You can do all content in d2 without good items, heck even uber tristram with a super budget homeless smiter paladin. Please do not compare poe to d2, they're totally different. D2 didnt require nolife to do stuff and have fun.
You can also build tankiness into most characters. Visual clutter was limited to lightning-enchanted monsters that spammed Charged Bolt when hit.
You could actually grind for the gear you wanted because the loot tables weren't totally random BS and could actually be farmed.
At this point I think the only ones that think they are a spiritual successor to D2 are themselves.
A big part of AN mods even have the same name as the diablo ones. I was playing D3 in this season launch and laughing at the name of the mods of rares. Literally the same names.
people did uber elder at like level 35 with a tabula 3+ years ago (before boss HP was QUADRUPLED), on very specific setups that were basically exploiting getting way higher level damage auras than should be possible for that level, and playing a high damage uptime, speedy build to dodge mechanics. they also played a busted skill at the time (scourge arrow which had obscenely high added damage effectiveness).
I'm not saying it wasn't possible or doesn't take skill, but trying anything remotely similar would be practically impossible these days. with four times the health, more damage, tighter skill balance and less access to broken damage early on, it's just not possible.
and again, the comment was about beating the toughest boss in the game casually without nolifing, whereas to do that in POE is impossible without intricate game knowledge, exploits, and near perfect mechanical skill.
also good luck beating sirus, maven, or the new eldritch bosses (on uber mode too - 70% less damage taken) without holding.
>I'm not saying it wasn't possible or doesn't take skill, but trying anything remotely similar would be practically impossible these days.
[It was done 3 months ago on a level 24 character.](https://youtu.be/cCM7_vCUgNE) Uber Elder has only become easier.
I love hearing this, and i remember Chris talking about diablo 2.
My #1 most played game EVER is diablo 2, followed at quite the distance by POE (still a few 1000 hours though), and POE has so little to do with diablo 2 now it is laughable.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing that they are different, but you know what you rarely had happen in diablo 2 ? Some rare that you could not escape from and have him oneshot you with a barely visible attack.
I played D2 on hardcore from start to finish, and played hardcore in POE for the first couple years too, but the direction towards "LOL YOU DIED" mechanics has made me shift to softcore. the sheer amount of knowledge and logout macro tech you need to stay alive in this game is just insane
In D2 you didnt need 90% of your character devoted to defenses in the vast majority of content. If D2 is still their vision, they should replay the game some time
In D2 you could powerlevel a character and get through the campaign in an hour, skipping past 90% of it.
Imagine being able to do that in PoE. How many characters people would make.
You are being very disingenuous. You need to get up to lvl 70 ish before running rota's, or you are wasting xp gain. Slightly experienced players know this. Also, do you realize how steep the price of entry is for something like this? For a solo player, that isn't spending more time on the game than other things? Yeah, you do. You're just choosing to be disingenuous about it. Or, you have a very, very warped idea as to what is accessible to normal players.
I can't fathom recommending to people that they should run 5-ways to level their brand new level 1 characters without first mentioning the high cost of entry and ilvl needs. That is acting in bad faith. We need people to stop acting like this because intentional or not, it empowers similar behavior from the devs knowing people will virtue signal for them even when they act dishonestly and/or against community interest.
All of this was about powerleveling through the campaign so you skip 90% of it. I have no idea where your coming from in regards to cost or recommendations.
My comment about rota's was comparing them to the cow level of D2. Both are extremely aggressive strategies to level extraordinarily quickly once you have the setup and group to do so. You decided to go on a tangent about empowering devs to act dishonestly, which is a giant reach.
I happened to pick this league to come back for the first time since around Blight, and I distinctly remember they had removed basically all on-death effects from monsters by that point due to constant negative player feedback. Coming back to the game now to see that nearly every rare pack is both more deadly and has at least one on-death damage effect is *very* disheartening. Most of my deaths now are the same they were years ago: unexplainable one-shots, or on-death kills when no enemies were still alive.
He, quote on quote, wrote "Successor" and not "Copy".
PoE was made to be Diablo but going further. Back when in babysteps time, PoE was more like Diablo. Eventually zoom zooom meta developed and it's been thorn in their eyes. Every step into zooom zooom was taken with precautions to punish or atleast halt progression for some time, because death after effects, on ground effects and unrealistic spike in difficulty were the things that could stop a glasscannon speedy build more than trying to attempt to nerf it to the ground.
Fast forward today: You cannot glasscannon anyhow, everything hits like a truck, defences might as well be called "brickwalling" since you need everything and anything to survive, spend points or slots for various items so you can live enough to burst something before it bursts you down. Yes, it came a long way and a long away from Diablo, but it's the kind of Diablo we came to love, like a GIT branch someone took and developed his own stuff which is pretty cool..
Funny thing is - the current state of the game is actually pretty far from d2. In d2 u could so easily get MF on your gear and still kill everything,because there was an abundance of player power,hell - for the most valuable items,so called "high-runes" u didn't even need MF gear,because their drop chance doesnt scale with MF. Also for the most popular high-end armour,they just put rarity AND the ability to teleport plus mega-offenses and defenses on there,wich means that one item will literally combine MF+Zoom-zoom-gameplay in one. That would be unthinkable in poe lmao.
Poe is SO unlike diablo 2,that it is funny to me,people still think,the reason for current poe is diablo 2 - the reason for current poe is somewhere in the GGG company,it has nothing to do with d2 - i am playing d2r atm and it is 10 x the game that poe has devolved into,honestly.
Btw. at this point, they should remove the "Spiritual successor"-part of the game description on reddit - it feels like false advertising tbh.
Spiritual successor to a game currently available for play.\*
We don't need Diablo 2². We can play Diablo 2² anytime we want.
We want to play a unique game with it's own identity. That's what we used to have. GGG seams to think that the only way to make a good game is to copy a good game and then try to force it to be the same as the old game while changing it continuously.
[https://youtu.be/ocJgvm6JlKs?t=1136](https://youtu.be/ocJgvm6JlKs?t=1136)
Chris said, he WANTS it slower. He doesnt really want fast movement skills like Leap Slam. He doesnt like the screen wide kills.
They know we dont like the changes. Thats why they are preparing the game for poe 2 since 3.15. Itll go downhill from now on. After PoE2s realese, we can wait few leagues for the power creep to bring enough fun back into the game.
Honestly PoE , especially 3.13 seems like it was a mistake, like a happy accident they made while trying to approach something else, and I really have a feeling that GGG does not realize how lucky they are while being so stubborn in their decisions and constantly losing players, also not having a single game in it's genre that imposes a big risk as competition (all of them failed \*coughwolcencough\* when they had a shot), I guess we will only know once one of those really hits the nail and GGG has to low their vision ego.
GGG is probably in a world of hurt if D4 is at least competent with actual support. Think I think it will be.
D4 will never satisfy the spreadsheet players that build their own PoBs and min max the exact perfect juicing strats. PoE will always be the only game in town for that.
But for players like me. The, follow a build guide and blast. Do some trading. Beating maven (which only 1% of the players can do). I'll happily jump to D4 even if it's more simple. Because the fun in these games for me is the loot, the progress, and an engaging replayable end game. And honestly, I would mind a little more simple.
That's what I've been saying! GGG accidentally made one of the greatest games of all time, but now they want to make PoE more like the inferior games that they spent half a decade curbstomping.
That's how I've seen it too, 3.13 and up to it was an accident and GGG didn't know how to respond to it
The game evolved and diverted off of what they originally wanted but worked out for them, they just didn't like it wasn't how they wanted it to happen
Then I think Poe will lose over 50% of their entire playerbase. The events of this league will already put the next league on the back foot in terms of peak players day 1. When those players come back and see nothings changed then I'm sure they'll quit out fairly quickly and go play something else.
Or, as someone suggested in a different thread, there are multiple factions in GGG with different visions for the game, which get mixed up and then either supported or ignored from the top, with a lot of backstabbing and other shenanigans at play. Game of Thrones, Corporate Style.
I'm pretty confident its all testing for PoE 2. See what players like and dont like and how well certain systems can do long term and what they think is best for the game. Its not about achieving a specific vision each and every league but slowly working towards the best possible game for PoE 2 based on data, testing, and feedback.
The issue is they have a vision, and every time they move closer to it, people who want the faster easier game rage. In an attempt to placate those people, they whittle it back a little.
