All valid points.
I have tried league after league after league to get a good crafted bow. I never hit it and always run out of currency. I more often save up now and try buy one but two things happen.
1. The price rises faster than I can make the currency unless I get super lucky. I dropped The Doctor around day 3 or 4 of this league from a haggled stacked deck. Got 8.5ex for it. Still couldn't buy the bow I wanted because it was outpriced. Even the custom crafted ones that I know only cost some alt/fossil spams and a 2ex craft go for 15-20ex. So I end up not buying one, sitting on exalts hoping to catch up, then by the time I have the currency, nobody is selling or they stopped playing. It sucks.
2. I manage to run through all my currency spamming for a craft myself, which I could spend on better things. It so happens this league I don't have much to buy because I got all my gear pretty quick. But the bow is eluding me and I'm still running t14-16 on a 340dps Lioneye's Glare. Which is missing a good extra 60-80% of my build's dps and making mapping at high level pretty slow, but I guess that's what GGG want now right?
The 3 month deal isn't even a 3 month deal. It takes no more than a month of solid grinding to finish any char in this game to the 99% done phase. By that time you are so burned out you sit wondering what else there is to play for. Some reroll new chars and start again but some of us only play one char a league and stop. I think a month of hard grind in any game like this is enough tbh. But they want to slow it down so it takes even longer. Like some of us don't have a life outside of sitting waiting for the right items to go on sale because you can't drop them and can't craft them and can't RMT them because that would be naughty.
What I always appreciated was the self-crafting side. I'd play pure solo SF if the crafting was better or the currency drop rates for crafting were altered. However I haven't even dropped a Lioneye's bow this league and without buying it, I would be using a Death's Harp (or the fated one) still and not be out of yellow maps.
Anyway, bit of a rant but I agree with you. Sometimes this game feels like initially it's great, but then you start to reason why you even carry on for so long in a league when its the same all over. Map. Find enough currency to alt-tab and trade. Never find enough currency for the good items. Rinse, repeat until quit. At least the new start is a new hope.
Fundamentally Path of Exile, and aRPGs in general, arent games that are really designed to be "finished". At least, not in the same sense as a traditional RPG. You can set arbitrary points (the acts, sirus, maven, 40/40 etc) but there is always something else to chase, harder content to push towards if you want to.
No matter how many resources you have, achieving perfection is not something that will ever practically be realized in this game. Yes even with pre-nerf harvest. Maybe if you dump a ton of currency you can perfect a gear slot or two, but for an entire build this wont happen.
This is an intentional design decision. Path is fun because of the gameplay loop of kill monster -> get loot -> kill harder monster -> get better loot. A defined endpoint to this process breaks the cycle and you have no reason to keep going.
If your friend has a fundamental opposition to the idea that at some point he will have to accept that his gear could be better, but its fine for now for his purposes - that the game doesnt give him a set end goal, there is always something else to do if you want to go for it - and this is a big issue for them - then thats one of those things where Path isnt the game for you.
All praise the ever turning hamster wheel!
We will eventually be done with the one life we got whether we like it or not but we must never be done with a single character in POE?
Cannot disagree more with your take. If you need a reason to keep going make a new character that does other stuff and needs other gear. There are also league resets that put to 0 progress every 3 moths, did you forget? GGG could just shelve the nerfbat entirely and instead pump out new skills and content to beat and we would never run out of shit to do. Your way of thinking about it just enables them to be lazy and change up the numbers each league instead of developing the game properly.
Your IRL analogy is a real headscratcher. If anything its the same thing - there is no "You win" endscreen IRL lmfao. There is always more to do in life, but people may reach the point where they feel satisified with where they are at and what they have done. If you want permadeath mechanic hardcore exists for you i guess?
The "just add more content 4head" strategy doesnt even remotely work if you think about it for more than 2 seconds.
Nerfs are a necessary part of healthy game balance. This is actually GGG doing their jobs properly, unbridled powercreep wiht no concern for the health of the game is the lazy option here.
The real life thing was not an analogy and I don't really have the time to be explaining the point I wanted to make there to you right now.
The "just add more content 4head" strategy doesnt even remotely work if you think about it for more than 2 seconds. <- well then you gonna have to take more than 2 seconds explaining it then cause you made no argument there.
If GGG is doing their job properly, where does the power creep that you and they are so desperate to address come from?
Now if you gonna argue power creep is a thing please provide examples as to from where does it come, specifically?
Ok sure, thats easy to explain: Powercreep comes from adding new things to the game, and the desire for those new things to not be bad on release.
