PSA: All the PoE2 Footage You've Seen is from the Equivalent of Acts 1~3
" Well I am older than most. My kids grew up using both consoles (and a TV) and PCs, but I have only ever played games on a PC using mouse controls mostly. I started playing games on a PC in the late 80s. Back then..."Consoles were for stupid kids games" lol My kids, their friends and I played Diablo on a home network. In any case my left hand keyboard use is not nearly as good as my right hand and using WASD is usually a mess of miss clicks. When I set up characters I have specific ways of arranging items to accommodate my fingers. The 1 key ring finger) and the E key (index finger) are easiest for me to hit without error or needing to look. I also use the MMB a lot. My Razer Death adder mouse has buttons I do not use. "Gratitude is wine for the soul. Go on. Get drunk." Rumi
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"Thanks. Interesting device. I don't know if it would be useful but likely worth a try since the keys better placed for moving from one to another. I assume it would work well with my Razer mouse. "Gratitude is wine for the soul. Go on. Get drunk." Rumi
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" I've used a combination of Razer keypad and Razer mouse for over a decade without any issue, and I've never bothered to use Synapse. The keypad maps to the left-hand side of your keyboard keys, essentially duplicates those controls. In effect it's a second, partial keyboard designed specifically for gaming and long-term comfort. You still play with the WASD and such where they generally are, but the keypad also puts Left Alt, arrow keys, and Space directly under your left thumb. Those are super helpful, especially since it really reduces the amount of weird canting and angling of the wrist you have to do to get to Alt and Space, as well as giving you arrow keys under your keyboard hand rather than over by your right hand. Those arrow keys alone could be four additional keybinds for utility skills or flasks. I wholeheartedly recommend this sort of set-up to basically any gamer who can afford it. The ergonomic win cannot be overstated, I've played all day on this set-up without any wrist or finger strain at all. | |
" That's interesting, I would have thought GGG's history and the existence of PoE1 as very much a suitable grounds for apprehension on this massive project. It seems appropriately relevant no? No one is saying balance will be 100%, me included. In fact I'd argue that's unobtainable realistically in the entire scope of the games lifespan. It will be constantly tweaked and adjusted. That's not even remotely what I'm saying, and you know it. Your comments are dismissive, and in bad faith. "Yeah yeah it will be a wild west at launch" then proceededing to Aww shucks that as a concern... eh doesn't really make for sound argument in my opinion. Your initially premise in the OP was to take second before judgment on something we haven't seen in full, yet you minimize or flat out reject some of the valid concerns some have based on GGG PoE track record. If anything what I've touched on is far more based on fact, since we have an actual product to refer to, than most of the conjecture you are surmising to be true. It seems your are placing your feelings of trust & belief on something unreleased, above someone else's anxiety or nervousness based on their actual GGG experience with PoE1. Make it make sense to me. Perhaps I've misunderstood overall, and this thread really is more of an emotional appeal to the community, and not really a thread about legit details and facts. If so carry-on with your feelings, I sorry if any PoE2 criticism hurt the vibe here. I'm sure it's all Sugar and Rainbows from this point on. Edit: side note that I haven't seen anything refuting my concern about game knowledge/tooltip, beyond an integrated encyclopedia of sorts based on key words. That hardly addresses the issues PoB solves in terms of damage calculations, gear swapping impacts, affix and conditions created by specific modifiers and so on. And to a lesser degree passive planning and real time decision making based on where you invest skill points. "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln Last edited by DarthSki44 on Jun 6, 2024, 1:57:05 PM
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" While I share a lot of your skepticism, this sentence stood out to me. You talk as if finding equilibrium is supposed to be easier to achieve after "MANY years". I beg to differ, and I think the easiest way to balance the game, is to start over - like they are doing. Making 36 ascendancies from scratch and balancing them in a new environment will probably be A LOT easier than trying to balance anything in PoE 1, where there are so many moving parts, so many multipliers and so many unforseen hurdles. The butterfly effect is real in PoE. Changing a minor trifle in one corner, can make the smallest man OP. There are hundreds, if not thousands of unique items, notables, key stones, skills and support gems just waiting for a single little mechanical addition to becomes the greates thing since sliced bread. PoE 1 is just... Too much... It cannot be balanced. Sometimes, just sometimes, you should really consider adapting to the world, instead of demanding that the world adapts to you.
