Afraid of the new Ascendancy Classes

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MoreDread wrote:

i loved to make a new character and have an almost infinite world of possibilities and now it feels like it is going to be funneled down into several pathways per class.

That is already true, if we assume builds from the class section are well-optimized we see that they tend to use similar tree highways which have proven to be more efficient and that differences between similar builds are often minor.

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MoreDread wrote:

the classes don't need their 'own inherent identity' in that way

Yes and no, if you give the character a background it means he possesses a certain set of skills or affinities that result from his upbringing or chosen profession. PoE went with affinities instead of fixed skill sets, which are kinda subtle and have the unfortunate result of 2H Duelist visiting a Mara starting area being almost the same as 2H Marauders visiting a duelist starting area (also as a result of players tending to pick similar pathways as I mentioned before). That's something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, Wraeclast isn't a dojo, teaching everyone the same way, a karui warrior and a pro arena fighter shouldn't be exactly the same, their physical build is different, their basic training is different and their philosophies are very different.

We also have Scion which embodies the generic approach, because that's a part of her background, she's supposed to be a tabula rasa.

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MoreDread wrote:

there would be a simple solution for this tho.. divorce the looks from the classes and my main issue with this disappears.

The game already had that in early stages, you just picked how your class will look and started from the center of the tree. The trouble with that approach is it's wasting resources as PoE isn't exactly modular, new animations and visuals have to be fitted to every char separately. And, if classes are purely cosmetic people will ask for more and that's extra work every time they implement something new, we don't often ask for more classes as it's kinda obvious they can't really fit on the tree in a way that makes sense without fully redesigning it.

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Mark_GGG wrote:

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Deadpeng wrote:

For those of you who were not here 2 years ago, Path of Exile used to be a game whereby a witch can be a Facebreaker puncher while a Marauder can be a spellcaster.

It still is, and ascendancy classes provide powerful new options for off-class builds as well - a spellcasting marauder is now more likely to play differently than a spellcasting witch, for example, due to being able to take advantage of the extra tankiness of the Juggernaut - a class for which only one of the big nodes (Undeniable) is explicitly limited to attacks, and one other (Unyielding) is implicitly pushed towards attacks due to them being easier to get fortify on.
Every other large node on that tree (and half the small nodes) is just as effective on a tanky caster as on a tanky archer, tanky bowrauder, or tanky melee character. This is intentional.

Keep in mind as well that there are two more ascendancies yet to be revealed for the classes you mentioned.

I loved playing my maraudermancer, rather than be hiding behind my minions I would be leaping into the fray and my minions would rush in. That was back when zombies were pretty good in terms of damage with multistrike and melee splash. I had a ton of armour, a ton of health and a ton of regen so was very durable for a summoner. Thankfully you can get all the minion nodes and still have plenty of scope to make a fun build, but you do take a fairly big hit in terms of damage output though as most witch summoners boost their minion damage with auras.

I think that is what is great about the game, being able to do stuff like that.

I would have preferred if the Sub-Classes were not class specific, so you could pick a Marauder Necromancer which would multiply the possible combinations exponentially. Perhaps have a unique name for the combination of class & sub-class so for example a Marauder Necromancer became a Reaver so you weren't defined by just your sub-class but the combination with the class as well.

However, most of the Juggernaut abilities would improve my Maraudermancer significantly defensively, it wouldn't have improved my damage output but survivability was the focus of the build, being a durable summoner.

For most summoners, they rely a lot on their spectres for their damage, the inability to get Necromancer for Soul Reaver would be a substantial negative for the average summoner, largely because the builds that used to focus on zombie for dps have been negatively impacted zombies over time. Their theoretical dps looks okay but most of them invariably run around like idiots most of the time and aren't hitting much of note. It makes them problematic when you want to get rid of something annoying, like a mob that is preventing the others from dying, etc. Spectres have been far superior to pretty much anything else because of their ability of the popular summons to do area significant effect damage so they just have to focus on the general direction.

I'd love to see summon skeleton changed to summon skeletal archers so you could link ranged support gems to that skill gem and have them do a fair bit of damage and zombie damage was a bit more viable if you had scope to build for it. What would be awesome is if a zombie used a melee ability that was linked to it and a skeleton would use a ranged attack skill linked to it, having zombies that cleaved or skeletons that fired ice shot, etc would really expand on the possibilities.

Unless something dramatic happens, these new ascendancy classes are going to make some of my friends to stop playing Path of exile. They have been quite rarely online lately but this will be the final blow. If that happens I will have to quit as well even if my own main character would survive. That would be a real pity, because Path of exile has been a fantastic game.

Some of you do not seem to understand why being forced to play certain character to use certain build is a problem. Let me tell you. I will use necromancer as example because it is the most obvious case.

Problem 1: There are always people who will not want to play certain character to play certain build. These people have each different reasons for their stance and I am not going to judge them but anyways they will be very disappointed.

