Old timer RPG reflections

Ill not comment much on the OP cause i will start talking about D&D and ill go totally offtopic, but ill rather stand on the basic point made there and the following quote

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Shagsbeard wrote:

Before, you had to make stuff work. You weren't given an item that works no matter what you do with it. New uniques are grossly overpowered. New skills are worse. There's no thought left... no choices that matter. Just "do this and you're good."

Thats actually one of the foundamental problems PoE has now and a core reason behind the gratuitous power creeping. Everyone can see this by himself by just looking at the support gems that GGG has been realeasing lately and compare them to the vanilla ones (the ones before and from 1.0 version).

Compare LMP/GMP, knockback, stun, chain, fork, old pierce, concentrated effect etc to the newly introduced support gems and the old ones that they reworked like elemental focus, controled destruction, new pierce, physical to lightning, trap and mine damage etc. Can you spot the problem? If not ill help you, old supports actually trade something for something else, they worked in such a way that they changed foundamentaly the way your skill you linked them behaved. Now they only indroduce MORE DAMAGE support gems without any drawback. Literally im using controlled destruction in a critical build and i have more damage/and better clear speed than i would have with any other kind of support including critical themed ones. Seriously something is fucked up when you only indroduce support that raise your dps and clear speed unconditionally. You make the game so much easier because it requires much less investement.

I had made a similar point and suggestion to counter it in the past :

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Regulator wrote:

Its the new trend supported from GGG to that new skills should all be overpowered (fucking powercreeping). Not only their damage values are insane but their mechanics and design also seem to be not thought at all. What is the issue here you might ask, and ill gladly analyze it. Many new skills and some older ones that got reworked need absolutely no fucking investment except the very basic ones (wear a wand with cast speed/spell dmg, a 2h weapon with 450dps minimum etc). Take for example Spark, after 1.0 but before the 2.1.0 , in order to make spark work you had to, besides getting spell dmg and cast speed, invest on duration nodes (or rarely duration gem), projectile speed, lmp or gmp, pierce or fork (or chain), what does spark need after the buff ? Only fork or pierce (if you count ascendancy classes it doesnt need even that). In short the skill got insanely OP without thinking. Lets see pre-nerf bladefall : insane damage, insane dmg effectivness, very good cast speed, solid aoe (with quality giving aoe bonus), basically in order to have a decent bladefall build all you had to do was take damage nodes and cast speed nodes (in other words the basic stuff for spells). The game literally tries more and more to make the new skills as easy to use as possible, making so many skill obsolete cause they seem and feel just way too bad in comparison. What im actually suggesting here is for skills to work there should be an actual investment in the tree,gear,gems. Not just put everything with the higher dmg multiplier (aka pierce buff, controlled destruction, elemental focus etc). In order to make that happen GGG whould buff support gems that are not used at all, like knockback, stun, bloodlust, additional accuracy, blind, chance to flee, fork etc. Simple upgrades as adding a secondary effect can make people consider some for using.

Yeah PoE indeed made that transition you talk about a while back, and seriously fuck that. We used to link our fireball with chain and that change to the basic skill was so beautiful that instantly hooked us to the game. Now we link spell echo and controlled destruction to have as much dps possible. Now we get spark with 7projectiles, and pierce with MORE DMG multiplier, a "melee" skill that has more aoe coverage than any basic spell and a MORE multiplier.

The current PoE powercreeping level is the same as when the Book of Exalted Deeds and Book of Vile Darkness were published for D&D. BoED and BoVD had tons of interactions and new mechanics though and at least in D&D the DM from time to time forbade certain things, GGG promotes even more of those broken toys or implements/reworks old ones that straight up suck the fun and creativity out of you. (if you choose to go that way)

Would you really feel better taking 4-6 clicks to kill each monster instead of 1-2. Would that make you feel like you actually accomplished something besides holding down the right mouse?

PoE is transitioning from one style to the other. Stuff is being stuck into the game to give the players more and more loot... not to make the game more interesting, but to make it have more candy. GGG is playing the role of the DM who just makes up random stuff to excite the players.

I hope they realize this and try to swing back to the design that got many of us interested in the game in the first place. It's not too late, but a change in direction is needed.



You're entire point is made with those two paragraphs.

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yungwhiz wrote:

Would you really feel better taking 4-6 clicks to kill each monster instead of 1-2. Would that make you feel like you actually accomplished something besides holding down the right mouse?

It would give monsters a fighting chance? Make combat more interesting? Dare I say make the game a bit harder?

Or do you enjoy exploding monsters like they are balloons filled with loot without any chance of dying during 90% of your game time.
Izaro/Atziri and Malachai (to some extent, they really need to increase the fighting area) are all good mechanical fights which this game needs to have more of imo.

Beyond bosses were also a good addition, I would have loved if there was a high level unique map filled with just beyond magic monsters & bosses.

Killing all monsters in 1-2 clicks is like pulling off a first-turn kill in a turn-based game, it reduces strategy completely to "who goes first?" Having monsters live for at least 2 seconds would be like letting them live until turn 4 in a turn-based game. yungwhiz does have a bit of a point if monsters have severe AI issues which cause them to "pass" on those turns, which would result in an equally boring encounter which takes longer. However, without increasing encounter length, adding meaningful combat depth is essentially impossible.

