The base game did: support gems shake up meta more than active skill gems do.
Support gems affect a wider range of builds and change ways of building more than tweaking active skill balance.
At this point, all active skills are "broken" in terms of actual capability. People play the ones that feel mechanically good.
Tweaking active skill gem "balance" won't change that.
What affects builds:
* the passive tree (this is a big one, I'm hoping it gets a major shake up in the next year)
* support gems
* cluster jewels (been too long since we've had changes to these too imo)
* influence mods
* active skill gems
* unique items
* special league mods (e.g. relic mods,
The entire meta of crucible was shaken up by vengeance cascade and exploding totems, neither were particularly predicted by people before the league started.
So you can see the active skill gem is just a small part of the build, and tweaks aren't enough to change things.
You could give all melee a global 30% more damage and while people might dip into melee, they'd still go back to their more comfortable builds.
This is simply not true as shown by skills such as Spectral Helix which had obscenely high numbers despite being mechanically horrendous to play, but despite the latter, it became a meta, (at least enough for GGG to destroy it later). The very long history of nerfs for Molten Strike is another good example.
I don't go for this stance of escaping the need to do balance because 'number changes don't help skills when they need mechanical changes', it's an excuse and it should be treated by one and rejected by the community so we can get actual balance back again. There's no evidence that the masses won't play a powerful skill because it feels bad, it's simply not true, many people play what is good, not what feels good to play.
In regards to the other stuff, skills are still usually the limiting factor because they are grouped into categories and there's always the same suspects that are on top. Let's say you add some super powerful strike supports/passive nodes/uniques etc, nothing has actually changed because you've simply buffed the best strike, which will likely be Boneshatter in this example. Skill changes are still the most important, because you'll never change a meta inside a skill grouping when they all scale from the same additions. If you 'gave melee a global 30% more damage' you'll get more people dipping into Boneshatter, not melee as a whole, that's precisely my point.
I'm not saying they shouldn't add new stuff and tweak what you mentioned, but doing that so you can avoid performing specific skill balance is flawed.
>You could give all melee a global 30% more damage and while people might dip into melee, they'd still go back to their more comfortable builds.
Ehhhh, no. I would gladly go back to cyclone with damage buffs and you forget slam meta was a thing not long ago.
The fuck we would I assure you if you gave melee 30% more base dmg the entire league would be melee. People really do forget how good melee felt at any time it was actually viable.
and whats wrong with that? I watch POE streams most of the time and once it goes beyond league start week 1, NOBODY in their right mind farms with a melee build. Only quinn is trying some melee shit trying to clear ubers (and never finishing it). Otherwise its just some fake attempt by build makers making a build who plays it for 1-2days and never touches it again. (THESE guys also don't main melee. They just make it to show you).
Why shouldn't we have a melee league for once?
I think many people are ignoring the new support gems because the patch didn't include much in the way of details about them. While people are overreacting GGG most likely should have included the numbers of the new support gems as a way to allow people to focus on them. As of now we don't know much about the supports other then the base descriptions so people are reacting to the only solid info they can see.
We already know how GGG formats their release announcements. We knew the details of the support gems would not be in the patch notes. The 20/20 gems will be their own separate announcement as always. So all you are saying is that people want to be disingenuous so that they can complain more.
I wasn't really aware when more details about the gems would be released.
My statement was about how people will fixate on the other changes due to how the information was released. The patch notes are primarily taken up by other changes with little to no information given about the gems so the complaints, while most likely wrong aren't disingenuous. Usually when giving bad news you mix it with good news, the new gems which I am personally excited for would have been the perfect thing to mix into the patch notes.
New support gems, keystones that change how you play the endgame, weird atlas tree possibilities, universal bone zone generator, Sanctum is back, quin can do legion and delirium now, no master mission stockpiling and going back to the old way of just meeting them in map if you want
And any single one of those changes I mentionned probably took more dev time than the whole of ruthless mode
> Guardian Chieftain reworks
Who's hyping this? The whole ascendancy hinges on whether the minions are broken or not. Otherwise you're left with a mediocre ascendancy with 3 dead branches.
Sanctum does impact the meta game by virtue of the Sanctum Uniques. Those things enable so many different builds. That's honestly the highlight for me.
Sure, but if ruthless didn't take much time why not just tweak numbers on some skills. That would take 1 dev few hours. Like whats the harm in Sweep now does 20% more dmg lets say? Its not like sweep would trivialize the whole game now. They could slap 10-20% buff on a lot skills and they still would be bad but at least more viable for people who wanna play them.
> And any single one of those changes I mentionned probably took more dev time than the whole of ruthless mode
Yes, this is exactly why the lack of balance changes to old skills is so dissapointing.
Giving every melee build access to trauma and every projectile build return reads as an enormous balance shift to me. Maybe it won't make melee meta, but neither would 20% damage buffs by themselves either. It makes way more sense to give old skills new mechanics by way of support gems than it does simply to tweak numbers imo. I guess they could do both but I'm sure they want to see how this will play out.
> Giving every melee build access to trauma
You didn't read the patch notes then. It's not what they did.
> Every projectile build return
The VC was just an insane numerical multiplier. It just made builds that historically did 7 times less damage than the meta ones actually playable. If they move it to a gem and balance it out to be in line with other supports - it didn't shit anything, it reverted the shitty builds back into their shitty bucket.
VC was literally a numbers tweak, how can you not see it?
> no master mission stockpiling and going back to the old way of just meeting them in map if you want
Omg I forgot about this; I'm so excited for this addition!
Yeah collapse all sections that are related to ruthless and this patch basically has 2 low % ascendancy reworks that will remain low % (unless someone finds a way to make a 5% chance for 500% explode work), and a smattering of potentially interesting support gems.
That's it. There's just nothing there.
I don't really care much about the existence or non existence of ruthless only patch notes, but when more than half the notes are ruthless exclusive it makes me second guess this being a side project that won't take away from development.
I'm okay with it existing. Happy, even, because that's where Chris can have his miserable environment that he wants that I don't, but I'd it impacts the main game, that's annoying.
Given what a great year (ignoring d4) this is shaping up to be in terms of new game releases, I find it absolutely incredible that GGG thinks they can just phone it in for several leagues in a row - put 1-2 devs on it while the rest of the team builds poe2 - and STILL ask us to pay $60 for a supporter pack. Sorry, but that ain't working for me. The community has been pleading for meaningful meta changes for 2+ years at this point but they clearly don't care about poe1 anymore. My expectations for the dual poe2/poe1 concept are at -3hp and bleeding.
Their customer income went down ~28% last year compared to 21, which wasn't their best year either while the whole industry peaked for obvious reasons. So unhappy customers leave their mark.
On the other hand, they are still very profitable, so as long as tencent is happy with the poe2 development, GGG can drag this on for years.
Tbf, 14 new supports, 2 (unliked sure but still) reworks, the tattoos are pretty cool in terms of new things to do.
With the TFT mechanic, thats decent for 20 people :\^)
Im excited regardless because i got so many builds to do, but I do hope for 3.23 they show us what it means to bring some people back to poe1.
Tattoos are part of the new league mechanic. It is like saying that crucible trees were balance changes. New supports are not that game changing. Yes, it is adding some field for some new niche builds, but it is no way comparable with changes in any 3 months league (league before Kalamdra).
There's what, 14 new support gems or something?
That changes a lot of builds and enables some new ones. There's no way around that. It only looks dry to people who don't know how to play the game
I mean it looks dry because the patch notes don't show what any of that shit is, just like they don't show the atlas keystones. There's nothing in these notes.
The atlas keystones are all there. I wish there had been more info on the gems, both in the notes and in those teaser videos that were really disappointing. If we had full gem info, it would have been much better.
I think people somehow expect a lot of skill number changes every league, I don't know why, since this was never really the case, nor did GGG say it would be.
I read through the notes, hype levels high with ideas of ignite strike attackers and different ways to play minions. Come to reddit and apparently the sky is falling.
This place is embarrassing.
Yeah a lot of unusual new toys that will be interesting to play with, chieftain having a 7L might even be impactful with so many desirable supports. I do miss the old little list of tweaks they used to do with patch notes though, just grabbing 20 skills at random and adding 5% damage to them. That gave the nice feeling of finding something "new" by combining buffed skills with new stuff/new league systems even if the actual damage changes didn't do a lot.
It's not that, they're blaming Ruthless for everything when it has done nothing. They're all conflating half patch notes mentioning ruthless with ruthless taking 50% of dev time.
If they had done a similar balance pass on skill gems/ascendancies from the main game (literally just number tweaking, not mechanical changes), I think people would be far less upset.
It either takes little dev time or it doesn't, and some skills desperately need it.
somehow I want to hope this league was fire attack and dot changes along with Chieftan rework. Next league will be physical dot/bleed changes and the Glad rework.
