An overview of Abyss league.

An excellent summary.

Point 8 is what ended this league early for me.

The Innocence fight killed me 3 times(first time, blind): The first I had no way to get to safety as the first statue spawned off screen and I was pinned against a wall, the second the fireballs splashed through the statue and killed me anyway, the third the fireballs spawned inside me with no statue again.

Together with the reports of the Kitava fight being terrible was more than enough to keep me away, the quality was just not there.

I think the next content release league should be based entirely around improvements like these and the ideas in points 14 and 16 could lead it to be written into a well rounded cohesive theme.

Great post!!

Group play sucks, group performance sucks, half my group crash every 5-20mins, game is in a terrible state in terms of balance and diversity. As someone that played since closed beta, in the last 2 years the game is definitely getting worse in terms of enjoyment. I feel the developers are just going to milk the game for as long as possible and it will continue to get worse, you see it time and time again. GGG is no longer a small company with a small audience, they have nothing to prove and only $$ to be made.

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Pinchyskree wrote:

An excellent summary.

Point 8 is what ended this league early for me.

The Innocence fight killed me 3 times(first time, blind): The first I had no way to get to safety as the first statue spawned off screen and I was pinned against a wall, the second the fireballs splashed through the statue and killed me anyway, the third the fireballs spawned inside me with no statue again.

Together with the reports of the Kitava fight being terrible was more than enough to keep me away, the quality was just not there.

I think the next content release league should be based entirely around improvements like these and the ideas in points 14 and 16 could lead it to be written into a well rounded cohesive theme.

All of these fights are so incredibly easy once you saw them, I really have no clue how people are seriously complaining about them.
Sure, if you do them blind then its an actual challenge and some adrenaline is involved, since you see stuff for the first time and are trying to figure out what is going on.
But that's your choice then.

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Player089 wrote:

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Pinchyskree wrote:

An excellent summary.

Point 8 is what ended this league early for me.

The Innocence fight killed me 3 times(first time, blind): The first I had no way to get to safety as the first statue spawned off screen and I was pinned against a wall, the second the fireballs splashed through the statue and killed me anyway, the third the fireballs spawned inside me with no statue again.

Together with the reports of the Kitava fight being terrible was more than enough to keep me away, the quality was just not there.

I think the next content release league should be based entirely around improvements like these and the ideas in points 14 and 16 could lead it to be written into a well rounded cohesive theme.

All of these fights are so incredibly easy once you saw them, I really have no clue how people are seriously complaining about them.
Sure, if you do them blind then its an actual challenge and some adrenaline is involved, since you see stuff for the first time and are trying to figure out what is going on.
But that's your choice then.

All players aren't you. We have to try to create a general picture. This is exactly what PoE development will follow too, you have to be seeing the whole audience playing the game, that's part of what balance is about and how you create positive learning and gaming curves. You have to imagine that not just you but you and your grandma are playing this game. You have absolutely no idea how many older folks are into PoE, they come from a very old crowd and support this game hugely too.

Making the game easier is not the solution. You won retain a player base like that, you'll bore them.

A better challenge that is more rewarding and something that is just easier are not the same thing. The amount of time spent has nothing to do with difficulty, just the amount of time you have spent. Some people seem to confuse this, to turn it into a pathetic attempt to attention seek on the internet.

Just like requiring foreknowledge to beat a boss without dying is not acceptable or quality design. You need clear stages of escalation in a fight to allow the skill of the player to judge what to do and when.

My character was nearly unkillable up to that point, only to have poor design killswitch me three times.

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Pinchyskree wrote:

A better challenge that is more rewarding and something that is just easier are not the same thing. The amount of time spent has nothing to do with difficulty, just the amount of time you have spent. Some people seem to confuse this, to turn it into a pathetic attempt to attention seek on the internet.

Just like requiring foreknowledge to beat a boss without dying is not acceptable or quality design. You need clear stages of escalation in a fight to allow the skill of the player to judge what to do and when.

My character was nearly unkillable up to that point, only to have poor design killswitch me three times.

This sums up a lot and it's not the first time I've heard it or seen it on the forums for that matter.

A good post. I enjoyed the read.

One shot mechanics to kill the people playing logoutcore have become so ingrained in me that I barely notice them now to be honest, the game is just stack 5.5k hp, get some mitigation that isn't sacrificing excessive amounts of damage and hope the perfect storm situation doesn't appear where you just instantly die. The clever builds that use esoteric game mechanics to create defenses that are worthy of sacrificing dps (those that make you able to avoid oneshots) either get hotfixed or summarily nerfed into the floor the next league.

The way the game has just become this disgusting mess of 'stack iiq, farm sextant blocked shaped map with good div card using shield charge build/wander' really really frustrates me. I am going to be incredibly disappointed in GGG if they don't absolutely rework sextants or remove blocking and also apply some hefty nerfs to iiq.

Lets not even get started on map drops... Those are so horrifically bad that I've given up on running red maps, because the constant anxiety of dropping a tier when I'm running some insane 8mod maps or high quantity maps with bloodlines. Atleast with T10 I can just alch'n'go and not have to worry about actually having the ability to play the game without buying maps off of luckier people (and from the looks of it, sextant abusers).

The map sustain + the oneshot mechanics have really burnt me out on this league, despite having made the most powerful and fun character to date for me - even taking on uber atziri and shaper for the first time. Its a shame I can't top off my achievements with level 100 as well.

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Pinchyskree wrote:

A better challenge that is more rewarding and something that is just easier are not the same thing. The amount of time spent has nothing to do with difficulty, just the amount of time you have spent. Some people seem to confuse this, to turn it into a pathetic attempt to attention seek on the internet.

Just like requiring foreknowledge to beat a boss without dying is not acceptable or quality design. You need clear stages of escalation in a fight to allow the skill of the player to judge what to do and when.

My character was nearly unkillable up to that point, only to have poor design killswitch me three times.

Sorry, but thats complete BS.
You CAN infact do the fight blind without dying. If you actually were skilled and fast enough, then you would be able to make it.

But you were not. You were not fast enough in realizing what is happening. What did you die to? The Innocence fight?
Statues that stop moving, clearly indicating that you could use them as cover. A boss that fires a beam while turning slowly to trace you - seen so often in so many games, everyone knows what to do.
A huge sound followed by an orb that slowly emmits from the boss, then explodes. Clearly, the game want's you to move away from it. Then a typical bullethell mechanic, seen literally millions times everywhere. Again, frozen statues to hide behind.

There is NOTHING in this fight that could not be dodged with enough skill. Not a single thing.

And now let's move on to this ridiculous claim that a boss fight HAS to be solvable in the first encounter.
Have you played ANY of the games in the past 15 years that actually had real boss encounters? Can you name a single game where people managed to figure out the boss encounter in it's entirety in the first encounter? Have you any clue how many attemps they actually needed to defeat these bosses?

You, like most of this forum, talk out of your ass. You have no experience in game balancing. Nothing, not a single reference, not a single year let alone month spent designing anything for anyone in anything.
Yet you come here on the forums to talk about your hypertheoretical way that you THINK things should be. And you do that while you even lack experience in actually playing games.

I have said this in another thread and I will say it again here: Feel free to suggest whatever you want here in the forums. Say you dont like how this and that behaves and you think it would be more enjoyable to you, if it wasn't that way.
But for gods sake stop talking in absolutes, calling things "bad game design" or claiming this and that "has to be this way".
You have no clue about balancing. GGG has an entire team on balancing, working on it since a decade and likely longer. You cannot, in any way possible, compete with them. Show some respect and some sense for reality and stop talking about things you don't grasp.