POE 2 speed slowed down. Yay or Nay ?

I'm very yay about it, and I think it's coming. The whole everything dies on screen with one button press is kinda dumb and makes designing any encounter outside bosses almost impossible. I don't think they'll go the whole way tho, because they know the playerbase would be really mad about it.

Most definitely Nay for me personally. The slow combat of D4 and Grim Dawn bores me to death.

On one hand, judging by the trailers it kinda seems that they are somewhat leaning towards slower pacing, though the trailers can be misleading and might be just a showcase rather than representation of an actual gameplay.

On the other hand, since both campaigns will share the same endgame, slower endgame would mean they would need to redesign half of the encounters since they are time/speed based - Blight, Legion, Alva, Breach. Somehow I'm very skeptical about this.

big nay cause the faster pace is what distinguishes PoE from all the other arpgs on the market, which seems to work pretty well giving that the game is already around and healthy since a decade.

The teaser trailer are slow cause it just looks better visually and ggg always used the "slow game play" style for their trailer ever since the game exists, even tho the trailer game play isn't exactly the same as the real gameplay. If they wanted to have a much slower paced game they would have changed it since years.

Slower, more measured gameplay would be better for the game overall; player retention would be higher and far fewer people would turn off from the game due to being blindsided by some distant monster effect that hit them faster than the human body is physiologically capable of reacting to outside stimuli.

The binary nature of Path of Exile 'combat', i.e. both players and monsters are either Alive or Dead, with absolutely no in-between "damaged" states, is the single biggest hurdle in designing satisfying gameplay and encounters in Path of Exile. Any halfway decent build - not even a good build, just a halfway decent one - can explode a white or blue pack of any arbitrary size on any arbitrary map tier before that pack has the chance to properly register the player's presence and start attacking them. A 'Good' build explodes rares just as quickly save for multiple defense-layered rares that might take two total seconds to melt. A "Great" build does the same to map bosses, while "the best" builds burn through uber-juiced pinnacle bosses so quickly they cannot finish even one skill animation.

Your build's efficacy and overall level of "Goodness" is not judged based on the level of contant you can clear, it's based on the level of content you can explode without even seeing it. Which is important because even heavily invested, powerful defensive builds tend to melt in seconds under uninterrupted focus fire from a dense pack of critters. Players have such unrestricted and infinite access to effectively instant recovery that a build that takes more than one second to go from one HP to full HP is automatically bad.

There's simply no reasonable way for the developers to put pressure on players, strain their resources and recovery and force them to make choices, because a Good Build has leech, regen, health-on-kill, flasks, damage recoup, and any one of those recovery methods is enough to get the build back to the top of its 8k health pool in less than three seconds. All combined, the multiple stacked recovery methods make it difficult for players to even notice their health changing. The same builds are slinging eight to nine-digit DPS figures and basically ignoring every modifier of every map or map-like zone they do, while the players behind those builds complain that the game is too easy and forgiving.

Those same players, the ones who have a hundred divines by the end of League Start Weekend and are sitting on a hundred mirrors by the end of the league, don't seem to realize that fewer than one in ten thousand Path of Exile players ever achieve this level of "Basic Competence", and for the overwhelming majority of the playerbase the game is already a brutal, unrelenting exercise in masochism. Think about it - players here treat defeating the Searing Exarch and Eater of Worlds as ho-hum, blase ordinary everyday things that any idiot with three chaos in his pocket should be able to do Day 1 of a league in basic-bitch blue gear with no boots on...and yet fewer than three percent of Path of Exile players have either the Searing Exarch or Eater of Worlds achievable on Steam.

Fewer than three percent.

The scaling in this game is absolutely out of control, and the overwhelming speed of clear it provides means that a "Good Player" manages to good-player themselves completely out of engaging with the content. Players who engage with the game's content instead of blowing through packs so quickly they don't even see what sort of critters the pack is comprised of first are simply dismissed as lolterrible and bullied off the game.

This is not sustainable. It fundamentally cannot be sustainable. At some point, Grinding Gear is gonna have to pump the brakes on the constant incremental Enfastening of the game, slow shit way down again and reset the clock. Chris Wilson has openly stated that he doesn't like how fast and Cookie Clicker-y the game has become and he would prefer a slower, more methodical game where players have to actually pay attention once in a while. Even the famous "Watching TV" comment from several years ago was "I want players to be able to play the game casually and be able to watch TV while they do it, except for emergent moments where they suddenly realize they're in unique danger and have to refocus and pay attention."

