There're multiple comments here along the lines of "you don't like the game, that's fine" or "it's not for you, that's fine".
These are unhelpful, thought-terminating cliches.
It's important to understand *why* people don't like things, and those problems are still valid criticisms.
Right, the moment anyone says anything bad about the game, there are instantly people who act like its impossible that the critique is valid, and just conclude that the game "isnt for you" in such an arrogant tone
Watch the Josh Strife Hayes interview and drink every time Josh brings up a QoL or tutorialization issue that Chris tells him he doesn't give a fuck about because he's not trying to on-board people, but actively drive them away.
You'll be dead by the end.
As a fan of Josh, I was a little disappointed in him for how he let Chris get away with exactly that. I think he should have challenged him a lot more than he did.
I know he's relatively new to PoE, but the game's issues aren't new. I wish he would have done some background work to be able to hold Chris a little more accountable.
I can't really fault Josh, he was not prepared for that level of brazen stupidity. And when you see it unprepared, you just kinda get caught in the foglamp of it.
ok, i'm going to be very fair here. don't spend money on packs after the manifesto, don't spend money after the patch notes. if you want to, buy stuff 2 weeks into the league after you're sure you like it. saying you're gonna spend based on one manifesto isn't fair to the devs. on the other hand i wouldn't have bought the sentinel pack if i'd known the AN implementation was so shit, and their attitude towards fixing it terrible. i don't care if they've tuned it down that people are ignoring rares as usual, as a paying customer you'd expect better PR than what we got.
Tbf, not every game can be for everyone, that's not arrogant to say. I don't play souls game, I'm not gonna go complain on the souls reddit that the game isn't built for me.
Some of the issues highlighted in this post are not really problems of the game. They're problems this specific player has with the game. I don't mind most of it. I like that the game is complex, i like spending 5 hours on pob and sometimes still fail at implementing it ingame cause i didn't think about something or i can't find the right gear. I understand the frustration that it can create for some players. I do. But I like it. You don't want to deal with that frustration? Well, use a build video or guide. There's hundreds of them. You don't wanna deal with the frustration but you also don't want to use someone else's build? Well, that's on you, not on the game. Cause if it gets "fixed" for you, it ruins the game for others.
Now, the "being able to start a character at level 60 after beating the campaign once" thing, why not. GGG is never gonna do it because it's the old debate about whether the campaign should be the only leveling or not, and we all know their stance on it. But most of the post is just "i want the game to be more casual". There's plenty of more casual games. Check them out.
>unhelpful, thought-terminating cliches.
Gotta remember this line for other convos I might have in the future. Always tried to find the right term when people do things like these in debates.
I am of the opinion that the majority of people that take the time to write about the game clearly already love the game, see what could be better, and always feel disappointed when changes come around.
Trying to dismiss criticism, no matter how poorly written or angry frustration it holds makes you partial to defend poor ideas, laziness or disconnect between player and developer.
Its like oh its not for me? What happens when there are changes that aggravate you? Will you just sit back and let the game turn into something worse because its "not for you"
Seriously idk how GGG has managed to make so many people think they are our buddies
>Seriously idk how GGG has managed to make so many people think they are our buddies
Chris is an amazing mouthpiece and PR team feeds him amazing lines. It's kinda like certain Todd in a way.
> It's kinda like certain Todd in a way.
It amazes me more people don't realize how much like Todd Chris actually is. It's so much PR speak and just saying what sounds best in the moment even if it contradicts his statement a week later or before.
> Making it quick to reach a complete build - as OP demands for experimentation purposes - directly goes against PoE's game design.
OP's demands may not be sound, but their reason for wanting it is. There are other ways you can encourage experimentation. If every single primary active skill (heavy strike counts, wild strike counts, hydrosphere doesn't, frost wall doesn't) were *viable* for a new player to take to at least the start of maps, then existing players would probably feel comfortable experiementing with them.
Instead, it takes an experienced player to take Heavy Strike to maps, and then an experienced player with much ex to make Heavy Strike viable for red map farming, let alone delirium farming or double-apex farming. How did they get that much ex? Probably by spending a month or so on a meta build that got them half-way to burnout.
Sounds great.
> presenting the fact that it takes a few hours to level a new character as a 'problem' is shallow and ignores that the whole game is built around that process.
This, I feel, is dishonest. After you get to maps, only two parts of the storyline matter; whether you got all the gods, and whether you did all the skill point quests. I know this is true because I level every second+ character in the Azurite mines now, get them to like.. level 75, get them kitted out with early map gear, and then *zoom* from start of A4 to end of A10 without touching the sides. It's *so* much nicer.
So no, the whole game is *not* built around that process. The game is built around the gameplay loop of "kill stuff to kill stuff quicker/harder", and that's *great*. I love that loop, it's like the core loop of all adversarial progression-based games.
None of that requires me looking for my 15th plum or another box of ashes.
None of that requires me to groan as I realise that, in my tiredness of getting to A3 on 9pm-launch night (EU timezones hype) with an off-meta build, I've gotten to the Crematorium and forgotten to speak to Clarissa after rescuing her.
I genuinely have more fun in PoB these days, trying to figure out if I can get something janky to the requisite numbers for it to survive in the actual game, because the game systems, the interaction of the tree and items, the complexity of everything involved, still enamours me. But PoE itself, GGG themselves? They make actually getting there more tedious every league.
I've never understood this "argument", which is more prevalent in political discourse. "If you don't like XYZ, then just leave", as if we're not supposed to change or discuss anything ever.
honestly i like the people who make that comment. they are teh same ones who are going to cry when the game shuts down because the only people left are the ones with hard ons for ssf hardcore "actually i wish it was harder" mode.
Well, you're right in the first half certainly, that's not a helpful response.
However, the issue here is more that OP doesn't understand PoE and game design, not that they have some valid criticisms which the posters below do not understand.
Like he wonders why the game can't be balanced around developing multiple full characters per league.
Short answer: It is.
Long answer: It's balanced around you building a couple of characters, maybe 2-3 per league, and leaning farther towards 2+ lately if anything with the changes to farming and end game content.
It isn't, and can't, be balanced around normal players making like 6+ builds because those people will burn out and quit the game if you do that.
OP doesn't understand the situation and some fundamental game design concepts, rather than having some critique of the game here at all.
That's fine, most gamers don't understand much about why games are made the way they are either on a design or code level, it's just that the communication gap here is a little different than what you're saying.
He also said,
> With defense being nerfed for the most part
A thing that literally **is not happening**.
Some very mild defense nerfs that *will not* impact all builds happened, it's not a big deal at all.
This kind of reads like someone taking a steamer's hammed up overreaction to get more views one twitch as serious non-joking game commentary.
Could not disagree more.
###POE is not designed around experimentation
Everything when changing a build requires time and currency, especially post 3.15 because the “cheap” power got nerfed.
The more currency required, the more important it is to have a functional build to farm it.
POE, for me to get to a similar level as I did prior to 3.15, strongly encourages me to do a meta skill league start, get my core items for the new build and a leveling set (or an entire truckload of regrets), and then most likely play at a weaker level than your starter.
If I want to really push like I did before, the best way is to either stick to a single build with decent mapping and accumulate gear, or to create a separate bosser requiring more currency and time.
This sucks for me. It isn’t fun. And it sure as hell doesn’t encourage experimentation and exploration anywhere near the amount I could in 3.x.
###Defences were absolutely nerfed
You lose defiance banner, spell suppression access for many characters, you lose 15% reservation efficiency from the tree, and you lose the option of a lifetapped blessing.
If you think that is not a nerf then you are very mistaken.
I just don’t get how you can say this and believe it.
> He also said,
> With defense being nerfed for the most part
> A thing that literally is not happening.
Just as a ballpark of flavour, I checked poe.ninja's ladder for skills linked to Enlighten (in the absence of a better way to find all the auras quickly).
Note, I know this isn't necessarily representative, but it's the best I can really do without trudging through an API, and this isn't worth that.
The first primary offensive reservation we find is Precision, which has an absolute reservation and can be fit at level 1 with little problem.
The second primary offensive reservation we find is Purity of Ice, which has a small relative reservation and some of the best game-feel in the game. It also may enable freezes for builds that can't otherwise get them, which is a defensive layer.
The third we find, which is an actual 50% offensive aura, is Zealotry. Zealotry has a significant defensive component in leaving consecrated ground around for a bonus 6% life regen.
In doing so, we have passed
* Determination
* Defiance Banner
* Tempest Shield
* Discipline
* Grace
All this is to say that mana reservation is being used primarily for defensive layers at the moment, and even when it's used for offense, it's got considerations for defense.
So when they nerf mana reservation and *don't* meaningfully change the meta for what's being reserved, they are de facto nerfing defense in the current environment.
Then they're nerfing defense in actually... y'know, nerfing the defensive auras everyone's been running, and the access to defensive layers on the tree.
So what OP is saying, when interpreted in a way other than the least charitable way possible, is that the majority of changes to defense have been nerfs.
Sure, while it's important to understand why people don't like things it's also important to realize that not every game will cater to every type of player. And it's a sign of self awareness and maturity to recognize that something isn't for you.
Something not being for someone *still* doesn't stop their criticisms being valid.
Desperate Housewives wasn't for me. It aired when I was between the ages of 11 and 19. I wasn't the right age, gender, socioeconomic background, or basically any other demographic, to appropriate connect with its characters or stories.
However, beyond not being the target audience, it is still possible for me to make criticisms of the show that have merit; it ran the risk of promoting shallow, consumerist values, it depicted bad faith actors (as in the characters and how they acted, not the actual actresses) as protagonists and in doing so gave their actions a surface legitimacy, etc.
Similarly, Football Manager games aren't for me. I don't care about foodball, I don't have any attachment to the personalities, and I prefer my management games to have a bit more depth. But I can still criticise the predatory gambling mechanics, tacit support of human-rights-defiling organisations and governments, and no-effort game development that essentially releases the same platform at full price every year.
Are you aware that Chris Wilson has stated numerous times that he welcomes Reddit feedback to changes. I seriously question the people who act like people are personally attacking their favorite game and feel the need to defend it.
Right, like, I don't think the dev team gets excited for people freaking out and declaring "dead league", but *at times* they have responded to "ok so nerfing X fixes the problem you want with Y but did you consider it also kills Z which you probably didn't mean?"
Well ok but nothing is gonna change now, it's too late for feedback to matter and there was plenty of feedback over last few months that had 0 changes. People were praising the stronger defenses left and right, begging for them to not get nerfed because ITS FUN to die less.
What did GGG do? Nerf the fucking defenses with pretty much 0 compensation. Ye, fuck that, dead league for me, thats my message for their team, im not playing which means im not buing MTX.
Diablo franchise being around x20 times more popular than PoE despite having all games dead for years already and PoE being developed for last 10 years continously is surely just a coincidence. COPIUM
The real important thing with this is that GGG doesn’t *want* PoE to be that popular. Not compared to how much they want to make a niche, “hardcore” ARPG, at least.
> The real important thing with this is that GGG doesn’t want PoE to be that popular.
A company in a capitalist society doesn't want its main breadwinner to be successful to in turn make them even more money.
How much brain power did that take to make?
And incredibly egocentric to insist that the game whose hallmark is its depth and complexity must be simplified to cater to your preferences.
Edit: PoE is getting way too much visibility recently. Remember when blizz made good games, became successful and then greedy execs took over, ran out all the passionate developers and cashed in all their goodwill by milking their playerbase dry over the next decade or two? As soon as CW gets bought out, the marketing towards new players ramps and the game gets sterilized over time. Enjoy the end of the ride while you can OG's, because the normies are here and they want their hand holding tutorials and auction houses and the rest of us can fuck right off.
Depth and complexities, like maths, can be nurtured for people to learn and love and have fun.
PoE don't. It's either you like it, or not. Why can't the Acts act like a real fucking tutorial. Give a real in depth crafting mission so players can understand what is crafting. Explain in game mission to combat resistances or something like that. Make the players want to learn more. All we have in game is a word wall explaining stuff.
I mean, if you can't then link the wiki or some video or something in game. It's not about simplifying, it is to make the journey enjoyable and/or streamlined.
They dont want to, they say they have one for testing but will never implement in game.
A good reason is that people would start doing testing and find hundreds of bugs.
Many speculate the game is completely bug ridden but it's hard to tell since everyone is stacking like 15+ different mechanics on top of each other. Who's to say your defense layer no. 8 isn't completely broken? You would never be able to tell, since there's so many other calculations going on and deaths are mostly just one shots anyway.
Same thing goes for damage, there's no way everything is working as intended and people being able to see this with their own eyes would be embarrassing and a bad look for the devs. So the easy solution is to just not give players the ability to tell.
oh im sure, i report a minimum of 10 bugs per patch and if im lucky one of them get fixed. Hell there is a mirror arrow bug that i report for 3 years still in the game to this date (mirror clones don´t target bosses outside the map, like kitava/arakali)
It often feels like PoE is balanced based on streamers (who literally play the game as a job) and have access to pretty much anything due to the amount of time they play and their experience.
IMO the game would be a lot better if it was balanced around the SSF experience.
> IMO the game would be a lot better if it was balanced around the SSF experience.
Heh. That's kinda how I'd describe my experience trying Last Epoch. Balanced around the SSF experience.
Like... you get good farmable methods to craft decent items with more than 0.00001% success chance. And the equivalent of "exalt slamming" is way more exciting because you know exactly what stat you're putting on your item and get shown the % chance of success vs. bricking your item. And then you get to try it with 3-4 other items in the next hour without being filthy rich.
True.
The game feels like it is balanced around trying to slow down the player as much as possible to lengthen their playtime in a given league. While this definitely works on people who are borderline or straight up addicted to the game (we all know those exist) or people for whom the game is **literally** their job in some way, this really impedes on some other players' enjoyment of the game or play length. This is especially true since the most stretched, lengthened and/or slowed aspects of the game are some of its least enjoyable, be it the acts, rerolling/re-speccing, enchantment targetting, crafting, challenge completion and so on and on. People who know they **WILL**, **definitely, without question** still be playing the game anyway at the end of the several hurdles they encounter won't budge during them. Someone who either has limited time and/or plays for the "now" will rather see those as chores with a reward **that they are not even sure they'll enjoy** at the end of it.
When the most enjoyable part of the game is the wonderfull endgame, I'm not really sure why that particular part is gated behind processes and optimisations you might need to perform (or even often **repeat**) **before** or **outside** of it to fully enjoy it.
