Lowering monster damage would help many problems in this game.

TLDR: Extremely high monster damage is a factor that lurks behind many of the complaints about this game; such as how bad desync is (only need small windows of loss of control to die to the absurd damage), the overvaluing of life and resists over other gear stats, which then in turn leads to complaints about RNG on orbs and gear, and the disparity between melee and ranged. Lowering the insane burst potential in by nerfing monster crit rate and crit modifier, combined with lowering the resist penalty, would go a long way towards making the burst damage much more sane and manageable, thus helping or outright fixing many of the above issues. To compensate, monsters can have their base damage buffed in some manner, so that their sustained, pressure potential goes up, but their insane burst potential goes down (since damage in this game is very binary in its outcomes; you either trivialize it via high armor/evasion/etc, or that all means jack and you take massive bursts and get gibbed).


Anyhow, the long version...

We all know that there is a lot of hubbub on the forums about many issues. How people cannot stand the EXP loss on death, how they hate the desync, the disparity between melee and ranged, how enemies deal insane amounts of spike damage, and how the game is “Path of Life Nodes”. Furthermore, you'll see people complain about how they have to have perfect gear in order to progress safely, or comfortably(which usually means all gear having resists and HP, with very little room for fluff stats); this causes people to then rail on the drops, or the perceived failings of the orb system and the multi-layered RNG of this games aspect.

Granted, each of these issues, valid or not so valid as the case may be, have their own specifics and arguments one way or the other; but I see a common link between all of them that I feel should be pointed out rather bluntly: and that is that all of these issues the desync (related to unfair deaths contributing to exp loss or character loss on HC), exp loss, frustration with the huge crapshoot of how orbs affect items, and the fact that people have a very narrow view (perhaps rightly so) of what stats are needed and allowed on gear in order for it to be usable, the perceived or actual strength and advantages of ranged vs. melee, the dominance of HP over other forums of defense; all of these issues are related to the fact that enemies spike way too hard, way too often, in this game.

Desync increases the likelihood that you'll take unavoidable damage; and because enemies hit so damn hard, even 1 second of desync can mean the loss of hours of EXP or the loss of a HC character. People stack life the way they do (look how good Kaom's is; low armor, no sockets, and no stats but life, but that life trumps all) not because (as some like to claim) the armor and evasion systems are deeply, hopelessly flawed; but because life is the best defensive parameter in this game for dealing with the ubiquitous damage spikes, so it's preferentially stacked on both gear and in skilldrasil. Most of the frustration with the orbs system, and the massive spread of stats and affixes on gear, comes from the fact that you HAVE to prioritize life, resists, and other defensive things such as bonus to armor or ES, over all of the other stats; thus why there has been such a backlash against the new light radius and stat requirement reduction affixes. You have to prioritize these things because, again, things hit too hard, too often, so anything that isn't related to survivability is seen as junk and undesirable in many situations, leading to people getting angry with orbs giving them stuff they think is crap, too often, thus devaluing orbs to some degree when it comes to using them.

Most of the real problem between melee and ranged has nothing to do with damage; as melee builds are quite capable of dealing impressive damage. However most of the “overpowered” builds/skills in this game (Freezing Pulse, Lightning Arrow, dual spork totem) are ranged, impressing upon people (erroneously) that the issue is a matter of killing power; when the sole reason there exists such a big issue between melee and ranged, is the simple fact that by their very nature, ranged characters avoid FAR, FAR more damage than melee, simply by not being in position to take as large a volume of hits as melee does. Why is this such a deal breaker? Because, again, enemies hit too damned hard.

So very many complaints about this game, both in the form of reactionary, hyperbolic QQ, and completely legitimate complaints, are in some way shape or form related to the fact that enemies hit too hard, too often.

Unfortunately I am not a very “mathy” person, and I also don't know anything about the monsters stats in this game, so I cannot provide any in-depth work to try to go along with my suggestions, but I think right off the bat, one of the biggest screw ups currently in PoE is the huge resist penalty in merciless. This right here is the single biggest reason why so many people hit the “merciless wall”, because even with a few pieces of resist gear, and an Inner Forced Purity, the merciless resist penalty makes it so you will get monstered by elemental damage quite badly, until you manage to out gear it. For the most part this would be ok, but the chaos resist penalty is especially vicious; to the point where 1-2 Viper Strike charges can kill you entirely by themselves, THROUGH an HP pot, even if you managed to get your chaos resist out of the deep negatives. That's ridiculous.

