An illness, the attainment of BiS gear.

Maybe start by removing mirrors so rmters would have to at least face the perils of the mighty RNG.
Setting the price of each bis slot as a finite value was a terrible idea.

hunting for BiS isnt an illness. its the core design of any arpg diablo like.

you always want to

improve your charakter
you do that by getting better gear
at some point you have almost BiS gear
and the next step whould be attaining that BiS gear for your build.

it just takes alot of time if you dont flip/rmt, and i think alot of players dont want to understand this :P

I think the problem here is that even mid-tier equipment like 400 DPS weapons in the lategame are stupidly difficult to come by yet the game expects you to have them, let alone the 600+ dps monstrosities that are the BIS items.

The other issue is the extremely high monster damage and very low life on levelup (i know it got buffed but it's still not enough later on).

The days of making crazy builds like a two-handed axe witch or an elemental bow templar are over and GGG's doing their best to keep it that way. Sickening.

EDIT: It got me to thinking that maybe there could be additional recipes added that aided in getting decent weapons and armor, stuff like regal + ilevel 60 rustic sash + ilevel 60 heavy belt to craft a yellow two-mod weapon with %phys and +phys based on the rarities of the sashes. That way you could recipe your mid to lategame weapons like the current phys/spell recipes do for the earlygame.

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Hemmingfish wrote:

The days of making crazy builds like a two-handed axe witch or an elemental bow templar are over and GGG's doing their best to keep it that way. Sickening.

Like i mention, but maybe not clearly enough, those builds still function IF you have BiS gear to allow them to function.

And that's mainly my point, quirky builds are gated behind overpowered items to have a reason for being in PoE. If your not playing min-maxed cookie cutter or meta following build, be prepared to deplete your exalt stash at triple the ratio compared to making a build like i mention before. that is, if you wanna play alched 77 and 78's with them and enjoy a bit of the end-game at a reasonable pace.

That's one of the reasons i think the community is so focused on the hunt for BiS gear. Not necessarily to make min-maxed builds function, but to experiment with the wide variety of possibility's in the end-game of PoE.

Peace,

-Boem-

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Boem wrote:

That is not to say it holds no relevance to the build, i am simply saying that at a certain point in character development, items become of a higher value then the passive points one gains with each increasing level.

As such and with the things i just wrote in mind, i think the hunt for BiS gear is a symptom of a more underlying illness within the game.
This illness in case it was not yet clear, is overall balance or more accurate the lack of such a balance.

-Boem-

I think that items should be more valueable than the skill tree and it is is neccessary to keep the game interesting. If it is too easy to get items that are very close to best in slot gear, people will lose interest. I think that the constant hunt to try to get best in slot items is what drives people to keep playing. I also think that once you have all mirrored best in slot items, you basically win the game for that character. Once you can do all content and never die and kill everything in seconds, you win. I think that is what happens with a lot of people. They get to that point, or as close as they are going to get reasonably, and they make a new character or build to keep it interesting.

I think they can fix balance on certain builds by just buffing skill gems/items that affect certain builds..

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Disrupted wrote:

Don't really see a problem, D2 was like this too (regarding weird builds and requirement of great gear).
Once you reach a certain part it will be much harder to progress, and looking out for that BiS gear is part of what will keep you playing.

People however got the wrong idea about D2 because it was full of botters, RmTers, D2jsp trash.
Without those you'd rarely ever see any high runeword, I played pure HC for years, rarest drop I ever got was Templar's Might, my throw barb wore it with pride!

I played D2 HC too and the difference is that you were able to 1 shot everything with mediocre gear while playing solo.
You only needed high runewords and BiS stuff to solo the game in a full party, kill baal in 1-3 seconds in a full party...

in PoE you need really high-end gear to just solo a high lvl map in an acceptable speed...

And I got several high rune drops (at least after the drop rate buff) and stuff like that without bots.
I also found pretty much every unique and set item (except windforce)... The drop rate was much higher than e.g. a koams heart imho especially...

"

Orbitalx wrote:

"

Boem wrote:

That is not to say it holds no relevance to the build, i am simply saying that at a certain point in character development, items become of a higher value then the passive points one gains with each increasing level.

As such and with the things i just wrote in mind, i think the hunt for BiS gear is a symptom of a more underlying illness within the game.
This illness in case it was not yet clear, is overall balance or more accurate the lack of such a balance.

-Boem-

I think that items should be more valuable than the skill tree and it is is necessary to keep the game interesting. If it is too easy to get items that are very close to best in slot gear, people will lose interest. I think that the constant hunt to try to get best in slot items is what drives people to keep playing. I also think that once you have all mirrored best in slot items, you basically win the game for that character. Once you can do all content and never die and kill everything in seconds, you win. I think that is what happens with a lot of people. They get to that point, or as close as they are going to get reasonably, and they make a new character or build to keep it interesting.

I think they can fix balance on certain builds by just buffing skill gems/items that affect certain builds..

