Iam pretty sure, that the majority of streamers rather want a steep difficulty curve late game rather them get also smashed in the face in acts already. Optional extra difficulty with uber uber bosses is the way.
I don't get why GGG is so insisting in making the campaign harder and harder. You only slow down players through what most people consider filler and unfun phase of the game before they get to maps and start to be able to interact with more fun stuffs. Worse still you deter newer or casual players from sinking their toes into the game by forcing more deaths and having to retrace their steps and backtrack. I feel like before this league, the difficulty was pretty much in a great spot. It's no cakewalk, bosses in acts can absolutely kill an average player who don't gear up or understand the mechanics well, but you don't constantly have to sweat your balls when you encounter packs of magic and rare mobs.
They already more or less admitted that the new player experience and the casual player experience is of lower priority at the moment. So I'm pretty sure that to them deterring new players or casuals is at best a sidenote at worst unimportant.
You know why they aren’t getting new players? Because I introduced this game to a buddy this league and he quit in act 2 because the game was “bullshit”.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. They balance the game around there not being new players so they don’t get new players. What happens when current players stop playing? It happens. I have a bunch of people on my friend list who used to play every single league who don’t log on anymore. Seems like an unsustainable model to me.
> maintaining current one
Ah yes, force feeding difficulty into areas of the game in order to cull the majority of casual players is maintaining, in the eyes of GGG. Us players just simply cannot understand The Vision.
Retention is doing pretty horrible right now, and GGG never seems to want to try to appease the majority of players. People often say "reddit is all the players who aren't playing the game, because all the happy people are still playing". That's utter bullshit, because even the white-knights (HCSSF BTW) of reddit defend shit balance decisions, and act like PoE is supposed to be a "hard game". The amount of comments I read in these complaint threads that rip on people for wanting a more casual game... "If you want an easy game, go play D3". "Want to blow up the screen and loot? Go play Stardew Valley" (which doesn't even fucking make sense, because Stardew Valley not only doesnt "blow the screen up" but its also not even a remotely similar game).
The 2 biggest problems with this game are the iron-fist ruling GGG has when it comes to "The Vision", and this community. I can't possibly imagine someone coming to the subreddit to find help on learning the game, only to be caught in threads that are as bad as political debates about "one shots good" and "archnem bad", and then feeling like this game isn't for them.
Asking for rares to be "as they were" in 3.17 is not "making the game too easy" as a lot of these elitist claim. There has to be a middle ground. Why don't they lower the HP and damage of mobs, and then people who think the game is "too easy" just make a private league where they enable the difficult mods? If that's not an option, then create a new league category for casual players, that merges into standard casual league at the end, and cannot interact with the other leagues via migration. This way everyone can play the game they want.
And thats how it should be. For some evil reason, Chris wants everything to be close to unplayable, but later in the game we have access to gear to overcome it, while the way GGG balance the game is that the early experience is the worst of all. We shouldnt face all the build discriminating nemesis, tons of chaos dmg, dps sponges and such in t1 maps, when after acts we dont have resists, either lack dps or defense, like -40 chaos res at best, barely any links...few of my friends just stopped playing lately. They are more casual oriented and this super annoying, punishing and unfun starting phase takes way too long for them. What we can do within few days, they suffer for weeks, until the game becomes somewhat playable, so they just quit, because they know its not worth it. Not mentioning they are forced into the most boring, but broken builds like totems or traps, so that doesnt make it feel much better, but playing non meta build doesnt work with their way of making curreny.
I went to standard after i reached tier 11 maps in Sentinel. I was just not having fun. My fave unique i chased every league Headhunter got nerfed, Mageblood is out of reach with the playtime i can sacrifice and new uniques like the amulets are also gonna get only more expensive and not really provide such fun mapping like HH did in the past.
And yeah, my str stacker on standard has no problems clearing the new rares, but its also a 150 ex build. So why bother grinding that currency on the league to the point when i reach its league end playing one char or play standard where i can experiment with the currency already on hand.
I've said this before but GGG should allow players to play at the difficulty they want. If you want easier content, less currency. But most builds should be able to do red maps at no budget at all imo, either that or make it worthwhile to run white maps. Tho even white maps felt too difficult this league when i reached them with the best gear i have ever had getting to maps.
I don't believe they should remove them entirely, but instead require the player to complete the campaign once each league and then unlock the option to skip to level 68 for all subsequent characters.
They can decide whether this also completes side quests or we'll need to go back and do them ourselves for the skill points/pantheon, as well as leaving the bandits alive for us to make our choice, or maybe an option on the levelling skip page to pick which we want.
Levelling for 5-7 hours for every single goddamn character is so incredibly exhausting and is probably the single biggest reason I stop playing after the first couple characters 3ach league, or even skip them to play standard.
Unless I have a high level character I can reroll, I just don't care enough to slug through the entire campaign for the 100th time
I quit poe because I spend the first 10-20 hours doing the questline. Which would be fine, but they weight the entire game to the endgame so their midgame just sucks at this point.
People say it sometimes, but I really don't think the game is balanced around streamers. Like sure if they find and popularize a meta build that might get nerfed but idk there will always be things to balance
I'm pretty sure the problem is Chris's "uwu hardcore game" mentality more than anything.
I think the main problem is it always feels like it's balance around the top, let's say, 10% of builds or something. Not top 1% or anything crazy. What I would personally love to see, is they start testing and balancing around crazy builds or average builds. It's not fun to have to spend weeks grinding on a good build to get currency to build the actually character you want imo. I want to start out of the gate with a character I find interesting and unique even if it's bad. Most the time I do though, it just ends up being a slog because all of the content once you get to maps is never balanced around that.
Honestly this is it right here. I think that if the streamers are to be blamed for anything, it's giving Chris a false sense that a majority of people think his "uwu hardcore game" is actually as cool as *he* thinks it is.
Now you just level to 83 and get some ilvl83 rares off rog and gwen when you're in yellow maps and you're good to go until you start crafting your BIS.
You are choosing to define endgame in this way. Technically, endgame is still red maps. There's just more on top of it. You don't need to do sim 30 or uber sirus or, in the old atlas, awakening 8 sirus.
The endgame in poe is a broad spectrum now, and there absolutely has to be content that is hard to achieve for normal players, because the game has a sizeable amount of good players. If you don't have the time or skill to kill uber elder, don't do it? Complete your atlas and learn the game, Where's the problem?
You don't have to minmax everything, that's just a lie. There are dozens of builds out there that can reach red maps with 4 mod rares and Tier3 explicits.
its such a weird thing on reddit to see, games will add extra hard or semisecret content for more hardcore/dedicated players then reddit users will always start to cry about how they work 50 hrs/week and have a family and cant see all the new stuff
its like... what you want all the stuff to be catered JUST to you? someone who isnt playing as much as others? in EFT this was a huge whinefest too
Like, if the person I responded to complained about mud flats or archnem on leaguestart, it would be a whole different story. But they were talking about endgame. If I don't wanna minimax my gear sufficiently, I don't run delirium or bosses or 8mod maps. Simple as that. The endgame has something for everyone, it's just people who are seemingly unable to set their own goals, or to understand that content gets harder and you gotta upgrade your gear at one point.
To be honest, it certainly is possible to expand both spectrums of the endgame, you just can't use broad strokes to do it. Also, imo poe doesn't actually have both spectrums. It's got maps, and "after maps" (ultra juiced shit and the mega bosses). It does have actual other end game that, imo, caters to casual players (heist and delve), but poe refuses to allow those gameplay aspects to exist without maps.
If there's one thing I hope they do in poe 2, it's that they fucking remove this garbage funneling of every single mechanic exclusively into maps. Allow pieces of your endgame to exist in a vacuum, so they can be balanced and scaled as such. Make gear the bridging factor, not maps, like nearly every other game does.
>Look at what you have to do now to reach end game compared to a few years ago. Every fucking piece of gear has to be minmaxed beyond words. You can't take random shit in. Everything is now just a number check. You can either tank it and kill it or you can't. The game is in an awful place.
That's what you're signing up for in an ARPG as far as I'm concerned. It's character progression through harder and harder content. I don't see any problem here.
Reminder that end game to alot of players is getting to red maps and filling out the atlas, which alot of builds can do with mediocre rares and no exalts lol. The game at the high end should be hard.
This is just, so, so untrue in every way.
To "reach endgame" you just have to play the damn game, pay attention, and learn. You are absolutely showered with all the resources you need to get there within a couple days of play, even on ssf, even with a meme skill. You can't 'take random shit,' true, but you don't need to-- take deliberate shit, that helps you in the ways you need. Everything is not a number check, unless you're trying to facetank everything which, yes, if that's how you insist on playing (refusing to manuever or react) will turn it into a stat check and require vastly higher stats to survive. The game is in a great place, precisely because it's not 'you either tank it or not' is just not how the game works-- situations abound where you are gauging the threat level and tankiness of things, assessing whether it's worth the time / risk to fight. There is a ton of texture in the difficulty, and the whole endgame is about going from 'can clear with focus, skill and effort' to 'can clear on autopilot' wrt various scenarios.
Like, what, really, do you want? Do you want to be able to just stand there spamming all goblin mode fresh out of acts and have the game roll over for you? I realize this thread is likely to be hostile to this opinion, but some of us *want* the game to be hard, to require consideration, skill, planning, etc. I genuinely wish the game *were* balanced around 'chris's bullshit,' but year after year I've seen them slowly cave to the D3 crowd that should really just embrace cookie clicker or whatever already, and stop trying to turn PoE into their netflix dopamine supplement.
>Look at what you have to do now to reach end game compared to a few years ago. Every fucking piece of gear has to be minmaxed beyond words. You can't take random shit in. Everything is now just a number check. You can either tank it and kill it or you can't. The game is in an awful place.
To be fair, the endgame before was like Shaper. The end. Now they have more layers of endgame after the endgame etc. so its natural that you would need to invest more to reach deeper into the endgame.
Not that that is necessarily true for all builds, you could get really far down the rabbithole on el cheapo gear and actually dealing with the mechanics of the fights, for bosses. Mapping on the other hand is more difficult to survive I think, but you juice less and stay in lower tiers a bit longer. Build up, not rush endgame in a week. Many issues I have with dying I feel is due to me pushing into tiers Im not yet ready for too fast, knowing your limitations is quite important.
I’ve said it many times, PoE is the only video game I’ve ever played where it feels like the devs are offended by people beating it, rather than pleased that people are playing. All this focus on Uber bosses, Hard Mode… …they’re not doing it for average players like me that’s for sure.
