0.3 Feedback, state of the game, and the campaign.

I want to get a vibe check from the community regarding the campaign. I’ve heard several streamers complain that they dont want to do the campaign more than once a season. This baffles me because the end game is randomly doing maps trying to get currency to craft or buy upgrades to your gear, but the pinnacle content vs meta broken lightning arrow/deadeye/invoker/blood mage is trivial and without a big challenge. So on what basis are they saying this exactly? Do they just really like starting a league, no life it for a week and craft to obtain ungodly amounts of currency and that’s where the fun is? The campaign and story is on the right track. Act 4 had a bigger town, better music, started leaning on large open areas though theres still way way too much linear pathing which had lead to areas abyssal fail and you can’t even get past something because it is next to a chest and leads to a depths, but regardless it is by far the most favored act so far. I dont understand the concept of a campaign skip at all. It’s the whole Diablo 3 mentality where you get to max lvl by doing those cellar power level strats where it takes 10 minutes for the achievements to catch up and you’re instantly max lvl, then you run and get the same gear using the same build as everyone else. Where’s the build planning and fun? Is it just a thing where players want to obtain the most amount of currency cause they get a great amount of joy from crafting rather than playing? My theory on this right now is that all of the long term old school Poe 1 players Poe 2 wants instant max lvl, zoom as much as possible, play a league on steroids for 2 weeks then just quit. Imagine Diablo 2 had a campaign skip rather than difficulty modes with easily achievable max level vs the yearly seasons they had. You just pop to max lvl easily and jump into the old school endless Baal runs known as maps right now. That to me is where Poe 2 gets really boring is because there’s no more structure and fighting the bosses takes a lot of setup. I for one despise meta copy paste builds, but i get why people end up doing them because they want a smooth experience and want to gather enough currency to actually make a character twink that they actually want to play vs the most effective build. I very much think GGG needs to stop pandering/catering to YT streamers/content creators that came from PoE 1 slowly creeping the game to be more and more like it with so many graphics you can’t see anything, endless on death effects, infinite AoE one button screen clearing nonsense and a leveling system where ppl can hit 90 in a few days or week. I’m sure a load of this will be solved when we get more weapons (i.e. classes) but I dont get why streamers are QQing about running the campaign when it’s only 4 of 6 and it’s going to get a LOT longer in length. New flash - getting to maps in sub 6 hours like in Poe 1 is not a thing anymore. I think PoE 1 should be PoE 1 and PoE 2 should be PoE 2 instead of trying to merge them. I say PoE 2 should evolve PoE 1, and there should even be difficulty mode options for a broad spectrum of players. An easy mode for brand new players from steam EA trial weekends and sales, then a normal, nightmare and hell mode that will cater to everyone. On easy mode, there’s no dumb cheap one tap boss moves, resists aren’t hugely important so you can mostly run through on trash while learning the game, skills auto allocate gems for the basic class designs which you could still swap out, swarm mechanics aren’t NEARLY as absurd as they are now, etc. The XP would scale down to a point you aren’t ready to hit maps going through once, and you would either need an interval type system or run through the next difficulty mode on normal. Then, there would be a nightmare mode similar to how it is now, and a Hell mode which is even harder. It would combine bosses having 2 in the same room similar to how maps do that now, adds in more boss moves never seen before, and everything is far far less forgiving for the softcore players or those that like souls-like endless death playstyles.

So please reply back to this with how you feel about the campaign. Does everyone really want to just run past it and get to maps asap?

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Also, here’s a list of suggestions I want to see GGG make regarding the game:

‪Essentially this league they tried to solve a problem that exists because the game is still half released and a full year behind schedule. Trying to balance a game being released in small segments creates loads of problems. 1: creating a redundant workload for employees that only gets worse. Add a new class like huntress in .2 caused them to rebalance everything in response which then caused .3 to delay the druid along with rethinking and reworking the entire gem damage outputs (based on current meta) and defensive scaling. Realize we’re 7 of 12 classes out. That’s 5 more weapon types and the huge amount of supports that go along with those. By slowly trickling content out, it is creating far far more work for these guys and pushing the release that much further out. It’s been a year since they missed the launch and in that year we’ve gotten 1 class. Let’s be generous and say 2 with Druid that was 95% there. There’s 12 classes. At this rate, that’s 2/yr. So another 2 years at this rate for officially release. If they simply focused on pushing out all content then have a league before official launch, they could work out the balance part. The only caveat to this i would say is they need to make sure all defensive options are viable and each having pros and cons to make all defensive options viable. Only extreme armour stacking works. Stacking for high eHP is what all end gamers do. There’s no life stacking to combat negatives of armor one shots. Consider having those massive blows not only be physical but chaos damage, both physical/elemental, or go to the drawing board on how mitigation should work in an ARPG. I was chatting with my brother yesterday who started a warrior. He’s a casual at best Poe player. He said he had a 30% reduction (tool tip) for physical hits in act 1 and I laughed at him saying that’s unfortunately not how that works. He asked why? I mentioned in order for Armor to mitigate like how resistances logically do, you would need 30x the incoming damage and mentioned some of the totals for bosses. 1k-1.5k in acts 1-2 for example. So he replied so I need 30,000-45,000 armor to survive a one shot ….in the campaign…in act 2?! And I told him yep. He asked can you get enough life to survive it? I told him nope, not without perfected optimal impossible everything. He was struggling just to hit high resists with the quant of non res runes. He reiterated and asked me, “So, you have a full plate warrior fighting a boss….he gets 1 shot right? Right. And you have an energy shield squish Caster Wizard in rags….but he survives the same hit because he has more fake life? Yup.” He was frustrated in the end and I get it. There’s a million ways to combat this, but simplicity is key—->Change armor to be the same as resists then appropriate damage from bosses/monsters. Then alongside of this have difficulty modes for the campaign where you can start off choosing which to go. Easy mode to learn the game fundamentals. Normal mode for a reasonable challenge. Nightmare mode for a strong challenge (similar to current with one shots and all). And Hell mode for extreme crazy loyal long term Poe guys. Would satisfy the new players, mid level players and high end players. ‬

The artwork guy for GGG is amazing and there’s plenty of room on the armor paper dolls for runes beneath the art, just not right on top and large lol. I know there’s toggles….but why just stamp it on top in the ugliest fashion possible? Makes it look like the tinker toys of PoE 1. Also, having instanced towns of very few people doesn’t make the game feel alive, kind of like comparing the StarCraft 2 menu to StarCraft 1 with bnet. The town areas themselves are super tiny acts 1-3, so just keep them as a shared instance for groups/guilds but otherwise empty if you’re playing solo through the campaign. This would probably help solve crashing issues. Hopefully towns are actually made to the size of towns (think d2 act 2) or theres a massive gigantic Oriath type of area in the end where ppl can hangout in massive quantities instead of just hiding in their hideout.

Shotgun list:

