Designing an Endgame for Diverse Play Speed Preferences

I haven't been visiting this sub-forum every day, but on the days I do show up there's always some argument following this template: "Here are a few sentences to prove why my opinion matters more than others. My opinion is that this game is too fast/slow. GGG should conform to my ideal pace. People who disagree with me should stop playing this game."

That gets translated to "I am explicitly not thinking of the company's best interests. But my opinion should still be listened to, serious."

When EA was just starting, there were a lot of those reactions to the first few acts. Now we see those reactions for the endgame pacing. There's a key difference between those phases though: how much room the player has to customise their play experience. In Act 1, there's comparatively little playstyle variability: few skills are online, you can't travel far on the passive skill tree, equipment is basic, all the areas have the same content (just with randomised terrain).

Once you get to maps, a lot of systems kick in. Players have great freedom to decide what their build is. They also get room to tune map content: the atlas passive tree and map mods. People are arguing like there can only be one speed you play endgame at. Why is that? The competitive desire to not fall behind the community.


To players who want a slow pace in the endgame, please describe in detail what you'd like to see. A restriction on other players' freedom of expression for their preferred playstyle? Or that you can keep up with the speed runners in wealth creation? Should all endgame content be equally balanced for equal wealth at fast vs slow speeds? Or would specific 'league content' being tuned for specific speeds be preferred?



For readers who can't imagine this, some examples:

Mr Fast wants to feel rewarded for speed. He tunes his endgame so he gets rushed by dense, fast, fragile mobs. Fodder to delight him as they die by the screenful while dropping loot with cool sound effects. He skews his content for Delirium and Breach, meaning he's given challenges to kill as much as possible in a limited time window.

Mr Slow wants to feel rewarded for skill. He wants meaningful interactions with sturdy enemies that would thoroughly punish him if he makes a mistake. Minibosses that delight him by exploding in extremely rare, powerful loot. He skews his content so there are fewer, stronger, tougher encounters.



For PoE 1 veterans asking "isn't that just mapper vs bosser?" I'm envisioning atlas passives to make even regular, t2 maps feel like a miniboss gauntlet than regular maps with dense mobs. Mr Slow would be gearing up by killing minibosses (think yellow mobs with pantheon touch, spaced out so you don't face too many at once). The end form for Mr Slow would then be a PoE 1 mapper: buying boss spawning consumables while doing minibosses when bored or to earn wealth to buy those consumables.

I think your Mr Slow descrption is spot on for me. As a casual player i havent reached end game yet, but for me a good boss fight shoudl take at least 3 minutes, include neccesary evades from some power attacks of the bosses and be overall chalneging (The first act boss was nearly perfect for me). I dont think any boss should be able to 1 shot a well defensive set up player tough. 2 shot sure, 1 shot never. In short you shoudl aheva decent chance of dying. But im not sure if this type of gameplay is possible if from what i have heard you have 1 try and then you have to farm for hours to retry. Imho bosses should be hard, but you should have at least 3 retries for 1 farming, otherwise it will be prolly to frustrating.

If a boss attack is well telegraphed and has a long build up and it one shots you I think that's fair. They gave you plenty of time to dodge the attack and you screwed up and died.

I don't understand why people think one shots should never be allowed.

Yeah honestly I would like to see more skill gems options early level to be able to test things out.for end game, I think the only thing slowing it down is the death mechanics, but that is not enough.

Personally I think map tiers should go up to 25 or 30. It makes no sense they only go to 15.
Additionally, I think the health and defenses of all monsters needs to be increased by a lot. I think the damage some of these monsters do needs to be reduced. Lastly if you make all maps take 3x longer, then the rewards should drop much more currency so that players can have fun rnging their gear.

I also think certain affixes should be changed. Movement speed should not be in increments of 5% up to 35% on boots. It should be like 2% up to 20%.

Belt slots should be added with books during the campaign, to free up a belt affix.
Light radius affixes are fine, but they should be buffed a lot, to the point they are useful.
Accuracy seems really in an odd place right now, it doesn't feel useful when I have it equipped and I have no idea if I have enough of it or not ever.

they should have put in metamorph and beastiary instead of delirium and breach. but no, putting in these "have to 1tap screens" mechanics clearly fit the "slow vision" more. maybe it wasnt obvious enough.

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FireStorm1010#8675 wrote:

I think your Mr Slow descrption is spot on for me. As a casual player i havent reached end game yet, but for me a good boss fight shoudl take at least 3 minutes, include neccesary evades from some power attacks of the bosses and be overall chalneging (The first act boss was nearly perfect for me). I dont think any boss should be able to 1 shot a well defensive set up player tough. 2 shot sure, 1 shot never. In short you shoudl aheva decent chance of dying. But im not sure if this type of gameplay is possible if from what i have heard you have 1 try and then you have to farm for hours to retry. Imho bosses should be hard, but you should have at least 3 retries for 1 farming, otherwise it will be prolly to frustrating.

These are the details that the devs can tweak easily in EA. Our feedback is for what the design should aim for: what we want the endgame to be while also acknowledging that other players want different things out of the endgame. The game has enough systems to accommodate for such differences provided the devs know what span to account for.