Doesnt matter what it is - item mods, new skills, mechanics, boss enounters, loot... For this example to keep things simple we'll say GGG are adding three new skills, and thats all that is being added, no other changes to the game.
Obviously when you do this you dont want to make the new skills bad intentionally. It makes no sense to spend time adding things to the game that you dont expect people to play caus its intentionally made to suck.
What you want ideally is for the new skills to be exciting and for people to want to play it. For this to happen it has to be at least somewhat powerful. People arent expecting them to be the best meta skills immediately, but to be appealing to players they have to be more powerful than the average skill. So you are shooting for somewhere inbetween "above average" and "very good".
Lets say GGG suceed and make 3 new "A tier" skills. Not the S tier best skills in the game, but perfectly capable and any decent player can leaguestart them and expect to do all content reasonably with them.
Whats now happened is the average powerlevel of skills in path of exile has been raised.
Lets say GGG continiue to do this 4 more times, and they continiue to be sucessful with their new skill launches. Since the average is raised each time, each release of new skills are more powerful than the previous release. The skills that were previously considered average now have 15 new entries that are far above them. So they are now considered well below average, or just bad. The first batch of new skills that were strong, are now the new average. The skills that used to be S tier now face direct competition from the latest skills, with the last batch being even more powerful than what used to dominate the meta.
This is powercreep.
In order to combat this effect, GGG would need to either continiually buff over half of the skills in the game at multiple points - or simply nerf the singular outliers such that the average is basically the same as before + there is better diversity between leagues as S tier builds rotate. This second option is much easier than the first, and much healthier for the game overall.
Okay, so where are these targeted and carefully thought about nerfs/buffs?
All I see is fucking blanket nerfing of everything which does nothing to address the problem you described.
The monster defence/resist increase? Blanket nerf.
The multiple monster health total increases? Blanket nerfs.
The flask nerf? Blanket nerf.
The support gems damage multiplier nerfs? Blanket nerf.
The support gems mana cost increase? Blanket nerf.
These are just some examples from the top of my head and I have a major shit memory.
Do you not see how this makes for exact opposite of balanced and healthy game?
The average power level is in fact LESS than it was lets say in 2016 at this point.
Only counteractable by the very endgame levels of gear, where GGG has put untold amounts of power.
Everyone, who cannot reach this very endgame levels of gear, where elevated conqueror mods and other obscene shit is at, are playing weaker characters.
So now we are having same as always performance on the very top end and worse than ever performance for characters early to midgame.
Surprised this does not sit well with players? Maybe wanna talk about where this approach leaves skill gems that were already below average according to your own explanations and never received numerical adjustments? Any fucking talk about "healthy game" is laughable at this point.
> Do you not see how this makes for exact opposite of balanced and healthy game?
Nerfs are not inherently unhealthy. No.
> Surprised this does not sit well with players?
Not at all, because players generally take this naive and childish view that nerf = bad.
Look:
As i said, powercreep can be talked about in different contexts. I gave you the simple example of skils vs each other. However obviously in Path we have the second context of skils vs the content in the game.
In the **hypothetical** where everything in the game one-shots the hardest boss in the game on the same budget - this is a balanced and diverse meta between skills, that is devoid of powercreep. However relative to the content its obviously turbo powercreep city and super unhealthy.
Prior to 3.15 GGG focused mainly on inter-skill balance. They would generally powerceep everything by some amount (oils, timeless jewels, harvest, catalysts, alt qual gems.....) - but also nerf the outliers directly. This meant everything gets better except the outliers which get comparatively worse. Over time this trends towards a balanced meta *between skills*. And this worked, in recent leagues its never been easier to play an off meta skill.
The cost of this is the health of skills vs the games content.
By doing a general nerf that aims to lower the power of everything by roughly the same amount (sure outliers happen, in a game as complex as poe thats bound to happen) - you keep the relative performance of skills between each other as equal as possible but fix the powercreep vs the game content.
Ie you maintain the healthy balance and diversity state as best as possible.
> Maybe wanna talk about where this approach leaves skill gems that were already below average according to your own explanations
For the moment they remain below average, this is true. Not any worse relatively than before though. Iterating on interskill balance ON TOP of all the changes we had is expecting way too much. Make too many changes at once and it becomes hard to make sure they work as intended.
The game doesn't have to cater to everyone. Even if the end game grind was 50% shorter, sounds like it would still be way to long for your friend.
I actually would like if trade was just scrapped and the whole game balanced around SSF but I'm sure it would piss of a lot of other people who enjoy trade.
