While people make decent points about balancing with buffs instead of nerfs and the tone-deaf PR of it all, I think the “you had years to figure this out” is really off base. No amount of playtesting from a team of hundreds is going to be able to hit the limits of what is possible like millions of players. You do your…

They do seem pretty effectively close to free.

To be fair the barbarians in Rome were also largely inside the gates.

All of which makes me really curious what the hell happened in the Indus Valley civilization, where the archeological evidence shows huge public works projects but basically no evidence of a wealthy elite.

Ah, yeah, ok I can see that.

I mean if you look at how D3 was regarded a couple weeks after release compared to D4 even after this misstep I think D4 is still way ahead of the game. If they can pull off a similar trajectory, I don’t see any reason to think that D4 will be “d3, but worse).

It seems pretty clear that the problem is that once you got to a certain echelon of the game there were only a small number of viable builds. Buffing the enemies only makes that problem worse.

Money isn’t the same as cultural relevance. Oil companies made more money than either but we aren’t considering making wikipedia pages for petroleum related memes. 

I still hear stray “Where’s the Beef” jokes. Pet Rocks was a thing from when I was a baby (I was born ‘73 - they evidently were around in ‘75) - but I remember Pet Rock jokes being told on talk shows on stuff at least through college. Those things all definitely pass the “20 year test”.

Do we know that most of the playerbase is in fact spending a lot of time in these higher level areas? Certainly a lot of invested playerbase is, but unless we’ve got some data on it I’d be surprised if most players aren’t at least somewhat close to me in their level of engagement.

I’ve done a couple Nightmare Dungeons and they did not seem any more difficult, but I guess they were “level 1" nightmare dungeons (according to the doohickey I used to open them). Haven’t done anything with Helltides yet (mostly because I’m entirely confused as to what they are and how they work, but I’m sure I’ll…

I am struggling to understand how you would even encounter higher level monsters. I mean I guess by partnering with someone higher level, but I have 0 interest in playing this with other people so is that just off the table for me?

I am really honestly trying to understand how. I haven’t noticed any big change in the difficulty (or more accurately lack thereof) of Nightmare dungeons. At what point will I notice (Barbarian 57, which I know isn’t like super high level or anything, but that represents dozens of hours of play).

I mean Eastwood started lecturing chairs for questionable political causes.

Huh? I’m having trouble parsing that sentence. Do you mean over-level content? And given that the game scales with level, how would you even face things overleveled for you? 

I mean I have a Level 57 Barbarian in Tier 3. I don’t think my build is particularly optimized, but the game has been absolutely trivial since I moved into tier 3, so I’m not at all opposed to toning shit down. I played some last night (which I believe was post patch) and didn’t really notice much of a difference…

You wouldn’t download an infant

I mean surely the phrase came up at some point in getting kids out of mines and textile mills, but yeah.

I mean he created the only moment in any Star Wars movie that has ever made me cry, so I’m going to say he nailed the last stand of Luke Skywalker as far as I’m concerned. 

I’m pretty sure they did - he was a legendary stage performer and he did star in one of the greatest movies ever made (or at least a movie that is regarded as such).