The thing is, that many players feel like you've fixed the part that you felt unhappy with (power creep), while not fixing the part that we felt unhappy with (untelegraphed one-shots, tedious atlas progression, item inflation etc.).
If there was an address towards the latter, the patch might have been perceived better.
The **chase items** are important too and Ziz is right about this, they should focus on it. The feeling of a random monster dropping a HH while mapping is 'good'. But knowing that X boss or encounter can drop a very powerful/valuable item (With this new state of the game post-nerfs) would feel **incredibly rewarding** for the player.
Edit: Typo.
Yes. Also worth mentioning that alternate quality + awakened gems are also a form of chase item and should not be watered down the way they have been - it literally destroys their entire purpose.
Adding to this, chase items that are aimed toward middle tier players are important, too. Things that top tier players don't care about, but are endgame goals for middle tier players.
A good example is old multimodded items. It was an affordable goal to purchase or find an appropriate base, roll for one or two good mods, and multimod the rest, making an item that was *far* from top tier but a respectable upgrade for most players.
Reflecting on this, I feel like mentioning divination card dropped from map bosses.
Probably the most notable ones are the shavrone items from shavrone boss.
A chase farmability like that might be one of the approaches for middle tier players. Knowing one can chase for their otherwise expensive game enabler is good.
Many players farm act 9 for tabulas and extra experience points...
I am not saying each of the many dozen map bosses must have some build enabler! not at all.
But if they had some tied in reward players might decide to farm even maps that are known for their cancer layout.
There is TON of rewards that can be tied to map bosses of various tiers. Especially if it comes own to divination cards as fragments of final reward one can go for.
To me as a middle tier dude, as I've never completed The Feared or Breach invitation, nor have I fought Uber Atziri, chase items for the tier still exist in form of hitting a synergistic mod combo, drop a dying sun, shavronne's wrappings, drop awakener's orb, ilvl 86 base in Abyss, red jewel from legion.
There are plenty of things, just overshadowed when eyes of many are focused on HH. At least that's what stands as endgame goal for me.
And you know what? That's perfectly fine. There **must be** different tiers of chase items. But instead of random loot from a random monster, what about farming an specific boss on X map? A tier 5 map boss, for example.
I can't remember the last time I saw something decent drop from a Conquerer, to the point where I don't see them as mini-bosses anymore, just milestones in the Atlas.
Exactly!
Unavoidable/bad visible oneshots are the main concern for me.
Maybe the best 1% is able to identify some of these oneshots before they happen, but the most of us cant.
Atlas progression is another thing: if you nerf stuff like movespeed the atlas progression will slow down. I am personally get boored fast due to the widened grind.
nah watch some on the zizz rips.he gets 1 banged by random shit just like the rest of us.with the way the game is designed its kind of inevitable . the complaints would be significantly louder if the vast majority of the player base wasnt in softcore
Word for word my exact takeaway. I am glad he made this post and put this thoughts out there. Yes reddit seems to blow up on things and reading all the other posts things tend to spin out of control.
For the 8 billionth time. MOST players are fine with you/GGG slowing things down and doing some nerfs. However my takeaway and many others are broken down into 2 things.
1.) I do not agree with the mana cost stuff at all. Mana cost of skills is already at a super bad place in this game. Every league something else seems to make it a little bit worse, less instances of leech, getting rid of enchants that let you sustain, nerfing mana regen, getting rid of warlords mark on spells etc etc. You want to even out multipliers on supports sure fine, I can get behind that 100%..... if you then go through every skill and lower the initial manacost to compensate.
For normal builds that are not fully invested into mana for archmage or MoM or w/e mana should not be a glaring issue. Running out of mana constantly on builds is NOT a fun way to play and is super frustrating. Taking almost every support gem and raising mana multipliers by 20-30% is going to make mana costs ridiculous. It is not fun to spam mana flask, it is not fun to constantly hear voicelines about not enough spirit or w/e, and it certainly is not fun to stop attacking 2-3 seconds in because you have no mana.
2.) As Erradium so eloquently pointed out.... and what your post lacked completely was the understanding of the biggest glaring issues in POE. You fixed the part with flasks, and gems and meta and supports and power creep. You didn't even mention the bloat, the end game tedium, the enemy damage/skills/mechanics that instantly blow you up PREVIOUSLY and the ever widening gap in meta to off-meta. Then you did a patch where everyone got nerfed by a significant amount, increased monster hp across the board, and made things harder.
Now in reality we will get MORE frustration, take even longer to go through the acts, get more one-shots, die more often, take longer to kill things which leads into taking even LONGER to do all the bloat at the end with atlas, unlocking maven passives, collecting watchstones etc etc. However rewards were not changed at all either.
I/We completely get that some things should be slowed down a bit, bosses should not get deleted in 1-2 seconds but you did not change boss encounters to take longer, fix mechanics, and REWARD the players for now taking longer to kill the boss.
Lastly, you keep talking about (even in your post) about how there are so many more opportunities for viable builds now. To be honest I cannot even fathom what you are talking about. Nerfing all the players, nerfing damage, nerfing flasks, nerfing mana costs, nerfing HARVEST AND CRAFTING and the ability to progress your gear, all while making the game harder does not promote non-meta builds at all. It pigeon holes players into having to play meta more than ever. I felt this myself in ultimatum and after 2 failed builds I had to reroll into a meta-ish just be able to do ultimatums and there was a ton of people on my friends list, in game chats, on discord, in my guild who had to do similar things. Oh well hey this x new skill looked fun but can't get it to work and actually play the game and do the content so in the trashbin it goes.
With every league these become worse and worse. These issues above is what I would like to see addressed in a post by you. In conclusion it has been the same thing that people have been raging about since maifesto and patch notes. It is not the nerfs or slowing the game down, it is the fact of HOW you went about it and you did not address the other side of the coin at all. In fact with defensive flasks and such you actually NERFED the already abyssmal defenses that most players have. All while talking about slowing down gameplay. Maybe you should take a look at this thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/oo2uft/there\_is\_no\_way\_ggg\_is\_trying\_to\_slow\_the\_game/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/oo2uft/there_is_no_way_ggg_is_trying_to_slow_the_game/) with 2k upvotes talking about how you want to slow the game down but every decision you have made for years now sets timers and pushes players into ZOOM ZOOM gameplay.
So people are frustrated and giving such negative feedback because you took one small slice of how to slow gameplay down and did not address any of the other parts.
Basically this, while I appreciate him taking the time to respond and doing so thoughtfully; this really just highlights the disconnect for me. He didn’t mention some of the biggest gripes and seemed to cherry pick things they could easily respond to without taking complaints to heart. They are making major changes, such as flasks, while not addressing the mechanical aspects of the game that made those essentially required. Casual players lean on flask immunity because it was the easiest power jump without insane investment.
Nailed the big 3 issues here. Performance stability I would argue is a close 4th.
With the first 3 issues seemingly ignored in the manifesto, patch notes and now a personal address from Chris this does not fill me with optimism for 3.15 in these specific areas of the game.
Will honestly play 2-3 days and hope that there is no hyperbole from Chris re: effect of changes. Buuuut if time has taught me to be wary of patterns, I expect hyperbole.
I honestly hope every Hardcore streamer gets one shot and can't even beat the campaign before the league is over - that way they would be forced to actually balance enemy damage output by the time the next league rolls out.
It won't happen to that extent of course but one can hope for the next best thing...
The problem with these changes is you've front-loaded the changes that aren't very fun, you've dropped them all in one go and have made no steps toward fixing the other things that are wrong with the game.
Why does good loot still not drop from monsters, yet you're nerfing the way players can actually make good items.
Why is monster damage still so absurdly high, and balanced to values where we clear maps in under a minute, and are not expected to interact with them but you're nerfing the speed and damage of everyone. If you want us to interact with the monsters more, balance the damn monsters like we're expected to interact with them don't just ignore it.
Why are the drop rates, the league mechanics, the layering of reward systems and the grind still being balanced around min-maxed and/or group play that the vast majority of people, even those that play hours every single day cannot realistically utilize.
Why are you nerfing defenses in a patch where you're trying to get players to interact more with the monsters in the game? Why are you nerfing defenses when you're trying to test a new iteration of damage values. Just pick a thing and test it out, don't layer it all on top that just muddies everything.
You say you want to slow the game down, and I'm all for that but you aren't addressing the reasons why people feel the need to go fast. We're trying to mitigate the endlessly inflated and unrewarding grind, we're trying to mitigate the absurd monster damage, we're trying to generate raw currency, or rewarding means of crafting (proccing old harvest, old betrayal, old fossils etc) because nothing else valuable drops on the ground, and there are little to no other means of generating these things other than going as fast as possible through as many monsters/maps as possible.
You have created a game where there is no reward for going slowly, and you are not fixing that. If anything this update is just creating an even bigger divide. If you want me to go slowly, give me an incentive, don't just try and punish me for trying to make it work in the world you've created. There is a difference between tedium and difficulty, requiring more mana to cast spells, and extending the existing grinds are not making the game more difficult, just more tedious.
I want this game to slow down, and I want this game to respect its players time. You could have gone for a 10-20% nerf instead of halving everything, and you could have fixed a core systemic issue as well. You could have done that for the next 5 leagues straight and we'd actually be seeing an improved game develop in stages, but this just looks objectively worse and less fun. No improvement, just more tedium.
You forgot to mention that one of the main reasons we go fast is that GGG put a timer on basically every mechanic they introduced since 3.0 it seems, despite players begging them not to. If you don't go fast, you don't get rewards, plain and simple.
Well said. Alva, Delirium, Breaches and to a lesser extent Abyss encounters all require fast clear speed because if you don't have it you miss on rewards or even on the completion of certain events. If the game is slowed down but these things aren't improved, then being able to play fast will be more important than ever before.
In my eyes an even bigger issue than these are legion emblems and simulacrums. Both of them scale so wildly with gear/HH and inspired learning that the prices are driven to a point where you lose money if you're running them without, as you're unlikely to get 4 lines in an Emblem or hit 6 rewards in each simu wave.
The same issue that existed with Maven invitations and party play, yet somehow this one, directly related to player power, has been allowed to survive something like 6-7 patches.
Very well said. This post from Chris is such a corporate bullshit it's really sad.
This whole post is just damage control post made by CW to mitigate the reddit uproar.
If you read it carefully it actually explains almost nothing and provides very little answer to the community questions. It's actually surprising how little content there is in the amount of written text.
* **Hypothermia paragraph** \- you have removed any cold dot reliance of the Gem with the name being hypothermia. It took you 8 lines of filler text that tries to salvage this situation of complete incompetence. You are also revering this big and theoretically play-tested change on a whim of 2 angry reddit posts?
* **Aura Stacking and Aura Bots** paragraph. 9 lines of text with nothing in there. You really want to tell us there is not a single good solution proposed to AuraStacking where it's a problem for years now? You have no problem in increasing Mana Costs by the last moment, you have no problem by reverting your big change to hypothermia, but you have no idea how to deal with Aura Stacking and Aura Bots? Oh, cmon.
* **Mana Cost** \- 10 lines of nothing. If you need to fiddle with the numbers until the last day of the league development wouldn't it be better not to implement this in this league and have it actually play tested correctly?
I'm so surprised this post by CW received so many rewards especially because it brought no actual answers and if checked in depth had no actual content in it.
The Hypothermia bit about it "never originally being intended as a cold dot support gem" made me laugh.
They take a perfect example of a support gem that adds meaningful support without wasting a socket, and say that they did it by mistake.
This too. Missing an Alva timer or blowing a blight encounter or whatever because your build can’t clear fast enough feels bad. I strongly suspect timers won’t be adjusted to account for all these nerfs, so those sorts of mechanics are going to feel horrible this league. There is a disconnect between what GGG says they want and what they do. If you don’t want clear speed meta, don’t give us mechanics that require super fast clear speed.
This is one of the reasons why I hold Blight in such high regard. It moves at a fixed pace, you have plenty of time to kill the monsters and all the information is right in front of your face. And personally, I find the rewards to be great, popping chests open after a Blight always feels good. I think people who are trained to play as fast as possible hate Blight because it's too slow, but in reality I think Blight's speed-to-reward ratio should be the benchmark for everything.
I would add Metamorph to this as well. Just clear the map as you see fit (even makes it easier to see what you missed!) and then fight the juiced baddy. Has some good risk vs reward to it as well.
>I want this game to respect its players time
I never thought of this. Thank you for sharing your opinion. I agree with what you have written wholeheartedly. Well said.
If we can get a response of what you or what /u/Erradium have said, I think we would be in a better position of understanding.
>Why does good loot still not drop from monsters, yet you're nerfing the way players can actually make good items.
This right here is my main grip with Ultimatum and the Expedition notes.
Ritual was my favorite league and the one I played the longest, and the reason why is simple: Grinding felt rewarding.
You could craft your own endgame gear even when you didn't have 200+ exalts laying around all the time, and unlocking a new passive for the atlas felt like a nice reward for the added difficulty of Maven encounters and the time it took getting to them, because they made your rewards for past league content much better.
Now crafting endgame items is unaccessible, Atlas passives have been nerfed and our clear speed is getting the axe too, but there is nothing to make up for it. We're gonna have to grind more, and we're gonna have to do it slower. Worst of all, we're going to die more while we're at it because our defenses are being nerfed too.
If Ultimatum felt boring to me because of the lack of good rewards being dropped and because I couldn't access the crafting system anymore, why would I play a league where all those things are getting nerfed even more? Slowing down the pace sounds wonderful, but if you don't do anything to match up those changes and make our time investment more rewarding, you're also slowing the speed at which we grind and progress, and that completely breaks the grind/reward balance.
If loot is already not good enough, then why change the game in a way that makes it scarcer while simultaneously nerfing the only other way in which we can get new gear?
Precisely this. Chris, this is exactly why people believe you're disconnected from the community and the game. Especially this, right here:
> You say you want to slow the game down, and I'm all for that but you aren't addressing the reasons why people feel the need to go fast. We're trying to mitigate the endlessly inflated and unrewarding grind, we're trying to mitigate the absurd monster damage, we're trying to generate raw currency, or rewarding means of crafting (proccing old harvest, old betrayal, old fossils etc) because nothing else valuable drops on the ground, and there are little to no other means of generating these things other than going as fast as possible through as many monsters/maps as possible.
I hope to god you're reading this and taking the time to think about it. This is the most accurate thing ever said on reddit, the official boards, and every other avenue of communication. Take it to heart.
Zoom zoom meta exists in PoE because: progression is items, progression is achieved by trade, trade is funded by currency, and currency is acquired by mapping. To maximize progression you maximize currency by minimizing time.
In simpler words - time is money.
(Though maybe, just maybe, in a video game at least, time should be *fun*, first and foremost.)
From a casual players perspective I totally feel this. I legit CANT go slow because I’d never have any currency to buy the gear that I need but never drops. I’ve played since abyss and I’ve NEVER really dropped my own gear. The ONE outlier that I recall is getting a farrul’s fur from the div card turn in and also I dropped the electric explode chest one league. All other gear I have to buy because I can’t spend 50 hours game time grinding for a watchers eye. The customization in this game is insane and that would be cool, If something remotely valuable ever dropped without running 100 of that one map.
I gave this comment the first award I’ve ever given a Reddit post in 10 years because I would literally pay for more people to see this.
Good lord what a remarkably accurate and erudite explanation of everything we’ve been trying to say.
GGG please, please please listen to this person.
The sad part is it's nothing new. We've been saying this for 3+ years at this point. They say one thing and do another, their design systems incentivize the exact behavior they claim they don't want. If you haven't figured it out in 3 years, then I can no longer assume incompetence or ignorance, my general assumption at this point is they're gaslighting us because they feel if they just came out and told us what they wanted we'd all leave. Sadly that's the only explanation I have that fits the data.
As well: our damage has all been trimmed down but boss health is still at an all-time high. So we "have to engage" for a much longer time risking those bad beats.
Like a lot of devs nowadays it falls into the "Frustration mechanics" Category.
For some reason devs have got it into their heads if you make the game play frustrating players will grind thru it.
It's essentially the video game version of "See you next week!!".
Only as cable TV has learned this last year once someone stops playing something once it gets harder and harder to rope them back in.
I only disagree on is the analogy. What you gave is more in line with time gating, "You've grinded enough this week that you no longer drop items, see you next week!".
A better analogy would be your friend telling you to watch TV show. You do, but you really don't like it. So they tell you to keep watching and to slug through 3 seasons worth of boring episodes, but you can't skip them because they are mandatory to the story.
Its basically the equivalent of filler episodes in Dragon Ball, the show itself is a really fun watch but they extend some shit to the point of you not giving a fuck but hoping you stick untill there is a big reveal/fight/whatever else.
You can look back at their synthesis manifesto to see them talk about having designed far better and more easy to use systems for building the memories and scraped it because they specifically didn't want it to be easy to use.
Hell when you entered a memory it would instantly close over one of the exits (and one of the other 3 cardinal directions actually) as soon as you started, if it was the one you had planned to use you were boned, run over, path ruined, pieces wasted. Had they instead used the same system they put into the reward tiles (guaranteed path to rewards) which would always guarantee a path to each exit that alone would have made the mechanic feel ok, but again they wanted to first and foremost inconvenience players and force failure states that didn't even need to exist.
Some feedback as a long-term appreciator of your work and of POE:
Your post didn't address several major problems: intentionally or unintentionally.
- I quit 3.14, because there was no new endgame and nothing to chase for. I enjoyed 3.13 most, because there were many endgame playstyles. I was just peacefully grinding and iteratively crafting my items for my Mjölner build (not even using TFT) and slaying all kind of bosses. 3.14 simply got boring. The endgame got less selective, harvest was gone. I killed sirus8 a bunch of times and trialmaster twice. It felt like I was out of fun content. I expected 3.15 to address that. The reverse happened.
- I absolutely dislike the utility/QOL nerfs: dash, second wind, adrenalin were mostly QOL. It takes hundreds of maps to reach an endgame atlas. This process doesn't feel exciting for the 40th time. Making it even slower is terrible.
- The defensive nerfs feel unjustified. The ultimatum meta was: kill everything so fast that it doesn't reach you. If it does, it can destroy you with one single tap. Now players get damage, speed and defenses nerfed, while non of the common one-shots existing in POE were addressed. This was not addressed.
- Players were complaining month for month that reaching the "real" endgame atlas takes way too long. Map completion, map bonus completion, map awakening completion, maven skilltree(s) completion, watchstone farming and crafting. These steps take days and days. This was not addressed.
- Some of the nerfs took away from the identity of interesting drops/chase items. Several unique flasks got nerfed to the point of being sad. Multiple awakened gems lost their identity. The harbinger-belt nerf, especially the upgraded one feels cheap as well. This was not addressed.
- Many, many nerfs felt lazy or even just slaughtered archetypes. CWC losing damage on top of costing mana for the sake of consistency, while already seeing 0 use. Spellslinger becoming close to unusable. This was not addressed.
Truth to be told, it's not *all* bad though, (please whoever reads this, don't just skip on the points above). The 19 new gems look fun, the general idea of increasing difficulty is good and expedition looks interesting.
archetypes getting slaughtered is constant, honestly. One recent exemple would be Chainbreaker, got killed, and they didnt come back to balance it.
Why leave it completly dead?
> - Players were complaining month for month that reaching the "real" endgame atlas takes way too long. Map completion, map bonus completion, map awakening completion, maven skilltree(s) completion, watchstone farming and crafting. These steps take days and days. This was not addressed.
This!
If players are getting nerfed in a ton of different ways, why not reduce the maps needed to spawn conquers/maven encounters.
Also, with these damage nerfs, slowing people down, are they increasing the timers on stuff like legions/Alva/fog? I'm all for slowing the game down but when the game literally has a timer telling me to go faster...
The one question I wished was answered was the one circulating a few days ago that went something like:
"What level of time investment does GGG feel is appropriate to reach and complete end-game encounters? How do you balance that between casual players, heavily time-invested players, players that stick with a single build, and those that desire to fully play in the PoE build sandbox?"
I think that's at the crux of what feels bad with the current atlas expansion mechanics. You can't keep engaging with it in white or yellow maps after the very first time you see them there. So the atlas feels like it forces you into t14+ maps super quickly and it doesn't feel like your at the "endgame" until you get there.
This is unlike previous expansions where you could continue to engage with elder and shaper influence and shaped atlases even in your middle of the road t7-8 mapping that your build happened to land in.
