Counterintuitive to the current clear speed meta: Slow the Game Back Down

I don't know why people are trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist.

Obviously if you're fully decked out, you are going to speed clear stuff very fast. That's the entire point of playing past post end-game. The strength of your character is going to scale past the difficulty of the current piece of content if you play it many dozens times over after beating it the first time.

If it takes you 10 mins to do gorge the first time, and if you improve your character running gorge 500 times. Why would it still take you 10 mins?

If you try to balance post end game scaling, you either need to make much more end game content (go high), or nerf everything so everyone is wearing garbage with much weaker skills (so only the 1% l33T can clear fast). Which is going wide.

If you balance based off the highest/fastest clearing builds/items, then everyone not running a decked out fully min-max out FOTM build is going to be completely ass with the "good build" being the average one.

"

RagnarokChu wrote:

I don't know why people are trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist.

Obviously if you're fully decked out, you are going to speed clear stuff very fast. That's the entire point of playing past post end-game. The strength of your character is going to scale past the difficulty of the current piece of content if you play it many dozens times over after beating it the first time.

its a problem because getting to that level is far to easy right now.

you dont need top tier gear

you dont need great gear

you dont need good gear

fuck you dont even NEED gear apparently .. if you cheese the right mechanics .



That is a problem. if everything is easy with my dirty rags and rusty sword . why the hell am i going to bother going for that fine silk and shiny broad sword?

the motivations to being the most awesome dude out there is completely undermined when the mountain you are king of is just an ant hill in your back yard.

"

Saltychipmunk wrote:

"

RagnarokChu wrote:

I don't know why people are trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist.

Obviously if you're fully decked out, you are going to speed clear stuff very fast. That's the entire point of playing past post end-game. The strength of your character is going to scale past the difficulty of the current piece of content if you play it many dozens times over after beating it the first time.

its a problem because getting to that level is far to easy right now.

you dont need top tier gear

you dont need great gear

you dont need good gear

fuck you dont even NEED gear apparently .. if you cheese the right mechanics .



That is a problem. if everything is easy with my dirty rags and rusty sword . why the hell am i going to bother going for that fine silk and shiny broad sword?

the motivations to being the most awesome dude out there is completely undermined when the mountain you are king of is just an ant hill in your back yard.

Far too easy compared to what? Other people? How it "used to be?".

It was always a clear speed meta, the only change now is that it's accessible to everyone instead of a very people that grinded enough.

People were complaining that it took dozens upon of hours to improve your character, now people are complaining there isn't enough hours to use your character once they got enough strength since everything so ez.

Going through the story 3x over got harder because of act 4 (and longer), and low to mid tier maps were always the same difficulty. Only difference now is more people go into them compared to before since there isn't a massive wall of grinding you have to do. You can go to dried lake for a couple dozen times and then buy a couple of cheap pieces to plug up the holes. Or if you are self-found, run dried lake a couple more dozen times.

Like you thinking after playing a game for 1000 hours it's always going to stay "hard and difficult". Even dark souls if you play it enough you can run through the game never dying. You can't design content to scale with player skill and optimization unless you do in fact design the game around the L337 1%.

"

raics wrote:

"

Sa_Re wrote:

I love SotN. ;)

Me too, replayed it recently :)

Looking forward to Bloodstained?

I do! Finally another castleroid game on proper platforms.

"

RagnarokChu wrote:

"

Saltychipmunk wrote:

"

RagnarokChu wrote:

I don't know why people are trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist.

Obviously if you're fully decked out, you are going to speed clear stuff very fast. That's the entire point of playing past post end-game. The strength of your character is going to scale past the difficulty of the current piece of content if you play it many dozens times over after beating it the first time.

its a problem because getting to that level is far to easy right now.

you dont need top tier gear

you dont need great gear

you dont need good gear

fuck you dont even NEED gear apparently .. if you cheese the right mechanics .



That is a problem. if everything is easy with my dirty rags and rusty sword . why the hell am i going to bother going for that fine silk and shiny broad sword?

the motivations to being the most awesome dude out there is completely undermined when the mountain you are king of is just an ant hill in your back yard.

Far too easy compared to what? Other people? How it "used to be?".

It was always a clear speed meta, the only change now is that it's accessible to everyone instead of a very people that grinded enough.

People were complaining that it took dozens upon of hours to improve your character, now people are complaining there isn't enough hours to use your character once they got enough strength since everything so ez.

Going through the story 3x over got harder because of act 4 (and longer), and low to mid tier maps were always the same difficulty. Only difference now is more people go into them compared to before since there isn't a massive wall of grinding you have to do. You can go to dried lake for a couple dozen times and then buy a couple of cheap pieces to plug up the holes. Or if you are self-found, run dried lake a couple more dozen times.