- Change armour to scale the same as resists. Adjust boss damage and quants appropriately.
- Scale life on tree so it has the same potential top as Energy Shield.
- Focus on pushing all classes/acts out and NOT on class balance right now. It’s just digging a hole and filling it up as mentioned above. Release it imperfect then patch mid league. Yes, i said it. Letting LA Deadeye and Infernalist run amok broke things and allowed players to trivialize the content to the point they complain pinnacles are too easy….as they run broken af omega dps builds instead of something they came up with themselves.
- Add in new item slots. D2 evolved D1 in every way including more item slots. Add in pants, armor linings, more rings or amulets, shoulders, whatever.
- Add in more stat pools so items cant be deterministically crafted to the point aside from the campaign or a unique nobody wears what they find. I know this wont go over well so i also suggest:
- Add in a new item rarity type with 4 prefixes and 4 suffixes. So we have common, uncommon, rare, and unique. A step above this to evolve the concept I think is necessary, and i would like to see it subject to RNG with unmodifiable stats like uniques have, only without unique triggers or abilities. That or straight pull a Diablo 2 LOD and do runewords socketable into a new end game item base. I’m far less a fan of this as it will make everyone wear the same gear, but that’s pretty much how it is right now. There is definitive best in slots and with determinate crafting everyone literally wears the nearly identical gear which kills what this game stands for.
- Add in more elements. Lean on wind. Add in water. Add in earth. Add in spiritual or whatever. Aside from the Warrior being nearly all fire, if you play anyone else you end up using fire, lightning, and cold all over the place. Every class has become a mage essentially and it makes everything feel even more samey without substantial class identity. At least there’s chaos, but giving it to both the monk and witch and sorceress once again has it leaning towards everything is the same despite the actual skill moves. Even if they are tied to weapons or neutral skills like a totem to give access to all classes, variety would always be better than always seeing fire/ice/lightning effects on the screen.
- On that note, lightning is broken af. Adding in a more damage taken multiplier with a damage type will always make it the highest damage variant. Add in that you can electrocute and it is literally the absolute best. Why freeze when you can electrocute and give a more damage taken multiplier? Why add a fire dot in a same where enemies swarm SOOOO fast with one game mode that players are forced to run meta huge dps builds to avoid mechanics or fighting? Fact is, lightning as it stands will always outshine the functionality of any other element which means a lightning build will always take top spot on effective damage done unless there’s a trigger mechanic happening between uniques, but then again just look at the lightning arrow deadeye. Lightning ALSO gets the endless triggers lol.
- On the note of armour scaling, they need to go back to the original roots of arpg’s and fantasy. Fighter types wearing heavy plate can always take more hits than casters but usually do less damage. Casters, on the other hand, usually will be squishy but do loads of damage. Instead, as it currently stands in Poe 2, the high ES caster is the tank and the plate wearing warrior is the guy that gets one shot because of how armour scaling works. So ya, a colossus giant smashes the warrior and the witch/sorceress just smiles and takes it. I saw a vid recently where it’s possible to scale ES to over 272,000. Was a zDPS but realize, with only jewels/tree he had 3,335. W/ only chest was 17,000. Helm up to 27,000 total ES. Boots total 35k etc. This already clowns any life build. (See EmpyrianGaming).
- And finally, I think they need to take the concept of the abyssal crafting lvl requirement on ribs and jawbones and also apply them to otherwise unavailable currency to low lvl players. Orbs of Annulment sub lvl 64. Divines sub lvl 64. Etc. A lot of the crafting in game and modifications you do are only accessible to end game players. I know ggg has the data on this, but look at the amount of players who actually reach end game. Spoiler alert - average person is not doing what you see on the average YT Twitch stream and either maybe makes it through campaign, starts maps and quits from boredom of mapping or doesn’t even make it that far so they just get to experience dying to one shots with the one game mode they offer which is going to be trash for player retention in the long term. The Poe-4-lifers will always be around, but if they want to achieve the scope of success that Diablo 2 had and beat Diablo 4 as Jonathan has stated was a goal, he needs to design it to appeal to all player types using the difficulty method i said above.
- Fire the level designer or push them to PoE 1. Linear pathing is dumb. Have large open overworld areas, and have sub dungeons beneath them for the restricted labyrinth feel. Diablo 3 did this. Diablo 4 did this and it’s terrible. One way in, one way out in many cases where you can’t move around in a game that focuses on mobility and freedom of movement like the monk. The best areas in Poe 2 are just that - the large open areas and maps that allow for density and freedom to move and get away. If you understand this concept, imagine in Diablo 2 you could only play a few feet outside of the path in the cold plains, etc. That’s linear pathing in a nutshell and it’s dumb. Honestly even the overworld as it exists isn’t using the full extent of the system or evolving it. IMHO, look at the Plateau of the Gods hideout. Multiple levels created using stairs to give the illusion of multiple levels within the same plane. Now expand that to the size or a large open map where there’s some choke points but overall you’re moving different elevations on the level itself. There’s tiny funneled linear microscopic versions of this but it’s not even as open as the gods hideout is. Take the gods hideout, expand it to the size of a map, and there you go. Overworld designer is stuck in the past. So much more they could be doing there, and instead all we get is very annoying linear pathing overall which makes targeting, using skills, movement skills, and even mechanics like abyssal a massive unnecessary annoyance.

All the love for GGG. Poe 2 is great and on the right track to be biblical. This is not a rant complaining, but more a criticism to show weak points and potential blind spots in the current design. At the rate of development they are pushing with 1 class a year that’s another 5 years of development. If the Druid comes in December because they couldn’t figure out how to make a bear walk backwards (rofl…just make it walk backwards dude…reverse the animation of forwards) then we could MAYBE say 2 a year which means 2-3 more years before 1.0 hah. I think they keep trying to cater to the YT twitch streamers etc and try to fix problems from the previous patch while introducing more skills and content….which then breaks everything again….which they then need to fix and hardly anything gets pushed out. I think it would be better for them to push content and classes, let them be broken for a league or two as they polish, then do the full 1.0 release. So push all content, give it a half a year to tweak numbers, then release. I’m sure this wont happen but it kills me to see this routine of digging a hole, filling it up, digging a hole, filling it up as it’s going to absolutely slog development.

simplify your (what i assume) rant


nobody reading that ty

Fucking wall of text that no one will read....