Character Balance in Path of Exile: Lake of Kalandra

"

axeltt012 wrote:

Man I agree so much with you. Same here 29yo with a GF and I feel like I can play almost any skill gem in the game if I do it right. I play around 10-20 builds each league that I theory craft myself... these people are realy displaying just how bad they are at the game. No wonder this happen when people tell new players to look for streamers to copycat their builds instead of learning it the hard way to understand the mechanics going in building a character so tyhey can reinvest their knowledge each new league on something new.

Feels like people can't accept that this game was meant to be hard

"Humility, I like it. I, too, am extraordinarily humble."

Haven't had to press X to doubt this hard in a long while, ROFL XD

Now they only need to add some more damagespikes and more invisible ground effects lingering 5+ sec after everything is killed on the screen to spice the game some more.

And we need more mobs that stand 2 screens away and attack with tracking projectiles or spikes etc.! Those are soooo cool.. no other game-designers did come up with things like this - i only wonder why! Check gamedesign do and donts and answer yourself.

And as they are on it, they should come up with league-mechanics for 3.19 where 99% cant get anything of worth from the content and 1% gets and sells everything!

Add more content players may be able to clear 5 leagues later ..this so much helps the players having fun grinding more hours every league.

Sorry but this is a new level of braindead

Elaborate this for me,.

How does doubling the amount of attributes needed for omniscience,. adding more item diversity from people stacking attribute's on them.???

"

Titoisagod wrote:

seems like a whole lot less ways to not die instantly and a few targeted nerfs for meta builds. the result will be the builds that are meta now generally stay meta and the ones that arent viable will become even less viable. may be time to step away from poe folks. it's not getting better.

This is a good way of putting it. Builds that aren't meta, will become useless meanwhile builds that are meta will stay meta.

"

WizBlizz1994 wrote:

Powerful builds are made when they are needed. Ice Spear COC Occultist is nearly untouched, why make a different build?

I tried ice spear occultist coc in 3.17. I kept dying all the time, I was suffering even in T16 maps, let alone end game. I had good gear, probably spent 50+ exalts on it, I even had help from a friend who got me stuff. On top of that, they did nerf this build as it's heavily dependent on auras.


I'm not against nerfs, I'm just against unbalanced nerfs. It's true the game is too easy for some, I mean, they gather 100-200 ex in 2-3 days which I can only do in about a month. So what's the real solution?
Balance the game, don't nerf it. My point is, if you want to balance things, you do it bit by bit. You don't do a massive overhaul and assume it's going to be alright. And first you identify the problem, which obviously is the top 5% players have it too easy, so think of ways how to make it more challenging for them while leaving the game fun for us who aren't as good.

One more League that i will not be spending any money on the game rofl unbelievable thats next level masochism.

"

Oxix wrote:

Break and nerf, new and renew, the wheel spin endlessly to make more money and the dumb rats (players) run in the wheel.

And the certain websites closely associated with the good ol' company prosper ;)

Honestly, at this point, I'm never going to play minions again. You keep slaughtering them over and over despite other builds being way stronger. The necro ascendancy change was completely uncalled for and seriously? Nerfing minion life again? Minions are already dying like flies despite investing in defense.

I was actually expecting you to buff the weaker minions but not touch the viable alternatives. But whatever I guess, moving everything to items so that only the top 1% can have access to playing a fun minion build because you made a very stupid ascendancy change.

To balance out this negative feedback regarding minions, I'll say that the spell suppression changes and aswell as mana reservation changes are definitely welcome and I do agree with those nerfs. Stacking spell suppression became mandatory for everyone which was a horrible meta.

I really do hope you stop being so out of touch regarding minions though. The current state of minions is already sad enough as it is.

So:

Bye spell supp. Not going to bother with it and going to resort to other mechanics (if it's not 95%+, it's waste of mod).

Trickster - I hardly believe it will be tempting still. Too much to rework(basically everything, so it would set it apart from other ascendancies that actually do the absolute same, just better).

Pathfinder - no idea who cares about that change and how it is going to influence me playing it. Used to be okish chaos bow build, now that's wiped long ago, it's just flask ascendency. Changes did change anything, nor made it more tempting to play.

