the damage output nerf is a good start , but butchering the maximum enchantment power from 100% to 50% is a lot , i cuts out a lot from utility , especially in melee gautlets fighting builds , at that level ,the build should have a flow and allow synergy .
now even at max everything there is minimal impact .
my humble opinion is that the max enchantment power should be 70%
Nerfing shouldn’t be done without in depth testing
Seems like a sledgehammer was used where a scalpel would have served…
Yup. An absolute overkill. They didn’t even try to find a sweet spot for the nerfs. They just cut everything in half without thought of how and why.
Melee builds are punished for actually engaging game mechanics. My Damage on Parry build could do hard difficulty crucible with some minor issues (although it took a while due to the nature of the build), now it can’t even handle normal difficulty.
I understand that they need to serve the souls-like combat but it must also serve the ARPG aspect of the game. An ARPG is supposed to make you feel strong, your effort and time rewarding and mastery of enemies (mechanics/dodge/parry/positioning) can make a king. Now I just feel like I am being punished for it. Could Parry everything and play based on that but now you get overwhelmed by 2-2 enemies easy (depending on enemy type).
All they did was reduce build diversity because of how unplayable some stuff has become. They gonna find a few builds that can play the game and that will be the meta. That’s it. Seen it happening before, I don’t even know why I thought it would be different here.
Way over the top nerfs.
Even in Souls like combat you can feel OP towards the end of the game if you go back to fight older bosses. The issue is they nerfed everything but didn’t actually play the game to see enemy output.
Even pre nerf, Cyvion DPS was borderline broken compared to every other boss such that even Plate builds could get stun locked or one shot in a bad run.
The heavy handed balance was because of a lot of heavy handed complaints in these forums. They changed it because of what everyone was complaining about.
Sure, balance changes should be done carefully. I have a counterpoint.
The systems in the game right now will all be deleted for 1.0. The balance right now only matters to people playing right now, since the real balance of the game will rely on the systems they are going to introduce in 1.0.
They can’t balance the game yet. Right now, they are just laying the groundwork for the version of the game they wanted to make in the first place.
I just hope they carefully consider balance before 1.0 hits public release, so they don’t have all of these polarized opinions for the official release of the full game.
Sorry to burst your bubble but the forums were not the vast majority of complaints.
It was the Discord echo chamber.
Yeah I find it really odd that the Discord is considered the main source for all dev decisions.
Not only is the Discord dominated by opinions of a select few, it’s also prone to knee jerk reactions and echoing sentiments due to the nature of instant messaging and lack of committment required to make a post.
A person making a detailed post in the forums is much more likely to have thought things through than a Discord rant, but it’s the rant that gets through the devs each time. That’s really unfortunate and even disrespectful to the others.
This!
-Discord, as a company, has some shady, even evil tendencies. (My playgroup is looking for alternatives.)
-Forums are a superior medium for discussion.
-The discussions here are more thoughtful and mature.
-Official Discords are often like reddit forums where certain thoughts are decided to be the correct ones and everything else is attacked.
-Why put the work into building, maintaining and moderating an “official” forum if they are going to favour discord?
I don’t get it…
i somehow don’t see the studio having a policy “we are going to listen to discord and ignore forums"
i think it’s a far fetched statement
more likely looking at telemetry and how that is backed up by feedback but not
“let’s wait for discord to tell us our development direction”
It’s not set in stone that they favor the Discord, only speculative from the 2 users above you.
If it helps, I don’t think it is nor do I think the Discord is an echo chamber (not more then any group/community is).
@Zenith @Gweddeoran let’s get this topic on subject again please.
Silas
It’s not that they favor it, it’s where the complaints and sentiment were most prevalent, because you can hammer discord every day and ping a developer with complaints about a bow being too easy or a rune being too OP.
In the forum that kind of spam either gets deleted by a mod or the topics get merged. It’s not a constant retreading of “this game is too easy”, “bow is too easy/OP”. People make a few threads and that’s it.
And the nerfs were heavyhanded because it is in the Discord where usually the ease of the game and builds gets exaggerated outside dedicated Youtube channels. Messages get amplified in different mediums, and it makes sense that in some place like Twitch or Discord due to the nature of the chat, the visibility of spammed messages is much more salient to a developer.
The nerfs needed to happen, but that needed to be accompanied to changes to poise, bow stamina economy, and probably revisiting current calculations for mitigation.
Now the game feels awful for cloth/leather fist builds, archers, and dual dagger leather builds. Basically almost anything that isn’t plate 50-60% base DR, or you have to have a mage builds that was so utterly broken with modifiers that now after getting halved it’s slightly less broken.
Either way most of this impact will be felt by the early to mid game, which is not how the nerf should have happened. They should have smoothed out the exponential power curve at the end of the campaign at 30 without making the game more of a slog for levels 10-25.
Blanket nerfs always leave people annoyed, there’s too much collateral damage to otherwise balanced builds.
Maybe, but here is something that might assure you that Discord is maybe not that loud compared to our lovely corner here.
Check this out 
:
Check the “Seen..”
Thomas is almost everyday viewing the forum, unless he’s on vacation or otherwise indisposed.
Thanks for going back on-topic Zenith!
Silas
I don’t doubt he does. He’s in the cesspit of Steam forums getting called names and awarded clown badges for the grave crime of being a responsive developer.
But the topics that show up on these forums are way more varied than what you might find on Steam, for example.
Which is why I countered the post in my original reply that the idea that the nerf and balance direction originate from these forums is highly unlikely given how calls for nerfs are much more frequent in other communication mediums.
These nerfs were a long time coming, it wasn’t healthy for the game to one shot bosses or zoom around the map.
I just wish it hadn’t swung this wildly.
It already happened before with a previous nerf to the bow Siren’s Call that made it pretty much unusable.
Then the poise buffs have made the prisoner witches insufferable and low poise weapons like gauntlets and daggers pretty miserable to play with if mob hp is both buffed while player damage is reduced and damage mitigation sources are reduced while damage is also reduced, massively dragging out fights where bosses are still 2-3 shotting players.
The more glass-like you make players and the more health sponge you make mobs, the more the push to play glass cannon builds because either way you’re gonna get two-three tapped by enemies, so you might as well stack damage and just use dodge roll and not take risk with parries.
It just kills build variety.
In the previous discussion people said that bows were easy, but bows before endgame affixes traded for safety a large penalty in damage. They just do way less damage than a melee build, and are massively stamina hungry, so maintaining that space was critical because if bow shots are taking 1/3 of your stamina wheel, it leaves you heavily open to punishment when distance is closed.
Now the damage and range are significantly nerfed, so mobs reliably get to and stay in your face, but the stamina economy was not fixed so you can both dodge and sprint to distance while having stamina to attack during an opening.
And with the nerf to defensive affixes across the board instead of putting a cap on DR, caster builds are back to wanting to build to spam rune attacks as getting hit on cloth on medium+ difficulty is half your health gone from most enemies while focus gain has been significantly hamstrung, causing casters to have to melee for prolonged time on an armor class that is suicidal for it.
Not exactly true.
I am basing my opinion on multiple interviews with Thomas, his comments, and how in his latest Q&A stream he took questions from the Discord specifically.
Thanks for this, would be following this post for sure 