I personally cannot understand this penalty to resists in merciless, because it is of a binary nature, in the sense that at first it's absolutely ridiculous for people that aren't well off, with gear waiting for them, or the currency to buy it easily, causing a ton of really fast deaths due to insane damage; but on the flip side, with a handful of decent pieces of gear and intelligent passive choices, you can overcome all but the chaos resist penalty rather easily, thus making me wonder why it has to be such a huge barrier to entry, only to end up being somewhat trivial; there's very little middle ground. It's the same problem with normal monster damage; either you have an ok amount of armor/evasion and largely trivialize any sort of sustained, pressure damage the enemies put out, or you take HUGE spikes of massive damage that crushes your armor and makes you wish you took more HP nodes.

My first suggestion would be to slightly lessen the resist penalty in merciless, and moderately reduce the chaos resist penalty; thus lessening the barrier to entry somewhat, and also reducing the frustration with gearing up and the orbs system, by making resist stacking not quite so much of an issue, so people won't view any stat they get on gear or from orbs, that isn't resist or life, as garbage. It'll also slightly soften the blow for less hardcore people, and people on their first characters, or who have had shit luck with drops.

My second suggestion, which is the more important one, is to across the board nerf the chance all enemies have to land a critical hit, and also their crit damage modifier. If this is done, I suspect (without knowing the mechanics or the numbers) that it would have the potential to greatly reduce the extreme spikiness of damage in this game. Whether or not it is a combination of enemies critting too often for too much of a bonus in damage, or it's just the modifier on their crits that is overtuned, critical hits are probably the simplest, most direct reason why (on the monsters end) spike damage is so prevalent and so severe in this game. Reducing how hard and how often enemies spike would directly reduce the value of life relative to armor/evasion; due to the fact that if enemies no longer spike ridiculously hard, ridiculously often, people won't feel the need to value life SO much, especially over armor/evasion. Seeing as how life is only valued as much as it is, because of the fact that it is the only defensive attribute that weathers the spike damage in this game. This could potentially be a much easier change than finding some way to potentially buff armor/evasion and/or devalue life nodes somehow. I realize some enemy abilities like charge, and certain rare auras, also contribute to huge damage, but dealing with those on a case by case basis is another story.

Now I realize that the first red flag about these suggestions is that people will have a wider margin for building glass cannons, and it would also empower super tank type builds; one or both of which might not be something GGG wants. However I feel that, again without knowing the numbers and the mechanics well enough, simply buffing monsters base damage potential, via increasing their STR, or INT, or making their damage ranges tighter (instead of enemy X hitting for between 10-150 per hit, tighten it up to 60-150 or something), or however the heck monsters have their damage determined, would offset the loss of spike potential in a much more intelligent way. Monster damage in this game is already, as I mentioned above, way to prone to all or nothing syndrome; you either utterly trivialize it, or it wrecks you. Buffing their base damage at the cost of spike potential in the form of a crit nerf, would give the monsters more power to pressure the player, while not having so much potential to string crits together in narrow windows, for damage that is not able to be weathered outside of having max resists and insane HP values.

These changes would devalue life, if only as a matter of player preference and not objectively (and if life stacking is still an issue, that is a different problem with a different solution). They would make desync less prone to leading to frustrating deaths and HC character losses, because the enemies wouldn't have such a high potential for calamitous amounts of spike damage in even narrow desync windows. It would reduce to some degree the disparity between melee and ranged, because melee would have a better chance at weathering the storm while in range to do damage. It would lower the frustrations of people that die often, by making it so that there are not as many chances for 2-3 seconds of bad play or lag, to lead to a demoralizing loss of exp, causing people to rail on the exp loss in this game (as often, there will still be complaints). Perhaps most importantly, given the volume of posts on the topic, it would relieve pressure on the orbs system; because peoples expectations for orbs and their effects on gear could open up a bit, and not be SO focused on “HP or resists, or fuck off it's trash”. People would in general have more of an opportunity to be happy with the effects of their orbs, because the pool of desirable effects the orbs give could open up more than it is now.

In any case, this post has gone on long enough. I know that it is a lot more complex than I made it sound, and I have no idea of the mechanics, values, and math behind all of this, so I don't properly know just how much of an impact this would have or how hard it would be for GGG to do. I also know that each of these individual problems (desync, melee vs. ranged disparity) are more complex, and have other issues that genuinely have nothing to do with damage from enemies. But it is my belief that behind so many of the issues that this game has right now (or at the very least the things people are complaining about), each have in some way this common thread connecting them; and that is that incoming damage on the player is too prone to excessive spikes, in both volume and severity. I feel that if GGG addresses this fact, that at least to some degree, the amount and severity of complaints and problems with all of the above issues, would be mitigated, for the betterment of the game. Furthermore, the possible elegance of these changes, is that it wounds, or even kills, multiple birds with one stone so to speak; rather than GGG having to potentially waste development time attempting to separately address each of these issues at different times.

