Balance is NOT possible - PROVE ME WRONG

I see tons of threads here about balance.

- Nerf build X, buff build Y
- Nerf gem X, buff gem Y
- Nerf passive node X, buff passoive node Y
- Nerf ES, increase life
- Buff uniques
- Remove IIR, keep IIR, change IIR
- Make bosses harder or make bosses weaker
- tons of threads about mapping and how to balance it
...

And this list is by far not complete. We, the community, ask for TONS of changes all the time, sometimes even in complete opposite directions. Some builds one-shot every content in the game, other can clear whole maps within 10 seconds and then there are non-meta builds who struggle with the content, have low clear or kill speed. Are these builds bad? Most of the time I don't think they art particulary bad, but ofc they are not optimized and no math has been done.

For me, the question arises: Is balance in a complex game like PoE1 and 2 possible at all? There are SO many variables in this game that influence the power of your character:

- Rare equipments with tons of modifiers
- Unique items with special abilities
- Weapon choice
- Runes
- Flasks and charms with different effects
- Passive tree
- Character choice that influence start on passive tree
- Ascendency tree
- Atlas Tree
- Active gems
- Passive gems
- Maps with tons of modifiers
- Precursor with modifiers
- Bosses with different abilities, movement patterns and resistances
- Monsters with different abilities, movement patterns and resistances
- Vaal orb that can do alot of unpredictable things to many of the above listet things

ALL these things interact with and influence each other If you touch one aspect, you automatically touch any other aspect as well.

Example: When people say nerf Lightning Spear, how would you nerf it? Just scale the damage down? Yeah, sure, that would definitely help against the overpowered builds. But what about people who don't "abuse" Lightning spear in that way and take a different route where Lightning spear is just mediocre? If you nerf that skill now, you will not just scale down the OP builds, you will definitely destroy Lightning Spear builds where it would've just been mediocre. Because now it becomes weak for these people. That means, GGG kinda has to carefully consider on how those overpowered builds work and carefully change some values on multiple variables to nerf something, without making it useless for 90% of all possible builds.

I would argue that GGG will never reach a point where builds that can one-shot content are not possible. We will also always have some zoomers that clear maps within 20 seconds. There are too many variables and players will always get creative to find something new. That's the price GGG has to pay for creating a game that offer so much build freedom. Especially when the game offers things like "increased damage" and "more damage". This allows exponentiell growth and damage goes through the roof.

Ofc, some say: Just "cap damage". Yeah... no. That's not how you create an interesting game. This way, 80% of the builds will cap their damage and focus the rest of their skillpoints and equipment modifiers into defensive stuff. End result would be: Everything feels similiar/identical. It would make the game boring. Everyone loves to see their dps increase when they put on a new weapon or level up their gem. Capping that would remove enjoyment for many people and would take away lots of freedom/build diversity.

That's why I say: balance is never possible. We can adjust certain things, but you will find overpowered stuff in every season and GGG can only react to the meta that develops there.

I suggest a very simple solution: gamedevs need to do a damage cap on the boss and a damage per second cap on the boss. Now let the meta builds instead of the boss's oneshot fight with him and execute like everyone else :) It would also be nice to balance the broken damage from some bosses' skills. Then the game will become much better.

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Zar_Wagash#5933 a écrit :

I suggest a very simple solution: gamedevs need to do a damage cap on the boss and a damage per second cap on the boss. Now let the meta builds instead of the boss's oneshot fight with him and execute like everyone else :) It would also be nice to balance the broken damage from some bosses' skills. Then the game will become much better.

Exactly what I have argumented against:

"Ofc, some say: Just "cap damage". Yeah... no. That's not how you create an interesting game. This way, 80% of the builds will cap their damage and focus the rest of their skillpoints and equipment modifiers into defensive stuff. End result would be: Everything feels similiar/identical. It would make the game boring. Everyone loves to see their dps increase when they put on a new weapon or level up their gem. Capping that would remove enjoyment for many people and would take away lots of freedom/build diversity."

Starting by not copying code from a decade ago might help.

They are creatively locked by trying to cheat a second title out of what was already a haywire mess of code.

Balance is possible, when you start fresh in a new environment and it's clear that whoever wrote all of POE 1 code is either aging out of ability to recreate similar code or never did so in the first place and is riding the coat tails of whoever pioneered everything in POE 1 to begin with.

This game sadly is always going to be a worse playing, better looking version of POE 1.

