Class differences in terms of gameplay feel is one thing (that is good to have it, classes should feel different when you play with them, that is the designers job - you give teleport to the wizard and jump to the barb for example), class differences in terms of roles each class fulfills in the group is another thing and it is bad to not have concurrence/alternative for each role in the group between the classes, especially when each class is designed to have offensive, defensive and movement skills.
The player base wants build diversity not playing 2 classes from 7 lol. We had a poll about that last year. And there is nothing wrong to have plug and play seasonal mode and a heavy grind non-seasonal one. Right now season and non-season pretty much overlap and people want an option to retire their chars from season just to be able to grind more efficiently at non-season with their already acquired gg gear there.
Also, perfect balancing is very hard to do in a game with uncapped difficulty, but it is also possible to fix the power of your sets and try to at least bring most items to certain equal level. Patch after patch fine tuning the numbers will pay off at the end. However that is not the direction this development team has taken. It is power creep and buffing multipliers to oblivion.
You are basically saying META is the only reason to try new specs. People will try new things and specs when there are new sets, unique items, patch changes, gameplay styles they haven't tried. It doesn't have to be the current META for people to try it, if they don't miss on something by not following this very same META.
Seasons would be plug and play game where only the builds you have fun with matter. If a META build is fun for you, you would play it, otherwise you won't. And this doesn't have to be one class or one spec, quite the opposite. You will see all kinds of builds in public games and you won't feel bad for playing with them because they are sub-optimal.
META is bad for build diversity and when this game enters full maintenance mode, when the META won't change and there will be no patches, the players will BEG for a seasonal cap.
^ META kills the fun in the game (and degenerates some brain cells since every char is a copy of the copy of the copy etc), it serves no other purpose. Without the need for META the new players will try to theorycraft themselves instead of watching videos with imba builds. Without META the public games will multiply, people will start grouping for the sake of it without the fear that they miss on main stat.
In your example you wouldn't let an undergeared noob to play with you and this way you would miss a potential cool person who recently started the game. If the grind is capped at season and uncapped at non-season you would still be able to farm with competent players at non-season, while having fun at season.
@steelreserv123: Capping the endgame grind here is with the intention to defeat the purpose of META, not to create a competition around it. If the devs want to push a meaningful competition they have a solid new mode to build upon called Challenge Rifts.
The whole idea of class diversity is say you have 10 classes and 4 spots in a group. In a perfect situation any combination of these 10 classes should create a group capable of acquiring the optimal resource per hour of what the endgame grind is - in D3 case main stat. Since we don't have such perfect situation aka class balance, the other option is simply to cap the endgame grind - cap main stat to 10k and gem levels to 50 for example and there won't be a need for any META thus there will be class diversity. Of course in a grind game like D3 this is somewhat counter-intuitive since one of your main goals is to be as efficient as possible and capping the grind means capping the efficiency value, but with the already split community in seasonal and non-seasonal mode this opens the possibility to abolish the META on season and as you said more people to try new specs and classes because of that.
However I don't see any of the above two options implemented any time soon, because of the DLC reasons I stated in the previous post. That said, stack all valuable items in the stash space you have available, because one day you may have to change the class if you play groups.
Classes, roles and META are highly related when we talk diversity in groups.
I had posted a thread on the official forums about this long time ago, which got deleted for no obvious reason when it reached 20+ replies. I suppose someone don't like the truth. And the truth is that as long as you have some kind of endgame grind (in D3 case its paragon and primals), you will have a META. As long as you have a META and there is no class balance, you won't have diversity in groups. The possible solutions are two:
1) Remove/cap the endgame grind on seasons
2) Balance all classes
Both are valid solutions, but they won't be achieved in the near future since we expect more classes to drop as purchasable DLC packs. In order to apply 2) you have to implement equal roles for every class or said otherwise every class should be able to fulfill each role in the group as efficient as the other classes. Now if you think money wise this is not very good. DLCs will sell better if they replace the old class roles (aka you buy Necro, because he is imba). So, as others already said, don't expect class diversity in groups anytime soonTM (4-5 years). Maybe after they stop selling DLC character packs we are going to see a big balancing patch. Maybe not. Maybe simply they don't care about class diversity in groups. Just as they don't care for many other things, besides as we all know - money.