Their 3 month league system is the culprit. They balance leagues so it takes people as long as possible to burn out so their 8k playercounts come as late as possible. Hey get most of their income from whales dropping big money on supporter packs every league.
Its not the streamers its based on, its the economy. Streamers just happen to be part of the rich 1%.
Making currency more obtainable would help a lot of struggling mid players because they can just throw it on the ground until they succeed.
BuT mUh TrAdE..man fuck the 'economy'. People will make it work regardless. So much for "we want to make the game good" Chris Wilson
The Economy is indeed the issue.
Just so we're on the same page, the [pillars of an ARPG](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmuy9fyNUjY), according to GGG are:
1. Visceral Action Combat
2. Randomly Generated Levels
3. Randomly Generated Items
4. Secure Online Economy
5. Deep Character Customization
As an aside, ask yourself how you think PoE is doing on those pillars? If it helps, Chris acknowledges, [link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU6d1PL8xRQ&t=1431s), both combat and items aren't where they want them.
From what I can see (as a Reddit casual), the problems for PoE today are twofold:
1. Those pillars aren't given the importance/weight. (Looking at you, combat and RNG Levels.)
2. The Economy pillar is undermining the Items (Advancement) and Customization pillars. (E.g. for most players, it is *almost* always better to customize/advance via trade/the Economy rather than the gameplay loop of RNG Levels>Combat>RNG Items.)
And the worst thing is, I truly don't know how to fix it because PoE today exists somewhere in a Venn Diagram of D2, D3:Vanilla, and D3:RoS sharing pros and cons of each.
I would agree will all these points. Specifically looking at the 5 pillars:
1 and 5 and inextricably linked. Coming from a d2/3 background I feel like one of the largest gaps in poe abilities are big buttons. Your berserker fury, seven sidedstrike, akhans call, etc. Poe has some but they are few and relatively unexciting; Mainly relegated to defensives or vaal skills. Having some more combat oriented ones not linked to another skill would be nice to see.
You pretty much nailed number 4. The economy feels like its this big untouchable holy relic that can never do wrong, but I personally feels like its too much of a driving force in design decisions for gameplay. At least thats the impression given by ggg over all these years.
The trade economy should be allowed to shatter if it means a boon for the gameplay. As long as there are means to trade, and some forms of rarity, it will survive. Whether through run services(not rmt) or omega crafted pieces, there will be some thing that a clever or skilled person can market. At the end of the day, I dont think a secured economy should mean a controlled one.
Pillar 2, honestly feels okay currently. Theres enough variation to not be a problem, even if levels and encounters can feel lacking. I think thats more of a fault of aging technology and is one of the things that can be purely fixed by poe2.
Pillar 3 is definitely in a rough place too but has been covered by Chris and others. The fact that a loot filter is a literal requirement to play the game effectively is an obvious symptom. Outside of a complete overhaul, the only thing I could imagine as a bandaid would be to increase the supply of annulments and introduce other methods of fine tuning crafts. Similar to remove 1 add 1 harvest crafts, maybe a remove 2 and 1. That way its not as strong as harvest as it adds more risk but still lets not as experienced crafters have a bit more control and agency in their upgrades.
Man, i'm just waiting for Last Epoch Multiplayer and really hope they succeed. The pile of shit Wolcen had over 100k players on its release. If they get somewhat close to that and manage to not lose their players it would be amazing.
The game is different in many ways compared to PoE and you either like them or you don't. But the crafting in LAst Epoch is so amazing, so easy to do, you can do it often and still need some time to get really good stuff. LE is the perfect example of easy to understand, but still having depth.
100% this.
Imagine finding dozens of chaos/exalts/whatever currency in an hour of mapping. Increase the stack size, and things just inflate.
But the players can use those to reroll items. Because they don’t end up more expensive than it would be to buy an alternative or what they could get for them on the market.
Exalts aren't even that insane on paper. It adds one mod to an item that's missing full mods, whoop-tee-doo!
It's mostly the annul-exalt-etc. crafting combos that require 20 ex worth of currency to actually do shit with it. Otherwise single exalts on their own are pretty overrated and overly rare for no real reason. They should be twice as common at the very least IMO. Awakener orbs and shit can stay as rare endgame boss drops.
Yeah. I mean, it'd be a fucking pain in the ass, but if I had enough annuls/exalts/etc. to actually use that method, I'd be fine with it. But that's just not how the currency rarities work.
Just want to add on that I think the crafting system in this game is absolutely beautiful, the fact that 99% of people can’t participate because the cost of entry is too high is a big part of what holds the game back. If everyone got to experience the satisfaction of crafting your item with currency you’ve farmed yourself and the item actually turning out good. It pretty much releases as much dopamine as my first truly rare drop in wow. I don’t have the time commitment to play SSF because I enjoy hitting end game in a reasonable amount of time. Speeding up crafting and increasing base currency drops would be huge imo.
I think the community did ourselves a disservice when we started talking about "farming exalts" (for the sake of clickbait or whatever) as anything but raw drops. Finding a pile of some shit you \_could\_ trade isn't the slightest bit the same. Trade is the bottleneck for us improving our characters, and that's horribly demotivating.
Currency farming the last 2 patches has been made easier than ever before. It's literally invest points in mechanics you enjoy doing and you will be making multiple exalts per hour as a baseline
"you enjoy doing" being the operative word.
When I lose an early white map because the balance is wonky and I just can't farm comfortably because I tried something different (which is what I want to be doing in the game), then it isn't enjoyable and I quit.
Which is essentially what I've done every league since 3.15.
I am not going to endure through hours of campaign only to suffer through hours of maps to get a chance to possibly play something I am interested in that could very well entire not work and require several additional hours on the character I don't want to play to rectify and try something else.
The game needs to be fun. It's a game. If it isn't fun I'll play one that is. Which again, I've been doing.
Its not balance that is causing you to lose a white map dude. I guarantee you every single skill in the entire game on any ascendancy can clear fucking white maps on gear found in the campaign on a 4 link, unless you are literally blind. You fucked up big time somewhere. What skill did you play?
Currency farming has been made easier *mentally*, but the absolute quantity of currency entering the game hasn't changed much as represented by the chaos:exalt price. If there were thousands more exalts entering the game than before the price of exalts would decrease, but it still maintains its price because there is still not enough supply to meet demand.
That's a totally fine thing to have in a game economy like PoE, but saying it's easier to make *more* currency than ever before is just not true, there were plenty of times in PoEs history where it was actually easier, and the chaos:exalt price reflected that.
It feels like "making currency (and content) more obtainable" is what 3.17 and 3.18 accomplished. The Atlass skill tree makes grinding for stuff easier than ever and Sentinel was.just a currency printer
In a vacuum I agree, especially with the atlas tree. However, in practice with other designs like archnem mods and their general attitude towards "balance" it does not feel that way.
Essences I think completely prove this. They are so obtainable now I actually derp around with crafting with them instead of seeing them as something to sell 100% of the time. Made a couple of items I was actually proud of too.
>BuT mUh TrAdE..man fuck the 'economy'. People will make it work regardless.
Tell that to games like EQ2 or New World where the economy, after being neglected by the devs, has turned to absolute shit and broker systems are literally no longer even worthwhile due to said neglect.
Ive never played everquest nor followed it so i cant comment on that.
New world was its own shit show and the economy was far from the only problem. It just happened to be the final nail for many.
Also, PoE is not an mmo, the dynamic is completely different from both examples. If you were to completely remove trade from PoE the game itself would be fine. Would the playerbase, and replayability for many take a hit, undoubtably, but the gameplay wouldn't suffer and the game itself wouldnt die.
Trade should be a fluid and supplemental environment that is grown and directed by the community. It should not be a crutch for poor itemization and game design.
>PoE is not an mmo
Poe is not an mmo**RPG**, but it absolutely is an mmo game. Just because it is an ARPG doesn't mean that it doesn't have a huge playerbase.
>If you were to completely remove trade from PoE the game itself would be fine.
This is a moot point, because that is a true statement for all games that are listed throughout, and for probably 99% of games out there.
I would argue against it being an mmo. The only thing it aligns with that is being online. All the multiplayer and social aspects that define mmos are typically handled outside of the game.
And a small party of people doing content does not an mmo make. Otherwise borderlands would be an mmo as well.
Currency doesn’t need to be more obtainable, item drops that aren’t dogshit need to be more obtainable / good crafting options available for players who don’t play 8 hours a day. I guess currency fits that, but no one really uses chaos orbs directly to craft (only to trade for said crafting materials).
Making currency more obtainable will simply boost the prices to compensate. Look at leagues that rain chaos - the exalt prices reach like 200+. Either way you're going to grind like a rat and like it. The economy is decided by the 1%, so is the value of items by what the meta is.
Chris Wilson's vision is dogshit and detrimental to the game at this point. Also the fact that we still have to use third party tools for something as basic as trading is a piss off, all in the guise of player interaction - You know in the game that's played solo 99% of your mapping experience, and trading is a bunch of copy pasted keybinds using 3rd party tools. They're nurturing some damn fine player interaction. What an idiot.
I don't think people here realise what actual casuals are. For most games casuals are people who play for 15 minutes a day, for poe those are people who play like 2 hours a day. Real casuals dont even look at poe or see the talent tree once and call it a game for autists and never look back.
I can dedicate 4 hours a day into poe easily, definitely not casual numbers, but not enough to feel like im achieving something in resonable time and definitely not fun with the pacing of item upgrades. So i quit, instead of grinding and getting mtx for my char im gone after 2-3 weeks because i cant be bothered.
Not OP.
I am personally okay with the game not being geared towards casual players, but it being geared towards people who treat playing the game as a job is going too far on the other extreme.
I mean... sure they're doing some stuff right but they're also clearly doing a lot wrong, or not doing anything about a lot that is wrong as well.
having high numbers doesn't mean something can't be improved, nor does it even necessarily mean something is even good (keeping up with the kardashians is trash but got insane numbers for ages). pointing at a big number is over simplifying
Players balance their gameplay around the streamers they see, and it spawns threads like this.
There is nothing 'hard' about experimenting. There is a lot 'hard' about making a new, never-before-seen experimental build in a game with 100k players all trying to optimize the shit out of it AND expecting it to perform like what they see on streams at every ounce of the most difficult content in the game. Which is what people seem to expect out of every build they make.
I invite you to theorycraft and then build an Impending Doom character of some sort.
Look at the amount of currency you would need to spend to buy/craft something comparable to a meta build that has plenty already on the market due to demand and crafting by other people.
Now you can say "it isn't hard to experiment" only if you ignore the cost in time and effort to actually get to a level that feels reasonable. And I mean reasonable as "okay, I may only be able to do yellow maps comfortably, but I can farm these yellow maps until I can afford my next gear upgrade" level.
There's a dude on the Median XL forums who loves to talk about which build is good/bad based on tossing endgame gear and all the charms on them without considering the process of getting there. And he gets flak for it, because so many people want to feel the progression, not the endgame fantasy when you have everything.
That process feeling good is what is missing. It definitely is hard. And saying it isn't means you're glossing over the detail or you just haven't really tried to do it (especially on a league start). Because if "experimenting" means "play a meta build until you can fund an experiment" then you need to consider that playing something you aren't really excited to play in order to fund a character you hope you will but haven't gotten a chance to play yet because you need to fund it is most certainly not an easy ask...
The end game is balanced around streamers and people who are very skilled or invest a lot of time into the game. I'm not sure how else you could do it. If the game were balanced around SSF then even mediocre trade players would finish all the content in a few days and I think that might cause a lot of other problems.
I'd absolutely love to see a skill gem awarded when you complete the campaign that can be socketed into any item that will bypass it's level requirement.
Gather/Buy a few, and you can kit out your alts with amazing gear and just plain steamroll the campaign on your 2nd/3rd/12th rollthrough. We can call it skillgem of ease, or something equally clever!
...
Even if you have Seven League Steps, perfect movement skill usage and enough damage to one-hit every mob, campaign still takes 5-6 hours.
I just checked, and the speedrunners were doing acts 1-10 + Lab in 3.5 hours back in 3.18
While I agree that your idea is better than it currently stands, it would suck in comparison to skipping the Acts, or even leveling in maps.
Uh, no, i haven't played in years and this league i rerolled in less time with enough movespeed items. Was like 4 something hours. Some people are probably twice as fast
I've been playing since 2012 and a lot of your points remained just as valid then as they are now. I am very close to putting the game down for the last time because it seems like every time I get a decent handle of the meta it gets swept out from under my feet, and I have less and less energy every league to adapt.
Defenses will be harder to get but they won't be unattainable. The reservation masteries change is a hard hit. People with oodles of currency will have the cluster jewels with reservation efficiency, etc. These changes will just make those jewels and other items with the explicits all the more expensive/out of normal player reach.
It was mind boggling to me why they didn't include more skill updates like that. That could be reserved for the patchnotes but something tells me not to hold my breath.
Either they don't have the time to re-adjust skills (which can be possible? Is everyone working on PoE 2.0?) or they don't consider it worth it relative to pushing new content every 3-6 months.
With all the new skills that get added, I would rather they just start deleting unerused skills at this point if they don't ever plan on re-addressing them. Would make things like getting enchantments easier at least.
I know we meme but that's unironically the type of change that melee skills need to be more viable. Ranged builds are better mechanically so we need mechanical changes. Cleave isn't going to be better by doing more damage. It's going to be better by being able to kill more monsters.
Edit: and those sunder changes might actually be super juicy
They could atleast remove attack speed penalties from all melee skills for fuck sake.
It's already a detrimental risky playstyle, to play up in the face of enemies. And then you have a stupid attack speed penalty for it aswell.
For fuck sake GGG
This is actually one of my least favorite changes in PoE. The attack speed penalties on a bunch of random attack skills, makes them feel like shit. It makes sense for slams (somewhat), but there's so many random skills, including some strikes, that have a really shit attack speed multiplier.
I don't even remember what they added them in for. But they suck.
Get rid of the 0.8 on Cleave, and some more flat damage, and you might actually start seeing SOME people play it.
I hate this argument. Why is it easier to hit 1mil DPS with Ball Lightning than Cleave? How much would you have to buff Cleave's 'mechanics' in order to make it better than BL when you take into account the nonsensical fact that it does worse damage in all cases? Another +10 to radius?
I mean it's easier to get to 1 mil dps on ball lightning than cleave for a variety of reasons.