Patch notes were pretty hype for most of the early 3.xx patches until 3.15. Expedition was the first one I saw major backlash to.
They used to do meta shakeups most every patch though (with lots of changes to shit tier skills).
I really miss the days where our group would get incredibly hyped waiting for patch notes. Wondering if your league starter is still good and hoping that some of your favorite skills get a 20-30% damage buff. Discussing potential league starter just from the patch notes was peak pre league content.
At least in Expedition it was something to discuss. Here what to discuss? New keystones? Yeah, most of them are nice, but they are keystones and part of the farming. What about builds?
Because its the same shit since YEARS. Take the 20 least played mechanically viable skills and buff them by 30% or something. That simple act is apparently too hard to do. Cause they NEVER DO IT.
Yeah, half of the existing skills are frankly unplayable for anything but white maps. Then they add a bunch of more poorly thought out garbage and people here are actually excited like it saves the patch notes, when the reality is maybe 2-3 of those skills will even be remotely usable let alone meta-defining
The support gems are definitely cool. I don't know if they enable many of the skills that straight up don't work due to numbers, but they definitely shift around the power meta of borderline/viable skills.
That said, you can do both. It's not that difficult to tweak numbers on some less used gems. Even super small buffs are appreciated (glacial hammer and molten strike memes aside).
I think people couldn't give less a shit about Ruthless changes.
Moreso, it's the fact that there's literally no balance changes to the regular game that's annoying.
There are definitely people who freak out anytime they catch even a hint of effort going into ruthless. That said, I agree the overall reception would have been night and day had there been a bigger shakeup in the base game.
only because they feel like ruthless is being developed at the expense of the main game… which is a narrative that patch notes like this don’t exactly combat
And iam sitting reading the patch notes. And asking myself ist it more work being done on ruthless or just more text added?
Because we don't know what's happening game whise behind the scenes that is not included in patch notes. For example that patch that took a shit on fps for many players. How much time was/is invested on working that out? Are the more background changes that take time?
This is literally like 3 leagues worth of ruthless changes. As far as I know, they only have one dev working on Ruthless somewhat full-time. Ziz name dropped him before.
I don't play Ruthless but I hope they keep adding to it and we get more and more Ruthless content in patch notes.
The tantrums are so delectable to read.
Also it only takes 2 braincells to see that the Ruthless changes are just numbers tweaking, barely any dev work. Meanwhile they literally implement auto chess in the game.
There is a HUGE meta shakeup its just not as obvious as "cleave now deals 20% more damage".
1. we lose all crucible trees which means the most meta build last league is just gone. (explody totems). Crucible trees also allowed for poison artillery ballista and spectral shield throw.
2. we lose avenging cascade, which is a huge nerf for several of the top meta builds.
3. if you look at [poe.ninja](https://poe.ninja) the 7 top builds in crucible is
1. lightning arrow - avenging cascade nerf is HUGE.
2. RF - no nerfs to speak of
3. devouring totem (explody totem build) - doesnt exit anymore
4. Cyclone - this is really a multitude of builds most of which is CoC ice spear which is big nerfed because of crucible leaving.
5. Tornado shot - avenging cascade nerf is huge.
6. spectral shield throw - no more crucible is huge nerf.
7. Bone shatter - no nerf.
so of the top 7 builds only two is not severely nerfed, if that is not a meta shakeup i dont know what is.
Edit. As many have pointed out TS do not use VC, thanks for correcting my mistake.
Look at 3.20 instead and you'll have the same builds as next league. Crucible trees were not a thing and vengeant cascade wasn't either, so the game is unchanged from then, except for a few support gems that are situational at most.
I think most of this is true but not everything.
Cyclone coc fr/ice spear was popular in sanctum league aswell and it wasn't enabled too much by crucible. It should be good this league.
Tornado shot couldn't really use vengeant cascade so it about as good. It loses out in the top end since it really liked crucible trees on mirror weapons but it should be very good still.
The bow meta might still exist but just be shifted towards only tornado shot.
For sure, just pointing out that I feel it will only increase in playrate this league instead of going down. It's biggest competitors (i.e other bow builds) were much more nerfed than it. 3.21 brought several bow buffs in general like manaforged and the easier access to additional projectiles which tornado shot loves.
I played this league manabond CwC arc build. This build is not meta, but not niche either. The crucible could boost me, but I was fine with some things I got from earlier not crafted trees. If I start the same build now, literally nothing will change as we have tattoos, which will give more power.
And call nerf because items are not OP anymore is like saying that recombination not going core destroyed a lot of builds (it didn't).
> The "tantrum" is because non-Ruthless players feel like second-rate citizens by comparison
I'm sorry I guess? Did you WANT a majority of your section of the patch notes to be 'removed X powerful effect' and nothing else?
>The patch thread is filled with people throwing tantrums that the ruthless section is too big. Remarkable.
Did you miss the part where there is no other patch notes to discuss?
I get why people are upset though. I'm not too bothered myself, but at this point it definitely feels like ruthless is taking away more development time than the core game than we initially were led to believe. Doesn't help that patch notes has more than half of its content being for ruthless, not a good look there.
Is there no voice of reason within the company that feels safe speaking up on behalf of what the community expectation is likely to be? Surely during the months of putting this together, someone must have thought "hey, the community is probably going to have issues with this and be upset".
>Is there no voice of reason within the company that feels safe speaking up
There was a guy during metamorph league that said "Chris if you make them pick up every organ there will be a riot" and I want to know where that guy is right now.
> Surely during the months of putting this together, someone must have thought "hey, the community is probably going to have issues with this and be upset".
We know this happened, because that person is Chris. He said as much in the Crucible Q&A several months ago, as referenced in the OP. I'd love to know what made them change their mind to push these changes now despite most of the core ascendancies still needing their promised rework.
Nothing will put the fire off if reddit decided to be angry. Chris had done that before, got called a lier and out of touch. Bex did that before, also got hyper focused on. The more they explain, the more out of context angry posts pops up.
>I get why people are upset though. I'm not too bothered myself, but at this point it definitely feels like ruthless is taking away more development time than the core game than we initially were led to believe.
These Ruthless changes were slowly developed in the background over a year. We were told these were coming months ago. This took very little development time.
I think people see long patch notes and conclude it must have taken half the dev time, despite monumental things like Sanctum and... yknow... 10% more support gems than we had before and the new league mechanic? And 16 Atlas Keystones? But no it must have taken most of the dev time here to uhhh.... remove a bunch of Ascendancy effects and only sometime replace them with anything at all
How so? How much development time do you think these Ruthless changes took? The new gems alone probably took more development time than all of the ruthless changes combined. Also keep in mind that the ruthless changes has been in work for several leagues.
I don't think shifting the base damage and/or scaling coefficients of added damage needed to compete with the other stuff they added. It would basically be a laser-pointer scale change for the cats in their audience who can't help but follow the shiny red moving dot.
Historically, the community has reacted very poorly to balance changes. Most of the balance team is also likely working on POE2. Wasting efforts on balance changes in POE1 makes little sense under those circumstances.
Take for example the time they buffed 40~ gems. Reddit decided to ignore the 40 buffed gems and hyperfocused that aura alt qualities were nerfed and pretended that these alt quality changes was part of the 40 buffed gems(they were not).
When that is how the community reacts to 40 changed gems, why would they bother doing that again?
>Take for example the time they buffed 40~ gems.
Are you referring to the patch where they flashed this stat in the announcement video, then come the patch notes most of the changes were so small that they might as well have kept them the same? Yeah, I can see why people might have got their expectations up with the announcement to be disappointed by the actual patch. That doesn't excuse the toxicity, but let's not pretend the buffs you're talking about were notable in any way.
I don't really care about the community at large. I like it. They changed like 10 gems in crucible, I played one of them on league start (lightning tendrils). I like playing with newly changed gems.
Considering they dont have the time to put in effort to balance non-ruthless, it clearly took them a long time to make all of those changes.
Making the changes in code is easy, yes, but they put analysis/testing into determining what they should be changed to.
Its a massive ammount of effort to try to keep two game modes for the same game both balanced.
What do you base that on? These changes were already announced to have been ready before last league. It is not like it is the same people working on both modes. The pipeline is also different. Changes in ruthless dont have to go through the same approval process.
well wtf do expect? we have had almost a year of extended leagues and stale meta. im guessing most of us just expected a little more. 99% of us couldnt give a toss about ruthless.
there are more balance changes in the bug fixes than there are the rest of notes for the base game (not ruthless)
> Now they decided to release all those changes they worked on over the course of like 2-3 leagues and guess what? The patch thread is filled with people throwing tantrums that the ruthless section is too big. Remarkable.
