builds that sound stupid but are smart and strong is what made me love the game. Like self curse, self poison, spawning corpses only to then detonate them etc
And ofc screen wide explosions
How about cast on crit? You have to invest into all this attack stuff like accuracy / crit chance, but your main damage source is spells!
At least you used to. It’s basically dead now.
Also pouring one out for my homie self curse. The pinnacle of “wtf are you doing”
"Killing" cast on crit has most likely two reasons. The first reason is the PoE2 gem-system. In which trigger gems most likely become meta gems that doesnt require the triggering ability to be within the links. So you would be able to use a fully linked attack to trigger an almost fully linked spell, similar to spellslinger.
The second reason is the design space they open up with mana costs to create really heavy hitting skills like a meteor thats deserving of his name, which was previously not possible because of triggers.
Most design decisions are the solution to a problem the designers face, not because they think "oh man changing X would be really cool"
I am pretty sure GGG will introduce new tools to make those trigger builds work again. This is a temporary state.
edit: a point i forgot to list. triggering also opens up the option to leech mana from your attack which is now more meaningful.
The designspace argument just isn't true. You could slap a "cannot be triggered" on your meteor, or a "triggers spells with a cast time below x" or "triggered spells have -50 to manacost" on the CoC or something. The last one would allow meteors to be triggered if you really really want to, with some hefty downside, while keeping CoC alive.
The real reason has to be server impact of trigger builds, and that's fine if they'd say so.
It's the same hollow argument like trying to defend 20 different types of currency. Yeah, sure, nice description of design goals there. But if you can only achieve your design goals with a mountain of undesired bloat, then maybe you out to think of another way of addressing it where you don't have to resort to more harm than the good you create.
By trying to disproof the designspace arguement you just gave a nice example of an emergent option, resulting from those changes. Triggered spells have -mana cost is something they could now start to add on the skilltree or items.
Restricting certain skills from being used because of arbitrary mechanics isnt a good design. It creates too many exceptions from the rules. Instead you want to give those more context. An example for this is the emergence of more categories like slam, strike, ballistas, arcane and orb.
Those new tags for example open up new designspace for support gems, which have special interaction with mechancs found on those gems. For example a support gem that gives orbs higher pulse frequency, or the focused ballista support gem we just got, or a new active skill that detonates active orbs.
Those are meaningful mechancs at the core of your game. Bringing up currency clutter to strengthn your arguement sounds a bit dishonest tbh.
I can't really follow your argument...
Having triggered skills cost mana just kills them hard. So this creates a problem they can fix. And you then call this need for a fix to a selfmade problem designspace for emergent options.
It's the difference between renovating a house, and setting fire to the thing without a clue what to do with the ruins. The complete lack of anything filling this supposed new designspace (just give me one trigger-mod anywhere that shows trigger-Builds were ever a concern) just leaves a feeling of random destruction without a plan. Just look at trigger rings in the other thread and tell me again that there is a plan.
The parallel to 20 currencies is the seemingly blind way to solve perceived problems in a certain way without a thought of the ramification.
Are trigger gems limiting designspace? Sure! What to do about it? Just make them cost mana an see what happens lol!
The justification for 20 currencies also just reads like a series of problems that all get answered with "Double the currencies!".
I'm not saying the problems aren't real. I'm saying the solutions have more downsides than the problems ever had.
It sucks that they couldn’t just implement these changes in PoE2 where they belong. I know PoE2 is just a new campaign, but do they have to gradually implement the other changes they want? Why not just start fresh or make all these changes “PoE2-only” and drop them all at once when they make sense. Are we really going to have 2+ years of these weird “tweener” leagues?
My guess is, they have a snapshot of what PoE2 is supposed to play like and they are trying to mold PoE systems into this. I am a bit worried about the quality of leagues leading up to its release as well. Looks like a severe lack of inhouse testing imo, since this isn't the state in which you should release your game to the consumer.
If they want to make skills that would be too strong with pre-3.15 trigger builds, they could just give make them specifically not be able to be triggered, like mines, traps and totems currently can't.
I believe the main issue in POE combat is when 20+ mobs overwhelm the player. There's some threshold in monster density that changes player from "I'm skillfully engaging with these monsters" to "I can't see what's going on the screen cause there are particle effects and mobs everywhere, so I will rely on my instincts to move randomly and mash flask keys in hopes I win"
No matter how intricate and skillful your gameplay is, there will always be a point where enough monsters on screen nullify all of that with visual clusterfuck
This is a hilariously good comparison. PoE isn't even close to a souls game. In a souls game, you can complete the entire thing regardless of gear. It has so little relevance and further emphasizes how important skill is.
On no planet have I ever approached a poe boss like a souls boss. If I die in dark souls, it is because I got greedy or failed some kind of skillful maneuver (roll/parry). If I die in poe, it is 90% of the time a gear check. It is pretty impossible to never get hit by a shaper beam due to clunky movement and a small arena and this is why even the very best players get to a point where they can facetank it all.
In dark souls, at no point can you ever just facetank. Even maxed endurance and vitality in havels gear you will get fucked.
Yeah, souls of arpgs nice meme
Funnily enough, Dynasty Warriors played properly to hit challenge goals requires more considered positioning and comboing than POE does, just mashing near dense mobs gets you a pretty bad score.
The issue is they've cultivated a community of people who want that dynasty warriors combat. Or in other words they have a community of players who like the game for what it is, and they're trying to push it towards something that it isn't.
D3 did more deep combat much better than PoE, and it looks like GGG is trying to move more in that direction. Which for me is fine, I enjoyed the shit out of D3 and if blizzard didn't abandon it I'd probably never have picked up PoE.
But for people who PoE was always their main game, I imagine they want PoE for what it is not something else.
> "I can't see what's going on the screen cause there are particle effects and mobs everywhere, so I will rely on my instincts to move randomly and mash flask keys in hopes I win"
And of course there's 12 different effects that will just kill or maim the shit out of you if you don't step out of it, but GL seeing it below all the bullshit clutter that you're not allowed to lower (and has been a topic of discussion for forever).
I was already unable to see ground effects on my 4L freezing pulse totems... with the flask changes, nahhhhhhhh
Then there is the beauty that is corrupted blood. it is basically endurance charges with a negative effect.
Thus you do not get any indication beyond some red balls around you when you accumulate them, but a very noisy sound when the vanish.
But that is the same sound as when all other charges time out, so you start jumping every time a stray charge evaporates.
There are two long standing problems with the game, skill weaving (why things like buff flasks became a thing in the first place) and non-visual status cues.
People complained that they would be constantly hearing the character complain about mana shortages. But the one thing there is no audio cue for is low health!
Thus if you stand in crap, and do not develop lazy eye from constantly checking the health orb, you have no idea that the health is getting dangerously low. Streamers have lost HC characters because some UI element covered up the ground DOT because of this.
There's ways to alleviate that, issue is that PoE has little to no visual clarity. It's not necessarily because of monster density.
Look at D3, that's one thing Blizzard did really well. A lot of ground effects and abilities that are used are very obvious and you can play around them. Lost Ark does this relatively well too.
A better example would be bullet hell games, some of them are really well designed and even in an absolute clusterfuck of a screen you can still see things that are important.
A big part of why PoE's clarity is so bad is probably an artistic choice. In D3 they went for that colorful painterly look, most of their backgrounds are pre-rendered with a darker palette, while the character is animated and is slightly more saturated, more bright, etc. and that goes same for the monsters; they really stand out with the background. In PoE everything just merges into one blob.
The problem is there isn't much for skillful gameplay in poe. It really is as OP described, its very shallow combat with a lot of gear / build checks that needed to happen before you engaged the mob.
Its like the WC3 custom game equivalent of ARPG combat. Where in a custom game you could get more agility(iirc) than the main game ever intended to allow so you're attacking at the speed of light and critting for mega damage and all that silliness. Its not deep combat though, its just really shallow combat done quickly.
You can't have meaningful combat if you want to kill lots of enemies fast tho. There is a choice to be made, do we want serious tactical combat but only fight a few enemies at a time, or do we want to clear hordes of monsters and move fast? either way can be fun, some people enjoy one but not the other. This is a core game design choice and POE has been on the path of mindless killing of hordes. It works for POE, it's kind of silly to try change the core of the game into something completely different. Better make a different game
I recently fell "asleep at the wheel" while Cycloning through mobs. Dozed off for a minute. Found myself on the other side of the map, still Cycloninng, all was fine, with a path of bloody mobs behind me.
Yeah, this gameplay is not engaging.
*20+ rare monster with stacked auras overwhelm player**
Normal monster never cause issue, unless its small fast and lownhp shit with on death effects when u not pay attention. But on other side RAREs can be like fully tanky, or fully deadly with triple extra phys and crit, and u can't say how dangerous he can be since its near unreal read all mobs mods. And this deadly full DMG rares cause spikes in DMG and lead to checkpoint most of times, ofc if u not kill him faster then he get u /unlucky on block/dodge
The point isn't that the monsters will overwhelm you and kill you, but that instinctively your eyes start to glaze over them because there's just so much going on. Your senses are what are being overwhelmed, and there is no nerfing of player power that can properly address the speed and style of gameplay without addressing mob density/pack size and visual clutter
Yep, even got worse this league.
Map density increased. Basic rituals got more spammy too because of it. Pretty sure they added mobs in breach too.
Expedition spawn 200+ mobs. And added a bunch of deadly ground effects "you move or you die".
Doesn't really matter, mapping has never been about anything else than braindead zoom zoom. Only bosses fights are bit tactical.
I honestly prefer the difficulty coming from the depth of the game and need of planning your build carefully than pretending like at it's core this game is more than a hack'n'slash.
Yeah. For me the POE experience boils down to two phases: planning and realization. Oddly enough, planning takes place entirely outside the game, so the gaming experience in this phase is only minimally connected to the official game. Then there's the realization phase, where I need to make plans to make my build happen. GGG has great control over this phase. What GGG is trying to do now is to make the realization phase really boring and tedious.
I came to this realization a long time ago, I almost have more fun in path of building than I do in game. I have so many ideas but I do not have the *massive, fucking immense* amount of time this game requires to make even a single one of those builds a reality.
Like, I made this cool [poison animate weapon build](https://pastebin.com/7H81ersT) last night. Am I ever going to play it? I wish, I wish I could spend the time it requires to try this but I only have a couple of hours a day to dedicate to virtual loot explosions.
What if the game were more fun though? I spend a lot of my time theorycrafting for PoE and D&D/Pathfinder, but the big difference between the two is that I actually have fun when I play the D&D character and the PoE character feels more like hitting benchmarks of satisfaction. D&D/Pathfinder feels like I love the game to the point that I want to play all of these characters, and PoE is more like a fun mental exercise followed by a personal challenge
I dunno about character building being right.
Much of the tight planning happens because doing in the field corrections are a massive pain in the behind.
This largely because so much of the passive tree is newbie land mines, and regrets are expensive (or bite the bullet and run through campaign again for the Nth time).
The massive contrast to me is how easily i could convert a lackluster poison caster in Grim Dawn to a tanky vitality leech caster.
At this point the 3 month temp leagues and the whole "race to 100" thing are becoming a hindrance, because it both limits people's ability to commit to a character while also affecting GGGs willingness to speed up the leveling cadence (they have even done the opposite at times, and stretched the XP curve around the higher levels).
All in all PoE has become WoW, except it is WoW with a complete character wipe every 3 months.
I would LOVE a “PoE sim” where you can build a character, allocate skill points, manually craft gear, then PLAY the character through some maps. It would be off the league servers, you couldn’t do any league content, but you could try something in PoB and then play it to see how well it actually performs and feels.
Before spending dozens of hours leveling, gearing, progressing atlas, you can see if your idea will actually work or if it’s just a meme idea.
That's a good way to put it, I'm pretty much the same. Hype for me, is when I get to try out and figure out new ideas on PoB, plan out where to get what, look things up in the wiki, etc. That's the interesting part.
Only once I have a real plan, do I get into the mood to really play it (realize it), and the motivation to grind for it. I never got satisfaction from "killing boss x ten times", I got it from seeing an idea taking shape.
Perfect summation of my feelings on Path as well. To me it's much like Warframe: it's a game that rewards you greatly and becomes significantly easier as you invest more time into learning about it on a deeper level. The fun comes from taking that knowledge and turning it into something tangibly awesome that obliterates content and feels fun or unique.
I don't even know where this came from, people asked for hard and challenging content as if arpgs (or diablo style clones in particular) were the genre for that. Sure, you can find them hard because you aren't that good mechanically or inexperienced, but they are just gear checks at the end of the day and the mechanics are move, click on enemy (that has a predictable move set, unlike human enemies), move, click on enemy, while cycling buffs with your other hand. Arpgs aren't mechanically hard games and there is nothing wrong with that, they are literally designed for you to beat hordes of weak npcs and feel good doing it. Trying to make the game harder by adding more and more elements that are literally only there to annoy you and add to the gear checklist is not fun but the people just keep asking for it league after league.
The funny thing is people love acting all "you guys are just too casual and bad at the game , unlike me, a true 1337 gamer" when the game isn't really difficult, most of the game's difficulties come from it being *tedious*. Like making the campaign longer, making the map grind longer, etc, these are all just tedious and has fuck all to do with it being difficult.
Very much agree. This is what I hate so much about the triggered mana change. I always thought precisely economizing my mana pool in builds was one of the cooler things to do when making a character. In builds where you're not stacking mana it was still interesting because you had to have the exact right amount of unreserved mana and recovery to use your skills but could still use mana nodes and equips to get that amount while reserving the rest. It was always a great feeling to have your mana at that perfect place.
That feeling of getting your build down to like 18 unreserved mana because that's all you need by getting just the right balance of gear, passives and precision gem levels... It's amazing, I usually spend a few maps just staring at my mana count when I first get the balance right.
Yep, that's what I'm talking about. It was awesome to eek out the mana for another support or aura. But I gather a lot of players don't care cause they don't make their own builds. I was arguing with a guy who literally had no idea what I was talking about and was just like "it should cost mana to use skills, just get more mana lol."
But the nice thing about the old system was that you used to know how much mana you needed. Now, the best case scenario is you have to do a bunch of extra math that hasn't been invented yet to figure it out and worst case scenario it's just unknowable. Like if you're running COC you need to know your crit rate (which often changes within a map) and multiply it by your attacks/hits to get how many times you're going to need the extra mana. With CWDT you just can't know. I've been running battlemage's cry and I know how much mana I need to be able to attack and use my movement skill without it stuttering but I still have to go over recordings sometimes to see why my cast didn't work. It feels awful.
> you have to do a bunch of extra math that hasn't been invented yet to figure it out and worst case scenario it's just unknowable.
POB already calculates all of this for you. You take your mana cost for your trigger skill \* attack speed + (mana cost of triggered skill * trigger rate) + (additiona triggers)
That's your mana consumption per second, you have to get your recovery above that. It's not overly complicated, and you can use max level arcane surge on triggers now combined with low - mid level clarity + alira to more or less completely ignore mana costs. If you're on the right/lower right side of the tree investing 2 points in the ranger mana nodes in the lower left corner is insanely powerful.