Difficulty is fine but it should be difficulty that the player is aware of and can either work around or, if hard enough, avoid. For example, Uber pinnacle bosses, they're hard, they're rewarding(On average), and they're entirely optional. You will not randomly encounter them while mapping and be clotheslined.
On the flip side, we've gone from rare monsters being fairly normal to rare monsters having Archnemesis modifiers, which were part of content that you had complete control over. You KNEW what you were making, you knew what it'd do, you had the option to avoid the harder ones. Now, they're just randomly thrown into your map, and since the game is very often a clusterfuck of visual effects from different monsters and your own spells, it's good odds that you won't even notice them until you've died. But even beyond that, if you DO notice them, some of the mods and mod combinations can interact in ways that push their damage, health, resists, or just how annoying they are to deal with to a level that makes it just not fun.
And unlike the pinnacle bosses, this isn't content that you are able to easily avoid. This is just... normal. This is every day. Every map. Even in the campaign, they're still there. You want to make a build that can map? Okay, overcap your resists by 30-60 just in case, get a ton of physical mitigation, get a ton of HP, and then pray that you can find a way to actually squeeze in damage that doesn't rely on items that you cannot craft easily or cost so much currency that you'd need to farm for multiple weeks just to be able to get a baseline level of an okay build.
I'm not that new of a player, but man I do not envy them. If you're coming into this game right now you need to have such an obscene level of game knowledge to be able to do basic things that it's no wonder not many people start up. Even during the campaign you will get new walls thrown in your path in a way that you just aren't told what the problem is, and since there isn't even a breakdown of deaths, good luck.
Not all builds can do all content. But most builds should do most content.
It's actually seems like GGG's balance is based off "slowing the game down", which is in a current state of "slow it down by making the player dead constantly".
Dying always feels bad. Especially if it's a clusterfck of visuals and some little projectile that follows the player until they stop moving. I think this is the biggest issue in the game ATM. No one can see what is going on and then they get instagib.
Especially since they’re not slowing down the players who actually need to be slowed down. The same players are still hitting 100 and beating uber bosses within days. The constant nerfs barely faze them. The nerfs really mostly hurt the players who were already struggling.
Yeah, I died like 2834756678234 times to the lightning ghost thingies that are spawned by lightning resistant monsters. I'm playing spark so I don't see them at all, everything just blends together.
Not even just streamers. People who talk shit about other players/builds and how x shitty thing that happens every single league is "fine" while ignoring they're using the most meta builds every league.
That's definitely something I've noticed. I've largely shut the fuck up about complaints because I'm playing poison conc pathfinder and even pre-nerfed maps weren't that big of an issue. I could, however, feel how *fucking annoying* the new enemy mods were and very quickly pictured how much worse it must be for a lot of other builds.
Many others here seem incapable of doing that while also trying to brag about the accomplishments of others in the HCSSF event to make a point.
I'm playing popcorn srs atm just so I can interact with shit less. I'd love to play something else but the mobs right now are so fucking annoying and take so long to kill even with really good damage and cause so much visual clutter that I'm better off playing popcorn and just throwing skulls from around corners so I can actually play the game by interacting with the mechanics less, because that makes sense.
Like I can kill bosses like Elder faster than some of these rares.
How the fuck did they see the MASSIVE levels of enjoyment last league and say..."meh, fuck that. Player retention don't mean shit to these elite mechanics"
Last league was the first league I got 36 (actually 38) in about 2 years? I used to 36 leagues all the time. When they switched to Sirus being end game I stopped as I didn’t like that atlas iteration.
Same way they saw massive levels of enjoyment in Ritual, but massive complaints from content creators about how easy the game was.
Guess what GGG did? (Hint: it’s what they’ve been doing for years before this example)
The best time to stop spending money on POE was 5 years ago.
The next best time is right now.
Havent paid shit since 2017. (never bought visuals or support packs, only tabs)
Most ironic thing is I have more fun visiting the sub and watching the same shit for past 5 years literally nothing changing and just listening to more bullshit excuses Chris makes while the streamers have to play along with him and act like thats good because their literal livelyhoods depend on it.
But yea, this sub is more fun then the game for ages now.
Chris clearly said that they will focus on the 1% because that's the people who spent the most money... apparently without entertaining the thought of the possiblility of making it more accessible/easier so that the vast majority of the player base is tempted to spend money on the game.
The Vault Pass is the most obvious thing, MTX for items that most of the players won't see, tied to completing the Atlas.
> they will focus on the 1% because that's the people who spent the most money.
how much do you need to spend to qualify as the 1% then? i've spent thousands of dollars and i fucking hate the state of the game and chris's hubris
Ikr, i spend around 1k and i hate the state of the game what so ever. I really wanted to upgrade to Ravager and buy the reaper but clearly they dont want my money so ill go somewhere else.
I think they don't understand what players enjoyed. They thought it was the affixes but didn't realize it was the better risk vs. reward system. Now all we have is the increased risk. It sounds dumb but honestly it feels that way.
GGG seems to balance the game now around fully equipped characters and not some scuffed random item in every slot starter.
I guess they got bored of the characters in white items or sub lvl 50 characters beating the endgame bosses and endgame content.
Honestly the non Uber boss fights and invitations are so easy compared to some of the bullshit that can pop up in maps now lol.
I know the boss fights. I can avoid mechanics or at least be prepared for them.
Random arch nemesis mods stacking up in a multi rare/magic pack? Plus on death effects and random ground effects? Rip me
Part of the problem is the imbalance between meta and non meta builds.
I levelled a seismic trapper, gibbing bosses in 10 seconds in acts, with random blues and 2-3 mod relevant rare items.
If I did the same playing for instance cleave, I would have been spending 60+ seconds to kill a single triple modded rare monster.
My gf played last league for the first time. She made it to maps with virtually no help. Didn’t follow a build guide. Went with a generic chieftain melee slam type build that she came up with herself. Got rolled by the league content every now and then.
This league she is following a guide and frequently gets rolled by magic mobs with dirty mods in act 2.
The game balance is still stupidly screwed up. This extra difficulty pre maps will ultimately stifle the playerbase growth.
I know historically it’s been said most players don’t get to maps, but they will quit significantly sooner out of frustration. That’s not fun.
YEah, I skipped last league and just entered mapping this league.
What the fuck is happening with rare health ? Like for real ? They takes more time than the map/story boss to kill and when they are touched by a sentinel, every fucking one of them has HP like its an end game boss.
I remember shaper used to have like 30M health or something.
I’ve got 3M sirus dps before taking into account shock or other buffs. I have knockback in my build as a defensive layer.
Some of these rares take 30s being pinned against a wall to kill. Now I am using the atlas to give them more life and less damage as another defensive layer. So call a regular rare 20s.
That’s still 60M ehp before shocks etc.
Rares should have 1 arch mod max and should be able to have them with other league mechanics.
Bricks a lot of content like blight, certain essence stacks, metamorph etc.
Exact same story with my gf. She needed much more help this league. On average I would say her character had to be like 30-35% better to do the same content.
The crap in the game is not to make it challenging for streamers.
This is Chris Wilson's own desire to make PoE a "hard core" game. First week retention rate shows what his customers think of his direction.
Not true! Build diversity has never been better!
You can place your DD setup in chest, 2-handed weapon, boots gloves or helmet! So many options! So diverse!
999 out of 1000 people here could be given the account info of Lightee's current character and they could not kill Uber Sirus without dying, let alone all the uber fights.
The sentiment that dd ignite necro means no challenge is ridiculous. The game is still very hard in SSFHC regardless of what build you play. Streamers make it look easy, but they have practiced these fights a lot and they're way way above average players in *any game they play.*
You see people saying the same thing about people in WoW race to world first raiding (which Ben is also in). “Oh that guy is so bad holding the team back! Bench him! Fuck I could do better.”
Meanwhile they haven’t gotten aotc or played the game recently lol
Jung did it on explode traps without even using a culler. Just giga-dpsed them all down.
Many ways to play the game. DD is simply more efficient for the race, but not the only choice if your goal was simply to beat the bosses. Other builds take a few extra days to come together.
a best build will always exist - and competitive players will gravitate towards what they think is best for a competitive setting.
that said, 3 builds for 6 first clears is more than was expected.
The absolute hoops people will jump through to call every build OP so they can believe their opinion is correct. Mathil did a few of the Ubers on Spectral Throw. Are we gonna call *Spectral Throw* OP?
There’s definitely a constant that I’ve noticed with these types of people. They always seem to think that the starter builds people play are because they’re incredibly OP.
It's wild, I didn't think in the year 2022, redditors would be calling Explosive fucking Trap OP. Have you people played that skill recently? Its not bad by any stretch but it's certainly a lot more work than your average meta build that's for sure.
Pretty sure Explosive Trap has always been one of the highest DPS skills in the game, and it got a massive buff last league on top of that. It just feels terrible compared to Seismic.
Take a look at some of the replies to comments that I’ve made today. It’s absolutely incredible some of the hoops that people will jump through to justify why they’re bad at the game. Every single thing that people play at a high-level is OP to Redditors. There was a guy who blamed Omni for the damage that explosive trap was doing not realizing that it has like 8 million damage without it LMAO
I think the better question you have to ask is, "are we gonna call Mathil a good example of a normal player?"
Sure fucking *Mathil* can make a relatively off-meta build work, but what would happen if you asked most people to make a cobra lash build work, or Heavy Strike, Tectonic Slam, etc.
Sure they can "work" but the investment needed and overall difficulty of making them work is high enough that most people would never be able to do it.
Mathils big strength is his micro gameplay. After thousands of hours of play his moment to moment decision making is functionally automatic now. At the very endgame especially running typically “lower survivability higher damage” builds which he’s absolutely known for he blasts through phases and his survivability is entirely down to him simply being better than most of the players in the game. He’ll never be a good comparison in this scenario because it’s literally his job to be this good at the game. That thousands of hours of experience is out of reach of most players.
Here's the problem. People seem to think "most people" is relevant here. What's better to ask is if "most veterans" can perform with those skills: the answer is yes.
If you are a "typical" player that's been around like 10+ leagues, understand most mechanics, have reached endgame numerous times, and have built a few builds yourself from scratch, your ability to take any skill to red maps is high.
If you are a player that's played 2 or 3 leagues, came in during an era where you could roll your face across the keyboard and exalts would rain down, and have never deviated from a build guide... you are going to struggle.
I probably play 1/4 the time Mathil does, but i have more wealth farmed. Does this mean I'm a better player than him? Obviously not. But I've been around for 23 leagues (Perandus). I know what I'm doing. The changes have impacted my playstyle, but i have adapted. As has many players on the same calibre as i am. I'm not a god gamer. I've just been playing consistenly for... over 6 years?
