[outdated] Caustic Arrow Solo Map MFer (20/300+)
" Gratz buddy! Jul 27, 2011 - Sept 30, 2018.
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" Thanks Chimurestaurat! Some more off-topic thoughts
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RE HoWA - It would be great if HoWA is available next league. As you probalby know, HoWA is an upgraded version of a drop from Esh - namely, Hand of Thought and Motion. Thus, even if Chayula is prophesied, HoWA won't be available - that said, HoWA might be available via Zana (really expensive and very hard to get) or perhaps Breaches will become a permanent - though less common - fixture of leagues henceforth - in this case, HoWA is available but rarer. ============= Hopefully GGG will increse single target DPS and clearspeed for multiple existing skills and introduce new Tier 1 clear speed/single target DPS skills for the next league. This league... HoWA is far superior to all other skills - which has the effect that far too many players are rolling HoWA. What happens? Gear for HoWA/CI becomes either totally unavailable or far too expensive. And guess what?... In spite of this, HoWA, with meh gear, still outperforms every other build unless you can purchase multiple mirror-worthy items. So is HoWA OP? Or are other builds under-powered? I think mostly the later. But, I expect that if HoWA is available in some form next league, it's likely to be nerfed. ================= My hopes for next league: 1) Buff life-based builds - CI is unnecessarily far better. 2) Buff DPS and clear-speed for most skills. The clear speed meta is likely here to stay - we need a choice of excellent skills or skill-combinations to be competitive with the best performing skills in this regard. 3) Retire or significantly buff a bunch of existing skills that no one plays anymore. Ideally, each skill should be approximately equal in performance and totally end game viable with maybe a few outliers - being either better than average or maybe even much better than average or of course worse than average. But if better than average, several skills should fall into this niche otherwise far too many players will glom onto the single best skill. 4) Replace extreme time-commitment challenges with skill-based challenges - requiring that the skill-based challenges be completed solo. This is a radical departure from the current design - and likely won't be implemented. GGG makes money via it's transaction sales. Higher player time commitment likely equals higher transaction sales. So time sink is probably here to stay. Last edited by hankinsohl#1231 on Feb 9, 2017, 3:51:39 PM
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" A major change like this is unlikely to come in a league which is hinted at honouring the history of PoE. Especially given double-dipping isn't scheduled until 3.0, I doubt we're going to see much in the way of changes to the existing meta, but rather changes to off-meta stuff, like the previously mentioned 1H changes in line for 2.6. " I seriously hope it doesn't, but there does need to be a BIT more equilibrium between skills currently. That said... " No. There needs to be a few bad skills in the game in order to separate the good ones. I agree that MOST skills should probably be relatively equal, with some slightly better than others but still having most remain competitive with end-game, but how much of it is just people not experimenting enough? For example, this dude used a skill hardly anybody uses and killed the Phoenix with Arctic Breath. Further... GGG has said repeatedly they're fine with meta shifts and skills going out of phase for a while then bringing them back, so you can expect a rotation of skills that were formerly good turn shit, then good again. Jul 27, 2011 - Sept 30, 2018. Last edited by Serleth#4392 on Feb 9, 2017, 4:09:08 PM
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" @Serleth... Further thoughts
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RE Life versus CI - I expect some change... not a nerf to CI, but some more life nodes/more life on gear. The imbalance is large enough that I think GGG will address it. RE Bad skills - I disagree. There doesn't *need* to be any bad skills. But, GGG has limited staff - so some skills just won't be upgraded due to resource limitations - if this is what you mean, than I agree. What I think will happen is that GGG will try to balance most skills - but this is imperfect. They'll miss things - and the POE community will find out what's been missed. Meanwhile, new skills will intentionally be made a bit better to encourage uptake. What will happen - is that one or more new skills, intentionally over-buffed, will have some subtle effects (or maybe not-so-subtle effects that will nonetheless escape alpha/beta testing) that can be exploited - expect that one or more new skills will be substantially better than any existing skill because of this. RE Skill rotation - yeah... this will happen - again due to limited resources. Some skills just won't get any attention next league - even if they're obviously terrible. So skill rotation, in terms of what's best each league, is inevitable - not per design, but because of resource limitation. Another way of looking at this - why on earth would a game designer introduce/include skills that are much worse than any other existing skill? This makes no sense. Yes, a good game, such as POE will require that you research your skill and leverage gear/tree/jewels etc. to get the best out of your chosen skill/skill(s) - but to include skills that are horrible no matter what you do - by design - well, I don't think any game designer would do this on purpose. Yes, bad skills will occur because no one likes the skill and thus no dev effort is spent to fix problems - but intentionally introducing bad skills, by design - I really doubt that this happens. Instead, some skills will inevitably become terrible over time as the game evolves - especially if the bad skills have few players adopting them. What's somewhat bizarre is "Blight" from last league - a brand new skill, and thus given dev attention. But out of the box, flawed, obviously so, in numerous ways. Why on earth did GGG waste effort on Blight - virtually no one plays it, because the skill is aweful. You could understand this situation if the skill had been around for a long time and very few players used it so thus it got little attention. But to the contrary - many players like Blight's playstyle. If the