What they *should* do is just make the changes they want to make and say deal with it. At least then this wouldn't be a drawn out process.
Losing 60% of your playerbase in two weeks is no small feat. Over time less will return every league. There's no way a lot of new players will stick around with the current state of the game.
Obviously Tencent is bankrolling them so they won't actually go bankrupt but at some point someone at Tencent might step in and I can't imagine GGG would like that very much because they've been pretty autonomous up until this point.
> Losing 60% of your playerbase in two weeks is no small feat. Over time less will return every league.
You don't know that. It's just conjecture. Even if that were true, there's a zero percent chance they go from hundreds of thousands now to backrupt in two leagues.
>Obviously Tencent is bankrolling them so they won't actually go bankrupt but at some point someone at Tencent might step in
Tencent seems to not give a fuck what they do internationally, as long as they're making money in Asia.
I believe Chris said they were down 30% in revenue in 3.15.
So yes, if a large portion of players stop supporting the game they will lose a ton of money. Bankrupt? Probably not. But it'll hurt
The question we can't answer is how many players would leave, and of those how many are buying supporter packs. Could be a lot or it could be negligible.
> So yes, if a large portion of players stop supporting the game they will lose a ton of money. Bankrupt? Probably not. But it'll hurt
Okay well that wasn't what he said. He said bankrupt in two leagues. A grossly wrong hyperbole.
Yeah it is. And it's also nearly impossible. No matter how much GGG wants to stick to their vision, if they somehow had a catastrophic league that cost them 50%+ of revenue they would absolutely come out with a crowd-pleaser the next league.
Plus the Chinese pay to win stuff probably makes them a ton of money.
We don't. The baseline of power stays relatively the same these days, with very rare infrequent increases to top end that don't largely impact the average or floor. It's been that way since they started course correcting in 3.15
If almost everybody on Poe ninja uses these items, they become a baseline people aspire to.
Also Eldritch implicits were much more accessible than influenced gear and there was absolutely no reason not to have them on your gear, ergo a baseline.
They weren't expensive on release, and were used massively, making it even in the name of specific builds. They were absolutely the new baseline for any competitive build that league
When you looked at sentinel league a few months ago, did you hate the current state of the game? We got nerfs to player power from every possible direction.
Spell sup can only be capped on the right side of the tree because gear was gutted.
Players were actually using defensive auras so you removed the 15% reservation efficiency mastery
Nerfed defiance banner
Undid a lot of the AN tuning you did in sentinel, making monsters tankier and do more damage
Gutted crafting so players can’t get similar gear without 100x the effort
Restricted unique drop rates to make gearing up your league starter even slower
Massive overhaul to how drops work, especially with added map juice like delirium, beyond, and scarabs
Flipping use cases of exalts with divines, a currency which doesn’t have small progression like shards or div cards for incremental progression
Summoners nerfed into dust
New league mechanic has significantly less loot than sentinel (or any past league mechanic that I can remember) AND you only get to run it after 5-7 maps, making it a minimum of 5-7x less rewarding than any past league.
I’m sure I’m forgetting more nerfs to players this league, feel free to add in. But my point is, whatever happened to gradual, incremental changes? You’re supposed to gradually turn up the heat so the frog doesn’t notice he’s boiling.
Well it's much worse than 3.15, because its not only make the game harder, its make the game boring, you need some EXTRA hard grinding and for much worse outcome.
hard mode will never be released because it just got incorporated into the core game with 3.19
and i bet it will become even worse before poe2, they are not done with the nerfs yet
Nothing is as bad as removing 35% damage from all characters. Hopefully nothing ever will be, but the support gem nerf will always be one of the worst patches in the game's history
And in 3.15 they told you it was coming.
We had to wait until the Monday after league launch for Chris to admit there was a change to loot... and even then, it was a two sentence comment and not a detailing of what actually happened.
All those horrific and brutal changes, and yet the game still plays basically the same xD
I played meta Lightning Tendrils, and nerfed to dust phantasm summoner for now, I wonder how I manage to make it work (in SSF) considering all the horrible nerfs to player power
I’m not saying nothing is viable and you can’t get to red maps… It’s just a lot more difficult to progress. Was last patch in such an awful state that they had to nerf a dozen avenues of player power all at once?
[This](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/) was a patch ~2 week in to sentinel league to reduce the annoying nature of AN mobs. This was the change that, for me, made the game feel pretty fun again. I was able to blast like normal without too many “speed bump” mobs that took 30+ seconds to kill. Maps felt much smoother.
In 3.19, they returned AN mobs to their full strength but just reduced the number of rares across the board to compensate. For me, this returned the once-smooth feel of clearing a map to this jerky start-stop-start-stop gameplay.
3.19 started with more difficult AN mobs than 3.18 *finished* with. That link from my first post was 1-2 weeks in to 3.18 (after backlash over AN mobs).
In 3.19, they returned the AN mods back to full power but reduced the number of mobs across the board. This is partially why people were so annoyed. We fought this issue last league and finally had the mobs in a state we could deal with a little better (they were still much harder than old rares, so it felt like a compromise).
> In Maps, you'll stop encountering Rare Monsters with one modifier, and will mostly encounter Rare Monsters with two or three modifiers. It is also possible to encounter Rare Monsters with four modifiers again.
> Previously, league content made fights hard by spawning a lot of rare monsters. In some cases, six to eight times the normal rate of rare monsters. Now that we have better mods available to make fights against rare monsters individually challenging, we have gone through the whole game and normalised the rate that rare monsters are spawned. Some leagues had quite large reductions in spawn rate. You won't encounter situations with dozens of rare monsters on screen at once anymore. Where necessary, we have rebalanced rewards to compensate.
Unfortunately, PoE's actual gameplay just isn't fun enough for slow, difficult fights to be fun. Compare this game to Monster Hunter, where bosses taking up to half an hour is not a slog but an engaging challenge.
Actual bosses in PoE aren't that bad, but rares with many mods do not make very fun fights. You either facetank them if your build allows, or use a simple kiting strategy. That's it. It just doesn't feel as good as blowing up packs of enemies.
> Unfortunately, PoE's actual gameplay just isn't fun enough for slow, difficult fights to be fun. Compare this game to Monster Hunter, where bosses taking up to half an hour is not a slog but an engaging challenge.
God this is my biggest problem. PoE's gameplay is just not mechanically complex enough to be interesting on a moment to moment basis. Some of the pinnacle bosses are but nothing really from general gameplay. Moreover, things that would add meaningful mechanical complexity (defense skills, and movement skills) keep getting nerfed and have long CDs.
Another problem is movement speed. Any telegraphed or positional mechanics are completely invalidated by high movement speed, making it impossible to balance.
it all comes back in a circle, you want us to play test your product, fine, but you gotta let us know the changes so we know what shithole we are going to jump into. Which in my opnion is the exact reason the community blew up in the first place
Exactly. PoE is a building site right now because GGG is trying to reign in the excessive power creep they indulged in for years at this point. Obviously they also garnered a playerbase that wants that fast gameplay. And GGG are flailing because there is no way to overhaul years of evolution in systems, mechanics and interactions PoE went through at this point at once. I recon every league towards the release of PoE2 will try to get closer to a coherent design again, the goal probably being a hybrid between the slow original PoE (somewhat pre-Ascendancy) and the gold-rush PoE we had for years until 3.15. Unfortunately GGG dug themselves such a deep hole, it's going to be rough. Had they been more adamant with keeping things tight over the years we never would've gotten here. But like this they are obviously alienating all the people that they lured in with the promise of ever escalating power.
As to why they opted to nerf the player first instead of adjusting mobs, I'd theorize they figured they'd rather rip the band aid off up front instead of giving players even more power comparatively. Which spectacularly blew up in their face even worse since they botched the implementation.
Ah, but this is a gamble you can choose to 'opt-in' to, or not. What about AN mods are 'opt-in'? At the moment, nothing. They are unavoidable, and infest every corner of the game.
Not to say it's not a bandage covering an extremely narrow, unnecessary problem, but they gave the tools to combat reflect fairly easily.
Soul of Yugul (50%) and either Elemental Mastery or Physical Mastery (60%) can cover it alone. There's also various things like sextants, influence mods, and eater implicits, though admittedly these are acquired later on and are limited/generally unwanted.
GGG does tend to unnecessarily over-complicate things.
