bapcja wrote:Most people don't go crazy about caster builds, because they are pretty much one dimensional. What do spells carry? %sdmg, %pierce and whole lot of not much else. What do wdm builds carry? Procs (we love them!), cb, ds, slow, leech and dozen different things that I wont list right now. All of which become more or less effective based on if/how many projectiles does the skill produce, if or how many times does it multi hit. Whether its single target or aoe. There's just a LOT of factors.
A lot of people play Diablo for the math, even if they dont realize it. Theres so much more number crunching involved with wdm builds compared to spell casting ones. They are simply more satysfying to play and tinker with.
Trying to sound fancy yet your argument is so shallow.
You want builds to be multi-dimensional yet you want to use a single wdm spell to do everything for you. The things which you listed for WDM are also offered in spellcasting: procs, slow, leech, also EF/SF and other mechanics which you curiously forgot to mention (considering you played the math card).
bapcja wrote:Repeated nerfs of the most popular wdm based builds paired with superficial buffs to unpopular skills might not be the way to go. If the devs want people to play outside of meta, maybe they shouldn't be afraid to generously buff builds that are picked by less than 5% of players online. The UHM rework was good example of it. Sure, it was a little overtuned but that can always be fixed later.
You do know that if you "generously buff unpopular builds" they are no longer "outside of meta" but ARE the "meta"? What exactly are you trying to accomplish here? It's like pretending you care about off-meta yet you expect us to power creep hard so you can pick the easiest fresh over-buffed meta build there currently is so you can spam 1 skill and pretend you're good at the game.
As someone who's worked nearly 10 years in the project I can tell you: MXL and power creep do
NOT get along well. Simply because there's way too much content to maintain, lots of items, over 1500 skills (lod has 350). There was a years-long power creep called Ultimative which took a stupid amount of work to get back in place (dmg rework, mana rework, res, pierce, leveling, and much more). We are not making the same mistakes again.
Last point - instead of making some popular generic post "plz we need more buffz" actually point exactly what your problem is and the builds which you claim were "superficial" and I'm happy to discuss what you're doing wrong. As the 1.4 announcement said, the buffs were not going to be ridiculous because most of the main addressed builds weren't even lacking power. But I guess you did not read that, same for this topic's title, it's the changelog thread not the feedback one. Post in an appropriate place if you want to make something constructive and are not here merely for the attention.