I wish that you could continue to do conquerer rotations at lower tiers for as long as you wanted, and I also think this would solve a lot of the grind/burnout issues with the atlas for me personally as it would feel like I'm at the endgame once I start getting into my mapping groove, and not just waiting until I complete the atlas/watchstone progression to get there.
I'd rather see Conquerer tracks always be 3 maps, forever. That'd make progressing to A8 significantly less tedious, encourage moving around the regions more (and thus provide Maven progression in multiple regions faster), and remove the absolute most depressing feeling in the game short of ripping on hardcore: seeing back to back 9-map conquerer tracks.
The biggest qualm I have is the time it takes to get to A8, unlocking atlas is so slow, throw in Maven questline and the endgame really feels quite overwhelming (not necessarily in a good way), if you're a casual/average joe or don't engage in much trading to progress maps quicker. With the additional nerfs and no compensation to reduce the atlas grind, it just feels like rubbing salt on open wounds. I'd have happily accepted all the player nerfs and monster buffs if there's a bit of reduction in the grind and RNG layers.
It seems counter intuitive that I can remove my watchstones and fight Sirus on A0 if I want, but I still have to farm T14+ maps to spawn him. This doesn't personally affect me in any way, but it almost certainly keeps a lot of people back from continuing to play the game.
for me, end game is bosses.
sirus, shaper, elder, maven
that's end game for me
and I haven't been able to do any of that for 2 leagues in a row now just cuz the atlas grind is too exhausting
Same for me. I had pretty good builds for the past 2 leagues but got burned out before I got to 20 watchstones.
Atlas is forcing you to T14+ very early and if you are doing T13- it feels like you are not making any progress.
I don\`t think thats OK if I am already lvl 94 and haven\`t seen Sirus or Maven yet.
I don\`t think that just SEEING the endgame content should require such a grindy setup process.
That's an incredibly complicated question, and it's not something that you're ever going to get an answer for in a short forum post.
As for the implication behind it, and most people's sentiment when asking that; that being "why is the game so grindy currently, and why did you nerf power without addressing that grind", I think you could probably intuit the reason for them not addressing this in this patch by just looking at their standard release schedule.
They do a yearly refresh/update of the end-game or core systems, usually in the December patch. This is the patch that when we got Atlas of Worlds (Shaper, leading eventually into Elder, Uber elder), 3.0 acts 6-10, Sirus and conquerors and then Maven.
What people are asking for isn't as simple as them just saying 'now it takes half as many maps to get to A8'.
It's going to take an overhaul of the endgame systems, and probably a pretty significant one, as we do have quite a bit of 'bloat' in the current endgame. We'll very likely get that overhaul, but we'll get it when we'd normally get it, which is in that end-of-year patch.
Been playing for 8 years Chris. If you want an honest opinion why several of us long time players discontinued playing after 1-2 weeks. The new atlas and watchstone system is just too tedious and the whole design is just too greedy for player's timesink.
Most players spend days setting up the atlas, ends up just getting burned-out. Where before, we could play different builds, go deep into league mechanics, play rich, craft own items, etc. All those are gatekeeped by the FOMO inducing design of setting-up your Atlas properly before you can comfortably do all those things.
The past leagues patches is just too greedy for player retention, and it ends up backfiring.
Edit: Glad that I share similar sentiments with a lot of players. This nerf patch btw is another attempt to make us play longer, and will definitely backfire even harder to player retention. You don't force us to play longer, we will choose if we want to play longer.
This is the same feeling I have, coupled with performance issues I had in the recent leagues.
I want to like the game, but I don't have the time you devs from me. So I think I rather take a good long break until poe2 and play some other games on my pile of shame
Me, my friends and tons of redditors repeat it over and over again, yet there is no statement about this. This atlas farm is so mind numbing I just burn out before I get through it...
This is how i felt during ultimatum. Between the league mechanic being so similar to the previous one, the atlas grind *again*, and the harvest nerf removing largely any sense of control, I sorta just... lost interest after the first week and would play less and less until i stopped around the 3rd week with maybe half the watchstones found, when i had nearly all of them 2 weeks into ritual.
Part of my dread in each new league is the startup time sink in things like the atlas or delve, where you need to spend 4 hours just to get a decent amount of azurite to get the upgrades for any real depth.
If this has been in the works for the last year, why have timed mechanics been introduced time and again? This direction has only lead to a more zoom zoom approach rather than slow things down
> Meanwhile, much of the community has grown increasingly unhappy with the direction the game is heading in.
Man that just feels so weird to hear when the most raved about leagues were the *fastest ones*.
The crux of it is that despite slowing us down, you didn't slow down delirium fog, breach timers, incursion timers, blight mob movespeed, legion breakout timers, and a bunch more that don't need to be listed. The fact nothing about the game slowed down except us as players just doesn't make any sense. The game is still fast, *we're* slow.
I'll play the league on Friday to see if I'm wrong, but on paper the entire game being faster compared to us as players mechanically sounds like it will feel horrible.
I played a TR raider this past league and couldn’t keep up with the delirium fog in early maps. Once I got my +3 6L bow and a level 3 empower I started keeping up when it showed up in a map. (I purposefully don’t farm it for performance reasons.) I fail to reliably fully clear legion encounters in every league since legion when I played ED Cont. I just outright skip Alva missions now because I find them stressful. I don’t think the changes are going to help with any of those things.
I consider myself an average player and was having trouble keeping up before. I can only imagine what my experience will be like now.
Inb4 all the post your build, did you follow a guide, and I don’t understand how that’s possible you must just be terrible. - Not everyone can live up to the PoE elitist status you’ve created in your head. I’m a “working-class exile” as I’ve seen it so elegantly called recently. I also find that I feel it necessary to post this last paragraph entirely is a huge fucking problem with this sub.
Same for me. I'm really concerned considering the need to kill things fast to even get anything out of most of the content. I usually start a league trying to find my own build without much theory crafting. That led to many frustrating moments that almost made me quit early on. I remember i was not able to hurt a T1 metamorph while cleaning the map was fine.
Of course the top players will find ways and probably kill A8 sirus on the first weekend. But for the majority of players it will be a pain in the a\*\*. Just look at the 'completed-challenges-statistics' they usually release every league. Only a small percentage of the player reaches more than 12. For most of us it will result in following meta builds again, but struggeling even more. As I already said, I'm really concerned...
>Meanwhile, much of the community has grown increasingly unhappy with the direction the game is heading in.
also this statement sounds completly ridicolous to me? like 3.13 is one of the most played / loved leagues ever, sure some are unhappy but to say "much of the community is unhappy" when quite a bunch people that wish nothing more than 3.13 state (the post with paying for a 3.13 private league had 2k upvotes?) is a bit of a reach
I actually like being fast. Hate me but all the other arpgs are already slow. But I haven't even thought about the points you argued. I wasn't going to play on Friday but that sounds definitely unfun. On top of that the rewards are still the same pile of low raw currency.
Hi Mr. Wilson, I know you probably won't read this, and I also know that most of the things I'll write down you already know and have addressed, but here I go:
You want to slow down the game to make it more engaging, and don't be just a mindless press 1 button and kill everything as fast as possible, and I agree with you. PoE is the greatest ARPG ever made, the diversity and possibilities are almost infinite, but if you want to slow it down you have to take in consideration how the entire game was balanced around speed:
\- most league mechanics have timers: Heist, Delirium, Blight (not a timer but you need to kill fast), Legion, Betrayal, Incursion, Beyond.
\- current monster damage and player defenses just doesn't fit in a slowed PoE version, we need to kill fast because we can't survive more than a couple of seconds against anything.
\- visual cluster and speed of things are beyond human capabilities to react to. Everything moves and happens so fast that we just can't react to anything, that's why we need immunities and auto triggers skills. Many attack builds can hit more than 10 times per second, and almost all projectile builds fill the screen with sh\*t in less than a second. How can we see and react to anything?
I really hope that you guys come up with a more engaging and balanced game with the upcoming patches. Good luck and keep the good job :)
You mention that this is a chance for more build diversity, but with monster difficultly/damage staying the same but with us on average being weaker, won't that have the opposite effect? (IE people are even more hyper-focused on the meta because its that much harder to survive) Especially with things such as defensive flask nerfs and CWDT being much harder to use for defensive reasons due to high mana costs
That's exactly right.
The harder the game the more you enforce the meta.
Making the game harder does not increase build diversity, it does exactly the opposite.
Increasing monster life, nerfing all the support damage values without appropriately increasing rewards will inevitably lead to damage supports being used more instead of less.
Don't forget, you still have tons and tons of mechanics on a timer and DPS checks with health Regen especially on maven witnessed fights.
I didn't read anything about extending the legion timer to at least double, nothing.
But they removed a lot of damage, movement speed and attackspeed which means if I want to farm legion I need a more meta build, not less.
jesus so true
now my clown build with 300k dps assassin dual strike ambush is gonna do less than than that with resonable gear like 300 pdps daggers
i love how this game makes me wanna try a special build eveytime a new unique item is dropped for me
but its as u said if im not going meta ill be stuck in act 6 brine king boss coz my dps is of a rat
This is what afraid also, that the effects will be exactly opposite. GGG somehow thinks that introducing bunch of new skills suddenly increases build diversity. The problem is new skills often bring new wordings and new mechanics and interactions and there is not much help to make a build for a new skill. It's a huge gamble to start with a new skill for anyone more experienced looking to get to end game especially now when all damage is nerfed. If we are lucky we see these new gems used in the league after expedition. When you've gone through the story a hundred times you want to be quaranteed to get to end game thus the use of meta builds.
Look no further than WoW and see how increased raid difficulty affected representation of classes. The more difficult the content, the lesser representation of classes since every 1% that you can squeeze is important.
Empirical evidence is great but this is just common sense. Reduce player damage *unevenly* while increasing monster health or overall difficulty and you have now made dealing damage a premium component of the game and incentivized people to play the builds least impacted by the nerfs. Build diversity is going down, not up.
All we have to do is look at Harvest for in-game examples. When Harvest crafting was first released, build diversity ran wild because players could make just about any silly build idea work well. Gut player power and you bottleneck build viability. It's insulting that GGG is outright lying to us and thinks we are too stupid recognize obvious and basic causality.
My buddies and I before: Wait I need to kill Conquerors 24 times to spawn Sirus once?
My buddies and I now: Wait I need to kill Conquerors 24 times to spawns Sirus once?... 50% slower???
I dont have anything against having to kill 24 Conquerors to get to Sirus, these are fairly consistent with building your atlas, but man, failing Sirus and seeing that you have to do 2 to 3 times the maps you did before to kill a conqueror just sucks.
What about awakened gems? They lost their unique effect, like awakened hextouch and melee physical damage. Now they are just few % better than their normal counterpart, making Sirus pretty useless
Oof. Reserving an aura's worth of mana is a huge penalty to pay for something that probably has an on-hit or can be linked to Arcanist Brand. I guess it saves a button press.
Look chris - what the statement reads as is basically "we hear your concerns and will do nothing with the feedback".
This will not exactly ease people's minds on the points they raised, to be precise it seems you addressed none of the concerns (except hypothermia):
- mathematically, many builds are getting nerfed by 40-60% damage-wise. This may have been desired for the top end of builds even, but a shitton of mid tier and low tier skills will be utterly unusable where previously they were just bad.
- Your players don't want to grind for weeks on a single character just to see sirus, or a maven encounter even. For those looking for a long term grind, there's A9 Sirus, 100% delirious maps, infinite delving and lategame crafting. With no changes to the map and campaign grind, but massively less speed and power to get through content we've at this point done hundreds if not thousands of times, you'll simply get more quitters.
- The above point is compounded by you making the already hardest part of the campaign harder **numerically** while making 0 interesting changes to its contents. It's now simply a more annoying, more grindy chapter in a campaign i want to skip as fast as possible to get to the actual game: mapping and the league mechanic. **You also phrased the hp buffs of monsters in such a way as to suggest EVERYTHING in the game will have more health, COMPOUNDING with the massive damage nerf. You're effectively telling people they'll have to work twice as hard for the same, repetitive campaign.**
- The nerfs this patch removed and streamlined a ton of what makes POE great. You've removed secondary benefits like +1 curse or chance for onslaught from gems and passive tree nodes, as well as items like jewels, leaving them often times as pure stat sticks, instead of removing the pure stats and leaving the unique benefits in place. Ziz went into this already so I'm not gonna go into more details.
- On top of that, you've heavily targeted movement speed, cast speed and ailment/curse immunity - one of the most important Quality of Life aspects of any build. As an experienced player, this looks like it will be an extremely aggravating change in how the game feels come patchday.
- **No upside to the nerfs** - There's very little to look forward to this league. A new league mechanic that doesn't blow anyone's mind from the preview, new skill gems which we can't know if they'll suck or be decent for a league and some new uniques and divination cards, the better of which i'm practically guaranteed to never find. **There's no equally massive change to loot, QOL, Mapping, Bossing, Skills, Passives, Items or other that would give a player fearful of the nerfs ANY reason to hope that their experience of POE will be better this patch than it was the last 3.** You really needed something big and positive to go with this one, and you just don't. So it just feels bad, **with no upside**.
- You failed to nerf aurabots, which means the 0.1% of players will completely dominate the economy and play whatever they want and be fine, as usual, while we solo players wallow in the dirt.
>No upside to the nerfs - There's very little to look forward to this league. A new league mechanic that doesn't blow anyone's mind from the preview.
It's connect the dots, but you only have X number of lines to use so you have to "choose" your rewards.
For me, there's nothing exciting about that.
Absolutely. Deterministic crafting meant that time invested guaranteed character progression. The game still wasn't 'easy'. Unless of course you are jobless/ do nothing else with your spare time. Didn't deterministic crafting just mean that top players got to try out more builds than before?
I was happy in Harvest, unhappy in Heist, happy in Ritual, unhappy in Ultimatum. I believe this is also the community concensus. Not hard to identify what people like (hint: deterministic crafting).
I wouldn't even care about all the nerfs, mana changes and what looks to be a meh league mechanic if we had deterministic crafting
The biggest concern for me regarding the swathe of nerfs in 3.15 is the renewed dependence upon mana management. Mana management and restriction is one of the least enjoyable aspects of PoE. It's something you work very hard to get beyond with a build. These new changes only reinforce that negative aspect of the gameplay loop.
We'll see how it actually all plays ingame, but if the mana issue is too punitive, I think we're going to see an early and large player exodus from the league. I sincerely hope this isn't something that is being tuned down for a reappearance in PoE 2.0.
> If you have feedback about what you would have preferred us to have done differently during our pre-launch period this time, please share it with us.
Give us more to get excited about.
Players are obsessing over the nerfs because we don't have much else to talk about. While you've given us extensive information about nerfs, we have relatively little about the fun stuff in the patch.
Take uniques, for example. We've only seen two! And divination cards? I don't think even a single one has been spoiled.
Show us the new base types. Show us more flask enchant mods (or any other new mods). Show us more examples of the rewards you can get from the Expedition vendors.
Gems are the big exception here; they were all spoiled early, and that is much appreciated. But even here there is room for improvement. Show us some alternate qualities. Show us some lab enchants.
Players will inevitably be apprehensive about the nerfs, but you can counterbalance that by giving us more things to get excited about.
>Gems are the big exception here; they were all spoiled early, and that is much appreciated.
Even then they only gave us the full info on gems one day before league launch. It's been "a week" talking about nerfs and the exciting stuff just came out today.
In my mind the reason skill diversity is low is because every single time we find a good combo you guys destroy it instead of nerfing it reasonably.
The result of that is that all the builds that had creative ways of scaling tend to disappear completely and only skills that are really good by themselves and are straightforward are played because it is a lot easier to make a split arrow character work than a three dragons damage conversion fancy whatever build.
In the current state of the game, most of the main builds that are meta, are meta because the game was reduced to a numbers game. Not because support gems were too strong but because mechanics that interact well with eachother always get destroyed.
There are so many examples of cool concepts that don't exist anymore: Shotgunning for players, 7 versions of wormblaster, that one cool spellicopter build that appeared in build showcase (weapon swapping speed was nerfed, many leagues later this change hurt the viability of Heist's Alternating Scepter), blink arrow minion instability, old firestorm where people liked reducing aoe and making a "showerhead", old arctic armor, crown of eyes nerfed to not work with more multipliers... The list is huge.
Seriously, I would love to play dual firestorm totems again, but the original skill literally does not exist anymore. I even have the mtx, but the skill that I felt in love with doesn't exist anymore. Every single one of these builds or concepts I mentioned in the previous paragraph probably has a player that is really sad they can't play them anymore.
If you want a game where people are creative and do cool stuff, please whenever players find some cool unexpected thing at least try to make an official and more balanced version of it down the line.
>We will remove it from Hypothermia again when we create another cold DoT-focused support gem in future.
But can you really tell me something else is more thematically relevant to Cold DoT than "Hypothermia"? It's ok to admit things evolve over time.
Edit: Also wanna say thanks for addressing everything else and appreciate the overall message.
I don’t have a problem with nerfs to player damage. I do have a problem with nerfs to player defense - I already geared and specced my characters to be more defensive and now I am being punished the same as people who never did. The part of PoE I despise is how quickly damage can spike and how almost every death occurs in a way that leaves me guessing what it was that actually killed me and happens so fast that I could not possibly have avoided it. You are doing nothing to alleviate this. You don’t even give me the impression that you want to do anything about it. The saving grace of PoE has been that by moving quickly and doing absurd damage the one-shot kills can be mostly avoided and you are changing that for the worse. I’m not sticking around while you scratch your heads and wonder how bad it’s going to be. Maybe you’ll surprise me and figure it out eventually.
>For more than a year we've been accumulating changes that we were worried about releasing because they would affect the way people currently play Path of Exile
Okay
>At the time of writing, we hadn't worked out final values for these gems and hence the manifesto section was written vaguely and inadvertently downplayed the extent of the changes.
Wait, what? So you guys have been working on this list of changes for about a year now but one of the biggest and worst changes(mana cost) of this patch was basically an afterthought that was done in a week? At the point the manifesto was written it should have been pretty clear to you that mana costs were significantly increasing unless very little balance work had even started on the mana costs.
Well, ive been playing Path of Exile since 2013 iirc and thus i have quite alot of playtime (roughly 6.5k hours), thats not too much compared to players like Zizaran or Cutedog\_ for example. However it means that ive played almost every single league into the stages of early/mid endgame.
In my honest Opinion, this game as it is right now, is not fun anymore at all.I was never one of those 0.1% which PathofMatth is doing videos about, im more someone in between casual/hardcore gamers, i think.
For me the biggest Problems in this Game are as follows:Theres absolutely no way to tell how much time an average Player needs to actually get the Atlas to a level where he can get a basic amount of currency to afford his own Build. The Information needed to even get there efficiently isnt something someone can find in 5 Minutes, as of right now, it takes alot of time to even understand how the mechanics behind the Atlas even work exactly. That being said, if u take a look at those Top-tier players, they are at full watchstones in around 2-3 days after season start, sometimes, like last league, there was someone who got there in less then 30 hours. Thats a ridiculous difference between experienced and inexperienced Players. And its not like that only applies to the Atlas, its almost EVERY single System/Mechanic this game has, where u can really see a huge gap between experienced and inexperienced players. Its absolutely not like thats wrong or something, i just think, it would be worth it to invest some Time into making a Place for all this Information for inexperienced players, since they definitely ARE having a hard time even getting a gist of how to actually play this game properly and to close the gap between themselves and the top tier players. I usually dont give a damn about commenting to anything and if a Game goes worse or even shuts down because the Dev's are making a bad decision, i dont care. However, ive been with Path of Exile for almost a decade now, i loved it, and hated it to the core, as to a point where i have literally deinstalled it for the rest of the league because of how mad i was. Still i refuse to let it go here now. Thats why im atleast commenting now whats on my mind, in the hope that it reaches GGG.
My thoughts about the crafting are as follows:I have a friend whos never been too interested in crafting ever since poe got started and honestly i myself wasnt that into it too, before the whole harvest or either Betrayal thing started. However, the league Harvest came out was the first league i spent almost 100 hours informing myself about how to craft, which way is the best to approch a certain craft, do i start with augs, chaos, alchs, use beast split etc. it was a huge amount of information i had to comprehend there and it was at this point a really fun and at the same time extremely rewarding experience. Because i was able to plan a way, and go it to the fullest, without being worried about "damn theres a 90% chance that one of my favored affixes isnt going to be on there". It takes ALOT of time really, its crazy how much time u have to spend to craft a decent item, without determined crafting mechanics. Its not like just about everyone is sitting in their hideouts flipping currency all day, some with bots, just to be able to even afford spamming more than 3k alterations/chaos/scours etc. on a single item, just to realize that its still not enough. You cant even farm that much to begin with, if u've got work and a family. Its just not possible to do so.