We got hoodwinked. Simple as that.

you can achieve balance by making every build viable.

they dont have to be equal. that would be equality, not balance. but they all have to be passible in terms of being able to do roughly the same in terms of performance.

right now, they dont have balance at all, in these terms. and realistically, it would be fairly easy to do. they have the data.... it is ea... so they have the time to do it.

hell.. with dev commands, they could do it with 1-2 testers, within a day or two just by themselves.

just pump up those numbers to make it so every skill or combo of skills can actually complete all content in roughly the same ammount of time with roughly equivilant gear/stats/etc.

would be even easier, and faster, to let the same set of monsters hit you, with a variance of defenses @ set numbers. like say... for example, 6k ES / 1.5k life. (obviously dif numbers for the other defenses and mixes of them. but i really only play es.)

all it would take, is the data from a set baseline number of +skill level, since they are hell bent on that stat being the end all be all for damage numbers... say, lv +28 as the baseline, as it would be pretty easy for every single build, to be able to get +7 w/ a corrupted gem, or +8 flat skill level in total on gear/passives/etc. that would give them a pretty nice starting point to do it, as if you cant complete t15's at +8, that would be a pretty serious problem.

then you take the numbers of that, and -/+ nerf/buff to keep the dps numbers relatively close. (by say... 250k.... 500k... +/- or w/e number they want it to be close by)

they know this.

they just wont do it.

Not all feedback is created equal.

I actually developed a mod for a game that's more complicated than PoE2. Most notably it's everything you said but also a class-less system. Those are notoriously hard to balance.

In pretty much any PvE RPG style game 'close enough' is a mantra. Long as everything feels reasonably viable being off by a small margin isn't an issue. Oh and I also have combo / payoff systems in the mod but they're not mandatory. They simply properly reward the effort.

GGG has a few concept flaws in how they design games which creates more problems than needed. One notable issue is they put too much emphasis on bosses. This inherently devolves gameplay into a glorified boss rush. They also put crafting front and center when it should be side by side with drops.

Probably the worst offender is design is their numbers are too big.

For instance if a moderate investment in armor only gave you 30%DR and Evasion gave 40% then they wouldn't need the silly Little Hit Vs Big Hit mechanic. They could simply have things they want hit hard do so. There's no excuse for caps in games like this.

They also launched with things like +10 total Skill levels which is just obscene to me.

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LordKillius#0678 a écrit :

Starting by not copying code from a decade ago might help.

They are creatively locked by trying to cheat a second title out of what was already a haywire mess of code.

Balance is possible, when you start fresh in a new environment and it's clear that whoever wrote all of POE 1 code is either aging out of ability to recreate similar code or never did so in the first place and is riding the coat tails of whoever pioneered everything in POE 1 to begin with.

This game sadly is always going to be a worse playing, better looking version of POE 1.

We got hoodwinked. Simple as that.

Nah, it's not possible. PoE1 never had the vision for "meaningful combat". PoE1 was always designed for "lets see how fast you can get" or "lets see how much dps you can reach". So balance was never really that important. The only thing GGG did was nerfing obvious skills that were overpowered without any meaningful investment. But other then that? PoE1 always allowed escalation.

But PoE2 is supposed to be different. Yes, they copied some of the things from PoE1 which are probably prone to change in the future. But other then that, I don't think you can perfectly balance this game at all with so many different variables. There is no ARPG (excluding PoE1) that offers so much character build freedom then PoE2. And that makes it near impossible to balance.

"

Innuendos#5095 a écrit :

you can achieve balance by making every build viable.

they dont have to be equal. that would be equality, not balance. but they all have to be passible in terms of being able to do roughly the same in terms of performance.

right now, they dont have balance at all, in these terms. and realistically, it would be fairly easy to do. they have the data.... it is ea... so they have the time to do it.

hell.. with dev commands, they could do it with 1-2 testers, within a day or two just by themselves.

just pump up those numbers to make it so every skill or combo of skills can actually complete all content in roughly the same ammount of time with roughly equivilant gear/stats/etc.

would be even easier, and faster, to let the same set of monsters hit you, with a variance of defenses @ set numbers. like say... for example, 6k ES / 1.5k life. (obviously dif numbers for the other defenses and mixes of them. but i really only play es.)

all it would take, is the data from a set baseline number of +skill level, since they are hell bent on that stat being the end all be all for damage numbers... say, lv +28 as the baseline, as it would be pretty easy for every single build, to be able to get +7 w/ a corrupted gem, or +8 flat skill level in total on gear/passives/etc. that would give them a pretty nice starting point to do it, as if you cant complete t15's at +8, that would be a pretty serious problem.

then you take the numbers of that, and -/+ nerf/buff to keep the dps numbers relatively close. (by say... 250k.... 500k... +/- or w/e number they want it to be close by)

they know this.

they just wont do it.