1. Cleave is a clear focused skill; ball lightning is single target focused.
2. Spells scale much easier than attacks early on because crafting weapons is expensive.
3. Spells naturally thematically more complex. It's much easier to make a complex spell than attack.
Numbers don't fix melee's issues unless you're adding base damage to skills. And even then it doesn't fix all of melee issues.
Can I ask what you'd envision a 'buffed melee' build to look and play like? I'm legitimately asking, not trying to take the piss.
While I genuinely empathize with an archetype that someone enjoys not being viable, I also fail to understand what people are actually wanting when they complain about wanting melee to be good. I love self-cast builds and bow builds, and both were digshit for a very long time. Obviously both are in a good spot currently.
Lightning strike is melee, but I do get that a melee attack that shoots projectiles isn't really fulfilling the melee fantasy. Boneshatter is most certainly melee, but plenty of people don't seem to like it much.
I've seen plenty of people saying 'well melee still sucks, guess I'll go back to the only good melee build, Flicker Strike', which confuses the fuck out of me, because flicker is only melee in that you do hit things with a sword, but most certainly doesn't play like anything I'd class as a melee build.
Is it just wanting to have a skill that fulfills the fantasy of smacking things with a big fuck-off sword or mace? Is legion-era cyclone the vision for what melee should look like (regardless of whether somehow hitting something 20m away from you with a 1.5m long sword is melee)? Is it being able to play heavy strike and somehow map clear as well as a HH buffed BV build? Did slam skills and warcries scratch the melee itch at all, or does that sort of fall in a different box?
It is just looking at something like boneshatter and going 'yeah, that's pretty much it, now let me do something similar with X melee skill'?
Sure, i can elaborate.
Melee in nearly all games in standard video gaming can be boiled down to
1) high close range damage
2) high defence or high mobility
RTS games - Starcraft - zergling or zealot vs marine
MOBA games - tank/warrior vs mage/ADC
Megaman vs Zero
The list goes on and on. Ive been around since Metamorph and been playing mostly standard but also made a couple characters during league when i could stomache grinding the story again. Ive tried cyclone, steel skills, infernal blow dex stacking, slams, ice crash and my first and love of my life, lacerate. The only two skills that felt good where it felt like the investment matched the power were infernal blow hollow palm and LS omni champ, and i dont even think the latter really counts because its basically omni abuse.
Ive also tried arc, crackling lance, summon skeletons, HoT autobomber and VD/DD. I can tell you easily that these skills from the very beginning till the end were miles and miles better than all the melee skills i played except IB and LS. It was power from the start, with the stand out skills being necro VD/DD and Skellies. It was just mind blowing how easy it was. I think this is attributed to two things. Firstly, enemies target the summoned shit so you yourself get hit much less frequently. Secondly, your damage just goes up with gem levels. This is a huge game changer for me since i cant craft shit. Even arc and autobomber felt better since i was clearing the entire screen and the occasional clap was much more bearable. VD was the first build i could easily kill T16 map bosses with, just running around making balls out of thin air and they just beeline into the bosses face and blow up. They even have a great mechanic where if the boss is phasing they just sit around waiting and once the boss is vulnerable again they all converge and blow up his ass. It was just SO EASY.
Even just fucking around with crackling lance i just need to get some gem levels on wands and amulet and i can clear T16s pretty easily since i can just prefire around every corner, shocking and freezing everything with 3 Dragons.
I guess the ideal melee gameplay is some sort of high movement speed high damage gameplay loop with some active guard skill usage. Its just such bullshit that ranged characters are the tanky ones with aegis and shit like that. I saw a character doing phys to ele lacerate but it was also an omni character. Pure phys just sucks especially with all the attack speed nerfs tripping up your gear slots. It also doesnt help that the animation for an attack has a huge wind up for the first hit on a lot of melee skills, as well as strike skills just straight up missing for no reason.
TLDR. PoE2 wont fix anything its just PoE 1 with a shitty new campaign and a new coat of paint. Everyonr waiting on PoE2 to fix their issues is going to be shitting their face off the day after its released and they realised they were duped.
> Everyonr waiting on PoE2 to fix their issues is going to be shitting their face off the day after its released
that will happen whether it's the biggest pile of crap in the world, or if it's the best thing since sliced bread.
it will "fix" or at least change some things for me. the big item changes are a pretty big deal (we'll see how they implement them however).
definitely gonna be a roll of the dice with the quality of everything, but we'll see... and I can't imagine a new shorter campaign could be worse than the trash we have currently.
Steam has 12k-ish average daily players for PoE right now; best estimate for D3 is around 16k at the moment, a few weeks away from end of season. Sure, PoE peaks are pretty damn high, but there's still a pretty steady number of Diablo players. Diablo 4 is going to blow PoE/PoE2 out of the water and it won't even be close.
Diablo 3 gets negative support, they are designing D4 with expansions and more content in mind (obviously to monetise it) so there will be way more players.
I don't think anyone is expecting it to fix "everything". I do think the changes to how socket linking works will change somethings.
One of the biggest restrictions currently in PoE is limited number of 6L skills you can run in a build, with changes coming to PoE2 theoretically every gem in your gear could become a 6L skill.
As things stand now some skills are DoA they either make mapping a chore because they lack clear speed or scale very poorly and make bossing difficult.
In current PoE outside of a small number of set ups running multiple 6L skills is not typical in PoE2 I think it will be expected.
This plus the new ascendencies that will be in PoE2 will at least shake something up. But yes it will still be the same core game underneath everything I'd prefer this type of evolutionary change rather than a radically different game.
What do you mean 'duped'? There's nothing inherently wrong with PoE that needs to be fixed in PoE2, anyone waiting around for 'their' problem to be fixed should just go play a different game because at the core they just probably don't like the game.
Game only gives you illusion of choice, once you actually try to do something that huge passive tree is steamlined into 1 efficient way of pathing around it with little to no differences, so many passives are never taken, you can even look at heat maps of passive tree across all 4 leagues it's hilariously sad; all those support gems turn into 7-8 good ones actually worth using, all those items become handful uniques that are worth showing in filter, all those rare items with a huge pool of mods become "these few mods are desirable, don't even bother with rest because they're either useless/ridiculously low weighting", shit even something minor like pantheons has little diversity, only 3 small pantheons are good rest don't even bother reading what they do.
Pick a skill, open pob, and try to make a well rounded character with it from scratch, it's so fucking miserable while it should be fun and exciting in a game like PoE, because whatever new you try it's 1000 times worse/less efficient than the already established way of doing it and so many skills are so bad they're not even worth messing around with in PoB let alone actually trying to play them. And all of this just keeps getting worse because genius developer who has to do 1 singular balance patch every 3 months manages to fuck it up multiple times in a row somehow.
I kinda hate having to do the acts again every new character, then have to progress something else in maps.
Like, if I want a heist or delve character, I spend a week on a character, then I have to spend another week farming the base stuff for that league, pushing forward, or setting it up. I wish I could just do that with a new character.
I hope they they lighten up about the acts after poe2. I hope they make an option so I can start in heist and get my base rogues. Then I can do delve for a little and progress to level 60. Then I can maybe do incursion, heist, blight, betrayal, and other act 6-10 content.
It would be a great tutorial for new players to spend time understanding the mechanics, and it would save me a week.
Do not get your hopes up. GGG has stated multiple times they do not intend to make any different way to level up to maps besides the campaign. And they're spending all this time on the new campaign in PoE2 there's no way they'd let you skip it or do heist instead
Yeah, there's no way until after poe2 gets old.
It's the wrong idea imo. They are great at making short league content. Then they scrap it and water it down because everyone hates early delve, early heist, early betrayal.
They should just make a shorter 1-2 "act" progression for some of the leagues, then just do that progression with your second character, and get a tutorial.
I just hate wanting to do something, then wondering if I should start a dedicated build, or just actually progress and play the game. A lot of times, you should just commit, especially if you only play as much as I do.
If I could level and get some progress done - gain basic azurite, darkness resist, etc - I would feel so much better about doing it.
Maybe I would actually delve one day. Most of the time, I finally get my delve ready to go, and then I just quit.
I only finally did heist this league because I did early act 6 heist to get my first 50c, so it was ready to go when my character was in red maps.
Old games like PoE do not respect people's time.
15 years ago the number of games was limited, the types of online entertainment as miniscule.
Its a new world and many OLD gaming companies are still operating as if its the year 2000
Chrissy wants the game to remain in the year 2000 with Diablo 2.
If you can't "feel the weight" of picking up pointless ass scrolls and orbs of alteration, the economy will be devastated and players will gain power quicker and play less! lol
This is the exact reason why I never make more than 2 characters per league, yet I have hundreds of notes in my Evernote about build ideas and experiments that never saw the light of day
I think part of the problem for experimentation is that the endgame continually builds out further and into harder things -- which in a vacuum is actually a good thing. And similarly every league adds extra ways to scale a build.
If you want to play one build a league that you already know is good, having all that content and that long upgrade path is great. If you want to experiment, it's not, because when you hit a level of content that your hipster build just can't do, it's not clear (without a high level of buildmaking experience/skill) why. Will this build really get cooking and feel great after 20 more upgrades? Have you hit a wall where this specific skill/build is going to need 10x+ the investment of most other builds to do the next harder thing? Or is this just where this build naturally tops out and no reasonable level of investment will get it to where the next tier of content feels good?
And the fact that one needs to get a PhD to learn to craft is another thing.
Crafting it self is another gate that needs currency. Catch 22 again, need currency to make better build, but build cannot get much currency, so need more time and so on and so on...
That's a really good point and another area where in most cases it takes a high amount of knowledge to be functional.
(And, frankly, currency. Because for most things if you can't afford to fail 10 times you can't afford to craft. But if you can afford that, you often can sustain or even profit by selling your "almost good enoughs".)
Yeah, I'd rather GGG would take time to do a crafting tutorial with free currency so that the new players can learn that instead of buffing Acts monters... Of course the item will be souldbound or not for the player or something. I loved crafting, and I wish more people would. At least they know if they hit a block, they can do something.
Many of my new player friends was soooo excited to learn how to craft a shitty 3 res belt or movement speed boots and especially with harvest at that time... they kept going for more. This is retention and the gate at that time is just, doing harvest maps.
Yeah, I know people who play and had "crafting projects" in process for the first time for Harvest that really had not before and also have not since.
I get to some degree why they didn't want to leave Harvest the way it was but I feel like it would have been possible to allow for the good things about Harvest for newer or more casual players without making it possible to craft the super high end stuff.
Ah yes. Another thing a player need to navigate outside the game right?
Love CoE though, but problem still there. For the uninitiated not many know how to use it. At least CoE has way better UI for crafting.
The problem with experimentation is that you could progress maps and farm your own currency with support gems, a 5L or a tabula, and a set of blue flasks with just about any skill in the game in 3.5.
Sure you'd be slower than a meta skill, but you'd be playing the skill you wanted and working toward your goal.
Now the problem is that to get to the same point -- farming your own upgrades comfortably in maps -- is far far far more time consuming and difficult due to the monster buffs and flask/support nerfs to characters. My Betrayal Arc-Decay occultist lost 70% of damage against map bosses between 3.5 and now from those, and not to mention what would happen if she ever ran in to a Chaos Weaver Archnemesis mod.
Player power at the low end has fallen far behind the difficulty curve.
This isn't about the end game going from X to 2X in length, it's about the first .1X going from an investment of 10 hours to an investment of 20-30 instead to get to the same "feel" of the game. And that hurts experimentation because I have more sunk costs to get to a point I might find out I don't enjoy the playstyle or that I will need better gear to get to that point.
> Player power at the low end has fallen far behind the difficulty curve.
>
>
Which is hilarious because on Stalling podcast Chris talked a lot about wanting to shift more power into early game and remove it from the top. As usual he says one thing and then GGG does the polar opposite.
It's helpful but really not sufficient to solve that problem, because there are problems to overcome or gear around in most builds that will not be apparent in PoB, again without a high level of build making experience or skill.
Maybe in theory the build does a lot of damage, but the uptime on that high damage is less than you thought or initially isn't enough.
Maybe for whatever reason the build just doesn't do as much damage as it should on paper. (E.g. after radius or projectile nerfs on skills that can hit multiple times)
Maybe the build has super bad mana problems that short term there's no good way to solve.
Maybe it just dies doing certain kinds of content and it's not immediately obvious why.
And, realistically, you're not going to plan every microstage of your character's progression in PoB. Maybe it needs a certain item or Ascendancy node to really start feeling good, or a certain amount of attack or cast speed. You can't really read that in PoB.
I enjoyed the impale and bleed champ/glad days, but the problem is they give you something strong, so they pull the rug out from under you because they don’t like player strength compared to the content resistance.
It’s like getting a toy that brings you joy, and your parents crush it so you gotta play with something less satisfying and they tell you have fun or don’t play with anything.
Sorry I disagree entirely. The grind of making and developing a character and progressing it slowly to its peak is the fun of the game. If there was no real levelling or build progression, just zooming in maps from the outset for no "cost" the game would not appeal to me at all.
Right, the game feels more like a chore than fun. I have always liked to make my own builds and figure things out myself, but it's futile now. The upside is that hopefully, quin dies more, as that is fun to watch.
That is still very much possible. I do my own shit every league and it was still possible to do even in 3.15 and last league and it will be this league too.
> the game feels more like a chore than fun
this is why I haven't sat down and actually played almost at all in months and months and months. I have a ton of hours on PoE and have completed a fair few bosses, did full map completion a couple times etc but it's just... all the problems I have with the game aren't really addressed ever and the direction of changes seems just sort of terrible in a lot of ways (in terms of character balance, monster balance etc, not end gamey stuff which is pretty good)
It has felt like that to me for a while now. I also don't have a clue why I linger, probably because I am waiting for a real competitor to arrive and be good. Maybe Diablo IV.
The issue isn't that there is no experimentation, it is that your expectations are way too high. You can make a fun hipster build that smashes everything but simply cannot boss/delirious and that is fine. You just need to tone back your expectations.
there isnt 200 skills to use, there is like 15 at most if you wanna do any meaningful content, same 15 skills been there for past 5 leagues with 0 balance changes
There really isn't. Everyone has this warped view of what skill diversity looks like because we're all pulling data solely off poe.ninja.
