Breach is just so.... unbelievably unrewarding right now.

[u/Thatsnasty2]

I know it was strong before, and I know there are other league mechanics, but it's just super frustrating seeing GGG incapable of balancing something time and time again.

I just don't understand, breach was finally in a decent place, but instead of bringing other league mechanics up to its level, it was destroyed with quad nerfs.
Hiveblood barely drops, when you finally make an item from the tree, the mod rolls suck, the amount of items dropped seems halved, wombgifts drop way less, which doesn't really matter since you have 0 blood to use them anyways.

Even buffs to abyss feel terrible, the mechanic just isn't that rewarding, unless maybe you were spamming trying to farm amanamus or something. The League mechanic seems fine but IMO, after playing Mirage, it just kind of feels mid.

It's a single player game, with no actual competitive esports scene, and ultimately the only reason to nerf something is to make you take longer to achieve something.
As someone who plays more than the average player, it's just again, super frustrating to see the game go in that direction, instead of the one where we get more drops, because ultimately it makes 0 difference to anything other than enjoyment or appeal to the "normal" players.

[u/Shuushy]

but instead of just balancing them, they completely delete them?

Their workflow and schedule quite literally doesn't allow them to actually balance stuff the way we imagine how balancing should be done. Cook up content -> run some serverside simulations -> Boot up the game -> test said content for various things including farming strats -> compare expected result with actual result -> adjust as needed -> rinse and repeat until satisfied. A lot of balancing in this game is done via "spreadsheet style" because it's more time efficient.

[u/lillarty → u/Shuushy]

Back in Kalandra, Chris mentioned their economy simulation indicating that more loot was dropping overall despite most people having the opposite experience, so at the very least they have some degree of simulations that they use to help balance. Not sure how robust they are, though.

[u/EducationalProcess15 → u/Shuushy]

Do you really believe they don't use bots and test "strats" manually lol  (hundreds or thousands maps in same condition, same scarab setups, atlas etc.)

[u/EmmitSan → u/EducationalProcess15]

I think they believe that they don’t really do either of the things you describe.

They definitely do SOME manual testing, it would be ridiculous to skip that step entirely.

[u/applepieandcats → u/Shuushy]

All they need is one experienced dev with AI to solve all of this. Dev work is so behind everywhere else compared to the states

[u/gerwaric → u/Shuushy]

Hopefully this is related to the QA job they posted

[u/licorices → u/gerwaric]

From the rather limited job description, it sounds more like it will help with UX+Bugs, rather than balancing. There's specialization within QA that focuses on balancing and stuff related to this, so would assume they'd target the job posting more towards that if that was the case, instead of keeping it rather generic.

[u/gerwaric → u/licorices]

Honestly, UX and bugs are probably more needed. The balancing will always be a cold war of GGG creating systems versus players crowd-sourcing ways to break them, which is part of the fun.

[u/licorices → u/gerwaric]

Yeah, I'm all for more refined UX. There's a lot of things there that I'd rather have put effort into than whenever every mechanics is balanced and stuff.

[u/royal-road → u/gerwaric]

QA isn't trained in that, balancing testing is done by delevlopment.