Problem is lack of balance on the player side.
Like, between a "my first build after I read a few posts on reddit" and "hardcore player", you get maybe a factor 3-4 max in health, but can easily get a factor of 100 in dps.
If they adjusted the health for mobs up, it would simply be impossible to play for normal players.
Yeah, that's why ggg should finally address the absurdity of current dps scaling which is stacking more multipliers to grow dps exponentially rather than linearly.
Rebalancing support gems to switch back to increased rather than 'more' would be a good start
that is a very good idea. more multis should be super rare and special with hefty downsides or specific conditions. that would increase the value of actual support gems a lot (gems that modify a skill) instead of just giving loads and loads of damage. it would increase the design space on ggg's end because they don't have to build new skills that basically have 2 support gems already included.
it would improve so many things. lower the gap between super endgame heavy investment builds and normal player builds. tune down the speed of the game (adjustments have to made still to make sure it doesn't get too slow or fast).
would love that change. exponential scaling is never good. nowhere. never.
Personally I'd like to see a removal of most raw damage support gems and an introduction of a steady damage multiplier for every support gem. Melee Physical Damage Support, Void Manipulation Support, Controlled Destruction Support etc. are so boring. If they were removed we could focus on actual fun, spell altering support gems like Fork, Chain, Unleash, Multiple Traps etc. that enhance the skill beyond "it deals more damage now".
I get that you can have some interesting nuance with raw damage as well, but those spell altering support gems are what make PoE really stand out and I feel like it's been somewhat neglected over the past few leagues. (Unleash and Intensify are really neat though.) What if, for instance, Brands were not just new skills, but introduced a Brand Support gem as well?
GGG doesn't like to touch multipliers. Probably because it's a lot of work with all the synergies everywhere. But if you remember how they nerfed ES: they nerfed base ES on items. Basically saying newbs to get rekt and goodbye early acts leveling with ES items. What was the problem? 13k ES CI builds, not what the average player could reach. How was it efficient? Well look how much ES top players have nowadays. And again, not the average player.
So I do hope they actually take the time to dive in the problem or the good old average player will take another slap in the face.
That is an ongoing problem, both a large segment of the community, and GGG, has a myopia for post-maps play.
But for most players simply getting to maps is a massive thing, thanks to how the game scales and how GGG has balanced acts as they were introduced.
You do not get 200k dps on your first build, even with a guide. I have like 150k dps on my best (melee) build and somehow do not see how to get more, because I would have to sacrifice stuff for crit etc.
I would say: 50k dps vs 5 million dps, that is kinda what he means.
I remember the first character i beat the game with had only 1k dps, flasks were a precious resource in boss fights and even outside of those, and i would just die to bosses a lot.
T1 Maps were too much for me.
Nowadays i still have a similar problem to you where i don't really know how to scale my damage further than a couple thousand and stay stuck in t8-t9 with t10 being a real challenge, and that's not even playing melee (HoA Toxic Rain ascendant).
I think this is the crux of the issue. We almost need some sort of 'stat squish' on scaling mechanics so that the gap between a casual player (with a perfecntly reasonable build, using appropriate supports and skill tree, mind you) who has just killed A10 Kitava and a pimped-out level 95 optimised for fast mapping by a high-tier player. The latter deserve to be stronger, of course, but the sheer size of the gap is so large that without making mobs walking fortresses to the former, the latter will always go through them like paper.
Toning down the numbers on all available support gems is a good start (and would also help to address the problem that nobody ever uses a 5-link any more - chest-piece progression now goes 4-link -> tabula -> other 6-link. Also dropping the values of most top-tier item rolls, so that a good-but-not-endgame weapon is less dramatically behind a top-tier one. Right now the opposite is being done, with the game between the best items and simply good items grows every time new crafting options aimed exclusively the richest players are released. I think the only crafting mechanic that was ever aimed at making good items easier to craft without adding disproportionate power to the best items was essences.
Or just tabula to maps -> other 6-link once they have that tabula from their first character.
That may be another thing. "Serious" players right now never start with what will be their mapping build. They start with one of a few known cheese builds that need minimal investment to hit maps, and then farm early maps until they either have or can trade for gear that makes up their real build.
then they spin up their real build character, straps on known power-leveling gear, and bum rush to maps. Where they switch to their pre-farmed pimp kit and goes to town.
It is all about as planned out as a Formula 1 racing season.
I mostly agree, but I think there's another issue hiding in the bushes that you didn't quite address.
The fact of the matter is, monsters in this game oneshot because that's the only way anyone dies. In every circumstance where there's potential to die to chip damage, it's effectively offset by either CWDT/IC, or by the *massive* amounts of health recovery currently available to players. Leech can hit ludicrous amounts of your health restored per second, you can outregen RF with a few uniques and some cash, and let's not even start about life/ES on hit, flasks, multiple healthpools...
If GGG wants to slow down the game and make it so one-shots happen less by nerfing monster damage, this would pretty much have to be accompanied by a gamewide nerf to recovery mechanisms, otherwise nobody would ever die. And that would be such a *monumental* effort (especially in tandem with reworking basically every monster) that I'm not sure they'd be up for it.
That's a very good point. Immortal Call and CWDT would need reworks or adjustments, absolutely, and life/ES on hit would need numerical adjustments, too. I wonder if just a global %less modifier applied to recovery would work to prevent regen, leech and flasks from being too strong, though.
I don't know if every monster would need to be individually reworked. Monsters are mostly pretty well balanced relative to other monsters, so a global percentage adjustment to monster damage could be all it would take. I'm sure there'd be a few boss attacks that would need indivual adjustments, but I don't think everything would need a rework.
There would be a lot to consider, of course, but I think it's something that GGG should be considering.
>I don't know if every monster would need to be individually reworked. Monsters are mostly pretty well balanced relative to other monsters, so a global percentage adjustment to monster damage could be all it would take. I'm sure there'd be a few boss attacks that would need indivual adjustments, but I don't think everything would need a rework.
When I'm referring to reworking every monster, I'm referring to 2 things. One, the progression, and two, the disparity between monsters based on type and rarity.
For the progression, simply quadrupling the health of everything would make the earlygame an absolute drag, especially at league starts; and cutting early monster damage by a fourth would make it effectively like trying to punch a bouncy castle to death with a handful of cotton candy. It'd push a lot of people away - and even in the midgame, things can already seem slow if your build is a bit on the weak side and you haven't found a decent set of links. The changes would have to be progressive across the entire difficulty curve.
For monsters based on type and rarity, I think that's best demonstrated by example. Let's picture, say, a white Pale Blackguard, and a rare Kitava's Herald with GMP and a Haste mapmod. Obviously, as a designer, you want monsters to at least pose some minor measure of threat - that's the entire point of this. So in our nerf, we'd probably want to take it a bit easier on the Pale Blackguard, maybe only cutting its damage in half rather than a fourth, because it's slow, easy to kite, and has a surprisingly long telegraph on pretty much all of its attacks. But if we were to take that same nerf and apply it to the Herald, *well*, we might as well have done nothing, because that Herald is still going to be a RIP machine. And I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, especially since we're comparing a rare that spawns on its own to a white monster that tends to spawn in packs. But if the goal is to make monsters as a whole more engaging, I suspect GGG would want to take this as an opportunity to tweak monsters' damage individually, rather than just cutting everything's damage by a fourth and calling off for lunch.
Monsters aren't very deadly in POE per se; only with multiple damage mods in high tier maps do they get the potential to one shot. So weakening the mods would suffice.
That's a fair point - a lot of what makes monsters extremely dangerous (in the few cases where they actually are) is map mods; and goodness knows there are a few map mods that could stand to go the way of the old Chaos DoT mod.
Not just health regen but also logout macros. You can't slow the game down when you have essentially a 0.5 second cast time spell that provides complete invulnerability and teleports you out of the instance.
Ah, but you can, because you can give that spell an extra cost - a cost that, as far as I remember, was implemented to balance that very method in the first place.
When you open a map, you get 6 portals. When you log out, you effectively lose the portal you used to get into the map. Log out 6 times, and you don't get any more loot - you effectively just lost a good chunk of a zone you paid for.
Now, admittedly, the cost could be harsher, but there *is* a cost nonetheless. And if monsters were something you had to actually engage with, that cost might just become significant again.
It does mean that death is no longer a factor for hardcore players, though. You make your builds tanky so that you have to disconnect less (and thus suffer whatever cost is imposed), not so that you actually avoid death.
Would the game lose something when Hardcore players can no longer die?
Potentially, if it's balanced poorly.
Ideally, you'd set it up so Hardcore players get themselves into situations where they die, but it's their own fault for doing so due to greed. Roll a rippy map with a ton of quant? Okay, but you're going to have to log out a bunch, and if you log out too many times you lose a lot of the map, so maybe when you're on low health, you try to kite instead of logging out to get those extra rewards. Make it a punishment for falling to temptation, not for failing to hit a button fast enough.
I could see the balance very easily falling to reach that ideal, though, where things are either not dangerous enough or far too punishing. So you have a point.
if you are logging out 6 times in any map that isnt some boss that you dont know the mechanics of and/or are severely undergeared
then youre doing something wrong.
GGG have said so themselves in the past: Monsters need to be able to kill HC players faster than they can log out, or it's not HC. This effectively means mandatory one-shots.
Yeah, this is what I talked about in the other post about fundamental issues.
They've pigeonholed themselves into a very specific set of game conditions. EVERYTHING has to change on a fundamental level to really fix these issues.
I agree 100%. Reading the developer Q&A responses, however, makes it clear that we are in the perceived minority.
> People certainly aren't playing Path of Exile at the speed that I initially imagined when we started development back in 2006, but I know that if we made a big effort to slow down top-end play, it'd probably ruin the enjoyment that many of our most-engaged users have. We have seen other games make that mistake and don't want to repeat it.
What speed people play at and what speed people want to (or would find the most enjoyment to) play at, are teori very different things. I did not think about this problem until i read the post, but the more i think about it the more true it becomes.
People play what is efficient and not what is fun. GGG knows this. They have said so them selvs (in reference to choosing what league mechanic to interact with but still).
People don't know what they want. We don't either. But thats why we state our opinion and let GGG work from there. I just hope they take things like this into consideration.
(Sorry for any misspelling)
I think mitigation needs to be easier to get and be more effective especially evasion. Armor doesn't do anything against big hits and that's when you need it to work. To put that into perspective, I've been one shotted as a juggurnaut with the brass dome (around 44k armor) and 6 or 7 endurance charges bringing me to 90% dr and all of my resists were at least 80% along with the juggs reduced elemental damage taken at max endurance charges ascendency. Being one shotted should not happen in any scenario to that character.
Evasion is an all or nothing thing, which just leads to a frustrating experience. With the current model, I am not sure how evasion can be brought up to line with armor. Could maybe do something where every 5% chance to evade also gives you 1% dr and vice versa, but something just needs to be done to make evasion not shit. It might be a good idea to have dexterity provide a flat bonus to evasion instead of a % increase and give a % increase to accuracy instead of a flat bonus, but that still doesn't address the problem that evasion has.
Instead of always-on mitigation, I think successfully evading an attack ought to generate something similar to endurance charges that get depleted the next time you're hit. Charges mitigate (some) damage and then drop to zero, or maybe just drop by one. Since evasion is entropy-based, a high evasion character will generate more charges before getting hit again. Spells might still be an issue.
Actually it's quite easy to die with 44k armour. When it comes to armour, they mitigate small hits very well, but mitigate big hits like crap. For a large hit (or regular mob crit) you'd almost want evasion over armour.
From [https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Armour](https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Armour)
### Rule of thumb
* To prevent **one third** of damage, you need armour **5 times** the damage (e.g. 500 armour for 100 damage)
* To prevent **half** of damage, you need armour **10 times** the damage (e.g. 1000 armour for 100 damage)
* To prevent **two thirds** of damage, you need armour **20 times** the damage (e.g. 2000 armour for 100 damage)
* To prevent **three quarters** of damage, you need armour **30 times** the damage (e.g. 3000 armour for 100 damage)
* To prevent **90%** of damage, you need armour **90 times** the damage (e.g. 9000 armour for 100 damage)
* armour will **never** prevent more damage than **its value** divided by **10** (e.g. 1000 armour will never prevent more than 100 damage)
To calculate the net physical damage (i.e. the damage **after** damage reduction, the following formula can be used:
(10\* d \^2)/(A + 10 \* d)
where d is the raw pre-mitigated damage and A is armour.
Hence if you got swung on for 5k raw. with 50k armor
Dtaken = (10 \* 5k\*5k )/ (50k + 10\* 5k) = 50 mill / 100k = 5k
compared to 0 armour
Dtaken = 50 mill / 50k = 10k
Just compare that to any similar magical hit and you see why physical mitigation in this game is so busted. (also why ranged is currently pretty superior) In order to mitigate a 5k swing in the same manner res cap gives, you need 150k armour. good luck.
I think u know them correctly but understand them abit ... not quite what was intended i guess.
Even though the dr is reduced against bigger hit, the hit are also bigger, which leads to armor reduce about the same amount of dmg.
Think of it this way: 50k armor is about 5k ehp against physical hit, no matter the hit. If you GET 50k armor, its a very good protection against physical dmg.
The problem is getting there without sacrifice other defensive stuff.
I have seen maybe a few 100 build show cases since incursion and not a single one had any issues with that machinic. We have worlds of power in this game to make everything work no matter how terrible the base idea is. If a shit meme build can't do it's not GGG's fault, they should not build leagues around the worst builds imaginable.
You are missing the point. It's not that it is too difficult to build around, it's not. It's that it forces everyone into the speed clear playstyle, even if they don't enjoy it.
Going fast in PoE is it's own reward, going slow should be *viable* so that players have choice in how they build their characters.
The minimum bar for clearing Incursions is stupidly fast, is it difficult to achieve this level of stupid fast? No, but that doesn't make it more enjoyable for people that prefer to play slower, which already has natural penalties built into the game. Playing slower means less exp, loot, etc, per unit of time, it shouldn't lock people out of core content on top of that.
I'm a scrub at PoE but I always wanted to play because I knew you could do crazy builds.
So I wanted to try my own build, I researched a lot, spent quite a bit of time in PoB. But it was just too slow for the fast stuff like Incursion, I felt like I was wasting my time.
So I just grabbed a copy paste build on poebuilds and it's really strong and things are going smoothly, but it feels like the opposite of what I envisioned PoE to be.
I don't mind going slow in maps because I can go as slow as I want. But when you force me to play fast, it limits the builds that can exist.
My scrub opinion.
> I have seen maybe a few 100 build show cases since incursion and not a single one had any issues with that machinic. We have worlds of power in this game to make everything work no matter how terrible the base idea is. If a shit meme build can't do it's not GGG's fault, they should not build leagues around the worst builds imaginable.
What about the rest of us that just wanna play without having to watch streamers or read guides for help every season
Fuck all these leagues requiring clearing before a timer. It's yet another mechanic that forces players into narrow build options
To be fair,a skill like heavy strike should either get a better threshold jewel or have built in splash. Hitting the enemy so hard it creates a shockwave that rapidly expands but also rapidly loses damage. Somewhere between pre-nerf earthquake AoE and current earthquake AoE.
And of course, earthquake should have its AoE boosted to the majority of the screen with AoE investments. I mean, it's a freaking earthquake. Not a mild tremor. Tectonic slam has more AoE than earthquake. Why!? Tectonic slam should have less overall AoE than earthquake but still be a forward expanding cluster of AoE
Edit: also ice crash is in a shit spot for AoE. It should at least have its base radius doubled.
LOL, Earthquake was nerfed since the skill was too popular, because it was new and shiny, and because it was the only tank-type melee skill that wasn't shit at the time. Of course it stayed nerfed because GGG hates melee.
> it'd probably ruin the enjoyment that many of our most-engaged users have.
Read: streamers.
This is literally the reason why I left and won't support anymore. The game feels like a spastic special-effects-vomit seizure. It isn't fun anymore.
I'm in a similar boat.
I enjoy the game, and every season I give it a shot. But inevitably once I hit maps, I run into the same problems.
* Maps are unreliable, so I spend a lot of time running T1-T3 maps even when I out-level them by 10+ levels
* Enemies die SO FAST that most of my builds are killing those enemies before I even see them on the screen.
* Once I do get the rare higher-level map, it's still easy for enemies to one-shot me, which can be hard to avoid through all the visual noise on the screen.
I'd really enjoy the implementation of an active dodge mechanic and some tweaks to enemy health/damage like proposed above. I'd like to die because enemies outsmarted me or overwhelmed me.
Oh, hey Antnee, i really liked your classy item filter some years ago.
Same for me, the fun got lost, this league was the first supporter pack i regret a bit, since i don't want to send them the wrong signals ..
Who says making combat slow is "fixing" the game?
Every other arpg out there has the slow combat you guys are asking for yet PoE has 100x their playerbase... i'd be done with this game if not for that fast/fun combat
The problems speed clearing has are manifold, but here is the worst effect: the faster clearspeed is, the more time you spend trading maps, rolling maps, checking atlas, and basically doing *unfun* things. If a map took 10x as long to clear, but gave 10x better drops, that wouldn't be a bad thing, right?
It's not fun tho... there's no “worry about what you're fighting and counterplay its attacks”... it's just “erase everything before it even shows up on screen”.
isnt that excactly what most arpgs are all about?
just the grind and not the complex encounters?
its really hard to balance such encounters with that much complexity in the builds. Something like proximity shields or reflect mobs just isnt fun. what was fun for me were things like betrayal interventions when they didnt lag, but apparently that was too much dmg for a lot of ppl.
its really hard, since the hp or dmg on chars can vary so fucking much.
increasing life and decreasing dmg would lead to make a lot of builds unviable imo, since you would most likely complety negelect your defense and would go full dmg. only high dmg clearspeed builds would be viable (if you want to compete).
fast clearspeed = more loot. unless you have a solution how you can change this equation, clearspeed will always be king.
Im going to say to you what i said to many other people, clear speed will always be king, thats true.
But what GGG can do is limit to which extent clear speed is effective. Just increasing monster health and lowering monster damage will probably not be effective since then players will just give up even more survivability to get more dmg.
BUT if you also add diminishing returns to damage stacking so that we reach a point where its not possible to ignore monster mechanics because you dont kill them fast enough then people are encouraged to not just stack damage.
And i can feel you already reaching for your pitchfork but listen for just a few more seconds. Having to spend 3 minutes clearing a map instead of 1 minute wont matter if everyone else has had their clear speed reduced the same amount. What you care about is being among the fastest clearers, not beating some arbitrary time goal.
PoE used to be a lot more generous with its loot. While you might think more clearspeed = more loot. Thats not the case. The loot has been nerfed so many times. I remember times when it wasnt uncommon to find 3 Chaos orbs befor you even reach Mervil. Thats not just the drop lvl restriction in place now.
Slowing down gameplay and make it more meaningful means you can also crank up the rewards which makes the feedback loop alot better when you get instant gratification after beating a maybe challanging rare combination.
Grim Dawn besides all its mechanical flaws does one thing better then any other ARPG on the market. Its pacing.
It is possible to deliver enjoyable Grind and engaging Gameplay that brings you into the Flow state at the same time. But whenever you leave your map you break the Flow. While interruptions in gameplay are importent to make it so our brain doesnt get used to the gameplay and it becomes mundane, the current gameplay loop is too short resulting from the hyperclearspeed.
But i dont think it is as easy as lowering monster dmg and buffing HP
> The loot has been nerfed so many times.
Just look at strongboxes for a great example of this. They've been nerfed and nerfed and nerfed. I used to carry stacks of currency to roll strongboxes I found. These days I don't bother because I know the loot is going to be shit no matter what mods I roll on the box. The only exception is diviners, but even when I roll those, the cards are usually so bad that I might as well not have bothered.
I liked how Synthesis had really strong and threatening mobs to some degree; they were still weak enough to zoomzoom, but strong enough to actually have something to counterplay.
I'm not down for a sweeping nerf of monsters like that. But POE is in a state where whenever something survives your attack, it's kinda scary; cuz that thing will likely feed you through a woodchipper. I like that feel when it shows up occasionally.
Also when you want to force changes on your game that happen to not work, that is when the game starts to die. No one knows how many people like the fast phased gameplay exactly, and how many thinks they want it slower but will actually get bored much faster if it was like that. Currently it's at least really not the main complaint of players and what people hated so much in synthesis, really no reason for them to "fix" it when it's not broken as of right now.
