just wanted to say a huge thank you to everyone @ the studio for keeping it real and keep pushing this game forward
i appreciate your work a lot and every time i load a different game i get reminded by how much sheer quality i’ve learned to take for granted with NRFTW
BIG KUDOS
you are doing great
this patch is just one of many massive green flags
To me it’s a red flag because they made all builds worse instead of selectively balancing weapon move sets and Runes. All this did is make bad builds worse and good builds a bit less impactful.
If they really wanted to fix things, time to address the discrepancies between weapon classes, and move sets within the same class. Or the redundancy in so many Wand and Staff Runes that all do the same thing with slightly different VFX.
Or just leave balancing till the very end before release when everything has been released into the game. This haphazard approach is a terrible way to fix things.
while it’s true that content balance (runes, weapons etc) matters, it’s much easier to do that once the floor and ceiling of power are closer together
when scaling is high, “super stronk” builds look amazing and weaker ones can still function off multipliers, but it’s harder to see what’s actually working in the core combat
so scaling things down first seems like a reasonable step to me
and anyway, the game’s in a really good place overall
i will hold off complaining about runes and poking holes in the multiplier math for one full day
When you frame it that way, I do agree, since as you said, weaker builds will do worse and will stand out more.
I think now the onus is on the players (and also the devs) to actually go over weaker builds and identify the key issues with them. Obviously, some builds are weak because they have no synergy and we can never expect those to perform well.
However, we now need to start looking at categories and weapons within those categories. I noticed how some staves have much faster movesets (False Truth vs Pinwheel) within the same class for no drawback, which makes them a lot better.
I also think we need to look at categories in general, since some are very weak compared to others now, such as Rapiers in the 1-handers and several 2-handers which feel weaker than Scythes that are fast with decent poise damage.
if i was the developer i would rollback any ‘‘balance’’ changes immediately, until meaningful and in depth testing and fine tuning is done at all aspects of the game regarding damage and utility , now they just made game unplayable for half the player base . at least raise the max enchantment power to 70/80 %
i think a lot of the frustration is coming from loss of power, which is fair, but for me the patch made combat actually matter again. before, a lot of encounters were just getting deleted
curious to see how it feels once people adapt a bit
Try fighting a pestilance level 4 Boss , you are getting deleted with everything maxed out 
Its sad to hear you feel this way but its good that you voice your opinion atleast ^^
but let me remind you that this is Early Access and we are the Testers but we are also here to have fun in the game of course.
Therefore try the game for a few days longer and come back make suggestions aswell as bug reports if you find any 
(of course they are testing it too, but they aren’t just Developing this game for themselves, they are Developing it for all of us)
Im not saying that you are wrong or right. 
yes of course its just feedback from people who love the game after all , they can do whatever they want
Yep, that testing is Early Access =D
We can’t expect the devs to go over every build one by one with every possible variation in difficulty and piloting level and then fine-tune them.
One of the points of Early Access is to generate data from the playerbase. They can look at completion times, amount of deaths, DPS, and a myriad other info to know what builds work in general, which items are OP, which are avoided, and how to balance everything.
They have said previously (and this is in line with many, many other games) that balance is an ongoing struggle. Everything is balanced until that one player finds that one strat or build which cheeses your boss.
A game like Grim Dawn (which is 10 years old) still receives balancing updates.
Honestly the amount and quality of content of NRFTW is already absurdly good and I think the update is a step in the right direction - not to say that everything is right and perfect, but they’re working towards that goal.
While I agree that EA is meant for testing, there should still be a structured approach to balancing so it respects the customers’ time. We did pay for a product after all, we aren’t freeloading beta testers.
I hope that future changes are more nuanced and focus on balance between weapons and runes instead of blanket nerfs that make weaker weapons/build options even weaker.
Bigger balancing changes, including runes, will be made with the class system. Those will hopefully address many of the current issues. We’ll have to wait and see.
I think these stopgap balance changes are shoehorned in on purpose. They are saving the real balance changes for when the systems they actually want to use are in the game.
There is no point in balancing the power systems we have now since they will replace it almost entirely when 1.0 comes out.
I’d rather they give us bad balance now, so they can focus on getting 1.0 ready for release sooner.