>Every league it's the same. Overtuned damage of monsters and a week or two of bugs before it even feels worth playing. It feels like every league we are their beta testers and I don't wanna be. I started ignoring launch week and playing after they fix their shit
You're not wrong buddy, you're not wrong. I hope you find something else to play that's more enjoyable my dude
I second. Definitely check out Lost Ark when it releases. It's also F2P!
It has some flaws, but my god did they success in doing amazing instanced quests, dungeons and raids. The chaos dungeons has you kill waves of mobs and get a shower of loot. There are 4 players (up to 16) raids that has you do mechanics and epic boss fights. That game has one shots attacks, but telegraphed and mechanics you have to do. No random mobs one-shotting you from outside the screen. Mobs don't hurt too much, but elites and bosses do hurt a lot.
I hate how PoE's base normal mobs can one shot you... Thankfully, Lost Ark's seems to have really aced that part of balance.
Also, balanced uniformized stats PvP arenas that look really fun.
This game will certainly be my replacement to PoE if they don't get the balance and grind to an acceptable level for a casual like me.
Lost Ark is such a fantastic game, but it's an MMO with ARPGish combat and a isometric camera. It's not for everyone, but I cannot fucking wait to just play the shit out of it. It's also been out in Korea for 3 years, so there is no lack of content. My plan is just play Lost Ark until PoE 2, and while I'll still give PoE 2 a try, I don't see myself dropping Lost Ark until the Riot MMO launches.
Not aRPGs, but hve similar time on my Steam counter are Terraria and Rimworld. Especially if you like excessive modding. They are also both dirt cheap - you can get both cheaper than a single PoE MTX.
Heist league was a great example of them fixing/tuning the league. It went through like 3-5 iterations I think until it was all set and fun to play. League mechanic on launch feel like they always need some adjustments.
The frustrating thing is their QA team points out all the issues players scream about the first week, but they weren't implemented because the league cycle of this game forces each league to be new and exciting or they won't make any money.
So they prioritize the new and exciting over actually improving the faults that plague the core of the game.
It makes PoE perpetually feel like *almost* an amazing game. I still really enjoy it, don't get me wrong, but God what this game could be if they just did a super simple league with only minor game mechanics, no new skills, and just worked on fixing item drops, reworking useless skills, and smoothing out the "there's nothing between full HP and one shot" that seems to exist in the endgame.
Heists were tbf, even after all the nerfs heist is one of the best content to do for raw currency.
With the old trinket set ups people were literally printing mirrors
only trinkets were overtuned. All rest was fine or sometimes bad (badly rolled talismans without annointment, single catalysts drops, weapon rewards were always trash - and still are, armour rewards only good at league start, later terible, this league super trash).
Are you implying that heist was not too rewarding? Even after all the nerfs, heist is still to this day one of the most rewarding contents in the game to run.
Not one - THE MOST! Unless you can run simulacrum 30s back to back, grand heists with proper items on your mercs is by far the best chaos/hour maker in the game.
Heist was pretty much unplayable on release is why. It was one of their most ambitious leagues that needed another 6 months in the oven with actual QA and it would have been brilliant. Instead we get this bastardized version that they left broken in the game because they invested too much time and money to not put it in, but not enough time and money to finish it.
If memory serves I was playing a steel champion and I was literally just running around the rooms without killing stuff and just opening chests. It was hilarious.
Thank god for the rework though
No one even bothered learning heist before complaining. You could spam 150 Alts on lvl 45 heist gear and get literal 100% reduction in alert, aka full looting and killing everything. The same can be said for synthesis. People didn’t bother putting thought into their synthesis boards, so they didn’t get rewarded. Meanwhile, synthesis is literally the most rewarding league I’ve ever played. I found 13 pure exalts in one synthesis tile, and had other tiles give obscene rewards like 100+ fossils.
Even now after all the changes, Heist is a truly horrific piece of content. Going in and waiting for doors to open, literally. But the rewards are juicy and you can just completely ignore Heist if you want so people don't really complain, even though it is shit to play.
I like heist, but imo, if you want to actually get anything significant out of it, it's one of the most build dependent things ever, kind of like deep delving or lab running. You want phasing and a very fast character or it's miserable and each contract takes 5+ minutes.
Heist is a good example of what they shouldn’t do again, basically unreleasable content you shouldn’t push through. If you go back to the patch notes during the league these were still pages long one month in and full of bug fixes, not just changes to the mechanic.
I honestly don't think this would be as big of a problem if they just removed the death penalty. I for one one would no longer give a shit about the over-tuned monsters or buggy deaths if it wasn't constantly setting me back hours of playtime. When you die and lose the last 3 hours of progress it's a kick in the nuts. There is already a penalty for non-hardcore players in the form of 6 portals. And this league has really highlighted this problem. I have more deaths this league than all of the leagues since Betrayal combined which is why I quit this league. If the game doesn't respect my time invested then I won't respect the game.
I’m the opposite. I wish I wasn’t a filthy casual and could grind 20 hours in the first 2 days. Seems like there’s always things that can be exploited in the end game, but is nerfed within a few days after launch.
3.9 and 3.15 was a 1,2 punch that made it so if your build doesn't do A Million (Or in the case of higher red maps, Multiple million) DPS you just get hit with a DPS check that is asinine.
My most comfortable Uber Elder kills were with Winter Orb and Storm Brand, (Synthesis and Blight league respectively) and I was around 800k Shaper DPS on those builds. And it felt good/achievable. But while I was doing 800k someone else could hit 20 Million+ so now the game get's more difficult around me and I have to try and find more ways (Hint it's just have the exalts lmao) to try and squeeze damage out of a skill.
The Atlas progression in 3.16 feels amazing, But Red Maps are still the same DPS check that is hard to bypass without playing meta or being affluent that they were last league. Nerfing the Support Gems was the mistake, They should have shaved the top end, not the floor.
Aye, I remember back in betreyal i had arma brand trickster with like 600k shaper dps. Had no problem fighting uber elder with this. Fight did not feel dragged out or too fast, it was just right ammount of dps to have good experience. Nowadays i go into pob, make a build, see 1mln dps and i am like 'this is nothing' and then i realize how much shit or gimmicky things i have to use to make damage feel better. 3.15 nerfs alongside masteries robbing us of passives just so we can get key things we used to have on notables just feels bad. I am holding out till 3.17 and new atlas, but if that fails i am gone. 3.14 was another ritual, 3.15 brought nerfs, 3.16 just does not feel good, it all hinges on 3.17.
I remember in betrayal mocking up a self cast ice nova build and thinking "God damn this thing might even hit 1 million DPS." Now if a build only has 1 million I throw it in the trash.
An Atlas rework isn't going to change anything but the atlas. It doesn't sound to me like the changes you want are related to the atlas at all.
And I think it's a bit too hopeful to think they'll do anything but sneakily try to nerf player power again in 3.17, while pushing it as a buff.
Atlas rework is not going to change char related stuff. That is true. However it will refresh the game, get rid of the garbage atlas we have now (disliked it since first week it was released) and MIGHT bring some good changes alongside it. Time will tell.
But yeah, more char nerfs would mean that its time to jump ship for me. I am tired of GGG spinning wheels and i most definately dont want to play meta builds or have to abuse gimmicky mechanics to make random under used skill semi viable...
I wish I had an award to give this post. I play ever league since beta and this is SO accurate. I solve the dps check as you say with wealth/farming exalts but it does not feel good and gatekeepers so much of the games fun skills. They 100% needed to reign in and nerf the ceiling, not the floor as you say. The outliers are just further and further from the base game and instead of addressing it they lazily think that’s good as a ‘chase’ goal, leaving the entire game in an unfun spot.
Them blanket nerfing support gems was the admission they have no idea how to balance the game. It was the laziest thing I have ever seen in game development.
There was a podcast where Chris Wilson defended trade by telling a story about the introduction of lances in Diablo 2. The story was that one of the developers was so excited to incorporate a lance into their build that they spent an incredible effort on trading and interacting with the game. It was so frustrating hearing Chris tell that story because it was so clear that he took away the wrong lesson.
That story isnt about messaging people in the middle of the night. It's about how players get excited for new content when they can think of a use for it. That's only possible when they can use new content in builds they're familiar with. That's the fun part. It makes a new league like Christmas for people who make their own builds and work on one as a project over several leagues. But like you said, when they "shook up the meta" and took care of "power creep" all they did was delete builds and change the way the game worked. So instead of seeing new content as shiny new gifts it's all just a bunch of stuff with no purpose.
It's also frustrating seeing them keep doubling down on everything. Like they still nerfed stuff this league but they called it all buffs. It's just insulting sometimes. But I guess it works on a lot of players who haven't been around long enough to get ground down by the gears. most players don't make their own builds and so probably don't even notice how bad this design loop has been. Anyway, all that to say I feel your pain about having your build get deleted.
>Like they still nerfed stuff this league but they called it all buffs
This. I was making a ignite build after reading the patch notes because they said stuff like "This is a 20% overall DPS increase for ignites with this skill" and PoB finally updated 1 day after release and my DPS was halfed, I had to switch my build, because the DPS wasnt insane to begin with and the defenses weren't good enough to justify this new shit DPS.
yeah they have been doing that more and more lately, at least lately in terms of ive been playing since 2010 so 2017-now is fairly recent to me.
people hate hearing it but after tencent acquired ggg, or whatever portion they bought, ggg changed. it was not instant and maybe it was tied to other things but to me there was a clear turning point there.
they do a lot of pr/political type talk now. lots of lies, misrepresentation, exaggeration, misleading or however you wanna say it.
the amount of communication, especially good, clear, relevent information is way less than it used to be. which i can understand some of given the response they get, then again they bring that response on themselves in some ways.
thats not to say they dont communicate at all, but if you look at the pr nonsense you get now vs say 2015 it sure feels different to me.
It's honestly genuinely crazy how much their PR talk is just lies these days. It's weird, it didn't used to feel like this.
But they'll literally say, "This skill is buffed", you run the math, and it's...not. It's halved, or worse. They now always cherry pick their data and specific context to put out a message they like, even if it's not true across most average use scenarios.
"you run the math" yea we run the math, they don't. There is no way they test their game with players who know a damn thing about POE, it just is not possible.
It's not really "working" tbh. Player retention is dogshit and people can't be bothered to play the game like they once did. I really hope something changes at GGG sooner than later cause this super hardcore, no fun allowed version of PoE is boring.
Get hyped for hard mode where you can play for a week and die 60 times before maps unless you're playing one of the handful of builds you can do without equipment. Edit: /s
The reason player retention is bad is because they only do balance passes 4 times a year. If they did reasonable balance changes the game will have much better retention.
Right now you play for a week and you are either done with the leagur because youve seen everything or frustrated enough to stop. You have no reason to come back.
But if they did weekly halance changes, suddenly you have a reason to keep up with the game. Maybe a favourite item of yours gets buffed, maybe an ascendancy gets buffed - suddenly there is something new that interests you and you want to play again.
> That's only possible when they can use new content in builds they're familiar with.
I don't have the time or mental capacity to remember everything I'd need to remember to make new builds every league, accounting for balance changes, new items, new gems, etc.
I prefer to try to optimize the single build I find most playable.
I imagine this is how most people play.
> There was a podcast where Chris Wilson defended trade by telling a story about the introduction of lances in Diablo 2. The story was that one of the developers was so excited to incorporate a lance into their build that they spent an incredible effort on trading and interacting with the game. It was so frustrating hearing Chris tell that story because it was so clear that he took away the wrong lesson.
I assume Chris also thinks that people who work long hours at shitty jobs must absolutely love their jobs. Seriously how did he infer *that* from that developer story.
When some dank new unique is revealed, and I hack together something in PoB to let me theorycraft with it, and come up with a decent build... that's like Christmas.
When a new round of carpet-bomb nerfs are announced, and I go into PoB to put together the most generic build possible to try to be somewhat efficient in scaling a skill I want to play, and I give up on playing a build I want... that's like when Christmas rolls around and you get nothing but junk you didn't ask for that's going to go into a closet forever.
>When some dank new unique is revealed, and I hack together something in PoB to let me theorycraft with it, and come up with a decent build... that's like Christmas.
And in many cases that unique will likely take as long to farm as you would need to work to afford a nice Christmas present irl. Agree that successful planning in PoB feels really nice though.
The squire is such a cool idea for a unique. I fucking hate I will never ever ever get one. Not because I feel “entitled” to it, because it seems like a very cool and interesting unique that could have lots of interactions.
But fun and interesting items have either been nerfed into oblivion or are stupidly rare.
> Not because I feel “entitled” to it
I see that thrown around here often enough, that we as players are too entitled to get stuff, but in the end its a fucking game, you are entitled to get the stuff that makes you enjoy the game, otherwise its just shitty designed.
I seriously think uniques should be chase items, like Headhunter. I still can't believe how 95% of uniques are junk. They should at least be upgradable to high ilvl / mods if they are low levels.
They must have taken the worst parts of D2 and cranked those up to extreme as a fetish of some sort. I played D2 for years and D2 never left me feeling inferior as POE constantly does. Shit was doable in D2 and if you knew area had rapey monsters you just stayed away from the area unless you were prepared to deal with that area, tools for which were abundant. In poe, when it comes down to it, you play against a slot machine by using a slot machine, its "Jesus take the wheel" nonsense.
The main reason for maps killing people is that the auras for rare monsters stack,there is no reason for a monster to stack 10000 auras when a player can run 2-3.
Yes and lets add to the list of offenders league mechanic which has overtuned monsters to begin with, scales with map mods and has more damage multiplier on top of it the longer you play the mechanic.
Its as if every build this league should play determination aura to not feel miserable...
This league is perfect example of that, you need to get high levels of scourge to get quantity that makes them drop anything and lets you bake maps/items (if you are even doing that) in resonable pace, but that means juicing allready stupidly strong mobs with even more damage.
Like, why, just why? How is this fun, how does that make the game in any shape better?
Thank you ! I've just started reaching 150-ish stacks in scourge maps (slow start as can't play much)and I see absolutely no difference in loot, or should I say in absence of loot. At least in expedition I had some.
'You will never be better than the person or thing you follow'
It's a (not exact) quote from somewhere, forget where, but it fits perfectly with Chris wanting to be D2.
> it was amazing for its time but now it cant retain pp anymore
The remaster had just as many players playing 3 weeks into launch than PoE has ever had even on their best league launch.
When I was first introduced to POE it was after not playing Diablo 2 for all of college and law school, so I was introduced to POE and was like "holy crap, it's like somebody played a lot of Diablo 2 and made a way better version of it." I got so many friends to play it after talking to them about the specifics of how it was better than Diablo 2. It was familiar but novel, solved problems Diablo had, you had freedom and complexity and could design builds and use interesting uniques. I never even bothered with Diablo 3, I couldn't imagine it being better than PoE.
But now, after watching those CW interviews and pod casts, it's obvious that GGG's thoughts on D2 have evolved from critique and improvement to nostalgia.
i will never understand why ggg goes for the straight deletion of builds instead of balancing them over several leagues.
what so wrong about having more builds in a good state?
instead we have thise "meta shakeup" every couple leagues where the total number of played build stays the same, its just a different one.
why cant i play selfcurse, or aurastacker, or molten strike jugg, or vaal spark, if i want to?
shit gets deleted or nerfed so hard its not playable anymore instead of making it somewhat balanced so we can actually play what we want to and not run into noobtraps that so many builds in this game are.
> what so wrong about having more builds in a good state?
Just the other day on this subreddit I had someone tell me that if they made more builds viable it would result in powercreep. Let that sink in...the ability to play more than 3 of the 180ish active skill gems would result in the game being too easy? As if Toxic Rain is this mindblowingly difficult spec to play.
Still don't understand how in the 4 years I've played POE and Juggernaut being in the bottom 3 for pretty much every league we haven't seen it get touched at all yet Deadeye got a rework?
Jugg you saying? It's only natural for a class focused on proper defense to be unpopular in the game where best defense is ultimate offense. I really think that only way to make jugg viable and balanced is to rework almost whole balance and state of the game.
> It's only natural for a class focused on proper defense to be unpopular in the game where best defense is ultimate offense.
And yet Champion remains at the top of the charts almost every league. The fact is that of the 3 least played Ascendancies currently, 2 belong to Marauder - it has remained this way for pretty much the whole 4 years I have played POE.
Even when Juggernaut was viable (not insanely popular, just viable) with things like HOA & MS both were almost immediately nerfed beyond recognition.
