Game Balance in Path of Exile: Expedition

Last week a friend of mine told me to buy as many Kimberley-Clarke stocks as I can, they make Kleenex, and the poe manifesto is coming out soon. Time to make money he said.

Boy was he right. stocks have soared 10 fold in the course of these last 2 days!

So I want to thank all of you who are so upset. Slainte!

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Is this some farcical joke?

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5Daydreams wrote:

Nerfs to overall damage and clear speed? I'm okay with that.

Nerfs to flasks? Also cool.

But nerfing basically all mana costs? Really? As if leveling wasn't already tedious enough already. This won't even make the game harder, it's just silly.

Why the hell (of all the "overall" changes) was this not mentioned in the manifesto? I mean... Seriously?

If you want to nerf arhcmage, go ahead, NERF ARCHMAGE, but nerfing absolutely everything else because it has "mana" attached to it feels relatively dumb and unexplained to me.

Still excited AF to play the next league, but absolutely skeptical about the mana changes.

What youre going to end up seeing is that the player retention rate plummet for 3.15. and then Chris Wilson & squad is going to say something like "no one could have seen that coming" after the league end.

Hype

Can someone elaborate on how Facebreaker works with Shield Crush or Spectral Shield Throw?

You want to stay true to your vision of the game? The problem there is that your vision of the game is really bad. What you want is not what your players want, and at the end of the day if players can't get what they want, they won't play.
(Player since Torment)

GGG, Thank for communicating so thoroughly with the community. Although I'm sure you'll have plenty of play-one-league-and-think-they-know-everything-Andy's like Exhall here, you've given us months and maybe years of warning that the game would be slowed down in accord with the vision for POE2. Also like that it'll take more than a month to zoom through all the content. It'll be nice to no longer complete 40 achievements in a month and sit for 2 months waiting for the next league.

Nerf flask? NO!
Nerf mana on gems? NO!

f that

To me it looks like many people actually don't red ad/or understood whole Manifesto and just complain about things they don't have chance to try yet. I'm a little afraid too because I know about one-shotting BUT I also believe that people from GGG know what they are doing. Let's see. Maybe we'll be crying all together after the new league start but not yet.

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Over time, the introduction of new mechanics, updates to existing balance and improved collective understanding of the game has caused the damage of characters to be way too high. Many players are able to complete mid-difficulty boss fights in a fraction of a second, without any interesting interaction. Our ability to create interesting boss fights and monster combat is removed when players are routinely killing those monsters or bosses before they have used a single ability.

You were adding 'DPS Or Bust' gameplay since Perandus. Breach, Delve, Abyss etc, etc - it all is essentially a sort of 'DPS Or Bust' events.

Query: why are you surprised by what you encouraged, voluntary and consciously, during all these years?

Query 2: how these league mechanics are expected to be played after DPS nerf?

So on top of playing Path of Life Nodes casual players have to grind even worse to maintain some viable DPS.

Query 3: are you expecting consistently playing playerbase raise after that?

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Firstly, the gap between the "good" and "bad" support gems has been narrowed, creating more interesting build opportunities.

Query 4: why Elemental Hit, Arcanist Brand and Barrage (the latter of which became completely obsolete by introduction of relevant Support Gem) are still bs after your improvements?

Query 5: do you think that Fork Support Gem is viable under current set of circumstances?

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It prevents us from balancing the game well for players who aren't smashing their keyboard constantly and seriously restricts the design space we can use on flasks.

Query 6: you are aware that smashing same skill keys are as bad, are you?

Automatization of flasks usage is a good idea though. But implementing it through crafting looks like a complete brain fart from both UX and gameplay points of view.

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In 3.15, triggering skills through support gems will require paying their mana cost.

Poet's Pen Vietnam Flashbacks?

I cordially apologize for arrogant tone.

But from a point of view of 35 years old PoE Open Beta player this whole manifesto is reeking of... weird stuff which tries to cover new numerous design mistakes by Nintendo's 'you think you want it but you don't' approach, Goebbels style wordings and a thick layer of tricks from random '25 Tricks To Sell Flawed Product' book.

You're keeping wasting your potential.