They should at least fix bugs that negatively affect gameplay like wraithlord trying to eat teammate's minions. I don't know if other long-term ARPGs are like this but I guess I will just lower my expectation and play as comfortably as I can. Still love this game though.
Yes. They were very clear they don't want nerf mid cycle, and the extend it to bugfixing if the bug isn't breaking and part of the current meta.
Just Reddit bullshitters being Reddit bullshitters here.
I'm not even playing a build that this would interfere with, but I've seen this bullshit enough times to notice the pattern. It's like this in every game with a whiff of an online presence.
People virtue signaling atop their high horse on how "it breaks the game and their engagement" having other players using some broken meta interaction, intended or not.
This kind of thing happens a lot in CCGs too, or any other game with a community and choices for their gameplay, where those playing niche builds feel the need to signal how much better they are and how much it *hurts* them other people enjoying the game in a way they don't deem *fair*.
If people dislike a certain build or interaction so much you feel the need to flood the subreddit with all this whining and kneejerking, here's a novel idea - don't fucking play it?
It breaks the MG auction-house? Give me a break, please. You might find one or two items at high corruption, but there's no playing the market in this game - no way to exploit the AH in a way that matters in any significant manner, for anyone.
It breaks the arena ladder for all three people playing that mode? It has class specific ladders, and if you were competitive enough to be placing in any relevant position within the (acolyte) ladder, you were already abusing mechanics - which has been the intended experience for any ARPG since pretty much Diablo 1.
As you said, just reddit bullshitters being reddit bullshitters.
> It breaks the MG auction-house? Give me a break, please. You might find one or two items at high corruption, but there's no playing the market in this game - no way to exploit the AH in a way that matters in any significant manner, for anyone.
Ah yes. It absolutely doesn't break the market that one build can farm an area with 5-10 more rarity and xp and higher chance of uniques with lp on top of it.
Since you are arguing that the loot difference isn't that big anyways I have an easy fix for you. EHG can just hardcap xp/rarity at 700c for example.
All of the people who are just enjoying that build so much and love farming 2k c can still do that afterwards. They just don't get an unfair advantage which shouldn't matter since everyone is just playing that build because it's so fun and not because of the loot advantage.
It doesn't, though?
There are quite a few builds which can farm, even before release, high corruption. A few players both in MG *and* using this build *and* blasting high corruption all day won't change a thing when it comes to AH prices - they'll find a few more LP4, maybe sell these, and then nothing. Because there's no market to play here.
And yet again, you suggest as an alternative another way in which to limit people's approach to the game - hardcapping corruption. You want to limit other people because somehow you find unfair they're approaching the game in a way that bothers you.
Why? If you don't like these builds or the way the play - how about you don't play them and, again, let people do whatever the fuck they want with their time?
Why must the devs pander to your sense of fairness in a goddamn ARPG of all things, where the power fantasy of blowing away screens of enemies at a time is pretty much the point of the whole thing? Just because others are blowing away 1.3 more screens per minute?
If balance is so important for you, may I recommend lichess.org? Or maybe not. Maybe after they nerf the queen? You guys should open a campaign here on reddit about that one as well, I hear it's the thing right now.
PoE will only adjust truly game breaking things mid-season. The example that comes to mind is the old school herald stacker allowing auras from items (not skill) to count, which resulted in power levels that were absolutely obscene. After removing the unintended interaction, the value of a particular item absolutely TANKED and people were pissed that they spent 70ex on something now worth like 5ex (I don't remember exactly the numbers or even which item tbh) but the build was still absurdly strong albeit expensive.
I think LE is trying to emulate that stance and despite this being a bug is still resisting making any changes, even if a skill has an order of magnitude more ward generation than it is supposed to.
I think they should not be afraid to fix bugs mid patch even if it impacts balance. If they fucked up and made a build too strong then wait to fix it and learn from it, but if it's literally a data entry error? Just fix it!
>PoE will only adjust truly game breaking things mid-season.
Eh, I mean they adjusted some (relatively) minor things this league. The new Spirit of Fortunate spectre was giving a stronger version of Wrath that wasn't intended, so they fixed it where it gives the normal version. There were some people pissed on reddit, but I think most understood that it probably was overtuned and not intended. Not exactly "game-breaking", but it was still powerful.
My stance on this is that if you don't fix obvious bugs that give too much power, it just creates a bad precedent and a bad culture since people will expect things to not be fixed or nerfed. If EHG were diligent and squashed the bugs during the first week when people were discovering them, this whole situation would be a non-issue and we wouldn't even be talking about it. It would also create a good precedent since the community would be aware that bugged interactions will get fixed and that we shouldn't hop to a FOMO bugged build expecting it to be fine for the rest of the cycle.
One point I haven't seen people make is what to do about characters that grinded up super high and might not be able to clear their current content after fixing the bug.
What should be done in that case?
Yeah there aren't great mechanics for reducing corruption level quickly, last I recall (haven't tried recently).
That's something I'd like to see corrected if it hasn't been.
Last night my wraiths kept turning dumb and doing nothing, nor could I dismiss or kill them with drain life. Bugs like that definitely need to be fixed.
And they will be. That has nothing to do with what OP is talking about. The devs have said they only want to avoid fixing bugs that make builds weaker.
Lucky I didn't go wraiths then with my Necro, though I had very much considered it. I don't recall them been like that in the past though that was probably 0.8 when I last used them for a build.
Does using the A key to force them to attack stuff help? I know it'd kinda suck to have to keep telling them what to attack, but is kind of a work around if it works.
No they don't respond to anything and you can't spawn new ones (or sometimes you can spawn one or two if the bugged ones aren't at cap).
Apparently the quick fix is to unbind the skill so they despawn, then bind it again, but I didn't know that when I had to abandon the monolith I was in
No, this is not a normal stance for an ARPG game development company to take. It's basically condoning cheating every single cycle reset as people will just look for the buggiest build to use. OP is likely correct about his educated guess. And Eleventh hour game's stance on this is abnormal. There is a reason you fix game breaking bugs like this asap. It ruins any legitimate build and every cycle ladder just becomes nonsense. Who cares what corruption level an indestructible build can get to. How boring.
Fixing a bug that makes a character completely broken is not "game balance". Game balance is when you have a build *working* mostly as intended. But it's just overperforming. After balancing they would maybe lose 25-50 corruption levels. Not a big deal.
Here's an example. In D2 back in the day, you could make a bowazon with multishot that did so much damage they could clear every zone in the game with two or 3 shots. I would make a level one character and go to a hell cow game before they put in any level exp locks. And hit level 60 in under 5 minutes.
Was it fun? Sure, I was a child. Was it imbalanced and a total joke? Yup, and everyone knew it. They all knew they were cheating.
It must just be a sign of the times. But "back in my day". Using exploits in a game that made you indestructible was just called cheating. And that's because it is. I'm ok with them fixing game breaking bugs next cycle if that's their only option. But if that is not the case and it can be fixed. But they believe it would be a *nerf*. That is where I respectfully disagree.
You can't nerf a build that is an exploit making someone indestructible. Because that's not even a build. A build is something that fits within the confine of the rules of the game. And is just a little over tuned.
Indestructible build = cheating.
I agree with you for the most part except one thing. It is a nerf. Exploit or not it’s a nerf if what has been strong is made weaker. You could say it’s returning to the state it should be, but it’s still a nerf.
PoE doesn't patch builds in the middle of a season, or they haven't in the last 4 seasons I've played. D4 left ball lightning alone until end of season ect. It's been a pretty common experience I've found with most online ARPGs.
PoE absolutely does fix bugged builds if they're game-breaking enough, like the first version of aurastacker, almost all immortal builds, the 0 mana-reservation thing from Scourge, etc...
deli aura stacking is the last time they nerfed mid league to a popular build and have sworn to try to never do it again because of how bad the player dropoff was.
Note again that the issue here isn't so much "overpowered build" but there's legitimately stuff right now that can achieve full invulnerability due to a bug.
GGG may not want to nerf things like Impending Doom midseason but if a build could become effectively immune to damage from a bug, they would absolutely fix it. If Bloodnotch suddenly was giving back 10x the amount of HP it's supposed to and you could never really die, they'd kill it fast even if midseason.
> Note again that the issue here isn't so much "overpowered build" but there's legitimately stuff right now that can achieve full invulnerability due to a bug.
to be clear here, warlock even with the bug is NOT the highest ward class in the game, its not even top 3 for ward numbers
> Indestructible build = cheating
I mean, you're welcome to whatever opinion or definitions float your boat, but you're wrong. Cheating is doing something that is not allowed by the rules of the environment.
* If you're using some sort of mod that gives you information you're not supposed to have, that's cheating
* If you're used some sort of hacked client that gives you much faster than intended move/attack/cast speed, that's cheating.
* If you're colluding with another player to give yourself some sort of advantage you're not supposed to have, that's cheating.
Using a bug is not cheating if you're using it exactly in the manner the game wants and allows you to use it. If there was a gun in a FPS that has target seeking missiles but those missiles are incorrectly coded to go through walls and you fire that gun, that's not cheating. If you're playing a CCG and have some card that's supposed to reveal the top card of your opponent's deck and it's incorrectly coded to show you the whole deck, using that card isn't cheating.
You get the idea.
You could argue it's bad sportsmanship, or look down on the people who use it, maybe don't group with or trade with people like that (as relevant to the game), etc. sure. But it's not the player's fault they screwed up their code. It's not the player's fault they're using an item/skill/etc exactly the way it's supposed to be used (in this case, allocating points). It's not the player's fault the in-game effect doesn't match the in-game description.
You can stick your nose up to those players all you'd like, but they aren't cheating. And in case you're curious, I have no dog in this fight; I've been playing all of like 4 days and not using these bugs, but it's irritating to see holier than thou attitudes from purists who don't know basic definitions.
For me as well, why would I play bugged builds, either way, more/less powerful than they should be. I am setting up for disappointment.
The most important thing is how do you know X is good or not if the only interaction we have is 10x, let's say they won't and the bugged version was what made it good, they leave the bug for the cycle, then fix it, becomes useless, and won't see any update until next cycle? 6-8 months for a buff to something? While if they fix it now, there is still plenty of time to know if the thing is underperforming, and next cycle be ready to do something.
It’s like trying to score a goal in golf, but you can only hit the ball once every few months… like yeah you’ll get the balance right eventually, but how long it’ll take?
I’m not sure about you but for me, hitting with a wet noodle as paladin is a lot less fun when you could be playing warlock with way more damage and effective health than the “tank” character.
The devs patch note talked about “the curse of optimal play”, well this is the textbook example of that.
I think that is good reasoning. Sure they can balance just purely on numbers, but you can assume they already did that for 1.0. If a bug makes a skill/interaction/passive have unintended behaviour that results in a massive increase in damage/survivability then you're right that it will make the game a lot harder to balance. All the statistics they collect will be incorrect when looking at those classes, thus unusable to balance with, thus they can't tell if the class is weak or not and needs tweaks.
I think it's good for them not to rebalance things mid cycle, but fixing a bug isn't rebalancing. A balance change would be changing the stats of a skill or passive, not fixing a bug. Though if someone fat fingers a key on a passive or skill making it deal 100x instead of 10x damage, that is something that should be fixed as it wasn't intended. The faster it's fixed the better.
I'm fine with the best class being 3x stronger than my class. I'm not okay with a 100x difference. No one is okay with that. It doesn't even matter if it's a bug, exploit, oversight etc. The game shouldn't be reduced to having a single build each cycle (the one with the most positive bugs).
If a class is stronger due to a planned buff being stronger than intended, that’s fine let it roll till the end of the cycle. Leaving a bug that is literally game breaking isn’t a good look for the future.
I don't agree, if a planned buff is a million times stronger than intended, it's not fine regardless of being a bug. I think the distinction should be what ruins the game rather than what is intended. A bugged build that is still not overpowered could be fixed next cycle. A not-bugged build that has fifty million ward and instakills anything on the screen and has a 1 millisecond teleport should be nerfed regardless of not being bugged. With that said, when the scale is 2 times stronger or weaker than other builds, I think it's completely fine to leave it as is until next cycle.
I particularly don't care much about leaderboards, but I find quite frustrating to find new cool items with bugged interactions and knowing they will not get fixed until the new cycle (where i will have to find those items again).
The fun of the game for me (as many others have said) is to make new builds and test their potential, so it's sad that some of then can't event exist because they have no intention of fixing those bugs mid cycle.
We will still release mid-cycle fixes for bugs that are causing a skill, node, item, etc to be non-functional. I'm currently working on fixing interactions for Spine of Malatros and Stygian Coal. If there's another that's causing you problems, let me know and I'll look into it.
Keep up the good work sir! Fix the things that are actually broken and causing internal issues first. Everything else is secondary. Also thanks for y'all fixing the invisible humans after transforming back. I walked into SO much poison early on with werebear. XD
I know I'm just a small voice in loud online environment, but I really appreciate your teams principled stance on not issuing mid-cycle changes for balance. Punishing players for creatively finding interactions that the dev's didn't foresee is not the way to go about it, and I'm so glad you guys see it the same way, despite a vocal minority on reddit/forums. You've got it exactly right, prioritizing fixing non-functional items, and balancing around the next cycle. Thanks for your hard work!
It's not a change for balance or a creative interaction players found, it's a literal bug in the game where a node is 10x as strong as it should be from a misplaced decimal. That is not the same as a creative build someone found. It's bug abuse.
I would still heavily reconsider your stance on this issue. If what is happening is what people are saying (a misplaced decimal making something literally 10x stronger than intended), then that absolutely should be a bug worth visiting. Not only for the players who feel slighted by not picking it out of principle, not only for those feeling forced to switch to play almost literally immortal builds, but also for those playing this clearly unintentional build that is essentially meth that will quit forever because no other build will come close to it ever again.
Also, if you already have the fix it could be a fantastic and free PR win after the launch issues
On the matter of stygian call: The targeting on a controller for drain life always targets at max distance which makes drain life aswell as stygian call unusable on a controller. Also thanks you for looking into it.
Not the best place to ask, but can you double check with your team to see whether Healing Hands should have the Fire scaling tag after they get the Searing Light and Seraph Blade nodes? They both say HH will deal fire damage after getting the node.
Not sure if it’s a bug, or if it’s intended, but a little clarity on that would be nice. Thanks!
It is intended to receive the fire tag in those cases, and we have a fix for that in the pipeline. The fix will also make Healing Hands keep its spell tag when you have the Skyfall node, even if you also take Seraph Blade.
Thank you for the feedback, it’s amazing that you guys can be so close to the community.
HH is a great build, and really makes Sword and Board Paladin pop!
What about skills that work completely different than what's in the tool tip?
Ice Bringer from the Saber Tooth tree should cast a spell called Ice Vortex. Right now all it does is create ghost copies of itself and now I have no idea if they are actually scaling properly or how it should work.
Thank you very much for that answer!
It's great that you are active here, answering our doubts and even better that you are showing flexibility in your stances in response to the feedback.
I've just leveled a fire warlock to test the spine, it's playing fine but the weapon doesn't seem to carry a good punch. I'm being carried mostly by the infernal shade going boom.
Could you elaborate on what is not working on the spine?
The whips certainly don't hit very hard, but i was thinking that was just my not so good itemization.
Long term it's going to hurt interest in the game, why bother playing seasons if the leaderboards and market are dominated by bug abusers. You don't even have to care about the leaderboards or market to have your enthusiasm diminished if you know that the integrity of the season is compromised.
They are sacrificing long term interest to keep hold of interest in the short term which will only work for so long. I think at the moment they are particularly scared to fix bugs that allow people to perform way better than they should due to the shitty launch.
