The VISUAL CLARITY Issue - Why it's already WORSE than POE 1

Visual clarity issues should be solved in 6 months League circle period.

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Foozenberg#2833 wrote:

Before anyone tells me it's not worse, remember poe1 got to this point after 10+ years of updates and power creep. Poe2 visual clarity is already this bad and the game is not even released.

Here are my issues:

Skill design and scaling - The main issue is that scaling of AOE and number of projectiles is getting as crazy as in poe1, and on top of that the poe2 skill effects look even crazier which makes the clutter just insane. It almost feels like the player skills were designed to look good in a vacuum, not with the endgame scaling in mind.

Not being able to see boss mechanics - POE2 has these cool boss fights with lots of mechanics that you need to avoid, but there are builds that make it literally impossible to see them. This heavily incentivizes builds that one shot bosses, so you don't risk dying beacuse of a mechanic that you cannot see.

These are also the reasons why we are all asking for a visual effect slider and death recap.

+1000000

Came here to make the same post, and lo and behold, its on the front page.

There is just too much visual clutter.

It hurts performance. If my 3080 struggles when the entire screen is filled with mobs suffering from a bunch of visual effects each and every one of them, while they are also creating their own ones etc, can't imagine the game being playable on people with less powerful PCs. At the end of the day, it's a Diablo spin off, it has no business being so demanding hardware-wise as it currently is.

It hurts gameplay, as people have already said, by not being able to see boss mechanics or wtf is going on. My frost sorceress for example I m leveling, can literally cover the entire boss arena with persistent effects. And that for solo play, can't imagine how coop would be, probably unplayable.

And the solution is very simple too. Just add a couple of buttons to hide player/friendly npcs effects, or persistent ground effects, or just turn the effect culling option into a slider/more aggressive.

Wow, FFXIV, D4, and probably more online games literally have such features. Then again, these games don't literally sell spell and skill effects for real money...

+1. Boss mechanics (for example citadel's Doriyani) have reqlly bad visibility. When I spam my eartshatter i can not see anything, if he is going to attack or not. Why the same skill works perfect in poe1 and i can see every attack clearly telegraphed?

most of time i lost boss and spamming my skills on guessing. if it doesnt dmg the top big hp bar, than i switch to another next guess...

we should somehow see boss hp bar above on bosses like other non boss enemies

the only way to against massive contents visual is: OP

means you don't need care about dying and zooming killing anything anyway

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SaKRaaN#0012 wrote:

just wait for chris wilson light pattern new arpg. Atleast they will respect economy and players. This is what im hoping for.

It was "Just wait for POE 2" and now it's "Just wait for a new ARPG".

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Quest27#4670 wrote:

They said visual clarity was a priority.

They said we wouldn't need loot filters.

They said combat would be meaningful.

We're 0/3, boys. Chris is gone and so is the vision.

Kill enemies I actually have to think about or work to take down, pick up loot, ID it, find an upgrade for my gear or at least something to stick in my stash for later and more rarely some even cooler rarer thing, repeat.

I don't know why that's so difficult for GGG lately. They're so fixated on scarcity and crafting through gambling mechanics that it genuinely makes me wonder if they're selling the currencies to the RMT vendors in the first place. Everything always has to be layers and layers of gambling instead of kill -> loot -> upgraydd.

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Foozenberg#2833 wrote:

Skill design and scaling - The main issue is that scaling of AOE and number of projectiles is getting as crazy as in poe1, and on top of that the poe2 skill effects look even crazier which makes the clutter just insane. It almost feels like the player skills were designed to look good in a vacuum, not with the endgame scaling in mind.

Not being able to see boss mechanics - POE2 has these cool boss fights with lots of mechanics that you need to avoid, but there are builds that make it literally impossible to see them. This heavily incentivizes builds that one shot bosses, so you don't risk dying beacuse of a mechanic that you cannot see.

These are also the reasons why we are all asking for a visual effect slider and death recap.

They won't be adding a visual effect slider, and I actually fully agree with this decision despite wanting visual clarity and attrition combat in the game as much as anyone.

Skills need to be examined for how their visuals scale with interactions to produce screen clutter. Modifiers in endgame which increase monster density should be removed completely, and the baseline monster density should be reduced. Density scaling should be replaced with effectiveness.

This means scaling back AoE skills that can be spammed to clear the screen. In addition to reducing player sustain (pleased to see leech nerf) these have the added benefit of requiring lower damage spikes from monsters in order to one-shot the player's life pool as the only means to kill a character which replenishes their life instantly.

If feeling 'powerful' means feeling like a 'god' to the extent of trivializing the content, then god should be able to see and understand what is happening on the screen, and not killed by a stray projectile that was influenced by intersecting multiplicative damage scalers.

This is not the way..
Drastically reducing character power variance is the underlying problem which all of these stem from. They cannot balance their monsters with respect to player power, when player power exists on such a massive spectrum.