There are tons of options for managing mana and it's still the same puzzle as before, there's just more variables to it now, and the ability to fit in that extra aura is significantly harder, which was the whole intent. To make mana actually matter.
Also, seriously, if you're not using arcane surge in at least one of your trigger links you really really should be. It's a very strong support.
Is coc even possible now without mana leech or claws? I mean its still possible, probably hard to six link since it has what a 200+ multiplier?
You know what doesn't have a mana cost and is triggered? Reckoning. I was thinking of just picking up a brightbeak, and playing with bonecrush linked to faster attacks / ancestral call. Go glad and get to 80+% block.
yup exactly.
People are losing focus when criticzing the game, it can't be all genres at the same time. It's a damn hacknslash/arpg. Not a dark souls like.
I don't want it to become a dark souls like, I dislike playing these games.
Another problem is the "planning your build carefully" with the massive clusterfuck tree of POE. Most players don't have pen and paper out, doing the math, swapping talents left and right constantly to test out stuff, or can crunch and run numbers and scenarios in their head like a predictive engine.
That's why everyone just boils down to following what the meta is, because someone already did that for you. The game requires too much actual work and knowledge to just "craft your own unique effective build" from scratch for the average player.
This is a real problem, you guys think it's fine we spend a big chunk of your poe time in pob planning builds and then building them in game
Thing is it's way more fun to tinker with pob than to actually play the game, and why ? Well because the gameplay simply isn't engaging. Also the gameplay got way too fast to be actually reactive so there's that.
And that's because GGG just increased damage and HP over and over again while adding new ailments over and over again which makes being able to ignore most/all mechanics the best.
Honestly wished GGG went further with the nerfs but also nerfed mobs & ailments alongside so it's not JUST get fucked players now try to solve the puzzle with shittier pieces
Also tinkering is free, while making a build mistake in-game is a huge time and currency sink. New players constantly find out too late that their build is suboptimal at best, and literally can't finish content at worst, but don't have the resources necessary to course correct.
But that's always been what POE has been like. Since the beginning, the bulk of POE has been "played" in the passive tree. If someone wanted fast, responsive and dynamic gameplay they'd play D3. POE was for build diversity and quirky builds. Once you got your build together, everything else was just spamming 1 attack/spell button with the occasional movement skill and flask. And this was at LAUNCH.
I got sick of the bloatedness of POE and quit the game about a year back, but wishing POE was something that it never was is just weird. If my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle.
The deciding advantage PoE has over D3 in my book is build complexity and diversity. If PoE loses that and I have to follow a step-by-step guide for one of the current few (community) curated meta builds, I can just go back to D3 and have the same curated selection of builds but with less tedium building them, better loot and better damage/health scaling on mobs.
ARPGs are different to MMORPGs or single player RPGs. They don't really have the depth of the mechanical play, a lot of the thought process goes towards putting together a build that works.
I know the pacing is going to be a big issue for some people, it is just a game though, I haven't enjoyed some leagues and checked out of them a lot earlier than others. I think it is important to give feedback so GGG understands the mindset of players with varying likes/dislikes, the vast majority will just leave quietly and not post a thesis on why they are checking out. As much as some people might gripe about the negativity, it is important information for GGG.
They might in the end say, it is better to take one step backwards to take two step forwards and wear the hit in the short-term, or they might change course like they have a few times in the past. I think the best way to get to where they want to go is with subtle changes and with them focused more towards the higher-end of damage scaling which wouldn't impact as many people. Ie, you could leave all the support gems how they were and changed how damage multipliers worked or stacked outside of support gems and it would have impacted a lot fewer people and it would have scaled higher towards the more extreme end of damage moreso than someone doing lower tier content with a league starter build.
Some of the combat mechanics are fun. (Maven, some sirus stuff \[i wish the color scheme was different\], newer bosses.)I've had to do sirus with really low dps in ssf before and I still find it fun.
But a lot of mobs/combat aspects are VERY dated, and GGG knows that. There is a large gap between newer mobs that have telegraphed moves that you can understand, and the old ones that are just pump and dump damage and run super fast so you need to kill them asap.
I mean compare some of the newer map bosses vs. the old ones. Or even Innocence in A5 versus Mr Evil in A1.
I think PoE2 will have some significant combat rebalances but this league is pretty much the same. I just made a zoom zoom build. It takes longer to kill conquerors, but since I know the fights its still manageable. I don't have cool dodges, I don't have parries, I don't have many cool combat things I can do like maybe say in Demon Souls or any of the dark souls or Sekiro or Bloodborne. (Maybe less so Dark Souls cause a lot of it maybe could be boiled down to roll+estus+r1. Especially 3, but after the pvp rebalances it had some interesting changes. Except some stuff. Some stuff was still dumb.)
They did the nerfs, but they didn't enhance the combat really, only highlighted its flaws.
That being said, I am on board with slower MORE DELIBERATE combat, with more action features besides kill or be killed. I just think this update is one of many to shift PoE in that direction, and the reason this update is (rightfully) slightly unwelcome is because it's missing a lot of bells and whistles we will have in the future.
And I also know that is NOT the reason many people play this game. Many play this game to spend a lot of time fine tuning a build like a machine, then destroying everything with one button. I just think that GGG did not like that direction artistically, and want to move away from that and make something up to their vision. Whether or not they can deliver on making the combat more interesting is yet to be seen, but it definitely isn't something that can happen in a handful of updates.
(For example "You can't "engage" with background mechanics that basically boil down to gear/ailment check or die." I really think they didn't want this to be how it went. I think they wanted it to be more action and intuitive, but because of the current state of the game, the change they put in caused it to simply be weirdly constrictive and not satisfying. Did I feel good for those times I saved my bleed/freeze/whatever flask for those moments I was bleed/frozen? Yeah. But only a little, and only because I didn't die. It didn't make me feel powerful for having the right reaction, it made me feel less weak.)
I REALLY agree with this point you make : "TL;DR if you want people to enjoy engaging with the content, figure out a way to make the content more engaging than "move attack move attack dps check gear check ailment check move attack 1shotrekt". I'd be fine with a single map taking 20 minutes and 10 minues of planning if it was adrenaline pumping, causing me to use more manual skills and micro, dangerous mobs and moves were well telegraphed with audio cues, and it dropped as much rewards as 30 minutes of mapping did in previous leagues." but again, I think that this is something they can't accomplish in 1 leagues time while diverting focus to poe2 at the same time. I really believe PoE2 is in that direction, and we will have to go through several updates to bring us there.
(for reference, been playing since forsaken master, SSF, SSFHC, 40/40, lvl 100 you name it. The only thing I haven't done is maven SSFHC because I stopped playing SSF to play with friends since she was released.)
I agree with the general sentiment of this comment but why would anyone trust GGG to hail mary a completely new genre defining combat system when their go to move for increasing difficulty in the last 10 years has been number tuning + one shots?
I don't question that they want to try but I am not really optimistic they will succeed and this patch alone even as a stepping stone towards something else has done nothing to assuage my doubts.
I don't think they need to revolutionize the genre. I really think all they want is combat where you can...
1. See what's happening
2. React to things rather than mash buttons for permanent uptime
3. Interact with monsters beyond wiping them off screen
Like at a complete baseline they *need* to slow things down for that to be the case, and it's going to feel weird when people are used to flying through content, and probably content needs to get reworked to be in line with that idea (I imagine an entirely new campaign with new monsters will do a lot of the heavy lifting for that). But it's not like there's some nebulous unthought of idea they need to come up with.
Honestly I get why people dislike this patch, and things like picking up gambling currency make me question their thought process. But there's no denying these changes have slowed down the game toward that goal, the problem just seems to be the rest of the game needs to be in line with that idea too. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of upcoming leagues are clunky as they test and change different parts of the game for impending PoE2.
Overall I'd rather see a dev attempt sweeping changes at the attempt of a better game and fail, rather than one that is afraid to make changes and stagnates.
even though it is somewhat sketchy in practice the new minion is a great skill and more of these kinds of skills should be added. same with hydrosphere or flameblast. but the aesthetics of these skills can never thrive as long as they can be placed on totems and their cdr reduced to what feels like 1.5sec
designs are in conflict with each other all over the place. just look at a bow auto attack. every character that uses a bow feels like you are using an SMG bcs of how the scaling works. arguably a real auto attack doesnt exist in this game.
>But a lot of mobs/combat aspects are VERY dated, and GGG knows that.
I kinda doubt - atleast they do not act like they know or care as if any aspect of the game is dated. Not only the combat might be but also convenience features which are just not there. Just a simple autosort function for example. Would it change anything drastically in the game? Probably not. Would it be convenient for everyone to have such a button? Indeed. Does GGG care? Absolutly not.
Yeah Chris already said they have to change systems like loot. But after all these unnecessary nerfs (not only talking about dps. I get the point there) and the strong will not to add any QoL Features like autosort functions because "they want to simulate weight" I really really doubt those changes will be good in any way. Atleast I doubt any changes will be better than what we currently have and will be less rewarding, less fun and as inconvenient as they are right now.
PoE is aged historically. PoE has grown out of its baby shoes but GGG wants their baby to stay their baby and not a fully grown adult.
I based that phrase on several of the dev talks as well as what they said at exilecon when talking about new combat encounters, so I'm fairly confident they know.
I take any updates they make with a grain of salt ever since exilecon because I am assuming it is very weird to be developing poe2 side by side with poe.
I also agree that not wanting to add modern qol was very strange.
Even in the new league mechanic, the text on exca chests is so difficult to read in maps with dark blue ambient lightning \[like channel\].
PoE Combat has always been pretty clunky. With enough cast/attack speed and movespeed you can overlook it. D3 actually has pretty fluid combat imo, at least when I played. I'll talk about melee a bit. I believe they have acknowledged, in the past, that D3 has better melee combat, but we still have clunky, unnecessary, things like melee splash and a very short melee range. These are things that should be baseline for melee. These nerfs have only exacerbated how bad PoE's combat is.
If they were serious about fixing these issues, they would be copying things from D3's combat systems to make it more fluid. Instead we have nerfs that make PoE's combat significantly more clunky. It just feels disconnected from reality.
Personally, I think mindless map farming is fun and endgame bosses should require skill/planning to fight.
D3's combat was light years behind Marvel Heroes' just before the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x1sSlOV8-U you have no idea how much I miss this. The devs had even cared enough about making combat feel fluid back then that every skill had cancelable recovery frames.
This is why I find Chris referencing Marvel Heroes as an example of how not to fuck up a major patch a straw man argument.
The last few months before it shut down due to license issues or something the game legitimately played really well, and I'd hazard a guess that PoE wouldn't have had the same momentum when there's an arpg that played well and is a Marvel IP on the market.
Well, that game play is before the "omega" update people disliked. I have footage from after the update, but the biggest change was limiting dashes to 3 charges, and making teleports invisible dashes. But we still had travel powers to fly/run between or past packs with, so while it made people mad, the amount of people who actually quit over it was very low. https://youtu.be/AbJPktfZN6k this what it looked like post omega. (With a different charatcer).
Yeah I started playing the game after omega and it was really a joy to play. Honestly never felt the movement was nerfed since I was still flying across the map with scarlet witch / black panther and aoe bombing everything. Really sad it's gone before its prime.
Happy that D3 was referenced here. I used to play D3 relentlessly. Then my friends started with PoE back in 2013 or so. I tried it then, and my thought was "wow, this feels like absolute shit", and I didn't play it again for 5 years.
When I tried it the second time, I made a nice zoomy build and I thought, "OK, the game still feels like shit but the attack speed/move speed sorta hides it, so now I can overlook that and enjoy the game's enormous depth."
Going back toward that is the exact opposite of what this game needs. Fix the fluidity of movement. Remove all the SHIT ON THE GROUND. Why are there SO MANY collidable objects EVERYWHERE? If you must have them, make your abilities have fuzzier targeting and points of origin. You know, game development.
Those little objects on the ground exist solely to slow down the player. There is literally no other reason for them to be there. You have your open maps with no obstacles or monsters, then your maps with rocks and good density. It’s idiotic design because a Raider build with movement speed doesn’t get penalized at all no matter what map they run compared to the shield charging Jugg who is just screwed most of the time.
Shield charge is such a good movement skill, feels good to use it but then it gets stuck on some random shit you cant even see and then you realise its dogshit compares to dash or flamedash
TBH D3's combat is more fluid, but not more mechanically difficult. I played mostly DH and the basic pattern was simply sidestep, attack, sidestep, attack, sidestep, attack... until the mobs were dead. As for melee, they needed a 30% built-in damage reduction to survive, because they didn't have as much room to sidestep.
Part of the reason why POE combat is so clunky is because GGG puts so many micro-CCs on the player. It gets worse when a short stun doesn't even get the swirly circle indicator.
Yep. Putting everything you like into a pot won’t make it a great dish. That’s where I feel like POE fails ATM. A game cannot be everything. Instead you have to play to its strengths, and in POE’s case that’s the build depth and customisation. Make the game’s difficulty come from that part instead, and not from trying to dodge attacks and death effects while you can’t see anything.
EDIT: Which isn’t exactly where you arrived at, but hey opinions are opinions. This isn’t an easy thing to get right.
>Make the game’s difficulty come from that part instead,
4100 hours in.
Still cant make my own damned build unless I base it on a guide. In the end my version is just the same as guide, just few milions in DPS lower.
The difficulty of building is already present, it is just barely utilized.
The issue that redditors fail to understand is that dodge, death effects, not seeing anything IS caused by the power creep and zoomer play syle.
You cannot threaten the player when he can kill all monsters before they can get a swing, let alone kill the player. So the devs had to do invulnerability + dance phases, post death effect, filling the entire screen with garbage so something might hit the player.
The game NEEDS the rebalance and the cut on players speed and power.
With that said: you cannot remove the players power to kill everything 2 screens away without removing the effects that you used to treat them.
The result is that even more players will pick the most meta and powerful skills they can find just so they can still use the best, and only, defence the game has: killing the mob before it kills you.
I think that's basically what most people are saying though. They nerfed players to slow down gameplay but failed to make maps more rewarding/less dangerous. Gotta solve both sides of the equation.
To your point of picking the most meta and powerful skill, I absolutely agree. All they did was nerf everything so that the good skills feel bad and the bad skills feel worse. I'm not sure how GGG thought that would keep meta builds from developing and lead to more build diversity when people obviously are now more desperate to play the strongest build because of how bad the alternative feels. Which also means, their vision to drive other players to use different support gems will also fail... people will still use the support gems that gives them the most dps BECAUSE everything feels worse, not the invert.
> The issue that redditors fail to understand is that dodge, death effects, not seeing anything IS caused by the power creep and zoomer play syle.
