I'm Unhappy I Put As Much Money As I Did In This Game

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jaxxxson wrote:

I did end up sending Chris an email, we've been talking back and forth and he likes some of my ideas and is informing me on how certain things are set-up and why.

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feyith wrote:

Same.

Edit: Just got a reply! :)

Any chance you two can give us some snippets of what he's saying?

I don't know if it's bad etiquette to quote from personal conversations.

The gist was that they do care about build variety and balance, and are discussing the Path of Tank Build Gear Checks issue.

There is also some stuff being tested that they are not announcing because it could be a wash and then people would be all hyped up over nothing.

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feyith wrote:

I don't know if it's bad etiquette to quote from personal conversations.

The gist was that they do care about build variety and balance, and are discussing the Path of Tank Build Gear Checks issue.

It is, but what you provided is good enough.

Unfortunately, until desync is fixed there won't be any reliable way to tackle hard content in the game by anything other than tanking or meatshielding yourself... and all evidence points to a conclusion desync can't be fixed without a total rework. So, the only way for them to add difficulty is piling up more burst damage and the only way we can tackle it is by overtanking.

I really don't know how they can tell you they're looking at addressing "Path of Tank Nodes" on one hand and then introduce a bunch of monsters and mechanics that deal a ton of burst damage right in your face, which is multiplied and seemingly scales exponentially in maps. And of course the only effective way to ensure survivable is to stack as much defense and eHP as possible.

It just doesn't compute.

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UnderOmerta wrote:

I really don't know how they can tell you they're looking at addressing "Path of Tank Nodes" on one hand and then introduce a bunch of monsters and mechanics that deal a ton of burst damage right in your face, which is multiplied and seemingly scales exponentially in maps. And of course the only effective way to ensure survivable is to stack as much defense and eHP as possible.

It just doesn't compute.

Actually it does. Damage is so ridiculously high that tanking is not possible, so you have to play tactical by positioning/decoys/movement/mobility skills.

Problem is desynch prevent that play styles. So all goes back to squire one, avoid anything you can't facetank or kill offscreen.

Again, most people are correctly voicing the problems of this game, but I believe that the "give better drops" feedback needs to stop. Improving the quality of loot that drops will do absolutely nothing to the game just shift the problem to up later in the game...
If right now you are hitting a plateau somewhere in mid-merciless where good RNG in terms of drops can make or break your character (i.e. progress to Piety/Maps or RIP trying), improving said drops will simply push the problem up to say mid-maps.

People will enjoy the better loot now and whine about them 3 months down the line where everyone hits the next plateau.

The problem is not drop-rates or loot quality in themselves, it's in the variance of RNG and the fact that the player does not have much imput and choice in how the loot is dropping for him.

What I mean is:

The loot drop distribution a.k.a the loot tables

If loot is better distributed in the world, farming a certain area instead of others becomes a choice.

In Diablo 2 you MADE characters to farm Baal, characters to farm ubers, characters to MF in Travincal and what not. Basically you were building your own network of characters in order to obtain Gear.

All this means Player Choice. PoE is more about making that one Super Character and farming everything with it. Which leads to RNG in it's purest of forms. Loot Tables and the need of specialized characters will lead to Player Choices having a meaning. You decide what you need and what to farm to obtain it... instead of hoping that that 1 unique will drop from *somehwhere*...

This is why people complain about trading so much... because the only boss in the game that has a loot table is poe.xys... This replaces farm boss X for said piece of gear, by: farm enough alterations and you'll afford it one day. MMO Design vs ARPG Design right there.

So basically:
POE: make the tankiest character for every piece of content, farm whatever and PRAY stuff drops, or just farm enough alterations to afford it.
Diablo2: Decide what item you want, make the character fit to farm it and fark the appropriate part of content until it drops.

Crafting

Randomness was less of a part in crafting in Diablo 2. In here all the wealth you have in your stash tab might just as well dissapear into 1 item and have nothing to show for. In D2 you had cube recipes which could give you some amazing stuff (Crafted Gloves, Amulets), utility recipes (similar to current vendor recipes) and most important you had the Runewords which were always available.

And you could get the runes you needed (at low levels) pretty easily with the Cube combining them for higher level ones. So basically in PoE for leveling purposes if you want to be efficient you need to trade. You need that Goldrim, you need those unique weapons. In Diablo 2, you could do it all yourself.

I've had countless leveling characters using those Ancient's Pledges and Stealth and Lore and Leaf, everything crafted by myself by simply collecting the runes and the gear for it. The satisfaction of finally crafting one of those was immense. In PoE to obtain my leveling uniques all I had to do is: "WTB Goldrim 4c" - spam that for 1 day while checking poe.xys. Not at all the same feeling. MMO vs ARPG.

So here again: the player has the input on what to get and how to get in in-game. It's not hopeless. You know that getting some specific (cheap) pieces of gear will get you what you need. Instead of hoping that some guy in trade will magically have it.

