Incoming Dual Totem Nerf

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Hilbert wrote:

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GGG ALWAYS LISTENS TO ALPHA TESTER FEEDBACK ON CHANGES AND HAS ADJUSTED ALPHA ACCORDINGLY.

And here lies a problem with alpha testers. A majority of alpha testers only applied to see act3 they will barely log into alpha anymore without major balance/content changes.

What the hell are you talking about? That simply isn't the case. Alpha has never been livelier in the last 2 months.

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Many alpha testers are players with that use broken skills on their characters and never used weaker skills.

This is an absolute lie. The whole reason Shock Nova got a mana cost reduction is because I made a shock nova witch on alpha 2.5 weeks ago and gave Qarl some feedback on it.

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I've seen over 70 alpha testers posting but the alpha realm only got 8-10 testers.

How do you know this? You're not in alpha. You're also wrong and also have faulty math in your head here. Alpha has been hovering at around 12.5-15~ avg players, not ten. Secondly, concurrent players does not represent active testing.

EVE Online has an active player pool of 430k. 33k~ play concurrently at any given moment on the server; less than 10% of players

Having 70~ some alpha testers and having more than two times more than 7 playing concurrently means alpha is very active, comparatively.

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Their feedback on Totems wizj spark and icespear/freezing pulse will be: "It's balanced/It's ok" simply because they never used EE based characters or played a sweep templar/maradeur who uses Coldsnap.

Also absolute falsehood. I have a multiple cold snap gem character, or rather, had one, though I didn't get to finish the build in time for the last wipe. We also give lots of feedback in regards to expected behavior of nerfs on weaker/underused skills and builds.

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2 Totems on Coldsnap wouldn't be necessary but I don't see Coldsnap being spamable anytime soon.

Totems don't even work well with cold snap because of coldsnap's cooldown. Actually, the cast speed nerf has little effect on cold snap totems because the CD caps its spammability anyway.

Cold Snap was buffed in part because of alpha feedback as well. We have been trying to test it more thoroughly to determine how it should be further changed or buffed.

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Dualtotems with Icenova with Increased AoE and Added lightning Damage is an essential link for a EE Firestorm character.

There are many alternatives to this. Ice Nova is hardly the be-all end-all way of utilizing EE and firestorm (which is, in all honestly, a terrible build idea, you should use a fast skill like firestorm to apply EE reductions, then a slower, more powerful skill, like fireball, to capitalize on reduced resistances).

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Somebody having 10+ different level 40 characters would give far better feedback than somebody having a Sparktotem, GS and a LA Charachter on high level.

Many players on alpha level multiple characters instead of running maps. In-fact Qarl has specifically requested we test all the difficulties thoroughly for possible difficulty spikes and bumps in the scaling of monsters in some areas.

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And I have never seen skills/nodes getting improved again shortly after they hit a heavy nerf and there are many skills that got hit too hard.
Especially from patches with Chaos Maelström as temp endgame.

This is alpha. There were so many changes with the last patch, which was applied just before kripp started streaming, that I was constantly giving Kripp false information during his stream. They changed the skill costs of many gems, vendor recipes, some monster abilities, changed some things about item mods which I can't discuss here.

It's your kind of baseless accusations that make the sheer idea of sharing in-alpha information a bad idea. If people like you continue to act this way, I'll be surprised if Kripp is allowed to stream alpha content again.

Hm. I made a witch that uses two totems, two curses and 4 traps (bear and fire). Kicks absolute ass, and I see this continuing. May need to swap in an increased cast speed support. The path I took brought me around minion passives, including instability, so that's another nice option for added defence. (Following the rumour mill, the path will also be close to the new ES regen passive; just need some HP regen nodes.)

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What the hell are you talking about? That simply isn't the case. Alpha has never been livelier in the last 2 months.

Because of act3.

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This is an absolute lie. The whole reason Shock Nova got a mana cost reduction is because I made a shock nova witch on alpha 2.5 weeks ago and gave Qarl some feedback on it.

Yet there are at last 5 page filled threads complaining about manacosts and manabuilds forcing builds into EB or Blood Magic.

Does it get fixed in some way? No instead Clarity is about 8 levels weaker than it was at the beginning.

Who uses explosive arrow after the pierce fusecharge got taken away? Elemental hit simply overpowers it in every aspect.

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How do you know this?

Alphatesters that like to talk

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Also absolute falsehood. I have a multiple cold snap gem character, or rather, had one, though I didn't get to finish the build in time for the last wipe. We also give lots of feedback in regards to expected behavior of nerfs on weaker/underused skills and builds.

I talk about a certain Dualtotem example that breaks not about bypassing delayed skills with several gems. I can name more, where removing attack damage removes the use for other builds.

Using many different gems on delayed skills or traps is a must and the perfect example how it works is level 28 pvp with flicker strike and beartraps.