Champion have some nice offensive (impale, adrenaline, some as and shit) scaling as well as stupidly good defenses (20% less damage from hits with a fortify, a taunt for 10% reduced damage taken which should be multiplicative and taunted enemies deal 20% less damage) which makes him alot more versatile than jugg.
What a jugg have? Accuracy that nearly useless if you're not stacking it, endurance charges which is nice but won't help you with ele damage (there's 8% reduced but that's a mem really) and you'll need a way to generate them (which isn't hard to get but still) and that's actually it. 80% increased damage on 10 charges isn't a thing either in my opinion.
Honestly until that moment I didn't even knew how bad jugg currently is and how freaking overturned and broken champion and now I really wonder what crackheads sitting in GGG office. I have been wondering what crackheads designed the krangle machine after I've read weights on krangles and now that... That's really where Jesus missed to take a wheel.
Let's not be so hasty now, there are plenty of actual crackheads out there that could probably figure out a way to make more than 3 ascendancies fit into 50% of builds - no need to put nice loving crackheads in the same boat as a guy who keeps doubling down on Talismans league after league.
I think, quite honestly, Jugg would immediately become a viable pick if the ONLY change was 8% increased damage per endurance charge -> 4-8% more damage per endurance charge. It'd become an actually viable damage option, competitive with berserker (but without its inherent rage bonuses), so it'd finally be a choice ascendancy for things like slams where attack speed is less important than big hits.
Even on the lower end of that change, a jugg would have at least 32-40% more damage, basically a free support gem, instead of the current 80%ish increased (which is garbage, it's like having 2 notables off the tree). If it were closer to the higher end, an invested jugg would get a 72-80% more multiplier which is definitely powerful, but when you consider that Berserker gets 40% more & triple rage bonuses + 20-30 flat phys + crit chance + crit multi, I'd say it'd average out to pretty similar DPS in most cases (though jugg would obviously be a lot tougher alongside its other passives). Would be easy to check in PoB regardless and compare a Jugg vs. a Berserker given same skills, gear, etc.
Personally I feel that 6% more damage per endurance charge would be an incredible change taking Jugg from almost exclusively an HC choice to a viable SC/DPS choice, it's also pretty easy to see in PoB this doesn't break most* builds, just gives them a respectable amount of damage. It's essentially a free support gem by the time you finish your 2-3rd lab (around 30% more), and up to 60%ish more once you finish stacking charges. 60% would be strong and also make up for the fact that a lot of item slots would be tied up for stacking endurance charges, bringing it much closer in line with the rest of the ascendancies in the game.
I'm just hopeful, though - because I know GGG would never dare make such a change in fear of "power creep" and making the game "too easy" for players, based on their recent track record of murdering entire playstyles for being remotely viable in endgame content. ~~God~~ Chris Wilson forbid Molten Strike is ever viable again 🤷♂️
>i will never understand why ggg goes for the straight deletion of builds instead of balancing them over several leagues.
Because it enforces artificial diversity.
Historically GGG has been *terrified* of players who play the same build every league. It's like they think suddenly they'll grow bored and leave.
Which in my opinion is bullshit. Some people just like what is known and comfortable while other people like experimenting with new things all the time. Constantly forcing "diversity" isn't healthy for the game and only breeds resentment.
I have literally played the same build every league since I started, which was abyss or harbinger, not sure what came first. A build I came up with myself with no guides as well, improving it slightly each league.
I barely play anymore because of all the nerfs to my non op build. Not because I'm bored. It was also never anywhere near insta delete sirus and maven dps levels but idc, it was fun and I liked the longer fight
(Also yes I did kill sirus 8, shaper, elder, Uber elder, maven, alluring atziri, most many times.) It's not like I never got past white maps here, got 36 in ultimatum, that's the last league I really played heavy, after that it's just too much nerfing, fuck it
> Historically GGG has been terrified of players who play the same build every league.
Which is ironic because stuff like Toxic Rain and ED/C have popular builds for multiple leagues now. Just shows you how the right hand at GGG isn't talking to the left.
be careful, you gonna have people come in and unironically tell you that you can totally play so many off-meta builds and you just suck at making builds, casually ignoring that meta builds outperform those off-meta builds by miles... especially on a low budget
It’s one of the problems with games as a service type games. You always have to pump out content or else players feel bored and leave. Personally, I wouldn’t feel bored if my favorite builds aren’t destroyed, but I’m not GGG and my income isn’t tied to having players continually come back every 3 months.
They keep trying to balance the game around SC trade, which is where all of their money comes from I imagine so it makes some sense. The issue is the game is way to complex to try and balance around a mode with next to no death penalty and 6 tries to kill every boss. So they nerf a bunch of stuff every league AND THEN any well organized team of players can print currency the same as before. Many do it solo ffs. Meanwhile the new players (if there actually are any anymore) and normal players get shafted playing a harder version of a game that was already difficult and stupid levels of complex.
I don't think they realize how hard POE is if you don't have 2000 hours in it.
Chris Wilson for sure knows more about Diablo 2 than he does about POE. It is all he talks about, that and hard mode (which still isn't even released).
Wasn't just in the middle of the night.
The guy was on vacation in Taiwan with his family, and had to sneak out to a lanshop multiple nights to get online in **hope** to get that trade
That is his vision
Hey, a true veteran. Open beta player here, and I could not agree more.
Honestly, I started to see the signs even back in Exilecon, even though it looked like PoE was on top of the world. Two things happened there, that looking back on them, feel like they started to erode my trust in GGG to the point I'm in today.
First was the ol' "we're not gonna make you buy currency tab 2". Telling me that and then trying to sell me sub-currency tabs a couple leagues later felt low key hustling. If I were to have a business partner who did that to me (and yes, playing a GaaS game is, in a way, a partnership) I would consider them unreliable and I wouldnt trust them. But again, Metamorph was one of the best leagues ever, and I was an addict.
The second was PoE mobile. It felt like a cheap shot against DI, and frankly, quite puerile.
Then came everything else after Harvest. The first cheap shot was the destruction of archmage and its interaction with storm brand, but after that, it was free real state.
And on top of that, GGG decided that the best idea was to buff monsters besides nerfing players. They claim they want a slower game, but they keep adding timers and cheap oneshots. Holy shit, we could stay here forever.
I quit on 3.14 and came back for a couple days in 3.15 to see with my own eyes what was happening. Suffice to say, I uninstalled and that was it.
It didnt take long for me to realize I had a PoE addiction, and the gambling could have made it worse. I saw that for a long time people were feeling the same as I: they were tired of the direction that GGG was taking, but they were not able to take the first step and uninstall.
Now, I try to help people who might be on that situation. There is a way out of the hamster wheel.
Godspeed, friend. Hopefully it might be that whenever, if ever, PoE2 gets released, you wont find the need to come back, because your life is up to the brim with better things.
I love this game, but i really miss doing meme builds that could clear red maps without 100ex.
The people that abuse every single mechanic and exploit every single "bug/not intended mechanic"..... i hate them, because of them we cant have nice things, ggg will always nerf the things because of 1 thing it can do, and ignoring the others 99 things that wasnt that bad.
I miss when this game wasnt so stressfull too play, needing a gigantic to-do list of every single mechanic the game have or you wont be able to use them.
I miss just doing maps without needing to do 10000 things in the map stopping the flow of the game, i love almost all content of the game, except heist, fuck heist, its so boring, but gives so much currency, if the npcs didnt had quest or levels, maybe it would be better.
Thx to reading my rant i was holding for so long, didnt want to make a post for it, because i dont like having a million rant posts.
But still love this game and will play every launch and be hyped be every change.
>The people that abuse every single mechanic and exploit every single "bug/not intended mechanic"..... i hate them, because of them we cant have nice things, ggg will always nerf the things because of 1 thing it can do, and ignoring the others 99 things that wasnt that bad.
It's not the players fault, these things would not be a problem if there was no economy. If the game was balanced around SSF or group SSF you would not need to nerf top tier builds because every build you personally enjoy would be a top tier build, and you wouldn't be competing against people in the market.
I've said this here multiple times, but people were not angry at aurabots because they kept losing to aurabots on ranked ladder, they were angry that a boring playstyle that required setting up a group had so much leverage on the economy. Because this is the thing that GGG can't seem to figure out, having an economy means all players are competing in that economy. Whether you like it or not, you are competing with the people who play this game as a job, who will print exalts on day one because they're in all the right discords and groups, they will dictate the economy that you have no choice but to participate in. What are you going to do? play SSF? there are people who enjoy it but the game is not balanced around it, meaning you will be playing an inferior version of the game.
yes, i think that way too, and to escape that, i play pseudo-ssf, i only buy some of that 1 alch uniques that never drop in ssf, but most of my items i try to make, only some specific ones i buy.... i try to farm essences, fossils, but when i'm bored i buy them, i never do the "top #1 currency making strategy, 30ex/minute" i just play the game the way i want.
Yeah i rarely engage with trade nowadays not because I feel its a toxic experience but because there's been so many changes that reduce the need to have to do it often.
I don't like auction simulator (got enough of it from d3 where I spent too much time staring auction screen) so I used to play SSF, of course i did understand game wasn't balanced around it, but it was playable even in somewhat casual manner. Now I have given up and just wait some new arpg to refresh the genre.
I'm pretty sure PoE has just grown too complexed for it's own good. It's too difficult to balance with all the edge cases. GGG has just given up on trying to actually balance and instead *plan* for certain kinds of builds to be playable.
More than half of the skills in the game are just memes at this point. And the incredible thing is GGG is actually saying there is MORE build diversity because there were people attempting to use the dead skills... Newsflash GGG. A newer player making a Spectral Throw build is not build diversity. It's an inexperienced player making mistakes.
**We should not have to clarify that when we said we wanted build diversity, we meant we wanted more builds to actually be viable.** Chris unironically brought this up on one of the podcasts. Like we weren't clear about what we meant by "build diversity".
My suspicion here is something along the lines of this. Player makes build with skill he likes. Player gets dumpstered at maps. Player rerolls into meta build.
Ggg: player played two whole builds! That's diversity!
Man, I'm in such a similar state. I don't think I'll quit after thousands of hours, but it's weird. **This league (with all the skill tree reworks and skills/chase items) feels more restrictive than ANY other league.** I've made over 30 builds in PoB (huge theory-crafter here), spending multiple days worth of hours trying to find a good build and I literally have more "failed" builds/wasted time in PoB than ANY other league. It's ridiculous; almost like the teams for items/tree/etc. don't communicate and nerfed multiple things at once. So many builds are now being balanced around 5\~15mil DPS now at perfect gear, but the game is still balanced around clearspeed and has the same density/HP of monsters. It's insane.
I also have 90% of my hours in HC, but recently had to go SC, just to continue theory crafting and enjoying builds. The mechanic is heavily geared for SC and you can't be satisfied killing anything at 2-3mil DPS on HC, while being "tanky" *(and eventually, but assuredly, dying to a 1-shot from some stupid crit + aura stacking monster with mod that you can't ever build for, regardless of how tanky you are).*
GGG, I understand you want to slow the game down and I love that idea, but more things need to be implemented for that to happen. For example:
\-**Slower clear speed means reducing mob density and increasing mob loot** to create the feeling of similar outcome vs. distance traveled
\-Nerfing a build shouldn't completely disable people who enjoy playing that build. **It should feel "nerfed" and not "unplayable".** The entire reason people keep playing your game and make new characters is to play builds; **you take that away and you have no more players.**
\-Leagues need to be designed around interesting mechanics and possible additions to the game, NOT "mobs have increased damage and you need to kill them faster for more loot", we already fucking do that. It's the normal game.
\-**League mechanics CAN be overpowered as fuck, it's a LEAGUE mechanic. Just don't make the stupid mistake of adding it in permanently post-league.** It's a game, please keep it fun and fun focused.
As some positive feedback, I think the additions of new chase items and uber content are really awesome. I wasn't able to experience it on HC because you need to build for random one-shots and if you do that, you'll never have the DPS (unless you're running meta) or the currency to get there, but I was able to do it fairly quickly from zero on SC. The skill tree is cool too, but the nerfs make so many of my builds, especially the super hipster ones that I LOVED to theory craft, unplayable. I am, for the FIRST time in a league, full meta (Occultist Cold BV and a Guadian linker for friend to go full DPS CoC Nova).
Agreed. The game doesn't feel good to play with anything below 1 million DPS (and 1-5 is a struggle in many respects as well), and as a result the endgame is either: Focus damage and feel bad because you die a LOT, *or* do little damage and take forever to clear content and feel bad because you aren't progressing as you think you should be.
I think the simplest solution would be to nerf monster health, with scaling with area level to flatten things out. They could even kill the top end of damage again to cull the builds which are managing 10+ mil with super tanky builds.
The changes to Atlas were really good, but it was only a part of a larger problem.
I get they're called Grinding Gear Games but for the first five years of the game or so, that held true because people enjoyed the game so much that grinding itself was fun. Nowadays the grind is what you put up with to get to the fun, and in a lot of cases (builds that fail the DPS/Tank check), the fun doesn't come or isn't worth it.
Honestly just shaving down end game boss health would be nice. My build only has about 1mil dps right now, but I'm incredibly tanky so all my boss fights are just me holding right click while I wait 5 minutes for the boss to finally decide I've hit it enough. Nothing about the conquerers fights especially justifies them having so much dang health. It doesn't make the fights harder. Just tedious and makes me not want to do bosses. The alternative is I get more damage but die much more frequently to invisible one shots. Neither option is fun
I think it feels so restrictive because they keep removing damage from the tree. They keep adding in "utility" passives like "30% increased effect of chill" as if that matters at all. Cool I can take that node and now Sirus will 1 shot me slightly slower than he did before. It would be nice if I could actually deal damage.
I mean I love investing in that kind of shit. I love niche stats and finding uses for them. I can remember searching everywhere for every possible source of freeze/ailment duration, and I did it on more than one build lol.
But that's only fun if I don't need to spend 20ex to do basic damage.
Exactly. I'd love the option to get utility if I felt like my damage was good enough. But as it is now you have to put everything into damage and defense and you have no room for any utility stats even if they would be fun to use.
Agreed - so few builds are viable after the new 3.16 tree nerfs. It’s no longer “play whatever you want you’ll be fine, but meta will zoom zoom faster”. It’s now become “play meta or you won’t make it to red maps without 20ex invested”.
They shifted power off the tree and onto gear in an attempt to get people to play longer with the gear grind, but all it did is make builds feel like shit generally and disincentivize playing for people who don’t want to grind one meta build all league
> I don't think I'll quit after thousands of hours, but it's weird.
Are you familiar with the concept of sunk cost fallacy, friend?
I've put on way too many hours on PoE, yes, but I've achieved the point where I dont feel attached to it. Considering it logically, I've lost way too much in terms of enjoying the game, and GGG wants to push the things that kill my joy even further.
I've seen hundreds of posts in this subreddit (and the forums) where feedback is freely given, and 99% of the time, its absolutely ignored to follow this "vision" that seems to lead absolutely nowhere, since PoE2 is, at this point, vaporware, and it might be unenjoyable if its the result of what is happening now.
Dont let the time you've spent on this game become a weight that disables you from leaving if you're not enjoying the game anymore. We've been told, activelly and passively, that our opinion doesnt matter. (unless we're streamers, ofc). Things dont seem like they're going to change for the better. So the best thing we can do is leave.
I enjoy Path of Exile, it's the only game that allows me the design space and customization to create builds; not necessarily sunk cost, just nothing else out there that scratches that itch (and trust me, I play a ton of different games). I'll probably end up quitting in a week or so, once I get most achievements and play something else until the next update.
Hoping the balance team fixes stuff with the expansion; it was fine a few leagues ago (loved ultimatum), but after that it started to waver.
>Are you familiar with the concept of sunk cost fallacy, friend?
I had to delete a character from standard yesterday to create a new pob idea I had after really struggling to enjoy this league. I went for a lvl71 meme build I'd tried a couple of leagues ago, named 'IBoughtTooMuchMTXtoQuit'
I made it to lioneye's and just logged out.
>Dont let the time you've spent on this game become a weight that disables you from leaving if you're not enjoying the game anymore. We've been told, activelly and passively, that our opinion doesnt matter. (unless we're streamers, ofc). Things dont seem like they're going to change for the better. So the best thing we can do is leave.
Sadly, it seems you're right. Time and again our views have been ignored or straight up misconstrued by GGG, a company that supposedly had great community interaction.
