Why the "You need more health" paradigm is bad

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Wispo wrote:

I have died very few times by desync, but many times by shitty mechanics. Until these mechanics will "live", 10% penalty even after lvl 80 or worstly 90 it's nuts, because even good preparing your exile, playing safe etc cannot save you by a sudden damage that hits you in a quarter of a second and instakills you (example magnus)

You keep saying "shitty mechanics" and I don't think you understand how harsh that may seem.

It takes magnus more then 1/4 a second to charge up a flameblast to kill you, let alone "instantly or 1 shot" Even with your 11k ES magnus (assuming no damage mods) takes a while to charge up blast, as long as it isn't bugging like you or someone mentioned with invisibility then you should be able to react to it. Again this is a challenging mechanic, but not one that cannot be overcame.

How often do you run into this exile? How much XP do you lose from other "deaths" that many many other players have learned to play around?

Trust me, I played back when the penalty was 15% (yes believe it or not they already reduced it) and I have many characters over level 80 and a good handful or two over level 90. The penality is there to force yourself to get better, not to discourage you or to somehow showcase or slowdown the game so you are occupied with the content they've added.

Again, without seeing your gameplay or how you react to certain situations I cannot offer anything but advice based on what I know. I can tell you without a doubt that a life based character, especially one that if were played now on standard with cloak of defiance, EB, high level AA and proper life flask\ect would feel much better then somehow running around with paper thin defenses and simply relying on 1 defensive mechanic. I know you hate life flask, but ES does not have an equiv aside from maybe vaal discipline for instantly restoring a large amount of life.

Another option you might try is carrying around a devouring totem, because you have ZO you can get life (ES) from it devouring corpses plus it gives something else for things to attack.

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Wispo wrote:

But what happens if a player, legitly, don't want to try all those 100+ uniquest (70% of trash...), or all possible gems (example: i personally don't like righteous fire and will never do such a build), or all combat methods (example: a guy that loves melee and "hates" mages)? Simply: happens that the player "John" will not want to build a total of 10 exiles, but only say 5. And after he is done, he dies in boredom, and search for another game. And with this other assumption in mind: "yeah good game, but i finished all the builds that i wanted and there has not been new decent conent from my last exile... so i go play D3". And he doesn't rewards a company that, rightly or wrong in his mind, has bored him.

Wispo, you've described the sort of player that's part of the transitory population in the shelf life of any game. Trying to retain them based on these random small factors is called "crowd pleasing." And it doesn't work.

Even the dedicated players eventually move on. The only question is if that's a matter of months or years. And a lot of those reasons can be innocuous such as real life or simply a desire to play newer games.

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Wispo wrote:

I have died very few times by desync, but many times by shitty mechanics. Until these mechanics will "live", 10% penalty even after lvl 80 or worstly 90 it's nuts, because even good preparing your exile, playing safe etc cannot save you by a sudden damage that hits you in a quarter of a second and instakills you (example magnus)

Come on man, we've been over this. That's not true.
You're exaggerating, Magnus is nowhere near that fast.
Defenses are fine.

Ruby flask are a thing. And don't tell me it's "temporary" either. If you can't resolve the situation before it runs out or use it as insurance, then your build has deeper problems.

I hate giving this lecture again, since I've posted it elsewhere, but here it is:
The reason people perceive that they just "die out of nowhere" is because they didn't anticipate it. They weren't being mindful. That's the real measure of skill. The cues were there and seems obvious in retrospect but they just didn't think about it when it should've mattered.

I suspect people with good reflexes don't actually react so much as they have an instinctual gift for picking up cues beforehand and acting on a a decision, rather than merely knee-jerk flailing. To the outside observer, it looks like quickness, but it's a skill that can be learned. That goes double for Path of Exile, which doesn't require the motor skills of games like, say, Tribes.

Once I got over the "Oh shit" factor of Magnus, he's actually rather predictable.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

How to fix:
1. Remove Immortal Call from game completely (except permanent leagues).
2. Same deal with the Surgeon's affix on flasks.
3. Same deal with instant leech.
4. Make temporary invulnerability into a damn flask.
5. Rebalance monster damage so it's not like everything in all of Wraeclast is trying to instagib you, and rebalance monster life so it's not like an AoE shooting gallery where you instakill everything.
6. Balance charges consumed per use and duration to prevent OPness.

Problem solved.

1. No need to remove it, just make it high-cooldown "oh shit" ability, so it couldnt be spammed.
2. I agree, flasks should refill on kill to keep balance.
3. I agree, GGG made great leech mechanics, and life on hit can be a balanced substitute for instant leech.
4. Actually, i think that isnt needed.
5. Probably, it is a side effect of "multiplicative" mods on monsters and maps.
6. Some items are OP in terms of gaining charges (like Romira), and should be fixed. Charges themselves are fine.

