Except in most (all?) cases that one OP skill is something that was 15+ years old and released back when Simu had a full staff including game designers, product managers, etc versus now when they have a ragtag group of part-time employees and one FTE making 99% of the decisions. Point being, they had a full staff of full-time employees that sat down and made the decision and now a ragtag group of part-timers has decided that it's too OP 15 years later. After having something in the game for 10-20 years removing it due to being OP is like finally closing the barn door after the horse got out, had children, raised a family and died of natural causes.
It wasn't always Purestone. It was Purestone whenever the change to spell prep RT went in 20+ years ago. Since then, they've been nerfing pures and semi's in the name of game balance instead of buffing squares. The current state of the game is that it's Squarestone and they haven't adjusted any of the pure killers they put in as obstacles over the years. They added so many creatures to hunting areas that pures just can't hunt and also maneuvers that squares and semis can shrug off or dodge. As a pure you're supposed to use disablers to avoid this, but then they've made creatures that immediately break free of the disabler so your only shot is to stun/kill outright, but then they've nerfed those spells in the name of game balance.Also, the thing about roundtime, is that the lower it gets, the more exponential the benefit. For example, going from 5 seconds to 4 is only a 20% increase in attack speed. But going from 2 to 1 is literally a 100% increase. Whoever thought it was a good idea to give people 1 second CT/RT was, to put it bluntly, mechanically challenged. The problem is that in this case it's been around for so long, people just accepted it as the norm. But this game has been Purestone since I started playing, so we've always known this crap is broken! It just took some GMs that finally had the balls to right some of the wrongs.
Warriors outperform every single class right now, hands down.It's funny how they can nerf the crap out of wizards and they still outperform most classes. That's how freaking overpowered your class has been.
If game balance meant something other than a nerf to Simu then I think more people would support it. 99% of the time though it's just meant nerf. Maybe I'm mistaken and I'm in the minority here, but I feel like most players would prefer they quit fucking with mechanics and just add content. And yeah, you can absolutely add content without "game balance" or changing the mechanics as they've shown time and time again over the last 25 years. I mean shit, the most crowded hunting areas today are the older ones, which is really telling when it comes to player sentiment towards Simu's idea of game balance.Personally? I not only agree with nerfing my own class if it's warranted, I would be one of the first in line asking for it if I felt there was imbalance. If only people would understand the value of balance, this would be a MUCH better game, and development would be able to come at a much faster pace.
Almost every class now feels like a slight variation of a standard template with the variation being the attack messaging. It wasn't always like that.
At the end of the day, Simu doesn't give a flying fuck what their customers actually want. It's just a bunch of GM's working on what they feel like. If Simu actually cared, they'd go back to surveying players instead of listening to the same 20 people spout their opinions on Discord.