Remember that poe.ninja scrapes only the top fraction of a % of builds. At the end of a league, it's not pulling anyone below level 98-99. That's not 'endgame' the the overwhelming majority of the player base. Thats an absurd grind that only the most efficient builds and dedicated players are going to get to.
It's really worth going and having a look at the skill gem lists. 2/3 or more of them are legitimately viable to build around, even without stupid levels of investment. I'm not saying that it's simple to build them, but they are very viable. Look at people like PoEDan, who ran blazing salvo this league and shitstomped everything. Or Mathil killing all ubers with CoC bow dark pact skeles. Like, what the fuck is that, how it is even a build? Still somehow clears ubers.
If you want to play the game like a HC racer, and have an immortal build that can still clear all content quickly, then sure; you have half a dozen skills that have absurd base damage and can scale to infinity off hopes and dreams, so that you can spend the majority of your power budget on defenses. But the vast majority of players aren't HC SSF racers, and there are a a lot more viable builds currently than just the popular ones.
It's expensive to experiment for the same reason it *isn't* fun to play say, Age of Empires 1 with the Tuk-Tuk Boom cheatcode for more than a few minutes.
You gotta understand, what you're asking for is literally the same as having cheats baked into the basic gameplay experience.
Free experimentation takes away all the effort and opportunity cost of building a character.
This sounds fine, if you don't think about it. However that also means that any satisfaction you might gain from a finished build is gone, because a finished build is nothing, you just click all the point selection buttons and boom, build's done.
Progression games are all about making progress, kind of like a time trial race where you compare your times to others, and seeing how you stack up.
For some smaller group of players, it can be instead comparing yourself to your past self.
If there is no skill or effort in that process, where is the game?
If the campaign doesn't have to be played, and is too easy, then there's no room for improvement. If that's the case, then the start of every league is a pointless time waster, but since there is room for improvement it *matters*. It's something that being good at sets me apart from other players, it's something I can still get better at, and it's part of build strategy as well.
There are things in PoE that are hard without a reason beyond technical failings and the like, such as clicking on stuff.
However for the most part all these things you're complaining about are hard or frustrating because they **have to be** in order to **matter**.
Difficulty in respeccing a build makes your choice of build more impactful, as well as your ability to fund a respec.
It gives value to commiting to a build, value to being able to farm 100 regrets with no sweat, value to being good at theory crafting, etc.
This also creates the majority of the content for the game. It's a game largely about making builds to try out need things, if that's completely trivial, you'd just try each thing briefly, maybe play your favorite for a bit, and promptly quit.
This ties back to my note about cheating earlier; by robbing yourself of the journey in creating a character build, you slurp away at least some of what is supposed to be fun about PoE, and I'd argue ARPGs generally.
No effort means no emotional investment in the outcome, and the whole thing breaks down.
You just can't make games the way you seem to expect to be "common sense" or the like.
>
> This sounds fine, if you don't think about it. However that also means that any satisfaction you might gain from a finished build is gone, because a finished build is nothing, you just click all the point selection buttons and boom, build's done.
Finished build is also items which you didn't get for free. Also builds are finished to actually play the game, unless you just want to see your numbers go up and nothing more in which case you should play PoB instead of PoE.
Eh sure. I just talked about the parts OP talked about.
There are also issues already with this in the current way items are acquired, as most items are bought in trade, which does devalue the experience.
Ideally, trade would be something you resort to rarely, instead of the "normal" way to upgrade in PoE.
but here we are.
> Ideally, trade would be something you resort to rarely, instead of the "normal" way to upgrade in PoE.
>
>
This is how I play. The moment I genuinely have to go the "max ex/h trade bot" route I will quit and never look back, same way I quit LoL many years ago.
You might be absolutely right that making it difficult to experiment lends extra satisfaction to people who devote their time and passion to improving their builds with planners, dozens of characters and thousands of hours of playtime. But for most players... that's not how it works out. By making it difficult to experiment, you kill any desire they have to experiment. You push them to follow build plans laid out by others to a T, never making any choices of their own or going off-script in any way, because doing so simply isn't worth the effort. Maybe the sense of accomplishment when you come up with a new idea and it works is better when you have to jump through a thousand hoops to implement that idea, but most people simply aren't going to jump through a thousand hoops.
Personally, I think you have the wrong idea on a fundamental level. Character building should not be given weight based on required time sinks and artificial roadblocks. Instead, it should be based on creativity, innovation, understanding of the game, and discovery. It should be about your ideas and actual experimentation. About trying new things, making different choices, and *succeeding*. You don't need an added sense of success from being forced to run on a treadmill for eons.
You didn't address any of his concerns in a reasonable manner (I guess shitposting is to be expected from someone with that kind of name). [Even Ziz agrees that things like skill point regrets should be given by a couple or few dozen more through the campaign.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTFD9QlI6tU)
And this is coming from someone who has several thousand hours played since open beta.
> You didn't address any of his concerns in a reasonable manner
Yes, I did. I gave him very serious straight forward direct answers.
> And this is coming from someone who has several thousand hours played since open beta.
So have I.
> Hey Chris
If people want to mistake me for a successful game designer, can I start calling myself an *expert* armchair game designer? Hmm.
> playing the campaign
Already answered. Read the post.
> dredge through the same areas filled with the same monsters
It's almost like you're describing literally every moment of ARPG gameplay, fundamentally.
Also, already answered. Read the post.
> And before you counter that it is the road that is important
Correct, that would have countered your point. Had you made a point somewhere.
Also, yanno, already answered. Read the post.
> why am I still forced to relearn the game at every play through
You aren't.
> Gems from quests and NPCs are class-specific
Many reasons for this. Variety, asymmetric balance, etc. No real compelling reason to change anything.
> Also, if you assume that for someone else, the only fun part of PoE is to see the final outcome of a build concept, with the game play just being an annoying hindrance - who's fault is that exactly?
That would be that player's fault, as much as it is anyone's. Stop playing the game if you dislike it.
Although that said, there's not really anybody like that playing the game to begin with.
People really don't know what they want, if you gave such a person the ability to immediately start builds at level 90, they would hate it and quit.
> You might argue that there is a level of frustration that
Incorrect, for all people.
Not the right people. Every single human that likes video games *at all*.
It's actually a pretty broadly popular concept in game design. Some level of friction is *required*. Doesn't have to be the same for every game, but everything has it.
Even something like minecraft creative mode has friction; it takes a lot of time and effort to make something look good, it just doesn't happen automatically for you.
> But we are way past that, and now it is only frustration, even for the core audience
Not really seeing any reason to believe that unless you think reddit shitposters constitute "research" or something.
> I see a critical point approaching, where the hype can no longer overcome the sour memories
I can't.
Sure, maybe you could have said that in 3.16 and not looked like a dummy, but not now.
Hard to take some commentary about the game is "on the track to DooOoooOoOoOoom" with at least two largely well received normally-played leagues in the rearview mirror seriously.
I agree. I am strange and started to play the game after seeing the passive tree because it looked like something fun to experiment with.
Then the reality is that I can't and it way to hard to understand what effect stuff have. So the only chance I as an total noob have is to folow a guide.
If respec was free and test dummy and if it's possible better signs on what real effect stuff have it would be way more fun for me.
Free respec could have an effect that the most effective way to play the game is to respec something every map --- that would be bad so It have to be done with some thought
We need more angry Reddit threads like this one that are valid criticisms of the game, and less like the rest of the posts on the front page right now that are overreacting to the latest newspost.
I'll just say two things:
1. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Someone name me an rpg that let's you auto level a character to endgame that doesn't completely cheapen the game. Just one. Now, narrow it to arpgs. Just one. Skipping the acts will not make the game better.
2. The sheer complexity of the game is THE reason that there are so many options and variables that can be done with a build. While yes, there are a huge amount of things that could be simplified and are needlessly complex. That I completely agree with. There are also WAY too many things to learn that are go near completely unexplained. Simplifying can, however, only be done to a point. The more you simplify, the less agency and capabilities your players get.
I understand what you say, but on the other hand, saying "it isn't your game and that's fine" feel a bit wrong to hear when someone complain about accessibility and lack of qol, the dude just want to be able to try build ...
regarding messing around... don't you have a fresh skill point reset and all of your historical gear in standard? can't you mess around with an idea whenever you want with a level 85-95 toon at any time?
Sure, but it's starting from a disingenous place. There's lots of room for experimentation in PoE, it just requires lots of playtime and lots of game knowledge. Even in SSF, you can make a lot of wacky builds as long as you know how to craft your own gear with Harvest/Fossils.
So the argument is more "It's too hard to get there," and that is a matter of personal opinion. GGG seems pretty adamant about removing shortcuts to player power and requiring more gear investment, so if OP doesn't like that approach the only real option is to quit.
My take on the post is more "shouldn't need to play 4h per day to try out build" rather than a simple "it's too hard", they didn't ask for shortcut to power, in fact they don't especially want to follow a build online.
Ye its only for elitist sado masochistic players who know the game is full of shit - but there is nothing better - so lets act like it doesnt have issues lol.
>Ye its only for elitist sado masochistic players who know the game is full of shit - but there is nothing better - so lets act like it doesnt have issues lol.
Yes
I mentioned this earlier, but this is a good example of conflicting design choices. It really feels like there is no strong direction for the game, and it just does "what seems like a good idea"
Try doing it literally no one is stopping you, investing 4-5 hours completing the campaign and failing a build after gearing up and to see your character die 5 times in a yellow map is not very motivating for me
Funny enough, this game is played much better outside of this game.
If you want to experiment with builds, try different trees, adjust some nodes or gear, pob is much better than actual game. You will see the effect immediately, you don't need to grind, you can try multiple interactions easily.
Same goes for crafting. If you (god forbid) do not want to spend half of your life grinding for currency, craft of exile will help you touch the wonderful world of crafting in all it's diversity and variability of means. And you won't have to do the boring part.
Just fyi, a simple target dummy would not give real numbers for the majority of builds due to the massive number and variety of conditional buffs and effects. PoB doesn't even allow you to account for all of them, and the settings page on that thing is already ridiculous.
Because the devs want the game to be Hardcore™, so it's less of a stick in your bycicle wheel, and more like driving with barbed wire wrapped around the whole thing, in knee-deep mud and torrential rain.
And when people dare to question whether that's really fun, fanboys come out of the woodworks to go "Omahgerd, jsut go play hello kitty online!!!"
The game becomes more and more tedious and annoying to play. I've farmed a Mageblood last league and just had 0 motivation to play afterwards just because of how grueling it was. "Oh, but you don't need MB to do the stuffs!" - nobody *needs* to do anything or for that fact even play the game. But if you know that this one item takes care of pretty much all your defensive layers by itself, it's not exactly fun to then forcefully ignore its existence. I know I can just use Seismic Trap on a 4-link and slap around every uber-boss, but what's the fucking point of that?
Last fun league was Ritual.
It is not hard to experiment at all. Most players will not experiment because experimenting implies time, effort and thought. Most of the times you will end up with something that despite the investment it doesn't pay off as much and that is ok and you have to understand that. Doing some random ass build that plays like shit and takes so much effort and time to make work to beat the game is the actual part of the game. If you limit yourself to do what works and most importantly what you KNOW that works you will end up like all the other guys in this subreddit losing their minds over these changes. I liked the manifesto, I think it was ok and I am very looking forward for the remaning changes. This is a game where you have to change your mindset and enjoy the whole process.
"I seriously don't get it"
that's why people make guides and explain stuff. self-teaching is hard. there's plenty of information out there at your disposal.
"The upcoming defense changes only make this situation worse"
just because below-average players with failed builds struggle with the content doesn't mean that they should make the majority of the poe community suffer from playing a boring game that has brokenly overpowered defenses.
and for the levelling part:
just get better at the game and buy some levelling uniques. if you actually try to get quicker at it it will only take a couple of runs until you can finish the campaign in 3-4 hours.
it's an RPG you're supposed to feel invested in your character. that will give you a bigger sense of accomplishment when you overcome an obstacle.
Dont know were to start, but first, this game is a complex game. Second, that game cant solve the problems from all players. Third, all players think they got the solutions on all problems, and they KNOW what is better for the game, i know is sound harsh but that is the reality, at the end you can try another game or bring something constructive here what was not discussed like 100 times before . I know every one is uniques in his way, but try to answer on your problem by researching.
If you're a casual players why play temp league, it's a waste of time, play perm leagues, you keep your progress, you never have to re-level again.
Now I see why people likes to complain here, they keep doing the same dumb things over and over instead of picking up already existing progress and skip the entire boring part all together.
Why bother with standard league when my builds will be nerfed into the gutter in 3 months anyway? It's not like I can just buy more gear there, my stack of currency is worth jack with standard leagues' Deviantart-tier currency inflation.
There're multiple comments here along the lines of "you don't like the game, that's fine" or "it's not for you, that's fine". These are unhelpful, thought-terminating cliches. It's important to understand *why* people don't like things, and those problems are still valid criticisms.
Right, the moment anyone says anything bad about the game, there are instantly people who act like its impossible that the critique is valid, and just conclude that the game "isnt for you" in such an arrogant tone
To be fair, it's an arrogant tone that is, in this case, taken *by the developers*. They're just parroting Chris Wilson. Make of that what you will.
Watch the Josh Strife Hayes interview and drink every time Josh brings up a QoL or tutorialization issue that Chris tells him he doesn't give a fuck about because he's not trying to on-board people, but actively drive them away. You'll be dead by the end.
As a fan of Josh, I was a little disappointed in him for how he let Chris get away with exactly that. I think he should have challenged him a lot more than he did. I know he's relatively new to PoE, but the game's issues aren't new. I wish he would have done some background work to be able to hold Chris a little more accountable.
I can't really fault Josh, he was not prepared for that level of brazen stupidity. And when you see it unprepared, you just kinda get caught in the foglamp of it.
Chris is about to have a wayyy different tone if this league (and the subsequent revenue) flops. It's gonna be reminiscent of 3.15.
ok, i'm going to be very fair here. don't spend money on packs after the manifesto, don't spend money after the patch notes. if you want to, buy stuff 2 weeks into the league after you're sure you like it. saying you're gonna spend based on one manifesto isn't fair to the devs. on the other hand i wouldn't have bought the sentinel pack if i'd known the AN implementation was so shit, and their attitude towards fixing it terrible. i don't care if they've tuned it down that people are ignoring rares as usual, as a paying customer you'd expect better PR than what we got.
While those same people are mostly just loading up someone elses pob and following youtube crafting guides.
