Nerfing mid league is a sin, but leaving a DOTH feature unfunctional is fine?

You can't take away their fidget spinner (top priority)

Making a highlight mechanic of the league function... (nah)

Make it make sense.

All balance tuning, nerf or buff, should be league-agnostic and implemented ASAP whenever an issue is identified.

Jonathan has mental gymnastics'd himself into thinking there's a meaningful difference between nerfing at the end of a league (once a new one begins) versus at any other timepoint. He claims players might feel cheated yet ignores how players could just as easily feel disappointed that the build they were planning to try at the start of the next league gets nerfed (nevermind the fact that those who play in Standard are always in the firing-line of the feelsbad he's so desperate to avoid). The same point can be argued both ways. It's a pointless distraction to save their team from doing more work.

This post nailed it.

I was also shocked hearing that backwards logic.

"If you take away the Lightning Spear (and other 100 fuckin stupid OP skills), the players will get disappointed and leave"

Yeah, if you fix a glitch at casino and players won't hit the jackpot at every spin, they will be unhappy and leave. But you have to do it, otherwise what is the point of everything else?

Problem is, if you leave these skills and their stupid power in game, anybody who played that build at least once will never want to play anything else, because there is nothing to improve on.

If you clear entire screen in 1 button, what new and better build you are hoping to create? You know that nothing will beat it, so you give up and wait for new league balance patch.

Don't deactivate the skills, but if something is obviously broken (and there are tons of these) bring it down to the average power, still functional, still encouraging players to push for better.

Leaving these broken things in the game on purpose is in the end a bad choice for everyone. The player who plays it, the players who don't play it and the game itself.

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Sargoth_CZ#3391 написал:

This post nailed it.

I was also shocked hearing that backwards logic.

"If you take away the Lightning Spear (and other 100 fuckin stupid OP skills), the players will get disappointed and leave"

Yeah, if you fix a glitch at casino and players won't hit the jackpot at every spin, they will be unhappy and leave. But you have to do it, otherwise what is the point of everything else?

Problem is, if you leave these skills and their stupid power in game, anybody who played that build at least once will never want to play anything else, because there is nothing to improve on.

If you clear entire screen in 1 button, what new and better build you are hoping to create? You know that nothing will beat it, so you give up and wait for new league balance patch.

Don't deactivate the skills, but if something is obviously broken (and there are tons of these) bring it down to the average power, still functional, still encouraging players to push for better.

Leaving these broken things in the game on purpose is in the end a bad choice for everyone. The player who plays it, the players who don't play it and the game itself.

Thankfully it's already too late.

Most players will play poe2 with speed or not play at all, since 0.1 and 0.2 existed.

If they keep nerfing in 0.3, the game will die for sure.

They need to start buffing, make more builds that is fast, can clear 1 screen in 1 button press and one shot the boss.

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Sargoth_CZ#3391 написал:

This post nailed it.

I was also shocked hearing that backwards logic.

"If you take away the Lightning Spear (and other 100 fuckin stupid OP skills), the players will get disappointed and leave"

I feel it all depends on wether the OP builds are just OP or are truly broken (read: bugged) OP.
If Lightning Spear is just efficient meta without doing actual bugged damage, i feel he is right and there is no real reason to take away the power of people at a time where people will already have invested more time in it overall, than when compared to right at league start.
Unfortunately, i don't see an immediate way to protect standard players such as myself from that where timing will always be inconvenient. I guess it's something to take into account when deciding where to play.

However, ..., If things are truly broken, that should NOT be conveniently postponed along with all the rest.
One of the most despising things about Diablo 4 for example, outside of the garbage game itself, was and remains Blizzard's absolute refusal to nerf the astonishingly bugged and broken builds they always managed to create each and every season, during their season.

"Oh, but if we do that people get pissed about taking their power away and they move on to other games. It's about pleasing customers and player retention"

Well Blizzard, during the dreaded spiritborn season, i got so sick and tired of some meta build joining our group and one-shotting the boss every nanosecond with 10 billion dps, that I left. How is that retaining customers ?

In those cases, that's either a lazy excuse for not having to bother with more mid-league patching, or, they truly lost sight of the other group, which is the one they should actually be protecting since they are the ones not exploiting bugs.

Everyone keeps going on about Lightning Spear and obviously either haven’t played the build or haven’t understood what they’re playing.
Lightning Spear is NOT the problem, Volt Support and how it charges up too quickly IS!
If Volt support, which currently charges 3 charges per meter travelled, was nerfed to 2 or maybe even 1 then Lightning Spear would not clear whole screens so the issue would be fixed.
Also Lightning Spear is not a good bossing skill, to do them ‘we’ (yes I play the build) drop 4 Storm Lances (and this could also me nerfed to max of 3) on a Snipers Marked boss and then Lightning Spear for some extra dmg until Storm Lances expire (or boss moves) when we repeat.

TLDR Lightning Spear is fine, Volt Support needs nerf to 2 or 1 charge per meter and Storm Lance needs to be nerfed from 4 max to 3 max.

Edit : I have missed out some buffs/debuffs from the rotations because you either know them or don’t and they’re not part of the problem.