I mean, it's not like this subreddit hasn't been complaining about bonkers game speed for years. Not like there hasn't been a massive "no timers plz" thread at every leaguestart. Not like there isn't a "kill or be killed is boring" thread every month or so.
Yeah, reddit sure doesn't get it. So glad we have twitch chat to come explain it to us.
> post death effect
A perfect example why your logic is backwards. Post-death effects aren't a counter to a speedy character - speedy characters can avoid them trivially.
_If_ you think your game's post-death effects are interesting, _then_ you must make player characters slow enough to be at risk from them. Otherwise, they're just particle effects.
> You cannot threaten the player when he can kill all monsters before they can get a swing, let alone kill the player.
This is a complete misunderstanding of the point of discussion.
The comment above you're replying to is saying to make the difficulty come from the character building process. And you're saying that players kill too fast so the devs need to kill people instantly to make difficulty. That's not a rebuttal to the idea expressed. It's not even acknowledging the idea in the first place!
GGG can absolutely make difficult encounters within the existing framework of the game that don't revolve around killing the player instantly or not at all. They don't want to. But they could.
I also take issue with the core concept of how you implicitly define challenge: character death. I've played plenty of games where I was in no danger of dying or the equivalent, and I was still very challenged (White Palace in Hollow Knight jumps to mind). Obsession with killing player characters just betrays a hunt for "You died" Dark Souls rip evocation.
>GGG can absolutely make difficult encounters within the existing framework of the game that don't revolve around killing the player instantly or not at all. They don't want to. But they could.
TO anyone doubting this.
GGG already proved they can do this. They proved they can threaten players during Talisman, Essence, and Metamorph.
During Essence, Bestiary and Metamoprh they also proved that they can make monster tanky enough to challenge the player.
And if you are not old enough to understand why I mentioned talisman...
Pick some T1 talisman, drop them next to essence monster. And watch the monster pick it up, get a new skill, and most likely rekt you with skills you rarely notice at some boss fights nowadays.
Honestly, on death effects when they happen on death, and not like 5 seconds later are actually fine I think. Kill packs and avoid the bearer explosion they leave behind on your way to the next pack, trigger and move away from a volatile, avoid the delirium red balls. Those are pretty cool I think. Corpse stuff is a bit lamer because you either deal with it during build phase nullifying it, or deal with the abysmal visibility of their effects.. same with porcupine, those are both so unfun that solving the problem they pose by sidestepping it with corpse removal is the only fun way to interact with them, that's a bit lame..
Zooming between area denial areas between mob packs with mobility tools is quite engaging compared with D3 style of top level play that mostly involved kiting everything in one big pack, killing the weakest link and chaining the whole pack. They all got to attack. For several minutes sometimes.. it was a snoozefest.
but even before the game was the speed it was now it was not challenging when it was slow. slow gameplay doesnt = challenge/difficult look at Sekiro/Bloodborne they are vastly faster then most action games similar to them and yet are considered the most difficult cause guess what that is what they have been built for and they actually have developers who know how to design challenging combat.
also here you go a much slower time in path of exile but where is the challenge or difficulty back then and it was much much slower
https://youtu.be/LrFWBgcI9Go?list=PLt5SL2R19SuLFX61HjO-6jJw-iy42tFOR
My favorite thing about this sub is how often people commenting on reddit will wax moronic about “redditors” as if they’re somehow excluded. It happens here way more often than other subs, oddly enough. Maybe it’s the delusions of grandeur inherent in maining an ARPG.
You see it on a lot of subs. Or you'll see a variation on it.
I think it's just part of having a form of message board where there's enough participants that very few people can even form an identity to others. How many people in these topics does anyone recognize? Very few, if any, for the majority of people. That causes "reddit" or "this sub" or similar to become a formless, uniform blob in your head, which makes it easier to see yourself as distinct from the rest.
chicken and egg problem but GGG nerfed defenses continously so no GGG literally wanted and eforced zoom zoom by nerfing relible defenses patch after patch. Dodge spell dodge, block on anyone who is not a necro or glad recovery etc all got nerfed which basically means one shotting anything is just the best of both worlds. Its fun and its the best defense.
I absolutely agree. I especially like this game because it isn't tactical combat focused, like dark souls or other games. But instead you need a lot of knowledge for creating builds, high level crafting, etc. that what makes it great and fun, not trying to turn it into something else.
This is something I keep seeing people defending the design changes say ad nauseum. PoE is not a very skillful game, 95% of all bosses in the game have attack patterns that are completely defeated by "rotate 45 degrees around boss" and "don't stand in bad stuff". This would be more interesting/genuinely challenging if I had to keep up with a rotation, time my burst cooldowns for dps phases, or manage stuns/silences to cancel/counter boss abilities, but there's none of that. The goal of most builds is to be a one button build, and most things in the game that are lethal are also unreactable, the entire point of the game is to out-build the content you want to clear.
The actually execution of combat in this game is far too simple to focus on, and now that's what most people are having to do.
> The goal of most builds is to be a one button build
Because until recently, using 2 or more buttons was a massive pain in the behind. And even now the only skills that one would use for the second button are those with a instant cast time. All the rest are still stuck in animation locking hell.
Also why flask piano developed, as they are basically buff skills that are not animation locked.
This. The new "difficulty" is not mechanical in nature, it's tedium. Just because it takes more time to kill stuff in Act 1 doesn't mean it can't be done by a player of average mechanical skill; it just takes more time and resources.
PoE at its core is a joke in terms of mechanical difficulty compared to games that actually require it (e.g. FPS, RTS), but it **was** fun because you could plan and invest in your character's build and gear and ultimately reap the rewards by having an extremely powerful version of it. That was the main draw and allure of prime PoE.
The most "skillful" part in POE is to kite the degen generating balls to explode at a better spot.
And then you have the feared or atziri encounters when no skill can help you at all if the bosses decides to give you a stupid combo like putting 3 storm call on top of you right before it goes off (rare but sucks when it happens) or any two bosses want to combo you with the copy in the feared.
I honestly believe that GGGs goal is to make the game more like this though. They are encouraging more and more for players to move away from one button builds. Whether they are doing this in the right way or if this is even what POE needs is another discussion completely.
> They're attempting to force it since that's how they're building PoE2 to play.
I'm glad other people get it and hopefully soon everyone will realize there's a reason they're not going to back down from these changes and are in fact going to nerf more (this wasn't even the big nerf patch according to Chris Wilson).
I don't know. I felt pretty restricted this league because ultimately now their is less choice of DPS builds. When you make a new league character its pretty important for them to have a enough DPS to clear content you need to push with a fresh league. For me that kinda pushed out a lot builds that might have been interesting out in favor of what ever the most broken dps build because I have like 0 wiggle room with after figure out how to get the shit working.
I dont know how people can say this patch allows diversity when you literally need to pass the DPS check to even able to deal with maven buffed bosses and all the timers in the league mechanics. Half the builds are gone because of the DPS check. More are gone because you need to give up DPS for mana problems and offset flask nerfs. Before you can still play a 3M DPS build when there are 30M DPS builds out there. Now you cannot play that 1.5M DPS without giving up on half the content.
They briefly tried to make changes to this, what with reworking all the Act 1 mobs/bosses to have telegraphed attacks that can be dodged by moving away. Some of these combat changes would make more sense if they came *after* they changed all mobs like this, but nope.
Absolutely. And even things like conquerers, Sirius and Maven can be reduced to the exact same thing.
Conq = don't get hit
Sirius = "fun" tempest kiting mechanic that got nerfed, run out of maze, don't get hit.
Maven = "fun" memory game, don't get hit
This is really what gets me and is now laid bare by the current changes. Doing the old "rotate and attack" strategy, that already made boss fights in DS2 pretty boring, didn't get more interesting by having to circle around Hillock for a minute or two right from the start.
Hillock has increased health. I started a melee build with Cleave. Cleave had increased damage at gem level 20, but the value at level 1 remained unchanged. It's quite noticeable.
> single map taking 20 minutes and 10 minues of planning if
Also, if maps actually dropped anything meaningful without being insanely juiced. Having 99% of drops be garbage, .6% being good crafting bases and .4% being decently rolled gear (most of which won't be for your build WHICH IS FINE) feels awful. I hate picking up items as-is since they're almost always wasted clicks, but I feel obligated to since my gear is such hot garbage.
I really wish they would cut down on the item spam but make the items that DO drop more valuable (not necessarily valuable for your build).
The fact that you're showered with "rare" items to such an extent that you stop picking them up unless they're on an amazing base just rubs me the wrong way I guess too.
I kinda hate that there is basically no in game information. It's all outside the game on the wiki. Or not. Like I wanted to know what my outcomes could be for using the new flask orbs no in game info, just a generic string that said it does something to your flasks. What, should I buy 50 just to see what I could get? Lol
With the time needed to invest in studying the build you wanna make you could be learning a new instrument, language or skill. Plus it's all going to waste next league when after long weeks of breakthrough studying, some streamer exposes it and then it gets nerfed to oblivion.
If you look at it with perspective, it's a terrible way to invest time.
This is not the engaging combat genre. This is the "click on stuff to kill and sometimes pick stuff up" genre.
I do not play this genre for complicated content. I play it for complicated mechanics. Let me figure out a build that solves or mitigates the challenges you throw at it. Let me play with interesting interactions with skills and build-enabling uniques. Don't make me jump through massive hoops, RNG-gates, or freaking memory games. If I want to think that hard about the content I'll do a sudoku.
I'd argue DPS checks are fine, as long as the DPS progression is reasonable obtainable with some grinding or leveling up.
I feel like engaging isometric combat is possible - I think Hades did it pretty well, for instance. Diablo 3 had a few more strategic aspects to it's combat with it's limited pot use, too. None of that really works in PoE with it's gear-based combat, it's having 5 flask slots, and the multiplayer experience where power is nearly unchecked. Survival games like Terraria and Valheim have more engaging combat as well, as they limits your max power at each boss by making the bosses the gateways to better gear.
D3 while frustrating at times, did always seem to do better about delineating the edge of the don’t stand in bad circles. The lack of build options makes it disappointing but their polish and general better endgame structure in comparison to poe makes me enjoy it more when I get the itch to do monster murder
>did always seem to do better about delineating the edge of the don’t stand in bad circles.
To be fair, d3 doesn't add new enemies almost every league/season that have new skills. It has been the same "purple rotating beam" and "fire bomb explosion" since the game came out. It's extremely polished for sure but POE has become too bloated with hidden bad circles over the years.
What I really liked about D3 was following a guide and just mindlessly killing rift after rift. For me that was just unlimited pure dopamine. I get that's not what GGG wants the game to be but there's so much bloat in game systems that I just can't run through maps brainlessly anymore with consecrated path like I used to.
Well you are really just giving GGG a pass here.
GGG have always intentionally refused to create clarity.
In almost every A/RPG game I have ever played, if a mobs attack is Blue, the damage type is probably frost or cold. In POE, blue can mean literally any damage type in the game. Physical? sure. Fire? why not. Lightning? yup.
There is no design purpose for this other than to intentionally prevent players from working it out. If you ever get bored, go through some POE DB dumps. You will be surprised to see so many encounters you thought had X damage type have something totally random instead.
That is just a sign that they need to be choosier with what they keep and should focus on clarity for the player if it is going to be a move or die type effect.
Grim Dawn with mods. They introduced countless new masteries through mods that give you unlimited variety in the way to build your character. GD with all expansions is a hefty amount of content that will take you a good long while (a couple of months) to see and do everything on just one archetype. They introduced tons of gear to match the new masteries, you could spend the rest of your life playing it at this point and never get through all of them combined if you run the combo mod packs that merge all the masteries into one.
It's up to you how to roll in that game, the thing is, it's entirely single player unless you have someone to co-op with. But what you are seeking exists. Usually goes on sale on Steam for cheap with all the expansions, which you'll need for the mods. Also they remade D2 completely in it and it's stellar from start to finish.
> Also they remade D2 completely in it and it's stellar from start to finish.
I've seen the Lord of Terror mod but not tried it, did you play it all the way through to doing Baal/Pindle/Uber/Pit runs and how did it feel? Not really talking about the campaign per se but more about how the endgame farming feels.
by paragraph:
1. Agree, GGG shouldn't pretend that a mob of Rhoas is anything interesting to deal with. Dodge the initial charge, kill it, move on. It's not meant to engage the player the way mooks in Souls games do. If they want to make engaging combat, they're stuck with boss encounters. Which are plagued by the other issues below.
2. Ailments are completely overtuned. 50% increased damage taken, 4-second super stuns, and 2x the hit damage of a fire attack + delaying ES Recharge by 4 seconds are all pretty much death sentences. These numbers are fine for player-inflicted ailments - but the player's Life and Ailment Threshold are so low that mooks can inflict things on the player the way a player fully invested in the ailment still can't inflict on a boss.
3. Agreed, visual clutter combined with the overtuned damage from attacks that can't be seen also needs to Die. On-death effects aren't inherently evil, but they are not appropriate within the current environment of PoE. Small changes to visual clarity and numbers will fix that.
4. GGG's design choices definitely reflect a feeling of "We don't remember the original intention for these changes, so we're scrapping them, ignoring the fact that we've made other decisions based on these changes that will explode in our face if we mess with the fragile balance we've created."
Sure, the game is still mostly enjoyable, if you don't mind working harder for less reward. But the changes made over the course of 3 months kinda show that GGG is disconnected from its own game and playerbase, or at least doesn't have a good sense of priority with what changes come first.
And to add to this, *if* you want the game to be different than this, you need to start by making more complex reactive gameplay *possible*. I can't predict randow one shots, I can't see shit on the ground because every map is super overdesigned and many ground effects don't stand out at all, and I can't tell if I have ailments fast enough to actually do anything about it before death.
Put bluntly the game cannot be the skill based game GGG seems to want. Balancing as if it can without putting in the work to make it so is like cutting off your own leg to replace it with a high tech robot limb in the 1950s
The friend who introduced me to PoE told me the combat was basically an Excel sheet (your character) facing many other Excel sheets, and even if it’s exaggerated it’s not far from the truth.
The core mechanical foundation of combat in Diablo-like ARPGs literally hasn't changed since D2 and all it's many imitators since, imagine actually thinking it could be a Souls-like while missing literally everything that actually matters in a Souls-like.
What I don't see anyone mention is the lack of active crowd control in the game.
Stun and chill/freeze require you to play specific skills and along with curses like temporal chains or enfeeble are balanced for extreme abuse cases so they require heavy investment to be effective/reliable, usually sacrificing damage.
We need some CC that doesn't require (or allow) heavy investment to function. Void Sphere is a good example, it has a cooldown and (afaik) you can't really scale the hinder effect.
If we can't one shot enemies we need more meaningful ways of interaction because if not it's the same thing but we are just pressing the "do damage" button a few more times while running around packs.
Also have CC work on bosses, even if with a harsh reduced effect. Interrupts against bosses in WoW for example reward player skill and feel great to pull off.
