Trivializing content/bosses is a huge problem and you're playing it down, Mark.

you basically still leveling. Level 80 I believe is the point when you enter mid-endgame and you can start min-maxing your build. Level 78-79 is when you get that giga weapon possible for 1 div and start finally blasting xD
You can start to think about 6 mod/3 tablet maps. You can start farming mechanics bit by bit. So real endgame starts there in T15 maps. before that is just a stepping stone for leveling after campaign. Well you still can run low tier maps and get some occasional tinks, but league mechanics often underpowered there. For example, big boy omens in Ritual are not exist before Level 80 maps, rest of the things outside of Ameloration, is not valuable/mediocre for crafting.

I personally think this one is a problem but it also is a major can of worms for GGG to address.

Players are used to the TTK

Many players can't actually boss and require this to bypass, they can and will rage if presented with content they might have to learn.

Many builds don't have any defence, defences are also fairly poorly balanced right now which again feeds into the previous points as the expectation is that defence is "optional".

Drops are set to a value assuming you will blast them in great numbers (as the community does).

Some bosses are extremely hard to even get an opportunity at and if forced to risk most players (myself included) will opt to vastly over dps a fight rather than attempt the mechanics with a major price for failure.

Basically I don't think that it is worth the time for GGG to change, we can already experience the bosses properly by not deliberately annihilating them with the strongest shit available and all changing it will do is shutout some players who whether its legitimate or not need the ability to invalidate the content.

Note despite taking this stance it isn't my personal preference, I would prefer a bit more balance orientated design and some smart threshholds to ensure we get a challenging/engaging fight that then has a good reward.

"

Soulsniper1313#7576 wrote:

"

saashaa#5518 wrote:

GGG just targets casuals and make game as "first time experience" hard. It's not balanced around min-maxed builds as it should be
You need to be a person who doesn't learn, play it as first time or have slow learning curve to enjoy it...


Mark told that in QA.

Yes and that is why the give me .1 again posts exist. You already experienced it. It will never be the same again. That is the point people refuse to accept. On top of that, new classes, weapons, skills have been added which allow people more options to get stronger faster. On top of that people know much better how to gear which makes it easier. They already know the move sets which makes it easier, etc.... If you want that same challenge again you need to impose the challenge on yourself. If you balance the game around min maxed top end builds you gut the player base and limit the already extremely limited build diversity that exists already. Play HCSSF and don't play meta. There is your challenge. But the vast majority saying they want challenge wont do that. They wont purposely wear weaker gear or hold points or play the most off meta things possible. They just refuse to do these things (vast majority) but still want the difficulty for ALL players turned up. 4+ minutes on a fight for some players with an average of 2 minutes and you are upset you beat it in 10 seconds. You are playing min max'd style meta builds the majority of the time if you are doing that. If you add new modes you split the player base even further which hurts group and trade. If you are unwilling the impose the challenge on yourself, then get used to the current balance because they clearly stated it is about where they want it.

Dunno, which are the most off meta, prolly warrior, but those are the meta in speedrunning and ladder farming. So those aren't the right choices, what else?

Nades? One shotting bosses without investment?

What else? Prolly casters? Ah oh CoC builds being meta and the most OP classes in the whole league. Why not none Crit, cause there is not enough damage nodes to do so and many abilities and extra functions are gated behind crits...

Ah sure we could play a monk with super charged slam, cause skill tree is open and it still is easy to get anything to work, since we don't need aftershocks or anything. Right?

Genuinly which are not meta in some case? And are we even talking about viable skill in that regard or some weird a** abilities like shockwave totems without fissures or jagged ground, to make it intersting?

Like sure, I would love to be able to play melee minions. Not spectres, the skeleton minions. But pityful they are not just crippled and handicapped, they are disabled, there is like no way you could make them even remotely good to play?

For real. Which skill that is not just directly dead is viable? Cause I would love to play Super Charged Slams, but I cannot. Cause the ability needs at least 3 seconds to charge while no stun in the world will hold that long and the abyss monsters at the other hand wouldn't even let me get to that point.

"

...then get used to the current balance because they clearly stated it is about where they want it.

Then swords, axes and other melee stuff is doomed to be bad before it gets released.