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Totems don't even work well with cold snap because of coldsnap's cooldown. Actually, the cast speed nerf has little effect on cold snap totems because the CD caps its spammability anyway.

Cold Snap was buffed in part because of alpha feedback as well. We have been trying to test it more thoroughly to determine how it should be further changed or buffed.

You don't understand how Sweep with 2 Totems work because you most likely never did such a build. The main reason you use 2 totems is because you don't have enough skills you can change to.

You use leap slam to get into mobs. You got 1 immortal call and 2 enduring cries 1 Cold snap totem 1 sweep 1 curse and 1 decoy totem.

You need 2 coldsnap totems to slow enemies down because IC doesn't protect you from everything.

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There are many alternatives to this. Ice Nova is hardly the be-all end-all way of utilizing EE and firestorm (which is, in all honestly, a terrible build idea, you should use a fast skill like firestorm to apply EE reductions, then a slower, more powerful skill, like fireball, to capitalize on reduced resistances).

And thats where ignorance kicks in. Firestorm is incredibly powerful with the correct items.
I got a Firestorm Summon Hybrid and even magic mobs don't survive one storm and once the boss is ignited he dies within seconds.
If I would have taken out the summon nodes it would be even more powerful.
The main problem is that is requires 3 nonreward gems and 1 unique(not searing touch) to build up damage.

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Many players on alpha level multiple characters instead of running maps. In-fact Qarl has specifically requested we test all the difficulties thoroughly for possible difficulty spikes and bumps in the scaling of monsters in some areas.

If he wanted it that bad he could have removed maps and common gems to force you to use weak skills.

Also manaproblems usually arise when you hit 4 link items.

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This is alpha. There were so many changes with the last patch, which was applied just before kripp started streaming, that I was constantly giving Kripp false information during his stream. They changed the skill costs of many gems, vendor recipes, some monster abilities, changed some things about item mods which I can't discuss here.

It's your kind of baseless accusations that make the sheer idea of sharing in-alpha information a bad idea. If people like you continue to act this way, I'll be surprised if Kripp is allowed to stream alpha content again.

It's not an accusation it's a fact and I talk about beta.
Just compare explosive arrow and elemental hit.

Main problems don't get solved by alpha, because you can't cover up all problems.

-Physical damage far inferior to Elemental Damage.
-4 links+ being far to expensive without eldricht battery or blood magic
-Travel all arround builds having next to no chance of survival.
-Bandits mainly ending up with either Life or Skillchoice
-Evasion not being reliable without Iron Reflexes
-skillgem and passive nodes being on the other side of the tree(1 class can't wear it the other one can't build up damage.
-Lack of magic mods that modify the damageoutput certain buildtypes.

Or race specfic problems like:
-Hillock reward always get turned in by a shadow(small chance for ranger/maradeur) and the duelist kill him last.
-Gem rewards in favor of certain classes.
-Resists/AI making certain bossfights morediffucult for certain builds.

Few things I feel like commenting on, bear with me:

The issue isn't affording things with EB or regen, the issue is how inefficient it is.

The reason alpha testers miss stuff, is because by far and by large, many of them don't know how to properly test balance. Breaking games, as such, is not a commonly held trait, and actually, a rather rare one. It is also, nearly impossible, to find someone, an alpha tester, with such a trait, with the limited time and resources at the developers disposal.

Also, the definition of "Alpha" is normally "Testing gaming architecture" which mainly means crashes and the related hard bugs. "Beta" realms are normally acknowledged by those in the gaming community as the "Polish" realm.

While I agree with Hilbert in a sense, some of these issues are so blatant I don't exactly know how or why they are allowed onto the beta realms, I also agree with anu, in saying that alpha is not about "breaking" or testing balance.

I personally think that Alpha invites are more a popularity contest, then anything else. Possibly why I don't get invited.

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While I agree with Hilbert in a sense, some of these issues are so blatant I don't exactly know how or why they are allowed onto the beta realms, I also agree with anu, in saying that alpha is not about "breaking" or testing balance.

What issues?

On alpha, we address balance, but as I think I've said like... five times now? The changes you saw on Kripp's stream -- the major ones anyway - WERE JUST ADDED. As in, WE HAVE NOT EVEN TESTED THEM. As far as I knew 24 hours ago, Keystone 126 didn't even work right, let alone was it balanced.

We are too small in number to test every possible build; it's like trying to count snowflakes or something. You can't do it with 100 people, not even a 1000.

The point of alpha is to test unpolished, buggy content and make it have enough quality that it won't screw up the beta realms, which, at this point in POE's development, are playing a very polished game that is polished enough it can be sold as a proper product.

We won't catch all the balance issues, by far, and sometimes, the developers intentionally make things weaker or stronger to see how players react and adapt to them. Nobody in alpha said, "Please make totems have another -10% less damage." Nobody. It happened, we're testing it.