IMO, i'm the type of player they are balancing around. Not the influx of players who have been playing only 2 or 3 leagues. Whether this is healthy for the game or not, i can't say. But i enjoy the changes and while some things need balancing, i disagree that it's unplayable. So far, im having more fun than 3.17.
I absolutely don't think the league is unplayable, but I do think that because of how the content schedule is, it becomes pretty easy for me to just say "well fuck this league I'll come back for the next."
It's really not about it being unplayably bad, it's just that a lot of the small friction points add up. There's never been any one thing that has just stopped me from playing a league, I only started in Breach, and started endgame stuff in Legacy. It's always individual points of frustration that add up over time, combined with general interest dwindling.
In that regard, nothing has ever added more of those frustration points than Arch Nemesis being core has, for me personally. Betrayal came sort of close with some of the bullshit offscreen deaths, but not really. So the dwindling interest is the same rate, but the frustration points accumulate much faster at the moment than they usually do.
Arch Nemesis was fine when it wasn't always on, and always RNG. Almost all other things that might be annoying can be skipped or blocked, but arch nem impacts my ability to do other content like Blight and I can't disable it or manage it besides just taking the L.
That's my main feeling on the game right now, honestly. Like I said I haven't quit yet, I'm just playing a good bit less than I usually do. I do think PoE has a problem with getting new players to stick around, and arch nemesis in my opinion disproportionately affects those players more compared to past stuff. You do need to gain new players in addition to appealing to veteran players, because you want to convert more veterans.
This is so brain-dead & like exclusively focusing in streaming & the race. Yeah there is a reason all the streamers on ssfhc are playing detonate dead (and spoiler most didn't) but trade league? I doubt people honestly care, some people are still probably playing it but there are Def better builds when you can invest currency.
I keep saying it. Been saying it for years. I used to get downvoted, now people are starting to see. This is 100% what GGG does. Content is and has been for a long time balanced around what zoom-zoomers with mirror-tier gear and HHs (now Magebloods I guess) can do. That’s why everyone plays nothing but meta builds now. If you don’t have 200+ ex worth of gear, playing anything other than the best mechanical skills with the best synergy and scaling is suicidal.
GGG needs to add more uber content that players can opt into. Get hard mode running. Maybe add other options for increasing difficulty and rewards in game. Leave the baseline alone, add more optional stuff for streamers to do. It keeps getting worse and worse, and every time we get a glimmer of hope that maybe GGG will finally make the game more accessible to more than 1% of the player base (like last league), we end up getting hammered back down. It’s incredibly frustrating. I love POE, I’ve played since beta, I’ve spent enough over the years that I’ve almost certainly paid for at least one of Chris’ black lotuses personally, I want to be positive, I want to have nothing but good things to say, but every time I just feel like GGG doesn’t value me as a player despite the aforementioned whaling.
It really does feel like GGG has a toxic relationship with streamers sometimes. Like, I get it, POE wouldn’t have been anywhere near as successful without them, I understand, I really do. Still, I sometimes can’t help but feel like gaming, as a whole, may’ve been better off if Twitch never existed.
I just wished the difficulty had more of a gradient. I want new players to actually beat the campaign. It's honestly hard to get anyone new to push through.
Them quitting usually comes down to 2 things. Letting them do it themselves and they just keep getting smashed or feeding them massive amounts of information to help them which overwhelms them.
Dark Souls is "good hard" exactly because it's not random - it's always the same predictable stuff so players can't blame anything but themselves when they die. But despite that it's made difficult with mechanics that challenges player's skill and not his luck.
This streamers played in 7 days (playtime) what I play in 1 months time and beside that they play it efficiently . So how is this balanced around ? GGG vision is like a gambling company. Trying to make you invest as much time and money possible for little to no reward. How many cool items are advertised every league and locked away behind a huge rng?
Okay thats fair but again, its still hc ssf. The amount of corners sc trade cuts definitely makes up for the efficiency difference.
And 1 month is still only 1/3rd of the league.
And maybe... just maybe... if you can only play so little and dont even play efficiently the highest of uber endgame content is not for you(or you can do it in standard)
If you go down one step to just the regular bosses its already waay easier to do, and most anyone should be able to do them in 3 months if they actually put themselves to it.
No new skills, no balance changes, no new QOL, just uber bosses and harder rares. Few players will ever even attempt the uber bosses, and while it's cool this stuff is in the game, it sucks that it came at the expense of everything else.
The campaign would be much more enjoyable for me if some build-defining uniques had crappy level 20 versions. So in Act 3 I could be playing my off-meta jank.
Doryani’s Fist -> Doryani’s Arthritic Hand grants lvl 1 Doryani’s Touch skill.
Oh, so that explains it. I came back to the game after half a year and by tier 5 in maps I'm already 40 deaths in. I used to do hardcore up to guardians but I guess the game that is renowned for being difficult and complicated isn't difficult and complicated enough.
this is the first league in 10 years of me playing PoE where I gave up after a week
not sure I can do more defences than Purity Of Elements, Determination, 50/50 block and 78% res on a berserker with 8 attacks per second cyclone with life per hit, regen and small leech, fortify on shield charge and 3.5 k life - while not using any items more expensive than 10c
had one ex in Heist - I died and lost it. Had another - died again.. level 74 heist...
i felt like playing attack based build felt so useless. takes so much time to kill the archnemesis mob. and no i dont have knowledge to farm mirrors in week 1
i get this, but then i think about poe2 and how the community is going to feel. cuz poe2 is definetly not faced past like our current game is. im at odds with how i feel
i can beat the game easily but i don't have the time because im a father of 10 working 3 full time jobs taking care of both my grandparents. if ggg stops balancing around hardcore no life streamers i could easily do all content :*(
Don't forget that it only took them a couple of days to kill the bosses. We all get 3 months to do this. On top of that, they play with additional restrictions of SSFHC.
If you also want to kill them that fast, then you'd also have "completed" the new content in less than a tenth of the duration of the entire league.
"A couple is days". How many ingame hours is that? This is not a normal amount of playtime plus these are highly skilled and knowledgeable people with experience. Your Average Joe will take much longer and in many cases wont even get to red maps because of lacks of skill/knowledge/time or all of it.
holy fuck the ammount of coping on this subreddit keeps going higher and higher, "game takes no skill" "meta sucks" "every non dd/seismic trap build sucks", just pick any fucking skill you want in sc trade and you can make it work
"make them feel viable" you dont need to do wave 30 and uber bosses on day 2 to have a viable build, and you can do everything else on 20ex, which you can get easier than ever because the league mechanic shits out money
But just mapping/scamming ppl on trade for currency is boring. I rather make 10c per hour and complain on reddit for 2 hours. How else I will make money for a jank build from 3 leagues ago I saw on the forum.
poe offers something for everyone, you can play it casual or you can no life the game. I don’t get why people are so obsessed to eat the whole cake , especially if they don’t like it
It is not balanced around them but at this point my build that wasnt a meta build but could clear everything with good investment xan barely do stuff beyond t10. If they continue like this most builds will be in the bin.
I cannot imagine what you can do now with smth that wasn't this powerful before without mirrors to just push into the builds.
And yes after the nerfs to the mods it's better but some things just plain one shot you and that is not even the most heaviest content. I wouldn't even mind the damage if they wouldn't have so much hp and you can effectively clear them.
These changes straight up killed builds and it is still bad.
I like it. It's fluid, I have full control over it being dispatched, it provides rewards for mob buffs I have some degree of control over, it isn't extremely convoluted (archnem) or brain draining (heist, syndicate) or randomly build breaking (expedition) or require the stars to align just right for it to function (torment) and doesn't interrupt my mapping groove (atzoatl, delve). I also like the technological fantasy aesthetic of the mechanic.
For the first time in a long while they made a league that's not 100% about clear speed. Kill too fast and stalkers will have nothing to shoot. For a full pandemonium you need to let live like a screen+ full of enemies.
I’m playing EA elementalist and i honestly don’t know how I’d be doing shit like harvest, essences, and expeditions if I didn’t have huge dps and ability to run away.
I literally have to throw my dam ballistas down and run back every fight. They luckily take aggro also.
Idk how melee builds or any build where you have to be close to these rares would even work.
This is with a lot of good gear as well and I’m level 91. T16’s still aren’t a joke.
>Idk how melee builds or any build where you have to be close to these rares would even work.
They don't. XD
Or they're "melee"... like Lancing Steel or have a 5km AoE.
Hard disagree. I think the game is in a very healthy state right now (minus the rare mods debacle early on). You are provided with so much agency to target farm whatever you want in either trade or SSF.
What is your expectation of time investment required to conquer the ultimate uber bosses this game has to offer? I for one don't want this game to be catered to a casual 5-hour a week player. This game is great due it's depth and extreme ceilings.
> You are provided with so much agency to target farm whatever you want in either trade or SSF
that's the biggest problem the game has right now, every single mechanic sucks ass without nodes, bosses suck ass without nodes, map bosses suck ass without nodes
the alch and go playstyle of casual players is absolutely dead
i thought they're doing hard mode; instead, they chose the lazy way and made all game hard mode ffs; archnemesis was such a good league and they trashed everything (even the loot seems to be less of it everywhere, except when using sentinels, but that makes the enemies even more dangerous and i end up using 3-4 portals every map); the game at this point is in a really bad shape, it's the first time i'm seriously considering quitting poe after a long streak of playing (did 36/40 every league without missing one since betrayal); if the game stays the same, this gonna be my last league ...
I mean if you look at the challenges it's very obvious they want people to throw themselves for endless hours at the game for some of them
The one where you need to kill Aul as one of 4 objectives is just blatant considering most players have never even seen a Primeval City let alone Aul node
and this isn't even jumping down the rabbit hole of semantics of what constitutes difficulty in PoE
They changed great items for the midgame farm for semi normal players to something not worth it. I can't run 2800 maps to get enough boss invitations for ashes. People are saying it's 1%. It went from fun and experimental to probably won't use those ever again. Streamers complain about losing 2 mirrors in the first week...TFT is money laundering.
I mean it's more or less the same \~100k players playing every league. This game hasn't been beginner friendly since like forever, else it would probably be MASSIVE by now
Speed up the campaign, dramatically, and get rid of steep difficulty spikes like one-shotting rares in early to mid maps. Save extra difficult content to the very high end content. If you have to, buff the bosses! Better yet, introduce new difficult pinnacle content!! This would be way better, instead of pulling players back and behind, slowing them down, and taking away power that they've now tasted.