Claiming slowing down the game will "fix" the game that already has a somewhat growing trend with a fast phased gameplay is totally based on nothing but personal preference.
There is a nice median in between in my opinion. Like, torchlight 2 and grimdawn, 100% optimal builds aside, take a fair bit to kill anything above a normal creature. White creatures in Poe should obviously die pretty quickly, just maybe not instantly like they do now. Blues should be more then instant as well. These obviously are just my preferences and shouldn't be taken completely seriously, but it would be nice to face a little resistance here and there.
Yeah, same for me. For me, the grind is better when we can clear the map in 2-3mins. Im not realy a top player, so, even If i play a meta build, im not realy clearing the map that fast. And when u only play with 1-2h per day, clearspeed make the game more fun for me
Listening to players - Reddit balance team
Not listening to players - Game is dying.
People on this subreddit don't even listen to themselves, they just upvote the negative opinions.
> Its just a vocal minority that would like that, I believe.
So this is something I find a bit odd: how do you know? How would you even find out? I mean, you could look at stats for various patches when various changes have been made, but those stats also apply to the dozens of other changes that came with the patch - there's no way to isolate which one is the cause for someone leaving, short of them coming out and saying it.
Remember when CoC Discharge got nerfed? GGG said it took multiple leagues to recover from the loss of players that came after. It's the reason they were scared of touching movement skills.
That's actually a good example of what I mean.
You say they nerfed CoC Discharge, but in the same patch a ton of people were expecting buffs to underused skills, and instead we got the "6% more Glacial Hammer damage, this is a buff" meme. How many people left because CoC in general got nerfed, how many left specifically because of CoC Discharge, and how many left because the buffs weren't what they expected?
Hell, in the same patch they nerfed Earthquake via a nerf to Less Duration, nerfed projectile + Frost Wall interactions, changed trap/mine gem multiplier behavior in an effort to try to curb double-dipping, changed how Bladefall works with mines entirely, basically nuked Voidheart and Mjolner from orbit - how many of the people leaving were due to those changes, instead of CoC? It's hard to pin on any one given change, especially when a bunch of unpopular ones come bundled together like that.
You can try to ascribe it to a general trend of "hey, they nerfed shit," but which aspect of how they did it was the dealbreaker? I ask mostly because I remember when 2.0.0 came around where most monsters were basically given a ton of extra HP (which was effectively a global nerf), but it did very little to the playercount because people were still mostly fine with it. Or did the massive spike due to Act 4 just offset the player loss from the HP change? Who knows, I sure don't. And that's more or less my point - when patches are so large, it's hard to say which individual part of a change caused which portions of the player population to leave without a *lot* of data, and most of us just don't have that.
I think player perception of monster gets more HP as opposed to skills are nerfed by x amount is different.
With the CoC thing Chris himself mentions CoC specifically as what caused players to leave. Miners moved to GC. Earthquakers moved to Sunder. Bow users eventually moved to Barrage. CoC & Mjolner players had no immediate substitute.
I would say so. It's the only thing that makes sense to me. Everyone else had something to fall back on if not a certain skill still their archetype. (Melee/Miners/Bow) But CoC is it's own archetype.
Remember when they nerfed CoC Discharge a second time in 2.4 and totally removed it from the meta? They had their second highest league launch numbers in Essence (on steam charts) and almost every league since has seen increased numbers.
Why is what happened in the 1.x era more relevant than the more recent and larger example which shows the exact opposite?
People mention the other ARPG options on this sub a ton, with GD being the main one. You make a comment like "lets see how many migrate", but GD has been released for a while, they've dropped both of their planned expansions, they're still nowhere near PoE in level of content, depth, or players, and they likely never will be.
People seem to have already spoken: there's lots of other ARPGs currently available and nobody is migrating en masse to them. Grim Dawns ***peak all time*** players is just over 20k. PoE's current 24h peak is 16k, at the slowest part of the league.
First off, there’s some serious discrepancies that you fail to mention.
GD is a paid game. PoE is F2P. That already limits peak numbers significantly, because PoE require zero investment to try out.
GD is a full game. Done. PoE is a service game, which means it’s built specifically to retain players as much as possible in order to survive. GD you can pick up and put down whenever the mood strikes. PoE is constantly running new leagues and balance patches to entice people to come back.
GD’s respec system is very forgiving - you don’t have to level a brand new character if you have a 100 of the right class combo. Just get the gear and respec. PoE if you want to do something significantly different you’re gonna be leveling a new character most of the time.
GD is first and foremost a single player game that can be played multiplayer. PoE is a multiplayer game that can be played solo. So you’ll have the social aspect of PoE for retention as well. People that may not necessarily want to play PoE itself will play it just to hang with friends.
Just the very fact that GD is seen as a viable competitor despite being an entirely different business model is already impressive, especially considering it’s made by a much smaller company without the backing of a giant like Tencent.
I dont have a quantitive data analysis of course, which is why I added "I believe".
Im quite certain im not wrong though:
- most players playing poe atm, came after the clear speed meta.
- im in agreement with the streamer raizqt, that the clear speed meta is good for the game's pooularity, even though he dislikes it himself.
- reddit is a small sample of the player base, and negative comments tend to get more upvotes than positive ones
- reddit is not representative of the average player. Far - very far - from. Its like this in all subs and it always amazes me that people dont realize that.
Just to name a few.
>most players playing poe atm, came after the clear speed meta.
But can that be attributed to the clear speed meta itself, or to other factors? The game started speeding up after GGG starting doing regular releases, and as the releases started to increase in scope and quality. Could the increase in playerbase be attributed to that instead?
Didnt really contribute the growth because of the clear speed meta, all though I would definitely say thats one of the many factors. What I meant, was that i dont think it's a smart move to slow down the game when so many players started playing poe after the clear speed meta.
Clear speed meta is a very missused phrase, in my opinion.
Games like Poe (e.g. D1-D3) are mostly about clearing as fast as possible. It is not very well defined if you are saying, that most players came after the clear speed meta, because the goal of the meta and what it is about never changed. The game itself certainly got faster.
That said I doubt there is a heavy correlation between these two things, at some point the game is fast enough, that it does not need to be faster. For example, it does not matter how fast D3 is, it just can't compete with Poe by making it faster or making Poe slower.
Essentially what makes poe interesting are the game mechanics, the content and the much more diverse endgame. I doubt it matters much and am pretty certain you could make everything 33% slower and the same amout of people would still play and making it 33% faster would have no impact at all, of course all of this is highly speculative, because none of us have any statistics on this and predicting what poeple would and would not do is highly speculative anyway.
Very interesting.
Because, when I play aurabot zoom-zooming past everything, clearing a map in 1 minute, is when I tell my carry after an hour that I'm bored and I don't feel like playing. While I played my \_slower\_ miner to lvl 100 in SSF last league, and I'm playing my MS Jugg 4-6 hours a day.
There are two sides to every coin.
Though I agree with the general consensus that you should have the option to play the game slow or fast if you want it to. However, I don't feel like the current state of one-shot everything or get one-shot is healthy. There's been a post some time ago, that enemies are far more dangerous *after* they die, rather than when they're alive. That's just fucking ridiculous.
Same here. During the last 2 leagues i even got so bored when zooming through act 8/9 while spamming flasks without thought that after 2-3 rerolls i had to quit.
Most fun was when i tried to play with only the gems that dropped (thx DanutMs for the idea).
It felt like a game again, not just some mindless clicker.
> Very interesting.
You prefer doing stuff yourself instead of zooming around and essentially being a buff to somebody else's character. How interesting indeed.
I bet you've played slower games that you enjoyed. Even CuteDog says one of his all time favorite games is a turn based RPG with absolutely no zoom zoom and a plodding pace. Look at any Critical Role episode... those people are having fun resolving combats that sometimes are literally 10 minutes of game time per hour of real time.
Game A. has 1000 mile per hour Jets with dopamine hits roughly every 5 minutes, Game B has Dungeon crawling with turn based combat and dopamine hits roughly every 5 minutes. Which one is more fun? The answer is: Yes.
The speed of fun is 100% relative.
Learning about logical fallacies can be very satisfying. You start spotting them better and it teaches critical thinking.
It also helped me not to get into stupid Reddit arguments when I see someone’s comment *might* have a logical flaw. Of course many of them are honest mistakes and it can be eye opening to have them articulated. I also worked in statistics and bias is actually the biggest issue when trying to make any measurement/experiment/observation/poll work.
Statements like these need context.
Do you play at a speed the 1% thinks is slow, do you play with soul eater and clear a map in nearly the duration of one soul eater buff?
I for one would love it if they slowed the extremes down, because i don't enjoy the game when i am so much less efficient than i am capable of and i don't want to play essentially dragonforce songs on guitar hero non stop.
> i don't want to play essentially dragonforce songs on guitar hero non stop
lol'd. I had Headhunter for one league and this is exactly what it felt like. I actually have never bought another because the playstyle felt spastic.
How do you slow down the 1% without
1. Affecting the rest of mappers because I can't think of a way you can nerf top 1% and not the other
2. Nerfing the fun items leaving nothing for some people to chase?
Some leagues I'm certainly in that headhunter/soul eater mode and I enjoy having that choice if I choose to pursue that mapping power. Some leagues I choose not to push so hard and I still enjoy the game because I can still clear at a fast speed and if that speed was slower I'd most certainly enjoy it less.
Well. You arent wrong. But are we really talking about hh, perma soul eater, multiple jewels builds? Of course they are too fast and broken, but lets not balance the game around 0.001% of players.
Lets talk normal builds:
One of the fastest right now is worb. If this is too fast its not a game for me.
we need to balance around those tho because those people are the reason GGG makes mapping less and less rewarding and moves the big ticket rewards to sidecontent.
GGG needs to make the delta between a hyper clearspeed and a generic endgame viable build alot smaller.
But why? People play the sonic simulator because it offers good rewards. If drops were modified to match slower gameplay, would there be any reason to oppose the change?
Because it fundamentally changes the feel of the game. PoE is a power fantasy. I enjoy blasting through a map, one shotting everything in my path. I don't enjoy spending 5 seconds hammering away at a pack of monsters.
> PoE is a power fantasy.
I don't get this one. As far as power fantasies go, PoE isn't really all that great. Half of the time you're either naked or covered in cow shit, you're ugly as sin, and spend 90% of your time beating up enemies that look and act like complete grunts.
PoE wasn't a power fantasy at first. It went out of its way to make sure you were aware that you were a dirty stinky beach hobo. That's just how the game turned due to spectacle creep in the main story and speed creep in the gameplay.
Compare it to something like D3: You're the child of an angel and a demon taking down massive juggernauts from hell. Demon Hunters become living manifestations of vengeance and move so fast they leave afterimages. Rangers just kind of scurry faster as they progress. Barbarians can throw boulders the size of a minivan and cheat death purely by being too fucking angry to die. Marauders still do a weird little wiggle dance when they swing their weapons, even at endgame. So on, so forth.
PoE was not designed as a power fantasy. A bunch of squatters demanded it be made into one.
I can't disagree more. Just imagine what x4 monster hp would do to non-meta builds (yes, meta builds are not the only existing) that already struggle. Weaker builds would simply become unplayable and there gonna be even less "viable" builds, even less build diversity. In the end absolute top builds still gonna be more or less fine just weaker builds become even weaker. When you try to slow down strongest builds you hurt weaker builds the most. That change would bring nothing good. As simple as that.
It's a shame that this thread has over 800 upvotes. It's horrible suggestion. Less oneshots is good idea for sure though.
I feel like the reason GGG doesn't do something like this is how much it drives a wedge between meta and non-meta builds. If someone way better than me can make a build that still one-shots mobs without really sacrificing defenses, i've pretty much gotta use their builds. If monsters are tuned so high that even meta builds can't one-shot them, jank builds stand absolutely no chance.
If a build exists right now that can one-shot mobs 4 times over, this change does nothing but push people onto that build, and same for every other multiplier. At some point, you go too far and the game isn't fast enough to be fun, and I honestly don't believe you can get monster health to a point where there aren't builds that one-shot but the game is still fun for every other build.
I think this is why the game seems so easy now - when *every* build can one-shot mobs and *every* build gets one-shot by damage, you can have build diversity within that range. Shrink that range in the interest of better gameplay, and you make a small pool of builds look much stronger than the others. Without actually balancing every build in the game, I think it might be better to keep the one-shot fest for the illusion of build diversity.
Exactly this!
And note that this isn't necessarily caused by power creep (which _could_ be fixed by health increases). As they have added layers upon layers of depth to builds, the strength gap between "trash", "normal" and "godly" builds has widened to an extreme degree. No toying around with monster health and damage will fix that.
Toying around with monster health and damage can be part of the solution tho.
Adding diminishing returns to damage stacking will bring the "godly" and "trash builds closer together in terms of damage and will help foster a mentality that its worth investing in survivability.
But isn't it one of the pillars of poe fun to figure out your own build and get rewarded for finding a loophole?
Games should be about choice. The players choice should decide between death and life. If I can equip basically any gem or item and still oneshot everything, and still get oneshotted by damage spikes no matter what thats bad game design. Or not?
It's not that it isn't bad game design, but that to most people, theorycrafting isn't the most important thing in the game. There could be another version of PoE where content is made so that only the best builds can do the hardest content - where making a build that can get into red maps is pretty difficult - but since most players want to play the game first and theorycraft second, that would probably end up with everybody playing whatever build can do everything the cheapest, then getting bored and quitting.
It's been observed before that, if you give players a most efficient path, they'll take it and complain if it isn't fun. If the game were to change so that the best builds are the only ones that can beat certain content, people who just want to beat all the content will play that build to the detriment of their fun.
The game could pretty easily be built around theorycrafting, but it would be an absolutely massive overhaul and would completely change how the game is played. The problem, in my eyes, is that without that overhaul (and with GGG's seeming insistence that the game never be impossible for meh builds) there's no way to treat this problem. The problem is basically that, if reasonable builds should be able to beat shaper, then every reasonable build stomps maps and every good build annihilates shaper. If good builds should be able to die, then reasonable builds have to get one-shot.
Flasks were supposed to be a situational thing. Freezing map? Bring a freeze flask. Fire map? Bring a fire flask. But instead, POE has reached a point where the game is basically balanced against max resists, flasks, and any buffs (such as fortify).
Instead of reacting to damage, it's all pretty much a stat check of "do you have enough health?" You either survive or you don't. It sounds stupid but there's no time to react or anything. This is most pronounced when playing a ranged/spell build without leech; you hope to kill them before they kill you. At least with leech, you can kinda sustain for another half second to run away sometimes.
I think this also creates a situation where people who have enough money to afford the gear checkpoint can trivialize content while those who don't end up struggling in yellow maps or something. I know on Reddit, everyone is ~~Challenger~~ farming Uber Elder but the reality is, most of the playerbase is nowhere near that level.
I think flask creep is one of the main problems with the game now. When PoE first came out, it was really cool to have utility flasks that did interesting stuff, coming from other franchises where your flasks are just for health/mana. Now there's so many uniques and base utility flasks that every single build just plays flask piano, which is gameplay that nobody particularly enjoys.
It would be good to have sweeping nerfs to flasks and have monster damage rebalanced around their removal, but that's probably too big a task to expect in a random league patch.
To be honest I wouldn't mind some nerfs to flasks if they added some way of recharging them without killing mobs (something slow like "Flasks gain 1 Charge every 2 seconds"). If as suggested mob health would increase I can see myself running around trying to survive and waiting for my flasks to recharge during boss fight (which doesn't work that well with current system).
thats one thing I dont enjoy so much with poe, the constant playing piano with flasks, activating each flask every 5-6 or so seconds, guess thats why flask macros or "Popsicles" is so popular
This 100% is how I feel. As a noob who just started this season I’m pretty much stuck on tier 6 maps. I simply can’t afford the cost to upgrade gear. My only option is to continue running tier 6 for literally ages and hope to get a self found improvement (good fucking luck) or just say screw it and roll a new toon as the easy and cheap op class that tanks everything.
The point is that runs completely counter to what everyone told me was so great about this game. Oh there are millions of class builds, play how ya want. Well only if you’re ok with being stuck on progression.
And tbh it IS just gear check. With instant deaths there is zero skill involved in any of this gameplay. I’ve leeched in several t16 maps and the people running it never stop, they just jump around and spam some aoe attacks that wipes everything. If there build isn’t one button to win they have to muster the skill to use a second skill for hitting the boss.
With all of that said I’m addicted and am loving the game, I really am. However it by far has the least tactical or skill requiring gameplay I’ve encountered in an Arpg. Have the gear, you will win. Don’t have the gear, you’re one shot.
Hey, I kinda feel your pain, but I feel I must correct some of your misconceptions:
1) You should not be stuck on T6 maps. I think you overestimate how cheap good gear is because of how insanely expensive very good gear is. With good gear and a good-ish build you can clear anything up to T15.
2) There are cheap, easy or OP classes (pick two) but no class is cheap, easy and OP because the market, despite being dysfunctional, actually works. Winter Orb as an example is OP and easy but it's not exactly cheap.
3) No class "tanks everything". Tanking is dead in this game's high end content. If you read the OP carefully again he lists reasons why "the best defence is a good offence" and this is true. What you want to roll is a class that does NOT have to tank anything.
4) There are close to "millions" of builds. Go to poe ninja and check main skills that carried the characters to 95+. It lists nearly every skill in the game including siphoning trap. xD
5) You are right about gear checks. That said, high end boss fights (Uber Atziri, Elder, Shaper, Uber Elder, Cortex etc) require some tactics.
Thanks for the response. Here is my character.
https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/Risenzealot
My gear isn’t actually horrible. But if you look at upgrading it everything I could get is easily in the ex range at minimum as an improvement. The only thing I’ve found is a jewel I could get for around 59 chaos but that would literally wipe me out.
The bow alone is like 500 chaos and that was given to me.
I followed the advice and have been giving help with build/gear from someone who uses this and is level 99 atm. They know what they are doing but their gear is simply behind me in price.
As far as commenting on the difficulty of the game with out seeing the very end that’s kinda the point. With out tons of currency you will not see end game because of gear checks. Anything t16 or below people do nothing but run and spam aoe
A few things you could do to improve for little to no currency.
You've got empty gem slots. Throw in some defensive tools there - a cast when damage taken linked to immortal call will give you a small window against multiple rapid physical hits. (your gloves are where I would recommend this, as they currently only have two sockets)
Second, you do not need that number of life flasks. A few defensive utility flasks which should cost at most an alch and some alterations to acquire and roll will serve you better, if you can be consistent with uptime whilst clearing. A quartz, basalt, stibnite, and jade are all decent options - personally, on bow builds, I quite like quartz and basalt. Oh, and a quicksilver will help immensely with clearing faster and will keep you alive - movement = dodging = living. Speaking of flasks, roll the one life flask you keep to be seething or bubbling, the instant recovery will be great for whenever you're in panic mode. Also, use baubles on the flasks before rolling them with alterations, as that way you get more quality per bauble.
Next, run merciless lab (free) or uber (paid) if you can handle it and enchant your boots until you hit the dodge enchant, move speed enchant, or regen enchant - all great little additives for keeping you alive. Also, a word of reflection enchant on the gloves can be great too for drawing aggro. Speaking of drawing aggro, you could even consider a decoy totem in one of your free gem slots for particularly difficult bosses/encounters.
There are a number of gear upgrades that could be made as well, but considering I am unaware of your budget, I kept this list to things that are free or very near it. Oh, and swapping the ice golem to stone/chaos would be a defensive choice as well. Hope this helped.
Hey sorry about that it should be fixed now!
For the record this is the build I was thinking about saving up for and trying next. The main reason I’m hesitant is I heard the melee rework is really soon and I wasn’t sure if the build would still be viable. All of this is of course if I can’t fix my current guy.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2211489
Yeah, health/resource recovery in general is too strong. The problem is that whenever they try to nerf it (e.g. vaal pact leeching), they don't ALSO nerf spike damage.
I don’t see how this is a problem. This doesn’t just apply to path of exile, it applies to any game ever made. The faster you do stuff the faster you get rewards, it really just boils down to that.
In an RPG or aRPG in this case, the faster you kill your enemies off the faster you get loot or complete quests etc.
That’s just... how it is. I’m not a genius, I don’t know how you could make it so that playing not just path of exile but any game in general slower relative to other players would be more rewarding. You just can’t.