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Wispo wrote:

I have died very few times by desync, but many times by shitty mechanics. Until these mechanics will "live", 10% penalty even after lvl 80 or worstly 90 it's nuts, because even good preparing your exile, playing safe etc cannot save you by a sudden damage that hits you in a quarter of a second and instakills you (example magnus)

Yep, and GGG have the best chance to fix it: BETA TEST!

But GGG too much forced with BETA and we will never see good changes... only bad one.

Getting drawn back in to this dicussion so I'll delete my previous post


Magnus is predictable. Until he is not.


Game is easy. Until it is not.

Stacking defensive stats is the only way we have of combating these sudden bursts of damage.

Are you reliably clearing lvl 70+ white maps?

Surely you'll be ok in a lvl 66 white map.

Nope. Oneshotted/killed before normal human reaction time.


Man, I know my clearspeed is terrible. But I'm stacking defense/hp/block/resist. Slow but steady boys. We'll be ok.


Nope. Oneshotted/killed before normal human reaction time.


Man. I outlevel this content by 10 levels and only run white maps. I've spent tons of currency on defensive stats on all my gear. I've made every decision directed towards safety this whole character. I've constantly used a totem to draw aggro and scout ahead. My finger hovers over my logout button and I've logged out accidentally more times than I can count. Just keep playing safe and boring man. Safe and slow and safe.

Nope. Oneshotted again....DAMMIT!

When a player who makes every decision towards safety and longevity has basically the same survival expectations as a player who has not, there is a problem.


Leveling slow and safe means I spend longer to get to the same level and die as someone leveling high-risk.

This is not a good thing. This is what I think people mean by the "more health paradigm"

No matter how many stats you stack or how slow and safe you play, unless you have access to very specific things, one of which is luck, there is always something which will destroy you out of nowhere.

No buildup, no good death where you go "damn this badass game was just too badass and I died"

just poof.

Poof!

Path of Poof

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BrainHP wrote:

Leveling slow and safe means I spend longer to get to the same level and die as someone leveling high-risk.

This is not a good thing. This is what I think people mean by the "more health paradigm"

No matter how many stats you stack or how slow and safe you play, unless you have access to very specific things, one of which is luck, there is always something which will destroy you out of nowhere.

No buildup, no good death where you go "damn this badass game was just too badass and I died"

just poof.

Poof!

Path of Poof

some of us view this as a good thing tohough. when I was watching kripp play this game for the first time all the way back to closed beta he basically said, to paraphrase : "you will never hit a breakpoint in path of exile where you are God and nothing will kill you, unlike in other arpg games"

instagib in form of spike damage, and consequently importance of hit point pool is a feature of this game. with it, it carries a lot of assumptions and establishments. such as instant logout, extremely powerful potions, low mob hp, stun and ailments based on total hit point pool, regen/leech based on total life pool, etc.

sure, lets say GGG changes this spike damage to be more stable damage without much fluctuation. how boring would that be ? very much so. sure, it will allow some to not pick a lot of life nodes. but since PoE is competitive, GGG has to balance on 'worst case scenario' which is someone who is picking mostly life nodes. in such scenario, someone who picks mostly life nodes is unkillable with steady, predictable damage. and because PoE mobs dont have much HP, its possible to stack a ton of hp nodes and still have respectable damage

and thus we arrive at chicken and the egg. clearly an unkillable build with steady damage in a game where combat lacks some oomph, isnt a terribly great idea either.

so then what happens ? well then GGG would probably nerf life nodes to make the 'worst case' be somewhat killable. then we have the summer of 13' which is when they nerfed life nodes and then people just went CI. this was by far the biggest fail in history of PoE balancing.

getting rid of spikey damage would be getting rid of a ton of core mechanics game is balanced around, and the tradeoff is highly questionable- I think people dont grasp the lack of *any* danger in the game and its correlation to utter boredom. I for once am glad that any build in poe, even legacy super powerful ones can be crushed by some content. we are exiles, not gods.

What is boring, at least for me is:

Constantly having to re-level through the same content to access the good stuff.

Having to choose between a couple viable leveling builds because the others move at a snail's pace without offering any additional safety.

Game balanced around trading

trading is a snorefest.

Getting a character to the point where build is coming together or I've transitioned to my lategame build and wondering if I should just start a new character so I don't lose this one to some random bursty bullshit.

White jumpy/chargy/flickery mobs coming from offscreen during any sort of lagspike.