When was the last time you, as a 'Good Player', had to pay attention to an emergent moment of unique threat in this game?

If Path of Exile 2 actually manages to offer a slower, more engaging game, the Speedy Speed Boys who cannot tolerate being unable to clear a map in fewer than twenty seconds will snarl, scream, complain, and quite possibly quit the game. The ten thousand 'Normal' PoE players to that one Speedy Speed Boy will have a better experience and be more likely to stay, play more, Git Gud, and become a financial supporter of the game.

Besides. even if PoE2's endgame plays as slowly as the Ngamakanui and Aggorat trailers showed? Five years from PoE2's release we'll be right back here where we are, with Speedy Speed Boys running 300+-divine builds through 100% Delirious guaranteed-Beyond 8-mod corrupted triple-Influenced T16 maps in eighteen seconds without even seeing the map before posting on the forums about how terrible Path of Exile would be if they couldn't get to that level within forty-five minutes of a new league starting.

And that miniscule minority of turbosweats will still not be able to financially sustain the game by themselves.

The only issue I have is that only about 20% of players hit level 100 in PoE, and if you slow down gameplay that number is going to down even more.

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xvorpsm wrote:

The only issue I have is that only about 20% of players hit level 100 in PoE, and if you slow down gameplay that number is going to down even more.

20% seems really high. But what's the issue there? Why is it a problem if not many people reach level 100?

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

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xvorpsm wrote:

The only issue I have is that only about 20% of players hit level 100 in PoE, and if you slow down gameplay that number is going to down even more.

20% seems really high. But what's the issue there? Why is it a problem if not many people reach level 100?

The 100 argument is moot because Legion exists. Couple divines got me from 98 to 100 in 2 hours I think.

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1453R wrote:

The scaling in this game is absolutely out of control, and the overwhelming speed of clear it provides means that a "Good Player" manages to good-player themselves completely out of engaging with the content. Players who engage with the game's content instead of blowing through packs so quickly they don't even see what sort of critters the pack is comprised of first are simply dismissed as lolterrible and bullied off the game.

You made some really excellent points throughout your post. And, I agree with most of it. The quote above, though, speaks to something that's been on my mind lately.

Even though I've been playing PoE for years, the builds I play sit in the range of half-way decent to "good" as you described. This is mainly because I have a lot of fun just trying to hodgepodge together my own custom builds. Since that's the case, a good chunk of my builds "engage with the content" to varying degrees. But, that's also fun for me.

Sometimes I consider making/posting build guides for some of them I found really fun to play, but then I see the "great" builds out there and get discouraged from doing so thinking about the "lolterrible" response they'd likely get. "Can't delete pinnacle bosses? Trash build."

However, when I play "good" builds, I experience largely what you describe. It's definitely fun to blow through packs. "Good-playering" myself out of engaging more deeply with the content. Then, after doing that for a while, I ask myself if this is what "good" *should* look like.

For me, I enjoy the combat a lot when I take the time to consider what enemies I'm facing off against, using my knowledge about their attack patterns or specials abilities, what skills are appropriate to approach the situation, and being mindful of my character's positioning. While this is certainly true for "good" builds against endgame bosses, it isn't for the vast majority of time in mapping or other league content. I feel like the game would be more fun (at least for me) if more of the content allowed for that kind of engaging, tactical approach to combat.

If achieving this means broadly slowing down the pace of the game in PoE2, then that would be a "yay" from me.

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la_blue_girl wrote:

I'm very yay about it, and I think it's coming. The whole everything dies on screen with one button press is kinda dumb and makes designing any encounter outside bosses almost impossible. I don't think they'll go the whole way tho, because they know the playerbase would be really mad about it.

The only reason anyone would want to slow down end game is because they suck at playing end game and wants to bring everyone down to their level, what they dont factor in is that bots will simply run more clients still devaluing the market and burning top level players in the process.

And if it isn't about trade leagues, then it doesn't affect your gameplay at all, so /thread.

YAY to slowdowns.

Rebalance the whole damn game so you don't need 10 million trillion DPS to not get one-shot every two minutes. Slowdown alone is far from enough. GGG need to look at all the 'resources' in the game, and balance them much better.