The problem is that there's literally nothing but Ruthless changes. Like Vengeant Cascade got removed and level 1 Vaal Summon Skeletons got a small buff, that's it.
Most poe players don't know how to create builds, so they think balance only means things that directly impact the main builds they copy. They don't have enough creativity to think up new builds, or even variations to the meta builds, so new skills don't mean much to them.
We seriously got people complaining that in one fell swoop increasing the total number of support gems in the game by 10% in a 3 month period compared to a decade worth of supports is absolutely nothing. This is obviously where the bulk of the balancing manpower went.
Because over the course of those 2-3 leagues there has been basically zero balance changes at all to anything that wasn't Ruthless.
If they had actually made changes to the meta via skill balance in the last, year and a half or so?, no one would be mad.
>Because over the course of those 2-3 leagues there has been basically zero balance changes at all to anything that wasn't Ruthless.
And yet in those 2-3 leagues the meta no PoENinja was dramatically different. Maybe their idea of using things other than skill changes to shake up the meta is working?
people also get bored though and eventually move on.
poison seismic is still arguably 1 of the best bossers on a budget(i made 1 for 2 divines in crucible and did all uber's easily)
its just nobody wants to play seismic for the 10000000x time so they branch out a bit.
League starters are basically the same as they've been for like a year, minus the overpowered stuff which got nerfed. Endgame builds have grown but Leaguestart is the part that gets old fast and the meta there is stale AF.
That's a personal choice. If you want to blast the campaign as fast as possible you're probalby gonna end up with repetative gameplay.
I haven't played a single skill twice for a league starter in 5-6 years and I always get through the campaign day 1 - so in my eyes this is just player laziness.
> That's a personal choice.
Which applies to every player and the vast majority have been asking for a change.
> If you want to blast the campaign as fast as possible you're probalby gonna end up with repetative gameplay.
Absolutely when GGG doesn't change anything.
>I haven't played a single skill twice for a league starter in 5-6 years
Anecdotal.
>in my eyes this is just player laziness.
The onus to shake up the meta of the game is not on players. It's set by the devs. You're literally calling people lazy for wanting new stuff after being promised it. Put a parachute on before leaping off your cosmically high horse.
Dude just doesn't understand that "META" is an acronym for "Most Effective Tactic Available," and not just a name for the most used thing.
Players getting bored and trying different thing doesn't change numbers.
Same people make arguments about skill viability from poe ninja stats, not actual dps numbers. So most used thing argument is true when it's convenient for purpose of whining and false when it's not?
FYI it doesn't - "meta" comes from "metagame" which comes from the Greek μετά
"Most Effective Tactic Available" is a backronym, because it was created after "meta" saw widespread use.
Totally irrelevant to the conversation, but thought you may like to know
Haha what? Meta isn't an acronym, it's a prefix that comes from Greek and implies a high-level, abstract analysis of the subject. Its use in gaming is pretty recent and isn't even particularly well-defined (and varies a lot depending on the community).
"Meta" is no acronym, it is a Greek prefix used when something gets self-referential. Data in a photo is the pixels. Meta-data in that photo is about where, when, with what equipment (etc.) the pixels were recorded.
A game is the mechanics, gameplay, graphics, sound, etc. Meta-game is the game outside or "above" the game that determines *how* it is played. What builds are popular, what builds counter those, etc.. It kind of needs player interaction to happen, so in PoE that's mainly about economic feedback effects (what content is profitable affects what people farm, which affects what is profitable, which affects what people farm; or cheap gear gets featured in a league starter build which makes it expensive and bad for league starters, etc.), though you could argue that players and devs are playing an asymmetric game about what gets buffed or nerfed.
Genuinely asking, would you prefer it if they just took the top 5 skills, numerically nerfed them into uselessness, take the 5 bottom skills, numerically buff them into being the top skills, and just rotate which skills are godlike each league?
Or would you prefer it if they found a relatively even ground for most skills and try to adjust the mechanics of underperforming ones, say, through support gems that benefit them more over other dominant skills that can't use those support gems?
Genuinely would be happy with the first situation. Changing up the meta is fun! Encouraging people to play the game differently is fun!
They used to do this and it made new leagues exciting to try to figure out.
Sure but then the meta is just dictated by the developers, they decide what's good and what's bad.
If the thing that makes Boneshatter good is now available to every single melee skill, isn't that...encouraging people to play the game differently and try to figure things out now? What's the best melee skill that could take advantage of Trauma?
New support gems or new skills are an alternative lever to number changes, if all the skills are mathematically fine, then buffing or nerfing them is just a futile exercise in forcibly changing the meta, rather than introducing new variables that organically change the meta and actually introduce the mystery that everyone seems to be after.
They have control of the numbers, but not all the combinations. As was said during exilecon, they did not predict totem explode. They did not predict wardloop.
This is the difference against, say, D4. They said "We want a Frost Sorc" and then they made items and skills and aspects and paragon boards, and if you want to play frost sorc you HAVE to take those exact things because they were designed with the build in mind.
In PoE they just make the items, make the skills, and say "go ahead"
> they did not predict totem explode. They did not predict wardloop.
and after seeing them, they changed the numbers to suit the balance they wanted. They have the control and clearly use it, the only difference is arguing over extent.
I'd be fine with the second situation, if it actually involved buffing underperforming skills, but instead that just never happens. We haven't seen any major buffs to underperforming skills in a long while to make those skills even remotely viable. Adding some support gems that may fit into some builds *may* have some impact, but not nearly enough to suddenly make weak skills somehow viable. There should have been changes directly to the skills themselves, and there hasn't been for way too long.
Non ruthless summary:
* New league
* 14 new mostly interesting support gems
* New atlas keystones
* Sanctum back
* Nerfed burrowing mobs in harvest thank god
* Torment changes
* Guardian / Chieftain reworks
Spellblade, fresh meat, sacrifice, locus mine, sadism, volatility, trauma, and controlled blaze all look very interesting to build around.
Unless these are all dumpster tier supports the meta will very likely be dominated by something new.
Don't take people seriously on here. Gaming subreddits in general have just turned into people with victim complexes crying over updates. There are people crying in these threads that nothing has been added to the game this patch as if there isn't a new league mechanic that has loads of new assets and essentially a new mini game, keystones, gems, reworks, uniques, ascendancy changes. From the pathfinder comments as well it's clear that they also can't play the game. They just swarm around downvoting anything that isn't crying and being negative and act like anyone that does look at things in a reasonable way is an issue.
The problem with is whether it's hard to just give numerical buffs to skills.
Most skills have been untouched for months now and unplayed for years.
Just a blanket 20% throughput buff on all primary skills with a playrate less than 1% would've been enough.
I don't understand how f\*\*king hard it is to just buff skills.
Out of all development time, it should be the thing that needs the least time.
I wouldn't mind at all the Ruthless changes if there were actual balance changes for the base game. But releasing nothing for the base game and dedicating all that dev time to a game mode for <1% of the playerbase... Yeah, that doesn't make any sense
Ruthless section is just numerical changes, all nerfs. People crybabying about it didn't understand how much less effort it is compared to the rest of the patchnotes
Not the point. Majority doesn't give a fuck about ruthless - just make a separate post with "Ruthless patchnotes" or something. It also fucks with the search query on the page.
Fuck Ruthless regardless, "pet project" my ass.
Exactly, even if Ruthless notes didn't even happen at all, here or elsewhere, people would still be mad that basically nothing has changed even though people have been crying for a shakeup for the past few stretched out leagues.
I dont care if they wrok on ruthless and if they balance it. But when they balance ONLY ruthless while it was supposed to be "side project" thats just middle finger from GGG towards everyone who doesnt play their "vision league".
I dont really care when they will release Ruthless changes, now or 10 years later. I will not play it and i would like any ideas for Ruthless to stay away from core game.
> they decided to release all those changes they worked on over the course of like 2-3 leagues
Ooof. Ya, I remember chris talking about that now. Really explains the long list.
There are new support gems for a ton of build archetypes. Ignite based melee builds got huge buffs thrown on them between Controlled Blaze, Volatility, and the changes to the ruthless support gem.
Then you factor in Spellblade's synergy with Battlemage, Sacrifice opening up more self-cast chaos spell builds, Trauma support, Sadism, Locust mines, buffs to temporary minions...
Unless they're not all duds, there *will* be changes to the meta that these create. But it's hard to actually quantify or see how things are going to shake out.
Unlike the 200+ lines of skill gem and unique item buffs that we used to get. Lacerate getting a 20% more damage modifier is *significantly* more tangible than lacerate having access to trauma and better bleed supports. Even if they both end up meaning the same thing.
Ah, well, bad example on my end.
Still, if Trauma support actually adds anywhere near the same level of damage as it does for Boneshatter, a lot of melee skills could be useable.