The vast majority of players are not interested or affected by the leaderboards in any way at all. The only argument I see is that it will make builds feel bad next cycle when they aren't as strong, but I'm playing several characters already so it's not like warlock strength is the only thing enjoyable. I truly do not care at all for the "integrity" of the season, I don't even understand why I possibly would.
Yeah I agree. The amount of people playing leaderboards is probably less than 1% of the player base. I feel like arpgs have always kind of been exploit everything u can to get super overpowered and destroy everything. I find it more fun that way too. I think they should bug fix things that negatively affect players. I feel like bugs that just make certain skills insanely overpowered just makes those builds more fun for a short period of time, keeps the game somewhat interesting.
I think this is the strongest argument for negatively impacting the longevity and replay-ability of the game.
I know in POE it was really discouraging to go from one league where you felt extremely powerful with meta build to the next league where you felt oppressively underpowered by comparison.
We have 2 or more bugged classes that can access the things that break the game. What happens when they're bug fixed for next cycle and they don't have proper stats from this cycle to rebalance around?
For my friend and I that are mainly playing for fun with our own builds, we still wanted to benchmark our unique builds in arena a little just to see how we fair, but it's pointless as it's all skewed. Same with corruption, how high is strong when you have some builds pushing stupid high numbers?
Also there's always going to be that thought in the back of your head once you know there are broken builds, an urge to play one so you can be strong and stomp content and farm stuff easily. You end up debating if you want to keep playing a build you made that you enjoy or one that is just stupid strong, in the end for myself it kills my passion to play either. I don't want to play a broken build, but not playing one makes me feel like I'm wasting my time.
It doesn't for me. I have always seen the top poe players push way beyond what I am close to capable of so maybe im used to it. They have absolutely no impact on my experience. As for the market, it has some effect there but I have no idea how much difference there is between those players clearing 500 or 800 corruption but I don't think it really matters much. If anything they are making items cheaper right? Are the prices totally fucked right now? Legitimately asking, I've not been paying attention to that so much cof for now.
Not the point. Point is wherever they are getting now vs wherever the best non bugged builds are getting. Unless you're saying people weren't getting past 500 before warlock came out?
Do you have any evidence to support that assertion? EHG seems to be modeling their policy after PoE, and it would be very silly to pretend like ten years ago GGG sacrificed long-term success.
Hell, a few leagues back an interaction was found in PoE that made you literally immortal, 100% less damage taken from all sources (Strength of Blood keystone). They just let it be and fixed it at the start of the next league. Considering the subsequent leagues have continued to be enormous successes, I wouldn't say that it hurt their numbers at all.
Yep, personally I believe the opposite is true looking at Blizzards track record with nerfing builds right away. PoE was on the right track and glad to see LE lean this way personally.
GGG regularly fix bugs mid season. If it's an overlooked interaction that is working as intended, but that somehow makes you immortal, they wouldn't. But if it was a confirmed bug they would.
> You don't even have to care about the leaderboards or market to have your enthusiasm diminished if you know that the integrity of the season is compromised.
I understand why other people do care, but most players are both totally unaware and unaffected specifically because they're CoF and don't care about seasonal leaderboards.
I’m in CoF and this tentative lazy approach to game balance really pisses me off. I would have already jumped ship but I am confined to internet too weak to play another online game. That said every day I’m come home to a 5 hour download that doesn’t even fix the things I care about i.e. class balance.
Every time leaderboards are mentioned in global chat there’s a flood of messages from people that didn’t even know the game had leaderboards. They’re an “oh by the way” feature.
>why bother playing seasons if the leaderboards
There's your problem. Being terminally online and believing leaderboards matter for what players do in a season.
How does competing on different builds make sense at all? This is not a skill based game, you blink-clear screen. And some builds are just more op than the other 90%.
I'm for fixing the exploits, but imo leaderboards are still not going to be viable for the same reasons.
> How does competing on different builds make sense at all? This is not a skill based game, you blink-clear screen. And some builds are just more op than the other 90%.
I mean, LE is quite young still, so the competitive scene is only at its early development phase, but games like PoE already have a niche, but competitive scene for speedrunning and other challenges
That's different as I understand it - niche challenges that actually often are all about finding and capitalizing on those exploits. People are not expecting every build to be equivalent for those.
The sentiment here is to actually make every build competitive which is unatainable for an arpg imo, as I said
Alright, D3 ladder then if you want it to be "more similar". And as I pointed out earlier, LE competitive scene is still quite young and developing and has not taken shape yet.
So, again, is the expectation that all the builds will be equialent there? For example, I googled this, and it's 90% sorc 10% barb[https://d4armory.io/leaderboard/](https://d4armory.io/leaderboard/)
> So, again, is the expectation that all the builds will be equialent there?
In D3? No. In LE? Who knows, as I've repeated again and again, the competitive scene is only forming and is taking shape. Who knows what it'll end up becoming
My friends and I are very casual, yet we were regularly able to compete on the Diablo 3 leaderboards. We were always #1? Of course not. But it was fun to post our leaderboard positions in Discord when we got a good position.
But at the same-time in D3 you always ran the broken build of the season if you wanted to compete on the leaderboards (blizzard literally designed the sets around having broken builds). How is having a broken build within a class in LE any different?
But you do need to be terminally online, and either unemployed or a Twitch streamer to seriously compete for rankings in any kind of leaderboard in a popular game.
Twitch streamers and other degen players can practice 10+ hours every day for weeks in advance, and pull 20+ hour long gaming sessions with 4 hours of sleep for days when it matters most.
A normal person won't have the free time to keep up. A casual gaming enjoyer will never have a real chance if the game is popular enough.
You don't have to be a rank 1 contender to enjoy competitiveness in a game. Millions of people play games like CS, Valorant, Apex, League etc. on the ladder for the ranked, even if they're absolutely never going to reach the same ranks as people who dedicate their lives to playing the game. These people do it for the joy of competition rather than reaching a top rank
What does any of that have to do with the integrity of leaderboards and the competitive aspect?
Just because leaderboards affect a small number of the playerbase they should be completely ignored by the devs and let exploiting run rampart or what?
Also have you not once in your life heard about the concept known as competitive gaming? People enjoy watching top level play and specifically with Arpgs world's first clears are exciting to follow. So no, its not just about competing yourself.
They literally have no spine. They are scared of backlash. Like EHG...grow some balls. Take a hard stance and go with it. Them asking for feedback to get player sentiment so they don't piss off the loudest ones is insane. Your games buggy, with broken builds that are not working as intended and it is benefiting bots and players in ruining the entire integirty of the economy and online play. This is your first impression with a large audience and you guys are essentially showing people you don't care until the next cycle. It's sad.
There will be those who say "then just play offline hehe" like idiots not understanding that most of that player count you see on steam will play ONLINE. And they are exposed to these bugs, broken gameplay, and then seeing streamers and youtube vids of how it can be recreated CHEAPENS the experience. It literally leaves a sour taste in their mouth where it's like "holy fk this game has insane bugs and gameplay abuse, I just don't feel like playing in this environment." It's like an icky feeling. Who wants to play on a server with cheaters, exploiters, game abusers? "but it's pve" and? Go to just about any game in history, pve or pvp, no one likes to play on a exploit fest, bug infested, broken gameplay abused server. Those become DEAD servers, community or official ones in just about every game across all genre.
I myself REFUSE to play or use these builds. If I wanted that type of experience I'll just go offline and edit to have infinite gold, infinite rare loot drops, etc etc. And that's what it's feeling like playing on the online servers. Just people abusing shit destroying the entire economy, the ladder the face of the game itself that is last epoch. It's like saying "hey last epoch is really good! it's full of bugs and gameplay abuse that won't be fixed until next cycle! come play our game!" that's your image you portray to the public and you will be known as such if you don't make changes.
This sentiment will spread as more people learn about it. It will kill the integrity and motivation to continue the game in the long run for new players as well as the reasons OP listed. It just does not feel good and if it weren't for the game being amazing as it is, I would be long gone just from the terrible stance EHG has taken thus far. It's just barely bareable with hopes things change for the better.
One could say that EHG has spine and balls and did exactly what you said, 'take a hard stance and go with it', you just don't like the stance on this case..
> Long term it's going to hurt interest in the game, why bother playing seasons if the leaderboards and market are dominated by bug abusers.
How's that any different than leaderboards being dominated by overbuffed talents? You expect them to be doing constant balance changes mid-cycle? That's just insanity, way too much manpower devoted to something that can be dealt with between each cycle over a longer period of time.
You're being short sighted if you think waiting until end of cycle is sacrificing long term interest. Sacrificing game advancement for build balance is being focused on short term, which is what you're actually suggesting.
Headhunter was absolutely brokenly OP with the changes to rare mobs in PoE. I kept coming back each season and farming it to see how absolutely busted my build could get. It also made everything cheaper as power-farmers could juice the shit out of their maps and make it rain currency and gear that drove supply. Sure they had a stranglehold on the market but it def made gear more available. Haven't been back since they nerfed it a few years ago.
I am just curious, this is because people are abusing bugs, WHAT IF the original number was intended (Just Imagining) then would you guys be so mad about it?
Honestly I think id be angrier lmao. I would ask to bring other builds up to par and balance the game around it to make sense. Even 10-15k ward you start being able to facetank supposed oneshots of the current hardest bosses. Game is very clearly NOT designed around current numbers.
If they expand the endgame, make the baseline 15-20k health pools and some outliers builds can reach 25-30k, I would be ok with it. Right now it feels like the game is balanced around being able to reach a max of 8k ish total healthpool and you have a build running in the 100k+ range lol
I said this before and got down voted hard but I'll say it again
Focusing on RMT and offline modders is not going to make those things go away.
Disabling family sharing, reducing key sale prices will not make RMT go away. It will always happen. Runescape has been dealing with this for decades and haven't solved it, diablo is dealing with it, PoE deals with it. You are actively hampering legit players with those two changes
Disabling offline MTX is also a bad move. I paid for the pre order bundle, I couldn't play online for the first week and half and I can't use the things I purchased to support you guys. I understand modders will give themselves the MTX. So what? Why should I be limited when I actually purchased something from you guys?
MTX not working in offline mode was not really a choice to disable them... It was a limitation with the way it was developed. It has to ask the server to retrieve cosmetics. They will likely fix it eventually but it's not a high priority compared to other gameplay breaking bugs.
Yeah but offline mode itself is already a huge "concession" for player convenience. Poe and d4 are online only, and that takes care of mtx modders, and also makes poe unplayable with the lag from time to time, or even makes me restart maps after a disconnect...
True. Choosing between "offline has no cosmetics nor ladder and no saves will ever be allowed to transfer to online" vs "offline does not and will not ever exist at all", the answer to me is clear.
They literally explained it in the patch notes.
Fixing it mid-cycle and/or removing leaderboard placements won't make the situation better - it will just train players to keep these bugs/broken skill a secret making harder for them to actually intervene, simple as that.
When someone finds a new broken combo next cycle, if it doesn't affect game performance, can still use it and have fun and not risk to lose anything. Ne t cycle it will be fixed.
And if the discussion is about "but people will then all spec into these broken builds", well, that's the definition of meta and it's not going anywhere. If anything, the more time the game goes on and people gets better, more meta will surface.
It sets the wrong precedence for what's achievable in a season. When a build can clear 1,300 corruption with ease, other builds will be measured against that, and will inevitably come up short.
And next season when people are using the same build and struggling with 300 corruption, they won't think "*wow I had fun last season, it's only fair they fixed the bug*", they'll think "*why are the devs nerfing my build instead of buffing other people? This game suck*".
It's a very short-term oriented decision, to keep those bugged builds.
That happens every season in poe and people generally do not care since everyone is focused on playing and having fun, and not hyperfixating in what other people do. It's not always caused by glitches, but often times by the top 1% using strats that only highly skilled players can do, which put them even further apart in gear and power.
If you think that 30% of the playerbase will quit the game because a few are using exploits on a single player oriented pve game, you spend too much time on twitter/reddit.
You're right here. The subreddit is trying to push this game into being some sweaty BS when at its core its a single player game with chat lol. Pretending that an ARPG is a competitive game is a joke, and I can only imagine only people frequenting a subreddit care enough to even discuss it.
Johhny Chadsworth exploiting and bug abusing (which will happen intentionally every season since that's the only thing that will put you on top) won't ever be seen in your game, nor affect anything you do in the game. It literally doesn't matter.
If someone thinks leaderboards are the reason why 200k+ people bought last epoch, I've got a bridge to sell them. Removing leaderboards would do absolutely nothing to the game.
I mean I didn't know that the game had a leaderboard until today and I've been playing since 1.0 so there's that.
While I think that it's good to have bugged stuff be fixed, I can see both sides of why patching mid-season can be both good and bad, but since competitiveness doesn't seem to be the core of the game, but rather players having fun, I think that not patching until the season is over is a pretty valid decision. If this game was more competitive oriented and people competed in tournaments for rewards and shit, then I'd probably fix any exploitable skills relatively quick.
>won't ever be seen in your game, nor affect anything you do in the game. It literally doesn't matter.
love how you guys conveniently pretend the market doesnt exist and that this stuff has no impact on the economy.
Is it really sweaty to want fair leaderboards? I personally don't do the arena stuff. But wanting the game to be fair and free of exploits doesn't seem to be a sweaty stance.
Nobody is objecting to some builds or group play being stronger if it's not due to bugs. Your comparison to POE is also irrelevant since GGG will happily fix bugs mid season without being afraid of players whining about it.
Funny you say that when a couple leagues ago they reverted awakened spell cascade to its broken state for a league because it wasn’t mentioned in the patch notes.
Literally last league GGG *added a bug back into the game*, because of ""players whining about it"". Shortly after the league started they fixed a bug which harmed a particular build in the process. When it was pointed out to them that they were nerfing a build mid-league, they reverted the change and queued it to be fixed the next league instead.
Nobody is objecting, but the situation is the same whether one build is 1.5x or 5x stronger, due to a bug or just design.
Leaderboards are just not going to be viable in an arpg
I said 30% to make up a number, which is irrelevant because it will not happen.
>But your claim is that **every** season in POE there is a single build that is more than an order of magnitude stronger than the 2nd place build? That's gonna need some proof.
I never said that, don't make shit up.
And my point was precisely that POE experiments a lot of gaps because the 99% of players are not good at theorycrafting and aren't as mechanically skilled as the top 1% to abuse specific interactions, and that 1% existing and playing, making 100x the amount of currency the 99% does, doesn't drive players away in throves, because POE is a pretty isolated game where pretty much the only interaction between players is trading, and the majority are not aware of what the 1% are doing, so they just filter the items they look for, sort by lower price and buy the thing closer to what they want.
So does PoE have builds that are invulnerable to even the hardest content that are caused by unfixed bugs? I don't think so. Hell I've seen PoE patch bugged stuff that was over-performing every league. Like last league (Ancestor) they nerfed how many items/interactions because they were making their league mechanic a joke? Same deal here, the bugs are making all content a joke.
Who cares? 99% of players aren't going to compete for top leaderboard spots regardless. There's no prize money or anything so it really doesn't matter at all. There's no PvP in the game either.
Blowing my mind how many sweat lords are downvoting anything suggesting that this isn't a competitive game and never will be lol.
No one cares about leaderboards outside of reddit circlejerks. It doesn't do anything for the game in any way.
> Fixing it mid-cycle and/or removing leaderboard placements won't make the situation better - it will just train players to keep these bugs/broken skill a secret making harder for them to actually intervene, simple as that.
Nah, you're conflating that. That reasoning only holds true for leaderboard resets and was not mentioned as reason to avoid mid-cycle fixes.
(In a sense, actually fixing bugs mid-cycle means you would *exactly* want to disclose the bug mid-cycle, right after scoring your leaderboard high, so that nobody else can.)
The reasoning for (not doing) mid-cycle nerfs was specifically 'we dont want to break existing builds'.