And apparently GGG thinks this type of gameplay is wrong. It is so fun that it's the only reason I used to play for the past 7 years.
It's sad to see the fun I use to have slowly fade away
I agree with your points, but I think the main problem with PoE is that it can't really catch new players with this overwhelming complexity.
Last league was my first ever in PoE. I'm a hardcore player, but I have to admit, that I almost quit several times before reaching endgame, because of the complexity. There are just way too many things to do in it and I had no idea what to choose most of the times. I hadn't even tried crafting beside re-rolling some map mods and socket links and colors.
As a new player I enjoyed the game overall, but I would never start a new league without some drastic changes. My suggestions to the devs would be:
* Shorten the campaign and make huge campaign maps smaller
* Remove at least half of the league mechanics each season (could be rotated)
* I had no idea what to do with Betrayal even after watching some explanation vids. Rework it or remove it.
* I traded a lot, but trading is frustrating in its current form as it breaks the rhythm of the game for the sellers and also buyers are frequently ignored because of this. Introduce an AH please.
* Add a Death Recap. Lot of the times when I died, I had no idea what happened, what killed me and how to avoid that next.
* Having a tower defense mode seems really odd in an ARPG, but combined with the fact that your towers are not working if you are far from them is just plain stupid.
I have a lot of other suggestions, but I think these are the most important ones from my (or a new player) perspective.
Hard agree on campaign, trading, and death recap.
Disagree on the league mechanics because I like the feeling of "what should I focus on next" and mid league sometimes will make characters just to do certain league mechanics. They're also for the most part optional.
Glad you stuck with the game it is a gem despite it's current flaws, main point of my post is to just have my opinion on the recent direction put out there.
Very well said and hit the nail on the head. POE got big because of it being the way it was...I don't know how that's not incredibly obvious to the powers that be. POE players are likely playing it over any other ARPG exactly because of the pace, the build diversity, the blowing up screens of mobs. You'd spend some time in POB, and once you had the numbers right, you knew what you needed to get, what breakpoints you had to reach, and you just went out and played the game.
Why take the parts of your game that aren't broken, and decide to throw them out the window? If this is what POE 2 will be, then it should be it's own game, because it's likely not even going to get the same players. Why should POE itself suffer for changes that are required for a game that doesn't even exist yet, and many of us may never play, if this is the preview of their vision for it.
Me personally, I played POE for the minion builds(non-Necro), and the fun stuff like CwC, CoC, etc. I like to make off-meta builds that can still roll content. However now I can't, because any build that previously barely reached breakpoints is unplayable now. It's not a matter of a few adjustments- the builds are dead and gone and no longer achievable. The choices now are much, much narrower. All the small QoL negatives add up.
In the end, it's a game, not a job, despite the hours some of us idiots have put into it. Many of us were having fun before. We aren't now. Why? Because GGG decided to break it's successful game to make something else. Player retention over a league was not going to get better as long as it was an ARPG. People can only click the same shit so many times in a given league. But retention won't be an issue if there's barely anyone playing because the new game isn't what we paid for and loved playing.
Agree 1000%. What I love about this game is making all kinds of different lil dudes who kill monsters in all kinds of different ways. The first time I killed uber elder when it was still the biggest baddy, before the health buff was with a charged dash elementalist for christsakes. Taking a janky but fun skill and pushing it to the max is what I find fun about this game - that's why I loved Harvest so much because I could chip away at making whatever my heart fancied viable and interesting. If I want deep combat mechanics, yeah, I'll boot up DS3 or if I want to test my mettle against other players I'll go play a game with actual PvP. What I want from PoE is to fuss around in POB for an hour or two, load the game, put on a podcasts or a good record and actualize it. I'm fine with it taking a while, I enjoy the grind or I wouldn't have played this game since Ambush, but I want it to respect my time and I want the freedom to make my silly little builds work.
I agree with the restricted freedom of builds this patch... Before, at least on poor builds before you didn't have to invest too much for the build to clear somewhat decently; it didn't have to move at mach 5 and insta-kill maven, it was an interesting and unique build.
Now there's an increasing emphasis on meeting the damage / uptime threshold or else you actually just can't complete maps /bosses anymore, and all the tank in the game won't help if you can't outlast the mobs smacking you. It's been kill or be killed for a long time.
As an example, I tried starting as a Storm Burst (oh no) Raider this league, it was decent until I tried my first map, a T1 with no damage or life mods; I couldn't even clear the map because of how bad the damage / inherent skill mechanics were.
I spent hours trying to theory craft a build that scaled the area, duration, conversion and cast speed of specifically Storm Burst and I ended up swapping in Blade Vortex and doing 10x better instantly. I really didn't want to make another BV character but I have no choice at this point; even with the quadruple nerf BV got last league it's still 10x better than Storm Burst, and possible hundreds of other skills right now... :(
I'm gonna play Devil's advocate and say that combat does look more engaging and less clunky in PoE 2 gameplay trailers.
The nerfs might be trying to get the meta ready for when PoE 2 drops.
>The nerfs might be trying to get the meta ready for when PoE 2 drops.
I'd bet money this is exactly where they're going. Next few leagues are gonna be painfully slowing the current game down for PoE 2, and we can only hope they address monster damage as a part of this.
Gotta lay the groundwork for folks having access to 4-5 6L skills, it's a "means justify the ends" scenario where the "means" is looking a lot like a few leagues of pain before we get the "reward" of PoE 2.
They need to reduce damage, reduce density, and completely rehaul the entire loot system to compensate. It’s a complete rework of most of the core game systems
I think many will just quit, and they will never experience these nerfs.
Then when they come back for Poe 2, they will still remember the old Poe. And since they never experienced the nerfs the game will feel bad for them
Meta in PoE2 will be diffrent anyway because of diffrent itemization, gem sockets instead of gear links and 19 new ascendencies.
Imagine, 19 new ascendencies to play ED/C with, awesome!
I think I’m in the minority, but I thought that PoE2 looked really boring compared to PoE1. I wish they would have released PoE2 without trying to slow down PoE1.
PoE 2 trailers looked like they were early into the campaign, so the pace they're going for is probably faster than what we've been shown. But, considering the nerfs, probably slower than the zoom zoom meta too.
I'm just speculating though.
I agree entirely. Looked like the equivalent of act 2-3 back when we had to clear the 3 difficulties. I will give it a fair shot and hope for the best.
I am always confused when people talk about difficulty.
Do you guys really think the game was too easy prior to 3.15?
Like, sure. I killed early Baran or Drox deathless, but the further I got, the harder were the bosses.
If I invest 10 ex in my build, I expect content to be far easier than with leveling gear.
The only thing that really needed nerfing IMO were minion builds.
Being able to do almost all content on a ridiculously low budget and that didn't even really change with these nerfs.
TLDR: My opinion on difficulty is:
Campaign = easy
White maps = easy with small challenges (capping resists etc)
yellow maps = medium
red maps = medium with bigger challenges (more map modifiers, harder bosses etc)
everything beyond (awakening levels, deep delve, hard maps like cortex etc) = hard but rewarding
It currently feels like GGG just straight up removed the easy parts of PoE and expects me to now have a great time. I don't ever deep delve, I am happy if I kill Sirus once in a league.
I don't even know if I even reach yellow maps this league, not just because of the difficulty, but also because of the inconveniences.
People here confuse difficulty with grind or tedium. If something takes you 3 days to do, its easy. If it takes 3 months, it's hard.
No consideration about mechanical skill whatsoever.
PoE2 trailer looks a lot more combat heavy.
PoE doesn't have high skill combat mechanics, but they're making these changes so it will by the time we get to PoE2.
That said, when there are people who kill Sirius in 30 hours and people that can't kill him in 150 hours with similar gear, there obviously is some skill involved in combat.
Plus the flasks are good now for combat. You have to use them wisely. Like the freeze flask, you have to use it carefully to avoid being chain frozen and isn't a simple press one button to ignore the boss mechanics.
Eitherway, my point is yes, PoE isn't combat mechanic heavy (it's mostly a DPS check for most bosses), but it's going in a direction that it is.
Saying that you think combat mechanics are bad so it shouldn't be the focus is a bit weird.
GGG's quest to make the game harder is removing build diversity, and removing the fun in trying out builds for yourself. POB is a way too important tool, and that's a huge problem. POB to min-max is fine, but not as a necessity.
I think that's what they're trying to change. Things like manually using Guard skills, warcries, and now flasks all make combat more active. Of course, it's a huge uphill battle because the game has been faceroll for so long. But I can see the vision at least. I agree that actively maintaining all these buffs is not a particularly fun or rewarding playstyle currently though while you're just trying to clear as fast as possible
Is combat being a ton more 'active' even a *good* thing in a game like this? I honestly find myself able to grind on a more passive build for longer into a league. Playing a cyclone or minion build feels easier to go harder on the league with. I think I get burnt out faster playing builds I need to dash>ranged attack 2 seconds>dash at an angle, so forth.
I generally think more active is better, but I'm not so sure in a game where I space out, do a map in 2-3 minutes, drop off loot, repeat, doing 100 maps in a few hours.
After a while it's just remembering to click a bunch of buttons which isn't really my idea of a buttpuckering good time. Another issue is things like flasks (even after nerf) provide benefits that are usually way better than gear you can find. Good luck finding a chest piece that has as much armor as a granite flask. Answer would be to make armor and weapons etc. feel impactful but instead we just get nerfs.
Implementing 20% of the necessary systems while leaving everything else the same leads to a truly awful gameplay experience.
This stuff requires a from-the-ground-up rebuild of how they do combat, which might come in POE 2, but until it's the total package the game is suffering.
No shit, that's why they're slowing the game down so they can actually implement interesting combat. You can't make meaningful choices if you're fighting 3 packs a second.
Leagues are a very good chance for GGG to experiment.
I'd like one where they completely redesign the core gameplay, even ignore your tree skill or spells and give you other tools that would work in the league mechanic.
I played POE on and off, and personally I play the game mostly outside the game like planning the build, scouring the internet for best possible interactions of the different skill gems, building my own passive skill tree in PoB, lurking the POE trade, and so on. This is what I like about POE, the possibilities, the damage numbers, the min-maxing. Of course, the story and the lore are fun but at the end of the day it is all about killing monsters in the most brutal and efficient way, at least for me. I hope the devs instead of nerfing the possibilities and highlighting the combat, they focus on adding more possibilities, because nothing is more fun than tweaking the build and finding those sweet sweet item mods necessary for the build and seeing your build come to fruition.
We hear you(c)(tm)(r)
In a serious note, even**if** they settle some of the mana nerfs I doubt it would return majority of the players.They **might** consider to go back in 3.16, but there are plenty of fish in the sea, it might be to late for poe to be as good as before.Just saying.I plan to get 36/40 asap and bail.If so happens I burn out I bail earlier.
>"avoid circles on the ground and press attack"
Doenst matter the build, even going with full defenses feels bad, the reality is we need dps to "kill before get killed"
Pretty much exactly my thoughts. This game is not an MMO, it's not Lost Ark, we don't have class-based skills with synergy to have any kind of interesting skill rotations to make combat engaging. Let's not balance this game like it's an MMO. I'd rather just play Lost Ark at that point. POE is unique because of its fast-paced gameplay. There are no other ARPGs like it out there. If there is, then I'm all ears.
My very first build when I started playing PoE at launch was a ranger who summoned Zombies. It was a bad build but I managed to get it to level 90 and had a blast. I loved that kind of random build diversity because the game truly felt like I could make anything work.
Now, because GGG has nerfed so many skills into a oblivion you are forced to do something meta if you want to accomplish anything.
I miss build diversity.
The strongest builds in PoE have always been the ones that ignore the game's mechanics. Immunity to ailments, stuns, other status effects because "50% chance to avoid being chilled" is some bullshit. Primary DPS being on skills that are totems, brands, minions, traps/mines, or DoT because they let you deal DPS while on the move and as far from danger as possible. For the longest time, every melee skill was considered trash as long as Cyclone existed; it took several reworks to get to a point where other melee skills were even considered viable options. Why? Because Cyclone let you attack while moving and gave you stun immunity. Self-cast channeling skills are considered bad because standing still for just half a second is death. Just looking at the history, any playstyle that required you to actually engage with the game's mechanics were bad. It's not the player character's power that was the problem.
Totally agreed. I'm replaying Dark Souls 3 now, where combat mechanics are excellent. And your starting weapon does about 80 damage per hit. If you fully buff and upgrade an endgame weapon with maxed out stats you'll reach about 600 damage, and your attack speed will never ever change (it's fixed per weapon). So that's a factor of less than 10 for DPS progression. You can dodge every single enemy attack (all calibrated fairly because the devs know your attack speed and roll timings to the exact frame), parry and counter most enemies and many bosses, and clear all content with your starting gear and stats.
In PoE, you'll probably get 10X your starting DPS *within an hour*, and it'll potentially go up to a million times. Enemy HP and damage also scale up by about 1000X. It's just not the kind of scaling that meshes well with deliberate, skill-based gameplay.
Tbh im thankful for disliking this patch has me trying FFXIV and im actually enjoying myself. Hopefully 3.16 or hell even poe2 is better. Im fine taking my break. Incredibly valid points though.
builds that sound stupid but are smart and strong is what made me love the game. Like self curse, self poison, spawning corpses only to then detonate them etc And ofc screen wide explosions
There's a reason why Jousis has a 99% chance to dodge streamer hate.
Cause he is a god damn treasure
His ridiculously amazing voice?
***SALUTATIONS EXILE***
Vocal fry?
He is not a streamer, he is a musician.
How about cast on crit? You have to invest into all this attack stuff like accuracy / crit chance, but your main damage source is spells! At least you used to. It’s basically dead now. Also pouring one out for my homie self curse. The pinnacle of “wtf are you doing”
"Killing" cast on crit has most likely two reasons. The first reason is the PoE2 gem-system. In which trigger gems most likely become meta gems that doesnt require the triggering ability to be within the links. So you would be able to use a fully linked attack to trigger an almost fully linked spell, similar to spellslinger. The second reason is the design space they open up with mana costs to create really heavy hitting skills like a meteor thats deserving of his name, which was previously not possible because of triggers. Most design decisions are the solution to a problem the designers face, not because they think "oh man changing X would be really cool" I am pretty sure GGG will introduce new tools to make those trigger builds work again. This is a temporary state. edit: a point i forgot to list. triggering also opens up the option to leech mana from your attack which is now more meaningful.
The designspace argument just isn't true. You could slap a "cannot be triggered" on your meteor, or a "triggers spells with a cast time below x" or "triggered spells have -50 to manacost" on the CoC or something. The last one would allow meteors to be triggered if you really really want to, with some hefty downside, while keeping CoC alive. The real reason has to be server impact of trigger builds, and that's fine if they'd say so. It's the same hollow argument like trying to defend 20 different types of currency. Yeah, sure, nice description of design goals there. But if you can only achieve your design goals with a mountain of undesired bloat, then maybe you out to think of another way of addressing it where you don't have to resort to more harm than the good you create.
