Drakk the ARPG-ist's PoE Review: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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Emphasy wrote:

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It's true, but still.... DoTA2 also has very high diversion between characters and items (and there is 100+ characters in it!), yet it still remains balanced, and many different playstyles may lead you to victory.
Same could be said about Starcraft2. Units arent homogenized like it was in earlier RTS like Warcraft2.

Don't compare a moba like LoL or Dota2 with PoE. Not only is the complexity in those games lightyears away from what PoE offers it is also very much questionable that those games are properly balanced. I don't know Dota2 enough, but from what I heard it is fairly similar to LoL in that it has Metachamps as much as PoE has its meta build. And like PoE Meta doesn't mean that everything else can't be used it is just the most optimal solution in the current balance environment. The issue for Dota2 and LoL however are not that they are so hard to balance, they need much more balance. In PoE is PvE, while those mobas are PvP which is entirely different.

Dota2 is quite different from LoL in this regard, especially in recent years. At least if you are talking about high level play, Dota2 is probably the most balanced and diverse games out there if judge both by pick rates of champions in games and how unique the heroes are. In this regard its easily possible to make a game with a lot of freedom that is also balanced (sc2 is another example), its just very hard.

PoE's melee vs ranged problem is actually not too hard to solve if GGG just adjust their attitude of releasing new skills as being ridiculously overtuned (blade vortex, looking at you). There were some points in PoE's history where the melee vs ranged wasn't that problematic, but its not the norm. The only real way for PoE to do this is to adjust skills that are truly melee range only

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Dota2 is quite different from LoL in this regard, especially in recent years. At least if you are talking about high level play, Dota2 is probably the most balanced and diverse games out there if judge both by pick rates of champions in games and how unique the heroes are. In this regard its easily possible to make a game with a lot of freedom that is also balanced (sc2 is another example), its just very hard.

Well I would argue that Dota is not that well picked apart as lol is, it is also a bit simpler (LoL often tries to do too much). But in LoL you have whole sets of analysts, which will hit Dota soon too and at this point imbalanced means a champ is about 1% more effective than another one. If you look at winrates in Dota2 and LoL they are both similar ranging from up to 60% all the way down to 35% and that doesn't look too balanced in both cases and both games are a lot simpler than PoE.

And honestly right now LoL is only having win rates from 53% down to 42% so a much smaller margin, yet a lot less champions are played by professionals mainly because of what I sad above. And most of the Top20 champions in LoL in terms of winrate aren't even used by professionals (at least considering the last worlds which were just recently).

So both games don't have a really good balance if you look at actual numbers, but they likely feel better because you usually have a team of 5 and thus individual strong champions are not that easy to recognize and even the stronger champs often have decent counters you can use against them.


But since you play PoE against generic enemies there is hardly any countering because every build faces the same content. If you would get more Flicker or Leap Slamming mobs or more Proximity shields as a ranged character and more Revenants or other melee terrors as a melee this might change, but right now all face the same content so you notice even slight missmatches fairly quickly.