In general, I actually agree with this. Nerfing one meta in a game with multiple choices of meta only pushes everyone towards the next meta, and annoys them in the process.
I’ve legitimately seen games ruined by dev teams with no idea how their own game works, trying to balance the game by nerfing whatever the meta of the week is, and occasionally buffing a random underpowered thing (usually nowhere near the right amount to actually balance it), because all it did was make players annoyed and not bother trying to get powerful stuff since it’d likely not be powerful next week.
However, I’ve also seen those same devs, terrified of upsetting players even more, decide not to nerf “that-one-thing-that-is-ten-times-more-powerful-than-everything-else” and watched every player use that thing and nothing else, and saw how it ruined every corner of the game. It became “get the thing, use the thing, get bored, go away”, for most people.
Nerfing stuff that is a little more powerful, or trying to chase down every single meta, is dumb. No argument here.
But when one thing is not just a little outside of the pack, but so far ahead nothing else comes close, it needs to be the target of balance. If you can so that by buffing EVERYTHING else until they’re all in a similar place, that’s fine (except not always, because if the outlier was a problem you might just be making everything a problem), but generally the best method is to balance the only thing that is in the wrong place in terms of power.
Basically, if everything in the game is balanced around you being at a power level of 100, and all of the classes - combined with other stuff - put you at a power level of 90-95 (or less, but whatever) and one class puts you at a power level of 150, then obviously all the other classes need more power, to get you up to 100. But, that won’t change the fact that the class putting you at 150 is too powerful and needs to come back down to 110 or something. If you push all the classes to 150, all that happens is that everything needs to be changed to 150 instead of 100. Whereas, if you bring the 150 down, you don’t need to make a thousand other changes, to bring everything up to 150, you just need to change that one thing.
Honestly, all the classes need to be looked at, and serious work put into actually balancing them. I’d love for that to happen, and for the result to be a bunch of buffs and changes to various underwhelming classes (and for the dev team to be good enough to successfully make changes that accurately balance them). But whether that happens or not, elementalist is an outlier in terms of power and it needs to be the main focus of balancing. It can still end up being stronger than other classes, and it can still be the main meta, but it shouldn’t be so much better that everything else becomes basically irrelevant. That’s all.
Participation level before hero defenses…
…and after