In a nutshell crafting:
PoE: Pray to the RNG gods that your currency is not wasted through crafting or better yet, just trade it all to the guy who had the chance to get the item you need.

Diablo2: Gather specific Runes, socketed items and other small pieces of gear and use them all to create powerful crafted gear to supplement your progression.


Solo vs Party.

Party is way to easy in PoE. Solo is too risky for the rewards. If you look at all the top streamers, people hitting 90+ they are always in a group. And what do they do? Mindlessly flood the screen with spell effects until all the shit is dead. Party play is brainless, pointless and tiring, but it is the way to go after a certain level because going solo is way, way too punishing.

Solo is more fun.

The amount of satisfaction you get by clearing a map solo is way greater as you feed you've carefully achieved something yourself, but it's simply way too risky to do it when people can clear maps by hiding behind the minions of that other dude and just spam away AoE. The rewards for playing solo are simply not enough.

Even worse, the game is balanced towards party play. The amount of punishment some packs / bosses can deal is usually higher than one average character can take. Therefore you either do this soulcrushing experience of wathcing the light-show spam of party play instead of playing the game at your own pace or risk losing your character.

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I did end up sending Chris an email, we've been talking back and forth and he likes some of my ideas and is informing me on how certain things are set-up and why.

I quote myself:

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Which result in making concessions or show that internal communication doesn't work/there are lies.

I had a chat with Chris long ago and even he liked ideas several executions were put into the opposite direction.

I talked for example about the Manacostissue and too much MMO aspects in the game.
What happened later? 60% Reservation and Auras are used like in a typical MMORPG.

And if I read something like "reduced the cost of" it's like 23 to 21 at mana some level.
The effect of a 10% node isn't exalty a noteable reduction.


The only way you can make the game enjoyable is if PLAYERs can create own leagues, with own skilltrees, tables.

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The gist was that they do care about build variety and balance, and are discussing the Path of Tank Build Gear Checks issue.

You will be the first one to blame once monsters receive an ability "Ignores Defense"

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If loot is better distributed in the world, farming a certain area instead of others becomes a choice.

In Diablo 2 you MADE characters to farm Baal, characters to farm ubers, characters to MF in Travincal and what not. Basically you were building your own network of characters in order to obtain Gear.All this means Player Choice. PoE is more about making that one Super Character and farming everything with it. Which leads to RNG in it's purest of forms. Loot Tables and the need of specialized characters will lead to Player Choices having a meaning. You decide what you need and what to farm to obtain it... instead of hoping that that 1 unique will drop from *somehwhere*...

The main difference was that once you had a character it wasn't hard to level up in D2 this way you had many characters. Till 1.10 the entire area allowed you to gain experience, since the penalty never reached zero.
In PoE on the other hand you won't gain any experience from that.
I got a high character I want to level another character way faster than the first one but even then it will still take 8-10h to get a level 60.
But what I want to see is initial character 8-10h pushed characters 2-4h. I want my characters feel finished at some point and in PoE they never do.
Does GGG really expect to invest 500h in creating characters just to find a viable build?

PoE is a 1 character game. It puts so much effort into creating annoying sideareas to progress and prevent fast progress/leveling that HC playing is "Play Rip Reroll" this isn't fun.

I am already sick again of PoE. It's no burnout. I wanted to create a PK character at bandits merciless but this is utterly pointless in Invasion because I see next to no Bandit parties in Merciless.
Normal sure you can grief a lot there but PKing there is quiet boring.
Cruel sure works I had crappy EQ but still cruel already has only like 5 parties and 3 of them are farming fellshrine. One is "Kill Vaal 1 fuse"

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So basically:
POE: make the tankiest character for every piece of content, farm whatever and PRAY stuff drops, or just farm enough alterations to afford it.
Diablo2: Decide what item you want, make the character fit to farm it and fark the appropriate part of content until it drops.

The main difference between PoE and D2 loot is that PoE wants to slow you down like hell.
You will never feel rewared with drops. Bad builds need 30-50 min to reach and kill a boss just to see blue items.
Even good characters need 5-10 minutes.

In D2 the first encounter was the hard one.
After that you could kill everything but MLEBs.

You will never feel rewarded after the heavy dropnerfs with OB.

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UnderOmerta wrote:

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jaxxxson wrote:

I did end up sending Chris an email, we've been talking back and forth and he likes some of my ideas and is informing me on how certain things are set-up and why.

"

feyith wrote:

Same.

Edit: Just got a reply! :)

Any chance you two can give us some snippets of what he's saying?

For mine, I've been asking about a few ideas I had to improve the game, most notably being creating more vendor recipes with life and resist magic armor so you can progress through the game. We've also been discussing the direction of uniques among a lot of other things, I've only gotten one direct response, so I'm waiting on a huge wall of text to be looked at and responded too. I can give a more direct gist of what I personally am asking about, but I don't want to mis-quote Chris out of respect.