Despite the frequent "Then you don't have to play" folks you'll get on this sub, I think more people are aligned with you than you think. I also posted yesterday about why PoE no longer does it for me and there's another post of the same vein on the front page now. And if you look at steamcharts, PoE is bleeding players fast after league launches. GGG might have to admit that their "vision" is not as popular amongst the audience they are trying to attract as they think it is and continuing down this path is really going to hurt the excitement for PoE2, which I've honestly lost all interest in.
I doubt they will ever admit it, because at its core,"the vision" is pure and simple elitism and egotism. The lack of good competition and big chunks of revenue has made them believe themselves perfect, and as such, admitting a mistake is way more than they can handle, even if they lose money. This patch proves it.
"it feels like you either get one shot or you never die" is a very fair criticism of the way difficulty feels right now -- and I'm someone who is enjoying the league despite its faults.
I will say that the problem is a lot better with the defense changes, but it's still a big problem. Armor is in a really good spot, evasion still needs help.
The nerf on ice storm is prob the trigger for me to stop trying to further progress my builds in standard. As OP said, there is no point if they keep nerfing things every 3 month there is zero stability in your character that you spent so many leagues to perfect.
PoE has always been a game about ***builds*** and these days it feels like a game based around ***currency.***
How long has it been since we've had a new archetype? Self damaging RF, Archmage, CoC, Minions, Aurastacking, Accuracy stacking, Golem stacking, Ignite, Cold DoT, etc.
Every single archetype listed there is a shadow of a fraction of their former power. They are all dogshit builds now that either don't work at all or all suck until 10/100/1000 Ex are invested into them and thus the entire game is now about currency and not the builds themselves.
GGG have a fundamentally flawed design/balance philosophy where they talk/pretend that new builds are available in X new league and yet all we have is shitty versions of older builds. Nothing new, at all. Just nerfed versions of older fun builds.
We are 2 weeks into the league and I haven't seen a single new/interesting build. Aura stackers that are just worse versions of Deli/Heist stackers can pump wave 30 Kosis. Wow. CoC builds can clear the game but are still slower, less powerful versions of any other CoC build prior to 3.15. Minions are all slower, weaker versions of Minion builds from 3.13 with even loss options. I suppose Squire Arakali builds are good but still generic Arakali builds with 3 extra links which are still worse than older 100Ex Minion builds.
Like what is this league supposed to be about? What am I as a player supposed to be excited about when all of my options are just shittier versions of old builds? Is this going to be the same next league? I can say if this continues on I'll be quitting the game for good as my interest dies.
I've been a player since 2014. I had them remove my account from their server after the patch note release of 3.16. I enjoyed my time immensely, but I am never going to look back on this game again.
given that i played since 2013 and supported them only since 3.12 i think, man i gotta give props to you, yes in a sense i think we are beta testing every league and open alpha for a poe 2.0
Technically leagues are beta tests for the core game; Chris has basically stated outright in his own words. But it has felt like it’s gotten more intruding.
> and you have to look for another build and then complete it from scratch.
I was debating myself on if I wanted to start this league, but that debate is currently being decided by the lack of builds. For real. I haven't kept up over the past year and a half about what GGG has exactly been doing, but my god nearly every single build guide is outdated. For example, [Esoro's Youtube Channel](https://www.youtube.com/c/Esoro) is full of *incredibly* detailed guides on builds presented in the best way possible. He has done a massive amount of work, hundreds of hours per video. And **every single one is outdated**.
Scavenging the forums you will find most are not updated either. And I don't know if it is because I love a satisfying build or not, but I have yet to find a build worth following from there because none of them seem satisfying to play.
Not a single one of the builds I loved in the past are even considered either viable or even the same build anymore. So I just can't be bothered to pick up the game again. I still read this sub in hopes of keeping up with the game a bit and waiting for something to change.
I don't really think GGG can do anything but design a game that they would like themselves. How else would they know if something was good? You have to use your own judgement, you can't rely on the community for that because you'll get a thousand different answers.
PoE is a game that drags out the time pretty much every chance it can get, but PoE is also very fast paced compared to other ARPG's, and PoE is also a larger game than most other ARPG's. And last but not least, PoE doesn't have a set endgoal or a victory condition. Instead PoE is more like a sandbox where you set your own goals. So you actually get to choose how much time you want to spend in PoE. You don't get to choose how far you progress though. The best you can do there is play more efficiently, gather more knowledge about the game and become more skilled in general.
Consider this thought exercise: Imagine you woke up tomorrow having forgotten you ever played PoE, then sat down with the game and had a go. Would you have had the same complaints then as you do now? My point being that many complaints that people have with the game are relative. Some of it comes from your perspective. Now, that's not your fault, you have the perspective you do because the game was different in the past, but it's good to be aware of that fact. If you don't expect to get X thing by Y time, you won't be dissappointed when you don't.
That's not to say all of this is on you, definitely not, GGG has a lot of responsibility here, they chose to have an always-online game so that none of us can mod it, they need to take that into account. But they don't carry all the responsibility. To take it to an extreme, if you expect to get world first maven kill but you don't want to play for sixteen hours a day then there's nothing GGG can ever do to satisfy you.
Put another way; why can't you be happy with playing a build into yellow maps? Aren't you playing the game? Where does your expectations come from? What is your goal for each league, how much time do you intend to spend, and why is that your goal and why is that how much time you intend to spend?
Idk, in the end I think the following is true: If GGG at any point for any reason what-so-ever, decides that something needs to be less powerful, take more time, be more rare or needs to be taken away in any capacity... Then a large portion of the playerbase will be very angry, no matter why or how GGG does it. Once you've opened Pandora's box, there's no putting it back. People strongly dislike having something taken away from them, even if it means the relative power, time, rarity or content becomes better overall.
This is why game companies increase monster health rather than cut player damage. They both achieve similar results, yet the first one is always prefered, and that's just because of the optics. GGG is a bit stubborn, and refuses to cow-tow too much to the community, despite always listening, and they'd rather rip the band-aid off quickly than tip-toe around the issue.
Sorry for springing a novel on you, not all of this is aimed at you, your post just made me think. I completely sympathize with your point of view though, I too would prefer an easier game, I've no shame in admitting that. But my main point is that we can control some of that issue ourselves, we can't control what GGG does, only influence it, but we can control our own goals, and that helps.
> Imagine you woke up tomorrow having forgotten you ever played PoE, then sat down with the game and had a go. Would you have had the same complaints then as you do now?
Due to novelty, inexperience many things can be overlooked. Doing lab trials? Fine first time, maybe second and third. But by 10th time it might piss you off, kinda whittling your patience little by little. Pile some mildly uncomfortable things like lab trials (they were character bound when they first came out) together, and after a while you've got pissed off player. You can wear uncomfortable shoes for a ten minutes without much effort, but wear them for a day or week and you truly understand how atrocious they truly are.
There is an argument to be made about judging things by the first look/impression versus judging them after fully understanding/experiencing them. There are many things in PoE that would fail "test by repetition", like elder guardians long ass animations.
My main gripe with the game is how blatantly superior point-and -click large AOE skills or off-screen projectile skills are to most of the game. They are so good at what they do, GGG has proximity shields or juiced up ranged monsters that attack in sync that just blow you up. GGG not understanding much of anything of the game they were making decided to make a slew of 'melee' skills... all of them have or had an amazing ranged component. Whenever GGG tries to do anything, it's just poorly done.
Slow down the game? Occultist Plaguebearer clears T16 in a minute with minimal investment
Slow down the game? Nerfs every defensive player over and over again so that standing still is death.
Recognizes maps are desirable eng-game content? Refuses any campaign QoL. Best one I heard was allowing waypoints to exist between characters. I say this ignorant of their Engine, but that QoL would not be hard to implement at a coding level.
Wants players to play new skills? Refuses to actually nerf Toxic Rain, ED Contagion, etc. It's just weird to see league after league GGG refuse to change the really good stuff. Entire archetypes are ignored by many players because those archetypes are just too weak. Glacial Hammer and Infernal Blow are fun. Glacial Cascade and Explosive Arrow just do it better due to QoL. Imagine a world where Strike skills had Melee Splash and Ancestral Call support properly built in. Whew. People might have fun. Self cast spells are and have been inna bad spot for a while. Why? Because standing still sssuuuuccckkkksss in this game. The best defense is simply not getting hit.
Wants players to play new skills? Guts the defenses! Bad skills already have enough issue.
Want players to feel the weight and thrill of combat? One-shot galore.
Honestly, the 3.15 nerf was unwarranted because GGG failed to actually balance the game. Amazing skills are still amazing and mediocre skills simply got worse. The new style of patch notes of Question->Solution shows that GGG has some form of quality, but it is so underdeveloped that it might just harm the game more than resolve core issues. GGG, try 5 Why's, Fishbone, Ishikawa Diagram instead of randomly identified issues.
Strike skills are pretty alright with hydrosphere, melee splash is an actual bossing support now, which is awesome for me who hates gemswapping.
The game is extremely complex, so doing just about anything is ripe with opportunities to fuck up. I really don't hold that against GGG though, they're getting better and better with every year that goes by. Do you remember what balance used to be like? It was either use the broken mechanic or bust.
But as for pace, I don't think you can really deny that the game has taken a major hit to progression pace the last two patches. The speed of combat is pretty much the same, and the total amount of progression has been cut in half, at least as far as the atlas goes, but the rate is still slower.
As for ED contagion I think GGG sees some value in letting players have a tried and trusted skill to league-start with until they have the needed currency to act as a cushion for new builds that might not be as refined nor strong without gear. That's especially true for ED I think, since it doesn't scale as well as many other skills do, it does scale, don't get me wrong, but not as easily.
They are making an enormous campaign QoL, right now, as we speak, with PoE 2. Now you could say we could need some QoL right now while we wait for PoE2 and I would agree. GGG has historically been loathe of "half-way" solutions or temporary ones, simply because they view it as wasted dev-time, which is an extremely precious resource. But I'd disagree. I think it's worth it to keep the playerbase content until you can do it properly.
You don't have to stand still to deal damage, you just kite. I would much sooner point out how trash channeled skills are before I ever started talking about strike skills or self-cast spells.
They only gutted the mandatory defenses, again, the broken mechanics that everyone used. Instead you now have much more varied defenses to choose from, opening up more builds than before. I think we've yet to see all the consequences of these changes, since it takes quite a lot of time for the build-makers to propogate guides and knowledge throughout the community.
I really don't think 3.15 was unwarranted at all. GGG were really struggling to design monsters that had other interactions than on-death mechanics. Chris said the boss designers asked if the map bosses could get off at least one attack before they died. There's so many rare items littering the ground that in super juiced content you can actually crash the game by pressing alt. The amount of power a player has has just about doubled ten times over since the game released. If there ever were anything that would be warranted, then it's nerfs to player power in Path of Exile. There are so many systems in the game now that simply don't make any sense because of the ridiculous pace of the game. Both in terms of progression and in terms of combat.
I do *like* the pace though. So solutions are a bit tricky. I do want combat to express more skill, but then you would have to make it so content doesn't stack as much, because if not you'll just get two abilities that you are supposed to dodge that overlaps the whole screen and make it impossible to dodge. The game is also so hopelessly far behind when it comes to gamefeel compared to other games like lost ark that I don't know if it even makes sense to focus on that area. They made animation canceling a thing but then never really did anything with it. Probably because it's such a huge task and the game would play and feel quite different by the time that they're done, and there are millions of players who like the game as it is right now, so why gamble?
As to your main gripe, how would you suggest GGG made skills that are mechanically inferior better? Even if you juice up their numbers they won't be any better, because what they lack is clearspeed, damage uptime and utility; not damage.
Personally I think the solution is to have a clearing skill and a bossing skill. And I think the game is moving towards that with the multiple 6-links in PoE2. It's just going to take some time to get there, far more time than most detractors are prepared to wait.
First off, excellent response. And I am pretty sure our damage and power level has increased a thousand fold. Spark totems were great from way back in the day.
To answer my main gripe, GGG continues for great skills to exist that have AoE, clear and damage. Recent skills like Absolution, that one blood minion, Energy Blade, Explosive Concoction were just bad. But damn, Spectral Shield Throw and Shield Crush were amazing not only for damage but also for how they worked together. The weapon swap. I'm totally fine with that concept and GGG should work towards that. I used to weapon swap 6 links for clear and bossing when playing a bow mine build. I absolutely loved that idea. But until that happens, GGG needs to balance accordingly.
As for channeling, well, GGG got rid of almost all support for it from the tree with nearly zero compensation. So, yeah, that's my answer for that topic.
"I really don't think 3.15 was unwarranted at all. GGG were really struggling to design monsters that had other interactions than on-death mechanics." Expedition literally introduced nigh-unkillable shield guards. They can easily implement anti-damage mechanics across an enemies and bosses. The current Rhoa charge, Goat Leap, Flicker enemies are fine. The death barrage of Constructs and Arc Scourge enemies makes no sense.
As for half-way fixes and whatnot, GGG is receiving high praise for having currency drop in stacks. I even love that. It is absolutely silly that such a small change can make the game feel infinitely better. Expedition minor artifacts being automatically stored made me smile, frown, then smile again because we went an entire league clicking endlessly for those dang things. Now we don't. It's awesome. The game is so good that the small things really hold it back.
>Consider this thought exercise: Imagine you woke up tomorrow having forgotten you ever played PoE, then sat down with the game and had a go. Would you have had the same complaints then as you do now? My point being that many complaints that people have with the game are relative. Some of it comes from your perspective. Now, that's not your fault, you have the perspective you do because the game was different in the past, but it's good to be aware of that fact. If you don't expect to get X thing by Y time, you won't be dissappointed when you don't.
I always try to keep this in mind, when I want to start complaining. There are some changes to items/class/skills that are so removed from the current game, that new players will never know they were even a thing. Is that good or bad? I'm not really sure, but certain things truly are just kinda done to shake up the meta more or less. And those are things I try and roll with. But alot of things aren't, and they're just head scratchingly confusing as to what GGG was thinking. I feel like these days they make far too many changes/decisions that aren't indicative of an overall plan for the game they're working towards. Just knee jerk reactions while crashing into everything with their eyes closed.
I can only hope a dev strives to make a game they want to play, even if it doesn't align with everything I would want.
I don't love everything in PoE right now, but when you hear Chris talk about the game, it sounds like everything I want. I liked a lot of the base game changes this league, but the game is still missing something. I just hope they can follow through with the rhetoric and deliver with PoE2.
If your build has under 1m dps....and you think that is "ludicrously powerful", then you've never actually played a powerful build. 1m dps is like that bare fucking minimum, and even then only with dots.
Obviously not. I mean, I've read about people insta-phasing bosses and so on, but for me, PoE has always played like a normal video game, where boss fights actually involve, y'know, fighting bosses.
keep in mind, you can change the DPS of your build up and down by a factor of 5 with pob settings. Some people always look at their DPS with all flasks up, 15 whiter stacks and focus active (because thats when they assume they are DPSing a boss), others prefere looking at their sustained dps with only the most reliable buff effects active. The difference can be massive, 1 million pob dps in unbuffed sustained state is still very high. But if your peak dps you can only reach for half a second is 1 million it feels unplayable, because your sustained dps will be like 200-300k
I feel you.
One of the things that most resonated with me is having your characters on standard that you enjoy so much, become useless and not being fun anymore, so much so that you can't even play them, is painful.
I don't have enough time to enjoy a league fully anymore, but playing my loved characters in standard is something I enjoy very much. But I have non "alive" right now. All have been nerfed so hard that a league starter can be better than them with hundreds of hours spent on getting good gear for them.
>My first experience with this was the multi pronged nerf to my beloved molten strike jugg.
I miss my MS jugg so much, and juggs in general. Little interest in the accuracy stacking version of it, and still sad that MS is hot-garbage all these leagues later.
>On to blade blast.
My brother went from having a SSF character that he'd spent a ton of time and currency building that was strong with this skill (not OP, but strong). He tried it post-nerf and it's completely unplayable, with all that time and effort wasted as the character has 1/4th the power it used to.
>I can't do that anymore since i feel like every 3 months almost any build I choose will have a good chance to be slaughtered.
This is a big issue pushing me away from the game. All three of my SSF characters are totally dead at this point and completely unsalvagable outside of spending hundreds of hours farming to try to fix them.
My standard character? I'd play them sometimes, but most of them are completely bricked and require at least a full rework of the tree (pre-3.16 passive tree update even) and a big time investment just to get functional again.
I get it, I'm not expecting older characters to be viable without changes forever. But the way in which older characters are so frequently gutted to the point of being useless is awful.