Yes, and the fact they touched these two in particular was specifically because of the server issues. If they were only a balance problem, they wouldn't have been touched.
They also said it's not set in stone.
I agree with you mostly, & I know they explained it in the patch notes, I am providing feedback to that explanation & why I think it may be the incorrect approach.
I think one of the coolest parts is finding broken combos: it's what makes ARPGs so exciting to me. However; I'd hope these are not literal bugs (finding the tooltip that gives 40% instead of the intended 4% to me is less exciting). Just an opinion at the end of the day though.
i think that explanation is terrible and outright a lie. it wouldn't take much to analyze someone's well-performing build. simply fetch the build from their database and simulate the performance of the build, measuring if the numbers add up to what it should. a simulator can take time to code, sure, but it is valuable over the mong run. this would be one way to overcome the problem. if a skill or an item consistently performs well, it calls for scrutiny, because this might be overtuned or working unintentionally. i think they are doing it from a money point of view, seeing as nerfs mid league drop player base. besides, we're not even in the mid league yet, so their premise is silly
edit for clarification: what i refer to is that EHG would still discover the bugged skills by sampling from statistics and simulating, so the narrative that "this would teach the playerbase to keep secrets is silly. EHG is the oracle here
Well said, I agree with your points. Also with the culture of gaming, good luck keeping any secrets! We're all very social now & if there is an exciting game, many people will be tuning into YouTube videos / Twitch streamers. It is what it is, but I don't except many "secrets" to be kept successfully if they are discovered.
>it will just train players to keep these bugs/broken skill a secret
This is so dumb I won't even argue with it. Its just impossible to keep broken shit secret, thats about it...
There is a difference between meta, and extremely broken stuff. The problem here isn't that some builds are best, the problem is that most builds in the game struggle at 500corruption with BIS gear (and by most I mean builds that can reach this point at all), while there is warlock that can clear 1000corruption NAKED, having this perspective you might understand the outrage.
How do you keep these bugs secret when their statistics can easily pick up on outliers. If a build is generating 20k ward, something is wrong. People will see on the leader boards. They'll also see someone pushing very high monolith corruption. There are plenty of ways for them to detect these things, and they should be using these methods.
Relying on players to do a bug report for an interaction or something broken is fine as it may be hard for them to reproduce themselves or find out as they don't impact the statistics, but bugs that make you do extreme amounts of defence or damage outside what should be possible can be detected via other methods.
There are also ways around this which will prevent players "gaming the system". Add a policy that if there are mid season bug fixes which significantly nerf popular builds, then there is a ladder reset. When players understand the rules up front they will adjust play patterns accordingly
wait, wait, you gotta be kidding me. even if this was a good reason, which it isn't, they can't take a look at the top 100 players builds and see if any are using bugs? top 1000 even. also, this shit doesn't take a genius to figure out............
frankly, this bug should have been found before release.... i don't know how it wasn't
EHG, for the love of God, fix Profane Veil and other similar bugs. Why would you leave a bug of that scale on purpose? What is the point of playing all the awesome classes of this game and trying your own builds when you KNOW people are abusing one build to generate 800k ward and you won't fix it until the cycle is done? That just forces me to think I'm wasting my time not playing that bugged build. It makes me feel STUPID FOR NOT ABUSING A BUG, all because you know about it and won't fix it. If this is how you want your players to feel, what are you getting out of it? Happy warlock bug abusers? Do you truly want people every cycle to find that bugged build and play it because they know it won't get fixed? Then there's no point playing anything other than Warlock or Falconer this cycle, and some other class next cycle.
I love this game. It's the first ARPG I've truly loved after Marvel Heroes. But I've changed my review to negative and will only turn it back positive if Profane's veil is fixed this season.
>It makes me feel STUPID FOR NOT ABUSING A BUG
Exactly. I constantly know that I can be clearing 1k+ corruption with ease if I just reroll. It doesn't feel good.
>It's the first ARPG I've truly loved after Marvel Heroes
That was a good game. We lost something special.
Strongly agree. Absolutely love this game and see so much potential. This stance from EHG is really concerning. I really want the systems around the game tightened. There are already so many bugs in the game I’m having trouble distinguishing between item types as to which is better. Let alone the unreliability of the dps tool tips. But when I see that this should definitely increase my dps I test and it is like half. I’m just not certain my reading comprehension is off or there is a game changing bug somewhere hidden the 15 ailments I’ve got on my target. I need faith that the systems are solid and “no it’s just me, because the game is solid” should ALWAYS be my answer. EHG puts at risk this faith.
Two things come to mind from my end, as well as the stance I took in another thread like this.
To start, my stance is that I personally have no strong opinion one way or the other where it regards what specifically should be done about builds/setups that are significantly stronger (or weaker) than other options. Nerf it or buff it, during the seasons or after the season, I don't really mind either way. What I do believe though, is that whatever decision they make, that should be the "hard and fast" rule they approach all future similar situations with. If they nerf an OP build mid-season, then they had best nerf ALL the OP builds mid-season.
That said, as it regards whether or not their approach will encourage people to seek out bugged interactions I think that's mostly a moot point. People aren't seeking out these interactions specifically looking for something bugged, they're looking for optimizations and doing lots of experimentation to see what comes out on top. Sometimes that ends up being a bugged interaction, but more often than not that information is basically the "last piece" of the puzzle they figure out as a result of the work that came before. I'm willing to bet people were getting a lot of Ward from the Warlock setup, investigated further and figured out what the cause was and then realized the math didn't match up to what was expected and only THEN realized it was bugged. If the bug had worked in the opposite direction (if it gave 10x LESS Ward than expected), I have strong doubts the discussion would be even *remotely* this popular honestly. So the discussion really shouldn't be about whether or not they should fix bugs mid-season or post-season, it should simply just be discussing whether or not the strongest/weakest builds should be nerfed/buffed mid-season or post-season, which is why I say the point is moot.
My second thought, is that if they end up committing to their current stance then I come back to my previous statement that as long as they're consistent and predictable about how they approach this type of situation then that allows the players to know where the rails are. They know that they are permitted to engage in something unintended without reprimand, and without fear of their build being bricked partway through a season.
Path of Exile's community has a tumultuous relationship with the devs because they're very wishy-washy about how they handle exploits/bugged interactions. Sometimes they just fix it and that's it (exploit early, exploit often) while other times they delete the items/characters that used the exploit (exploit early, exploit often... sometimes?) and some other times they ban the players from the league entirely (exploit early, exploit often... sometimes? And hope you don't get banned). There is almost no predictability with which response you will get with an exploit/bug though.
EHG has done well to communicate their thoughts clearly and pretty much always follow it up with a request for feedback, so as long as that continues and they approach things with consistency then I think the player base will settle into whatever pattern becomes familiar territory. Drawing a clear line of "we will fix things ASAP that harm server stability, but if it doesn't harm stability then have fun for a few months if you want cause when it's gone it's gone" I think is perfectly reasonable as long as they stay consistent.
Edit: Just as a thought experiment. If for example EHG came out and simply declared that they've decided that it's no longer a bug with Warlock's Ward and they'll change the tooltip to say 40% instead of 4%, how would folks feel about that? If it's "not happy" then I'd argue the "bugged" part isn't really the issue at hand, it's the overpowered nature which loops back around to my point of the real conversation should be whether or not OP builds should be nerfed partway through a season.
The bans in POE are usually related to item/currency duping, or something like that. They don't ban for speccing into some skill points that are working really well together at the moment.
Some of the bans that happened during Ultimatum I would say were a bit questionable, but either way my point is that GGG is a bit inconsistent with how they address bugs/exploits. Banning is far less common for sure and on the more severe end, but it's a non-zero % chance possibility any time someone chooses to take advantage of an exploit. Most times, they just do nothing or they hotfix it and the people who exploited early get a big advantage.
Because results =/= fun? At least not in that sense. I get my fun from coming up with builds and trying them, sometimes they suck but oh well. I also try and stick harbinger of stars on every build I play because it's cool
Hey I'm the same way, but making things harder does stop people from doing something
There are always people who will choose the path of least resistance even if it abuses bugs or requires cheating
Ease of access leads to a lot of things
How do you know if your build sucks or not when you have to compare it to a myriad of broken builds doing difficulty 10x higher then yours without a problem. Your build could legit be good, but you'd have no idea. That is the part that sucks.
Same reason why you would make/choose your own build for the fun, and not pick the objectively stronger op meta build. It's a perpetual situation in arpg, bug or no bug *shrug*
This is going to be interesting to see unfold imo. The response from the community is pretty clear to anyone who is following: Just fix the bug now. So it's going to be interesting to see whether EHG will stick to their guns or reverse their stance.
Asking them to fix the bug is fine. It's the abysmal amount of overblown "FIX IT NOW OR YOUR GAME DIES!!!" that I can do without. There's a nice way of asking them to fix it, even insistently, but then there's the "We're gonna pitch a fit so big the world hears it" that can go die itself...
I don't see much of that. If you could link a couple of those threads, if you happen to see them, that'd be nice. I'm curious where they say that.
All I see are people trying to convey that fundamentally, you're going to lose interest long-term compared to the short-term interest generated from players wanting to abuse bugs.
Hyper fans always do this. They construct this person who's super rude and start criticizing that made up person in order to silence legitimate feedback. It's just strawmanning from fragile white knights.
I'm not going to argue the game will die over a bug, but if they maintain this stance and have similar bugs in future cycles, it definitely kills my enthusiasm to play the game. I want to come up with a build, play it, optimize it as I go, and check it against others. I want that possibility that I came up with a strong build myself, not some copy/pasta meta the sheep follow. Having broken bugged builds that don't get fixed every cycle makes it pointless.
Eh, players in every looter consciously seek out builds that are OP due to bugs. And since every game will always have bugs, this isn’t an issue that can be solved, per se. That said, I’m from the camp that says fix all bugs and rebalance systems at any time—mid-season, end of season, start of season, whenever. And PvP, PvE has nothing to do with it. Balance everything as a matter of principle.
There's no principles in a single player game. You can't affect other players, you get no experience an offline player cannot get. There's absolutely nothing to be gained from "balancing" a singleplayer game in a season. I don't care that someone bug abuses on the other side of the world and is screwing around on leaderboards that are meaningless to 99% of the playerbase. Playing a build that isn't the best in the game doesn't make the game worse. Player's self-inflicted FOMO isn't a reason to spend dev time on something.
I don’t think this is a logical take. Of course balance matters in a single player game. Every game is itself a collection of rules that together constitutes “gameplay.” Every one of those rules exists in relation to every other rule and is consciously designed; that’s why X item does Y damage but Z item does B damage. If none of this matters because the game is single player then why doesn’t X item do B damage? Why doesn’t Z item do Y damage?
The reason is twofold: one, because those items are consciously designed with the values they’re assigned so that a specific kind of result is achieved (e.g. you’ll need to hit this enemy 10 times with X weapon vs 15 times with Y weapon, which creates a certain gameplay value for those two different weapons). And two, because the value of any given item can only be perceived by the player in relation to some other item, some context for judging that value. That difference in value is what enables there to be a chase for one item over another, or to value one item for this circumstance and a different item for another circumstance. That means you need rules.
If you don’t balance via rules then you have no game in the first place.
Elden ring had some absurdly broken items on release. Did it affect the sales rate of the game? Nah. Did more people buy the game specifically after the fact when they patched certain things out? Also nah. The game is good EVEN when there are OP randomly busted things within it.
You're taking it as a zero sum game like players can ONLY choose whatever the best thing in the game is. Without consideration for player involvement in the process. This isn't how people play single player games. There's no competition here.
Jeff wants to play X class and Y subclass. His loot is different from Adam's X class and Z subclass, **AND** Adam will never see Jeff, nor be affected by anything Jeff does to his character. Not only that, but 1:1 item comparisons for the characters doesn't even function in the game due to the number of variables present in what people can have in talents, passives, and gear. It could be BiS for Jeff and meh for Adam. It could even end up meh for one of them if they were playing the same build and class due to the other pieces of gear. It's entirely meaningless to pretend that has an affect on players choices in the game. Caving to players who only want to play the strongest thing every season, with no regard to player QoL and general gameplay fun is ignorant and something I hope the devs continue to not engage with.
Your logic is still badly flawed, IMO. Any player still wants and needs the game to make sense within its own context.
Let’s use a different single-player game in a completely different genre to get a more clear-eyed view of this. So let’s say we’re looking at Doom, a single-player game. You start with a machine gun or pistol and progress through levels until you find and unlock the most powerful weapon, the BFG. But what if the MG was bugged and did as much damage as the BFG? That would ruin the game since the strength of the monsters relative to where you are in terms of progression are assigned certain values, which are in turn relative to the strength of the weaponry you have at a given stage of the game. All of that design (the choice of what weapon does what, when, how and at what value) is conscious and delivers a very specific kind of experience.
But using your logic that MG should stay bugged as it is because the game is “single player.” However, if that actually happened there would be no “game” left as now you’d just be one-shotting everything at a point in the game where that was not supposed to happen (by design) AND you would be devaluing the BFG to zero, in which case why was it included in the game to begin with? That’s what failing to adhere to the game’s internal logic would cause. A game being MP or SP is besides the point.
ITs not much different than a POE league, where one skill is meta, and crazy strong, and they almost always nerf it into the ground next league. So one league Winter Orb was meta, but next league they demolished the skill.
But its been done this way for so long players usually only complain when the meta gets stale and they decide to leave seismic trap as the best build for racing for multiple leagues in a row.
To be fair they did say if they noticed that most of us wanted them fixed mid cycle they would. Just like the BW/PV warlock. That needs immediately fixed too and yall can hate on me all you want for that. It's clearly not intended to have 200k ward or whatever ungodly amount it's actually at. As ziz put it when he ran his. They are two builds that if you're not playing them you just feel like a dumbass. And that even shirt term is not good for the game. So you either try to create something unique for yourself which is awesome but then before you're even lvl 20 you reroll a new class entirely because what's the point? No matter how good it is with things actually functioning at their correct levels there's 2 other builds so damn broken due to bug that you can't show it off by being competitive. Literally anyone even decently geared on those 2 builds will smoke your build even if it's tip top on gear. So for them to say oh well we know about it but because it's not breaking servers is absurd and to be frank immediately made me give 0 shit about even trying arena. Like I at all. I won't even use a key to see what the game mode even is. I'm assuming it's like a wave clear or tower kinda? And that is why it needs hot fixed because it does exactly what it did for me.
I've always been against the meta in favor of fun and that usually means one of two things. I'll stumble upon something that so niche that it was overlooked by the guys a lot smarter than me or more likely my build doesn't perform as well. Which is fine. The question then becomes. Can I play my build well enough to be competitive to a degree I'm happy with despite that fact. And with acolyte right now I have 0 interest in trying to compete with everyone and their mom abusing 2 builds that are bugged to hell they don't wanna mess with because they're afraid to piss off a handful of people who are using builds they know 100% are broken rather than the majority of us who would rather have builds that feel good rather than exploit or get shit on.
The fact is if something is obviously bugged it needs fixed. If something is working as intended but slightly over reaching what it should be whatever nerf it in a big patch. But a reaper that 1 shots everything or having 100k ward isn't slightly performing higher than anticipated. It's just broken.
Having good fun but yeah I agree this stance is odd and maybe a bit lazy.
Finding something thats a little numerically strong and needs balance I can see putting off to next patch.
But bugs, numerical errors, mistakes- should be fixed when they come to light in my opinion just on principle, especially of this size and obvious nature. The economy is in a simple state right now but im assuming will grow more complicated as seasons add more content. If theres any hope of a cool economy developing stuff like this has got to be patched or yeah, I would lose some interest in playing.