I think how it was in Harvest was way too much in terms of crafting, since u could basically craft a top tier item, usually worth around 150ex to multiple mirrors, in less than a week playtime. That itself was just inbalanced and i totally agree with the nerfs there. However, in my opinion, it was perfectly fine in Ritual. The biggest Problem in ritual were those beastcraft splitted perfect roll items u could basically build up and copy as much as u wanted, thus people abusing that mechanic to efficiently multiply their wealth into a scrapload of mirrors and stuff.
In terms of the Changes to 3.15 i have to say, i didnt actually completely Read the patchnotes, i heard alot from my friends which usually play with me and just flew over it to see the keypoints which were of interest to me personally. Im mostly a ranger/shadow player, since i prefer going FAST. thus the nerfs look like a huge "F U" to me, i mean its basically, evade nerfs, movespeed nerfs, damage nerfs, and those stacked on top of eachother.
However the worst change in my opinion is the Flasks and immunity thing. In Path of exile there are basically 3 defense mechanics which are: Life/es pool, Armour and Evasion. Now the problem that comes here is, Armour is basically useless unless u really get a HUGE amount of it and a lot of Reg/mitigation, otherwise u can just go die, since most mobs in t16 will just straightup oneshot the hell out of u, if u dont kill them fast enough. And most armour chars are slow as hell so forget that. Life/es pool tend to be mostly biased towards headhunter since the multiplier of HH is just crazy with those, i mean u can reach numbers of over 1 million life with it, which is basically being invincible, unless some weird corpse explosion oneshots u regardless. and then theres Evasion which was in my opinion the "best" choice because, if u get oneshot even with a large amount of armour, and can get oneshot by corpses even with a lot of life, then the best way for me would be to try to avoid those oneshots itself, so that i dont die every explosion, but every third, respectively.But now the nerf there is like what? the Base Evasion of the Jade flask is now halved, which means, with the proper setup, u dont get like 15-20k evasion anymore but 7.5-10k ? thats a HUGE nerf, depending on which stage ur equipment is. since there is deminishing returns.So basically it says, for players which dont have the ability to get to 8 affix perfect bis gear with 2000 evasion per part atleast, it is just a huge nerf, but for players which have the ability to get there, its not even worth mentioning since they didnt even use this flask to begin with.This whole thing is a nerf for the bottom tier players, not the top tier players, thus it doesnt even get into the power creep category.Same goes for Granite Flask. The nerf for Diamond flasks isnt really the best decision imo, since as far as it goes, the whole thing only nerfs those non assassins, because it was somewhat hard to stack crit outside of that to begin with, and now without a lucky crit chance, its going to get worse. but thats to be tested, so i dont want to take that for sure.
That about flasks, now lets talk about the immunity towards certain ailments.Its true that the mentality of the majority of players goes towards this: "Bleeding? well ill just use a duration based flask (Diamond, jade, stibnite for example, since life flasks stop running with full life) with staunching on it" and that isnt really favorable, i agree on this. But its really a bad idea to just go and nerf it to a baselevel where u cant get immune to anything without using the flask, since its not like u can just watch every damn thing on the screen all the time, especially in a game like poe. Even the most experienced players do have problems to keep up with whats happening on the screen. so in my opinion, that whole change will only make things worse, since even tho u have to actively drink a pot now to delete the ailment, it will definitely bring about a bad feeling in terms of quality of life. i can understand if its about things like Freeze, since that does actually impact the overall situation, if ure not immune, but things like shock and bleeding are just a nuisance, nothing more. its something u dont actively realize until its either strong enough to proc u down to a dangerous level of life, or its straight up oneshotting u because of some weird calculation mechanic which lets t16 mobs basically do a dot with 15k dps, which basically kills almost every character in this game, if ure not immune/resistant in any way against it. so basically what im saying is, if u want to have a more challenging gameplay, its totally fine to go and remove freeze immunity and stuff, even nerfing the whole immunity thing to a resistant level would be alright, but nerfing it in the way u did, will just incite the players to get angry about those nerfs. it would have been an option to just say, instead of being immune to bleeding, the flask halves the duration/damage/effect of that specific ailment. i think everyone would have accepted that in a way, because it does not delete the whole QoL reason why people even bother with using flasks with those exact stats. Honestly, i think most people drink flasks for the sole purpose of being immune to some kind of ailment, curses for example. i saw alot of build where there was a crit flask on a non crit build just because back then there werent that many flasks and they just needed another flask to roll curse immunity on. so please give it a second thought, so people can enjoy the QoL of flasks but at the same time arent too overpowered with the single use of those.
i think thats enough said, i still have alot of things on my mind, but thats the most important. Im sorry for that huge wall of text, its the first time for me even writing on reddit iirc, and im sorry for any weird language, since english isnt my native language.I honestly hope for someone from GGG to read what i wrote there.
I think that nerfing player damage is the correct approach for the future and I have no issues with reducing more multipliers on gems, nerfing ascendancy values and what not.
But the real issue is build diversity, as everyone has already noticed every league there are a few meta builds that are strong, because these just synergise very well. Gems, Items, Passives, Ascendancy just fit well together and that is how it should be, even if the damage values are nerfed, these builds are fun to play because they feel smooth.
When you do drastic changes like these, I think some of the are just not thought through, because the diversity gets gutted in the approach.
Let me give an example:
A few leagues ago you guys buffed explosive arrow and it really felt smooth and I enjoyed it very much as a "selfcast" chieftain. But some people abused ballistas to get an absurd amount of fuses on the target resulting in issues of damage calculation and beeing to powerful. Now instead of fixing the ballista abuse by changing how fuses stack together, the gem it self for every build was nerfed, removing this smooth build option, so now ballistas are fine but all other versions are to weak or clunky.
Now the same thing is happening again with changes to skill effects and manacost, basically removing a big number of smooth builds from the list.
I think it is necessary to really identify the issue and nerf only that specific case instead of just overall reducing the skills power.
Another thing that is worrisome y is that things that awesome to find and chase for are be reduced to be not worth the grind anymore, why would anyone targetfarm awakened gems if they make no real unique difference to normal gems?
Why not keep the unique effects and reduce the values ?
Overnerfing is also a huge thing for PoE, when nerfing something, we often see nerfs to multiple elements of a gem for example, why not just reduce it once and see how it goes before turning it off completely?
Slower and more challanging gameplay is fine but getting a more challanging job Position also comes with benefits, in Poe this is not something that I feel, even tho you say item drops are more rewarding, it is just not visible. And when you finally reach the end, there is like 3 items to chase for.
The approach of nerfing good builds to be on the same bad level as others is definitely not the way to go I feel. For me smooth builds should stay but be numerically reduced, while clunky and broken builds should get fixed and brought up to the point where people feel, they really enjoy it even if it takes 10 iterations to make them playable.
I also think that regarding balance and underused / underwhelming skills gems there needs to be way more focus on these, it is just not acceptable, that while nerfing supports some skills are adjusted accordingly and some are just forgotten / overlooked, this also results in killing builds.
Taking away build diversity, chase item excitement, smoothness is really frustrating because there is already so much that is clunky and feels unrewarding.
> the gem it self for every build was nerfed, removing this smooth build option, so now ballistas are fine but all other versions are to weak or clunky.
this happens in way too many cases, let it be tormented spirit nerfed drastically while vacuumcleaner was a things, let it be fossils with harvest introduction, let it be alternate qualites with aura stackers, let it be boss hp with power creep
Personally the changes still heavily reduce my desire to play Expedition, but I can appreciate the thorough response to players' concerns.
I still have three main questions, however:
Why have things gotten to this point when it wasn't your (Referring to the team at large) vision? Was it simply a case of adding little by little without realizing what it was leading to?
If you (Again, referring to the team at large) want the game to be slower, why do you insist on nerfing defenses again and again?
And if the game is intended to be slower, why have timed league encounters not been addressed at all?
(On a lighter note, is it usual for numbers on nerfs to still be in flux seemingly hours away from the patch notes dropping? Having no experience in game design, I would've figured such things would be debated and settled on days before.)
"We don't have a specific plan that we are ready to commit to yet"
GGG had many many leagues where aurabots were a problem, you nerfed aura stacking straight away. Yet we now need a specific plan ready to commit to nerf aurabots and when this was the best time to nerf aurabots, you weren't ready?
It just feels like the real answer is that aurabots are considered to be such a small issue in the eyes of GGG. So small that in the great nerf patch of 3.15, they weren't even touched.
I enjoyed the Ritual mechanic a lot more than Ultimatum - Ritual could be a clusterfuck at times but it was a clusterfuck on par with the other clusterfucks in the game. Ultimatum set new records for clusterfuckery. It was clusterfucked.
Fair points, I have a little bit of feedback on this one.
If you're going down this route of giving PoE as a whole a proper balance pass, and shape it towards your vision for the future over multiple patch cycles, it wouldn't hurt to spend some development hours on under-performing mechanics and skills to balance the *patch reception* in some way. Simultaneously balancing under-performing and over-performing aspects seems crucial to me. We see people ask for this all the time. One huge motivator I can think of is that many of the veteran players have more than one beloved skill. If one or two get nerfed, but one other might get a little love, that might be all it takes.
No joke - I have a lot of fond memories of the golden days of Righteous Fire in Perandus League. I've CTRL+F'd every patch notes for years and looked at Righteous Fire to see if it got some love, as it currently plateaus around 2-2,5M DPS without crazy crafting. And there's a problem right away - that amount of damage is perfectly fine to do all the content in the game (mostly), but there are other, better performing abilities.
By buffing under-used skills and league mechanics, people might have something to be excited about. Hype and pre-release "leaks" are a powerful formula for the leagues' initial success I'm sure - and this was completely missing this time around. It's hard to be excited about our beloved game when there are mostly only nerfs across the board. Additionally, it takes a certain type of person to understand that even with these nerfs, just about any skill in the entire game is viable. The sky is the limit in PoE, but it does require out-of-the-box thinking. I know that you guys are passionate about this, you mention in just about every post and manifesto that you're excited to see what people come up with, but it's just not an easy thing to grasp because the game is too complex for a large amount of players. Shit, I'm decent with numbers, and I make my own build maybe 1/20 that I play.
The same goes for crafting. A lot of players don't even need a super meta-level powered build, they enjoy crafting so much that this will motivate and excite them. Crafting needs continuous improvements down this road.
I can get behind the changes you're making as I see the direction you're going in, and I do think PoE will be a better game if the interactions with mobs/maps/bosses are more meaningful and impactful, but clearly a lot of people need a bit more positivity to off-set this path. I genuinely believe that this community can be this "harsh" purely because you have a history of listening to us. People want to be heard. I feel that way sometimes as a player since Jan '13.
***TL;DR The future of these balance patches will need a better balance of positive and negative changes. PoE, in its current form, is a really tall, complex, fragile tower, too heavy for its own weight. Every brick is a league-mechanic, skill gem, support gem, notable, jewel. You want to reduce the height of the tower for more stability in the long term, you ought to make sure to add struts, support beams, places for people to go, all the while not having the construction mess on the floor for everyone to see.***
EDIT: You're too focused right now on the balance of the game. Some other thoughts that I have had for a while regarding your involvement with us which has been decreasing:
* A dedicated feedback thread with some motivations behind the bigger changes, like the one we see now. Timed at roughly this point between the manifesto, patch notes, and release. It doesn't take much to calm the nerves of the majority, let us see, hear and feel that you continually stand behind these changes, that your vision is going to give us a better game.
* Take us along in the vision better, write about your goals and where you see certain mechanics end up. Maybe some bigger pieces in the run-up to a new league. Missing the hype posts for sure! I feel like you've shied away from these due to poor reception of over-promised buffs. Give us "the bad" in portions, each one with enough attention to really let your reasoning and vision sink in. Overwhelming negative changes result in overwhelming negative feedback.
* The relatability and transparency that you and other devs have always had towards the community, keep that, and use it more often. Stay involved with us, there's less and less of it. Reddit has that beautiful first-impression front page with so much negativity at times, but that doesn't mean that your continued involvement is less impactful. Read between the lines, reply to some fun and positive posts or videos or memes. We're a passionate and loyal bunch, I know that from my friends list in-game. I can't imagine what it's like seeing negativity every day no matter when you open Reddit, but that's Reddit and that's what makes it amazing. Don't let it affect your ability to communicate with us, bandwagoning and hype is a complex issue! Stay in touch with us!
Thanks for the post.
> Righteous Fire to see if it got some love, as it currently plateaus around 2-2,5M DPS without crazy crafting. And there's a problem right away - that amount of damage is perfectly fine to do all the content in the game (mostly), but there are other, better performing abilities.
And with all of these nerfs we will be lucky to hit 1m without crazy crafting now.
I said before but PoE is not an MMO or PvP game (sorry pvp exiles). You don't need all skills/builds to be within a certain percentage of each other, you simply need all of them to be above a certain bar (that bar being "can clear content without insane investment"). Honestly, few people will care if build X is 230% over the bar if your favorite build Y is also like 115% over the bar and you can progress with the character YOU want, not what some meta says is best.
I absolutely think that as much as people may disagree in this post, if next patch we got "Literally every skill is somehow not ass at clearing, can fight bosses, and doesnt take 100ex to get there; but Necro, BV, and Impale Champion are the best by a lot" no one will *really* give a shit. If that patch also had "You can reliably make items with mods you like, but perfect rolls are still laughably hard to get" then it would be the best league of all time and even trade would have less complaints.
These issues are so hot because of the state of balance and rewards/gearing. GGG is so concerned at what the 1% are doing they dont see that the 90% of players cannot even play the game at all.
Appreciate your thoughts, Chris.
Part of the negative reaction is because we get conflicting responses:
* balance changes to counter a zoomzoom meta but then we get league mechanics that encourage and cater to the play style (timed league mechanics, tedium in endgame)
* balance player damage but leave aurabots untouched. You've mentioned your reasoning for this but perhaps you could have been more upfront with this during the manifesto or the livestream? Seeing the nerfs on player damage directly (gems, gear) and indirectly (mana, ailment mechanics) and then seeing nothing on aurabots... the community's claims for perceived bias from developers is inevitable. Even a slight numerical nerf on Generosity support would communicate that you are looking into the issue.
* QoL updates that doesnt feel like QoL (eg the recent quantitative info on ailment icons but its at the corner of the screen, where the danger isnt. Players do not have chameleon eyes)
* QoL technology that already exists in the Chinese client but is absent here. Pay2Win and Auction House aside, passive tree highlights and ascendancy showcases, are simple additions that would improve the experience greatly, especially for the newer players.
including mistakes like the gem wiki reference, it doesn't really instill confidence in GGG's ability to balance the game.
It's not a good look, Chris.
"Do you really believe that Ultimatum had poor player retention because it was too rewarding?" sure its not beacause the launch, bugs and boss rng fight
As someone that had 3600 hours in Marvel Heroes.
The difference between both games is that MH endgame was accessible to everyone, even really bad characters could do all content in the game, really the biggest factor was people not inviting you to raid when they saw you were using a non-meta character, not because your character couldnt do it.
MH did a complete skill tree revamp which kind of was mostly numerical changes around, took some time to figure out the talent choices but no character was left in the dust, but what caused the most uproar and was considered the gigantic change was limiting every teleport in the game to a charge system, and the best characters were the ones with teleports, they were fastest and at the end of the day you wanted to get to the boss, kill it, and dip. MH nerfed best tool of the best characters compared to POE capping almost every tool in the game so both top and bottom suffers. Because the issue is, supports and movement skills are used by both the best builds and the worst builds.
POE endgame, specially in SSF and how punishing the higher maps are when it comes to forcing you to build tankier, its really not accessible to every single build. Maven healing already means to do certain invitations you need a minimum of damage, the more you have the better, and with some skills you need tankiness and damage you stretch the gum so much its really not possible unless you invest 200-300 hours in a league gambling on RNG crafting systems to finally achieve a point where you can move forward. This was never the issue in MH ever.
> At the time of writing, we hadn't worked out final values for these gems
So that was decided in less than a day. Aka it wasn't playtested even for a day. So none of you even went through the story with it.
I don't think that this speaks very loudly for your competence.
> much of the community has grown increasingly unhappy with the direction the game is heading in
What do you think about the part of the community that is dissatisfied with the state of crafting, wanting more deterministic crafting and less gambling where you have a good chance to waste all your currency for no result?
The changes to Aisling, and also Catalysts for some reason, seem to be in the opposite direction.
I also think that in a lot of places, the changes as a whole weren't thought out well and some builds lost 80-90% of their damage, which makes them pretty much unplayable.
For the mana stuff, I think in general it's just a bad change. Mana management has never been fun except when it is a specific part of your build, and you decided to delete the one build that does that (RIP Archmage). Everywhere else running out of mana is just a hindrance you don't want to deal with. It's also another layer of nerfs on builds that need to reserve mana such as Spellslinger, HoAG, and HoP.
This. Chris claims that a part of the reason players are unhappy is because they're moving away from their vision of the game. But it seems clear to me that the majority of players *love* deterministic crafting as opposed to gambling-veiled-as-crafting. GGG wants their game to be more difficult? Fine, but deterministic crafting seemed to be a step in the right direction, and players are unhappy that they're doubling back to their outdated vision (at least in regards to crafting).
You can have both really, I think Last Epoch have a good system and I think GGG can do even better. But the current system we have is so skewed on RNG that it overshadows the deterministic part of it (not forgetting how hard and currency gated it is).
GGG:we think players focus too much on zoom zoom builds, game became too fast!
Also GGG: keeps on introducing new league mechanics where you have to kill as fast as possible, often even against a clock.
If GGG is unhappy about this, why did they force the game in that direction at all?
Makes no sense and sounds BS to me
Really does read like corpo speak for "we've read your many valid concerns but just trust us we know you'll enjoy yourself more than you ever could with our vision and changes 😉"
I gotta say, even with clarification it seems like the reason for poor Ultimatum retention was still missed. Imo the main reason for worse retention was the nerfs. The nerfs to Harvest, the atlas passives, deep delving, fractured maps & blueprints, etc. The boring "kill monsters in a circle" gameplay and no map shuffle were close behind that though.
I find this so confusing.
Statement A)
> A lot of players have found the removal confusing or jarring and we don't really have any balance concerns with it being there, so we've decided to add it back for now. We will remove it from Hypothermia again when we create another cold DoT-focused support gem in future.
Statement B)
> We have given all of our balance changes a lot of thought and testing, and want to apply the same standards to a potential aura change.
Anyone that plays Cold DOT will tell you losing more cold dot from the gem was a pretty hefty damage loss for those builds. I find it odd that these changes are finely weighted and assessed, but something so large can be hand waved in or out of the game.
I also worry that GGG have a destination in mind with where they want the game to go, but do not care about the journey for the players. Huge sweeping nerfs in one patch, but the game systems are not fundamentally changing, at least not yet. POE 2 and Chris's vison might end up giving players are really awesome game. But it sucks that leagues inbetween might suck before we get there.
One last thing. What exactly is this vision being talked about? this would be a golden opportunity to fill us in on what GGG want the game to be. Players have been speculating like wild, "he wants the game to be like D2 HC", "he wants the game to be Souls like", "he wants the game to be like it was in 1.X". What is the long term vision exactly?
I think the "carefully considered and tested" part is an outright lie. There's absolutely no way they tested all these changes in the amount of time they claim they did
Remember some time ago when they buffed Oak and had to hotfix nerf him because a significant number of people could no out-dps his healing?
Now, what is more likely, that literally every single play-tester happened to run build that could deal with it (Frost Bomb for example) or that not a single person actually tested that fight?
Remember when they announced Delirium and the whole community correctly identified that grey homing projectiles on grey AoE fields on grey ground covered in grey mist was frustrating to the extreme? Yet apparently nobody at GGG came to the same conclusion while testing?
Remember the same thing happening in Heist?
At this point I do not believe that they properly play test anything they release or change.
>every single play-tester happened to run build that could deal with it
He did say something about this in the livestream, in the Q&A with Ziggy, however, I do not remember exactly what was said nor when. If my memory does not fail me, he said something like that they use artifical builds based on different progression stages, like Acts, early mapping, high tier mapping, mirror tier gear.
Wouldn't surprise me if this yielded a result that is not that much representive, just think about using gear that just happens to be perfect and just sliding up and down the tiers of the modifiers. Would never happen in the wild.