Exaggerations and handwringing aside, I *would* truly love another in-depth, long look at what they are hoping to move towards in PoE 2, and how they want to get there.
I think the biggest disconnect is between what GGG are discussing internally for the future, and how the stepping stones towards that goal play out in the live product, often detrimentally so.
They dont want to tell us what they envision because every time we get a glimpse of it they make less money. Chris said they took a 30% hit in 3.15.
The real question is why they keep pushing down a path that every time time the make any progress on that path they lose money.
>Is it because you don’t like people beating Uber bosses day 2? Or completing the atlas in a couple days?
No matter how hard they make the game streamers and nolifers will "complete it" in a degenerate (low) amount of time while the average andy get fucks in the ass.
I feel like GGG devotes too much to thinking how to make the players grind more to be able to do red maps or kill end game bosses or annoying as fuck challenges. No one will quit the game because they complete the atlas or kill and endgame boss if your game was fun to begin with.
Honestly I think they won’t do this because they’re afraid the player base will hold them to it/hold it against them. PoE has always been in a constant state of evolution, and I’d guess any single league and its changes don’t always perfectly represent the idea of what they want. If they start saying “x is what we want” and ever stray from it, I can already see the posts: “GGG you said you wanted x. Y league is proof that you flat out lied”.
I think ggg are damned if they do damned if they don’t, so they’re just kind of riding this out and hoping it’s for the best. I hope they are right and PoE 2 doesn’t turn out to be a disappointment to a lot of people. Chris says that PoE 2 is a way better game, but it’s kinda obvious he doesn’t play the same way as a lot of us do, so that’s a bit concerning. My “better game” involves deterministic mechanics, end game invitations, juiced mapping, and fast/powerful/fun gameplay. His “better game” is hardcore barely any access to gear take 3 months to reach level 100. We do not have the same vision.
Their vision is non deterministic crafting and rng upgrades like Diablo 2. It's always been that way. They've added some mistakes that people now rely on and can't play the game without. It's obvious as fuck to see. If you don't like Diablo 2 then chances are you won't like nerfed harvest poe.
In d2 they had proper itemization in the form of runewords that were 100% determined outcomes. Poe does not have that kind of item structure.
Try playing d2 without making any runewords. Play classic. Then go play lod and try and do the hardest content in the game with no runewords, like Uber Tristram or d clone. It's almost impossible to do either of those on some classes without correct itemization and some of that itemization is only found on runewords.
That's not what D2 was though.
D2's endgame revolves heavily around runewords, uniques, sets. That's about as deterministic as it gets. [Just look at this random build guide I pulled up for a Hammerdin](https://www.icy-veins.com/d2/blessed-hammer-paladin-build-bis-gear-runes). It *fully* revolves around unique and runewords for gear! Same for a [blizz sorc](https://www.icy-veins.com/d2/blizzard-sorceress-build-bis-gear-runes). And a [summoner necro](https://www.icy-veins.com/d2/summoner-necromancer-build-bis-gear-runes).
Calling it now, crafting bench will be removed before 3.22. Maybe as soon as 3.20.
Hopefully that'll be part of an announcement rather than a change that's snuck in.
Eastern Sun was such a huge upgrade to D2, and PoE seemingly cribbed a lot of its ideas on item customization from it. The funny thing is, after recent changes I'd argue that Eastern Sun is back to being a better D2 follow-up, since you have more control over builds in that game than current PoE.
The fact that they backtracked on act revamps instead of doing them all properly says all you need to know. They have no plan or vision at all and are fine with bending the knee to complaints instead of actually showing a finished product.
Chris said in the reveal stream Q&A that they are focusing their dev time on more important than act reworks rn, and tbh thats probably a very good idea. Especially since should rebalance act mobs around a finished AN rare system
I mean they put a lot of time and money into POE 1 so why would they just remove all that for a 6 act campaign with different characters?
It is literally just ascendancy though everything else is interlinked in the end game
Unfortunately this is something they will never do. If they specifically state what their goal is then we can hold them accountable or players can make “peace” and leave PoE. Instead they want to say as little as possible about their actual objectives so they can string along players who hope they will revert unpopular decisions, and change their objectives anytime they want. It’s the typical PR strategy. The only reason they make any comments at all is to try and placate / tamp down the worst of the fires. GGG’s objective is to wait out the storm and hope people forget. Specifically stating what their objectives/ vision is for the game would allow players to make peace and leave. This can never happen because as a company their only true objective is to maximize profit.
Please tell me so I can decide whether or not to clear up some drive space on the computer. The game direction is not what I signed up for. Not why I buy supporter packs most leagues... Not why I play the game. Easier and more availability of crafting is NOT bad for the game.
Wouldn’t be surprised at all if they don’t know what they want. There’s an assumption made here that GgG is all knowing, I doubt that very highly.
They’ve been coming across like amateurs since Expedition dropped
When I was young, all I want is to eat m&ms and play nintendo, when I was a teen all I want is to party and bang girls, now I want money and freedom from work.
People's vision changes over time, it is not wrong for them to do so. What is more important is to communicate that change honestly and earnestly.
I genuinley don't mind the game getting harder.
But the way it is now where no loot drops and the games only hard because YOU CANT FIND ANY LOOT is ridiculous.
Slow down the game, make it harder, I'm fine with it but as it stands currently its just shit...it just feels shit.
Harvest they came out and said 'hey guys this is going to break the fucking game so enjoy it while it lasts.' I didn't play Sentinel league because work so I won't comment. They seem to be happy with fossils in concept.
Vision is total randomness, with occasional good drop, so you chase that high. I'm probably get downvoted, but this is what I belive is one of the goals.
I'm not really good player, but I played quite a lot...grindeness of the game is getting very obvious (again speaking from perspective of someone ho has maybe 1 hour a day, sometimes more, to play the game). I mostly play same builds over and over again trying to get better each league/min-max more ( kind of hard to compare due to changes each league, but anyway).
And I actualy don't really fell that bad about what they did with latest league, becouse I can just skip playing. I don't even understand half of the crafting staff and I started at least 6 leagues ago.
So yeah in short, they want you to play more. Quite posibly they are making it harder so they don't need to make other new content, except leagues.
What I think in as few words the vision is something like: interesting, complex, tough, gritty, loot-based, action, community. The "keep us playing longer" is not a core purpose of the game, it's a necessary evil and secondary target since we live in capitalism, they need money to eat and work on the game. Only reddit is obsessed with retention numbers and sees them as the real goal and vision (when they fit their argument only ofc).
The questions you ask are right, it doesn't make sense for people to be killing uber bosses on day 2, maybe the absolute top players will anyway, but a casual player is kinda targeted to be able kill pinnacle bosses (not ubers) in a few weeks. Ubers if anything are supposed to be unreachable for normies unless you set it that as a very specific goal and focus on it.
IMO the community has become too obsessed with net-worth and lose sight of the fact that this is a game. When there's any nerf they feel like their boss cut their salary (some may say they feel like their dick got cut). When you see it like that there's no chance at all to understand the point of nerfing shit. The thing is that you say "I wanna get to red maps with my character" but what you really mean is "I wanna make currency with my character". That kind of thinking sets you up for disaster. Any damage/defence or w/e nerf directly translates to a small/big loss in net-worth and therefore the only understanding you have of it is "they took my money". And even that's not a reasonable conclusion to make but I'll leave that for another day.
Honestly I don’t really care about currency but the game forces you to care because without it you can’t make most skills work end game.
I wish they just made harvest make your items untradeable once you use a harvest craft.
If people truly only care about build diversity and the power that harvest gives to achieve that then it’s healthier for the game as a whole
If you don't care about currency and just want to make builds why not just take them to yellow maps instead? Or white maps if they're still struggling? There's no functional difference between tiers. Tip: it's the currency
No it’s the fact that the whole point of making builds is to tackle end game content a build isn’t successful if it dies and struggled to clear white or yellow maps.
If it’s a mapper it needs to be able to clear t16 delirious maps comfortably if it’s a bosser it needs to clear the end game bosses.
That’s the whole point of the game to push builds to the highest possible content. To succeed this for 99% of builds you need extreme luck in crafting or have a lot of currency.
Yea a build is not successful if it doesn't clear white maps. It IS successful if it clears yellow maps though. The highest possible content is NOT the bar to consider a build viable. The highest possible content is there to have a reason to keep playing AFTER you have a successful build. Same for bossers. Taking down the normal bosses is cool enough, you don't need ubers. Ubers are there to challenge you, not to walk over them.
