Game Balance in Path of Exile: Expedition

My hopes for this League: X
The Garbage Can: []

[X]

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Ryzara wrote:

Im just honestly wondering how this stuff makes it into the game in the first place if its against ur so called design philosophy.

Excellent question.

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Sarciss wrote:

tanky characters are a lie in this game 99%.

For real.

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Kitty1987 wrote:

So you nerf crap out of everyone but leave the monsters insanely overpowered...as if it was not bad enough mobs 1 shot even through 8k energy

Indeed, this game demands like 5 different types of damage mitigation and still you'll be one shot eventually. (No one will ever convince me HC uses the exact same rules. Yay for closed source, server side, and no damage log.)

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so it's a much higher gear and passive skill investment

That's basically every patch notes I've ever experienced. Pretty soon they are just gonna put an exalted orb gate on the exit of lioneye's watch. "Can't trade you way up to an ex with your three ID scrolls? Git Gud Scrub!"

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retain some level of Elemental Ailment mitigation, while the Inquisitor and the Elementalist no longer have any at all

That is so silly. The portrait image is the class smiling while being on electric frozen fire.

What next? Removing the chaos immunity from chaos inoculation? Preventing necromancers from raising the dead? Pacifist Slayers?

And shock isn't even an ailment, it's just more damage.

Split arrow damage buff and system wide beat down on all defenses except dodge. Glass cannon ranger meta, once again.

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Jhiroth wrote:

I'm not looking to spend 20-40% more time on an already over-time-sink game just so you can feel like your players will be challenged by killing the same boss they have over 3000 times.

And that's the core problem right there and why it's fair to speculate the game's western future is in jeopardy: GGG west seems to care more about how they feel than how players feel, and they entire business model for gaming is selling good feelings to players.

That's why loot crates are so shady, they take something akin to a steakhouse and turn it into an opium den. It's all a dopamine trade and the bottom line is if a game fails to deliver pleasure, or delivers less pleasure for ANY reason, it is failing period.

It really has become a game of attrition.

For my own part I no longer really play poe to feel more happy, I play poe to feel less bad. Poe for me, is moving further from single malt, and closer to plastic bottles.

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bartekowca666 wrote:

I see a lot of people complaining about buffs to campaign monsters... I can see why, and I somewhat agree. My solution: make the campaign difficult. Like really difficult. But then, when we want to make another character, give us either endless delve or infinite map system that scales with level, till 68, where you drop us at the endgame. Everyonhe is happy tehn, I guess?

That would actually add work. People would then simply build a "story killer" first the way they now build "league starters." What we really need is the last 6 acts removed entirely and t1 maps being ilvl 40. half the map content is recycle story zones and bosses anyway, just eliminate the redundancy.

Why am I compiling this reply? Only the mods at best read this stuff. Clearly our input is neither requested nor desired by what ever handful of people make the decisions.

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TDCFC wrote:

I mean, you have to see the irony on that wall of gatekeeping text, right? I can't be the only one laughing at this.

By the way, 120 hours is a lot of time for the filthy casuals with other things in life that enjoy gaming, well, casually. But, hey, you are absolutely right if you say "don't play a game for non-casuals if you are a casual". That statement is correct, except the game was not always like this, hence the disapproval of people.

Calm down, buddy. Everything's gonna be ok. It's literally "only a game".

Sure man, seeing big chunks of text may be dizzying and reading words is hard work... I apologize and promise I'll send you a colored drawing to make it more accessible for you.

Really? It hasn't? I'm pretty sure it has. Not everybody got to kill Atziri, The Shaper, Elder etc back when they were introduced as current content. As for leveling it was only made easier over time.

Hope this was short enough for you to read and not get any of them ironic feelings.

Well, flat damage nerfs rather than some kind of diminishing returns on the high end is fairly discouraging since one of the directions I wanted to take my one high-investment character uses a few of them with a specific crafting program to reach, according to POB with reasonable Config options, *drumroll* 1,242,523.4 shaper DPS (wow, REALLY TRIVIALIZING CONTENT THERE). but from the sound of it the other possibility shouldn't have been hit too bad...aside from the Arcane Surge hit. FFS. Guess I'd better bust my ass to get my last 8 regular Atlas passives before Friday after all -.-

Flasks would be fine, since I already use them reactively, aside from hexfont and/or vulnerability-csatin enemies.

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Flame Dash's cooldown time is now 3.5 seconds (from 3) and has 0-19% increased cooldown recovery rate (from 0-47%). Its cast time is now 0.8s (from 0.7s), but it still retains its cast time bypass if not used in rapid succession.

The Second Wind support gem has been changed to have a much higher mana multiplier, and a penalty rather than a boost to cooldown recovery speed, so it's now a choice rather than a support gem you'd always use on a skill if you had a socket spare, and doesn't provide such a growth in uptime for the above skills.