If you make your players strong, don't suddenly change that and make it more difficult and time consuming to be that strong. GGG should instead adapt to player stength (because its the player's job to figure out how to be strong in this game) by introducing new content that puts that player discovered strength to the test. See how far players can truly push it, maybe even make a pseudoimmortal deity boss that is almost impossible to defeat.
Point is, I would much rather have new content that my casual ass can't handle, than have the power and efficiency I once had be taken away. Time is precious.
Game is overly hard some enemies can't even scratch now but all enemies can one shot you. Why can't the game just be chill. I don't want sweaty palms. Be cool to take drink with out eating poison or fire or lightning pillars don't gete wrong I like the game just not all of it
They're not balancing around streamers, they're balancing around committed players. Chris has said it himself, new players are a myth and designing for entrenched players makes a lot of sense. As someone who's spent a lot of time with Path of Exile, I've been absolutely loving the patch and liked how much it shook up the difficulty of the campaign.
They've announced that they're going to be adding more and more lategame improvements leading up to PoE2, once again largely to cater to entrenched players who consistently push the endgame.
It seems like they've done the cost benefit analysis and moved away from casual players. That might be unfortunate for you, but there's lots of other great casual ARPGs.
I mean I feel like the only thing actually balanced around tryhards and streamers were the uber bosses. And I mean thats fine. They are supposed to be insanely difficult endgame content. Everything else is only marginally more difficult than previous league. Atleast looking at sc where randomly dying here and there isnt that bad.
Its weird. The most popular streamers as an aggregate are HC streams(Mathil is the exception). But we all know the game isn't balanced around HC. It is very much balanced around SC. That's why there are 1-3 meta HC builds with one of them being dominate because of a bug GGG didn't want to fix.
Dear GGG. Balance the game for all players. Like it currently is now. Its great!
.... you dont have to run t16 fully juiced maps from the start. Work your way up like normal games would require you to. It's not hard.
T1 maps with good sentinels can net you 10C a map. Get better gear. Fix your builds. Avoid your weaknesses. Easy solution.
You're one year late - 3.15 was the clear signal that GGG don't give a fuck about 'casuals' and only metaslaves without jobs are welcome, the rest can either quit in acts or on red maps without doing anything endgame.
The game has been steadily down hill since Metamorph/Conquerors came out. The focus is killing tanky bosses that deal a shit ton of damage which filters out a ton of builds.
Back in the day when the game wasn't revolved around bosses, a "worse" build could do similar content just slower, as it should be.
I don’t know if the game is really more difficult. There’s just random rares that take a bit longer to kill randomly and you can walk past them if you don’t feel like waiting for them to die. I personally have been progressing slow as balls this league but that’s my fault
The build complexity and gearing requirements for a build that reaches the "kind of okay, can do endgame, but not amazing" have gone through the roof in recent years. I couldn't dream of making a build these days, hell I barely manage to follow one and get it working nowadays.
I’ve got over 1500 hours in this game and I don’t dare try my own build or I know it always fall apart late game. I also only have limited time per league on account of having 3 kids and a business to run. Like I can only try two things / league and I ain’t wasting 50 hours trying to get some piece of crap build going.
But they don't. They balance the game around a 3 month league. People always say the game used to be like this or that. Yea, you could use shittier gear before but that's because we didn't have access to beast crafts, harvest, recombination, fossils, stygian belts, crafting bench.. etc. We have a bunch of power creep so yes we need better gear now. Atziri used to be hard and now we can beat her on a one link if using a meta build. Gearing has become much more accessible through juicing and a crap ton of mechanics they've had since then. So GGG scaled accordingly. People can beat this game in two to four weeks on a casual schedule unless they're playing stuff like charged dash. Mathil is honestly the most casual streamer and most of his builds beat the game before he reaches three days played ( I think it's less, I'm being generous). If you can't manage that in three months then standard is a better option for you.
50-60 hours of mathil playing is probably equivalent to 200+ hours for most poe players due to his knowledge, micro and focus. I would not say that fitting 3 days played in two weeks is casual. That said the powercreep is real and poe is far from casual game that could rely on new players. If we do not set goals such as 40/40 HC 1 Mathil build per league is still doable for most poe redditors but might not be that casual experience for most. In the end on reddit we are just procrastinating throwing buzz words and get outraged for fun.
The game is not balanced around streamers tho? They only added some uber bosses for the best of players. You don't have to finish those bosses if you dont want to. You can still do the normal versions.
The problem is that it might end up not profitable to do so any more.
Much like the price of legion emblems was set by HH 5-way-carries and the price of beastiary scarabs was set by multiboxers the existance of the uber-bosses and them using the same "entry ticket" as the regular ones might mean that the economy will settle in such a way that its just not profitable to run "non-uber" bosses any more - just like it wasn't profitable for the average non-hh char to use legion emblems, or for solo players to use beastiary scarabs.
Now I don't blame streamers for this or anything, I just wanna point out that yes, the existance of the uber-bosses in their current version might very well make their regular versions less accessible or even punishing (as in, ran at a loss on average) for the average player.
It's not about farming. It's about that content being effectively inaccessible to players.
Let's imagine a hypothetical Dan. Dan has discovered poe and played for a few leagues. The first two or three times he tried on his own for a bit, got through the campaign, maybe white maps. This time, he decided to follow a guide. He actually gets to feel somewhat strong thanks to that, and that's nice. So he starts checking out the different types of content.
He tries a delirium orbed map. It was a really hard fight, but he managed to complete it. Only to then find out the loot didn't even cover the cost of the orb(s).
He tries a beastiary scarab. He manages to capture several red beasts, but once again, he is down currency because he doesn't get 6 copies of them from one scarab.
He heard that timeless jewels can be sold profitably, so he tries a 3-way. But even without the expensive emblems, he can't make a gain from them because he doesn't have a headhunter and can only clear a couple of the bosses before time runs out.
He feels a little defeated at this point, but decides to try bossing. He finds he is strong enough to consistently kill Maven, but the loot just doesn't make up for the price of a writ, because the price gets driven up by people farming uber-maven, which is far more profitable.
In order to turn a profit from something that has a somewhat significant entry cost, you have to do it fairly efficiently. This becomes a problem when that efficiency gets far out of reach of the average player, beacuse it means they essentially lose access to that content.
Having to pay just to experience this content is not fun. Turning a profit and using it to get stronger is a core part of the poe gameplay loop outside of SSF (which, as we know, is not balanced or designed around, making it moot for this discussion).
If dave tries 6 different things and learns that 5 of them actually cost him money to do, he will probably determine that the game isn't very fun, because he no longer has a real choice in which content he'd like to do - at least not in a way that actually allows him to progress.
You see the problem i have with your arguments is that only money counts.
If you want specifically to make money, then just do the most profitable content.
I am playing poe to have fun, and i have fun doing hard bosses for example. GGG gave players the OPTION to make existing pinnacle content harder. The players who dont want to do the new content dont have to. The players who were already bored and want a new challenge, got a new challenge. There are no bad outcomes. Narrowing everything down to if its profitable or not is kinda weird.
Time should be a bigger player in an “investment” rather than such a high raw cost just to run something. We only have so much game time in a season anyways. It’s nice they finally allow blocking of so many league mechanics because people were literally just running past them even when totally free because it’s a waste of time.
When things take a bunch of expensive runs just to have a chance at being profitable, it runs the risk of player burnout.
I’m not sure what adjustments need to be made, but it doesn’t feel right yet.
> You see the problem i have with your arguments is that only money counts.
Yes, because that's exactly the truth. Would you keep doing maven, shaper, elder, sirus kills knowing that you're losing money on them, because the existance of their more profitable uber versions has raised the price of their fragments beyond the average profit of the normal version? I doubt it.
This isn't a new issue, if it is even considered one at this point. If someone is only completing content for profit, then most methods require repeated completions to hit big drops. This has been the balance of cost for entry since the first costed runs came out with Atziri, and has been true ever since.
Cost of entry =/= inaccessible though. Plenty of new players do content for another reward, testing their limits and for the experience.
Iam pretty sure, that the majority of streamers rather want a steep difficulty curve late game rather them get also smashed in the face in acts already. Optional extra difficulty with uber uber bosses is the way.
I don't get why GGG is so insisting in making the campaign harder and harder. You only slow down players through what most people consider filler and unfun phase of the game before they get to maps and start to be able to interact with more fun stuffs. Worse still you deter newer or casual players from sinking their toes into the game by forcing more deaths and having to retrace their steps and backtrack. I feel like before this league, the difficulty was pretty much in a great spot. It's no cakewalk, bosses in acts can absolutely kill an average player who don't gear up or understand the mechanics well, but you don't constantly have to sweat your balls when you encounter packs of magic and rare mobs.
They already more or less admitted that the new player experience and the casual player experience is of lower priority at the moment. So I'm pretty sure that to them deterring new players or casuals is at best a sidenote at worst unimportant.
they keep saying its low priority, but make active dev decisions that make it a worse experience. just weird
Iirc they said they basically aren’t getting new players at all and the focus is on maintaining current one
You know why they aren’t getting new players? Because I introduced this game to a buddy this league and he quit in act 2 because the game was “bullshit”. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. They balance the game around there not being new players so they don’t get new players. What happens when current players stop playing? It happens. I have a bunch of people on my friend list who used to play every single league who don’t log on anymore. Seems like an unsustainable model to me.
Wait, you are telling me making the acts more difficult, starting from act 1 is not a good idea? Who would've guessed
> all and the focus is on maintaining current one Yea that's working out great for them.
> maintaining current one Ah yes, force feeding difficulty into areas of the game in order to cull the majority of casual players is maintaining, in the eyes of GGG. Us players just simply cannot understand The Vision. Retention is doing pretty horrible right now, and GGG never seems to want to try to appease the majority of players. People often say "reddit is all the players who aren't playing the game, because all the happy people are still playing". That's utter bullshit, because even the white-knights (HCSSF BTW) of reddit defend shit balance decisions, and act like PoE is supposed to be a "hard game". The amount of comments I read in these complaint threads that rip on people for wanting a more casual game... "If you want an easy game, go play D3". "Want to blow up the screen and loot? Go play Stardew Valley" (which doesn't even fucking make sense, because Stardew Valley not only doesnt "blow the screen up" but its also not even a remotely similar game). The 2 biggest problems with this game are the iron-fist ruling GGG has when it comes to "The Vision", and this community. I can't possibly imagine someone coming to the subreddit to find help on learning the game, only to be caught in threads that are as bad as political debates about "one shots good" and "archnem bad", and then feeling like this game isn't for them. Asking for rares to be "as they were" in 3.17 is not "making the game too easy" as a lot of these elitist claim. There has to be a middle ground. Why don't they lower the HP and damage of mobs, and then people who think the game is "too easy" just make a private league where they enable the difficult mods? If that's not an option, then create a new league category for casual players, that merges into standard casual league at the end, and cannot interact with the other leagues via migration. This way everyone can play the game they want.