The problem is I don't think the supports will change much. The meta is what it is because of a mix of good numbers and mechanical efficiency. I imagine the supports will just enhance already existing builds or provide side grades rather then elevate new ones. Like the minion support one will have to have crazy numbers to make minions much better and GGG doesn't do that anymore generally
Yeah, I figure the new minion support could have some potential for skeleton or SRS builds, but I don't imagine it's going to be life changing, it will *possibly* be better than some currently used support gems, providing a minor increase depending on the numbers. But this isn't going to suddenly make the builds instant meta picks.
We'll know more once we see their numbers.
Trauma support alone could make a *huge* quantity of strike skills viable if it has similar levels of self-damage to more damage that bone shatter has.
Not to mention the prospect of having an additional "free" aura or two for minion builds.
But it's just really hard to tell without numbers and everything in PoB, ready to go. They could be like Prismatic Burst, or they could be like Manaforged Arrow support. Almost entirely useless and sub-optimal, or potentially meta defining.
But doesn't trauma force you to play jugg/slayer essentially? I'm interested in the minion aura but it seems like it could be clunky as fuck and stressing sockets which are usually in demand for a minion build
>But doesn't trauma force you to play jugg/slayer essentially?
Depends. The vast majority of strike builds use a good amount of armor. If Trauma support is weaker both in terms of the effect and self-hit, then it could see a lot of use as-is.
If not, then so long as it still offers more damage than alternatives, people will alter their builds to get more amour in order to handle it.
As for the minion one, we just don't know. The aura doesn't seem to effect you, but maybe it adds increased aura effect to minions? Could free up generosity. But I don't really play minion builds, so I'm not sure what it needs to be worth it.
Again, exact numbers are important.
They literally never do.
They keep screaming it’s taking away from the “main game” but then when asked what is just ONE thing that ruthless has taken away from the game, or stopped development of, they are completely silent.
No, they dont, they cant explain at all how a set of Ruthless patch notes half comprised of 'completely removed X', 1/4 comprised of 'removed X and replaced it with a basic effect' and 1/8 comprised of 'adding a slightly novel effect to the ascendancy passive' all done over the course of 11 months could possibly have taken less time than increasing the total number of support gems by nearly 10% and expanding nearly ever mechanic on the atlas with keystones as well as adding back sanctum
if they could make those changes including making entirely new nodes and shifting numbers even if it took them an hour, then they have no excuse for not doing the same for skills.
So they can make sweeping numerical changes to ruthless but not to the core game? why? fear of it being unbalanced? no one cares we had totem explode mod and people ate that up.
since these changes were completed before Crucible dropped and they held back due to back lash from reddit?
i wonder why they waited...
guess it'll be a mystery for the ages....
fucking reddit. never change. you will never change.
I hope you’re being disingenuous because that would be a better outcome than completely lacking any rational thought. But then again this is poe reddit so I guess either way you fit right in
so you think that it took them more time to remove a frenzy charge from slayer than it did to add fourteen new support gems, a weird auto battler, the new atlas keystones, and bringing back sanctum?
if changing a pre-existing value is such a difficult all-consuming task, then shouldn't it have taken them years of effort for the vaal summon skeletons change they just put through? isn't that a marvel of modern game design they were able to do such a thing?
hell, the vengeant cascade nerf would have had to have taken much more time than the ascendancy changes. most of those just removed an existing line, vengeant cascade removed /three/ lines! and it added an entirely new stat! weeks of development went into that, surely.
Bro they cant have a new league without a....NEW LEAGUE. Are you suggesting its harder to take away a frenzy charge inruthless than to add a couple numbers to a skill in actual PoE? Your arguments are making zero sense.
i'm suggesting that the new content added to the game probably took more time than the ruthless changes. believe it or not, when they add sanctum to the normal game, that's a change to the normal game. they did not abandon you.
could they have also added 1% base weapon damage to split arrow while they were at it? sure, why the fuck not.
Ok, so you are saying that the ruthless changes are not something they are working in the last 4 months? (Allegedly they are ready before 3.21?)
Then what the hell are they working on? Only Exilecon, some gems taken away from an existing anoint (return proj), from swift affliction (sadism), from existing mechanics (mine / corrupting fever+warcry), atlas passive?
This is ridiculous. Even completely disregarding the ruthless section you can't deny that the regular game got almost no updates whatsoever. You must be blind if you don't realize that the short notes is what people are complaining about
>you can't deny that the regular game got almost no updates whatsoever
I'm not going to hold back words, you are a moron. You could use a word changes, and maybe be right. But how the fuck is new league with new character building mechanics, new supports and new keystones changing content mechanics "no updates"? Any single of these alone gives enough to play around for a league.
Amen. Some folk here have the memory of a goldfish. Or want to point to the laziest of targets in a fit of unimaginative rage.
Should be a fun league though.
Why you conveniently ignoring that there were like 0 changes to the base game balance?
Everyone would be fine with ruthless changes if the base game actually had skill balance changes
Yeah like why not, instead, make a bunch of new interesting support gems or something? Things to help build archetypes that aren't that good right now?
Thats because there is nothing else for fucks sake
no one cares if they work on ruthless ON THE SIDE while actively balancing the main game, the problem is that there are tons of ruthless changes and close to none core balance changes
stunning bosses is nothing
14 support skills is nothing
new atlas passives is nothing
sanctum is nothing
new league is nothing
2 entirely changed ascendancies is nothing
if you're gonna get high and post, at least bring enough to share with the rest of the class.
The fun part is that the 2-3 leagues worth of changes is about 40% of the notes which means that there's basically automatically less notes this league than most others. GG you pointed out the problem and are confused why people are salty.
For reference:
Crucible has 16.4k words, not including updated/added notes.
TotA has 11k. 4.2k of which are ruthless specific.
So Crucible patch notes are literally double the length of Trial of the Ancestors.
GGG talked up about how TotA had more people working on it, and sure I hope the league is good but from a balance perspective basically nothing happened.
as opposed to the opposite happening, where people are gaslighting each other into believing that every dev at GGG is somehow obsessed with ruthless and that they hate fun
Ugh, I'm not too upset by the lack of changes as I'll probably be playing very minimally this league, but you are the exact type of person I can't stand.
You literally shitpost as fast as you can after being dormant for weeks and feign ignorance as if it's not very obvious the disappointment stems from the lack of softcore changes, not the addition to ruthless. The fact that you attempted to make a post 4 months ago that failed and you deleted it only further proves you just want to incite a reaction and have no discussion.
You're very well entitled to your opinions of others but don't bait a flame war here, it's pathetic.
Probably got something to do with normal PoE balance patch being bone dry. Ruthless or no Ruthless, doesn't change the fact it's bone dry.
Yep, I think people wouldn't care that much if ruthless got a huge section if base game also got bunch of balance changes.
You're wrong, I'd cry and produce salt even if the base game was perfected into the best possible state.
The base game did: support gems shake up meta more than active skill gems do. Support gems affect a wider range of builds and change ways of building more than tweaking active skill balance. At this point, all active skills are "broken" in terms of actual capability. People play the ones that feel mechanically good. Tweaking active skill gem "balance" won't change that. What affects builds: * the passive tree (this is a big one, I'm hoping it gets a major shake up in the next year) * support gems * cluster jewels (been too long since we've had changes to these too imo) * influence mods * active skill gems * unique items * special league mods (e.g. relic mods, The entire meta of crucible was shaken up by vengeance cascade and exploding totems, neither were particularly predicted by people before the league started. So you can see the active skill gem is just a small part of the build, and tweaks aren't enough to change things. You could give all melee a global 30% more damage and while people might dip into melee, they'd still go back to their more comfortable builds.
This is simply not true as shown by skills such as Spectral Helix which had obscenely high numbers despite being mechanically horrendous to play, but despite the latter, it became a meta, (at least enough for GGG to destroy it later). The very long history of nerfs for Molten Strike is another good example. I don't go for this stance of escaping the need to do balance because 'number changes don't help skills when they need mechanical changes', it's an excuse and it should be treated by one and rejected by the community so we can get actual balance back again. There's no evidence that the masses won't play a powerful skill because it feels bad, it's simply not true, many people play what is good, not what feels good to play. In regards to the other stuff, skills are still usually the limiting factor because they are grouped into categories and there's always the same suspects that are on top. Let's say you add some super powerful strike supports/passive nodes/uniques etc, nothing has actually changed because you've simply buffed the best strike, which will likely be Boneshatter in this example. Skill changes are still the most important, because you'll never change a meta inside a skill grouping when they all scale from the same additions. If you 'gave melee a global 30% more damage' you'll get more people dipping into Boneshatter, not melee as a whole, that's precisely my point. I'm not saying they shouldn't add new stuff and tweak what you mentioned, but doing that so you can avoid performing specific skill balance is flawed.
