How do the devs decide on changes?

[Goobs]

I feel like they use an 8 ball or smoke the green before they come up with these stupid patch notes. Fighter with no weapon mastery penalty? Faster full plate armor? Barbarian gets 1% increase move speed from 9% and 5% less PDR reduction on a SIX SECONDS buff?

Do the devs throw darts to a rat tape onto a spinning random wheel? What the hell are they thinking? Are they thinking? This game is so disgustingly unbalanced and they STILL haven't nerfed Warlock in ANY significant way!

I want to like this game but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ at this point I can't see how this out of touch behaviour and mismanaged balance will improve.

[Aldain]

Originally posted by effusivemind:

it's been curious to see the reaction to these changes.

I've never seen the wiz community as divided as they are about Meditation. the diversity of opinion spans the entire spectrum from wiz players saying Meditation build is "unviable" to perhaps the camp I fall into currently that says this change is meta-defining for the class.

the build allows wiz at low GS to not only contribute to PvE clear but be the most effective in the game at doing so. this matters a lot more than people think besides just farming or bossing. before if you brought a wiz on the team you were at risk of getting spawn rushed cuz you had slower clear. if you don't clear fast enough you don't have free space to kite back to. you'll get sandwiched by players and mobs.

I also think players have been wildly underestimating what it means to have the amount of firepower behind 6 Chain Lightnings in a short fight. all other spells aside, if you have 6 Chain Lightnings and use most of them well you basically win the encounter even if the rest of it goes sloppily and even if you have low magic power bonus.

at high GS you no longer need strength up to 15 or additional physical power to take wiz out of it's baseline -25% phys dmg so you can actually help your team clear with Crystal Sword or Magic Staff. you can dump those stats completely and go for additional magic power, will, vigor, even agility. with Meditation build you can invest more in raw power and wiz has insane spell scaling compared to every other caster. casting Magic Missile with Magic Staff out completely replaces melee attacking and after playing this way wizs will never want to go back to melee attacking again.

Meditation also scales significantly with knowledge. upon my testing I was able to regen all my spells even with Spell Overload at ~43 knowledge. you can also stack clarity pots with Meditation meaning if you rly need to and only have 2 seconds to sit you get a tremendous amount of value out of that alone.

I could write pages about how powerful this change is, meanwhile most wiz players are sleeping on this right now

To me the divide feels a bit like a lot of people got too complacent/snobbish about 10 Spell/Shield setups and are stuck in their ways personally. The sheer amount of people calling it a noob trap with absolute venom that I saw was quite...surprising.

People always are like "Just use a campfire instead bro" but that only works assuming you have a team because the time it takes for a Wizard to setup a campfire is longer than just meditating, in teams that works reasonably well but it still basically limits you in the same way a Cleric or Druid are either way.

[effusivemind]

Originally posted by Aldain:

To me the divide feels a bit like a lot of people got too complacent/snobbish about 10 Spell/Shield setups and are stuck in their ways personally. The sheer amount of people calling it a noob trap with absolute venom that I saw was quite...surprising.

People always are like "Just use a campfire instead bro" but that only works assuming you have a team because the time it takes for a Wizard to setup a campfire is longer than just meditating, in teams that works reasonably well but it still basically limits you in the same way a Cleric or Druid are either way.

this is precisely why I've stayed off Reddit and the DaD Discord for discussion.

I think it's unfortunate they nerfed Arcane Shield cuz of bonk build, I ran Arcane Shield sometimes when I played 5 spell caster at low GS. but the reality is the wiz community has been complaining forever about two things: (1) bad PvE clear and (2) wanting better spell count regen. they finally have a solution and most of them are just complaining.

these changes make sense from a dev perspective. in the last Q&A sdf described wiz as a "super glass cannon." it sounds like they want wizs to have a lot of dmg but be very squishy. at least for now, that could always change.

wizs will likely never have something like Phantomize but locks also don't have anything close to 35 or 30 base dmg spells attached to a 1.0 scaling that realistically will hit players, either. it's just the way it is.

I'm happy to debate wizs on 10 spell Overload versus 5 spell Overload with Meditation, but the people saying "Just use campfire instead bro" don't even make sense.

in base gear a poor quality campfire will regen 2.75 Fireball spell counts, and that's with the maximum amount of knowledge you can get. you would literally have to campfire twice if you wanted to get all 4 of those spell counts back after a teamfight, and if you're running Spell Overload you would need to camp 3 times.

from what I've seen I would agree with you. it does seem these comments are coming from people that have already made up their mind they want to play wiz with 10 spell or Arcane Shield. the wizs I've convinced to try new Meditation have all said similar things, "I thought it would be bad but it's pretty good."

I have nothing against Arcane Shield or 10 spell. I used both last patch, but I'm also not going to bury my head in the sand and pretend like Meditation isn't strong and doesn't solve a lot of wiz's problems just cuz the internet wiz mafia has a narrative they want other players to follow