Everything you need to know from yesterdays State of Exile Podcast featuring CHRIS WILSON

Edit: Here is a link to the State of Exile podcast website. http://stateofexile.net/

The interviewing was done by ZiggyD and ZenocideGenius so if you want to check them out on twitch.tv, you can. I haven't spent much time watching either of them, but if Chris deems them worthy of hosting him on a podcast, they deserve a nod here I suppose. :P

The rest of the edit will be for cleaning up bad grammar and sentence construction, I had no idea how many English-as-a-second language speakers would be interested in something like this.

1:00-10:00 - Chris explains how they chose Prophecy as the June league - they have a list of league ideas, and chose Prophecy from that list. Chris goes on to talk more extensively about what was in the news post from a few days ago.
https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1663440

He mentioned that the content will be optional: if you don’t like prophecy, you can sell your coins and prophecies to other players.

10:00-19:00 Fated Uniques are not intended to be Best in Slot (BiS) for end game play. Fated Uniques will have 1-2 properties added/changed. GGG don’t want to target the worst uniques (because those deserve and will get reworks in the future), but instead will target the somewhat bad uniques that get replaced very quickly as you level up. Level requirement will go up a bit upon fulfilling the prophecy and Fating the item. Some spoilers for uniques that will probably have Fated Versions:

Springleaf +120 life
Katenhalt - your physical damage can chill
Kaom’s Sign - x% of max life regenerated per endurance charge
Craghead - attacks that stun cause bleeding
Queens Decree - +40% minion movement speed

20:00-21:00 Prophecy going into the core standard league is uncertain, and will depend on player feedback.

22:30 - 26:00 Chaos conversion nerfs? All chaos conversion uniques have been reduced to 60% of their current versions - all old items will be reverted. (No legacy voltaxics). There will be additional small changes to other chaos things in addition to nerfing conversion rates. There will likely be a Balance Manifesto post late this week, where the team will talk about upcoming balance changes. Passive Skill Tree changes will be either nothing, or moving the position of one Keystone.

26:00 - 31:00 Challenge league mechanics - why haven’t they been rolled into the core game recently? Things like Tempest and Warbands didn’t NEED to be added to the core game, so they weren’t. They could have been added as map mods, but GGG were happy with the amount of mods they had. Internally they thought Talisman was their best league, but they understand that many players didn’t see it that way. According to them, a watered down Talisman rolled into the core game would have sucked. They could bring it back ‘in force’ - which might mean turning it on for a week in standard.

They could take out something currently in the core game and replace it with something newer (he didn’t say rotation, but kind of like that) for examble, they could take out tormented spirits and put in talisman circles randomly spawning instead.

32:00 - 33:00 They are considering disabling some portion of the unique pool in future challenge leagues while buffing the drop rate of the remaining pool.

34:00 -41:00 Ascendancy and Talisman were almost flip-flopped in their release order. (Chris said this would have been a disaster). Ascendancies were designed around 8 points and 4 labyrinths from the start. “I understand that a lot of the community don’t like the labyrinth… While the people who don’t like it are very vocal; it is only a small portion who don’t like it. Many are happy to go through it as an interesting thing in the game. Many people really hate it...this, to me, is not the end of the world. It’s okay to have divisive content in the game."

41:00 - 42:00 Removing Cruel difficulty? There is no definitive plan to do that. There are a lot of things they would have to shuffle around like bandits, quest rewards (skill rewards) labyrinth, etc etc. Long term it’s more likely that in the distant future, they skip right to only 1 difficulty. He also defends the idea that 3 difficulties can be quite a rewarding experience IF they can make cruel and merciless feel unique from your normal playthrough. He admits that they perhaps aren’t quite meeting that goal yet, but thinks that Prophecy will help.

42:00 - 50:00 What’s different about the new 4th lab? Expect a news post mid week on this topic. You can find trials for the 4th lab only in maps, and rarely at that. They will appear in white/yellow maps, so you can reach the end game lab without ever running red maps (T12+). A new trap type - Sentinel Traps - will empower the 6 trap types you’re familiar with, and you need to throw suppressing fire at them. Initially the design of 4th lab was to be even harder than what it’s going to be.

2.3.0 will have fixes for ES builds in the labs concerning trap damage. ~40% less damage to your ES. Unclear on hybrid builds. Low life builds were not mentioned.

There will be a Prophecy for using the Divine Font twice (a.k.a. double enchant at the end of the lab).

51:00 - 53:00 Ascendancy balance? Wait for the design post for specifics. Their goal is both balance between classes, and balance of big nodes taken WITHIN individual classes. Expect changes to Guardian and Slayer, most other classes will have small changes. The intention is not nerfing the Ascendancies to fight power creep.

55:00 - 59:00 Performance improvements! New sound system. Expect both immediate improvements and the sound team to keep adding and improving. The new system will support compressed sounds, which will use less memory, which will help graphical issues. The game won’t crash due to lack of memory, and 32 bit users should be happy. It should also help stuttering and frame rate issues, but they plan on continuing to work on frame rate issues.