Edit 2 : Honestly I personally couldn’t care less if GGG made the above fixes mid league or buried the entire build at league end, although burying the entire build is going to ruin a lot more (builds) than just this specific build.

Edit 3 : Lightning has always had an advantage because it does what real world lightning does and forks. Cold has a similar but lesser advantage that it freezes. Fire seems imo to have a disadvantage in that ignited mobs are not ‘screaming’ and to some degree immobilised by that, but I suppose they do spread their debuff.

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outlander19900#0213 написал:

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Timbo Zero#8289 написал:

Everyone keeps going on about Lightning Spear and obviously either haven’t played the build or haven’t understood what they’re playing.
Lightning Spear is NOT the problem, Volt Support and how it charges up too quickly IS!
If Volt support, which currently charges 3 charges per meter travelled, was nerfed to 2 or maybe even 1 then Lightning Spear would not clear whole screens so the issue would be fixed.
Also Lightning Spear is not a good bossing skill, to do them ‘we’ (yes I play the build) drop 4 Storm Lances (and this could also me nerfed to max of 3) on a Snipers Marked boss and then Lightning Spear for some extra dmg until Storm Lances expire (or boss moves) when we repeat.

TLDR Lightning Spear is fine, Volt Support needs nerf to 2 or 1 charge per meter and Storm Lance needs to be nerfed from 4 max to 3 max.

Edit : I have missed out some buffs/debuffs from the rotations because you either know them or don’t and they’re not part of the problem.

Edit 2 : Honestly I personally couldn’t care less if GGG made the above fixes mid league or buried the entire build at league end, although burying the entire build is going to ruin a lot more (builds) than just this specific build.

I agree that nothing wrong with lightning spear.
My last character in hc was a stormweaver with 10k es playing lightning spear with 20k dps. I have never played a meta builds, I'm very basic player and play for fun and look nothing up.

Lightning spear itself is nothing special, it's the meta interactions that build makers find that raise the ceiling too high.

Lightning spear is absolutely normal, it's the meta interactions and gems that are the problem.

And if all these people who don’t understand the issue get their way then your non-meta build is dead.
If people are going to complain about something they really should know what they are complaining about other than the FOMO.

They way they are dictating people play goes as follows...

Release a shotgun of new things (only 10% are effective and only about 30% function).

Let people waste their time testing everything that was not previously tested.

Let the community either "enjoy" their favorite character and take 3x times longer to do anything in game. Or swap to the FOTM build and "enjoy" the game.

The issue IS NOT lightning spear. The issue is a the top down decision making and lack of internal testing.

The issue is exacerbated by the inane development cycle being beholden to a 10 year old game, and refusal to prioritize MAJOR content features that have been bugged and useless since launch (specters).

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LordKillius#0678 написал:

They way they are dictating people play goes as follows...

Release a shotgun of new things (only 10% are effective and only about 30% function).

Let people waste their time testing everything that was not previously tested.

Let the community either "enjoy" their favorite character and take 3x times longer to do anything in game. Or swap to the FOTM build and "enjoy" the game.

The issue IS NOT lightning spear. The issue is a the top down decision making and lack of internal testing.

The issue is exacerbated by the inane development cycle being beholden to a 10 year old game, and refusal to prioritize MAJOR content features that have been bugged and useless since launch (specters).

Your initial title and post implied (and others picked up on) the Lightning Spear issue (probably due to your “DotH Feature” mention) which is why I made my posts.

GGG has, since I started playing in 2017, had a habit of nerfing a bunch of things and making new things ‘meta’. It appears to be their business model for selling skill mtx and to encourage us to play new builds and not just keep playing the same old thing again and again (Explosive Arrow was meta for ages and bored me silly).

Whether we agree with this strategy or not is largely irrelevant as it’s their product to manipulate as they think will serve their business best (rightly or wrongly).

As for features and bugs, give them time and they will get there. This is a glorified beta and they are being communicative (although I think they could do better) and are now (allegedly) committing to 4 month major updates for both games (alternating each 2 months).

Honestly I am with the rest of the community in that I am impatient for new stuff, but also impressed with how far they’ve come from the hot mess (way rushed release of EA and PoE1 stalled for 7 months over normal league renewal) they launched PoE2 in.

Eh we agree to disagree on one thing at least. I feel like a real bait and switch happened from December till now. The overall confidence in buying into the development and "vision" of the game is gone and leaves me with same bitter feeling of buying d4 and booting up a game that did not function in an acceptable capacity. To boot while the clock ticks by and the "major feature" from DOTH sat untouched and un functional we got loot boxes, MTX push, retroactive MTX transfer from POE2 to POE1 (the exact opposite of what was promised), more MTX stash tabs (that should have already been covered by fragments tab). Almost every development principle they spouted in December has turned out to be a lie. Not only have they not addressed this at all, they have doubled down to say. POE2 is literally beholden to POE1 in every way, it shares dev space and literally EVERY stat line.

I don't have the level of enthusiasm for updates or seasons when it's being handled like every other game company, I went it for it because I believed the lies and hype from December. Can't get a refund, and likely won't ever win that level of trust back either.