"do you not have phones?"

you mocked blizzard for being so out of touch with the fans and what they wanted, and rightfully so. adding an easter egg specifically to mock this peak moment of hubris and disconnect. blizzard up on the stage showing they had NO IDEA what fans wanted, or that they had heard ANYTHING fans had been saying for years. literal YEARS at that point we had been waiting for a proper diablo sequel (fuck 3, that was not diablo). and when they came out with that immortal presentation... it removed all doubt about whether blizzard cares about players, or quality, or feedback.

ggg. you may not have had a 'do you not have phones' moment, but at this point i feel the ONLY reason for that is that you guys dont get up on stage and try to defend the inane decisions being made behind the scenes. i started playing back in like 2016, and in all that time only one melee skill has every been viable in one leage. it has ALWAYS been a meme, and players have ALWAYS cried out to make it playable.

it has been the same 4-5 skills in use in all that time. new skills are added that cant keep up, old skills are never made viable, and while the 'top' skills do see nerfs league after league, the splash damage from those nerfs nerf EVERYONE else too, resulting in a net zero change relatively speaking. being forced to play the same skills league after league, or get walled before endgame without mirror-tier equipment is simply NOT FUN. and i realize that most people seem to have forgotten this by now, but the POINT of games is FUN.

the promise of poe that attracted most of us was the freedom to do what we like, to come up with new and interesting builds. and that promise has been a lie right from the start. the endless variety boils down to half a dozen that make it to end game. its like having a fighting game where only one character has the moves to actually beat the game, or a racing game where only one car is faster than the competition.

clean out your ears, ggg. people WANT to use the other skills in the game. people dont want to spend 80% of their build and gear layering defenses to get one shot LESS amongst the cluster fuck of rainbow puke end game combat becomes. people WANT to experiment with different build and combo ideas, but are actively discouraged from doing so because 99% of all such attempts WILL fail, and the 1% that dont are made by streamers and become the new meta because, again, the options of viable builds are so few.

and the worst part is, you have been told over and over again for YEARS exactly what will fix the balancing nightmare you have created. remove multipliers. simple as that. you CANNOT balance a game where you multiply multipliers, where one build peaks at 2 million dps, while another breaks BILLIONS. the ONLY way to make the game able to actually BE balanced is to remove all multipliers (or at least stack them into one mod so they arent multiplying each other). this ONE change will bring all skills and numbers into line, and sure you would have to rebalance EVERYTHING around this new baseline, but this would allow for the game to ACTUALLY be balanced, which would make all skills viable.

and THAT is what players want, and have been screaming for for years. otherwise, you can bet your ass the community settle on some statement to be YOUR 'do you not have phones' moment, because as far as i can tell you have been doing the exact same thing for a very long time. ignoring players, our feedback, and what we want from the game, to push your vision of streamers and microtransactions.

Its good that in this day and game we have so many games to play. we can pick and choose what we enjoy and dont need to force ourselves to a single game we dont enjoy playing and dont want to play anymore.

Lol you don't speak for me don't say PLAYERS WANT THIS and that when in reality it's a few of you at most whining.

The entire concept of balancing is the antithesis of what PoE is, though.

A character in PoE is a product of every possible path through the passive tree * every modification of the tree (anointments, cluster gems) * every modifier you can have on gear * every value a modifier can have...

The by-the-numbers-difference between the best and worst character that can hypothetically be made in the game is astronomical.

In order to actually balance characters, you'd have to completely rework the game to have very limited skill trees, static gear stats etc. It would be a completely different game.

1. Don't speak on my behalf. Never.
2. Small hint: you're probably very bad at making builds. There are plenty of builds with various skills that are perfectly viable (including melee builds, I do play my own melee build so I know they can be fine).
Try Zizaran PoE University series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osEbXtWuZEw&ab_channel=Zizaran

i've not played the same build twice in the past 2 yrs. And I usually don't like playing very off-meta builds, which means that the meta has been huge and diverse.

Even last league, 2 of the top meta builds was poison SRS & shockwave totem, which practically no one played before sanctum league. Yet there are also players who've played nothing but Seismic trap since 3.15

So speak for yourself when you talk about "4-5 main skills to use"

poe never had "balance" in their game.
their initial design with that huge skill tree already made other developers laugh out loud cause they thought ggg would never be able to balance those many factors.

and they were right, ggg never really cared and just played "whack a mole" with the worst outliers.

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it's not a "don't you have phones" event, diablo strayed from the path after they sacked the d2 developers, poe never really changed.

OP please list the top 5 skills used in each league for the past 5 leagues

So that we can compare what people have been playing

All I know is no one plays any bow build other than tornado shot, all the streamers play tornado shot MF

You probably won't want to hear it but Multipliers aren't that big of a deal. I develop also and in the end they're just numbers. What actually matters are the ratios of those numbers.

In this regard I can say the stat value of DPS to Defense is about 20 to 1 these days. That is to say no matter how you layer it Defense comes out about 1/20th of what DPS will.

Comically they have tried to fix the true problems of this game like Movement Speed and Enemy Density however it's the community who got outraged at a change that wasn't done well but healthy for the game none the less. In cases like this GGG can't win either way.

They are indeed ignoring the Melee plight but they're also developed themselves into a corner where there really isn't an easy solution anymore. There's generally key perks Melee get for being melee. More DPS, More Durability, More CC or more Mobility. Mobility isn't going to happen because the game is already out of control with that stat globally. CC doesn't make a huge difference, so we have more damage / durability. ie more multipliers.

There's quite a lot of hyperbole in this post, OP. I get that you're frustrated about melee being slightly weaker than ranged in a neverending clearspeed meta, but you need to avoid undermining your own arguments if you want anyone to take them seriously.