GGG, this is not difficulty — it's disrespect

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate#2605 wrote:

I've got friends quitting because this is the easiest the game has ever been...

gotta love how GGG recognized being able to run basically all the auras was a bad idea a long time ago and nerfed mana reservation. Same with auto-casting shouts and other things. Now.....we get a league mechanic that gives us 1-2 auras and a curse or other buff skills for free. And that is the LEAST aspect of the power creep of this league.

[remove this post]

I just wish that some of the bad mods on maps would be removed (cough reflect cough) and that the damage of some mercs on players would get nerfed a bit mroe. The electric templar guys are the ones that one shot me the most it feels.

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cowmoo275#3095 wrote:

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate#2605 wrote:

I've got friends quitting because this is the easiest the game has ever been...

gotta love how GGG recognized being able to run basically all the auras was a bad idea a long time ago and nerfed mana reservation. Same with auto-casting shouts and other things. Now.....we get a league mechanic that gives us 1-2 auras and a curse or other buff skills for free. And that is the LEAST aspect of the power creep of this league.

We're talking as if mercs are going core. They're not, and if somehow GGG decides that they will, expect massive nerfs to happen.

If they want to add crazy power creep as a non-permanent league mechanic, I don't see anything wrong with it. Sure I won't ever utilize mercs with Doryani's or treat them like a second Animate Guardian since I don't want to become attached to a crutch that is leaving in a few months, but it would be nice if people just want an opportunity to turn their brain off once in a while.

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Pizzarugi#6258 wrote:

We're talking as if mercs are going core. They're not, and if somehow GGG decides that they will, expect massive nerfs to happen.

If they want to add crazy power creep as a non-permanent league mechanic, I don't see anything wrong with it. Sure I won't ever utilize mercs with Doryani's or treat them like a second Animate Guardian since I don't want to become attached to a crutch that is leaving in a few months, but it would be nice if people just want an opportunity to turn their brain off once in a while.

I'm not talking about the system going core. Honestly I wouldn't be surprised either way, but that's a problem for later. I'm talking about all of my friends who completely noped out of this league, one of which did so literally in a single day, as soon as it became obvious what it was: GGG selling out and catering to the lowest common denominator casual game tourists who are checking this game out because they heard about path of exile 2. The difficulty of this game isn't just turned down, it's been deliberately switched off; there literally is not a skill floor when you can have an unkillable companion beat the entire game for you.

Mercenaries are not balanced improperly, there's no bug or unexpected behavior. GGG wanted this to be the easiest league, ever, and they packaged it alongside the easiest set of challenges, ever. And when some people started complaining because their mercenaries weren't quite invulnerable in tier seventeen maps? We got a patch which gave them even more magical damage reduction. I literally have not been able to find anything which can kill my Eruptor since that patch... he can eat searing exarch incineration nukes, he can stand in Shaper beams and walk through Sirus storms.

He's basically a god, and after I see if he can solo the Hall of Grandmasters without me having to attack a single time I'm gonna keep delving, try and get down to like depth ten thousand and find an Aul. Maybe that will be an actual fight?

Edit/update: 3.8 wings of HOGM cleared, stalemate vs GG_NOOBS_TWO. I thought about going back to my HO to get a Frost bomb gem, but I was so disgusted that I couldn't be arsed. Wouldn't be a fair win for the merc anyway, since he could never have outdamaged that regen on his own.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate#2605 wrote:

I'm not talking about the system going core.

I wasn't responding to you. I was responding to the guy who responded to you. :P

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate#2605 wrote:

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised either way, but that's a problem for later. I'm talking about all of my friends who completely noped out of this league, one of which did so literally in a single day, as soon as it became obvious what it was: GGG selling out and catering to the lowest common denominator casual game tourists who are checking this game out because they heard about path of exile 2.

I'm going to be a little more charitable with this and assume that the reason the league mechanics were designed this way is because of at least one of two reasons:

1. They wanted a rewarding power fantasy league as their apology for us having almost a year of Settlers due to Path of Exile 2 sucking up all developer time.

