cynic's reaction to the announcement

1) well.. leveling is now better. i like it. i like seeing how my characters grow. but..

1a) but most of the builds can be made at lvl 60+ due to build-enabling uniques that are 59, 61, 65 or 75.. so it is the same stuff: one has to force oneself to slog trough the content just so he can play the build he wants. anyone tried leveling AS melee CI? in reality you slog with magma orb or firestorm or whatever till 50-60 and then switch. these first levels are a total waste of time. i do not see any change in this area. so the people will complain - because the problem is still there

2) when i read 4 major and 12 minor gods i already have a stinking suspition that one or few of these will be uber rare..

3) new bosses.. cool. but new bosses approach TCP/IP packets TTL levels. 20 jumps, 500ms and they are dead. with power creep boss design DOES NOT MATTER. as long as a player exploiting YOUR 'balance' can dish out dps measured in gazzillions.. noone will ever notice that your bosses have phases or mechanics. right click, life bar goes down, collect loot (or skip it, we have peons for that)

4) balance again. if you continue to give power for free to anyone who asks and our damage will continue to grow 'just because' (pierce support - %more multiplier on top of already more damage via primary effect.. WTF?!?!) the game will be the same shallow shadow of what it once could have been. balance at this time matters more than colours and fancy 'acts'

5) new layouts seen in the videos around the neat. these were not strands - irrelevant. noone will run these maps. you conditioned the playerbase that map has to be linear corridor with easy mobs, no obstacles and should if possible has a dimensions allowing full discharge to cover entire width. new layouts have too many edges the shield charge can stop on. move on to whatever new shaped strand will be.

6) new boss fight. 'melee friendly' as ever. you guys never learn.. 'melee' in poe is a joke and you seem to like it that way


people right now are hyping the '10 acts' like madmans - their right, fair enough.

sadly, it doesnt solve the problem people were moaning about (and will do in 3.0 because nothing will change) - to start an endgame build (typical and easy example - RF build) one has to get RotP. lvl 65. good job. slog till then. same with Oro's sacrifice. and many many builds. CI is yet another example.

once the hype calms down and we see that the 'careful balancing process' that brough us into 3y long reign of ES+VP builds with double-dip on top of it is still with us - it will be a very bitter-sweet expansion. cool leveling process (i really like it - but how many characters can be leveled 'as' from the start? most my builds cannot. simply as that) but the same rotten core.

'power-level till new-version-of-dried-lake, farm till you reach gear requirements, move on to abuse current FotM crap on linear maps killing mobs that cannot hit back maybe noticing a boss or two (the loot explosion is a good tale)'

i hope im wrong and the power creep we 'enjoyed' since 2.0 will be tamed down. if not.. cool, yet another clicker game with pretty gfx..

How is waiting till lvl 50-65 an issue? I mean sure they could add low level mini versions of these uniques but getting to lvl 50-65 is neither hard or time consuming. We are talking within a week of casual "I have a job and friends gameplay". So what is the problem with that?

i had to buy character slots several times now. it really isnt any fun to level witch that is planned to be a melee ci character. it isnt any fun to go trough the same story (no matter how good!) for the 50th time (and you have to know that i used to race a lot in the past - had a separate account for that - and racing used to be mainly 'start act1normal and go-go-go. ive done these first 30 levels SO MANY TIMES already

and people that were moaning about cruel or merc removal had the same very issue. you HAVE to do these 50-65levels. HAVE to. as an off-build. would anyone do that if we had an option to create a lvl 60 character with one click? for the few times - esp when you can do it 'as' a character - sure

but as long as the majority of answers would be 'click for a pre-made pre-leveled characters now' - then the problem is still there

My cynical thoughts have been more along the lines of "these acts can't possibly have the same level of content as previous acts and will be repetitive and low quality".

I really hope I'm wrong and I may well be but it all sounds a bit too good to be true from my perspective. I literally had to double check the date to make sure it wasn't April 1st.

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Vesuvius079 wrote:

My cynical thoughts have been more along the lines of "these acts can't possibly have the same level of content as previous acts and will be repetitive and low quality".

Maybe GGG will improve them further in future expansions. For now it is still better than doing the exact same content 3x.

Content-wise 3.0 will probably be awesome, but balance, yeah... balance. We will see. GGG will prob address some major issues, but I do not expect any radical movements from the current situation: a rather easy game, that delivers "insta-grat" satisfaction of power, while challenge will still be pushed at the very end of the endgame.

E:
God powers, while interesting, sound like another layer of power creep.

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Vesuvius079 wrote:

My cynical thoughts have been more along the lines of "these acts can't possibly have the same level of content as previous acts and will be repetitive and low quality".

I really hope I'm wrong and I may well be but it all sounds a bit too good to be true from my perspective. I literally had to double check the date to make sure it wasn't April 1st.

You and me both. I saw Feb 14th and thought "Has anyone done pranks on Valentine's Day?". Next up: I checked Reddit to see if the main site had been hacked.

I am genuinely impressed but I think it was more of a marketing tactic than anything. If you look at the teaser stuff, you see very little new stuff - it is mostly all recycled content. Which is fine I think,it will still be better than repeating Acts 1-4 three times... but I am guessing each Act will be more like an episode and 2-3 of those maybe equals an Act.

The real cynic in me is wondering what GGG's angle is - they say they want to be done with this "Story Arc." I'm really quite curious if they might be planning to move on to an actual Path of Exile 2 next year.

For me, personally, this is bittersweet. New zones galore is great, but... I really hope there is a meaningful trade overall on the horizon. And what about the general balance of the game? You know they will be spending so much time rebalancing the leveling curve that the meta is likely to stay very similar to what it is now.

The announcement seems more about what the developers now think of their game than what the players wanted from the game.

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degraga wrote:

The announcement seems more about what the developers now think of their game than what the players wanted from the game.

The announcement seems more about what the game developers wanted with their game from 2003 to 2013 and which players wanted in that time frame than what the players nowadays want from the game.

But it's OK, you can run Beyond + Breach + Perandus in the mega-flashback league and one-shot screens of meaningless cannon fodder for piles of meaningless loot to your delight.

The God Powers idea, while the powers are unlocked differently, sounds eerily similar to the Legendary Item powers from current Diablo 3.

In Diablo 3 the power is unlocked for you to choose and switch between by using a recipe that involves consumable ingredients as well as the Legendary Item you want the Legendary Power from. Once a power is obtained you can switch between it and other similarly obtained Legendary Powers while in town at no additional cost (Allows up to 3 Legendary Power effects to be applied to your character instead of being derived from gear).

We still don't know exact details on Act themselves, other changes aside.

I'd say it would be smart to wait until we know something about changes to melee and all others.
If there are some substantial changes planned, we're just blowing hot air here. So yeah, lets hold a little longer. :P