Suggestion for improvements for POE 2: Difficulty Setting

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teodar1987 wrote:

OP, the game has exactly what you want. Its called monster lvl in its most basic form. In addition to that you have a semi-gambling for making the game harder in specific ways for specific rewards - the league mechanics and map mods.

What I want is to be able to fight Shaper, or Sirius. Cannot do that right now. I'm ok if they drop 1 Alchemy Orb as my reward. I just want to try out the fights and see if I can win. Not possible currently. A difficulty setting accomplishes this. "Getting better" isn't possible, I am as "better" as I am going to get after playing for 5 years.

Why not make SSF the only mode that has this difficulty scaling option, or even only allow it in private leagues? Then you are not splitting more of the player base and then the people that choose to play on EZ mode can enjoy a more relaxing version of this game without impacting trade league. If you think this game is too easy, maybe you should try it out on SSFHC or maybe try off-meta builds. This game is easy enough probably 60% of the time...and then you die to some random instakill even when you are well geared/specced.

It's not even the instakills. I started Flashback with an ES Champ. I'm in Act 10 now and the character has never even been close to dying. Worst I had was a Revenant corpse explosion in Blood Aqueduct which got me down to about 1/4 HP. Yet I have 3 deaths on the character.

Each death has been the same. I enter an area, start slamming and warcrying and everything is melting just fine. Then suddenly the monsters freeze in place and my golem stops following me. I can move around fine, still attack and so on. But my attacks do nothing to the monsters, they just ignore me and stand in place where they spawned. It's like one of those movie scenes where the whole world freezes in place but the hero can still walk around and do everything as normal.

Then my hard drive churns for about 45 seconds and I get booted to login. OK, fine, DCs happen. Log in, waypoint back to the area where I was and resume fighting. Except I notice I'm doing much less damage than before. So I glance down and oops, my mana orb is full. Oh, my auras aren't active. And we all know what that implies. So I check the /deaths function and sure enough, there is +1 to my death total. It's not that I'm being one-shotted or even off-screened. It's that I'm dying in another dimension where I don't even get to witness my own death, hear my own death cry or get a 'Resurrect in Town' button.

I'd say that 90% of my deaths currently are loading screen deaths, rubber-banding deaths or deaths like this, where my machine is playing in one time dimension and the server in another. It doesn't bother me much, I stopped being bothered by deaths long ago and just laugh or shrug now. But it does make HC completely non-viable.

It can, however, be screamingly funny. I did a Heist recently which ended with a giga-horde of reinforcements spawning. I decided on the ole 'Benny Hill end credits' ploy of scarpering for the exit with the whole world hot on my heels. Just as I got to the exit, rubber-banding kicked in and boinged me back into the clutches of the pursuing mob. So I rush for the exit again and, just short of it, boing - back into the clutches of the mob again. This happened a dozen times. Literally. It took me twelve attempts to traverse that final fifteen yards to safety. It was like a nightmare where no matter how hard you run, you can't get away from the chasing monster. It wasn't a death and I did eventually get to the exit. But I was laughing so much it was difficult to focus on the screen.

Fair enough, this isn't a difficulty setting issue, it's a 'can I please have control of my character and/or see what the heck it is that I'm fighting so that I can actually play the game' issue. If we could get a setting for that, along with a difficulty setting, that would be boss.

You may have noticed from the Necromancer dominance in this game for over a year now that players will just choose the path of least resistance a lot of the time. Classes like a summoner deal auto-damage which allows the player to focus on avoidance / defenses. They're not technically better than a melee build but melee esp requires a lot more attention and dare I say skill to play.

Honestly having played from 2013 this game has only gotten easier and easier. This game was pretty damn hard when it had 3 acts. If you tried to speed run maps like people do now you'd just get stun locked, drain all your pots and die.

My mom of 60 plays this game. It's not really that difficult functionally. It's the layers which make it difficult to understand or keep up with as a casual player.

If players don't get anything extra they likely will just take that path of least resistance. It's why I've always wanted a slightly different League Trophy for SSF and Hardcore. Nothing special just one of the flags shows an insignia that it was attained in one of these modes. Personally that's enough for me to debate going back to lagcore or dealing with SSF which this game is not designed for anymore.

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lagwin1980 wrote:

casual player here, NO, game isn't hard in the slightest, it IS deep but even the most basic player should manage to get to maps and end game with some time investment, that is all.

There should be no special exception to allow people to "see all the content", that is what WoW has done and it failed badly...people WANT to feel challenged, want to be rewarded for their work and feel good about their actual accomplishments and giving easy access to all content in a dumbed down form negates all that.

"See all the content" is the best thing that WOW has ever done and that is one of the main thing why WOW is so popular after all these years. People has so many things to do, they can try everything in the game and they wont get punished because they try hard challenges. All WOW players can feel challenges, thats why there is casual, normal, heroic and mythic levels. The harder the challenge the better reward. They have done perfect reward system where players feel that they got something no mather what is the difficulty level, you still get something and that makes players want more and more and they keep playing.