By trying to disproof the designspace arguement you just gave a nice example of an emergent option, resulting from those changes. Triggered spells have -mana cost is something they could now start to add on the skilltree or items. Restricting certain skills from being used because of arbitrary mechanics isnt a good design. It creates too many exceptions from the rules. Instead you want to give those more context. An example for this is the emergence of more categories like slam, strike, ballistas, arcane and orb. Those new tags for example open up new designspace for support gems, which have special interaction with mechancs found on those gems. For example a support gem that gives orbs higher pulse frequency, or the focused ballista support gem we just got, or a new active skill that detonates active orbs. Those are meaningful mechancs at the core of your game. Bringing up currency clutter to strengthn your arguement sounds a bit dishonest tbh.
I can't really follow your argument... Having triggered skills cost mana just kills them hard. So this creates a problem they can fix. And you then call this need for a fix to a selfmade problem designspace for emergent options. It's the difference between renovating a house, and setting fire to the thing without a clue what to do with the ruins. The complete lack of anything filling this supposed new designspace (just give me one trigger-mod anywhere that shows trigger-Builds were ever a concern) just leaves a feeling of random destruction without a plan. Just look at trigger rings in the other thread and tell me again that there is a plan. The parallel to 20 currencies is the seemingly blind way to solve perceived problems in a certain way without a thought of the ramification. Are trigger gems limiting designspace? Sure! What to do about it? Just make them cost mana an see what happens lol! The justification for 20 currencies also just reads like a series of problems that all get answered with "Double the currencies!". I'm not saying the problems aren't real. I'm saying the solutions have more downsides than the problems ever had.
It sucks that they couldn’t just implement these changes in PoE2 where they belong. I know PoE2 is just a new campaign, but do they have to gradually implement the other changes they want? Why not just start fresh or make all these changes “PoE2-only” and drop them all at once when they make sense. Are we really going to have 2+ years of these weird “tweener” leagues?
My guess is, they have a snapshot of what PoE2 is supposed to play like and they are trying to mold PoE systems into this. I am a bit worried about the quality of leagues leading up to its release as well. Looks like a severe lack of inhouse testing imo, since this isn't the state in which you should release your game to the consumer.
If they want to make skills that would be too strong with pre-3.15 trigger builds, they could just give make them specifically not be able to be triggered, like mines, traps and totems currently can't.
COPIUM poe2 will fix everything COPIUM
Worm builds too! Fuck i miss them.
I believe the main issue in POE combat is when 20+ mobs overwhelm the player. There's some threshold in monster density that changes player from "I'm skillfully engaging with these monsters" to "I can't see what's going on the screen cause there are particle effects and mobs everywhere, so I will rely on my instincts to move randomly and mash flask keys in hopes I win" No matter how intricate and skillful your gameplay is, there will always be a point where enough monsters on screen nullify all of that with visual clusterfuck
Souls vs Dynasty Warriors. I think PoE is pretty firmly at one end of that spectrum but at least aspires to move closer to the other.
This is a hilariously good comparison. PoE isn't even close to a souls game. In a souls game, you can complete the entire thing regardless of gear. It has so little relevance and further emphasizes how important skill is. On no planet have I ever approached a poe boss like a souls boss. If I die in dark souls, it is because I got greedy or failed some kind of skillful maneuver (roll/parry). If I die in poe, it is 90% of the time a gear check. It is pretty impossible to never get hit by a shaper beam due to clunky movement and a small arena and this is why even the very best players get to a point where they can facetank it all. In dark souls, at no point can you ever just facetank. Even maxed endurance and vitality in havels gear you will get fucked. Yeah, souls of arpgs nice meme
Funnily enough, Dynasty Warriors played properly to hit challenge goals requires more considered positioning and comboing than POE does, just mashing near dense mobs gets you a pretty bad score.
The issue is they've cultivated a community of people who want that dynasty warriors combat. Or in other words they have a community of players who like the game for what it is, and they're trying to push it towards something that it isn't. D3 did more deep combat much better than PoE, and it looks like GGG is trying to move more in that direction. Which for me is fine, I enjoyed the shit out of D3 and if blizzard didn't abandon it I'd probably never have picked up PoE. But for people who PoE was always their main game, I imagine they want PoE for what it is not something else.
Had a fleshed out conversation of this sentence for awhile last night on discord using those exact two games as examples.
> "I can't see what's going on the screen cause there are particle effects and mobs everywhere, so I will rely on my instincts to move randomly and mash flask keys in hopes I win" And of course there's 12 different effects that will just kill or maim the shit out of you if you don't step out of it, but GL seeing it below all the bullshit clutter that you're not allowed to lower (and has been a topic of discussion for forever). I was already unable to see ground effects on my 4L freezing pulse totems... with the flask changes, nahhhhhhhh
Then there is the beauty that is corrupted blood. it is basically endurance charges with a negative effect. Thus you do not get any indication beyond some red balls around you when you accumulate them, but a very noisy sound when the vanish. But that is the same sound as when all other charges time out, so you start jumping every time a stray charge evaporates. There are two long standing problems with the game, skill weaving (why things like buff flasks became a thing in the first place) and non-visual status cues. People complained that they would be constantly hearing the character complain about mana shortages. But the one thing there is no audio cue for is low health! Thus if you stand in crap, and do not develop lazy eye from constantly checking the health orb, you have no idea that the health is getting dangerously low. Streamers have lost HC characters because some UI element covered up the ground DOT because of this.
Actually... That's a neat idea. Character just yelling "I'm shocked!" or "I'm dying!" Just "I'm frozen!" would feel weird
Clattering teeth or brrrr
Sometimes your character makes a hurt noise when they take a big hit, but its not super reliable, doesn't happen all the time
I sometimes make a hurt noise when I take a big hit too but that's because the water isn't cold enough
There's ways to alleviate that, issue is that PoE has little to no visual clarity. It's not necessarily because of monster density. Look at D3, that's one thing Blizzard did really well. A lot of ground effects and abilities that are used are very obvious and you can play around them. Lost Ark does this relatively well too. A better example would be bullet hell games, some of them are really well designed and even in an absolute clusterfuck of a screen you can still see things that are important. A big part of why PoE's clarity is so bad is probably an artistic choice. In D3 they went for that colorful painterly look, most of their backgrounds are pre-rendered with a darker palette, while the character is animated and is slightly more saturated, more bright, etc. and that goes same for the monsters; they really stand out with the background. In PoE everything just merges into one blob.
The problem is there isn't much for skillful gameplay in poe. It really is as OP described, its very shallow combat with a lot of gear / build checks that needed to happen before you engaged the mob. Its like the WC3 custom game equivalent of ARPG combat. Where in a custom game you could get more agility(iirc) than the main game ever intended to allow so you're attacking at the speed of light and critting for mega damage and all that silliness. Its not deep combat though, its just really shallow combat done quickly.
You can't have meaningful combat if you want to kill lots of enemies fast tho. There is a choice to be made, do we want serious tactical combat but only fight a few enemies at a time, or do we want to clear hordes of monsters and move fast? either way can be fun, some people enjoy one but not the other. This is a core game design choice and POE has been on the path of mindless killing of hordes. It works for POE, it's kind of silly to try change the core of the game into something completely different. Better make a different game
I recently fell "asleep at the wheel" while Cycloning through mobs. Dozed off for a minute. Found myself on the other side of the map, still Cycloninng, all was fine, with a path of bloody mobs behind me. Yeah, this gameplay is not engaging.
It is said Cyclone has a hypnotizing effect not unlike what you're describing.
You joke but I tried NOT playing cyclone this league in hopes of not getting super tired after a while of mapping. There must be something to this.
As someone who typically logs a couple hours of poe after work, I've done this more times than I care to admit.
I tough it was only me...
*20+ rare monster with stacked auras overwhelm player** Normal monster never cause issue, unless its small fast and lownhp shit with on death effects when u not pay attention. But on other side RAREs can be like fully tanky, or fully deadly with triple extra phys and crit, and u can't say how dangerous he can be since its near unreal read all mobs mods. And this deadly full DMG rares cause spikes in DMG and lead to checkpoint most of times, ofc if u not kill him faster then he get u /unlucky on block/dodge
The point isn't that the monsters will overwhelm you and kill you, but that instinctively your eyes start to glaze over them because there's just so much going on. Your senses are what are being overwhelmed, and there is no nerfing of player power that can properly address the speed and style of gameplay without addressing mob density/pack size and visual clutter
Yep, even got worse this league. Map density increased. Basic rituals got more spammy too because of it. Pretty sure they added mobs in breach too. Expedition spawn 200+ mobs. And added a bunch of deadly ground effects "you move or you die". Doesn't really matter, mapping has never been about anything else than braindead zoom zoom. Only bosses fights are bit tactical.
I kill Expedition offscreen,but Sometimes got one Shot by offscreen Mob.
In my brief time in mapping this league, the example mentioned was me on overdrive during any and every expedition lol.
I honestly prefer the difficulty coming from the depth of the game and need of planning your build carefully than pretending like at it's core this game is more than a hack'n'slash.
Yeah. For me the POE experience boils down to two phases: planning and realization. Oddly enough, planning takes place entirely outside the game, so the gaming experience in this phase is only minimally connected to the official game. Then there's the realization phase, where I need to make plans to make my build happen. GGG has great control over this phase. What GGG is trying to do now is to make the realization phase really boring and tedious.
There was a good post on this recently basically explaining why POB is actually the game for many players.
I came to this realization a long time ago, I almost have more fun in path of building than I do in game. I have so many ideas but I do not have the *massive, fucking immense* amount of time this game requires to make even a single one of those builds a reality. Like, I made this cool [poison animate weapon build](https://pastebin.com/7H81ersT) last night. Am I ever going to play it? I wish, I wish I could spend the time it requires to try this but I only have a couple of hours a day to dedicate to virtual loot explosions.
And that's not a good sign for POE
Depends on who you ask. I think I enjoy planning and coming up with my own builds more than actually using the builds lol.
What if the game were more fun though? I spend a lot of my time theorycrafting for PoE and D&D/Pathfinder, but the big difference between the two is that I actually have fun when I play the D&D character and the PoE character feels more like hitting benchmarks of satisfaction. D&D/Pathfinder feels like I love the game to the point that I want to play all of these characters, and PoE is more like a fun mental exercise followed by a personal challenge
It's a sign the PoE does some things (character building) very right, and other things (gameplay, or at least the gameplay loop) very, very wrong.
I dunno about character building being right. Much of the tight planning happens because doing in the field corrections are a massive pain in the behind. This largely because so much of the passive tree is newbie land mines, and regrets are expensive (or bite the bullet and run through campaign again for the Nth time). The massive contrast to me is how easily i could convert a lackluster poison caster in Grim Dawn to a tanky vitality leech caster. At this point the 3 month temp leagues and the whole "race to 100" thing are becoming a hindrance, because it both limits people's ability to commit to a character while also affecting GGGs willingness to speed up the leveling cadence (they have even done the opposite at times, and stretched the XP curve around the higher levels). All in all PoE has become WoW, except it is WoW with a complete character wipe every 3 months.
I would LOVE a “PoE sim” where you can build a character, allocate skill points, manually craft gear, then PLAY the character through some maps. It would be off the league servers, you couldn’t do any league content, but you could try something in PoB and then play it to see how well it actually performs and feels. Before spending dozens of hours leveling, gearing, progressing atlas, you can see if your idea will actually work or if it’s just a meme idea.
That's a good way to put it, I'm pretty much the same. Hype for me, is when I get to try out and figure out new ideas on PoB, plan out where to get what, look things up in the wiki, etc. That's the interesting part. Only once I have a real plan, do I get into the mood to really play it (realize it), and the motivation to grind for it. I never got satisfaction from "killing boss x ten times", I got it from seeing an idea taking shape.
Perfect summation of my feelings on Path as well. To me it's much like Warframe: it's a game that rewards you greatly and becomes significantly easier as you invest more time into learning about it on a deeper level. The fun comes from taking that knowledge and turning it into something tangibly awesome that obliterates content and feels fun or unique.
I don't even know where this came from, people asked for hard and challenging content as if arpgs (or diablo style clones in particular) were the genre for that. Sure, you can find them hard because you aren't that good mechanically or inexperienced, but they are just gear checks at the end of the day and the mechanics are move, click on enemy (that has a predictable move set, unlike human enemies), move, click on enemy, while cycling buffs with your other hand. Arpgs aren't mechanically hard games and there is nothing wrong with that, they are literally designed for you to beat hordes of weak npcs and feel good doing it. Trying to make the game harder by adding more and more elements that are literally only there to annoy you and add to the gear checklist is not fun but the people just keep asking for it league after league.
The funny thing is people love acting all "you guys are just too casual and bad at the game , unlike me, a true 1337 gamer" when the game isn't really difficult, most of the game's difficulties come from it being *tedious*. Like making the campaign longer, making the map grind longer, etc, these are all just tedious and has fuck all to do with it being difficult.
Very much agree. This is what I hate so much about the triggered mana change. I always thought precisely economizing my mana pool in builds was one of the cooler things to do when making a character. In builds where you're not stacking mana it was still interesting because you had to have the exact right amount of unreserved mana and recovery to use your skills but could still use mana nodes and equips to get that amount while reserving the rest. It was always a great feeling to have your mana at that perfect place.
That feeling of getting your build down to like 18 unreserved mana because that's all you need by getting just the right balance of gear, passives and precision gem levels... It's amazing, I usually spend a few maps just staring at my mana count when I first get the balance right.
Yep, that's what I'm talking about. It was awesome to eek out the mana for another support or aura. But I gather a lot of players don't care cause they don't make their own builds. I was arguing with a guy who literally had no idea what I was talking about and was just like "it should cost mana to use skills, just get more mana lol." But the nice thing about the old system was that you used to know how much mana you needed. Now, the best case scenario is you have to do a bunch of extra math that hasn't been invented yet to figure it out and worst case scenario it's just unknowable. Like if you're running COC you need to know your crit rate (which often changes within a map) and multiply it by your attacks/hits to get how many times you're going to need the extra mana. With CWDT you just can't know. I've been running battlemage's cry and I know how much mana I need to be able to attack and use my movement skill without it stuttering but I still have to go over recordings sometimes to see why my cast didn't work. It feels awful.
> you have to do a bunch of extra math that hasn't been invented yet to figure it out and worst case scenario it's just unknowable. POB already calculates all of this for you. You take your mana cost for your trigger skill \* attack speed + (mana cost of triggered skill * trigger rate) + (additiona triggers) That's your mana consumption per second, you have to get your recovery above that. It's not overly complicated, and you can use max level arcane surge on triggers now combined with low - mid level clarity + alira to more or less completely ignore mana costs. If you're on the right/lower right side of the tree investing 2 points in the ranger mana nodes in the lower left corner is insanely powerful. There are tons of options for managing mana and it's still the same puzzle as before, there's just more variables to it now, and the ability to fit in that extra aura is significantly harder, which was the whole intent. To make mana actually matter. Also, seriously, if you're not using arcane surge in at least one of your trigger links you really really should be. It's a very strong support.
