To everyone QQing about Poison Arrow (and letter to PvP Devs)

Wear two Ming's Hearts.

WARNING: I AM ASSUMING YOU GUYS ARE HLD.

In all seriousness, GGG, 99% of players do not have Chaos Resistance (And 99% of players trying PvP atm are PvE who don't give a damn about PvP and are in to get rep. aka, not dedicated PvP builds. Because why gear an entirely different character who is exclusively effective at 1v1 or 3v3 or some crap? Use existing PvE char who has -60% chaos res because almost no mobs deal chaos damage). The 1% that use CI are then destroyed by Exploding Arrow, which can literally be swapped into Poison Arrow setups and still be fully effective. Along with Tornado Shot, these are the unholy trinity of godawful bow skills that are currently OP.

Now, I don't know how you guys tested PvP balancing and formulas, but it is indisputable that regular players are a veritable bug-finding force. Not only are we more numerous and diversified in build choices: We also deliberately root out things that are broken as hell, to get an edge over the opponent. We may not have figured out all the OP synergies, but we've found plenty. So trust in our feedback. When we say something is OP, it isn't that our build, specifically, can't handle it. It's because 99% of builds cannot handle it. Especially people who use totems and minions, who have next to no sources of chaos resistance and are often easily destroyed by other attacks regardless. What's even more egregious is that these builds are so easily made: Get a +3 5L bow. Couple of exalts, tops. Throw in some cheap gems. Proceed to kill everyone else.

If I were in charge of PvP balance, I would have released hotfixes for these PvP formulas within hours. If further issues came up, they would be addressed immediately. While balance is sometimes a case of see-saw: down with X, up with Y, it is possible to achieve balance through reactionary, but reasoned, adjustments.

Ditto the hotfixes for certain daily Leo missions not giving rep (Win a 6v6 CTF as certain class), ditto that for PvP matching (You need to make ranking changes more drastic, or else people will continuously face each other, which not only dulls the PvP experience, but can be abused to farm rep). Is that what you want, GGG? A crappy unvaried PvP experience? Sarn Arena FFA is way more fun than 1v1 simply because it's DIFFERENT (it gets old when only the same people are in a fight, though).

And another thing: You've divided your focuses too greatly. Here's the thing: You introduced new leagues and PvP. Great, you gave us a choice, except now everyone chose to go temp-leagues.

Not that I would advocate against the regular introduction of temporary leagues, but here's my analysis of the way you planned things.

Firstly, you introduced the templeagues immediately, along with the new PvP-oriented Uniques. Then you slated the first season of PvP events to occur about a week or two after the introduction of the new leagues. PoE's playerbase consists of people who exclusively play temp-leagues, people who play both Standard and temp-leagues, and people who play Standard exclusively. What you've done clearly panders to anyone who plays temp-leagues, since this first week is formative for the economy of temp-leagues.

But what about that last third of your audience (not to assume exactly 33% of PoE players play standard exclusively)? You've hung us out to dry. All we get is the default PvP experience, which is 80 XP a kill, facing the same guy over and over. Pretty weak stuff. Here's the thing: People who play Standard exclusively hunger for new content, rather than old content rehashed (temp leagues, essentially). Act 3? Good. Forsaken Masters? Good. Act 4? We're salivating. But your new content for this patch was Leo and PvP. And guess what? It's not a satisfactory standalone experience, for all the time investment vs payoff, when it should be.

In politics, politicians selectively target the borderline audience, attempting to sway them into joining their faction. They don't bother with the solid supporting fanbase, which is already hooked and will continue to follow unless if catastrophic mistakes are made.

You guys should do the same. People who are staying are here to stay. You guys should have marketed towards people who aren't sold on your changes by shoving them in their faces. It wouldn't have been subtle, and people might have complained about carrot and stick tactics. But guess what? It would have worked.

If you wanted those borderline people to care about PvP, you should have:
1). Introduced the interesting PvP events first. LLD>HLD audience, according to current demographics, but more importantly, FFA and multi-person tourneys. 1v1 is extremely stale, especially with your broken matchmaking system.