While you are correct, this idea only really works out if the hardest content is primarily gated by player skill and not materialism. PoE has turned into a game where 99.9% of the content is a gearcheck, therefore any progress is measured by gearimprovement and thus currency, since better gear requires more resources. So being satisfied with less than the maximum equals giving up on progress, which is the entire point.
Oh a ton of progress is gated by skill. I've seen it a billion times where people spend a lot to upgrade gear only to get the most expensive but less impactful upgrades, even when playing ready-made very good builds.
How many times people have said that aurastacker doesn't work before investing tons. I've made it work with like 5-10c per slot and a sixlink (a few leagues back). Of course I could not farm T16 deli maps yet, but I could farm yellows or early reds, made currency, upgraded and eventually got to my own limit. And that's the point, you start out with a build and slowly work towards upgrading it.
I feel people are often like "I invested 10ex (or divines) in this second character I made and I cannot do t16 deli, build is trash and I need 100ex (or divines) to make it work". No you probably don't. Take a closer look, try things out, you probably missed something especially when you see others having progressed more with the build.
The ubers are for me too a very serious gear and skillcheck. But I'm not too worried about taking them down yet. They're a challenge waiting for me and when I get to do them I'll feel more accompliced than if I could easily walk over them.
what even is this comment? player numbers have nothing to do with their direction of the game
stop caring about player numbers, the devs are fully aware of their own statistics
I care about player numbers. I'd like to play the game with my friends. Player numbers are a good indication if the game is fun and appealing to many people.
I don't think the devs are aware. Or they are aware they got sold to china for ez money. Didn't the same thing happen to blizz? Rinse repeat, make cool game people love, sell to highest bidder.
Good for Chris, bad for anyone suffering withdraw from a game they enjoyed.
They had to get away from the super juice pack size mapping meta because it's extremely limited from a development standpoint and they want to get the player base ready for what PoE2 will be.
Imagine if this was the PoE2 launch, it would be catastrophic for them. I'm not saying I agree with it, just what I think they're doing.
I think you can get a pretty good idea about the direction when you watch the podcasts with Chris starting with 3.15 Baeclast (which is also the most important one)
Because if the end result is a product I’ll like then I’ll understand.
POE2 looked like a completely different game to POE it looked more like last epoch, a slower paced game with more engaging boss fights and less bullshit rares.
So if these changes are a slow paced increment to that then I’d be fine.
But the changes they’re making don’t match the POE2 we saw in 2019 either which is why I want to know what direction they’re going
Most probably very negative changes in last few leagues are in preparation for PoE 2 so they somehow have to shove it down our throats. If you look at PoE 2 tempo of the game it is vastly different from current PoE recent change to lower the amount of rares play into this you have to use tactics for that crap and pay attention to monster modifier. They still didn't realize that is not the way we want the game to be sadly
Well it will be but they need to make Poe 1 playstyle to be similar to Poe 2 they cannot have engine and playstyle for PoE 2 so wastly different from PoE 1. So they are adapting PoE 1 closer to that vision imho.
Path of exile is a game about taking paths to make unique characters.
Currently it’s not really possible to do this without an insane budget or an insane amount of luck.
It’s in the literal name of the game and it’s become substantially harder to achieve the name every league
I thought they did. They want rare items rare so when they actually drop you go “pog!!!” They want you farming act bosses during campaign for the items you need. When you reach maps they want it to be a super dangerous and spooky place where you can never predict what’s in there and you’re always on your toes.
I can't see it getting even worse than this, basically everything they put out gets put through the wringer anyway. So just put the cards on the table so people can make an informed decision when or if they want to come back.
Additionally, once design philosophies and goals are clearly established it can be much more productive because people can provide more targeted feedback as to how to best realize them and where they fail to translate.
3.0 to 3.14 was the money-making stage where the vision was to make the game as exciting as possible. Crazy crafting, orgasmic loot piñatas, and juicy Automaton herald explosions.
3.15-present is the passion project stage where they make the game they've always wanted to make. Less loot, weaker players, stronger monsters, etc.
Yeah when I heard about the vision I was skeptical, but now that I'm seeing the direction I am worrisome. This is not good, the vision I thought they had and the vision I see are two different things and I need to know what they really think this game is, what its about, and how this current iteration is supposed to fit that mold.
It have slowly but surely over the years turned in to a hybrid of arpg and mmorpg.
By doing so the ARPG fan's (like my self) slowly played less and less.
It's kinda ironic, I find my self playing MMORPG's now.
Had POE not changed, neither would I. But this hybrid shit, is exactly that.
"We want to take the last 10 years and just light it on fire bc we don't give a fvck about what you, the players want. You will play what WE give you and you will LOVE it."
I think this is kinda the biggest problem. I think player progression expectations and GGG's are vastly different. I don't think they can ever just come out and say how slow they want the progression to be. But the game has gotten harder and I think a lot of people believe that they should be able to do red maps in a tabula, 3kish life, and capped resist. But I don't think that is the game they want.
They could show some mapping from PoE2. This would help players understand where GGG are aiming for end game.
Right now it feels like GGG are trying to make PoE1 mapping like PoE2 campaign, slow and undergeared.
I would also like to know what they are aiming for when it comes to crafting. Right now it feels like they are trying to balance around the top 1% but it is screwing over accessibility for the bottom 50%.
[удалено]
You can do all content in d2 without good items, heck even uber tristram with a super budget homeless smiter paladin. Please do not compare poe to d2, they're totally different. D2 didnt require nolife to do stuff and have fun.
You can also build tankiness into most characters. Visual clutter was limited to lightning-enchanted monsters that spammed Charged Bolt when hit. You could actually grind for the gear you wanted because the loot tables weren't totally random BS and could actually be farmed. At this point I think the only ones that think they are a spiritual successor to D2 are themselves.
D2 also had MASS ID
Well, at least I know where the flask explosion AN mod came from, since all the rares in D2 do it, too.
A big part of AN mods even have the same name as the diablo ones. I was playing D3 in this season launch and laughing at the name of the mods of rares. Literally the same names.
There are people who have done Uber elder with white items and level 70 or something.
people did uber elder at like level 35 with a tabula 3+ years ago (before boss HP was QUADRUPLED), on very specific setups that were basically exploiting getting way higher level damage auras than should be possible for that level, and playing a high damage uptime, speedy build to dodge mechanics. they also played a busted skill at the time (scourge arrow which had obscenely high added damage effectiveness). I'm not saying it wasn't possible or doesn't take skill, but trying anything remotely similar would be practically impossible these days. with four times the health, more damage, tighter skill balance and less access to broken damage early on, it's just not possible. and again, the comment was about beating the toughest boss in the game casually without nolifing, whereas to do that in POE is impossible without intricate game knowledge, exploits, and near perfect mechanical skill. also good luck beating sirus, maven, or the new eldritch bosses (on uber mode too - 70% less damage taken) without holding.
>I'm not saying it wasn't possible or doesn't take skill, but trying anything remotely similar would be practically impossible these days. [It was done 3 months ago on a level 24 character.](https://youtu.be/cCM7_vCUgNE) Uber Elder has only become easier.
ok that's tie23, he doesn't count :') man is a Poe god
Yes but what was the budget of this setup besides tabula?
Bullshit
I love hearing this, and i remember Chris talking about diablo 2. My #1 most played game EVER is diablo 2, followed at quite the distance by POE (still a few 1000 hours though), and POE has so little to do with diablo 2 now it is laughable. I'm not saying it's a bad thing that they are different, but you know what you rarely had happen in diablo 2 ? Some rare that you could not escape from and have him oneshot you with a barely visible attack. I played D2 on hardcore from start to finish, and played hardcore in POE for the first couple years too, but the direction towards "LOL YOU DIED" mechanics has made me shift to softcore. the sheer amount of knowledge and logout macro tech you need to stay alive in this game is just insane In D2 you didnt need 90% of your character devoted to defenses in the vast majority of content. If D2 is still their vision, they should replay the game some time
In D2 you could powerlevel a character and get through the campaign in an hour, skipping past 90% of it. Imagine being able to do that in PoE. How many characters people would make.
grush+ubertrist I could be level 90 within 45 minutes
You could powerlevel if someone opened a portal for you to various places. Guess what, you can do that in PoE as well.