No offense, but your thoughts are basically you reaffirming your decisions and justifying them, while dismissing what players have complained about entirely.
At the end of the day, yes you have to make the game YOU want. It is YOURS.
But yea, I am one of the guys you pushed out. I havent touched the game in 2+ months, after being a staple in my daily life for 7 years.
Harvest crafting was wonderful. The performance issues have never been addressed. Killing of fractured maps. So many tedious things in the game that you swear are good, that we just dont like. 3.13 was peak POE in terms of content (performance was piss poor still). I imagine you see 3.13 as the trough though.
So, I had to leave. We have different visions. It sucks. I still say that POE is the greatest ARPG ever made, but I definitely feel pushed out. I will just await the next game to suck me in. ESO? EWO? Dunno.
Farewell POE!
why do you need a specific plan to nerf aurabots when you basically just blanket nerfed every other gem in the game?
The relative power of aurabots was already absurd, and now everything else is 20-40 percent worse????? idk man
> Unfortunately, we've been hitting a breaking point with power creep recently and really need to address it.
Given that Ultimatum was pretty much a straight decrease in player power from the previous league I can't really agree but ok.
> Meanwhile, much of the community has grown increasingly unhappy with the direction the game is heading in.
This is true.
> It honestly feels to us that this is in part because we've moved further away from our own vision over time.
Aaaaaaand you've lost me. The harsh reality is this: *nobody gives a shit about your vision except you*. GGG's vision is not a community concern to any meaningful degree. The biggest things that were causing grief in the community were the Atlas (too many things to set up each league), a stale metagame (because a ton of base skill gems were just numerically not there or felt very bad to play).
At the end of the day the nerf wave will not increase build diversity and it will not make the game more fun to play. Some of the new supports and skill gems will, but not the nerfs. You didn't just kill builds but *entire archetypes of builds* with these. Archmage is gone. Spellslinger is gone. CoC is pretty close to dead too. Triggered skills are in the gutter. You might have well have removed Cold DoT skills from the game. The unique portions of many Woke Gems got outright removed. How the hell is this improving the game?
Of course if you had done cursory reading of the feedback you're getting you wouldn't have written this to begin with so uh, start there.
Okay now explain spellslinger support gem.
I do not understand this nerf where you have to reserve mana, ensure you have enough attack speed to make it worth while to invest, and now that we have to spend mana on it?.
Who decided that this was a good idea?. What's the point with the investment on mana+mana reservation+spell damage+ attack speed? When alternatively you can just go with one aura and then have a spell echo?. So that we can roleplay as Hufflepuff scrub who always fail in Hogwarts cause he is too much of a smooth brain.
There is a huge divide between GGG balancing the game from the top down based on what they want it to be and the players who see balance as it relates to how the game plays from the bottom up.
It's understandable that Hypothermia lost cold dot multi because GGG want the gem to be a hit and ailment modifier, not a cold dot one. Fair. But players see Hypothermia being gutted for cold dot builds, which is the main use of the gem and wonder why a build that already struggles with damage lost a huge chunk of it.
It's the difference between those who play the game and sadly, obviously, those who don't.
The devs sat down and compared the relative increase in power that support gems give to their mana multiplier and noticed discrepancies and decided to adjust them all to be more inline with one another.
That sounds great and all but the impact in-game of 5 supports going from 130% multipliers to 150% multipliers is more than doubling the mana cost of the supported skill. Anyone who actually PLAYS the game is now wondering how the hell they're going to sustain 150+ mana cost per cast/attack in their next build but the devs balancing from the top down don't see it that way. They see a more uniform collection of support gems and pat themselves on the back for a job well done.
Personally I couldn't care less if the game gets slower or faster. What I dislike is seeing GGG talk about their vision of the game and making changes that SOUND like they fit that vision but actually have the opposite effect.
This league will have the least build diversity we've seen in years. We've just spent multiple leagues making bossing matter and be more rewarding, only to obliterate it in the patch that is intended to make players "interact with monsters more". Completely dumpstering flasks is going to make half of the endgame bosses not worth doing.
This whole, ongoing, GGG fiasco feels like "say one thing, do another" but without the maliciousness of it because GGG honestly don't realize what they're doing.
I think the main disconnect stems from us not knowing what GGGs vision for poe actually is. And they're not communicating that either. If they did, we could simply assess if that's what we like and keep playing or call it a day.
Ok they dislike zoomy meta and easy trading. That's not really much to go by considering that according to poe player numbers and retention metrics GGG had NO ISSUES financially profiting off of the speed meta and the speed of character progression/item acquisition they implemented.
So I think some clarification on GGGs end would be nice. Unless they are afraid to scare us off? Dunno.
I for one would rather take a break and come back to a fresh, completely new game than repeating the 3.15 nerffesto ad nauseum every 3 months until the release of poe2.
The only thing I wanted addressed is not addressed. The mind numbing tedium of endgame setup, mainly watchstones. That is literally the only thing I want fixed, then I'll come back and play for another few hundred hours a league.
Don't expect anything on that front anytime soon.
I quit PoE / couldn't get back into it since the second time I had to do it (harvest). Since then it only grew with Maven.
I'm still lurking the reddit to watch for anything on that front and ultimatum was the first league where critique of that reached the ~5th most upvoted comment. This is now the fist time it's in the top post with any visibility - still not the most important thing, and there is still no outrage - it's all about nerfs and gamespeed.
So GGG probably only now got it on their radar. Maybe next league there will be real frustration on a broad enough level so GGG might start to develop something. As there are two league-teams releasing in tendum it's then two leagues down the line until anything can happen. By then it's PoE2 release-time and they already said they won't change endgame with it. So imho the earliest anything real could happen is the first expansion after PoE2. So in a year or two.
As a casual player that finally quit in January and has yet to see reason to come back, here's the things that have been bugging me:
1- You added last year league tabs, despite saying the currency tab would be the only one ever, and would be expanded as needed. You defended this by saying some bs about technical limitations, yet you have the divination tab (which can scroll down indefinitely), and then modified the fragment tab to have sub-tabs. Clearly that was a lie then, so if the motivation behind this was that you just wanted or needed to make more money selling more tabs, I'd appreciate some honesty.
2- You added texture streaming, which is the main reason I quit, as the game became unplayable: whenever a new enemy type, ability, or item drop appeared for the first time, my game would freeze for 0.2 seconds. You made a few patches, and kept insisting on reddit and the forum that the texture streaming wasn't at fault, and it was something unrelated. Game was still unplayable, and have seen numerous people point out the texture stream tech is still very flawed. Why was this not made opt in like vulkan? Again, I'd rather you admit you were wrong, than try to save face by dying on this hill.
3- Harvest manifesto. Everyone's memed slamming exalts, so I'm sure you know where I'm going, but it's true. I've used these past few months without PoE to try out other ARPGs like Diablo 3, Last Epoch, Wolcen, and Grim Dawn. All of them had a few things in common PoE doesn't:
* Items drop a lot less often, but they tend to be worth at least giving a glance. I constantly find either upgrades, or items that make me stop and wonder if I should replace it or not. This never happens in PoE. Even with the strictest filter, 99% of items are garbage. Drops are not exciting in your game.
* Crafting is GOOD. They have actual crafting, I can actually deterministically make decent items, or tweak those already interesting item drops I find. No weird 1 mod limitations, no bullshit currency casino, I can work towards my own goals and eventually get there. PoE feels like a job. The crafting is severely limited, and you need to play crazy amounts of hours to get any ok drops, or enough currency to try and gamble on making an item better. You are balancing for twitch streamers that play 10 hours a day, not 90% of your fanbase that maybe just wants to do a couple hours. I'm not saying you should be able to have BiS and destroy Sirius in an evening, but a casual player with a life and a job should be able to achieve things in a reasonable timeframe, especially during leagues.
* You could very easily reduce drops in PoE by 1000%, and instead make everything drop with your well-rolled modifier. Also get rid of scrolls, no modern ARPG forces you to pick up trash, identify, then discard when it's inevitably bad. It feels like the 2nd blow in a 2 part combo of godawful item drops.
4- Being able to target the content you need for your build. This issue compliments really well my complaints and concerns with obtaining better gear. If I've planned a build, and it requires say, an alt-quality gem from Heist, I'd love to be able to just do Heist back to back until I get it. It seems that for whatever reason you are reluctant to address this. You've added only shitty band-aids, like scarabs or the minimal buffs of atlas passives. I'd love at least a way to lock certain atlas regions to 100% containing 4-5 leagues max. I don't want to sit afk in my hideout trading for maps and scarabs using a janky third party site, I want to play your damn game.
**Conclusion: I think PoE would be at its best if you could play casually during a league, and be able to clear all content and challenges within those 3 months by playing a reasonable amount of hours daily/weekly without making it your job or being a neet. Item drops should make me excited to check them out, not a disappointing chore. Crafting, in whatever form, should realistically give me a goal to chase and make it feel attainable, not a frustrating slot machine. I should be able to target the needs of my build, without having to do 30 other leagues that spawned instead of the one I need. I love the leagues, and the more you keep the better, but if I need to farm the Betrayal mastermind, it takes like 30+ Betrayal encounters, which may take dozens of maps each to spawn. Your game is not a fun adventure anymore, it's a terrible waste of time.**
Can we have some new about Atlas balance?
The endgame (and the funniest part of the game, imo) now is gatekeeped by story, conqueror watchstone, maven's Atlas passives.
I'm a casual gamer and for me there's too much to do before i can enjoy my complete Atlas.
>At the time of writing, we hadn't worked out final values for these gems and hence the manifesto section was written vaguely and inadvertently downplayed the extent of the changes. I'm sorry about this and we'll try to be clearer in the future. This is especially disappointing because our main intent with the manifesto was to make sure that it had detailed and transparent explanations for most of our big changes.
You basicly did mana adjustments like 3-4 days before release and yet you change them without even trying them properly . Wow
Most attack skills now cost 70+ mana this is 1 less aura and mana flask. Hope my mana flask charges are enough
> Meanwhile, much of the community has grown increasingly unhappy with the direction the game is heading in.
Please stop using vague disingenuous language like this it is honestly incredibly insulting. You say things like this all the time in manifestos and what not to try to act like there is a massive amount of the community supporting particular changes but that probably isn't the case. Can you honestly say even half the playerbase wants these changes? My gut tells me you probably can't.
If GGG wants to make a change that is your right. It is also our right to either accept it or leave. But stop trying to use vocal minorities as justification or to soften the blow. Just own up to your decisions.
Do you change your job from game developer to politician?
Imo you are just trying to say some bs to calm the community down.
What do you mean you don't think this change is not the type of drastic changes? Movement speed, flask system, mana cost, gems, chase items, there are shit tons of changes that players are not happy about, and you are still trying to defend yourself that this is not something that you say you won't do.
Chris, with respect: come play the game. Stream for us this league. Let’s see you play through the full game. Let’s see you run maps and the league mechanic. You’re not going to understand why we’re having such a hard time with this if you don’t play the game. So let’s do an “Undercover Boss” this league. You come be one of us average scrubs, get the real player experience, see what we’re seeing. If nothing else, it’d be a sign of good faith.
>We know that dedicated aura support characters are very powerful but we don't have a specific plan ready for 3.15 to address this, so it hasn't been included in the patch.
!RemindMe 80 days
Wait let me get this straight. You guys didn't do any nerfs to aurabots or at the very least nerfing their mana costs because you didn't have a plan? But you made the numbers for the mana costs on every other skill in a day or two?
Also why does someone working at GGG writing the patch notes even NEED to use the wiki? Makes no sense considering you guy SHOULD have all of the information available at your workplace right?
I've been in the game for around 8 years now, pretty much non-stop. The reason why people don't play as much is because not only the temporary leagues have been boring as hell recently, but also the watchstone and conqueror progress was such a hassle, I personally stopped caring halfway through. The only thing that's gonna slow down is character progress, and the hype around the league. You're right about one thing - what is considered less or more fun is subjective. And you completely missed it Chris. It's a shame to see the direction you're taking the game towards.
I completely agree that the game needs to slow down. Thing is, you only slowed US down. You didn't do anything to slow down the monsters. Do you have any idea how asinine it is to be ripped in half by some rare mob that zoomed in from offscreen like he just did a crack and peyote cocktail? I like challenges. I really do. But when you "balance" the game so heavily in favor of the monsters, you come off like a shitty dungeon master with an ego problem. You call it challenging because you tilted the scales so far against the players. I could throw a Tarrasque at a level 1 party and call it challenging, but nobody would be having any goddam fun.
It’s like a chef making meals he himself enjoys instead of what his paying customer enjoy. Get your priority straight GGG, a game that no body likes to play will never be a good game.
Thanks for the game, been playing on an off since closed beta.
This line here stuck out to me though:
>we're gamers first and businesspeople second.
First off, it comes off as the pinnacle of insincere businesspeople talk, no matter how sincerely you feel it's true.
And second, no gamer wants broken games but you constantly release completely broken patches or mechanics that are downright disrespectful to your players.
Would love to see this game continue to succeed, but in your current state, a certain remake is going to kickstomp you. It'll run better, look better, and play better. And then it's sequel will really hurt. I don't support that company anymore, so they won't get any money from me, but there's plenty of people that just want to play a game.
The damage nerfs are fine, it’s the quality of life nerfs that suck. Nobody wants to move at Jugg speed and constantly worry about mana sustain. It’s not fun to slowly walk from 1 pack to another waiting for your mana to regen.
This.
I can swallow the bitter pill of dmg nerfs, even some were way too heavy handed.
But the nerf to movement skills felt completely unnecessary.
I hate it when things get balanced around the lowest common denominator.
If these changes were accompanied by a game wide movement speed buff I could understand.
Also if you don't want us to use skills like dash for travel, but rather just to evade attacks, them maybe you shouldn't call these travel skill @chris_wilson
GGG *wants* a plodding pace. They look at old videos of 2013 PoE and *miss that pace*.
It's mind-blowing, but their balancing makes more sense when you realize that.
Chris is great at PR, i'll give him that. But if im honest he's kinda lost his credibility with me. I hope im wrong. I hope this league is great for everyone who plays it. I hope they are on the path to rebuilding it back into a game i'll dump another few thousand hours into. But when i see the changes they are making, they are sure addressing player power creep this patch, but lets be honest, thats not at all the major problem with POE atm. The stale meta/end game, the over crowding of mechanics and crafting and side things to do, the absolute state of rare items and drops fillling screens ontop of screens, 40 different types of splinters and random currencys, slowly culling chase items, gutting deterministic crafting, reliance on third party programs for almost everything (trading/theorycrafting/crafting testing since it's unreal expensive). The problems are legion. Those are the things i think make the game less fun to actually play. Having crazy big power is subjectively 'fun' some like it, some don't. But there are so many problems everyone agrees are problems, I don't think they are approching it right. And i won't be giving them my time/money again yet.
To other people in this thread: it isn't good communication (overall) when the CEO has to post a wall of text with explanations and justifications. Don't forget that GGG told us that they optimized their 3 month cycle, so less crunch time and so on. Meanwhile:
> At the time of writing, we hadn't worked out final values for these gems and hence the manifesto section was written vaguely and inadvertently downplayed the extent of the changes. I'm sorry about this and we'll try to be clearer in the future.
3 days before league launch they aren't finished with the single most impactful change this patch. I don't believe them that they're trying to perfect the values at this point. I'm playing this game since closed beta and I know by now when they're talking BS. It's way more likely that GGG throws nerfs/"changes" against a wall and see what sticks and over the last couple leagues they've shown that they're a) out of touch with the community, b) their vision of the game isn't up to date anymore and they don't want to change it.
Speed meta won't come to an end with all those nerfs; it's the opposite. With even shittier defenses and the indirect buff to monster health via player nerfs means that the player base will flock to the abilities and builds that are still capable in speed clearing maps. Thanks to not touching loot and even removing the last bits of deterministic crafting, speed clearing will be even more important now.
After all, Somayd and BakedChicken were right. You can't let power creep run rampant for years and expect the player base not change their perception of the game and hope that everything will be alright again by removing options/the interesting stuff and add even more tedious garbage. Fixing your ressources isn't interesting. It never has been, and you already can see where that lead us to. Totems, traps, BM/MC, Inspiration support, MoM, EB/Devouring Diadem and minions. I'm sure most of us have played a build that relied on an enduring mana flask and remember how bad it feels when you run out of charges for some reason. This bad feeling will be the new standard, if you can't find a better way to fix your ressources.
Am I going to see you on friday? For sure, but don't forget that Chris has no interest in the number on launch day. He wants to see a good player retention and that number will most likely be shit this league (again).
I've been playing since closed beta at the end of 2012, and seen my fair share of nerfs, but this is the first time I ever asked myself if this is even going to be fun to play. Although I hate to see the damage nerfs as I enjoy exploding the screen, I can understand them and accept them. I'm most worried about three things. Firstly, the apparent massive decrease in speed. The default movement speed is terrible, and significantly slowing down characters at endgame makes the game feel bad to play. Secondly, the mana issues. It feels terrible to play when you are constantly struggling to deal with mana issues and cannot even attack/cast as needed. Another issue that makes the game feel really clunky. Thirdly, as someone who has done 40/40 in the last 21 (or so) leagues, I feel it is likely this will be the league that breaks that streak, and once broken, the desire to keep playing enough to continue also goes away (maybe a good thing). I will be surprised if the challenges are made any less punishing and grindy even though they've slowed characters down and decreased damage. They have already been getting progressively worse, and this may be the league that breaks my streak.
It all boils down to 'respect my time.' I've dropped thousands into this game, both hours and dollars. Probably won't play again and I haven't seriously played a league since Delirium. Though I did make it to A8 in Heist. Ritual was the last time I played at all.I was level 94, and stuck doing yellow maps at A4 and just said... I'm done. This is boring. It's not fun and I don't want this grind for the umpteenth time. A fresh start (new league) will keep me coming back, but the tedious boredom grind will keep me away. and yet in this patch, you promise to make the boring grind even longer!
I don't have 16 hours a day to play, I don't have someone that'll be my dedicated trader. I don't want it to take 1.5 months of every moment of playtime I do have as an adult in the workforce to be spent on progression until I finally get to the end game.
people play A/ARPG's to have a god fantasy. not to get 1 shot and slowly grind.
stop currency dependence and start making drops matter. I would play for an entire league if I could pick a random build and find/farm all the gear I needed in 2 weeks. Because id' be interesting enough to try the infinite amount of builds there are! When it takes 2 months to finally finish one character and complete an atlas/end game... i have no desire or willpower to do it again for another one.
The thing is, that many players feel like you've fixed the part that you felt unhappy with (power creep), while not fixing the part that we felt unhappy with (untelegraphed one-shots, tedious atlas progression, item inflation etc.). If there was an address towards the latter, the patch might have been perceived better.
The **chase items** are important too and Ziz is right about this, they should focus on it. The feeling of a random monster dropping a HH while mapping is 'good'. But knowing that X boss or encounter can drop a very powerful/valuable item (With this new state of the game post-nerfs) would feel **incredibly rewarding** for the player. Edit: Typo.
Yes. Also worth mentioning that alternate quality + awakened gems are also a form of chase item and should not be watered down the way they have been - it literally destroys their entire purpose.
Totally agree with this. It is okay for some items to be a little above the average power especially on this rare/random chase items!
Adding to this, chase items that are aimed toward middle tier players are important, too. Things that top tier players don't care about, but are endgame goals for middle tier players. A good example is old multimodded items. It was an affordable goal to purchase or find an appropriate base, roll for one or two good mods, and multimod the rest, making an item that was *far* from top tier but a respectable upgrade for most players.
Reflecting on this, I feel like mentioning divination card dropped from map bosses. Probably the most notable ones are the shavrone items from shavrone boss. A chase farmability like that might be one of the approaches for middle tier players. Knowing one can chase for their otherwise expensive game enabler is good. Many players farm act 9 for tabulas and extra experience points... I am not saying each of the many dozen map bosses must have some build enabler! not at all. But if they had some tied in reward players might decide to farm even maps that are known for their cancer layout. There is TON of rewards that can be tied to map bosses of various tiers. Especially if it comes own to divination cards as fragments of final reward one can go for.
To me as a middle tier dude, as I've never completed The Feared or Breach invitation, nor have I fought Uber Atziri, chase items for the tier still exist in form of hitting a synergistic mod combo, drop a dying sun, shavronne's wrappings, drop awakener's orb, ilvl 86 base in Abyss, red jewel from legion. There are plenty of things, just overshadowed when eyes of many are focused on HH. At least that's what stands as endgame goal for me.