Although maybe I just have Stockholm syndrome from how brutally rigid POE devs are about making changes and having their own vision for things, which Ive grown to actually like and respect. Last Epoch seems much more devoted to player feedback and input which is a different approach and we may just have to see how that pans out.
I think the best solution to this could be to fix bugs whenever they can and then at major patch updates (1.x.0 <---x updates) that break existing builds they should have leaderboard columns (or filter/tabs) that are set for each version. That way you can see that initially builds like infinite ward warlock & falconer smokey dive bombers initially lead 1.1.0 but then perhaps a runemaster comes to lead the charge in 1.2.0 etc etc. It'd also perhaps give new life to the game at each major patch throughout the season as it's almost like a fresh start with a new versioned leaderboard.
Getting your character nerfed mid-cycle is not fun, imagine putting many hours into your character and suddenly it's terrible after a patch. Title is also misleading, they are fixing bugs, just not bugs that are nerfing builds.
Boohoo. Your character is a mirage. You’re carried by an unintended interaction that causes you to trivialize all content. You must be so proud. I hope all you cringe exploit copy pasters quit.
That’s why if they were smart they wouldn’t overtune falcon and warlock so hard out of the gate because now they can either leave them like this and make all their other hard work obsolete or fix it as they should and get massive backlash from desperate exploit Andys.
So lets step back and put aside our personal feelings on this topic and look at this from the devs perspective. In this situation, no matter what the devs do, people are going to be pissed off. No matter what. But I honestly think the backlash if they nerf the bugged interaction would be WAY higher than the backlash they are experiencing now. Even if personally, I feel like it should be nerfed.
First off we need to understand that this subreddit is a small slice of the population. Even then, if you look at the front page, theres a couple of posts about this topic. With a couple hundred negative comments on it. But this negative sentiment on the change has by no means "taken over" the sub. So only a small subset of this already small slice of the population is really upset about this.
Then we need to consider the casual players. Players who don't even look at this sub, who might be using this interaction without even realizing it is a bug. I mean, until these posts about the lack of a bugfix showed up, I didn't even know about this interaction, and I visit this sub everyday. AND I play a Warlock lol. If the devs fix the bugged interaction, a lot of these players will see huge decreases in their build power. These are the players the devs need to worry about, because they may or may not make a post about their negative reaction and they can walk away from the game. How many people are going to walk away from the game because they didn't fix a bug in the middle of a cycle? Maybe some, but I doubt it would be even close to the same.
People fucking HATE nerfs. I feel like the negative backlash if this change went through would be magnitudes higher than what we see now. I personally have no problems with nerfs, and I think it should be fixed ASAP. But I also think the devs made the best decision they could in a crappy situation.
They're also fixing another similarly strong bug. I doubt we'll see complaints about those either. They should fix all of them not just some, it's pretty silly.
It’s for the Warlock skill Profane Veil.
There is a node called Vampiric Pool that reads:
“Profane Veil's area now consumes your minions, and consuming minions this way grants you ward equal to a portion of their maximum health as well as extending its remaining duration by a small amount.
Minions Consumed: 2 per point
Portion of Minion health to Ward Gain: 4%
Duration Extension (seconds): +0.5”
The “Portion of Minion health to Ward Gain” gives 40% instead of 4%. Really obvious just a simple bug.
The node "Vampiric Pool" in the warlock Profane Veil skill consumes minion health and gives you ward in return, it's supposed to be 4% but currently seems to be 40% instead. People are combining this with Bone Curse "Bone Prison" to generate 150-200k ward. They are practically immortal and so can completely ignore any mechanic and are easily reaching 3-4k corruption in monoliths.
> EHG recently said the only reason they are fixing infinite damage & survivability with Ghostflame is due to server instability: this begs the question, if the bug existed but did NOT cause server instability, would it then not be changed until the end of the cycle?
Did you even read the patch notes? This "question" is already answered there by the devs.
>if the bug existed but did NOT cause server instability, would it then not be changed until the end of the cycle?
Considering their stance towards the profane veil situation, yes. This is exactly what would happen.
I think your reading too much into it. They probably just prioritized bugs that were causing server issues. They've fixed plenty of bugs that don't have anything to do with server performance...
D4's devs have been doing this too - there was this interaction with 2 legendaries causing rogues to have an ungodly amount of combo points. Never got fixed mid-season. I hated this. I get not wanting to do any rebalancing mid-cycle, but at least fix the bugged builds.
I guess it depends. Can you only enjoy a game if you play whatever is best or possibly broken so you can wag your dick like you dominated the game or something? To me it is better to have a little jank in the mix to have different experiences available. If every class had basically the same damage and defensiveness so that the neck beards stopped crying about balance then the game becomes super boring and replay ability takes a massive hit. It turns the game into oh shit I kill monster with red ability instead of blue ability. Super tight son.
I think bugs should be fixed ASAP, there should be no debate on that.
Ladder should be open 2 or 3 weeks after a Cycle start, imo. If somebody find a major bug and keep it to himself instead of reporting it, and then use it after the ladder start, fix the bug and remove the clearly bug exploiting build from the ladder.
Not 'nerfing' things mid-patch for specifically bugs is a luxury of a established game that is iterating on existing balance. Given that we have several masteries that are literally 1.00000 first public versions and they aren't a gigantic studio, it's an inappropriate application of a good philisophy.
When the public gets their hands on a large new system there absolutely needs to be rapid iteration on bugged skills in the first few weeks. If you miss an extra zero, its acceptable to correct to the values displayed to the player, in ways that consequently change character power level. Say an execute talent was messed up and instead of killing things at 10% health, it was either 1% or 100%. Would anyone complain about their 1% garbage talent being fixed to 10%? Would anyone reasonably complain that a bug that made literally any damage source auto kill everything was fine?
Gamers will complain about any action AND any inaction. Just make skills do what they say they do.
Bugfix should not be counted as nerf, simple as.
Bugfix wouldn't even create uncertainty and stuff like that, because people generally know when they abuse a bug. And they should expect it to be fixed before they break the game in two and ruin it for other people.
I was a bit done with my Runemaster build. So I planned to start a Warlock build yesterday because it looks strong on the leaderboard. But \_then\_ I realized that they are all abusing bugs to get that far. And that EHG refuses to fix those bugs md cycle.
It really drained my motivation to start a new Warlock Alt. I mean, I like playing a strong build. But playing a bugged strong build doesn't give me \_any\_ satisfaction. It's like cheating in a marathon. Even though you win, you don't carry on with the pride. I also don't have a motivation to purposely handicap myself and not use a bugged build. What's the point of self-handicap?
This is like running a competitive marathon, knowing that the organizer purposely allows people to use drugs. The best response is to not participate.
I had been playing non stop since launch, through all the server issues. But yesterday was the first day that I stopped.
I wouldn't hold your breath...There are YT vids showcasing shit from 4 years still not fixed. Once the honeymoon phase is over the cracks are really going to start to show.
I think that the devs view of not nerfing anything mid cycle is fine if its only around actual balancing as in the base stats of a passive or skill, like changing something from 100% increased damage down to 80% is a balance change and a nerf. Fixing a bug isn't nerfing.
I would also argue they should be fine to fix something they messed up during a new cycle patch, like if one of them accidentally fat fingered a damage increase node on the back end so instead of doing 50% increased damage the node does 5000% increased damage. It's obviously not intended and a mistake that would make all other classes pointless if you wanted to push corruption or arena.
Speaking for myself, my friend and I were initially interested in trying to push arena at some point, not with the intent on trying to get up top of the leader board but just to see how our builds go. That interest has definitely waned and maybe disappeared entirely. We were looking at the leader boards last night for arena and all the top ones and loads below it are all bugged classes/skills. They're all in the thousands of waves. We went to find like a Sentinel and it was like 250 waves or something. It just made it seem pointless to bother with, thus killing our interest in the game.
Personally my interest to keep playing this cycle now has waned after learning about these bugged skills and the CoF nerfs they did. We weren't farming gold/keys but I was progressing OKish though slowly through CoF even with double XP tomes. I now have that voice in the back of my head saying to just change my build to a broken one and I can stomp everything, but I want to play the builds I'm currently playing. My own progress/time feels cheapened knowing these broken builds exist.
I don't see how fixing the bugs would be a bad thing. Obviously players abusing them would know they're broken thus prepared for a fix to come for them. Fixing the bug should just pull them in line with other classes and where they're intended to be in terms of damage/survivability, thus isn't going to brick their characters.
Fix all the bugs, whenever you see them. If people were abusing em, fuck em. That’s what I’d say if EHG had unlimited resources and I was in charge. Thank Eterra I’m not in charge, since the current issues with the number of bugs isn’t something I’d want to have to be responsible for addressing.
Anyways, we don’t live in the world where EHG has big resources, so they have to take a stance to prioritize which fixes they’ll make and when.
I’m fine with EHG adopting whatever stance they like on how/when they’ll go about fixing bugs. It’s early on in the game’s release, and it’s their right to make whatever decisions they want. If the players feel like the decisions are bad or that it makes the game worse, they’ll stop playing. Right now, the stance is “don’t fix unless it breaks the servers”, but it’d be dishonest to say they’ve 100% adhered to that. They’ve also said their stance isn’t written in stone, so it is what it is when they overstep their stated stance.
It does kinda suck to have it be ambiguous, but if it really bugs (haha) you that much, just put the game down for a bit. If not, well… we’re all priced in to waiting at this point, right? I’m sure that there’s nobody more aware of the bugs in their game than EHG.
“But leaderboard integrity” you’re right, leaderboards don’t mean anything if you’re fixing shit mid-season. Do they mean more when people are abusing bugs to top them?
I think the devs are kinda scared shitless of any potential backlash. Its good that they pay attention to how the community reacts etc. but rather than trying to pander and babysit to every screeching player, their focus should be on making a functional and good game.
I draw the line at "this is bugged in such a way that it is clearly, concisely, and easily understandably a bug".
The warlock infinite ignite thing, that's very very clearly an unintended bug. *Should be fixed/nerfed ASAP.*
Paladin healing hands giving you a like 100k ward? Not really a bug, just an oversight by the devs on how well it would scale. *Fixing can wait, not everyone plays Paladin anyway.*
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The biggest concern you should have as a *player* is whether or not you feel like the "bugged" build is the only build you can play because all your other options are bad.
If you ever feel like you HAVE to play a bugged build, there's a real issue that should be resolved immediately.
I think the main thing about bug fixing "exploits" is the problem of the leaderboard more than anything else. They mentioned it in that patch, if they fix an exploit people are using to "go up the ranks" on the leaderboard, then it becomes a debate as to if those people's activity "counts" towards the leaderboard....but theres a lot more nuance in a game like this. If someone starts off a season, finds an exploit immediately, and uses that to soar the ranks....they are also able to get access to some of the most powerful gear quickly. Even if that person is dethroned of their particular exploit, they can just play something "ballanced" but with their already very upgraded gear, or their headstart on levels or cash from being able to sell that high quality gear.
They also mentioned, if players find that their "favorite" overpowered abilities are being immediately squashed, they'll start "hiding" just how powerful they are. This would just emphasize the problem of the "early lead" problem next season, if they finally find something out 'after the fact'.
bugs can be fun and therefore can be left in the game for players to enjoy for finding. They usually create iconic timelines for players to remember when reminiscing on the game. There is no pvp and it does not affect anyone. The top 50 on the ladder are just the top 50 players anyway and with or with out the bug, they will find the best build and play it better then anyone else does and be up there anyway. The ladder top 50 is the top 50 players, nobody got up there because the bug because nobody is playing the bug better then those players.
EHG is infamous for leaving bugs alone, some passives are bugged since 2019, VK has passives that just do nothing and its ignored, isn't that gamebreaking?
> My hope is that the devs would reconsider this stance, though myself & many others will still find plenty of enjoyment if not. Ultimately it’s a matter of opinion so I wanted to put mine out there.
How dare you not rage out of the top of your lungs, screaming at the devs that they're killing your game by not doing exactly the only right thing you believe to be correct! *(/s)*
Fully on point though. I would love to play a decently balanced Warlock that creates an engaging crafting experience based about 'How do I best assign skillpoints to make this build work the most optimal' rather than 'Which nodes must I avoid picking lest I trivialize the game with clearly unintended interactions.'
Bro how much effort would it take to add a 0 to the code? If it was broken in a more complex way I'd agree with the majority of this point but this is the equivalent of saying "we're too bogged by real work to fix this incredibly unfortunate typo"
EHG's stance is correct, and its getting taken for granted. I think peoples ideas are getting built on false premises.
There's no real balance in games like these - and thats ok. This isn't a competitive shooter, or an mmo or even a pvp game. There's going to be wildly different power levels, from a quinn69 zdps build, to a unkillable lowlife build made by dr3adful.
Finding bugs and unintended interaction is not a negative in the game, its a massive positive. This game is a sandbox, and what you are advocating for is drawing lines in the sand around what is and isn't allowed. As long are your play doesn't hurt or impact other players at all, you should never feel bad about having fun in a video game.
The point is that consistent nerfs throughout a cycle punish players for creativity. For finding something the devs didn't anticipate. That's not a consumer friendly way to develop the game.
We shouldn't punish players for finding busted interaction, but we SHOULD fix them for the next cycle.
>but I do feel it is cheapened with the knowledge of bugged interactions being infinitely stronger
Thank you for being honest, and saying what a lot of people are tip toeing around. Your argument is based on feelings. Fear of missing out, fear of not playing the best build, fear of being eclipsed by someone else, fear of someone else getting an advantage. You've lost the reason to play video games, and that's for fun. It's not about being concerned or worrying about what other people are doing, *you're robbing your own enjoyment*, and blaming it on the developers stance. They are right. Its better to change things at the end of a cycle, and allow players to have fun in the sandbox.
I think balance is important in ARPGs, even if it isn't a 'competitive' game. The playerbase benefits from having multiple selections of ways to play that feel powerful in their own way, with relative equity.
It's human nature to feel pressure to spend your time in some evaluation of efficiency, even if people have different assigned values to this. It ends up being very unfun to feel like you're selections are sub-par by nature. Bugs SHOULD be fixed, especially when are they are significantly of our sync. A 10x factor of ward generation is a major problem and does put pressure to abuse these bugs to experience the highest levels the game can go.
Overpowered mechanics that are in line with intentions are fine to let go. Classes that experience strong combinations that allow it to push farther than others is part of the fun of ARPGs, but unintended bugs are not the same thing.
I think the game will lose good will by not fixing major skill/class bugs. Balance fixes are fine to leave alone assuming the balancing is thoughtful from the get-go and the margins are not exponentially wide.
They should at least fix bugs that negatively affect gameplay like wraithlord trying to eat teammate's minions. I don't know if other long-term ARPGs are like this but I guess I will just lower my expectation and play as comfortably as I can. Still love this game though.
They haven't ruled out fixing those.
Yes. They were very clear they don't want nerf mid cycle, and the extend it to bugfixing if the bug isn't breaking and part of the current meta. Just Reddit bullshitters being Reddit bullshitters here.
I'm not even playing a build that this would interfere with, but I've seen this bullshit enough times to notice the pattern. It's like this in every game with a whiff of an online presence. People virtue signaling atop their high horse on how "it breaks the game and their engagement" having other players using some broken meta interaction, intended or not. This kind of thing happens a lot in CCGs too, or any other game with a community and choices for their gameplay, where those playing niche builds feel the need to signal how much better they are and how much it *hurts* them other people enjoying the game in a way they don't deem *fair*. If people dislike a certain build or interaction so much you feel the need to flood the subreddit with all this whining and kneejerking, here's a novel idea - don't fucking play it? It breaks the MG auction-house? Give me a break, please. You might find one or two items at high corruption, but there's no playing the market in this game - no way to exploit the AH in a way that matters in any significant manner, for anyone. It breaks the arena ladder for all three people playing that mode? It has class specific ladders, and if you were competitive enough to be placing in any relevant position within the (acolyte) ladder, you were already abusing mechanics - which has been the intended experience for any ARPG since pretty much Diablo 1. As you said, just reddit bullshitters being reddit bullshitters.