Problem 2: Imagine you have level 90+ standard league templar summoner and you have specialised to use specters because you think they are cool and fit you playstyle. Now you are told that you are going to be incredibly less effective than your witch counterparts. We shall see if there is going be any way to be good summoner without being witch but it is already quite certain that spectre summoners have to be witches when ascendancy comes. This will cause many standard league players to have to change character, which means basically leveling up from zero. Avoiding this from happening is the exact reason these people are playing in standrd league. The current way how ascendancy classes are implemented is an insult towards standard league palyers. GGG, I know we standard league players are 2nd class citizens in Path of exile (and you have you reasons for that) but this is just horrible way to treat your players.

I see only three ways to solve these problems without scrapping the whole idea of ascendancy classes.
A) Let everyone to choose freely their starting character and its position in the tree.
B) Let any class to choose freely its ascendancy class (I bet this solution is unacceptable due to balancing problems)
C) As someone had alraedy mentioned, how about letting every class to have not only its own three ascendancy classes available but also those of its two neigbour classes. This would be like solution B but easier to manage.

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SaiyanZ wrote:

At the moment you can start with a Marauder, Templar, Witch or Shadow for a Mjolner build with just a couple percent different in stats.

Exactly. So, what do you think majority vote would say on that, is it good or bad?

It doesn't make a lick of difference to me what my character looks/sounds like. So, it's hard for me to get behind good/bad on this issue. It's a non-issue to me. What gets me is the power-creep. The game currently is in dire need of rebalancing, and adding a new layer of power to the characters isn't going to help there.

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Shagsbeard wrote:

The different characters should never have been referred to as 'classes'. There was very little to classify them. I think the new sub-trees are a great idea. Poorly implemented... far too powerful... but a great idea.

GGG is all about carrot-stick-carrot-stick. They make the game hard, then act all "we're the good guys" and give us stuff to trivialize it. Then they make it too hard, and have another opportunity to play the good guys. The game will be too easy for a while, and they'll add something to restore the difficulty.

That doesn't work for long. Each time they add new content to restore the difficulty, they lose 95% of their game with the only content that matters being that 5% they add to restore difficulty. The rest of the game simply becomes a chore to plod through.

My real hope for the game is that after they add this stuff, they work on an entire re-balancing of the whole game... perhaps while adding act V, or expanding act IV. Dumping Cruel difficulty would be a good start.

What.

Have you ever played another game before? cause all or almost all classes in this game are classes in other games and to me they always have been in this game

A Mara can you guess what class this is? cause i bet your first guess isnt a mage! i think it could be... a warrior?! did i win? i think i won

On to other things... i think this is a good thing and a bad thing in ways

The good: already said it shows what classes are used for what
The bad: it shows what classes are meant to do what like real classes do on other games but at the same time limits subclasses to a class (but i dont make spell casting warriors as it is since i dont like that so it isnt that bad)

In the end i think its a good thing even if any class cant use any subclass

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raics wrote:

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MoreDread wrote:

i loved to make a new character and have an almost infinite world of possibilities and now it feels like it is going to be funneled down into several pathways per class.

That is already true, if we assume builds from the class section are well-optimized we see that they tend to use similar tree highways which have proven to be more efficient and that differences between similar builds are often minor.

this is true but a slightly different problem.
its one of efficiency and balancing.
you need a certain amount of proper defense and offense and a good skill combination with enough synergy to be able to make it to the higher tiers of maps and reach the max level

certain passives and combinations of nodes are just more efficient than others and finding out about how that works is a big part of the game and its depth
for one if you see this as an issue then it doesnt get improved by adding specialization classes
i personally dont think adding some new ones that are slightly more restrictive is going to change that much, but that remains to be seen.

obviously my concern is loosing a little bit of freedom
the freedom to play as a shadow because i prefer that character even tho starting as a witch would give me a slightly more efficient distribution of points just because i don't like her voice, or dont wanna play as a female character, or dont like her animation set or whatever.
its not gonna be the end of the world but its gonna be a bummer for me.
i'm not sure yet, but it might be enough for me to stop playing, even tho i was very excited about all the other new additions that are coming because it changes one of the core things about this game that i was playing it for.

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raics wrote:

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MoreDread wrote:

the classes don't need their 'own inherent identity' in that way

Yes and no, if you give the character a background it means he possesses a certain set of skills or affinities that result from his upbringing or chosen profession. PoE went with affinities instead of fixed skill sets, which are kinda subtle and have the unfortunate result of 2H Duelist visiting a Mara starting area being almost the same as 2H Marauders visiting a duelist starting area (also as a result of players tending to pick similar pathways as I mentioned before). That's something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense, Wraeclast isn't a dojo, teaching everyone the same way, a karui warrior and a pro arena fighter shouldn't be exactly the same, their physical build is different, their basic training is different and their philosophies are very different.

We also have Scion which embodies the generic approach, because that's a part of her background, she's supposed to be a tabula rasa.

i dont really see your point here as i dont percieve that as a downside at all.
while their background may be different, bio mechanics work pretty much the same no matter what your background is, and they both could be proficient with that type of weapon.
i guess a better point would have been comparing a 1H marauder with a rapier to a 2H Club duelist, at least in relation to their background.
those don't make a whole lot of sense in terms of their backgrounds, and the duelist picking up karui themed affinities just by going for a specific spec that happens to be in that part of the skill tree may be a bit weird...
but wraeclast is a very alien world compared to the backgrounds the individual characters are coming from and it is supposed to change them in ways that weren't even possible before.
in the end i see it as a playground for us to do cool stuff and the characters backgrounds are kind of meaningless in the long run. i mean you are going to encounter a whole bunch of duelists with the exact same background story and as a player you (at least most players i would presume) wanna focus on what differentiates those individuals and their builds, not so much how they relate to the lore that is the same for everyone who started with the same class.