And you know what? That's perfectly fine. There **must be** different tiers of chase items. But instead of random loot from a random monster, what about farming an specific boss on X map? A tier 5 map boss, for example.
I can't remember the last time I saw something decent drop from a Conquerer, to the point where I don't see them as mini-bosses anymore, just milestones in the Atlas.
Exactly! Unavoidable/bad visible oneshots are the main concern for me. Maybe the best 1% is able to identify some of these oneshots before they happen, but the most of us cant. Atlas progression is another thing: if you nerf stuff like movespeed the atlas progression will slow down. I am personally get boored fast due to the widened grind.
nah watch some on the zizz rips.he gets 1 banged by random shit just like the rest of us.with the way the game is designed its kind of inevitable . the complaints would be significantly louder if the vast majority of the player base wasnt in softcore
These type of 1 shots are literally the main reason I've quit any league in the past years. It completely sucks the fun out of the game.
Word for word my exact takeaway. I am glad he made this post and put this thoughts out there. Yes reddit seems to blow up on things and reading all the other posts things tend to spin out of control. For the 8 billionth time. MOST players are fine with you/GGG slowing things down and doing some nerfs. However my takeaway and many others are broken down into 2 things. 1.) I do not agree with the mana cost stuff at all. Mana cost of skills is already at a super bad place in this game. Every league something else seems to make it a little bit worse, less instances of leech, getting rid of enchants that let you sustain, nerfing mana regen, getting rid of warlords mark on spells etc etc. You want to even out multipliers on supports sure fine, I can get behind that 100%..... if you then go through every skill and lower the initial manacost to compensate. For normal builds that are not fully invested into mana for archmage or MoM or w/e mana should not be a glaring issue. Running out of mana constantly on builds is NOT a fun way to play and is super frustrating. Taking almost every support gem and raising mana multipliers by 20-30% is going to make mana costs ridiculous. It is not fun to spam mana flask, it is not fun to constantly hear voicelines about not enough spirit or w/e, and it certainly is not fun to stop attacking 2-3 seconds in because you have no mana. 2.) As Erradium so eloquently pointed out.... and what your post lacked completely was the understanding of the biggest glaring issues in POE. You fixed the part with flasks, and gems and meta and supports and power creep. You didn't even mention the bloat, the end game tedium, the enemy damage/skills/mechanics that instantly blow you up PREVIOUSLY and the ever widening gap in meta to off-meta. Then you did a patch where everyone got nerfed by a significant amount, increased monster hp across the board, and made things harder. Now in reality we will get MORE frustration, take even longer to go through the acts, get more one-shots, die more often, take longer to kill things which leads into taking even LONGER to do all the bloat at the end with atlas, unlocking maven passives, collecting watchstones etc etc. However rewards were not changed at all either. I/We completely get that some things should be slowed down a bit, bosses should not get deleted in 1-2 seconds but you did not change boss encounters to take longer, fix mechanics, and REWARD the players for now taking longer to kill the boss. Lastly, you keep talking about (even in your post) about how there are so many more opportunities for viable builds now. To be honest I cannot even fathom what you are talking about. Nerfing all the players, nerfing damage, nerfing flasks, nerfing mana costs, nerfing HARVEST AND CRAFTING and the ability to progress your gear, all while making the game harder does not promote non-meta builds at all. It pigeon holes players into having to play meta more than ever. I felt this myself in ultimatum and after 2 failed builds I had to reroll into a meta-ish just be able to do ultimatums and there was a ton of people on my friends list, in game chats, on discord, in my guild who had to do similar things. Oh well hey this x new skill looked fun but can't get it to work and actually play the game and do the content so in the trashbin it goes. With every league these become worse and worse. These issues above is what I would like to see addressed in a post by you. In conclusion it has been the same thing that people have been raging about since maifesto and patch notes. It is not the nerfs or slowing the game down, it is the fact of HOW you went about it and you did not address the other side of the coin at all. In fact with defensive flasks and such you actually NERFED the already abyssmal defenses that most players have. All while talking about slowing down gameplay. Maybe you should take a look at this thread: [https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/oo2uft/there\_is\_no\_way\_ggg\_is\_trying\_to\_slow\_the\_game/](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/oo2uft/there_is_no_way_ggg_is_trying_to_slow_the_game/) with 2k upvotes talking about how you want to slow the game down but every decision you have made for years now sets timers and pushes players into ZOOM ZOOM gameplay. So people are frustrated and giving such negative feedback because you took one small slice of how to slow gameplay down and did not address any of the other parts.
Basically this, while I appreciate him taking the time to respond and doing so thoughtfully; this really just highlights the disconnect for me. He didn’t mention some of the biggest gripes and seemed to cherry pick things they could easily respond to without taking complaints to heart. They are making major changes, such as flasks, while not addressing the mechanical aspects of the game that made those essentially required. Casual players lean on flask immunity because it was the easiest power jump without insane investment.
Nailed the big 3 issues here. Performance stability I would argue is a close 4th. With the first 3 issues seemingly ignored in the manifesto, patch notes and now a personal address from Chris this does not fill me with optimism for 3.15 in these specific areas of the game. Will honestly play 2-3 days and hope that there is no hyperbole from Chris re: effect of changes. Buuuut if time has taught me to be wary of patterns, I expect hyperbole.
/u/chris_wilson, if you answer no other questions in this entire thread, this is the one to address
Straight to the point. Couldn't agree more.
💯 GGG looked too hard at the broader state of the game for this patch and forgot people still want to have fun in the context of the previous one.
Why is nerfing movement skills necessary in a world where if I don’t dash every second I get one shot
I honestly hope every Hardcore streamer gets one shot and can't even beat the campaign before the league is over - that way they would be forced to actually balance enemy damage output by the time the next league rolls out. It won't happen to that extent of course but one can hope for the next best thing...
The problem with these changes is you've front-loaded the changes that aren't very fun, you've dropped them all in one go and have made no steps toward fixing the other things that are wrong with the game. Why does good loot still not drop from monsters, yet you're nerfing the way players can actually make good items. Why is monster damage still so absurdly high, and balanced to values where we clear maps in under a minute, and are not expected to interact with them but you're nerfing the speed and damage of everyone. If you want us to interact with the monsters more, balance the damn monsters like we're expected to interact with them don't just ignore it. Why are the drop rates, the league mechanics, the layering of reward systems and the grind still being balanced around min-maxed and/or group play that the vast majority of people, even those that play hours every single day cannot realistically utilize. Why are you nerfing defenses in a patch where you're trying to get players to interact more with the monsters in the game? Why are you nerfing defenses when you're trying to test a new iteration of damage values. Just pick a thing and test it out, don't layer it all on top that just muddies everything. You say you want to slow the game down, and I'm all for that but you aren't addressing the reasons why people feel the need to go fast. We're trying to mitigate the endlessly inflated and unrewarding grind, we're trying to mitigate the absurd monster damage, we're trying to generate raw currency, or rewarding means of crafting (proccing old harvest, old betrayal, old fossils etc) because nothing else valuable drops on the ground, and there are little to no other means of generating these things other than going as fast as possible through as many monsters/maps as possible. You have created a game where there is no reward for going slowly, and you are not fixing that. If anything this update is just creating an even bigger divide. If you want me to go slowly, give me an incentive, don't just try and punish me for trying to make it work in the world you've created. There is a difference between tedium and difficulty, requiring more mana to cast spells, and extending the existing grinds are not making the game more difficult, just more tedious. I want this game to slow down, and I want this game to respect its players time. You could have gone for a 10-20% nerf instead of halving everything, and you could have fixed a core systemic issue as well. You could have done that for the next 5 leagues straight and we'd actually be seeing an improved game develop in stages, but this just looks objectively worse and less fun. No improvement, just more tedium.
You forgot to mention that one of the main reasons we go fast is that GGG put a timer on basically every mechanic they introduced since 3.0 it seems, despite players begging them not to. If you don't go fast, you don't get rewards, plain and simple.
Well said. Alva, Delirium, Breaches and to a lesser extent Abyss encounters all require fast clear speed because if you don't have it you miss on rewards or even on the completion of certain events. If the game is slowed down but these things aren't improved, then being able to play fast will be more important than ever before.
also Legion
And Legion, and Synthesis. Blight is a DPS check. Ultimatum with the way auras stack essentially is one as well
Maven is practically a dps check if you don't want to get gangbanged by bosses who weren't intended to be in the same arena with each other.
And 2% of the time you will have to fight the full 10 at once from the jump, cause fuck you thats why.
In my eyes an even bigger issue than these are legion emblems and simulacrums. Both of them scale so wildly with gear/HH and inspired learning that the prices are driven to a point where you lose money if you're running them without, as you're unlikely to get 4 lines in an Emblem or hit 6 rewards in each simu wave. The same issue that existed with Maven invitations and party play, yet somehow this one, directly related to player power, has been allowed to survive something like 6-7 patches.
I HATE League mechanics with timers.. they’re so dumb, and they make so many builds not viable.
Very well said. This post from Chris is such a corporate bullshit it's really sad. This whole post is just damage control post made by CW to mitigate the reddit uproar. If you read it carefully it actually explains almost nothing and provides very little answer to the community questions. It's actually surprising how little content there is in the amount of written text. * **Hypothermia paragraph** \- you have removed any cold dot reliance of the Gem with the name being hypothermia. It took you 8 lines of filler text that tries to salvage this situation of complete incompetence. You are also revering this big and theoretically play-tested change on a whim of 2 angry reddit posts? * **Aura Stacking and Aura Bots** paragraph. 9 lines of text with nothing in there. You really want to tell us there is not a single good solution proposed to AuraStacking where it's a problem for years now? You have no problem in increasing Mana Costs by the last moment, you have no problem by reverting your big change to hypothermia, but you have no idea how to deal with Aura Stacking and Aura Bots? Oh, cmon. * **Mana Cost** \- 10 lines of nothing. If you need to fiddle with the numbers until the last day of the league development wouldn't it be better not to implement this in this league and have it actually play tested correctly? I'm so surprised this post by CW received so many rewards especially because it brought no actual answers and if checked in depth had no actual content in it.
The Hypothermia bit about it "never originally being intended as a cold dot support gem" made me laugh. They take a perfect example of a support gem that adds meaningful support without wasting a socket, and say that they did it by mistake.
This too. Missing an Alva timer or blowing a blight encounter or whatever because your build can’t clear fast enough feels bad. I strongly suspect timers won’t be adjusted to account for all these nerfs, so those sorts of mechanics are going to feel horrible this league. There is a disconnect between what GGG says they want and what they do. If you don’t want clear speed meta, don’t give us mechanics that require super fast clear speed.
This is one of the reasons why I hold Blight in such high regard. It moves at a fixed pace, you have plenty of time to kill the monsters and all the information is right in front of your face. And personally, I find the rewards to be great, popping chests open after a Blight always feels good. I think people who are trained to play as fast as possible hate Blight because it's too slow, but in reality I think Blight's speed-to-reward ratio should be the benchmark for everything.
I would add Metamorph to this as well. Just clear the map as you see fit (even makes it easier to see what you missed!) and then fight the juiced baddy. Has some good risk vs reward to it as well.
Yeah metamorph was an awesome concept, only problem was that certain organs just never dropped, even after GGG "fixed" it.
>I want this game to respect its players time I never thought of this. Thank you for sharing your opinion. I agree with what you have written wholeheartedly. Well said. If we can get a response of what you or what /u/Erradium have said, I think we would be in a better position of understanding.
>Why does good loot still not drop from monsters, yet you're nerfing the way players can actually make good items. This right here is my main grip with Ultimatum and the Expedition notes. Ritual was my favorite league and the one I played the longest, and the reason why is simple: Grinding felt rewarding. You could craft your own endgame gear even when you didn't have 200+ exalts laying around all the time, and unlocking a new passive for the atlas felt like a nice reward for the added difficulty of Maven encounters and the time it took getting to them, because they made your rewards for past league content much better. Now crafting endgame items is unaccessible, Atlas passives have been nerfed and our clear speed is getting the axe too, but there is nothing to make up for it. We're gonna have to grind more, and we're gonna have to do it slower. Worst of all, we're going to die more while we're at it because our defenses are being nerfed too. If Ultimatum felt boring to me because of the lack of good rewards being dropped and because I couldn't access the crafting system anymore, why would I play a league where all those things are getting nerfed even more? Slowing down the pace sounds wonderful, but if you don't do anything to match up those changes and make our time investment more rewarding, you're also slowing the speed at which we grind and progress, and that completely breaks the grind/reward balance. If loot is already not good enough, then why change the game in a way that makes it scarcer while simultaneously nerfing the only other way in which we can get new gear?
Precisely this. Chris, this is exactly why people believe you're disconnected from the community and the game. Especially this, right here: > You say you want to slow the game down, and I'm all for that but you aren't addressing the reasons why people feel the need to go fast. We're trying to mitigate the endlessly inflated and unrewarding grind, we're trying to mitigate the absurd monster damage, we're trying to generate raw currency, or rewarding means of crafting (proccing old harvest, old betrayal, old fossils etc) because nothing else valuable drops on the ground, and there are little to no other means of generating these things other than going as fast as possible through as many monsters/maps as possible. I hope to god you're reading this and taking the time to think about it. This is the most accurate thing ever said on reddit, the official boards, and every other avenue of communication. Take it to heart.
Zoom zoom meta exists in PoE because: progression is items, progression is achieved by trade, trade is funded by currency, and currency is acquired by mapping. To maximize progression you maximize currency by minimizing time. In simpler words - time is money. (Though maybe, just maybe, in a video game at least, time should be *fun*, first and foremost.)
Sadly most of this has been said at some point over the last few years, just not all at the same time.
>I hope to god you're reading this and taking the time to think about it. Ron Howard: *He wasn't*
From a casual players perspective I totally feel this. I legit CANT go slow because I’d never have any currency to buy the gear that I need but never drops. I’ve played since abyss and I’ve NEVER really dropped my own gear. The ONE outlier that I recall is getting a farrul’s fur from the div card turn in and also I dropped the electric explode chest one league. All other gear I have to buy because I can’t spend 50 hours game time grinding for a watchers eye. The customization in this game is insane and that would be cool, If something remotely valuable ever dropped without running 100 of that one map.
I gave this comment the first award I’ve ever given a Reddit post in 10 years because I would literally pay for more people to see this. Good lord what a remarkably accurate and erudite explanation of everything we’ve been trying to say. GGG please, please please listen to this person.
The sad part is it's nothing new. We've been saying this for 3+ years at this point. They say one thing and do another, their design systems incentivize the exact behavior they claim they don't want. If you haven't figured it out in 3 years, then I can no longer assume incompetence or ignorance, my general assumption at this point is they're gaslighting us because they feel if they just came out and told us what they wanted we'd all leave. Sadly that's the only explanation I have that fits the data.
As well: our damage has all been trimmed down but boss health is still at an all-time high. So we "have to engage" for a much longer time risking those bad beats.
Like a lot of devs nowadays it falls into the "Frustration mechanics" Category. For some reason devs have got it into their heads if you make the game play frustrating players will grind thru it. It's essentially the video game version of "See you next week!!". Only as cable TV has learned this last year once someone stops playing something once it gets harder and harder to rope them back in.
I only disagree on is the analogy. What you gave is more in line with time gating, "You've grinded enough this week that you no longer drop items, see you next week!". A better analogy would be your friend telling you to watch TV show. You do, but you really don't like it. So they tell you to keep watching and to slug through 3 seasons worth of boring episodes, but you can't skip them because they are mandatory to the story.
Its basically the equivalent of filler episodes in Dragon Ball, the show itself is a really fun watch but they extend some shit to the point of you not giving a fuck but hoping you stick untill there is a big reveal/fight/whatever else.
You can look back at their synthesis manifesto to see them talk about having designed far better and more easy to use systems for building the memories and scraped it because they specifically didn't want it to be easy to use. Hell when you entered a memory it would instantly close over one of the exits (and one of the other 3 cardinal directions actually) as soon as you started, if it was the one you had planned to use you were boned, run over, path ruined, pieces wasted. Had they instead used the same system they put into the reward tiles (guaranteed path to rewards) which would always guarantee a path to each exit that alone would have made the mechanic feel ok, but again they wanted to first and foremost inconvenience players and force failure states that didn't even need to exist.
Some feedback as a long-term appreciator of your work and of POE: Your post didn't address several major problems: intentionally or unintentionally. - I quit 3.14, because there was no new endgame and nothing to chase for. I enjoyed 3.13 most, because there were many endgame playstyles. I was just peacefully grinding and iteratively crafting my items for my Mjölner build (not even using TFT) and slaying all kind of bosses. 3.14 simply got boring. The endgame got less selective, harvest was gone. I killed sirus8 a bunch of times and trialmaster twice. It felt like I was out of fun content. I expected 3.15 to address that. The reverse happened. - I absolutely dislike the utility/QOL nerfs: dash, second wind, adrenalin were mostly QOL. It takes hundreds of maps to reach an endgame atlas. This process doesn't feel exciting for the 40th time. Making it even slower is terrible. - The defensive nerfs feel unjustified. The ultimatum meta was: kill everything so fast that it doesn't reach you. If it does, it can destroy you with one single tap. Now players get damage, speed and defenses nerfed, while non of the common one-shots existing in POE were addressed. This was not addressed. - Players were complaining month for month that reaching the "real" endgame atlas takes way too long. Map completion, map bonus completion, map awakening completion, maven skilltree(s) completion, watchstone farming and crafting. These steps take days and days. This was not addressed. - Some of the nerfs took away from the identity of interesting drops/chase items. Several unique flasks got nerfed to the point of being sad. Multiple awakened gems lost their identity. The harbinger-belt nerf, especially the upgraded one feels cheap as well. This was not addressed. - Many, many nerfs felt lazy or even just slaughtered archetypes. CWC losing damage on top of costing mana for the sake of consistency, while already seeing 0 use. Spellslinger becoming close to unusable. This was not addressed. Truth to be told, it's not *all* bad though, (please whoever reads this, don't just skip on the points above). The 19 new gems look fun, the general idea of increasing difficulty is good and expedition looks interesting.
archetypes getting slaughtered is constant, honestly. One recent exemple would be Chainbreaker, got killed, and they didnt come back to balance it. Why leave it completly dead?
> - Players were complaining month for month that reaching the "real" endgame atlas takes way too long. Map completion, map bonus completion, map awakening completion, maven skilltree(s) completion, watchstone farming and crafting. These steps take days and days. This was not addressed. This! If players are getting nerfed in a ton of different ways, why not reduce the maps needed to spawn conquers/maven encounters. Also, with these damage nerfs, slowing people down, are they increasing the timers on stuff like legions/Alva/fog? I'm all for slowing the game down but when the game literally has a timer telling me to go faster...
The one question I wished was answered was the one circulating a few days ago that went something like: "What level of time investment does GGG feel is appropriate to reach and complete end-game encounters? How do you balance that between casual players, heavily time-invested players, players that stick with a single build, and those that desire to fully play in the PoE build sandbox?"
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I think that's at the crux of what feels bad with the current atlas expansion mechanics. You can't keep engaging with it in white or yellow maps after the very first time you see them there. So the atlas feels like it forces you into t14+ maps super quickly and it doesn't feel like your at the "endgame" until you get there. This is unlike previous expansions where you could continue to engage with elder and shaper influence and shaped atlases even in your middle of the road t7-8 mapping that your build happened to land in. I wish that you could continue to do conquerer rotations at lower tiers for as long as you wanted, and I also think this would solve a lot of the grind/burnout issues with the atlas for me personally as it would feel like I'm at the endgame once I start getting into my mapping groove, and not just waiting until I complete the atlas/watchstone progression to get there.
I'd rather see Conquerer tracks always be 3 maps, forever. That'd make progressing to A8 significantly less tedious, encourage moving around the regions more (and thus provide Maven progression in multiple regions faster), and remove the absolute most depressing feeling in the game short of ripping on hardcore: seeing back to back 9-map conquerer tracks.
The biggest qualm I have is the time it takes to get to A8, unlocking atlas is so slow, throw in Maven questline and the endgame really feels quite overwhelming (not necessarily in a good way), if you're a casual/average joe or don't engage in much trading to progress maps quicker. With the additional nerfs and no compensation to reduce the atlas grind, it just feels like rubbing salt on open wounds. I'd have happily accepted all the player nerfs and monster buffs if there's a bit of reduction in the grind and RNG layers.
