Game Balance in Path of Exile: Expedition

Will spells from CoC cost mana?
If they will - RIP CoC =(

The only two interesting things about Ultimatum (other than Hateforge) were the clever use of Aisling crafting/veiled chaos orbs to get sick items and the potential to stack Focus mods for sick buffs. They removed both from the game. Lame. Focus wasn't even popular...they could've just lowered the Fortify and ailment duration bonuses if it was constraining design space.

Most of the nerfs themselves are ok, but this should've never happened at the same time as flask nerfs. I don't think GGG understands how much DEFENSIVE power many builds get from flasks. Some builds will now take straight up 25% more damage in maps as a baseline, and that's not considering the longer time it will take to kill or the opportunity cost of having to work harder for ailment/curse immunity. I don't think many people are going to skip the Shav's for a 14 second flask that doesn't gain charges. Lol.

GGG is now designing the game for two categories of people:
1. Streamers who play 16 hours per day every day and engage the community while playing
2. People who never complete the campaign and engage with streamers rather than the game itself

The people in between who want to play a lot and actually have fun playing have had their game experience dumpstered. I think it's only worth coming to play the yearly "big" leagues from now on, and maybe fooling around with the new skill mechanics for a few hours in each of the "filler" leagues.

Pretty much all of this is garbage. Had almost 3600 hours in PoE but as a filthy casual this just sucked the soul right out of this game. I see nothing left here but painful grind, still the whole one-shot problem, and the worst RNG in the gaming industry. So... Last Epoch, Grim Dawn and maybe Wolcen will be getting my time (and money) in the future.

GGG:
- fix your new player experience.
- stop punishing casuals for wanting to play
- instead of punishing everyone but the streamers (who will work around it because this is their livelihood) - come up with solutions that slow down just those guys who hit Sirius or whatever in a few hours.

I'm really sad. Been losing my enchantment since the expeditions announcement. I play in standard and have for a while now. I will check it out and see if it's as bad as it reads but unless it looks a lot worse than it is, I'm done man.

"

Kalevalla wrote:

Man up baby gamers. You're still going to be zooming through the atlas 1 shotting every enemy.

But slower and more annoying then before, without any reason. Its not a pvp game, so i dont realy care what streamers do and all this 99999 delve cyber diggers too. They dont affect on me, but what is affect is taking more time for doing same things as early. I just feel robbed. But as many ppl said, its GGG game and they can do whatever they want, and i will vote with wallet and time for this "changes"

Welcome to the no fun zone, where fun is not allowed

Wow, i couldn't imagine that GGG buy so many bot accounts to make us believe, that people LIKE TO GET NERFED lol.
You are not nerfing some op builds, not changing tree to make it different, you just nerf EVERYTHING. I see no reason for this, saying "mhmhmm, we want to make poe as hard as it used to be" is not the actual one. You made people upset in last league: the worst league start ever, pile of pointless nerfes, bad league mechanic. And we already can check on one of three. Fail the league start - and even bots on comments wont help you.

I want to play PoE. PoE, guys. Not diablo, not LE and other slow games. I want to play the most dynamic and most diverse ARPG which is difficult only in understanding the game, and not in dull difficulty at the level of "beat one mob". DYNAMICS, SPEED is a feature of your game. Don't lose it. For fans of slow gameplay, there is an SSF.

If you're actually keeping a close eye on feedback, here's mine. In general I agree player damage needs to be reigned in and flasks needs to be reworked, for example. What I dislike about this manifesto is that we agree on the issues but disagree completely on the solutions. For example, extremely high monster density causes problems for a lot of in-game systems. My solution: reduce monster density in endgame, buff their abilities to have more impact, and make each monster kill more rewarding with regards to exp. Your solution: rebalance systems individually for the current level of monster density.

Another example: Flask uptime is too high. It would be less if you reduced monster density, but because that is staying the same, your solution is rebalance to flasks effects individually to provide effects you are comfortable with having high uptime. It seems like so much more work to rebalance every system in game to treat a problem caused by high monster density, when reducing monster density to within original parameters would result in a superior product for far less development effort.

I also wish you would explicitly consider the smaller subdivisions of players (hardcore, SSF, challenge completionists, etc.) when designing new content for endgame, making challenges, new boss fights, or changes to crafting. I understand you have to cater to the average player but I don't believe those things are mutually exclusive. As a hardcore player exclusively, I can say for certain I would care a lot more about challenges (and play more as a result, spending more money in the process) if there were anything at all, such as a color palate change, that differentiated them from the exact same challenges I could earn far, far more easily in softcore.

In general, I think GGG makes too many assumptions about why or how we play the game. Chris's seminar on player retention with regards to patch content and timing was enlightening to understand how you see your own playerbase, but I would caution against seeing the entire playerbase condensed down to a single reaction to GGG's actions. It's a useful metric, but you lose understanding of your players, like why some of us play hardcore, or engage with certain mechanics while ignoring others.

I'm not interested in providing feedback on reddit even though it's clear GGG pays a lot of attention to dialogue there, and I rarely engage on the forum. I'd provide a lot more feedback if you offered in-game surveys on questions you found important, though.

This is like watching your pet die in front of you.
I just don't know what to do.