skill were competitive it would be hugely popular. But... due to limited resources - Blight was left unfinished. It actually seems to me that one Dev designed Blight and was given almost no time to identify - via tester/alpha/beta participation - Blight's weaknesses and then address them Completely opposite to Blight was Blade Flurry - huge dev time commitment and testing. Awful at first, and then probably a bit OP. Scaled back before release, but still a really awesome skill. Middle of the road is Scorching Ray - an "OK" skill, maybe so, out-of-box. I actually think that Scorching Ray received about the same dev attention as Blight did - it just so happens that Scorching Ray was viable in end-game whereas Blight had numerous problems. Neither of these skills, IMO, were adequately budgeted for end-game balance. ------------------ Hiccups similar to the Blight fiasco will undoubtedly recur in the future - not by design, but due to limited resources and, in hindsight, non-optimal release planning. Last edited by hankinsohl#1231 on Feb 9, 2017, 5:59:42 PM
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It has nothing to do with limited resources. GGG's flat out said that they will always have a few skills in the game be bad as a learning mechanism for newer players, to discover what works well and what doesn't. The list of "bad" skills isn't meant to be prolific, but there will be a few.
Double Strike, for example. It provides the perfect comparison to Lacerate so as to illustrate that Lacerate is a good skill. While this is a more concrete example, there won't necessarily always be a direct comparison. Exactly the same as their philosophy on uniques: you don't know what's good unless you know what's bad. They've also said they're fine with having a variance in power levels. Hence, meta. And some of it's plain and simple caution or human error, particularly in a game as complex as PoE. You're RARELY going to find a skill that they released properly balanced straight out of the gate, whether it's under or over powered, on the sheer basis that a hundred thousand players are more likely to find what's broken about a skill than a few dozen testers. You see this constantly even in AAA games like Overwatch. Bastion's been garbage since release because he had no mobility and often gets focused hard in sentry mode, so now they've made him able to heal while moving on the PTR and gave him some damage reduction while sieged. Conversely, McCree was OP as shit out of the gate, able to flashbang and empty a revolver with his Fan the Hammer skill and kill basically everything. And this is one of the biggest developers on the planet. It's the nature of balance and testing in any game. The community's always going to test your game better than whatever you have going on before release. Jul 27, 2011 - Sept 30, 2018.
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Some more :-)
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Good discussion. Please supply links to GGG statements about intentionally introducing/making available skills that are much worse than average - to me, this makes no sense whatsoever. But if GGG has taken this tack - well, whatever. RE new skill balance - I'm actually not sure. It's not the number of beta testers you have... rather, it's the quality. Take Blight - for sure, no one could get this skill to work in a Tier 1 sense - yeah, it's workable if you want a sub-par skill... but it's not competitive with numerous other skills either in terms of clear speed or DPS. Obviously flawed - unless you subscribe to the intentionally bad skill design philosophy, Blight's poor performance must be put down to lack of resources. Phox got it to semi-work as an OK skill with a bunch of special gear - but he relied on Abyssal Cry to carry the load on bosses, and probably clear speed - he'd have done much better using just about any other skill coupled with Abyssal Cry. Take HoWA - an extremely great/OP item. Was it adequately tested - I think not. Why? Because, insofar as I know, beta testing consists of letting a bunch of players play the game - maybe boosted by level. It takes quite a while to accumulate HoWA gear... assuming that you even know that HoWA exists. So likely, HoWA got almost no beta testing. This isn't good testing - if no one/very few testers actually use your new item(s) imbalances are inevitable. Better to just hand out level 92 or so to at least some beta testers along with their pick of whatever new/existing gear they want; better yet, insure that several really knowledgeable players use whatever new item you want tested- give them this item, along with level 92 or so out of the gate plus some semi-decent other items - and pretty much make it such that these players choose to use your new item. Then, check balance. Hell... it's even simpler than this... suppose you were assigned HoWA development. You come up with some stats that you think are OK. And then... don't you test the item? Try it out with high Int/ES/WED gear? I would. And I would find that's it's extremely powerful. Far better than anything else i the game. And maybe such testing occurred - and maybe HoWA was left as-is by design. But if so, why weren't other items boosted to give comperable performance? In contrast to beta testing, in the real game, new items are found - and stats published. The entire gaming community is given a lot of time to look at these new items and to try out various on-paper builds based on them. And if an item looks really good, the paper plans are put into action - and then posted on the forums - and you've got HoWA. To be sure - and I agree with you - no limited testing, such as beta testing peformed by GGG, can possibly find all skill imbalances. On the other hand, introduction of Blight - intentionally bad skill inclusion put aside - points out some really big flaws around testing/resource allocation/new content release on the part of GGG. Last edited by hankinsohl#1231 on Feb 9, 2017, 7:03:55 PM
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" This was made a while ago, either in a video or over a year ago. I don't recall where it was. " Quality is a function of stress testing. They are human. Certain humans will notice things other humans do not. By attritting the process, you're more likely to find issues. I'm not really going to get further into the speculation of how well they do or don't test things because quite frankly, we just don't know. Jul 27, 2011 - Sept 30, 2018.
