Poe's act content needs to be dramatically rebalanced

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Arrowneous wrote:

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I_NO wrote:

Why are you so triggered by leveling dude lol

Mostly another QQ thread. Same as all the "melee sucks, please fix GGG" threads but with ranger bow builds.

But yes, get in line behind REAL melee players (not the quasi-melee skills but the "in your face" ones).

Chris was asked this in a podcast just before Betrayal started and he was ok with some skills being op compared to others. He (and GGG) expect/want you to play PoE a long time (forever) and thus be rotating though whatever happens to be a meta (read as viable) skill for the current expansion's mechanics. But you can hear him for yourself:

Dropped Frames #173

Just because Chris said it, doesn't make it right. Arc trapper may have been a fun build for me, a summoner main, but I don't like to follow metas, because I don't want them and other future Flavor of the Month builds to determine how leagues are balanced only to have them nerfed back into the ground when its over. I want my summoner build to comfortably handle all new content, hell I want all sub-par builds to comfortably handle new content and not just the ones that can delete things 2 screens around you for the next 3 months.

I regards to the OP:
Act content doesn't need to be reworked. The entirety of your post seems to be acknowledging that OP builds are the problem by blowing through act content. So how about we nerf higher end builds and buff sub-par builds to have a more even balance, rather than changing the symptom which is act content? I'm not suggesting we have all builds be perfectly balanced in power between each other because that's an exercise in futility, but narrowing down the huge power gap isn't beyond the realm of possibility.

It seems like common sense that spells would provide smoother leveling progression than attacks. That's an inherent consequence of the gem leveling system vs gear upgrade requirements for attack dps. The only attacks that should even be capable of feeling smooth for leveling are the ones that scale well with gem levels like caustic arrow and elehit.

And really, people can still level with sunder, but you have to, you know, fucking upgrade your weapon as you go.

Although I do agree spells are stronger at leveling reducing content hp is dumbest idea of balancing. Why not just nerf the broken builds instead of nerfing all of the act content? You really want to oneshot everything with a 4link with any build? What s the point, might as well just remove leveling from the game

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Dr1MaR wrote:

Although I do agree spells are stronger at leveling reducing content hp is dumbest idea of balancing. Why not just nerf the broken builds instead of nerfing all of the act content? You really want to oneshot everything with a 4link with any build? What s the point, might as well just remove leveling from the game

Mostly because the goal is to smooth out the act content for all archetypes but not change end game balance beause that is a can of worms even GGG has a hard time balancing.

It depends what GGG considers is the reasonable amount of time players should complete act content, whether it is 4 hours with a meta spell or potentially much more with a non meta build.

Using the information from responses so far, I've been leveling a ranger to see how far behind it would be to a storm brand elementalist.

One of the things i don't like with leveling is that the life potions are so weak and slow that they are almost useless

I think leveling as a non-RT based char takes more thought than spells.

You need to give a lot of considerations to things such as gear, passives etc... A lot of times when I am leveling a ranger I will pick up skill points I wouldn't have in my final build to respec later.

A lot of people following ranger guides might be misguided into thinking they can just blindly plug points away and expect a smooth experience but they're wrong.

A lot of players also don't realize that you need to adapt. My ranger in SSF was getting bad drops, so I picked up sunder and used sunder to level through until maps.

Alternatively, the speed that a pathfinder can run blood aqueducts with lightning arrow is stupidly fast compared to other builds, you can turbo through aqueducts into a tabula while you collect chaos recipie rares.

The playstyle is just different, and maybe you're not sure how to adjust your playstyle to it.

There is nothing wrong with that, I stink at playing 2-h melee builds, but I don't go around saying 2h melee needs a buff.

Considering everybody play SC nowadays this means nothing really since you can zerg bosses and hard places anyway without caring for reflect anymore or the need to take life nods.

It s all about damage so of course skill scaling from spells will be strong in A1 to 10.

In past reflect would keep the power level in check, slowing down builds like casters who get high raw dps from skill gems but then they erased it so...

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ironstove wrote:

I think leveling as a non-RT based char takes more thought than spells.

You need to give a lot of considerations to things such as gear, passives etc... A lot of times when I am leveling a ranger I will pick up skill points I wouldn't have in my final build to respec later.

A lot of people following ranger guides might be misguided into thinking they can just blindly plug points away and expect a smooth experience but they're wrong.

A lot of players also don't realize that you need to adapt. My ranger in SSF was getting bad drops, so I picked up sunder and used sunder to level through until maps.

Alternatively, the speed that a pathfinder can run blood aqueducts with lightning arrow is stupidly fast compared to other builds, you can turbo through aqueducts into a tabula while you collect chaos recipie rares.

The playstyle is just different, and maybe you're not sure how to adjust your playstyle to it.

There is nothing wrong with that, I stink at playing 2-h melee builds, but I don't go around saying 2h melee needs a buff.

From my experience so far it is heavily reliant on getting a good weapon even if you are using a scaling skill like ele hit and aggressively taking +10-12% damage nodes I would not normally get in my final build. Also, spending much more currency on progression gear a spell caster could ignore since who needs defense when you can 1 shot bosses before they even swing.

Well, I mentioned melee but it was sunder this time ( you can be fast with many other melee skills too, some of them will suck though ), sunder might be better than many bow still for leveling, you will find skill underperforming during acts ( and not only acts ) in all category.
Sparks for spells as an example ... I don't think that it would be a smooth experience compared to many other spells, or sunder.

Regarding leveling with bows, I'm pretty positive that Caustic arrow / split arrow / RoA etc are still strong enough to go through the act content very comfortably.

I find it more fun to level while having to care about the weapon rather than just level the skill and not care about anything on a side note.


PS : I think that top racers are always leveling with 2 weapons, the DW bonus is quite noticeable, and it is true that it is something that wanders/archers do not have access to.
Archers do have a quiver, that is probably the reason why.
I cannot tell about leveling as a wander as I haven't done it for a very long time, but with the new crafting, I don't think it would be too bad, the single target might be lacking though.

Are you really arguing about the issue? Why? The op is 100% right. Of course it's completely bs that casters only need about a quarter of the time leveling their chars.