Betrayal Core potential/suggestion (long-ish)

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grepman wrote:

the whole point of nets was to NOT burst it down and be strategic about your damage output

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cephalocidal wrote:

The more I think about it the more problems I see with full Betrayal integration. Biggest ones I keep landing on are content creep and whatever space in the game the new league will occupy. I don't think GGG wants a WoW-like mess of a million different systems all overwhelming new players, and even though I think Betrayal is a lot of fun to tinker with it's very complicated. Shrines, Tormented Spirits, Strongboxes, these all make reasonable sense when you bump into them. Bestiary makes decent sense after a moment. Delve and Incursion are still a bit confusing to new players, but not overly so. Betrayal is something that you often need to pause and think about even after you get a handle on it. My current thoughts are that if it goes core, the board gets axed or greatly streamlined.

So the initial perspective is to stream-line betrayal content for the sake of new players not feeling overwhelmed, correct?

This game is notoriously overwhelming for a brand new player, any version of a Betrayal implementation will not change that fact.

As much thought as you put into this it seems you've completely forgotten the actual issues with the league. The farm-ability of low area level Betrayal content, and pure breach stones need serious attention specifically. I'm sure you want to argue that immediately.

"But my idea limits gilded scarab/pure stone mods."
"But my idea limits frequency of betrayal encounters."

Making gilded scarabs rarer; increasing the price or decreasing use-age is a straight nerf, but scarabs already exceeded the cost of a matching zana mod, so I wouldn't expect drastic price differences, just less access to use.

Pure stones would certainly go up in price but that isn't the issue with them. The combination of a safe clear paired with unprecedented xp gains was terrible for game health. I've got buddies in my guild that have never seen a character past 92 suddenly pushing level 100, and guess what they've done it on?

Betrayal's most interesting aspect was of course the veiled mods and crafting options opened up. They're well into the power creep argument... but focus was a better addition from GGG than could have been expected. Couldn't believe they added a button to press in clear speed meta, like, jesus. WP GGG.

Though the veiled mods probably need tamed, I also cannot imagine not seeing them. Betrayal needs consistent ongoing map encounters with veiled rares dropping plentifully. Limiting the encounters to this safehouse run idea might appropriate enough veiled drops but this was another issue not actually addressed.

That's the biggest issue with your long winded post. You didn't really address anything. You puked out 2 pages of "streamlining" knowing Jun is considered a master and we'll expect a daily map slot and chance to appear per area.

Betrayal needs re-balanced but realistically needs to stay a 'per instance encounter.' Otherwise the current system is fine. Again the entire pretense was for the sake of new players, which makes very little sense to me.

The resounding issues with Catarina are half fixed with your idea though. At least you wouldn't reset your safehouses... Wish she dropped something not shit.

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reprot9x wrote:

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theD4nk0wl wrote:

the whole point of nets was to NOT burst it down and be strategic about your damage output

Lol Quote is from grepman, plz don't make it seem like I said that nonsense.

Oh lol. oops

Fixed =)

I personally like Betrayal's complexity, especially the Syndicate screen. That said, I think it's much more likely that GGG gets rid of divisions in the name of simplification. They'll probably populate it with some subset of the non-Master characters (e.g. Aisling, Jorgin, Rin...) and re-use the old Masters elsewhere. I doubt we'll be able to choose who is in or out; only their ranks.

But then again, Incursion got dumped on us more or less untouched so who knows.

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theD4nk0wl wrote:

So the initial perspective is to stream-line betrayal content for the sake of new players not feeling overwhelmed, correct?

This game is notoriously overwhelming for a brand new player, any version of a Betrayal implementation will not change that fact.

As much thought as you put into this it seems you've completely forgotten the actual issues with the league. The farm-ability of low area level Betrayal content, and pure breach stones need serious attention specifically. I'm sure you want to argue that immediately.

"But my idea limits gilded scarab/pure stone mods."
"But my idea limits frequency of betrayal encounters."

Making gilded scarabs rarer; increasing the price or decreasing use-age is a straight nerf, but scarabs already exceeded the cost of a matching zana mod, so I wouldn't expect drastic price differences, just less access to use.

