Elemental/Templar nerf?

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Aixius wrote:

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radiatoren wrote:

I acknowledge that the item new item progression is a lot better than the former. If the game is gonna be balanced right it is also a very good idea to have the values scaled high in the closed beta to make imbalances easier to spot. I would, however, like a more streamlined passive skill forest. A 33% or 50% overall reduction would make for an easier balancing after open beta begins. The biggest problems I see in the game at the moment are surviveability (I am not that worried about it since a lot of it can be improved by more skillgems, new monster abilities and numeric recalibration/skilltree improvements), cold damage effects (slow is more powerful than any other standard effect in the game and freeze duration/shatter are unmatched status effects) and numeric inflation on mods and passive skills (though that has been improved a lot by item progression).

Being able to slow/freeze your enemies has traditionally been a more practical and safe way to play games like this; the tradeoff is that cold damage is usually a lower amount (which is why "adds 2-3 cold damage" looks way better than "adds 2-3 fire damage", but fire damage can traditionally roll much higher).

As for the OP: this is a closed beta and the whole point of a beta is ready the game for release through testing and tweaking. None of this is finalized. If you can't handle the testing process then I suggest waiting for at least open beta, because all your characters/stash/progress are going to get wiped in the near future anyway.

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Chris wrote:

For the health of the game we have to make changes that may invalidate builds that people have made in this temporary Closed Beta.

In Open Beta, once we're not wiping any more, I can definitely see the argument for wanting to minimise the disruption to people's builds.

Changes we make right now though help us reach a balanced Open Beta faster.

Remember the cycle that happens if we refuse to nerf something:

• We have to buff everything else to make it feel as powerful as the cool broken build.
• People complain the game is now too easy.
• We make the monsters harder so that it's still challenging in the right places.
• Later, we realise that there has been arbitrary inflation of damage values. We scale them all down without affecting balance, to keep numbers reasonable.

At the end of the cycle, it's exactly like we did the correct fix in the first place, but it took ten times as long and left the game in a bad state for most of it.

Having said that, the 0.9.11 changes aren't really very disruptive. I just wanted to rant about nerf philosophy during Closed Beta.

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radiatoren wrote:

Do not get me wrong. I love freeze and slow effects and I truely do not want to get rid of it entirely. I am just proposing turning off the shatter, remove freeze, remove slow-effect or maybe something less drastic to make it less of a preference. Shatter is very powerful in PvE and freeze/slow was the flavour of the month in cutthroat PvP. I know several powerful builds entirely focused around cold damage.

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Charan wrote:

That all said, this is a beta, and a closed one at that. Nothing's set in stone, and the game experience is subject to change. Indeed, isn't it our job as beta testers to find things that might actually need what you call 'nerfing' and what I prefer to see in most cases as 'balancing'?

How many of you would stumble onto some crazy uber build and not tell the devs?