Also in terms of balance,... PCoC safe deserved its nerfs since it was clearly stronger as the new Spirit walker ascendancy which gives you a freaking boss companion right? So that was prolly the reason they nerfed it.
Cause it was used by a whooping massive 3% playerbase of poe.ninja in the best times.

Especially since it cannot even be used in combination with most poison abilities, since it is an unarmed ability which prohibits you to have a martial weapon equipped xD

GG

I think I can summarize the sentiments most people seem to be converging in on.

The floor for player power vs the ceiling is too wide and where a player rests along that spectrum has too many determining variables to meaningfully address or balance. What seems to be desired is more autonomy to mitigate the risk of landing at the bottom of that spectrum or to move upwards if you find yourself there.

There are also a few "broken" or "OP" in-game mechanics that push the power ceiling way too high relative to other mechanics.

However, outside of those outlier "OP" mechanics, that power ceiling relative to the content is still too high, and it is also too accessible.

Today is 0.5 patch day and I think we'll see the main pain points enabling this sentiment addressed, namely the outlier "OP" mechanics and other enabling mechanics getting nerfed, as they've mentioned most of them already in their announcements.

Specifically I think we will see:

1. A raised power floor. Or at least increased accessibility to middle-power through more tools that can give determinatively "probably ok" but not "gg" outcomes.

With all of the new item and mechanic additions and defensive adjustments it will probably be easier to get "ok" items and be "ok" defensively, but it will also become more difficult to get or make those GG-OP items that seem so problematically plentiful right now. This will lead to;

2. Decreased accessibility to higher levels of player power through increased variability in itemization.

I think temple removal is going to do a lot of heavy lifting here. However, the currently "too accessible" high levels of power (outside of outliers) may also owe some of their presence to the fact that the current itemization/reward pool is also just less diluted than it would be if "everything" was in the game. More items and more affixes and more mechanics means increased variability across the board which makes it more difficult to find any one particular orientation of affixes per item.

There will be less generically mass-demanded GG-OP items on the market as an overall ratio of items just because of the increased variability of itemization outcomes. A "BiS" piece could look different for every player. This makes the very existence of a BiS item require specialization in crafting outcomes. Hard to find, and difficult to make, and less people trying to find/make it. In other words: less accessible.

I think this will encourage players to gamble their currency on crafts more often than hoarding it for trading, and also lead to people trading for more gear bases to craft on, and this is just inherently more fun than trading for finished gear. I think this will leave a good taste in players mouths even if their gear might be worse than what they have in 0.3.

3. More uniform access to, and clear quest-signaling to players in regards to how they should scale endgame rewards by completing an atlas. Scaling the quality of rewards in endgame looks to me like it is mainly done through atlas progression - both the 'main' and 'content-specific' trees - and this progress is tied to mechanics that culminate in boss events.

Those who become adept at the bossing and progressing the necessary atlas-progression related content will be able to become powerful the most efficiently, whether they engage with trade or not. Better signaling will result in more players scaling rewards. So it's probably useful to bee-line completion as fast as you are able. This might increase the volume of loot overall so we'll see how much it counter-acts my point #2. I think as long as it's WAY less than temple-league amounts of contributory loot-inflation, we are still going to feel like overall power accessibility is reduced, and at the very least be moving in the right direction. I suppose we'll see though.

Risks:
- More outlier, "broken" exploit-level interactions make it through the testing and we are back to 40% of a league playing a busted "meta" build that just trivializes content, and undermines the economic health and balance of the league.
- The asymmetric weighting of rewards between different branches of content are too out of whack creating situations where it's "never optimal" to farm content A, you should just farm content B and then use those rewards to trade for any rewards associated with Content A. Just feels bad to do Content A. Extra bad if Content A already sucks (cough, trials, cough).

I guess in conclusion we're prob not gonna see "finished" balance around difficulty at least until all the classes and basetypes are in the game and it's all had some time to marinate amongst the player base, but I'm optimistic some of the aspects surrounding player power will at least be able to move in the right direction on our way there. Temple snake removal and triggered skill adjustments are likely going to make a large impact already. Excited to see how 0.5 progresses. See you guys on the beach.