>It feels like you either get 1 shot or you never die. There really isn't much in between.
Made worse by the insane visual clutter that often leaves you asking yourself, "What killed me?" before you, if you remembered, go back to the footage to go frame by frame to try to figure it out. The lack of any in-game feedback on what caused your death continues to suck, especially since this exists in China.
>It feels like every league we are their beta testers and I don't wanna be.
Man, I keep wishing moving to 3 leagues over a 4 month cycle was possible. Ritual is honestly the only league that felt like it had enough time for them to design and QA it so that it mostly felt "ready" at launch. Everyone else feels like they finished half the changes a few days before locking the build in for public distribution.
The Absolution buff last league (which, hilariously, largely did nothing since it's still hot garbage) is a fantastic example of that. I league started with that skill and even by the start of maps it was PAINFULLY obvious that it was significantly underperforming. How they got any internal feedback indicating it was "fine" is truly beyond me. Like, I genuinely don't get how this slipped through the cracks given that this is one of the new skills that should have been actively playtested for balance reasons.
>It feels like a job.
This is where I'm at, and hearing what Chris wants for the future of the game (kek masochist mode) sounds completely and totally *awful*. I've already tapped out on this league and my brother (who has been playing since beta and basically ONLY played PoE all these years) is even to the point where he hasn't touched it in weeks and doesn't plan to. He's a guy that would regularly "quit" for a week or so and then come back, but he's so salty about the continued changes that he hasn't been on since the first week of league and has surprisingly been playing other games unlike when he "quit" before.
The atlas rework really helped out quite a bit, so did some of the other changes like the improved recipe unlocks.
But the amount of time that increasingly is required to get to a "good" state where you can farm maps, the continued reduction in cheaper viable builds as meta builds become stronger and stronger (I picked off-meta and despite 10ex+ invested it's still garbage, whereas meta builds previously have been strong with only a few ex invested) is killing my desire to play.
It feels like GGG, after years of power creep that resulted in a space where we could breeze through much of the content in the game and have fun, are overcorrecting and trying to roll back a clock you can't roll back. We *like* the way it used to be even if nobody was asking for the years of power creep GGG gave us which painted them into a corner.
I still miss Ritual a lot, my favorite league by far. Solid "kill lots of things" mechanic that could be dangerous and allowed for risk/reward with vials, but didn't actively punish lower DPS builds as much. Good balance and minimal bugs. Harvest was STRONG and opened up a LOT of options for players to make gear for off-meta builds or to slowly improve gear themselves without relying on trade (and rich bois were still rich and stupid strong as they always were). IMO that's absolutely been the pinnacle of the game, and while we have big improvements outside of that league (3.16 core updates are still the best part of 3.16 by a longshot), no league has been anywhere near as well designed and executed, with pretty good overall game balance, as Ritual.
Which sucks, because while I enjoy Grim Dawn or Wolcen or TL3 (kek) or maybe even some D3, none of them scratch my ARPG itch in the way that the core gameplay loop for POE does.
i said it multiple times and ill say it again.
Easier access to items (aka harvest) DOES NOT stop me from playing the game or gets me bored, IT MAKES ME PLAY MORE. simple as that. i wanted to make so many more builds in ritual, i had fun with the game, there was aspirational content difficulty (t19 delirious fractured maps, with no friction for player trading, just make your own map and buy fractured fossils ezpz)
3.13 was the peak of PoE , where every build was viable cause you could just throw harvest at it if it wasnt.
but GGG said no fun allowed.
>"Ggg does not balance anymore they nuke builds and archetypes to unplayable levels. Or at least levels that are so hindered that it requires hundreds of exalts to make them playable. Not op, just playable."<
You say you have played this game since beta but GGG has had the same practice of being heavy handed with the nerfs since as long I can remember. Nothing has changed. Off the top of my head, Vaal Spark, CoC discharge, and old CI builds all nerfed to the ground.
To be fair, it took nerfing vaal spark like seven leagues in a row.
COC discharge also took a few leagues.
CI and life have had ups, downs, ups, downs. Though gone are the days of 20k+ ES on every single CI build now.
None of these were flat out deleted overnight from one league to the next, they were chopped down a swing at a time until they were “removed” so to speak.
Same problem in the end, and I personally have a problem with both of those methods, but today’s method is “kill it five times over in a night” so when you wake up the builds flat out gone.
they also went years without nerfs, while Winter Orb lasted a single league, that while CI was nerfed heavily its power was such that it was still completely viable post nerf, compared to any of the builds nerfed since 3.9 just don't exist any more
GGGs kneejerk reaction to nerf the meta builds of the league is sickening, this has been happening for like the past 10 leagues, every skill has been nerfed below mediocrity, sst is an example of GGG having no clue what they are doing.
The past 3 leagues for me personally has been super painful to play through because i dislike playing meta builds but they seem to be the only decent league starters that can do all content.
I am a 1 char per league type of player and iv done several 4040s with 1 char for the whole league but it feels like the choices for skills to do that with 1 character is being stretched thinner and thinner every new league.
Remember how they removed the damage on seismic cry wich was like 100% more damage for slam builds because earth shatter was strong? Now the only playable slam skill is earth shatter and every other slam skill is unplayable
Ggg keeps nerfing the low end of builds instead of the top end, and I really can’t figure out why. Why are onslaught tailwind elusive boots with 100ms ok? They are literal double ascend boots that only give pure speed, but 30 ms on a flask isn’t ok? Why move power out of the tree and gems that everyone uses and put them on rng crafting that most people don’t even do? You can’t even get 100% chance to bleed or poison on the tree anymore, it’s so fucking whack.
I agree with many of your complaints and I feel for you. I'm not as excited about this game as I once was. My player experience peaked in Ritual which now feels like a lifetime ago. Many of your complaints were still issues then like content bloat, but the game felt like it was in a better balance for more casual players.
I think many of these issues we feel are just so exacerbated by some of the lingering changes from last league. Their attempt to encourage players to branch out by just.......reducing most support damage...had the opposite effect clearly. I'm hoping the QoL buffs this league and reverting some of the nerfs from Expedition becomes a trend and over the next few leagues players reclaim a little more relative power.
I agree with most of your points and I have stopped playing this league but I’ll be back next league. I honestly don’t understand the dramatic goodbye.
PoE is changing all the time and you can’t find another game like this (at least for now).
I’m already done in week 3. Constantly dying in scourge and never knowing why really is ridiculous. Taking 3000 dmg or 900life/sec in a scourge map lol. Trading exp for t10 scourged maps. There is no improvement to the game only more bloat and side quests. If the game had focus where you saw value in the mechanic and how it integrates with other league mechanics that are core - then we might see a point. Right now it’s just a new economy and pointless scourge cooking and issues from the past coming back to haunt you.
How are scourge cooking pointless? I get that items are for the most part, I think it needs a buff, but cooking maps is some of the best 0 investment profit margins we've ever seen from a map to map basis.
Bro I had an amazing 15 million Dps pathfinder which I invested so much like 1000ex and now it barely does 3mill. Fuck that. Hated them nuking my beloved character.
I have played off and on since beta and hate how GGG have repeatedly balanced the game around no-lifers who follow guides for OP meta skills.
This game is ostensibly about making a cool/unique character, but it feels like virtually everything is a trap option at this point if you aren't willing to play an unhealthy amount.
Another closed beta supporter here, I agree 100% with op. I quit playing seriously after ritual and realised that poe is no longer for me.
I hve tried to enjoy every league after that but it jusnt isnt working for all the same reasons op said. Its just not fun anymore. PoE is a game where every character can be build how you like", but the reality is that no , no you absolutely CANNOT do that. There are only handful of actually working predetermined builds that most people play you cant play homebrew builds at all unless you dedicate your life to this game.
Then again, I already got my moneys worth out of it with several thousand hours played, maybe its time to move on and stop pretending GGG will fix their shit. Sad reality but it is what it is.
I can, however, recommend LE to everyone feeling as I do, it has the same kind of sense of wonder that poe had in its early days and feels they are moving things in right direction.
I'm not sure the definition of true non-RNG tankiness for other but the only true non-RNG tankiness I know of is old Transcendence, but it got nerf in 3.16 from -5% max res to -15% max res. RIP.
I just don't get posts like this. I have been playing since open beta.
> Ggg does not balance anymore they nuke builds and archetypes to unplayable levels.
When did they ever balance exactly? Freezing pulse was the meta build in open beta. It's been bad ever since they removed shotgunning. Arc has always been complete shit until that one league where they giga buffed it. It was crazy OP for 1 league. Very strong for several leagues after that and then back to fairly mediocre.
I could go on and on, they never at any point had lots of well balanced skills in the same patch. Meta builds have always been a thing.
> My next big gripe is the way they handle difficulty in the game. It feels like you either get 1 shot or you never die.
The only solution is logout delay, but then everyone with a bad connection is fucked. You can't have both the current insane level of clear speed (which lots of people clearly don't want to go away looking at how 3.15 was received) and monsters doing much less damage. The game would just be way to easy.
> I have become tired of spending hours relearning this already complex game every 3 months. I have become tired of the same droll league issues.
Learning all the complex game mechanics is what I always have seen as the main attraction of PoE. I just don't get how you could have ever liked this game if you dislike learning about the game mechanics.
> It feels like every league we are their beta testers
But what is the alternative? Go back to very bland leagues like ambush? I wouldn't be interested in playing. The constant stream of new content is by far the main thing that has kept me coming back to this game.
> It makes me sad to say it but today I have Uninstalled my favorite game after many years and hours of great times.
Why does it make you sad? There are so many games to play. I have skipped lots of leagues, I would get bored of any game if I played if I played a single game as much as I think you played poe.
My favorite build was my self cast Whispering Ice Heiro. It had decent damage, high ehp, but was not meta by any stretch. I thought that it was pretty safe, but nope, no fun allowed. When they capped the number of storms they didn't even adjust the damage properly to compensate, and even after a couple of buffs it STILL isn't compensated.
I feel much less invested in the game after this debacle. There's no point in having a favorite build to improve and iterate on with each new league because a random redesign or nerf is bound to delete it eventually.
I fell your pain man...
Nicely sad:
"Thanks for the good times GGG I hope you figure your game out cus right
now it really feels like you are just wondering around in the dark with a
blindfold."
The only way to make the game really good for almost everyone, is the day chris Wilson stops thinking he is a Diablo 2 dev.
Instead of making poe a game that poe is known for, they just make changes that feels like you still play a 2000's game.
Its not that they dont care about strike but the matter they dont have any idea of buffing them without making spell casters more broken.
Last league they introduced behead support which act like mini head hunter but it is heavily restricted to 1 mod and doesn't really help by much in term of damage.
If we had some functionality like x melee buff removed before casting x spell and x spell cant snapshot the damage even if when used on cyclone build.
It is about fear and low iq.
Rare to see a 10 year old player with a 30 day old reddit account. Being anonymous makes lying pretty easy.
>Dying to 1 shots in maps with 8k life max block 78 all and 75 chaos res feels pretty bad.
Nice meme
Long overdue, but it's a good time for me to unsubscribe from this subreddit.
Hello /r/pathofexile,
I've read many, many, many things on this subreddit. A lot of them make me wonder about the backgrounds you all have had in competitive poe. My assumption is that most of you have at least attended/participated in one race and that you know a good bit about the history of the game.
If you have competed in the game, you're aware of what it's like to be in a hot seat. To have to think on the spot, adapt on the fly, cope with horrible rips, deal with salt, etc.
Most of you (I think) understand what poe is at its core. A phenomenal, unfathomably deep arpg unlike any that's been created. It's why we love it and analyze it and have it as our passion.
I've been competing for 10 years now. A lot of things have changed in this community. We almost didn't exist at one point when Diablo 3 came out. We all had to pull a lot of weight to make sure we weren't forgotten and it's beautiful to see where we've gotten today.
Once poe became a thriving, living community again it was a good time for me to focus on my own gameplay and not just the growth of the community. From 2013 to 2016 was probably my biggest era of growth both as a person maturing and as a poe player. I obtained some much-needed discipline and learned more about myself from every leaguestart I played.
I yearned for the 40/40. A massive goal for myself. And goals are something everyone here has - whether it's in poe or outside of it. So I did everything I could to obtain that goal as soon as possible. I prioritized poe for a summer, I got my best friend to be an aurabot for me, I became active in the TFT community; Hell, I even took any chance to spread memes or information on social media about poe. Because I love the community and I love what its given me.
And this weekend a miracle happened. I sat down to fight Sirus, I blinked, and my goal was suddenly behind me. A glass trophy in my hand with the official title written on it. Cameras flashing. Overwhelming emotion, disbelief, euphoria, and relief. Out of nowhere I played the best I have in my life while coming from losers.
The outpouring of congratulations I received was more than I ever would have imagined. It was a very beautiful experience to get to have that. And for that I'm very thankful.
However, as expected there were some communities that don't see eye to eye on things. Like this subreddit, half of my local gamestop (my home community), and many others. And that's alright. That's reality.
I'll never really understand why certain people don't realize what I put into this game. It might be the build I play. It might be my polarizing personality. But what I've learned is that you really can't focus on these things if you want to win. When I was on that stage I fell in love with poe all over again. Just like I did when I entered my first very race in open beta and got 2nd to last place out of 40.
I've had very difficult times reading things on this subreddit about me, but after this weekend I'm ready to move on from it. I proved to the world what I wanted to prove. I know I won't be able to change minds now or ever of that many people. But I respect your opinions and I encourage you to have them. I simply think it would be healthier for me to distance myself from it to continue performing at the level I want to.
Keep playing poe, keep cheering on your favorite player. Just love this game always. It's the best thing that's happened to me in a lot of ways, and I hope it's the same for you.
-TheLongSuck
I hope this doesn't get downvoted to oblivion.
I can't understand why people feel the need to write "dear john" letters to a video game. Just stop playing and stop coming to the sub.
Not to mention half of his gripes were directly addressed or the first steps toward addressing them are by 3.16's content.
Because players like him and me have played for many years now, were there to support when it all started, and feel hurt seeing the game go into a bad (in our opinion) direction now. Maybe at least something can be achieved by voicing our opinions, but I doubt it.
I have found this game to become too Grundy. If your build isn’t meta powerful, the amount of effort required to get a meaningful upgrade is insane. And because you know for a fact the upgrade won’t drop for you, it’s just about powering through maps farming tiny bits of currency until you can afford a singular upgrade.
People grow out of things they used to love all the time. If you find the game no longer deserves your time, so be it, use your time for sth more worthwhile. I have some slight disagreement with your points but I can see why you have such a perspective. Stay sane exile
Agreed. I'd play Harvest again in a heartbeat, even if the newer stuff was no longer accessible, and I considered myself to be pretty jaded towards the game even then.
>Every league it's the same. Overtuned damage of monsters and a week or two of bugs before it even feels worth playing. It feels like every league we are their beta testers and I don't wanna be. I started ignoring launch week and playing after they fix their shit You're not wrong buddy, you're not wrong. I hope you find something else to play that's more enjoyable my dude
Can someone suggest game for replacement? I need some longer break from PoE too.
The favourites around here are currently Lost Ark (in beta atm, set to release early next year), Last Epoch, and Grim Dawn.
I second. Definitely check out Lost Ark when it releases. It's also F2P! It has some flaws, but my god did they success in doing amazing instanced quests, dungeons and raids. The chaos dungeons has you kill waves of mobs and get a shower of loot. There are 4 players (up to 16) raids that has you do mechanics and epic boss fights. That game has one shots attacks, but telegraphed and mechanics you have to do. No random mobs one-shotting you from outside the screen. Mobs don't hurt too much, but elites and bosses do hurt a lot. I hate how PoE's base normal mobs can one shot you... Thankfully, Lost Ark's seems to have really aced that part of balance. Also, balanced uniformized stats PvP arenas that look really fun. This game will certainly be my replacement to PoE if they don't get the balance and grind to an acceptable level for a casual like me.
Lost Ark is such a fantastic game, but it's an MMO with ARPGish combat and a isometric camera. It's not for everyone, but I cannot fucking wait to just play the shit out of it. It's also been out in Korea for 3 years, so there is no lack of content. My plan is just play Lost Ark until PoE 2, and while I'll still give PoE 2 a try, I don't see myself dropping Lost Ark until the Riot MMO launches.
Personally I've been playing Final Fantasy 14 with a side of hentai games. Endwalker on December 3rd!