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Have a few things to add to the Serleth / Hankinsohl conversation.
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A few more things to keep in mind. GGG's goals are likely to produce a free to play game that grows in player size as fast as possible, and entices the largest portion of that player base to donate money. As players, we want a game that is balanced at least as well as the rest of the stuff on the market that we are interested in playing. These goals are *usually* aligned, however, what is best for one is not always what is best for the other. I'm with Serleth in that you need some bad skills / gear - the wide range makes players with top end gear feel better, and players without that gear strive harder for it. Not every skill needs to be end-game viable. Every skill should have use case where it shines, but those are vastly different. A skill can be end game viable, easy for new players to master, good for party play, good for solo play, good for low level xp, etc. Some players want to challenge all the available content. Some want to play PVP. Some want to magic find. Some want to generate currency - and so on. Most players want a few of those. Take our favourite build, for instance - Serleth's CA MF Scion. Do we start with CA at level 1? Hell no. CA sucks hairy donkey nuts at level 1. So, we start with Searing Bond, or Magma Orb, or whatever, then switch to CA later. For us, Searing Bond only needs to be viable for the first ~50 levels. Meta. There's *always* going to be some. So, throwing a bunch of effort into stamping it out is at best a waste of resources. At worst, it's a rabbit hole you can pour everything into without any results. Instead, they are better off to try to control it - which they currently do reasonably well with timeboxed leagues and the nerf hammer. Imagine they have a goal of keeping a meta to a single league - how does that affect their customer base? It means the meta players can't just rinse and repeat every league - they have to dig, figure out what they think will be the meta, and most of them will be wrong, abandon that toon and create a new one 3-7 days into the league. So the vast majority of the meta players will play a week longer each league? As far as GGG is concerned, that's a win. Every decent company puts together an analysis of their user types and possible goals - noob, kid, experienced player, etc - and their bucket lists - storyline, maps, endgame, ladder contender, 40 challenges, gear collector, etc - and everything they decide to assign resources to should satisfy as many of those pairings as possible. We tend to look at this from the perspective of the experienced player who wants to generate in-game currency, however, the 13 year old kid that never finishes Cruel mode is also important to them. Especially if he has currency and is willing to spend it! Bottom line on meta - I would be completely un-surprised to learn that a constantly changing meta is deliberately planned into each league. Current league IGN: Teldra_Anc_LAD
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" I could go into this quite in depth - software quality has been my profession for 20+ years, however, I'll try to keep it short. ;) Bugs have a natural distribution across severity and likelihood. All development teams tend to create about the same percentage of crash vs cosmetic, for example. Given that the bugs we face in POE are non-critical - the game doesn't crash, the servers don't crash, our player data isn't corrupted, etc, etc, I can emphatically say this game is rather well tested. The issues that we *do* face are game balance, supporting skills that are triggered when they should not be, items dropping in places where they cannot be picked up, etc. These are not bugs that any product owner would (or should!) stop a deployment over. Development teams don't attempt to ship a bug free product - they try to ship a product with the *right* bugs, the ones that don't impact the customers badly enough to affect satisfaction levels. Bugfixing past a certain point is cost prohibitive - even mission critical software that can kill people if it fails badly - air traffic control, NASA, etc - is only tested for double fault bugs at most. Short... ish, anyway. :D Current league IGN: Teldra_Anc_LAD
Feel free to message me in game if I'm on. |
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" Interesting. Thanks for the insight. Jul 27, 2011 - Sept 30, 2018.
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