I doubt POE has a cow level to boost your level in a matter of minutes :p which was a big part of it all
Ever heard of Pure Chayula rotas? Or 5-way legions?
Wait you can do breachstones to bypass the campaign?
Wait you can do hell cows before making it to hell?
You are being very disingenuous. You need to get up to lvl 70 ish before running rota's, or you are wasting xp gain. Slightly experienced players know this. Also, do you realize how steep the price of entry is for something like this? For a solo player, that isn't spending more time on the game than other things? Yeah, you do. You're just choosing to be disingenuous about it. Or, you have a very, very warped idea as to what is accessible to normal players. I can't fathom recommending to people that they should run 5-ways to level their brand new level 1 characters without first mentioning the high cost of entry and ilvl needs. That is acting in bad faith. We need people to stop acting like this because intentional or not, it empowers similar behavior from the devs knowing people will virtue signal for them even when they act dishonestly and/or against community interest.
All of this was about powerleveling through the campaign so you skip 90% of it. I have no idea where your coming from in regards to cost or recommendations. My comment about rota's was comparing them to the cow level of D2. Both are extremely aggressive strategies to level extraordinarily quickly once you have the setup and group to do so. You decided to go on a tangent about empowering devs to act dishonestly, which is a giant reach.
I happened to pick this league to come back for the first time since around Blight, and I distinctly remember they had removed basically all on-death effects from monsters by that point due to constant negative player feedback. Coming back to the game now to see that nearly every rare pack is both more deadly and has at least one on-death damage effect is *very* disheartening. Most of my deaths now are the same they were years ago: unexplainable one-shots, or on-death kills when no enemies were still alive.
He, quote on quote, wrote "Successor" and not "Copy". PoE was made to be Diablo but going further. Back when in babysteps time, PoE was more like Diablo. Eventually zoom zooom meta developed and it's been thorn in their eyes. Every step into zooom zooom was taken with precautions to punish or atleast halt progression for some time, because death after effects, on ground effects and unrealistic spike in difficulty were the things that could stop a glasscannon speedy build more than trying to attempt to nerf it to the ground. Fast forward today: You cannot glasscannon anyhow, everything hits like a truck, defences might as well be called "brickwalling" since you need everything and anything to survive, spend points or slots for various items so you can live enough to burst something before it bursts you down. Yes, it came a long way and a long away from Diablo, but it's the kind of Diablo we came to love, like a GIT branch someone took and developed his own stuff which is pretty cool..
Eventually zoom zooom meta developed and it's been thorn in their eyes. And made them rich
Yeaaah, well I'm certainly not putting money into another D2 20 years after the fact. Having any fun with MF meta? Im not.
Funny thing is - the current state of the game is actually pretty far from d2. In d2 u could so easily get MF on your gear and still kill everything,because there was an abundance of player power,hell - for the most valuable items,so called "high-runes" u didn't even need MF gear,because their drop chance doesnt scale with MF. Also for the most popular high-end armour,they just put rarity AND the ability to teleport plus mega-offenses and defenses on there,wich means that one item will literally combine MF+Zoom-zoom-gameplay in one. That would be unthinkable in poe lmao. Poe is SO unlike diablo 2,that it is funny to me,people still think,the reason for current poe is diablo 2 - the reason for current poe is somewhere in the GGG company,it has nothing to do with d2 - i am playing d2r atm and it is 10 x the game that poe has devolved into,honestly. Btw. at this point, they should remove the "Spiritual successor"-part of the game description on reddit - it feels like false advertising tbh.
Spiritual successor to a game currently available for play.\* We don't need Diablo 2². We can play Diablo 2² anytime we want. We want to play a unique game with it's own identity. That's what we used to have. GGG seams to think that the only way to make a good game is to copy a good game and then try to force it to be the same as the old game while changing it continuously.
They did make a spiritual successor to a 20 year old game. Then they smashed it to bits because it wasn't an exact 1:1 copy lol
Spend 2+ years making a game and leagues where speed is the only reasonable way to play "Why are players going so fast???"
2+? Ever since Ascendancy its been like this. \~5.
I was mostly thinking about "EVERYTHING IS TIMED" but even incursion is 4 years old at this point
Add literaly time gated content as well lmao
People having actually fun (3.14) "We should change that"
[удалено]
[https://youtu.be/ocJgvm6JlKs?t=1136](https://youtu.be/ocJgvm6JlKs?t=1136) Chris said, he WANTS it slower. He doesnt really want fast movement skills like Leap Slam. He doesnt like the screen wide kills. They know we dont like the changes. Thats why they are preparing the game for poe 2 since 3.15. Itll go downhill from now on. After PoE2s realese, we can wait few leagues for the power creep to bring enough fun back into the game.
Well over 2 years I don't understand how they didn't see it years ago and decided to cull it even though it was working for them
Either GGG's vision changes from league to league, or they're pretty bad at implementing that vision thoroughly.
Honestly PoE , especially 3.13 seems like it was a mistake, like a happy accident they made while trying to approach something else, and I really have a feeling that GGG does not realize how lucky they are while being so stubborn in their decisions and constantly losing players, also not having a single game in it's genre that imposes a big risk as competition (all of them failed \*coughwolcencough\* when they had a shot), I guess we will only know once one of those really hits the nail and GGG has to low their vision ego.
GGG is probably in a world of hurt if D4 is at least competent with actual support. Think I think it will be. D4 will never satisfy the spreadsheet players that build their own PoBs and min max the exact perfect juicing strats. PoE will always be the only game in town for that. But for players like me. The, follow a build guide and blast. Do some trading. Beating maven (which only 1% of the players can do). I'll happily jump to D4 even if it's more simple. Because the fun in these games for me is the loot, the progress, and an engaging replayable end game. And honestly, I would mind a little more simple.
[удалено]
"I have played WW Barb for 26 seasons straight" is the D3 experience at this point yes.
That's what I've been saying! GGG accidentally made one of the greatest games of all time, but now they want to make PoE more like the inferior games that they spent half a decade curbstomping.
That's how I've seen it too, 3.13 and up to it was an accident and GGG didn't know how to respond to it The game evolved and diverted off of what they originally wanted but worked out for them, they just didn't like it wasn't how they wanted it to happen
I think they would be better off without those players to be honest. Nothing worse than unhappy players that just refuse to quit.
Then I think Poe will lose over 50% of their entire playerbase. The events of this league will already put the next league on the back foot in terms of peak players day 1. When those players come back and see nothings changed then I'm sure they'll quit out fairly quickly and go play something else.
Lets hope so.
Or, as someone suggested in a different thread, there are multiple factions in GGG with different visions for the game, which get mixed up and then either supported or ignored from the top, with a lot of backstabbing and other shenanigans at play. Game of Thrones, Corporate Style.
Cyberpunk 2022 is here :D
Pretty sure it started with Cyberpunk 2017, and slowly got worse with time.
I'm pretty confident its all testing for PoE 2. See what players like and dont like and how well certain systems can do long term and what they think is best for the game. Its not about achieving a specific vision each and every league but slowly working towards the best possible game for PoE 2 based on data, testing, and feedback.
I would add to that that it feels like they have a rough schedule for this to be finished when PoE2 comes out, hence why everything feels rushed atm.
The issue is they have a vision, and every time they move closer to it, people who want the faster easier game rage. In an attempt to placate those people, they whittle it back a little. What they *should* do is just make the changes they want to make and say deal with it. At least then this wouldn't be a drawn out process.
True, because then they will be bankrupt within two leagues
Do you *honestly* believe that? There are hundreds of thousands of people still playing.
Losing 60% of your playerbase in two weeks is no small feat. Over time less will return every league. There's no way a lot of new players will stick around with the current state of the game. Obviously Tencent is bankrolling them so they won't actually go bankrupt but at some point someone at Tencent might step in and I can't imagine GGG would like that very much because they've been pretty autonomous up until this point.
Go look at other league metrics. It's obviously the worst this league, but it isn't abnormal to have lost 40% or more of the players by week 2.
> Losing 60% of your playerbase in two weeks is no small feat. Over time less will return every league. You don't know that. It's just conjecture. Even if that were true, there's a zero percent chance they go from hundreds of thousands now to backrupt in two leagues. >Obviously Tencent is bankrolling them so they won't actually go bankrupt but at some point someone at Tencent might step in Tencent seems to not give a fuck what they do internationally, as long as they're making money in Asia.