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raics wrote:

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MoreDread wrote:

there would be a simple solution for this tho.. divorce the looks from the classes and my main issue with this disappears.

The game already had that in early stages, you just picked how your class will look and started from the center of the tree. The trouble with that approach is it's wasting resources as PoE isn't exactly modular, new animations and visuals have to be fitted to every char separately. And, if classes are purely cosmetic people will ask for more and that's extra work every time they implement something new, we don't often ask for more classes as it's kinda obvious they can't really fit on the tree in a way that makes sense without fully redesigning it.

thats not the same tho, if they all started at the very same point on the skill tree, then they were only superficially different and i am not asking for new classes either.

i'm not even asking for more ressources because different looks exist and i dont feel like the game even needs more base classes on the skill tree.

all i was saying is make the currently existing looks a choice that is seperate from your starting areas on the tree. this requires no new animations, no refitting of already existing gear and no changes to be made to the skill tree.

but if you wanted to go down that route, and i'm not saying you should... you could easily cut every classes head off, and use all the existing classes as different body types with interchangeable heads without having to put any extra strain on the artists at all.

i have alot of respect for GGG, they made an awesome game, have an awesome business model and all i'm trying to do here is suggest some ways that will make this work for people like me who seem to dislike this aspect of the upcoming update more than others.

All i see are people getting hung-up on the data revealed at this instance.

Instead of realizing we don't have the full picture yet.

@shags, it's only power creep if nothing else gets adjusted, which i doubt very much.

@moredread, fair points but why wouldn't you be able to make an inquisition trapper(templar) for example and abuse those perks or a templar summoner (some of those perks are insane for summons, like the sanctified ground etc) without even accounting for other changes and the non-released ascendancy classes.

It's going to boil down to creativity, the 100% spectre damage and life might sound impressive but it's just a stat preventing you to take other stats (trade-off). Which is what PoE has always been about, contemplating trade-offs and finding cool stuff within those constraints.

I very much doubt we wont see duelist bow characters for example or shadow bow characters simply because the ranger has the "dead eye" ascendancy. I would consider that a premature conclusion.

Peace,

-Boem-

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Boem wrote:

@shags, it's only power creep if nothing else gets adjusted, which i doubt very much.

Let's ask then... what's the point? If they raise the damage by specters 100% and then decrease the effect of that damage, aren't we right back to where we are now?

It's bad either way. The game is unbalanced because of it's complexity. Adding another layer of complexity will only make things worse. If they do happen to hit on a sweet spot where they beef up the characters at the same time as increasing the challenge they face... we're no better off than we were before.

We, the players, need to guide them. Giving them this hyped based feedback of "wow! Neat! We love it!" without any rational thought put into it as to how it would affect their game is doing them a disservice. They need to know that the majority of players don't know what causes them to enjoy a game... they just play. You can ruin a game by catering to what players think they want.

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MoreDread wrote:

the freedom to play as a shadow because i prefer that character even tho starting as a witch would give me a slightly more efficient distribution of points just because i don't like her voice, or dont wanna play as a female character, or dont like her animation set or whatever.

Yeah, that's a legitimate complaint, I agree visual choice will be more limited. How much it will matter depends entirely on the player, for instance, I'm finding those skulls we got instead of globe girls more objectionable.

And about the effect of subclasses on char choice, well, take this for instance - one of my favorite chars is a Shadow bow summoner hybrid. I went for him because there aren't all that many Shadow summoners and because he has a decent starting area for an elemental bow user, some ele damage, proj damage, attack speed, generally useful stuff. Now, I doubt subclasses will make me rebuild it into a witch for two reasons:
Firstly, he's a dual spec, and a shadow will probably have his third subclass dealing with the aspect of an ele attacker which will be a good option too, I don't think there will be a specialization that can help both my bow attacks and summons, unless one of templar subs is a 'centurion' or something but I assume that would be summon/melee.
And the second reason is more important, he's a shadow because I didn't really care all that much about minmaxing him, and that won't change unless something I'll mention later happens.

So, it's ultimately about mentality, if you're a min-maxer you won't give a rat's ass about visuals anyway, and if you like a dose of roleplaying you won't care about min-maxing too much. And it might actually be a great thing for dual-specs, you always end up lacking in one area and a well-picked subclass might bring it up to snuff somewhat or give you more leeway.

Unless that something happens, and that's power creeping on subclass territory. In retrospective, we ended up having to use every single generally useful mechanic that got implemented, playing without trigger gems isn't really acceptable anymore with this game pace and playing melee without fortify smacks of suicide. So, it all ultimately depends how much will a heavy synergy between main build and subclass end up being required. That's my primary concern here.