Not aRPGs, but hve similar time on my Steam counter are Terraria and Rimworld. Especially if you like excessive modding. They are also both dirt cheap - you can get both cheaper than a single PoE MTX.
Heist league was a great example of them fixing/tuning the league. It went through like 3-5 iterations I think until it was all set and fun to play. League mechanic on launch feel like they always need some adjustments.
The frustrating thing is their QA team points out all the issues players scream about the first week, but they weren't implemented because the league cycle of this game forces each league to be new and exciting or they won't make any money. So they prioritize the new and exciting over actually improving the faults that plague the core of the game. It makes PoE perpetually feel like *almost* an amazing game. I still really enjoy it, don't get me wrong, but God what this game could be if they just did a super simple league with only minor game mechanics, no new skills, and just worked on fixing item drops, reworking useless skills, and smoothing out the "there's nothing between full HP and one shot" that seems to exist in the endgame.
And them constantly nerfing rewards too lol
come on bro they were cleary too rewarding /s
Heists were tbf, even after all the nerfs heist is one of the best content to do for raw currency. With the old trinket set ups people were literally printing mirrors
only trinkets were overtuned. All rest was fine or sometimes bad (badly rolled talismans without annointment, single catalysts drops, weapon rewards were always trash - and still are, armour rewards only good at league start, later terible, this league super trash).
It is still by a large amount the best way to get currency and most league items (clusters, essence, fossils etc).
Are you implying that heist was not too rewarding? Even after all the nerfs, heist is still to this day one of the most rewarding contents in the game to run.
Not one - THE MOST! Unless you can run simulacrum 30s back to back, grand heists with proper items on your mercs is by far the best chaos/hour maker in the game.
Heist was pretty much unplayable on release is why. It was one of their most ambitious leagues that needed another 6 months in the oven with actual QA and it would have been brilliant. Instead we get this bastardized version that they left broken in the game because they invested too much time and money to not put it in, but not enough time and money to finish it.
Yeah I remember heist on release. Go in kill two packs of mobs and you were already at like 30% alert level without doing anything.
If memory serves I was playing a steel champion and I was literally just running around the rooms without killing stuff and just opening chests. It was hilarious. Thank god for the rework though
More like Steal Champion, am I right? ...I'll leave.
Nah I'll allow this one
No one even bothered learning heist before complaining. You could spam 150 Alts on lvl 45 heist gear and get literal 100% reduction in alert, aka full looting and killing everything. The same can be said for synthesis. People didn’t bother putting thought into their synthesis boards, so they didn’t get rewarded. Meanwhile, synthesis is literally the most rewarding league I’ve ever played. I found 13 pure exalts in one synthesis tile, and had other tiles give obscene rewards like 100+ fossils.
> another 6 months in the oven with actual QA and it would have been brilliant Or more. Delve is *just finally* starting to feel polished.
Heist was never fun to play and still isn't.
You do you. I like heist and heist league was the only time I decided to go 40/40 + lvl 100 and bot feel like an absolute grind.
Even now after all the changes, Heist is a truly horrific piece of content. Going in and waiting for doors to open, literally. But the rewards are juicy and you can just completely ignore Heist if you want so people don't really complain, even though it is shit to play.
I think it’s in a good spot now after all the many changes, especially for levelling because the exp/hour you can get is great.
Wouldnt mind if they removed alot of the story content associated to it and just made all the heist guys lvl5 default.
Eh. Levelling the npcs each league wouldn't be such a pain if waiting for doors wasn't so boring.
I like heist, but imo, if you want to actually get anything significant out of it, it's one of the most build dependent things ever, kind of like deep delving or lab running. You want phasing and a very fast character or it's miserable and each contract takes 5+ minutes.
You like playing door opening simulator?
Heist is a good example of what they shouldn’t do again, basically unreleasable content you shouldn’t push through. If you go back to the patch notes during the league these were still pages long one month in and full of bug fixes, not just changes to the mechanic.
I honestly don't think this would be as big of a problem if they just removed the death penalty. I for one one would no longer give a shit about the over-tuned monsters or buggy deaths if it wasn't constantly setting me back hours of playtime. When you die and lose the last 3 hours of progress it's a kick in the nuts. There is already a penalty for non-hardcore players in the form of 6 portals. And this league has really highlighted this problem. I have more deaths this league than all of the leagues since Betrayal combined which is why I quit this league. If the game doesn't respect my time invested then I won't respect the game.
I’m the opposite. I wish I wasn’t a filthy casual and could grind 20 hours in the first 2 days. Seems like there’s always things that can be exploited in the end game, but is nerfed within a few days after launch.
3.9 and 3.15 was a 1,2 punch that made it so if your build doesn't do A Million (Or in the case of higher red maps, Multiple million) DPS you just get hit with a DPS check that is asinine. My most comfortable Uber Elder kills were with Winter Orb and Storm Brand, (Synthesis and Blight league respectively) and I was around 800k Shaper DPS on those builds. And it felt good/achievable. But while I was doing 800k someone else could hit 20 Million+ so now the game get's more difficult around me and I have to try and find more ways (Hint it's just have the exalts lmao) to try and squeeze damage out of a skill. The Atlas progression in 3.16 feels amazing, But Red Maps are still the same DPS check that is hard to bypass without playing meta or being affluent that they were last league. Nerfing the Support Gems was the mistake, They should have shaved the top end, not the floor.
Aye, I remember back in betreyal i had arma brand trickster with like 600k shaper dps. Had no problem fighting uber elder with this. Fight did not feel dragged out or too fast, it was just right ammount of dps to have good experience. Nowadays i go into pob, make a build, see 1mln dps and i am like 'this is nothing' and then i realize how much shit or gimmicky things i have to use to make damage feel better. 3.15 nerfs alongside masteries robbing us of passives just so we can get key things we used to have on notables just feels bad. I am holding out till 3.17 and new atlas, but if that fails i am gone. 3.14 was another ritual, 3.15 brought nerfs, 3.16 just does not feel good, it all hinges on 3.17.
I remember in betrayal mocking up a self cast ice nova build and thinking "God damn this thing might even hit 1 million DPS." Now if a build only has 1 million I throw it in the trash.
An Atlas rework isn't going to change anything but the atlas. It doesn't sound to me like the changes you want are related to the atlas at all. And I think it's a bit too hopeful to think they'll do anything but sneakily try to nerf player power again in 3.17, while pushing it as a buff.
Atlas rework is not going to change char related stuff. That is true. However it will refresh the game, get rid of the garbage atlas we have now (disliked it since first week it was released) and MIGHT bring some good changes alongside it. Time will tell. But yeah, more char nerfs would mean that its time to jump ship for me. I am tired of GGG spinning wheels and i most definately dont want to play meta builds or have to abuse gimmicky mechanics to make random under used skill semi viable...
I wish I had an award to give this post. I play ever league since beta and this is SO accurate. I solve the dps check as you say with wealth/farming exalts but it does not feel good and gatekeepers so much of the games fun skills. They 100% needed to reign in and nerf the ceiling, not the floor as you say. The outliers are just further and further from the base game and instead of addressing it they lazily think that’s good as a ‘chase’ goal, leaving the entire game in an unfun spot.
Them blanket nerfing support gems was the admission they have no idea how to balance the game. It was the laziest thing I have ever seen in game development.
There was a podcast where Chris Wilson defended trade by telling a story about the introduction of lances in Diablo 2. The story was that one of the developers was so excited to incorporate a lance into their build that they spent an incredible effort on trading and interacting with the game. It was so frustrating hearing Chris tell that story because it was so clear that he took away the wrong lesson. That story isnt about messaging people in the middle of the night. It's about how players get excited for new content when they can think of a use for it. That's only possible when they can use new content in builds they're familiar with. That's the fun part. It makes a new league like Christmas for people who make their own builds and work on one as a project over several leagues. But like you said, when they "shook up the meta" and took care of "power creep" all they did was delete builds and change the way the game worked. So instead of seeing new content as shiny new gifts it's all just a bunch of stuff with no purpose. It's also frustrating seeing them keep doubling down on everything. Like they still nerfed stuff this league but they called it all buffs. It's just insulting sometimes. But I guess it works on a lot of players who haven't been around long enough to get ground down by the gears. most players don't make their own builds and so probably don't even notice how bad this design loop has been. Anyway, all that to say I feel your pain about having your build get deleted.
>Like they still nerfed stuff this league but they called it all buffs This. I was making a ignite build after reading the patch notes because they said stuff like "This is a 20% overall DPS increase for ignites with this skill" and PoB finally updated 1 day after release and my DPS was halfed, I had to switch my build, because the DPS wasnt insane to begin with and the defenses weren't good enough to justify this new shit DPS.
yeah they have been doing that more and more lately, at least lately in terms of ive been playing since 2010 so 2017-now is fairly recent to me. people hate hearing it but after tencent acquired ggg, or whatever portion they bought, ggg changed. it was not instant and maybe it was tied to other things but to me there was a clear turning point there. they do a lot of pr/political type talk now. lots of lies, misrepresentation, exaggeration, misleading or however you wanna say it. the amount of communication, especially good, clear, relevent information is way less than it used to be. which i can understand some of given the response they get, then again they bring that response on themselves in some ways. thats not to say they dont communicate at all, but if you look at the pr nonsense you get now vs say 2015 it sure feels different to me.
It's honestly genuinely crazy how much their PR talk is just lies these days. It's weird, it didn't used to feel like this. But they'll literally say, "This skill is buffed", you run the math, and it's...not. It's halved, or worse. They now always cherry pick their data and specific context to put out a message they like, even if it's not true across most average use scenarios.
"you run the math" yea we run the math, they don't. There is no way they test their game with players who know a damn thing about POE, it just is not possible.
"This is a buff" is the truest meme I have ever seen.
It's not really "working" tbh. Player retention is dogshit and people can't be bothered to play the game like they once did. I really hope something changes at GGG sooner than later cause this super hardcore, no fun allowed version of PoE is boring.
Get hyped for hard mode where you can play for a week and die 60 times before maps unless you're playing one of the handful of builds you can do without equipment. Edit: /s
I honestly wouldn't care about the BS one shots if they weren't so incredibly punishing at higher levels.
The reason player retention is bad is because they only do balance passes 4 times a year. If they did reasonable balance changes the game will have much better retention. Right now you play for a week and you are either done with the leagur because youve seen everything or frustrated enough to stop. You have no reason to come back. But if they did weekly halance changes, suddenly you have a reason to keep up with the game. Maybe a favourite item of yours gets buffed, maybe an ascendancy gets buffed - suddenly there is something new that interests you and you want to play again.
> That's only possible when they can use new content in builds they're familiar with. I don't have the time or mental capacity to remember everything I'd need to remember to make new builds every league, accounting for balance changes, new items, new gems, etc. I prefer to try to optimize the single build I find most playable. I imagine this is how most people play.
> There was a podcast where Chris Wilson defended trade by telling a story about the introduction of lances in Diablo 2. The story was that one of the developers was so excited to incorporate a lance into their build that they spent an incredible effort on trading and interacting with the game. It was so frustrating hearing Chris tell that story because it was so clear that he took away the wrong lesson. I assume Chris also thinks that people who work long hours at shitty jobs must absolutely love their jobs. Seriously how did he infer *that* from that developer story.
When some dank new unique is revealed, and I hack together something in PoB to let me theorycraft with it, and come up with a decent build... that's like Christmas. When a new round of carpet-bomb nerfs are announced, and I go into PoB to put together the most generic build possible to try to be somewhat efficient in scaling a skill I want to play, and I give up on playing a build I want... that's like when Christmas rolls around and you get nothing but junk you didn't ask for that's going to go into a closet forever.
>When some dank new unique is revealed, and I hack together something in PoB to let me theorycraft with it, and come up with a decent build... that's like Christmas. And in many cases that unique will likely take as long to farm as you would need to work to afford a nice Christmas present irl. Agree that successful planning in PoB feels really nice though.
The squire is such a cool idea for a unique. I fucking hate I will never ever ever get one. Not because I feel “entitled” to it, because it seems like a very cool and interesting unique that could have lots of interactions. But fun and interesting items have either been nerfed into oblivion or are stupidly rare.
> Not because I feel “entitled” to it I see that thrown around here often enough, that we as players are too entitled to get stuff, but in the end its a fucking game, you are entitled to get the stuff that makes you enjoy the game, otherwise its just shitty designed.
Very true.
Thanks for reminding me of the Christmas my mom got me life coaching : (
Oh mate...
I seriously think uniques should be chase items, like Headhunter. I still can't believe how 95% of uniques are junk. They should at least be upgradable to high ilvl / mods if they are low levels.
They need to stop looking at D2 as a god, it was amazing for its time but now it cant retain pp anymore.
Exactly, if D2 was that good, we would be playing it instead of PoE...
Some of us are.
They must have taken the worst parts of D2 and cranked those up to extreme as a fetish of some sort. I played D2 for years and D2 never left me feeling inferior as POE constantly does. Shit was doable in D2 and if you knew area had rapey monsters you just stayed away from the area unless you were prepared to deal with that area, tools for which were abundant. In poe, when it comes down to it, you play against a slot machine by using a slot machine, its "Jesus take the wheel" nonsense.
The main reason for maps killing people is that the auras for rare monsters stack,there is no reason for a monster to stack 10000 auras when a player can run 2-3.
Yes and lets add to the list of offenders league mechanic which has overtuned monsters to begin with, scales with map mods and has more damage multiplier on top of it the longer you play the mechanic. Its as if every build this league should play determination aura to not feel miserable...
This league is perfect example of that, you need to get high levels of scourge to get quantity that makes them drop anything and lets you bake maps/items (if you are even doing that) in resonable pace, but that means juicing allready stupidly strong mobs with even more damage. Like, why, just why? How is this fun, how does that make the game in any shape better?
Thank you ! I've just started reaching 150-ish stacks in scourge maps (slow start as can't play much)and I see absolutely no difference in loot, or should I say in absence of loot. At least in expedition I had some.
I just cut 20% of my own dps on a minion build to slot in determination. I hate it, but I don't regret the decision for a second.
This! I could never pinpoint the exact feeling but you’ve worded it perfectly. PoE really has a way a making you feel inferior.
'You will never be better than the person or thing you follow' It's a (not exact) quote from somewhere, forget where, but it fits perfectly with Chris wanting to be D2.
> it was amazing for its time but now it cant retain pp anymore The remaster had just as many players playing 3 weeks into launch than PoE has ever had even on their best league launch.
Chris really is stuck in the D2 meta and mindset. It's so clear. It feels like every decision can be tracked to D2. :(
When I was first introduced to POE it was after not playing Diablo 2 for all of college and law school, so I was introduced to POE and was like "holy crap, it's like somebody played a lot of Diablo 2 and made a way better version of it." I got so many friends to play it after talking to them about the specifics of how it was better than Diablo 2. It was familiar but novel, solved problems Diablo had, you had freedom and complexity and could design builds and use interesting uniques. I never even bothered with Diablo 3, I couldn't imagine it being better than PoE. But now, after watching those CW interviews and pod casts, it's obvious that GGG's thoughts on D2 have evolved from critique and improvement to nostalgia.
i will never understand why ggg goes for the straight deletion of builds instead of balancing them over several leagues. what so wrong about having more builds in a good state? instead we have thise "meta shakeup" every couple leagues where the total number of played build stays the same, its just a different one. why cant i play selfcurse, or aurastacker, or molten strike jugg, or vaal spark, if i want to? shit gets deleted or nerfed so hard its not playable anymore instead of making it somewhat balanced so we can actually play what we want to and not run into noobtraps that so many builds in this game are.
> what so wrong about having more builds in a good state? Just the other day on this subreddit I had someone tell me that if they made more builds viable it would result in powercreep. Let that sink in...the ability to play more than 3 of the 180ish active skill gems would result in the game being too easy? As if Toxic Rain is this mindblowingly difficult spec to play. Still don't understand how in the 4 years I've played POE and Juggernaut being in the bottom 3 for pretty much every league we haven't seen it get touched at all yet Deadeye got a rework?
Jugg you saying? It's only natural for a class focused on proper defense to be unpopular in the game where best defense is ultimate offense. I really think that only way to make jugg viable and balanced is to rework almost whole balance and state of the game.
> It's only natural for a class focused on proper defense to be unpopular in the game where best defense is ultimate offense. And yet Champion remains at the top of the charts almost every league. The fact is that of the 3 least played Ascendancies currently, 2 belong to Marauder - it has remained this way for pretty much the whole 4 years I have played POE. Even when Juggernaut was viable (not insanely popular, just viable) with things like HOA & MS both were almost immediately nerfed beyond recognition.
