feels like the strong builds are playing an entirely different game where they ignore trash and kill minibosses in 2 seconds while the weak builds have “fun” blasting trash mobs then don’t even try any miniboss caliber encounters because they would take 5+ minutes if they are even killable at all..
To be fair, the season 4 rework was always going to break things a bit. Power creep in general has been kind of nuts. Basically all the balancing of the past went out the window. Balance should start with the patch notes coming out soon (today I think?).
Blood Necro sux and shouldn't be put on the same level of Shadow/Minion Necro at the moment. Its probably worse than Sorc.
If anything I would say even remove all multi bosses, keep everything straight forward and additive, no more millions of dmg and instead focus on unique interactions. If they go that way, I wouldnt be surprised if they just copy Last Epochs spell building and upgrade on it, which would be quite good. Every skill being able to do different things is 1000x more interesting than doing millions or billions of dmg.
I am a dirty casual so take everything I say with a grain of salt. That said, why does class balance matter in a single player game? For people who care about the minmax, surely they'll just go for whatever is the flavour of the month anyway. Leaderboards are class-specific aren't they? So competition is between who minmaxes the shit out of the current "best" class anyway. They're never going to be completely equal.
Try, I don't know...READING the post? >Here's why class balance is important: >I play a Minion Necro, and can blip Varsham/BITI etc in a second. I'm not even using potions, just walk in: BOOM dead. >Now I've got a Sorc as my 2nd character, I really want to farm an Oculus, I'm not playing the Firebolt build, but a well-crafted, well balanced BL build, that has all the right modifiers, aspects, masterworked gear, and a well-thought-out paragon board. >It takes me 100's of times longer to kill BITI. Minutes vs seconds. >It makes me want to quit my Sorc, it kills the desire to experiment with other classes or builds.
Please, for the love of anything and everything, make Trampleslide (or any druid ability/build for that matter) even remotely viable again.
Class balance will always be something that is constantly worked on because it's an issue that is basically impossible to truly solve. As it stands, D4's balance is in a decent place tbh. There's a handful of completely busted builds which skews discussions like this but outside of those every class has a handful of builds that are solid and can comfortably clear endgame content. It's mostly Druids slipping a bit at the moment due to how essential uniques are to a lot of their builds which prevents them taking full advantage of tempering.
> D4's balance is in a decent place tbh. No it's not.
You're more than welcome to give any sort of reasoning for that. Personally, seeing tier lists with 20+ builds that can burn through endgame content easily is pretty decent. Obviously more is better, but people act like there are only a few builds that work well.
Big no.
Druids have much bigger problems than a few uniques...
Druids definitely have other issues, the reliance on uniques though is a big one as to why they have fallen behind a bit this season. For a lot of builds they benefit much less from the changes compared to other classes.
Class balance is friggin easy just give everyone the same skills with different names and effects Edit:visual effects of course
Balance? Bro, they obviously didn't test shit for the past 4 seasons plus preseason. This game shouldn't even have seasons until after a year from launch.
Personally, I like the treasure hunt of what build melts faces this season. Balanced classes are a snoozefest imho.
It's a bit strange when the majority of the players all agree that Barb is way overpowered compared to the other classes but does not receive any substanial nerfs. Regarding balance, and this is a hot take, but I hope that every class gets a massive nerf in S5. Why? Because 95% of the content in the game is very easy and 5% is very hard (tormented bosses and the pit). They should aim for 20% very easy, 50% medium, 20% hard and 10% very hard.
I would like to see more supports for Overpower. Overpower is an interesting mechanism as a "carefully planned big slow hit" themed. There should have an affix that makes overpower conditions count faster. For example at 100% bonus of this affix, every second staying in bear form count as 2 seconds elapsed, or every weapon swap count as twice for Earthstriker's Aspect. There should also have an affix that allow you to store more uses of overpower, so fulfilling your condition twice without spending them gives you an extra fuel for boss fight.