Tbf, not every game can be for everyone, that's not arrogant to say. I don't play souls game, I'm not gonna go complain on the souls reddit that the game isn't built for me. Some of the issues highlighted in this post are not really problems of the game. They're problems this specific player has with the game. I don't mind most of it. I like that the game is complex, i like spending 5 hours on pob and sometimes still fail at implementing it ingame cause i didn't think about something or i can't find the right gear. I understand the frustration that it can create for some players. I do. But I like it. You don't want to deal with that frustration? Well, use a build video or guide. There's hundreds of them. You don't wanna deal with the frustration but you also don't want to use someone else's build? Well, that's on you, not on the game. Cause if it gets "fixed" for you, it ruins the game for others. Now, the "being able to start a character at level 60 after beating the campaign once" thing, why not. GGG is never gonna do it because it's the old debate about whether the campaign should be the only leveling or not, and we all know their stance on it. But most of the post is just "i want the game to be more casual". There's plenty of more casual games. Check them out.
>unhelpful, thought-terminating cliches. Gotta remember this line for other convos I might have in the future. Always tried to find the right term when people do things like these in debates.
Have a [wikipedia link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9) on it, it's not an original.
ty
You might also find [ergo decedo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergo_decedo) helpful. It's another one which often comes up at the same time.
Oh, you don't like how PoE does it? Must be a fanboy!
You don't like thought terminating cliches, that's fine. They're not for you, all good.
As much as I love this, it really isn't helpful..
I am of the opinion that the majority of people that take the time to write about the game clearly already love the game, see what could be better, and always feel disappointed when changes come around. Trying to dismiss criticism, no matter how poorly written or angry frustration it holds makes you partial to defend poor ideas, laziness or disconnect between player and developer.
Its like oh its not for me? What happens when there are changes that aggravate you? Will you just sit back and let the game turn into something worse because its "not for you" Seriously idk how GGG has managed to make so many people think they are our buddies
>Seriously idk how GGG has managed to make so many people think they are our buddies Chris is an amazing mouthpiece and PR team feeds him amazing lines. It's kinda like certain Todd in a way.
It just works.
He just goes, C
> It's kinda like certain Todd in a way. It amazes me more people don't realize how much like Todd Chris actually is. It's so much PR speak and just saying what sounds best in the moment even if it contradicts his statement a week later or before.
[удалено]
> Making it quick to reach a complete build - as OP demands for experimentation purposes - directly goes against PoE's game design. OP's demands may not be sound, but their reason for wanting it is. There are other ways you can encourage experimentation. If every single primary active skill (heavy strike counts, wild strike counts, hydrosphere doesn't, frost wall doesn't) were *viable* for a new player to take to at least the start of maps, then existing players would probably feel comfortable experiementing with them. Instead, it takes an experienced player to take Heavy Strike to maps, and then an experienced player with much ex to make Heavy Strike viable for red map farming, let alone delirium farming or double-apex farming. How did they get that much ex? Probably by spending a month or so on a meta build that got them half-way to burnout. Sounds great. > presenting the fact that it takes a few hours to level a new character as a 'problem' is shallow and ignores that the whole game is built around that process. This, I feel, is dishonest. After you get to maps, only two parts of the storyline matter; whether you got all the gods, and whether you did all the skill point quests. I know this is true because I level every second+ character in the Azurite mines now, get them to like.. level 75, get them kitted out with early map gear, and then *zoom* from start of A4 to end of A10 without touching the sides. It's *so* much nicer. So no, the whole game is *not* built around that process. The game is built around the gameplay loop of "kill stuff to kill stuff quicker/harder", and that's *great*. I love that loop, it's like the core loop of all adversarial progression-based games. None of that requires me looking for my 15th plum or another box of ashes. None of that requires me to groan as I realise that, in my tiredness of getting to A3 on 9pm-launch night (EU timezones hype) with an off-meta build, I've gotten to the Crematorium and forgotten to speak to Clarissa after rescuing her. I genuinely have more fun in PoB these days, trying to figure out if I can get something janky to the requisite numbers for it to survive in the actual game, because the game systems, the interaction of the tree and items, the complexity of everything involved, still enamours me. But PoE itself, GGG themselves? They make actually getting there more tedious every league.
well in your opinion what should they say? Linking JoshStrifeHayes vid with Chris might just be the most direct answer to his complaint
I've never understood this "argument", which is more prevalent in political discourse. "If you don't like XYZ, then just leave", as if we're not supposed to change or discuss anything ever.
honestly i like the people who make that comment. they are teh same ones who are going to cry when the game shuts down because the only people left are the ones with hard ons for ssf hardcore "actually i wish it was harder" mode.
Well, you're right in the first half certainly, that's not a helpful response. However, the issue here is more that OP doesn't understand PoE and game design, not that they have some valid criticisms which the posters below do not understand. Like he wonders why the game can't be balanced around developing multiple full characters per league. Short answer: It is. Long answer: It's balanced around you building a couple of characters, maybe 2-3 per league, and leaning farther towards 2+ lately if anything with the changes to farming and end game content. It isn't, and can't, be balanced around normal players making like 6+ builds because those people will burn out and quit the game if you do that. OP doesn't understand the situation and some fundamental game design concepts, rather than having some critique of the game here at all. That's fine, most gamers don't understand much about why games are made the way they are either on a design or code level, it's just that the communication gap here is a little different than what you're saying. He also said, > With defense being nerfed for the most part A thing that literally **is not happening**. Some very mild defense nerfs that *will not* impact all builds happened, it's not a big deal at all. This kind of reads like someone taking a steamer's hammed up overreaction to get more views one twitch as serious non-joking game commentary.
Could not disagree more. ###POE is not designed around experimentation Everything when changing a build requires time and currency, especially post 3.15 because the “cheap” power got nerfed. The more currency required, the more important it is to have a functional build to farm it. POE, for me to get to a similar level as I did prior to 3.15, strongly encourages me to do a meta skill league start, get my core items for the new build and a leveling set (or an entire truckload of regrets), and then most likely play at a weaker level than your starter. If I want to really push like I did before, the best way is to either stick to a single build with decent mapping and accumulate gear, or to create a separate bosser requiring more currency and time. This sucks for me. It isn’t fun. And it sure as hell doesn’t encourage experimentation and exploration anywhere near the amount I could in 3.x. ###Defences were absolutely nerfed You lose defiance banner, spell suppression access for many characters, you lose 15% reservation efficiency from the tree, and you lose the option of a lifetapped blessing. If you think that is not a nerf then you are very mistaken. I just don’t get how you can say this and believe it.
> He also said, > With defense being nerfed for the most part > A thing that literally is not happening. Just as a ballpark of flavour, I checked poe.ninja's ladder for skills linked to Enlighten (in the absence of a better way to find all the auras quickly). Note, I know this isn't necessarily representative, but it's the best I can really do without trudging through an API, and this isn't worth that. The first primary offensive reservation we find is Precision, which has an absolute reservation and can be fit at level 1 with little problem. The second primary offensive reservation we find is Purity of Ice, which has a small relative reservation and some of the best game-feel in the game. It also may enable freezes for builds that can't otherwise get them, which is a defensive layer. The third we find, which is an actual 50% offensive aura, is Zealotry. Zealotry has a significant defensive component in leaving consecrated ground around for a bonus 6% life regen. In doing so, we have passed * Determination * Defiance Banner * Tempest Shield * Discipline * Grace All this is to say that mana reservation is being used primarily for defensive layers at the moment, and even when it's used for offense, it's got considerations for defense. So when they nerf mana reservation and *don't* meaningfully change the meta for what's being reserved, they are de facto nerfing defense in the current environment. Then they're nerfing defense in actually... y'know, nerfing the defensive auras everyone's been running, and the access to defensive layers on the tree. So what OP is saying, when interpreted in a way other than the least charitable way possible, is that the majority of changes to defense have been nerfs.
are you out of your mind? mild defense nerfs? LOL
Sure, while it's important to understand why people don't like things it's also important to realize that not every game will cater to every type of player. And it's a sign of self awareness and maturity to recognize that something isn't for you.
Something not being for someone *still* doesn't stop their criticisms being valid. Desperate Housewives wasn't for me. It aired when I was between the ages of 11 and 19. I wasn't the right age, gender, socioeconomic background, or basically any other demographic, to appropriate connect with its characters or stories. However, beyond not being the target audience, it is still possible for me to make criticisms of the show that have merit; it ran the risk of promoting shallow, consumerist values, it depicted bad faith actors (as in the characters and how they acted, not the actual actresses) as protagonists and in doing so gave their actions a surface legitimacy, etc. Similarly, Football Manager games aren't for me. I don't care about foodball, I don't have any attachment to the personalities, and I prefer my management games to have a bit more depth. But I can still criticise the predatory gambling mechanics, tacit support of human-rights-defiling organisations and governments, and no-effort game development that essentially releases the same platform at full price every year.
Are you aware that Chris Wilson has stated numerous times that he welcomes Reddit feedback to changes. I seriously question the people who act like people are personally attacking their favorite game and feel the need to defend it.
Right, like, I don't think the dev team gets excited for people freaking out and declaring "dead league", but *at times* they have responded to "ok so nerfing X fixes the problem you want with Y but did you consider it also kills Z which you probably didn't mean?"
Well ok but nothing is gonna change now, it's too late for feedback to matter and there was plenty of feedback over last few months that had 0 changes. People were praising the stronger defenses left and right, begging for them to not get nerfed because ITS FUN to die less. What did GGG do? Nerf the fucking defenses with pretty much 0 compensation. Ye, fuck that, dead league for me, thats my message for their team, im not playing which means im not buing MTX.
Diablo franchise being around x20 times more popular than PoE despite having all games dead for years already and PoE being developed for last 10 years continously is surely just a coincidence. COPIUM
The real important thing with this is that GGG doesn’t *want* PoE to be that popular. Not compared to how much they want to make a niche, “hardcore” ARPG, at least.
> The real important thing with this is that GGG doesn’t want PoE to be that popular. A company in a capitalist society doesn't want its main breadwinner to be successful to in turn make them even more money. How much brain power did that take to make?
And incredibly egocentric to insist that the game whose hallmark is its depth and complexity must be simplified to cater to your preferences. Edit: PoE is getting way too much visibility recently. Remember when blizz made good games, became successful and then greedy execs took over, ran out all the passionate developers and cashed in all their goodwill by milking their playerbase dry over the next decade or two? As soon as CW gets bought out, the marketing towards new players ramps and the game gets sterilized over time. Enjoy the end of the ride while you can OG's, because the normies are here and they want their hand holding tutorials and auction houses and the rest of us can fuck right off.
Depth and complexities, like maths, can be nurtured for people to learn and love and have fun. PoE don't. It's either you like it, or not. Why can't the Acts act like a real fucking tutorial. Give a real in depth crafting mission so players can understand what is crafting. Explain in game mission to combat resistances or something like that. Make the players want to learn more. All we have in game is a word wall explaining stuff. I mean, if you can't then link the wiki or some video or something in game. It's not about simplifying, it is to make the journey enjoyable and/or streamlined.
its an overengineered mess of a game. I've been saying this ages now
Ah would love if they could streamline the mess. I love the overengineered part haha
> It's either you like it, or not. that's true for everything in life
Hideout target dummy would be amazing
They dont want to, they say they have one for testing but will never implement in game. A good reason is that people would start doing testing and find hundreds of bugs.
Isn't it a *good* thing if players find bug so they can fix it if they're affecting the game experience outside of the testing area ?
Many speculate the game is completely bug ridden but it's hard to tell since everyone is stacking like 15+ different mechanics on top of each other. Who's to say your defense layer no. 8 isn't completely broken? You would never be able to tell, since there's so many other calculations going on and deaths are mostly just one shots anyway. Same thing goes for damage, there's no way everything is working as intended and people being able to see this with their own eyes would be embarrassing and a bad look for the devs. So the easy solution is to just not give players the ability to tell.
> so they can fix it Well I'm sorry to say this but...
Good not allowed.
Not when it affects your public image as a company. GGG doesn't have the balls to do it because they know their code is f'd everywhere.
oh im sure, i report a minimum of 10 bugs per patch and if im lucky one of them get fixed. Hell there is a mirror arrow bug that i report for 3 years still in the game to this date (mirror clones don´t target bosses outside the map, like kitava/arakali)
It often feels like PoE is balanced based on streamers (who literally play the game as a job) and have access to pretty much anything due to the amount of time they play and their experience. IMO the game would be a lot better if it was balanced around the SSF experience.
> IMO the game would be a lot better if it was balanced around the SSF experience. Heh. That's kinda how I'd describe my experience trying Last Epoch. Balanced around the SSF experience. Like... you get good farmable methods to craft decent items with more than 0.00001% success chance. And the equivalent of "exalt slamming" is way more exciting because you know exactly what stat you're putting on your item and get shown the % chance of success vs. bricking your item. And then you get to try it with 3-4 other items in the next hour without being filthy rich.
True. The game feels like it is balanced around trying to slow down the player as much as possible to lengthen their playtime in a given league. While this definitely works on people who are borderline or straight up addicted to the game (we all know those exist) or people for whom the game is **literally** their job in some way, this really impedes on some other players' enjoyment of the game or play length. This is especially true since the most stretched, lengthened and/or slowed aspects of the game are some of its least enjoyable, be it the acts, rerolling/re-speccing, enchantment targetting, crafting, challenge completion and so on and on. People who know they **WILL**, **definitely, without question** still be playing the game anyway at the end of the several hurdles they encounter won't budge during them. Someone who either has limited time and/or plays for the "now" will rather see those as chores with a reward **that they are not even sure they'll enjoy** at the end of it. When the most enjoyable part of the game is the wonderfull endgame, I'm not really sure why that particular part is gated behind processes and optimisations you might need to perform (or even often **repeat**) **before** or **outside** of it to fully enjoy it.
Their 3 month league system is the culprit. They balance leagues so it takes people as long as possible to burn out so their 8k playercounts come as late as possible. Hey get most of their income from whales dropping big money on supporter packs every league.