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It's not so much a rejection of the concerns outright, Darth.
Rather, I reject the idea that "bad balance" is going to be a game-crippling concern, or that Optimal Farming paths will be same. Your stated example of the latter was "this rainforest map is quick to run and the boss is easy on sorc." I dismiss this as a concern because it already happens. Everywhere online, you'll find Optimal Strategies for absolutely hypermaximizing the return from one map with one build, and it's held up as The Most Efficient Way To Farm In PoE. And yet almost nobody follows those guides save for the people who're naturally inclined to seek that sort of ultrafocus in the first place because doing that sort of thing is boring and mind-numbing for most people. it doesn't really matter that the rewards for doing so are disproportinate compared to "normal" play - normal play is what most people find fun and engaging, and so long as they feel adequately rewarded for doing what they're doing, most of them won't care that the Waterways Shield Charger is generating twenty times more loot than they are using a bizarre, warped-to-hell Endgame Strat. The usual response is "good for him, I like running different maps/my favorite tilesets" and they go about their business. Similarly with the issues of balance. The beta period for PoE2 is slated to be three to six months in length, essentially a "Beta League" for players to help dial in the balance to a tolerable state for the full launch. This beta will likely have some wild stuff happening in it, but as you said - that's unavoidable for a game as complex as Path of Exile, with as many moving pieces as it's got. There's no way to avoid it, all we can do is hope the number of real humdingers is kept to a reasonable minimum and all be ready to deal with progress wipes and rollbacks during the beta period to fix any glaring issues the beta population turns up. After that, the game will still be rougher than PoE1, yes. But it's releasing with a lot less Old League content and will have less stuff available in the base launch, for this and many other reasons. Do I believe it's within Grinding Gear's capabilities to get the game to a tolerable, if not perfect, state of overall balance? Yes. Ergo no reason in my mind to worry myself sick and indulge in Nopium over balance - either they stick the landing or they don't, and we have no real way of knowing which it'll be ahead of time. I don't see this as a Nopium dealbreaker, the way you suggested it would be. The way you phrased and presented your arguments, it came off as suggesting PoE2 was doomed to permanent and unsalvageable failure because of early balancing issues and Spreadsheet Enjoyers' tendency towards Optimal Farming Strats. I disagree - that's Nopium. A level of concern over how turbulent the beta period will be, and wondering if the game will have a rocky launch due to either concern? Reasonable, and not Nopium. Like I said - we have no way of knowing whether or not they'll stick the landing, and while I'm not overly concerned with that eventuality I understand that some people can be more concerned than I am. Just ideally not to the point of Nopium. My intent was to try and reduce the level of Nopium - the knee-jerk "THIS IS ALL HORRIBLE FOREVER!" nonsense from people who've made up their minds that because they haven't seen a PoE2 showcase of some trillion-Mirror endgame Kaiju Blaster with effectively infinite DPS and EHP breaking the game over its Galactus-sized knee, that the game will be unacceptably slow and fragile and awful. That is Nopium, a desperate overreach and ignorance of facts in evidence, and reading it constantly in every source talking about PoE2 is getting incredibly tiresome. Do I care if PoE1 players don't like PoE2 and prefer to stick with the original game? Not at all, actually. I'm thrilled as punch that people who unabashedly love what PoE1 has become get to keep their game and play as they've always played without interruption from PoE2. If people are genuinely uninterested in the second game, the way Phrazz and ChanBalam are? That's absolutely their call to make, and I'm willing to discuss reasoning with them but I'm not going to sass their decision. People screaming like nut-punched coyotes and spewing factually incorrect sky-is-falling doomsayer nonsense in every thread? Way less okay. Nopium ain't okay. I'm sick of reading Nopium, and I figured I'd do a little bit to try and combat it. | |
" Balanced amongst the class types will be fine I suspect. Although ranged vs Melee will be interesting as GGG never really got that right like Diablo has. I'm more talking about decisons within those classes in terms of specialization. If we end up seeing 6-10 ascendancy hardly played, then it's seems to me as wasted development resources. If so, my question would end up being why 36 and not 24 better ones? That's the point there. On using years in a negative aspect, it was more to highlight how it seems GGG cannot get it right, or make changes that clearly don't work given their experience. You shouldn't need Ghazzy to tell you "x" won't work on minion ascendancy. Surely we would agree on that point? Feedback is one thing, development is quite another. Its hard, no doubt, but why is Gladiator such a meme lol. Please don't tell me it cannot be done. "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln Last edited by DarthSki44 on Jun 6, 2024, 2:22:38 PM
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Ascendancy usage levels is as much about FotM, player preferences, and current trends as it is about balance. Grinding Gear has stated that they're fine with certain Ascendancies seeing relatively little overall play (i.e. Chieftain) so long as those Ascendancies perform well for the people who do take them. Certain Ascendancies see what feels like overbearing dominance of selection because they're easy to use (Raider, Juggernaut), provide an inexpensive alternative to otherwise extremely pricey build types (Assassin, Pathfinder), or because they fit a popular aesthetic/style niche (Necromancer).
