Imho, not nerfing anything was something utterly wrong to aim at.
"Nerfing" was needed, badly needed.
1.06 had balances problems. LoD should have aimed at correcting them. You don't balance things by widening the "gap".
LoD widened the gap, and made the balance even worse.
By now, it was probably too late. But by setting "not nerfing" as a goal, the designers made sure 1.10 would fail at balancing the game.
D2 was from the start a very hard game to balance. Just too many variables. 30 skills per character class, 20 ranks for each of those skills, same skills can be used throughout the game, game can be played from SP untwinked to 8 players heavily twinked, and so on...
But by constantly raising the "power factor" (more powerful opponents, more powerful items, more powerful skills) you made the job from "impossibly hard" to just "impossible".
I find it a pity D2's designers fell for that. It's a well-known pitfall in the PnP RPG community.
"Nerfing" was needed, badly needed.
1.06 had balances problems. LoD should have aimed at correcting them. You don't balance things by widening the "gap".
LoD widened the gap, and made the balance even worse.
By now, it was probably too late. But by setting "not nerfing" as a goal, the designers made sure 1.10 would fail at balancing the game.
D2 was from the start a very hard game to balance. Just too many variables. 30 skills per character class, 20 ranks for each of those skills, same skills can be used throughout the game, game can be played from SP untwinked to 8 players heavily twinked, and so on...
But by constantly raising the "power factor" (more powerful opponents, more powerful items, more powerful skills) you made the job from "impossibly hard" to just "impossible".
I find it a pity D2's designers fell for that. It's a well-known pitfall in the PnP RPG community.