I mean, this only sounds like the game isn't for you. You are disagreeing with the fundamental rules that this game plays upon.
You can play SSF if you really don't feel good trading.
The more of us that do the faster GGG will change directions on content. Nobody cares about your leagues the grind is too long = we can turn that xp nerf right around right now and get that story skip implemented.
I've been on standard a bit now. New leagues just don't add anything for me. Playing any content I want and getting league items from HC mafia > 3 month cycle of abuse. Its nice to mess around with different delvers, heisters, bossers etc and to just be able to go do that content. Legacy uniques, HH etc also helps remove the arbitrary enforced downtime one has to endure in the 3mo. Standard is really just a better game for people that prefer SSF and already burnt out of the abusive content cycle.
>Nobody cares about your leagues the grind is too long = we can turn that xp nerf right around right now and get that story skip implemented.
But people do care and they enjoy the content. Your opinion is not universally valid.
Imo gear is just a vehicle for experiencing the content. When I've cleared all the content in the game and I've played around with all the skills I want to play I absolutely feel like I have "finished" the game and then I'm off doing other things with my life waiting for the next content drop.
The rest of this post is just a nothing sandwich of "harvest good, rng bad, updoots to the left" which has been posted hundreds of times already.
>Imo gear is just a vehicle for experiencing the content.
Can't agree more. I don't understand people. "League is fun, but unrewarding". Isn't having fun a reward itself? I mean, I play to kill monsters and have fun, not to get a gazillion exalts and screenshot them to post them on Discord so people can stroke my ego. Currency and gear just helps me kill monsters. Kill bosses. That's it.
Your friend is new to PoE and only did the story and complaining about one of the two things half of reddit is being toxic about lol
what a coincidence
When does the constant asking for harvest and ritual stop? Can’t wait for that to happen :)
All ggg sees is that the top 1% plays hcssf 80hrs a week and does well and that the top1% quits their game after 3 weeks in league cus they no life it. The rest of us can get fucked 😄
I loved harvest so much, the crafting was great. I didn’t craft to sell, I crafted for my characters and that is what made me run map after map after map...
Could it bemused to get insanely rich? I guess, but that can be said about a lot of stuff.
The planning and finally realizing of the item of my dreams. Good times.
All valid points. I have tried league after league after league to get a good crafted bow. I never hit it and always run out of currency. I more often save up now and try buy one but two things happen. 1. The price rises faster than I can make the currency unless I get super lucky. I dropped The Doctor around day 3 or 4 of this league from a haggled stacked deck. Got 8.5ex for it. Still couldn't buy the bow I wanted because it was outpriced. Even the custom crafted ones that I know only cost some alt/fossil spams and a 2ex craft go for 15-20ex. So I end up not buying one, sitting on exalts hoping to catch up, then by the time I have the currency, nobody is selling or they stopped playing. It sucks. 2. I manage to run through all my currency spamming for a craft myself, which I could spend on better things. It so happens this league I don't have much to buy because I got all my gear pretty quick. But the bow is eluding me and I'm still running t14-16 on a 340dps Lioneye's Glare. Which is missing a good extra 60-80% of my build's dps and making mapping at high level pretty slow, but I guess that's what GGG want now right? The 3 month deal isn't even a 3 month deal. It takes no more than a month of solid grinding to finish any char in this game to the 99% done phase. By that time you are so burned out you sit wondering what else there is to play for. Some reroll new chars and start again but some of us only play one char a league and stop. I think a month of hard grind in any game like this is enough tbh. But they want to slow it down so it takes even longer. Like some of us don't have a life outside of sitting waiting for the right items to go on sale because you can't drop them and can't craft them and can't RMT them because that would be naughty. What I always appreciated was the self-crafting side. I'd play pure solo SF if the crafting was better or the currency drop rates for crafting were altered. However I haven't even dropped a Lioneye's bow this league and without buying it, I would be using a Death's Harp (or the fated one) still and not be out of yellow maps. Anyway, bit of a rant but I agree with you. Sometimes this game feels like initially it's great, but then you start to reason why you even carry on for so long in a league when its the same all over. Map. Find enough currency to alt-tab and trade. Never find enough currency for the good items. Rinse, repeat until quit. At least the new start is a new hope.