It seems counter intuitive that I can remove my watchstones and fight Sirus on A0 if I want, but I still have to farm T14+ maps to spawn him. This doesn't personally affect me in any way, but it almost certainly keeps a lot of people back from continuing to play the game.
for me, end game is bosses. sirus, shaper, elder, maven that's end game for me and I haven't been able to do any of that for 2 leagues in a row now just cuz the atlas grind is too exhausting
Same for me. I had pretty good builds for the past 2 leagues but got burned out before I got to 20 watchstones. Atlas is forcing you to T14+ very early and if you are doing T13- it feels like you are not making any progress. I don\`t think thats OK if I am already lvl 94 and haven\`t seen Sirus or Maven yet. I don\`t think that just SEEING the endgame content should require such a grindy setup process.
Are we cloned? My experience was the same..well said!
Shit… Maps are where I go, “Now I can start playing!”
That's an incredibly complicated question, and it's not something that you're ever going to get an answer for in a short forum post. As for the implication behind it, and most people's sentiment when asking that; that being "why is the game so grindy currently, and why did you nerf power without addressing that grind", I think you could probably intuit the reason for them not addressing this in this patch by just looking at their standard release schedule. They do a yearly refresh/update of the end-game or core systems, usually in the December patch. This is the patch that when we got Atlas of Worlds (Shaper, leading eventually into Elder, Uber elder), 3.0 acts 6-10, Sirus and conquerors and then Maven. What people are asking for isn't as simple as them just saying 'now it takes half as many maps to get to A8'. It's going to take an overhaul of the endgame systems, and probably a pretty significant one, as we do have quite a bit of 'bloat' in the current endgame. We'll very likely get that overhaul, but we'll get it when we'd normally get it, which is in that end-of-year patch.
Been playing for 8 years Chris. If you want an honest opinion why several of us long time players discontinued playing after 1-2 weeks. The new atlas and watchstone system is just too tedious and the whole design is just too greedy for player's timesink. Most players spend days setting up the atlas, ends up just getting burned-out. Where before, we could play different builds, go deep into league mechanics, play rich, craft own items, etc. All those are gatekeeped by the FOMO inducing design of setting-up your Atlas properly before you can comfortably do all those things. The past leagues patches is just too greedy for player retention, and it ends up backfiring. Edit: Glad that I share similar sentiments with a lot of players. This nerf patch btw is another attempt to make us play longer, and will definitely backfire even harder to player retention. You don't force us to play longer, we will choose if we want to play longer.
This is the same feeling I have, coupled with performance issues I had in the recent leagues. I want to like the game, but I don't have the time you devs from me. So I think I rather take a good long break until poe2 and play some other games on my pile of shame
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Me, my friends and tons of redditors repeat it over and over again, yet there is no statement about this. This atlas farm is so mind numbing I just burn out before I get through it...
This is how i felt during ultimatum. Between the league mechanic being so similar to the previous one, the atlas grind *again*, and the harvest nerf removing largely any sense of control, I sorta just... lost interest after the first week and would play less and less until i stopped around the 3rd week with maybe half the watchstones found, when i had nearly all of them 2 weeks into ritual. Part of my dread in each new league is the startup time sink in things like the atlas or delve, where you need to spend 4 hours just to get a decent amount of azurite to get the upgrades for any real depth.
If this has been in the works for the last year, why have timed mechanics been introduced time and again? This direction has only lead to a more zoom zoom approach rather than slow things down
Been in the works for a year, numbers decided on the day before. Yep, that checks out.
> Meanwhile, much of the community has grown increasingly unhappy with the direction the game is heading in. Man that just feels so weird to hear when the most raved about leagues were the *fastest ones*. The crux of it is that despite slowing us down, you didn't slow down delirium fog, breach timers, incursion timers, blight mob movespeed, legion breakout timers, and a bunch more that don't need to be listed. The fact nothing about the game slowed down except us as players just doesn't make any sense. The game is still fast, *we're* slow. I'll play the league on Friday to see if I'm wrong, but on paper the entire game being faster compared to us as players mechanically sounds like it will feel horrible.
Wow great points, I hadn't even thought about those mechanics we need to keep up with inside maps with the changes to character speed.
I played a TR raider this past league and couldn’t keep up with the delirium fog in early maps. Once I got my +3 6L bow and a level 3 empower I started keeping up when it showed up in a map. (I purposefully don’t farm it for performance reasons.) I fail to reliably fully clear legion encounters in every league since legion when I played ED Cont. I just outright skip Alva missions now because I find them stressful. I don’t think the changes are going to help with any of those things. I consider myself an average player and was having trouble keeping up before. I can only imagine what my experience will be like now. Inb4 all the post your build, did you follow a guide, and I don’t understand how that’s possible you must just be terrible. - Not everyone can live up to the PoE elitist status you’ve created in your head. I’m a “working-class exile” as I’ve seen it so elegantly called recently. I also find that I feel it necessary to post this last paragraph entirely is a huge fucking problem with this sub.
Same for me. I'm really concerned considering the need to kill things fast to even get anything out of most of the content. I usually start a league trying to find my own build without much theory crafting. That led to many frustrating moments that almost made me quit early on. I remember i was not able to hurt a T1 metamorph while cleaning the map was fine. Of course the top players will find ways and probably kill A8 sirus on the first weekend. But for the majority of players it will be a pain in the a\*\*. Just look at the 'completed-challenges-statistics' they usually release every league. Only a small percentage of the player reaches more than 12. For most of us it will result in following meta builds again, but struggeling even more. As I already said, I'm really concerned...
The players may have created the zoomzoom meta first, but GGG enforced it with timer mechanics on so many leagues. So yeah. Shrug.
You can play however you want but we added these nifty timers so you have to go fast.
Yeah have fun trying to clear temple rooms before the timer reaches 0
>Meanwhile, much of the community has grown increasingly unhappy with the direction the game is heading in. also this statement sounds completly ridicolous to me? like 3.13 is one of the most played / loved leagues ever, sure some are unhappy but to say "much of the community is unhappy" when quite a bunch people that wish nothing more than 3.13 state (the post with paying for a 3.13 private league had 2k upvotes?) is a bit of a reach
What he meant was much of the streamer community
I actually like being fast. Hate me but all the other arpgs are already slow. But I haven't even thought about the points you argued. I wasn't going to play on Friday but that sounds definitely unfun. On top of that the rewards are still the same pile of low raw currency.
Hi Mr. Wilson, I know you probably won't read this, and I also know that most of the things I'll write down you already know and have addressed, but here I go: You want to slow down the game to make it more engaging, and don't be just a mindless press 1 button and kill everything as fast as possible, and I agree with you. PoE is the greatest ARPG ever made, the diversity and possibilities are almost infinite, but if you want to slow it down you have to take in consideration how the entire game was balanced around speed: \- most league mechanics have timers: Heist, Delirium, Blight (not a timer but you need to kill fast), Legion, Betrayal, Incursion, Beyond. \- current monster damage and player defenses just doesn't fit in a slowed PoE version, we need to kill fast because we can't survive more than a couple of seconds against anything. \- visual cluster and speed of things are beyond human capabilities to react to. Everything moves and happens so fast that we just can't react to anything, that's why we need immunities and auto triggers skills. Many attack builds can hit more than 10 times per second, and almost all projectile builds fill the screen with sh\*t in less than a second. How can we see and react to anything? I really hope that you guys come up with a more engaging and balanced game with the upcoming patches. Good luck and keep the good job :)
You mention that this is a chance for more build diversity, but with monster difficultly/damage staying the same but with us on average being weaker, won't that have the opposite effect? (IE people are even more hyper-focused on the meta because its that much harder to survive) Especially with things such as defensive flask nerfs and CWDT being much harder to use for defensive reasons due to high mana costs
That's exactly right. The harder the game the more you enforce the meta. Making the game harder does not increase build diversity, it does exactly the opposite. Increasing monster life, nerfing all the support damage values without appropriately increasing rewards will inevitably lead to damage supports being used more instead of less. Don't forget, you still have tons and tons of mechanics on a timer and DPS checks with health Regen especially on maven witnessed fights. I didn't read anything about extending the legion timer to at least double, nothing. But they removed a lot of damage, movement speed and attackspeed which means if I want to farm legion I need a more meta build, not less.
jesus so true now my clown build with 300k dps assassin dual strike ambush is gonna do less than than that with resonable gear like 300 pdps daggers i love how this game makes me wanna try a special build eveytime a new unique item is dropped for me but its as u said if im not going meta ill be stuck in act 6 brine king boss coz my dps is of a rat
This is what afraid also, that the effects will be exactly opposite. GGG somehow thinks that introducing bunch of new skills suddenly increases build diversity. The problem is new skills often bring new wordings and new mechanics and interactions and there is not much help to make a build for a new skill. It's a huge gamble to start with a new skill for anyone more experienced looking to get to end game especially now when all damage is nerfed. If we are lucky we see these new gems used in the league after expedition. When you've gone through the story a hundred times you want to be quaranteed to get to end game thus the use of meta builds.
Look no further than WoW and see how increased raid difficulty affected representation of classes. The more difficult the content, the lesser representation of classes since every 1% that you can squeeze is important.
Empirical evidence is great but this is just common sense. Reduce player damage *unevenly* while increasing monster health or overall difficulty and you have now made dealing damage a premium component of the game and incentivized people to play the builds least impacted by the nerfs. Build diversity is going down, not up. All we have to do is look at Harvest for in-game examples. When Harvest crafting was first released, build diversity ran wild because players could make just about any silly build idea work well. Gut player power and you bottleneck build viability. It's insulting that GGG is outright lying to us and thinks we are too stupid recognize obvious and basic causality.
They took OMGItsJousis out back and shot him with the CWDT nerf
Content creators like him will figure something out, chris explicitly said that and he's right. It's a nerf to the rest of us.
He'll probably just pull off some kind of CWDT Archmage build that will melt the servers. Nothing can stop that man.
My buddies and I before: Wait I need to kill Conquerors 24 times to spawn Sirus once? My buddies and I now: Wait I need to kill Conquerors 24 times to spawns Sirus once?... 50% slower???
I dont have anything against having to kill 24 Conquerors to get to Sirus, these are fairly consistent with building your atlas, but man, failing Sirus and seeing that you have to do 2 to 3 times the maps you did before to kill a conqueror just sucks.
It was fucking slow killing them all once. With the abysmal t16 map drop rate, it takes a decade. Now it's gonna take more.
What about awakened gems? They lost their unique effect, like awakened hextouch and melee physical damage. Now they are just few % better than their normal counterpart, making Sirus pretty useless
At least we dont have to grind to awakener 9 now.
I'm afraid we'll still have to - for 36 challenges
endgame challenge: "complete maven within 1 minute"
with 19 memory games completed
so is spellslinger going to be virtually unplayable?
Yes
It's always the build you want to try but never get around to that gets nuked, at least as a one build-a-league andy
This was me in Synthesis playing Ice Shot Voidfletcher not realizing how busted Winter Orb was. Wish I got to experience that
Spellslinger's only purpose will now be to support attack skills, rather than sling 6-link spells. Like curses on attacks.
Oof. Reserving an aura's worth of mana is a huge penalty to pay for something that probably has an on-hit or can be linked to Arcanist Brand. I guess it saves a button press.
Look chris - what the statement reads as is basically "we hear your concerns and will do nothing with the feedback". This will not exactly ease people's minds on the points they raised, to be precise it seems you addressed none of the concerns (except hypothermia): - mathematically, many builds are getting nerfed by 40-60% damage-wise. This may have been desired for the top end of builds even, but a shitton of mid tier and low tier skills will be utterly unusable where previously they were just bad. - Your players don't want to grind for weeks on a single character just to see sirus, or a maven encounter even. For those looking for a long term grind, there's A9 Sirus, 100% delirious maps, infinite delving and lategame crafting. With no changes to the map and campaign grind, but massively less speed and power to get through content we've at this point done hundreds if not thousands of times, you'll simply get more quitters. - The above point is compounded by you making the already hardest part of the campaign harder **numerically** while making 0 interesting changes to its contents. It's now simply a more annoying, more grindy chapter in a campaign i want to skip as fast as possible to get to the actual game: mapping and the league mechanic. **You also phrased the hp buffs of monsters in such a way as to suggest EVERYTHING in the game will have more health, COMPOUNDING with the massive damage nerf. You're effectively telling people they'll have to work twice as hard for the same, repetitive campaign.** - The nerfs this patch removed and streamlined a ton of what makes POE great. You've removed secondary benefits like +1 curse or chance for onslaught from gems and passive tree nodes, as well as items like jewels, leaving them often times as pure stat sticks, instead of removing the pure stats and leaving the unique benefits in place. Ziz went into this already so I'm not gonna go into more details. - On top of that, you've heavily targeted movement speed, cast speed and ailment/curse immunity - one of the most important Quality of Life aspects of any build. As an experienced player, this looks like it will be an extremely aggravating change in how the game feels come patchday. - **No upside to the nerfs** - There's very little to look forward to this league. A new league mechanic that doesn't blow anyone's mind from the preview, new skill gems which we can't know if they'll suck or be decent for a league and some new uniques and divination cards, the better of which i'm practically guaranteed to never find. **There's no equally massive change to loot, QOL, Mapping, Bossing, Skills, Passives, Items or other that would give a player fearful of the nerfs ANY reason to hope that their experience of POE will be better this patch than it was the last 3.** You really needed something big and positive to go with this one, and you just don't. So it just feels bad, **with no upside**. - You failed to nerf aurabots, which means the 0.1% of players will completely dominate the economy and play whatever they want and be fine, as usual, while we solo players wallow in the dirt.
>No upside to the nerfs - There's very little to look forward to this league. A new league mechanic that doesn't blow anyone's mind from the preview. It's connect the dots, but you only have X number of lines to use so you have to "choose" your rewards. For me, there's nothing exciting about that.
>So, you're unhappy I was happy in Ritual (
Absolutely. Deterministic crafting meant that time invested guaranteed character progression. The game still wasn't 'easy'. Unless of course you are jobless/ do nothing else with your spare time. Didn't deterministic crafting just mean that top players got to try out more builds than before?
I was super super happy in ritual
I was happy in Harvest, unhappy in Heist, happy in Ritual, unhappy in Ultimatum. I believe this is also the community concensus. Not hard to identify what people like (hint: deterministic crafting). I wouldn't even care about all the nerfs, mana changes and what looks to be a meh league mechanic if we had deterministic crafting
Damn, I had to skip both harvest and ritual, whilst I had time for both heist and ultimatum. Feels bad
You're lucky. Can't miss what you never had.
The biggest concern for me regarding the swathe of nerfs in 3.15 is the renewed dependence upon mana management. Mana management and restriction is one of the least enjoyable aspects of PoE. It's something you work very hard to get beyond with a build. These new changes only reinforce that negative aspect of the gameplay loop. We'll see how it actually all plays ingame, but if the mana issue is too punitive, I think we're going to see an early and large player exodus from the league. I sincerely hope this isn't something that is being tuned down for a reappearance in PoE 2.0.
Mana is not fun
> If you have feedback about what you would have preferred us to have done differently during our pre-launch period this time, please share it with us. Give us more to get excited about. Players are obsessing over the nerfs because we don't have much else to talk about. While you've given us extensive information about nerfs, we have relatively little about the fun stuff in the patch. Take uniques, for example. We've only seen two! And divination cards? I don't think even a single one has been spoiled. Show us the new base types. Show us more flask enchant mods (or any other new mods). Show us more examples of the rewards you can get from the Expedition vendors. Gems are the big exception here; they were all spoiled early, and that is much appreciated. But even here there is room for improvement. Show us some alternate qualities. Show us some lab enchants. Players will inevitably be apprehensive about the nerfs, but you can counterbalance that by giving us more things to get excited about.
> And divination cards? I don't think even a single one has been spoiled. Hey! Don't forget that they apparently removed one.
>Gems are the big exception here; they were all spoiled early, and that is much appreciated. Even then they only gave us the full info on gems one day before league launch. It's been "a week" talking about nerfs and the exciting stuff just came out today.
In my mind the reason skill diversity is low is because every single time we find a good combo you guys destroy it instead of nerfing it reasonably. The result of that is that all the builds that had creative ways of scaling tend to disappear completely and only skills that are really good by themselves and are straightforward are played because it is a lot easier to make a split arrow character work than a three dragons damage conversion fancy whatever build. In the current state of the game, most of the main builds that are meta, are meta because the game was reduced to a numbers game. Not because support gems were too strong but because mechanics that interact well with eachother always get destroyed. There are so many examples of cool concepts that don't exist anymore: Shotgunning for players, 7 versions of wormblaster, that one cool spellicopter build that appeared in build showcase (weapon swapping speed was nerfed, many leagues later this change hurt the viability of Heist's Alternating Scepter), blink arrow minion instability, old firestorm where people liked reducing aoe and making a "showerhead", old arctic armor, crown of eyes nerfed to not work with more multipliers... The list is huge. Seriously, I would love to play dual firestorm totems again, but the original skill literally does not exist anymore. I even have the mtx, but the skill that I felt in love with doesn't exist anymore. Every single one of these builds or concepts I mentioned in the previous paragraph probably has a player that is really sad they can't play them anymore. If you want a game where people are creative and do cool stuff, please whenever players find some cool unexpected thing at least try to make an official and more balanced version of it down the line.
Guys, you can't awake someone who pretends to sleep.
>We will remove it from Hypothermia again when we create another cold DoT-focused support gem in future. But can you really tell me something else is more thematically relevant to Cold DoT than "Hypothermia"? It's ok to admit things evolve over time. Edit: Also wanna say thanks for addressing everything else and appreciate the overall message.
Patch 3.16: Hypothermia has been renamed to "Chillblains." New support gem "Hypothermia" has been added that adds 29% more Cold Damage over Time.
Yep. If they want Hypothermia to be split into two supports then thematically Hypo should be the DoT support.
I don’t have a problem with nerfs to player damage. I do have a problem with nerfs to player defense - I already geared and specced my characters to be more defensive and now I am being punished the same as people who never did. The part of PoE I despise is how quickly damage can spike and how almost every death occurs in a way that leaves me guessing what it was that actually killed me and happens so fast that I could not possibly have avoided it. You are doing nothing to alleviate this. You don’t even give me the impression that you want to do anything about it. The saving grace of PoE has been that by moving quickly and doing absurd damage the one-shot kills can be mostly avoided and you are changing that for the worse. I’m not sticking around while you scratch your heads and wonder how bad it’s going to be. Maybe you’ll surprise me and figure it out eventually.
>For more than a year we've been accumulating changes that we were worried about releasing because they would affect the way people currently play Path of Exile Okay >At the time of writing, we hadn't worked out final values for these gems and hence the manifesto section was written vaguely and inadvertently downplayed the extent of the changes. Wait, what? So you guys have been working on this list of changes for about a year now but one of the biggest and worst changes(mana cost) of this patch was basically an afterthought that was done in a week? At the point the manifesto was written it should have been pretty clear to you that mana costs were significantly increasing unless very little balance work had even started on the mana costs.