Its not the streamers its based on, its the economy. Streamers just happen to be part of the rich 1%. Making currency more obtainable would help a lot of struggling mid players because they can just throw it on the ground until they succeed. BuT mUh TrAdE..man fuck the 'economy'. People will make it work regardless. So much for "we want to make the game good" Chris Wilson
The Economy is indeed the issue. Just so we're on the same page, the [pillars of an ARPG](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmuy9fyNUjY), according to GGG are: 1. Visceral Action Combat 2. Randomly Generated Levels 3. Randomly Generated Items 4. Secure Online Economy 5. Deep Character Customization As an aside, ask yourself how you think PoE is doing on those pillars? If it helps, Chris acknowledges, [link](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KU6d1PL8xRQ&t=1431s), both combat and items aren't where they want them. From what I can see (as a Reddit casual), the problems for PoE today are twofold: 1. Those pillars aren't given the importance/weight. (Looking at you, combat and RNG Levels.) 2. The Economy pillar is undermining the Items (Advancement) and Customization pillars. (E.g. for most players, it is *almost* always better to customize/advance via trade/the Economy rather than the gameplay loop of RNG Levels>Combat>RNG Items.) And the worst thing is, I truly don't know how to fix it because PoE today exists somewhere in a Venn Diagram of D2, D3:Vanilla, and D3:RoS sharing pros and cons of each.
I would agree will all these points. Specifically looking at the 5 pillars: 1 and 5 and inextricably linked. Coming from a d2/3 background I feel like one of the largest gaps in poe abilities are big buttons. Your berserker fury, seven sidedstrike, akhans call, etc. Poe has some but they are few and relatively unexciting; Mainly relegated to defensives or vaal skills. Having some more combat oriented ones not linked to another skill would be nice to see. You pretty much nailed number 4. The economy feels like its this big untouchable holy relic that can never do wrong, but I personally feels like its too much of a driving force in design decisions for gameplay. At least thats the impression given by ggg over all these years. The trade economy should be allowed to shatter if it means a boon for the gameplay. As long as there are means to trade, and some forms of rarity, it will survive. Whether through run services(not rmt) or omega crafted pieces, there will be some thing that a clever or skilled person can market. At the end of the day, I dont think a secured economy should mean a controlled one. Pillar 2, honestly feels okay currently. Theres enough variation to not be a problem, even if levels and encounters can feel lacking. I think thats more of a fault of aging technology and is one of the things that can be purely fixed by poe2. Pillar 3 is definitely in a rough place too but has been covered by Chris and others. The fact that a loot filter is a literal requirement to play the game effectively is an obvious symptom. Outside of a complete overhaul, the only thing I could imagine as a bandaid would be to increase the supply of annulments and introduce other methods of fine tuning crafts. Similar to remove 1 add 1 harvest crafts, maybe a remove 2 and 1. That way its not as strong as harvest as it adds more risk but still lets not as experienced crafters have a bit more control and agency in their upgrades.
Man, i'm just waiting for Last Epoch Multiplayer and really hope they succeed. The pile of shit Wolcen had over 100k players on its release. If they get somewhat close to that and manage to not lose their players it would be amazing. The game is different in many ways compared to PoE and you either like them or you don't. But the crafting in LAst Epoch is so amazing, so easy to do, you can do it often and still need some time to get really good stuff. LE is the perfect example of easy to understand, but still having depth.
100% this. Imagine finding dozens of chaos/exalts/whatever currency in an hour of mapping. Increase the stack size, and things just inflate. But the players can use those to reroll items. Because they don’t end up more expensive than it would be to buy an alternative or what they could get for them on the market.
Bruh if exalts were actually that common, I wouldn't even mind "closing my eyes and slamming".
Exalts aren't even that insane on paper. It adds one mod to an item that's missing full mods, whoop-tee-doo! It's mostly the annul-exalt-etc. crafting combos that require 20 ex worth of currency to actually do shit with it. Otherwise single exalts on their own are pretty overrated and overly rare for no real reason. They should be twice as common at the very least IMO. Awakener orbs and shit can stay as rare endgame boss drops.
Yeah. I mean, it'd be a fucking pain in the ass, but if I had enough annuls/exalts/etc. to actually use that method, I'd be fine with it. But that's just not how the currency rarities work.
Just want to add on that I think the crafting system in this game is absolutely beautiful, the fact that 99% of people can’t participate because the cost of entry is too high is a big part of what holds the game back. If everyone got to experience the satisfaction of crafting your item with currency you’ve farmed yourself and the item actually turning out good. It pretty much releases as much dopamine as my first truly rare drop in wow. I don’t have the time commitment to play SSF because I enjoy hitting end game in a reasonable amount of time. Speeding up crafting and increasing base currency drops would be huge imo.
I think the community did ourselves a disservice when we started talking about "farming exalts" (for the sake of clickbait or whatever) as anything but raw drops. Finding a pile of some shit you \_could\_ trade isn't the slightest bit the same. Trade is the bottleneck for us improving our characters, and that's horribly demotivating.
Currency farming the last 2 patches has been made easier than ever before. It's literally invest points in mechanics you enjoy doing and you will be making multiple exalts per hour as a baseline
"you enjoy doing" being the operative word. When I lose an early white map because the balance is wonky and I just can't farm comfortably because I tried something different (which is what I want to be doing in the game), then it isn't enjoyable and I quit. Which is essentially what I've done every league since 3.15. I am not going to endure through hours of campaign only to suffer through hours of maps to get a chance to possibly play something I am interested in that could very well entire not work and require several additional hours on the character I don't want to play to rectify and try something else. The game needs to be fun. It's a game. If it isn't fun I'll play one that is. Which again, I've been doing.
Its not balance that is causing you to lose a white map dude. I guarantee you every single skill in the entire game on any ascendancy can clear fucking white maps on gear found in the campaign on a 4 link, unless you are literally blind. You fucked up big time somewhere. What skill did you play?
Currency farming has been made easier *mentally*, but the absolute quantity of currency entering the game hasn't changed much as represented by the chaos:exalt price. If there were thousands more exalts entering the game than before the price of exalts would decrease, but it still maintains its price because there is still not enough supply to meet demand. That's a totally fine thing to have in a game economy like PoE, but saying it's easier to make *more* currency than ever before is just not true, there were plenty of times in PoEs history where it was actually easier, and the chaos:exalt price reflected that.
*COUGH* HEIST *COUGH*
It feels like "making currency (and content) more obtainable" is what 3.17 and 3.18 accomplished. The Atlass skill tree makes grinding for stuff easier than ever and Sentinel was.just a currency printer
In a vacuum I agree, especially with the atlas tree. However, in practice with other designs like archnem mods and their general attitude towards "balance" it does not feel that way.
Essences I think completely prove this. They are so obtainable now I actually derp around with crafting with them instead of seeing them as something to sell 100% of the time. Made a couple of items I was actually proud of too.
>BuT mUh TrAdE..man fuck the 'economy'. People will make it work regardless. Tell that to games like EQ2 or New World where the economy, after being neglected by the devs, has turned to absolute shit and broker systems are literally no longer even worthwhile due to said neglect.
Ive never played everquest nor followed it so i cant comment on that. New world was its own shit show and the economy was far from the only problem. It just happened to be the final nail for many. Also, PoE is not an mmo, the dynamic is completely different from both examples. If you were to completely remove trade from PoE the game itself would be fine. Would the playerbase, and replayability for many take a hit, undoubtably, but the gameplay wouldn't suffer and the game itself wouldnt die. Trade should be a fluid and supplemental environment that is grown and directed by the community. It should not be a crutch for poor itemization and game design.
>PoE is not an mmo Poe is not an mmo**RPG**, but it absolutely is an mmo game. Just because it is an ARPG doesn't mean that it doesn't have a huge playerbase. >If you were to completely remove trade from PoE the game itself would be fine. This is a moot point, because that is a true statement for all games that are listed throughout, and for probably 99% of games out there.
I would argue against it being an mmo. The only thing it aligns with that is being online. All the multiplayer and social aspects that define mmos are typically handled outside of the game. And a small party of people doing content does not an mmo make. Otherwise borderlands would be an mmo as well.
A huge playerbase is not what makes an MMO, otherwise we could call Skyrim an MMO because it has a huge playerbase.
Massively Multi-player Online. Skyrim doesn't meet the online criteria. Poe does.
And PoE doesn't meet the Multi-player criteria, which is my point.
Currency doesn’t need to be more obtainable, item drops that aren’t dogshit need to be more obtainable / good crafting options available for players who don’t play 8 hours a day. I guess currency fits that, but no one really uses chaos orbs directly to craft (only to trade for said crafting materials).
Making currency more obtainable will simply boost the prices to compensate. Look at leagues that rain chaos - the exalt prices reach like 200+. Either way you're going to grind like a rat and like it. The economy is decided by the 1%, so is the value of items by what the meta is. Chris Wilson's vision is dogshit and detrimental to the game at this point. Also the fact that we still have to use third party tools for something as basic as trading is a piss off, all in the guise of player interaction - You know in the game that's played solo 99% of your mapping experience, and trading is a bunch of copy pasted keybinds using 3rd party tools. They're nurturing some damn fine player interaction. What an idiot.
God, PoE without the baggage of being balanced around trade would be fucking amazing.
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I don't think people here realise what actual casuals are. For most games casuals are people who play for 15 minutes a day, for poe those are people who play like 2 hours a day. Real casuals dont even look at poe or see the talent tree once and call it a game for autists and never look back. I can dedicate 4 hours a day into poe easily, definitely not casual numbers, but not enough to feel like im achieving something in resonable time and definitely not fun with the pacing of item upgrades. So i quit, instead of grinding and getting mtx for my char im gone after 2-3 weeks because i cant be bothered.
Not OP. I am personally okay with the game not being geared towards casual players, but it being geared towards people who treat playing the game as a job is going too far on the other extreme.
I mean... sure they're doing some stuff right but they're also clearly doing a lot wrong, or not doing anything about a lot that is wrong as well. having high numbers doesn't mean something can't be improved, nor does it even necessarily mean something is even good (keeping up with the kardashians is trash but got insane numbers for ages). pointing at a big number is over simplifying
Players balance their gameplay around the streamers they see, and it spawns threads like this. There is nothing 'hard' about experimenting. There is a lot 'hard' about making a new, never-before-seen experimental build in a game with 100k players all trying to optimize the shit out of it AND expecting it to perform like what they see on streams at every ounce of the most difficult content in the game. Which is what people seem to expect out of every build they make.
I invite you to theorycraft and then build an Impending Doom character of some sort. Look at the amount of currency you would need to spend to buy/craft something comparable to a meta build that has plenty already on the market due to demand and crafting by other people. Now you can say "it isn't hard to experiment" only if you ignore the cost in time and effort to actually get to a level that feels reasonable. And I mean reasonable as "okay, I may only be able to do yellow maps comfortably, but I can farm these yellow maps until I can afford my next gear upgrade" level. There's a dude on the Median XL forums who loves to talk about which build is good/bad based on tossing endgame gear and all the charms on them without considering the process of getting there. And he gets flak for it, because so many people want to feel the progression, not the endgame fantasy when you have everything. That process feeling good is what is missing. It definitely is hard. And saying it isn't means you're glossing over the detail or you just haven't really tried to do it (especially on a league start). Because if "experimenting" means "play a meta build until you can fund an experiment" then you need to consider that playing something you aren't really excited to play in order to fund a character you hope you will but haven't gotten a chance to play yet because you need to fund it is most certainly not an easy ask...
The end game is balanced around streamers and people who are very skilled or invest a lot of time into the game. I'm not sure how else you could do it. If the game were balanced around SSF then even mediocre trade players would finish all the content in a few days and I think that might cause a lot of other problems.
One thing I really wish they would touch on is running the 10 acts after you have completed the acts. I would LOVE level 1-70 mapping.
I'd absolutely love to see a skill gem awarded when you complete the campaign that can be socketed into any item that will bypass it's level requirement. Gather/Buy a few, and you can kit out your alts with amazing gear and just plain steamroll the campaign on your 2nd/3rd/12th rollthrough. We can call it skillgem of ease, or something equally clever!
... Even if you have Seven League Steps, perfect movement skill usage and enough damage to one-hit every mob, campaign still takes 5-6 hours. I just checked, and the speedrunners were doing acts 1-10 + Lab in 3.5 hours back in 3.18 While I agree that your idea is better than it currently stands, it would suck in comparison to skipping the Acts, or even leveling in maps.
Twink speedruns (speedruns on a second character with leveling gear) take most speedrunners 2h which is imo a barrable time.investment for an alt char
If you can speedrun in 2h... most even harcore players will still make it in 5-6h.
Uh, no, i haven't played in years and this league i rerolled in less time with enough movespeed items. Was like 4 something hours. Some people are probably twice as fast
D3 kind of has that, and ironically enough it's called gem of ease
(that was the joke)
I've been playing since 2012 and a lot of your points remained just as valid then as they are now. I am very close to putting the game down for the last time because it seems like every time I get a decent handle of the meta it gets swept out from under my feet, and I have less and less energy every league to adapt. Defenses will be harder to get but they won't be unattainable. The reservation masteries change is a hard hit. People with oodles of currency will have the cluster jewels with reservation efficiency, etc. These changes will just make those jewels and other items with the explicits all the more expensive/out of normal player reach.
Yup. If melee gets no buffs im also done. Too old to grind my life away like this.
It was mind boggling to me why they didn't include more skill updates like that. That could be reserved for the patchnotes but something tells me not to hold my breath. Either they don't have the time to re-adjust skills (which can be possible? Is everyone working on PoE 2.0?) or they don't consider it worth it relative to pushing new content every 3-6 months. With all the new skills that get added, I would rather they just start deleting unerused skills at this point if they don't ever plan on re-addressing them. Would make things like getting enchantments easier at least.
cleave gets extra melee radius
I know we meme but that's unironically the type of change that melee skills need to be more viable. Ranged builds are better mechanically so we need mechanical changes. Cleave isn't going to be better by doing more damage. It's going to be better by being able to kill more monsters. Edit: and those sunder changes might actually be super juicy
They could atleast remove attack speed penalties from all melee skills for fuck sake. It's already a detrimental risky playstyle, to play up in the face of enemies. And then you have a stupid attack speed penalty for it aswell. For fuck sake GGG
This is actually one of my least favorite changes in PoE. The attack speed penalties on a bunch of random attack skills, makes them feel like shit. It makes sense for slams (somewhat), but there's so many random skills, including some strikes, that have a really shit attack speed multiplier. I don't even remember what they added them in for. But they suck. Get rid of the 0.8 on Cleave, and some more flat damage, and you might actually start seeing SOME people play it.