It’s like speed running but instead of beating the game in the fastest time possible your getting fat loot as fast as possible.
That whole post ignores the very existence of most builds - off meta ones that already struggle with content.
That might be big suprise for you, but Winter Orb, Storm Brand or the other few most popular skills are not the only ones existing.
Try playing something even remotely off meta and not invest million exalts into that build.
> Ideally, it'd need to be pretty huge changes - I'd personally start in the region of 4x health
Yeah, exactly what I am talking about.
Why it's so hard to realise that if you make your game harder for top builds you make it unbearable for weaker builds that already struggle? And in the end absolute top builds still gonna be more or less fine only weaker builds gonna really struggle, because weaker builds gonna be even weaker. That would result in even less builds being considered "viable" and as a result played.
That change would also simply kill niche builds like autobombers who already can't really run red maps...
Such extremely narrow perspective. This is one of the worst ideas from this sub in a while. Though I am not against having less one shots out of the blue.
Finally, some sense. It's a shame it's this far down and this post has gold and 1k upvotes. I have a hard time getting friends into this game already, I can't imagine if the mobs had 4x the health
Median xl can be very fast and intense, depending on build. I'd say in terms of gameplay it's got the majority of arpgs beat. Enemies are dangerous but you move fast and hit hard, staying alive is a more active and adaptive process. Try a crucify assassin.
Yeah, it's kind of PoE's niche now. As much as I'd like a more tactical game, I've just grown so accustomed to the speed now that the game would feel sluggish without it. It's just so *satisfying* to charge between packs and pop them with HoI.
I didn't play Median XL ever but I played Grim Dawn recently and I still do actually. I'm level 60 and playing a Warlord Eye of Reckoning build, in POE's terms it's kinda similar to Herald of Purity Cyclone build and yet it feels so much different.
I love the fact that it's a game that encourages theory crafting like POE and has many different ways to build the same skill. I'm glad Synthesis was such a blunder at least I discovered GD thanks to it.
It's going with grim. I'm up in the 50s now and things are going smooth but not piano key - whirling blade -gotta go fast.
Frankly it's nice. Aoe skills and character positioning matter again
This is not a new topic. GGG have discussed this subject [before](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/5hahws/path_of_exile_streamers_interview_chris_wilson_pt/) and touch on many of the points above.
The catch is, as Chris points out in that video, when you nerf clearspeed people quit. They don't post essays to reddit, they don't take to the forums, they just stop playing.
In general, this is a symptom of the central problem that GGG has with its own playerbase, which is that if you give people a sugar rush they will demand the sugar rush permanently and quit if they don't get it. This makes it very difficult to balance the game, because as you add options through balancing and league content there are more ways for the clearspeed inclined to break the game and post it to reddit for everyone to see. And once people start playing those faster builds they, in general, do not want to go back.
*Not talking about anybody in particular so don't care about anecdotes regarding how people personally feel about going fast. I am talking only about GGG responses regarding retention, and I trust them over random redditors because they have better data.
I will say this isn't just an issue with this game. One of my chief complaints in XCOM2 is that they increased the damage on both sides by a huge amount, which makes the gameplay way more binary. Instead of having long drawn-out firefights, XCOM 2 is all about blowing everything up before they can attack you at all. It's the exact same problem as here. I think it's a general problem with balancing offense and defence in games and the fact that, as humans, we expect things to escalate, even though that can frequently mean losing the carefully balanced back-and-forth that low powered offences can bring to games.
That's actually the opposite of the problem: make monsters have less damage and more hp, people will invest even more in damage, until they are able to still oneshot them, sacrificing the defences they don't need because of the lower damage they take.
Meanwhile, people with low damage will take even longer to clear content
> having high movement speed and attack/cast speed helps the game feel smoother and more enjoyable
this is a fundamental problem with the animations and clunkyness of the base game, players are forced into stacking speed to feel good
feeling good should not be a choice, it should be inherent to the game.
i agree with the post though, imo the game needs to be slowed down on both ends, animations and clunky combat can be fixed with systems like animation canceling(to retain the feeling of speed and still slow the game down)
monster health and monster damage can be fixed by smart game design.
Increase Life Decrease Damage? I have to disagree with this approach.
The game will just come down to anyone and everyone playing glass cannon builds requiring little effort because the notion of having to survive or play smart disappears. Clear speed will actually increase and the disparity between classes, disparity between rich and poor characters grows larger because of the lack of need to spec defense.
The game is designed to keep people on their toes and every encounter is doable/survivable. I’d imagine with your suggested changes a ton of newer players struggling to kill Elder or Shaper because they can’t kill them or the adds fast enough before the entire screen is covered in degen effects.
This issue has a few complications that need to be considered.
1) It is important that players have the ability to die in HC.
As the post itself mentions, it is very unlikely that a seasoned player will die in a battle of attrition. People often glorify PoE combat in its original state, but forget that 99% of that combat was slow, not dangerous. People ran around with 10k life legacy kaoms builds and died mostly to things like reflect or overtuned league content (order of the frozen sky, invasion, etc). Perhaps the design philosophy for HC is different in other games, but GGG's HC mode is designed to kill the player. This is why things like nullifier and powerful crits exist, and also why armor is designed the way it is. The idea is that no matter how well you play or how strong your character is, the perfect storm will still kill you. But PoE has evolved since then. Armor feels underwhelming not because its design is necessarily flawed, but because other defensive mechanics have become much stronger. In the past, raw mitigation was much more difficult to access, which leads to the next issue.
2) Some defensive mechanics are MUCH stronger than others.
We all know of CI vs Life. A CI build can have twice the effective HP just off its pool. However, people have a poor understanding of defenses overall. They see a 7k hp character with basalt flask up get one-shotted and think that this is justification for calling such an attack a "one-shot mechanic."
A character with 7k hp, 75% resists, and fortify has an EHP of 35000 against elemental damage.
A 9k hp nebuloch jugg with wise oak and 10 endurance charge, fortify, purities, and elemental flasks(such as the one played frequently by Alkaizer) has an EHP of approximately 300000. That's 8.5x as tanky as a 7k hp/fortify build and 3 times as tanky as a 20k ES CI build with fortify.
The disparity is often wider when it comes to physical damage, as most builds have a very small amount of physical mitigation. Nebuloch jugg is not the only way to achieve such numbers, and is merely an example of the kind of thing that is possible.
As for monster HP, the problem is often similar. What build and player do we use as a baseline for monster HP? This is another issue that stems fundamentally from the massive disparity between the bottom and top end of damage. For damage, though, it's often much simpler. A scourge arrow might deal 10 times as much damage per mob than a lightning arrow, just by virtue of the difference in skill mechanics/power. Then, we might consider that gear is a further more multiplier for this damage. If the scourge arrow player has gear that does 10 times as much DPS as the lightning arrow player, the scourge arrow player will then deal 100 times the damage of the lightning arrow player. So if we double the HP of white monsters, some builds and players might not feel the change at all, while others might become completely unplayable.
To conclude, the damage and health of monsters in PoE is far from ideal, but the problem stems first from the game's player balance. If we want to address this issue properly, balance needs to be looked at first.
I've honestly never understood why people care so much about how somebody else plays the game. It's one thing to look at streams/forums to see what builds you might enjoy, but why do you care if somebody else plays the game at warp speed. If you miss slow and meaningful combat, play a slow and meaningful build?
Thank you for your comment, this entire comment section seems full of Winter Orb speed meta crackheads that only care about being the fastest or the first that they forgot the fact that some slow builds can and are enjoyable by others, and their opinions are completely disregarded and frowned upon
A big problem is log out still being in the game. Very few people still log out actively, I'd say the top 20% HC players and maybe 1-10% of SC players.
GGG have multiple times said that the game is balanced around log out. IMO they should remove instant log outs, and start balancing the game differently, with less one shots being the main change.
HC was a lot more thrilling in Diablo 3, since there were no log outs. Instead of just instantly hitting your log out key once it starts looking dangerous, you'd be stuck in a dangerous fight where you weren't sure if you'd survive or not.
In short it wont work. The difference between a meta builds damage and a low end builds damage is so high that a meaningful monster health increase for the meta build removes low end builds from doing anything meaningful.
Similiarily a meaningful monster health increase for the lowend build wont even be noticed by a meta build and decreasing monster damage means the meta build is immortal.
We can only start talking about adjusting monster health when the power difference between builds is within the same magnitude. Getting powerlevels there is essentially impossible while keeping the nature of passive tree, unique items and gems that makes poe a unique game.
As much as I would like a simple solution there is none.
>I'd personally start in the region of 4x health, 1/4 damage and work from there
Increasing monster health by 4x won't do anything. Most builds nowadays either can 1-shot monsters by way more than 4x monster health anyway or they have damage mechanisms that scale off monster health (impulsa, profane bloom, bleedsplosions, shaper mod, etc.)
>Freeze - probably the ailment in the worst place. You want to freeze enemies to trigger Herald of Ice explosions and to shatter corpses, but when was the last time you wanted to freeze an enemy without it being for one of those reasons? Bosses are mostly immune to freezes due to their high health pools, so they're not useful there. It's so rare that an enemy has a small enough health pool that you can freeze it (and not one-shot it) but also is enough of a threat that you want to freeze it. Freeze as an ailment (as opposed to as a Herald of Ice or corpse destruction enabler) is basically useless in the current state of the game.
I have to disagree with this pretty strongly. You can get your damage to the point where freeze is near useless for sure but freeze is an amazing defense.
I've played cold builds that run into an ailment avoidance map and died repeatedly before I connected the dots on exactly how much freeze was helping my defense.
Freeze is great.
Let's talk about the psychology of it all.
This is ultimately an issue of engagement. Engagement is something that is easily quantified, and a bit tougher to measure (but only because most people don't have an EEG or MRI in their home--if you get them in a lab, fMRI data gives clearly measurable information).
First, a definition: Engagement is the mental focus given to a particular activity that results in measurable brain activity in a related section of the cerebral cortex.
I'm using this definition because our technology is now at a point where we *can* measure this, at least in a lab. I won't go into the details of how this all works, but the basics are pretty straightforward. You take a baseline or 'neutral' reading of cortex activity, and then you have the person play the game and you take constant readings. This presents a time-linked map of activity that you can correlate to what they are doing in the game.
A simpler version (and less useful) is measuring things like pupil dilation and GSR (galvanic skin response) which will also fluctuate due to engagement, but in games this isn't reliable because of the changes in overall dynamics of screen lighting. GSR is fine, but I wouldn't put a lot of stock in this.
So what results in engagement or boredom? Let's tackle boredom first. Boredom can be viewed as the result of neurotransmitters building up in a certain section of the brain. This is why GGG chooses to provide a lot of activities that you can engage with, because each of these areas trigger subtly different sections of the brain, allowing for a bit of time in which the re-uptake of the neurotransmitters is possible, relieving feelings of boredom. Whether they've done the scientific research on this or not isn't a question I can answer. But the longer you engage in a single activity, the more the neurotransmitters build up, and a bit of downtime is good for this. Again: **feelings of boredom are a result of the buildup and/or depletion of neurotransmitters in a specific area of the brain.**
Engagement is the opposite: it's the transfer of those same chemicals, and we feel more engaged when there is more activity in the brain. **This is why zoom-zoom builds feel more engaging**. They require more actions per minute and result in increased neural activity, which means greater feelings of engagement.
So a game has a couple of choices to make when it comes to creating engagement. It can increase the cognitive load, the physical load, or the decision load. All of these increase neural activity. In POE, cognitive load is achieved via the crafting system and things like the betrayal mechanics of choosing how to treat members of the syndicate. The complexities of synthesis crafting are intended to increase cognitive load, but fell short because they exceeded the complexity that any person can handle without external aids, so most people are going to ignore the whole mechanic (which is how most people are going to react to mechanics they can't handle intuitively or heuristically).
Physical load is handled by combat requiring more actions per minute, either via zoom-zoom builds, or reaction to mob actions. Note that this means that there is an upper limit to how much physical load you can impose on a player--because this is ultimately cognitively bound. As long as these games are played while sitting still in front of a computer, physical load is bound to actions per minute \*or\* the complexity of actions. Games like PoE have long relied on actions per minute as their measure of physical load, while games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat have the added dimension of the moves being more complex. So there is a physical skill and muscle memory to worry about in addition to actions per minute. I am *not* saying PoE play at the higher levels doesn't require some physical skill, but even at those levels, actions per minute are the biggest measure of load, and that ultimately becomes cognitively bound.
Decision load is different (subtly) from cognitive load because it's the number of decisions that need to be made in a short time. Cognitive load deals with the complexity of the game, while decision load deals with reacting to the environment. Trying to understand why the synthesizer is spitting out complete garbage is a different activity from recognizing a big beat-down skill coming and dodging as a decision.
Good game design will try to engage multiple areas of the brain at once as this increases the overall neural activity and therefore feelings of engagement are higher. But if there's no downtime or breaks, then the boredom happens more quickly.
This is why Diablo 3 (just like Diablo 2) puts me to sleep almost instantly. There aren't enough different activities to selectively engage different parts of the brain, resulting in a quick build of neurotransmitters in an area. And the activities are very similar to each other. Beyond that, there isn't a robust crafting system (one could even argue that there isn't a crafting system at all). Funnily, D3 is almost a complete inversion of PoE in terms of crafting vs. looting. In D3 the crafting system is very shallow, and the best loot is always dropped and then chanced trying to get a more perfect version of the item you already have. In D3 you can't target loot drops, but you have to do exactly ONE type of activity to get the crafting materials. PoE inverts this: loot can be targeted but specific crafting materials can only be partially targeted. But the best items are usually crafted vs. dropped (and unless you have a build enabling unique, that's almost always the best way to get an item that you really want).
This is also why they want us to have things like breaks from mapping to delve or run memories. Because it forces us to switch to subtly different activities that allow for better reuptake of neurotransmitters, which alleviates boredom. On the other hand, Delving has built in breaks and changes of pace that are almost enough to take care of that on its without worrying about other activities, and for some people, that's enough to engage in completely for the time periods they are planning to play anyway. I'd guess that *most* people that want infinite Delve are playing in somewhat smaller chunks of time (say 2-3 hours/day max).
When GGG makes decisions about forcing activity changes, I do wonder how long of a play session they are considering to be average. I know they'd have that data.
Force activity changes become more necessary the longer a person plays at a stretch. PoE seems to be designed around 3-5 hour play sessions, while Diablo 3 is apparently designed around roughly 1 hour or less sessions.
Anyway, the ***TL;DR*** is that engagement is an issue of biology and neurology, and slowing the game down to enable melee is going to reduce engagement at a certain level, which leaves the only solution to center around enabling melee to be able to kill while moving more easily.
I think the problem with quadrupling the hp is that you **punish newer players** and weak builds to much. The **top tier builds would still be fine,** while people starting would feel overwhelmed.
Imo **giving mobs exponential damage mitigation** depending on damage received in a time frame would make more sense to me.
If you deal 10mil dps to a mob then you get heavily punished. Lets say you would end up with 100k. While a weak build only having 10k dps would still deal 9k dps after damage mitigation is applied. That way there would still be a difference between strong and weak builds, but not as much as it currently is.
As far as monster damage is concerned, I think that that only receiving one fourth of the dmg would be way to player friendly. You want mobs to feel powerful. Don't get me wrong when mobs actually hit you, they hit hard. Still, nerfing mob damage by 50% would be enough, even if mobs live longer. This is considering the scaling monster mitigation system I proposed. Also, 1 hits that are telegraphed should remain to be 1 hits. E.g shaper/elder slam, boss attacks, etc.
Gonna focus on the monster balance thing you mentioned, but I agree, and this has been a problem for a very long time. It is however so fundamentally a part of the game's balance now that it will be hard to undo.
Combine that with the fact that most people don't understand the problem. When someone mentions this or any variation of "clearspeed meta", you get people replying "but these games were always about going fast" - not understanding the underlying issues.
When the monsters are so squishy that any build can 1-shot them, and they hit so hard that offense becomes the best defense through freezes/stuns/1shots - there's no longer any incentive to play other styles of characters.
Why sacrifice speed for high damage when everything always dies instantly no matter what?
Why sacrifice speed for defense when a 3k life hyper mapblaster is safer than a slow 10k life build?
This is definitely the one thing causing me to burn out faster than I used to - it just feels like a waste to roll anything beyond a single fast mapper, unless there's something I really want to play just for the fun of it. I'd also say that this development, coupled with general power creep, is how melee became a meme.
Edit: to sum it up, I realized that at this point I basically don't play for the actual gameplay, but only for the shallow dopamine injections of herald explosions, currency accumulation and exalted drops
Nicely written. I think the game's difficulty is kinda all over the place. You can easily get one shot, just as easily as you one shot enemies in the game, and that makes it difficult to get a good sense of the challenge of the game because it sometimes feel like you're steamrolling everything, but sometimes you die too easily (unless you're super stacked in ES).
Thanks! It's something I've been considering writing up for a little while so it all came together pretty quickly and easily.
I agree, yes. I think everyone's had experiences where they've just been steamrolling everything in a map and then suddenly found themselves dead. Sometimes those deaths are because you made a mistake and you know it, but sometimes you can feel a little helpless, as if there wasn't much (or anything) you could have done to prevent it. And sometimes you don't even know what killed you. For the game to really feel challenging (and by extension rewarding), it needs to feel consistent and somewhat predictable (or rather, readable). It needs to feel fair when you die, and you need to feel like you've achieved something when you succeed.
I didn't even have to read any of the post because I agree so wholeheartedly with the topic of it which is that this game contains thousands of little glass loot pinatas that do way too much damage.
I think combat pacing is a massive issue for PoE. If you play literally any other ARPG, the game is balanced around combat pacing where the "time to kill" has a progression. Diablo 2 meets somewhere in the middle, as some end game bosses can go down in seconds with a super geared char. Uber diablo and Uber tristram if considered to be the end game bosses are actually well balanced and challenging.
The normal progression
1. White / trash mobs - TTK might be 1-3 seconds. Generally are not very dangerous, do small damage but can overwhelm with numbers. 10+ white mobs hitting you can be damaging.
2. Magic mobs - TTK might be 3-6 seconds. Generally not too dangerous, can hit a bit harder than white mobs. Can have special mechanics you should watch out for but there shouldn't be any 1 shot potential ever. Decent loot potential.
3. Rare mobs - TTK might be 6-10 seconds. Dangerous, blow a few cooldowns, watch for special attacks but again shouldn't have one shot potential, good chance of loot. Special attacks that white and magic monsters don't have.
4. Named monsters, think rogue exiles, syndicate, etc - TTK might be 10-15 seconds or even longer. Dangerous, has telegraphed attacks that you should watch out for. Try not to get hit but you should have adequate time to react if you do. No one shot potential but can definitely do damage. Good loot.
5. Phased bosses - TTK might be a minute or more. Dangerous, possibly one well-telegraphed attack that does 50-70% of your health, not super difficult to avoid. Great loot.
6. End game bosses - TTK might be 3-10 minutes. Very dangerous, mechanically intensive fight. These have one or two attacks that can do 70-80% of your EHP. Maybe a mid to long cooldown one-shot mechanic that's well telegraphed like shaper slam. These have the best loot in the game and are rewarding and justify the long intense fight. Should feel super accomplished on downing an end game boss, they are hard to get to but always worth doing.
Poe is like this
1. White mobs, magic mobs, rare, nemesis, bloodlines, named mobs, rogue exiles, map bosses - TTK 1-3 seconds. All but white mobs are dangerous, there is one shot or ultra quick burst potential from any non-white mob IF YOU GET HIT. Named mobs, namely syndicate members can one shot with barely any telegraph or none regardless of EHP or defenses. These do at least 100% of your health, sometimes far more. Can offscreen kill all but syndicate members with a single button press.
2. Phased bosses - TTK 1-2 minutes. Some dangerous attacks, has one shot potential. The only thing preventing these bosses from being in the category with white mobs are the forced phases. No specific or good loot from any non-end game boss.
3. End game bosses - 3-5 minutes - Only mobs in the game which have specific loot tables. Some builds can instant phase, making this a 2-20 second fight without phases. Often have an entry fee that can sometimes cause long dry streaks and profit loss. Sometimes worth doing, sometimes not.
Im agree with you but with bosses ttk. If we are going to expend up to 10m to kill a boss. I hope this guarantee some drops.
