Path of Exile, Gameplay Criticism

To oneshot or be oneshotted .

Very good video .As we can see good examples of in the video of screens full of visual effects ,so what exactly are we attacking ,what are we supposed to see of "telegraphed attacks" to avoid ? Seriously ggg needs to tone down this bullshit .But ggg just adds more and more visual effects and it gets worse the more the devs touch the game .I am at a point now that i dont want the devs to add more stuff for a long time now ,a year maybe ,fix old stuff first .Go from 3 to 2 temp leagues a year so they can use their dev-time on other stuff too ( its ton of stuff to fix ) .

The visual effects in this game have become really bad with the addition of Incursion ,Delve Bestiary and Abyss .Was really bad before this too and now its just stupid .

Not only does the visual effects make the game worse but it looks extremely childish .The game more and more looks like a childrens game or something a hippie would love ( wow check out all these colors man ) .

With this stupid mentality of ggg : You cant see anything but we have the xp penalty anyway .You need to playtest the game a lot more yourself .

Powercreep : Its a thing with arpgs ,other arpgs than Poe in particular needs powercreep to look good and thats because of lack of depth and build diversity .Poe dont have a problem with depth at all .This game has so much potential still .Powercreep is the slow death of arpgs ,and the cure for that is simple ,just stop powercreeping and instead buff/nerf stuff to be more equal and viable to play .When introducing new items ,add new interesting mechanics and different options for builds and playstyles to be equal or have other advantages to the old stuff .GGG just kills build diversity in the game that has the most potential of all arpgs ever made depthwise ,its such a waste and its really sad this seems to be the fate of Poe too .A meta shifting game is not a good game ,its a game that camouflagues its flaws and mistakes the devs makes .Casters is the thing pushed now ,next league melee again ?

Xp penalty : With all the chaos in this game and the fact that visual effects literally technically removes the ability to actually see the so called telegraphed attacks it should be removed until this issue is fixed .Carefully reintroduce it but this time balanced after a huge overhaul of monster dps & life vs player dps & life ( ehp ) .The idea is to remove the 1 shot or be 1 shotted gameplay .Make life leech less mandatory if its possibly .The game probably would be much better if the monsterspacks was smaller but longer fights .Xp gain is adjusted to be about what we get now from a map .Less chaos on the screen ,better looking game too and less frustrating .The thing is often does dying in Poe feels really bad ,why because of stupid things the player cant control or prevent .Better camera control is also a thing ,sometimes we get 1 shotted off screen which also is not telegraphed attacks .Happened to me yesterday ,level 98 with 95 % on the xp bar ( 8000 life & 800 es ) ,was in a incursion temple timed mission and a huge vaal construct pack with its ultra fast projectiles melted me .How am i supposed to stop that ,oh i need to magically know the pack is there off screen ,yeah right .Just to add to the extremely unbalanced dps some monsters have ,the map was blue with no dps or stats to increase the dps ,no curses etc ,basically a white map .Unbalanced monsters contribute to the killing of build diversity .I want the game to be hard ( hardcore ) but its difficult in a way its unhealthy atm .


Betrayal is coming : I didnt play it so i dont know but i read the forums and what i have read is just crazy .They were really really unbalanced .I hope this gets properly balanced but i have my doubt its ggg afterall ( are they bad at math or something ) .In my gaming career ggg is the definition of unbalance in games .Balancing after alt f4 since the start ,no wonder the chaos we see and what we have to endure .All the things i have talked about here is my nr 1 hate about the game .Overall its more positive than negatives about the game but i am not gonna lie the bad stuff really is dragging the game down a lot .

I just want to add something to the XP-Loss: In the Betrayal Season I had a lot of disconnects and rubberbandings (a lot more than in other Seasons). The XP loss from technical issues felt realy hard, because It wasn't my fault. In that time I couldn't react to dmg income and if a dc happened the server also noticed it too late (-10%). Also Alt-F4 didn't work most of the time because of short delays (Maybe it should work that way all the time to prevent people doing it). From a gameplay point of view I understand the penalty, but from a technical point of view I don't.