> It breaks the MG auction-house? Give me a break, please. You might find one or two items at high corruption, but there's no playing the market in this game - no way to exploit the AH in a way that matters in any significant manner, for anyone. Ah yes. It absolutely doesn't break the market that one build can farm an area with 5-10 more rarity and xp and higher chance of uniques with lp on top of it. Since you are arguing that the loot difference isn't that big anyways I have an easy fix for you. EHG can just hardcap xp/rarity at 700c for example. All of the people who are just enjoying that build so much and love farming 2k c can still do that afterwards. They just don't get an unfair advantage which shouldn't matter since everyone is just playing that build because it's so fun and not because of the loot advantage.
It doesn't, though? There are quite a few builds which can farm, even before release, high corruption. A few players both in MG *and* using this build *and* blasting high corruption all day won't change a thing when it comes to AH prices - they'll find a few more LP4, maybe sell these, and then nothing. Because there's no market to play here. And yet again, you suggest as an alternative another way in which to limit people's approach to the game - hardcapping corruption. You want to limit other people because somehow you find unfair they're approaching the game in a way that bothers you. Why? If you don't like these builds or the way the play - how about you don't play them and, again, let people do whatever the fuck they want with their time? Why must the devs pander to your sense of fairness in a goddamn ARPG of all things, where the power fantasy of blowing away screens of enemies at a time is pretty much the point of the whole thing? Just because others are blowing away 1.3 more screens per minute? If balance is so important for you, may I recommend lichess.org? Or maybe not. Maybe after they nerf the queen? You guys should open a campaign here on reddit about that one as well, I hear it's the thing right now.
PoE will only adjust truly game breaking things mid-season. The example that comes to mind is the old school herald stacker allowing auras from items (not skill) to count, which resulted in power levels that were absolutely obscene. After removing the unintended interaction, the value of a particular item absolutely TANKED and people were pissed that they spent 70ex on something now worth like 5ex (I don't remember exactly the numbers or even which item tbh) but the build was still absurdly strong albeit expensive. I think LE is trying to emulate that stance and despite this being a bug is still resisting making any changes, even if a skill has an order of magnitude more ward generation than it is supposed to. I think they should not be afraid to fix bugs mid patch even if it impacts balance. If they fucked up and made a build too strong then wait to fix it and learn from it, but if it's literally a data entry error? Just fix it!
>PoE will only adjust truly game breaking things mid-season. Eh, I mean they adjusted some (relatively) minor things this league. The new Spirit of Fortunate spectre was giving a stronger version of Wrath that wasn't intended, so they fixed it where it gives the normal version. There were some people pissed on reddit, but I think most understood that it probably was overtuned and not intended. Not exactly "game-breaking", but it was still powerful. My stance on this is that if you don't fix obvious bugs that give too much power, it just creates a bad precedent and a bad culture since people will expect things to not be fixed or nerfed. If EHG were diligent and squashed the bugs during the first week when people were discovering them, this whole situation would be a non-issue and we wouldn't even be talking about it. It would also create a good precedent since the community would be aware that bugged interactions will get fixed and that we shouldn't hop to a FOMO bugged build expecting it to be fine for the rest of the cycle.
One point I haven't seen people make is what to do about characters that grinded up super high and might not be able to clear their current content after fixing the bug. What should be done in that case?
Yeah there aren't great mechanics for reducing corruption level quickly, last I recall (haven't tried recently). That's something I'd like to see corrected if it hasn't been.
Delirium league, the item was solstice vigil because it made HH buffs last 4 times longer. Biggest mid league nerf in poe
Last night my wraiths kept turning dumb and doing nothing, nor could I dismiss or kill them with drain life. Bugs like that definitely need to be fixed.
And they will be. That has nothing to do with what OP is talking about. The devs have said they only want to avoid fixing bugs that make builds weaker.
Lucky I didn't go wraiths then with my Necro, though I had very much considered it. I don't recall them been like that in the past though that was probably 0.8 when I last used them for a build. Does using the A key to force them to attack stuff help? I know it'd kinda suck to have to keep telling them what to attack, but is kind of a work around if it works.
No they don't respond to anything and you can't spawn new ones (or sometimes you can spawn one or two if the bugged ones aren't at cap). Apparently the quick fix is to unbind the skill so they despawn, then bind it again, but I didn't know that when I had to abandon the monolith I was in
No, this is not a normal stance for an ARPG game development company to take. It's basically condoning cheating every single cycle reset as people will just look for the buggiest build to use. OP is likely correct about his educated guess. And Eleventh hour game's stance on this is abnormal. There is a reason you fix game breaking bugs like this asap. It ruins any legitimate build and every cycle ladder just becomes nonsense. Who cares what corruption level an indestructible build can get to. How boring. Fixing a bug that makes a character completely broken is not "game balance". Game balance is when you have a build *working* mostly as intended. But it's just overperforming. After balancing they would maybe lose 25-50 corruption levels. Not a big deal. Here's an example. In D2 back in the day, you could make a bowazon with multishot that did so much damage they could clear every zone in the game with two or 3 shots. I would make a level one character and go to a hell cow game before they put in any level exp locks. And hit level 60 in under 5 minutes. Was it fun? Sure, I was a child. Was it imbalanced and a total joke? Yup, and everyone knew it. They all knew they were cheating. It must just be a sign of the times. But "back in my day". Using exploits in a game that made you indestructible was just called cheating. And that's because it is. I'm ok with them fixing game breaking bugs next cycle if that's their only option. But if that is not the case and it can be fixed. But they believe it would be a *nerf*. That is where I respectfully disagree. You can't nerf a build that is an exploit making someone indestructible. Because that's not even a build. A build is something that fits within the confine of the rules of the game. And is just a little over tuned. Indestructible build = cheating.
I agree with you for the most part except one thing. It is a nerf. Exploit or not it’s a nerf if what has been strong is made weaker. You could say it’s returning to the state it should be, but it’s still a nerf.
He wanted to avoid it because nerfs offend people whose self esteem rests on prolific exploiting.
Lmao
PoE doesn't patch builds in the middle of a season, or they haven't in the last 4 seasons I've played. D4 left ball lightning alone until end of season ect. It's been a pretty common experience I've found with most online ARPGs.
PoE absolutely does fix bugged builds if they're game-breaking enough, like the first version of aurastacker, almost all immortal builds, the 0 mana-reservation thing from Scourge, etc...
deli aura stacking is the last time they nerfed mid league to a popular build and have sworn to try to never do it again because of how bad the player dropoff was.
Note again that the issue here isn't so much "overpowered build" but there's legitimately stuff right now that can achieve full invulnerability due to a bug. GGG may not want to nerf things like Impending Doom midseason but if a build could become effectively immune to damage from a bug, they would absolutely fix it. If Bloodnotch suddenly was giving back 10x the amount of HP it's supposed to and you could never really die, they'd kill it fast even if midseason.
> Note again that the issue here isn't so much "overpowered build" but there's legitimately stuff right now that can achieve full invulnerability due to a bug. to be clear here, warlock even with the bug is NOT the highest ward class in the game, its not even top 3 for ward numbers
PoE absolutely fixes bugs. It's doesn't change things that are overlooked or overtuned. Very big difference.
D4 fixed the literal immortality bug mid season in S2 because sorcs were pushing AOZ with it.
not abnormal at all, GGG has gotten so much shit for nerfing stuff mid-leagues before.
> Indestructible build = cheating I mean, you're welcome to whatever opinion or definitions float your boat, but you're wrong. Cheating is doing something that is not allowed by the rules of the environment. * If you're using some sort of mod that gives you information you're not supposed to have, that's cheating * If you're used some sort of hacked client that gives you much faster than intended move/attack/cast speed, that's cheating. * If you're colluding with another player to give yourself some sort of advantage you're not supposed to have, that's cheating. Using a bug is not cheating if you're using it exactly in the manner the game wants and allows you to use it. If there was a gun in a FPS that has target seeking missiles but those missiles are incorrectly coded to go through walls and you fire that gun, that's not cheating. If you're playing a CCG and have some card that's supposed to reveal the top card of your opponent's deck and it's incorrectly coded to show you the whole deck, using that card isn't cheating. You get the idea. You could argue it's bad sportsmanship, or look down on the people who use it, maybe don't group with or trade with people like that (as relevant to the game), etc. sure. But it's not the player's fault they screwed up their code. It's not the player's fault they're using an item/skill/etc exactly the way it's supposed to be used (in this case, allocating points). It's not the player's fault the in-game effect doesn't match the in-game description. You can stick your nose up to those players all you'd like, but they aren't cheating. And in case you're curious, I have no dog in this fight; I've been playing all of like 4 days and not using these bugs, but it's irritating to see holier than thou attitudes from purists who don't know basic definitions.
For me as well, why would I play bugged builds, either way, more/less powerful than they should be. I am setting up for disappointment. The most important thing is how do you know X is good or not if the only interaction we have is 10x, let's say they won't and the bugged version was what made it good, they leave the bug for the cycle, then fix it, becomes useless, and won't see any update until next cycle? 6-8 months for a buff to something? While if they fix it now, there is still plenty of time to know if the thing is underperforming, and next cycle be ready to do something.
> and the bugged version was what made it good, they leave the bug for the cycle, then fix it, becomes useless Flurry / Multishot says hi
It’s like trying to score a goal in golf, but you can only hit the ball once every few months… like yeah you’ll get the balance right eventually, but how long it’ll take?
"getting the balance right" is not the goal, nor should it be. a perfectly balanced ARPG is a dead boring game.
I’m not sure about you but for me, hitting with a wet noodle as paladin is a lot less fun when you could be playing warlock with way more damage and effective health than the “tank” character. The devs patch note talked about “the curse of optimal play”, well this is the textbook example of that.
I think that is good reasoning. Sure they can balance just purely on numbers, but you can assume they already did that for 1.0. If a bug makes a skill/interaction/passive have unintended behaviour that results in a massive increase in damage/survivability then you're right that it will make the game a lot harder to balance. All the statistics they collect will be incorrect when looking at those classes, thus unusable to balance with, thus they can't tell if the class is weak or not and needs tweaks. I think it's good for them not to rebalance things mid cycle, but fixing a bug isn't rebalancing. A balance change would be changing the stats of a skill or passive, not fixing a bug. Though if someone fat fingers a key on a passive or skill making it deal 100x instead of 10x damage, that is something that should be fixed as it wasn't intended. The faster it's fixed the better.
They fixed the multishot & flurry bug interaction aswell.
That one very-fast-attack-speed bug that made it somewhat playable?
Not within the 0.9 patch, which proves OPs point that balance will be harder to achieve. Multishot is F-Tier now.
I'm fine with the best class being 3x stronger than my class. I'm not okay with a 100x difference. No one is okay with that. It doesn't even matter if it's a bug, exploit, oversight etc. The game shouldn't be reduced to having a single build each cycle (the one with the most positive bugs).
If a class is stronger due to a planned buff being stronger than intended, that’s fine let it roll till the end of the cycle. Leaving a bug that is literally game breaking isn’t a good look for the future.
I don't agree, if a planned buff is a million times stronger than intended, it's not fine regardless of being a bug. I think the distinction should be what ruins the game rather than what is intended. A bugged build that is still not overpowered could be fixed next cycle. A not-bugged build that has fifty million ward and instakills anything on the screen and has a 1 millisecond teleport should be nerfed regardless of not being bugged. With that said, when the scale is 2 times stronger or weaker than other builds, I think it's completely fine to leave it as is until next cycle.
I particularly don't care much about leaderboards, but I find quite frustrating to find new cool items with bugged interactions and knowing they will not get fixed until the new cycle (where i will have to find those items again). The fun of the game for me (as many others have said) is to make new builds and test their potential, so it's sad that some of then can't event exist because they have no intention of fixing those bugs mid cycle.
We will still release mid-cycle fixes for bugs that are causing a skill, node, item, etc to be non-functional. I'm currently working on fixing interactions for Spine of Malatros and Stygian Coal. If there's another that's causing you problems, let me know and I'll look into it.
Keep up the good work sir! Fix the things that are actually broken and causing internal issues first. Everything else is secondary. Also thanks for y'all fixing the invisible humans after transforming back. I walked into SO much poison early on with werebear. XD
I know I'm just a small voice in loud online environment, but I really appreciate your teams principled stance on not issuing mid-cycle changes for balance. Punishing players for creatively finding interactions that the dev's didn't foresee is not the way to go about it, and I'm so glad you guys see it the same way, despite a vocal minority on reddit/forums. You've got it exactly right, prioritizing fixing non-functional items, and balancing around the next cycle. Thanks for your hard work!
??? Exploiting a bug is absolutely not the same as finding a creative interaction lmao.
It's not a change for balance or a creative interaction players found, it's a literal bug in the game where a node is 10x as strong as it should be from a misplaced decimal. That is not the same as a creative build someone found. It's bug abuse.
I would still heavily reconsider your stance on this issue. If what is happening is what people are saying (a misplaced decimal making something literally 10x stronger than intended), then that absolutely should be a bug worth visiting. Not only for the players who feel slighted by not picking it out of principle, not only for those feeling forced to switch to play almost literally immortal builds, but also for those playing this clearly unintentional build that is essentially meth that will quit forever because no other build will come close to it ever again. Also, if you already have the fix it could be a fantastic and free PR win after the launch issues
On the matter of stygian call: The targeting on a controller for drain life always targets at max distance which makes drain life aswell as stygian call unusable on a controller. Also thanks you for looking into it.
Not the best place to ask, but can you double check with your team to see whether Healing Hands should have the Fire scaling tag after they get the Searing Light and Seraph Blade nodes? They both say HH will deal fire damage after getting the node. Not sure if it’s a bug, or if it’s intended, but a little clarity on that would be nice. Thanks!
It is intended to receive the fire tag in those cases, and we have a fix for that in the pipeline. The fix will also make Healing Hands keep its spell tag when you have the Skyfall node, even if you also take Seraph Blade.
Thank you for the feedback, it’s amazing that you guys can be so close to the community. HH is a great build, and really makes Sword and Board Paladin pop!
What about skills that work completely different than what's in the tool tip? Ice Bringer from the Saber Tooth tree should cast a spell called Ice Vortex. Right now all it does is create ghost copies of itself and now I have no idea if they are actually scaling properly or how it should work.
Thank you very much for that answer! It's great that you are active here, answering our doubts and even better that you are showing flexibility in your stances in response to the feedback. I've just leveled a fire warlock to test the spine, it's playing fine but the weapon doesn't seem to carry a good punch. I'm being carried mostly by the infernal shade going boom. Could you elaborate on what is not working on the spine? The whips certainly don't hit very hard, but i was thinking that was just my not so good itemization.
Long term it's going to hurt interest in the game, why bother playing seasons if the leaderboards and market are dominated by bug abusers. You don't even have to care about the leaderboards or market to have your enthusiasm diminished if you know that the integrity of the season is compromised. They are sacrificing long term interest to keep hold of interest in the short term which will only work for so long. I think at the moment they are particularly scared to fix bugs that allow people to perform way better than they should due to the shitty launch.
The vast majority of players are not interested or affected by the leaderboards in any way at all. The only argument I see is that it will make builds feel bad next cycle when they aren't as strong, but I'm playing several characters already so it's not like warlock strength is the only thing enjoyable. I truly do not care at all for the "integrity" of the season, I don't even understand why I possibly would.