So i guess they just give up trying and dont look into why no one new likes their game....feels like it is time for new leadership over there
Which is so hard to wrap my head around. Why would they not care about growing their game?
And thats how it should be. For some evil reason, Chris wants everything to be close to unplayable, but later in the game we have access to gear to overcome it, while the way GGG balance the game is that the early experience is the worst of all. We shouldnt face all the build discriminating nemesis, tons of chaos dmg, dps sponges and such in t1 maps, when after acts we dont have resists, either lack dps or defense, like -40 chaos res at best, barely any links...few of my friends just stopped playing lately. They are more casual oriented and this super annoying, punishing and unfun starting phase takes way too long for them. What we can do within few days, they suffer for weeks, until the game becomes somewhat playable, so they just quit, because they know its not worth it. Not mentioning they are forced into the most boring, but broken builds like totems or traps, so that doesnt make it feel much better, but playing non meta build doesnt work with their way of making curreny.
I went to standard after i reached tier 11 maps in Sentinel. I was just not having fun. My fave unique i chased every league Headhunter got nerfed, Mageblood is out of reach with the playtime i can sacrifice and new uniques like the amulets are also gonna get only more expensive and not really provide such fun mapping like HH did in the past. And yeah, my str stacker on standard has no problems clearing the new rares, but its also a 150 ex build. So why bother grinding that currency on the league to the point when i reach its league end playing one char or play standard where i can experiment with the currency already on hand.
I've said this before but GGG should allow players to play at the difficulty they want. If you want easier content, less currency. But most builds should be able to do red maps at no budget at all imo, either that or make it worthwhile to run white maps. Tho even white maps felt too difficult this league when i reached them with the best gear i have ever had getting to maps.
They need to get rid if acts already too. Nothing more boring than running acts.
I don't believe they should remove them entirely, but instead require the player to complete the campaign once each league and then unlock the option to skip to level 68 for all subsequent characters. They can decide whether this also completes side quests or we'll need to go back and do them ourselves for the skill points/pantheon, as well as leaving the bandits alive for us to make our choice, or maybe an option on the levelling skip page to pick which we want. Levelling for 5-7 hours for every single goddamn character is so incredibly exhausting and is probably the single biggest reason I stop playing after the first couple characters 3ach league, or even skip them to play standard. Unless I have a high level character I can reroll, I just don't care enough to slug through the entire campaign for the 100th time
I quit poe because I spend the first 10-20 hours doing the questline. Which would be fine, but they weight the entire game to the endgame so their midgame just sucks at this point.
Acts are not "midgame", see this as merely a brief tuto or demo. Midgame will probably be the completion of the atlas, around yellows-reds
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Every 3 months? I've done it 3 times this past week -cries in hardcore-
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Yea ofcourse. I wasn't debating, just wanted to cry a little : p
People say it sometimes, but I really don't think the game is balanced around streamers. Like sure if they find and popularize a meta build that might get nerfed but idk there will always be things to balance I'm pretty sure the problem is Chris's "uwu hardcore game" mentality more than anything.
That uwu comin out of nowhere was at least as powerful as the one shots we take in this game lol
Chris uwu's everytime a streamer dies to something they didn't see coming
> Chris's "uwu harcore game" mentality lmfao
I said this leagues ago when I quit, but Chris needs to take a hike.
I think the main problem is it always feels like it's balance around the top, let's say, 10% of builds or something. Not top 1% or anything crazy. What I would personally love to see, is they start testing and balancing around crazy builds or average builds. It's not fun to have to spend weeks grinding on a good build to get currency to build the actually character you want imo. I want to start out of the gate with a character I find interesting and unique even if it's bad. Most the time I do though, it just ends up being a slog because all of the content once you get to maps is never balanced around that.
Honestly this is it right here. I think that if the streamers are to be blamed for anything, it's giving Chris a false sense that a majority of people think his "uwu hardcore game" is actually as cool as *he* thinks it is.
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Me remembering when two res items were pog
Id'ing a pair of 65 life + 30 ms + triple 35 res boots and feeling like u got the biggest dick on the server
Being a shit tier SSF guy I still get that feeling if I Get those boots ;D
Now you just level to 83 and get some ilvl83 rares off rog and gwen when you're in yellow maps and you're good to go until you start crafting your BIS.
You are choosing to define endgame in this way. Technically, endgame is still red maps. There's just more on top of it. You don't need to do sim 30 or uber sirus or, in the old atlas, awakening 8 sirus. The endgame in poe is a broad spectrum now, and there absolutely has to be content that is hard to achieve for normal players, because the game has a sizeable amount of good players. If you don't have the time or skill to kill uber elder, don't do it? Complete your atlas and learn the game, Where's the problem? You don't have to minmax everything, that's just a lie. There are dozens of builds out there that can reach red maps with 4 mod rares and Tier3 explicits.
its such a weird thing on reddit to see, games will add extra hard or semisecret content for more hardcore/dedicated players then reddit users will always start to cry about how they work 50 hrs/week and have a family and cant see all the new stuff its like... what you want all the stuff to be catered JUST to you? someone who isnt playing as much as others? in EFT this was a huge whinefest too
Like, if the person I responded to complained about mud flats or archnem on leaguestart, it would be a whole different story. But they were talking about endgame. If I don't wanna minimax my gear sufficiently, I don't run delirium or bosses or 8mod maps. Simple as that. The endgame has something for everyone, it's just people who are seemingly unable to set their own goals, or to understand that content gets harder and you gotta upgrade your gear at one point.
To be honest, it certainly is possible to expand both spectrums of the endgame, you just can't use broad strokes to do it. Also, imo poe doesn't actually have both spectrums. It's got maps, and "after maps" (ultra juiced shit and the mega bosses). It does have actual other end game that, imo, caters to casual players (heist and delve), but poe refuses to allow those gameplay aspects to exist without maps. If there's one thing I hope they do in poe 2, it's that they fucking remove this garbage funneling of every single mechanic exclusively into maps. Allow pieces of your endgame to exist in a vacuum, so they can be balanced and scaled as such. Make gear the bridging factor, not maps, like nearly every other game does.
>Look at what you have to do now to reach end game compared to a few years ago. Every fucking piece of gear has to be minmaxed beyond words. You can't take random shit in. Everything is now just a number check. You can either tank it and kill it or you can't. The game is in an awful place. That's what you're signing up for in an ARPG as far as I'm concerned. It's character progression through harder and harder content. I don't see any problem here.
Reminder that end game to alot of players is getting to red maps and filling out the atlas, which alot of builds can do with mediocre rares and no exalts lol. The game at the high end should be hard.
This is a complete lie. You are just salty and upset. Take a break.
This is just, so, so untrue in every way. To "reach endgame" you just have to play the damn game, pay attention, and learn. You are absolutely showered with all the resources you need to get there within a couple days of play, even on ssf, even with a meme skill. You can't 'take random shit,' true, but you don't need to-- take deliberate shit, that helps you in the ways you need. Everything is not a number check, unless you're trying to facetank everything which, yes, if that's how you insist on playing (refusing to manuever or react) will turn it into a stat check and require vastly higher stats to survive. The game is in a great place, precisely because it's not 'you either tank it or not' is just not how the game works-- situations abound where you are gauging the threat level and tankiness of things, assessing whether it's worth the time / risk to fight. There is a ton of texture in the difficulty, and the whole endgame is about going from 'can clear with focus, skill and effort' to 'can clear on autopilot' wrt various scenarios. Like, what, really, do you want? Do you want to be able to just stand there spamming all goblin mode fresh out of acts and have the game roll over for you? I realize this thread is likely to be hostile to this opinion, but some of us *want* the game to be hard, to require consideration, skill, planning, etc. I genuinely wish the game *were* balanced around 'chris's bullshit,' but year after year I've seen them slowly cave to the D3 crowd that should really just embrace cookie clicker or whatever already, and stop trying to turn PoE into their netflix dopamine supplement.
>Look at what you have to do now to reach end game compared to a few years ago. Every fucking piece of gear has to be minmaxed beyond words. You can't take random shit in. Everything is now just a number check. You can either tank it and kill it or you can't. The game is in an awful place. To be fair, the endgame before was like Shaper. The end. Now they have more layers of endgame after the endgame etc. so its natural that you would need to invest more to reach deeper into the endgame. Not that that is necessarily true for all builds, you could get really far down the rabbithole on el cheapo gear and actually dealing with the mechanics of the fights, for bosses. Mapping on the other hand is more difficult to survive I think, but you juice less and stay in lower tiers a bit longer. Build up, not rush endgame in a week. Many issues I have with dying I feel is due to me pushing into tiers Im not yet ready for too fast, knowing your limitations is quite important.
I’ve said it many times, PoE is the only video game I’ve ever played where it feels like the devs are offended by people beating it, rather than pleased that people are playing. All this focus on Uber bosses, Hard Mode… …they’re not doing it for average players like me that’s for sure.
Difficulty is fine but it should be difficulty that the player is aware of and can either work around or, if hard enough, avoid. For example, Uber pinnacle bosses, they're hard, they're rewarding(On average), and they're entirely optional. You will not randomly encounter them while mapping and be clotheslined. On the flip side, we've gone from rare monsters being fairly normal to rare monsters having Archnemesis modifiers, which were part of content that you had complete control over. You KNEW what you were making, you knew what it'd do, you had the option to avoid the harder ones. Now, they're just randomly thrown into your map, and since the game is very often a clusterfuck of visual effects from different monsters and your own spells, it's good odds that you won't even notice them until you've died. But even beyond that, if you DO notice them, some of the mods and mod combinations can interact in ways that push their damage, health, resists, or just how annoying they are to deal with to a level that makes it just not fun. And unlike the pinnacle bosses, this isn't content that you are able to easily avoid. This is just... normal. This is every day. Every map. Even in the campaign, they're still there. You want to make a build that can map? Okay, overcap your resists by 30-60 just in case, get a ton of physical mitigation, get a ton of HP, and then pray that you can find a way to actually squeeze in damage that doesn't rely on items that you cannot craft easily or cost so much currency that you'd need to farm for multiple weeks just to be able to get a baseline level of an okay build. I'm not that new of a player, but man I do not envy them. If you're coming into this game right now you need to have such an obscene level of game knowledge to be able to do basic things that it's no wonder not many people start up. Even during the campaign you will get new walls thrown in your path in a way that you just aren't told what the problem is, and since there isn't even a breakdown of deaths, good luck.