And sometimes the game feels like that dying is a part of it. If the game says you die you die. ;)

Short:
XP-Loss OK, when It's my fault (incl. Alt-F4)
XP.Loss not OK, when it's caused by technical issues (lag,dc,rubberbanding and bugs), not my fault.

The XP-Loss System needs an adjustment.

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MrsDeath_ wrote:

If i was a dev. and someone showed me a video where person says '' support is not a role in rpg games'' i wouldnt take that video seriously either.

You brought this up before, and I answered it on the first page of this thread:

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Khalixxa wrote:

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MrsDeath_ wrote:

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ffogell wrote:

GGG should hire you!

lets not go that far. this guy thinks support is not a role to play in an arpg game..

I was exaggerating a bit in my attempt to conserve time.

Let me be clear, I absolutely think that support is a role. What I meant was that, the current rendition of "nuke the screen" and "aura bot" aren't the ideal role distribution, considering how prevalent they are.

I never said at any point that support isn't a role, I said "Aura Bot is not a role", and it was hyperbole. The name "Aura Bot" already pokes fun at itself, I was just poking more.

I was trying to make a larger point about the nature of cooperative play. Why would that automatically invalidate the entire body of the presentation?

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MrsDeath_ wrote:

No one cares about this thread or the video in that matter.
OP has no idea about PoE.

Wow. I never attacked you in any way. Where did these personal attacks come from all the sudden?

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MrsDeath_ wrote:

I am reading some players twisting op's points but i think he has some points that are worth a second thought. I just happen to disagree with them.

You said this a while ago, and it seems like a decent steel-man approach. I thought that you were one of the few who were genuinely interested in the big picture. Why the change of tone?

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Khalixxa wrote:

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MrsDeath_ wrote:

If i was a dev. and someone showed me a video where person says '' support is not a role in rpg games'' i wouldnt take that video seriously either.

You brought this up before, and I answered it on the first page of this thread:

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Khalixxa wrote:

I was exaggerating a bit in my attempt to conserve time.

Let me be clear, I absolutely think that support is a role. What I meant was that, the current rendition of "nuke the screen" and "aura bot" aren't the ideal role distribution, considering how prevalent they are.

I never said at any point that support isn't a role, I said "Aura Bot is not a role", and it was hyperbole. The name "Aura Bot" already pokes fun at itself, I was just poking more.

I was trying to make a larger point about the nature of cooperative play. Why would that automatically invalidate the entire body of the presentation?

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MrsDeath_ wrote:

No one cares about this thread or the video in that matter.
OP has no idea about PoE.

Wow. I never attacked you in any way. Where did these personal attacks come from all the sudden?

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MrsDeath_ wrote:

I am reading some players twisting op's points but i think he has some points that are worth a second thought. I just happen to disagree with them.

You said this a while ago, and it seems like a decent steel-man approach. I thought that you were one of the few who were genuinely interested in the big picture. Why the change of tone?

Im just mad at people expecting a lightning speed change in the game according to one thread they happen to be agreeing completely.
Please dont mind my bad mouth. Its an old habit i cant shake off.
I am pissed off at the kind of players who can say ''I will skip this league. ''
I appreciate the effort you put into video and wouldnt wanna disrespect your work. I ll fix my comments.

On the Death Penalty:

I agree with most points in the video, and would have agreed completely up until relatively recently when I was finally able to get a character through the story and into Maps - and that altered my opinion somewhat.

You don't get any kind of death penalty up to and including Act 5, meanwhile the death penalty from Act 6 to Act 10 is very low.

For a long while I took the horror-stories I'd read about the death penalty to heart, and that caused me to plan around the penalty. I've no doubt there are others who do, or have done exactly the same: learn where you will encounter bosses within the story acts, and then grind on the easy trash-mobs until I hit the next level-up, THEN take-on the boss. It meant the death penalty couldn't affect me, so I could easily zerg-rush bosses by throwing myself onto them dozens and dozens of times, and the only penalty was the time taken to do it.

It felt a bit cheap, but I moved past that sensation and fully intended to use that strategy all the way through to the end. And it worked... until Act 7.

Very well-played, GGG.