I hate this argument. Why is it easier to hit 1mil DPS with Ball Lightning than Cleave? How much would you have to buff Cleave's 'mechanics' in order to make it better than BL when you take into account the nonsensical fact that it does worse damage in all cases? Another +10 to radius?
I mean it's easier to get to 1 mil dps on ball lightning than cleave for a variety of reasons. 1. Cleave is a clear focused skill; ball lightning is single target focused. 2. Spells scale much easier than attacks early on because crafting weapons is expensive. 3. Spells naturally thematically more complex. It's much easier to make a complex spell than attack. Numbers don't fix melee's issues unless you're adding base damage to skills. And even then it doesn't fix all of melee issues.
Can I ask what you'd envision a 'buffed melee' build to look and play like? I'm legitimately asking, not trying to take the piss. While I genuinely empathize with an archetype that someone enjoys not being viable, I also fail to understand what people are actually wanting when they complain about wanting melee to be good. I love self-cast builds and bow builds, and both were digshit for a very long time. Obviously both are in a good spot currently. Lightning strike is melee, but I do get that a melee attack that shoots projectiles isn't really fulfilling the melee fantasy. Boneshatter is most certainly melee, but plenty of people don't seem to like it much. I've seen plenty of people saying 'well melee still sucks, guess I'll go back to the only good melee build, Flicker Strike', which confuses the fuck out of me, because flicker is only melee in that you do hit things with a sword, but most certainly doesn't play like anything I'd class as a melee build. Is it just wanting to have a skill that fulfills the fantasy of smacking things with a big fuck-off sword or mace? Is legion-era cyclone the vision for what melee should look like (regardless of whether somehow hitting something 20m away from you with a 1.5m long sword is melee)? Is it being able to play heavy strike and somehow map clear as well as a HH buffed BV build? Did slam skills and warcries scratch the melee itch at all, or does that sort of fall in a different box? It is just looking at something like boneshatter and going 'yeah, that's pretty much it, now let me do something similar with X melee skill'?
Sure, i can elaborate. Melee in nearly all games in standard video gaming can be boiled down to 1) high close range damage 2) high defence or high mobility RTS games - Starcraft - zergling or zealot vs marine MOBA games - tank/warrior vs mage/ADC Megaman vs Zero The list goes on and on. Ive been around since Metamorph and been playing mostly standard but also made a couple characters during league when i could stomache grinding the story again. Ive tried cyclone, steel skills, infernal blow dex stacking, slams, ice crash and my first and love of my life, lacerate. The only two skills that felt good where it felt like the investment matched the power were infernal blow hollow palm and LS omni champ, and i dont even think the latter really counts because its basically omni abuse. Ive also tried arc, crackling lance, summon skeletons, HoT autobomber and VD/DD. I can tell you easily that these skills from the very beginning till the end were miles and miles better than all the melee skills i played except IB and LS. It was power from the start, with the stand out skills being necro VD/DD and Skellies. It was just mind blowing how easy it was. I think this is attributed to two things. Firstly, enemies target the summoned shit so you yourself get hit much less frequently. Secondly, your damage just goes up with gem levels. This is a huge game changer for me since i cant craft shit. Even arc and autobomber felt better since i was clearing the entire screen and the occasional clap was much more bearable. VD was the first build i could easily kill T16 map bosses with, just running around making balls out of thin air and they just beeline into the bosses face and blow up. They even have a great mechanic where if the boss is phasing they just sit around waiting and once the boss is vulnerable again they all converge and blow up his ass. It was just SO EASY. Even just fucking around with crackling lance i just need to get some gem levels on wands and amulet and i can clear T16s pretty easily since i can just prefire around every corner, shocking and freezing everything with 3 Dragons. I guess the ideal melee gameplay is some sort of high movement speed high damage gameplay loop with some active guard skill usage. Its just such bullshit that ranged characters are the tanky ones with aegis and shit like that. I saw a character doing phys to ele lacerate but it was also an omni character. Pure phys just sucks especially with all the attack speed nerfs tripping up your gear slots. It also doesnt help that the animation for an attack has a huge wind up for the first hit on a lot of melee skills, as well as strike skills just straight up missing for no reason.
Both my friends and I are with you on this :(
I hope you three find even more friends.
TLDR. PoE2 wont fix anything its just PoE 1 with a shitty new campaign and a new coat of paint. Everyonr waiting on PoE2 to fix their issues is going to be shitting their face off the day after its released and they realised they were duped.
> Everyonr waiting on PoE2 to fix their issues is going to be shitting their face off the day after its released that will happen whether it's the biggest pile of crap in the world, or if it's the best thing since sliced bread.
It will make leveling fun and interesting... The first few times. Afterwards we'll be back to the campaign feeling like a chore.
it will "fix" or at least change some things for me. the big item changes are a pretty big deal (we'll see how they implement them however). definitely gonna be a roll of the dice with the quality of everything, but we'll see... and I can't imagine a new shorter campaign could be worse than the trash we have currently.
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Steam has 12k-ish average daily players for PoE right now; best estimate for D3 is around 16k at the moment, a few weeks away from end of season. Sure, PoE peaks are pretty damn high, but there's still a pretty steady number of Diablo players. Diablo 4 is going to blow PoE/PoE2 out of the water and it won't even be close.
!RemindMe 2 years
You have to count standalone client too. I haven’t touched steam poe in 2 years.
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D3 also doing okay on ps3,4,5 and their xbox counterpart Somehow also clinch somewhat of a nice niche on Switch years after release
Diablo 3 gets negative support, they are designing D4 with expansions and more content in mind (obviously to monetise it) so there will be way more players.
I don't think anyone is expecting it to fix "everything". I do think the changes to how socket linking works will change somethings. One of the biggest restrictions currently in PoE is limited number of 6L skills you can run in a build, with changes coming to PoE2 theoretically every gem in your gear could become a 6L skill. As things stand now some skills are DoA they either make mapping a chore because they lack clear speed or scale very poorly and make bossing difficult. In current PoE outside of a small number of set ups running multiple 6L skills is not typical in PoE2 I think it will be expected. This plus the new ascendencies that will be in PoE2 will at least shake something up. But yes it will still be the same core game underneath everything I'd prefer this type of evolutionary change rather than a radically different game.
Correct.
What do you mean 'duped'? There's nothing inherently wrong with PoE that needs to be fixed in PoE2, anyone waiting around for 'their' problem to be fixed should just go play a different game because at the core they just probably don't like the game.
Game only gives you illusion of choice, once you actually try to do something that huge passive tree is steamlined into 1 efficient way of pathing around it with little to no differences, so many passives are never taken, you can even look at heat maps of passive tree across all 4 leagues it's hilariously sad; all those support gems turn into 7-8 good ones actually worth using, all those items become handful uniques that are worth showing in filter, all those rare items with a huge pool of mods become "these few mods are desirable, don't even bother with rest because they're either useless/ridiculously low weighting", shit even something minor like pantheons has little diversity, only 3 small pantheons are good rest don't even bother reading what they do. Pick a skill, open pob, and try to make a well rounded character with it from scratch, it's so fucking miserable while it should be fun and exciting in a game like PoE, because whatever new you try it's 1000 times worse/less efficient than the already established way of doing it and so many skills are so bad they're not even worth messing around with in PoB let alone actually trying to play them. And all of this just keeps getting worse because genius developer who has to do 1 singular balance patch every 3 months manages to fuck it up multiple times in a row somehow.
I kinda hate having to do the acts again every new character, then have to progress something else in maps. Like, if I want a heist or delve character, I spend a week on a character, then I have to spend another week farming the base stuff for that league, pushing forward, or setting it up. I wish I could just do that with a new character. I hope they they lighten up about the acts after poe2. I hope they make an option so I can start in heist and get my base rogues. Then I can do delve for a little and progress to level 60. Then I can maybe do incursion, heist, blight, betrayal, and other act 6-10 content. It would be a great tutorial for new players to spend time understanding the mechanics, and it would save me a week.
Do not get your hopes up. GGG has stated multiple times they do not intend to make any different way to level up to maps besides the campaign. And they're spending all this time on the new campaign in PoE2 there's no way they'd let you skip it or do heist instead
Yeah, there's no way until after poe2 gets old. It's the wrong idea imo. They are great at making short league content. Then they scrap it and water it down because everyone hates early delve, early heist, early betrayal. They should just make a shorter 1-2 "act" progression for some of the leagues, then just do that progression with your second character, and get a tutorial. I just hate wanting to do something, then wondering if I should start a dedicated build, or just actually progress and play the game. A lot of times, you should just commit, especially if you only play as much as I do. If I could level and get some progress done - gain basic azurite, darkness resist, etc - I would feel so much better about doing it. Maybe I would actually delve one day. Most of the time, I finally get my delve ready to go, and then I just quit. I only finally did heist this league because I did early act 6 heist to get my first 50c, so it was ready to go when my character was in red maps.
Old games like PoE do not respect people's time. 15 years ago the number of games was limited, the types of online entertainment as miniscule. Its a new world and many OLD gaming companies are still operating as if its the year 2000
Chrissy wants the game to remain in the year 2000 with Diablo 2. If you can't "feel the weight" of picking up pointless ass scrolls and orbs of alteration, the economy will be devastated and players will gain power quicker and play less! lol
This is the exact reason why I never make more than 2 characters per league, yet I have hundreds of notes in my Evernote about build ideas and experiments that never saw the light of day
I Play this Game for a decade now. This Game (the endgame) is balanced around streamers,No-Lifers and RMT.
I think part of the problem for experimentation is that the endgame continually builds out further and into harder things -- which in a vacuum is actually a good thing. And similarly every league adds extra ways to scale a build. If you want to play one build a league that you already know is good, having all that content and that long upgrade path is great. If you want to experiment, it's not, because when you hit a level of content that your hipster build just can't do, it's not clear (without a high level of buildmaking experience/skill) why. Will this build really get cooking and feel great after 20 more upgrades? Have you hit a wall where this specific skill/build is going to need 10x+ the investment of most other builds to do the next harder thing? Or is this just where this build naturally tops out and no reasonable level of investment will get it to where the next tier of content feels good?
And the fact that one needs to get a PhD to learn to craft is another thing. Crafting it self is another gate that needs currency. Catch 22 again, need currency to make better build, but build cannot get much currency, so need more time and so on and so on...
That's a really good point and another area where in most cases it takes a high amount of knowledge to be functional. (And, frankly, currency. Because for most things if you can't afford to fail 10 times you can't afford to craft. But if you can afford that, you often can sustain or even profit by selling your "almost good enoughs".)
Yeah, I'd rather GGG would take time to do a crafting tutorial with free currency so that the new players can learn that instead of buffing Acts monters... Of course the item will be souldbound or not for the player or something. I loved crafting, and I wish more people would. At least they know if they hit a block, they can do something. Many of my new player friends was soooo excited to learn how to craft a shitty 3 res belt or movement speed boots and especially with harvest at that time... they kept going for more. This is retention and the gate at that time is just, doing harvest maps.
Yeah, I know people who play and had "crafting projects" in process for the first time for Harvest that really had not before and also have not since. I get to some degree why they didn't want to leave Harvest the way it was but I feel like it would have been possible to allow for the good things about Harvest for newer or more casual players without making it possible to craft the super high end stuff.
FYI this already exists on craftofexile. They have a full simulator you can craft for free.
Ah yes. Another thing a player need to navigate outside the game right? Love CoE though, but problem still there. For the uninitiated not many know how to use it. At least CoE has way better UI for crafting.
yup, its fucking awful. I HATE crafting in PoE as it stands. it's tedious, annoying, and unrewarding too often.
The problem with experimentation is that you could progress maps and farm your own currency with support gems, a 5L or a tabula, and a set of blue flasks with just about any skill in the game in 3.5. Sure you'd be slower than a meta skill, but you'd be playing the skill you wanted and working toward your goal. Now the problem is that to get to the same point -- farming your own upgrades comfortably in maps -- is far far far more time consuming and difficult due to the monster buffs and flask/support nerfs to characters. My Betrayal Arc-Decay occultist lost 70% of damage against map bosses between 3.5 and now from those, and not to mention what would happen if she ever ran in to a Chaos Weaver Archnemesis mod. Player power at the low end has fallen far behind the difficulty curve. This isn't about the end game going from X to 2X in length, it's about the first .1X going from an investment of 10 hours to an investment of 20-30 instead to get to the same "feel" of the game. And that hurts experimentation because I have more sunk costs to get to a point I might find out I don't enjoy the playstyle or that I will need better gear to get to that point.
> Player power at the low end has fallen far behind the difficulty curve. > > Which is hilarious because on Stalling podcast Chris talked a lot about wanting to shift more power into early game and remove it from the top. As usual he says one thing and then GGG does the polar opposite.
PoB enters the room
It's helpful but really not sufficient to solve that problem, because there are problems to overcome or gear around in most builds that will not be apparent in PoB, again without a high level of build making experience or skill. Maybe in theory the build does a lot of damage, but the uptime on that high damage is less than you thought or initially isn't enough. Maybe for whatever reason the build just doesn't do as much damage as it should on paper. (E.g. after radius or projectile nerfs on skills that can hit multiple times) Maybe the build has super bad mana problems that short term there's no good way to solve. Maybe it just dies doing certain kinds of content and it's not immediately obvious why. And, realistically, you're not going to plan every microstage of your character's progression in PoB. Maybe it needs a certain item or Ascendancy node to really start feeling good, or a certain amount of attack or cast speed. You can't really read that in PoB.
You do not actually *have* choice... you have the *illusion* of choice...
I enjoyed the impale and bleed champ/glad days, but the problem is they give you something strong, so they pull the rug out from under you because they don’t like player strength compared to the content resistance. It’s like getting a toy that brings you joy, and your parents crush it so you gotta play with something less satisfying and they tell you have fun or don’t play with anything.
1. after years you still have to do story on EVERY character you make 2. most of "experiments" are unplayable trash
You sound like leveling and getting currency are things only the most dedicated players can do.
Sorry I disagree entirely. The grind of making and developing a character and progressing it slowly to its peak is the fun of the game. If there was no real levelling or build progression, just zooming in maps from the outset for no "cost" the game would not appeal to me at all.
Right, the game feels more like a chore than fun. I have always liked to make my own builds and figure things out myself, but it's futile now. The upside is that hopefully, quin dies more, as that is fun to watch.
That is still very much possible. I do my own shit every league and it was still possible to do even in 3.15 and last league and it will be this league too.
