Path of Exile, Gameplay Criticism

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Fruz wrote:

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gibbousmoon wrote:

And that there is the problem. Mindless grinding is rewarded, and active engagement with genuinely challenging content is punished.

It's all about affordances. And this game's affordances are utterly fucked.

What would make a piece of content challenging without the xp penalty on death ? where would be the risk ?
And if there is no risk, could you call it 'challenging' ? I don't think so ( not saying that any different kind of penalty would not work of course ).

As said before, portals only matter for about a handful of encounters, for everything else ... those don't really matter anymore, characters are too powerful anyway.

Your question makes no sense in the context of my specific criticism and suggestion. Nowhere did I even mention lowering the experience penalty.

I'm on the fence about it, personally. It is most certainly fulfilling a function at the moment that is not fulfilled adequately by any other mechanic in the game, but I also agree that it has problems.

My biggest beef with the experience penalty (since that seems like what people are talking about at this point in the thread) is the variable risk involved. You are 100% safe at 0% to the next level, and from then on your risk slowly ramps up, which incentivizes you to take fewer and fewer risks. The tension is dynamic, if you will. --And some people LIKE that dynamism, so I can't say it is objectively bad. But I don't like it.

I think it was bound to turn into a death penalty thread because most of the OP's points can be linked too the DP. Ridiculious rates lead un avoidable death. Its hard to manage hp when ur either at 100% or 0%. My only experience at 50% is act 1. Even A well built melee char can feel like a glass cannon. Also not being able to see anything cause of the particles everywhere again leads to death which doesnt feel fair and brings us back to the Dp. Most death in this game is due to poor mechanics, poor design, not bad player decisions.

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Millar wrote:

Even A well built melee char can feel like a glass cannon.
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Most death in this game is due to poor mechanics, poor design, not bad player decisions.

bs.

if you know how to build/play properly, you can be practically immortal.

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robmafia wrote:

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Millar wrote:

Even A well built melee char can feel like a glass cannon.
...
Most death in this game is due to poor mechanics, poor design, not bad player decisions.

bs.

if you know how to build/play properly, you can be practically immortal.

Yup:

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gibbousmoon wrote:

...GGG's death penalty just tells you to fuck off and go play the meta instead...

Unfortunately, skill at playing only plays a small role. The two big factors which decide your chance of avoiding one-shots are
1. Follow a guide of the current OP build
2. Avoid rippy content

Yay...

no.

that's just a different fallacy.

you (well, maybe not you. but i and many others) don't need to avoid hard content to play without dying/not be glass. even without meta builds.

fuck that, ESPECIALLY without meta builds. meta builds have been rather glassy/squishy for the last... years.

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robmafia wrote:

no.

that's just a different fallacy.

you (well, maybe not you. but i and many others) don't need to avoid hard content to play without dying/not be glass. even without meta builds.

fuck that, ESPECIALLY without meta builds. meta builds have been rather glassy/squishy for the last... years.

You seem to be conflating "meta" with "popular." Known meta builds tend to become popular, for obvious reasons. Unknown meta builds do not, for equally obvious reasons.

Large power differentials among builds (yes, even ideally optimized ones) have existed in this game for some time, and they change regularly, largely to serve the whims of developers who believe that going out of your way to create a "shifting meta," i.e. deliberate imbalances, is somehow a superior approach to going out of your way to create balance and thereby maximize the variety of gameplay approaches for players to choose from.

So yes, unless you want to argue that the game is well balanced (good luck with that) my original point still stands. Deaths in Path of Exile teach you very little.

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鬼殺し wrote:

That's cheating, gibbous. Who the heck could disagree with that? We all know the game is a hectic clusterfuck. There's no combat log. OHKOs are a thing. You're doing the PoE version of laying down a bet that wetness follows rain.

Not at all. Even just a death log would be a step in the right direction.

And it's always my goal to make arguments that people feel they can't disagree with. :P

robmafia's implication that certain builds can't cut the mustard because the player is 100% at fault simply doesn't hold up in the context of such an imbalanced game.

I'm not begging the question, if that's what you're implying. I'm simply stating that improvements can and should be made, and (the controversial part:) precisely where they can and should be made.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

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鬼殺し wrote:

That's cheating, gibbous. Who the heck could disagree with that? We all know the game is a hectic clusterfuck. There's no combat log. OHKOs are a thing. You're doing the PoE version of laying down a bet that wetness follows rain.

Not at all. Even just a death log would be a step in the right direction.

And it's always my goal to make arguments that people feel they can't disagree with. :P

robmafia's implication that certain builds can't cut the mustard because the player is 100% at fault simply doesn't hold up in the context of such an imbalanced game.

I'm not begging the question, if that's what you're implying. I'm simply stating that improvements can and should be made, and (the controversial part:) precisely where they can and should be made.

that wasn't quite what i implied.

but i fail to see how gladiators were meta in delve.

or how lightning spire scions are even close to meta now.

and yet, i don't have these problems.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Well we say that, perhaps expecting PoE to be what it isn't and was never meant to be.

I can't disagree. I don't, for example, ever expect to convince the devs that their position on the meta is wrong thinking.

also, i don't think the dev's try to make meta shifts, it seems more plausible that they're just bad at balance.