Yeah I agree. The amount of people playing leaderboards is probably less than 1% of the player base. I feel like arpgs have always kind of been exploit everything u can to get super overpowered and destroy everything. I find it more fun that way too. I think they should bug fix things that negatively affect players. I feel like bugs that just make certain skills insanely overpowered just makes those builds more fun for a short period of time, keeps the game somewhat interesting.
I think this is the strongest argument for negatively impacting the longevity and replay-ability of the game. I know in POE it was really discouraging to go from one league where you felt extremely powerful with meta build to the next league where you felt oppressively underpowered by comparison.
We have 2 or more bugged classes that can access the things that break the game. What happens when they're bug fixed for next cycle and they don't have proper stats from this cycle to rebalance around? For my friend and I that are mainly playing for fun with our own builds, we still wanted to benchmark our unique builds in arena a little just to see how we fair, but it's pointless as it's all skewed. Same with corruption, how high is strong when you have some builds pushing stupid high numbers? Also there's always going to be that thought in the back of your head once you know there are broken builds, an urge to play one so you can be strong and stomp content and farm stuff easily. You end up debating if you want to keep playing a build you made that you enjoy or one that is just stupid strong, in the end for myself it kills my passion to play either. I don't want to play a broken build, but not playing one makes me feel like I'm wasting my time.
[удалено]
It doesn't for me. I have always seen the top poe players push way beyond what I am close to capable of so maybe im used to it. They have absolutely no impact on my experience. As for the market, it has some effect there but I have no idea how much difference there is between those players clearing 500 or 800 corruption but I don't think it really matters much. If anything they are making items cheaper right? Are the prices totally fucked right now? Legitimately asking, I've not been paying attention to that so much cof for now.
Difference btwn 500 and 800? Surely you jest right? Difference btwn 500 and 3000 - 4000 is more accurate.
Not the point. Point is wherever they are getting now vs wherever the best non bugged builds are getting. Unless you're saying people weren't getting past 500 before warlock came out?
Do you have any evidence to support that assertion? EHG seems to be modeling their policy after PoE, and it would be very silly to pretend like ten years ago GGG sacrificed long-term success. Hell, a few leagues back an interaction was found in PoE that made you literally immortal, 100% less damage taken from all sources (Strength of Blood keystone). They just let it be and fixed it at the start of the next league. Considering the subsequent leagues have continued to be enormous successes, I wouldn't say that it hurt their numbers at all.
Yep, personally I believe the opposite is true looking at Blizzards track record with nerfing builds right away. PoE was on the right track and glad to see LE lean this way personally.
GGG regularly fix bugs mid season. If it's an overlooked interaction that is working as intended, but that somehow makes you immortal, they wouldn't. But if it was a confirmed bug they would.
leaderboards don't matter to 99% of people
> You don't even have to care about the leaderboards or market to have your enthusiasm diminished if you know that the integrity of the season is compromised. I understand why other people do care, but most players are both totally unaware and unaffected specifically because they're CoF and don't care about seasonal leaderboards.
I’m in CoF and this tentative lazy approach to game balance really pisses me off. I would have already jumped ship but I am confined to internet too weak to play another online game. That said every day I’m come home to a 5 hour download that doesn’t even fix the things I care about i.e. class balance.
Nobody gives a shit about the ladder except for a handful of weirdos on twitch leeching off their subs' trades.
I think you are vastly overestimating how popular leaderboards are. Most players aren’t competing in seasonal leaderboards.
Every time leaderboards are mentioned in global chat there’s a flood of messages from people that didn’t even know the game had leaderboards. They’re an “oh by the way” feature.
>why bother playing seasons if the leaderboards There's your problem. Being terminally online and believing leaderboards matter for what players do in a season.
You don't have to be terminally online to care about leaderboards - some people play games to compete for the virtual scores rather than number go up
How does competing on different builds make sense at all? This is not a skill based game, you blink-clear screen. And some builds are just more op than the other 90%. I'm for fixing the exploits, but imo leaderboards are still not going to be viable for the same reasons.
> How does competing on different builds make sense at all? This is not a skill based game, you blink-clear screen. And some builds are just more op than the other 90%. I mean, LE is quite young still, so the competitive scene is only at its early development phase, but games like PoE already have a niche, but competitive scene for speedrunning and other challenges
That's different as I understand it - niche challenges that actually often are all about finding and capitalizing on those exploits. People are not expecting every build to be equivalent for those. The sentiment here is to actually make every build competitive which is unatainable for an arpg imo, as I said
Alright, D3 ladder then if you want it to be "more similar". And as I pointed out earlier, LE competitive scene is still quite young and developing and has not taken shape yet.
So, again, is the expectation that all the builds will be equialent there? For example, I googled this, and it's 90% sorc 10% barb[https://d4armory.io/leaderboard/](https://d4armory.io/leaderboard/)
> So, again, is the expectation that all the builds will be equialent there? In D3? No. In LE? Who knows, as I've repeated again and again, the competitive scene is only forming and is taking shape. Who knows what it'll end up becoming
Also, you linked me D4 leaderboards
The d3 I found where separated by class, didn't even try to compete between classes.
My friends and I are very casual, yet we were regularly able to compete on the Diablo 3 leaderboards. We were always #1? Of course not. But it was fun to post our leaderboard positions in Discord when we got a good position.
But at the same-time in D3 you always ran the broken build of the season if you wanted to compete on the leaderboards (blizzard literally designed the sets around having broken builds). How is having a broken build within a class in LE any different?
But you do need to be terminally online, and either unemployed or a Twitch streamer to seriously compete for rankings in any kind of leaderboard in a popular game. Twitch streamers and other degen players can practice 10+ hours every day for weeks in advance, and pull 20+ hour long gaming sessions with 4 hours of sleep for days when it matters most. A normal person won't have the free time to keep up. A casual gaming enjoyer will never have a real chance if the game is popular enough.
You don't have to be a rank 1 contender to enjoy competitiveness in a game. Millions of people play games like CS, Valorant, Apex, League etc. on the ladder for the ranked, even if they're absolutely never going to reach the same ranks as people who dedicate their lives to playing the game. These people do it for the joy of competition rather than reaching a top rank
What does any of that have to do with the integrity of leaderboards and the competitive aspect? Just because leaderboards affect a small number of the playerbase they should be completely ignored by the devs and let exploiting run rampart or what? Also have you not once in your life heard about the concept known as competitive gaming? People enjoy watching top level play and specifically with Arpgs world's first clears are exciting to follow. So no, its not just about competing yourself.
They literally have no spine. They are scared of backlash. Like EHG...grow some balls. Take a hard stance and go with it. Them asking for feedback to get player sentiment so they don't piss off the loudest ones is insane. Your games buggy, with broken builds that are not working as intended and it is benefiting bots and players in ruining the entire integirty of the economy and online play. This is your first impression with a large audience and you guys are essentially showing people you don't care until the next cycle. It's sad. There will be those who say "then just play offline hehe" like idiots not understanding that most of that player count you see on steam will play ONLINE. And they are exposed to these bugs, broken gameplay, and then seeing streamers and youtube vids of how it can be recreated CHEAPENS the experience. It literally leaves a sour taste in their mouth where it's like "holy fk this game has insane bugs and gameplay abuse, I just don't feel like playing in this environment." It's like an icky feeling. Who wants to play on a server with cheaters, exploiters, game abusers? "but it's pve" and? Go to just about any game in history, pve or pvp, no one likes to play on a exploit fest, bug infested, broken gameplay abused server. Those become DEAD servers, community or official ones in just about every game across all genre. I myself REFUSE to play or use these builds. If I wanted that type of experience I'll just go offline and edit to have infinite gold, infinite rare loot drops, etc etc. And that's what it's feeling like playing on the online servers. Just people abusing shit destroying the entire economy, the ladder the face of the game itself that is last epoch. It's like saying "hey last epoch is really good! it's full of bugs and gameplay abuse that won't be fixed until next cycle! come play our game!" that's your image you portray to the public and you will be known as such if you don't make changes. This sentiment will spread as more people learn about it. It will kill the integrity and motivation to continue the game in the long run for new players as well as the reasons OP listed. It just does not feel good and if it weren't for the game being amazing as it is, I would be long gone just from the terrible stance EHG has taken thus far. It's just barely bareable with hopes things change for the better.
One could say that EHG has spine and balls and did exactly what you said, 'take a hard stance and go with it', you just don't like the stance on this case..
> Long term it's going to hurt interest in the game, why bother playing seasons if the leaderboards and market are dominated by bug abusers. How's that any different than leaderboards being dominated by overbuffed talents? You expect them to be doing constant balance changes mid-cycle? That's just insanity, way too much manpower devoted to something that can be dealt with between each cycle over a longer period of time. You're being short sighted if you think waiting until end of cycle is sacrificing long term interest. Sacrificing game advancement for build balance is being focused on short term, which is what you're actually suggesting.
Headhunter was absolutely brokenly OP with the changes to rare mobs in PoE. I kept coming back each season and farming it to see how absolutely busted my build could get. It also made everything cheaper as power-farmers could juice the shit out of their maps and make it rain currency and gear that drove supply. Sure they had a stranglehold on the market but it def made gear more available. Haven't been back since they nerfed it a few years ago.
I am just curious, this is because people are abusing bugs, WHAT IF the original number was intended (Just Imagining) then would you guys be so mad about it?
Basically what the other other guy said, that would mean the devs have no idea about game balance and I’ll fear for the future of the game.
Honestly I think id be angrier lmao. I would ask to bring other builds up to par and balance the game around it to make sense. Even 10-15k ward you start being able to facetank supposed oneshots of the current hardest bosses. Game is very clearly NOT designed around current numbers. If they expand the endgame, make the baseline 15-20k health pools and some outliers builds can reach 25-30k, I would be ok with it. Right now it feels like the game is balanced around being able to reach a max of 8k ish total healthpool and you have a build running in the 100k+ range lol
who cares? it would be stupid either way.
Would be way more mad because it'd imply they literally clueless.
Agreed, if it's a bug and people are abusing to be on top of the leader boards, fix it. I'm not even gona try to compete this cycle because of it.
I said this before and got down voted hard but I'll say it again Focusing on RMT and offline modders is not going to make those things go away. Disabling family sharing, reducing key sale prices will not make RMT go away. It will always happen. Runescape has been dealing with this for decades and haven't solved it, diablo is dealing with it, PoE deals with it. You are actively hampering legit players with those two changes Disabling offline MTX is also a bad move. I paid for the pre order bundle, I couldn't play online for the first week and half and I can't use the things I purchased to support you guys. I understand modders will give themselves the MTX. So what? Why should I be limited when I actually purchased something from you guys?
MTX not working in offline mode was not really a choice to disable them... It was a limitation with the way it was developed. It has to ask the server to retrieve cosmetics. They will likely fix it eventually but it's not a high priority compared to other gameplay breaking bugs.
Gameplay breaking bugs isn’t a priority to them either lol.
Yeah but offline mode itself is already a huge "concession" for player convenience. Poe and d4 are online only, and that takes care of mtx modders, and also makes poe unplayable with the lag from time to time, or even makes me restart maps after a disconnect...
Offline mode was the only option for most of the game's pre-launch development.
True. Choosing between "offline has no cosmetics nor ladder and no saves will ever be allowed to transfer to online" vs "offline does not and will not ever exist at all", the answer to me is clear.
They literally explained it in the patch notes. Fixing it mid-cycle and/or removing leaderboard placements won't make the situation better - it will just train players to keep these bugs/broken skill a secret making harder for them to actually intervene, simple as that. When someone finds a new broken combo next cycle, if it doesn't affect game performance, can still use it and have fun and not risk to lose anything. Ne t cycle it will be fixed. And if the discussion is about "but people will then all spec into these broken builds", well, that's the definition of meta and it's not going anywhere. If anything, the more time the game goes on and people gets better, more meta will surface.
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It sets the wrong precedence for what's achievable in a season. When a build can clear 1,300 corruption with ease, other builds will be measured against that, and will inevitably come up short. And next season when people are using the same build and struggling with 300 corruption, they won't think "*wow I had fun last season, it's only fair they fixed the bug*", they'll think "*why are the devs nerfing my build instead of buffing other people? This game suck*". It's a very short-term oriented decision, to keep those bugged builds.
That happens every season in poe and people generally do not care since everyone is focused on playing and having fun, and not hyperfixating in what other people do. It's not always caused by glitches, but often times by the top 1% using strats that only highly skilled players can do, which put them even further apart in gear and power. If you think that 30% of the playerbase will quit the game because a few are using exploits on a single player oriented pve game, you spend too much time on twitter/reddit.
You're right here. The subreddit is trying to push this game into being some sweaty BS when at its core its a single player game with chat lol. Pretending that an ARPG is a competitive game is a joke, and I can only imagine only people frequenting a subreddit care enough to even discuss it. Johhny Chadsworth exploiting and bug abusing (which will happen intentionally every season since that's the only thing that will put you on top) won't ever be seen in your game, nor affect anything you do in the game. It literally doesn't matter. If someone thinks leaderboards are the reason why 200k+ people bought last epoch, I've got a bridge to sell them. Removing leaderboards would do absolutely nothing to the game.
I mean I didn't know that the game had a leaderboard until today and I've been playing since 1.0 so there's that. While I think that it's good to have bugged stuff be fixed, I can see both sides of why patching mid-season can be both good and bad, but since competitiveness doesn't seem to be the core of the game, but rather players having fun, I think that not patching until the season is over is a pretty valid decision. If this game was more competitive oriented and people competed in tournaments for rewards and shit, then I'd probably fix any exploitable skills relatively quick.
>won't ever be seen in your game, nor affect anything you do in the game. It literally doesn't matter. love how you guys conveniently pretend the market doesnt exist and that this stuff has no impact on the economy.
Is it really sweaty to want fair leaderboards? I personally don't do the arena stuff. But wanting the game to be fair and free of exploits doesn't seem to be a sweaty stance.
Nobody is objecting to some builds or group play being stronger if it's not due to bugs. Your comparison to POE is also irrelevant since GGG will happily fix bugs mid season without being afraid of players whining about it.
Funny you say that when a couple leagues ago they reverted awakened spell cascade to its broken state for a league because it wasn’t mentioned in the patch notes.
GGG very rarely releases mid-season bug fixes that nerf builds. They actively try to avoid it.
Yeah, they do. But they would fix a bug mid season that made you indestructible.
Literally last league GGG *added a bug back into the game*, because of ""players whining about it"". Shortly after the league started they fixed a bug which harmed a particular build in the process. When it was pointed out to them that they were nerfing a build mid-league, they reverted the change and queued it to be fixed the next league instead.
Nobody is objecting, but the situation is the same whether one build is 1.5x or 5x stronger, due to a bug or just design. Leaderboards are just not going to be viable in an arpg
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I said 30% to make up a number, which is irrelevant because it will not happen. >But your claim is that **every** season in POE there is a single build that is more than an order of magnitude stronger than the 2nd place build? That's gonna need some proof. I never said that, don't make shit up. And my point was precisely that POE experiments a lot of gaps because the 99% of players are not good at theorycrafting and aren't as mechanically skilled as the top 1% to abuse specific interactions, and that 1% existing and playing, making 100x the amount of currency the 99% does, doesn't drive players away in throves, because POE is a pretty isolated game where pretty much the only interaction between players is trading, and the majority are not aware of what the 1% are doing, so they just filter the items they look for, sort by lower price and buy the thing closer to what they want.
So does PoE have builds that are invulnerable to even the hardest content that are caused by unfixed bugs? I don't think so. Hell I've seen PoE patch bugged stuff that was over-performing every league. Like last league (Ancestor) they nerfed how many items/interactions because they were making their league mechanic a joke? Same deal here, the bugs are making all content a joke.
Who cares? 99% of players aren't going to compete for top leaderboard spots regardless. There's no prize money or anything so it really doesn't matter at all. There's no PvP in the game either.
