You break the game, or the game breaks you

"

Char1983 wrote:

One comment though: It is rediculously hard to balance a game that is as complex as PoE, and it becomes even almost impossible to balance it for all classes / skills / builds with the extreme number scaling present in PoE.

The damage a player deals scales from about 10 DPS at the beginning to 20.000 DPS at level 80, with ranges from 2000 DPS to 200.000 DPS. If it scaled fro 10 DPS to 500 DPS instead (with lower monster life) and ranged from 250 DPS to 1000 DPS, it would be much easier to build a game that is challenging for top-tier players yet beatable for casuals. Whether it would be more fun on average, I cannot really say. People love bazillions of DPS.

It is, indeed, difficult. This is why I try to avoid specific balance issues and talk about the game's philosophy and "feel" as a whole. Right now it feels as if GGG are erring on the side of things being too difficult, and the difficulty is not a good one. It feels artificially imposed and unrelated to player skill and knowledge, just to pure luck and usage of a very limited number of skills and items.

"

"

caboom wrote:

my 2 cents for a quick fix would be to reduce both monsters and players attacks/skills damage by 20-25%.

That doesn't make any sense. You reduce/buff either one. Reducing/Buffing both creates the same problem again.

no it dosent.

monsters lower damage means you dont need to spend 3/4 of your skill points into defence to avoid the surprise 1 shot situations widening your choices, players lower damage means one cant go full defence and still achive good damage.

its creates choices, what you want to play? the moving rock that can facetank olmost everything but has crap clear speed or the glass cannon with high damage that cant take more than 2 or 3 hits? and of course the wide variety between them.

heck i would go 1 step further and make defensive skills like fortitude give a negative global damage to enforce this offensive vs defensive choice.

It also feels very random. A lot of the time the map is very easy, and then the boss hits like a truck. I see that the boss should be harder, but the discrepancy between the boss and the rest of the map should not be extreme right? For example, the bosses in Phantasmagoria and Village Ruin seem pretty much out of place. And then other times the boss is just pretty weak (Underground River Bear, or the Rhoas in Arid Lake and Plateau, though I love both maps).

Bosses like Necropolis feel right to me. They are harder then the rest of the map, but not impossible, they don't oneshot you, they require some skill and running around. I have had some very interesting fights with the Necropolis boss, or with dual Necropolis bosses.

"

caboom wrote:

heck i would go 1 step further and make defensive skills like fortitude give a negative global damage to enforce this offensive vs defensive choice.

It's called Fortify, if you mean that, but I think that idea is pretty bad. If you do that, the usual result is that someone creates a ranged glass cannon that is so extreme in damage output that its offence becomes its defense (if you oneshot or permafreeze everything before it can reach you, you don't have to have any defense, essentially). That just massively benefits casters and ranged characters and massively penalizes melee.

"

caboom wrote:

its creates choices, what you want to play? the moving rock that can facetank olmost everything but has crap clear speed or the glass cannon with high damage that cant take more than 2 or 3 hits? and of course the wide variety between them.

I wish it's like this. But in the current state @ >lvl 77 map bosses the tank can take 1 upto 2 hits and all other get one-shot, unless you are a tank and somehow bypassed the life leech problem.

I think the entire game needs to be tuned down. Monsters have now ridiculous amounts of HP and hit like a train, while players do well above 100k dps with just 3-4k health.

I would like 3-4k end game dps with 3-4k health for regular players and 1-2k dps with 5k health for the tank like players. That feels balanced. Monsters are tuned to these values.

It's hard to explain to new players that their regular 8k dps build is not good enough for maps. They need more more-modifiers until you get around 50k dps for single targets. (And even then Malachai was outregerating me with my 21k tooltip Kinetic Blast dual totem build)

That was a really good read, thank you for this. Although on one hand I am very pleased with most aspects of the game as it stands now, and was thrilled with the new expansion(s) for the most part, I fully agree with almost all of what you have said here. I recently posted a feedback thread praising the expansion and the general direction the game has taken since I began my long hiatus from PoE last year around the end of ambush/invasion (Not sure how that was received as I haven't looked at it since posting because it was mainly meant for the devs on the off chance one of them happened to see it while skimming the forums; if someone bet me that it ended up as a childish flame war I would not take that wager that's for sure), but one thing that I did touch on was the frustration that I feel over GGG's tendency to look at the achievements of those in the top 2-3% of the ladder as personal slights and as insults to their game-design prowess. Of course there is much more to the issue than just that, and you have managed to articulate my feelings on these subjects far better than me. Obviously a great deal of thought was put into your post.

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love the game but collectively these issues prevent it from reaching true "legendary" status as far as I am concerned. Unfortunately I do not think that GGG's stance on the subject will change; I could be (And hope that I am) wrong as the master crafting that was introduced between my departure and recent return is a huge change that represents, in my opinion, a significant deviation from GGG's preferred vision for their game. To me, this illustrates their willingness, in some cases, to accede to the players' wishes to the detriment of their own. In any case, I will continue to play so long as I enjoy it; when I am no longer deriving a sense of accomplishment (yeah, I know) and excitement from the game I will take another break and come back for a review after a couple of major patches.

Really quickly, one other thing that I recently began to consider is that the constant rebalancing due to the success of a tiny percentage of the playerbase has resulted, in many cases, in some fairly vitriolic resentment being directed at the segment of the player population that, regardless of how you feel about their decision to devote so much time/energy into an online game, is responsible for much of the innovation and "theorycrafting" that drives the discovery of unique and interesting builds. "If it wasn't for you no-lifers my ____________ build wouldn't have been nerfed!", et cetera. That is definitely not healthy for the game.

I'm fine with GGG's efforts to keep the game challenging. I think the devs are fine with players outsmarting them in unexpected ways, but when all challenge is removed, that's not ok. It has severe impact on the lifetime of a character for most players.

"

Kaw wrote:

I think the entire game needs to be tuned down. Monsters have now ridiculous amounts of HP and hit like a train, while players do well above 100k dps with just 3-4k health.

Personally I think if you have 100k DPS and 3k health you got your priorities wrong (unless you have other strong ways of defending yourself, for example a tanky decoy totem), and if you keep dying in 77+ maps with that, well, that's just like it is.

"

Kaw wrote:

I would like 3-4k end game dps with 3-4k health for regular players and 1-2k dps with 5k health for the tank like players. That feels balanced. Monsters are tuned to these values.

While I think that your suggestion over-amplifies DPS builds (tanky builds get 43% more life compared to DPS builds, DPS builds get 133% more damage compared to tanky builds - you seem to not like to build tanky characters), I like the general direction you are going, toning down numbers. However, it is not going to happen.

"

Kaw wrote:

(And even then Malachai was outregerating me with my 21k tooltip Kinetic Blast dual totem build)

My build has 15k tooltip DPS. Malachai on Merciless is easy and fun, maps are fine up to level 77 (have not tried much above yet). Damage is not the issue.

"

Char1983 wrote:

For example, the bosses in Phantasmagoria and Village Ruin seem pretty much out of place.