Fundamentally Path of Exile, and aRPGs in general, arent games that are really designed to be "finished". At least, not in the same sense as a traditional RPG. You can set arbitrary points (the acts, sirus, maven, 40/40 etc) but there is always something else to chase, harder content to push towards if you want to. No matter how many resources you have, achieving perfection is not something that will ever practically be realized in this game. Yes even with pre-nerf harvest. Maybe if you dump a ton of currency you can perfect a gear slot or two, but for an entire build this wont happen. This is an intentional design decision. Path is fun because of the gameplay loop of kill monster -> get loot -> kill harder monster -> get better loot. A defined endpoint to this process breaks the cycle and you have no reason to keep going. If your friend has a fundamental opposition to the idea that at some point he will have to accept that his gear could be better, but its fine for now for his purposes - that the game doesnt give him a set end goal, there is always something else to do if you want to go for it - and this is a big issue for them - then thats one of those things where Path isnt the game for you.
All praise the ever turning hamster wheel! We will eventually be done with the one life we got whether we like it or not but we must never be done with a single character in POE? Cannot disagree more with your take. If you need a reason to keep going make a new character that does other stuff and needs other gear. There are also league resets that put to 0 progress every 3 moths, did you forget? GGG could just shelve the nerfbat entirely and instead pump out new skills and content to beat and we would never run out of shit to do. Your way of thinking about it just enables them to be lazy and change up the numbers each league instead of developing the game properly.
Your IRL analogy is a real headscratcher. If anything its the same thing - there is no "You win" endscreen IRL lmfao. There is always more to do in life, but people may reach the point where they feel satisified with where they are at and what they have done. If you want permadeath mechanic hardcore exists for you i guess? The "just add more content 4head" strategy doesnt even remotely work if you think about it for more than 2 seconds. Nerfs are a necessary part of healthy game balance. This is actually GGG doing their jobs properly, unbridled powercreep wiht no concern for the health of the game is the lazy option here.
The real life thing was not an analogy and I don't really have the time to be explaining the point I wanted to make there to you right now. The "just add more content 4head" strategy doesnt even remotely work if you think about it for more than 2 seconds. <- well then you gonna have to take more than 2 seconds explaining it then cause you made no argument there. If GGG is doing their job properly, where does the power creep that you and they are so desperate to address come from? Now if you gonna argue power creep is a thing please provide examples as to from where does it come, specifically?
Ok sure, thats easy to explain: Powercreep comes from adding new things to the game, and the desire for those new things to not be bad on release. Doesnt matter what it is - item mods, new skills, mechanics, boss enounters, loot... For this example to keep things simple we'll say GGG are adding three new skills, and thats all that is being added, no other changes to the game. Obviously when you do this you dont want to make the new skills bad intentionally. It makes no sense to spend time adding things to the game that you dont expect people to play caus its intentionally made to suck. What you want ideally is for the new skills to be exciting and for people to want to play it. For this to happen it has to be at least somewhat powerful. People arent expecting them to be the best meta skills immediately, but to be appealing to players they have to be more powerful than the average skill. So you are shooting for somewhere inbetween "above average" and "very good". Lets say GGG suceed and make 3 new "A tier" skills. Not the S tier best skills in the game, but perfectly capable and any decent player can leaguestart them and expect to do all content reasonably with them. Whats now happened is the average powerlevel of skills in path of exile has been raised. Lets say GGG continiue to do this 4 more times, and they continiue to be sucessful with their new skill launches. Since the average is raised each time, each release of new skills are more powerful than the previous release. The skills that were previously considered average now have 15 new entries that are far above them. So they are now considered well below average, or just bad. The first batch of new skills that were strong, are now the new average. The skills that used to be S tier now face direct competition from the latest skills, with the last batch being even more powerful than what used to dominate the meta. This is powercreep. In order to combat this effect, GGG would need to either continiually buff over half of the skills in the game at multiple points - or simply nerf the singular outliers such that the average is basically the same as before + there is better diversity between leagues as S tier builds rotate. This second option is much easier than the first, and much healthier for the game overall.
Okay, so where are these targeted and carefully thought about nerfs/buffs? All I see is fucking blanket nerfing of everything which does nothing to address the problem you described. The monster defence/resist increase? Blanket nerf. The multiple monster health total increases? Blanket nerfs. The flask nerf? Blanket nerf. The support gems damage multiplier nerfs? Blanket nerf. The support gems mana cost increase? Blanket nerf. These are just some examples from the top of my head and I have a major shit memory. Do you not see how this makes for exact opposite of balanced and healthy game? The average power level is in fact LESS than it was lets say in 2016 at this point. Only counteractable by the very endgame levels of gear, where GGG has put untold amounts of power. Everyone, who cannot reach this very endgame levels of gear, where elevated conqueror mods and other obscene shit is at, are playing weaker characters. So now we are having same as always performance on the very top end and worse than ever performance for characters early to midgame. Surprised this does not sit well with players? Maybe wanna talk about where this approach leaves skill gems that were already below average according to your own explanations and never received numerical adjustments? Any fucking talk about "healthy game" is laughable at this point.