Class differences in terms of gameplay feel is one thing (that is good to have it, classes should feel different when you play with them, that is the designers job - you give teleport to the wizard and jump to the barb for example), class differences in terms of roles each class fulfills in the group is another thing and it is bad to not have concurrence/alternative for each role in the group between the classes, especially when each class is designed to have offensive, defensive and movement skills.
The player base wants build diversity not playing 2 classes from 7 lol. We had a poll about that last year. And there is nothing wrong to have plug and play seasonal mode and a heavy grind non-seasonal one. Right now season and non-season pretty much overlap and people want an option to retire their chars from season just to be able to grind more efficiently at non-season with their already acquired gg gear there.
Also, perfect balancing is very hard to do in a game with uncapped difficulty, but it is also possible to fix the power of your sets and try to at least bring most items to certain equal level. Patch after patch fine tuning the numbers will pay off at the end. However that is not the direction this development team has taken. It is power creep and buffing multipliers to oblivion.
You are basically saying META is the only reason to try new specs. People will try new things and specs when there are new sets, unique items, patch changes, gameplay styles they haven't tried. It doesn't have to be the current META for people to try it, if they don't miss on something by not following this very same META.
Seasons would be plug and play game where only the builds you have fun with matter. If a META build is fun for you, you would play it, otherwise you won't. And this doesn't have to be one class or one spec, quite the opposite. You will see all kinds of builds in public games and you won't feel bad for playing with them because they are sub-optimal.
META is bad for build diversity and when this game enters full maintenance mode, when the META won't change and there will be no patches, the players will BEG for a seasonal cap.
^ META kills the fun in the game (and degenerates some brain cells since every char is a copy of the copy of the copy etc), it serves no other purpose. Without the need for META the new players will try to theorycraft themselves instead of watching videos with imba builds. Without META the public games will multiply, people will start grouping for the sake of it without the fear that they miss on main stat.
In your example you wouldn't let an undergeared noob to play with you and this way you would miss a potential cool person who recently started the game. If the grind is capped at season and uncapped at non-season you would still be able to farm with competent players at non-season, while having fun at season.
@steelreserv123: Capping the endgame grind here is with the intention to defeat the purpose of META, not to create a competition around it. If the devs want to push a meaningful competition they have a solid new mode to build upon called Challenge Rifts.
The whole idea of class diversity is say you have 10 classes and 4 spots in a group. In a perfect situation any combination of these 10 classes should create a group capable of acquiring the optimal resource per hour of what the endgame grind is - in D3 case main stat. Since we don't have such perfect situation aka class balance, the other option is simply to cap the endgame grind - cap main stat to 10k and gem levels to 50 for example and there won't be a need for any META thus there will be class diversity. Of course in a grind game like D3 this is somewhat counter-intuitive since one of your main goals is to be as efficient as possible and capping the grind means capping the efficiency value, but with the already split community in seasonal and non-seasonal mode this opens the possibility to abolish the META on season and as you said more people to try new specs and classes because of that.
However I don't see any of the above two options implemented any time soon, because of the DLC reasons I stated in the previous post. That said, stack all valuable items in the stash space you have available, because one day you may have to change the class if you play groups.
Classes, roles and META are highly related when we talk diversity in groups.
I had posted a thread on the official forums about this long time ago, which got deleted for no obvious reason when it reached 20+ replies. I suppose someone don't like the truth. And the truth is that as long as you have some kind of endgame grind (in D3 case its paragon and primals), you will have a META. As long as you have a META and there is no class balance, you won't have diversity in groups. The possible solutions are two:
1) Remove/cap the endgame grind on seasons
2) Balance all classes
Both are valid solutions, but they won't be achieved in the near future since we expect more classes to drop as purchasable DLC packs. In order to apply 2) you have to implement equal roles for every class or said otherwise every class should be able to fulfill each role in the group as efficient as the other classes. Now if you think money wise this is not very good. DLCs will sell better if they replace the old class roles (aka you buy Necro, because he is imba). So, as others already said, don't expect class diversity in groups anytime soonTM (4-5 years). Maybe after they stop selling DLC character packs we are going to see a big balancing patch. Maybe not. Maybe simply they don't care about class diversity in groups. Just as they don't care for many other things, besides as we all know - money.