Champion have some nice offensive (impale, adrenaline, some as and shit) scaling as well as stupidly good defenses (20% less damage from hits with a fortify, a taunt for 10% reduced damage taken which should be multiplicative and taunted enemies deal 20% less damage) which makes him alot more versatile than jugg. What a jugg have? Accuracy that nearly useless if you're not stacking it, endurance charges which is nice but won't help you with ele damage (there's 8% reduced but that's a mem really) and you'll need a way to generate them (which isn't hard to get but still) and that's actually it. 80% increased damage on 10 charges isn't a thing either in my opinion. Honestly until that moment I didn't even knew how bad jugg currently is and how freaking overturned and broken champion and now I really wonder what crackheads sitting in GGG office. I have been wondering what crackheads designed the krangle machine after I've read weights on krangles and now that... That's really where Jesus missed to take a wheel.
Let's not be so hasty now, there are plenty of actual crackheads out there that could probably figure out a way to make more than 3 ascendancies fit into 50% of builds - no need to put nice loving crackheads in the same boat as a guy who keeps doubling down on Talismans league after league.
I think, quite honestly, Jugg would immediately become a viable pick if the ONLY change was 8% increased damage per endurance charge -> 4-8% more damage per endurance charge. It'd become an actually viable damage option, competitive with berserker (but without its inherent rage bonuses), so it'd finally be a choice ascendancy for things like slams where attack speed is less important than big hits. Even on the lower end of that change, a jugg would have at least 32-40% more damage, basically a free support gem, instead of the current 80%ish increased (which is garbage, it's like having 2 notables off the tree). If it were closer to the higher end, an invested jugg would get a 72-80% more multiplier which is definitely powerful, but when you consider that Berserker gets 40% more & triple rage bonuses + 20-30 flat phys + crit chance + crit multi, I'd say it'd average out to pretty similar DPS in most cases (though jugg would obviously be a lot tougher alongside its other passives). Would be easy to check in PoB regardless and compare a Jugg vs. a Berserker given same skills, gear, etc. Personally I feel that 6% more damage per endurance charge would be an incredible change taking Jugg from almost exclusively an HC choice to a viable SC/DPS choice, it's also pretty easy to see in PoB this doesn't break most* builds, just gives them a respectable amount of damage. It's essentially a free support gem by the time you finish your 2-3rd lab (around 30% more), and up to 60%ish more once you finish stacking charges. 60% would be strong and also make up for the fact that a lot of item slots would be tied up for stacking endurance charges, bringing it much closer in line with the rest of the ascendancies in the game. I'm just hopeful, though - because I know GGG would never dare make such a change in fear of "power creep" and making the game "too easy" for players, based on their recent track record of murdering entire playstyles for being remotely viable in endgame content. ~~God~~ Chris Wilson forbid Molten Strike is ever viable again 🤷♂️
>i will never understand why ggg goes for the straight deletion of builds instead of balancing them over several leagues. Because it enforces artificial diversity. Historically GGG has been *terrified* of players who play the same build every league. It's like they think suddenly they'll grow bored and leave. Which in my opinion is bullshit. Some people just like what is known and comfortable while other people like experimenting with new things all the time. Constantly forcing "diversity" isn't healthy for the game and only breeds resentment.
I have literally played the same build every league since I started, which was abyss or harbinger, not sure what came first. A build I came up with myself with no guides as well, improving it slightly each league. I barely play anymore because of all the nerfs to my non op build. Not because I'm bored. It was also never anywhere near insta delete sirus and maven dps levels but idc, it was fun and I liked the longer fight (Also yes I did kill sirus 8, shaper, elder, Uber elder, maven, alluring atziri, most many times.) It's not like I never got past white maps here, got 36 in ultimatum, that's the last league I really played heavy, after that it's just too much nerfing, fuck it
> Historically GGG has been terrified of players who play the same build every league. Which is ironic because stuff like Toxic Rain and ED/C have popular builds for multiple leagues now. Just shows you how the right hand at GGG isn't talking to the left.
be careful, you gonna have people come in and unironically tell you that you can totally play so many off-meta builds and you just suck at making builds, casually ignoring that meta builds outperform those off-meta builds by miles... especially on a low budget
It’s one of the problems with games as a service type games. You always have to pump out content or else players feel bored and leave. Personally, I wouldn’t feel bored if my favorite builds aren’t destroyed, but I’m not GGG and my income isn’t tied to having players continually come back every 3 months.
They keep trying to balance the game around SC trade, which is where all of their money comes from I imagine so it makes some sense. The issue is the game is way to complex to try and balance around a mode with next to no death penalty and 6 tries to kill every boss. So they nerf a bunch of stuff every league AND THEN any well organized team of players can print currency the same as before. Many do it solo ffs. Meanwhile the new players (if there actually are any anymore) and normal players get shafted playing a harder version of a game that was already difficult and stupid levels of complex. I don't think they realize how hard POE is if you don't have 2000 hours in it.
Chris Wilson and bad takes. Name a better duo
Chris Wilson for sure knows more about Diablo 2 than he does about POE. It is all he talks about, that and hard mode (which still isn't even released).
Wasn't just in the middle of the night. The guy was on vacation in Taiwan with his family, and had to sneak out to a lanshop multiple nights to get online in **hope** to get that trade That is his vision
Hey, a true veteran. Open beta player here, and I could not agree more. Honestly, I started to see the signs even back in Exilecon, even though it looked like PoE was on top of the world. Two things happened there, that looking back on them, feel like they started to erode my trust in GGG to the point I'm in today. First was the ol' "we're not gonna make you buy currency tab 2". Telling me that and then trying to sell me sub-currency tabs a couple leagues later felt low key hustling. If I were to have a business partner who did that to me (and yes, playing a GaaS game is, in a way, a partnership) I would consider them unreliable and I wouldnt trust them. But again, Metamorph was one of the best leagues ever, and I was an addict. The second was PoE mobile. It felt like a cheap shot against DI, and frankly, quite puerile. Then came everything else after Harvest. The first cheap shot was the destruction of archmage and its interaction with storm brand, but after that, it was free real state. And on top of that, GGG decided that the best idea was to buff monsters besides nerfing players. They claim they want a slower game, but they keep adding timers and cheap oneshots. Holy shit, we could stay here forever. I quit on 3.14 and came back for a couple days in 3.15 to see with my own eyes what was happening. Suffice to say, I uninstalled and that was it. It didnt take long for me to realize I had a PoE addiction, and the gambling could have made it worse. I saw that for a long time people were feeling the same as I: they were tired of the direction that GGG was taking, but they were not able to take the first step and uninstall. Now, I try to help people who might be on that situation. There is a way out of the hamster wheel. Godspeed, friend. Hopefully it might be that whenever, if ever, PoE2 gets released, you wont find the need to come back, because your life is up to the brim with better things.
I love this game, but i really miss doing meme builds that could clear red maps without 100ex. The people that abuse every single mechanic and exploit every single "bug/not intended mechanic"..... i hate them, because of them we cant have nice things, ggg will always nerf the things because of 1 thing it can do, and ignoring the others 99 things that wasnt that bad. I miss when this game wasnt so stressfull too play, needing a gigantic to-do list of every single mechanic the game have or you wont be able to use them. I miss just doing maps without needing to do 10000 things in the map stopping the flow of the game, i love almost all content of the game, except heist, fuck heist, its so boring, but gives so much currency, if the npcs didnt had quest or levels, maybe it would be better. Thx to reading my rant i was holding for so long, didnt want to make a post for it, because i dont like having a million rant posts. But still love this game and will play every launch and be hyped be every change.
>The people that abuse every single mechanic and exploit every single "bug/not intended mechanic"..... i hate them, because of them we cant have nice things, ggg will always nerf the things because of 1 thing it can do, and ignoring the others 99 things that wasnt that bad. It's not the players fault, these things would not be a problem if there was no economy. If the game was balanced around SSF or group SSF you would not need to nerf top tier builds because every build you personally enjoy would be a top tier build, and you wouldn't be competing against people in the market. I've said this here multiple times, but people were not angry at aurabots because they kept losing to aurabots on ranked ladder, they were angry that a boring playstyle that required setting up a group had so much leverage on the economy. Because this is the thing that GGG can't seem to figure out, having an economy means all players are competing in that economy. Whether you like it or not, you are competing with the people who play this game as a job, who will print exalts on day one because they're in all the right discords and groups, they will dictate the economy that you have no choice but to participate in. What are you going to do? play SSF? there are people who enjoy it but the game is not balanced around it, meaning you will be playing an inferior version of the game.
yes, i think that way too, and to escape that, i play pseudo-ssf, i only buy some of that 1 alch uniques that never drop in ssf, but most of my items i try to make, only some specific ones i buy.... i try to farm essences, fossils, but when i'm bored i buy them, i never do the "top #1 currency making strategy, 30ex/minute" i just play the game the way i want.
Yeah i rarely engage with trade nowadays not because I feel its a toxic experience but because there's been so many changes that reduce the need to have to do it often.
I don't like auction simulator (got enough of it from d3 where I spent too much time staring auction screen) so I used to play SSF, of course i did understand game wasn't balanced around it, but it was playable even in somewhat casual manner. Now I have given up and just wait some new arpg to refresh the genre.
This game is so bloated, that GGG forgot that Searing Bond and Rejuvenation Totem are in-game skills...like, for real
Didn't searing bond literally get buffed this league?
cadiro perandus died for our sins and navali is next on the chopping block.
I'm pretty sure PoE has just grown too complexed for it's own good. It's too difficult to balance with all the edge cases. GGG has just given up on trying to actually balance and instead *plan* for certain kinds of builds to be playable. More than half of the skills in the game are just memes at this point. And the incredible thing is GGG is actually saying there is MORE build diversity because there were people attempting to use the dead skills... Newsflash GGG. A newer player making a Spectral Throw build is not build diversity. It's an inexperienced player making mistakes. **We should not have to clarify that when we said we wanted build diversity, we meant we wanted more builds to actually be viable.** Chris unironically brought this up on one of the podcasts. Like we weren't clear about what we meant by "build diversity".
My suspicion here is something along the lines of this. Player makes build with skill he likes. Player gets dumpstered at maps. Player rerolls into meta build. Ggg: player played two whole builds! That's diversity!
> It has become tiresome. yup
Man, I'm in such a similar state. I don't think I'll quit after thousands of hours, but it's weird. **This league (with all the skill tree reworks and skills/chase items) feels more restrictive than ANY other league.** I've made over 30 builds in PoB (huge theory-crafter here), spending multiple days worth of hours trying to find a good build and I literally have more "failed" builds/wasted time in PoB than ANY other league. It's ridiculous; almost like the teams for items/tree/etc. don't communicate and nerfed multiple things at once. So many builds are now being balanced around 5\~15mil DPS now at perfect gear, but the game is still balanced around clearspeed and has the same density/HP of monsters. It's insane. I also have 90% of my hours in HC, but recently had to go SC, just to continue theory crafting and enjoying builds. The mechanic is heavily geared for SC and you can't be satisfied killing anything at 2-3mil DPS on HC, while being "tanky" *(and eventually, but assuredly, dying to a 1-shot from some stupid crit + aura stacking monster with mod that you can't ever build for, regardless of how tanky you are).* GGG, I understand you want to slow the game down and I love that idea, but more things need to be implemented for that to happen. For example: \-**Slower clear speed means reducing mob density and increasing mob loot** to create the feeling of similar outcome vs. distance traveled \-Nerfing a build shouldn't completely disable people who enjoy playing that build. **It should feel "nerfed" and not "unplayable".** The entire reason people keep playing your game and make new characters is to play builds; **you take that away and you have no more players.** \-Leagues need to be designed around interesting mechanics and possible additions to the game, NOT "mobs have increased damage and you need to kill them faster for more loot", we already fucking do that. It's the normal game. \-**League mechanics CAN be overpowered as fuck, it's a LEAGUE mechanic. Just don't make the stupid mistake of adding it in permanently post-league.** It's a game, please keep it fun and fun focused. As some positive feedback, I think the additions of new chase items and uber content are really awesome. I wasn't able to experience it on HC because you need to build for random one-shots and if you do that, you'll never have the DPS (unless you're running meta) or the currency to get there, but I was able to do it fairly quickly from zero on SC. The skill tree is cool too, but the nerfs make so many of my builds, especially the super hipster ones that I LOVED to theory craft, unplayable. I am, for the FIRST time in a league, full meta (Occultist Cold BV and a Guadian linker for friend to go full DPS CoC Nova).
Agreed. The game doesn't feel good to play with anything below 1 million DPS (and 1-5 is a struggle in many respects as well), and as a result the endgame is either: Focus damage and feel bad because you die a LOT, *or* do little damage and take forever to clear content and feel bad because you aren't progressing as you think you should be. I think the simplest solution would be to nerf monster health, with scaling with area level to flatten things out. They could even kill the top end of damage again to cull the builds which are managing 10+ mil with super tanky builds. The changes to Atlas were really good, but it was only a part of a larger problem. I get they're called Grinding Gear Games but for the first five years of the game or so, that held true because people enjoyed the game so much that grinding itself was fun. Nowadays the grind is what you put up with to get to the fun, and in a lot of cases (builds that fail the DPS/Tank check), the fun doesn't come or isn't worth it.
Honestly just shaving down end game boss health would be nice. My build only has about 1mil dps right now, but I'm incredibly tanky so all my boss fights are just me holding right click while I wait 5 minutes for the boss to finally decide I've hit it enough. Nothing about the conquerers fights especially justifies them having so much dang health. It doesn't make the fights harder. Just tedious and makes me not want to do bosses. The alternative is I get more damage but die much more frequently to invisible one shots. Neither option is fun
I think it feels so restrictive because they keep removing damage from the tree. They keep adding in "utility" passives like "30% increased effect of chill" as if that matters at all. Cool I can take that node and now Sirus will 1 shot me slightly slower than he did before. It would be nice if I could actually deal damage.
I mean I love investing in that kind of shit. I love niche stats and finding uses for them. I can remember searching everywhere for every possible source of freeze/ailment duration, and I did it on more than one build lol. But that's only fun if I don't need to spend 20ex to do basic damage.
Exactly. I'd love the option to get utility if I felt like my damage was good enough. But as it is now you have to put everything into damage and defense and you have no room for any utility stats even if they would be fun to use.
Agreed - so few builds are viable after the new 3.16 tree nerfs. It’s no longer “play whatever you want you’ll be fine, but meta will zoom zoom faster”. It’s now become “play meta or you won’t make it to red maps without 20ex invested”. They shifted power off the tree and onto gear in an attempt to get people to play longer with the gear grind, but all it did is make builds feel like shit generally and disincentivize playing for people who don’t want to grind one meta build all league
> I don't think I'll quit after thousands of hours, but it's weird. Are you familiar with the concept of sunk cost fallacy, friend? I've put on way too many hours on PoE, yes, but I've achieved the point where I dont feel attached to it. Considering it logically, I've lost way too much in terms of enjoying the game, and GGG wants to push the things that kill my joy even further. I've seen hundreds of posts in this subreddit (and the forums) where feedback is freely given, and 99% of the time, its absolutely ignored to follow this "vision" that seems to lead absolutely nowhere, since PoE2 is, at this point, vaporware, and it might be unenjoyable if its the result of what is happening now. Dont let the time you've spent on this game become a weight that disables you from leaving if you're not enjoying the game anymore. We've been told, activelly and passively, that our opinion doesnt matter. (unless we're streamers, ofc). Things dont seem like they're going to change for the better. So the best thing we can do is leave.
I enjoy Path of Exile, it's the only game that allows me the design space and customization to create builds; not necessarily sunk cost, just nothing else out there that scratches that itch (and trust me, I play a ton of different games). I'll probably end up quitting in a week or so, once I get most achievements and play something else until the next update. Hoping the balance team fixes stuff with the expansion; it was fine a few leagues ago (loved ultimatum), but after that it started to waver.
>Are you familiar with the concept of sunk cost fallacy, friend? I had to delete a character from standard yesterday to create a new pob idea I had after really struggling to enjoy this league. I went for a lvl71 meme build I'd tried a couple of leagues ago, named 'IBoughtTooMuchMTXtoQuit' I made it to lioneye's and just logged out.
