Have you considered scaling down the size of effects?

Hey all,

Thanks for the feedback in this thread. I'll first address the size comment in the OP with a short historical run-down. In the early days of PoE there was very few skills and a lot fewer ways to multiply them. Fireball in the beginning was huge basically because it was the only thing you cast. Once multiple projectiles and various ways to cast it very fast emerged we did make it smaller. Since then things have grown even more crazy, which is part of what makes PoE awesome, but it is a mixed blessing when it comes to effects. We are still finding our way with this as it sometimes can be hard to predict how even new skills will be used , and changes late in the cycle of the skill development might have large and hard to foresee consequences. Regarding Fireball and Ice Spear, they were both made back when there wasn't much going on other than simple self cast so the size wasn't an issue. Now it is a bit different and have new WIP version on our testing servers. In the case of the Ice Spear this has been under way for almost a year if I remember correctly. Unfortunately it is always hard to find time to change older things that "sort of work" compared to adding new content.

Our particle system has also become better and better with time, and currently Russell has been using newer techniques that generally are faster and cleaner than older effects. With the addition of trails we will slowly go over pretty much all projectiles to make them more modern and fitting to the new environment. (trails can create much nicer and cleaner effects where we before had to "spam" slower particles to create a similar look) One thing to be aware of here is that the game has been in development for 7.5 years, and things have changed so much during that time. What might seem like an eternity to many players can be a relatively short amount of time to the developers and the project as a whole.

BTW, lightning shield is internally used as an example of a "bad" effect when it comes to the size and brightness that hijacks all attention near it. The attention grabbing part can also be a good thing though, so with each skill its all about finding a balance. In the case of LS I think it is too obtrusive at the moment, but that brings me to another problem: People tend to grow very attached to the way effects look which makes it hard for us to change things after the fact. An example here is auras which initially were made to look good individually, but created huge messy glows when stacked 3+ which was the common way to use them late game. My point here is that it can be hard to keep up with balance and meta game changes, and each time we do so we have to be very careful. In the case of the aura change it angered a lot of players, even if I think the change was for the best.

As a final note I'd like to say that we are reading the forums and listening to feedback, even when not responding. I understand that something like a year might seem like an eternity for some spells to go unchanged, but that does not mean we are unaware or not caring about the feedback. Even if we know about most of these issues already, more information about them is great to keep us up to date and for helping us prioritise what to address first.