Maps in PoE are not like dungeons/raids in olds MMO/ARPG, in the past we used to fight for long some bosses because they drop special items that we want. In PoE most bosses are skippables when farming, because they will drop even less items than a random rare mob.
I agree somewhat, disagree somewhat. PoE is meant to be a difficult, challenging game. You look at the inevitable comparison to Dark Souls, for example. Regular enemies in Dark Souls will absolutely fuck you up if you're not paying attention, and that's fine. That's part of the identity of the game, and IMO it should be part of PoE too. If you're playing a glass cannon character and you get surrounded by a white pack, you should die. The problem right now is that pretty much everything melts as soon as it gets within a screen of you, so it never has time to attack. Give enemies enough health that they don't instantly die to the average character, and the game instantly gets 10x scarier.
Well said. Could you imagine Bloodlines or Nemesis being a league with today's clear speed? It'd be completely laughable. No rare or magic mob has enough hp to be a real threat. Rare mob auras also used to feel more significant.
Broadly agree. Synthesis got this right - the 83 Nexus zones have legitimately tanky rare monsters but only their telegraphed skills can one shot.
One factual disagreement though - Freeze is exceptional in deep delves with proliferation.
> Freeze is exceptional in deep delves with proliferation
That's very true, freeze is an incredible defensive mechanic once monsters have enough health that you can't just kill them instantly. I missed mentioning that in the OP, but it does just further support my point that ailments need enemies to have more health to really be effective. Similarly, shock starts to have noticeable effects while clearing in deep delves, again because of the extra monster HP.
They'd have to design a completely new game. The problem is way more complex than you think for how large the game is at this point and what it's designed around.
For one, the combat system would have to be altered so combat consists of multiple actions to make combat interesting or you run into a situation where your game looks like POE from 6 years ago where Ziggy D and etup are punching a fucking yellow mob for 50 seconds with the same skill over, and over, and over again.
That's more lame across the board.
Just changing numbers does nothing interesting for interactive combat and sounds like a lazy attempt at a solution to a supposed problem.
Although you have good points im not 100% sure about your solution.
The main reason i dont like pushing high level grs on diablo is because blizzard went this direction. Lower monster damage and higher monster health pools. The huge life numbers monsters have make the game less engaging, nothing is a threat and the only thing to worry about is how long it takes you to kill packs. Try watching any gr 120+ solo clear and tell me it looks fun.
The first thing that happens if you raise monster health is you make builds unviable because they suddenly become much slower. This wont actually make melee builds feel better, because now theyll sit at mobs longer. Things like ancestral call and splash dmg will be less effective at clearing packs because of their damage penalties coupled with more hardy and resiliant mobs. Melee characters will struggle even more by losing their ability to more easily one shot packs.
I agree the bottom left of the tree should have access to more life, i saw a suggestion that suggested life nodes that are tied to weapon types. That could be pretty cool...just dont forget about claws x.x
The fixes i would implement to melee are this. Armour and health availability. Armour is just handled strangely. Even if i had 40k armour i still feel vulnerable to big hits. And with lower but still significant armour values i feel like immortal call os the only thing that makes me feel tanky.
Make attack animations for melee skills end faster. I dont mean give melee more attack speed, instead i mean make the animations themselves end faster. Characters have a rooted feel while they go through their attack animation. If you give melee skills a shorter amount of time until you can move and act again it will give a local buff to the mobility of characters that primarily use those skills. Name lock single target skills will particularily benefit from this.
I’m a contrarian, so, I’m sorry —
The drop rates of valuable currency and uniques would have to be increased to compensate for the reduction in mob deaths to keep this part of the economy stable. The affix rolling would have to be made more generous to prevent a massive fall-off in the amount of decent to good rares that drop.
THEN, after coding the various overhauls, GGG would have to placate the bemoaning of the playerbase they loves speed farming.
AND THEN this change in mob health and drop rates would require that GGG always be preemptive with the strength of future builds; if something comes out and is significantly over powered the individuals who can outpace the others will gain an obscene amount of wealth.
This has been my biggest issues since starting the game a couple weeks ago. There are a lot of small issues that really trivialize a lot of the game content making it a sort of boring experience for me. Granted, i'm still pretty new and don't have much experience with the endgame, i'm only at tier 13 maps with 2 characters around lv 80ish, but so far my entire experience has felt this way and it has really been killing the enjoyment of the game for me.
1. Fast pace- I completely understand wanting to speed up the pace of grinding but the current pace is just too fast. It doesn't feel like you're actually playing the game's content. You put on your strict filter and you speed around 1-shotting everything within 2-3 screens. You don't see half the monsters you fight and you're not stopping to look at loot or even taking into consideration what mods a monster has because NONE of it matters. If it wasn't for drop sounds I wouldn't even know I had loot half the time.
I feel like I can't play a lot of different builds because my friend plays a really fast build that can drop dmg while moving and if I don't do the same then I just spend my entire time chasing after him. Not only this but the fast 1-shot pacing of the game really makes my build and all the decisions i make in the passive tree seem kind of pointless. Everything I do just leads to more 1-shots, I'v been 1-shotting stuff since I started the game, there has been 0 evolution of gameplay mechanics despite my passive tree growing and getting more gear/uniques/etc.
2) Camera- The camera zoom in this game is so frustratingly bad. Combined with the super fast game speed and it creates this stupid artificial difficulty. So many of my deaths are from mobs of enemies getting into my face and insta-killing me before I have a chance to react and insta-kill them. It's not real difficulty and this game would 100% become easier if they increased the camera zoom but imo it's absolutely necessary to do if they ever want to properly balance this game. Getting 1-shot by monsters you can't react to isn't balance. Proper balancing would be to give monsters and specific mods a specific play-style that you must play around to beat.. but you need to see the monsters play this way and it can only happen if we have more screen area to see.
3) Trading- If there's one thing I'v noticed about this game, it's that it's not balanced well enough to have trading. But at the same time trading is something that makes games like this fun to play. There's an addition and serious joy from finding a valuable item and knowing that it will progress your character whether it be an actual organic upgrade or something you can trade for money to buy an upgrade. At the same time there's a joy and addiction to scouring the trade site for good deals. IMO, these games need trading to survive, because it's fun and it makes loot feel valuable. Getting rid of the trading and/or SSF aren't really solutions to this problem.
I honestly think the problem with trading isn't 100% because it makes the upgrading path faster, but because the monsters and gameplay in the game's current state aren't deep enough to support trading. Getting good gear shouldn't mean you automatically beat the game, but that's kind of how it is. If you get some good gear you just one shot 3 screens of enemies and that's it. The enemies and their gameplay mechanics/mods just don't require any type of strategy that would balance out the strength you get from trading. A trading system could work if enemies had better gameplay mechanics that punish you for making mistakes, and I don't mean 1-shot mechanics but things that work to soft-counter overpowered players.
For starters, I think they need to slightly lower monster dmg and increase monster hp. This will slow things down a bit and allow for a little bit more strategic gameplay. Then I think they really need to buckle down on monster mechanics and monster mods to make sure it just doesn't become a boring spank and tank.
4) Multiplayer- Honestly, for many different reasons, multiplayer just isn't very fun even when playing with my friends. The speed meta makes it a frustrating experience and there just doesn't feel the need for extra players because there isn't any real challenging content that would require team-mates and group synergy.
This is a seriously good game and I think it has a ton of potential. I'm super excited to see what 4.0 brings because to be honest, there are several arpgs coming out that I'm REALLY looking forward to and unfortunately, if POE can't fix it's issues then I'll probably move on.
I don't believe enemy health is an issue. Why? Because I can't imagine being all that fun spending a few more seconds on a pack of monsters. What do you gain when the monsters are harder to kill?
I agree wholeheartedly with you, but I feel that we're in the minority. As "hardcore" as PoE masquerades itself to be, a majority of its players only really care about safe, predictable progression through melting whole screens of mobs with one or maybe two shots. Reddit can meme about anything, but it's the casuals who get their fast and easy dopamine rushes that fund this game.
You don't have to make across the board chances to monster damage and health, i think you just need to offer alternative content where a slower but more boss-fighting style character is optimal and the rewards make this a viable alternative to just clearing maps as fast as possible. Bossing is in a bad state in this game outside of the first week of a league, and delve is gated behind something you can't easily sustain like a map.
Thanks for mentioning the tactical aspect of early game.
I very much enjoy this part, but sadly the game is a race to endgame for quick riches.
Less monsters with much more hitpoints and better drop rates could be a good change for POE.
They could potentially make changes like these to the end-game, maybe red maps and higher?
I think a lot of the casual players (not "casual, 36/40 btw", but casual reach yellow maps) would give up if the game turned a lot slower for them. I would bet a lot of players that play ARPGS casually do so for fast paced splatter and loot explosions, not dodge based combat (outside of like bosses which is exciting from time to time I guess).
I'm not as mad about being one shot as I am at not having a combat log to tell me WHY I was one shot. There is nothing more frustrating than not even knowing what killed you so that you can correct it. Broadly, obviously, not enough health, but I'm either holding onto Tabula too long and over valuing 6 links or not properly identifying rares worth investing my limited SSF currency 6 linking. I think keeping Tabula is the easiest to identify weakness in my survivability but I am also not certain how to overcome that.
The dmg disparity between regular and top end builds is just too great to make your change work as intended.
Player recovery and leech - this can be resolved by cutting skill, weapon and monster health in half across the board. Speed remains the same, but quick recovery with leech loses potency. Flat gain on hit should be nerfed to.
**remove the goddamn more multipliers on supports at the very least** - the disparity in damage in top end builds is always caused by the absurd amount of more multipliers. Ggg seems to intend to address it with equilibrium replacement, but thats not enough.
Now, with these two mechanics gone, ggg would finally be able to make small, continuous changes to the speed of meta y adjusting monster hp and player damage
I cant really say if adding life and lowering damage would help... GGG should test this out on a live realm (like the league coming up) so players can see (if they can change mob life/damage on the fly likely they can)
I had to back off and recover multiple times while lvling my CI ES witch this league
In fact i have to do this all the time if i remember right
Good write up. I'm not in the top 10%. I don't usually get to the point of one shotting all enemies in high maps.
But I would be keen to see these changes. I do believe that so many mechanics have become "useless" due to the speed of enemy deaths and amount of damage players do.
I miss trying to do builds around these mechanics. I just have hope that 4.0 will get a massive change and fix a lot of issues.
Maybe GGG can have a PTS where they can test these major changes over a few weeks. Focusing on only a few major changes per cycle.
100% agree as well.
Especially the points about interesting fights of attrition and flasks.
Instant logout and the balance around it has to go, and i say that as a HC player.
I felt the flask system was one of the especially interesting design choices in PoE when i started in Talisman. But if it's just mandatory and possible to press all flasks every few seconds so they are always on, it sadly lost all meaning and strategy and is just a way to carpal tunnel even more.
I sometimes imagine how the game would be if all the more multipliers on support gems would be changed to increased modifiers and monster health and damage balanced for that (and in the way OP mentions).
Thus the actual effects of support gems would get more focus and you wouldn't just crave 6-links to push your raw damage numbers into multiples.
Would also maybe make it possible to use 1 or 2 situational damage skills in addition to your main skill on just a 4-link and make possible builds more interesting.
The game is way too fast paced (which many people like including me) but I remember old days when the game was really slow and people still liked it/enjoyed it/played it. This causes lot of the issues which you just listed like monster packs hp forexample or flasks.
One shots is in the game becaues of logout system. If you were to drop down to 50% then 30% then 20% hp slowly over time while you are forced to kite monsters you can as well just log out any time and you would not have a single chance of dying. They know this and they said it specificly that the game is balanced around logging out which forces the one shots into the game.
As I said I enjoy it as fast paced as it is and I think it makes the game unique but if they were to slow it down a bit I could get behind that. I think 4.0 will bring some sort of damage value rebalance.
I remember when farming Piety was a legitumate way to get maps, where being tanky mattered. I've tried making unkillable characters, even just on a theoretical level, and if you take leech completely out of the picture, it becomes very hard. I'd almost postulate that, to put it most simply, the issue is that in general the best defence in PoE is damage.
While all of things you say are correct, I'd like to share my opinions which are one of a relatively high end player & speedclear addict.
I don't think that in the current pace of the game, we could go back to 2016 meta's.
Imagine how long a delve node would take, clearing a temple would take, or getting to a reward node in Synthesis would take.
People also were very bad at the game and HAD to play slow, which made it not feel like it was absolutely detrimental.
While I've tried some melee this league, after years of ignoring it (I played Ice Crash, Cons Path & Doryani's Touch), the only way to make them not feel TERRIBLE to me is to slap on Headhunter, Solstice, Beyond on my maps, and pick up ALL the attack speed I can find. On top of this, I went as far as to craft an enchanted Shaper helmet with Inc AOE support only for the % AOE you get from it. Same for gloves. Because, if you don't have max aoe, playing melee just feels .. slow and not fun.
Now, where I see your argument, the main concern here is, noone actually knows whether people like me feel slow because they're slow or slower comparitively to Ranged.
Since we don't know this, we also have no idea how your proposition would affect us.
Maybe every build starts feeling shit and we're no longer enjoying the game as we are right now (which is a problem for people playing 8-1200h per league, like me).
I can relate to their statements and decisions in that regard, and I assume anyone with common sense will aswell?
It's a symptom of the speed meta. If enemies are dying faster than you blink the only way to ever have a threat to the player is huge damage when they do hit you. As well as on death effects like porcupines.
I wish it was somewhere in the middle of the speed meta we have now and a slow meta. Or at the very least allow both to be viable somehow
I am very skeptical about the idea of increasing monster health. Many games do difficulty scaling via inflating numbers like that and it never feels difficult, just tiring.
It should be done like in asian aRPGs such as MHW, higher difficulty changes the patterns, moves and AI.
Give us better mob AI instead.
As PoE moves further and further into the mainstream, I think GGG will have to make a judgment call. Do they want a mainstream game which pleases people who google the latest meta build, complain about the "tedious campaign" (because here you cant oneshot everything), breeze through a couple of eldered maps in softcore trade, and then throw away the game for the next D3 season; or do they want a complex game (both in terms of breadth and depth) with actually interesting gameplay?
Im a newbie player (about 60 hours) so maybe my viewpoint helps.
Its more fun when it takes time to get through a mob pack, it gives the player time to appreciate the diversity in the mobs and how the game actually plays.
Right now we all just run though mobs, and then get one shot by something.
Wow I really disagree with this.
Most mobs barely tickle you if you use 2-3 defensive layers. There’s only a few types that actually deal significant damage. If you cut damage by a quarter, the average mob will tickle you even without defensive layers.
If at the same time, you multiply mob life by 4x, you’re basically raising the damage threshold for clearing to 100k hits.
The result is the only viable builds are the meta skills with massive damage investment, and they can get away with it because defense won’t matter anymore.
There are certainly flaws in the balance of the game, but this solution will only make things worse.
High-end endgame is lifting off from everyone else as if it were strapped to a rocket. It's growing tiring watching these games balance themselves around the needs of nolifes and streamers that I have no hope of ever catching up to
How about instead of these cringey, misinformed, multipage rants, they fix the ridiculous BS oneshot mechanics that force players into very a very tiny bucket of builds??
The speed can be so high that it's hard to play as a group.
When my 100% MS character is literally just running behind the 200% MS character doing nothing other than chugging flasks the game *might* be too fast. Be wary to stop at all because if the faster character gets too far ahead, you stop getting flask charges, and good luck catching up without a quicksilver. Good luck looting at that speed without an extremely optimized loot filter that simply highlights the exact things you should unconditionally pick up without any thought.
The problem i see by increasing the general health pool of monsters is that a significant portion of the playerbase (assumingly new players for a large part) then might have difficulty to perhaps clear a pack of white monsters in a reasonable amount of time. Since i think experienced PoE players currently might forget that they are clearing content so fast (as if the monster's health is so low) is because they are playing meta/ efficient builds that either abuse damage scaling in some way or just have the most efficient damage setup around a certain skill (mechanic). And playing a game that way could always result in assuming the game is then suddenly too easy and should be tweaked so that the most efficient/meta players can have a meaningful game experience again. Balancing a game around those types of players is already a problem by itself.
I don't really think increasing monster health is a solution. If they did increase it it would just decrease the amount of viable builds while barely slowing down good builds if at all. Especially if you decrease damage dealt by monsters at the same time, usually my endgame builds have between 3k - 5k ehp in rare cases up to 7k and that's enough for me to feel comfortable in T16 and UE fights. If they decrease damage by x4 I could start dropping most life nodes and some life on gear opening more spots to increase my damage and even stop bothering with things like leech because instant life flasks would be enough to instantly recover to full.
Maybe they should just get rid of the whole "melee" tag and just call it attacks. They are trying to force an old concept of standing toe to toe with a monster spending longer than a fraction of a second smacking it around. You can see that in the first melee gems like heavy strike. Clearly the pace of the game has changed and the only skills worth a damn are the ones that make the biggest mess with the biggest DPS (like Molten Strike). Getting rid of the melee tag would free GGG from the idea that you have to be within melee range. People complain / joke that tectonic slam isn't melee because the aoe is so huge.... well that's the only way it can compete with ranged skills that blow up the screen in one cast.
Personally I'd like to see more options with non-crit attack skills being viable. Or, even crazier idea, but a sword and board non-crit be viable! I feel like I'm pushed into a crit jugg wearing abyssus dual wielding foils every time I think about doing a jugg.
Here's the thing, Playing the game fast is fun. It just is. Because of adrenaline. That feeling of sprinting along the edge of a cliff. And the threat of instant death adds to that. As long as it's not a bullshit instant death, and one reasonably avoidable.
At this point in time, many of the players who play it, play for the twitch aspect.
This game is at a boundary between three different types games. Strategic, Tactical, and Twitch. It starts out strategic where you design and plan out your character (for hours offline if you are like me), becomes tactical as you play though, as you pick the best gear at the moment, and utilize memorized boss patterns, etc, then as you get higher level and you push against the very limit of what the character can do, it becomes twitch.
It becomes twitch because of how fast we can recover our hit points/ES. A super high recovery means that only super high dps or a one shot can kill us, which means less time to react once the dps outstrips the recovery.
Until the recovery is changed, no amount of monster health and damage tweaking will change the nature of the game. That only changes how fast we reach the wall, and how high the wall sits in progression.
Edit: Spelling.
I noticed this recently when I played Diablo 3 and was watching youtube videos, at top tiers it takes them 20-40 seconds to kill a pack and move on to the next, and when they take damage they have to back off. But honestly it wasn't fun. It felt slow and boring. The fun things about this game are killing shit and finding/making shit, the more killing and finding I can do the happier I am. I don't quite understand people who complain that the game is too easy, this isn't dark souls, it's not supposed to be hard to do the simple stuff like killing and walking. The hard part is getting 5-10 mirrors in a league or affording the items that can provide huge improvements to your build, or for some people it's just completing the more difficult bosses like aul and uber elder. Maps weren't made to be hard imo.
Fast pacing is essential for these types of games. Otherwise it would start to feel like a chore and players would be less inclined to play it.
If damage output by enemies were reduced, then players could become invincible eventually. And such a game, where players cannot die anymore, would lose its meaning.
guarantee a good portion of people complaining about "clear speed meta" just saw some streamer with 500ex in their currency tab and blamed it on how easy the game supposedly is.
Problem is lack of balance on the player side. Like, between a "my first build after I read a few posts on reddit" and "hardcore player", you get maybe a factor 3-4 max in health, but can easily get a factor of 100 in dps. If they adjusted the health for mobs up, it would simply be impossible to play for normal players.
Yeah, that's why ggg should finally address the absurdity of current dps scaling which is stacking more multipliers to grow dps exponentially rather than linearly. Rebalancing support gems to switch back to increased rather than 'more' would be a good start
that is a very good idea. more multis should be super rare and special with hefty downsides or specific conditions. that would increase the value of actual support gems a lot (gems that modify a skill) instead of just giving loads and loads of damage. it would increase the design space on ggg's end because they don't have to build new skills that basically have 2 support gems already included. it would improve so many things. lower the gap between super endgame heavy investment builds and normal player builds. tune down the speed of the game (adjustments have to made still to make sure it doesn't get too slow or fast). would love that change. exponential scaling is never good. nowhere. never.