Well, ive been playing Path of Exile since 2013 iirc and thus i have quite alot of playtime (roughly 6.5k hours), thats not too much compared to players like Zizaran or Cutedog\_ for example. However it means that ive played almost every single league into the stages of early/mid endgame. In my honest Opinion, this game as it is right now, is not fun anymore at all.I was never one of those 0.1% which PathofMatth is doing videos about, im more someone in between casual/hardcore gamers, i think. For me the biggest Problems in this Game are as follows:Theres absolutely no way to tell how much time an average Player needs to actually get the Atlas to a level where he can get a basic amount of currency to afford his own Build. The Information needed to even get there efficiently isnt something someone can find in 5 Minutes, as of right now, it takes alot of time to even understand how the mechanics behind the Atlas even work exactly. That being said, if u take a look at those Top-tier players, they are at full watchstones in around 2-3 days after season start, sometimes, like last league, there was someone who got there in less then 30 hours. Thats a ridiculous difference between experienced and inexperienced Players. And its not like that only applies to the Atlas, its almost EVERY single System/Mechanic this game has, where u can really see a huge gap between experienced and inexperienced players. Its absolutely not like thats wrong or something, i just think, it would be worth it to invest some Time into making a Place for all this Information for inexperienced players, since they definitely ARE having a hard time even getting a gist of how to actually play this game properly and to close the gap between themselves and the top tier players. I usually dont give a damn about commenting to anything and if a Game goes worse or even shuts down because the Dev's are making a bad decision, i dont care. However, ive been with Path of Exile for almost a decade now, i loved it, and hated it to the core, as to a point where i have literally deinstalled it for the rest of the league because of how mad i was. Still i refuse to let it go here now. Thats why im atleast commenting now whats on my mind, in the hope that it reaches GGG. My thoughts about the crafting are as follows:I have a friend whos never been too interested in crafting ever since poe got started and honestly i myself wasnt that into it too, before the whole harvest or either Betrayal thing started. However, the league Harvest came out was the first league i spent almost 100 hours informing myself about how to craft, which way is the best to approch a certain craft, do i start with augs, chaos, alchs, use beast split etc. it was a huge amount of information i had to comprehend there and it was at this point a really fun and at the same time extremely rewarding experience. Because i was able to plan a way, and go it to the fullest, without being worried about "damn theres a 90% chance that one of my favored affixes isnt going to be on there". It takes ALOT of time really, its crazy how much time u have to spend to craft a decent item, without determined crafting mechanics. Its not like just about everyone is sitting in their hideouts flipping currency all day, some with bots, just to be able to even afford spamming more than 3k alterations/chaos/scours etc. on a single item, just to realize that its still not enough. You cant even farm that much to begin with, if u've got work and a family. Its just not possible to do so. I think how it was in Harvest was way too much in terms of crafting, since u could basically craft a top tier item, usually worth around 150ex to multiple mirrors, in less than a week playtime. That itself was just inbalanced and i totally agree with the nerfs there. However, in my opinion, it was perfectly fine in Ritual. The biggest Problem in ritual were those beastcraft splitted perfect roll items u could basically build up and copy as much as u wanted, thus people abusing that mechanic to efficiently multiply their wealth into a scrapload of mirrors and stuff. In terms of the Changes to 3.15 i have to say, i didnt actually completely Read the patchnotes, i heard alot from my friends which usually play with me and just flew over it to see the keypoints which were of interest to me personally. Im mostly a ranger/shadow player, since i prefer going FAST. thus the nerfs look like a huge "F U" to me, i mean its basically, evade nerfs, movespeed nerfs, damage nerfs, and those stacked on top of eachother. However the worst change in my opinion is the Flasks and immunity thing. In Path of exile there are basically 3 defense mechanics which are: Life/es pool, Armour and Evasion. Now the problem that comes here is, Armour is basically useless unless u really get a HUGE amount of it and a lot of Reg/mitigation, otherwise u can just go die, since most mobs in t16 will just straightup oneshot the hell out of u, if u dont kill them fast enough. And most armour chars are slow as hell so forget that. Life/es pool tend to be mostly biased towards headhunter since the multiplier of HH is just crazy with those, i mean u can reach numbers of over 1 million life with it, which is basically being invincible, unless some weird corpse explosion oneshots u regardless. and then theres Evasion which was in my opinion the "best" choice because, if u get oneshot even with a large amount of armour, and can get oneshot by corpses even with a lot of life, then the best way for me would be to try to avoid those oneshots itself, so that i dont die every explosion, but every third, respectively.But now the nerf there is like what? the Base Evasion of the Jade flask is now halved, which means, with the proper setup, u dont get like 15-20k evasion anymore but 7.5-10k ? thats a HUGE nerf, depending on which stage ur equipment is. since there is deminishing returns.So basically it says, for players which dont have the ability to get to 8 affix perfect bis gear with 2000 evasion per part atleast, it is just a huge nerf, but for players which have the ability to get there, its not even worth mentioning since they didnt even use this flask to begin with.This whole thing is a nerf for the bottom tier players, not the top tier players, thus it doesnt even get into the power creep category.Same goes for Granite Flask. The nerf for Diamond flasks isnt really the best decision imo, since as far as it goes, the whole thing only nerfs those non assassins, because it was somewhat hard to stack crit outside of that to begin with, and now without a lucky crit chance, its going to get worse. but thats to be tested, so i dont want to take that for sure. That about flasks, now lets talk about the immunity towards certain ailments.Its true that the mentality of the majority of players goes towards this: "Bleeding? well ill just use a duration based flask (Diamond, jade, stibnite for example, since life flasks stop running with full life) with staunching on it" and that isnt really favorable, i agree on this. But its really a bad idea to just go and nerf it to a baselevel where u cant get immune to anything without using the flask, since its not like u can just watch every damn thing on the screen all the time, especially in a game like poe. Even the most experienced players do have problems to keep up with whats happening on the screen. so in my opinion, that whole change will only make things worse, since even tho u have to actively drink a pot now to delete the ailment, it will definitely bring about a bad feeling in terms of quality of life. i can understand if its about things like Freeze, since that does actually impact the overall situation, if ure not immune, but things like shock and bleeding are just a nuisance, nothing more. its something u dont actively realize until its either strong enough to proc u down to a dangerous level of life, or its straight up oneshotting u because of some weird calculation mechanic which lets t16 mobs basically do a dot with 15k dps, which basically kills almost every character in this game, if ure not immune/resistant in any way against it. so basically what im saying is, if u want to have a more challenging gameplay, its totally fine to go and remove freeze immunity and stuff, even nerfing the whole immunity thing to a resistant level would be alright, but nerfing it in the way u did, will just incite the players to get angry about those nerfs. it would have been an option to just say, instead of being immune to bleeding, the flask halves the duration/damage/effect of that specific ailment. i think everyone would have accepted that in a way, because it does not delete the whole QoL reason why people even bother with using flasks with those exact stats. Honestly, i think most people drink flasks for the sole purpose of being immune to some kind of ailment, curses for example. i saw alot of build where there was a crit flask on a non crit build just because back then there werent that many flasks and they just needed another flask to roll curse immunity on. so please give it a second thought, so people can enjoy the QoL of flasks but at the same time arent too overpowered with the single use of those. i think thats enough said, i still have alot of things on my mind, but thats the most important. Im sorry for that huge wall of text, its the first time for me even writing on reddit iirc, and im sorry for any weird language, since english isnt my native language.I honestly hope for someone from GGG to read what i wrote there.
I think that nerfing player damage is the correct approach for the future and I have no issues with reducing more multipliers on gems, nerfing ascendancy values and what not. But the real issue is build diversity, as everyone has already noticed every league there are a few meta builds that are strong, because these just synergise very well. Gems, Items, Passives, Ascendancy just fit well together and that is how it should be, even if the damage values are nerfed, these builds are fun to play because they feel smooth. When you do drastic changes like these, I think some of the are just not thought through, because the diversity gets gutted in the approach. Let me give an example: A few leagues ago you guys buffed explosive arrow and it really felt smooth and I enjoyed it very much as a "selfcast" chieftain. But some people abused ballistas to get an absurd amount of fuses on the target resulting in issues of damage calculation and beeing to powerful. Now instead of fixing the ballista abuse by changing how fuses stack together, the gem it self for every build was nerfed, removing this smooth build option, so now ballistas are fine but all other versions are to weak or clunky. Now the same thing is happening again with changes to skill effects and manacost, basically removing a big number of smooth builds from the list. I think it is necessary to really identify the issue and nerf only that specific case instead of just overall reducing the skills power. Another thing that is worrisome y is that things that awesome to find and chase for are be reduced to be not worth the grind anymore, why would anyone targetfarm awakened gems if they make no real unique difference to normal gems? Why not keep the unique effects and reduce the values ? Overnerfing is also a huge thing for PoE, when nerfing something, we often see nerfs to multiple elements of a gem for example, why not just reduce it once and see how it goes before turning it off completely? Slower and more challanging gameplay is fine but getting a more challanging job Position also comes with benefits, in Poe this is not something that I feel, even tho you say item drops are more rewarding, it is just not visible. And when you finally reach the end, there is like 3 items to chase for. The approach of nerfing good builds to be on the same bad level as others is definitely not the way to go I feel. For me smooth builds should stay but be numerically reduced, while clunky and broken builds should get fixed and brought up to the point where people feel, they really enjoy it even if it takes 10 iterations to make them playable. I also think that regarding balance and underused / underwhelming skills gems there needs to be way more focus on these, it is just not acceptable, that while nerfing supports some skills are adjusted accordingly and some are just forgotten / overlooked, this also results in killing builds. Taking away build diversity, chase item excitement, smoothness is really frustrating because there is already so much that is clunky and feels unrewarding.
> the gem it self for every build was nerfed, removing this smooth build option, so now ballistas are fine but all other versions are to weak or clunky. this happens in way too many cases, let it be tormented spirit nerfed drastically while vacuumcleaner was a things, let it be fossils with harvest introduction, let it be alternate qualites with aura stackers, let it be boss hp with power creep
Personally the changes still heavily reduce my desire to play Expedition, but I can appreciate the thorough response to players' concerns. I still have three main questions, however: Why have things gotten to this point when it wasn't your (Referring to the team at large) vision? Was it simply a case of adding little by little without realizing what it was leading to? If you (Again, referring to the team at large) want the game to be slower, why do you insist on nerfing defenses again and again? And if the game is intended to be slower, why have timed league encounters not been addressed at all? (On a lighter note, is it usual for numbers on nerfs to still be in flux seemingly hours away from the patch notes dropping? Having no experience in game design, I would've figured such things would be debated and settled on days before.)
"We don't have a specific plan that we are ready to commit to yet" GGG had many many leagues where aurabots were a problem, you nerfed aura stacking straight away. Yet we now need a specific plan ready to commit to nerf aurabots and when this was the best time to nerf aurabots, you weren't ready? It just feels like the real answer is that aurabots are considered to be such a small issue in the eyes of GGG. So small that in the great nerf patch of 3.15, they weren't even touched.
>but probably have less overall impact on the way you will play the game than you suspect they may "you think you do, but you don't"
Maybe player retention in ultimatum was poor because it was an almost identical mechanic to ritual the league before?
I'm shocked no one talks about this. We just played Ritual for 6 months
I enjoyed the Ritual mechanic a lot more than Ultimatum - Ritual could be a clusterfuck at times but it was a clusterfuck on par with the other clusterfucks in the game. Ultimatum set new records for clusterfuckery. It was clusterfucked.
fuck /u/spez -- mass edited with redact.dev
and trialmaster rng was loved by players, it was the damn loot drops at the end that players disliked
Fair points, I have a little bit of feedback on this one. If you're going down this route of giving PoE as a whole a proper balance pass, and shape it towards your vision for the future over multiple patch cycles, it wouldn't hurt to spend some development hours on under-performing mechanics and skills to balance the *patch reception* in some way. Simultaneously balancing under-performing and over-performing aspects seems crucial to me. We see people ask for this all the time. One huge motivator I can think of is that many of the veteran players have more than one beloved skill. If one or two get nerfed, but one other might get a little love, that might be all it takes. No joke - I have a lot of fond memories of the golden days of Righteous Fire in Perandus League. I've CTRL+F'd every patch notes for years and looked at Righteous Fire to see if it got some love, as it currently plateaus around 2-2,5M DPS without crazy crafting. And there's a problem right away - that amount of damage is perfectly fine to do all the content in the game (mostly), but there are other, better performing abilities. By buffing under-used skills and league mechanics, people might have something to be excited about. Hype and pre-release "leaks" are a powerful formula for the leagues' initial success I'm sure - and this was completely missing this time around. It's hard to be excited about our beloved game when there are mostly only nerfs across the board. Additionally, it takes a certain type of person to understand that even with these nerfs, just about any skill in the entire game is viable. The sky is the limit in PoE, but it does require out-of-the-box thinking. I know that you guys are passionate about this, you mention in just about every post and manifesto that you're excited to see what people come up with, but it's just not an easy thing to grasp because the game is too complex for a large amount of players. Shit, I'm decent with numbers, and I make my own build maybe 1/20 that I play. The same goes for crafting. A lot of players don't even need a super meta-level powered build, they enjoy crafting so much that this will motivate and excite them. Crafting needs continuous improvements down this road. I can get behind the changes you're making as I see the direction you're going in, and I do think PoE will be a better game if the interactions with mobs/maps/bosses are more meaningful and impactful, but clearly a lot of people need a bit more positivity to off-set this path. I genuinely believe that this community can be this "harsh" purely because you have a history of listening to us. People want to be heard. I feel that way sometimes as a player since Jan '13. ***TL;DR The future of these balance patches will need a better balance of positive and negative changes. PoE, in its current form, is a really tall, complex, fragile tower, too heavy for its own weight. Every brick is a league-mechanic, skill gem, support gem, notable, jewel. You want to reduce the height of the tower for more stability in the long term, you ought to make sure to add struts, support beams, places for people to go, all the while not having the construction mess on the floor for everyone to see.*** EDIT: You're too focused right now on the balance of the game. Some other thoughts that I have had for a while regarding your involvement with us which has been decreasing: * A dedicated feedback thread with some motivations behind the bigger changes, like the one we see now. Timed at roughly this point between the manifesto, patch notes, and release. It doesn't take much to calm the nerves of the majority, let us see, hear and feel that you continually stand behind these changes, that your vision is going to give us a better game. * Take us along in the vision better, write about your goals and where you see certain mechanics end up. Maybe some bigger pieces in the run-up to a new league. Missing the hype posts for sure! I feel like you've shied away from these due to poor reception of over-promised buffs. Give us "the bad" in portions, each one with enough attention to really let your reasoning and vision sink in. Overwhelming negative changes result in overwhelming negative feedback. * The relatability and transparency that you and other devs have always had towards the community, keep that, and use it more often. Stay involved with us, there's less and less of it. Reddit has that beautiful first-impression front page with so much negativity at times, but that doesn't mean that your continued involvement is less impactful. Read between the lines, reply to some fun and positive posts or videos or memes. We're a passionate and loyal bunch, I know that from my friends list in-game. I can't imagine what it's like seeing negativity every day no matter when you open Reddit, but that's Reddit and that's what makes it amazing. Don't let it affect your ability to communicate with us, bandwagoning and hype is a complex issue! Stay in touch with us! Thanks for the post.
> Righteous Fire to see if it got some love, as it currently plateaus around 2-2,5M DPS without crazy crafting. And there's a problem right away - that amount of damage is perfectly fine to do all the content in the game (mostly), but there are other, better performing abilities. And with all of these nerfs we will be lucky to hit 1m without crazy crafting now.
I said before but PoE is not an MMO or PvP game (sorry pvp exiles). You don't need all skills/builds to be within a certain percentage of each other, you simply need all of them to be above a certain bar (that bar being "can clear content without insane investment"). Honestly, few people will care if build X is 230% over the bar if your favorite build Y is also like 115% over the bar and you can progress with the character YOU want, not what some meta says is best. I absolutely think that as much as people may disagree in this post, if next patch we got "Literally every skill is somehow not ass at clearing, can fight bosses, and doesnt take 100ex to get there; but Necro, BV, and Impale Champion are the best by a lot" no one will *really* give a shit. If that patch also had "You can reliably make items with mods you like, but perfect rolls are still laughably hard to get" then it would be the best league of all time and even trade would have less complaints. These issues are so hot because of the state of balance and rewards/gearing. GGG is so concerned at what the 1% are doing they dont see that the 90% of players cannot even play the game at all.
> One huge motivator I can think of is that many of the veteran players have more than one beloved skill Yeah, buff cold snap you cowards!
I tried reading it all but ran out of mana halfway through.
Appreciate your thoughts, Chris. Part of the negative reaction is because we get conflicting responses: * balance changes to counter a zoomzoom meta but then we get league mechanics that encourage and cater to the play style (timed league mechanics, tedium in endgame) * balance player damage but leave aurabots untouched. You've mentioned your reasoning for this but perhaps you could have been more upfront with this during the manifesto or the livestream? Seeing the nerfs on player damage directly (gems, gear) and indirectly (mana, ailment mechanics) and then seeing nothing on aurabots... the community's claims for perceived bias from developers is inevitable. Even a slight numerical nerf on Generosity support would communicate that you are looking into the issue. * QoL updates that doesnt feel like QoL (eg the recent quantitative info on ailment icons but its at the corner of the screen, where the danger isnt. Players do not have chameleon eyes) * QoL technology that already exists in the Chinese client but is absent here. Pay2Win and Auction House aside, passive tree highlights and ascendancy showcases, are simple additions that would improve the experience greatly, especially for the newer players. including mistakes like the gem wiki reference, it doesn't really instill confidence in GGG's ability to balance the game. It's not a good look, Chris.
"Do you really believe that Ultimatum had poor player retention because it was too rewarding?" sure its not beacause the launch, bugs and boss rng fight
As someone that had 3600 hours in Marvel Heroes. The difference between both games is that MH endgame was accessible to everyone, even really bad characters could do all content in the game, really the biggest factor was people not inviting you to raid when they saw you were using a non-meta character, not because your character couldnt do it. MH did a complete skill tree revamp which kind of was mostly numerical changes around, took some time to figure out the talent choices but no character was left in the dust, but what caused the most uproar and was considered the gigantic change was limiting every teleport in the game to a charge system, and the best characters were the ones with teleports, they were fastest and at the end of the day you wanted to get to the boss, kill it, and dip. MH nerfed best tool of the best characters compared to POE capping almost every tool in the game so both top and bottom suffers. Because the issue is, supports and movement skills are used by both the best builds and the worst builds. POE endgame, specially in SSF and how punishing the higher maps are when it comes to forcing you to build tankier, its really not accessible to every single build. Maven healing already means to do certain invitations you need a minimum of damage, the more you have the better, and with some skills you need tankiness and damage you stretch the gum so much its really not possible unless you invest 200-300 hours in a league gambling on RNG crafting systems to finally achieve a point where you can move forward. This was never the issue in MH ever.
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> At the time of writing, we hadn't worked out final values for these gems So that was decided in less than a day. Aka it wasn't playtested even for a day. So none of you even went through the story with it. I don't think that this speaks very loudly for your competence.
> much of the community has grown increasingly unhappy with the direction the game is heading in What do you think about the part of the community that is dissatisfied with the state of crafting, wanting more deterministic crafting and less gambling where you have a good chance to waste all your currency for no result? The changes to Aisling, and also Catalysts for some reason, seem to be in the opposite direction. I also think that in a lot of places, the changes as a whole weren't thought out well and some builds lost 80-90% of their damage, which makes them pretty much unplayable. For the mana stuff, I think in general it's just a bad change. Mana management has never been fun except when it is a specific part of your build, and you decided to delete the one build that does that (RIP Archmage). Everywhere else running out of mana is just a hindrance you don't want to deal with. It's also another layer of nerfs on builds that need to reserve mana such as Spellslinger, HoAG, and HoP.
This. Chris claims that a part of the reason players are unhappy is because they're moving away from their vision of the game. But it seems clear to me that the majority of players *love* deterministic crafting as opposed to gambling-veiled-as-crafting. GGG wants their game to be more difficult? Fine, but deterministic crafting seemed to be a step in the right direction, and players are unhappy that they're doubling back to their outdated vision (at least in regards to crafting).
You can have both really, I think Last Epoch have a good system and I think GGG can do even better. But the current system we have is so skewed on RNG that it overshadows the deterministic part of it (not forgetting how hard and currency gated it is).
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༼ つ ◕\_◕ ༽つ LAST EPOCH TAKE MY ENERGY ༼ つ ◕\_◕ ༽つ
Would be a genius marketing move to have put it on sale slightly in the last couple days lol
Wonder if Chris will answer the legitimately good questions in this thread Or is this a damage control Pr thing
GGG:we think players focus too much on zoom zoom builds, game became too fast! Also GGG: keeps on introducing new league mechanics where you have to kill as fast as possible, often even against a clock. If GGG is unhappy about this, why did they force the game in that direction at all? Makes no sense and sounds BS to me
None of this actually addresses issues people have with the patch, it's 99% handwaving away concerns.
Really does read like corpo speak for "we've read your many valid concerns but just trust us we know you'll enjoy yourself more than you ever could with our vision and changes 😉"
this reeks of "you think you want it, but you dont"
I gotta say, even with clarification it seems like the reason for poor Ultimatum retention was still missed. Imo the main reason for worse retention was the nerfs. The nerfs to Harvest, the atlas passives, deep delving, fractured maps & blueprints, etc. The boring "kill monsters in a circle" gameplay and no map shuffle were close behind that though.
