You focus on one aspect. The fact is they standardize how active attack work, from how they scale and whether they hit one target or multiple target how much they will do. You can consider these changes good but they have been more standardize. They did not just change every where it says 1w to now say 10% etc.
Named item standardization that they did awhile back and now expanding to W on weapons is more of my issue then this particular change.
Except that is what they did? At most they changed the very few cases of .5W to 10% from what I can tell. You said 'With this recent update standardize of active attack remove some of the uniqueness of certain attacks between classes etc.'
The aspect I commented on was the most obvious example that 'standardizing' is a floating term without definition or being used incorrectly.
To 'standardize' is to have something conform to a standard or the process of setting a standard. So all weapon damage being calculated by [W] that has a set value for each [W] is a
standard.
If it wasn't standardized, active attacks would be adding different unique flat damage numbers for every different active attack, eg Cracking Attack does 100/250/500 damage but Splitting Steel does 75/200/350 damage. Two attacks from two different classes going from +3W to +30% didn't change anything about the 'uniqueness' because it was already standardized. The standard was just +W.
The term you are probably looking for is 'homogenize,' an example being all melee builds have 2 cleave attacks, 1 single target and a self heal or all melee builds need points in a particular tree or skill. FvS and Cleric having near identical 'melee' trees is homogenization, not standardization.
I am certain the OP is not referring to the Special Attack Changes, and certainly not just this one update. Weapons standardization for +W weapon damage was his example. And there is no elusive shiny unicorn in this game to chase any longer. Back in teh day I longed for a scroll of Sword of Shadow or shard of Ring of Spell Storing. They were so rare and powerful, which I envied those that had them. But part of the fun was the pursuit and dedication to finding them. There is no equivalent chase left in the game. The closest thing is the rerolling of GoMF. So many whine and complain that it requires so much to find the perfect roll, and give up with something they can live with. Others will farm threads until they get what they want. There should also be a chase goal in this game. The only chase left is really meaningless rXP beyond 156pts and every single past life. Whats left after this? I guess waiting for the next nerf to your perfect build, so that you have to plan, respec, farm gear, etc, just to get back to what you already had. This is not fun.
I was replying to someone in particular, not the OP. But I also don't understand your point either. Is the sword of shadows getting a nerf to its special crit profile as well? I do not believe so, but correct me if I am wrong. And considering the +W is intended to keep scaling with higher level weapons that release, I am not sure why you are asserting that you just wait to get nerfed instead of running the new raid.
YMMV on if you want the new raids to have items you want because it's paywalled, but there it is.
How do you figure that?
Changing from 100% spell power scaling to 75% spell power scaling seems very clearly a nerf for all spell power scaling imbues.
Even if we add in the separate change to switch d6 imbues to d8, the net of the two is still a nerf... i.e. 100% of d6 is 3.5 average. 75% of d8 is 3.375 average.
Anyway, I don't think the problem is so much that they've 'homogenized everything'. If that is the goal, then I can only call it a spectacular failure as there are CLEARLY still some builds that are vastly stronger than others.
Rather, I'd say that the frequent SWEEPING changes are causing a lot of disruption and re-evaluation and thus... annoyance. You figure out a good build and then watch it get nerfed into oblivion. So you work out another design... and that gets nuked too. If the game is too much of a moving target it becomes frustrating.
And on the flip side, if the game sits on underperforming, underpowered or incredibly niche skills, weapons or classes for literal years on end, it stagnates and that is rightfully seen as a negative. And as far as I know, the only thing that got 'nuked' was caster MM Shiradi. What else?