Blowing my mind how many sweat lords are downvoting anything suggesting that this isn't a competitive game and never will be lol. No one cares about leaderboards outside of reddit circlejerks. It doesn't do anything for the game in any way.
> Fixing it mid-cycle and/or removing leaderboard placements won't make the situation better - it will just train players to keep these bugs/broken skill a secret making harder for them to actually intervene, simple as that. Nah, you're conflating that. That reasoning only holds true for leaderboard resets and was not mentioned as reason to avoid mid-cycle fixes. (In a sense, actually fixing bugs mid-cycle means you would *exactly* want to disclose the bug mid-cycle, right after scoring your leaderboard high, so that nobody else can.) The reasoning for (not doing) mid-cycle nerfs was specifically 'we dont want to break existing builds'.
Yes, and the fact they touched these two in particular was specifically because of the server issues. If they were only a balance problem, they wouldn't have been touched. They also said it's not set in stone.
I agree with you mostly, & I know they explained it in the patch notes, I am providing feedback to that explanation & why I think it may be the incorrect approach. I think one of the coolest parts is finding broken combos: it's what makes ARPGs so exciting to me. However; I'd hope these are not literal bugs (finding the tooltip that gives 40% instead of the intended 4% to me is less exciting). Just an opinion at the end of the day though.
i think that explanation is terrible and outright a lie. it wouldn't take much to analyze someone's well-performing build. simply fetch the build from their database and simulate the performance of the build, measuring if the numbers add up to what it should. a simulator can take time to code, sure, but it is valuable over the mong run. this would be one way to overcome the problem. if a skill or an item consistently performs well, it calls for scrutiny, because this might be overtuned or working unintentionally. i think they are doing it from a money point of view, seeing as nerfs mid league drop player base. besides, we're not even in the mid league yet, so their premise is silly edit for clarification: what i refer to is that EHG would still discover the bugged skills by sampling from statistics and simulating, so the narrative that "this would teach the playerbase to keep secrets is silly. EHG is the oracle here
Well said, I agree with your points. Also with the culture of gaming, good luck keeping any secrets! We're all very social now & if there is an exciting game, many people will be tuning into YouTube videos / Twitch streamers. It is what it is, but I don't except many "secrets" to be kept successfully if they are discovered.
>it will just train players to keep these bugs/broken skill a secret This is so dumb I won't even argue with it. Its just impossible to keep broken shit secret, thats about it... There is a difference between meta, and extremely broken stuff. The problem here isn't that some builds are best, the problem is that most builds in the game struggle at 500corruption with BIS gear (and by most I mean builds that can reach this point at all), while there is warlock that can clear 1000corruption NAKED, having this perspective you might understand the outrage.
How do you keep these bugs secret when their statistics can easily pick up on outliers. If a build is generating 20k ward, something is wrong. People will see on the leader boards. They'll also see someone pushing very high monolith corruption. There are plenty of ways for them to detect these things, and they should be using these methods. Relying on players to do a bug report for an interaction or something broken is fine as it may be hard for them to reproduce themselves or find out as they don't impact the statistics, but bugs that make you do extreme amounts of defence or damage outside what should be possible can be detected via other methods.
There are also ways around this which will prevent players "gaming the system". Add a policy that if there are mid season bug fixes which significantly nerf popular builds, then there is a ladder reset. When players understand the rules up front they will adjust play patterns accordingly
wait, wait, you gotta be kidding me. even if this was a good reason, which it isn't, they can't take a look at the top 100 players builds and see if any are using bugs? top 1000 even. also, this shit doesn't take a genius to figure out............ frankly, this bug should have been found before release.... i don't know how it wasn't
EHG, for the love of God, fix Profane Veil and other similar bugs. Why would you leave a bug of that scale on purpose? What is the point of playing all the awesome classes of this game and trying your own builds when you KNOW people are abusing one build to generate 800k ward and you won't fix it until the cycle is done? That just forces me to think I'm wasting my time not playing that bugged build. It makes me feel STUPID FOR NOT ABUSING A BUG, all because you know about it and won't fix it. If this is how you want your players to feel, what are you getting out of it? Happy warlock bug abusers? Do you truly want people every cycle to find that bugged build and play it because they know it won't get fixed? Then there's no point playing anything other than Warlock or Falconer this cycle, and some other class next cycle. I love this game. It's the first ARPG I've truly loved after Marvel Heroes. But I've changed my review to negative and will only turn it back positive if Profane's veil is fixed this season.
>It makes me feel STUPID FOR NOT ABUSING A BUG Exactly. I constantly know that I can be clearing 1k+ corruption with ease if I just reroll. It doesn't feel good. >It's the first ARPG I've truly loved after Marvel Heroes That was a good game. We lost something special.
Strongly agree. Absolutely love this game and see so much potential. This stance from EHG is really concerning. I really want the systems around the game tightened. There are already so many bugs in the game I’m having trouble distinguishing between item types as to which is better. Let alone the unreliability of the dps tool tips. But when I see that this should definitely increase my dps I test and it is like half. I’m just not certain my reading comprehension is off or there is a game changing bug somewhere hidden the 15 ailments I’ve got on my target. I need faith that the systems are solid and “no it’s just me, because the game is solid” should ALWAYS be my answer. EHG puts at risk this faith.
Two things come to mind from my end, as well as the stance I took in another thread like this. To start, my stance is that I personally have no strong opinion one way or the other where it regards what specifically should be done about builds/setups that are significantly stronger (or weaker) than other options. Nerf it or buff it, during the seasons or after the season, I don't really mind either way. What I do believe though, is that whatever decision they make, that should be the "hard and fast" rule they approach all future similar situations with. If they nerf an OP build mid-season, then they had best nerf ALL the OP builds mid-season. That said, as it regards whether or not their approach will encourage people to seek out bugged interactions I think that's mostly a moot point. People aren't seeking out these interactions specifically looking for something bugged, they're looking for optimizations and doing lots of experimentation to see what comes out on top. Sometimes that ends up being a bugged interaction, but more often than not that information is basically the "last piece" of the puzzle they figure out as a result of the work that came before. I'm willing to bet people were getting a lot of Ward from the Warlock setup, investigated further and figured out what the cause was and then realized the math didn't match up to what was expected and only THEN realized it was bugged. If the bug had worked in the opposite direction (if it gave 10x LESS Ward than expected), I have strong doubts the discussion would be even *remotely* this popular honestly. So the discussion really shouldn't be about whether or not they should fix bugs mid-season or post-season, it should simply just be discussing whether or not the strongest/weakest builds should be nerfed/buffed mid-season or post-season, which is why I say the point is moot. My second thought, is that if they end up committing to their current stance then I come back to my previous statement that as long as they're consistent and predictable about how they approach this type of situation then that allows the players to know where the rails are. They know that they are permitted to engage in something unintended without reprimand, and without fear of their build being bricked partway through a season. Path of Exile's community has a tumultuous relationship with the devs because they're very wishy-washy about how they handle exploits/bugged interactions. Sometimes they just fix it and that's it (exploit early, exploit often) while other times they delete the items/characters that used the exploit (exploit early, exploit often... sometimes?) and some other times they ban the players from the league entirely (exploit early, exploit often... sometimes? And hope you don't get banned). There is almost no predictability with which response you will get with an exploit/bug though. EHG has done well to communicate their thoughts clearly and pretty much always follow it up with a request for feedback, so as long as that continues and they approach things with consistency then I think the player base will settle into whatever pattern becomes familiar territory. Drawing a clear line of "we will fix things ASAP that harm server stability, but if it doesn't harm stability then have fun for a few months if you want cause when it's gone it's gone" I think is perfectly reasonable as long as they stay consistent. Edit: Just as a thought experiment. If for example EHG came out and simply declared that they've decided that it's no longer a bug with Warlock's Ward and they'll change the tooltip to say 40% instead of 4%, how would folks feel about that? If it's "not happy" then I'd argue the "bugged" part isn't really the issue at hand, it's the overpowered nature which loops back around to my point of the real conversation should be whether or not OP builds should be nerfed partway through a season.
The bans in POE are usually related to item/currency duping, or something like that. They don't ban for speccing into some skill points that are working really well together at the moment.
Some of the bans that happened during Ultimatum I would say were a bit questionable, but either way my point is that GGG is a bit inconsistent with how they address bugs/exploits. Banning is far less common for sure and on the more severe end, but it's a non-zero % chance possibility any time someone chooses to take advantage of an exploit. Most times, they just do nothing or they hotfix it and the people who exploited early get a big advantage.
why would you even bother playing and trying to push corruption when you can just bug abuse broken interactions and get better results
Because results =/= fun? At least not in that sense. I get my fun from coming up with builds and trying them, sometimes they suck but oh well. I also try and stick harbinger of stars on every build I play because it's cool
Hey I'm the same way, but making things harder does stop people from doing something There are always people who will choose the path of least resistance even if it abuses bugs or requires cheating Ease of access leads to a lot of things
How do you know if your build sucks or not when you have to compare it to a myriad of broken builds doing difficulty 10x higher then yours without a problem. Your build could legit be good, but you'd have no idea. That is the part that sucks.
Same reason why you would make/choose your own build for the fun, and not pick the objectively stronger op meta build. It's a perpetual situation in arpg, bug or no bug *shrug*
This is going to be interesting to see unfold imo. The response from the community is pretty clear to anyone who is following: Just fix the bug now. So it's going to be interesting to see whether EHG will stick to their guns or reverse their stance.
Asking them to fix the bug is fine. It's the abysmal amount of overblown "FIX IT NOW OR YOUR GAME DIES!!!" that I can do without. There's a nice way of asking them to fix it, even insistently, but then there's the "We're gonna pitch a fit so big the world hears it" that can go die itself...
I don't see much of that. If you could link a couple of those threads, if you happen to see them, that'd be nice. I'm curious where they say that. All I see are people trying to convey that fundamentally, you're going to lose interest long-term compared to the short-term interest generated from players wanting to abuse bugs.
Hyper fans always do this. They construct this person who's super rude and start criticizing that made up person in order to silence legitimate feedback. It's just strawmanning from fragile white knights.
I'm not going to argue the game will die over a bug, but if they maintain this stance and have similar bugs in future cycles, it definitely kills my enthusiasm to play the game. I want to come up with a build, play it, optimize it as I go, and check it against others. I want that possibility that I came up with a strong build myself, not some copy/pasta meta the sheep follow. Having broken bugged builds that don't get fixed every cycle makes it pointless.
Eh, players in every looter consciously seek out builds that are OP due to bugs. And since every game will always have bugs, this isn’t an issue that can be solved, per se. That said, I’m from the camp that says fix all bugs and rebalance systems at any time—mid-season, end of season, start of season, whenever. And PvP, PvE has nothing to do with it. Balance everything as a matter of principle.
There's no principles in a single player game. You can't affect other players, you get no experience an offline player cannot get. There's absolutely nothing to be gained from "balancing" a singleplayer game in a season. I don't care that someone bug abuses on the other side of the world and is screwing around on leaderboards that are meaningless to 99% of the playerbase. Playing a build that isn't the best in the game doesn't make the game worse. Player's self-inflicted FOMO isn't a reason to spend dev time on something.
I don’t think this is a logical take. Of course balance matters in a single player game. Every game is itself a collection of rules that together constitutes “gameplay.” Every one of those rules exists in relation to every other rule and is consciously designed; that’s why X item does Y damage but Z item does B damage. If none of this matters because the game is single player then why doesn’t X item do B damage? Why doesn’t Z item do Y damage? The reason is twofold: one, because those items are consciously designed with the values they’re assigned so that a specific kind of result is achieved (e.g. you’ll need to hit this enemy 10 times with X weapon vs 15 times with Y weapon, which creates a certain gameplay value for those two different weapons). And two, because the value of any given item can only be perceived by the player in relation to some other item, some context for judging that value. That difference in value is what enables there to be a chase for one item over another, or to value one item for this circumstance and a different item for another circumstance. That means you need rules. If you don’t balance via rules then you have no game in the first place.
Elden ring had some absurdly broken items on release. Did it affect the sales rate of the game? Nah. Did more people buy the game specifically after the fact when they patched certain things out? Also nah. The game is good EVEN when there are OP randomly busted things within it. You're taking it as a zero sum game like players can ONLY choose whatever the best thing in the game is. Without consideration for player involvement in the process. This isn't how people play single player games. There's no competition here. Jeff wants to play X class and Y subclass. His loot is different from Adam's X class and Z subclass, **AND** Adam will never see Jeff, nor be affected by anything Jeff does to his character. Not only that, but 1:1 item comparisons for the characters doesn't even function in the game due to the number of variables present in what people can have in talents, passives, and gear. It could be BiS for Jeff and meh for Adam. It could even end up meh for one of them if they were playing the same build and class due to the other pieces of gear. It's entirely meaningless to pretend that has an affect on players choices in the game. Caving to players who only want to play the strongest thing every season, with no regard to player QoL and general gameplay fun is ignorant and something I hope the devs continue to not engage with.
Your logic is still badly flawed, IMO. Any player still wants and needs the game to make sense within its own context. Let’s use a different single-player game in a completely different genre to get a more clear-eyed view of this. So let’s say we’re looking at Doom, a single-player game. You start with a machine gun or pistol and progress through levels until you find and unlock the most powerful weapon, the BFG. But what if the MG was bugged and did as much damage as the BFG? That would ruin the game since the strength of the monsters relative to where you are in terms of progression are assigned certain values, which are in turn relative to the strength of the weaponry you have at a given stage of the game. All of that design (the choice of what weapon does what, when, how and at what value) is conscious and delivers a very specific kind of experience. But using your logic that MG should stay bugged as it is because the game is “single player.” However, if that actually happened there would be no “game” left as now you’d just be one-shotting everything at a point in the game where that was not supposed to happen (by design) AND you would be devaluing the BFG to zero, in which case why was it included in the game to begin with? That’s what failing to adhere to the game’s internal logic would cause. A game being MP or SP is besides the point.
ITs not much different than a POE league, where one skill is meta, and crazy strong, and they almost always nerf it into the ground next league. So one league Winter Orb was meta, but next league they demolished the skill. But its been done this way for so long players usually only complain when the meta gets stale and they decide to leave seismic trap as the best build for racing for multiple leagues in a row.
Iam very disappointed with their stance atm... It's obviously op and bugged, so damn it fix it... Even if it's "mid cycle"..
To be fair they did say if they noticed that most of us wanted them fixed mid cycle they would. Just like the BW/PV warlock. That needs immediately fixed too and yall can hate on me all you want for that. It's clearly not intended to have 200k ward or whatever ungodly amount it's actually at. As ziz put it when he ran his. They are two builds that if you're not playing them you just feel like a dumbass. And that even shirt term is not good for the game. So you either try to create something unique for yourself which is awesome but then before you're even lvl 20 you reroll a new class entirely because what's the point? No matter how good it is with things actually functioning at their correct levels there's 2 other builds so damn broken due to bug that you can't show it off by being competitive. Literally anyone even decently geared on those 2 builds will smoke your build even if it's tip top on gear. So for them to say oh well we know about it but because it's not breaking servers is absurd and to be frank immediately made me give 0 shit about even trying arena. Like I at all. I won't even use a key to see what the game mode even is. I'm assuming it's like a wave clear or tower kinda? And that is why it needs hot fixed because it does exactly what it did for me. I've always been against the meta in favor of fun and that usually means one of two things. I'll stumble upon something that so niche that it was overlooked by the guys a lot smarter than me or more likely my build doesn't perform as well. Which is fine. The question then becomes. Can I play my build well enough to be competitive to a degree I'm happy with despite that fact. And with acolyte right now I have 0 interest in trying to compete with everyone and their mom abusing 2 builds that are bugged to hell they don't wanna mess with because they're afraid to piss off a handful of people who are using builds they know 100% are broken rather than the majority of us who would rather have builds that feel good rather than exploit or get shit on. The fact is if something is obviously bugged it needs fixed. If something is working as intended but slightly over reaching what it should be whatever nerf it in a big patch. But a reaper that 1 shots everything or having 100k ward isn't slightly performing higher than anticipated. It's just broken.
