1.2.0 Improvements to New User Experience

Yes please. Attack speed feels so slow early on...

Honestly the whole 'clunky' 'slugishness' is so easily felt each time I make a new character especially when you are used to playing on fast moving and attack speed builds. IMO this 'clunky slugishness' is directly related to base attack and movement speeds. It makes the game feel slow. Instead of balancing around specific weapons early on, why not just buff the base movement and attack / cast speeds of everything? Monsters and characters will move and attack faster making the game feel faster paced and less 'clunky'. You can reduce the damage on skills / items across the board to compensate for the extra attack / cast speed so players and monsters both end up doing the same dps at the end of the day.

While this is probably more time consuming to implement I think the benefits greatly outweigh the time spent. The game just 'feels right' when you have movement / attack / cast speed gear on.

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Chris wrote:

Early Attack Speed
Compared to other Action RPGs, our early melee attack speed is relatively slow. We're currently internally testing a change where early weapons have been rebalanced to be slightly faster, while still doing the same overall damage per second. This is tapered so that higher level weapons are unmodified (by then, the player can have vast amounts of attack speed from items, passive skills and support gems). So far, we've found that this helps combat feel more impactful at low levels. We're still investigating the balance consequences of the change (such as its impact on mana when skills are used more often) and haven't yet decided whether and when we'll deploy it to the live realm.

I think this is a powerful and brilliant idea. However, there are three important considerations:

1. Early critical strike chance needs to be less than later critical strike chance. I feel a good rule of thumb would be to make the "Normal difficulty" weapon tiers (ex: Rusted Sword through Dusk Blade) about 25% faster with 4% crit chance, the Cruel tier (Variscite Blade through Twilight Blade) unchanged, and the Merciless tier (Gemstone Sword through Midnight Blade) 20% slower with 6% crit chance. The numbers are kind of made up, but the point is to consider criticals per second as a weapon metric.

2. Mana cost needs to start lower for early gem levels and scale up faster, so that mana consumption per second is maintained.

3. Please don't go exclusively by raw, white-item DPS. In real gameplay, and especially for the higher-level weapons, damage mods are always included to some extent. Affix damage should factor into DPS balance.

As far as tutorials go...

First entry into Lioneye's Watch should include a box saying "Your Flasks have been refilled due to entering a Town." Simple notification, teaches a concept. Does not need to be repeated.

Do not start us off with three full flasks; instead, one full Small Life, one full Small Mana. Also have the initial zombie always drop a Small Life in addition to the gem drop. New players don't normally rush straight to Hillock, and thus may notice this empty flask filling up, and thus — without any direct explanation needed — learn how flasks are recharged. As an added bonus, racers my find the scramble to be first to Lioneye's Watch slightly more challenging.

Could you try taking the guide system from various games such as Dota 2 and Heroes of Newerth in the sense that players can access community guides from in game?

I'm seeing this working when new players pick a class and open the passive tree they are able to go to a guide section for their class. In that section will be all the guides that the community have made or transferred from the current forum based system, with a vote/favourite system. A new player with a ranger for example could open the guide section and choose to look at a guide named "X's Lightning Arrow Ranger", which they could click on to see how the build plays, pros/cons, gear and a passive tree suggestion.

I'm thinking this would be a good idea if it could be implemented, as some of my friends often comment on the overwhelming nature of the passive tree for new players and how they don't want to mess up their build. Some of my friends find the tree too daunting to get into the game so I think this would help bring more players to the game.

I also think this would help with the excitement of progression for new players because they would be guided into the end game with a clear path.

The Dominus fight and the mobs in the tower in Normal and especially Cruel need a serious looking into in terms of balance, the chances of a new player soloing Dominus without rage quitting is seriously low.

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those who haven't played Action RPGs before.

PoE is more an Asiagrinder or a MMORPG but not ARPG.

New players certainly don't leave because of normal.
They leave because or horrible drop rates.

Decreased killspeed-->Less drops.
Imagine you would find less and less gold in another game. And crafting is like a rigged slotmachine. That's how PoE feels.

Repetive Gemrewards after some point(Where is Attackspeed for the Meleetemplar for example? You always see RMC, Blood Magic, Melee Damage etc.)

Being forced to trade-->Yes even a paid Dominuskill cruel is a trade.