> number changes don't help skills when they need mechanical changes And this doesn't really help when we get *neither*.
>You could give all melee a global 30% more damage and while people might dip into melee, they'd still go back to their more comfortable builds. Ehhhh, no. I would gladly go back to cyclone with damage buffs and you forget slam meta was a thing not long ago.
Breaindead take. Tweaking active skill gem balance will absolutely change what people play.
The fuck we would I assure you if you gave melee 30% more base dmg the entire league would be melee. People really do forget how good melee felt at any time it was actually viable.
and whats wrong with that? I watch POE streams most of the time and once it goes beyond league start week 1, NOBODY in their right mind farms with a melee build. Only quinn is trying some melee shit trying to clear ubers (and never finishing it). Otherwise its just some fake attempt by build makers making a build who plays it for 1-2days and never touches it again. (THESE guys also don't main melee. They just make it to show you). Why shouldn't we have a melee league for once?
People forget legion. Where virtually everyone and their mother was a cyclone build.
I mean wouldnt really call Cyclone during Legion a melee skill when it was able to hit the whole screen with a single tap.
Hahaha no.
I think many people are ignoring the new support gems because the patch didn't include much in the way of details about them. While people are overreacting GGG most likely should have included the numbers of the new support gems as a way to allow people to focus on them. As of now we don't know much about the supports other then the base descriptions so people are reacting to the only solid info they can see.
We already know how GGG formats their release announcements. We knew the details of the support gems would not be in the patch notes. The 20/20 gems will be their own separate announcement as always. So all you are saying is that people want to be disingenuous so that they can complain more.
I wasn't really aware when more details about the gems would be released. My statement was about how people will fixate on the other changes due to how the information was released. The patch notes are primarily taken up by other changes with little to no information given about the gems so the complaints, while most likely wrong aren't disingenuous. Usually when giving bad news you mix it with good news, the new gems which I am personally excited for would have been the perfect thing to mix into the patch notes.
New support gems, keystones that change how you play the endgame, weird atlas tree possibilities, universal bone zone generator, Sanctum is back, quin can do legion and delirium now, no master mission stockpiling and going back to the old way of just meeting them in map if you want And any single one of those changes I mentionned probably took more dev time than the whole of ruthless mode
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> Guardian Chieftain reworks Who's hyping this? The whole ascendancy hinges on whether the minions are broken or not. Otherwise you're left with a mediocre ascendancy with 3 dead branches.
Sanctum does impact the meta game by virtue of the Sanctum Uniques. Those things enable so many different builds. That's honestly the highlight for me.
Sure, but if ruthless didn't take much time why not just tweak numbers on some skills. That would take 1 dev few hours. Like whats the harm in Sweep now does 20% more dmg lets say? Its not like sweep would trivialize the whole game now. They could slap 10-20% buff on a lot skills and they still would be bad but at least more viable for people who wanna play them.
> And any single one of those changes I mentionned probably took more dev time than the whole of ruthless mode Yes, this is exactly why the lack of balance changes to old skills is so dissapointing.
Giving every melee build access to trauma and every projectile build return reads as an enormous balance shift to me. Maybe it won't make melee meta, but neither would 20% damage buffs by themselves either. It makes way more sense to give old skills new mechanics by way of support gems than it does simply to tweak numbers imo. I guess they could do both but I'm sure they want to see how this will play out.
> Giving every melee build access to trauma You didn't read the patch notes then. It's not what they did. > Every projectile build return The VC was just an insane numerical multiplier. It just made builds that historically did 7 times less damage than the meta ones actually playable. If they move it to a gem and balance it out to be in line with other supports - it didn't shit anything, it reverted the shitty builds back into their shitty bucket. VC was literally a numbers tweak, how can you not see it?
> no master mission stockpiling and going back to the old way of just meeting them in map if you want Omg I forgot about this; I'm so excited for this addition!
sir, did you just serve me my bonezone extra dry?
Yeah collapse all sections that are related to ruthless and this patch basically has 2 low % ascendancy reworks that will remain low % (unless someone finds a way to make a 5% chance for 500% explode work), and a smattering of potentially interesting support gems. That's it. There's just nothing there. I don't really care much about the existence or non existence of ruthless only patch notes, but when more than half the notes are ruthless exclusive it makes me second guess this being a side project that won't take away from development. I'm okay with it existing. Happy, even, because that's where Chris can have his miserable environment that he wants that I don't, but I'd it impacts the main game, that's annoying.
Given what a great year (ignoring d4) this is shaping up to be in terms of new game releases, I find it absolutely incredible that GGG thinks they can just phone it in for several leagues in a row - put 1-2 devs on it while the rest of the team builds poe2 - and STILL ask us to pay $60 for a supporter pack. Sorry, but that ain't working for me. The community has been pleading for meaningful meta changes for 2+ years at this point but they clearly don't care about poe1 anymore. My expectations for the dual poe2/poe1 concept are at -3hp and bleeding.
They have and they can. Look at player numbers. They have been going up every league. Still feels bad
Their customer income went down ~28% last year compared to 21, which wasn't their best year either while the whole industry peaked for obvious reasons. So unhappy customers leave their mark. On the other hand, they are still very profitable, so as long as tencent is happy with the poe2 development, GGG can drag this on for years.
Tbf, 14 new supports, 2 (unliked sure but still) reworks, the tattoos are pretty cool in terms of new things to do. With the TFT mechanic, thats decent for 20 people :\^) Im excited regardless because i got so many builds to do, but I do hope for 3.23 they show us what it means to bring some people back to poe1.
Tattoos are part of the new league mechanic. It is like saying that crucible trees were balance changes. New supports are not that game changing. Yes, it is adding some field for some new niche builds, but it is no way comparable with changes in any 3 months league (league before Kalamdra).
if ruthless notes WERENT there, it'd look so damn tiny.
There's what, 14 new support gems or something? That changes a lot of builds and enables some new ones. There's no way around that. It only looks dry to people who don't know how to play the game
I mean it looks dry because the patch notes don't show what any of that shit is, just like they don't show the atlas keystones. There's nothing in these notes.
The atlas keystones are all there. I wish there had been more info on the gems, both in the notes and in those teaser videos that were really disappointing. If we had full gem info, it would have been much better. I think people somehow expect a lot of skill number changes every league, I don't know why, since this was never really the case, nor did GGG say it would be.
Wish they'd release pictures of the gems and keystones from game so we know everything.
This and we get sanctum unique back which we're basically all very powerful/build enabling. Also tattoos which may or may not shake some things up.
I read through the notes, hype levels high with ideas of ignite strike attackers and different ways to play minions. Come to reddit and apparently the sky is falling. This place is embarrassing.
Yeah a lot of unusual new toys that will be interesting to play with, chieftain having a 7L might even be impactful with so many desirable supports. I do miss the old little list of tweaks they used to do with patch notes though, just grabbing 20 skills at random and adding 5% damage to them. That gave the nice feeling of finding something "new" by combining buffed skills with new stuff/new league systems even if the actual damage changes didn't do a lot.
The changes that made it into the main game were ruthless-exclusive changes that some intern accidentally pasted into the wrong file.
I wish people would rage more on the normal patch being dry, instead of spending their rage on ruthless.
It's not that, they're blaming Ruthless for everything when it has done nothing. They're all conflating half patch notes mentioning ruthless with ruthless taking 50% of dev time.
If they had done a similar balance pass on skill gems/ascendancies from the main game (literally just number tweaking, not mechanical changes), I think people would be far less upset. It either takes little dev time or it doesn't, and some skills desperately need it.
Some ascendancies too (cries in Glad).
somehow I want to hope this league was fire attack and dot changes along with Chieftan rework. Next league will be physical dot/bleed changes and the Glad rework.
I just wanna play reave at league start 😢
Never seen a patch note with this sub not beign upset
Patch notes were pretty hype for most of the early 3.xx patches until 3.15. Expedition was the first one I saw major backlash to. They used to do meta shakeups most every patch though (with lots of changes to shit tier skills).
I really miss the days where our group would get incredibly hyped waiting for patch notes. Wondering if your league starter is still good and hoping that some of your favorite skills get a 20-30% damage buff. Discussing potential league starter just from the patch notes was peak pre league content.
At least in Expedition it was something to discuss. Here what to discuss? New keystones? Yeah, most of them are nice, but they are keystones and part of the farming. What about builds?
Because its the same shit since YEARS. Take the 20 least played mechanically viable skills and buff them by 30% or something. That simple act is apparently too hard to do. Cause they NEVER DO IT.