The exact wall I hit is probably obvious to most of you, and it was indeed Maligaro. The boss fight takes place inside a Map, and it comes equipped with the rules and quirks of Maps - particularly the 6 portal rule.

I didn't believe you'd only get 6 attempts to kill the boss, because I suspected that would lead to a situation where you're stuck without a map and unable to make progress. So I treated the situation as just a visual oddity and proceeded to try and zerg-rush Maligaro.

It annoyed me how deaths placed you back at the map device, from where you have to traverse the subsequent area to return to Maligaro, and even though I saw the portals being used up none of this stopped me from trying anyway. After the 6th portal disappeared, I checked the device to find the Map had returned and was able to be re-used to create 6 new portals, so I threw myself into one intending to finish-up killing the boss - only to find the area and boss, the whole entire instance, had been completely reset.

As a badly built Marauder who'd stopped being viable several acts prior and who's sole strategy against bosses was to zerg them, I knew there was nothing I could do to get that character past that boss.

So after a bit of scouting around I found a really good build, Enki's Arc Witch, which seemed to be much easier to play as and was progressing through the game noticeably faster. And she felt strong, really strong. Able to surprise me by killing bosses in literal seconds when I least expected it.

So my confidence grew to the point where I stopped caring about the death penalty: I felt nothing could kill me, so there wasn't any pressure or incentive to go out of my way to gain level-ups before bosses. When I did eventually die and was hit by the XP penalty, I can't even say I noticed the loss at all because it seemed so insignificant. All in all, I died about 8 times by the time I finished Act 10, but never once felt like I'd been set-back in any way, and it was only the fact that I could type "/deaths" in the chat and it didn't say 0 that bothered me at all.

So I'd literally gone from not caring about death and using zerg-rushing as a main strategy, to wanting to clear the story without any recorded deaths on the character; something I've not yet been able to achieve, but it's changed my outlook on the game and my approach to playing it significantly.

I took that character into maps, and continued levelling it a bit more. I managed to reach level 80, at which I did start to notice the death penalty become a lot more painful than it used to be.

I began to realize the situation I was in: XP penalties mean that you can't just stick to killing enemies you're comfortable with, you have to keep progressing to harder enemies otherwise you'll eventually start to get very little and eventually no XP. That means sooner or later you're forced to put yourself in situations where you'll start to die more and more often. You can't just sit in safe zones and idly grind your way to 100 simply by switching off your brain for 200 hours like in other RPGs.

It did occur to me that GGG have found a solution to the age-old problem of success in RPGs being predominantly tied to time spent playing. If you literally can *never* reach level 100 no matter how many thousand times you farm a level 65 area, then being level 100 suddenly has meaning. The death penalty is a vital part of that, since without it one could easiy just zerg-rush trash mobs and accumulate XP every time they killed one, which again would just make level 100 an inevitability for players who are prepared to do that.

So in conclusion, I see both the death penalty and XP penalty systems as pretty redundant and useless during the story phase, but beyond that they're essential for adding meaning to reaching very high levels. And it's better to put hard walls in front of players who're struggling due to badly built characters, or characters who're not well equipped or prepared because it's more enjoyable and more rewarding to reroll a new character with the aim of being stronger and getting further, than it is to stubbornly force a weak character through content they're totally unable to handle.

I fear that if either of those systems were removed or changed too much, we'd see an increase in people trying to take uber-weak characters to level 100, which would lead to a whole lot of boring gameplay for those players involving instantly dying thousands of times, and so many more people able to hit level 100 that it means nothing and nobody cares when you got there.

lolz @ people simultaneously complaining about power creep and the xp penalty

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Pobatti wrote:

On the Death Penalty:

Wall of senseless mumbling.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Level 80. Give me a break. At current state of the game death penalty is just another heavy outdated and long obsolete mechanic, stolen directly from Diablo 2 and defended by whiteknights just for... sake of defending, as for them every GGG's decision is "best in the world".