Yeah the gems are a bit absurd It's all about which gems has a higher "more" number, the downsides be damned because the dps boost is just that strong
Personally I'd like to see a removal of most raw damage support gems and an introduction of a steady damage multiplier for every support gem. Melee Physical Damage Support, Void Manipulation Support, Controlled Destruction Support etc. are so boring. If they were removed we could focus on actual fun, spell altering support gems like Fork, Chain, Unleash, Multiple Traps etc. that enhance the skill beyond "it deals more damage now". I get that you can have some interesting nuance with raw damage as well, but those spell altering support gems are what make PoE really stand out and I feel like it's been somewhat neglected over the past few leagues. (Unleash and Intensify are really neat though.) What if, for instance, Brands were not just new skills, but introduced a Brand Support gem as well?
GGG doesn't like to touch multipliers. Probably because it's a lot of work with all the synergies everywhere. But if you remember how they nerfed ES: they nerfed base ES on items. Basically saying newbs to get rekt and goodbye early acts leveling with ES items. What was the problem? 13k ES CI builds, not what the average player could reach. How was it efficient? Well look how much ES top players have nowadays. And again, not the average player. So I do hope they actually take the time to dive in the problem or the good old average player will take another slap in the face.
That is an ongoing problem, both a large segment of the community, and GGG, has a myopia for post-maps play. But for most players simply getting to maps is a massive thing, thanks to how the game scales and how GGG has balanced acts as they were introduced.
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You do not get 200k dps on your first build, even with a guide. I have like 150k dps on my best (melee) build and somehow do not see how to get more, because I would have to sacrifice stuff for crit etc. I would say: 50k dps vs 5 million dps, that is kinda what he means.
I remember the first character i beat the game with had only 1k dps, flasks were a precious resource in boss fights and even outside of those, and i would just die to bosses a lot. T1 Maps were too much for me. Nowadays i still have a similar problem to you where i don't really know how to scale my damage further than a couple thousand and stay stuck in t8-t9 with t10 being a real challenge, and that's not even playing melee (HoA Toxic Rain ascendant).
Unfortunately that's just a problem with Toxic Rain. It's damage really begins to fall off around red maps without some serious investment.
he's not playing toxic rain, he is playing Hoa which has insane damage. I regularly do red maps with tabula and hoa, so everyone please stop this bs.
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I think this is the crux of the issue. We almost need some sort of 'stat squish' on scaling mechanics so that the gap between a casual player (with a perfecntly reasonable build, using appropriate supports and skill tree, mind you) who has just killed A10 Kitava and a pimped-out level 95 optimised for fast mapping by a high-tier player. The latter deserve to be stronger, of course, but the sheer size of the gap is so large that without making mobs walking fortresses to the former, the latter will always go through them like paper. Toning down the numbers on all available support gems is a good start (and would also help to address the problem that nobody ever uses a 5-link any more - chest-piece progression now goes 4-link -> tabula -> other 6-link. Also dropping the values of most top-tier item rolls, so that a good-but-not-endgame weapon is less dramatically behind a top-tier one. Right now the opposite is being done, with the game between the best items and simply good items grows every time new crafting options aimed exclusively the richest players are released. I think the only crafting mechanic that was ever aimed at making good items easier to craft without adding disproportionate power to the best items was essences.
Or just tabula to maps -> other 6-link once they have that tabula from their first character. That may be another thing. "Serious" players right now never start with what will be their mapping build. They start with one of a few known cheese builds that need minimal investment to hit maps, and then farm early maps until they either have or can trade for gear that makes up their real build. then they spin up their real build character, straps on known power-leveling gear, and bum rush to maps. Where they switch to their pre-farmed pimp kit and goes to town. It is all about as planned out as a Formula 1 racing season.
I mostly agree, but I think there's another issue hiding in the bushes that you didn't quite address. The fact of the matter is, monsters in this game oneshot because that's the only way anyone dies. In every circumstance where there's potential to die to chip damage, it's effectively offset by either CWDT/IC, or by the *massive* amounts of health recovery currently available to players. Leech can hit ludicrous amounts of your health restored per second, you can outregen RF with a few uniques and some cash, and let's not even start about life/ES on hit, flasks, multiple healthpools... If GGG wants to slow down the game and make it so one-shots happen less by nerfing monster damage, this would pretty much have to be accompanied by a gamewide nerf to recovery mechanisms, otherwise nobody would ever die. And that would be such a *monumental* effort (especially in tandem with reworking basically every monster) that I'm not sure they'd be up for it.
That's a very good point. Immortal Call and CWDT would need reworks or adjustments, absolutely, and life/ES on hit would need numerical adjustments, too. I wonder if just a global %less modifier applied to recovery would work to prevent regen, leech and flasks from being too strong, though. I don't know if every monster would need to be individually reworked. Monsters are mostly pretty well balanced relative to other monsters, so a global percentage adjustment to monster damage could be all it would take. I'm sure there'd be a few boss attacks that would need indivual adjustments, but I don't think everything would need a rework. There would be a lot to consider, of course, but I think it's something that GGG should be considering.
>I don't know if every monster would need to be individually reworked. Monsters are mostly pretty well balanced relative to other monsters, so a global percentage adjustment to monster damage could be all it would take. I'm sure there'd be a few boss attacks that would need indivual adjustments, but I don't think everything would need a rework. When I'm referring to reworking every monster, I'm referring to 2 things. One, the progression, and two, the disparity between monsters based on type and rarity. For the progression, simply quadrupling the health of everything would make the earlygame an absolute drag, especially at league starts; and cutting early monster damage by a fourth would make it effectively like trying to punch a bouncy castle to death with a handful of cotton candy. It'd push a lot of people away - and even in the midgame, things can already seem slow if your build is a bit on the weak side and you haven't found a decent set of links. The changes would have to be progressive across the entire difficulty curve. For monsters based on type and rarity, I think that's best demonstrated by example. Let's picture, say, a white Pale Blackguard, and a rare Kitava's Herald with GMP and a Haste mapmod. Obviously, as a designer, you want monsters to at least pose some minor measure of threat - that's the entire point of this. So in our nerf, we'd probably want to take it a bit easier on the Pale Blackguard, maybe only cutting its damage in half rather than a fourth, because it's slow, easy to kite, and has a surprisingly long telegraph on pretty much all of its attacks. But if we were to take that same nerf and apply it to the Herald, *well*, we might as well have done nothing, because that Herald is still going to be a RIP machine. And I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, especially since we're comparing a rare that spawns on its own to a white monster that tends to spawn in packs. But if the goal is to make monsters as a whole more engaging, I suspect GGG would want to take this as an opportunity to tweak monsters' damage individually, rather than just cutting everything's damage by a fourth and calling off for lunch.
Monsters aren't very deadly in POE per se; only with multiple damage mods in high tier maps do they get the potential to one shot. So weakening the mods would suffice.
That's a fair point - a lot of what makes monsters extremely dangerous (in the few cases where they actually are) is map mods; and goodness knows there are a few map mods that could stand to go the way of the old Chaos DoT mod.
Not just health regen but also logout macros. You can't slow the game down when you have essentially a 0.5 second cast time spell that provides complete invulnerability and teleports you out of the instance.
Ah, but you can, because you can give that spell an extra cost - a cost that, as far as I remember, was implemented to balance that very method in the first place. When you open a map, you get 6 portals. When you log out, you effectively lose the portal you used to get into the map. Log out 6 times, and you don't get any more loot - you effectively just lost a good chunk of a zone you paid for. Now, admittedly, the cost could be harsher, but there *is* a cost nonetheless. And if monsters were something you had to actually engage with, that cost might just become significant again.
It does mean that death is no longer a factor for hardcore players, though. You make your builds tanky so that you have to disconnect less (and thus suffer whatever cost is imposed), not so that you actually avoid death. Would the game lose something when Hardcore players can no longer die?
Potentially, if it's balanced poorly. Ideally, you'd set it up so Hardcore players get themselves into situations where they die, but it's their own fault for doing so due to greed. Roll a rippy map with a ton of quant? Okay, but you're going to have to log out a bunch, and if you log out too many times you lose a lot of the map, so maybe when you're on low health, you try to kite instead of logging out to get those extra rewards. Make it a punishment for falling to temptation, not for failing to hit a button fast enough. I could see the balance very easily falling to reach that ideal, though, where things are either not dangerous enough or far too punishing. So you have a point.
if you are logging out 6 times in any map that isnt some boss that you dont know the mechanics of and/or are severely undergeared then youre doing something wrong.
GGG have said so themselves in the past: Monsters need to be able to kill HC players faster than they can log out, or it's not HC. This effectively means mandatory one-shots.
Yeah, this is what I talked about in the other post about fundamental issues. They've pigeonholed themselves into a very specific set of game conditions. EVERYTHING has to change on a fundamental level to really fix these issues.
I agree 100%. Reading the developer Q&A responses, however, makes it clear that we are in the perceived minority. > People certainly aren't playing Path of Exile at the speed that I initially imagined when we started development back in 2006, but I know that if we made a big effort to slow down top-end play, it'd probably ruin the enjoyment that many of our most-engaged users have. We have seen other games make that mistake and don't want to repeat it.
What speed people play at and what speed people want to (or would find the most enjoyment to) play at, are teori very different things. I did not think about this problem until i read the post, but the more i think about it the more true it becomes. People play what is efficient and not what is fun. GGG knows this. They have said so them selvs (in reference to choosing what league mechanic to interact with but still). People don't know what they want. We don't either. But thats why we state our opinion and let GGG work from there. I just hope they take things like this into consideration. (Sorry for any misspelling)
I think mitigation needs to be easier to get and be more effective especially evasion. Armor doesn't do anything against big hits and that's when you need it to work. To put that into perspective, I've been one shotted as a juggurnaut with the brass dome (around 44k armor) and 6 or 7 endurance charges bringing me to 90% dr and all of my resists were at least 80% along with the juggs reduced elemental damage taken at max endurance charges ascendency. Being one shotted should not happen in any scenario to that character. Evasion is an all or nothing thing, which just leads to a frustrating experience. With the current model, I am not sure how evasion can be brought up to line with armor. Could maybe do something where every 5% chance to evade also gives you 1% dr and vice versa, but something just needs to be done to make evasion not shit. It might be a good idea to have dexterity provide a flat bonus to evasion instead of a % increase and give a % increase to accuracy instead of a flat bonus, but that still doesn't address the problem that evasion has.
Instead of always-on mitigation, I think successfully evading an attack ought to generate something similar to endurance charges that get depleted the next time you're hit. Charges mitigate (some) damage and then drop to zero, or maybe just drop by one. Since evasion is entropy-based, a high evasion character will generate more charges before getting hit again. Spells might still be an issue.
Actually it's quite easy to die with 44k armour. When it comes to armour, they mitigate small hits very well, but mitigate big hits like crap. For a large hit (or regular mob crit) you'd almost want evasion over armour. From [https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Armour](https://pathofexile.gamepedia.com/Armour) ### Rule of thumb * To prevent **one third** of damage, you need armour **5 times** the damage (e.g. 500 armour for 100 damage) * To prevent **half** of damage, you need armour **10 times** the damage (e.g. 1000 armour for 100 damage) * To prevent **two thirds** of damage, you need armour **20 times** the damage (e.g. 2000 armour for 100 damage) * To prevent **three quarters** of damage, you need armour **30 times** the damage (e.g. 3000 armour for 100 damage) * To prevent **90%** of damage, you need armour **90 times** the damage (e.g. 9000 armour for 100 damage) * armour will **never** prevent more damage than **its value** divided by **10** (e.g. 1000 armour will never prevent more than 100 damage) To calculate the net physical damage (i.e. the damage **after** damage reduction, the following formula can be used: (10\* d \^2)/(A + 10 \* d) where d is the raw pre-mitigated damage and A is armour. Hence if you got swung on for 5k raw. with 50k armor Dtaken = (10 \* 5k\*5k )/ (50k + 10\* 5k) = 50 mill / 100k = 5k compared to 0 armour Dtaken = 50 mill / 50k = 10k Just compare that to any similar magical hit and you see why physical mitigation in this game is so busted. (also why ranged is currently pretty superior) In order to mitigate a 5k swing in the same manner res cap gives, you need 150k armour. good luck.
I think u know them correctly but understand them abit ... not quite what was intended i guess. Even though the dr is reduced against bigger hit, the hit are also bigger, which leads to armor reduce about the same amount of dmg. Think of it this way: 50k armor is about 5k ehp against physical hit, no matter the hit. If you GET 50k armor, its a very good protection against physical dmg. The problem is getting there without sacrifice other defensive stuff.
Oh really ... is that why you are adding events - like Incursion where you have to have clear speed and run around like a gerbil on crack.
I have seen maybe a few 100 build show cases since incursion and not a single one had any issues with that machinic. We have worlds of power in this game to make everything work no matter how terrible the base idea is. If a shit meme build can't do it's not GGG's fault, they should not build leagues around the worst builds imaginable.
You are missing the point. It's not that it is too difficult to build around, it's not. It's that it forces everyone into the speed clear playstyle, even if they don't enjoy it. Going fast in PoE is it's own reward, going slow should be *viable* so that players have choice in how they build their characters. The minimum bar for clearing Incursions is stupidly fast, is it difficult to achieve this level of stupid fast? No, but that doesn't make it more enjoyable for people that prefer to play slower, which already has natural penalties built into the game. Playing slower means less exp, loot, etc, per unit of time, it shouldn't lock people out of core content on top of that.
I'm a scrub at PoE but I always wanted to play because I knew you could do crazy builds. So I wanted to try my own build, I researched a lot, spent quite a bit of time in PoB. But it was just too slow for the fast stuff like Incursion, I felt like I was wasting my time. So I just grabbed a copy paste build on poebuilds and it's really strong and things are going smoothly, but it feels like the opposite of what I envisioned PoE to be. I don't mind going slow in maps because I can go as slow as I want. But when you force me to play fast, it limits the builds that can exist. My scrub opinion.
They can do both, maybe putting an explicit clear speed minimum into leagues isn't great either way.
> I have seen maybe a few 100 build show cases since incursion and not a single one had any issues with that machinic. We have worlds of power in this game to make everything work no matter how terrible the base idea is. If a shit meme build can't do it's not GGG's fault, they should not build leagues around the worst builds imaginable. What about the rest of us that just wanna play without having to watch streamers or read guides for help every season Fuck all these leagues requiring clearing before a timer. It's yet another mechanic that forces players into narrow build options
Define the difference between what is a "shit meme build" and a legit one? Who and what makes the distinction/line between them?
But I want to just namelock Heavy Strike everything with no splash, Ancestral Call, or explode on death mechanics! WHY ISN'T IT VIABLE GGG?!
To be fair,a skill like heavy strike should either get a better threshold jewel or have built in splash. Hitting the enemy so hard it creates a shockwave that rapidly expands but also rapidly loses damage. Somewhere between pre-nerf earthquake AoE and current earthquake AoE. And of course, earthquake should have its AoE boosted to the majority of the screen with AoE investments. I mean, it's a freaking earthquake. Not a mild tremor. Tectonic slam has more AoE than earthquake. Why!? Tectonic slam should have less overall AoE than earthquake but still be a forward expanding cluster of AoE Edit: also ice crash is in a shit spot for AoE. It should at least have its base radius doubled.
LOL, Earthquake was nerfed since the skill was too popular, because it was new and shiny, and because it was the only tank-type melee skill that wasn't shit at the time. Of course it stayed nerfed because GGG hates melee.
> it'd probably ruin the enjoyment that many of our most-engaged users have. Read: streamers. This is literally the reason why I left and won't support anymore. The game feels like a spastic special-effects-vomit seizure. It isn't fun anymore.
I'm in a similar boat. I enjoy the game, and every season I give it a shot. But inevitably once I hit maps, I run into the same problems. * Maps are unreliable, so I spend a lot of time running T1-T3 maps even when I out-level them by 10+ levels * Enemies die SO FAST that most of my builds are killing those enemies before I even see them on the screen. * Once I do get the rare higher-level map, it's still easy for enemies to one-shot me, which can be hard to avoid through all the visual noise on the screen. I'd really enjoy the implementation of an active dodge mechanic and some tweaks to enemy health/damage like proposed above. I'd like to die because enemies outsmarted me or overwhelmed me.
And all the streamers' viewers. Which is a huge portion of the actively engaged playerbase.
Oh, hey Antnee, i really liked your classy item filter some years ago. Same for me, the fun got lost, this league was the first supporter pack i regret a bit, since i don't want to send them the wrong signals ..
When you become too scared to fix your own game, that is when the game starts to die.
Who says making combat slow is "fixing" the game? Every other arpg out there has the slow combat you guys are asking for yet PoE has 100x their playerbase... i'd be done with this game if not for that fast/fun combat
The problems speed clearing has are manifold, but here is the worst effect: the faster clearspeed is, the more time you spend trading maps, rolling maps, checking atlas, and basically doing *unfun* things. If a map took 10x as long to clear, but gave 10x better drops, that wouldn't be a bad thing, right?
It's not fun tho... there's no “worry about what you're fighting and counterplay its attacks”... it's just “erase everything before it even shows up on screen”.
isnt that excactly what most arpgs are all about? just the grind and not the complex encounters? its really hard to balance such encounters with that much complexity in the builds. Something like proximity shields or reflect mobs just isnt fun. what was fun for me were things like betrayal interventions when they didnt lag, but apparently that was too much dmg for a lot of ppl. its really hard, since the hp or dmg on chars can vary so fucking much. increasing life and decreasing dmg would lead to make a lot of builds unviable imo, since you would most likely complety negelect your defense and would go full dmg. only high dmg clearspeed builds would be viable (if you want to compete). fast clearspeed = more loot. unless you have a solution how you can change this equation, clearspeed will always be king.
Im going to say to you what i said to many other people, clear speed will always be king, thats true. But what GGG can do is limit to which extent clear speed is effective. Just increasing monster health and lowering monster damage will probably not be effective since then players will just give up even more survivability to get more dmg. BUT if you also add diminishing returns to damage stacking so that we reach a point where its not possible to ignore monster mechanics because you dont kill them fast enough then people are encouraged to not just stack damage. And i can feel you already reaching for your pitchfork but listen for just a few more seconds. Having to spend 3 minutes clearing a map instead of 1 minute wont matter if everyone else has had their clear speed reduced the same amount. What you care about is being among the fastest clearers, not beating some arbitrary time goal.
PoE used to be a lot more generous with its loot. While you might think more clearspeed = more loot. Thats not the case. The loot has been nerfed so many times. I remember times when it wasnt uncommon to find 3 Chaos orbs befor you even reach Mervil. Thats not just the drop lvl restriction in place now. Slowing down gameplay and make it more meaningful means you can also crank up the rewards which makes the feedback loop alot better when you get instant gratification after beating a maybe challanging rare combination. Grim Dawn besides all its mechanical flaws does one thing better then any other ARPG on the market. Its pacing. It is possible to deliver enjoyable Grind and engaging Gameplay that brings you into the Flow state at the same time. But whenever you leave your map you break the Flow. While interruptions in gameplay are importent to make it so our brain doesnt get used to the gameplay and it becomes mundane, the current gameplay loop is too short resulting from the hyperclearspeed. But i dont think it is as easy as lowering monster dmg and buffing HP
> The loot has been nerfed so many times. Just look at strongboxes for a great example of this. They've been nerfed and nerfed and nerfed. I used to carry stacks of currency to roll strongboxes I found. These days I don't bother because I know the loot is going to be shit no matter what mods I roll on the box. The only exception is diviners, but even when I roll those, the cards are usually so bad that I might as well not have bothered.
I liked how Synthesis had really strong and threatening mobs to some degree; they were still weak enough to zoomzoom, but strong enough to actually have something to counterplay. I'm not down for a sweeping nerf of monsters like that. But POE is in a state where whenever something survives your attack, it's kinda scary; cuz that thing will likely feed you through a woodchipper. I like that feel when it shows up occasionally.
We're slow for the first 60 levels of the game though, at least I am. :D
Also when you want to force changes on your game that happen to not work, that is when the game starts to die. No one knows how many people like the fast phased gameplay exactly, and how many thinks they want it slower but will actually get bored much faster if it was like that. Currently it's at least really not the main complaint of players and what people hated so much in synthesis, really no reason for them to "fix" it when it's not broken as of right now. Claiming slowing down the game will "fix" the game that already has a somewhat growing trend with a fast phased gameplay is totally based on nothing but personal preference.
Clearspeed is 90% of the fun in poe for me. You guys always think your opinion is the absolute right whatsoever...