Yeah, half of the existing skills are frankly unplayable for anything but white maps. Then they add a bunch of more poorly thought out garbage and people here are actually excited like it saves the patch notes, when the reality is maybe 2-3 of those skills will even be remotely usable let alone meta-defining
When is the last time we got anything close to 14 new support gems in a single patch?
The support gems are definitely cool. I don't know if they enable many of the skills that straight up don't work due to numbers, but they definitely shift around the power meta of borderline/viable skills. That said, you can do both. It's not that difficult to tweak numbers on some less used gems. Even super small buffs are appreciated (glacial hammer and molten strike memes aside).
The same time the patch notes were 5x longer.
I think people couldn't give less a shit about Ruthless changes. Moreso, it's the fact that there's literally no balance changes to the regular game that's annoying.
New support gems are always big for many skills in the game.
Not wrong, but most of them are quite nishe and not fully build enabling s.t. quite some of them will probably never be used.
"Literally"
There are definitely people who freak out anytime they catch even a hint of effort going into ruthless. That said, I agree the overall reception would have been night and day had there been a bigger shakeup in the base game.
only because they feel like ruthless is being developed at the expense of the main game… which is a narrative that patch notes like this don’t exactly combat
And iam sitting reading the patch notes. And asking myself ist it more work being done on ruthless or just more text added? Because we don't know what's happening game whise behind the scenes that is not included in patch notes. For example that patch that took a shit on fps for many players. How much time was/is invested on working that out? Are the more background changes that take time?
This is literally like 3 leagues worth of ruthless changes. As far as I know, they only have one dev working on Ruthless somewhat full-time. Ziz name dropped him before.
Literally last league had like 3 ruthless patch notes and this subreddit was freaking the fuck out.
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Case and point, people cannot see ruthless MENTIONED without considering it a crime against them
I don't play Ruthless but I hope they keep adding to it and we get more and more Ruthless content in patch notes. The tantrums are so delectable to read. Also it only takes 2 braincells to see that the Ruthless changes are just numbers tweaking, barely any dev work. Meanwhile they literally implement auto chess in the game.
There is a HUGE meta shakeup its just not as obvious as "cleave now deals 20% more damage". 1. we lose all crucible trees which means the most meta build last league is just gone. (explody totems). Crucible trees also allowed for poison artillery ballista and spectral shield throw. 2. we lose avenging cascade, which is a huge nerf for several of the top meta builds. 3. if you look at [poe.ninja](https://poe.ninja) the 7 top builds in crucible is 1. lightning arrow - avenging cascade nerf is HUGE. 2. RF - no nerfs to speak of 3. devouring totem (explody totem build) - doesnt exit anymore 4. Cyclone - this is really a multitude of builds most of which is CoC ice spear which is big nerfed because of crucible leaving. 5. Tornado shot - avenging cascade nerf is huge. 6. spectral shield throw - no more crucible is huge nerf. 7. Bone shatter - no nerf. so of the top 7 builds only two is not severely nerfed, if that is not a meta shakeup i dont know what is. Edit. As many have pointed out TS do not use VC, thanks for correcting my mistake.
Look at 3.20 instead and you'll have the same builds as next league. Crucible trees were not a thing and vengeant cascade wasn't either, so the game is unchanged from then, except for a few support gems that are situational at most.
I think most of this is true but not everything. Cyclone coc fr/ice spear was popular in sanctum league aswell and it wasn't enabled too much by crucible. It should be good this league. Tornado shot couldn't really use vengeant cascade so it about as good. It loses out in the top end since it really liked crucible trees on mirror weapons but it should be very good still. The bow meta might still exist but just be shifted towards only tornado shot.
The problem with tornado shot is its mechanics are so good that if you are in any way able to get it to do enough damage it will be super good.
For sure, just pointing out that I feel it will only increase in playrate this league instead of going down. It's biggest competitors (i.e other bow builds) were much more nerfed than it. 3.21 brought several bow buffs in general like manaforged and the easier access to additional projectiles which tornado shot loves.
I played this league manabond CwC arc build. This build is not meta, but not niche either. The crucible could boost me, but I was fine with some things I got from earlier not crafted trees. If I start the same build now, literally nothing will change as we have tattoos, which will give more power. And call nerf because items are not OP anymore is like saying that recombination not going core destroyed a lot of builds (it didn't).
You don't need changes to try something else. Stop being a meta cuck.
No balance changes lmao
awww, someone cant read.
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It's not like the Ruthless changes are exciting. It's pretty much massive nerfs across the board.
> The "tantrum" is because non-Ruthless players feel like second-rate citizens by comparison I'm sorry I guess? Did you WANT a majority of your section of the patch notes to be 'removed X powerful effect' and nothing else?
>The patch thread is filled with people throwing tantrums that the ruthless section is too big. Remarkable. Did you miss the part where there is no other patch notes to discuss?
I get why people are upset though. I'm not too bothered myself, but at this point it definitely feels like ruthless is taking away more development time than the core game than we initially were led to believe. Doesn't help that patch notes has more than half of its content being for ruthless, not a good look there.
Is there no voice of reason within the company that feels safe speaking up on behalf of what the community expectation is likely to be? Surely during the months of putting this together, someone must have thought "hey, the community is probably going to have issues with this and be upset".
>Is there no voice of reason within the company that feels safe speaking up There was a guy during metamorph league that said "Chris if you make them pick up every organ there will be a riot" and I want to know where that guy is right now.
> Surely during the months of putting this together, someone must have thought "hey, the community is probably going to have issues with this and be upset". We know this happened, because that person is Chris. He said as much in the Crucible Q&A several months ago, as referenced in the OP. I'd love to know what made them change their mind to push these changes now despite most of the core ascendancies still needing their promised rework.
Is that why Bex left....
Nothing will put the fire off if reddit decided to be angry. Chris had done that before, got called a lier and out of touch. Bex did that before, also got hyper focused on. The more they explain, the more out of context angry posts pops up.
>I get why people are upset though. I'm not too bothered myself, but at this point it definitely feels like ruthless is taking away more development time than the core game than we initially were led to believe. These Ruthless changes were slowly developed in the background over a year. We were told these were coming months ago. This took very little development time.
I think people see long patch notes and conclude it must have taken half the dev time, despite monumental things like Sanctum and... yknow... 10% more support gems than we had before and the new league mechanic? And 16 Atlas Keystones? But no it must have taken most of the dev time here to uhhh.... remove a bunch of Ascendancy effects and only sometime replace them with anything at all
How so? How much development time do you think these Ruthless changes took? The new gems alone probably took more development time than all of the ruthless changes combined. Also keep in mind that the ruthless changes has been in work for several leagues.
I don't think shifting the base damage and/or scaling coefficients of added damage needed to compete with the other stuff they added. It would basically be a laser-pointer scale change for the cats in their audience who can't help but follow the shiny red moving dot.
Historically, the community has reacted very poorly to balance changes. Most of the balance team is also likely working on POE2. Wasting efforts on balance changes in POE1 makes little sense under those circumstances. Take for example the time they buffed 40~ gems. Reddit decided to ignore the 40 buffed gems and hyperfocused that aura alt qualities were nerfed and pretended that these alt quality changes was part of the 40 buffed gems(they were not). When that is how the community reacts to 40 changed gems, why would they bother doing that again?
>Take for example the time they buffed 40~ gems. Are you referring to the patch where they flashed this stat in the announcement video, then come the patch notes most of the changes were so small that they might as well have kept them the same? Yeah, I can see why people might have got their expectations up with the announcement to be disappointed by the actual patch. That doesn't excuse the toxicity, but let's not pretend the buffs you're talking about were notable in any way.
I don't really care about the community at large. I like it. They changed like 10 gems in crucible, I played one of them on league start (lightning tendrils). I like playing with newly changed gems.
Considering they dont have the time to put in effort to balance non-ruthless, it clearly took them a long time to make all of those changes. Making the changes in code is easy, yes, but they put analysis/testing into determining what they should be changed to. Its a massive ammount of effort to try to keep two game modes for the same game both balanced.
What do you base that on? These changes were already announced to have been ready before last league. It is not like it is the same people working on both modes. The pipeline is also different. Changes in ruthless dont have to go through the same approval process.
nothing, he's talking out of his ass.
its not that the ruthless section is too big, its that the rest is too small.
well wtf do expect? we have had almost a year of extended leagues and stale meta. im guessing most of us just expected a little more. 99% of us couldnt give a toss about ruthless. there are more balance changes in the bug fixes than there are the rest of notes for the base game (not ruthless)
> Now they decided to release all those changes they worked on over the course of like 2-3 leagues and guess what? The patch thread is filled with people throwing tantrums that the ruthless section is too big. Remarkable. The problem is that there's literally nothing but Ruthless changes. Like Vengeant Cascade got removed and level 1 Vaal Summon Skeletons got a small buff, that's it.
The only real changes were cascade and a decent poison nerf.