So I use to be the type saying BOSSES ARE TOO HARD ENEMIES ARE TOO HARD WAH WAH WAH

Then I started doing some real number crunching, testing, POB planning, tried so many different combos, started exploring other ARPG's to get a sense of how to build a scale damage accordingly, and bosses became 2ez

Came back to POE2 with da knowledge, made a crossbow build for hunt, and shit was wrecking, galvanic shard clearing every mob on screen thanks to chain support + abyss mod giving attacks an extra chain, specced purely into attack dmg/elemental increase, and pierce, then got rakiatas flow and made a separate build specifically for rakiatas, so have an endgame build that works without rakiatas, sacrifice some dps for pierce, but with rakiatas I shred shit instantly, 1mil dps in 3-4 secs which is nothing compared to other builds, but enough to do uber content as long as I kite properly and survive

Specced into shock magnitude for 2nd weapon set and got my shock magnitude from 25% to 81% for plasma blast, then swap to other set and spam shockburst, switch rakiatas between galvanic shards for maps and shockburst for bosses, I have never killed bosses or hordes of enemies this effortlessly xD, and then relevelling through the campaign with grenades, 2EZ

Bosses and enemies were nerfed a lil too much, BUT THIS IS COMING FROM SOMEONE WITH 3K+ HOURS AND MANY OTHER ARPG EXPERIENCE, New players are not like this, they will struggle, there is so much to understand and take into account, new players get too overwhelmed hence the demand to nerf, what needs to be made clear, is that if something isn't working in the campaign, its because your build simply is too spread out, not focused on a specific style or damage type, new players don't fully understand what points to take, like my first playthrough with my buddy our dps was garbo, we were speccing into a lot of defense nodes too early on, no dps nodes, didn't have any idea what our endgame plan was just made it up as we went along

What I think needs to happen, is introduce some kind of system that gives players tips and hints, say they die to a boss too many times, have somewhere in like the bottom right/left, maybe an exclamation point that the player can click on and get some helpful advice like "Try respeccing points, try a new game plan, maybe hint at the bosses weakness, suggest certain skill gems, but the devs have stated they don't want this to be the case, they want players to experiment, sadly newbies get scared away before they want to experiment, the game needs to make it clear to newbies through some kind of in game system encouraging to try out new skill gems and nodes, sadly skill gems and support gems are not easy to get throughout the campaign WHICH FURTHER SWAYS PLAYERS FROM EXPERIMENTING!

So either add some system to help players out highlight weaknesses in their build and or the boss they keep dying to, Or make skill gems and supports more common throughout the campaign, or a way to trade orbs/gold to get skill/support gems say a new NPC or something

"

karsey#2995 wrote:

There will be less generically mass-demanded GG-OP items on the market as an overall ratio of items just because of the increased variability of itemization outcomes. A "BiS" piece could look different for every player. This makes the very existence of a BiS item require specialization in crafting outcomes. Hard to find, and difficult to make, and less people trying to find/make it. In other words: less accessible.

I think this will encourage players to gamble their currency on crafts more often than hoarding it for trading, and also lead to people trading for more gear bases to craft on,

Yeah, that's one way it could go. The other way is that because the crafting system itself is so abysmally bad and RNG slot machiney, and more a test in patience and pain tolerance than anything that requires skill, you're just going to lose more players, or those who don't want to play the same meta 80% of the population is playing. I am 100% a hardcore gamer with most games, and generally love crafting, and taking advantage of it in games where that works. I want zero to do with the bullshit PoE2 crafting system.

I don't mind playing the sell my crafting materials and use those proceeds to buy better gear game, but that will increasingly not work in a game with less deterministic and more random gear.

This 100% funnels people to meta builds, because what are hideout crafters going to make? Items that sell, or items that sell for something even when they're near misses to that perfect version of the item for some meta. People can only buy what's available.

I made a lot of weird builds last season, and it was sorta 50/50 on how this affected my gear. Found some amazingly cheap and perfect stuff for my weird builds that no one wanted, but then for half my gear slots never really saw what it was I needed because no one made, especially towards the end of the season, not surprisingly. It was one of the big walls I hit where I decided to stop playing, because progression felt blocked without engaging in the completely unfun crafting.

https://youtu.be/wjjVcHAr718?t=8482

I mean... do I even need to say anything?

And it's definitely not just this outlier skill... so much of it is like this. Ridiculous power with next to no investment.

