endgame balance needs to resemble Campaign

outside of obvious issues like stat stacking in 0.1 lightnign spear 0.3 and other broken things

while i haven't personally played builds with it.. 'some people idea of "endgame" is when your totally invulnerable to everything thats not a 1 shot and can totally afk in t16 30 delirious maps and not die to a group of 30 monsters.

to me.. this seems obviously unintended as its broken as fuck

but i have been told that "many builds/classes can do this in endgame"

now idk what broken mechanics they are abusing.. some seem to be recouped as life

but
i bought this game becuase i loved diablo 2

i love the campaign, and i love t1-15 maps i love t1 bosses and (with trading) t4 bosses are fun.. and t15 +3 maps are fun


and all of that is because im still venerable to damage, i need to dodge roll im strong but not invincible i need to play correctly to not die.. i cant afk... and i dont get 1 shot.
just like in campaign

and because that's been my entire experience with poe2.. i just assumed that the broken things would be deleted...

but people have told me this has been a thing since 0.1

how the heck is this allowed to be in the game?

meaningful combats means using potions, dodge rolls and dying because you messed up or ran out of pots. and so far that has been my entire experience

not becuase u can afk and not die to anything thats not a 1 shot

please fix w/e things allow people to do that. so everyone can play the game as intended. and people stop abusing clearly broken things with poe1 d3 level power creep

My friend. The entire premise of games like this is having the ability to go from a peasant with a club dying to a wolf in act 1 and eventually scaling into a god. If the best my character can eventually get to is dying on T16 maps to random trash. I dont want to play.

I agree. Once there's no real risk of death there's no real point or thrill. It becomes mindless clicking hoping for a good drop you can sell, but good drop or not the end result will be going back to the mindless clicking.

I'd always prefer less quantity enemies with higher health and damage to what we have now. Dodging behind some asshole who could have killed you and bashing his head in is satisfying. Standing there while 60 enemies hack away at you recouping 120% of the damage they do is boring as all hell.

Dodging Geonor's gimmicky wolf form at the last instant and hitting a potion to try to not die if you don't dodge the next one in time and managing to scrape by and beat his ass is *satisfying* game play regardless of loot drops. It's a challenge and you feel something when you overcome it.

Being a bullet proof immortal God in a video game is like a Reddit basement dwelling version of a power fantasy. Most of us learned as children that when we enable a god mode cheat code the game loses all meaning and entertainment and we might as well just stop playing.

We spoken about the current POE2 campaign being meaningless slog that needs to be fixed/reworked before 1.0 And campaign is only a small portion of the game

Proposing those changes right now I think is too late. It will essentially bring back the 0.2 situation all over again and we all know what happened after that. It also will make the game more taxing to your mental. You spent so much time earning the power only to end up feeling your time spend was worthless. So I am not sure people will appreciate playing the LARGEST portion of POE2 being in a constant self-torture. It will reduce number of a build viability and filter playerbase again.

Poe2 is literally poe 1 2.0 (unfortunately) but slower and attempt to bring the meaningful combat to the was a complete failure.

That's funny, much as I think the existing story is complete trash the campaign is the best part for me. After that it devolves into eternally running maps with no real point besides hoping to find loot, with a character tweaked to be able to wipe screens with a sneeze and no more real progression.

default_mp3 nonsence talking, every time.

get in that avatar portal and bee born again please.

we haven't got the endgame yet, so what balance are you talking about mate

I understand and agree with you OP, but I think you are looking at the wrong genre of game.

ARPGS have traditionally been, basically mindless farming and gambling simulators. There is no PVP, there is no hardcore endgame PVE content for which you need to gear, optimize and practice to overcome, just infinite, repeatable farming. And sure as hell, people ll try to do that as efficiently and painlessly as possible.

POE2, with the funds and momentum is has, sure could try to become a new genre defining game, but we also live in a (capitalistic) society, and it d be foolish to try and mess with a tried and true money printing machine. There is an entire graveyard of ambitious games and developers that tried to do exactly that.

It's not an unreasonable amount of effort to make a character that can be moderately difficult to suicide in a juiced t16 that can clear very well and also handedly deal with +5 bosses, but you're typically not also going to be casually afk tanking map boss slams or pinnacle slams or sometimes dangerous converging rare monster attacks.

The true AFK builds all take a lot of effort and are dependent on very rare items.

I think the only build I've legitimately seen afk a triple-damage juiced +5 t16 Zekoa with Abyss rares in his arena is a Shaman that only had like 2.5k hp and a few hundred ES - CoF, DoD, sacrifice of flesh jewel and other near mirror-tier exceptional gear packed to the tits with rare soul cores and perfectly rolled jewels, 90 max fire res, good corruption outcomes on gear to hit res/attribute reqs and even then a crit did get them. Their clear was ED/C, single target was Dark Effigy and they leaned heavily on a super-gg staff to do decent damage.

Other impressive builds are designed to tank pinnacle slams and deal with bosses in general but sometimes won't clear as well as a good all-rounder build.

It is also the case that sometimes people forget they can respec a character to do pinnacle content and then respec it back into a mapper (they also might not care). If you've ever gone into the Arbiter fight wearing a herald spirit buff, you fall into that category - I've done it too.

The rarity of the items that true AFK builds have basically makes them off-limits in a ssf setting and accessible to only the most dedicated players in a trade league.

So when you're on the beach looking up YouTube videos of how to build your character, keep in mind you're sometimes looking at someone's 500hr project that was also built on top of 1500 hours of prior experience and knowledge.

I agree with the main point of this thread. The game stops being fun for me, once my character can clear maps too effortlessly. The campaign balance feels better than endgame.
I seriously believe there would be a market for such a game: a top down action combat RPG where combat stays challenging and doesn't devolve into mindless farm. Maybe even the majority of players would like that, if one takes into account people attracted who usually play other genres.