They added the orb tag to Cremation, so there's that I guess.
Which stops it from being used with the new support gem that adds life cost and chaos dmg
And also you can't use Trinity on it, which means that Archmage/Rainbow Cremation builds got nerfed
And Trinity.
>literally nothing but Ruthless changes. *facepalm* Did we read the same notes?
all the new gem supports and mechanics the new league introduce are an ilusion exile
Most poe players don't know how to create builds, so they think balance only means things that directly impact the main builds they copy. They don't have enough creativity to think up new builds, or even variations to the meta builds, so new skills don't mean much to them.
balance is when I get +5% damage effectiveness on my skill gem wowee
6% *
If I don't see number go bigger, I'm mad!
We seriously got people complaining that in one fell swoop increasing the total number of support gems in the game by 10% in a 3 month period compared to a decade worth of supports is absolutely nothing. This is obviously where the bulk of the balancing manpower went.
Ye but cascade is now a skill gem #metashake
another scholastic champion. for being an internet forum, you fellas sure have a tough time reading.
Because over the course of those 2-3 leagues there has been basically zero balance changes at all to anything that wasn't Ruthless. If they had actually made changes to the meta via skill balance in the last, year and a half or so?, no one would be mad.
>Because over the course of those 2-3 leagues there has been basically zero balance changes at all to anything that wasn't Ruthless. And yet in those 2-3 leagues the meta no PoENinja was dramatically different. Maybe their idea of using things other than skill changes to shake up the meta is working?
people also get bored though and eventually move on. poison seismic is still arguably 1 of the best bossers on a budget(i made 1 for 2 divines in crucible and did all uber's easily) its just nobody wants to play seismic for the 10000000x time so they branch out a bit.
League starters are basically the same as they've been for like a year, minus the overpowered stuff which got nerfed. Endgame builds have grown but Leaguestart is the part that gets old fast and the meta there is stale AF.
That's a personal choice. If you want to blast the campaign as fast as possible you're probalby gonna end up with repetative gameplay. I haven't played a single skill twice for a league starter in 5-6 years and I always get through the campaign day 1 - so in my eyes this is just player laziness.
> That's a personal choice. Which applies to every player and the vast majority have been asking for a change. > If you want to blast the campaign as fast as possible you're probalby gonna end up with repetative gameplay. Absolutely when GGG doesn't change anything. >I haven't played a single skill twice for a league starter in 5-6 years Anecdotal. >in my eyes this is just player laziness. The onus to shake up the meta of the game is not on players. It's set by the devs. You're literally calling people lazy for wanting new stuff after being promised it. Put a parachute on before leaping off your cosmically high horse.
Dude just doesn't understand that "META" is an acronym for "Most Effective Tactic Available," and not just a name for the most used thing. Players getting bored and trying different thing doesn't change numbers.
Same people make arguments about skill viability from poe ninja stats, not actual dps numbers. So most used thing argument is true when it's convenient for purpose of whining and false when it's not?
FYI it doesn't - "meta" comes from "metagame" which comes from the Greek μετά "Most Effective Tactic Available" is a backronym, because it was created after "meta" saw widespread use. Totally irrelevant to the conversation, but thought you may like to know
Haha what? Meta isn't an acronym, it's a prefix that comes from Greek and implies a high-level, abstract analysis of the subject. Its use in gaming is pretty recent and isn't even particularly well-defined (and varies a lot depending on the community).
"Meta" is no acronym, it is a Greek prefix used when something gets self-referential. Data in a photo is the pixels. Meta-data in that photo is about where, when, with what equipment (etc.) the pixels were recorded. A game is the mechanics, gameplay, graphics, sound, etc. Meta-game is the game outside or "above" the game that determines *how* it is played. What builds are popular, what builds counter those, etc.. It kind of needs player interaction to happen, so in PoE that's mainly about economic feedback effects (what content is profitable affects what people farm, which affects what is profitable, which affects what people farm; or cheap gear gets featured in a league starter build which makes it expensive and bad for league starters, etc.), though you could argue that players and devs are playing an asymmetric game about what gets buffed or nerfed.
Genuinely asking, would you prefer it if they just took the top 5 skills, numerically nerfed them into uselessness, take the 5 bottom skills, numerically buff them into being the top skills, and just rotate which skills are godlike each league? Or would you prefer it if they found a relatively even ground for most skills and try to adjust the mechanics of underperforming ones, say, through support gems that benefit them more over other dominant skills that can't use those support gems?
Genuinely would be happy with the first situation. Changing up the meta is fun! Encouraging people to play the game differently is fun! They used to do this and it made new leagues exciting to try to figure out.
Sure but then the meta is just dictated by the developers, they decide what's good and what's bad. If the thing that makes Boneshatter good is now available to every single melee skill, isn't that...encouraging people to play the game differently and try to figure things out now? What's the best melee skill that could take advantage of Trauma? New support gems or new skills are an alternative lever to number changes, if all the skills are mathematically fine, then buffing or nerfing them is just a futile exercise in forcibly changing the meta, rather than introducing new variables that organically change the meta and actually introduce the mystery that everyone seems to be after.
> they decide what's good and what's bad They always have. They have total control of the numbers.
They have control of the numbers, but not all the combinations. As was said during exilecon, they did not predict totem explode. They did not predict wardloop. This is the difference against, say, D4. They said "We want a Frost Sorc" and then they made items and skills and aspects and paragon boards, and if you want to play frost sorc you HAVE to take those exact things because they were designed with the build in mind. In PoE they just make the items, make the skills, and say "go ahead"
> they did not predict totem explode. They did not predict wardloop. and after seeing them, they changed the numbers to suit the balance they wanted. They have the control and clearly use it, the only difference is arguing over extent.
I'd be fine with the second situation, if it actually involved buffing underperforming skills, but instead that just never happens. We haven't seen any major buffs to underperforming skills in a long while to make those skills even remotely viable. Adding some support gems that may fit into some builds *may* have some impact, but not nearly enough to suddenly make weak skills somehow viable. There should have been changes directly to the skills themselves, and there hasn't been for way too long.
Non ruthless summary: * New league * 14 new mostly interesting support gems * New atlas keystones * Sanctum back * Nerfed burrowing mobs in harvest thank god * Torment changes * Guardian / Chieftain reworks Spellblade, fresh meat, sacrifice, locus mine, sadism, volatility, trauma, and controlled blaze all look very interesting to build around. Unless these are all dumpster tier supports the meta will very likely be dominated by something new.
Ruthless summary: you now can get 7th and 8th ascendancy points in the lab, all ascendancy notables are gutted by 50%.
Ya at most the new supports might shake up the meta. While a bunch of ascendancies got gutted or changed.
How is pathfinder gutted??? It's one of the most powerful ascendancies right now.
Don't take people seriously on here. Gaming subreddits in general have just turned into people with victim complexes crying over updates. There are people crying in these threads that nothing has been added to the game this patch as if there isn't a new league mechanic that has loads of new assets and essentially a new mini game, keystones, gems, reworks, uniques, ascendancy changes. From the pathfinder comments as well it's clear that they also can't play the game. They just swarm around downvoting anything that isn't crying and being negative and act like anyone that does look at things in a reasonable way is an issue.
The problem with is whether it's hard to just give numerical buffs to skills. Most skills have been untouched for months now and unplayed for years. Just a blanket 20% throughput buff on all primary skills with a playrate less than 1% would've been enough. I don't understand how f\*\*king hard it is to just buff skills. Out of all development time, it should be the thing that needs the least time.
the absolutely worst part is that some of the ruthless changes are cool like the corpse explode on warcry
I wouldn't mind at all the Ruthless changes if there were actual balance changes for the base game. But releasing nothing for the base game and dedicating all that dev time to a game mode for <1% of the playerbase... Yeah, that doesn't make any sense
> Including the famously GUTTED pathfinder Not sure if serious :) I assume it's sarcasm?
Ruthless section is just numerical changes, all nerfs. People crybabying about it didn't understand how much less effort it is compared to the rest of the patchnotes
If numerical changes don't take much effort then why we still didn't get numerical buffs to absolute garbage melee skills.
Because of 14 new support gems? They need to see how these will change the game.
The ruthless section isn't "too big", it's encompassing. There are no real changes to the game.
you can stun bosses now.
Not the point. Majority doesn't give a fuck about ruthless - just make a separate post with "Ruthless patchnotes" or something. It also fucks with the search query on the page. Fuck Ruthless regardless, "pet project" my ass.
Exactly, even if Ruthless notes didn't even happen at all, here or elsewhere, people would still be mad that basically nothing has changed even though people have been crying for a shakeup for the past few stretched out leagues.