GGG is wrong when saying "players want to feel God-like"

No I don't.

With extremely strong set-up that trivialize all gameplay, at that point, players are no longer playing the game. They are just emulating, or mining bitcoin. Just dragons amassing wealth to be another dragon.

It just shouldn't be allowed in the first place.

Jonathan also said this:

"People often judge things by watching streamers who are often playing something that's completely cracked and out of control. And so people don't get an understanding of what the average player is actually experiencing."

Aside from the fact that this is a poor excuse by itself and it mirrors some really poor replies people give in here on the forums (and probably reddit) to invalidate the issues we raise with the gameplay... then how come even in your own videos you promote the exact same things?

Are those builds really completely cracked outliers that only streamers experience after ridiculous 150+ farming times? No, not even close. That's basically the experience for almost everything starting early in campaign with no serious investment.

https://youtu.be/cOZJcWgntiM?t=259
https://youtu.be/cOZJcWgntiM?t=290
https://youtu.be/cOZJcWgntiM?t=333
https://youtu.be/cOZJcWgntiM?t=356
https://youtu.be/86MS6GHBAOg?t=237

"

InvisiblePosture#7553 wrote:

"

Soulsniper1313#7576 wrote:

"

saashaa#5518 wrote:

GGG just targets casuals and make game as "first time experience" hard. It's not balanced around min-maxed builds as it should be
You need to be a person who doesn't learn, play it as first time or have slow learning curve to enjoy it...


Mark told that in QA.

Yes and that is why the give me .1 again posts exist. You already experienced it. It will never be the same again. That is the point people refuse to accept. On top of that, new classes, weapons, skills have been added which allow people more options to get stronger faster. On top of that people know much better how to gear which makes it easier. They already know the move sets which makes it easier, etc.... If you want that same challenge again you need to impose the challenge on yourself. If you balance the game around min maxed top end builds you gut the player base and limit the already extremely limited build diversity that exists already. Play HCSSF and don't play meta. There is your challenge. But the vast majority saying they want challenge wont do that. They wont purposely wear weaker gear or hold points or play the most off meta things possible. They just refuse to do these things (vast majority) but still want the difficulty for ALL players turned up. 4+ minutes on a fight for some players with an average of 2 minutes and you are upset you beat it in 10 seconds. You are playing min max'd style meta builds the majority of the time if you are doing that. If you add new modes you split the player base even further which hurts group and trade. If you are unwilling the impose the challenge on yourself, then get used to the current balance because they clearly stated it is about where they want it.

Dunno, which are the most off meta, prolly warrior, but those are the meta in speedrunning and ladder farming. So those aren't the right choices, what else?

Nades? One shotting bosses without investment?

What else? Prolly casters? Ah oh CoC builds being meta and the most OP classes in the whole league. Why not none Crit, cause there is not enough damage nodes to do so and many abilities and extra functions are gated behind crits...

Ah sure we could play a monk with super charged slam, cause skill tree is open and it still is easy to get anything to work, since we don't need aftershocks or anything. Right?

Genuinly which are not meta in some case? And are we even talking about viable skill in that regard or some weird a** abilities like shockwave totems without fissures or jagged ground, to make it intersting?

Like sure, I would love to be able to play melee minions. Not spectres, the skeleton minions. But pityful they are not just crippled and handicapped, they are disabled, there is like no way you could make them even remotely good to play?

For real. Which skill that is not just directly dead is viable? Cause I would love to play Super Charged Slams, but I cannot. Cause the ability needs at least 3 seconds to charge while no stun in the world will hold that long and the abyss monsters at the other hand wouldn't even let me get to that point.

"

...then get used to the current balance because they clearly stated it is about where they want it.

Then swords, axes and other melee stuff is doomed to be bad before it gets released.

Also in terms of balance,... PCoC safe deserved its nerfs since it was clearly stronger as the new Spirit walker ascendancy which gives you a freaking boss companion right? So that was prolly the reason they nerfed it.
Cause it was used by a whooping massive 3% playerbase of poe.ninja in the best times.

Especially since it cannot even be used in combination with most poison abilities, since it is an unarmed ability which prohibits you to have a martial weapon equipped xD

GG

Was this reply even meant for me? It is all over the place.