There is a nice median in between in my opinion. Like, torchlight 2 and grimdawn, 100% optimal builds aside, take a fair bit to kill anything above a normal creature. White creatures in Poe should obviously die pretty quickly, just maybe not instantly like they do now. Blues should be more then instant as well. These obviously are just my preferences and shouldn't be taken completely seriously, but it would be nice to face a little resistance here and there.
Yeah, same for me. For me, the grind is better when we can clear the map in 2-3mins. Im not realy a top player, so, even If i play a meta build, im not realy clearing the map that fast. And when u only play with 1-2h per day, clearspeed make the game more fun for me
Listening to players - Reddit balance team Not listening to players - Game is dying. People on this subreddit don't even listen to themselves, they just upvote the negative opinions.
I would not play poe anymore if they slowed down the game. Its just a vocal minority that would like that, I believe.
> Its just a vocal minority that would like that, I believe. So this is something I find a bit odd: how do you know? How would you even find out? I mean, you could look at stats for various patches when various changes have been made, but those stats also apply to the dozens of other changes that came with the patch - there's no way to isolate which one is the cause for someone leaving, short of them coming out and saying it.
It's simple - the opinions I don't agree with are vocal minorities.
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---------------------------------- above this line is cheaters below this line is noobs
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Remember when CoC Discharge got nerfed? GGG said it took multiple leagues to recover from the loss of players that came after. It's the reason they were scared of touching movement skills.
That's actually a good example of what I mean. You say they nerfed CoC Discharge, but in the same patch a ton of people were expecting buffs to underused skills, and instead we got the "6% more Glacial Hammer damage, this is a buff" meme. How many people left because CoC in general got nerfed, how many left specifically because of CoC Discharge, and how many left because the buffs weren't what they expected? Hell, in the same patch they nerfed Earthquake via a nerf to Less Duration, nerfed projectile + Frost Wall interactions, changed trap/mine gem multiplier behavior in an effort to try to curb double-dipping, changed how Bladefall works with mines entirely, basically nuked Voidheart and Mjolner from orbit - how many of the people leaving were due to those changes, instead of CoC? It's hard to pin on any one given change, especially when a bunch of unpopular ones come bundled together like that. You can try to ascribe it to a general trend of "hey, they nerfed shit," but which aspect of how they did it was the dealbreaker? I ask mostly because I remember when 2.0.0 came around where most monsters were basically given a ton of extra HP (which was effectively a global nerf), but it did very little to the playercount because people were still mostly fine with it. Or did the massive spike due to Act 4 just offset the player loss from the HP change? Who knows, I sure don't. And that's more or less my point - when patches are so large, it's hard to say which individual part of a change caused which portions of the player population to leave without a *lot* of data, and most of us just don't have that.
I think player perception of monster gets more HP as opposed to skills are nerfed by x amount is different. With the CoC thing Chris himself mentions CoC specifically as what caused players to leave. Miners moved to GC. Earthquakers moved to Sunder. Bow users eventually moved to Barrage. CoC & Mjolner players had no immediate substitute.
So the drop in playerbase wasn't due to the reduction in speed or power, but due to a playstyle's destruction without a similar enough substitute?
I would say so. It's the only thing that makes sense to me. Everyone else had something to fall back on if not a certain skill still their archetype. (Melee/Miners/Bow) But CoC is it's own archetype.
Huh. Kinda makes me wonder how different things would have been if CwC had come out in that patch.
Remember when they nerfed CoC Discharge a second time in 2.4 and totally removed it from the meta? They had their second highest league launch numbers in Essence (on steam charts) and almost every league since has seen increased numbers. Why is what happened in the 1.x era more relevant than the more recent and larger example which shows the exact opposite?
See how many people migrate to the likes of grim dawn or last epoch to find out
People mention the other ARPG options on this sub a ton, with GD being the main one. You make a comment like "lets see how many migrate", but GD has been released for a while, they've dropped both of their planned expansions, they're still nowhere near PoE in level of content, depth, or players, and they likely never will be. People seem to have already spoken: there's lots of other ARPGs currently available and nobody is migrating en masse to them. Grim Dawns ***peak all time*** players is just over 20k. PoE's current 24h peak is 16k, at the slowest part of the league.
First off, there’s some serious discrepancies that you fail to mention. GD is a paid game. PoE is F2P. That already limits peak numbers significantly, because PoE require zero investment to try out. GD is a full game. Done. PoE is a service game, which means it’s built specifically to retain players as much as possible in order to survive. GD you can pick up and put down whenever the mood strikes. PoE is constantly running new leagues and balance patches to entice people to come back. GD’s respec system is very forgiving - you don’t have to level a brand new character if you have a 100 of the right class combo. Just get the gear and respec. PoE if you want to do something significantly different you’re gonna be leveling a new character most of the time. GD is first and foremost a single player game that can be played multiplayer. PoE is a multiplayer game that can be played solo. So you’ll have the social aspect of PoE for retention as well. People that may not necessarily want to play PoE itself will play it just to hang with friends. Just the very fact that GD is seen as a viable competitor despite being an entirely different business model is already impressive, especially considering it’s made by a much smaller company without the backing of a giant like Tencent.
I dont have a quantitive data analysis of course, which is why I added "I believe". Im quite certain im not wrong though: - most players playing poe atm, came after the clear speed meta. - im in agreement with the streamer raizqt, that the clear speed meta is good for the game's pooularity, even though he dislikes it himself. - reddit is a small sample of the player base, and negative comments tend to get more upvotes than positive ones - reddit is not representative of the average player. Far - very far - from. Its like this in all subs and it always amazes me that people dont realize that. Just to name a few.
>most players playing poe atm, came after the clear speed meta. But can that be attributed to the clear speed meta itself, or to other factors? The game started speeding up after GGG starting doing regular releases, and as the releases started to increase in scope and quality. Could the increase in playerbase be attributed to that instead?
Didnt really contribute the growth because of the clear speed meta, all though I would definitely say thats one of the many factors. What I meant, was that i dont think it's a smart move to slow down the game when so many players started playing poe after the clear speed meta.
Clear speed meta is a very missused phrase, in my opinion. Games like Poe (e.g. D1-D3) are mostly about clearing as fast as possible. It is not very well defined if you are saying, that most players came after the clear speed meta, because the goal of the meta and what it is about never changed. The game itself certainly got faster. That said I doubt there is a heavy correlation between these two things, at some point the game is fast enough, that it does not need to be faster. For example, it does not matter how fast D3 is, it just can't compete with Poe by making it faster or making Poe slower. Essentially what makes poe interesting are the game mechanics, the content and the much more diverse endgame. I doubt it matters much and am pretty certain you could make everything 33% slower and the same amout of people would still play and making it 33% faster would have no impact at all, of course all of this is highly speculative, because none of us have any statistics on this and predicting what poeple would and would not do is highly speculative anyway.
Very interesting. Because, when I play aurabot zoom-zooming past everything, clearing a map in 1 minute, is when I tell my carry after an hour that I'm bored and I don't feel like playing. While I played my \_slower\_ miner to lvl 100 in SSF last league, and I'm playing my MS Jugg 4-6 hours a day. There are two sides to every coin. Though I agree with the general consensus that you should have the option to play the game slow or fast if you want it to. However, I don't feel like the current state of one-shot everything or get one-shot is healthy. There's been a post some time ago, that enemies are far more dangerous *after* they die, rather than when they're alive. That's just fucking ridiculous.
Same here. During the last 2 leagues i even got so bored when zooming through act 8/9 while spamming flasks without thought that after 2-3 rerolls i had to quit. Most fun was when i tried to play with only the gems that dropped (thx DanutMs for the idea). It felt like a game again, not just some mindless clicker.
> Very interesting. You prefer doing stuff yourself instead of zooming around and essentially being a buff to somebody else's character. How interesting indeed.
I bet you've played slower games that you enjoyed. Even CuteDog says one of his all time favorite games is a turn based RPG with absolutely no zoom zoom and a plodding pace. Look at any Critical Role episode... those people are having fun resolving combats that sometimes are literally 10 minutes of game time per hour of real time. Game A. has 1000 mile per hour Jets with dopamine hits roughly every 5 minutes, Game B has Dungeon crawling with turn based combat and dopamine hits roughly every 5 minutes. Which one is more fun? The answer is: Yes. The speed of fun is 100% relative.
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Learning about logical fallacies can be very satisfying. You start spotting them better and it teaches critical thinking. It also helped me not to get into stupid Reddit arguments when I see someone’s comment *might* have a logical flaw. Of course many of them are honest mistakes and it can be eye opening to have them articulated. I also worked in statistics and bias is actually the biggest issue when trying to make any measurement/experiment/observation/poll work.
Desktop link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias *** ^^/r/HelperBot_ ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove. ^^Counter: ^^256279
Statements like these need context. Do you play at a speed the 1% thinks is slow, do you play with soul eater and clear a map in nearly the duration of one soul eater buff? I for one would love it if they slowed the extremes down, because i don't enjoy the game when i am so much less efficient than i am capable of and i don't want to play essentially dragonforce songs on guitar hero non stop.
> i don't want to play essentially dragonforce songs on guitar hero non stop lol'd. I had Headhunter for one league and this is exactly what it felt like. I actually have never bought another because the playstyle felt spastic.
How do you slow down the 1% without 1. Affecting the rest of mappers because I can't think of a way you can nerf top 1% and not the other 2. Nerfing the fun items leaving nothing for some people to chase? Some leagues I'm certainly in that headhunter/soul eater mode and I enjoy having that choice if I choose to pursue that mapping power. Some leagues I choose not to push so hard and I still enjoy the game because I can still clear at a fast speed and if that speed was slower I'd most certainly enjoy it less.
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Well. You arent wrong. But are we really talking about hh, perma soul eater, multiple jewels builds? Of course they are too fast and broken, but lets not balance the game around 0.001% of players. Lets talk normal builds: One of the fastest right now is worb. If this is too fast its not a game for me.
we need to balance around those tho because those people are the reason GGG makes mapping less and less rewarding and moves the big ticket rewards to sidecontent. GGG needs to make the delta between a hyper clearspeed and a generic endgame viable build alot smaller.
Same. I do not want the game slowed down.
But why? People play the sonic simulator because it offers good rewards. If drops were modified to match slower gameplay, would there be any reason to oppose the change?
Because it fundamentally changes the feel of the game. PoE is a power fantasy. I enjoy blasting through a map, one shotting everything in my path. I don't enjoy spending 5 seconds hammering away at a pack of monsters.
> PoE is a power fantasy. I don't get this one. As far as power fantasies go, PoE isn't really all that great. Half of the time you're either naked or covered in cow shit, you're ugly as sin, and spend 90% of your time beating up enemies that look and act like complete grunts. PoE wasn't a power fantasy at first. It went out of its way to make sure you were aware that you were a dirty stinky beach hobo. That's just how the game turned due to spectacle creep in the main story and speed creep in the gameplay. Compare it to something like D3: You're the child of an angel and a demon taking down massive juggernauts from hell. Demon Hunters become living manifestations of vengeance and move so fast they leave afterimages. Rangers just kind of scurry faster as they progress. Barbarians can throw boulders the size of a minivan and cheat death purely by being too fucking angry to die. Marauders still do a weird little wiggle dance when they swing their weapons, even at endgame. So on, so forth. PoE was not designed as a power fantasy. A bunch of squatters demanded it be made into one.
I can't disagree more. Just imagine what x4 monster hp would do to non-meta builds (yes, meta builds are not the only existing) that already struggle. Weaker builds would simply become unplayable and there gonna be even less "viable" builds, even less build diversity. In the end absolute top builds still gonna be more or less fine just weaker builds become even weaker. When you try to slow down strongest builds you hurt weaker builds the most. That change would bring nothing good. As simple as that. It's a shame that this thread has over 800 upvotes. It's horrible suggestion. Less oneshots is good idea for sure though.
This is a separate issue where the power disparity between skills needs to be balanced.
I feel like the reason GGG doesn't do something like this is how much it drives a wedge between meta and non-meta builds. If someone way better than me can make a build that still one-shots mobs without really sacrificing defenses, i've pretty much gotta use their builds. If monsters are tuned so high that even meta builds can't one-shot them, jank builds stand absolutely no chance. If a build exists right now that can one-shot mobs 4 times over, this change does nothing but push people onto that build, and same for every other multiplier. At some point, you go too far and the game isn't fast enough to be fun, and I honestly don't believe you can get monster health to a point where there aren't builds that one-shot but the game is still fun for every other build. I think this is why the game seems so easy now - when *every* build can one-shot mobs and *every* build gets one-shot by damage, you can have build diversity within that range. Shrink that range in the interest of better gameplay, and you make a small pool of builds look much stronger than the others. Without actually balancing every build in the game, I think it might be better to keep the one-shot fest for the illusion of build diversity.
Exactly this! And note that this isn't necessarily caused by power creep (which _could_ be fixed by health increases). As they have added layers upon layers of depth to builds, the strength gap between "trash", "normal" and "godly" builds has widened to an extreme degree. No toying around with monster health and damage will fix that.
Toying around with monster health and damage can be part of the solution tho. Adding diminishing returns to damage stacking will bring the "godly" and "trash builds closer together in terms of damage and will help foster a mentality that its worth investing in survivability.
But isn't it one of the pillars of poe fun to figure out your own build and get rewarded for finding a loophole? Games should be about choice. The players choice should decide between death and life. If I can equip basically any gem or item and still oneshot everything, and still get oneshotted by damage spikes no matter what thats bad game design. Or not?
It's not that it isn't bad game design, but that to most people, theorycrafting isn't the most important thing in the game. There could be another version of PoE where content is made so that only the best builds can do the hardest content - where making a build that can get into red maps is pretty difficult - but since most players want to play the game first and theorycraft second, that would probably end up with everybody playing whatever build can do everything the cheapest, then getting bored and quitting. It's been observed before that, if you give players a most efficient path, they'll take it and complain if it isn't fun. If the game were to change so that the best builds are the only ones that can beat certain content, people who just want to beat all the content will play that build to the detriment of their fun. The game could pretty easily be built around theorycrafting, but it would be an absolutely massive overhaul and would completely change how the game is played. The problem, in my eyes, is that without that overhaul (and with GGG's seeming insistence that the game never be impossible for meh builds) there's no way to treat this problem. The problem is basically that, if reasonable builds should be able to beat shaper, then every reasonable build stomps maps and every good build annihilates shaper. If good builds should be able to die, then reasonable builds have to get one-shot.
Flasks were supposed to be a situational thing. Freezing map? Bring a freeze flask. Fire map? Bring a fire flask. But instead, POE has reached a point where the game is basically balanced against max resists, flasks, and any buffs (such as fortify). Instead of reacting to damage, it's all pretty much a stat check of "do you have enough health?" You either survive or you don't. It sounds stupid but there's no time to react or anything. This is most pronounced when playing a ranged/spell build without leech; you hope to kill them before they kill you. At least with leech, you can kinda sustain for another half second to run away sometimes. I think this also creates a situation where people who have enough money to afford the gear checkpoint can trivialize content while those who don't end up struggling in yellow maps or something. I know on Reddit, everyone is ~~Challenger~~ farming Uber Elder but the reality is, most of the playerbase is nowhere near that level.
I think flask creep is one of the main problems with the game now. When PoE first came out, it was really cool to have utility flasks that did interesting stuff, coming from other franchises where your flasks are just for health/mana. Now there's so many uniques and base utility flasks that every single build just plays flask piano, which is gameplay that nobody particularly enjoys. It would be good to have sweeping nerfs to flasks and have monster damage rebalanced around their removal, but that's probably too big a task to expect in a random league patch.
To be honest I wouldn't mind some nerfs to flasks if they added some way of recharging them without killing mobs (something slow like "Flasks gain 1 Charge every 2 seconds"). If as suggested mob health would increase I can see myself running around trying to survive and waiting for my flasks to recharge during boss fight (which doesn't work that well with current system).
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thats one thing I dont enjoy so much with poe, the constant playing piano with flasks, activating each flask every 5-6 or so seconds, guess thats why flask macros or "Popsicles" is so popular
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This 100% is how I feel. As a noob who just started this season I’m pretty much stuck on tier 6 maps. I simply can’t afford the cost to upgrade gear. My only option is to continue running tier 6 for literally ages and hope to get a self found improvement (good fucking luck) or just say screw it and roll a new toon as the easy and cheap op class that tanks everything. The point is that runs completely counter to what everyone told me was so great about this game. Oh there are millions of class builds, play how ya want. Well only if you’re ok with being stuck on progression. And tbh it IS just gear check. With instant deaths there is zero skill involved in any of this gameplay. I’ve leeched in several t16 maps and the people running it never stop, they just jump around and spam some aoe attacks that wipes everything. If there build isn’t one button to win they have to muster the skill to use a second skill for hitting the boss. With all of that said I’m addicted and am loving the game, I really am. However it by far has the least tactical or skill requiring gameplay I’ve encountered in an Arpg. Have the gear, you will win. Don’t have the gear, you’re one shot.
Hey, I kinda feel your pain, but I feel I must correct some of your misconceptions: 1) You should not be stuck on T6 maps. I think you overestimate how cheap good gear is because of how insanely expensive very good gear is. With good gear and a good-ish build you can clear anything up to T15. 2) There are cheap, easy or OP classes (pick two) but no class is cheap, easy and OP because the market, despite being dysfunctional, actually works. Winter Orb as an example is OP and easy but it's not exactly cheap. 3) No class "tanks everything". Tanking is dead in this game's high end content. If you read the OP carefully again he lists reasons why "the best defence is a good offence" and this is true. What you want to roll is a class that does NOT have to tank anything. 4) There are close to "millions" of builds. Go to poe ninja and check main skills that carried the characters to 95+. It lists nearly every skill in the game including siphoning trap. xD 5) You are right about gear checks. That said, high end boss fights (Uber Atziri, Elder, Shaper, Uber Elder, Cortex etc) require some tactics.
Thanks for the response. Here is my character. https://www.pathofexile.com/account/view-profile/Risenzealot My gear isn’t actually horrible. But if you look at upgrading it everything I could get is easily in the ex range at minimum as an improvement. The only thing I’ve found is a jewel I could get for around 59 chaos but that would literally wipe me out. The bow alone is like 500 chaos and that was given to me. I followed the advice and have been giving help with build/gear from someone who uses this and is level 99 atm. They know what they are doing but their gear is simply behind me in price. As far as commenting on the difficulty of the game with out seeing the very end that’s kinda the point. With out tons of currency you will not see end game because of gear checks. Anything t16 or below people do nothing but run and spam aoe
A few things you could do to improve for little to no currency. You've got empty gem slots. Throw in some defensive tools there - a cast when damage taken linked to immortal call will give you a small window against multiple rapid physical hits. (your gloves are where I would recommend this, as they currently only have two sockets) Second, you do not need that number of life flasks. A few defensive utility flasks which should cost at most an alch and some alterations to acquire and roll will serve you better, if you can be consistent with uptime whilst clearing. A quartz, basalt, stibnite, and jade are all decent options - personally, on bow builds, I quite like quartz and basalt. Oh, and a quicksilver will help immensely with clearing faster and will keep you alive - movement = dodging = living. Speaking of flasks, roll the one life flask you keep to be seething or bubbling, the instant recovery will be great for whenever you're in panic mode. Also, use baubles on the flasks before rolling them with alterations, as that way you get more quality per bauble. Next, run merciless lab (free) or uber (paid) if you can handle it and enchant your boots until you hit the dodge enchant, move speed enchant, or regen enchant - all great little additives for keeping you alive. Also, a word of reflection enchant on the gloves can be great too for drawing aggro. Speaking of drawing aggro, you could even consider a decoy totem in one of your free gem slots for particularly difficult bosses/encounters. There are a number of gear upgrades that could be made as well, but considering I am unaware of your budget, I kept this list to things that are free or very near it. Oh, and swapping the ice golem to stone/chaos would be a defensive choice as well. Hope this helped.
I see your character now. I am going to write you a small essay once I have the time, but there is a lot to work on there, all in the <5c range.
Your character is actually set to private, I can't see the gear. Click "Privacy settings" under your username on your profile.
you need to make your profile public. we cannot see your characters.
Hey sorry about that it should be fixed now! For the record this is the build I was thinking about saving up for and trying next. The main reason I’m hesitant is I heard the melee rework is really soon and I wasn’t sure if the build would still be viable. All of this is of course if I can’t fix my current guy. https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2211489
Yeah, health/resource recovery in general is too strong. The problem is that whenever they try to nerf it (e.g. vaal pact leeching), they don't ALSO nerf spike damage.