I'm not even going to regard you, Hilbert at this point, alpha testers are not developers. You haven't read a single thing from alpha, even if there's some stupid person feeding you inside information. You don't know what I or the other alpha testers talk about or present to GGG. You don't know what you've said and you're coming to the inane conclusion that we are the reason your special snowflake build is being nerfed. At the end of the day, even I did ask for totems to be nerfed, they weren't nerfed because of me. I didn't do it. The guys in charge did. Why are you blaming us? That's nonsense.

In case you didn't notice, EE is being buffed. So, your build may be fine in the end anyway, even though it sounds like a crazy, ineffective build to me. And even if it it so super amazing, that you say I'm ignorant for not knowing about it, you can't expect me to test every single build there is in existence for balance. That's my point. The alpha realm is for basic balance, core balance testing. It's for secure balance testing. The developers try a hue nerf to CI, and they see how it fairs when a small, but hugely varied, playerbase plays with it. They then make refinements there and ship it to beta, where it gets further refinements that we test out. If they tried to invite 5000 people to alpha, the information in alpha would not be secret and we would be having these rage-whine-overreaction-threads every day for changes that possibly won't even take place.

Epsi, anubite is right. The majority of alpha players run many builds rather than sticking to one for a long time, hence why late game stuff isn't nearly as balanced, which is what beta is suppose to do.

Until the patch 2 days ago the alpha and beta trees were the same. I get the impression that GGG is happy with the majority of things for OB and now are back to working on balancing builds. Basically you guys are raging over the rough draft of some ideas rather than the final product put into beta, which would STILL be subjected to change.

I really doubt these CI/totem changes will be seen in OB, they are, they won't be in their current states.

It's not so much that I am trying to destroy or cause a ruckus, it's just that its plainly apparent that alpha simply doesn't have either the numbers or the talent (Book definition now, there are many alpha players of whom I hold only the utmost respect for) to properly test for balance. What I am saying is that hilbert IS correct. The balance of alpha-coming-into-beta issues and patches are almost always flawed, as we can see, however, what I say and point out is that alpha is not where balance issues, and finer tweaks such as balance are normally made. That there is some semblance of mass balancing going on in alpha speaks to the level of alpha testers we have.

Simply putting it into a more correct perspective, rather then hilberts more flawed one.

All of the alphas I have participated in (From large to small, from Alpha privates, to full-blown title-alphas) are almost always a gut-grinding experience where we the testers, were so busy finding bugs, errors and glitches, that balance was so remote in our minds, that we were all running the exact same build.

As for anubite. I don't watch Krip's stream. All i know about the patch is what you and my other two groups, both including alpha-ites, have said. My point is that the people are expecting the wrong things from alpha testers, and that the alpha testers are defending something they really shouldn't be defending.

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EpsiIon wrote:

Few things I feel like commenting on, bear with me:

The issue isn't affording things with EB or regen, the issue is how inefficient it is.

The reason alpha testers miss stuff, is because by far and by large, many of them don't know how to properly test balance. Breaking games, as such, is not a commonly held trait, and actually, a rather rare one. It is also, nearly impossible, to find someone, an alpha tester, with such a trait, with the limited time and resources at the developers disposal.

Also, the definition of "Alpha" is normally "Testing gaming architecture" which mainly means crashes and the related hard bugs. "Beta" realms are normally acknowledged by those in the gaming community as the "Polish" realm.

While I agree with Hilbert in a sense, some of these issues are so blatant I don't exactly know how or why they are allowed onto the beta realms, I also agree with anu, in saying that alpha is not about "breaking" or testing balance.

I personally think that Alpha invites are more a popularity contest, then anything else. Possibly why I don't get invited.

Developers just dont trust gamers enough to give them the resources they need to properly test a game. an alpha tester is not given the same resources that a "in house" tester is given. if they really wanted deep testing, they would give alpha testers the ability to make themselves whatever level they want, and the ability to generate whatever items they want etc. From watching krips stream, it seems like all the testers have access to is a different build of the game.... it would take days to test something a "in house" tester could test in minutes.

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Hilbert wrote:

And I have never seen skills/nodes getting improved again shortly after they hit a heavy nerf and there are many skills that got hit too hard.

^ This

The real irony here, is that the thread was intended to object to changes being made, not receive a stfu from various sources.

1. We are asked to trust a process which sometimes in the past goes to far to nerf skills.

2. Some of the response objections from seasoned players are of the "don't whine / complain" variety, this doesn't make one bit of sense. The purpose of the forums is to support or object to the skill changes. If you support the change state why you support a change on the basis of the change being made.

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anubite wrote:

In case you didn't notice, EE is being buffed.

Sorry to pick a line out of the context but how is EE being buffed? Or you probably can't discuss it because of NDA. I'm just annoyed that Kripp carefully skimmed through the whole passive skill tree, checking EVERY SINGLE keystone EXCEPT Elemental Equilibrium...