I thought RPGs were about killing monsters and finding loot?

Neah, key is to link danger/reward ratios a whole lot better.

It's asinine to keep 0 danger "drop" mechanics like rolling items in town or RNG crafting as a better way to obtain "mirror worthy rares" than going and killing stuff.

Just like it's as asinine to not link properly difficulty regarding leveling to 100 to the dangerous content.

On softcore, you should be persuaded not to use automatically "opie-op meta" to "insta kill" bosses with phases and interesting mechanics as you only have a binary alive/dead status encouraged by instant leech/log out etc.

Just imagine providing fair danger/reward regarding loot - drops should already be at least halved and most items that are hidden by filters shouldn't even drop - but making it so that you would have a better chance to get a "chase" unique/rare after you put some effort into fighting "the good fight" and vanquishing your "difficult" foe...

Add to that the alien concept of granting more EXP for "tougher" enemies and keep the current level for casuals, if the death penalty is to be kept as it is on softcore. Even those casuals might be enticed then to make an effort to push through, think and improve - be that on gear side, skill side, build side etc.

But it would also require more investment from GGG into proper "balancing" and addressing all "broken" level "opie-op" stuff, supervising the "market" if trade becomes the "go to" solution for everything and even additional work on all unfinished and QoL missing features.

It's a longshot, but hey, I'm a dreamer that still hopes that PoE will improve. RNGesus knows that it has all the potential...

The devs should just evaluate what the most useful uniques in the game are and make them harder to obtain.

True endgame enlightenment is (i) Forum QQ (ii) 24/7 Hideout Warrior.

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Nephalim wrote:

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vio wrote:

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Whoever proposed the density nerf needs to be fired.

the alternative would have been to lower xp gain from mobs, nerf droprates and triple the required souls on vaal skills.

which solution would have had less side effects and needed less work?

and the most important question being: which other solution would have saved them cpu time, decreased server costs and stabilised servers at the same time?

The better solution is to turn of these god awful gore effects from belly of the beast, reduce particle generation of skills, and give us more sliders for graphical control.

I would gladly pay 100 dollars for the ability to turn off gore effects, herald of ice nova's, ground effects and so forth.

not applicable. gore effects, particle calculation other skill effects and graphics are client side while i speak of server side calculations.

mob density directly correlates with server cpu usage, monsters projectile's cpu usage potentiates with the mob count.

and i can imagine that they think that mob encounters like breaches and mini breaches (harbingers) are more impressive with otherwise lowered mob density.

well, i'm just trying to guess their reasons, i'm not a fan of mob density nerfs either. ggg's community interaction is lacking lately, too many communities to keep entertained i guess. wish they would have sticked to their forums and the pc version even if that meant a slower game development and smaller company.

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Whoever proposed the density nerf needs to be fired.

Was this their solution to shaped meta? Seems heavy handed, Going 10+ screens with no monsters feels really bad.

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Arrowneous wrote:

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Whoever proposed the density nerf needs to be fired.

It's GGG's simplest solution to reduce server simulation overload and thus server latency which in turn is the cause of most fps drops/crashes. If the server can't run through all mob damage calculations and everything else in <= 16.67 ms (1000/60) then our frame rate drops. So reduce total server side calculations per iteration by reducing mob pack size and the server has less to calculate. Easy for devs. Sucks for players. Also has the side benefit from devs viewpoint but not the players that with fewer mobs to kill the xp/hour goes down and thus the race to 100 is slowed. Win-win for the devs but lose-lose for players.

Yeah, sad thing...

Actually, reducing mob density could be a good change, IF:
- monsters made tougher, so fighting fewer nombers still takes same time (get rid of "oneshot meta, etc).
- Rescale experience/loot rewards accordingly.

But of course (as it always happens with GGG), nothing was changed, only density was nerfed.

This is just a matter of supply and demand.
Lowering the supply by making good uniques more rare would increase their value and make finding one feel more significant, but it would take us back to the days where you could play 5000 hours without ever finding any of them and unless you trade a lot they would all be way out of your reach.
Increasing the demand by buffing them would also increase their value, but then there is power creep and outclassing of rares etc. to worry about.

A better solution would be to make quality on unique items completely unchangeable. That way you can still get the thrill of finding that 20/20 item without removing the items alltogether for the vast majority of players and not have to worry about powercreep.

This is basically what D2 did.

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Sickness wrote:

A better solution would be to make quality on unique items completely unchangeable. That way you can still get the thrill of finding that 20/20 item without removing the items alltogether for the vast majority of players and not have to worry about powercreep.
This is basically what D2 did.

And it will make the real difference only for some uniques, primarily weapons with high added flat physical (like Hegemony's Era).
For items like Kaom's Heart? WTFLOL!

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鬼殺し wrote:

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Frankenberry wrote:

In my opinion chase items should be rare items.

I'd swear that was the original intention, with both mirrors and eternal orbs augmenting that. There was a period where certain rares were crafted well enough to become famous as mirror-worthy, although their names elude me now. There may still be a few, but I think the out-of-control 'unique chase item' power creep has soundly killed that direction.

As I recall, it all started with Shavronne's Wrappings, which did something no unique ever could, and created a meta all of its own. The player perception of chase item became 'unique' then, and we've seen nothing but ongoing attempts at one-upping what Shav's did ever since.

This is exactly how I remember it.

Can't help but feel like some of this is due to the D3 diaspora, and carrying over connotations of the only gear worth equipping being legendaries or sets. At least GGG never gave in to set items.