d3 Don Vu on the 2.6.1 Balance Changes

[Zadina 923]

The Diablo III Game Designer has clarified some of the player's concerns on the upcoming balance changes.

Even though the team has already posted their balance goals for Patch 2.6.1, the latest PTR patch has raised complaints upon the community who feels that Necromancer is kept powerful at the expense of the other classes.

Don Vu tried to address these complaints with a lengthy post in the official forums. He explained that big numerical changes don't necessarily indicate big buffs or big nerfs, since Greater Rifts scale on an exponential curve. He added that they use a whole bunch of data to determine balance changes and not just the leaderboards, GRift level and times, or PTR clears.

Lastly, Don Vu underlined that they are not trying to keep Necromancer at number 1. As far as Barbarian and Whirlwind are concerned, they lowered Whirlwind's damage to keep in check its synergy with two different runes of Battle Rage.

Don Vu

Hey everyone,

There has a been a lot of discussion about some of the changes in the most recent PTR Patch and I wanted to chime in and hopefully give some insight as to why we made some of the decisions we made.

First I’d like to try and quell some misconceptions that I’ve noticed within the community:
 

• Big number changes don’t necessarily mean big buffs and/or nerfs. Increasing a damage bonus from 6,100% to 10,100% sounds like a lot, but Greater Rifts scale on an exponential curve. For each successive Greater Rift level, you need roughly 17% more damage than the last to complete it. Going from 6,100% to 10,100% is roughly a 66% increase, which is only about 3 Greater Rift levels.
• The leaderboards aren’t all the data we use. Oftentimes one player will have a really high Greater Rift clear with a specific spec, but also have almost as high Greater Rift clears with other specs. Those almost as high Greater Rift clears aren’t shown on the leaderboards. We have data from every Greater Rift clear to analyze and action upon. This is partly what we mean when we say sometimes things don’t show the whole picture.
• We don’t just look at the Greater Rift level and time cleared. We look at paragon, legendary gems, augments, stats – just a whole slew of data from our Business Intelligence team – and do internal tests of our own. We have a target Greater Rift level with specific paragon, legendary gems, augments, stats, etc. derived from the top clears on Live and PTR and we try to hit that target by tweaking changes over the course of the PTR. Some of the reasons why you saw some specs get buffed, then nerfed, then buffed, then nerf again are because sometimes we don’t hit our target and because the goalpost moved after players cleared higher with the Blood Lancer Necromancer on Live.
• We’re not trying to keep the Necromancer at #1. In addition to the above bullet point, when we look at data on clears from Live vs. from PTR, we consider the amount of effort the Live person put in vs. the one on PTR. Oftentimes PTR players simply don’t put in as many attempts as someone as Live. We also keep in mind that not everyone plays on the PTR, so we aren’t necessarily receiving data from all of the best players for each spec.

The Whirlwind changes have been a hot topic, so I wanted to dig a little deeper and explain those. A couple of PTR Patches ago, we fixed a bug with Battle Rage: Bloodshed that nerfed it’s damage quite a bit. Before we fixed the bug, the top Whirlwind build used Battle Rage: Bloodshed, so the increase on damage from 1700% to 3400% on Wrath of the Wastes was meant to compensate for the nerf on damage on Battle Rage: Bloodshed. However, the recent high Greater Rift clears with Whirlwind started to use Battle Rage: Swords to Ploughshares. We considered the paragon, legendary gems, etc. of the player that cleared Greater Rift 118, but we also considered how fast after the patch the player cleared it. All of the things considered, we decided to decease Whirlwind damage a little bit – roughly 2 Greater Rift levels.

With all of the things we have to consider, sometimes we do get things wrong. The testing, feedback, and discussion we’ve received from the community has helped us tremendously. Hopefully we’ve done some things right during this patch cycle. Thanks again and have a great rest of your weekend! (source)

[Kaelos 74]

In my opinion they should switch these set numbers from thousands to hundreds like legendary items have and remove some of unnecesary difficulty levels

[MrEdren 114]

If we're being asked to pony up 1/3 the cost of the game for one new class, IMO it had damn well better be kept near the top.  This is a PVE game.   

[Arkpit 101]

19 minutes ago, MrEdren said:

If we're being asked to pony up 1/3 the cost of the game for one new class, IMO it had damn well better be kept near the top.  This is a PVE game.   

DLC for Necro is optional and it's offering a different way of playing the game, nothing less, nothing more.

If the Necro would intentionally be made better just because it's a DLC the game would literally be "Pay-2-win" in terms of ladder each season which would be something no one wants for any game.

[Valhalen 1,484]

Why people care so much about which class is performing better than the other? Like said above, this is a PvE game. Even though we do have the option of PvPing, people never do that. All that fuzz just because of the leaderboards?

[Yridaa 490]

30 minutes ago, Valhalen said:

Why people care so much about which class is performing better than the other?

Because I don't want to gimp my friends in their team composition. And we always strive to be competitive (Both IRL and in games)

 

It's just in our nature. You see it everywhere. Me too, personally. I'd rather kill things fast rather than slow. Makes sense right?