SET FREE THE ASCENDANCY POINTS (or rework the lab) [New ascension methods/lab rework ideas]

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gibbousmoon wrote:

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Pyrokar wrote:

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The reasons people find it boring today are, for many, the same reasons people found it boring back when traps still hit like a truck.

When did they reduce trap dmg? It's still percentage base except for for Ulab ones. Isn't it?

If I remember correctly, they reduced the damage to ES quite a bit (halved it?). I think they nerfed Izaro as well.

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Environmental traps in the labyrinth now calculate a player's life differently for determining damage. This was previously the total of a player's maximum life and Energy Shield. Now Energy Shield counts as 60% of its value for this purpose. Only Energy Shield covering life is counted. This was determined to be the best ratio applicable to the wide variety of Energy Shield based builds that exist.

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Pyrokar wrote:

That was a long ass time ago. Thought you were talking about something more recent. My bad.

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I) For starters its the first time in an expansion that GGG gated such content. With "such" i mean immaterial content aka the ascendancy points that feel way too important, personal and flavourful for character customization, thus making the first non-optional expansion. After all this is an ARPG game where min-maxing and character creation/optimization matter a ton.

II) Even though gating is a dick move, its sometimes needed to make something feel more important. What is the problem though here is that GGG decided that the gate is a completely different game inside PoE. A series and combination of 80' arcade games with 90' action-adventure, aka Indiana Jones meet PoE meet Contra. This has the negative effect of alienating many players who feel excluded from this expansion because they do not find that - obviously different - playstyle fun and/or engaging. PoE can have experimental content, thats fine from and for everyone, but gating something so important behind that is a dumb move from the company

III) Guess what? there is more. GGG labeled the labyrinth as hard, difficult, skill-based content that will prove to be an alternate end-game. Well they couldnt be more wrong. First of all there is no difficulty issue whatsover, maybe some feel izaro is overtuned for his level but thats easily countered with overleveling or knowing the game mechanics. Second the only skill that someone needs, is to know how to press quicksilver pots or use movement skills. Wait, see pattern of the trap, quicksilver pull lever, and level cleared (just like playing hardcore mario).

IV) But it gets worse. In a game like PoE where the skill tree and character creation is the main attraction surely people's choices must be (and are) very important. Well... labyrinth and especially traps say TO HELL WITH YOUR CHOICES, if x person used 50points on his basic skill tree to get hp and armour while y player used 20 points for hp and armour, regarding traps the person with the less hp has actually an easier time in case he gets hit by a trap. WHAT???? How is that possible you may ask, well its easy, healing pots restore higher percentage to the player with the less flat hp pool. Yeah that happens, and its even worse for certain hybrid or pure ES characters. Ofcourse one's players damage and movement choices are unaffected by the labyrinth. So traps ignore and negate specific mechanics while they allow others to trivilize them.So yeah very well thought and fair system.. not.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

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Trading one evil for another is not so appealing for many players.

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Regulator wrote:

Not gonna lie i stopped playing the game, but come back from time to time to chat with guildmates and see what new is in the game. And today when i came back i saw ton of unread messages and checked them, ofcourse they were about the lab and how shitty, out of place, horrible implemented etc it is. So those messages prompted me to write this one.

Recently one of them guildmates and dear friend made those videos showcasing high level content with unascended characters. Here are some examples :

Unascended Shadow vs lvl 82 Lich
Unascended Shadow vs Red Elder
Unascended shadow vs Four-way legion
Unascended Shadow vs Shaper
Unascended Shadow vs Uber Elder

Go on, check one or two out you wont be dissapointed. Have in mind while he is legit a very good player he is not the no-life gamer/streamer so any of those feats is doable by most experienced players

He demonstrates between other things (depending on each one's personal capabilities of critical thinking) that the game has become a big pile of shit where the damage is so abundant that the ascendancy classes dont even matter anymore.

When they first came out the game was in a much different state and and it worth fighting for, cause they actually mattered, nowdays they dont, maybe you are 10seconds faster in clearing a map if you have one or instead of 5k damages hits you take 4.5k but with the "progress" over the years they might as well put them behind uber elder plus a paywall and mandatory 100h of real time work and nobody will care cause of the millions of dps everybody can reach.

The valiant knights still make the shitty old statements i see and the few of "us" keeping the problem visible are even fewer nowdays i see. Dont expect a drastic change at this point, its costly even thinking about it for GGG, there must be a new round of bad press and vibe again for them to even talk about it, but since Tencent they are way more willing to do so as seen with various way less outspoken issues they rushed to fix (as if those were the majority of players and not 100people on reddit only)

Do what Pyrokar does, and dont ascend, seriously you can do all content, and most importantly when TencentGGG gathers info about classes more unascended ones will appear (as they progressively do in recent info announcemnts), its the only way if you truly desire change to achieve it.

Sincerely FUCK LAB :)