Lesser-used Ascendancies are not necessarily bad, they're just not as broadly applicable. Admittedly the current Chieftain certainly made a lot of choices, and I don't know as most folks would've made the same choices, but Grinding Gear's stated on numerous occasions that they don't generally pre-create builds. Not to the extent the community thinks they do. They put tools out there and see what the players do with them. Sure, certain broad skill archetypes are given things so people who like that archetype can have fun, i.e. the Shield [X] skills for Captain America Enjoyers, but they don't necessarily envision a specific build guide when they make an item, skill or Ascendancy. Instead it's usually "these are interesting and thematic modifiers with a lot of intriguing potential. Let's see where the community goes with it." Like Phrazz said, that'll be much easier to get right in a new game where they don't have to keep ten thousand legacy plates spinning while trying to change out the underlying mechanics doing the spinning. Also damnit now I kinna want to do a Chieftain build just to do dumb stuff with some of the less disastrous nodes on it. Those resist nodes, memey as they are, are honestly pretty juicy if you can get enough phys-taken-as-element. Between Purity of Fire and a Ruby flask, you can easily cap out at 90% fire res, which means 90% all res for a miniscule fraction of the normal price for that defensive layer. And given the first resist node is also giving you double the value out of every Fire resist roll? Welp - time to actually use Lightning Coil and see if I can find a way to fill in the other fifty percent of physical damage without spending a million divines I'll never have. Heh. | |
" Hmm I don't want this to come off as insulting, but this seems either intentionally naive or woefully ignorant. Either PoE2 will be player friendly or it won't. This is a massive multi-million dollar decision & project. There is far more at stake, far more pressure, and far more attention. In truth, regarding players, nobody needed a guide in D2 to know Meph or Baal runs were optimal. Players figure it out. If they design 100 bosses and 15 of them are distinctly easier, guess which 15 will be "run". That's not a good starting point imo. Many developers actually have QA looking for cheese and abuse potential. Seriously it's a thing that can ruin a game. I cannot imagine GGG taking into account in development of PoE2, that "xyz" doesn't matter because players will just cheese it or meta it out, so who cares. My main point being overall that PoE2 will be DoA if it's as player hostile as it is now in PoE1. I haven't seen much, no one has, so we have to refer mostly to what GGG has done and said previously. I will grant you that Mark has at least acknowledged this in public, so perhaps there is room for some hopiun. If PoE2 relases in poor shape and the initially impression is that it isn't great or player hostile or whatever else might be a concern... that will be difficult to overcome. PoE2's launch will not be a small indie game developer coming out of beta in Jan of 2013 in almost total obscurity. The lights will be hot, the expectations will be high, and they will not get a second chance at it. If they want to be big boys, they have to put on big boy pants. Either way we will find out in a few months where they are at after all these delays. I suspect we will know very quickly, especially if it's a full version beta. If we get a snapshot beta like we have seen at press and media events, I would be extremely concerned about an impending disaster. "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt." - Abraham Lincoln Last edited by DarthSki44 on Jun 6, 2024, 2:54:25 PM
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" It can absolutely be buffed, but can it be balanced? Giving it 10% too much is just as off-balanced as 10% too little. But I would bet my kidney that we'll see a Glad buff within the next two leagues. Not really sure who would want my kidney, though... Sometimes, just sometimes, you should really consider adapting to the world, instead of demanding that the world adapts to you.
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