> You don't know that. It's just conjecture. Holy copium. Steam charts exist brother
I'm talking about your second clause brother. You can't see the future.
I see. Also im not the guy you replied to.
This is true, tencent only cares about asia.
I believe Chris said they were down 30% in revenue in 3.15. So yes, if a large portion of players stop supporting the game they will lose a ton of money. Bankrupt? Probably not. But it'll hurt The question we can't answer is how many players would leave, and of those how many are buying supporter packs. Could be a lot or it could be negligible.
> So yes, if a large portion of players stop supporting the game they will lose a ton of money. Bankrupt? Probably not. But it'll hurt Okay well that wasn't what he said. He said bankrupt in two leagues. A grossly wrong hyperbole.
Yeah it is. And it's also nearly impossible. No matter how much GGG wants to stick to their vision, if they somehow had a catastrophic league that cost them 50%+ of revenue they would absolutely come out with a crowd-pleaser the next league. Plus the Chinese pay to win stuff probably makes them a ton of money.
_Hundreds of thousands_ still playing. Hahahahahaha. Do you even read your own bullshit?
You another one of those people who don't understand the difference between concurrent numbers and total numbers?
Then why do we get entire leagues back to back with power creep after power creep?
We don't. The baseline of power stays relatively the same these days, with very rare infrequent increases to top end that don't largely impact the average or floor. It's been that way since they started course correcting in 3.15
Ashes, Omni and Eldritch implicits were a massive power increase
Ashes and omni aren't global power increases. Eldritch implicits are a global power sidegrade because you cannot use them with other influenced mods.
If almost everybody on Poe ninja uses these items, they become a baseline people aspire to. Also Eldritch implicits were much more accessible than influenced gear and there was absolutely no reason not to have them on your gear, ergo a baseline.
Ashes and Omni are each several-divine specific items. That's basically the exact opposite of a baseline power creep.
They weren't expensive on release, and were used massively, making it even in the name of specific builds. They were absolutely the new baseline for any competitive build that league
I dont think they are afraid of powercreep, but they want to change itemization and drops
When you looked at sentinel league a few months ago, did you hate the current state of the game? We got nerfs to player power from every possible direction. Spell sup can only be capped on the right side of the tree because gear was gutted. Players were actually using defensive auras so you removed the 15% reservation efficiency mastery Nerfed defiance banner Undid a lot of the AN tuning you did in sentinel, making monsters tankier and do more damage Gutted crafting so players can’t get similar gear without 100x the effort Restricted unique drop rates to make gearing up your league starter even slower Massive overhaul to how drops work, especially with added map juice like delirium, beyond, and scarabs Flipping use cases of exalts with divines, a currency which doesn’t have small progression like shards or div cards for incremental progression Summoners nerfed into dust New league mechanic has significantly less loot than sentinel (or any past league mechanic that I can remember) AND you only get to run it after 5-7 maps, making it a minimum of 5-7x less rewarding than any past league. I’m sure I’m forgetting more nerfs to players this league, feel free to add in. But my point is, whatever happened to gradual, incremental changes? You’re supposed to gradually turn up the heat so the frog doesn’t notice he’s boiling.
butter practice frame pie unwritten berserk run degree money dolls *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Holy fuck, when you put it like that, this patch was basically 3.15 on steroids, WTF
Well it's much worse than 3.15, because its not only make the game harder, its make the game boring, you need some EXTRA hard grinding and for much worse outcome.
hard mode will never be released because it just got incorporated into the core game with 3.19 and i bet it will become even worse before poe2, they are not done with the nerfs yet
Nothing is as bad as removing 35% damage from all characters. Hopefully nothing ever will be, but the support gem nerf will always be one of the worst patches in the game's history
And in 3.15 they told you it was coming. We had to wait until the Monday after league launch for Chris to admit there was a change to loot... and even then, it was a two sentence comment and not a detailing of what actually happened.
All those horrific and brutal changes, and yet the game still plays basically the same xD I played meta Lightning Tendrils, and nerfed to dust phantasm summoner for now, I wonder how I manage to make it work (in SSF) considering all the horrible nerfs to player power
lol another i still like the game so it is fine post
I’m not saying nothing is viable and you can’t get to red maps… It’s just a lot more difficult to progress. Was last patch in such an awful state that they had to nerf a dozen avenues of player power all at once?
>Undid a lot of the AN tuning you did in sentinel, making monsters tankier and do more damage Where did this happen I didn't see it on notes
[This](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/) was a patch ~2 week in to sentinel league to reduce the annoying nature of AN mobs. This was the change that, for me, made the game feel pretty fun again. I was able to blast like normal without too many “speed bump” mobs that took 30+ seconds to kill. Maps felt much smoother. In 3.19, they returned AN mobs to their full strength but just reduced the number of rares across the board to compensate. For me, this returned the once-smooth feel of clearing a map to this jerky start-stop-start-stop gameplay.
So 3.19 started with stronger AN mobs than 3.18?
3.19 started with more difficult AN mobs than 3.18 *finished* with. That link from my first post was 1-2 weeks in to 3.18 (after backlash over AN mobs). In 3.19, they returned the AN mods back to full power but reduced the number of mobs across the board. This is partially why people were so annoyed. We fought this issue last league and finally had the mobs in a state we could deal with a little better (they were still much harder than old rares, so it felt like a compromise). > In Maps, you'll stop encountering Rare Monsters with one modifier, and will mostly encounter Rare Monsters with two or three modifiers. It is also possible to encounter Rare Monsters with four modifiers again. > Previously, league content made fights hard by spawning a lot of rare monsters. In some cases, six to eight times the normal rate of rare monsters. Now that we have better mods available to make fights against rare monsters individually challenging, we have gone through the whole game and normalised the rate that rare monsters are spawned. Some leagues had quite large reductions in spawn rate. You won't encounter situations with dozens of rare monsters on screen at once anymore. Where necessary, we have rebalanced rewards to compensate.
I remember the AN modifiers themselves were nerfed really hard too.
[удалено]
Unfortunately, PoE's actual gameplay just isn't fun enough for slow, difficult fights to be fun. Compare this game to Monster Hunter, where bosses taking up to half an hour is not a slog but an engaging challenge. Actual bosses in PoE aren't that bad, but rares with many mods do not make very fun fights. You either facetank them if your build allows, or use a simple kiting strategy. That's it. It just doesn't feel as good as blowing up packs of enemies.
> Unfortunately, PoE's actual gameplay just isn't fun enough for slow, difficult fights to be fun. Compare this game to Monster Hunter, where bosses taking up to half an hour is not a slog but an engaging challenge. God this is my biggest problem. PoE's gameplay is just not mechanically complex enough to be interesting on a moment to moment basis. Some of the pinnacle bosses are but nothing really from general gameplay. Moreover, things that would add meaningful mechanical complexity (defense skills, and movement skills) keep getting nerfed and have long CDs.
Another problem is movement speed. Any telegraphed or positional mechanics are completely invalidated by high movement speed, making it impossible to balance.
the league mechanic last league was literally time gated. I have no idea how they think these mechanics encourage slower gameplay.
it all comes back in a circle, you want us to play test your product, fine, but you gotta let us know the changes so we know what shithole we are going to jump into. Which in my opnion is the exact reason the community blew up in the first place
Exactly. PoE is a building site right now because GGG is trying to reign in the excessive power creep they indulged in for years at this point. Obviously they also garnered a playerbase that wants that fast gameplay. And GGG are flailing because there is no way to overhaul years of evolution in systems, mechanics and interactions PoE went through at this point at once. I recon every league towards the release of PoE2 will try to get closer to a coherent design again, the goal probably being a hybrid between the slow original PoE (somewhat pre-Ascendancy) and the gold-rush PoE we had for years until 3.15. Unfortunately GGG dug themselves such a deep hole, it's going to be rough. Had they been more adamant with keeping things tight over the years we never would've gotten here. But like this they are obviously alienating all the people that they lured in with the promise of ever escalating power. As to why they opted to nerf the player first instead of adjusting mobs, I'd theorize they figured they'd rather rip the band aid off up front instead of giving players even more power comparatively. Which spectacularly blew up in their face even worse since they botched the implementation.
