Do we expect too much from GGG?
" Truth right there. The majority of whine on these forums is regarding things that are the way they are due to conscious decisions from the devs (for example, the way to get Atziri fragments) rather than being mistakes or errors that could and should be corrected. I understand many people want to voice their opinions over things that annoy them or that they would like to see changes in, but I hate it when they have the attitude "my opinion is the truth, not just an opinion". | |
"I don't believe critical strikes have to be lucky. I consider them to represent a hit you managed to get past the enemy's defences - striking the weak point, slipping your blade between the plates of their armour, etc. While such events can happen to anyone when they're lucky (hence a low base chance to get a critical strike), someone who specifically trains for it should be able to successfully land such strikes far more often. Crits are aligned with intelligence in PoE because - as I understand it - it takes presence of mind and quick thinking to find (and thus take advantage of) such openings. This (and most other descriptions I've heard of the flavour justifications for crits in games) admittedly don't mesh perfectly with the ways AoE crits are handled in PoE, which was done more for a 'feel' reason than a 'realism' or 'justification' one - we found people not noticing or caring when they got crits on individual enemies using AoE spells, where critting all enemies felt like a significant "cool" event. It also allowed some on-crit effects to be more powerful at the expense of only counting once in that situation for the whole skill. | |
" spells should crit what spells (elemental ones) shouldnt do is Stun big mistake GGG made making their game is forgetting to give a special specific attribute to physical damage... they didnt forget they just removed all it had in previous ARPG classics back in the days, phys was the only one that could leech and stun now everything can leech and stun plus everything else has a special attribute (fire/burn,cold/freeze,lightning/shock,chaos/bypassES) Physical should have Crushing Blow as special ZiggyD is the Labyrinth of streamers, some like it, some dont, but GGG will make sure to push it down ur throat to make you like it Last edited by Sexcalibure on Nov 19, 2014, 11:00:17 PM
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(mumbles: something something gameplay discussion)
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To start with -
"Don't be. That was and interesting read, and I'm glad you posted it. I do think it's interested that this concept seems so obvious to you and at the same time so alien to me. This is probably more a factor of what games we grew up on than anything else, and it's always interesting to hear such a differing perspective. "I don't want to completely derail the topic, but if you could expand a bit more on this, or link me to a good source of information on how this works out, I'd be quite interested. I'm particularly intruiged to know how often you're using basic attacks (and what can count as a "basic attack" for this purpose) compared to other skills. "They can in 4th and 5th edition. I did a little digging and from what I can tell the crit mechanic doesn't generally apply to spells in 3/3.5 because you're not making an attack roll (that could roll high and thus be a crit), rather the enemy is failing a save roll against the spell. Apparently touch spells could crit because they require an attack roll for the touch, but take that with a grain of salt because it's something I just read on the Internet about a game system I'm not overly familiar with. "I can understand where you're coming from, but I don't see that this is necessarily really a spell/attack distinction. An attack like sweep, swinging the weapon around in a circle to hit many foes, isn't really going to be aimed at a specific body part, and and laser/beam like spells certainly feel like they would. I'd certainly grant that weapon attacks more often lend themselves to this kind of aiming. For a hypothetical, how would you feel about a game where single target spells and attacks could crit, but AoE ones could not? That actually feels more like the distinction you're making to me, although I could be wrong. "I don't see any reason why spells critting would necessarily be any more a sign of imbalance than attacks critting - particularly ranged attacks, since spells tend to be ranged. This may again be a case of us being exposed to different games, but the general association of spell crit with imbalance is not one I've developed over my gaming life. "This is certainly true, and particularly since the addition of accuracy checks on crits, does present a reason why spell crits are inherently more powerful than non-spell crits in PoE. Spells not missing never made much sense to me personally - if I were making my own game I'm not sure it would occur to me to have attacks miss and spells not (although using different stats to determine their accuracy would). "Thematically, we