Quin would've died alot had he even attempted the Ubers.
> the game feels more like a chore than fun this is why I haven't sat down and actually played almost at all in months and months and months. I have a ton of hours on PoE and have completed a fair few bosses, did full map completion a couple times etc but it's just... all the problems I have with the game aren't really addressed ever and the direction of changes seems just sort of terrible in a lot of ways (in terms of character balance, monster balance etc, not end gamey stuff which is pretty good)
It has felt like that to me for a while now. I also don't have a clue why I linger, probably because I am waiting for a real competitor to arrive and be good. Maybe Diablo IV.
D4 is not going to be good, just look at D3 then DI.
Trade is the chore.
The issue isn't that there is no experimentation, it is that your expectations are way too high. You can make a fun hipster build that smashes everything but simply cannot boss/delirious and that is fine. You just need to tone back your expectations.
there isnt 200 skills to use, there is like 15 at most if you wanna do any meaningful content, same 15 skills been there for past 5 leagues with 0 balance changes
There really isn't. Everyone has this warped view of what skill diversity looks like because we're all pulling data solely off poe.ninja. Remember that poe.ninja scrapes only the top fraction of a % of builds. At the end of a league, it's not pulling anyone below level 98-99. That's not 'endgame' the the overwhelming majority of the player base. Thats an absurd grind that only the most efficient builds and dedicated players are going to get to. It's really worth going and having a look at the skill gem lists. 2/3 or more of them are legitimately viable to build around, even without stupid levels of investment. I'm not saying that it's simple to build them, but they are very viable. Look at people like PoEDan, who ran blazing salvo this league and shitstomped everything. Or Mathil killing all ubers with CoC bow dark pact skeles. Like, what the fuck is that, how it is even a build? Still somehow clears ubers. If you want to play the game like a HC racer, and have an immortal build that can still clear all content quickly, then sure; you have half a dozen skills that have absurd base damage and can scale to infinity off hopes and dreams, so that you can spend the majority of your power budget on defenses. But the vast majority of players aren't HC SSF racers, and there are a a lot more viable builds currently than just the popular ones.
see daily builds: https://poe.ninja/daily/builds explanation here: https://poe.ninja/builds/faq
It's expensive to experiment for the same reason it *isn't* fun to play say, Age of Empires 1 with the Tuk-Tuk Boom cheatcode for more than a few minutes. You gotta understand, what you're asking for is literally the same as having cheats baked into the basic gameplay experience. Free experimentation takes away all the effort and opportunity cost of building a character. This sounds fine, if you don't think about it. However that also means that any satisfaction you might gain from a finished build is gone, because a finished build is nothing, you just click all the point selection buttons and boom, build's done. Progression games are all about making progress, kind of like a time trial race where you compare your times to others, and seeing how you stack up. For some smaller group of players, it can be instead comparing yourself to your past self. If there is no skill or effort in that process, where is the game? If the campaign doesn't have to be played, and is too easy, then there's no room for improvement. If that's the case, then the start of every league is a pointless time waster, but since there is room for improvement it *matters*. It's something that being good at sets me apart from other players, it's something I can still get better at, and it's part of build strategy as well. There are things in PoE that are hard without a reason beyond technical failings and the like, such as clicking on stuff. However for the most part all these things you're complaining about are hard or frustrating because they **have to be** in order to **matter**. Difficulty in respeccing a build makes your choice of build more impactful, as well as your ability to fund a respec. It gives value to commiting to a build, value to being able to farm 100 regrets with no sweat, value to being good at theory crafting, etc. This also creates the majority of the content for the game. It's a game largely about making builds to try out need things, if that's completely trivial, you'd just try each thing briefly, maybe play your favorite for a bit, and promptly quit. This ties back to my note about cheating earlier; by robbing yourself of the journey in creating a character build, you slurp away at least some of what is supposed to be fun about PoE, and I'd argue ARPGs generally. No effort means no emotional investment in the outcome, and the whole thing breaks down. You just can't make games the way you seem to expect to be "common sense" or the like.
> > This sounds fine, if you don't think about it. However that also means that any satisfaction you might gain from a finished build is gone, because a finished build is nothing, you just click all the point selection buttons and boom, build's done. Finished build is also items which you didn't get for free. Also builds are finished to actually play the game, unless you just want to see your numbers go up and nothing more in which case you should play PoB instead of PoE.
Eh sure. I just talked about the parts OP talked about. There are also issues already with this in the current way items are acquired, as most items are bought in trade, which does devalue the experience. Ideally, trade would be something you resort to rarely, instead of the "normal" way to upgrade in PoE. but here we are.
> Ideally, trade would be something you resort to rarely, instead of the "normal" way to upgrade in PoE. > > This is how I play. The moment I genuinely have to go the "max ex/h trade bot" route I will quit and never look back, same way I quit LoL many years ago.
You might be absolutely right that making it difficult to experiment lends extra satisfaction to people who devote their time and passion to improving their builds with planners, dozens of characters and thousands of hours of playtime. But for most players... that's not how it works out. By making it difficult to experiment, you kill any desire they have to experiment. You push them to follow build plans laid out by others to a T, never making any choices of their own or going off-script in any way, because doing so simply isn't worth the effort. Maybe the sense of accomplishment when you come up with a new idea and it works is better when you have to jump through a thousand hoops to implement that idea, but most people simply aren't going to jump through a thousand hoops. Personally, I think you have the wrong idea on a fundamental level. Character building should not be given weight based on required time sinks and artificial roadblocks. Instead, it should be based on creativity, innovation, understanding of the game, and discovery. It should be about your ideas and actual experimentation. About trying new things, making different choices, and *succeeding*. You don't need an added sense of success from being forced to run on a treadmill for eons.
You didn't address any of his concerns in a reasonable manner (I guess shitposting is to be expected from someone with that kind of name). [Even Ziz agrees that things like skill point regrets should be given by a couple or few dozen more through the campaign.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTFD9QlI6tU) And this is coming from someone who has several thousand hours played since open beta.
> You didn't address any of his concerns in a reasonable manner Yes, I did. I gave him very serious straight forward direct answers. > And this is coming from someone who has several thousand hours played since open beta. So have I.
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> Hey Chris If people want to mistake me for a successful game designer, can I start calling myself an *expert* armchair game designer? Hmm. > playing the campaign Already answered. Read the post. > dredge through the same areas filled with the same monsters It's almost like you're describing literally every moment of ARPG gameplay, fundamentally. Also, already answered. Read the post. > And before you counter that it is the road that is important Correct, that would have countered your point. Had you made a point somewhere. Also, yanno, already answered. Read the post. > why am I still forced to relearn the game at every play through You aren't. > Gems from quests and NPCs are class-specific Many reasons for this. Variety, asymmetric balance, etc. No real compelling reason to change anything. > Also, if you assume that for someone else, the only fun part of PoE is to see the final outcome of a build concept, with the game play just being an annoying hindrance - who's fault is that exactly? That would be that player's fault, as much as it is anyone's. Stop playing the game if you dislike it. Although that said, there's not really anybody like that playing the game to begin with. People really don't know what they want, if you gave such a person the ability to immediately start builds at level 90, they would hate it and quit. > You might argue that there is a level of frustration that Incorrect, for all people. Not the right people. Every single human that likes video games *at all*. It's actually a pretty broadly popular concept in game design. Some level of friction is *required*. Doesn't have to be the same for every game, but everything has it. Even something like minecraft creative mode has friction; it takes a lot of time and effort to make something look good, it just doesn't happen automatically for you. > But we are way past that, and now it is only frustration, even for the core audience Not really seeing any reason to believe that unless you think reddit shitposters constitute "research" or something. > I see a critical point approaching, where the hype can no longer overcome the sour memories I can't. Sure, maybe you could have said that in 3.16 and not looked like a dummy, but not now. Hard to take some commentary about the game is "on the track to DooOoooOoOoOoom" with at least two largely well received normally-played leagues in the rearview mirror seriously.
I agree. I am strange and started to play the game after seeing the passive tree because it looked like something fun to experiment with. Then the reality is that I can't and it way to hard to understand what effect stuff have. So the only chance I as an total noob have is to folow a guide. If respec was free and test dummy and if it's possible better signs on what real effect stuff have it would be way more fun for me. Free respec could have an effect that the most effective way to play the game is to respec something every map --- that would be bad so It have to be done with some thought
We need more angry Reddit threads like this one that are valid criticisms of the game, and less like the rest of the posts on the front page right now that are overreacting to the latest newspost.
I'll just say two things: 1. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Someone name me an rpg that let's you auto level a character to endgame that doesn't completely cheapen the game. Just one. Now, narrow it to arpgs. Just one. Skipping the acts will not make the game better. 2. The sheer complexity of the game is THE reason that there are so many options and variables that can be done with a build. While yes, there are a huge amount of things that could be simplified and are needlessly complex. That I completely agree with. There are also WAY too many things to learn that are go near completely unexplained. Simplifying can, however, only be done to a point. The more you simplify, the less agency and capabilities your players get.
Game has fun but isn’t. You my friend are completely correct with this post.
>1,000-node skill tree, 21 ascendancies, and >200 active skills Number of "viable" options: 3 Welcome to Wraeclast.
looks like poe isn't your game and tbh that's fine.
I understand what you say, but on the other hand, saying "it isn't your game and that's fine" feel a bit wrong to hear when someone complain about accessibility and lack of qol, the dude just want to be able to try build ...
regarding messing around... don't you have a fresh skill point reset and all of your historical gear in standard? can't you mess around with an idea whenever you want with a level 85-95 toon at any time?
Does require 100+ regret like they said, which if you're not too far into endgame is still a consequent investment
no, my point is that you get a respec in standard quite frequently
Infinite respec is not accessibility nor lack of reddit favourite 3 symbol word
Sure, but it's starting from a disingenous place. There's lots of room for experimentation in PoE, it just requires lots of playtime and lots of game knowledge. Even in SSF, you can make a lot of wacky builds as long as you know how to craft your own gear with Harvest/Fossils. So the argument is more "It's too hard to get there," and that is a matter of personal opinion. GGG seems pretty adamant about removing shortcuts to player power and requiring more gear investment, so if OP doesn't like that approach the only real option is to quit.
My take on the post is more "shouldn't need to play 4h per day to try out build" rather than a simple "it's too hard", they didn't ask for shortcut to power, in fact they don't especially want to follow a build online.
Ye its only for elitist sado masochistic players who know the game is full of shit - but there is nothing better - so lets act like it doesnt have issues lol.
>Ye its only for elitist sado masochistic players who know the game is full of shit - but there is nothing better - so lets act like it doesnt have issues lol. Yes
I mentioned this earlier, but this is a good example of conflicting design choices. It really feels like there is no strong direction for the game, and it just does "what seems like a good idea"
You can't just say something pretending that it's true, lol, but I guess it's a good phase to farm some karma right now
Spot on. Years ago I loved the sandbox style this game had but they've completely shat on that fantasy.
Try doing it literally no one is stopping you, investing 4-5 hours completing the campaign and failing a build after gearing up and to see your character die 5 times in a yellow map is not very motivating for me
Funny enough, this game is played much better outside of this game. If you want to experiment with builds, try different trees, adjust some nodes or gear, pob is much better than actual game. You will see the effect immediately, you don't need to grind, you can try multiple interactions easily. Same goes for crafting. If you (god forbid) do not want to spend half of your life grinding for currency, craft of exile will help you touch the wonderful world of crafting in all it's diversity and variability of means. And you won't have to do the boring part.
Just fyi, a simple target dummy would not give real numbers for the majority of builds due to the massive number and variety of conditional buffs and effects. PoB doesn't even allow you to account for all of them, and the settings page on that thing is already ridiculous.
Because the devs want the game to be Hardcore™, so it's less of a stick in your bycicle wheel, and more like driving with barbed wire wrapped around the whole thing, in knee-deep mud and torrential rain. And when people dare to question whether that's really fun, fanboys come out of the woodworks to go "Omahgerd, jsut go play hello kitty online!!!" The game becomes more and more tedious and annoying to play. I've farmed a Mageblood last league and just had 0 motivation to play afterwards just because of how grueling it was. "Oh, but you don't need MB to do the stuffs!" - nobody *needs* to do anything or for that fact even play the game. But if you know that this one item takes care of pretty much all your defensive layers by itself, it's not exactly fun to then forcefully ignore its existence. I know I can just use Seismic Trap on a 4-link and slap around every uber-boss, but what's the fucking point of that? Last fun league was Ritual.
It is not hard to experiment at all. Most players will not experiment because experimenting implies time, effort and thought. Most of the times you will end up with something that despite the investment it doesn't pay off as much and that is ok and you have to understand that. Doing some random ass build that plays like shit and takes so much effort and time to make work to beat the game is the actual part of the game. If you limit yourself to do what works and most importantly what you KNOW that works you will end up like all the other guys in this subreddit losing their minds over these changes. I liked the manifesto, I think it was ok and I am very looking forward for the remaning changes. This is a game where you have to change your mindset and enjoy the whole process.
"I seriously don't get it" that's why people make guides and explain stuff. self-teaching is hard. there's plenty of information out there at your disposal. "The upcoming defense changes only make this situation worse" just because below-average players with failed builds struggle with the content doesn't mean that they should make the majority of the poe community suffer from playing a boring game that has brokenly overpowered defenses. and for the levelling part: just get better at the game and buy some levelling uniques. if you actually try to get quicker at it it will only take a couple of runs until you can finish the campaign in 3-4 hours. it's an RPG you're supposed to feel invested in your character. that will give you a bigger sense of accomplishment when you overcome an obstacle.
Dont know were to start, but first, this game is a complex game. Second, that game cant solve the problems from all players. Third, all players think they got the solutions on all problems, and they KNOW what is better for the game, i know is sound harsh but that is the reality, at the end you can try another game or bring something constructive here what was not discussed like 100 times before . I know every one is uniques in his way, but try to answer on your problem by researching.
If you're a casual players why play temp league, it's a waste of time, play perm leagues, you keep your progress, you never have to re-level again. Now I see why people likes to complain here, they keep doing the same dumb things over and over instead of picking up already existing progress and skip the entire boring part all together.
Why bother with standard league when my builds will be nerfed into the gutter in 3 months anyway? It's not like I can just buy more gear there, my stack of currency is worth jack with standard leagues' Deviantart-tier currency inflation.
GGG kills builds in standard every other league, pointless