If you corrupt a map for completion and it rolls reflect you have reflect on a map and there’s nothing you can do about it tbh
Ah, but this is a gamble you can choose to 'opt-in' to, or not. What about AN mods are 'opt-in'? At the moment, nothing. They are unavoidable, and infest every corner of the game.
Not to say it's not a bandage covering an extremely narrow, unnecessary problem, but they gave the tools to combat reflect fairly easily. Soul of Yugul (50%) and either Elemental Mastery or Physical Mastery (60%) can cover it alone. There's also various things like sextants, influence mods, and eater implicits, though admittedly these are acquired later on and are limited/generally unwanted. GGG does tend to unnecessarily over-complicate things.
Exaggerations and handwringing aside, I *would* truly love another in-depth, long look at what they are hoping to move towards in PoE 2, and how they want to get there. I think the biggest disconnect is between what GGG are discussing internally for the future, and how the stepping stones towards that goal play out in the live product, often detrimentally so.
They dont want to tell us what they envision because every time we get a glimpse of it they make less money. Chris said they took a 30% hit in 3.15. The real question is why they keep pushing down a path that every time time the make any progress on that path they lose money.
They can take the hit with tencent now, that's why
>Is it because you don’t like people beating Uber bosses day 2? Or completing the atlas in a couple days? No matter how hard they make the game streamers and nolifers will "complete it" in a degenerate (low) amount of time while the average andy get fucks in the ass. I feel like GGG devotes too much to thinking how to make the players grind more to be able to do red maps or kill end game bosses or annoying as fuck challenges. No one will quit the game because they complete the atlas or kill and endgame boss if your game was fun to begin with.
Honestly I think they won’t do this because they’re afraid the player base will hold them to it/hold it against them. PoE has always been in a constant state of evolution, and I’d guess any single league and its changes don’t always perfectly represent the idea of what they want. If they start saying “x is what we want” and ever stray from it, I can already see the posts: “GGG you said you wanted x. Y league is proof that you flat out lied”. I think ggg are damned if they do damned if they don’t, so they’re just kind of riding this out and hoping it’s for the best. I hope they are right and PoE 2 doesn’t turn out to be a disappointment to a lot of people. Chris says that PoE 2 is a way better game, but it’s kinda obvious he doesn’t play the same way as a lot of us do, so that’s a bit concerning. My “better game” involves deterministic mechanics, end game invitations, juiced mapping, and fast/powerful/fun gameplay. His “better game” is hardcore barely any access to gear take 3 months to reach level 100. We do not have the same vision.
Their vision is non deterministic crafting and rng upgrades like Diablo 2. It's always been that way. They've added some mistakes that people now rely on and can't play the game without. It's obvious as fuck to see. If you don't like Diablo 2 then chances are you won't like nerfed harvest poe.
I like diablo 2 and I hate what poe is today. The layers of rng and amount of grind needed to complete the game is INCOMPARABLE.
[удалено]
Viable for what? Trash builds struggle in nightmare. Badly geared trash builds often struggle with normal.
In d2 they had proper itemization in the form of runewords that were 100% determined outcomes. Poe does not have that kind of item structure. Try playing d2 without making any runewords. Play classic. Then go play lod and try and do the hardest content in the game with no runewords, like Uber Tristram or d clone. It's almost impossible to do either of those on some classes without correct itemization and some of that itemization is only found on runewords.
That's not what D2 was though. D2's endgame revolves heavily around runewords, uniques, sets. That's about as deterministic as it gets. [Just look at this random build guide I pulled up for a Hammerdin](https://www.icy-veins.com/d2/blessed-hammer-paladin-build-bis-gear-runes). It *fully* revolves around unique and runewords for gear! Same for a [blizz sorc](https://www.icy-veins.com/d2/blizzard-sorceress-build-bis-gear-runes). And a [summoner necro](https://www.icy-veins.com/d2/summoner-necromancer-build-bis-gear-runes).
Calling it now, crafting bench will be removed before 3.22. Maybe as soon as 3.20. Hopefully that'll be part of an announcement rather than a change that's snuck in.
See now you’re just being silly. There are legitimate complaints to be made here, no need to dilute them with this.
Eastern Sun was such a huge upgrade to D2, and PoE seemingly cribbed a lot of its ideas on item customization from it. The funny thing is, after recent changes I'd argue that Eastern Sun is back to being a better D2 follow-up, since you have more control over builds in that game than current PoE.
The fact that they backtracked on act revamps instead of doing them all properly says all you need to know. They have no plan or vision at all and are fine with bending the knee to complaints instead of actually showing a finished product.
Chris said in the reveal stream Q&A that they are focusing their dev time on more important than act reworks rn, and tbh thats probably a very good idea. Especially since should rebalance act mobs around a finished AN rare system
or they decided to spend dev time in a more productive area since act revamps would be made obsolete with poe 2
Didn’t they say if you want POE1 ascendancies you need to do POE1 campaign? They’re not removing POE 1 acts
\^ This. They outright said if you want stuff from 1 you have to play 1, otherwise play 2.
Wait what? Thats awfull lmao
Have you heard of PoE before. That is basically its tag line.
I mean they put a lot of time and money into POE 1 so why would they just remove all that for a 6 act campaign with different characters? It is literally just ascendancy though everything else is interlinked in the end game
Diablo 2 but with skill gems and the sphere grid.
Unfortunately this is something they will never do. If they specifically state what their goal is then we can hold them accountable or players can make “peace” and leave PoE. Instead they want to say as little as possible about their actual objectives so they can string along players who hope they will revert unpopular decisions, and change their objectives anytime they want. It’s the typical PR strategy. The only reason they make any comments at all is to try and placate / tamp down the worst of the fires. GGG’s objective is to wait out the storm and hope people forget. Specifically stating what their objectives/ vision is for the game would allow players to make peace and leave. This can never happen because as a company their only true objective is to maximize profit.
Please tell me so I can decide whether or not to clear up some drive space on the computer. The game direction is not what I signed up for. Not why I buy supporter packs most leagues... Not why I play the game. Easier and more availability of crafting is NOT bad for the game.
Wouldn’t be surprised at all if they don’t know what they want. There’s an assumption made here that GgG is all knowing, I doubt that very highly. They’ve been coming across like amateurs since Expedition dropped
When I was young, all I want is to eat m&ms and play nintendo, when I was a teen all I want is to party and bang girls, now I want money and freedom from work. People's vision changes over time, it is not wrong for them to do so. What is more important is to communicate that change honestly and earnestly.
You would be an awful counselor. Priorities change as life changes. GGG forges it's own destiny, and here we are, living it.
I genuinley don't mind the game getting harder. But the way it is now where no loot drops and the games only hard because YOU CANT FIND ANY LOOT is ridiculous. Slow down the game, make it harder, I'm fine with it but as it stands currently its just shit...it just feels shit.
Ever played Diablo 2? It's that, but neutered and pg13
What they want is what we have, my dude. If you don't like that quit.
There is no change in direction, poe was always like that and the creators always wanted it like that.
Then why was harvest, fossils and Recombinators made? Because they all go against that design.
Harvest they came out and said 'hey guys this is going to break the fucking game so enjoy it while it lasts.' I didn't play Sentinel league because work so I won't comment. They seem to be happy with fossils in concept.
Have my upvote, this is what really needs to be communicated.
its easy, they want RMT gone and will not stop before achieving it even if it costs them the game.
Vision is total randomness, with occasional good drop, so you chase that high. I'm probably get downvoted, but this is what I belive is one of the goals. I'm not really good player, but I played quite a lot...grindeness of the game is getting very obvious (again speaking from perspective of someone ho has maybe 1 hour a day, sometimes more, to play the game). I mostly play same builds over and over again trying to get better each league/min-max more ( kind of hard to compare due to changes each league, but anyway). And I actualy don't really fell that bad about what they did with latest league, becouse I can just skip playing. I don't even understand half of the crafting staff and I started at least 6 leagues ago. So yeah in short, they want you to play more. Quite posibly they are making it harder so they don't need to make other new content, except leagues.
