Development Manifesto: Balance in Path of Exile: Conquerors of the Atlas

GGG are an absolute disgrace and farce when it comes to balancing, seems that will never, ever change as they continue to trash melee for real or even as a joke. More and more I believe they do it on purpose for some reason, maybe as payback because they were PK-abused in Diablo as range or mage players by some melee baba gods.

Took so many years for them to finally do something that made melee compelling and on par for once with off-screeners, but all it took was about 3 months to go back to old ways and completely butcher melee every patch since, including 3.9. Add insult to injury they buff the range off-screeners like the old PoE days, making this game even less challenging for the no life, no skill trend followers.

Any melee enthusiast should vote with their wallet and never support these guys ever again, just for how atrocious, clueless and biased against melee their balance team has been since inception.

I've first tried a 2H Cyclon HH Build on Standard after 3.9 Patch release. It seems they "balanced" the game around exactly this build. It feels against red tier bosses like a normal build now. The feeling of POG Build is gone or shifted to like T3 maps where your buffed 1.5million tooltip DPS somewhat matter against this low life boss.

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SuperDumbo wrote:

I've first tried a 2H Cyclon HH Build on Standard after 3.9 Patch release. It seems they "balanced" the game around exactly this build. It feels against red tier bosses like a normal build now. The feeling of POG Build is gone or shifted to like T3 maps where your buffed 1.5million tooltip DPS somewhat matter against this low life boss.

Fine. And how is the Atlas ? Did all the maps marked as "completed" remained completed for this expansion as well ?

Yes. And if you run an old Map you will get the points. But it seems to be a task to make them visible again. Right now you will see only T5 Maps with your completion and you need to do the thing with those new mechanics. I think it will be fun to play on Standard to unlock them. Especially with new Life buffs to bosses. I am skipping the league and go straight in to maps on Standard. There is too much content anyway. Blight is very common too. The masters are turned down and you have the juicy stuff like Blight and Legion in them.

Congratulations GGG. After over 5k hours played, I'm really struggling not to just completely fucking quit this game now.

This has been the absolute worst leveling experience ever in this game for me, I haven't had the slightest bit of fun the entire time, it's been nothing but frustration and disappointment. I might've been able to push through it if I thought endgame might actually provide some measure of fun, but I also heard this morning about the order of magnitude buffs to the life of the old endgame bosses, which can only mean the new ones are that much worse. 30 million hp just for the shaper guardians, and more than double that for shaper himself? The absolute strongest builds I've ever played barely made it into 6-digit shaper DPS numbers, and most have been nowhere near that.

When all your players can think about while playing is how much more fun they'd be having playing literally anything else (which has been exactly my experience thus far), that's probably a sign that you're doing something wrong.

I'm going to start drinking heavily now so I can hopefully get through this shit-tier leveling experience, and hopefully if/when I get through it endgame won't actually suck nearly as much as I now expect it to, but as of right now you're real close to losing me as a player altogether.

^ +1

League is terrible but ok I dont play any leagues, I prefer to wait till they get balanced and properly implemented on perma leagues. Problem is the melee nerf (by making bosses harder and nerfing melee survival) and specially the Atlas change... Jesus I cant see any improvement over the old system, its serious a mess of rng confusing finding waldo (credits to the other thread mentioning waldo lol) and even made me convert ALL my maps one by one cause the system is bugged...

Test things first and stop changing things for the sake of change. The new atlas dont have ANY new content, its all the same just inside out to make a ilusion that is new.

Take more time between league to release proper tested content and most important BALANCED arquetypes so u dont need to play "meta" or punish urself playing something u know is 10x worst.

Life buff also applied to any Unique Enemy in the map. GGG basically killed any zoom-zoom meta in red maps. I will not even try new league after two days in Standard with 3.9. Actually i'll go play COD:MW now. Because even playing Standard is bugged (Zana give no missions, crashes with Headhunter Build).

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DivineChampion wrote:

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PhilpC48 wrote:

It seems the basic principle with GGG here is "no fun allowed". I guess it's time to move on and play some other game.

Adios, amigos.

We will miss you, troll with private profile having 1 post in history.

LOL! Judging ppl by the number of posts and their profile being private. You've definitely made my day, kid.
I started playing this game in March this year and loved it at first. But the problem I'm having with this game is that after each league, all of my builds I've spent so much time to create suddenly become obsolete. I'm a casual and can't play all day long as opposed to 13 year-olds like you, and when all of my effort is swept away in a matter of a day, I too feel like being robbed and cheated. I totally agree with what the other guy said, and frankly the only troll I see in this conversation, is you. So run along, little mouse, live happily in your bubble and keep doing what you do best, which is insulting other people. You're sure good at it.

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GGG wrote:

Similarly, the Point Blank keystone has been seeing use on many Bow and other projectile skills for a long time. We felt the damage bonus was too great at close range, forcing a close range playstyle onto a long range weapon. The keystone now provides 30% more projectile damage at close range (down from 50% more), tapering to 30% less damage at long range (from 50% less).

While your description of the problem may be accurate, your choice of solution shows an astounding lack of foresight.

Do you really think that buffing off-screen kills will move the game in a direction that is more fun and engaging for your players? Wasn't this something you wanted to move the game away from?

rip all minions and zimbies