Hard to tell how much of a difference this is going to make in combat for my one high-investment character, in practice, but good fscking god did backtracking through maps just get more annoying.

I suppose, since I use a staff, I should look into maybe swapping to leap slam and using it to proc fortify (although it's a bit of an issue that Second Wind is almost mandatory for Decoy Totem which habitually mysteriously fails to actually summon even though the cooldown starts again; some jankiness with skill/movement sequencing? I honestly can't tell...).

On a self-cast Occultist.

....was that the effect you were hoping to have here? >.>

I dont get it why GGG can't just did what warframe did? Add more ENDGAME CHALLENGING CONTENT. Just add some maps up until tier 25-30, expand the goddamn atlas, dont nerf stuff. Playing slow is boring.

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You can see how Trap builds are going to be very powerful.

seriously??? if you knew your game/playerbase you'd know that the reason no one plays traps is because mechanically they're inferior to mines in almost every way. we all know that traps are strong, but mines feel way better (and they still scale better lol).

people aren't going to stop playing meta skills bc you dropped damage across the board, you literally have leagues worth of evidence telling you this.

the trash tier gems, for the most part, aren't trash tier because they have shit damage rolls. they're trash tier because they're mechanically inferior! we want to play fun builds, but why would i bother when it means actively handicapping my game-play experience? the end-game is so convoluted that you need to play something meta to get your league going.

do yall want people to stop playing? bc this is how you get people to stop playing. i cant wait to burn out half way through maven progression, again.

nerfing everything to the ground wont make stormbind feel any better chris

the TL:dr

The game powercreeped and got too easy endgame monsters can oneshot everything if not the tankiest builds but the players made builds that could either kill said monsters before they were a problem or avoid their damage entierely, to remedy this we:

-buffed the already trigger happy one shot mobs

-nerfed the players ability to predict and counter negative effects with their
flasks forcing them to either get a build with immunity to potential insta death debuffs overinvest in tankiness or die

-nerfed the players ability to physically dodge attacks thanks to movement
skills because they were playing the game engaging and reacting to the
content and apparently that's illegal

-nerfed overall damage so players would use more utility support gems instead
of more damage support gems against
tankier monsters with skills that deal less than before effectively
encouraging the opposite behaviour

Ahem, a poem for the GGG development & balancing team:

Nerfs are great, the community shall debate
Buffs are a waste, for the toxicity you face
Day in, day out; those with, and without
Though naysayers may seethe
the rest of us shall breathe

Never forget that some of us actually love the ups and downs you all put work into bringing us, and changing up the meta, for better or worse in the eyes of whomever, it is always a good thing.

That's another easy decision to skip this league just like ultimatum. This is not why I initially started playing path of exile. It just feels like "You are having fun in the wrong way so we removed it.". Especially with these out of touch manifestos and cherry picking of what playstyles are fine and which ones aren't.

If I want to play hard games I can always go and play stuff like dark souls, sekiro etc.. At least there the games combat is made in a way that fits the idea and you can see what kills you. Poe is not a game about difficulty. You can add extra difficulty yourself by going into fights undergeared. But the realistic goal of outgearing all the content on any given build should always be there so you can just faceroll the content eventually and feel the peak of the build. Then you can move on to another fun skill that you enjoy and do the same. Especially things like the maven memory game or waiting around for sirus for the 100th time have no place in an arpg imo.

At this point I honestly regret coming back in ritual and buying a supporter pack thinking maybe the fiesta is done and the direction of the game is fine again. Maybe I just have to accept that after all these years I am not the target audience of this game anymore. A lot of people that I played with every league feel similar but maybe we are just the minority here.

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hatefield wrote:

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TDCFC wrote:

I mean, you have to see the irony on that wall of gatekeeping text, right? I can't be the only one laughing at this.

By the way, 120 hours is a lot of time for the filthy casuals with other things in life that enjoy gaming, well, casually. But, hey, you are absolutely right if you say "don't play a game for non-casuals if you are a casual". That statement is correct, except the game was not always like this, hence the disapproval of people.

Calm down, buddy. Everything's gonna be ok. It's literally "only a game".

Sure man, seeing big chunks of text may be dizzying and reading words is hard work... I apologize and promise I'll send you a colored drawing to make it more accessible for you.

Really? It hasn't? I'm pretty sure it has. Not everybody got to kill Atziri, The Shaper, Elder etc back when they were introduced as current content. As for leveling it was only made easier over time.

Hope this was short enough for you to read and not get any of them ironic feelings.

Ah yes, instead of contributing to the discussion with counter points you insult the poster personally. Nice touch. Really makes me want to believe your perspective... not