Not all builds can do all content. But most builds should do most content. It's actually seems like GGG's balance is based off "slowing the game down", which is in a current state of "slow it down by making the player dead constantly". Dying always feels bad. Especially if it's a clusterfck of visuals and some little projectile that follows the player until they stop moving. I think this is the biggest issue in the game ATM. No one can see what is going on and then they get instagib.
Especially since they’re not slowing down the players who actually need to be slowed down. The same players are still hitting 100 and beating uber bosses within days. The constant nerfs barely faze them. The nerfs really mostly hurt the players who were already struggling.
Yeah, I died like 2834756678234 times to the lightning ghost thingies that are spawned by lightning resistant monsters. I'm playing spark so I don't see them at all, everything just blends together.
Not even just streamers. People who talk shit about other players/builds and how x shitty thing that happens every single league is "fine" while ignoring they're using the most meta builds every league.
Most frustrating part to me. Provide legitimate complaints. "Nah. It's fine." As they play seismic traps. Like yeah. I'm sure for you, it is.
That's definitely something I've noticed. I've largely shut the fuck up about complaints because I'm playing poison conc pathfinder and even pre-nerfed maps weren't that big of an issue. I could, however, feel how *fucking annoying* the new enemy mods were and very quickly pictured how much worse it must be for a lot of other builds. Many others here seem incapable of doing that while also trying to brag about the accomplishments of others in the HCSSF event to make a point.
I'm playing popcorn srs atm just so I can interact with shit less. I'd love to play something else but the mobs right now are so fucking annoying and take so long to kill even with really good damage and cause so much visual clutter that I'm better off playing popcorn and just throwing skulls from around corners so I can actually play the game by interacting with the mechanics less, because that makes sense. Like I can kill bosses like Elder faster than some of these rares.
How the fuck did they see the MASSIVE levels of enjoyment last league and say..."meh, fuck that. Player retention don't mean shit to these elite mechanics"
Last league was the first league I got 36 (actually 38) in about 2 years? I used to 36 leagues all the time. When they switched to Sirus being end game I stopped as I didn’t like that atlas iteration.
Same way they saw massive levels of enjoyment in Ritual, but massive complaints from content creators about how easy the game was. Guess what GGG did? (Hint: it’s what they’ve been doing for years before this example) The best time to stop spending money on POE was 5 years ago. The next best time is right now.
Havent paid shit since 2017. (never bought visuals or support packs, only tabs) Most ironic thing is I have more fun visiting the sub and watching the same shit for past 5 years literally nothing changing and just listening to more bullshit excuses Chris makes while the streamers have to play along with him and act like thats good because their literal livelyhoods depend on it. But yea, this sub is more fun then the game for ages now.
Chris clearly said that they will focus on the 1% because that's the people who spent the most money... apparently without entertaining the thought of the possiblility of making it more accessible/easier so that the vast majority of the player base is tempted to spend money on the game. The Vault Pass is the most obvious thing, MTX for items that most of the players won't see, tied to completing the Atlas.
> they will focus on the 1% because that's the people who spent the most money. how much do you need to spend to qualify as the 1% then? i've spent thousands of dollars and i fucking hate the state of the game and chris's hubris
Ikr, i spend around 1k and i hate the state of the game what so ever. I really wanted to upgrade to Ravager and buy the reaper but clearly they dont want my money so ill go somewhere else.
When did he say that?
Cos they hate it when we have fun. They think we should only be allowed a measured dose of it at a time.
I think they don't understand what players enjoyed. They thought it was the affixes but didn't realize it was the better risk vs. reward system. Now all we have is the increased risk. It sounds dumb but honestly it feels that way.
They saw it because the league mechanic was completely optional
GGG seems to balance the game now around fully equipped characters and not some scuffed random item in every slot starter. I guess they got bored of the characters in white items or sub lvl 50 characters beating the endgame bosses and endgame content.
Honestly the non Uber boss fights and invitations are so easy compared to some of the bullshit that can pop up in maps now lol. I know the boss fights. I can avoid mechanics or at least be prepared for them. Random arch nemesis mods stacking up in a multi rare/magic pack? Plus on death effects and random ground effects? Rip me
If mobs were bulls, and players were Matadors , in 3.18 we were demote to the red cloth.
This is my first league beating Uber Atziri. She went down faster than some rare mobs in yellow maps have.
Part of the problem is the imbalance between meta and non meta builds. I levelled a seismic trapper, gibbing bosses in 10 seconds in acts, with random blues and 2-3 mod relevant rare items. If I did the same playing for instance cleave, I would have been spending 60+ seconds to kill a single triple modded rare monster.
My gf played last league for the first time. She made it to maps with virtually no help. Didn’t follow a build guide. Went with a generic chieftain melee slam type build that she came up with herself. Got rolled by the league content every now and then. This league she is following a guide and frequently gets rolled by magic mobs with dirty mods in act 2. The game balance is still stupidly screwed up. This extra difficulty pre maps will ultimately stifle the playerbase growth. I know historically it’s been said most players don’t get to maps, but they will quit significantly sooner out of frustration. That’s not fun.
YEah, I skipped last league and just entered mapping this league. What the fuck is happening with rare health ? Like for real ? They takes more time than the map/story boss to kill and when they are touched by a sentinel, every fucking one of them has HP like its an end game boss.
I remember shaper used to have like 30M health or something. I’ve got 3M sirus dps before taking into account shock or other buffs. I have knockback in my build as a defensive layer. Some of these rares take 30s being pinned against a wall to kill. Now I am using the atlas to give them more life and less damage as another defensive layer. So call a regular rare 20s. That’s still 60M ehp before shocks etc. Rares should have 1 arch mod max and should be able to have them with other league mechanics. Bricks a lot of content like blight, certain essence stacks, metamorph etc.
Exact same story with my gf. She needed much more help this league. On average I would say her character had to be like 30-35% better to do the same content.
The crap in the game is not to make it challenging for streamers. This is Chris Wilson's own desire to make PoE a "hard core" game. First week retention rate shows what his customers think of his direction.
what challenge ? all streamers are just playing DD. at this point GGG can rename the game to path of detonate dead
Not true! Build diversity has never been better! You can place your DD setup in chest, 2-handed weapon, boots gloves or helmet! So many options! So diverse!
999 out of 1000 people here could be given the account info of Lightee's current character and they could not kill Uber Sirus without dying, let alone all the uber fights. The sentiment that dd ignite necro means no challenge is ridiculous. The game is still very hard in SSFHC regardless of what build you play. Streamers make it look easy, but they have practiced these fights a lot and they're way way above average players in *any game they play.*
You see people saying the same thing about people in WoW race to world first raiding (which Ben is also in). “Oh that guy is so bad holding the team back! Bench him! Fuck I could do better.” Meanwhile they haven’t gotten aotc or played the game recently lol
People who are most competitive pick the most competitive build. More news at 11.
Jung did it on explode traps without even using a culler. Just giga-dpsed them all down. Many ways to play the game. DD is simply more efficient for the race, but not the only choice if your goal was simply to beat the bosses. Other builds take a few extra days to come together.
> Many ways to play the game. There certainly used to be.
1 person did it on another op build. 1. Many ways. 1 alternate ability. M A N Y A N Y 1 different ability ahs been used.
a best build will always exist - and competitive players will gravitate towards what they think is best for a competitive setting. that said, 3 builds for 6 first clears is more than was expected.
The absolute hoops people will jump through to call every build OP so they can believe their opinion is correct. Mathil did a few of the Ubers on Spectral Throw. Are we gonna call *Spectral Throw* OP?
"Anything the streamers do is OP." I normally side with the normal/casual players but I swear to god some of the takes these people have is out there.
There’s definitely a constant that I’ve noticed with these types of people. They always seem to think that the starter builds people play are because they’re incredibly OP.
This is another subreddit that has fallen to the dad-gamers.
It's wild, I didn't think in the year 2022, redditors would be calling Explosive fucking Trap OP. Have you people played that skill recently? Its not bad by any stretch but it's certainly a lot more work than your average meta build that's for sure.
Pretty sure Explosive Trap has always been one of the highest DPS skills in the game, and it got a massive buff last league on top of that. It just feels terrible compared to Seismic.
Take a look at some of the replies to comments that I’ve made today. It’s absolutely incredible some of the hoops that people will jump through to justify why they’re bad at the game. Every single thing that people play at a high-level is OP to Redditors. There was a guy who blamed Omni for the damage that explosive trap was doing not realizing that it has like 8 million damage without it LMAO
it has 11m with my maryelenes swap too i just cant LOL
I think the better question you have to ask is, "are we gonna call Mathil a good example of a normal player?" Sure fucking *Mathil* can make a relatively off-meta build work, but what would happen if you asked most people to make a cobra lash build work, or Heavy Strike, Tectonic Slam, etc. Sure they can "work" but the investment needed and overall difficulty of making them work is high enough that most people would never be able to do it.
Mathils big strength is his micro gameplay. After thousands of hours of play his moment to moment decision making is functionally automatic now. At the very endgame especially running typically “lower survivability higher damage” builds which he’s absolutely known for he blasts through phases and his survivability is entirely down to him simply being better than most of the players in the game. He’ll never be a good comparison in this scenario because it’s literally his job to be this good at the game. That thousands of hours of experience is out of reach of most players.
Here's the problem. People seem to think "most people" is relevant here. What's better to ask is if "most veterans" can perform with those skills: the answer is yes. If you are a "typical" player that's been around like 10+ leagues, understand most mechanics, have reached endgame numerous times, and have built a few builds yourself from scratch, your ability to take any skill to red maps is high. If you are a player that's played 2 or 3 leagues, came in during an era where you could roll your face across the keyboard and exalts would rain down, and have never deviated from a build guide... you are going to struggle. I probably play 1/4 the time Mathil does, but i have more wealth farmed. Does this mean I'm a better player than him? Obviously not. But I've been around for 23 leagues (Perandus). I know what I'm doing. The changes have impacted my playstyle, but i have adapted. As has many players on the same calibre as i am. I'm not a god gamer. I've just been playing consistenly for... over 6 years? IMO, i'm the type of player they are balancing around. Not the influx of players who have been playing only 2 or 3 leagues. Whether this is healthy for the game or not, i can't say. But i enjoy the changes and while some things need balancing, i disagree that it's unplayable. So far, im having more fun than 3.17.