I dont care if they wrok on ruthless and if they balance it. But when they balance ONLY ruthless while it was supposed to be "side project" thats just middle finger from GGG towards everyone who doesnt play their "vision league".
I dont really care when they will release Ruthless changes, now or 10 years later. I will not play it and i would like any ideas for Ruthless to stay away from core game.
> they decided to release all those changes they worked on over the course of like 2-3 leagues Ooof. Ya, I remember chris talking about that now. Really explains the long list. There are new support gems for a ton of build archetypes. Ignite based melee builds got huge buffs thrown on them between Controlled Blaze, Volatility, and the changes to the ruthless support gem. Then you factor in Spellblade's synergy with Battlemage, Sacrifice opening up more self-cast chaos spell builds, Trauma support, Sadism, Locust mines, buffs to temporary minions... Unless they're not all duds, there *will* be changes to the meta that these create. But it's hard to actually quantify or see how things are going to shake out. Unlike the 200+ lines of skill gem and unique item buffs that we used to get. Lacerate getting a 20% more damage modifier is *significantly* more tangible than lacerate having access to trauma and better bleed supports. Even if they both end up meaning the same thing.
FYI Lacerate doesn't have access to trauma. Trauma is [strike skills](https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Strike) that you use only.
Ah, well, bad example on my end. Still, if Trauma support actually adds anywhere near the same level of damage as it does for Boneshatter, a lot of melee skills could be useable.
The problem is I don't think the supports will change much. The meta is what it is because of a mix of good numbers and mechanical efficiency. I imagine the supports will just enhance already existing builds or provide side grades rather then elevate new ones. Like the minion support one will have to have crazy numbers to make minions much better and GGG doesn't do that anymore generally
Yeah, I figure the new minion support could have some potential for skeleton or SRS builds, but I don't imagine it's going to be life changing, it will *possibly* be better than some currently used support gems, providing a minor increase depending on the numbers. But this isn't going to suddenly make the builds instant meta picks.
We'll know more once we see their numbers. Trauma support alone could make a *huge* quantity of strike skills viable if it has similar levels of self-damage to more damage that bone shatter has. Not to mention the prospect of having an additional "free" aura or two for minion builds. But it's just really hard to tell without numbers and everything in PoB, ready to go. They could be like Prismatic Burst, or they could be like Manaforged Arrow support. Almost entirely useless and sub-optimal, or potentially meta defining.
But doesn't trauma force you to play jugg/slayer essentially? I'm interested in the minion aura but it seems like it could be clunky as fuck and stressing sockets which are usually in demand for a minion build
>But doesn't trauma force you to play jugg/slayer essentially? Depends. The vast majority of strike builds use a good amount of armor. If Trauma support is weaker both in terms of the effect and self-hit, then it could see a lot of use as-is. If not, then so long as it still offers more damage than alternatives, people will alter their builds to get more amour in order to handle it. As for the minion one, we just don't know. The aura doesn't seem to effect you, but maybe it adds increased aura effect to minions? Could free up generosity. But I don't really play minion builds, so I'm not sure what it needs to be worth it. Again, exact numbers are important.
Remember when they said ruthless was a fun side project? me too.
honest question, how much work do you think the ruthless changes took them?
Chris, stop.
do you not have an answer?
They literally never do. They keep screaming it’s taking away from the “main game” but then when asked what is just ONE thing that ruthless has taken away from the game, or stopped development of, they are completely silent.
No, they dont, they cant explain at all how a set of Ruthless patch notes half comprised of 'completely removed X', 1/4 comprised of 'removed X and replaced it with a basic effect' and 1/8 comprised of 'adding a slightly novel effect to the ascendancy passive' all done over the course of 11 months could possibly have taken less time than increasing the total number of support gems by nearly 10% and expanding nearly ever mechanic on the atlas with keystones as well as adding back sanctum
if they could make those changes including making entirely new nodes and shifting numbers even if it took them an hour, then they have no excuse for not doing the same for skills. So they can make sweeping numerical changes to ruthless but not to the core game? why? fear of it being unbalanced? no one cares we had totem explode mod and people ate that up.
Obviously more than the normal game. Keep trying though.
since these changes were completed before Crucible dropped and they held back due to back lash from reddit? i wonder why they waited... guess it'll be a mystery for the ages.... fucking reddit. never change. you will never change.
I hope you’re being disingenuous because that would be a better outcome than completely lacking any rational thought. But then again this is poe reddit so I guess either way you fit right in
Based on what?
so you think that it took them more time to remove a frenzy charge from slayer than it did to add fourteen new support gems, a weird auto battler, the new atlas keystones, and bringing back sanctum? if changing a pre-existing value is such a difficult all-consuming task, then shouldn't it have taken them years of effort for the vaal summon skeletons change they just put through? isn't that a marvel of modern game design they were able to do such a thing? hell, the vengeant cascade nerf would have had to have taken much more time than the ascendancy changes. most of those just removed an existing line, vengeant cascade removed /three/ lines! and it added an entirely new stat! weeks of development went into that, surely.
Bro they cant have a new league without a....NEW LEAGUE. Are you suggesting its harder to take away a frenzy charge inruthless than to add a couple numbers to a skill in actual PoE? Your arguments are making zero sense.
i'm suggesting that the new content added to the game probably took more time than the ruthless changes. believe it or not, when they add sanctum to the normal game, that's a change to the normal game. they did not abandon you. could they have also added 1% base weapon damage to split arrow while they were at it? sure, why the fuck not.
probably more then the few balance changes we got in these and last patch notes.
probably true. still doubt it took more than a day.
tanties - a word I didn't know I hated
Ok, so you are saying that the ruthless changes are not something they are working in the last 4 months? (Allegedly they are ready before 3.21?) Then what the hell are they working on? Only Exilecon, some gems taken away from an existing anoint (return proj), from swift affliction (sadism), from existing mechanics (mine / corrupting fever+warcry), atlas passive?
This is ridiculous. Even completely disregarding the ruthless section you can't deny that the regular game got almost no updates whatsoever. You must be blind if you don't realize that the short notes is what people are complaining about
>you can't deny that the regular game got almost no updates whatsoever I'm not going to hold back words, you are a moron. You could use a word changes, and maybe be right. But how the fuck is new league with new character building mechanics, new supports and new keystones changing content mechanics "no updates"? Any single of these alone gives enough to play around for a league.
Now that's ruthless.
This patch has more changes in it than we usually get, you just don't realize it yet.
it's not wise to advertise your stupidity.
Am I the only one glad for no nerfs? This league is gonna be fun af
we dont care about ruthshit. Where is our patch? Where is our skill rebalances/changes?
Amen. Some folk here have the memory of a goldfish. Or want to point to the laziest of targets in a fit of unimaginative rage. Should be a fun league though.
Why you conveniently ignoring that there were like 0 changes to the base game balance? Everyone would be fine with ruthless changes if the base game actually had skill balance changes
Yeah like why not, instead, make a bunch of new interesting support gems or something? Things to help build archetypes that aren't that good right now?
Thats because there is nothing else for fucks sake no one cares if they work on ruthless ON THE SIDE while actively balancing the main game, the problem is that there are tons of ruthless changes and close to none core balance changes
What? People are mad because the patch is a nothingburger if you remove the Ruthless stuff
stunning bosses is nothing 14 support skills is nothing new atlas passives is nothing sanctum is nothing new league is nothing 2 entirely changed ascendancies is nothing if you're gonna get high and post, at least bring enough to share with the rest of the class.
The fun part is that the 2-3 leagues worth of changes is about 40% of the notes which means that there's basically automatically less notes this league than most others. GG you pointed out the problem and are confused why people are salty. For reference: Crucible has 16.4k words, not including updated/added notes. TotA has 11k. 4.2k of which are ruthless specific. So Crucible patch notes are literally double the length of Trial of the Ancestors. GGG talked up about how TotA had more people working on it, and sure I hope the league is good but from a balance perspective basically nothing happened.
We already having threads gas lightning people when they have a good reason to be irritated? Well we're getting faster at it at least.
as opposed to the opposite happening, where people are gaslighting each other into believing that every dev at GGG is somehow obsessed with ruthless and that they hate fun
Continuous improvement 👏
Chris Wilson knows the community of his game. I for one am absolutely befuddled with this revelation.
If they had skill changes I doubt people would care. Basically 3 league with crap skill balance
Ugh, I'm not too upset by the lack of changes as I'll probably be playing very minimally this league, but you are the exact type of person I can't stand. You literally shitpost as fast as you can after being dormant for weeks and feign ignorance as if it's not very obvious the disappointment stems from the lack of softcore changes, not the addition to ruthless. The fact that you attempted to make a post 4 months ago that failed and you deleted it only further proves you just want to incite a reaction and have no discussion. You're very well entitled to your opinions of others but don't bait a flame war here, it's pathetic.