the gap will slowly close with the new masteries and the shuffeling of role centric skill lines anyway. no need for further disincentive

Nah, rather than nerfing subclassing, I prefer seeing pure builds strengthened so there is a wide selection of builds a player can use and still feel a satisfying amount of power/utility etc.

Subclassing is a fun/flexible addition to the game. Don't penalize those of us who embraced it by trashing it.

Class Mastery effectively already does this, and is a good thing.

Certain skills should require base class for full power to break up busted combos.

So I said it then and I say it now: they should've thought through subclassing far more carefully before releasing it.

But now, as someone mentioned above, they're already doing this whole class rework and class mastery thing in response to subclassing so there's no point in making different changes currently that would likely conflict with what's planned.

But beyond that point, subclassing should not be nerf hammered back to where nobody would even use it. They've made this balance mistake too many times in the past. Regular classes should be made more attractive and adjustments should be made when subclassing leads to broken combinations, such that there is a wide variety of good options that are fun to play. A blanket nerf like what's suggested would honestly not be sufficient to tone down the broken combinations, but would render most other subclassing combinations even more useless.

Why would I otherwise subclass ...

Eliahnus wrote: »

Why would I otherwise subclass

Specialization and synergistic combos are stronger than they look on paper.

Certain busted skill combos will still be stronger than whatever buff provided by Class Mastery, these will need to be nerfed otherwise subclassing still beats pure classing by a mile.

They need to make pure classing have something that subclassing doesn't for it to truly offset the power discrepancy, and while the class mastery closes the gap some, it definitely isn't the solution to this entirely. Either introducing a new ultimate only available when pure classing, or a unique buff thats not just a damage increase. Some sort of utility is what is needed down the road, once all the classes have been updated.

That said I don't need pure classing to be 100 percent as good as subclassing rn, just making the pure class builds viable again will keep me playing longer. Probably the thing they should focus on is breaking up the combos universally used by most subclass builds, like every other player using streak is really annoying for one.

Class mastery is not going to make up the difference for even a single subclass skill line. My pure stam warden was hitting 100K on the dummy and once I swapped one skill line for NB assassination I immediately shot up to 112K. If I added the Sorc storm calling line to my build as well I could likely gain another 8-10% damage on top of that.

Some of these subclassing lines are just way too good for raw damage output. Unfortunately content that has been added has also followed the same curve to keep up with the power creep and would need to be adjusted as well. I do t think the devs have time to rebalance everything and there is no putting the inflated damage numbers back in the bag at this point.