One of the points raised in the Q&A was how to make bosses learnable. Because yes, right now the playerbase is selling all those boss attempts to the few players who can oneshot the boss. The devs don't want to see all their hardwork wasted by players skipping or cheesing the boss. They're thinking along the lines of "you get some retries for easy versions of some boss, less retries at higher tiers". For next patch, that'll be for just one boss. We'll see how that shakes out.

Boss fights are one thing, farming is another. What should Mr Slow do to find better gear? When they've just reached the endgame and want to upgrade out of their campaign gear, what are they to do? Right now they are pressured to imitate Mr Fast even if it makes them dizzy. What's the ideal farming content for Mr Slow?

Sounds nice but I get the idea they don't want a player-customized endgame experience. Or player-customized anything other than filters, really.

Trimming the quote to keep to the thread topic, I agree with you on earlygame skill gem scarcity but that's not the current topic.

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Genocidalvirus#0793 wrote:

Personally I think map tiers should go up to 25 or 30. It makes no sense they only go to 15.
Additionally, I think the health and defenses of all monsters needs to be increased by a lot. I think the damage some of these monsters do needs to be reduced. Lastly if you make all maps take 3x longer, then the rewards should drop much more currency so that players can have fun rnging their gear.

What should change as map tiers go up? And in such a way that Mr Fast and Mr Slow are both satisfied?

PoE 1 had some early atlas passive tree keystones to scale all monster offense/defense for farming content. What if this was an early atlas tree decision for PoE 2 players? Mr Slow would have tough, rich monsters and Mr Fast would have fast, dense monsters.

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Pl4t1numX#4325 wrote:

they should have put in metamorph and beastiary instead of delirium and breach. but no, putting in these "have to 1tap screens" mechanics clearly fit the "slow vision" more. maybe it wasnt obvious enough.

For non-PoE 1 players, metamorph and beastiary are names of leagues which introduced minibosses. The latter put a handful of extra yellow mobs on the map with one being a super-yellow. With PoE 1 atlas passives and scarabs, you could dope your endgame content to have 10+ extra yellow mobs with more than one being super-yellow.

Meantime metamorph made you build your own Frankenstein boss. 5 mobs would get put into a vat and out came an uber-yellow that shapeshifted between all 5 mobs while doing boss-grade versions of their signature attacks.

I'd love to see Metamorph in PoE 2 with a tweak. Hated it in PoE 1 as I never did make super-optimised extreme DPS builds and a metamorph monster was seriously beefy. I'd end up running 2 screens away to recover: in a game without dodge rolls but with ludicrous dash/teleport skills, that was how to get away from danger. In PoE 2, I'd want the Metamorph monster to have some way to restrict how far you can run. Be that spawning in a dedicated arena or a Ritual-style lockdown of space where you can run.

On the note of Delirium though, I think back to the Unending Nightmare atlas keystone. You could change that content from Mr Fast to Mr Slow preference by removing the time limit. If the devs re-think what the downside for going slow is, that would be one league that can satisfy both player types. Provided you don't have to do Mr Fast content to unlock that toggle.

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FruitLord#0833 wrote:

Sounds nice but I get the idea they don't want a player-customized endgame experience. Or player-customized anything other than filters, really.

If that was their mindset, why even put an atlas tree and optional endgame league content at all?

The issue with Mr. Slow vs. Mr. Fast is that both benefit from the same build. This is why I value rarity, rewarding equipping worse gear (making it harder) for better rewards. Although rarity is actually underpowered, it would be great if it even added 1-2% quantity with a rarity affix.

I’ve been running an off-meta build that clears all content, but it’s much harder than using a meta build. This would be fine if the economy weren’t moving faster than I can complete content. My good items don’t sell because they depreciate before selling, and upgrades are unaffordable. Items I bought for 15 exalts are now worth 5 div, so upgrades cost more divs than I can earn.

The new patch seems promising, but I hope the single-click map-clear meta is addressed. I can’t keep up with the economy, no matter how much I play.

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Genocidalvirus#0793 wrote:

The issue with Mr. Slow vs. Mr. Fast is that both benefit from the same build. This is why I value rarity, rewarding equipping worse gear (making it harder) for better rewards. Although rarity is actually underpowered, it would be great if it even added 1-2% quantity with a rarity affix.

I’ve been running an off-meta build that clears all content, but it’s much harder than using a meta build. This would be fine if the economy weren’t moving faster than I can complete content. My good items don’t sell because they depreciate before selling, and upgrades are unaffordable. Items I bought for 15 exalts are now worth 5 div, so upgrades cost more divs than I can earn.

The new patch seems promising, but I hope the single-click map-clear meta is addressed. I can’t keep up with the economy, no matter how much I play.

Same player build, but different atlas build. Imagine Mr Slow actively gets motion sickness or otherwise finds it literally sickness inducing to play at "one click, screen dies" speed. Imagine Mr Fast actively being unable to stay engaged with the game if every fight needed a few seconds of interaction.

You're arguing that the economy is what matters. That's what I'm trying to solve: is there a way for Mr Slow and Mr Fast to have very different content clearing speeds while still feeling they stay relevant in the economy? The speed of inflation is a separate, relevant topic that's already on dev minds: Q&A was talking of how they need more uniques to be div sinks and possibly other things which also sink divs (like metacrafting in PoE 1).