Sorry, but that's a very naive take on balancing. The formulares for damage in PoE2 are crazy. You have so many things that give additive or multiplicative damage. Furthermore, you can use a skill in SO many different way. Like self-cast, auto cast, cast when crit, cast when ailment etc. You can use it as your only damage source or combine it with other attack skills/spells. If there is ONE overpowered build for a certain spell that deals 6 million dps, that doesn't mean it also deals 6 million dps if you try out a different build with it. Like I said above, if you nerf a skill to nerf a certain BUILD, then you not just nerf the BUILD, you nerf ALL builds related to that skill, reducing the number of possible builds. And a game like this strives to enable you to create thousands of different builds, if you are creative enough.

"

Xzorn#7046 a écrit :

Not all feedback is created equal.

I actually developed a mod for a game that's more complicated than PoE2. Most notably it's everything you said but also a class-less system. Those are notoriously hard to balance.

I would be interested to know which game you are talking about. Because more complex then PoE2 with all the variables I have mentioned above? I really wonder.

"

Xzorn#7046 a écrit :

In pretty much any PvE RPG style game 'close enough' is a mantra. Long as everything feels reasonably viable being off by a small margin isn't an issue. Oh and I also have combo / payoff systems in the mod but they're not mandatory. They simply properly reward the effort.

GGG has a few concept flaws in how they design games which creates more problems than needed. One notable issue is they put too much emphasis on bosses. This inherently devolves gameplay into a glorified boss rush. They also put crafting front and center when it should be side by side with drops.

Probably the worst offender is design is their numbers are too big.

For instance if a moderate investment in armor only gave you 30%DR and Evasion gave 40% then they wouldn't need the silly Little Hit Vs Big Hit mechanic. They could simply have things they want hit hard do so. There's no excuse for caps in games like this.

They also launched with things like +10 total Skill levels which is just obscene to me.

Even if you take out the +10 total skill levels, this game would still have balance issues. Don't get me wrong: Their heavy focus on crafting, trading and +skill level is - in my opinion - not a good choice, but again: This game offers to many variables.

"

AceNightfire#0980 a écrit :

"

Innuendos#5095 a écrit :

you can achieve balance by making every build viable.

they dont have to be equal. that would be equality, not balance. but they all have to be passible in terms of being able to do roughly the same in terms of performance.

right now, they dont have balance at all, in these terms. and realistically, it would be fairly easy to do. they have the data.... it is ea... so they have the time to do it.

hell.. with dev commands, they could do it with 1-2 testers, within a day or two just by themselves.

just pump up those numbers to make it so every skill or combo of skills can actually complete all content in roughly the same ammount of time with roughly equivilant gear/stats/etc.

would be even easier, and faster, to let the same set of monsters hit you, with a variance of defenses @ set numbers. like say... for example, 6k ES / 1.5k life. (obviously dif numbers for the other defenses and mixes of them. but i really only play es.)

all it would take, is the data from a set baseline number of +skill level, since they are hell bent on that stat being the end all be all for damage numbers... say, lv +28 as the baseline, as it would be pretty easy for every single build, to be able to get +7 w/ a corrupted gem, or +8 flat skill level in total on gear/passives/etc. that would give them a pretty nice starting point to do it, as if you cant complete t15's at +8, that would be a pretty serious problem.

then you take the numbers of that, and -/+ nerf/buff to keep the dps numbers relatively close. (by say... 250k.... 500k... +/- or w/e number they want it to be close by)

they know this.

they just wont do it.

Sorry, but that's a very naive take on balancing. The formulares for damage in PoE2 are crazy. You have so many things that give additive or multiplicative damage. Furthermore, you can use a skill in SO many different way. Like self-cast, auto cast, cast when crit, cast when ailment etc. You can use it as your only damage source or combine it with other attack skills/spells. If there is ONE overpowered build for a certain spell that deals 6 million dps, that doesn't mean it also deals 6 million dps if you try out a different build with it. Like I said above, if you nerf a skill to nerf a certain BUILD, then you not just nerf the BUILD, you nerf ALL builds related to that skill, reducing the number of possible builds. And a game like this strives to enable you to create thousands of different builds, if you are creative enough.

not as naive as thinking this game has thousands of builds.

it doesnt. 56% of the playerbase is 1 of three ascendency, and the vast majority of those, are like, 1-2 builds each.... that info isnt hard to find my dude.

once you set the baseline with what i said, you will see what outliners there are once you put the passives into effect(which is its own shitstorm), and can again, -/+ from there.

not rocket science.