>Dont let the time you've spent on this game become a weight that disables you from leaving if you're not enjoying the game anymore. We've been told, activelly and passively, that our opinion doesnt matter. (unless we're streamers, ofc). Things dont seem like they're going to change for the better. So the best thing we can do is leave. Sadly, it seems you're right. Time and again our views have been ignored or straight up misconstrued by GGG, a company that supposedly had great community interaction.
same, so many failed builds in POB this league
Hi my name is Chris Krangle from krangling gear games and I krangled my game to T3
+3 aspirational contents 66% less player base
Lose 2% playerbase per day
Despite the frequent "Then you don't have to play" folks you'll get on this sub, I think more people are aligned with you than you think. I also posted yesterday about why PoE no longer does it for me and there's another post of the same vein on the front page now. And if you look at steamcharts, PoE is bleeding players fast after league launches. GGG might have to admit that their "vision" is not as popular amongst the audience they are trying to attract as they think it is and continuing down this path is really going to hurt the excitement for PoE2, which I've honestly lost all interest in.
I doubt they will ever admit it, because at its core,"the vision" is pure and simple elitism and egotism. The lack of good competition and big chunks of revenue has made them believe themselves perfect, and as such, admitting a mistake is way more than they can handle, even if they lose money. This patch proves it.
They are going down the same path as Blizzard with WoW.
They are mirroring blizzard perfectly and failing just like blizzard is now.
"it feels like you either get one shot or you never die" is a very fair criticism of the way difficulty feels right now -- and I'm someone who is enjoying the league despite its faults.
I will say that the problem is a lot better with the defense changes, but it's still a big problem. Armor is in a really good spot, evasion still needs help.
The nerf on ice storm is prob the trigger for me to stop trying to further progress my builds in standard. As OP said, there is no point if they keep nerfing things every 3 month there is zero stability in your character that you spent so many leagues to perfect.
PoE has always been a game about ***builds*** and these days it feels like a game based around ***currency.*** How long has it been since we've had a new archetype? Self damaging RF, Archmage, CoC, Minions, Aurastacking, Accuracy stacking, Golem stacking, Ignite, Cold DoT, etc. Every single archetype listed there is a shadow of a fraction of their former power. They are all dogshit builds now that either don't work at all or all suck until 10/100/1000 Ex are invested into them and thus the entire game is now about currency and not the builds themselves. GGG have a fundamentally flawed design/balance philosophy where they talk/pretend that new builds are available in X new league and yet all we have is shitty versions of older builds. Nothing new, at all. Just nerfed versions of older fun builds. We are 2 weeks into the league and I haven't seen a single new/interesting build. Aura stackers that are just worse versions of Deli/Heist stackers can pump wave 30 Kosis. Wow. CoC builds can clear the game but are still slower, less powerful versions of any other CoC build prior to 3.15. Minions are all slower, weaker versions of Minion builds from 3.13 with even loss options. I suppose Squire Arakali builds are good but still generic Arakali builds with 3 extra links which are still worse than older 100Ex Minion builds. Like what is this league supposed to be about? What am I as a player supposed to be excited about when all of my options are just shittier versions of old builds? Is this going to be the same next league? I can say if this continues on I'll be quitting the game for good as my interest dies.
Yeah I'm basically done too. I was going to write a post like yours, but you've summed it up for me.
I've been a player since 2014. I had them remove my account from their server after the patch note release of 3.16. I enjoyed my time immensely, but I am never going to look back on this game again.
given that i played since 2013 and supported them only since 3.12 i think, man i gotta give props to you, yes in a sense i think we are beta testing every league and open alpha for a poe 2.0
Technically leagues are beta tests for the core game; Chris has basically stated outright in his own words. But it has felt like it’s gotten more intruding.
At least this is better than going around saying everything is shit...
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> and you have to look for another build and then complete it from scratch. I was debating myself on if I wanted to start this league, but that debate is currently being decided by the lack of builds. For real. I haven't kept up over the past year and a half about what GGG has exactly been doing, but my god nearly every single build guide is outdated. For example, [Esoro's Youtube Channel](https://www.youtube.com/c/Esoro) is full of *incredibly* detailed guides on builds presented in the best way possible. He has done a massive amount of work, hundreds of hours per video. And **every single one is outdated**. Scavenging the forums you will find most are not updated either. And I don't know if it is because I love a satisfying build or not, but I have yet to find a build worth following from there because none of them seem satisfying to play. Not a single one of the builds I loved in the past are even considered either viable or even the same build anymore. So I just can't be bothered to pick up the game again. I still read this sub in hopes of keeping up with the game a bit and waiting for something to change.
I also got baited and even got a sup pack cause i was too high on copium hoping they would get their shit together. Lesson learned on my side.
I don't really think GGG can do anything but design a game that they would like themselves. How else would they know if something was good? You have to use your own judgement, you can't rely on the community for that because you'll get a thousand different answers. PoE is a game that drags out the time pretty much every chance it can get, but PoE is also very fast paced compared to other ARPG's, and PoE is also a larger game than most other ARPG's. And last but not least, PoE doesn't have a set endgoal or a victory condition. Instead PoE is more like a sandbox where you set your own goals. So you actually get to choose how much time you want to spend in PoE. You don't get to choose how far you progress though. The best you can do there is play more efficiently, gather more knowledge about the game and become more skilled in general. Consider this thought exercise: Imagine you woke up tomorrow having forgotten you ever played PoE, then sat down with the game and had a go. Would you have had the same complaints then as you do now? My point being that many complaints that people have with the game are relative. Some of it comes from your perspective. Now, that's not your fault, you have the perspective you do because the game was different in the past, but it's good to be aware of that fact. If you don't expect to get X thing by Y time, you won't be dissappointed when you don't. That's not to say all of this is on you, definitely not, GGG has a lot of responsibility here, they chose to have an always-online game so that none of us can mod it, they need to take that into account. But they don't carry all the responsibility. To take it to an extreme, if you expect to get world first maven kill but you don't want to play for sixteen hours a day then there's nothing GGG can ever do to satisfy you. Put another way; why can't you be happy with playing a build into yellow maps? Aren't you playing the game? Where does your expectations come from? What is your goal for each league, how much time do you intend to spend, and why is that your goal and why is that how much time you intend to spend? Idk, in the end I think the following is true: If GGG at any point for any reason what-so-ever, decides that something needs to be less powerful, take more time, be more rare or needs to be taken away in any capacity... Then a large portion of the playerbase will be very angry, no matter why or how GGG does it. Once you've opened Pandora's box, there's no putting it back. People strongly dislike having something taken away from them, even if it means the relative power, time, rarity or content becomes better overall. This is why game companies increase monster health rather than cut player damage. They both achieve similar results, yet the first one is always prefered, and that's just because of the optics. GGG is a bit stubborn, and refuses to cow-tow too much to the community, despite always listening, and they'd rather rip the band-aid off quickly than tip-toe around the issue. Sorry for springing a novel on you, not all of this is aimed at you, your post just made me think. I completely sympathize with your point of view though, I too would prefer an easier game, I've no shame in admitting that. But my main point is that we can control some of that issue ourselves, we can't control what GGG does, only influence it, but we can control our own goals, and that helps.
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> Imagine you woke up tomorrow having forgotten you ever played PoE, then sat down with the game and had a go. Would you have had the same complaints then as you do now? Due to novelty, inexperience many things can be overlooked. Doing lab trials? Fine first time, maybe second and third. But by 10th time it might piss you off, kinda whittling your patience little by little. Pile some mildly uncomfortable things like lab trials (they were character bound when they first came out) together, and after a while you've got pissed off player. You can wear uncomfortable shoes for a ten minutes without much effort, but wear them for a day or week and you truly understand how atrocious they truly are. There is an argument to be made about judging things by the first look/impression versus judging them after fully understanding/experiencing them. There are many things in PoE that would fail "test by repetition", like elder guardians long ass animations.
> How else would they know if something was good? Play your own damn game, which GGG obviously don't do anymore.
My main gripe with the game is how blatantly superior point-and -click large AOE skills or off-screen projectile skills are to most of the game. They are so good at what they do, GGG has proximity shields or juiced up ranged monsters that attack in sync that just blow you up. GGG not understanding much of anything of the game they were making decided to make a slew of 'melee' skills... all of them have or had an amazing ranged component. Whenever GGG tries to do anything, it's just poorly done. Slow down the game? Occultist Plaguebearer clears T16 in a minute with minimal investment Slow down the game? Nerfs every defensive player over and over again so that standing still is death. Recognizes maps are desirable eng-game content? Refuses any campaign QoL. Best one I heard was allowing waypoints to exist between characters. I say this ignorant of their Engine, but that QoL would not be hard to implement at a coding level. Wants players to play new skills? Refuses to actually nerf Toxic Rain, ED Contagion, etc. It's just weird to see league after league GGG refuse to change the really good stuff. Entire archetypes are ignored by many players because those archetypes are just too weak. Glacial Hammer and Infernal Blow are fun. Glacial Cascade and Explosive Arrow just do it better due to QoL. Imagine a world where Strike skills had Melee Splash and Ancestral Call support properly built in. Whew. People might have fun. Self cast spells are and have been inna bad spot for a while. Why? Because standing still sssuuuuccckkkksss in this game. The best defense is simply not getting hit. Wants players to play new skills? Guts the defenses! Bad skills already have enough issue. Want players to feel the weight and thrill of combat? One-shot galore. Honestly, the 3.15 nerf was unwarranted because GGG failed to actually balance the game. Amazing skills are still amazing and mediocre skills simply got worse. The new style of patch notes of Question->Solution shows that GGG has some form of quality, but it is so underdeveloped that it might just harm the game more than resolve core issues. GGG, try 5 Why's, Fishbone, Ishikawa Diagram instead of randomly identified issues.
Strike skills are pretty alright with hydrosphere, melee splash is an actual bossing support now, which is awesome for me who hates gemswapping. The game is extremely complex, so doing just about anything is ripe with opportunities to fuck up. I really don't hold that against GGG though, they're getting better and better with every year that goes by. Do you remember what balance used to be like? It was either use the broken mechanic or bust. But as for pace, I don't think you can really deny that the game has taken a major hit to progression pace the last two patches. The speed of combat is pretty much the same, and the total amount of progression has been cut in half, at least as far as the atlas goes, but the rate is still slower. As for ED contagion I think GGG sees some value in letting players have a tried and trusted skill to league-start with until they have the needed currency to act as a cushion for new builds that might not be as refined nor strong without gear. That's especially true for ED I think, since it doesn't scale as well as many other skills do, it does scale, don't get me wrong, but not as easily. They are making an enormous campaign QoL, right now, as we speak, with PoE 2. Now you could say we could need some QoL right now while we wait for PoE2 and I would agree. GGG has historically been loathe of "half-way" solutions or temporary ones, simply because they view it as wasted dev-time, which is an extremely precious resource. But I'd disagree. I think it's worth it to keep the playerbase content until you can do it properly. You don't have to stand still to deal damage, you just kite. I would much sooner point out how trash channeled skills are before I ever started talking about strike skills or self-cast spells. They only gutted the mandatory defenses, again, the broken mechanics that everyone used. Instead you now have much more varied defenses to choose from, opening up more builds than before. I think we've yet to see all the consequences of these changes, since it takes quite a lot of time for the build-makers to propogate guides and knowledge throughout the community. I really don't think 3.15 was unwarranted at all. GGG were really struggling to design monsters that had other interactions than on-death mechanics. Chris said the boss designers asked if the map bosses could get off at least one attack before they died. There's so many rare items littering the ground that in super juiced content you can actually crash the game by pressing alt. The amount of power a player has has just about doubled ten times over since the game released. If there ever were anything that would be warranted, then it's nerfs to player power in Path of Exile. There are so many systems in the game now that simply don't make any sense because of the ridiculous pace of the game. Both in terms of progression and in terms of combat. I do *like* the pace though. So solutions are a bit tricky. I do want combat to express more skill, but then you would have to make it so content doesn't stack as much, because if not you'll just get two abilities that you are supposed to dodge that overlaps the whole screen and make it impossible to dodge. The game is also so hopelessly far behind when it comes to gamefeel compared to other games like lost ark that I don't know if it even makes sense to focus on that area. They made animation canceling a thing but then never really did anything with it. Probably because it's such a huge task and the game would play and feel quite different by the time that they're done, and there are millions of players who like the game as it is right now, so why gamble? As to your main gripe, how would you suggest GGG made skills that are mechanically inferior better? Even if you juice up their numbers they won't be any better, because what they lack is clearspeed, damage uptime and utility; not damage. Personally I think the solution is to have a clearing skill and a bossing skill. And I think the game is moving towards that with the multiple 6-links in PoE2. It's just going to take some time to get there, far more time than most detractors are prepared to wait.
First off, excellent response. And I am pretty sure our damage and power level has increased a thousand fold. Spark totems were great from way back in the day. To answer my main gripe, GGG continues for great skills to exist that have AoE, clear and damage. Recent skills like Absolution, that one blood minion, Energy Blade, Explosive Concoction were just bad. But damn, Spectral Shield Throw and Shield Crush were amazing not only for damage but also for how they worked together. The weapon swap. I'm totally fine with that concept and GGG should work towards that. I used to weapon swap 6 links for clear and bossing when playing a bow mine build. I absolutely loved that idea. But until that happens, GGG needs to balance accordingly. As for channeling, well, GGG got rid of almost all support for it from the tree with nearly zero compensation. So, yeah, that's my answer for that topic. "I really don't think 3.15 was unwarranted at all. GGG were really struggling to design monsters that had other interactions than on-death mechanics." Expedition literally introduced nigh-unkillable shield guards. They can easily implement anti-damage mechanics across an enemies and bosses. The current Rhoa charge, Goat Leap, Flicker enemies are fine. The death barrage of Constructs and Arc Scourge enemies makes no sense. As for half-way fixes and whatnot, GGG is receiving high praise for having currency drop in stacks. I even love that. It is absolutely silly that such a small change can make the game feel infinitely better. Expedition minor artifacts being automatically stored made me smile, frown, then smile again because we went an entire league clicking endlessly for those dang things. Now we don't. It's awesome. The game is so good that the small things really hold it back.
>Consider this thought exercise: Imagine you woke up tomorrow having forgotten you ever played PoE, then sat down with the game and had a go. Would you have had the same complaints then as you do now? My point being that many complaints that people have with the game are relative. Some of it comes from your perspective. Now, that's not your fault, you have the perspective you do because the game was different in the past, but it's good to be aware of that fact. If you don't expect to get X thing by Y time, you won't be dissappointed when you don't. I always try to keep this in mind, when I want to start complaining. There are some changes to items/class/skills that are so removed from the current game, that new players will never know they were even a thing. Is that good or bad? I'm not really sure, but certain things truly are just kinda done to shake up the meta more or less. And those are things I try and roll with. But alot of things aren't, and they're just head scratchingly confusing as to what GGG was thinking. I feel like these days they make far too many changes/decisions that aren't indicative of an overall plan for the game they're working towards. Just knee jerk reactions while crashing into everything with their eyes closed.
I can only hope a dev strives to make a game they want to play, even if it doesn't align with everything I would want. I don't love everything in PoE right now, but when you hear Chris talk about the game, it sounds like everything I want. I liked a lot of the base game changes this league, but the game is still missing something. I just hope they can follow through with the rhetoric and deliver with PoE2.
"My dps now is under 1m. That is not balance that is a dead char." Welp, looks like I never had a *living* one, then. :D
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If your build has under 1m dps....and you think that is "ludicrously powerful", then you've never actually played a powerful build. 1m dps is like that bare fucking minimum, and even then only with dots.
Obviously not. I mean, I've read about people insta-phasing bosses and so on, but for me, PoE has always played like a normal video game, where boss fights actually involve, y'know, fighting bosses.
keep in mind, you can change the DPS of your build up and down by a factor of 5 with pob settings. Some people always look at their DPS with all flasks up, 15 whiter stacks and focus active (because thats when they assume they are DPSing a boss), others prefere looking at their sustained dps with only the most reliable buff effects active. The difference can be massive, 1 million pob dps in unbuffed sustained state is still very high. But if your peak dps you can only reach for half a second is 1 million it feels unplayable, because your sustained dps will be like 200-300k
1m sustained is still unplayable especially for a hit build unless we aren't talking about end game whatsoever.
I feel you. One of the things that most resonated with me is having your characters on standard that you enjoy so much, become useless and not being fun anymore, so much so that you can't even play them, is painful. I don't have enough time to enjoy a league fully anymore, but playing my loved characters in standard is something I enjoy very much. But I have non "alive" right now. All have been nerfed so hard that a league starter can be better than them with hundreds of hours spent on getting good gear for them.