Your argument is two dimensional from my perspective sir.

first of all, if more weight was put into the passive tree for example, the hunt for BiS gear would not magically disappear like some people in this thread are suggesting. The only difference would be that instead of increasing the power of a character by 50%, the power curve would be at a 25% increase, that's still an increase worth hunting for from my perspective.

Secondly, when it comes to re-rolling characters in the current game-state, depending on your mind-set, you can only keep doing it for X amount of time, since most builds fail to function reasonable when compared with other builds previously developed. As an example i always use somebody that made all the current crit builds and then decides to roll a non-crit build. The disparity between these two set-ups is so huge that a non-crit feels dull and sluggish in comparison. So in reality the huge disparity kills the desire to re-roll since only a very narrow scope of builds can maintain a functionality in high-end content.

And this second thing is partially because of the power presented in items. One can make functioning allts or re-rolls for sure, but the efficiency behind them compared to min-maxed builds is an insult to the investment.(exaggeration to illustrate my point obviously)

An easy comparison is my crit ST char vs my 2-hand cleave char.

the crit character, roughly 6 exalts worth of investment and goes pew pew pew in 78 maps with 100% modifiers.

My duelist roughly 11 exalts invested and fears going into 77/78 maps with to many modifiers.

Both characters can run those maps btw, but the duelist will die often which in this game design, cost's me even more currency. While that shadow can be played with one eye open in 100% 78 maps and perform without any risk of dying, which saves me currency.

So in terms of rerolling, once you have enough game-knowledge you know when you have depleted the characters to re-roll with, because all others will be quirky and fail eventually in high end content.

In reality the current system holds re-rolling back and makes it a negative experience if you consider the out-come. That's not to say you cant be having fun with it, but eventually the current design will put you in front of a wall unable to overcome, well that's not entirely true, if you have the currency to back it up you can roll 78 maps with just 50% packsize on them and nothing else to delete the challenge from the content.

Peace,

-Boem-

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azraelb wrote:

"

Disrupted wrote:

Don't really see a problem, D2 was like this too (regarding weird builds and requirement of great gear).
Once you reach a certain part it will be much harder to progress, and looking out for that BiS gear is part of what will keep you playing.

People however got the wrong idea about D2 because it was full of botters, RmTers, D2jsp trash.
Without those you'd rarely ever see any high runeword, I played pure HC for years, rarest drop I ever got was Templar's Might, my throw barb wore it with pride!

I played D2 HC too and the difference is that you were able to 1 shot everything with mediocre gear while playing solo.
You only needed high runewords and BiS stuff to solo the game in a full party, kill baal in 1-3 seconds in a full party...

in PoE you need really high-end gear to just solo a high lvl map in an acceptable speed...

And I got several high rune drops (at least after the drop rate buff) and stuff like that without bots.
I also found pretty much every unique and set item (except windforce)... The drop rate was much higher than e.g. a koams heart imho especially...

Man, im jelly of your RNG.

With that said, I wouldnt call the gear you needed to 1 shot everything "mediocre" and I was having in mind weird builds since it was about this too. Hell, just the last part of running Baal was a nightmare, those lightning souls and exploding skull midgets... Yeah I know of the lower kurast and Hell rune farming, I never had much luck myself.
With that said, Ill agree that the game was a little easier. It was also pretty much left to itself for at least 5 years (if not more) and was an unbalanced mess for the most part full of broken skills that I wonder if ever got fixed (meant real broken like a few of the amazon skills). Me, I stopped playing when the ladders time became reduced to catter to the RMT/Botters/JSP players, which by then were the majority.
For that matter D2 suffered of the exact same problem, it had a few OPop builds and others were given the middle finger if you didnt have very good gear, that's what the OP was about too.

Now you got me curious too, we could calculate D2 uniques drop chance (and unless baal farmed, the rarest had a ridiculous chance to drop), but does anyone know Kaom's heart drop chance? Well, I guess you do, so could you tell me?

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Boem wrote:

People are forced into builds to enjoy the end-game

People should learn/remember to enjoy their builds in itself instead of 'enjoying endgame' only...

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Mr_Cee wrote:

"

Boem wrote:

People are forced into builds to enjoy the end-game

People should learn/remember to enjoy their builds in itself instead of 'enjoying endgame' only...

While i don't necessarily disagree with that sentiment, i do hope you realize how hollow that argument sounds?

Some examples,

1) end-game provides the best experience for a character
2) end-game is the most challenging content and could be considered "the most fun" for players with a certain mind-set
3) time spend in end-game has the highest chance of return profits in this game

I mean, sure you can get level 100 and some currency by running tropical islands only, but that doesn't necessarily equate to fun either. Neither does having a fun build that is unable to level up if the player desires to do so.

My point was that the scope of builds that can tackle hard end-game content are very narrow when compared with possible theory-crafts presented in this game. And because of this, if people want to experience that part of the game they have the option of playing a few select builds and forget about any creativity.

Peace,

-Boem-