If GGG make one separate server where isnt death penalty im ready to pay monthly fee for playing in this server but with death penalty im rarely play over few weeks and leave, i dont like get punished when i try harder challenges at least not that way like poe does it. In WOW i have been on wipefest more than 5-6 days on raid boss, but i always know that every try makes me and raid better and in the end we can kill the boss. In POE you grind like moron to get some uber boss map and then you have 6 tries ( not remember how many portals there is) and you doesnt even get to know what killed you, how amazing. POE will be always for very littel audience and they have reached its maximum, dont tell me that patch day there are 100+k players, lets see how many are them when league ends or peak time in standard.

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Xzorn wrote:

You may have noticed from the Necromancer dominance in this game for over a year now that players will just choose the path of least resistance a lot of the time. Classes like a summoner deal auto-damage which allows the player to focus on avoidance / defenses. They're not technically better than a melee build but melee esp requires a lot more attention and dare I say skill to play.

I must be doing something wrong because my summoners die like flies. Sure, they're easier to gear and they put out more damage than solo builds. But I haven't found them tankier than other classes.

I initially thought that Trappers, Miners and Totem builds would also be safer. Not so. The six builds I've taken furthest into the game with fewest deaths have been:
1) Bleed bow Gladiator
2) Toxic Rain Miner Sab
3) Call of Steel Ground Slam Champ
4) Vortex Occultist
5) Winter Orb Elementalist(!)
6) Blade Vortex Chieftain

I'm a bit mystified as to how a channeling Witch gets fewer deaths than my Earthshatter Jugg. But that's how it has panned out. All of my builds are essentially SSF, even in trade league I only buy essential build-enabling uniques for my characters. So it is possible that my 'safer' builds have just had better gear drops. But I'm not really sensing it. For gear, I just go for the standard 'rares for capped resists and then as much life as possible'. And I reckon their gear is all much of a muchness.

I think the key probably is constant movement. My ES Jugg stops to warcry and then slam and that's where he gets owned. My Vortex Occultist and WO Elementalist are always moving, as is the Toxic Rain Sab.

I guess my summoners could be in constant motion but I get caught combat-watching, admiring my zombies and spectres as they take out some dangerous foe. But then, for whatever reason, some monster targets me instead of the minions, catches me flat-footed and one-shots me. I suppose I should make a conscious effort to not combat-watch and instead just run around like a headless chicken. It may make me more survivable.

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porous2 wrote:

I initially thought that Trappers, Miners and Totem builds would also be safer. Not so. The six builds I've taken furthest into the game with fewest deaths have been:
1) Bleed bow Gladiator
2) Toxic Rain Miner Sab
3) Call of Steel Ground Slam Champ
4) Vortex Occultist
5) Winter Orb Elementalist(!)
6) Blade Vortex Chieftain

I'm not surprised bow bleed Glad had the least deaths. I played one in Metamorph before they gooned up the Citadel Bow you need to being Elder base. Either way solid build.

Haven't tried a Toxic Rain Miner though I've heard Toxic rain is good and Miners are like CoC where they tend to be better "casters" than self cast. I dabbled in Lancing Steel a bit. Pretty good. Might try a full build on it next league. The cast delay on Call of Steel is stupid and annoying though.

Haven't messed with the others recently. Winter Orb used to be more of a starter / race thing but got nerfed or something I dunno and yea, I can only justify one shout with Call to Arms.

Game Balance wise standing still without heavy distraction to enemies is usually death. GGG has been designing their semi bosses and enemies based on the auto-damage and just evade builds I mentioned. I stopped Playing Hardcore in Abyss when I got killed in 1s by an invisible enemy that musta had 15 attacks per second. My time isn't worth testing leagues for GGG and I wanted to try out more play styles like in Heist I went Zerker which would just be dumb in HC and it was a lot of fun.

lol this whole thread is insane...

If you can't beat content, it means you farm and CHANGE until you can! That is literally the entire point of this entire genre.

If you can't beat a boss, LEARN how to by trial and error and creativity.

Be thankful the exp penalty doesn't degrade you levels! Games like this one, diablo 2, diablo 3, etc etc are GRINDFESTS regardless of what "difficulty" they are. Before I learned and mastered various skills and the passive tree, I would run WHITE maps until I was high 80s level before I could progress any further. That IS your difficulty level.

For those of you conflating "progression difficulty" and game difficulty: they are and SHOULD be the same thing. The game already allows you to fight Sirus even on white maps. Bosses like Shaper/Elder are NO LONGER the final bosses of the game and are gated behind hard to get items because they are uber bosses just like uber tristram in Diablo.

And don't tell me you want to be able to see all the maps...half the bosses are the same as previous map bosses, just harder. AKA higher difficulty.

You also have grades of maps: white, blue, yellow, corrupted, unique etc. Those are also DIFFICULTY levels. Can't run yellow maps with lots of mods? then run blue maps.

This game does have one of the most complex skill and passive system to learn, and it takes some actual thought and experimentation. Otherwise, follow a build that does all the thinking for you. THIS IS THE GAME.

also a thought specifically on the exp death penalty that the OP seems to have a real problem with: this is again a staple part of basically all arpgs (or at least every single one I've played). It should be HARD to max out your character. If you are just constantly gaining exp what would be the actual point of a death mechanic at the endgame? Just to piss you off a little? It should be an actual numerical penalty which it is. It makes you decide WHEN you want to try harder content or when you need to take a step back and grind a little.

As one of the other posters said, try playing Hardcore where death is permanent!