At present day achieving level 100 is solely matter of currency. There is PoB tool, plenty of strong builds on forum, it is not any problem to build character which will not die even on T16 bossfight. I personally designed such character, reached level 97 and decided to stop levelling at this point, as it is just… senseless. You know why? Because on level 97 just one T16 map gives you like… 0,6% of experience. So to get to level 98 I should run like… 166 T16 maps. Deathless, but it is not big issue. Lets assume I can buy such map for 13 c each (I choose such price due to fact, some T16 can drop from monsters during grinding). It is 2158 c and 332 minutes (1 map-2 minutes) of playing to get my char from 97 to 98 and accordingly more for the last two levels.

To conclude, death penalty is simply ignored by those, who can afford to race to level 100, but it is big fun breaker for every weaker players. They would not achieve level 100 with their crappy builds anyway, too much grinding. So now death penalty is just outdated chore, just like dozen other outdated mechanics, including horrible trade system.

lolz @ people complaining about how stupidly easy and brainless the game is via power creep and STILL dying often enough to complain about the xp penalty

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postrach_myszy wrote:

To conclude, death penalty is simply ignored by those, who can afford to race to level 100, but it is big fun breaker for every weaker players. They would not achieve level 100 with their crappy builds anyway, too much grinding. So now death penalty is just outdated chore, just like dozen other outdated mechanics, including horrible trade system.

It's negligable and can be ignored by players, even in SSF modes, for the duration of the story. The only impact it has is after that point, once players start to reach high enough levels where it takes many hours of grinding to gain a single level. At that point a single death could set you back days, or weeks.

But that problem is being overblown. Horror stories are being told about it, and that leads to new players coming into the game hearing those stories, and becoming utterly terrified of the XP penalty from Act 6 onwards. Which is stupid, especially when you die a few times and hardly notice the XP bar move.

And yes, you have a point about trading allowing players to gear-up easily to the point where they're facerolling content at sufficiently high tiers that level 100 is trivial. But I used level 100 contextually as a vague goalpost: ie. a level which it's considered very difficult to legitimately reach taking into consideration access to things like trading and power-creep.

Overpowered builds will eventually hit the same walls that underpowered builds do, except the numbers will be higher. There's a limit as to how far you can push a weak build, but there's a limit to how far you can push a powerful build too. Trying to push beyond that limit would quickly deteriorate into slow and boring play. The death penalty means that beyond a certain point attrition is simply not enough and further progress is impossible without more power being fundamentally added to the build.

Assuming no hard upper level-cap, and that enemies continued to scale indefinitely, the strongest possible build in the game could theoretically reach a higher level than the second strongest, because the difference in strength would keep the attrition strategy slow but viable for longer. No matter how much player-skill you factor into the equation, there is always a point where enemy power levels and stats would dwarf those of any build and make further progress impossible.

Remove the death penalty and what would players do?

Hit a trash-mob pack with a suicide attack, do 1% of damage to some of the mobs. Respawn and repeat. 20 minutes later if one happens to die, you pocket the XP. Only have to repeat that about a million more times to squeak-out another level-up...

It sounds rediculous because it is, but time and time again players have demonstrated that if you're able to do that in an online game there are always going to be players who do exactly that. It's not exactly a playstyle any developer wants their players to be using, because it contributes directly into the negative stereotype of online games, that the best or highest ranked players gain their high placement on leaderboards because of time invested rather than skill.

It's blatantly clear from other things, such as the drop-rate and XP-penalties that are applied when killing low-level enemies, that GGG really don't want people adopting strategies such as these. The purpose of those two penalties is to force players onwards. If a build is weak, it can continue to level-up from the highest level enemies it can kill, but only up to a point beyond which XP drops to 0 and they will make no progress unless they tackle harder enemies.

Or in short, a weak build cannot simply sit in Act 9/10 forevermore and eventually hit level 100 or beyond: the XP required to reach the next level continues to increase as you level, and if that isn't enough to nudge you to harder content then eventually the incoming supply of XP itself dries up completely and no more progress can be made.

That's a thing that applies to any build no matter what the power-level, because the effect is the same: the stronger your build, the more you'd probably be inclined to keep on pushing past the capabilities of your build, it's not just a thing low-levels do, and these penalties make it much easier to recognize the situation you're in and go "nope, not happening. Better re-roll and try again with a different build strategy".