2. Path of Exile 2 gave them too narrow a window to not only work on the league, but also an expansion to the Atlas storyline simultaneously. I feel like they put all of their effort on the latter first and Mercenaries came second.

I won't go so far as to make any assumptions about them selling out just yet. With PoE2 taking up all their time earlier, I'm willing to wait and see what next league will bring first now that they're supposedly back on a more rigid development schedule.

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Pizzarugi#6258 wrote:

I wasn't responding to you. I was responding to the guy who responded to you. :P

It's really dumb to talk about something "going core" one week into a league. It's also dumb to assume the league obviously WON'T go core in modern PoE. It's also dumb to think that we are talking about "mercenaries going core and the damage it can do" when that has nothing to do with the conversation, and the league is a freaking week old.

We are talking about Mercenaries NOW. The damage it is doing NOW. The faults of the idea NOW. And yes, the base game matters for its effect NOW. Just like every single other league that has ever existed.

Just because something may or may not go core, which we can't possibly know or predict, doesn't give a free pass to all manner of nonsense that might go into a league mechanic.

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Pizzarugi#6258 wrote:

1. They wanted a rewarding power fantasy league as their apology for us having almost a year of Settlers due to Path of Exile 2 sucking up all developer time.\

This is such a awful take that it warrants a separate response. Their "apology" is destroying their own game? Turning their back on all the changes they made, presumably made to BETTER the game in the past? You do realize that the active development and BALANCE of the game is what makes the game fun, popular, and the reason it has existed for as long as it has?

It is NOT an apology to turn their back on that. Not even close. They KNOW (or at least they KNEW) that too much power leads to quicker burnout, and leads to a crappier game. If they thought "power fantasy league" was something that people truly wanted, enough to purposely plan it as an "apology" (lol), they would have done it a long long time ago. We would have easy mode. We would have scalable difficulty. We would have more generous drops. We would still have Harvest 1.0.

Come on man...

The only thing you learn from dying from mercenaries is that you should not do them. Even reading their gear does nothing. You don´t see how much dmg they will do with skills they have equipped. Reading means nothing vs them besides the ignoring mitigation supports (which are still not the reason people getting randomly 1 tapped by the most overtuned mechanic in this game).

Seeing 90% max res 8k hp pool people with multiple endurance charges getting 1 tapped from elemental damage with 0 dmg mods on maps has nothing to do with "git gud". Its such bm its not even funny anymore. [Removed by Support]

And reading patch notes with things like:

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Vastly reduced the gold cost of extremely rare Unique items from Cadiro in Betrayal. The rarest unique will cost at a maximum ~135000 gold. This is to alleviate an issue where you'd have to keep a huge amount of gold on your character at all times just in case the right unique item was offered. This is approximately twenty-five times cheaper now for the most expensive unique items.

Like what? 25 times cheaper now? We had also absurd dmg and life modifiers on monsters EVERY LEAGUE that were tuned like this aswell. Seriously, it is disrespectful. And yes GGG, you still have one 0 too much in your code for the damage of some mercenaries. And no you can´t build enough defense vs some of them.

Unfortunately the only disrespect I see here is pointed at OP.

Let me introduce myself - I am a humble off-meta veteran that does like to experiment a lot. I have over 8k hours of gameplay accumulated through multiple leagues on hundreds of characters (not all of them got to endgame, a lot did though).

Now let's talk a bit about topic. I don't think that devs mean to treat us bad. Sure, the game has some issues, some of them pretty bad. OHKOs from mercs - yea, huge pain. No problem with pinnacle content yet getting one-shot by some random merc skill made me not interact with some of them (eg. Bastion) as even checking their equipement without fight reduces your renown - I'd rather die.

However the post didn't focus too much on that - there were other and mainly other problems pointed out. Are these problems though?

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One-shots are everywhere, often without clear telegraphing or counterplay.

True - it is a thing. Some of the best builds get one-shot from time to time. Sometimes it's so random you don't even know taht you could be killed by what did kill you. Sure, you can just say "unlucky" and continue as if nothing happened, but that doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist. And the problem is that it's just not fun. It's not the difficulty when you get insta-killed by unidentified source.

