Death Penalty System - EXP Loss in particular

I'm not as far as you all, but I do like the XP penalty. Immediately after leveling, I can afford to be more risky, but when I'm further along I focus on just leveling up. I like the cycle that encourages, so I focus on different things over time.

But I don't love the loss of ground items on death. Sometimes I want to grab an item during combat instead of fighting, to avoid the risk of losing it. It would be nice to have a way to retrieve one lost item, maybe for some fee.

There is so much wrong information in this thread that I will just try to list it here instead of quoting every passage.

1) Dying once to a bug is no reason to remove a core mechanic of the game. It is an exception that should be fixed. Just because you have a leaky faucet in your house does not mean you buy a new house. You simply fix the faucet.

2) Removing the XP penalty is a very slippery slop. Because people will always continue whining. First the XP penalty. If that gets removed they cry about waystones being lost on fail. If this gets changed they cry about additional content being lost ... 5 years later everybody has a cheat menu where they can simply spawn in every item in the game. The whining never stops until the game is dead due to the bad changes players requested.

3) You can still do every single bit of content, except pinnacle bosses, in the game on a lower difficulty. Nothing is blocked for you. You can do Expedition on tier 15 or you can do them on tier 1. The content is there. You may get a bit less loot from it, but that is by design. If your character is not yet strong enough to play a higher tier without dying, you are not meant to play that higher tier.

4) Do you not understand, that there needs to be obstacles for the player to overcome in order for them to get a feeling of accomplishment? You are trying to remove this bit by bit. If you continue dying your character is simply not meant to play that difficulty yet. You re meant to farm more currency/better items and levels on a lower difficulty before you proceed to the higher difficulty.

How do you even hit the wall? Do you follow the quests for "finish tier 1", "finish tier 2", ...? If so, if a specific tier is a wall for you. You need to pause and play the previous tier, that was no wall, until you can improve your character to overcome that wall.

In a game like PoE there a hundreds or maybe even thousands of builds that perform on a different level. Gear also makes a huge difference. So there is absolutely no way to balance the maps for each builds. That's why it is so great that every player simply chooses their own difficulty.

If you hit a wall, YOU need to do something differently. It really is that simple. I am sure if you go to the forum and ask "How can I improve my character?" you will receive a more positive and helpful feedback.

I also hit a wall from time to time. In this case I take a step back, look at my character, maybe even at some guides, to try to figure out how to improve it. Then I either make those improvements or I go back to easier content to farm. This is a core part of an ARPG.

In PoE 1 we got used to just skipping it, because the game was fully solved. Most build creators presented builds that could walk naked through the campaign, finish the entire atlas in magic items, kill pinnacle bosses and farm every content. I assume in PoE 2 this may be the case as well at some point. But not even three weeks into early access the game is not yet that solved. We do not have every bit of information like we had in PoE 1.

You guys really need to understand that if you keep dying over and over again, so that you cannot progress, you are simply doing something wrong. It is not the game! It is you! Change your approach.

I got several chars to 100 in POE1, I think the xp penalty is just antiquated and has more to do with extending playtime for leagues and subsequent sales during leagues than any faffery about player conditioning. I'd be happy to see both it and the one portal map thing go away. Don't think it really is a core mechanic that needs to exist. Devs just said that they consider builds overpowered when people feel they have no choice but to play that build and simultaneously have created conditions in which people are more likely to gravitate to specific builds to avoid punishment.

agreeeeeeed

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Avaricta#4758 wrote:

2) Removing the XP penalty is a very slippery slop. Because people will always continue whining. First the XP penalty. If that gets removed they cry about waystones being lost on fail. If this gets changed they cry about additional content being lost ... 5 years later everybody has a cheat menu where they can simply spawn in every item in the game. The whining never stops until the game is dead due to the bad changes players requested.

No, it is not a slippery slope. Some features are just bad. This is one of them. If this "feature" wasn't in the game, no one would be asking for it to be put in.

If there were a feature where all bosses and uniques could insta-kill the player on a critical strike, would it start the slippery slope to remove that? What if there was a feature that blacked your monitor out if a mob blinded you? Would that be "whining" to want it removed?

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Avaricta#4758 wrote:

4) Do you not understand, that there needs to be obstacles for the player to overcome in order for them to get a feeling of accomplishment? You are trying to remove this bit by bit. If you continue dying your character is simply not meant to play that difficulty yet. You re meant to farm more currency/better items and levels on a lower difficulty before you proceed to the higher difficulty.

The XP penalty does not add obstacles. It punishes you for attempting to overcome them. As you say, if you keep dying, you know you need to improve somehow. No punishment is necessary.

What removing the death penalty does is let me spend more time facing the challenges, rather than spending more time grinding up XP in between each new attempt. Accomplishment comes from overcoming challenges, not grinding in a "time out" map regaining lost XP.

Removing the XP penalty does NOT make the game easier in any way. It just makes it less punishing and less tedious.

You will still hit those walls and need to improve without death penalties. Everything you said still holds true. It just means you can immediately work on improving your character, rather than spending time grinding to get back to the point you were before.

You are encouraging a playstyle without risks. You can't simply go "Wow, I fought the boss twenty times, then I finally beat it!", because you've lost so much to the penalties. News Flash - that's the way almost all other video games work.

The penalties actually make winning even less of an accomplishment, because you have to go in so over-prepared, over-leveled, and over-geared you remove the challengge (or at least, as much of it as you can).