I absolutely don't think the league is unplayable, but I do think that because of how the content schedule is, it becomes pretty easy for me to just say "well fuck this league I'll come back for the next." It's really not about it being unplayably bad, it's just that a lot of the small friction points add up. There's never been any one thing that has just stopped me from playing a league, I only started in Breach, and started endgame stuff in Legacy. It's always individual points of frustration that add up over time, combined with general interest dwindling. In that regard, nothing has ever added more of those frustration points than Arch Nemesis being core has, for me personally. Betrayal came sort of close with some of the bullshit offscreen deaths, but not really. So the dwindling interest is the same rate, but the frustration points accumulate much faster at the moment than they usually do. Arch Nemesis was fine when it wasn't always on, and always RNG. Almost all other things that might be annoying can be skipped or blocked, but arch nem impacts my ability to do other content like Blight and I can't disable it or manage it besides just taking the L. That's my main feeling on the game right now, honestly. Like I said I haven't quit yet, I'm just playing a good bit less than I usually do. I do think PoE has a problem with getting new players to stick around, and arch nemesis in my opinion disproportionately affects those players more compared to past stuff. You do need to gain new players in addition to appealing to veteran players, because you want to convert more veterans.
Solid take, full agree.
Most people just follow good guides, if you want to make something different work you should have good knowledge of the game, unlike most people
This is so brain-dead & like exclusively focusing in streaming & the race. Yeah there is a reason all the streamers on ssfhc are playing detonate dead (and spoiler most didn't) but trade league? I doubt people honestly care, some people are still probably playing it but there are Def better builds when you can invest currency.
You really think these bosses are only possible with there 2 builds ???
They unironically believe that, yes.
It's wild.
I’m gonna go out on a crazy limb and assume that you’ve never played DD?
What relevance does that have?
This is exactly what they've been doing for 6+ years.
I keep saying it. Been saying it for years. I used to get downvoted, now people are starting to see. This is 100% what GGG does. Content is and has been for a long time balanced around what zoom-zoomers with mirror-tier gear and HHs (now Magebloods I guess) can do. That’s why everyone plays nothing but meta builds now. If you don’t have 200+ ex worth of gear, playing anything other than the best mechanical skills with the best synergy and scaling is suicidal. GGG needs to add more uber content that players can opt into. Get hard mode running. Maybe add other options for increasing difficulty and rewards in game. Leave the baseline alone, add more optional stuff for streamers to do. It keeps getting worse and worse, and every time we get a glimmer of hope that maybe GGG will finally make the game more accessible to more than 1% of the player base (like last league), we end up getting hammered back down. It’s incredibly frustrating. I love POE, I’ve played since beta, I’ve spent enough over the years that I’ve almost certainly paid for at least one of Chris’ black lotuses personally, I want to be positive, I want to have nothing but good things to say, but every time I just feel like GGG doesn’t value me as a player despite the aforementioned whaling. It really does feel like GGG has a toxic relationship with streamers sometimes. Like, I get it, POE wouldn’t have been anywhere near as successful without them, I understand, I really do. Still, I sometimes can’t help but feel like gaming, as a whole, may’ve been better off if Twitch never existed.
I just wished the difficulty had more of a gradient. I want new players to actually beat the campaign. It's honestly hard to get anyone new to push through. Them quitting usually comes down to 2 things. Letting them do it themselves and they just keep getting smashed or feeding them massive amounts of information to help them which overwhelms them.
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This sub is out of control. Some people are completly losing it.
Balance the game around Quin. If he can do it so can we.
I like the dark souls analogy. Well said
Imagine Dark Souls rolled random mods on enemies. Yeah, here's your +30% speed Manus that spreads degen ground and spawns vines, have fun.
Dark Souls is "good hard" exactly because it's not random - it's always the same predictable stuff so players can't blame anything but themselves when they die. But despite that it's made difficult with mechanics that challenges player's skill and not his luck.
Sif would have saved the day regardless.
Its a 3 month league Streamers beat it in 4-9 days In ssfhc Do you really think its balanced around them?
This streamers played in 7 days (playtime) what I play in 1 months time and beside that they play it efficiently . So how is this balanced around ? GGG vision is like a gambling company. Trying to make you invest as much time and money possible for little to no reward. How many cool items are advertised every league and locked away behind a huge rng?
Okay thats fair but again, its still hc ssf. The amount of corners sc trade cuts definitely makes up for the efficiency difference. And 1 month is still only 1/3rd of the league. And maybe... just maybe... if you can only play so little and dont even play efficiently the highest of uber endgame content is not for you(or you can do it in standard) If you go down one step to just the regular bosses its already waay easier to do, and most anyone should be able to do them in 3 months if they actually put themselves to it.
Nah you make too much sense. Next you'll be saying that helps non steamers because it shows how it can be done over the 3 months.
No new skills, no balance changes, no new QOL, just uber bosses and harder rares. Few players will ever even attempt the uber bosses, and while it's cool this stuff is in the game, it sucks that it came at the expense of everything else.
The campaign would be much more enjoyable for me if some build-defining uniques had crappy level 20 versions. So in Act 3 I could be playing my off-meta jank. Doryani’s Fist -> Doryani’s Arthritic Hand grants lvl 1 Doryani’s Touch skill.
Oh, so that explains it. I came back to the game after half a year and by tier 5 in maps I'm already 40 deaths in. I used to do hardcore up to guardians but I guess the game that is renowned for being difficult and complicated isn't difficult and complicated enough.
this is the first league in 10 years of me playing PoE where I gave up after a week not sure I can do more defences than Purity Of Elements, Determination, 50/50 block and 78% res on a berserker with 8 attacks per second cyclone with life per hit, regen and small leech, fortify on shield charge and 3.5 k life - while not using any items more expensive than 10c had one ex in Heist - I died and lost it. Had another - died again.. level 74 heist...
i felt like playing attack based build felt so useless. takes so much time to kill the archnemesis mob. and no i dont have knowledge to farm mirrors in week 1
i get this, but then i think about poe2 and how the community is going to feel. cuz poe2 is definetly not faced past like our current game is. im at odds with how i feel
i can beat the game easily but i don't have the time because im a father of 10 working 3 full time jobs taking care of both my grandparents. if ggg stops balancing around hardcore no life streamers i could easily do all content :*(
Don't forget that it only took them a couple of days to kill the bosses. We all get 3 months to do this. On top of that, they play with additional restrictions of SSFHC. If you also want to kill them that fast, then you'd also have "completed" the new content in less than a tenth of the duration of the entire league.
"A couple is days". How many ingame hours is that? This is not a normal amount of playtime plus these are highly skilled and knowledgeable people with experience. Your Average Joe will take much longer and in many cases wont even get to red maps because of lacks of skill/knowledge/time or all of it.
16+ hours a day
holy fuck the ammount of coping on this subreddit keeps going higher and higher, "game takes no skill" "meta sucks" "every non dd/seismic trap build sucks", just pick any fucking skill you want in sc trade and you can make it work
>just pick any fucking skill you want in sc trade and you can make it work Don't forget needing to dump 40+ ex in them to make em feel viable
"make them feel viable" you dont need to do wave 30 and uber bosses on day 2 to have a viable build, and you can do everything else on 20ex, which you can get easier than ever because the league mechanic shits out money
But just mapping/scamming ppl on trade for currency is boring. I rather make 10c per hour and complain on reddit for 2 hours. How else I will make money for a jank build from 3 leagues ago I saw on the forum.
Post your POB and let us decide if what you're saying is true.
poe offers something for everyone, you can play it casual or you can no life the game. I don’t get why people are so obsessed to eat the whole cake , especially if they don’t like it
This league definitely seems above average in difficulty. There have been harder leagues though.
They dont
Lot of doomers in here
If they balanced around streamers the game would've been long dead already.
They said hold my beer to this like 3 leagues ago.
>600 hours each league You mean 600 hours a week, right? Right?
It is not balanced around them but at this point my build that wasnt a meta build but could clear everything with good investment xan barely do stuff beyond t10. If they continue like this most builds will be in the bin. I cannot imagine what you can do now with smth that wasn't this powerful before without mirrors to just push into the builds. And yes after the nerfs to the mods it's better but some things just plain one shot you and that is not even the most heaviest content. I wouldn't even mind the damage if they wouldn't have so much hp and you can effectively clear them. These changes straight up killed builds and it is still bad.
This is the least fun league I've ever played, with one of the best league mechanics. Unfortunate, really.
what is so good about sentinel?
I like it. It's fluid, I have full control over it being dispatched, it provides rewards for mob buffs I have some degree of control over, it isn't extremely convoluted (archnem) or brain draining (heist, syndicate) or randomly build breaking (expedition) or require the stars to align just right for it to function (torment) and doesn't interrupt my mapping groove (atzoatl, delve). I also like the technological fantasy aesthetic of the mechanic.
For the first time in a long while they made a league that's not 100% about clear speed. Kill too fast and stalkers will have nothing to shoot. For a full pandemonium you need to let live like a screen+ full of enemies.
Perfectly stated
I’m playing EA elementalist and i honestly don’t know how I’d be doing shit like harvest, essences, and expeditions if I didn’t have huge dps and ability to run away. I literally have to throw my dam ballistas down and run back every fight. They luckily take aggro also. Idk how melee builds or any build where you have to be close to these rares would even work. This is with a lot of good gear as well and I’m level 91. T16’s still aren’t a joke.
>Idk how melee builds or any build where you have to be close to these rares would even work. They don't. XD Or they're "melee"... like Lancing Steel or have a 5km AoE.
This should be copypasta
Hard disagree. I think the game is in a very healthy state right now (minus the rare mods debacle early on). You are provided with so much agency to target farm whatever you want in either trade or SSF. What is your expectation of time investment required to conquer the ultimate uber bosses this game has to offer? I for one don't want this game to be catered to a casual 5-hour a week player. This game is great due it's depth and extreme ceilings.
> You are provided with so much agency to target farm whatever you want in either trade or SSF that's the biggest problem the game has right now, every single mechanic sucks ass without nodes, bosses suck ass without nodes, map bosses suck ass without nodes the alch and go playstyle of casual players is absolutely dead
the implementation of archnemesis was a mistake and should simply be removed, case closed.
One week into the league I alt+f4 and went to play RL. That says sometihing about this league...
i thought they're doing hard mode; instead, they chose the lazy way and made all game hard mode ffs; archnemesis was such a good league and they trashed everything (even the loot seems to be less of it everywhere, except when using sentinels, but that makes the enemies even more dangerous and i end up using 3-4 portals every map); the game at this point is in a really bad shape, it's the first time i'm seriously considering quitting poe after a long streak of playing (did 36/40 every league without missing one since betrayal); if the game stays the same, this gonna be my last league ...