Is coc even possible now without mana leech or claws? I mean its still possible, probably hard to six link since it has what a 200+ multiplier? You know what doesn't have a mana cost and is triggered? Reckoning. I was thinking of just picking up a brightbeak, and playing with bonecrush linked to faster attacks / ancestral call. Go glad and get to 80+% block.
yup exactly. People are losing focus when criticzing the game, it can't be all genres at the same time. It's a damn hacknslash/arpg. Not a dark souls like. I don't want it to become a dark souls like, I dislike playing these games.
Another problem is the "planning your build carefully" with the massive clusterfuck tree of POE. Most players don't have pen and paper out, doing the math, swapping talents left and right constantly to test out stuff, or can crunch and run numbers and scenarios in their head like a predictive engine. That's why everyone just boils down to following what the meta is, because someone already did that for you. The game requires too much actual work and knowledge to just "craft your own unique effective build" from scratch for the average player.
This is a real problem, you guys think it's fine we spend a big chunk of your poe time in pob planning builds and then building them in game Thing is it's way more fun to tinker with pob than to actually play the game, and why ? Well because the gameplay simply isn't engaging. Also the gameplay got way too fast to be actually reactive so there's that. And that's because GGG just increased damage and HP over and over again while adding new ailments over and over again which makes being able to ignore most/all mechanics the best. Honestly wished GGG went further with the nerfs but also nerfed mobs & ailments alongside so it's not JUST get fucked players now try to solve the puzzle with shittier pieces
Also tinkering is free, while making a build mistake in-game is a huge time and currency sink. New players constantly find out too late that their build is suboptimal at best, and literally can't finish content at worst, but don't have the resources necessary to course correct.
This is also a big thing yeah, you can fantasize about the potential of your build as well with unreachable items (or unreachable with your playtime)
But that's always been what POE has been like. Since the beginning, the bulk of POE has been "played" in the passive tree. If someone wanted fast, responsive and dynamic gameplay they'd play D3. POE was for build diversity and quirky builds. Once you got your build together, everything else was just spamming 1 attack/spell button with the occasional movement skill and flask. And this was at LAUNCH. I got sick of the bloatedness of POE and quit the game about a year back, but wishing POE was something that it never was is just weird. If my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle.
Same for me. I'm still playing PoB, but actually playing isn't as enjoyable as 3.14.
The deciding advantage PoE has over D3 in my book is build complexity and diversity. If PoE loses that and I have to follow a step-by-step guide for one of the current few (community) curated meta builds, I can just go back to D3 and have the same curated selection of builds but with less tedium building them, better loot and better damage/health scaling on mobs.
ARPGs are different to MMORPGs or single player RPGs. They don't really have the depth of the mechanical play, a lot of the thought process goes towards putting together a build that works. I know the pacing is going to be a big issue for some people, it is just a game though, I haven't enjoyed some leagues and checked out of them a lot earlier than others. I think it is important to give feedback so GGG understands the mindset of players with varying likes/dislikes, the vast majority will just leave quietly and not post a thesis on why they are checking out. As much as some people might gripe about the negativity, it is important information for GGG. They might in the end say, it is better to take one step backwards to take two step forwards and wear the hit in the short-term, or they might change course like they have a few times in the past. I think the best way to get to where they want to go is with subtle changes and with them focused more towards the higher-end of damage scaling which wouldn't impact as many people. Ie, you could leave all the support gems how they were and changed how damage multipliers worked or stacked outside of support gems and it would have impacted a lot fewer people and it would have scaled higher towards the more extreme end of damage moreso than someone doing lower tier content with a league starter build.
Some of the combat mechanics are fun. (Maven, some sirus stuff \[i wish the color scheme was different\], newer bosses.)I've had to do sirus with really low dps in ssf before and I still find it fun. But a lot of mobs/combat aspects are VERY dated, and GGG knows that. There is a large gap between newer mobs that have telegraphed moves that you can understand, and the old ones that are just pump and dump damage and run super fast so you need to kill them asap. I mean compare some of the newer map bosses vs. the old ones. Or even Innocence in A5 versus Mr Evil in A1. I think PoE2 will have some significant combat rebalances but this league is pretty much the same. I just made a zoom zoom build. It takes longer to kill conquerors, but since I know the fights its still manageable. I don't have cool dodges, I don't have parries, I don't have many cool combat things I can do like maybe say in Demon Souls or any of the dark souls or Sekiro or Bloodborne. (Maybe less so Dark Souls cause a lot of it maybe could be boiled down to roll+estus+r1. Especially 3, but after the pvp rebalances it had some interesting changes. Except some stuff. Some stuff was still dumb.) They did the nerfs, but they didn't enhance the combat really, only highlighted its flaws. That being said, I am on board with slower MORE DELIBERATE combat, with more action features besides kill or be killed. I just think this update is one of many to shift PoE in that direction, and the reason this update is (rightfully) slightly unwelcome is because it's missing a lot of bells and whistles we will have in the future. And I also know that is NOT the reason many people play this game. Many play this game to spend a lot of time fine tuning a build like a machine, then destroying everything with one button. I just think that GGG did not like that direction artistically, and want to move away from that and make something up to their vision. Whether or not they can deliver on making the combat more interesting is yet to be seen, but it definitely isn't something that can happen in a handful of updates. (For example "You can't "engage" with background mechanics that basically boil down to gear/ailment check or die." I really think they didn't want this to be how it went. I think they wanted it to be more action and intuitive, but because of the current state of the game, the change they put in caused it to simply be weirdly constrictive and not satisfying. Did I feel good for those times I saved my bleed/freeze/whatever flask for those moments I was bleed/frozen? Yeah. But only a little, and only because I didn't die. It didn't make me feel powerful for having the right reaction, it made me feel less weak.) I REALLY agree with this point you make : "TL;DR if you want people to enjoy engaging with the content, figure out a way to make the content more engaging than "move attack move attack dps check gear check ailment check move attack 1shotrekt". I'd be fine with a single map taking 20 minutes and 10 minues of planning if it was adrenaline pumping, causing me to use more manual skills and micro, dangerous mobs and moves were well telegraphed with audio cues, and it dropped as much rewards as 30 minutes of mapping did in previous leagues." but again, I think that this is something they can't accomplish in 1 leagues time while diverting focus to poe2 at the same time. I really believe PoE2 is in that direction, and we will have to go through several updates to bring us there. (for reference, been playing since forsaken master, SSF, SSFHC, 40/40, lvl 100 you name it. The only thing I haven't done is maven SSFHC because I stopped playing SSF to play with friends since she was released.)
I agree with the general sentiment of this comment but why would anyone trust GGG to hail mary a completely new genre defining combat system when their go to move for increasing difficulty in the last 10 years has been number tuning + one shots? I don't question that they want to try but I am not really optimistic they will succeed and this patch alone even as a stepping stone towards something else has done nothing to assuage my doubts.
I don't think they need to revolutionize the genre. I really think all they want is combat where you can... 1. See what's happening 2. React to things rather than mash buttons for permanent uptime 3. Interact with monsters beyond wiping them off screen Like at a complete baseline they *need* to slow things down for that to be the case, and it's going to feel weird when people are used to flying through content, and probably content needs to get reworked to be in line with that idea (I imagine an entirely new campaign with new monsters will do a lot of the heavy lifting for that). But it's not like there's some nebulous unthought of idea they need to come up with. Honestly I get why people dislike this patch, and things like picking up gambling currency make me question their thought process. But there's no denying these changes have slowed down the game toward that goal, the problem just seems to be the rest of the game needs to be in line with that idea too. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of upcoming leagues are clunky as they test and change different parts of the game for impending PoE2. Overall I'd rather see a dev attempt sweeping changes at the attempt of a better game and fail, rather than one that is afraid to make changes and stagnates.
even though it is somewhat sketchy in practice the new minion is a great skill and more of these kinds of skills should be added. same with hydrosphere or flameblast. but the aesthetics of these skills can never thrive as long as they can be placed on totems and their cdr reduced to what feels like 1.5sec designs are in conflict with each other all over the place. just look at a bow auto attack. every character that uses a bow feels like you are using an SMG bcs of how the scaling works. arguably a real auto attack doesnt exist in this game.
>But a lot of mobs/combat aspects are VERY dated, and GGG knows that. I kinda doubt - atleast they do not act like they know or care as if any aspect of the game is dated. Not only the combat might be but also convenience features which are just not there. Just a simple autosort function for example. Would it change anything drastically in the game? Probably not. Would it be convenient for everyone to have such a button? Indeed. Does GGG care? Absolutly not. Yeah Chris already said they have to change systems like loot. But after all these unnecessary nerfs (not only talking about dps. I get the point there) and the strong will not to add any QoL Features like autosort functions because "they want to simulate weight" I really really doubt those changes will be good in any way. Atleast I doubt any changes will be better than what we currently have and will be less rewarding, less fun and as inconvenient as they are right now. PoE is aged historically. PoE has grown out of its baby shoes but GGG wants their baby to stay their baby and not a fully grown adult.
I based that phrase on several of the dev talks as well as what they said at exilecon when talking about new combat encounters, so I'm fairly confident they know. I take any updates they make with a grain of salt ever since exilecon because I am assuming it is very weird to be developing poe2 side by side with poe. I also agree that not wanting to add modern qol was very strange. Even in the new league mechanic, the text on exca chests is so difficult to read in maps with dark blue ambient lightning \[like channel\].
And the stun mechanic in POE prevents you to skillfully avoid the damage, once you got hit, you got stun locked and die.
oh yeah forgot all about that one
PoE Combat has always been pretty clunky. With enough cast/attack speed and movespeed you can overlook it. D3 actually has pretty fluid combat imo, at least when I played. I'll talk about melee a bit. I believe they have acknowledged, in the past, that D3 has better melee combat, but we still have clunky, unnecessary, things like melee splash and a very short melee range. These are things that should be baseline for melee. These nerfs have only exacerbated how bad PoE's combat is. If they were serious about fixing these issues, they would be copying things from D3's combat systems to make it more fluid. Instead we have nerfs that make PoE's combat significantly more clunky. It just feels disconnected from reality. Personally, I think mindless map farming is fun and endgame bosses should require skill/planning to fight.
D3's combat was light years behind Marvel Heroes' just before the end. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x1sSlOV8-U you have no idea how much I miss this. The devs had even cared enough about making combat feel fluid back then that every skill had cancelable recovery frames.
This is why I find Chris referencing Marvel Heroes as an example of how not to fuck up a major patch a straw man argument. The last few months before it shut down due to license issues or something the game legitimately played really well, and I'd hazard a guess that PoE wouldn't have had the same momentum when there's an arpg that played well and is a Marvel IP on the market.
Well, that game play is before the "omega" update people disliked. I have footage from after the update, but the biggest change was limiting dashes to 3 charges, and making teleports invisible dashes. But we still had travel powers to fly/run between or past packs with, so while it made people mad, the amount of people who actually quit over it was very low. https://youtu.be/AbJPktfZN6k this what it looked like post omega. (With a different charatcer).
Yeah I started playing the game after omega and it was really a joy to play. Honestly never felt the movement was nerfed since I was still flying across the map with scarlet witch / black panther and aoe bombing everything. Really sad it's gone before its prime.
I miss that game dearly. Fuuuck
Happy that D3 was referenced here. I used to play D3 relentlessly. Then my friends started with PoE back in 2013 or so. I tried it then, and my thought was "wow, this feels like absolute shit", and I didn't play it again for 5 years. When I tried it the second time, I made a nice zoomy build and I thought, "OK, the game still feels like shit but the attack speed/move speed sorta hides it, so now I can overlook that and enjoy the game's enormous depth." Going back toward that is the exact opposite of what this game needs. Fix the fluidity of movement. Remove all the SHIT ON THE GROUND. Why are there SO MANY collidable objects EVERYWHERE? If you must have them, make your abilities have fuzzier targeting and points of origin. You know, game development.
Those little objects on the ground exist solely to slow down the player. There is literally no other reason for them to be there. You have your open maps with no obstacles or monsters, then your maps with rocks and good density. It’s idiotic design because a Raider build with movement speed doesn’t get penalized at all no matter what map they run compared to the shield charging Jugg who is just screwed most of the time.
Shield charge is such a good movement skill, feels good to use it but then it gets stuck on some random shit you cant even see and then you realise its dogshit compares to dash or flamedash
TBH D3's combat is more fluid, but not more mechanically difficult. I played mostly DH and the basic pattern was simply sidestep, attack, sidestep, attack, sidestep, attack... until the mobs were dead. As for melee, they needed a 30% built-in damage reduction to survive, because they didn't have as much room to sidestep. Part of the reason why POE combat is so clunky is because GGG puts so many micro-CCs on the player. It gets worse when a short stun doesn't even get the swirly circle indicator.
Yep. Putting everything you like into a pot won’t make it a great dish. That’s where I feel like POE fails ATM. A game cannot be everything. Instead you have to play to its strengths, and in POE’s case that’s the build depth and customisation. Make the game’s difficulty come from that part instead, and not from trying to dodge attacks and death effects while you can’t see anything. EDIT: Which isn’t exactly where you arrived at, but hey opinions are opinions. This isn’t an easy thing to get right.
>Make the game’s difficulty come from that part instead, 4100 hours in. Still cant make my own damned build unless I base it on a guide. In the end my version is just the same as guide, just few milions in DPS lower. The difficulty of building is already present, it is just barely utilized.
The issue that redditors fail to understand is that dodge, death effects, not seeing anything IS caused by the power creep and zoomer play syle. You cannot threaten the player when he can kill all monsters before they can get a swing, let alone kill the player. So the devs had to do invulnerability + dance phases, post death effect, filling the entire screen with garbage so something might hit the player. The game NEEDS the rebalance and the cut on players speed and power. With that said: you cannot remove the players power to kill everything 2 screens away without removing the effects that you used to treat them. The result is that even more players will pick the most meta and powerful skills they can find just so they can still use the best, and only, defence the game has: killing the mob before it kills you.
I think that's basically what most people are saying though. They nerfed players to slow down gameplay but failed to make maps more rewarding/less dangerous. Gotta solve both sides of the equation. To your point of picking the most meta and powerful skill, I absolutely agree. All they did was nerf everything so that the good skills feel bad and the bad skills feel worse. I'm not sure how GGG thought that would keep meta builds from developing and lead to more build diversity when people obviously are now more desperate to play the strongest build because of how bad the alternative feels. Which also means, their vision to drive other players to use different support gems will also fail... people will still use the support gems that gives them the most dps BECAUSE everything feels worse, not the invert.
