How can an ARPG fit a vision of more deliberate combat? A discussion thread

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AintCare#6513 wrote:

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GregoryAdams#7051 wrote:

I think that there should simply be more viable ways to progress through the game.

For example, if you're mechanically skilled and play meta builds, you progress faster. And that's fine. That's your reward for playing the game "the right way", I guess.

If you're not mechanically skilled, you can over farm and over level, and out-gear the bosses. The trade-off here would be time.

And if you want to play a very off meta build, then maybe that would require you farm even longer, so that you have the very specific defenses for each specific fight, until your build comes together.

i agree, and this is why i brought up the 1-3 acts of normal diff in poe2. i don't play meta and i'm always under geared. i never once felt gated due to lack of dps. (till foundary mini boss). if they could balance the game like this i woud be very very happy, i just don't think its viable since it requires literally hand crafted encounters

I mean, the base versions of the encounters in the campaign might as well be a bit more handcrafted/controlled.
Their versions in maps with modifiers etc... they can go wild there.

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GregoryAdams#7051 wrote:

I mean, the base versions of the encounters in the campaign might as well be a bit more handcrafted/controlled.
Their versions in maps with modifiers etc... they can go wild there.

exactly and this is due to rng, hence my question to begin with. how can you do this with the amount of rng anyway?

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

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Phrazz#3529 wrote:

We're already seeing HUGE delays and minimal support for PoE 1, so the "just stick to PoE 1" argument is mute. At best.

I have sympathy for this. Tbh I can't wait for the die hard POE1 clear speed fans to go back to POE1 and let 2 be its own thing. I expect the main reason for completely ignoring POE1 outside of obvious manhours to POE2 into EA, is that they want to give everyone a fair shot to at least try to adapt to a slower pace and higher skill cap without an immediate POE1 league for everyone to rage quit into.

I feel like GGG is "starting to figure it out" they showed this when they forked POE2 off as a separate game because they finally realized the POE1 players were going to riot. They still got the Riot tbh. But they'll probably mollify that with a POE1 league announcement soon(TM)

It's probably easier at this point to bring 1 to the higher graphical standard and update/ build on it, than make 2 into sth resembling 1 for zoom crowd.

Would be great btw, I want to play both and hopefully very different.

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AintCare#6513 wrote:

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GregoryAdams#7051 wrote:

I mean, the base versions of the encounters in the campaign might as well be a bit more handcrafted/controlled.
Their versions in maps with modifiers etc... they can go wild there.

exactly and this is due to rng, hence my question to begin with. how can you do this with the amount of rng anyway?

Well, for example, you can add things like quest rewards. Resist rings, for example. To give you some kind of baseline not-completely-RNG thing you can rely on.

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Rabarbar_Lichy#7553 wrote:

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

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Phrazz#3529 wrote:

We're already seeing HUGE delays and minimal support for PoE 1, so the "just stick to PoE 1" argument is mute. At best.

I have sympathy for this. Tbh I can't wait for the die hard POE1 clear speed fans to go back to POE1 and let 2 be its own thing. I expect the main reason for completely ignoring POE1 outside of obvious manhours to POE2 into EA, is that they want to give everyone a fair shot to at least try to adapt to a slower pace and higher skill cap without an immediate POE1 league for everyone to rage quit into.

I feel like GGG is "starting to figure it out" they showed this when they forked POE2 off as a separate game because they finally realized the POE1 players were going to riot. They still got the Riot tbh. But they'll probably mollify that with a POE1 league announcement soon(TM)

It's probably easier at this point to bring 1 to the higher graphical standard and update/ build on it, than make 2 into sth resembling 1 for zoom crowd.

Would be great btw, I want to play both and hopefully very different.

I'm with you on this one I might play both at times, I don't love what POE1 became I wanted something a lot closer to what we've gottn with 2 (up to the point where it gets dumb again in maps) but I can still enjoy myself and Settlers was a good time.

The Cast on crit, cast on freese, etc. would have to go. They are always going to make clearing trash mobs and non-boss enemies trivial with the correct build. If they want the game to be more deliberate, they can't put in a system to automate attacks. This is like asking: how do you make a clicker not play like a clicker.

The skill gems already make the game pretty hard to balance.

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GregoryAdams#7051 wrote:

Well, in that case, wouldn't it make more sense to make the skill floor lower, i.e. make the base game easier overall? Then you enable all the less optimized builds to complete the game, too.

The reason I'm mentioning this is that I personally don't really like the focus on mechanical gameplay at all.

The problem is that you can't have a game that's both difficult AND doesn't invite hyper optimization. Because that's the logical "solution" to the difficulty.

The problem is the huge efficiency difference between optimized and non-optimized builds and then balance the game around only optimized builds while allowing some form of snowballing with an in-game market. It is fine for an optimized build to have double the chances to make mistakes but still come out on top, which I think the game went the totally wrong way of nerfing player defensive abilities while putting little if any restrictions on offensive scaling. If GGG really want to slow the game down they need to tune the offensive scaling way down and focus on making interesting defensive scaling, as lowered/limited dps is the only way to um, “make sure” people are engaged with any mechanism they make instead of current meta of killing enemy off screen so you never need to worry about how you may be killed.

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

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Phrazz#3529 wrote:

We're already seeing HUGE delays and minimal support for PoE 1, so the "just stick to PoE 1" argument is mute. At best.

I have sympathy for this. Tbh I can't wait for the die hard POE1 clear speed fans to go back to POE1 and let 2 be its own thing. I expect the main reason for completely ignoring POE1 outside of obvious manhours to POE2 into EA, is that they want to give everyone a fair shot to at least try to adapt to a slower pace and higher skill cap without an immediate POE1 league for everyone to rage quit into.

I feel like GGG is "starting to figure it out" they showed this when they forked POE2 off as a separate game because they finally realized the POE1 players were going to riot. They still got the Riot tbh. But they'll probably mollify that with a POE1 league announcement soon(TM)

Personally, I'm not asking for clear speed. I'm asking for the game to be better.

so am I i just find the current bones to be really exciting and promising of greater things.

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alhazred70#2994 wrote:

so am I i just find the current bones to be really exciting and promising of greater things.

The bones are there. What's frightening, is all of the anti-fun, deliberate design decisions.