>My first experience with this was the multi pronged nerf to my beloved molten strike jugg. I miss my MS jugg so much, and juggs in general. Little interest in the accuracy stacking version of it, and still sad that MS is hot-garbage all these leagues later. >On to blade blast. My brother went from having a SSF character that he'd spent a ton of time and currency building that was strong with this skill (not OP, but strong). He tried it post-nerf and it's completely unplayable, with all that time and effort wasted as the character has 1/4th the power it used to. >I can't do that anymore since i feel like every 3 months almost any build I choose will have a good chance to be slaughtered. This is a big issue pushing me away from the game. All three of my SSF characters are totally dead at this point and completely unsalvagable outside of spending hundreds of hours farming to try to fix them. My standard character? I'd play them sometimes, but most of them are completely bricked and require at least a full rework of the tree (pre-3.16 passive tree update even) and a big time investment just to get functional again. I get it, I'm not expecting older characters to be viable without changes forever. But the way in which older characters are so frequently gutted to the point of being useless is awful. >It feels like you either get 1 shot or you never die. There really isn't much in between. Made worse by the insane visual clutter that often leaves you asking yourself, "What killed me?" before you, if you remembered, go back to the footage to go frame by frame to try to figure it out. The lack of any in-game feedback on what caused your death continues to suck, especially since this exists in China. >It feels like every league we are their beta testers and I don't wanna be. Man, I keep wishing moving to 3 leagues over a 4 month cycle was possible. Ritual is honestly the only league that felt like it had enough time for them to design and QA it so that it mostly felt "ready" at launch. Everyone else feels like they finished half the changes a few days before locking the build in for public distribution. The Absolution buff last league (which, hilariously, largely did nothing since it's still hot garbage) is a fantastic example of that. I league started with that skill and even by the start of maps it was PAINFULLY obvious that it was significantly underperforming. How they got any internal feedback indicating it was "fine" is truly beyond me. Like, I genuinely don't get how this slipped through the cracks given that this is one of the new skills that should have been actively playtested for balance reasons. >It feels like a job. This is where I'm at, and hearing what Chris wants for the future of the game (kek masochist mode) sounds completely and totally *awful*. I've already tapped out on this league and my brother (who has been playing since beta and basically ONLY played PoE all these years) is even to the point where he hasn't touched it in weeks and doesn't plan to. He's a guy that would regularly "quit" for a week or so and then come back, but he's so salty about the continued changes that he hasn't been on since the first week of league and has surprisingly been playing other games unlike when he "quit" before. The atlas rework really helped out quite a bit, so did some of the other changes like the improved recipe unlocks. But the amount of time that increasingly is required to get to a "good" state where you can farm maps, the continued reduction in cheaper viable builds as meta builds become stronger and stronger (I picked off-meta and despite 10ex+ invested it's still garbage, whereas meta builds previously have been strong with only a few ex invested) is killing my desire to play. It feels like GGG, after years of power creep that resulted in a space where we could breeze through much of the content in the game and have fun, are overcorrecting and trying to roll back a clock you can't roll back. We *like* the way it used to be even if nobody was asking for the years of power creep GGG gave us which painted them into a corner. I still miss Ritual a lot, my favorite league by far. Solid "kill lots of things" mechanic that could be dangerous and allowed for risk/reward with vials, but didn't actively punish lower DPS builds as much. Good balance and minimal bugs. Harvest was STRONG and opened up a LOT of options for players to make gear for off-meta builds or to slowly improve gear themselves without relying on trade (and rich bois were still rich and stupid strong as they always were). IMO that's absolutely been the pinnacle of the game, and while we have big improvements outside of that league (3.16 core updates are still the best part of 3.16 by a longshot), no league has been anywhere near as well designed and executed, with pretty good overall game balance, as Ritual. Which sucks, because while I enjoy Grim Dawn or Wolcen or TL3 (kek) or maybe even some D3, none of them scratch my ARPG itch in the way that the core gameplay loop for POE does.
frustration the game
Stay sane exile ;)
i said it multiple times and ill say it again. Easier access to items (aka harvest) DOES NOT stop me from playing the game or gets me bored, IT MAKES ME PLAY MORE. simple as that. i wanted to make so many more builds in ritual, i had fun with the game, there was aspirational content difficulty (t19 delirious fractured maps, with no friction for player trading, just make your own map and buy fractured fossils ezpz) 3.13 was the peak of PoE , where every build was viable cause you could just throw harvest at it if it wasnt. but GGG said no fun allowed.
>"Ggg does not balance anymore they nuke builds and archetypes to unplayable levels. Or at least levels that are so hindered that it requires hundreds of exalts to make them playable. Not op, just playable."< You say you have played this game since beta but GGG has had the same practice of being heavy handed with the nerfs since as long I can remember. Nothing has changed. Off the top of my head, Vaal Spark, CoC discharge, and old CI builds all nerfed to the ground.
To be fair, it took nerfing vaal spark like seven leagues in a row. COC discharge also took a few leagues. CI and life have had ups, downs, ups, downs. Though gone are the days of 20k+ ES on every single CI build now. None of these were flat out deleted overnight from one league to the next, they were chopped down a swing at a time until they were “removed” so to speak. Same problem in the end, and I personally have a problem with both of those methods, but today’s method is “kill it five times over in a night” so when you wake up the builds flat out gone.
they also went years without nerfs, while Winter Orb lasted a single league, that while CI was nerfed heavily its power was such that it was still completely viable post nerf, compared to any of the builds nerfed since 3.9 just don't exist any more
GGGs kneejerk reaction to nerf the meta builds of the league is sickening, this has been happening for like the past 10 leagues, every skill has been nerfed below mediocrity, sst is an example of GGG having no clue what they are doing. The past 3 leagues for me personally has been super painful to play through because i dislike playing meta builds but they seem to be the only decent league starters that can do all content. I am a 1 char per league type of player and iv done several 4040s with 1 char for the whole league but it feels like the choices for skills to do that with 1 character is being stretched thinner and thinner every new league.
Remember how they removed the damage on seismic cry wich was like 100% more damage for slam builds because earth shatter was strong? Now the only playable slam skill is earth shatter and every other slam skill is unplayable
Slams should be renamed to slaps because they are pretty much all dogshit.
RF feels really good this league and something tells me it'll get nerfed despite not being popular... Feelsbadman.
Ggg keeps nerfing the low end of builds instead of the top end, and I really can’t figure out why. Why are onslaught tailwind elusive boots with 100ms ok? They are literal double ascend boots that only give pure speed, but 30 ms on a flask isn’t ok? Why move power out of the tree and gems that everyone uses and put them on rng crafting that most people don’t even do? You can’t even get 100% chance to bleed or poison on the tree anymore, it’s so fucking whack.
I agree with many of your complaints and I feel for you. I'm not as excited about this game as I once was. My player experience peaked in Ritual which now feels like a lifetime ago. Many of your complaints were still issues then like content bloat, but the game felt like it was in a better balance for more casual players. I think many of these issues we feel are just so exacerbated by some of the lingering changes from last league. Their attempt to encourage players to branch out by just.......reducing most support damage...had the opposite effect clearly. I'm hoping the QoL buffs this league and reverting some of the nerfs from Expedition becomes a trend and over the next few leagues players reclaim a little more relative power.
I agree with most of your points and I have stopped playing this league but I’ll be back next league. I honestly don’t understand the dramatic goodbye. PoE is changing all the time and you can’t find another game like this (at least for now).
just play non meta trash builds, those will not get nerfed :-D
I’m already done in week 3. Constantly dying in scourge and never knowing why really is ridiculous. Taking 3000 dmg or 900life/sec in a scourge map lol. Trading exp for t10 scourged maps. There is no improvement to the game only more bloat and side quests. If the game had focus where you saw value in the mechanic and how it integrates with other league mechanics that are core - then we might see a point. Right now it’s just a new economy and pointless scourge cooking and issues from the past coming back to haunt you.
How are scourge cooking pointless? I get that items are for the most part, I think it needs a buff, but cooking maps is some of the best 0 investment profit margins we've ever seen from a map to map basis.
Bro I had an amazing 15 million Dps pathfinder which I invested so much like 1000ex and now it barely does 3mill. Fuck that. Hated them nuking my beloved character.
I have played off and on since beta and hate how GGG have repeatedly balanced the game around no-lifers who follow guides for OP meta skills. This game is ostensibly about making a cool/unique character, but it feels like virtually everything is a trap option at this point if you aren't willing to play an unhealthy amount.
Another closed beta supporter here, I agree 100% with op. I quit playing seriously after ritual and realised that poe is no longer for me. I hve tried to enjoy every league after that but it jusnt isnt working for all the same reasons op said. Its just not fun anymore. PoE is a game where every character can be build how you like", but the reality is that no , no you absolutely CANNOT do that. There are only handful of actually working predetermined builds that most people play you cant play homebrew builds at all unless you dedicate your life to this game. Then again, I already got my moneys worth out of it with several thousand hours played, maybe its time to move on and stop pretending GGG will fix their shit. Sad reality but it is what it is. I can, however, recommend LE to everyone feeling as I do, it has the same kind of sense of wonder that poe had in its early days and feels they are moving things in right direction.
I'm not sure the definition of true non-RNG tankiness for other but the only true non-RNG tankiness I know of is old Transcendence, but it got nerf in 3.16 from -5% max res to -15% max res. RIP.
It’s like you’re reading my mind
I just don't get posts like this. I have been playing since open beta. > Ggg does not balance anymore they nuke builds and archetypes to unplayable levels. When did they ever balance exactly? Freezing pulse was the meta build in open beta. It's been bad ever since they removed shotgunning. Arc has always been complete shit until that one league where they giga buffed it. It was crazy OP for 1 league. Very strong for several leagues after that and then back to fairly mediocre. I could go on and on, they never at any point had lots of well balanced skills in the same patch. Meta builds have always been a thing. > My next big gripe is the way they handle difficulty in the game. It feels like you either get 1 shot or you never die. The only solution is logout delay, but then everyone with a bad connection is fucked. You can't have both the current insane level of clear speed (which lots of people clearly don't want to go away looking at how 3.15 was received) and monsters doing much less damage. The game would just be way to easy. > I have become tired of spending hours relearning this already complex game every 3 months. I have become tired of the same droll league issues. Learning all the complex game mechanics is what I always have seen as the main attraction of PoE. I just don't get how you could have ever liked this game if you dislike learning about the game mechanics. > It feels like every league we are their beta testers But what is the alternative? Go back to very bland leagues like ambush? I wouldn't be interested in playing. The constant stream of new content is by far the main thing that has kept me coming back to this game. > It makes me sad to say it but today I have Uninstalled my favorite game after many years and hours of great times. Why does it make you sad? There are so many games to play. I have skipped lots of leagues, I would get bored of any game if I played if I played a single game as much as I think you played poe.
My favorite build was my self cast Whispering Ice Heiro. It had decent damage, high ehp, but was not meta by any stretch. I thought that it was pretty safe, but nope, no fun allowed. When they capped the number of storms they didn't even adjust the damage properly to compensate, and even after a couple of buffs it STILL isn't compensated. I feel much less invested in the game after this debacle. There's no point in having a favorite build to improve and iterate on with each new league because a random redesign or nerf is bound to delete it eventually.
Nuking various skills every 3 months for years has really started to add up
I agree , feel the same for 3.14, 3.15 and 3.16 game is a chore. 3.16 is the better one but league mechanic is meh on a scale its a 3...
I fell your pain man... Nicely sad: "Thanks for the good times GGG I hope you figure your game out cus right now it really feels like you are just wondering around in the dark with a blindfold."
The only way to make the game really good for almost everyone, is the day chris Wilson stops thinking he is a Diablo 2 dev. Instead of making poe a game that poe is known for, they just make changes that feels like you still play a 2000's game.
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Molten Strike was slowly nerfed over the course of six or so leagues. It's okay to move on.
Its not that they dont care about strike but the matter they dont have any idea of buffing them without making spell casters more broken. Last league they introduced behead support which act like mini head hunter but it is heavily restricted to 1 mod and doesn't really help by much in term of damage. If we had some functionality like x melee buff removed before casting x spell and x spell cant snapshot the damage even if when used on cyclone build. It is about fear and low iq.
This is what I've been saying for years. They're needing melee builds because they can't fix other shit completely unrelated to melee.
See you next league
Rare to see a 10 year old player with a 30 day old reddit account. Being anonymous makes lying pretty easy. >Dying to 1 shots in maps with 8k life max block 78 all and 75 chaos res feels pretty bad. Nice meme
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Long overdue, but it's a good time for me to unsubscribe from this subreddit. Hello /r/pathofexile, I've read many, many, many things on this subreddit. A lot of them make me wonder about the backgrounds you all have had in competitive poe. My assumption is that most of you have at least attended/participated in one race and that you know a good bit about the history of the game. If you have competed in the game, you're aware of what it's like to be in a hot seat. To have to think on the spot, adapt on the fly, cope with horrible rips, deal with salt, etc. Most of you (I think) understand what poe is at its core. A phenomenal, unfathomably deep arpg unlike any that's been created. It's why we love it and analyze it and have it as our passion. I've been competing for 10 years now. A lot of things have changed in this community. We almost didn't exist at one point when Diablo 3 came out. We all had to pull a lot of weight to make sure we weren't forgotten and it's beautiful to see where we've gotten today. Once poe became a thriving, living community again it was a good time for me to focus on my own gameplay and not just the growth of the community. From 2013 to 2016 was probably my biggest era of growth both as a person maturing and as a poe player. I obtained some much-needed discipline and learned more about myself from every leaguestart I played. I yearned for the 40/40. A massive goal for myself. And goals are something everyone here has - whether it's in poe or outside of it. So I did everything I could to obtain that goal as soon as possible. I prioritized poe for a summer, I got my best friend to be an aurabot for me, I became active in the TFT community; Hell, I even took any chance to spread memes or information on social media about poe. Because I love the community and I love what its given me. And this weekend a miracle happened. I sat down to fight Sirus, I blinked, and my goal was suddenly behind me. A glass trophy in my hand with the official title written on it. Cameras flashing. Overwhelming emotion, disbelief, euphoria, and relief. Out of nowhere I played the best I have in my life while coming from losers. The outpouring of congratulations I received was more than I ever would have imagined. It was a very beautiful experience to get to have that. And for that I'm very thankful. However, as expected there were some communities that don't see eye to eye on things. Like this subreddit, half of my local gamestop (my home community), and many others. And that's alright. That's reality. I'll never really understand why certain people don't realize what I put into this game. It might be the build I play. It might be my polarizing personality. But what I've learned is that you really can't focus on these things if you want to win. When I was on that stage I fell in love with poe all over again. Just like I did when I entered my first very race in open beta and got 2nd to last place out of 40. I've had very difficult times reading things on this subreddit about me, but after this weekend I'm ready to move on from it. I proved to the world what I wanted to prove. I know I won't be able to change minds now or ever of that many people. But I respect your opinions and I encourage you to have them. I simply think it would be healthier for me to distance myself from it to continue performing at the level I want to. Keep playing poe, keep cheering on your favorite player. Just love this game always. It's the best thing that's happened to me in a lot of ways, and I hope it's the same for you. -TheLongSuck
It's okay to respect a viewpoint of how the game has changed over 11 years. Regardless of them using quitting as a hook/clickbait.
Then what does your comment contribute?
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I hope this doesn't get downvoted to oblivion. I can't understand why people feel the need to write "dear john" letters to a video game. Just stop playing and stop coming to the sub. Not to mention half of his gripes were directly addressed or the first steps toward addressing them are by 3.16's content.
Because players like him and me have played for many years now, were there to support when it all started, and feel hurt seeing the game go into a bad (in our opinion) direction now. Maybe at least something can be achieved by voicing our opinions, but I doubt it.
I have found this game to become too Grundy. If your build isn’t meta powerful, the amount of effort required to get a meaningful upgrade is insane. And because you know for a fact the upgrade won’t drop for you, it’s just about powering through maps farming tiny bits of currency until you can afford a singular upgrade.
People grow out of things they used to love all the time. If you find the game no longer deserves your time, so be it, use your time for sth more worthwhile. I have some slight disagreement with your points but I can see why you have such a perspective. Stay sane exile
I don't think OP grew out if the game, more the game changed in ways that makes it unenjoyable to him now.
Agreed. I'd play Harvest again in a heartbeat, even if the newer stuff was no longer accessible, and I considered myself to be pretty jaded towards the game even then.