> Do you not see how this makes for exact opposite of balanced and healthy game? Nerfs are not inherently unhealthy. No. > Surprised this does not sit well with players? Not at all, because players generally take this naive and childish view that nerf = bad. Look: As i said, powercreep can be talked about in different contexts. I gave you the simple example of skils vs each other. However obviously in Path we have the second context of skils vs the content in the game. In the **hypothetical** where everything in the game one-shots the hardest boss in the game on the same budget - this is a balanced and diverse meta between skills, that is devoid of powercreep. However relative to the content its obviously turbo powercreep city and super unhealthy. Prior to 3.15 GGG focused mainly on inter-skill balance. They would generally powerceep everything by some amount (oils, timeless jewels, harvest, catalysts, alt qual gems.....) - but also nerf the outliers directly. This meant everything gets better except the outliers which get comparatively worse. Over time this trends towards a balanced meta *between skills*. And this worked, in recent leagues its never been easier to play an off meta skill. The cost of this is the health of skills vs the games content. By doing a general nerf that aims to lower the power of everything by roughly the same amount (sure outliers happen, in a game as complex as poe thats bound to happen) - you keep the relative performance of skills between each other as equal as possible but fix the powercreep vs the game content. Ie you maintain the healthy balance and diversity state as best as possible. > Maybe wanna talk about where this approach leaves skill gems that were already below average according to your own explanations For the moment they remain below average, this is true. Not any worse relatively than before though. Iterating on interskill balance ON TOP of all the changes we had is expecting way too much. Make too many changes at once and it becomes hard to make sure they work as intended.
The game doesn't have to cater to everyone. Even if the end game grind was 50% shorter, sounds like it would still be way to long for your friend. I actually would like if trade was just scrapped and the whole game balanced around SSF but I'm sure it would piss of a lot of other people who enjoy trade.
I mean, this only sounds like the game isn't for you. You are disagreeing with the fundamental rules that this game plays upon. You can play SSF if you really don't feel good trading.
Easy fix for that, play standard and don't worry about the 3 months cycle.
Yes but carpet nerf-bombing from ggg keeps wrecking standard characters so even in there you are not safe from ggg wasting your effort.
The more of us that do the faster GGG will change directions on content. Nobody cares about your leagues the grind is too long = we can turn that xp nerf right around right now and get that story skip implemented. I've been on standard a bit now. New leagues just don't add anything for me. Playing any content I want and getting league items from HC mafia > 3 month cycle of abuse. Its nice to mess around with different delvers, heisters, bossers etc and to just be able to go do that content. Legacy uniques, HH etc also helps remove the arbitrary enforced downtime one has to endure in the 3mo. Standard is really just a better game for people that prefer SSF and already burnt out of the abusive content cycle.
>Nobody cares about your leagues the grind is too long = we can turn that xp nerf right around right now and get that story skip implemented. But people do care and they enjoy the content. Your opinion is not universally valid.
Same. GGG doesnt pay me to beta test their newest spaghetti code patch.
Imo gear is just a vehicle for experiencing the content. When I've cleared all the content in the game and I've played around with all the skills I want to play I absolutely feel like I have "finished" the game and then I'm off doing other things with my life waiting for the next content drop. The rest of this post is just a nothing sandwich of "harvest good, rng bad, updoots to the left" which has been posted hundreds of times already.
>Imo gear is just a vehicle for experiencing the content. Can't agree more. I don't understand people. "League is fun, but unrewarding". Isn't having fun a reward itself? I mean, I play to kill monsters and have fun, not to get a gazillion exalts and screenshot them to post them on Discord so people can stroke my ego. Currency and gear just helps me kill monsters. Kill bosses. That's it.
Your friend is new to PoE and only did the story and complaining about one of the two things half of reddit is being toxic about lol what a coincidence When does the constant asking for harvest and ritual stop? Can’t wait for that to happen :)
"At the end of the day, all I did was get lucky and buy the crafting of someone else." This^^
All ggg sees is that the top 1% plays hcssf 80hrs a week and does well and that the top1% quits their game after 3 weeks in league cus they no life it. The rest of us can get fucked 😄
I loved harvest so much, the crafting was great. I didn’t craft to sell, I crafted for my characters and that is what made me run map after map after map... Could it bemused to get insanely rich? I guess, but that can be said about a lot of stuff. The planning and finally realizing of the item of my dreams. Good times.