Communication and the Sacred Orb

This is such a bad idea. Just add 15% to all the bases.

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prkalo wrote:

My dudes you should really stop wasting your valuable time on these absolutely insignificant things... You have so many other shit to fix and you decide to use your limited time to come up with some obscure currency thing that MBY some of us will see ONCE in the next 4 years of playing? I mean I dont mind the currency or whatever but really, if this is the ceiling of your imagination then i dont know... Still love you tho

THIS! ^ Like you could have just buffed the values on bases by 15% and done something actually valuable with your time.

Well... I think we can agree that there's a failure to communicate happening here, but I don't think we're in agreement as to where that failure has occurred. The problem isn't just that we didn't know the drop rate of Sacred Orbs. As described here, Sacred Orbs are going to be so rare that they may as well not exist anyway, so neither Sacred Orbs, not their essentially-zero drop rate, really impacts the conversation in any meaningful way.

The problem is that the basic system change you're proposing, i.e. having armour pieces drop with an extra layer of effectively invisible RNG, is bad in and of itself. Adding yet another currency item to a game that's already swimming in far too many currency items and shards and fragments (remember the backlash to Expedition League?) is also not not good, and the ludicrous rarity of the proposed item does nothing to correct its inherent badness.

Why not just let Divine Orbs do this same job? These are rare enough already, especially for SSF players; do we really need yet another hyper-rare, hyper-specific currency whose only reason to exist is that the underlying change to your base items was also bad?

I appreciate that you're tying to be more transparent about your thought processes here, but you'd also promised to take players' feedback on board. Reaction to the variable armour defence values change was bad; reaction to the sacred orb, which was intended to mitigate this badness, was also bad. Why is that not your cue to re-examine the entire change at the heart of this latest backlash? Especially since the chain of changes in question look more like a cascade of design failures than anything else?

Chris, you know we love you, but... you're doing it to yourself, this time. Again. Why are you doing this to yourselves again? I don't get it. I really don't. Is there some reason why this one change is absolutely fundamental to the vision for PoE2? Is it really not possible to produce a similar benefit without adding two additional layers of RNG bullshit, and yet another effing currency item, to a game that already has too much of both things?

Edited to fix a couple of typos. Damn those typos.

If it means anything, I'm thankful for the clarification.

Thanks GGG. Let's see how this pans out.

The new Armour/EV/ES base percentage should not go on any bases.

its so wrong and the rarity makes it worse since you can go from ok to worse.
If normal players see one , in my opinion it wont be worth using.


Only way i see the base variance to be acceptable is if it get combined whit a vaal orb in some kind of alter. Then you are accepting that you may brick the item. But not on any base

Honestly… who cares? A very rare item that makes a marginal difference on the base defense of gear isn’t something worth caring about. It won’t make the game more exciting or fun for anyone except a handful of high end crafters. It’s not a chase item, it won’t feel impactful when obtained or used, and it’s just another piece of clutter to the game. All impactful, fun, worthwhile crafting has been removed lately, real fun upgrades like anomalous skill gems or certain powerful awakened gems are nerfed, and now we might be able to increase the defense on a single piece of gear by a few percent. Give me something that is worth chasing and that makes a tangible difference and I’ll get excited. This certainly isn’t it.

I can't help but laugh about this post from Chris.

It's basically saying that:
GGG thinks that everything the players have complained about is actually not bad but good for the game.

So why "clarify" anything? That's where we were before that post.

Just add flat 15% and get rid off this idea.

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Gotcahomes wrote:

Honestly I cant do it with this game anymore everything is a walking mess and missing context one after the other.

See you on launch day

"

Have a play when Scourge comes out next week and let us know what you think. In playtesting so far, I am personally finding my interactions with base types a lot more interesting than before and get excited both seeing a perfect-defence base type drop and knowing that it would be technically possible to fix a non-perfect one with enough investment, if the item was godly enough to warrant it.

I don't understand your excitement from knowing it is technically possible.

I hope you can understand that PoE has not been really forgiving towards strategically built up value. Godly items may be crushed at your whim every league - some players recently lost thousands of hours of investment in their aurastacker build, for example.

See, in D2R, value is stable as the game remains stable. That godly item matters more because it will be godly forever. Much more fun as strategic investment.

But as rigorous as changes are in PoE, I have to say, this technical possibility of a chance is a misfit for this.


Further I don't think your play experience is that relatable. I'm happy you're happy with this, but to be honest I think you're just saying stuff.


We'll be fine in the end, I guess. To each their own on how to learn to cope with how you change the game around.