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symban wrote:

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UnderOmerta wrote:

I really don't know how they can tell you they're looking at addressing "Path of Tank Nodes" on one hand and then introduce a bunch of monsters and mechanics that deal a ton of burst damage right in your face, which is multiplied and seemingly scales exponentially in maps. And of course the only effective way to ensure survivable is to stack as much defense and eHP as possible.

It just doesn't compute.

Actually it does. Damage is so ridiculously high that tanking is not possible, so you have to play tactical by positioning/decoys/movement/mobility skills.

Problem is desynch prevent that play styles. So all goes back to squire one, avoid anything you can't facetank or kill offscreen.

The problem is "average" monster damage is so high that you have to go tank. PoE is not a game that you can simply avoid damage to begin with. Your FOV is tiny and monsters move extremely fast compared to most ARPGs. They can literally jump on you from off your screen, or shoot at you before you know they're there. You can play in 0 lag and extra defensive and you'll still take damage.

So because "average" damage is so high, you're forced to invest in a tanky build regardless. Which makes it all the more frustrating when the game introduces a bunch of instant kill mechanics that will gib even a tanky character, because the majority of the game forces you to build tanky and then getting killed while having a tanky build is no fun.

Another very sensitive feedback from me is regarding to the affixes on items and the state of the items in general.

What I feel is that currently rare-magic items are extremely one-dimensional and that uniques lack in the awesomeness department.I will talk about magic and rare items in this post and will give feedback on the uniques in another.

If we look at the magic and rare items we notice two things:
1. That there are the so-called power-stats which everyone needs and requires on gear.
2. That all other stats are garbage.

The power stats are what I might call the tanking stats which have to be on your gear. Life, Flat Defense, Percentage Defense, Resistaces. EVeryone is looking for these stats on the items to the point where if an item does not have at least 3 of these in their high bracket the item is automatically considered vendor trash. On the other hand, all the rest of the stats (+regen, light radius, thorns, stun recovery, etc) are so worthless that nobody ever bothers with them.

Chris said in the reddit interview that they think that having bad stats in the game is just way to make good items shine. I feel that he is wrong and that the current state of the item affixes simply makes items one dimensional. There should not be a clear-cuttoff beween good and bad. This is not only bad design but also spells mockery towards the players which will soon realize that you've deliberately put bad stats into the game just to make the RNG heavier and the grinds longer. I believe that instead of having good or bad affixes, everything should tend towards being situational. Even these "worse" affixes could have uses - maybe to some niche builds, maybe to some ways of playing, making them attractive in a certain way.

- I once suggested a Keystone converting +Light Radius to Accuracy
- I also suggested more (interesting) item affixes to be added: http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/764431/page/1

The underlying problem is the fact that because the only good stats are pretty much these 6 or 7 not only everyone is hunting for the same thing which leads to large imbalances in the distribution of wealth caused by RNG, but also the game balance is severely influenced by it. Basically GGG assumes that in high content all your pieces of gear will have a max roll of +health and +defense and monsters do damage accordingly. It is all power-based gameplay, where your gear is checked constantly. Again MMO design - it's pretty much just like in WoW (there it was GearScore > X or gtfo, here it's basically Life > Y or RIP in pieces)

In this environment, there's no room for intelligent crafting of some low defense builds with high amounts of utility that can scrape by without being hit. There are the few defensive combos that work (one of the typical MoM+AA, IR+Grace, Armor+Endurance+Determination, Eva+Acro+Ondars, CI - which pretty much depend on your starting class and are of the tree where you spend most of your skills)

Going back to Diablo 2 everyone remembers that a somewhat viable build were Amazons putting all their passive points into Dex and relying on knockback, evasions and speed to avoid hits. Clearly something impossible in here.

The stats on the items in their current state are simply limiting our immagination. The word of the day is "Tank-the-fuck-up". Hunt that "+Life+Def+%Def+Res+Res+Res" chestpiece like everyone else or RIP trying. This can be simply avoided by making difficulty less of a statistical check of the character's defenses and more about giving the player tools to tackle difficulty.

Here's another example from Diablo 2: Light Radius. In D2 this stat was actually quite important because you could not see mobs outside of your vision. In PoE this is not really the case. Also, if we remember the Dim Vision curse or the Cloak of Shadows ability we clearly see that it was possible to build a character that would survive simply by blinding all enemies, thus becoming invisible to them which would allow him to have way less defenses because he would simply be engaged by way less mobs at a time. Food for thought anyway...

Affixes on rares need to be more varied. They need to support more playstyles and there needs to be more difficulty in deciding whether a piece of armor is good or bad. Currently the decision is black or white when there should be a lot more nuances of gray in the mix.

Finally, if the mod-pool becomes more diluted game balance can follow. The current "one-shot" or spike-damage mechanics can be smoothened out because the game balance would stop assuming that everyone has +max health on all their pieces of gear. If more utility is added on gear, more game styles can be valid and this would lead to a richer experience.