You put in a one week delay for your seasonal events, so your borderline audience has already tried the REWARDING PvP experiences (1v1, 3v3, 6v6, which are respectively crap or impossible to get matches in) and found them disappointing. In short, plan your PvP seasons better to catch more interested people.

2). Create incentives for PvPing. Leveling Leo for a new hideout and some decor is enough, but for some, it isn't enough. To them, Leo's pathetic L28 gear and quirky workbench, in conjunction with some pretty graphical assets, is unsatisfying. PoE is an ARPG, and therefore loot-central. So give them cake. Your later PvP seasons are going to have rewards, yes but those are LATER. You should have made them NOW, if you wanted to hold the pre-patch hype.

But really, creating event-exclusive rewards isn't enough of an incentive. You guys should scale up PvP experience. 80 XP per kill, yeah, I can see that working just fine at the level 7->8 grind. Assuming about 800k XP requirement, that's a lovely 10,000 PvP kills for just that level. And each kill can take up to a minute and a half, and they're all hard-earned. So at least 1,000 hours of sheer winning in PvP. To say nothing of when people lose in PvP, which is an inevitability when two sides are in conflict. As someone who has leveled all of the original Forsaken Masters to level 8 during the days of Tidal, Mud Flats, and Fetid Pool grinding, or master split maps, I will say that Leo's PvP grind is far more difficult and tedious than that of all other masters combined. It is also far less rewarding.

Give the losers rewards? Introduce some items that can be obtained EXCLUSIVELY via PvP with some PvE and PvP utility? I don't know.

But what I do know is this: If I'm given a choice between new leagues with a fresh economy where the gimmick is literally bags of loot, and an unrewarding, stale, unbalanced PvP experience in an ARPG, I think I know what I'm going to choose.

Pa is fine, actually it's kinda weak vs anyone with good chaos res. I'd like to see a way to penetrate chaos res too(maybe on vulnerability or gem itself)

Edit: 80 x 100 000 isn't 800 000

poison arrow is quite weak against good chaos res but most of player play with -60 % :D

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Malone wrote:

poison arrow is quite weak against good chaos res but most of player play with -60 % :D

Not even close, PvPers aren't stupid

Maybe the top10 is not stupid, the rest is still discovering PvP and have builds with many weakness, including crazy chaos resistance ( and I do include myself in this last category, I am still learning from my mistakes ).

What you learn quickly is to have some alt gear to quickly switch at the beginning of the fight to adapt your setup to the opponent.

we are at the beginning, people are just starting to adapt.

Still PA is extremely easy to work around, also move alot and stay away from the clouds

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Tommie_Sjukskriven wrote:

Still PA is extremely easy to work around, also move alot and stay away from the clouds

fix'd math mistake

As for Poison Cloud, I don't know if you've ever fought people with dedicated builds (e.g: not talentless hacks who decided to jump on the PA bandwagon because they saw it dominating), but their AOE clouds are really big, their trees have DoT and AOE, and they have over 15k DoT via +3 bow, Level 4 (effective 5 from +1) Empower, 6Ls, etc. They can shoot several meters away from me and I'll feel it. Fast attack speed doesn't hurt either.

Plus, they can always swap to their backup, which nobody here has addressed (but several people have complained about in a separate thread, although I keep forgetting HLD is a minority.

Which I don't understand, because LLD is just scaled-down HLD brokenness. What do people in LLD use? TS, EA, Whirling, Flicker Strike, all that good ol' OP crap.

What do people in HLD use? Oh, I don't know, the exact same stuff.

Sure, sometimes I see the occasional weird guy like a Temporal Chaining CI Firestormer with lots of ES regen from Templar's Oath and some kind of tank defense, or a quadcursing summoner with tank zombies (that I destroy with prolif), or Chaos (insert skill variant here).

But mostly the hypereffective skills. The main difference between LLD and HLD is that LLD is cheaper.

The most annoying thing about PA is that you can't avoid it in closed arena, you either have resist or you die (and even with 75% you still take damage). I have one PA build (that i made i 1.2 in order to finally achieve counter reflect) and to be honest, i don't like playing it because of that mechanic.