Like you thinking after playing a game for 1000 hours it's always going to stay "hard and difficult". Even dark souls if you play it enough you can run through the game never dying. You can't design content to scale with player skill and optimization unless you do in fact design the game around the L337 1%.

The game will never be as difficult as it was your first time through. However, giving bosses tactics that should be maneuvered will allow the game to be slowed down and at the same time make it easier to pull the power of various skill builds closer together. Right now, the game balances around what is meta/what GGG wants to become the next meta. Usually the nerfs are not enough and at the same time the dirt tier of skills are left virtually untouched. If you can deck out a cheap but op EQ character , but need to actually avoid the hard hitting attacks or you will end up dying to map bosses because you ignored the telegraphed windup it simply becomes easier to allow GGG to buff/nerf gems to not be so far apart from each other in effectiveness. Molten strike currently has nowhere near the clear speed of Earthquake, I don't particularly care if molten strike become exactly equal to earthquake and it probably is impossible to make them even anyway, but there should be a difference of like a minute to thirty seconds to kill a map boss. Molten strike does well as a block based defensive build as it is but dps is severely lacking versus Marohi EQ. A heavy defence build like that should be able to handle the heavy hits of the boss a bit better allowing them to swing away at point blank range longer. Meanwhile the EQ marohi should be forced to suffer a bit for not going 1h/shield and have to eq from a distance often enough to make it relevant.

It can still be easier/quicker for the dps oriented meta builds, but the average creative builds should be following behind a lot closer then they are now. And flat out just buffing non meta skills seems like lazy power creep while tactical boss fights can slow powercreep down by not letting you attack constantly. Just look at the new boss video and see how a meta build and non meta could be fair enough if meta builds were forced to actually play defensively beyond spamming flasks and stacking endurance charges/ one shotting everything with mines/ stacking BV with Vaal Haste and Clarity.

You're right, the game should be slowed down. Like it actually is, as I told in my "future endgame improvements" thread, damage is just overpowering everything else - of course damage from distance.

Your analysis is completely correct and I hope GGG will find a way to slow the game down in future Endgames - and Makes it possible to build Tanks that really can sustain every situation in close combat like Tanks should.

Anybody ever tried to afk Uber? ^^
Should be possible to survive - of course you can't win.

Why you should build a Tank if you can't survive every situation if you can kill everything with a dd before it ist able to harm you? It's no point in that.

@Fruz: My point with StarCraft 1 (not SC2) was that balance was handled by third-party (community mapmakers). We remember it fondly as a superbly well-balanced game, but that wasn't true with the initial map pool (which tended to overly favor Zerg due to rush distances). In the most competitive tournaments the maps weren't official Blizzard, they were finely tuned creations which finished Blizzard's balance work, using terrain as the final balance lever (although Blizzard deserves credit for getting balance close enough to make this possible). New introductions to the map pool also caused for balance revaluations and provided that steady flow of additional meta shakeup content, all without direct Blizzard action.

So, to ask those against third-party solutions in game design, well, there's a shining example of third-party success.

@RagChu: As I said earlier, expanding player knowledge erodes balance. However, balance exists on the meta, theorycrafting level. I think the game should be more challenging for piloting skill reasons. Now, I'm not trying to say every damn build in an ARPG should be a high APM intense bullet hell experience... just the glass, kill-entire-screen-in-a-blink-of-an-eye builds. Those should be; they are not. It's the same result but in casual mode.

Right now everything is tilted towards meta, nothing to skilled piloting. When it comes to loot/XP per hour, build matters, gear matters, trading matters, but whether it not you watch Netflix as you farm doesn't matter. PoE is no longer a game worthy of your full attention - except when theorycrafting or trading.

.

.

@ScrotieMcB But when the theorycrafting involves near maximum potential (all 20/20 gems with mirror weapon) vs content that require a much lower potential (weapon that is 15-20% of max potential and level 15 gems) that is were we have problems.

If I start at 2k dps at dried lake, and every 3 hours I farm dried like I gain 1k dps. After 30 hours I now have 12k dps. Now I have 6x the damage needed to clear dried lake and if I start maps I can plow through all of the low-mid tiers.

After that point it will continue to scale further and further past the content. It becomes trivial because you "earned" the right for the content to be trivial. GGG like I said has two options to go about this, either up the amount of content that requires a much higher potential (latest expansion) and then nerf the shit out of everything to lower max potential. Making you move through said potential much slower.

Even then at some point you'll hit the amount of potential power to make all content trivial, which is the goal of every character.