Gearchecks-->Do you even see how players are playing at the beginning of 4 month leagues. Grace+Determination, Searing Bond etc. just not to be oneshot.
Invasion was a perfect noobtrap because if you meleed invaders in normal you got pretty much oneshot. I even got oneshot at level 3 by a now nerfed frostwall snake in melee range at 200 hp.

Poor unique design-->I already told you in skype that most uniques are "5 levels and throw away uniques"
Goldrim is still the best unique which can be used for many levels.

Build enablers don't work because those builds only do good when you reached certain level.
Others are throw away uniques.

You need weapons that scale with level, add buffs depending on received damage, cursed items which are more powerful than regular items having a huge drawback and can only be removed by using certain currency.



The issue you are talking about are unbalanced nodes in the skilltrees.

You can't create much high dps with Damage nodes only.

You need Speed too. If you don't got many damage nodes you go crit and speed.
I also told you that in Skype.

If attack speed and cast speed bothers you that much change the level 31 gems to level 12 gems.
But I warn you Cast speed and attackspeed results in higher manacosts and you never handled manacost nicely. Players will be pissed even earlier when they hear "My mana is gone" and they have no more charges left and must circle around packs in normal already.

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i think you mean Sweep skill. noone uses that so there is no problem :)

No he is right. In CB several melee skills bypassed the weapon attackspeed like groundslam having a 1.2 base APS that's why it was popular.
Leap slam also had its own APS but IIRC there was something like a 2 sec delay and a patch changed it to 1 or 1.1 sec with attackspeed modification which turned oak into a perma Airborne mob, so it got reduced to 1.2 sec.

doing a beginner friendly tutor section to the forum, some videos and no changes ingame.... of give new players "one older brother" to the chat window, for some dudes who explain the game deeply

Over time I feel PoE's first impression has improved a lot. To me a lot of that has come from the improvements in animation and effects related to damaging and killing monsters. It's much more satisfying to murder the deranged scavengers on the coast then the closed beta/open beta scavenger iterations. Many monsters have improved in this way and I love how satisfying it is. Likewise causing monsters to react to your blows before they die helps. Extra gore makes the game twice as fun for me when playing a melee.

Further to this I would say the visible "effort" and fluidity in terms of movement and foley regarding player-character attack animations plays into this. Fast-casting spells are pretty uniformly fun in the early game because they're so flashy and effective. Melee to me has proved the most fun as either the Marauder/other strength class using ground slam (ground slam sound + extra gore = extremely satisfying) or the Scion since her animations are very involved (compared scion's sword-swing animation which looks powerful, involving the whole body in the swing with the marauder's default 2h attack which looks like he's hammering a nail, both feet planted with next-to-no involvement from the whole body).

Can't comment on other player's experiences but honestly some extra gore as a default and some improvement in in fluidity and visible character "effort" to melee animation might go a long way to making combat even more satisfying.

The Scion is the more verbose Exile of the bunch (for better or worse). It seems odd she needs to be unlocked. For a new user every class is going to shape up poorly so I think the idea that the Scion is a more advanced class prone to more build mistakes is overstated. With the unlock requirement on the Scion removed it might help player retention for those who have some interest in the story.

Finally regarding move speed: Please make movement speed penalties related to wearing armour explicit in the item description as the slow down from the full heavy outfit a newbie will inevitably collect off the twilight strand (as simply picking them up will equip them and only heavy armour types drop) slows the player down immensely and makes the game seem more sluggish than it is.

As for tutorials showing is much more important than telling. Diablo 1 and 2 had no tutorial. They had a help-screen one could toggle but that was it. There's probably a healthy middle ground between explaining content outright and neglecting to address it at all.

Don't forget that if you increase attack speed for 10%, you will also need 10% more mana regeneration to do same dps as before. So melee users start to experience more mana problems as before. This is applies mostly for races, where you run with hatred from level 10 and if you dont have large mana potions later - you are screwed.

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jstq wrote:

Don't forget that if you increase attack speed for 10%, you will also need 10% more mana regeneration to do same dps as before.

Or, the skills could cost ~10% less. 90%*1.1=99%.

Great!

Edit : A real tutorial would be a really good thing for new users. It will prevent them from leaving the game before understanding how it works. I think this is somehting you will work hard on cause it will substantially increase the new players number in my opinion ;)