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Regulator wrote:

Compare LMP/GMP, knockback, stun, chain, fork, old pierce, concentrated effect etc to the newly introduced support gems and the old ones that they reworked like elemental focus, controled destruction, new pierce, physical to lightning, trap and mine damage etc. Can you spot the problem?

Differences aside, they are using these supports as a means of balancing the game. Notice which skills the newly released 'more multiplier' support gems affect - it's highly correlated with lesser used skills. Not sure why phys to lightning is in your list, it's the same as cold to fire has been for a while.

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innervation wrote:

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Regulator wrote:

Compare LMP/GMP, knockback, stun, chain, fork, old pierce, concentrated effect etc to the newly introduced support gems and the old ones that they reworked like elemental focus, controled destruction, new pierce, physical to lightning, trap and mine damage etc. Can you spot the problem?

Differences aside, they are using these supports as a means of balancing the game. Notice which skills the newly released 'more multiplier' support gems affect - it's highly correlated with lesser used skills. Not sure why phys to lightning is in your list, it's the same as cold to fire has been for a while.

Yeap cold to fire also fall in the same category of buffed supports without reason. As if dipping in both fire and cold nodes was not strong enough on its own (maybe not efficient when compared to other kind of changes and skills they implemented), they had to add the extra damage too.

Controlled destruction? MORE, can be used by literally every spellcasting build even critical based ones. Bladefall, EK, Blade Vortex, Spark, Firestorm, Arc etc are just some of the OP skills that it can support. Name one op skill, it can support it.

New Pierce? MORE, can be used by literally every projectile build, name a projectile skill that wouldnt benefit from MORE multiplier, even without taking into account the fixed 50% chance to pierce (this is actually retarded since they made the scion ascendant get 50% pierce and also buffed the pierce wheel near acrobatics to 50%)

Elemental Focus? MORE, can be used literally by every elemental build, like you would give a fuck if you cant shock when can oneshot everything with that juicy multiplier. Name 1 elemental build (or chaos for that instance since everyone is converting shit) that wont benefit from this one too.

Physical to Lighting? EXTRA and conversion, as if converting half your damage to lighting was not a good option vs reflect as well as going full elemental if you wished with certain skills, they needed to add that EXTRA modifier to make it juicer.


Some of the good and well made new support gems are hypothermia and the other similar to it, minefield etc. Compare though those to the above (more,extra), once you test the above you simply cant find any logical reason not to keep using them. Everything that i mentioned above and before (plus some i definately forget) are straight up gratuitous power creeping that only promotes oneshots of any kind. Like Scrotie mentioned before, the equivalent of oneshot or 1second kill in turn based games is killing your opponent in the surpise round (when you are the only one who can act) not even the first round actually. It promotes exactly than, if i shoot first i kill you. Look at atziri farmers, they skip her stages with 2sec skill spam, she uses 4-5 skills in the whole fight and has 2 healing phases thats it. Thats like killing solo an Ancient Red Dragon in D&D in the first 5 turns with a lvl 15 fighter.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Killing all monsters in 1-2 clicks is like pulling off a first-turn kill in a turn-based game, it reduces strategy completely to "who goes first?" Having monsters live for at least 2 seconds would be like letting them live until turn 4 in a turn-based game. yungwhiz does have a bit of a point if monsters have severe AI issues which cause them to "pass" on those turns, which would result in an equally boring encounter which takes longer. However, without increasing encounter length, adding meaningful combat depth is essentially impossible.

The thing is, asymmetric games against computer controlled opponents are generally designed to be winnable by the player, and players expect them to be. In online games the servers have to run games for thousands of players fighting tens or even hundreds of enemies each, so processing power available to a single enemy's AI is limited. Consequently the AI is predictable and players will eventually learn all of its moves and how to avoid them.

The asymmetric nature of the game manifests as the player and enemies being allowed to do different kinds of things. The player having an instant heavy-hitting attack is perfectly fine, but if enemies can instantly kill the player without warning, players will cry foul. So enemies will telegraph their strongest attacks to allow the player to get out of the way.

Since the enemies are inherently stupid, they are given more HP than the player. In case of bosses it may be orders of magnitude more. I don't know the exact numbers for PoE, but I would guess map bosses have millions or tens of millions of HP. Meanwhile players really have to try to hit 10k. This is not so much to give the boss an opportunity to kill the player as it is to allow the player to make a mistake and get herself killed.

In a perfectly balanced symmetric game you would have an approximately 50% chance to beat the boss. That just wouldn't work in PoE where you lose XP with every death. I wonder what the ladder would look like if half of all boss fights would result in the player dying at least once? Would anyone make it even to level 90?

@Databeaver: there's a world of difference between a functional AI on an easy enemy, and a potato which just sits there. I wasn't advocating enemies which are evenly matched against players, merely enemies which actually do things.

Coming from old WoW, I like the boss fight style of Merciless Malachai, more of that in this game wouldn't be bad IMO

"don't stand in the fire" as it were