Prophecy mobs shouldn’t lag you like Perandus mobs.

60:00 - 62:00 Power creep versus game difficulty. [*NOTE* I used double quotes but missed a word here and there, and was at times liberal with my use of ellipses. I did my best to be true to the spirit of what he said] “What is your vision for the difficulty of PoE?” Chris: ‘Treat what I’m about to say as not being the way I feel it is now, but rather where we want to end up’: “the vision is that a PoE player can come home from work after a long day and play path of exile knowing that he’s going to kill some monsters…and not have a white monster take like 6 hits to kill because it’s so tanky… I want a situation where your character is powerful and can kill regular groups of monsters just fine… and it’s kind of a mindless behavior, you know, and you can chill out and watch T.V. while you’re playing PoE, and then suddenly there’s [sic] spikes of difficulty: you know, you run into a storm herald monster, or there’s an aura combination you have to worry about, maybe reflect. So there’s things that keep you alert, but, the overall experience isn’t beating on monsters while you try to finish a map in 45 minutes.

We’ve had times in the past where the game has been too difficult…We’ve tried to reinforce the idea that this is a game that with a competent build and good items can kind of plow their way through. This is an aspirational thing that we want to work towards. Now this has become something its probably too easy for a number of characters, but we have to be careful… we can’t just buff monster damage and health across the board. There are the silent majority who are playing much less powerful characters with worse items who are potentially enjoying themselves [at the current difficulty]. “

They understand that the top players perhaps think the game is too easy. And they have plans to try and find a way to challenge those players in ways that don’t affect the aforementioned silent majority.

63:00 - 67:00 New monsters, new abilities, more monsters that use skills. Think of things currently in the game like a pack of goatmen, 10 of which are simple jumpers with 1 or 2 shamans that cast molten shell and other spells. They want to design more packs like that which have ‘leader’ monsters who organically use 1 or 2 skills even though they are white/normal monsters. Some will come in 2.3, more in the future.

67:00 - Chris has heard the sentiment expressed that some standard players are disappointed with recent challenge league mechanics not being added to the core standard experience.

68:00 - They are trying to stay on a 13 week schedule - 12 week leagues with 1 week off/downtime. 3.0.0 will probably disrupt this schedule.

71:00 - They changed hover-over-item border art in 2.0.0 and no one noticed :c

72:00 - 75:00 Where are the races at? They haven’t improved the race system yet, and basically chose to do the flashback events instead of releasing another race season with no changes. They also wanted to get the performance improvements into the game ASAP, because that improves everyone's experience. Additionally they wanted to stay on schedule for Prophecy, and make sure the China launch goes smoothly.

If racers are happy with no changes to the system, they will run another season with no changes. Otherwise they will keep not running them, and will improve race seasons when they can.

Maybe they can add tools to help commentators shoutcast races to make it more of a spectator e-sport (this seemed like just an idea, not something they are actively working on).

76:00 - What are you working on going forward? We’re gonna work on compressing more of our data, improving frame rate performance, upgrading the engine, a 64 bit version, a directX 11 release next year. (all hopefully / optimistically).

I'd also like to note that I know the 'you can play PoE while watching T.V. thing is, has been, and may continue to cause a stir. I think you should listen to that part of the podcast and judge for yourself. It sounded to me like what he meant was you COULD watch T.V while playing but you'd be risking dying to the difficulty spikes. Not that you SHOULD and CAN play the game on auto pilot.

Rather that if you have a good build with good gear and you're doing stuff that is reasonable for your level, trash mobs should be auto pilot with a few spikes of difficulty that will require you to focus up when auras collide, or at the map boss.

The other, more cynical reading (which I think is the wrong one, but I can see how people read into it this way) is that he wants PoE to be a game you play while watching T.V. I believe the first, more nuanced one is correct, but like I said, listen and judge for yourself.

Super helpful. Thank you!

thanks, this saves me from listening to the stupidity of the usual SoE guys.

Thanks as English is not my native language , i prefer written things ;)

Interesting. Thanks man.

lmao oh look another voltaxic drop, nice vendor trash Kappa.

Cool! thanks!

I guess with two darks and mantle you can still get 75% chaos conversion. (125 x .6) "good enough" for reflect w/ LL gem if my maths is right.

About power creep. All they need is a map mod. Like monsters have 100% more health and 50% more dps. then it's optional and casuals could skip it and powergamers could roll maps till they get it.

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Aim_Deep wrote:

Cool! thanks!

I guess with two darks and mantle you can still get 75% chaos conversion. (125 x .6) "good enough" for reflect w/ LL gem if my maths is right.

About power creep. All they need is a map mod. Like monsters have 100% more health and 50% more dps. then it's optional and casuals could skip it and powergamers could roll maps till they get it.

With the right combo of mods you can exceed that. Rolling for it with chaos is the self-defeating part.