wanted daggers to work with spells on the basis of the "ritual dagger" which is a longstanding trope, and certainly are sometimes seen as implements of spellcasting. Mechanically, we needed other weapons to work with spells. Design-wise, global crit made sense as a stat that thematically fit the dagger = crit association, and worked with both spells and attacks without giving them two implicits. Thanks for explaining where you were coming from, it was an interesting read (and I certainly don't disagree with all of it). On-topic, I think some people do expect too much, some expect to little (and many are probably in both groups with respect to different issues). Certainly the percentage of people who claim to know how easy something is to implement or change and are actually correct is at the very least on the low side - this job has taught me a lot about not assuming I know how another person's code works and what changes make sense. I think in many cases it isn't so much that people expect too much, but that they expected something different to what they got, and tend to take the position that what they had expected is what should have happened, or even what we actually wanted, and see what we delivered as a failure from that perspective. Last edited by Mark_GGG on Nov 19, 2014, 11:10:04 PM
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Spoiler
" [removed by support] What is a crit? a lucky chance to do extra damage? double damage perhaps? How does this occur? I submit to you that it occurs through chance itself not the medium itself. I come from old paper and pencil RPG stock, where successes/failures were determined through a roll of the dice where the outcome of the roll could be effected by specific traits of the character. There was always a chance of automatic failure and automatic extra damage (critical). In our minds we would see failure as a stumble/fumble and a critical strike as a blow that landed on a target that was either off-guard, or hit in a weak/less armored location. The point being is that we engaged our imagination in effort to make the experience as life like as possible, with the rationalization that chance and randomness represents what could actually happen. Why must a fireball never strike lucky when a sword can? Is it not an effect of will, luck, training? Granted 95% crit is unrealistic, but for you to say there should be no chance for a spell to crit makes me wonder what kind of game you'd design, and who would play it with you. Last edited by Michael_GGG on Nov 19, 2014, 11:07:53 PM
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I see Charan's point but I think the argument's mostly thematic i.e. other games treat spells this way, therefore PoE should. But PoE does a lot of things different to other games, and many of them to me feel like a good way to approach a predominantly PvE game (sorry to PVPers, but I really don't get why you aren't playing Starcraft 2 or something!). Theme isn't as important as fun, and reward for investment. If (paraphrasing the endless 'nurf crit' and the various responses) you want a game where you can't eventually feel really powerful, you're looking for a roguelike, not an ARPG.
I said it before, I'll say it again - play anything for a very long time and you're likely to become disillusioned by it, no matter how perfect it seemed at the start. Part of the problem is the slow creep of a feeling of 'ownership' - I saw it a lot on MUDs where users would come back after ragequitting twenty times for 'just one other thing I need to say about what needs fixing!'... Last edited by davidnn5 on Nov 19, 2014, 11:08:38 PM
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The ragequit comment wasn't directed at johnKeys btw ;)
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" If you train for and specialize in crits then surely your attacks must be less frequent as you need to wait for and find openings although the attack itself should be blindingly fast to exploit the opening during the window of opportunity (if you want to maintain 95% crit statistics anyway). Likewise your armor and weapon of choice should be light and flexible to allow for the maneuverability required to exploit openings. A 95% crit specialist should be a glass cannon compared to the non-crit specialist of equal experience, right? I am not an experienced PoE player, nor an end game crit specialist, but in most other games I've played crit is balanced around survivability unless it is in the too hard basket where they just have a soft/hard cap on crit percentages. I don't think I've ever played a game where a 95% crit rate is seen as acceptable. I am not criticizing the mechanics in PoE as I am hardly qualified to, just wanted to point out that usually high crit means low survivability or some other form of balance. What do high crit builds sacrifice in PoE? | |
" I think this is spot on and extends to everything, not just games. When you over indulge things lose their flavour. We have a saying in Afrikaans, "When the mouse is full the cheese is bitter". |