Pure stones would certainly go up in price but that isn't the issue with them. The combination of a safe clear paired with unprecedented xp gains was terrible for game health. I've got buddies in my guild that have never seen a character past 92 suddenly pushing level 100, and guess what they've done it on?

Betrayal's most interesting aspect was of course the veiled mods and crafting options opened up. They're well into the power creep argument... but focus was a better addition from GGG than could have been expected. Couldn't believe they added a button to press in clear speed meta, like, jesus. WP GGG.

Though the veiled mods probably need tamed, I also cannot imagine not seeing them. Betrayal needs consistent ongoing map encounters with veiled rares dropping plentifully. Limiting the encounters to this safehouse run idea might appropriate enough veiled drops but this was another issue not actually addressed.

That's the biggest issue with your long winded post. You didn't really address anything. You puked out 2 pages of "streamlining" knowing Jun is considered a master and we'll expect a daily map slot and chance to appear per area.

Betrayal needs re-balanced but realistically needs to stay a 'per instance encounter.' Otherwise the current system is fine. Again the entire pretense was for the sake of new players, which makes very little sense to me.

The resounding issues with Catarina are half fixed with your idea though. At least you wouldn't reset your safehouses... Wish she dropped something not shit.

I am a talker, yes.

As far as the overwhelming nature of the game goes, I don't dispute that or that suggest in any way that it'll magically disappear with some golden implementation of Betrayal (or its wholesale removal from future leagues - we've gotten confirmation on Jun as a master but how that actually lands is still unknown); it's one of the things I love about PoE. My concern is with Betrayal as it stands competing for headspace with whatever the new league mechanics wind up being based on its complexity. Going off the cadence of permanent master introductions present now (Einhar in Act 2, Niko in Act 4, Alva in Act 5) and the location of the vault itself in Act 9 I'd hazard a guess that we're going to be meeting Jun for the first time in Act 9 in or just outside Highgate, with a couple of zones between there and the Oasis for the introduction of the Syndicate mechanics before the training wheels come off. This puts Harbor Bridge off the table even if nothing else is changed, which (combined with Syndicate events no longer being guaranteed in every zone/map further blunts the easy reward loop and should go a good ways toward getting players to at least notice the mechanics of whatever league comes next.

Scarabs are fine more or less as is; even the Gilded Scarabs don't offer guarantees on maximised returns for what are currently the most lucrative options (like Sulphite) and I'd anticipate at least some shift in value there towards the surer bets no matter what.

As for Pure Breachstones being the One True Path to 100 now... yeah. They are. Even for people who play solo, once they're up into the low 90's if they can manage to clear a PB deathless that's going to do more for them than days of grinding at any point in the game's past. I don't really think it should be central to the arguments around Betrayal though; hitting level 100 has been less special for a while now, and if you're still waiting on anything in the passive tree to get your build humming by the time you've broken 90 ten more points probably aren't gonna save you. General reward access and the nature of those rewards seems like a decent target for discussion but the stones themselves are more distracting than anything.

Lastly - for now, would love to keep this running - I wasn't shooting for some perfect solution. I wanted to toss something out there and get some holes blown in it to see what other players saw as the core value of the league most worth retaining.

(And Veiled mods are great. Soft corruptions that can be backed out of definitely have their place in the game
Focus, too. It's the opportunity cost panic button Vaal skills used to be but -potentially - so much better.)

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theD4nk0wl wrote:

Lol. Lets take a game designed around optimizing and force you to do less damage for certain encounters.

there's literally nothing outlandish about that. just like you can 'optimize' anything else you can 'optimize' your damage output for red beasts only.

old poe had plenty of such things. where you had to do be careful and not floor the pedal of dps. reflect, invasion mobs, leapers, mobs you had to hover your mouse over to see what they did.

the fact that you think such a thing is out of the ordinary in a game like poe showcases whats wrong with this game today and what's wrong with the gamers' mentality about what poe is.