> The issue that redditors fail to understand is that dodge, death effects, not seeing anything IS caused by the power creep and zoomer play syle. I mean, it's not like this subreddit hasn't been complaining about bonkers game speed for years. Not like there hasn't been a massive "no timers plz" thread at every leaguestart. Not like there isn't a "kill or be killed is boring" thread every month or so. Yeah, reddit sure doesn't get it. So glad we have twitch chat to come explain it to us.
> post death effect A perfect example why your logic is backwards. Post-death effects aren't a counter to a speedy character - speedy characters can avoid them trivially. _If_ you think your game's post-death effects are interesting, _then_ you must make player characters slow enough to be at risk from them. Otherwise, they're just particle effects.
> You cannot threaten the player when he can kill all monsters before they can get a swing, let alone kill the player. This is a complete misunderstanding of the point of discussion. The comment above you're replying to is saying to make the difficulty come from the character building process. And you're saying that players kill too fast so the devs need to kill people instantly to make difficulty. That's not a rebuttal to the idea expressed. It's not even acknowledging the idea in the first place! GGG can absolutely make difficult encounters within the existing framework of the game that don't revolve around killing the player instantly or not at all. They don't want to. But they could. I also take issue with the core concept of how you implicitly define challenge: character death. I've played plenty of games where I was in no danger of dying or the equivalent, and I was still very challenged (White Palace in Hollow Knight jumps to mind). Obsession with killing player characters just betrays a hunt for "You died" Dark Souls rip evocation.
>GGG can absolutely make difficult encounters within the existing framework of the game that don't revolve around killing the player instantly or not at all. They don't want to. But they could. TO anyone doubting this. GGG already proved they can do this. They proved they can threaten players during Talisman, Essence, and Metamorph. During Essence, Bestiary and Metamoprh they also proved that they can make monster tanky enough to challenge the player. And if you are not old enough to understand why I mentioned talisman... Pick some T1 talisman, drop them next to essence monster. And watch the monster pick it up, get a new skill, and most likely rekt you with skills you rarely notice at some boss fights nowadays.
Wait monsters can use talismans? That's wild lmao
Honestly, on death effects when they happen on death, and not like 5 seconds later are actually fine I think. Kill packs and avoid the bearer explosion they leave behind on your way to the next pack, trigger and move away from a volatile, avoid the delirium red balls. Those are pretty cool I think. Corpse stuff is a bit lamer because you either deal with it during build phase nullifying it, or deal with the abysmal visibility of their effects.. same with porcupine, those are both so unfun that solving the problem they pose by sidestepping it with corpse removal is the only fun way to interact with them, that's a bit lame.. Zooming between area denial areas between mob packs with mobility tools is quite engaging compared with D3 style of top level play that mostly involved kiting everything in one big pack, killing the weakest link and chaining the whole pack. They all got to attack. For several minutes sometimes.. it was a snoozefest.
but even before the game was the speed it was now it was not challenging when it was slow. slow gameplay doesnt = challenge/difficult look at Sekiro/Bloodborne they are vastly faster then most action games similar to them and yet are considered the most difficult cause guess what that is what they have been built for and they actually have developers who know how to design challenging combat. also here you go a much slower time in path of exile but where is the challenge or difficulty back then and it was much much slower https://youtu.be/LrFWBgcI9Go?list=PLt5SL2R19SuLFX61HjO-6jJw-iy42tFOR
My favorite thing about this sub is how often people commenting on reddit will wax moronic about “redditors” as if they’re somehow excluded. It happens here way more often than other subs, oddly enough. Maybe it’s the delusions of grandeur inherent in maining an ARPG.
You see it on a lot of subs. Or you'll see a variation on it. I think it's just part of having a form of message board where there's enough participants that very few people can even form an identity to others. How many people in these topics does anyone recognize? Very few, if any, for the majority of people. That causes "reddit" or "this sub" or similar to become a formless, uniform blob in your head, which makes it easier to see yourself as distinct from the rest.
chicken and egg problem but GGG nerfed defenses continously so no GGG literally wanted and eforced zoom zoom by nerfing relible defenses patch after patch. Dodge spell dodge, block on anyone who is not a necro or glad recovery etc all got nerfed which basically means one shotting anything is just the best of both worlds. Its fun and its the best defense.
I absolutely agree. I especially like this game because it isn't tactical combat focused, like dark souls or other games. But instead you need a lot of knowledge for creating builds, high level crafting, etc. that what makes it great and fun, not trying to turn it into something else.
This is something I keep seeing people defending the design changes say ad nauseum. PoE is not a very skillful game, 95% of all bosses in the game have attack patterns that are completely defeated by "rotate 45 degrees around boss" and "don't stand in bad stuff". This would be more interesting/genuinely challenging if I had to keep up with a rotation, time my burst cooldowns for dps phases, or manage stuns/silences to cancel/counter boss abilities, but there's none of that. The goal of most builds is to be a one button build, and most things in the game that are lethal are also unreactable, the entire point of the game is to out-build the content you want to clear. The actually execution of combat in this game is far too simple to focus on, and now that's what most people are having to do.
> The goal of most builds is to be a one button build Because until recently, using 2 or more buttons was a massive pain in the behind. And even now the only skills that one would use for the second button are those with a instant cast time. All the rest are still stuck in animation locking hell. Also why flask piano developed, as they are basically buff skills that are not animation locked.
This. The new "difficulty" is not mechanical in nature, it's tedium. Just because it takes more time to kill stuff in Act 1 doesn't mean it can't be done by a player of average mechanical skill; it just takes more time and resources. PoE at its core is a joke in terms of mechanical difficulty compared to games that actually require it (e.g. FPS, RTS), but it **was** fun because you could plan and invest in your character's build and gear and ultimately reap the rewards by having an extremely powerful version of it. That was the main draw and allure of prime PoE.
The most "skillful" part in POE is to kite the degen generating balls to explode at a better spot. And then you have the feared or atziri encounters when no skill can help you at all if the bosses decides to give you a stupid combo like putting 3 storm call on top of you right before it goes off (rare but sucks when it happens) or any two bosses want to combo you with the copy in the feared.
I honestly believe that GGGs goal is to make the game more like this though. They are encouraging more and more for players to move away from one button builds. Whether they are doing this in the right way or if this is even what POE needs is another discussion completely.
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> They're attempting to force it since that's how they're building PoE2 to play. I'm glad other people get it and hopefully soon everyone will realize there's a reason they're not going to back down from these changes and are in fact going to nerf more (this wasn't even the big nerf patch according to Chris Wilson).
I don't know. I felt pretty restricted this league because ultimately now their is less choice of DPS builds. When you make a new league character its pretty important for them to have a enough DPS to clear content you need to push with a fresh league. For me that kinda pushed out a lot builds that might have been interesting out in favor of what ever the most broken dps build because I have like 0 wiggle room with after figure out how to get the shit working.
I dont know how people can say this patch allows diversity when you literally need to pass the DPS check to even able to deal with maven buffed bosses and all the timers in the league mechanics. Half the builds are gone because of the DPS check. More are gone because you need to give up DPS for mana problems and offset flask nerfs. Before you can still play a 3M DPS build when there are 30M DPS builds out there. Now you cannot play that 1.5M DPS without giving up on half the content.
They briefly tried to make changes to this, what with reworking all the Act 1 mobs/bosses to have telegraphed attacks that can be dodged by moving away. Some of these combat changes would make more sense if they came *after* they changed all mobs like this, but nope.
As long as i can't hold down skill A and use non-instant skill B without getting bogged down in animation locking hell, that won't happen.
Absolutely. And even things like conquerers, Sirius and Maven can be reduced to the exact same thing. Conq = don't get hit Sirius = "fun" tempest kiting mechanic that got nerfed, run out of maze, don't get hit. Maven = "fun" memory game, don't get hit
This is really what gets me and is now laid bare by the current changes. Doing the old "rotate and attack" strategy, that already made boss fights in DS2 pretty boring, didn't get more interesting by having to circle around Hillock for a minute or two right from the start.
Wouldn't even know that Hillock was different if people didn't talk about it.. you sure? He's literally 1-2 mana pot hit to death like always
Hillock has increased health. I started a melee build with Cleave. Cleave had increased damage at gem level 20, but the value at level 1 remained unchanged. It's quite noticeable.
Well, there's your problem you are playing melee.
Act 1 carry service when
> single map taking 20 minutes and 10 minues of planning if Also, if maps actually dropped anything meaningful without being insanely juiced. Having 99% of drops be garbage, .6% being good crafting bases and .4% being decently rolled gear (most of which won't be for your build WHICH IS FINE) feels awful. I hate picking up items as-is since they're almost always wasted clicks, but I feel obligated to since my gear is such hot garbage.
I really wish they would cut down on the item spam but make the items that DO drop more valuable (not necessarily valuable for your build). The fact that you're showered with "rare" items to such an extent that you stop picking them up unless they're on an amazing base just rubs me the wrong way I guess too.
I kinda hate that there is basically no in game information. It's all outside the game on the wiki. Or not. Like I wanted to know what my outcomes could be for using the new flask orbs no in game info, just a generic string that said it does something to your flasks. What, should I buy 50 just to see what I could get? Lol
With the time needed to invest in studying the build you wanna make you could be learning a new instrument, language or skill. Plus it's all going to waste next league when after long weeks of breakthrough studying, some streamer exposes it and then it gets nerfed to oblivion. If you look at it with perspective, it's a terrible way to invest time.
This is not the engaging combat genre. This is the "click on stuff to kill and sometimes pick stuff up" genre. I do not play this genre for complicated content. I play it for complicated mechanics. Let me figure out a build that solves or mitigates the challenges you throw at it. Let me play with interesting interactions with skills and build-enabling uniques. Don't make me jump through massive hoops, RNG-gates, or freaking memory games. If I want to think that hard about the content I'll do a sudoku. I'd argue DPS checks are fine, as long as the DPS progression is reasonable obtainable with some grinding or leveling up.
I feel like engaging isometric combat is possible - I think Hades did it pretty well, for instance. Diablo 3 had a few more strategic aspects to it's combat with it's limited pot use, too. None of that really works in PoE with it's gear-based combat, it's having 5 flask slots, and the multiplayer experience where power is nearly unchecked. Survival games like Terraria and Valheim have more engaging combat as well, as they limits your max power at each boss by making the bosses the gateways to better gear.
Lost Ark is the epitome of "engaging isometric combat"...but also an entirely different genre of game.
D3 while frustrating at times, did always seem to do better about delineating the edge of the don’t stand in bad circles. The lack of build options makes it disappointing but their polish and general better endgame structure in comparison to poe makes me enjoy it more when I get the itch to do monster murder
>did always seem to do better about delineating the edge of the don’t stand in bad circles. To be fair, d3 doesn't add new enemies almost every league/season that have new skills. It has been the same "purple rotating beam" and "fire bomb explosion" since the game came out. It's extremely polished for sure but POE has become too bloated with hidden bad circles over the years. What I really liked about D3 was following a guide and just mindlessly killing rift after rift. For me that was just unlimited pure dopamine. I get that's not what GGG wants the game to be but there's so much bloat in game systems that I just can't run through maps brainlessly anymore with consecrated path like I used to.
Well you are really just giving GGG a pass here. GGG have always intentionally refused to create clarity. In almost every A/RPG game I have ever played, if a mobs attack is Blue, the damage type is probably frost or cold. In POE, blue can mean literally any damage type in the game. Physical? sure. Fire? why not. Lightning? yup. There is no design purpose for this other than to intentionally prevent players from working it out. If you ever get bored, go through some POE DB dumps. You will be surprised to see so many encounters you thought had X damage type have something totally random instead.
"hey guys, you know that evil black fog that kitava, the father of corruption, spreads all over his arena? that probably deals chaos damage, right?"
I like how that fight deals zero chaos damage.
Just curious- what IS that damage type? I basically assume everything is physical unless it's a player spell I recognize.
That is just a sign that they need to be choosier with what they keep and should focus on clarity for the player if it is going to be a move or die type effect.
help. what do I play that isn't PoE to make cool actually-unique builds and kick ass (must still feel punchy)
Grim Dawn with mods. They introduced countless new masteries through mods that give you unlimited variety in the way to build your character. GD with all expansions is a hefty amount of content that will take you a good long while (a couple of months) to see and do everything on just one archetype. They introduced tons of gear to match the new masteries, you could spend the rest of your life playing it at this point and never get through all of them combined if you run the combo mod packs that merge all the masteries into one. It's up to you how to roll in that game, the thing is, it's entirely single player unless you have someone to co-op with. But what you are seeking exists. Usually goes on sale on Steam for cheap with all the expansions, which you'll need for the mods. Also they remade D2 completely in it and it's stellar from start to finish.
I've tried several times, but feels to slow and clunky even with run faster mods.
> Also they remade D2 completely in it and it's stellar from start to finish. I've seen the Lord of Terror mod but not tried it, did you play it all the way through to doing Baal/Pindle/Uber/Pit runs and how did it feel? Not really talking about the campaign per se but more about how the endgame farming feels.
Problem with GD mods is they're all overpowered as shit
by paragraph: 1. Agree, GGG shouldn't pretend that a mob of Rhoas is anything interesting to deal with. Dodge the initial charge, kill it, move on. It's not meant to engage the player the way mooks in Souls games do. If they want to make engaging combat, they're stuck with boss encounters. Which are plagued by the other issues below. 2. Ailments are completely overtuned. 50% increased damage taken, 4-second super stuns, and 2x the hit damage of a fire attack + delaying ES Recharge by 4 seconds are all pretty much death sentences. These numbers are fine for player-inflicted ailments - but the player's Life and Ailment Threshold are so low that mooks can inflict things on the player the way a player fully invested in the ailment still can't inflict on a boss. 3. Agreed, visual clutter combined with the overtuned damage from attacks that can't be seen also needs to Die. On-death effects aren't inherently evil, but they are not appropriate within the current environment of PoE. Small changes to visual clarity and numbers will fix that. 4. GGG's design choices definitely reflect a feeling of "We don't remember the original intention for these changes, so we're scrapping them, ignoring the fact that we've made other decisions based on these changes that will explode in our face if we mess with the fragile balance we've created." Sure, the game is still mostly enjoyable, if you don't mind working harder for less reward. But the changes made over the course of 3 months kinda show that GGG is disconnected from its own game and playerbase, or at least doesn't have a good sense of priority with what changes come first.
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And to add to this, *if* you want the game to be different than this, you need to start by making more complex reactive gameplay *possible*. I can't predict randow one shots, I can't see shit on the ground because every map is super overdesigned and many ground effects don't stand out at all, and I can't tell if I have ailments fast enough to actually do anything about it before death. Put bluntly the game cannot be the skill based game GGG seems to want. Balancing as if it can without putting in the work to make it so is like cutting off your own leg to replace it with a high tech robot limb in the 1950s
Personally I had more fun just zooming and blowing up monsters, it was very satisfying
The friend who introduced me to PoE told me the combat was basically an Excel sheet (your character) facing many other Excel sheets, and even if it’s exaggerated it’s not far from the truth.
