Map Drops in The Awakening

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BlazedAs wrote:

very little trading going on

You're kidding, right? I've made and spent easily 30ex in beta.

Good step in the right direction.

Making map drops rarer than Live isn't a good idea. While yes, some players are able to easily sustain map pools (particularly those running in coordinated groups), it is still quite common for players to have severe problems with map drops.

Combining this "slight" nerf from live, with the boss changes I think is essentially a "double" nerf. So even if we do kill the boss everytime, overall the maps will still be worse than live? What is motivating this change? One of the key things to keep people playing is progression. Making progression harder isn't going to have people sticking around longer.

If you do these changes, which I think are shortsighted or based on nerfing the coordinated map groups and not on the average map player, I hope at least you intend on running several balance paasses on the current map bosses. Right now boss difficulty seems barely tied to map level, with many bosses being trivial on higher maps and some bosses being extremely tough in lowlvl maps.

For reference, my post in the feedback forum on map drops
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1287484

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klausdawg wrote:

Combining this "slight" nerf from live, with the boss changes I think is essentially a "double" nerf. So even if we do kill the boss everytime, overall the maps will still be worse than live?

Uh. No?

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Making map bosses more challenging and more rewarding to fight. They will drop more items (and maps) than they currently do

They're providing incentive to actually kill, rather than skip, the bosses.

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davidnn5 wrote:

So, can you please, just for once in a manifesto, not tell us what it is you want, but *why*? It seems like your motivation is built purely around top-end racers and league players getting advantages (and yes, to 100 too quickly, as it that affects most of us). But I don't want to put words in your mouth - please enlighten me.

Exactly. They seem to be balancing around top-end racers. This is insane. I am hardly a casual player, I have over 4000 hours into POE right now. Yet I have never gotten a character over 92. The game SHOULD NOT be balanced around the very very few minor percentage of players that are willing to grind maps for 10% xp value or less to get to 100.

Ummm this is terrible. I don't understand how anyone can think this is good for the game. Us "casual" players will be stuck running low level maps and if we try to run difficult maps we won't have the gear to survive the maps unless we no life it and slowly gear up from farming low level maps.

I feel like this change is to address racers grinding to level 100 who build huge map pools from only rolling pack size maps. Unfortunately this changes impacts the entire community in a negative way and to a greater degree casual players rather than the racers.


edit: I'm glad I didn't buy a new supporter pack yet. I'm leaning towards not buying one now. I have no interest in farming tropical island and dungeon ad nauseum to experience the end game.

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Serleth wrote:

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klausdawg wrote:

Combining this "slight" nerf from live, with the boss changes I think is essentially a "double" nerf. So even if we do kill the boss everytime, overall the maps will still be worse than live?

Uh. No?

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Making map bosses more challenging and more rewarding to fight. They will drop more items (and maps) than they currently do

They're providing incentive to actually kill, rather than skip, the bosses.

Map boss could drop a +2 once in 20 kills as opposed to once in 40 kills on live, while no other mob in the map can drop a +2, that's very probably a nerf.

Overall, a big relief. This lines up mostly with what I've been saying--it should be fairly easy to sustain, but moving up should be a big step that's taken with some consideration. Really, if you want people to run harder maps, the first priority should be to add more quantity to all the basic mods and nerf pack size to something like 25%-35%. It's the single most lucrative quantity mod because it's effectively multiplicative, but it adds very little difficulty.

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(+2 maps) can cause players to get out of their depth - playing maps that are too hard for the items they currently have.

I agree that this is an issue, and as I understand it one from Maelstrom as well, but surely the opposite case is worse? I mean, any time a HC player dies in maps and has to relevel, that player has a map pool that's much higher than the player can handle. And yet, we manage because we know how to follow the experience penalty and gauge our character's strengths and weaknesses. I can understand wanting to avoid noobtrapping players who are new to the map system, but always running your highest level map is already a currency and experience management mistake to begin with. Endgame should really be the point where this sort of heavy-handedness tapers off. I agree that more pressure than live should be put on rolling maps a bit harder, so long as it's more about "how hard can I make this and live" and less about "what's my rolling budget." But that point, further clamping down on droprates has the opposite effect, where no number of mods makes up for the low base of the map. That's the point it got to for me in the current beta phase, and it was horribly demotivating.

Just something to keep in mind.

EDIT: Also, any nerf to map drops in terms of how much currency you have to dump into them is always going to hit solo players harder than groups. Since the beginning, no real attempt has been made to address the cost disparity between group map rotations versus a solo player who has to roll potentially six times the number of maps while getting the same xp and loot per hour. It's not an accident that Chris here is talking about "mapping groups" rather than players. If the balance team still doesn't feel that this is a problem, then it would be best to err on the side of caution in nerfing map sustain so that solo players can at least stay afloat.

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TheAnuhart wrote:

Map boss could drop a +2 once in 20 kills as opposed to once in 40 kills on live, while no other mob in the map can drop a +2, that's very probably a nerf.

But boss drops will be buffed. Hard to know. I bet it will be less RNG overall.

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TheAnuhart wrote:

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Chris wrote:

It's worth noting that +2 maps are a dangerous thing. They can cause players to get out of their depth - playing maps that are too hard for the items they currently have.

Then let the difficulty be the gate, not currency and map seed RNG.

A gate you can freely open and difficulty, content, challenge you can access if you want, dare.

Currency and RNG will always be apart of the game, that will never change. I think making bosses have a higher chance to drop maps is a difficulty gate. Bosses are not always easy and if you do a boss instead of skipping it you are rewarded.

By the sounds of what was said they are trying to make the game more player friendly. Instead of newer players running into brick walls constantly, they are trying to adjust the game so the game progression isnt so rough.