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reprot9x wrote:

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grepman wrote:

the whole point of nets was to NOT burst it down and be strategic about your damage output

it's hilarious how modern poe players are boxed in.

for them, core gameplay loop is running around at lightspeed one-shotting garbage in maps with glass builds.

how many of these players would last in private leagues that actually buff mobs power ? fuck it, not even those, but famine races that unhost used to run ?

exactly

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cephalocidal wrote:

The ability to fail by accidentally killing a targeted beast was another point of thoughtfulness for the players to juggle, but the scaling of damage and beast health turned into a secondary and unintended gameplay "feature" where the gap between detonating a beast on sight and not having the raw damage output to reliably drop it became unmanageably slim for many players.

translation : players don't want to stop and alter their gameplay in any meaningful way for any encounters

what does that say about the players ?

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It also hampered creativity, as certain skills became much less usable if a player was attempting to engage with the league mechanics and capture beasts in higher level maps.

I don't know how you do tech pub if two things that you mention have nothing in common.

limitations BREED creativity, not the other way around. some builds being less usable is normal for leagues, just like glass cannons are less usable for syndicate (pre-nerf) or invasion (pre-nerf)

have you played poe with no stash ?
the creativity there outweighs anything you can come up with 10 tabs

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The ability to accidentally spend valuable beasts on unintended recipies was less an issue of player ignorance than it was an issue of flawed UI design

yes and no. you can figure out recipes by yourself.
this isnt any different than using a mirror of calandra as a new player.

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I consider it streamlined rather than dumbed down because the core concept of the mechanic - capturing beasts and then sacrificing them - is intact.

you arent capturing the beast. it's auto done for you. you arent doing ANYTHING OTHER THAN THE USUAL MAPPING CORE GAMEPLAY LOOP. in bestiary, you were. until they introduced necro nets, which was another giant clusterfuck that split the community.

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The thoughtfulness is still there, but it's different now; do you choose to target the beasts directly, or do you delay that in favour of pathing through the map with the benefit of a support NPC?

um, what ?

where is the choice here ?

basically do I dps the beast now or do I dps it later ? do I do master mission now or do I do it later ? that's what you pass off as a choice ?

jesus christ.

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It's a matter of perspective; my theorycrafted implementation of Betrayal mechanics retains what I view as the core of the league - manipulation of the syndicate to control rewards - just in a much tighter package that doesn't interfere directly with future league content. I do agree on the point of Interventions being most interesting and effective when they hit a player unawares; the problem I ran into when thinking about how to include it in a way that isn't unpleasantly disruptive to play is how much space it takes up in the gameplay experience itself. Having to do cleanup after getting the syndicate members to their knees (for any type of encounter, not just incursions) works well enough as a way to encourage thoughtfulness of play now, but I can see it being vexing in the extreme if it's happening on top of a future league mechanic that also calls for higher situational awareness. Something is definitely lost by moving the ambushes off to a side area, but it protects whatever comes next and allows it to remain the focus of the league. Ultimately, giving Interventions special treatment in a way that isn't disruptive to gameplay in an unintended way limits the nature of any future league content occurring alongside it in ways GGG might not want to be constrained by. Giving all types of syndicate encounters the same level of care is another possibility, but a very resource-intensive one that magnifies that risk.

honestly they will probably do something like you said while also nerfing the syndicates into the ground, or completely scrap them.

I understand what you were trying to do, but this is a point - the more the league deviates from the core gameplay loop that gamers think poe is about (mapping and blowing up shit without looking at the screen much), the harder it is to keep after the league is over

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grepman wrote:

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theD4nk0wl wrote:

Lol. Lets take a game designed around optimizing and force you to do less damage for certain encounters.

there's literally nothing outlandish about that. just like you can 'optimize' anything else you can 'optimize' your damage output for red beasts only.

old poe had plenty of such things. where you had to do be careful and not floor the pedal of dps. reflect, invasion mobs, leapers, mobs you had to hover your mouse over to see what they did.

the fact that you think such a thing is out of the ordinary in a game like poe showcases whats wrong with this game today and what's wrong with the gamers' mentality about what poe is.

Checking for reflect or other mods a pack has is one thing. Stopping for beasts and removing gem links isn't "tactical"