If they think the xp loss is needed to prevent glass canons rushing waystones let the xploss only effect the waystone you are dying in.

Death in waystone = Lose map and all the xp you got in that waystone.

Its enough punishment to erase your progression when you play to risky in an waypoint. But to punish earlier progression and working backwards by the fixed 10% xp loss is over the top i think.

As already pointed out, this mechanic serves no purpose and is from "the old days". It is a punishment and not hard or difficult but tedious. A game needs challenges and difficultly, loosing exp and grind it back is neither hard nor challenging nor does it prevent me from anything.

But this is something like the auction house feature aka the downfall and bringer of famine. This feature is responsible for so much bad things, it feels like the anti-christ. So we will never get rid of "loosing exp" one of the apocalyptic rider that will bring the end of all and so on and forth ... blah.

There is no argument here. Like respect cost or one portal in mapping. Removing will not change anything in reality but the dev's and this community will behave as if touching/removing it, is like a Thanos snap or worse PoE will transform instantly to D4 also THE CHILDREN.

You don't believe me?
What is the purpose ?
How does it change me or the game?

There is no argument, it is punishment for the sake of it. The exp penalty comes to late and does nothing except taking time in the most annoying way - i myself quit a lot of times at 90+ because the requirement to level up is a joke and not needed (no build i every saw needed points beyond lvl 75) at this point in PoE I.

Xp loss is actually important part of the game.
It means you cant just put some random items together and keep ketting stronger.
Having to stop some times to figure how to make your build better simply makes game better.

Btw I dont care if you have multiple level 100 chars in current poe 1. If you did that 5-6 years ago that actually means something.

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LaNSa#2186 wrote:

Xp loss is actually important part of the game.
It means you cant just put some random items together and keep ketting stronger.
Having to stop some times to figure how to make your build better simply makes game better.

Btw I dont care if you have multiple level 100 chars in current poe 1. If you did that 5-6 years ago that actually means something.

cool.

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Mouser#2899 wrote:

No, it is not a slippery slope. Some features are just bad. This is one of them. If this "feature" wasn't in the game, no one would be asking for it to be put in.

If there were a feature where all bosses and uniques could insta-kill the player on a critical strike, would it start the slippery slope to remove that? What if there was a feature that blacked your monitor out if a mob blinded you? Would that be "whining" to want it removed?

I would be asking to put it back in.

Do you not understand that if you die over and over again on the same content, that it is on you? You are doing something that you should not be doing. The game is trying to tell you this by removing XP. You just keep failing to understand this. This is not the games fault. It is yours.

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Mouser#2899 wrote:

The XP penalty does not add obstacles. It punishes you for attempting to overcome them. As you say, if you keep dying, you know you need to improve somehow. No punishment is necessary.

The XP loss is not the obstacle, it is the message. The obstacle is the weaker state of your character that needs to be improved.

And your logic can be turned around. If you already understand the message by simply dying, then there will not be much of XP loss. Because then you already understand that you attempted a difficulty beyond your characters current capabilities and will surely switch to a lower difficulty, correct? If you keep pushing a higher difficulty with a weaker character, then it is a conscious decision you take and you will have to live with the consequences of potentially losing XP.

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Mouser#2899 wrote:

What removing the death penalty does is let me spend more time facing the challenges, rather than spending more time grinding up XP in between each new attempt. Accomplishment comes from overcoming challenges, not grinding in a "time out" map regaining lost XP.

Do you understand that the biggest part of the game is gearing up and improving your character?

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Mouser#2899 wrote:

Removing the XP penalty does NOT make the game easier in any way. It just makes it less punishing and less tedious.

You will still hit those walls and need to improve without death penalties. Everything you said still holds true. It just means you can immediately work on improving your character, rather than spending time grinding to get back to the point you were before.

You are encouraging a playstyle without risks. You can't simply go "Wow, I fought the boss twenty times, then I finally beat it!", because you've lost so much to the penalties. News Flash - that's the way almost all other video games work.

The penalties actually make winning even less of an accomplishment, because you have to go in so over-prepared, over-leveled, and over-geared you remove the challengge (or at least, as much of it as you can).

Wrong!

You try take this into absolutes on purpose just to bring a wrong point across. You do not need to play without risks. You simply have to manage your risks by deciding what difficulty you choose. And the game gives you all tools necessary to choose the exact difficulty you want. It is 100% up to you.

Also you are mixing different things here. Attempting bosses over and over again applies to pinnacle bosses. Map bosses in the current state just die like rares. Most players that really reach endgame may attempt these a couple of times just for them to beat them and mark them as checked in their mind. As an accomplishment. Here the XP loss is complete irrelevant. If you are already at that stage you should easily be able to farm high tier maps without dying constantly.

Even if you meant map bosses. Even here the game offers you every possibility to reduce your potential loss. You can simply run maps without bosses until you level up. After the level up you can freely die as many times as you want without losing XP. So after a level up you can attempt every map with a boss without worrying about XP loss.

Mapping is the core endgame. It offers a wide variety of difficulty you can freely choose from. If you choose a difficulty that fits the current state of your character you will not continuously die.

Again. If you keep dying over and over again you are doing something wrong. If you play how the game is built, the XP penalty will be irrelevant to you.

People are just complaining about a game mechanic because of their bad decisions.