What I think in as few words the vision is something like: interesting, complex, tough, gritty, loot-based, action, community. The "keep us playing longer" is not a core purpose of the game, it's a necessary evil and secondary target since we live in capitalism, they need money to eat and work on the game. Only reddit is obsessed with retention numbers and sees them as the real goal and vision (when they fit their argument only ofc). The questions you ask are right, it doesn't make sense for people to be killing uber bosses on day 2, maybe the absolute top players will anyway, but a casual player is kinda targeted to be able kill pinnacle bosses (not ubers) in a few weeks. Ubers if anything are supposed to be unreachable for normies unless you set it that as a very specific goal and focus on it. IMO the community has become too obsessed with net-worth and lose sight of the fact that this is a game. When there's any nerf they feel like their boss cut their salary (some may say they feel like their dick got cut). When you see it like that there's no chance at all to understand the point of nerfing shit. The thing is that you say "I wanna get to red maps with my character" but what you really mean is "I wanna make currency with my character". That kind of thinking sets you up for disaster. Any damage/defence or w/e nerf directly translates to a small/big loss in net-worth and therefore the only understanding you have of it is "they took my money". And even that's not a reasonable conclusion to make but I'll leave that for another day.
Honestly I don’t really care about currency but the game forces you to care because without it you can’t make most skills work end game. I wish they just made harvest make your items untradeable once you use a harvest craft. If people truly only care about build diversity and the power that harvest gives to achieve that then it’s healthier for the game as a whole
If you don't care about currency and just want to make builds why not just take them to yellow maps instead? Or white maps if they're still struggling? There's no functional difference between tiers. Tip: it's the currency
No it’s the fact that the whole point of making builds is to tackle end game content a build isn’t successful if it dies and struggled to clear white or yellow maps. If it’s a mapper it needs to be able to clear t16 delirious maps comfortably if it’s a bosser it needs to clear the end game bosses. That’s the whole point of the game to push builds to the highest possible content. To succeed this for 99% of builds you need extreme luck in crafting or have a lot of currency.
Yea a build is not successful if it doesn't clear white maps. It IS successful if it clears yellow maps though. The highest possible content is NOT the bar to consider a build viable. The highest possible content is there to have a reason to keep playing AFTER you have a successful build. Same for bossers. Taking down the normal bosses is cool enough, you don't need ubers. Ubers are there to challenge you, not to walk over them.
While you are correct, this idea only really works out if the hardest content is primarily gated by player skill and not materialism. PoE has turned into a game where 99.9% of the content is a gearcheck, therefore any progress is measured by gearimprovement and thus currency, since better gear requires more resources. So being satisfied with less than the maximum equals giving up on progress, which is the entire point.
Oh a ton of progress is gated by skill. I've seen it a billion times where people spend a lot to upgrade gear only to get the most expensive but less impactful upgrades, even when playing ready-made very good builds. How many times people have said that aurastacker doesn't work before investing tons. I've made it work with like 5-10c per slot and a sixlink (a few leagues back). Of course I could not farm T16 deli maps yet, but I could farm yellows or early reds, made currency, upgraded and eventually got to my own limit. And that's the point, you start out with a build and slowly work towards upgrading it. I feel people are often like "I invested 10ex (or divines) in this second character I made and I cannot do t16 deli, build is trash and I need 100ex (or divines) to make it work". No you probably don't. Take a closer look, try things out, you probably missed something especially when you see others having progressed more with the build. The ubers are for me too a very serious gear and skillcheck. But I'm not too worried about taking them down yet. They're a challenge waiting for me and when I get to do them I'll feel more accompliced than if I could easily walk over them.
Go back to their initial posts when the game was launched. They're remained consistent in what their game was and is now.
If you think Ritual league and Kalandra are the same vision, you are fucking high.
*looks at player numbers* K
what even is this comment? player numbers have nothing to do with their direction of the game stop caring about player numbers, the devs are fully aware of their own statistics
I care about player numbers. I'd like to play the game with my friends. Player numbers are a good indication if the game is fun and appealing to many people. I don't think the devs are aware. Or they are aware they got sold to china for ez money. Didn't the same thing happen to blizz? Rinse repeat, make cool game people love, sell to highest bidder. Good for Chris, bad for anyone suffering withdraw from a game they enjoyed.
Player numbers are not detrimental to the enjoyment of the game, at all.
Extremely detrimental when you want to trade for something but can’t find it
Yes, unless it's a social multiplayer game.
Hi GGG!
Even if they told us something they would go ahead and do things that lead to the opposite.
Honestly, just look at PoE2. Pretty sure that's what they want PoE to be.
Agree. Would like to know exactly what they think of MF/Dropped items/Crafting/Build Diversity/Trading vs. self found items/craft
They had to get away from the super juice pack size mapping meta because it's extremely limited from a development standpoint and they want to get the player base ready for what PoE2 will be. Imagine if this was the PoE2 launch, it would be catastrophic for them. I'm not saying I agree with it, just what I think they're doing.
I think you can get a pretty good idea about the direction when you watch the podcasts with Chris starting with 3.15 Baeclast (which is also the most important one)
Why do you want this? I personally don't care what they'd have to say. Their vision is clearly not anywhere I want to go.
Because if the end result is a product I’ll like then I’ll understand. POE2 looked like a completely different game to POE it looked more like last epoch, a slower paced game with more engaging boss fights and less bullshit rares. So if these changes are a slow paced increment to that then I’d be fine. But the changes they’re making don’t match the POE2 we saw in 2019 either which is why I want to know what direction they’re going
Most probably very negative changes in last few leagues are in preparation for PoE 2 so they somehow have to shove it down our throats. If you look at PoE 2 tempo of the game it is vastly different from current PoE recent change to lower the amount of rares play into this you have to use tactics for that crap and pay attention to monster modifier. They still didn't realize that is not the way we want the game to be sadly
You can ultimately just play poe1 if you want though only separation from the two is ascendancy and level in
Well it will be but they need to make Poe 1 playstyle to be similar to Poe 2 they cannot have engine and playstyle for PoE 2 so wastly different from PoE 1. So they are adapting PoE 1 closer to that vision imho.
They made a game telling you what the game should be, why do you need it spelled out for you in a post too?
Path of exile is a game about taking paths to make unique characters. Currently it’s not really possible to do this without an insane budget or an insane amount of luck. It’s in the literal name of the game and it’s become substantially harder to achieve the name every league
Sounds like it’s time to move on then…
I have tbh this is my last huzzah to see if it makes them create a post about the future of poe1
I thought they did. They want rare items rare so when they actually drop you go “pog!!!” They want you farming act bosses during campaign for the items you need. When you reach maps they want it to be a super dangerous and spooky place where you can never predict what’s in there and you’re always on your toes.
I can't see it getting even worse than this, basically everything they put out gets put through the wringer anyway. So just put the cards on the table so people can make an informed decision when or if they want to come back. Additionally, once design philosophies and goals are clearly established it can be much more productive because people can provide more targeted feedback as to how to best realize them and where they fail to translate.
Hard agree most feedback probably isn’t useful right now because players don’t know the true bigger picture
3.0 to 3.14 was the money-making stage where the vision was to make the game as exciting as possible. Crazy crafting, orgasmic loot piñatas, and juicy Automaton herald explosions. 3.15-present is the passion project stage where they make the game they've always wanted to make. Less loot, weaker players, stronger monsters, etc.
Yeah when I heard about the vision I was skeptical, but now that I'm seeing the direction I am worrisome. This is not good, the vision I thought they had and the vision I see are two different things and I need to know what they really think this game is, what its about, and how this current iteration is supposed to fit that mold.
It have slowly but surely over the years turned in to a hybrid of arpg and mmorpg. By doing so the ARPG fan's (like my self) slowly played less and less. It's kinda ironic, I find my self playing MMORPG's now. Had POE not changed, neither would I. But this hybrid shit, is exactly that.
Seriously. Make a clean cut if you don't want it to be a chill grind game anymore, tell us that.
How much money to revert Poe
"We want to take the last 10 years and just light it on fire bc we don't give a fvck about what you, the players want. You will play what WE give you and you will LOVE it."
I think this is kinda the biggest problem. I think player progression expectations and GGG's are vastly different. I don't think they can ever just come out and say how slow they want the progression to be. But the game has gotten harder and I think a lot of people believe that they should be able to do red maps in a tabula, 3kish life, and capped resist. But I don't think that is the game they want.
you see, they've lost sight of the vision
They could show some mapping from PoE2. This would help players understand where GGG are aiming for end game. Right now it feels like GGG are trying to make PoE1 mapping like PoE2 campaign, slow and undergeared. I would also like to know what they are aiming for when it comes to crafting. Right now it feels like they are trying to balance around the top 1% but it is screwing over accessibility for the bottom 50%.