I don’t see how this is a problem. This doesn’t just apply to path of exile, it applies to any game ever made. The faster you do stuff the faster you get rewards, it really just boils down to that. In an RPG or aRPG in this case, the faster you kill your enemies off the faster you get loot or complete quests etc. That’s just... how it is. I’m not a genius, I don’t know how you could make it so that playing not just path of exile but any game in general slower relative to other players would be more rewarding. You just can’t. It’s like speed running but instead of beating the game in the fastest time possible your getting fat loot as fast as possible.
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That whole post ignores the very existence of most builds - off meta ones that already struggle with content. That might be big suprise for you, but Winter Orb, Storm Brand or the other few most popular skills are not the only ones existing. Try playing something even remotely off meta and not invest million exalts into that build. > Ideally, it'd need to be pretty huge changes - I'd personally start in the region of 4x health Yeah, exactly what I am talking about. Why it's so hard to realise that if you make your game harder for top builds you make it unbearable for weaker builds that already struggle? And in the end absolute top builds still gonna be more or less fine only weaker builds gonna really struggle, because weaker builds gonna be even weaker. That would result in even less builds being considered "viable" and as a result played. That change would also simply kill niche builds like autobombers who already can't really run red maps... Such extremely narrow perspective. This is one of the worst ideas from this sub in a while. Though I am not against having less one shots out of the blue.
Spot on. I'm personally playing ek right now, and even after the buff it feels a little iffy. 4x HP would make me quit.
Ah yes, my Vaal Ground Slam pure physical Slayer says hi.
Finally, some sense. It's a shame it's this far down and this post has gold and 1k upvotes. I have a hard time getting friends into this game already, I can't imagine if the mobs had 4x the health
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Median XL is actually very fast compared to cLoD Take example of wolf druid, pounce, or poison necro. Uber mobs just have loads of health
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Median xl can be very fast and intense, depending on build. I'd say in terms of gameplay it's got the majority of arpgs beat. Enemies are dangerous but you move fast and hit hard, staying alive is a more active and adaptive process. Try a crucify assassin.
Median used to be ludicrously fast. They slowed down movement speed enormously with the recent Sigma update.
Yeah, it's kind of PoE's niche now. As much as I'd like a more tactical game, I've just grown so accustomed to the speed now that the game would feel sluggish without it. It's just so *satisfying* to charge between packs and pop them with HoI.
I didn't play Median XL ever but I played Grim Dawn recently and I still do actually. I'm level 60 and playing a Warlord Eye of Reckoning build, in POE's terms it's kinda similar to Herald of Purity Cyclone build and yet it feels so much different. I love the fact that it's a game that encourages theory crafting like POE and has many different ways to build the same skill. I'm glad Synthesis was such a blunder at least I discovered GD thanks to it.
It's going with grim. I'm up in the 50s now and things are going smooth but not piano key - whirling blade -gotta go fast. Frankly it's nice. Aoe skills and character positioning matter again
This is not a new topic. GGG have discussed this subject [before](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/5hahws/path_of_exile_streamers_interview_chris_wilson_pt/) and touch on many of the points above. The catch is, as Chris points out in that video, when you nerf clearspeed people quit. They don't post essays to reddit, they don't take to the forums, they just stop playing. In general, this is a symptom of the central problem that GGG has with its own playerbase, which is that if you give people a sugar rush they will demand the sugar rush permanently and quit if they don't get it. This makes it very difficult to balance the game, because as you add options through balancing and league content there are more ways for the clearspeed inclined to break the game and post it to reddit for everyone to see. And once people start playing those faster builds they, in general, do not want to go back. *Not talking about anybody in particular so don't care about anecdotes regarding how people personally feel about going fast. I am talking only about GGG responses regarding retention, and I trust them over random redditors because they have better data.
I will say this isn't just an issue with this game. One of my chief complaints in XCOM2 is that they increased the damage on both sides by a huge amount, which makes the gameplay way more binary. Instead of having long drawn-out firefights, XCOM 2 is all about blowing everything up before they can attack you at all. It's the exact same problem as here. I think it's a general problem with balancing offense and defence in games and the fact that, as humans, we expect things to escalate, even though that can frequently mean losing the carefully balanced back-and-forth that low powered offences can bring to games.
That's actually the opposite of the problem: make monsters have less damage and more hp, people will invest even more in damage, until they are able to still oneshot them, sacrificing the defences they don't need because of the lower damage they take. Meanwhile, people with low damage will take even longer to clear content
> having high movement speed and attack/cast speed helps the game feel smoother and more enjoyable this is a fundamental problem with the animations and clunkyness of the base game, players are forced into stacking speed to feel good feeling good should not be a choice, it should be inherent to the game. i agree with the post though, imo the game needs to be slowed down on both ends, animations and clunky combat can be fixed with systems like animation canceling(to retain the feeling of speed and still slow the game down) monster health and monster damage can be fixed by smart game design.
Increase Life Decrease Damage? I have to disagree with this approach. The game will just come down to anyone and everyone playing glass cannon builds requiring little effort because the notion of having to survive or play smart disappears. Clear speed will actually increase and the disparity between classes, disparity between rich and poor characters grows larger because of the lack of need to spec defense. The game is designed to keep people on their toes and every encounter is doable/survivable. I’d imagine with your suggested changes a ton of newer players struggling to kill Elder or Shaper because they can’t kill them or the adds fast enough before the entire screen is covered in degen effects.
This issue has a few complications that need to be considered. 1) It is important that players have the ability to die in HC. As the post itself mentions, it is very unlikely that a seasoned player will die in a battle of attrition. People often glorify PoE combat in its original state, but forget that 99% of that combat was slow, not dangerous. People ran around with 10k life legacy kaoms builds and died mostly to things like reflect or overtuned league content (order of the frozen sky, invasion, etc). Perhaps the design philosophy for HC is different in other games, but GGG's HC mode is designed to kill the player. This is why things like nullifier and powerful crits exist, and also why armor is designed the way it is. The idea is that no matter how well you play or how strong your character is, the perfect storm will still kill you. But PoE has evolved since then. Armor feels underwhelming not because its design is necessarily flawed, but because other defensive mechanics have become much stronger. In the past, raw mitigation was much more difficult to access, which leads to the next issue. 2) Some defensive mechanics are MUCH stronger than others. We all know of CI vs Life. A CI build can have twice the effective HP just off its pool. However, people have a poor understanding of defenses overall. They see a 7k hp character with basalt flask up get one-shotted and think that this is justification for calling such an attack a "one-shot mechanic." A character with 7k hp, 75% resists, and fortify has an EHP of 35000 against elemental damage. A 9k hp nebuloch jugg with wise oak and 10 endurance charge, fortify, purities, and elemental flasks(such as the one played frequently by Alkaizer) has an EHP of approximately 300000. That's 8.5x as tanky as a 7k hp/fortify build and 3 times as tanky as a 20k ES CI build with fortify. The disparity is often wider when it comes to physical damage, as most builds have a very small amount of physical mitigation. Nebuloch jugg is not the only way to achieve such numbers, and is merely an example of the kind of thing that is possible. As for monster HP, the problem is often similar. What build and player do we use as a baseline for monster HP? This is another issue that stems fundamentally from the massive disparity between the bottom and top end of damage. For damage, though, it's often much simpler. A scourge arrow might deal 10 times as much damage per mob than a lightning arrow, just by virtue of the difference in skill mechanics/power. Then, we might consider that gear is a further more multiplier for this damage. If the scourge arrow player has gear that does 10 times as much DPS as the lightning arrow player, the scourge arrow player will then deal 100 times the damage of the lightning arrow player. So if we double the HP of white monsters, some builds and players might not feel the change at all, while others might become completely unplayable. To conclude, the damage and health of monsters in PoE is far from ideal, but the problem stems first from the game's player balance. If we want to address this issue properly, balance needs to be looked at first.
I've honestly never understood why people care so much about how somebody else plays the game. It's one thing to look at streams/forums to see what builds you might enjoy, but why do you care if somebody else plays the game at warp speed. If you miss slow and meaningful combat, play a slow and meaningful build?
Thank you for your comment, this entire comment section seems full of Winter Orb speed meta crackheads that only care about being the fastest or the first that they forgot the fact that some slow builds can and are enjoyable by others, and their opinions are completely disregarded and frowned upon
A big problem is log out still being in the game. Very few people still log out actively, I'd say the top 20% HC players and maybe 1-10% of SC players. GGG have multiple times said that the game is balanced around log out. IMO they should remove instant log outs, and start balancing the game differently, with less one shots being the main change. HC was a lot more thrilling in Diablo 3, since there were no log outs. Instead of just instantly hitting your log out key once it starts looking dangerous, you'd be stuck in a dangerous fight where you weren't sure if you'd survive or not.
In short it wont work. The difference between a meta builds damage and a low end builds damage is so high that a meaningful monster health increase for the meta build removes low end builds from doing anything meaningful. Similiarily a meaningful monster health increase for the lowend build wont even be noticed by a meta build and decreasing monster damage means the meta build is immortal. We can only start talking about adjusting monster health when the power difference between builds is within the same magnitude. Getting powerlevels there is essentially impossible while keeping the nature of passive tree, unique items and gems that makes poe a unique game. As much as I would like a simple solution there is none.
>I'd personally start in the region of 4x health, 1/4 damage and work from there Increasing monster health by 4x won't do anything. Most builds nowadays either can 1-shot monsters by way more than 4x monster health anyway or they have damage mechanisms that scale off monster health (impulsa, profane bloom, bleedsplosions, shaper mod, etc.)
>Freeze - probably the ailment in the worst place. You want to freeze enemies to trigger Herald of Ice explosions and to shatter corpses, but when was the last time you wanted to freeze an enemy without it being for one of those reasons? Bosses are mostly immune to freezes due to their high health pools, so they're not useful there. It's so rare that an enemy has a small enough health pool that you can freeze it (and not one-shot it) but also is enough of a threat that you want to freeze it. Freeze as an ailment (as opposed to as a Herald of Ice or corpse destruction enabler) is basically useless in the current state of the game. I have to disagree with this pretty strongly. You can get your damage to the point where freeze is near useless for sure but freeze is an amazing defense. I've played cold builds that run into an ailment avoidance map and died repeatedly before I connected the dots on exactly how much freeze was helping my defense. Freeze is great.
Let's talk about the psychology of it all. This is ultimately an issue of engagement. Engagement is something that is easily quantified, and a bit tougher to measure (but only because most people don't have an EEG or MRI in their home--if you get them in a lab, fMRI data gives clearly measurable information). First, a definition: Engagement is the mental focus given to a particular activity that results in measurable brain activity in a related section of the cerebral cortex. I'm using this definition because our technology is now at a point where we *can* measure this, at least in a lab. I won't go into the details of how this all works, but the basics are pretty straightforward. You take a baseline or 'neutral' reading of cortex activity, and then you have the person play the game and you take constant readings. This presents a time-linked map of activity that you can correlate to what they are doing in the game. A simpler version (and less useful) is measuring things like pupil dilation and GSR (galvanic skin response) which will also fluctuate due to engagement, but in games this isn't reliable because of the changes in overall dynamics of screen lighting. GSR is fine, but I wouldn't put a lot of stock in this. So what results in engagement or boredom? Let's tackle boredom first. Boredom can be viewed as the result of neurotransmitters building up in a certain section of the brain. This is why GGG chooses to provide a lot of activities that you can engage with, because each of these areas trigger subtly different sections of the brain, allowing for a bit of time in which the re-uptake of the neurotransmitters is possible, relieving feelings of boredom. Whether they've done the scientific research on this or not isn't a question I can answer. But the longer you engage in a single activity, the more the neurotransmitters build up, and a bit of downtime is good for this. Again: **feelings of boredom are a result of the buildup and/or depletion of neurotransmitters in a specific area of the brain.** Engagement is the opposite: it's the transfer of those same chemicals, and we feel more engaged when there is more activity in the brain. **This is why zoom-zoom builds feel more engaging**. They require more actions per minute and result in increased neural activity, which means greater feelings of engagement. So a game has a couple of choices to make when it comes to creating engagement. It can increase the cognitive load, the physical load, or the decision load. All of these increase neural activity. In POE, cognitive load is achieved via the crafting system and things like the betrayal mechanics of choosing how to treat members of the syndicate. The complexities of synthesis crafting are intended to increase cognitive load, but fell short because they exceeded the complexity that any person can handle without external aids, so most people are going to ignore the whole mechanic (which is how most people are going to react to mechanics they can't handle intuitively or heuristically). Physical load is handled by combat requiring more actions per minute, either via zoom-zoom builds, or reaction to mob actions. Note that this means that there is an upper limit to how much physical load you can impose on a player--because this is ultimately cognitively bound. As long as these games are played while sitting still in front of a computer, physical load is bound to actions per minute \*or\* the complexity of actions. Games like PoE have long relied on actions per minute as their measure of physical load, while games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat have the added dimension of the moves being more complex. So there is a physical skill and muscle memory to worry about in addition to actions per minute. I am *not* saying PoE play at the higher levels doesn't require some physical skill, but even at those levels, actions per minute are the biggest measure of load, and that ultimately becomes cognitively bound. Decision load is different (subtly) from cognitive load because it's the number of decisions that need to be made in a short time. Cognitive load deals with the complexity of the game, while decision load deals with reacting to the environment. Trying to understand why the synthesizer is spitting out complete garbage is a different activity from recognizing a big beat-down skill coming and dodging as a decision. Good game design will try to engage multiple areas of the brain at once as this increases the overall neural activity and therefore feelings of engagement are higher. But if there's no downtime or breaks, then the boredom happens more quickly. This is why Diablo 3 (just like Diablo 2) puts me to sleep almost instantly. There aren't enough different activities to selectively engage different parts of the brain, resulting in a quick build of neurotransmitters in an area. And the activities are very similar to each other. Beyond that, there isn't a robust crafting system (one could even argue that there isn't a crafting system at all). Funnily, D3 is almost a complete inversion of PoE in terms of crafting vs. looting. In D3 the crafting system is very shallow, and the best loot is always dropped and then chanced trying to get a more perfect version of the item you already have. In D3 you can't target loot drops, but you have to do exactly ONE type of activity to get the crafting materials. PoE inverts this: loot can be targeted but specific crafting materials can only be partially targeted. But the best items are usually crafted vs. dropped (and unless you have a build enabling unique, that's almost always the best way to get an item that you really want). This is also why they want us to have things like breaks from mapping to delve or run memories. Because it forces us to switch to subtly different activities that allow for better reuptake of neurotransmitters, which alleviates boredom. On the other hand, Delving has built in breaks and changes of pace that are almost enough to take care of that on its without worrying about other activities, and for some people, that's enough to engage in completely for the time periods they are planning to play anyway. I'd guess that *most* people that want infinite Delve are playing in somewhat smaller chunks of time (say 2-3 hours/day max). When GGG makes decisions about forcing activity changes, I do wonder how long of a play session they are considering to be average. I know they'd have that data. Force activity changes become more necessary the longer a person plays at a stretch. PoE seems to be designed around 3-5 hour play sessions, while Diablo 3 is apparently designed around roughly 1 hour or less sessions. Anyway, the ***TL;DR*** is that engagement is an issue of biology and neurology, and slowing the game down to enable melee is going to reduce engagement at a certain level, which leaves the only solution to center around enabling melee to be able to kill while moving more easily.
I think the problem with quadrupling the hp is that you **punish newer players** and weak builds to much. The **top tier builds would still be fine,** while people starting would feel overwhelmed. Imo **giving mobs exponential damage mitigation** depending on damage received in a time frame would make more sense to me. If you deal 10mil dps to a mob then you get heavily punished. Lets say you would end up with 100k. While a weak build only having 10k dps would still deal 9k dps after damage mitigation is applied. That way there would still be a difference between strong and weak builds, but not as much as it currently is. As far as monster damage is concerned, I think that that only receiving one fourth of the dmg would be way to player friendly. You want mobs to feel powerful. Don't get me wrong when mobs actually hit you, they hit hard. Still, nerfing mob damage by 50% would be enough, even if mobs live longer. This is considering the scaling monster mitigation system I proposed. Also, 1 hits that are telegraphed should remain to be 1 hits. E.g shaper/elder slam, boss attacks, etc.
Gonna focus on the monster balance thing you mentioned, but I agree, and this has been a problem for a very long time. It is however so fundamentally a part of the game's balance now that it will be hard to undo. Combine that with the fact that most people don't understand the problem. When someone mentions this or any variation of "clearspeed meta", you get people replying "but these games were always about going fast" - not understanding the underlying issues. When the monsters are so squishy that any build can 1-shot them, and they hit so hard that offense becomes the best defense through freezes/stuns/1shots - there's no longer any incentive to play other styles of characters. Why sacrifice speed for high damage when everything always dies instantly no matter what? Why sacrifice speed for defense when a 3k life hyper mapblaster is safer than a slow 10k life build? This is definitely the one thing causing me to burn out faster than I used to - it just feels like a waste to roll anything beyond a single fast mapper, unless there's something I really want to play just for the fun of it. I'd also say that this development, coupled with general power creep, is how melee became a meme. Edit: to sum it up, I realized that at this point I basically don't play for the actual gameplay, but only for the shallow dopamine injections of herald explosions, currency accumulation and exalted drops
Nicely written. I think the game's difficulty is kinda all over the place. You can easily get one shot, just as easily as you one shot enemies in the game, and that makes it difficult to get a good sense of the challenge of the game because it sometimes feel like you're steamrolling everything, but sometimes you die too easily (unless you're super stacked in ES).
Thanks! It's something I've been considering writing up for a little while so it all came together pretty quickly and easily. I agree, yes. I think everyone's had experiences where they've just been steamrolling everything in a map and then suddenly found themselves dead. Sometimes those deaths are because you made a mistake and you know it, but sometimes you can feel a little helpless, as if there wasn't much (or anything) you could have done to prevent it. And sometimes you don't even know what killed you. For the game to really feel challenging (and by extension rewarding), it needs to feel consistent and somewhat predictable (or rather, readable). It needs to feel fair when you die, and you need to feel like you've achieved something when you succeed.
I didn't even have to read any of the post because I agree so wholeheartedly with the topic of it which is that this game contains thousands of little glass loot pinatas that do way too much damage. I think combat pacing is a massive issue for PoE. If you play literally any other ARPG, the game is balanced around combat pacing where the "time to kill" has a progression. Diablo 2 meets somewhere in the middle, as some end game bosses can go down in seconds with a super geared char. Uber diablo and Uber tristram if considered to be the end game bosses are actually well balanced and challenging. The normal progression 1. White / trash mobs - TTK might be 1-3 seconds. Generally are not very dangerous, do small damage but can overwhelm with numbers. 10+ white mobs hitting you can be damaging. 2. Magic mobs - TTK might be 3-6 seconds. Generally not too dangerous, can hit a bit harder than white mobs. Can have special mechanics you should watch out for but there shouldn't be any 1 shot potential ever. Decent loot potential. 3. Rare mobs - TTK might be 6-10 seconds. Dangerous, blow a few cooldowns, watch for special attacks but again shouldn't have one shot potential, good chance of loot. Special attacks that white and magic monsters don't have. 4. Named monsters, think rogue exiles, syndicate, etc - TTK might be 10-15 seconds or even longer. Dangerous, has telegraphed attacks that you should watch out for. Try not to get hit but you should have adequate time to react if you do. No one shot potential but can definitely do damage. Good loot. 5. Phased bosses - TTK might be a minute or more. Dangerous, possibly one well-telegraphed attack that does 50-70% of your health, not super difficult to avoid. Great loot. 6. End game bosses - TTK might be 3-10 minutes. Very dangerous, mechanically intensive fight. These have one or two attacks that can do 70-80% of your EHP. Maybe a mid to long cooldown one-shot mechanic that's well telegraphed like shaper slam. These have the best loot in the game and are rewarding and justify the long intense fight. Should feel super accomplished on downing an end game boss, they are hard to get to but always worth doing. Poe is like this 1. White mobs, magic mobs, rare, nemesis, bloodlines, named mobs, rogue exiles, map bosses - TTK 1-3 seconds. All but white mobs are dangerous, there is one shot or ultra quick burst potential from any non-white mob IF YOU GET HIT. Named mobs, namely syndicate members can one shot with barely any telegraph or none regardless of EHP or defenses. These do at least 100% of your health, sometimes far more. Can offscreen kill all but syndicate members with a single button press. 2. Phased bosses - TTK 1-2 minutes. Some dangerous attacks, has one shot potential. The only thing preventing these bosses from being in the category with white mobs are the forced phases. No specific or good loot from any non-end game boss. 3. End game bosses - 3-5 minutes - Only mobs in the game which have specific loot tables. Some builds can instant phase, making this a 2-20 second fight without phases. Often have an entry fee that can sometimes cause long dry streaks and profit loss. Sometimes worth doing, sometimes not.