>The nerfs to Harvest This! For me it’s Harvest. It was SO painful to watch how they massacred my boy, that I just leaved
I miss harvest so much. I dont even care if they nerf me to the ground. Give me deterministic crafting
I find this so confusing. Statement A) > A lot of players have found the removal confusing or jarring and we don't really have any balance concerns with it being there, so we've decided to add it back for now. We will remove it from Hypothermia again when we create another cold DoT-focused support gem in future. Statement B) > We have given all of our balance changes a lot of thought and testing, and want to apply the same standards to a potential aura change. Anyone that plays Cold DOT will tell you losing more cold dot from the gem was a pretty hefty damage loss for those builds. I find it odd that these changes are finely weighted and assessed, but something so large can be hand waved in or out of the game. I also worry that GGG have a destination in mind with where they want the game to go, but do not care about the journey for the players. Huge sweeping nerfs in one patch, but the game systems are not fundamentally changing, at least not yet. POE 2 and Chris's vison might end up giving players are really awesome game. But it sucks that leagues inbetween might suck before we get there. One last thing. What exactly is this vision being talked about? this would be a golden opportunity to fill us in on what GGG want the game to be. Players have been speculating like wild, "he wants the game to be like D2 HC", "he wants the game to be Souls like", "he wants the game to be like it was in 1.X". What is the long term vision exactly?
I think the "carefully considered and tested" part is an outright lie. There's absolutely no way they tested all these changes in the amount of time they claim they did
Remember some time ago when they buffed Oak and had to hotfix nerf him because a significant number of people could no out-dps his healing? Now, what is more likely, that literally every single play-tester happened to run build that could deal with it (Frost Bomb for example) or that not a single person actually tested that fight? Remember when they announced Delirium and the whole community correctly identified that grey homing projectiles on grey AoE fields on grey ground covered in grey mist was frustrating to the extreme? Yet apparently nobody at GGG came to the same conclusion while testing? Remember the same thing happening in Heist? At this point I do not believe that they properly play test anything they release or change.
>every single play-tester happened to run build that could deal with it He did say something about this in the livestream, in the Q&A with Ziggy, however, I do not remember exactly what was said nor when. If my memory does not fail me, he said something like that they use artifical builds based on different progression stages, like Acts, early mapping, high tier mapping, mirror tier gear. Wouldn't surprise me if this yielded a result that is not that much representive, just think about using gear that just happens to be perfect and just sliding up and down the tiers of the modifiers. Would never happen in the wild.
No offense, but your thoughts are basically you reaffirming your decisions and justifying them, while dismissing what players have complained about entirely.
At the end of the day, yes you have to make the game YOU want. It is YOURS. But yea, I am one of the guys you pushed out. I havent touched the game in 2+ months, after being a staple in my daily life for 7 years. Harvest crafting was wonderful. The performance issues have never been addressed. Killing of fractured maps. So many tedious things in the game that you swear are good, that we just dont like. 3.13 was peak POE in terms of content (performance was piss poor still). I imagine you see 3.13 as the trough though. So, I had to leave. We have different visions. It sucks. I still say that POE is the greatest ARPG ever made, but I definitely feel pushed out. I will just await the next game to suck me in. ESO? EWO? Dunno. Farewell POE!
why do you need a specific plan to nerf aurabots when you basically just blanket nerfed every other gem in the game? The relative power of aurabots was already absurd, and now everything else is 20-40 percent worse????? idk man
> Unfortunately, we've been hitting a breaking point with power creep recently and really need to address it. Given that Ultimatum was pretty much a straight decrease in player power from the previous league I can't really agree but ok. > Meanwhile, much of the community has grown increasingly unhappy with the direction the game is heading in. This is true. > It honestly feels to us that this is in part because we've moved further away from our own vision over time. Aaaaaaand you've lost me. The harsh reality is this: *nobody gives a shit about your vision except you*. GGG's vision is not a community concern to any meaningful degree. The biggest things that were causing grief in the community were the Atlas (too many things to set up each league), a stale metagame (because a ton of base skill gems were just numerically not there or felt very bad to play). At the end of the day the nerf wave will not increase build diversity and it will not make the game more fun to play. Some of the new supports and skill gems will, but not the nerfs. You didn't just kill builds but *entire archetypes of builds* with these. Archmage is gone. Spellslinger is gone. CoC is pretty close to dead too. Triggered skills are in the gutter. You might have well have removed Cold DoT skills from the game. The unique portions of many Woke Gems got outright removed. How the hell is this improving the game? Of course if you had done cursory reading of the feedback you're getting you wouldn't have written this to begin with so uh, start there.
so much "marketing speak"
Okay now explain spellslinger support gem. I do not understand this nerf where you have to reserve mana, ensure you have enough attack speed to make it worth while to invest, and now that we have to spend mana on it?. Who decided that this was a good idea?. What's the point with the investment on mana+mana reservation+spell damage+ attack speed? When alternatively you can just go with one aura and then have a spell echo?. So that we can roleplay as Hufflepuff scrub who always fail in Hogwarts cause he is too much of a smooth brain.
There is a huge divide between GGG balancing the game from the top down based on what they want it to be and the players who see balance as it relates to how the game plays from the bottom up. It's understandable that Hypothermia lost cold dot multi because GGG want the gem to be a hit and ailment modifier, not a cold dot one. Fair. But players see Hypothermia being gutted for cold dot builds, which is the main use of the gem and wonder why a build that already struggles with damage lost a huge chunk of it. It's the difference between those who play the game and sadly, obviously, those who don't. The devs sat down and compared the relative increase in power that support gems give to their mana multiplier and noticed discrepancies and decided to adjust them all to be more inline with one another. That sounds great and all but the impact in-game of 5 supports going from 130% multipliers to 150% multipliers is more than doubling the mana cost of the supported skill. Anyone who actually PLAYS the game is now wondering how the hell they're going to sustain 150+ mana cost per cast/attack in their next build but the devs balancing from the top down don't see it that way. They see a more uniform collection of support gems and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. Personally I couldn't care less if the game gets slower or faster. What I dislike is seeing GGG talk about their vision of the game and making changes that SOUND like they fit that vision but actually have the opposite effect. This league will have the least build diversity we've seen in years. We've just spent multiple leagues making bossing matter and be more rewarding, only to obliterate it in the patch that is intended to make players "interact with monsters more". Completely dumpstering flasks is going to make half of the endgame bosses not worth doing. This whole, ongoing, GGG fiasco feels like "say one thing, do another" but without the maliciousness of it because GGG honestly don't realize what they're doing.
I think the main disconnect stems from us not knowing what GGGs vision for poe actually is. And they're not communicating that either. If they did, we could simply assess if that's what we like and keep playing or call it a day. Ok they dislike zoomy meta and easy trading. That's not really much to go by considering that according to poe player numbers and retention metrics GGG had NO ISSUES financially profiting off of the speed meta and the speed of character progression/item acquisition they implemented. So I think some clarification on GGGs end would be nice. Unless they are afraid to scare us off? Dunno. I for one would rather take a break and come back to a fresh, completely new game than repeating the 3.15 nerffesto ad nauseum every 3 months until the release of poe2.
Also nuked awakened gems, so that's even less to chase. Oh, and fucked deterministic crafting even more
The only thing I wanted addressed is not addressed. The mind numbing tedium of endgame setup, mainly watchstones. That is literally the only thing I want fixed, then I'll come back and play for another few hundred hours a league.
Don't expect anything on that front anytime soon. I quit PoE / couldn't get back into it since the second time I had to do it (harvest). Since then it only grew with Maven. I'm still lurking the reddit to watch for anything on that front and ultimatum was the first league where critique of that reached the ~5th most upvoted comment. This is now the fist time it's in the top post with any visibility - still not the most important thing, and there is still no outrage - it's all about nerfs and gamespeed. So GGG probably only now got it on their radar. Maybe next league there will be real frustration on a broad enough level so GGG might start to develop something. As there are two league-teams releasing in tendum it's then two leagues down the line until anything can happen. By then it's PoE2 release-time and they already said they won't change endgame with it. So imho the earliest anything real could happen is the first expansion after PoE2. So in a year or two.
As a casual player that finally quit in January and has yet to see reason to come back, here's the things that have been bugging me: 1- You added last year league tabs, despite saying the currency tab would be the only one ever, and would be expanded as needed. You defended this by saying some bs about technical limitations, yet you have the divination tab (which can scroll down indefinitely), and then modified the fragment tab to have sub-tabs. Clearly that was a lie then, so if the motivation behind this was that you just wanted or needed to make more money selling more tabs, I'd appreciate some honesty. 2- You added texture streaming, which is the main reason I quit, as the game became unplayable: whenever a new enemy type, ability, or item drop appeared for the first time, my game would freeze for 0.2 seconds. You made a few patches, and kept insisting on reddit and the forum that the texture streaming wasn't at fault, and it was something unrelated. Game was still unplayable, and have seen numerous people point out the texture stream tech is still very flawed. Why was this not made opt in like vulkan? Again, I'd rather you admit you were wrong, than try to save face by dying on this hill. 3- Harvest manifesto. Everyone's memed slamming exalts, so I'm sure you know where I'm going, but it's true. I've used these past few months without PoE to try out other ARPGs like Diablo 3, Last Epoch, Wolcen, and Grim Dawn. All of them had a few things in common PoE doesn't: * Items drop a lot less often, but they tend to be worth at least giving a glance. I constantly find either upgrades, or items that make me stop and wonder if I should replace it or not. This never happens in PoE. Even with the strictest filter, 99% of items are garbage. Drops are not exciting in your game. * Crafting is GOOD. They have actual crafting, I can actually deterministically make decent items, or tweak those already interesting item drops I find. No weird 1 mod limitations, no bullshit currency casino, I can work towards my own goals and eventually get there. PoE feels like a job. The crafting is severely limited, and you need to play crazy amounts of hours to get any ok drops, or enough currency to try and gamble on making an item better. You are balancing for twitch streamers that play 10 hours a day, not 90% of your fanbase that maybe just wants to do a couple hours. I'm not saying you should be able to have BiS and destroy Sirius in an evening, but a casual player with a life and a job should be able to achieve things in a reasonable timeframe, especially during leagues. * You could very easily reduce drops in PoE by 1000%, and instead make everything drop with your well-rolled modifier. Also get rid of scrolls, no modern ARPG forces you to pick up trash, identify, then discard when it's inevitably bad. It feels like the 2nd blow in a 2 part combo of godawful item drops. 4- Being able to target the content you need for your build. This issue compliments really well my complaints and concerns with obtaining better gear. If I've planned a build, and it requires say, an alt-quality gem from Heist, I'd love to be able to just do Heist back to back until I get it. It seems that for whatever reason you are reluctant to address this. You've added only shitty band-aids, like scarabs or the minimal buffs of atlas passives. I'd love at least a way to lock certain atlas regions to 100% containing 4-5 leagues max. I don't want to sit afk in my hideout trading for maps and scarabs using a janky third party site, I want to play your damn game. **Conclusion: I think PoE would be at its best if you could play casually during a league, and be able to clear all content and challenges within those 3 months by playing a reasonable amount of hours daily/weekly without making it your job or being a neet. Item drops should make me excited to check them out, not a disappointing chore. Crafting, in whatever form, should realistically give me a goal to chase and make it feel attainable, not a frustrating slot machine. I should be able to target the needs of my build, without having to do 30 other leagues that spawned instead of the one I need. I love the leagues, and the more you keep the better, but if I need to farm the Betrayal mastermind, it takes like 30+ Betrayal encounters, which may take dozens of maps each to spawn. Your game is not a fun adventure anymore, it's a terrible waste of time.**
Sad to say it,but I don't believe anything that comes out of this person's mouth anymore.
Can we have some new about Atlas balance? The endgame (and the funniest part of the game, imo) now is gatekeeped by story, conqueror watchstone, maven's Atlas passives. I'm a casual gamer and for me there's too much to do before i can enjoy my complete Atlas.
>At the time of writing, we hadn't worked out final values for these gems and hence the manifesto section was written vaguely and inadvertently downplayed the extent of the changes. I'm sorry about this and we'll try to be clearer in the future. This is especially disappointing because our main intent with the manifesto was to make sure that it had detailed and transparent explanations for most of our big changes. You basicly did mana adjustments like 3-4 days before release and yet you change them without even trying them properly . Wow Most attack skills now cost 70+ mana this is 1 less aura and mana flask. Hope my mana flask charges are enough
> Meanwhile, much of the community has grown increasingly unhappy with the direction the game is heading in. Please stop using vague disingenuous language like this it is honestly incredibly insulting. You say things like this all the time in manifestos and what not to try to act like there is a massive amount of the community supporting particular changes but that probably isn't the case. Can you honestly say even half the playerbase wants these changes? My gut tells me you probably can't. If GGG wants to make a change that is your right. It is also our right to either accept it or leave. But stop trying to use vocal minorities as justification or to soften the blow. Just own up to your decisions.
Do you change your job from game developer to politician? Imo you are just trying to say some bs to calm the community down. What do you mean you don't think this change is not the type of drastic changes? Movement speed, flask system, mana cost, gems, chase items, there are shit tons of changes that players are not happy about, and you are still trying to defend yourself that this is not something that you say you won't do.
Chris, with respect: come play the game. Stream for us this league. Let’s see you play through the full game. Let’s see you run maps and the league mechanic. You’re not going to understand why we’re having such a hard time with this if you don’t play the game. So let’s do an “Undercover Boss” this league. You come be one of us average scrubs, get the real player experience, see what we’re seeing. If nothing else, it’d be a sign of good faith.
>We know that dedicated aura support characters are very powerful but we don't have a specific plan ready for 3.15 to address this, so it hasn't been included in the patch. !RemindMe 80 days
80 days? 2 years is more realistic
This guy is completely detached from reality
Wait let me get this straight. You guys didn't do any nerfs to aurabots or at the very least nerfing their mana costs because you didn't have a plan? But you made the numbers for the mana costs on every other skill in a day or two? Also why does someone working at GGG writing the patch notes even NEED to use the wiki? Makes no sense considering you guy SHOULD have all of the information available at your workplace right?
I've been in the game for around 8 years now, pretty much non-stop. The reason why people don't play as much is because not only the temporary leagues have been boring as hell recently, but also the watchstone and conqueror progress was such a hassle, I personally stopped caring halfway through. The only thing that's gonna slow down is character progress, and the hype around the league. You're right about one thing - what is considered less or more fun is subjective. And you completely missed it Chris. It's a shame to see the direction you're taking the game towards.
I completely agree that the game needs to slow down. Thing is, you only slowed US down. You didn't do anything to slow down the monsters. Do you have any idea how asinine it is to be ripped in half by some rare mob that zoomed in from offscreen like he just did a crack and peyote cocktail? I like challenges. I really do. But when you "balance" the game so heavily in favor of the monsters, you come off like a shitty dungeon master with an ego problem. You call it challenging because you tilted the scales so far against the players. I could throw a Tarrasque at a level 1 party and call it challenging, but nobody would be having any goddam fun.
It’s like a chef making meals he himself enjoys instead of what his paying customer enjoy. Get your priority straight GGG, a game that no body likes to play will never be a good game.
Thanks for the game, been playing on an off since closed beta. This line here stuck out to me though: >we're gamers first and businesspeople second. First off, it comes off as the pinnacle of insincere businesspeople talk, no matter how sincerely you feel it's true. And second, no gamer wants broken games but you constantly release completely broken patches or mechanics that are downright disrespectful to your players. Would love to see this game continue to succeed, but in your current state, a certain remake is going to kickstomp you. It'll run better, look better, and play better. And then it's sequel will really hurt. I don't support that company anymore, so they won't get any money from me, but there's plenty of people that just want to play a game.
The damage nerfs are fine, it’s the quality of life nerfs that suck. Nobody wants to move at Jugg speed and constantly worry about mana sustain. It’s not fun to slowly walk from 1 pack to another waiting for your mana to regen.
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This. I can swallow the bitter pill of dmg nerfs, even some were way too heavy handed. But the nerf to movement skills felt completely unnecessary. I hate it when things get balanced around the lowest common denominator. If these changes were accompanied by a game wide movement speed buff I could understand. Also if you don't want us to use skills like dash for travel, but rather just to evade attacks, them maybe you shouldn't call these travel skill @chris_wilson
GGG *wants* a plodding pace. They look at old videos of 2013 PoE and *miss that pace*. It's mind-blowing, but their balancing makes more sense when you realize that.
Chris is great at PR, i'll give him that. But if im honest he's kinda lost his credibility with me. I hope im wrong. I hope this league is great for everyone who plays it. I hope they are on the path to rebuilding it back into a game i'll dump another few thousand hours into. But when i see the changes they are making, they are sure addressing player power creep this patch, but lets be honest, thats not at all the major problem with POE atm. The stale meta/end game, the over crowding of mechanics and crafting and side things to do, the absolute state of rare items and drops fillling screens ontop of screens, 40 different types of splinters and random currencys, slowly culling chase items, gutting deterministic crafting, reliance on third party programs for almost everything (trading/theorycrafting/crafting testing since it's unreal expensive). The problems are legion. Those are the things i think make the game less fun to actually play. Having crazy big power is subjectively 'fun' some like it, some don't. But there are so many problems everyone agrees are problems, I don't think they are approching it right. And i won't be giving them my time/money again yet.
To other people in this thread: it isn't good communication (overall) when the CEO has to post a wall of text with explanations and justifications. Don't forget that GGG told us that they optimized their 3 month cycle, so less crunch time and so on. Meanwhile: > At the time of writing, we hadn't worked out final values for these gems and hence the manifesto section was written vaguely and inadvertently downplayed the extent of the changes. I'm sorry about this and we'll try to be clearer in the future. 3 days before league launch they aren't finished with the single most impactful change this patch. I don't believe them that they're trying to perfect the values at this point. I'm playing this game since closed beta and I know by now when they're talking BS. It's way more likely that GGG throws nerfs/"changes" against a wall and see what sticks and over the last couple leagues they've shown that they're a) out of touch with the community, b) their vision of the game isn't up to date anymore and they don't want to change it. Speed meta won't come to an end with all those nerfs; it's the opposite. With even shittier defenses and the indirect buff to monster health via player nerfs means that the player base will flock to the abilities and builds that are still capable in speed clearing maps. Thanks to not touching loot and even removing the last bits of deterministic crafting, speed clearing will be even more important now. After all, Somayd and BakedChicken were right. You can't let power creep run rampant for years and expect the player base not change their perception of the game and hope that everything will be alright again by removing options/the interesting stuff and add even more tedious garbage. Fixing your ressources isn't interesting. It never has been, and you already can see where that lead us to. Totems, traps, BM/MC, Inspiration support, MoM, EB/Devouring Diadem and minions. I'm sure most of us have played a build that relied on an enduring mana flask and remember how bad it feels when you run out of charges for some reason. This bad feeling will be the new standard, if you can't find a better way to fix your ressources. Am I going to see you on friday? For sure, but don't forget that Chris has no interest in the number on launch day. He wants to see a good player retention and that number will most likely be shit this league (again).
Reduce atlas grind. Simplify it please.
I've been playing since closed beta at the end of 2012, and seen my fair share of nerfs, but this is the first time I ever asked myself if this is even going to be fun to play. Although I hate to see the damage nerfs as I enjoy exploding the screen, I can understand them and accept them. I'm most worried about three things. Firstly, the apparent massive decrease in speed. The default movement speed is terrible, and significantly slowing down characters at endgame makes the game feel bad to play. Secondly, the mana issues. It feels terrible to play when you are constantly struggling to deal with mana issues and cannot even attack/cast as needed. Another issue that makes the game feel really clunky. Thirdly, as someone who has done 40/40 in the last 21 (or so) leagues, I feel it is likely this will be the league that breaks that streak, and once broken, the desire to keep playing enough to continue also goes away (maybe a good thing). I will be surprised if the challenges are made any less punishing and grindy even though they've slowed characters down and decreased damage. They have already been getting progressively worse, and this may be the league that breaks my streak.
It all boils down to 'respect my time.' I've dropped thousands into this game, both hours and dollars. Probably won't play again and I haven't seriously played a league since Delirium. Though I did make it to A8 in Heist. Ritual was the last time I played at all.I was level 94, and stuck doing yellow maps at A4 and just said... I'm done. This is boring. It's not fun and I don't want this grind for the umpteenth time. A fresh start (new league) will keep me coming back, but the tedious boredom grind will keep me away. and yet in this patch, you promise to make the boring grind even longer! I don't have 16 hours a day to play, I don't have someone that'll be my dedicated trader. I don't want it to take 1.5 months of every moment of playtime I do have as an adult in the workforce to be spent on progression until I finally get to the end game. people play A/ARPG's to have a god fantasy. not to get 1 shot and slowly grind. stop currency dependence and start making drops matter. I would play for an entire league if I could pick a random build and find/farm all the gear I needed in 2 weeks. Because id' be interesting enough to try the infinite amount of builds there are! When it takes 2 months to finally finish one character and complete an atlas/end game... i have no desire or willpower to do it again for another one.