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"On death" effects are spammed like confetti — exploding monsters, chain reactions, persistent degen zones, all overlapping.

Is that true though? At least partially it is. There are different effects that aim to kill you in a semi-unfair way. It's only semi-unfair most of the time. Unfortunatelly here comes the part where it's a real problem. When there is too much screen clutter even some of the best telegraphed effects can catch you off-guard just because it's nearly impossible to spot them in all that chaos. The game encourages getting more pack size and juicing everything and it doesn't help with screen clutter. Archnemesis kinda failed in cleaning it as well. That problem is unfortunately a real pain in devs' arses, as it's not easy to redesign such a big part of the game, as I believe that the screen clutter is the main problem here, not the confetti.

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You die in a millisecond to a combo of mods you couldn't even read.

Yes, yes, yes. Three times yes. Sometimes it's not even a combo, but just one modifier that gets you quicker than you could aim the monster and read it. Screen clutter doesn't quite help there as well.

What do I think about OP's solutions to these?

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Scale or cap XP death penalty — for example, only apply it past level 95, or reduce it if death was caused by "on-death" effects.

I don't really think that's the solution. I'm definitely not a fan of removing XP penalty for lower levels - lower levels just overXP the penalties until you stop at some level when you lose more than you gain (loss is %, gain is number - it is quite a good system itself)

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Improve visual/audio telegraphs — don’t make monsters silently explode or apply stacking DoTs without clear feedback.

Not everything can be telegraphed clearly enough in every situation. Too strong telegraphs for some effects might be actually bad and confusing. I believe that it's not the direction, as there are many builds that let you ignore some threats and if you get PTSD after some effects that used to one-shot you, you might have a problem to ignore them on a build that just doesn't give a damn about them. And you don't want to be afraid everytime you see some specific mechanic. A bit more complex than it might look like, even if some things might be done, it wouldn't quite solve the problem.

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Nerf synergy stacking of monster mods — certain combinations are simply broken.

Tag system, mutually exclusive mods - yes, please. Some synergies are broken, some plainly annoying and tiresome - once again that's not what fun is.

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Add a proper death log — so players can understand what killed them and how to avoid it.

Well... the prayers just can't get answered.


Now some theory why the OP is kinda right.
The game has grind, the game is about getting loot, the game is finally about getting stronger. And when we get stronger we crave for more and more - it's just like the atlas -

And just because more is never enough, many players want to face new challenges. We want power, yes. We want to show the monsters we struggled to kill back in the days that now they are just some bugs to stomp. But we don't want to stop there - we reach further for stronger monsters that pose a threat, to get even more powerful and one day stomp them as well.

Now a word for all the haters, that instead of thinking about what OP posted focused on his build. OP didn't claim that game is unfair because HE with HIS character feels bad. What he said is a little bit more universal and as you can even see from his supporter badges - he didn't start playing the game a week ago. He must have played a lot of builds - that's pretty obvious, so saying that his point is invalid, because his current gear and passives aren't quite right is just low and disrespectful. And when you say that the problem isn't in the things he pointed out but it's about his build... well - do you really say that the solution for getting randomly one-shot from off screen projectiles is more defense? There will be some stronger off screen shots next time and you won't mitigate it then. You will need even more defense, right? So is it truly about difficulty, or is it about things that you can't even properly react to?

You can't just keep playing low-tier content not to get randomly one-shot or covered in screen of breach monsters or other stuff until you get better gear - if it was just that, you would be forced to play low-risk just to get some XP. Play low-risk in PoE? Most people don't play Hardcore and many play for some "gambling", the adrenaline - that's the stuff. When I get hit for 95% of my maximum life - it reminds me that I'm alive, gets the adrenaline pumping. I don't want to stay safe until I gear up - that's not fun for me, that's not fun for quite a chunk of playerbase.

Is the OP right? Yes, at least more than you could think reading replies.
Is the solution to aformentioned problems simple? Nope.
Is there respect in replies? Partially.

TL;DR
1. OP is't entirelly wrong, actually he gets quite some valid points.
2. Let's keep the conversation civil.
3. The devs aren't that disrespectful as one might think, yet I feel your pain - I travelled the path as well.