Development Manifesto: Game Balance in Path of Exile: Harvest

Hyped for harvest guess ill try me a slam and brand toon

"Critical Strike Multiplier values have been lowered from almost every passive, as well as from some items. Critical-based characters far-exceeded non-critical characters later in the game; this will bring the two a little closer together."

Again, wtf... Why? As if the crit multi was not nerfed in the past enough? How are you supposed to scale damage in a decent enough way? Why would you do this? We went from this (70% global crit multi) to where we are now, and for what? The crit multi was fine how it is now, it's already been nerfed from 70% global crit multi down to only 35-38% for tier 1. Leave crit alone...

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nGio wrote:

But if they continued to buff abilities, while leaving Winter Orb, melee builds, Zombies, etc powerful, then there would be more builds to choose from. I'd still be playing ST if it didn't eat 3 consecutive patches of nerfs. People will always gravitate towards powerful builds, because that's the fun and fantasy of the genre.

People get genres confused. Power Creep has become a negative term, but it was the reason why D2 was such a great game. Arpgs have low skill ceilings, and the only difficulty that can be added are more telegraphed attacks to dodge. Adjusting numbers doesn't make it any more or less difficult. I personally consider someone who "grinds efficiently" as a 'good player' in an arpg.

Hack n slash is supposed to be a chill alternative to pvp. Back in the day, friends would play SC for the stress inducing pvp, then hop back to D2 for some chill n grind. We have plenty of games that are ruled by nerf hammers, apms, and lessons in humility. Every game doesn't have to be bastardized into some self suffering esport wannabe.

The hardcore craziness of arpgs is the willingness to grind for countless hours, not to make 'BiG LC$ PlaYZ'. New gen gamers are conditioned for this, and have no idea that D2 was an absolute faceroll, but kept our attention for a decade.

Sure power creep doesn't have to be always negative. But if they only buff everything everytime to make all build somewhat equal then they have to buff monsters everytime too.

Players that complain about power creep mostly do it because they can easily see the massive difference in difficulty of some builds/maps/bosses.

If every builds in the game could easily run T16 fully buffed maps in than 1 min will the game really be better?

Buffing every monsters every time to compensate for the buff to build is kinda the same as setting a ground difficulty and making most builds perform similarly in that range. But having a base difficulty is way easier to balance for devs. PoE already have way more skill/mechanics diversity, it's already a nightmare to balance. I fully understand devs to try and make at it easier for them to balance.

There will always be better builds. but if a build is a little bit less powerful but is still close and fun to play then more players will play those other builds.

Nice

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menchop wrote:

Please keep in mind that some unique items like Rigwald's Curse have lost potential since the introduction of oils into the core game.

Corruption prevents from annointing items, so now it is almost useless. I believe most talismans (if not all of them) should be reworked.

what you said is one of the things that hurt most, i am actually back to league of legends now XD. i have played every build in the game and i have never enjoyed anything but facebreaker, facebreaker got nerfed countless times over the years.

last league you needed to spend a lot "minimum of 60-80 exalts" to get a good enough facebreaker build going,

1 a vulnerability corrupted FB with decent roll was 20 ex
2 each ring would cost u from 15 to 25 exalts "circle of guilt"
3 a proper rare helmet with increased phys, enough resistances and stats to help u cover up from the many uniques u are equiping is gonna be no less than 10 exalts considering you would want a proper helmet enchantment.
4 surrender ealry legue was close ot 4 or 5 exalts
5 u need a proper rare belt and boots for resistances which is gonna cost you another 5- 10 exalts.
6 u needa proper body armour with explosions "personally i combined it with frenzy on hit to avoid using blood rage and to get help for single target" that's another 15-25 exalts for a proper roll

by the time u get headhunter ur talking about a mirror tier build.

it is tanky and the dps would jump up to 6 million with good optimization.

now for such a build to deserve a nerf i could understand that hte dps goes to 4 with mirror gear but they nerfed surrender previously and now they hit herald of purity which means they hit also circle of guilt and even the new usable skills got phys to attacks removed.

believe it or not the damage went down from 6 million to around 1 with a mirror gear. i am pretty sure i could push it to 2 but the point is that the nerfs people are crying about did not kill the "dual wielders" but the nerf to facebreakers actually made facebreakers impossible to scale for the very end game content.

Patch notes and skill tree info please! ❤

in the meantime we'll pour out a flask for our fallen meta builds.
hahahahhah i cant breathe

Wow Path of Nerfing at its finest, however im impressed how good you guys are at wording these nerfs as actually something good hahaah

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Igolac wrote:

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nGio wrote:

[Removed by Support]

The biggest "problem" of poe is that most players don't make their own build.
Meaning that they will all follow builds of good players (usually streamers)
So when 99% of streamers make the same kind of builds (example cyclone) then a lot of players will play those build.

So in order to make players play other builds they nerf the OP / meta build to force the build makers to make other kind of builds.

This is the truest thing I've read in the whole thread. That is the real problem of PoE, and "meta nerf cycles" every league. PoE is not a game for casuals, so we (the casuals) in order to be able to play all content in every league are mostly forced to mimic the builds of people that really invest hours, a casual simply does not have the time that requires to study and create a build from scratch with the current state of things in PoE.

From a "theory crafter" point of view, PoE really stinks in all aspects of build making, all work to test and create a build must be done OUT of PoE with tools that are even not from GGG like PoB and (and are really assumptions couse there is no way to really tell if something will work till is yet done), all the crafting info or docs are out of PoE in pages that are not endorsed to GGG, all trading is done difficult by design (and this is in GGG words not mine), even the char info inside PoE is really a shit, better don't trust your char sheet and go PoB (PoB is not accurate neither but is more that PoE and gives more info). All in PoE is designed in a way that require literaly hours outside PoE and outside the game it self to really get to end content in a reasonable time in each league, or in other hand you can play standard and invest literaly THOUSANDS of hours to get to end content doing all by your self without mimic anyone, and in the way pray for GGG not destroying all thousands hour invested in standard couse a "nerf cycle of meta builds" nerfs to the ground your off-meta.


But this is how PoE is designed after all, and how GGG has designed and want PoE, and we should be used to it, the real problem with this design is that only a few player (really a few of the overall player base) can invest the time that is needed to create a new and fancy/fresh build, because of this all players play the same builds with same items and the rest builds are ignored and GGG must nerf it to introduce variation and the cycle goes on...

PD: All in all GGG can do this because with all this design flaws and "shits happen" every league there is not even ONE only game that can be compared to PoE in terms of deep and posibilities. But at the same time I belive that some day, some company will do a game with a good design and PoE simply will dissapear, because then they can't revert all the damage done to the game with this poor "obscured by design" focus.

Love balance and all, but this one literally feels like almost everything on the list are nerfs. Anyone else?

Literally just got back into the game, Delirium was fun, but needed the entire league to test three characters and get back into the groove, and now all my plans are ruined. Meh?