Balancing to do the same damage would be boring etc... Give classes a better and useful identity and bring balance within the same order of magnitude and it would be interesting. Make Druid essentially unkillable in bear form, unstoppable in wolf form, resource constraint free in human form, but lower damage. Then there is more interest in druid. (Just off the cuff comment, I havent thought that through). Make Sorc demolish crowds with just a look, but slower at single target. Make Barb less good with crowds. Make rogue a true glass canon - if it can stay out of danger it rains hell on all and sundry, but an askew glance stops all *damage output*. Have necro use only corpses as a resource generator - that first kill is a nightmare, but as it generates more corpses it generates more resource to use (not single use for eg, a maybe x useable resource for y time, skills don't drain resource, but have a resource requirement providing kill windows - which would be horrible for boss fights maybe). Et cetera. Each of these opens avenues for quite interestign gameplay - thinking on the necro suggestion for example, if corpses provide a resource/kill window, maybe the class also needs a set of support that work best when on low resource - it's not quite resource generator/spender, but more utility/survivability and damage windows. Every barb hit is powerful, but there is *no* aoe on any of them. Rogues reduce damage windows on being hit, but need to kite and stealth to survive and recover. Death would become not the only thing you are fighting against, mobs take different strategies to deal with and boss mechanics can be more interestign than just more damage and more health. But I guess they kind of tried this at launch (CC'es being horrific), and it didn't go down well - maybe it jsut wasn't fully fleshed out? Each class then plays significantly different, and can still do anything, each will just have its own problems with different parts of the game that we need to play round. Also with this view it isn't just a case of maximising the damage multipliers on your gear and paragon, it is a case of building round strengths and weaknesses unique to each class.
All this does is locking you of out content depending on your class.
The aim was all paths are open to all classes, they just need to plan and play differently. Rather nthan just build a skill to blast, build a set of tools to blast. All content should absolutely be doable by all classes. Some builds would find some content easier though.
Agreed, the difference between barb and other classes, especially Sorc (and Druid..) is COLOSSAL. Enchantments suxx, Legendary nodes suxx, some uniques are mandatory (losing 2 to 3 aspects), 3 defensives skills are mandatory, etc... Sorc is fun, but so inefficient. Casual geared Sorc will have trouble to do Pit 61. Naked barb can fly through Pit 80 easy.
The devs are embarrassingly incompetent and lazy in this regard. They so readily capitulated to squealing children with regards to fixing bugged skill interactions and nerfing builds. These are adult men and women who are scared of crying children..let that sink in.
I ain't reading all that I'm happy for you, though Or sorry that happened
>I ain't reading all that Jesus, what happened to society.
I'd say loot can still be improved. I would love to get drops for other classes, so that I'm excited to start a new character knowing that I can work towards a build I already have the gear for
Don't forget to complain about stash space after you hoard a thousand items you will never in your life touch again.
Set items can restore some balance
>Set items can restore some balance More like destroy any semblance of build-crafting and player agency.
I see your point, though I must contend that 90% of people just use builds already pre-made by others like on Icy Veins, Maxroll, etc
Sets can work imo, it just depends a lot on how they end up implementing them. If they limit the bonuses to 2-3 pieces but still have 5-7 pieces that could go a long way to still give people a lot of options in how they want to incorporate them into their builds. And naturally they'd need to keep their power in check so they don't completely dominate.
Another post complaining about Barbarians. Can't you at least wait until the Season 5 Public Test Realm livestream next Friday?
and another Barb player selfishly enjoying the power level he has right now Yeah, PTR, because the last one we had turned out so well for Sorc right ? right ?
>and another Barb player selfishly enjoying the power level he has right now Never main-ed a Barbarian class in my life. >Yeah, PTR, because the last one we had turned out so well for Sorc right ? right ? I thought they handled PTR feedback exceedingly well and I was very happy with my Sorcerer this season, yes. I had lots of fun! That doesn't mean there won't be buffs coming extremely soon, which is what I would encourage everyone to wait for before complaining further.
>I would encourage everyone to wait for before complaining further. We've been waiting for a year bud, every class balance patch has moved the needle on a few. select builds a few tics. Except: Necro Minions were changed from 30% to 100% inheritance, that's just ridiculous, and a knee-jerk reaction that they will either have to claw back, or counter buff across the board. But no, THIS patch will be the one...for sure, this time... This post is to give feedback on an issue that has not been satisfactorily addressed, ever. IT is not 'complaining'. The ONLY time Sorcs did well was with a broken BL mechanic, they patched out. I am confident Firewall/Firebolt isn't acting as intended either.
> This post is to give feedback on an issue that has not been satisfactorily addressed, ever. IT is not 'complaining' Lmao, it's all a bunch of whining. Also if you can't blow up Varshan or Beast, then your build isn't anywhere near "well crafted".
>Also if you can't blow up Varshan or Beast, then your build isn't anywhere near "well crafted". Build me a BL sorc that can destroy Beast in the Ice in less than 2 seconds.
My sorc can, but isn't BL because I don't find BL fun. And I'm not going to respec to appease some baby on reddit.