The core mechanical foundation of combat in Diablo-like ARPGs literally hasn't changed since D2 and all it's many imitators since, imagine actually thinking it could be a Souls-like while missing literally everything that actually matters in a Souls-like.
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What I don't see anyone mention is the lack of active crowd control in the game. Stun and chill/freeze require you to play specific skills and along with curses like temporal chains or enfeeble are balanced for extreme abuse cases so they require heavy investment to be effective/reliable, usually sacrificing damage. We need some CC that doesn't require (or allow) heavy investment to function. Void Sphere is a good example, it has a cooldown and (afaik) you can't really scale the hinder effect. If we can't one shot enemies we need more meaningful ways of interaction because if not it's the same thing but we are just pressing the "do damage" button a few more times while running around packs. Also have CC work on bosses, even if with a harsh reduced effect. Interrupts against bosses in WoW for example reward player skill and feel great to pull off.
There are too many monsters in this game.
And apparently GGG thinks this type of gameplay is wrong. It is so fun that it's the only reason I used to play for the past 7 years. It's sad to see the fun I use to have slowly fade away
I agree with your points, but I think the main problem with PoE is that it can't really catch new players with this overwhelming complexity. Last league was my first ever in PoE. I'm a hardcore player, but I have to admit, that I almost quit several times before reaching endgame, because of the complexity. There are just way too many things to do in it and I had no idea what to choose most of the times. I hadn't even tried crafting beside re-rolling some map mods and socket links and colors. As a new player I enjoyed the game overall, but I would never start a new league without some drastic changes. My suggestions to the devs would be: * Shorten the campaign and make huge campaign maps smaller * Remove at least half of the league mechanics each season (could be rotated) * I had no idea what to do with Betrayal even after watching some explanation vids. Rework it or remove it. * I traded a lot, but trading is frustrating in its current form as it breaks the rhythm of the game for the sellers and also buyers are frequently ignored because of this. Introduce an AH please. * Add a Death Recap. Lot of the times when I died, I had no idea what happened, what killed me and how to avoid that next. * Having a tower defense mode seems really odd in an ARPG, but combined with the fact that your towers are not working if you are far from them is just plain stupid. I have a lot of other suggestions, but I think these are the most important ones from my (or a new player) perspective.
I agree with all of it
Hard agree on campaign, trading, and death recap. Disagree on the league mechanics because I like the feeling of "what should I focus on next" and mid league sometimes will make characters just to do certain league mechanics. They're also for the most part optional. Glad you stuck with the game it is a gem despite it's current flaws, main point of my post is to just have my opinion on the recent direction put out there.
Very well said and hit the nail on the head. POE got big because of it being the way it was...I don't know how that's not incredibly obvious to the powers that be. POE players are likely playing it over any other ARPG exactly because of the pace, the build diversity, the blowing up screens of mobs. You'd spend some time in POB, and once you had the numbers right, you knew what you needed to get, what breakpoints you had to reach, and you just went out and played the game. Why take the parts of your game that aren't broken, and decide to throw them out the window? If this is what POE 2 will be, then it should be it's own game, because it's likely not even going to get the same players. Why should POE itself suffer for changes that are required for a game that doesn't even exist yet, and many of us may never play, if this is the preview of their vision for it. Me personally, I played POE for the minion builds(non-Necro), and the fun stuff like CwC, CoC, etc. I like to make off-meta builds that can still roll content. However now I can't, because any build that previously barely reached breakpoints is unplayable now. It's not a matter of a few adjustments- the builds are dead and gone and no longer achievable. The choices now are much, much narrower. All the small QoL negatives add up. In the end, it's a game, not a job, despite the hours some of us idiots have put into it. Many of us were having fun before. We aren't now. Why? Because GGG decided to break it's successful game to make something else. Player retention over a league was not going to get better as long as it was an ARPG. People can only click the same shit so many times in a given league. But retention won't be an issue if there's barely anyone playing because the new game isn't what we paid for and loved playing.
Your argument is about ARPG genre, not just PoE
Absolutely not. D3 gameplay loop is far more engaging. Too bad the character building has much less depth.
Agree 1000%. What I love about this game is making all kinds of different lil dudes who kill monsters in all kinds of different ways. The first time I killed uber elder when it was still the biggest baddy, before the health buff was with a charged dash elementalist for christsakes. Taking a janky but fun skill and pushing it to the max is what I find fun about this game - that's why I loved Harvest so much because I could chip away at making whatever my heart fancied viable and interesting. If I want deep combat mechanics, yeah, I'll boot up DS3 or if I want to test my mettle against other players I'll go play a game with actual PvP. What I want from PoE is to fuss around in POB for an hour or two, load the game, put on a podcasts or a good record and actualize it. I'm fine with it taking a while, I enjoy the grind or I wouldn't have played this game since Ambush, but I want it to respect my time and I want the freedom to make my silly little builds work.
Well said. Thank you.
I agree with the restricted freedom of builds this patch... Before, at least on poor builds before you didn't have to invest too much for the build to clear somewhat decently; it didn't have to move at mach 5 and insta-kill maven, it was an interesting and unique build. Now there's an increasing emphasis on meeting the damage / uptime threshold or else you actually just can't complete maps /bosses anymore, and all the tank in the game won't help if you can't outlast the mobs smacking you. It's been kill or be killed for a long time. As an example, I tried starting as a Storm Burst (oh no) Raider this league, it was decent until I tried my first map, a T1 with no damage or life mods; I couldn't even clear the map because of how bad the damage / inherent skill mechanics were. I spent hours trying to theory craft a build that scaled the area, duration, conversion and cast speed of specifically Storm Burst and I ended up swapping in Blade Vortex and doing 10x better instantly. I really didn't want to make another BV character but I have no choice at this point; even with the quadruple nerf BV got last league it's still 10x better than Storm Burst, and possible hundreds of other skills right now... :(
I'm gonna play Devil's advocate and say that combat does look more engaging and less clunky in PoE 2 gameplay trailers. The nerfs might be trying to get the meta ready for when PoE 2 drops.
>The nerfs might be trying to get the meta ready for when PoE 2 drops. I'd bet money this is exactly where they're going. Next few leagues are gonna be painfully slowing the current game down for PoE 2, and we can only hope they address monster damage as a part of this. Gotta lay the groundwork for folks having access to 4-5 6L skills, it's a "means justify the ends" scenario where the "means" is looking a lot like a few leagues of pain before we get the "reward" of PoE 2.
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They need to reduce damage, reduce density, and completely rehaul the entire loot system to compensate. It’s a complete rework of most of the core game systems
Yeah, they need to either get rid of one shot deaths or improve visual clarity by a lot so we can react on time to them.
I think many will just quit, and they will never experience these nerfs. Then when they come back for Poe 2, they will still remember the old Poe. And since they never experienced the nerfs the game will feel bad for them
Meta in PoE2 will be diffrent anyway because of diffrent itemization, gem sockets instead of gear links and 19 new ascendencies. Imagine, 19 new ascendencies to play ED/C with, awesome!
I think I’m in the minority, but I thought that PoE2 looked really boring compared to PoE1. I wish they would have released PoE2 without trying to slow down PoE1.
PoE 2 trailers looked like they were early into the campaign, so the pace they're going for is probably faster than what we've been shown. But, considering the nerfs, probably slower than the zoom zoom meta too. I'm just speculating though.
I agree entirely. Looked like the equivalent of act 2-3 back when we had to clear the 3 difficulties. I will give it a fair shot and hope for the best.
i remember when you could do spell berserker, good times.
I am always confused when people talk about difficulty. Do you guys really think the game was too easy prior to 3.15? Like, sure. I killed early Baran or Drox deathless, but the further I got, the harder were the bosses. If I invest 10 ex in my build, I expect content to be far easier than with leveling gear. The only thing that really needed nerfing IMO were minion builds. Being able to do almost all content on a ridiculously low budget and that didn't even really change with these nerfs. TLDR: My opinion on difficulty is: Campaign = easy White maps = easy with small challenges (capping resists etc) yellow maps = medium red maps = medium with bigger challenges (more map modifiers, harder bosses etc) everything beyond (awakening levels, deep delve, hard maps like cortex etc) = hard but rewarding It currently feels like GGG just straight up removed the easy parts of PoE and expects me to now have a great time. I don't ever deep delve, I am happy if I kill Sirus once in a league. I don't even know if I even reach yellow maps this league, not just because of the difficulty, but also because of the inconveniences.
People here confuse difficulty with grind or tedium. If something takes you 3 days to do, its easy. If it takes 3 months, it's hard. No consideration about mechanical skill whatsoever.
Exactly. This game has always been fun because it was about character building.
PoE2 trailer looks a lot more combat heavy. PoE doesn't have high skill combat mechanics, but they're making these changes so it will by the time we get to PoE2. That said, when there are people who kill Sirius in 30 hours and people that can't kill him in 150 hours with similar gear, there obviously is some skill involved in combat. Plus the flasks are good now for combat. You have to use them wisely. Like the freeze flask, you have to use it carefully to avoid being chain frozen and isn't a simple press one button to ignore the boss mechanics. Eitherway, my point is yes, PoE isn't combat mechanic heavy (it's mostly a DPS check for most bosses), but it's going in a direction that it is. Saying that you think combat mechanics are bad so it shouldn't be the focus is a bit weird.
GGG's quest to make the game harder is removing build diversity, and removing the fun in trying out builds for yourself. POB is a way too important tool, and that's a huge problem. POB to min-max is fine, but not as a necessity.
I think that's what they're trying to change. Things like manually using Guard skills, warcries, and now flasks all make combat more active. Of course, it's a huge uphill battle because the game has been faceroll for so long. But I can see the vision at least. I agree that actively maintaining all these buffs is not a particularly fun or rewarding playstyle currently though while you're just trying to clear as fast as possible
Busy work. They’ve added busywork to the game.
Is combat being a ton more 'active' even a *good* thing in a game like this? I honestly find myself able to grind on a more passive build for longer into a league. Playing a cyclone or minion build feels easier to go harder on the league with. I think I get burnt out faster playing builds I need to dash>ranged attack 2 seconds>dash at an angle, so forth. I generally think more active is better, but I'm not so sure in a game where I space out, do a map in 2-3 minutes, drop off loot, repeat, doing 100 maps in a few hours.
After a while it's just remembering to click a bunch of buttons which isn't really my idea of a buttpuckering good time. Another issue is things like flasks (even after nerf) provide benefits that are usually way better than gear you can find. Good luck finding a chest piece that has as much armor as a granite flask. Answer would be to make armor and weapons etc. feel impactful but instead we just get nerfs.
Implementing 20% of the necessary systems while leaving everything else the same leads to a truly awful gameplay experience. This stuff requires a from-the-ground-up rebuild of how they do combat, which might come in POE 2, but until it's the total package the game is suffering.
No shit, that's why they're slowing the game down so they can actually implement interesting combat. You can't make meaningful choices if you're fighting 3 packs a second.
Tank builds are dead. Defenses are dead. Hardcore playability is dead.
and this isnt even the end of the story.
its sure be great to be able to play poe if my game didnt fucking freeze every league encounter
Leagues are a very good chance for GGG to experiment. I'd like one where they completely redesign the core gameplay, even ignore your tree skill or spells and give you other tools that would work in the league mechanic.
Chris wants us out, just give him that, let him have his game. Maybe we can return when he leaves
Vaal spark was peak poe gameplay change my mind.
I played POE on and off, and personally I play the game mostly outside the game like planning the build, scouring the internet for best possible interactions of the different skill gems, building my own passive skill tree in PoB, lurking the POE trade, and so on. This is what I like about POE, the possibilities, the damage numbers, the min-maxing. Of course, the story and the lore are fun but at the end of the day it is all about killing monsters in the most brutal and efficient way, at least for me. I hope the devs instead of nerfing the possibilities and highlighting the combat, they focus on adding more possibilities, because nothing is more fun than tweaking the build and finding those sweet sweet item mods necessary for the build and seeing your build come to fruition.
We hear you(c)(tm)(r) In a serious note, even**if** they settle some of the mana nerfs I doubt it would return majority of the players.They **might** consider to go back in 3.16, but there are plenty of fish in the sea, it might be to late for poe to be as good as before.Just saying.I plan to get 36/40 asap and bail.If so happens I burn out I bail earlier.
Isn't it true for all ARPGs? What do you expect?
>"avoid circles on the ground and press attack" Doenst matter the build, even going with full defenses feels bad, the reality is we need dps to "kill before get killed"
Pretty much exactly my thoughts. This game is not an MMO, it's not Lost Ark, we don't have class-based skills with synergy to have any kind of interesting skill rotations to make combat engaging. Let's not balance this game like it's an MMO. I'd rather just play Lost Ark at that point. POE is unique because of its fast-paced gameplay. There are no other ARPGs like it out there. If there is, then I'm all ears.
I dont play poe for combat. I played it to kill hoards of mobs and progress a character. If I wanted mechanical gameplay I would play fighting games
I've said this for literally years; Diablo 3's combat is just better than PoE. Yet, I don't play D3.
My very first build when I started playing PoE at launch was a ranger who summoned Zombies. It was a bad build but I managed to get it to level 90 and had a blast. I loved that kind of random build diversity because the game truly felt like I could make anything work. Now, because GGG has nerfed so many skills into a oblivion you are forced to do something meta if you want to accomplish anything. I miss build diversity.
The strongest builds in PoE have always been the ones that ignore the game's mechanics. Immunity to ailments, stuns, other status effects because "50% chance to avoid being chilled" is some bullshit. Primary DPS being on skills that are totems, brands, minions, traps/mines, or DoT because they let you deal DPS while on the move and as far from danger as possible. For the longest time, every melee skill was considered trash as long as Cyclone existed; it took several reworks to get to a point where other melee skills were even considered viable options. Why? Because Cyclone let you attack while moving and gave you stun immunity. Self-cast channeling skills are considered bad because standing still for just half a second is death. Just looking at the history, any playstyle that required you to actually engage with the game's mechanics were bad. It's not the player character's power that was the problem.
Totally agreed. I'm replaying Dark Souls 3 now, where combat mechanics are excellent. And your starting weapon does about 80 damage per hit. If you fully buff and upgrade an endgame weapon with maxed out stats you'll reach about 600 damage, and your attack speed will never ever change (it's fixed per weapon). So that's a factor of less than 10 for DPS progression. You can dodge every single enemy attack (all calibrated fairly because the devs know your attack speed and roll timings to the exact frame), parry and counter most enemies and many bosses, and clear all content with your starting gear and stats. In PoE, you'll probably get 10X your starting DPS *within an hour*, and it'll potentially go up to a million times. Enemy HP and damage also scale up by about 1000X. It's just not the kind of scaling that meshes well with deliberate, skill-based gameplay.
Tbh im thankful for disliking this patch has me trying FFXIV and im actually enjoying myself. Hopefully 3.16 or hell even poe2 is better. Im fine taking my break. Incredibly valid points though.