That's just how I feel from what I've observed both in game, and on the forums. Anyone have any thoughts?

No one has an opinion? lol

- you didn't even name the problem in the title
- you didn't use any text formatting to underline the basic ideas, and you know yourself your post is very long.

Put some structure to it :)

All the best...

"

Undon3 wrote:

- you didn't even name the problem in the title
- you didn't use any text formatting to underline the basic ideas, and you know yourself your post is very long.

Put some structure to it :)

All the best...

I wrote all of this in one sitting at 3 in the morning, so I honestly didn't have the patience to write it up properly, but was eager to get it posted. I've also got finals for the next week, starting today, so I'll bullet point it and all that jazz when I can.

Ok. Gave it a read.

Just very quick...

The real issues:
- the skill tree. Why? Unpredictability of builds.
- the multitude of gear. Why? Unpredictability of player resistances, HP, ES at certain points in the game
- the RNG mods on mobs. Why? Stacking of many +dmg mods on certain mobs, auras, etc. Unpredictability again.

Why the unpredictability matters?

Because developers CAN'T BALANCE PROPERLY. There are at least these 3 stacks of unpredictability. They have a Kripp that goes in a 70 map at level 80 with 7.000 HP and 80+ resistances, and me for example, that gets in that map with +60 resistances and 2500 HP and 4500 ES. To add to this, the RNG mobs can roll less damage for Kripp who already has tons of HP, and high damage mods for me.

Conclusion: The system is flawed in its conception. There is no way to properly balance it. Even games that have a huge AAA developer team, almost 0 RNG contribution and simple skill trees STRUGGLE with balancing. Hence, GGG do not even try too hard to balance the content, they actually encourage players finding ways to play the content in completely OP farming mode, basically "breaking" the game. There is a very relevant Brother Laz interview about this kinda stuff.

"

Obsidus wrote:

I wrote all of this in one sitting at 3 in the morning, so I honestly didn't have the patience to write it up properly, but was eager to get it posted. I've also got finals for the next week, starting today, so I'll bullet point it and all that jazz when I can.

I am impressed by your ability to write a full novel at such an odd hour. I have my own long book that I've been working on but I haven't posted it yet because I can't get everything out in one sitting.

Hi

When GGG first introduced the resist minuses in CB I wrote that a player would need to stack over 100% resists just to have a high lvl resist for end game and yet again I am here mentioning it again. Even though they removed one of the difficulties the dev's still left merciless with a 40% minus cap... GGG funny on the one hand they don't want farming but then they make game super hard so a player needs to farm the shitty RNG system so they can get wicked gear.

If GGG could do anything to fix this issue maybe lowering the resist minus in merci to 20% and lower the chaos resist per diff to 10% minus, or take the passive tree and increase the resist nodes(there so low there useless) and move the chaos resist nodes that seem to be hanging out with CI(which makes no friggin' sense to have the best chaos passives beside a immune to chaos passive) Also they could just increase the orb drop in general making it more viable to attempt to use them on items as opposed to saving every scrap so you can pay a overinflated price because this ''crafting system'' is a joke being so random with so many different mods(Light radius mods are you JOKING?)

cheers

lotta good points hidden in here, imo.

I have been preaching similiar since the beginning of OB, as the real issue, is A3. To be honest, act 1 and 2, still remind me, and feel pretty much on par with CB, but act 3 is a total new ballgame, and imo, it just doesnt work.

The insane spike damage, the path of life nodes, rng system that smacks ya in the face about as often as D3, and a crafting system that somehow really thinks it is crafting, well ...

The play experience has become less than desireable since OB began. Thus my leave from the game until, well , who knows. Maybe GGG is fine with it as is, i mean, its been months and nothing has been done to address the crazy amped up state of a3.

I hear people say they like it too, which is fine, masochists have opinions too. But dont take long to search around and find that many people are disgruntled over the current state of the game, and theres no shortage of reasons it seems.

Agreed, that is all I can say.

I know it wasn't tipped as a post that warrants a L2P reply, but lots of what has been said here does just come down to a "this is too hard" attitude.