How to address the growing problem of power creep of items, and builds in PoE.
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Ugh, powercreep. My frustration isn't that the ceiling is rising, it's that it's happening in the sloppiest, most reckless way possible.
Bad balance, so some builds breeze through the game like it's nothing while anyone who wants to use more out-of-fashion skills, gear, etc. still struggles. Overall, though, the game has gotten easier - to a breaking point when using meta builds. No tougher content to pit the best builds against. Delve, sorta, but it and other challenges are locked behind weird elaborate gating and RNG. Don't even get me started on how tough content doesn't even yield rewards much of the time... Flipping the basic mechanics of the game on their head, which is maddening to people like me who have been around for a while: bonuses that used to be reserved for specific ascendancies are now item affixes; bows are the best caster weapons (I got downvoted on Reddit for complaining about this, so I guess it must be fine); basic defenses like armour/evasion are crap compared to keystones like MoM/Acro... honestly I could keep listing these changes that totally devalue and depreciate the basic cost-benefit decision-making players used to have to do. And I will: affixes that used to be attached to highly valued unique items are now on rares; more multipliers that used to be reserved for support gems or auras are now mere item affixes; extra poorly-named multipliers for specific kinds of dot (but not physical or fire dot?); support gems that act as both defensive and offensive choices at the same time with zero tradeoff; 7link+ items are now commonplace when that was reserved for very specific gear with tradeoffs (remember Bringer of Rain?). It's just getting silly. Anyway, the bad balance I mentioned before means that arbitrarily buffing monsters is a very short-sighted way of trying to address this problem. I think it makes sense to do a combination of nerfs and buffs to get stuff more in alignment and THEN assess whether a global difficulty boost make sense (it would indeed at that point, IMO). I think this is what GGG is kinda-sorta trying to do with their focuses on balancing certain wide swaths of the game league-by-league, but I question a lot of their specific choices and their order of operations. We're all in this leaky boat together, people. Last edited by demon9675#2961 on Mar 29, 2019, 2:38:45 AM
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" This. First, PoE should get rid of too many multiplicative scalings, that easily get values out of control. Scaling should be more linear - it's easier to balance then. Second, balance should be taken more seriously! IGN: MortalKombat
Molten Strike build guide: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1346504 There is no knowledge That is not power |
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Spoiler
" Agree as well. There was absolutely no need for added cold/chaos multipliers, those go up to 38% more on 1H, 40% on bows and 75% on staves. They just wanted to make absolutely sure that the majority of players tries out their new shiny or crazy buffed skills. Br4wn3's suggestion of leaving 90% of the content unchanged and dial the difficulty of the last 10% to 11 would make the game only feel more disjointed than it currently already is. Most average players (remember? the silent majority which buys MTX as well?) would hit a brick wall without any chance to overcome it until they gather enough info on some meta build. That would be terribly frustrating for many, and not in the good "let's give it another try" way. More in the "screw this game, I'm done" style. And yes, every player wants to see the entirety of a game, noone ever said "90%, I guess that's good enough right there!". With the PS4 launch and it's accompanying limitations (flask usage is clunky, teleport skills have fixed distances) those players could never ever dream of seeing the true endgame. The current side content could actually provide the wanted challenge, only it would have to be way more accessible (looking at you, Delve!). To be honest, it would be close to a miracle if GGG could tie all these loose ends together with 4.0. I'm sadly not too optimistic about the future development, it seems their original vision got blurred along the way and feature creep is running rampant for quite a while now. Giving the player options is good in general, but there comes the point of saturation, cause you can still only engage with one thing at a time. |
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" it's amazing. the game gets crappier and crappier, easier and easier. and the masses will defend it with this tripe - as if the game's balanced around paytoplay private leagues. [Removed by Support]
"Your forum signature was removed as it was considered to be inappropriate and a breach of our Code of Conduct." ...it was quotes. from the forum. lolz! |
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" To be fair, that is only the latter part of the sentence. He didn't say that private leagues are the alternative, he wanted some of the difficulty settings from those transfer over to SSFHC for example. Not sure I'm a fan of that though, not being able to trade is already a massive disadvantage. Adding to this a severe increase in difficulty might be overkill and turn players like me (playing only SSFHC since over 3 years now) away. I'd rather see them setting up a temp league akin to the old "turbo" or "famine" races. That way players who seek the extra challenge can go all out, but the changes won't screw over the average player who just wants to have a good time. Those would have to be regular free 3-month leagues as well of course, not hiding behind a paywall. |
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you're assuming everyone will be interested in killing shaper/uber elder. The fight is already hard enough, let not make it harder. Only a fraction(no data here) of the player base is killing uber elder for a living and I guess you're targeting them. But for the majority of player, people who running fast-clearing build,etc, the uber elder/shaper is already quite hard without good gear.
