Shinnyshin

Wait what? I mean, the rest of your post seemed pretty solid...but I had a lot of trouble taking it seriously after this in the opening. Ipwr was a horrific mess that has done more than its fair share to ruin the game. It would take a truly ingenious system to somehow worsen the gear situation. From your post, it sounds like they might have actually pulled that miracle off. But to claim the starting point was remotely good is...

Not weighing in on your guys' discussion, but just want to say that Skeletons taking reduced damage from arrows is a gaming classic. Usually not immunity, but resistance is very common.

I guess it would depend on the economy of this game. Right now the game is not balanced around having a lot of gold. 1 Million gold is annoying to farm yet you can eat through it really quickly. If suddenly you were able to (practically) AFK farm Onslaught for a few thousand gold a round, the value of gold will be much much different. Farming mana in DD1 was almost non-existent. In DD1, most people used items as currency until they added in Mana tokens... and even then I don't think people mass trade mana-tokens to trade items. 100% would work if it was balanced, and that's up to the Dev team

Honestly, I'd take an item-of-choice reroll per day over a 750 any and every day of the week.

Nicely done. Does anyone know exactly how much the range was reduced? We could find the % area decrease from that to get a full % DPS loss, which would probably be even more egregious.

LOL neither is Global cooling. If yo notice, politics will sway back & forth on whether it's global warming or global cooling. Just depends on what will get them the most attention. But, right now, they are using the term "Climate change" as the buzz word. Well, of course the climate changes! Every season! Every year! lol As for OP, I would not expect a patch this week either. Thanks Knowsnolimits for the twitter update. :-) Fun fact. The phrase "Climate Change" was the creation of a political evil genius who specializes in renaming things to pursue an agenda. He thought Climate Chan

To get back to the broad topic, there are really two explanations: 1) Trendy has a specific vision for gameplay and is adjusting the game long-term to match that vision of the future. 2) Trendy doesn't like something people are doing and is radically changing the rules of the game in order to nerf something. Maybe short-term, maybe long-term, maybe indefinitely. They themselves may not know. I hope it's the former. If so, that could be a lot of fun, despite my usual view of tower-defense games. Hopefully it'll accompany a further increase max ranks for towers, 'cuz giving us less to spen

Balance is, in my view, a unified vision for how players should be playing. This vision guides the devs when balancing all of these competing aspects: -Build diversity options vs optimization required -Players scrambling nonstop vs AFK ends of spectrum -Finding ways for all characters and aspects of the game to be relevant vs a few options dominating Trendy's current problem, imo, is that it doesn't really seem to have a clear view of how things should be and instead is just reacting to the excesses of the current gamestate. A lot of different approaches can work so long as you fully und

Agree with you 100%. Current gamestate has a lot of problems and Dracolich doesn't really make the situation any worse--if anything it helps make the current gamestate more tolerable. So why remove it from this current iteration? When the gamestate is changed and Dracolich becomes something that damages the game, I absolutely agree it should be curbed. But now? That just hurts players without helping anyone or anything. What exactly would be improved by changing DL at the current moment? Not in the future, but in the present?

I absolutely agree that when Trendy wants to up the difficulty and change the current gamestate, DL needs to be re-examined. After being tested in the new system to confirm what needs to be done. It doesn't seem like we're moving to this better, more challenging world any time soon. For the forseeable future, we're mass-grinding the same maps over and over while barely paying attention and this NM5 addition only reinforces that. In this world of runs/hour, the Dracolich certainly doesn't make the game worse and, if anything, is very good for players. So why advocate ditching Dracolich in

Then wouldn't it make more sense to nerf DL if/when we get to that point rather than now? I mean, DL's...problematic status is intertwined with the problems of the current gamestate. What's the point in gutting DL before we address those gamestate problems and see how things shake out? To nerf DL now just seems like a player-hostile solution out of misplaced frustrations.

Agreed. And even the Enchantress is very subject to RNG as you need something worth improving to work with. That feel when you've sunk all your earnings into an acceptable-but-not-amazing piece of gear and then another meh piece of gear pops up with a 3 higher iPWR base or a 1% higher passive. Contrasting DD2 with most MMOs and Diablo-genre games I know, I'd say the key distinction in grind is that with DD2, you absolutely have to win the extremely low % (lower than MMOs in my opinion) lottery otherwise you have accomplished nothing with your playtime. No earning tokens to slow-and-steady

Agreed. With the # creep and the crit # weirdness we recently saw, it's pretty clear the numbers are scaling out of control. Not from a balance perspective, but from the raw bulk of the #s being too much. I...actually think the game would benefit a lot from an order of magnitude reduction or two, just for sanity's sake. 'cuz if it's this bad now, just imagine six months down the road...

Uhhh, no. Here's the massive gaping flaw with the reasoning you (and people arguing the same) consistently use. You put forth this false dichotomy between no progress and getting everything you want almost instantly. I think that if I do get everything I want after umpteenbillion hours of work and then perhaps quit playing, that's a victory for the game. 'cuz I played it for umpteenbillion hours to get that stuff. There's a middle ground between no progress and "but then everyone'd get everything they want and then stop playing". It's a huge, really easy to envision middle ground. There'

Making better items drop will not make the game more enjoyable or keep people playing. If they make the drops better the only thing that will do is allow people to get the best gear available faster and once they have it then every drop will be "junk" to them again and nothing has changed except that NM4 incursions are even easier than they used to be because you have perfect gear now. I mean, you can say that. But the reason my friends and I stopped playing was because the horrific gear drops made us feel like we were flat-out wasting our time playing. When you emerge from a multi-week-lon