Development Manifesto: Game Balance in Path of Exile: Harvest

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MandrulDuce wrote:

Each time you add new stuff to the end game it has to be harder and slightly more challenging than what is already in the game. It wouldn't be fun and appealing otherwise. As that accumulates over time, the gap between vanilla alc an go red maps and current end game widens. Yet you are still balancing the average power lvl around vanilla red maps, indirectly nerfing all the builds in the game.

Delirium proved the flaw in this design philosophy the best. How many builds could clear juiced t16 maps? (not to bring into discussion t19s). Very few. And the majority of builds have ceilings they can't scale above regardless of investment.
Not to say that most builds that average people build couldn't handle delirium on a regular t16 map.

Let's take the example of Herald Stackers. Everybody complained they were OP. Most of them probably just saw clips of empy's 3000ex build trivializing Sirus. The medium budget version of that build (which is already an insane investment) could engage with the end game content of delirium (juiced maps with full delirium) at a good pace and would still have to be careful and in danger of dying.
Nobody built a stacker to engage with regular t16 maps and trivialize them. They did it because it was fun to build and manage all its moving parts, it would always have something you can invest into and improve, and it could engage with actual delirium end game content.
Crit builds were also amongst the few that would scale enough to do juiced delirium maps.
You are gutting all of the above described because "let's not trivialize vanilla t16 maps".

Why put harder content in the game if you take away our ability to scale builds to engage with it? And if we can't engage with it, for people that played for years, what you expect us to have fun with??? Vanilla mapping?

This design philosophy literally makes zero sense for me at this point. Nerf builds to bring them to the power level of average builds which become trash builds with the addition of more difficult content.
More buffs less nerfs.