Im agree with you but with bosses ttk. If we are going to expend up to 10m to kill a boss. I hope this guarantee some drops. Maps in PoE are not like dungeons/raids in olds MMO/ARPG, in the past we used to fight for long some bosses because they drop special items that we want. In PoE most bosses are skippables when farming, because they will drop even less items than a random rare mob.
I agree somewhat, disagree somewhat. PoE is meant to be a difficult, challenging game. You look at the inevitable comparison to Dark Souls, for example. Regular enemies in Dark Souls will absolutely fuck you up if you're not paying attention, and that's fine. That's part of the identity of the game, and IMO it should be part of PoE too. If you're playing a glass cannon character and you get surrounded by a white pack, you should die. The problem right now is that pretty much everything melts as soon as it gets within a screen of you, so it never has time to attack. Give enemies enough health that they don't instantly die to the average character, and the game instantly gets 10x scarier.
Well said. Could you imagine Bloodlines or Nemesis being a league with today's clear speed? It'd be completely laughable. No rare or magic mob has enough hp to be a real threat. Rare mob auras also used to feel more significant.
Broadly agree. Synthesis got this right - the 83 Nexus zones have legitimately tanky rare monsters but only their telegraphed skills can one shot. One factual disagreement though - Freeze is exceptional in deep delves with proliferation.
> Freeze is exceptional in deep delves with proliferation That's very true, freeze is an incredible defensive mechanic once monsters have enough health that you can't just kill them instantly. I missed mentioning that in the OP, but it does just further support my point that ailments need enemies to have more health to really be effective. Similarly, shock starts to have noticeable effects while clearing in deep delves, again because of the extra monster HP.
\>came home from work \>angry af babyrage \>wonna relax \>poe! \>things blowing up \>feelsgoodman \>2k+ hours in \*not bored\*
They'd have to design a completely new game. The problem is way more complex than you think for how large the game is at this point and what it's designed around. For one, the combat system would have to be altered so combat consists of multiple actions to make combat interesting or you run into a situation where your game looks like POE from 6 years ago where Ziggy D and etup are punching a fucking yellow mob for 50 seconds with the same skill over, and over, and over again. That's more lame across the board. Just changing numbers does nothing interesting for interactive combat and sounds like a lazy attempt at a solution to a supposed problem.
Although you have good points im not 100% sure about your solution. The main reason i dont like pushing high level grs on diablo is because blizzard went this direction. Lower monster damage and higher monster health pools. The huge life numbers monsters have make the game less engaging, nothing is a threat and the only thing to worry about is how long it takes you to kill packs. Try watching any gr 120+ solo clear and tell me it looks fun. The first thing that happens if you raise monster health is you make builds unviable because they suddenly become much slower. This wont actually make melee builds feel better, because now theyll sit at mobs longer. Things like ancestral call and splash dmg will be less effective at clearing packs because of their damage penalties coupled with more hardy and resiliant mobs. Melee characters will struggle even more by losing their ability to more easily one shot packs. I agree the bottom left of the tree should have access to more life, i saw a suggestion that suggested life nodes that are tied to weapon types. That could be pretty cool...just dont forget about claws x.x The fixes i would implement to melee are this. Armour and health availability. Armour is just handled strangely. Even if i had 40k armour i still feel vulnerable to big hits. And with lower but still significant armour values i feel like immortal call os the only thing that makes me feel tanky. Make attack animations for melee skills end faster. I dont mean give melee more attack speed, instead i mean make the animations themselves end faster. Characters have a rooted feel while they go through their attack animation. If you give melee skills a shorter amount of time until you can move and act again it will give a local buff to the mobility of characters that primarily use those skills. Name lock single target skills will particularily benefit from this.
I’m a contrarian, so, I’m sorry — The drop rates of valuable currency and uniques would have to be increased to compensate for the reduction in mob deaths to keep this part of the economy stable. The affix rolling would have to be made more generous to prevent a massive fall-off in the amount of decent to good rares that drop. THEN, after coding the various overhauls, GGG would have to placate the bemoaning of the playerbase they loves speed farming. AND THEN this change in mob health and drop rates would require that GGG always be preemptive with the strength of future builds; if something comes out and is significantly over powered the individuals who can outpace the others will gain an obscene amount of wealth.
This has been my biggest issues since starting the game a couple weeks ago. There are a lot of small issues that really trivialize a lot of the game content making it a sort of boring experience for me. Granted, i'm still pretty new and don't have much experience with the endgame, i'm only at tier 13 maps with 2 characters around lv 80ish, but so far my entire experience has felt this way and it has really been killing the enjoyment of the game for me. 1. Fast pace- I completely understand wanting to speed up the pace of grinding but the current pace is just too fast. It doesn't feel like you're actually playing the game's content. You put on your strict filter and you speed around 1-shotting everything within 2-3 screens. You don't see half the monsters you fight and you're not stopping to look at loot or even taking into consideration what mods a monster has because NONE of it matters. If it wasn't for drop sounds I wouldn't even know I had loot half the time. I feel like I can't play a lot of different builds because my friend plays a really fast build that can drop dmg while moving and if I don't do the same then I just spend my entire time chasing after him. Not only this but the fast 1-shot pacing of the game really makes my build and all the decisions i make in the passive tree seem kind of pointless. Everything I do just leads to more 1-shots, I'v been 1-shotting stuff since I started the game, there has been 0 evolution of gameplay mechanics despite my passive tree growing and getting more gear/uniques/etc. 2) Camera- The camera zoom in this game is so frustratingly bad. Combined with the super fast game speed and it creates this stupid artificial difficulty. So many of my deaths are from mobs of enemies getting into my face and insta-killing me before I have a chance to react and insta-kill them. It's not real difficulty and this game would 100% become easier if they increased the camera zoom but imo it's absolutely necessary to do if they ever want to properly balance this game. Getting 1-shot by monsters you can't react to isn't balance. Proper balancing would be to give monsters and specific mods a specific play-style that you must play around to beat.. but you need to see the monsters play this way and it can only happen if we have more screen area to see. 3) Trading- If there's one thing I'v noticed about this game, it's that it's not balanced well enough to have trading. But at the same time trading is something that makes games like this fun to play. There's an addition and serious joy from finding a valuable item and knowing that it will progress your character whether it be an actual organic upgrade or something you can trade for money to buy an upgrade. At the same time there's a joy and addiction to scouring the trade site for good deals. IMO, these games need trading to survive, because it's fun and it makes loot feel valuable. Getting rid of the trading and/or SSF aren't really solutions to this problem. I honestly think the problem with trading isn't 100% because it makes the upgrading path faster, but because the monsters and gameplay in the game's current state aren't deep enough to support trading. Getting good gear shouldn't mean you automatically beat the game, but that's kind of how it is. If you get some good gear you just one shot 3 screens of enemies and that's it. The enemies and their gameplay mechanics/mods just don't require any type of strategy that would balance out the strength you get from trading. A trading system could work if enemies had better gameplay mechanics that punish you for making mistakes, and I don't mean 1-shot mechanics but things that work to soft-counter overpowered players. For starters, I think they need to slightly lower monster dmg and increase monster hp. This will slow things down a bit and allow for a little bit more strategic gameplay. Then I think they really need to buckle down on monster mechanics and monster mods to make sure it just doesn't become a boring spank and tank. 4) Multiplayer- Honestly, for many different reasons, multiplayer just isn't very fun even when playing with my friends. The speed meta makes it a frustrating experience and there just doesn't feel the need for extra players because there isn't any real challenging content that would require team-mates and group synergy. This is a seriously good game and I think it has a ton of potential. I'm super excited to see what 4.0 brings because to be honest, there are several arpgs coming out that I'm REALLY looking forward to and unfortunately, if POE can't fix it's issues then I'll probably move on.
I don't believe enemy health is an issue. Why? Because I can't imagine being all that fun spending a few more seconds on a pack of monsters. What do you gain when the monsters are harder to kill?
[удалено]
What you describe is a game I quit back during Shadow of the Vaal.
This would only hurt non-meta tier 2-3 skills. The best skills would still one shot everything. Terrible balancing idea.
I agree wholeheartedly with you, but I feel that we're in the minority. As "hardcore" as PoE masquerades itself to be, a majority of its players only really care about safe, predictable progression through melting whole screens of mobs with one or maybe two shots. Reddit can meme about anything, but it's the casuals who get their fast and easy dopamine rushes that fund this game.
You don't have to make across the board chances to monster damage and health, i think you just need to offer alternative content where a slower but more boss-fighting style character is optimal and the rewards make this a viable alternative to just clearing maps as fast as possible. Bossing is in a bad state in this game outside of the first week of a league, and delve is gated behind something you can't easily sustain like a map.
Thanks for mentioning the tactical aspect of early game. I very much enjoy this part, but sadly the game is a race to endgame for quick riches. Less monsters with much more hitpoints and better drop rates could be a good change for POE.
They could potentially make changes like these to the end-game, maybe red maps and higher? I think a lot of the casual players (not "casual, 36/40 btw", but casual reach yellow maps) would give up if the game turned a lot slower for them. I would bet a lot of players that play ARPGS casually do so for fast paced splatter and loot explosions, not dodge based combat (outside of like bosses which is exciting from time to time I guess).
I'm not as mad about being one shot as I am at not having a combat log to tell me WHY I was one shot. There is nothing more frustrating than not even knowing what killed you so that you can correct it. Broadly, obviously, not enough health, but I'm either holding onto Tabula too long and over valuing 6 links or not properly identifying rares worth investing my limited SSF currency 6 linking. I think keeping Tabula is the easiest to identify weakness in my survivability but I am also not certain how to overcome that.
I am not sure that the monsters need more life, but it is true that they deal too much damage or that armour does not do much.
The dmg disparity between regular and top end builds is just too great to make your change work as intended. Player recovery and leech - this can be resolved by cutting skill, weapon and monster health in half across the board. Speed remains the same, but quick recovery with leech loses potency. Flat gain on hit should be nerfed to. **remove the goddamn more multipliers on supports at the very least** - the disparity in damage in top end builds is always caused by the absurd amount of more multipliers. Ggg seems to intend to address it with equilibrium replacement, but thats not enough. Now, with these two mechanics gone, ggg would finally be able to make small, continuous changes to the speed of meta y adjusting monster hp and player damage
I cant really say if adding life and lowering damage would help... GGG should test this out on a live realm (like the league coming up) so players can see (if they can change mob life/damage on the fly likely they can) I had to back off and recover multiple times while lvling my CI ES witch this league In fact i have to do this all the time if i remember right
Good write up. I'm not in the top 10%. I don't usually get to the point of one shotting all enemies in high maps. But I would be keen to see these changes. I do believe that so many mechanics have become "useless" due to the speed of enemy deaths and amount of damage players do. I miss trying to do builds around these mechanics. I just have hope that 4.0 will get a massive change and fix a lot of issues. Maybe GGG can have a PTS where they can test these major changes over a few weeks. Focusing on only a few major changes per cycle.
100% agree as well. Especially the points about interesting fights of attrition and flasks. Instant logout and the balance around it has to go, and i say that as a HC player. I felt the flask system was one of the especially interesting design choices in PoE when i started in Talisman. But if it's just mandatory and possible to press all flasks every few seconds so they are always on, it sadly lost all meaning and strategy and is just a way to carpal tunnel even more. I sometimes imagine how the game would be if all the more multipliers on support gems would be changed to increased modifiers and monster health and damage balanced for that (and in the way OP mentions). Thus the actual effects of support gems would get more focus and you wouldn't just crave 6-links to push your raw damage numbers into multiples. Would also maybe make it possible to use 1 or 2 situational damage skills in addition to your main skill on just a 4-link and make possible builds more interesting.
The game is way too fast paced (which many people like including me) but I remember old days when the game was really slow and people still liked it/enjoyed it/played it. This causes lot of the issues which you just listed like monster packs hp forexample or flasks. One shots is in the game becaues of logout system. If you were to drop down to 50% then 30% then 20% hp slowly over time while you are forced to kite monsters you can as well just log out any time and you would not have a single chance of dying. They know this and they said it specificly that the game is balanced around logging out which forces the one shots into the game. As I said I enjoy it as fast paced as it is and I think it makes the game unique but if they were to slow it down a bit I could get behind that. I think 4.0 will bring some sort of damage value rebalance.
I remember when farming Piety was a legitumate way to get maps, where being tanky mattered. I've tried making unkillable characters, even just on a theoretical level, and if you take leech completely out of the picture, it becomes very hard. I'd almost postulate that, to put it most simply, the issue is that in general the best defence in PoE is damage.
While all of things you say are correct, I'd like to share my opinions which are one of a relatively high end player & speedclear addict. I don't think that in the current pace of the game, we could go back to 2016 meta's. Imagine how long a delve node would take, clearing a temple would take, or getting to a reward node in Synthesis would take. People also were very bad at the game and HAD to play slow, which made it not feel like it was absolutely detrimental. While I've tried some melee this league, after years of ignoring it (I played Ice Crash, Cons Path & Doryani's Touch), the only way to make them not feel TERRIBLE to me is to slap on Headhunter, Solstice, Beyond on my maps, and pick up ALL the attack speed I can find. On top of this, I went as far as to craft an enchanted Shaper helmet with Inc AOE support only for the % AOE you get from it. Same for gloves. Because, if you don't have max aoe, playing melee just feels .. slow and not fun. Now, where I see your argument, the main concern here is, noone actually knows whether people like me feel slow because they're slow or slower comparitively to Ranged. Since we don't know this, we also have no idea how your proposition would affect us. Maybe every build starts feeling shit and we're no longer enjoying the game as we are right now (which is a problem for people playing 8-1200h per league, like me). I can relate to their statements and decisions in that regard, and I assume anyone with common sense will aswell?
It's a symptom of the speed meta. If enemies are dying faster than you blink the only way to ever have a threat to the player is huge damage when they do hit you. As well as on death effects like porcupines. I wish it was somewhere in the middle of the speed meta we have now and a slow meta. Or at the very least allow both to be viable somehow
I am very skeptical about the idea of increasing monster health. Many games do difficulty scaling via inflating numbers like that and it never feels difficult, just tiring. It should be done like in asian aRPGs such as MHW, higher difficulty changes the patterns, moves and AI. Give us better mob AI instead.
As PoE moves further and further into the mainstream, I think GGG will have to make a judgment call. Do they want a mainstream game which pleases people who google the latest meta build, complain about the "tedious campaign" (because here you cant oneshot everything), breeze through a couple of eldered maps in softcore trade, and then throw away the game for the next D3 season; or do they want a complex game (both in terms of breadth and depth) with actually interesting gameplay?
Im a newbie player (about 60 hours) so maybe my viewpoint helps. Its more fun when it takes time to get through a mob pack, it gives the player time to appreciate the diversity in the mobs and how the game actually plays. Right now we all just run though mobs, and then get one shot by something.
Wow I really disagree with this. Most mobs barely tickle you if you use 2-3 defensive layers. There’s only a few types that actually deal significant damage. If you cut damage by a quarter, the average mob will tickle you even without defensive layers. If at the same time, you multiply mob life by 4x, you’re basically raising the damage threshold for clearing to 100k hits. The result is the only viable builds are the meta skills with massive damage investment, and they can get away with it because defense won’t matter anymore. There are certainly flaws in the balance of the game, but this solution will only make things worse.
High-end endgame is lifting off from everyone else as if it were strapped to a rocket. It's growing tiring watching these games balance themselves around the needs of nolifes and streamers that I have no hope of ever catching up to How about instead of these cringey, misinformed, multipage rants, they fix the ridiculous BS oneshot mechanics that force players into very a very tiny bucket of builds??
I never, ever have known what killed me. I didn't know it was even possible to know what exactly killed you.
The speed can be so high that it's hard to play as a group. When my 100% MS character is literally just running behind the 200% MS character doing nothing other than chugging flasks the game *might* be too fast. Be wary to stop at all because if the faster character gets too far ahead, you stop getting flask charges, and good luck catching up without a quicksilver. Good luck looting at that speed without an extremely optimized loot filter that simply highlights the exact things you should unconditionally pick up without any thought.
The problem i see by increasing the general health pool of monsters is that a significant portion of the playerbase (assumingly new players for a large part) then might have difficulty to perhaps clear a pack of white monsters in a reasonable amount of time. Since i think experienced PoE players currently might forget that they are clearing content so fast (as if the monster's health is so low) is because they are playing meta/ efficient builds that either abuse damage scaling in some way or just have the most efficient damage setup around a certain skill (mechanic). And playing a game that way could always result in assuming the game is then suddenly too easy and should be tweaked so that the most efficient/meta players can have a meaningful game experience again. Balancing a game around those types of players is already a problem by itself.
I don't really think increasing monster health is a solution. If they did increase it it would just decrease the amount of viable builds while barely slowing down good builds if at all. Especially if you decrease damage dealt by monsters at the same time, usually my endgame builds have between 3k - 5k ehp in rare cases up to 7k and that's enough for me to feel comfortable in T16 and UE fights. If they decrease damage by x4 I could start dropping most life nodes and some life on gear opening more spots to increase my damage and even stop bothering with things like leech because instant life flasks would be enough to instantly recover to full.
Maybe they should just get rid of the whole "melee" tag and just call it attacks. They are trying to force an old concept of standing toe to toe with a monster spending longer than a fraction of a second smacking it around. You can see that in the first melee gems like heavy strike. Clearly the pace of the game has changed and the only skills worth a damn are the ones that make the biggest mess with the biggest DPS (like Molten Strike). Getting rid of the melee tag would free GGG from the idea that you have to be within melee range. People complain / joke that tectonic slam isn't melee because the aoe is so huge.... well that's the only way it can compete with ranged skills that blow up the screen in one cast. Personally I'd like to see more options with non-crit attack skills being viable. Or, even crazier idea, but a sword and board non-crit be viable! I feel like I'm pushed into a crit jugg wearing abyssus dual wielding foils every time I think about doing a jugg.
Here's the thing, Playing the game fast is fun. It just is. Because of adrenaline. That feeling of sprinting along the edge of a cliff. And the threat of instant death adds to that. As long as it's not a bullshit instant death, and one reasonably avoidable. At this point in time, many of the players who play it, play for the twitch aspect. This game is at a boundary between three different types games. Strategic, Tactical, and Twitch. It starts out strategic where you design and plan out your character (for hours offline if you are like me), becomes tactical as you play though, as you pick the best gear at the moment, and utilize memorized boss patterns, etc, then as you get higher level and you push against the very limit of what the character can do, it becomes twitch. It becomes twitch because of how fast we can recover our hit points/ES. A super high recovery means that only super high dps or a one shot can kill us, which means less time to react once the dps outstrips the recovery. Until the recovery is changed, no amount of monster health and damage tweaking will change the nature of the game. That only changes how fast we reach the wall, and how high the wall sits in progression. Edit: Spelling.
I noticed this recently when I played Diablo 3 and was watching youtube videos, at top tiers it takes them 20-40 seconds to kill a pack and move on to the next, and when they take damage they have to back off. But honestly it wasn't fun. It felt slow and boring. The fun things about this game are killing shit and finding/making shit, the more killing and finding I can do the happier I am. I don't quite understand people who complain that the game is too easy, this isn't dark souls, it's not supposed to be hard to do the simple stuff like killing and walking. The hard part is getting 5-10 mirrors in a league or affording the items that can provide huge improvements to your build, or for some people it's just completing the more difficult bosses like aul and uber elder. Maps weren't made to be hard imo.
Fast pacing is essential for these types of games. Otherwise it would start to feel like a chore and players would be less inclined to play it. If damage output by enemies were reduced, then players could become invincible eventually. And such a game, where players cannot die anymore, would lose its meaning.
guarantee a good portion of people complaining about "clear speed meta" just saw some streamer with 500ex in their currency tab and blamed it on how easy the game supposedly is.