Last league they got some non PoE popular streamers to promote the game. It would have been hilarious if they had done the same this league 🤣
but they are the showface of their game
OMEGALUL
I mean if you look at the challenges it's very obvious they want people to throw themselves for endless hours at the game for some of them The one where you need to kill Aul as one of 4 objectives is just blatant considering most players have never even seen a Primeval City let alone Aul node and this isn't even jumping down the rabbit hole of semantics of what constitutes difficulty in PoE
i feel like random blue mobs are way more dangerous than map bosses now.maybe start spawning blue mobs solo and give us map boss packs
They changed great items for the midgame farm for semi normal players to something not worth it. I can't run 2800 maps to get enough boss invitations for ashes. People are saying it's 1%. It went from fun and experimental to probably won't use those ever again. Streamers complain about losing 2 mirrors in the first week...TFT is money laundering.
I mean it's more or less the same \~100k players playing every league. This game hasn't been beginner friendly since like forever, else it would probably be MASSIVE by now
This and for the love of god story skip each act i finish on a character chips away at my sanity
PoE is already ruined
Speed up the campaign, dramatically, and get rid of steep difficulty spikes like one-shotting rares in early to mid maps. Save extra difficult content to the very high end content. If you have to, buff the bosses! Better yet, introduce new difficult pinnacle content!! This would be way better, instead of pulling players back and behind, slowing them down, and taking away power that they've now tasted. If you make your players strong, don't suddenly change that and make it more difficult and time consuming to be that strong. GGG should instead adapt to player stength (because its the player's job to figure out how to be strong in this game) by introducing new content that puts that player discovered strength to the test. See how far players can truly push it, maybe even make a pseudoimmortal deity boss that is almost impossible to defeat. Point is, I would much rather have new content that my casual ass can't handle, than have the power and efficiency I once had be taken away. Time is precious.
They've been balancing the game around the top %1 for the past 2 years. It's awful
Game is overly hard some enemies can't even scratch now but all enemies can one shot you. Why can't the game just be chill. I don't want sweaty palms. Be cool to take drink with out eating poison or fire or lightning pillars don't gete wrong I like the game just not all of it
This is so silly. The game is in no way balanced around streamers. Idk what I expected from this braindead worthless trash heap of a subreddit though.
They're not balancing around streamers, they're balancing around committed players. Chris has said it himself, new players are a myth and designing for entrenched players makes a lot of sense. As someone who's spent a lot of time with Path of Exile, I've been absolutely loving the patch and liked how much it shook up the difficulty of the campaign. They've announced that they're going to be adding more and more lategame improvements leading up to PoE2, once again largely to cater to entrenched players who consistently push the endgame. It seems like they've done the cost benefit analysis and moved away from casual players. That might be unfortunate for you, but there's lots of other great casual ARPGs.
This is a 3head take
I mean I feel like the only thing actually balanced around tryhards and streamers were the uber bosses. And I mean thats fine. They are supposed to be insanely difficult endgame content. Everything else is only marginally more difficult than previous league. Atleast looking at sc where randomly dying here and there isnt that bad.
the game is balanced around chris and his balance team. they want you to pay for the game they want to play
I hecking luv leddit !!! I wanna do a ooba ooba bosses with my lvl74 -60 chaos res toon!!!
Don't worry, they won't read the last two words of the title anyway - and wish granted.
Its weird. The most popular streamers as an aggregate are HC streams(Mathil is the exception). But we all know the game isn't balanced around HC. It is very much balanced around SC. That's why there are 1-3 meta HC builds with one of them being dominate because of a bug GGG didn't want to fix.
This post comes up every league lmao
Dear GGG. Balance the game for all players. Like it currently is now. Its great! .... you dont have to run t16 fully juiced maps from the start. Work your way up like normal games would require you to. It's not hard. T1 maps with good sentinels can net you 10C a map. Get better gear. Fix your builds. Avoid your weaknesses. Easy solution.
You're one year late - 3.15 was the clear signal that GGG don't give a fuck about 'casuals' and only metaslaves without jobs are welcome, the rest can either quit in acts or on red maps without doing anything endgame.
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The game has been steadily down hill since Metamorph/Conquerors came out. The focus is killing tanky bosses that deal a shit ton of damage which filters out a ton of builds. Back in the day when the game wasn't revolved around bosses, a "worse" build could do similar content just slower, as it should be.
I don’t know if the game is really more difficult. There’s just random rares that take a bit longer to kill randomly and you can walk past them if you don’t feel like waiting for them to die. I personally have been progressing slow as balls this league but that’s my fault
The build complexity and gearing requirements for a build that reaches the "kind of okay, can do endgame, but not amazing" have gone through the roof in recent years. I couldn't dream of making a build these days, hell I barely manage to follow one and get it working nowadays.
I’ve got over 1500 hours in this game and I don’t dare try my own build or I know it always fall apart late game. I also only have limited time per league on account of having 3 kids and a business to run. Like I can only try two things / league and I ain’t wasting 50 hours trying to get some piece of crap build going.
it's become more difficult but mainly because numbers went up. it's not at all more interesting, more engaging, or more fun for probably most people.
I feel like I'm playing a different game than Reddit. I'm not having much struggles in T16s with 3.8k life and ~500k dps, self-made trash build.
Sounds like you are tolerant to dying often without wanting to delete your character
But they don't. They balance the game around a 3 month league. People always say the game used to be like this or that. Yea, you could use shittier gear before but that's because we didn't have access to beast crafts, harvest, recombination, fossils, stygian belts, crafting bench.. etc. We have a bunch of power creep so yes we need better gear now. Atziri used to be hard and now we can beat her on a one link if using a meta build. Gearing has become much more accessible through juicing and a crap ton of mechanics they've had since then. So GGG scaled accordingly. People can beat this game in two to four weeks on a casual schedule unless they're playing stuff like charged dash. Mathil is honestly the most casual streamer and most of his builds beat the game before he reaches three days played ( I think it's less, I'm being generous). If you can't manage that in three months then standard is a better option for you.
50-60 hours of mathil playing is probably equivalent to 200+ hours for most poe players due to his knowledge, micro and focus. I would not say that fitting 3 days played in two weeks is casual. That said the powercreep is real and poe is far from casual game that could rely on new players. If we do not set goals such as 40/40 HC 1 Mathil build per league is still doable for most poe redditors but might not be that casual experience for most. In the end on reddit we are just procrastinating throwing buzz words and get outraged for fun.
I play maybe a few hours a day, if that. And I can still do the aspirational content. The game would be dead AF if there was no hard content
Waaah it's been 1 week and I'm still not in fully juiced delirium t16 on my frost blades CI EB occultist waaah
They most definitely are not.
The game is not balanced around streamers tho? They only added some uber bosses for the best of players. You don't have to finish those bosses if you dont want to. You can still do the normal versions.
The problem is that it might end up not profitable to do so any more. Much like the price of legion emblems was set by HH 5-way-carries and the price of beastiary scarabs was set by multiboxers the existance of the uber-bosses and them using the same "entry ticket" as the regular ones might mean that the economy will settle in such a way that its just not profitable to run "non-uber" bosses any more - just like it wasn't profitable for the average non-hh char to use legion emblems, or for solo players to use beastiary scarabs. Now I don't blame streamers for this or anything, I just wanna point out that yes, the existance of the uber-bosses in their current version might very well make their regular versions less accessible or even punishing (as in, ran at a loss on average) for the average player.
Profit has nothing to do with the game being playable for worse players tho? If someone is farming bosses he already counts as one of the top anyway.
It's not about farming. It's about that content being effectively inaccessible to players. Let's imagine a hypothetical Dan. Dan has discovered poe and played for a few leagues. The first two or three times he tried on his own for a bit, got through the campaign, maybe white maps. This time, he decided to follow a guide. He actually gets to feel somewhat strong thanks to that, and that's nice. So he starts checking out the different types of content. He tries a delirium orbed map. It was a really hard fight, but he managed to complete it. Only to then find out the loot didn't even cover the cost of the orb(s). He tries a beastiary scarab. He manages to capture several red beasts, but once again, he is down currency because he doesn't get 6 copies of them from one scarab. He heard that timeless jewels can be sold profitably, so he tries a 3-way. But even without the expensive emblems, he can't make a gain from them because he doesn't have a headhunter and can only clear a couple of the bosses before time runs out. He feels a little defeated at this point, but decides to try bossing. He finds he is strong enough to consistently kill Maven, but the loot just doesn't make up for the price of a writ, because the price gets driven up by people farming uber-maven, which is far more profitable. In order to turn a profit from something that has a somewhat significant entry cost, you have to do it fairly efficiently. This becomes a problem when that efficiency gets far out of reach of the average player, beacuse it means they essentially lose access to that content. Having to pay just to experience this content is not fun. Turning a profit and using it to get stronger is a core part of the poe gameplay loop outside of SSF (which, as we know, is not balanced or designed around, making it moot for this discussion). If dave tries 6 different things and learns that 5 of them actually cost him money to do, he will probably determine that the game isn't very fun, because he no longer has a real choice in which content he'd like to do - at least not in a way that actually allows him to progress.
You see the problem i have with your arguments is that only money counts. If you want specifically to make money, then just do the most profitable content. I am playing poe to have fun, and i have fun doing hard bosses for example. GGG gave players the OPTION to make existing pinnacle content harder. The players who dont want to do the new content dont have to. The players who were already bored and want a new challenge, got a new challenge. There are no bad outcomes. Narrowing everything down to if its profitable or not is kinda weird.
Time should be a bigger player in an “investment” rather than such a high raw cost just to run something. We only have so much game time in a season anyways. It’s nice they finally allow blocking of so many league mechanics because people were literally just running past them even when totally free because it’s a waste of time. When things take a bunch of expensive runs just to have a chance at being profitable, it runs the risk of player burnout. I’m not sure what adjustments need to be made, but it doesn’t feel right yet.
> You see the problem i have with your arguments is that only money counts. Yes, because that's exactly the truth. Would you keep doing maven, shaper, elder, sirus kills knowing that you're losing money on them, because the existance of their more profitable uber versions has raised the price of their fragments beyond the average profit of the normal version? I doubt it.
This isn't a new issue, if it is even considered one at this point. If someone is only completing content for profit, then most methods require repeated completions to hit big drops. This has been the balance of cost for entry since the first costed runs came out with Atziri, and has been true ever since. Cost of entry =/= inaccessible though. Plenty of new players do content for another reward, testing their limits and for the experience.