" You want to fight an impossible battle. There's a very thin line between difficult that it's fun to just tedious work. Most of the player base might not want that. I don't want to min max my gear, spending hours to practice just to kill a boss. " you could but if their target isnt a boss farmer, let not make it harder for them to go for the occasional uber elder/shaper kill. Boost difficulty only make people not want to play the game anymore. People are getting kill left and right by red syndicate and you're suggesting too boost their damage um no. " so if there's such a big spike in dmg and life. People would find it frustrating to run red maps/get red maps and lose interest |
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" At least, increase enemy life drastically (+1000%), because player damage is already abysmal. Any decent build oneshots enemies befre they even react. And it's bad, because you dont feel any "combat" this way. It's fine, if a specialized "glass cannon" build uses "kill or get killed" playstyle, while having multiple drawbacks (such as frequent death rate). But We have a situation, where virtually every build does that! And I, personally, get frustrated with that. What's the point to obtain 50-exa worth gear, when 3-exa worth one does the same job? What's the point to perform turkey shoot again and again, just to drop more challenging content? Why there is such a power discrepancy between Syndicate/deep delve and the "normal" content? Rewards dont justify it in the slightest. IGN: MortalKombat
Molten Strike build guide: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1346504 There is no knowledge That is not power |
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" And after that change a select few builds would still do that and we would have even less variety in classes than we have now. The Zoom-Zoom-Xplode-A-Screen playstyle has long been a staple of this game, it would be suicidal for GGG to go back to hitting zombies 10 times before they die (hello closed-beta players!). It would be a feeling of non-progression cause that's the way you fight mobs in Twilight Strand. There are just too many ways to speed up your char, I feel nowadays movement speed trumps damage by a long shot. But if you cut that in half you'd have to rebalance all the drop rates so that players don't quit out of frustration. I think at this point their options are pretty limited and they obviously have no interest in cutting back on the damage, as seen by this league's skill rebalancing. They just seem to roll with it, introducing tiny speed bumps here and there but mainly ignoring it altogether. If you really want a different approach to combat you might have to add games like Grim Dawn to your library, cause PoE will probably never be like that again. |
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" But that's exactly what we do in almost every other ARPG, and MMORPG too. Only in arcades (like Super Mario or Contra) and FPS shooters (like Quake or Call of Duty) enemies are supposed to be killed so fast that they often cant even react... As far as i know, PoE claims to be ARPG... Why dont rename it to "arcade" genre? It would sure fit! IGN: MortalKombat Molten Strike build guide: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1346504 There is no knowledge That is not power Last edited by MortalKombat3#6961 on Mar 29, 2019, 4:34:59 PM
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" Do you have any idea how boring this game's gonna be, slogging through the same maps day in and day out at a snail's pace, because mobs are now walking brick walls, dropping the same unrewarding garbage? I remember a time when the game did that during closed beta, when summoning was weak as shit, and mapping was always an uphill battle that was so slow, I literally got boredom fatigue playing this fucking game. People are running these meta builds and mapping tactics for a reason. The game is shit in regards to rewards, and it forces players to run as fast and as efficiently as possible to get something remotely valuable for themselves or for someone else. And the people who would suffer most from OP's absurd suggestion would be players who don't run meta builds or map efficiently, essentially forcing them to start doing so. Sorry, I don't think we should be screwing over players who want to run subpar builds they find enjoyable and have a gnat's ass chance at killing the Shaper/Uber Elder, just because some crazy-ass nolifers can delete screens and 1shot these bosses. We shouldn't be punishing everyone because someone found a way to cheese the game. Nerf the crazy-ass nolifer builds and set up restrictions to prevent further powercreep from happening. PoE players: Our game has a wide diversity of builds. Also PoE players: The [league mechanic] doesn't need to be nerfed, you just need to play a [current meta] build! And the winds will cry / and many men will die / and all the waves will bow down / to the Loreley Last edited by Pizzarugi#6258 on Mar 29, 2019, 6:50:26 PM
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