Competitiveness in an ARPG based on PVE I find super boring. Balancing around it in this genre...amazingly limiting.

Just waiting to die again.

A synonym of boring is "unimaginative" which is precisely the nature of the death mechanics in PoE

What is not boring:

Progression where I feel like if I make some really stupid decisions and push too far I'll die. Stupid decisions shouldn't include simply playing the game imo.

Big scary badass monster killing me because it is the first time I saw it. First HC playthrough of normal. Unspoilered and self-found with a ranger. Dying to Dominus bloody rain stuff feels like this. I learned and won't die from that again. Same cannot be said for loads of different white mobs.


Feeling like a badass for even an instant without being crushed.

killing demons/badass creatures.

trying strange builds.

Finding cool items.

Pushing it a bit and living by the skin of your teeth. 10-30 seconds of terror mashing buttons and potions and cooldowns. Standing on the corpses of the monsters you defeated.




Take for example the 1mhc race.

Havoc died to rhoas. Havoc remakes and is lvl 100 now. his leveling partners are dead. most of the ladder is dead. What percentage of the people who started playing in the 1mhc race actually wanted to play it through the month and did so? Is Havoc or the others in top 20 even still playing 1mhc now that they reached the top? Many streamers said "fk it gonna go play beta."

Is that the POE race scene? Just whoever doesn't get fed-up with lagged out deaths or random bursty RNG bullshit.

Racers gonna race. Do whatever you want to the mechanics including RNG death mechanics. Racers are going to just do whatever it takes to race to the top, unless they get bored of it. Most everyone else, well they just don't care to continue after a certain point. Nerf the crap out of everything, buff everything. Racers still gonna race.



You get 2 people in 2 rowboats, if they are racers they are gonna race. If not they are gonna enjoy the rowboat differently. Take the paddles away, put a hole in the boat. Racers still gonna race. It's literally what they do. They'll shout to their buddies on shore to bring em a bail. They'll do whatever it takes to race that sad little boat faster than anyone else.

Sad byproduct of taking the paddles away and putting a hole in the boat is that everyone else is just gonna sink/stop boating. Hero worship only goes so far before people get tired of sinking.

The key here is diversity of enjoyment. Is PoE wanting to pigeonhole itself as a RACING ESPORTS ARPG balanced mainly for the players who stream/youtube/race?



Nearly all the other aspects of this game outside the the terrible trade system and the death mechanics are spot on. Frankly I feel that these other aspects as well as PoE having no real competitor in this niche is why people stick with it. The story, artstyle, graphics quality and sound are very good. The balance of death mechanics is just getting to the point of overshadowing all that.
Give me a good death, not an insta-burst bullshit death.

you're kinda moving the goalposts now. but Ill play.

my point was that the game was designed with a certain playstyle and has some core mechanics engrained that are extremely hard or close to impossible to eradicate without turning the whole game upside down. kind of core change that would take far more than 2-3 months of closed beta to test out.

and even then, there are certain features GGG wants to retain. such as not feeling of safety at any time. and competitiveness.

just because you think balancing around 'racers' is dumb doesnt make GGG think the same way. just because you want it one way, doesnt mean it isnt the other way. any complex system (and poe the game is obviously such system) is designed usually for average-case scenario, but scalability for worst case scenario is often required. in poes case, worst case scenario are people who play the game so long the content is few so it needs to be kept interesting.

'racers' are people playing the game 12-14 hours a day. consequently they give GGG publicity, views, money and in general support.
going out of the way and saying 'racers will be racers fuck em' and abandoning the playerbase they catered to in the first place, would be not only extremely unwise, but also just plain stupid economically speaking.

GGG will not go out of its way and balance around self-found and players who play 1 hour a day over players who trade a ton and play 12-14 hour a day. it just will not happen.

the proverbial 'everyone else' in the boat in your example is really- you. and the game will not be balanced around you. it was not catered to you. or me, for that matter. it was catered to people who play a fuckton and trade while doing it.

the fact that havoc died, is a great example of why the bursty system works. because you - playing an hour or two a day, and havoc- who probably has over 20k hours logged in poe and knows the game about as well as anyone - can both die. if the power creep was proportional to hours played, he would probably get unkillable in his early 90s then sleepwalk to 100 and quit before.

and guess what - for every few people on the ladder who died to bursty damage and quit, havoc logged more hours than them. so who is more important to GGG and who they dont want to leave ? no names like me or you or someone who plays poe day and night and sets the meta ? yes, someone who sets the meta- 'racers' are one of the first ones to figure out most efficient ways to do stuff because thats their game- efficiency.




and I dont understand why moving through same content is an issue- the best ARPG of all time (d2) had exactly the same thing