Minions - wt...As if things wasn't bad still anyway or at best mediocre (50-100ex investment for something viable and playable or just use another build to farm and play, maybe at the end of the league try out mega beefed minions). I don't even want to touch them anymore, now not only you will lose some mods(which were crucial earlier for damage mitigation/defenses etc.), but now you will have less of this or that. For minion connoisseur only. More specter nerf? Like no one's playing them for several leagues...ok, whatever.

Seismic trap bye, other slightly beefed up, but not nearly enough to warrant them for late endgame. So bye trapper, it was nice while it lasted. Again, will be just for trap connoisseurs.

VDDD all of that, was getting boring and weird mechanic anyway and playstyle meh. Only thing that kept it going was amassing massive defenses and then having somewhat good damage (it sucked without decent investment anyway, just ratio between defenses and damage made it desirable for some). But bye, won't miss.

Fire Arrow...no idea why that okish build got hammered. Wouldn't even bother. Very niche playstyle, you had to invest in it decent amount, but eventually an ok build, if you like to play like that. Gone? K, fine. So TS/Ice Shot with 100ex+ is somewhat only bow viable build for all the season, unless you want to infinitely farm yellow, low red maps with some chaos arrow build.

Arctic Armour - dude, I am not going to reserve mana for that skill, if you give me extra 8% phys reduction. Flasks and armor are fine and instead I will get MORE damage with reservation.

And general nerfs here and there, nothing magic, will find ways around it or simply won't touch it at all.

Next league:
chaos builds left and right, with melee builds (still has a lot of one shot potential and good high scalability).
TOP builds will be Lightning Strike with that CoC Forbbiden Rite. +other 100ex+ TSes, aurastackers and what not.

Ok. I understand problems that are written, I get solution, but I do not understand logical reasoning that comes to that solution in order to solve the problem. How is it "reduce this - increase that". How is it never an "ok, so this now works, lets give some other options and/or make them work".

For instance, bow builds (personal favorite) had some buffs and then kinda worked, was ok, there was better options for starters, but late game they caught up and ran with it. Nerf again. Ok, bye then. How's that "a fix"?

Anyway, this always has same feelings for me, more raised eyebrow than any joy. Hopefully league will be interesting, maybe with some story and lots of new stuff to explore (not only for hundred exalt builds). Maybe acts will be even touched (one can dream)...

Best way to balance things is to do it slowly. People rarely appreciates unexpected changes. But everyone wants the game to stay a challenge of course.

So don't just change how everything works forcing people to forget what they've spent hours learning only to relearn what they had already learnt.

Add another stage of difficulty or slightly lower the chances of getting those really good items. If you want to touch skills, don't change how they work, just slightly balance them.

This is balancing

You don't remove the heaviest weights from one side, you start with the lowest and carefully monitor the effects.

Talk to your developers, they know how it should be done, I'm sure the devs must have voiced their opinion on this. Any person with a logical brain would.

Minion builds became my league starter a few leagues back.
Gutting their HP while expecting us to stat stick even more on our gear, and take away from our character's stats [BONE rings?] Necro Aegis already stat sticks for minions and takes that chunk away from us, now we have to invest *more* lines of our gear to the minions, which are either 1- glass cannon damage but you literally *cannot get hit* because they don't protect you, or 2- can taunt and protect you, but do trash damage.
They already start to kind of suck reaching end game, and struggle to keep alive due to lack of an hp pool. [which I get, they're minions, they're meant to be summoned over and over, and some bonuses get applied when you constantly summon depending on your rolls]
Taking away ele res from them is a mistake. Lowering their HP pool is a mistake. Essentially telling us we have to give more lines on our gear to the summons, even gear slots with these new bone rings, is a mistake.
Don't gut a build/set of builds because its popular, and others not so much. Some of the fun of minion builds I found, was seeing how hard you could scale them up to be these monsters of mayhem, even double wanding to buff them more, because you were just ABLE to. You had the choice to, and now there's pretty much no choice with these builds, lol.
Either figure out a way to balance them properly, or don't touch them at all. Just taking the dial of "powerfulness" for a build and cranking it one way or the other isn't the play, and tbh is kind of a shit balancing tactic.