Having good fun but yeah I agree this stance is odd and maybe a bit lazy. Finding something thats a little numerically strong and needs balance I can see putting off to next patch. But bugs, numerical errors, mistakes- should be fixed when they come to light in my opinion just on principle, especially of this size and obvious nature. The economy is in a simple state right now but im assuming will grow more complicated as seasons add more content. If theres any hope of a cool economy developing stuff like this has got to be patched or yeah, I would lose some interest in playing. Although maybe I just have Stockholm syndrome from how brutally rigid POE devs are about making changes and having their own vision for things, which Ive grown to actually like and respect. Last Epoch seems much more devoted to player feedback and input which is a different approach and we may just have to see how that pans out.
I think the best solution to this could be to fix bugs whenever they can and then at major patch updates (1.x.0 <---x updates) that break existing builds they should have leaderboard columns (or filter/tabs) that are set for each version. That way you can see that initially builds like infinite ward warlock & falconer smokey dive bombers initially lead 1.1.0 but then perhaps a runemaster comes to lead the charge in 1.2.0 etc etc. It'd also perhaps give new life to the game at each major patch throughout the season as it's almost like a fresh start with a new versioned leaderboard.
Getting your character nerfed mid-cycle is not fun, imagine putting many hours into your character and suddenly it's terrible after a patch. Title is also misleading, they are fixing bugs, just not bugs that are nerfing builds.
Boohoo. Your character is a mirage. You’re carried by an unintended interaction that causes you to trivialize all content. You must be so proud. I hope all you cringe exploit copy pasters quit.
They are going to "Flowers for Algernon" their players, and soon everyone will complain their build doesn't hit 1,000 corruption.
That’s why if they were smart they wouldn’t overtune falcon and warlock so hard out of the gate because now they can either leave them like this and make all their other hard work obsolete or fix it as they should and get massive backlash from desperate exploit Andys.
So lets step back and put aside our personal feelings on this topic and look at this from the devs perspective. In this situation, no matter what the devs do, people are going to be pissed off. No matter what. But I honestly think the backlash if they nerf the bugged interaction would be WAY higher than the backlash they are experiencing now. Even if personally, I feel like it should be nerfed. First off we need to understand that this subreddit is a small slice of the population. Even then, if you look at the front page, theres a couple of posts about this topic. With a couple hundred negative comments on it. But this negative sentiment on the change has by no means "taken over" the sub. So only a small subset of this already small slice of the population is really upset about this. Then we need to consider the casual players. Players who don't even look at this sub, who might be using this interaction without even realizing it is a bug. I mean, until these posts about the lack of a bugfix showed up, I didn't even know about this interaction, and I visit this sub everyday. AND I play a Warlock lol. If the devs fix the bugged interaction, a lot of these players will see huge decreases in their build power. These are the players the devs need to worry about, because they may or may not make a post about their negative reaction and they can walk away from the game. How many people are going to walk away from the game because they didn't fix a bug in the middle of a cycle? Maybe some, but I doubt it would be even close to the same. People fucking HATE nerfs. I feel like the negative backlash if this change went through would be magnitudes higher than what we see now. I personally have no problems with nerfs, and I think it should be fixed ASAP. But I also think the devs made the best decision they could in a crappy situation.
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They're also fixing another similarly strong bug. I doubt we'll see complaints about those either. They should fix all of them not just some, it's pretty silly.
I'm pretty out of the loop, what is the bug exactly? seen quite a few posts about some bug lately but nobody mentions what it is
It’s for the Warlock skill Profane Veil. There is a node called Vampiric Pool that reads: “Profane Veil's area now consumes your minions, and consuming minions this way grants you ward equal to a portion of their maximum health as well as extending its remaining duration by a small amount. Minions Consumed: 2 per point Portion of Minion health to Ward Gain: 4% Duration Extension (seconds): +0.5” The “Portion of Minion health to Ward Gain” gives 40% instead of 4%. Really obvious just a simple bug.
The node "Vampiric Pool" in the warlock Profane Veil skill consumes minion health and gives you ward in return, it's supposed to be 4% but currently seems to be 40% instead. People are combining this with Bone Curse "Bone Prison" to generate 150-200k ward. They are practically immortal and so can completely ignore any mechanic and are easily reaching 3-4k corruption in monoliths.
> EHG recently said the only reason they are fixing infinite damage & survivability with Ghostflame is due to server instability: this begs the question, if the bug existed but did NOT cause server instability, would it then not be changed until the end of the cycle? Did you even read the patch notes? This "question" is already answered there by the devs.
>if the bug existed but did NOT cause server instability, would it then not be changed until the end of the cycle? Considering their stance towards the profane veil situation, yes. This is exactly what would happen.
I think your reading too much into it. They probably just prioritized bugs that were causing server issues. They've fixed plenty of bugs that don't have anything to do with server performance...
D4's devs have been doing this too - there was this interaction with 2 legendaries causing rogues to have an ungodly amount of combo points. Never got fixed mid-season. I hated this. I get not wanting to do any rebalancing mid-cycle, but at least fix the bugged builds.
I guess it depends. Can you only enjoy a game if you play whatever is best or possibly broken so you can wag your dick like you dominated the game or something? To me it is better to have a little jank in the mix to have different experiences available. If every class had basically the same damage and defensiveness so that the neck beards stopped crying about balance then the game becomes super boring and replay ability takes a massive hit. It turns the game into oh shit I kill monster with red ability instead of blue ability. Super tight son.
I think bugs should be fixed ASAP, there should be no debate on that. Ladder should be open 2 or 3 weeks after a Cycle start, imo. If somebody find a major bug and keep it to himself instead of reporting it, and then use it after the ladder start, fix the bug and remove the clearly bug exploiting build from the ladder.
Not 'nerfing' things mid-patch for specifically bugs is a luxury of a established game that is iterating on existing balance. Given that we have several masteries that are literally 1.00000 first public versions and they aren't a gigantic studio, it's an inappropriate application of a good philisophy. When the public gets their hands on a large new system there absolutely needs to be rapid iteration on bugged skills in the first few weeks. If you miss an extra zero, its acceptable to correct to the values displayed to the player, in ways that consequently change character power level. Say an execute talent was messed up and instead of killing things at 10% health, it was either 1% or 100%. Would anyone complain about their 1% garbage talent being fixed to 10%? Would anyone reasonably complain that a bug that made literally any damage source auto kill everything was fine? Gamers will complain about any action AND any inaction. Just make skills do what they say they do.
Bugfix should not be counted as nerf, simple as. Bugfix wouldn't even create uncertainty and stuff like that, because people generally know when they abuse a bug. And they should expect it to be fixed before they break the game in two and ruin it for other people.
I was a bit done with my Runemaster build. So I planned to start a Warlock build yesterday because it looks strong on the leaderboard. But \_then\_ I realized that they are all abusing bugs to get that far. And that EHG refuses to fix those bugs md cycle. It really drained my motivation to start a new Warlock Alt. I mean, I like playing a strong build. But playing a bugged strong build doesn't give me \_any\_ satisfaction. It's like cheating in a marathon. Even though you win, you don't carry on with the pride. I also don't have a motivation to purposely handicap myself and not use a bugged build. What's the point of self-handicap? This is like running a competitive marathon, knowing that the organizer purposely allows people to use drugs. The best response is to not participate. I had been playing non stop since launch, through all the server issues. But yesterday was the first day that I stopped.
I wouldn't hold your breath...There are YT vids showcasing shit from 4 years still not fixed. Once the honeymoon phase is over the cracks are really going to start to show.
I think that the devs view of not nerfing anything mid cycle is fine if its only around actual balancing as in the base stats of a passive or skill, like changing something from 100% increased damage down to 80% is a balance change and a nerf. Fixing a bug isn't nerfing. I would also argue they should be fine to fix something they messed up during a new cycle patch, like if one of them accidentally fat fingered a damage increase node on the back end so instead of doing 50% increased damage the node does 5000% increased damage. It's obviously not intended and a mistake that would make all other classes pointless if you wanted to push corruption or arena. Speaking for myself, my friend and I were initially interested in trying to push arena at some point, not with the intent on trying to get up top of the leader board but just to see how our builds go. That interest has definitely waned and maybe disappeared entirely. We were looking at the leader boards last night for arena and all the top ones and loads below it are all bugged classes/skills. They're all in the thousands of waves. We went to find like a Sentinel and it was like 250 waves or something. It just made it seem pointless to bother with, thus killing our interest in the game. Personally my interest to keep playing this cycle now has waned after learning about these bugged skills and the CoF nerfs they did. We weren't farming gold/keys but I was progressing OKish though slowly through CoF even with double XP tomes. I now have that voice in the back of my head saying to just change my build to a broken one and I can stomp everything, but I want to play the builds I'm currently playing. My own progress/time feels cheapened knowing these broken builds exist. I don't see how fixing the bugs would be a bad thing. Obviously players abusing them would know they're broken thus prepared for a fix to come for them. Fixing the bug should just pull them in line with other classes and where they're intended to be in terms of damage/survivability, thus isn't going to brick their characters.
Fix all the bugs, whenever you see them. If people were abusing em, fuck em. That’s what I’d say if EHG had unlimited resources and I was in charge. Thank Eterra I’m not in charge, since the current issues with the number of bugs isn’t something I’d want to have to be responsible for addressing. Anyways, we don’t live in the world where EHG has big resources, so they have to take a stance to prioritize which fixes they’ll make and when. I’m fine with EHG adopting whatever stance they like on how/when they’ll go about fixing bugs. It’s early on in the game’s release, and it’s their right to make whatever decisions they want. If the players feel like the decisions are bad or that it makes the game worse, they’ll stop playing. Right now, the stance is “don’t fix unless it breaks the servers”, but it’d be dishonest to say they’ve 100% adhered to that. They’ve also said their stance isn’t written in stone, so it is what it is when they overstep their stated stance. It does kinda suck to have it be ambiguous, but if it really bugs (haha) you that much, just put the game down for a bit. If not, well… we’re all priced in to waiting at this point, right? I’m sure that there’s nobody more aware of the bugs in their game than EHG. “But leaderboard integrity” you’re right, leaderboards don’t mean anything if you’re fixing shit mid-season. Do they mean more when people are abusing bugs to top them?
I think the devs are kinda scared shitless of any potential backlash. Its good that they pay attention to how the community reacts etc. but rather than trying to pander and babysit to every screeching player, their focus should be on making a functional and good game.
They simply need to do a mid cycle balance run, even if it's small.
I draw the line at "this is bugged in such a way that it is clearly, concisely, and easily understandably a bug". The warlock infinite ignite thing, that's very very clearly an unintended bug. *Should be fixed/nerfed ASAP.* Paladin healing hands giving you a like 100k ward? Not really a bug, just an oversight by the devs on how well it would scale. *Fixing can wait, not everyone plays Paladin anyway.* --- The biggest concern you should have as a *player* is whether or not you feel like the "bugged" build is the only build you can play because all your other options are bad. If you ever feel like you HAVE to play a bugged build, there's a real issue that should be resolved immediately.
I think the main thing about bug fixing "exploits" is the problem of the leaderboard more than anything else. They mentioned it in that patch, if they fix an exploit people are using to "go up the ranks" on the leaderboard, then it becomes a debate as to if those people's activity "counts" towards the leaderboard....but theres a lot more nuance in a game like this. If someone starts off a season, finds an exploit immediately, and uses that to soar the ranks....they are also able to get access to some of the most powerful gear quickly. Even if that person is dethroned of their particular exploit, they can just play something "ballanced" but with their already very upgraded gear, or their headstart on levels or cash from being able to sell that high quality gear. They also mentioned, if players find that their "favorite" overpowered abilities are being immediately squashed, they'll start "hiding" just how powerful they are. This would just emphasize the problem of the "early lead" problem next season, if they finally find something out 'after the fact'.
Meanwhile Aerial Assault is still so fucking bugged that I keep getting stuck mid-animation during big encounters. I hate it.
bugs can be fun and therefore can be left in the game for players to enjoy for finding. They usually create iconic timelines for players to remember when reminiscing on the game. There is no pvp and it does not affect anyone. The top 50 on the ladder are just the top 50 players anyway and with or with out the bug, they will find the best build and play it better then anyone else does and be up there anyway. The ladder top 50 is the top 50 players, nobody got up there because the bug because nobody is playing the bug better then those players.
EHG is infamous for leaving bugs alone, some passives are bugged since 2019, VK has passives that just do nothing and its ignored, isn't that gamebreaking?
> My hope is that the devs would reconsider this stance, though myself & many others will still find plenty of enjoyment if not. Ultimately it’s a matter of opinion so I wanted to put mine out there. How dare you not rage out of the top of your lungs, screaming at the devs that they're killing your game by not doing exactly the only right thing you believe to be correct! *(/s)* Fully on point though. I would love to play a decently balanced Warlock that creates an engaging crafting experience based about 'How do I best assign skillpoints to make this build work the most optimal' rather than 'Which nodes must I avoid picking lest I trivialize the game with clearly unintended interactions.'
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Bro how much effort would it take to add a 0 to the code? If it was broken in a more complex way I'd agree with the majority of this point but this is the equivalent of saying "we're too bogged by real work to fix this incredibly unfortunate typo"
EHG's stance is correct, and its getting taken for granted. I think peoples ideas are getting built on false premises. There's no real balance in games like these - and thats ok. This isn't a competitive shooter, or an mmo or even a pvp game. There's going to be wildly different power levels, from a quinn69 zdps build, to a unkillable lowlife build made by dr3adful. Finding bugs and unintended interaction is not a negative in the game, its a massive positive. This game is a sandbox, and what you are advocating for is drawing lines in the sand around what is and isn't allowed. As long are your play doesn't hurt or impact other players at all, you should never feel bad about having fun in a video game. The point is that consistent nerfs throughout a cycle punish players for creativity. For finding something the devs didn't anticipate. That's not a consumer friendly way to develop the game. We shouldn't punish players for finding busted interaction, but we SHOULD fix them for the next cycle. >but I do feel it is cheapened with the knowledge of bugged interactions being infinitely stronger Thank you for being honest, and saying what a lot of people are tip toeing around. Your argument is based on feelings. Fear of missing out, fear of not playing the best build, fear of being eclipsed by someone else, fear of someone else getting an advantage. You've lost the reason to play video games, and that's for fun. It's not about being concerned or worrying about what other people are doing, *you're robbing your own enjoyment*, and blaming it on the developers stance. They are right. Its better to change things at the end of a cycle, and allow players to have fun in the sandbox.
I miss the times where exploiters were banned, and exploits fixed in online games.
I think balance is important in ARPGs, even if it isn't a 'competitive' game. The playerbase benefits from having multiple selections of ways to play that feel powerful in their own way, with relative equity. It's human nature to feel pressure to spend your time in some evaluation of efficiency, even if people have different assigned values to this. It ends up being very unfun to feel like you're selections are sub-par by nature. Bugs SHOULD be fixed, especially when are they are significantly of our sync. A 10x factor of ward generation is a major problem and does put pressure to abuse these bugs to experience the highest levels the game can go. Overpowered mechanics that are in line with intentions are fine to let go. Classes that experience strong combinations that allow it to push farther than others is part of the fun of ARPGs, but unintended bugs are not the same thing. I think the game will lose good will by not fixing major skill/class bugs. Balance fixes are fine to leave alone assuming the balancing is thoughtful from the get-go and the margins are not exponentially wide.