How to address the growing problem of power creep of items, and builds in PoE.

Yes, the strongest builds got around 30 million dps or so. That's scaling. Power-creep does the same but provides proper content for the respective power-levels.

The issue is that scaling isn't worked out properly. Defensive abilities haven't stayed up 'to par' with the offensive abilities. Sure, you can make yourself immune to phys damage (which is a fairly bad design-choice actually), as well as raise your max elemental resistance to 90% now. But that isn't helping if the base mechanisms like evasion and armor won't keep up, as well as life and ES doing the same in some regards.

Remember the times when builds with tons of evasion but rather low life were viable? Now it's only either to stack life or ES. If you go live better have phase acrobatics or MoM to survive more for instance. That's bad design once again sadly.

Or remember when going with armor actually was a good choice? Also far in the past, same as getting a bit of chaos res to keep damage lower instead of ignoring it completely and just steamrolling everything which does the damage type completely before it 2-shots you.

Hence why I say the base-system has to be adjusted to represent the scaled damage, both on the player and on mobs. It's a major rework, and one which can be messed up easily. We can be sure GGG will stretch the time until they need to do it out until it's nearly too late, touching their long-standing core systems is a rather fickle undertaking after all. It's one which has to be done though.

Imagine it scaling further, 3-4 further modifiers come into play, giving you another hrmm... 20% total damage to those 30 mil, now we got 36 mil. Any difference? Not really. Will the enemies from now on feel any different at all? Also not really, we've reached the absolute maximum of what a character can survive after all, now it's only their respective mechanic which can change, and multi-phase battles like the mastermind are all feeling the same. Make one mistake = dead. Simple. Uber-elder, mastermind, deep-delve bosses, cortex... all of them feel like the same fight right now.

If the scaling system gets adjusted they all can get a respective 'challenge modifier' so to speak. Mastermind would feel different from uber-elder besides the length of the fight (so more chances to screw up). The only thing deciding how hard a fight is now is the amount of damage you can push out and the amount of phases a boss has, with the strongest builds handling them all the same. Namely: Phase begins - shoot - phase ends - next phase repeat.

If you do a secondary character 90% of progression can be simply skipped. You can give it absolutely overpowered unique items to rush through the acts, then outfit it with prepared end-game equipment. The only thing holding you back is how long you've played to get the xp needed. All content during that will feel the same: Shoot, it does, next mob. Bosses the same. Screw mechanics! Some of them are really great but we never get to actually see them as they phase in and out without a second to waste.

Hence my suggestion to rework the scaling so every boss along the way needs a bit of preparation beforehand, no matter the stage of the game. Also running under the suggested level for a zone should be severely punished no matter of the equipment. And for running maps we definitely should have the need to upgrade out equipment along the way steadily, not allowing 'overpowered' gear for the respective one.

Another solution: Changing your defenses and damage respective to the zone you run rather then by adding new mobs to change it. Now we got zones based on their level purely. But what about giving a sort of total number about offense/defense and utility based on the Tier's of each mod on your equipment? That could then decide up to which area you're 'supposed' to run. Different mods can give different amount to this number, so you can't simply go to T16 immediately despite having stacked 10 different crit multi mods. Their combined tier isn't high enough to allow their full use in a higher-tiered area.
Same going for defensive modifiers, not allowing full defense unless you have a specific total amount, diminishing it the further above the expected area you go, no matter what the actual numbers on the equipment are. If you're only doing 50% damage compared to what you 'could' do because you're too early at a specific place will definitely make the game a lot more challenging and rewarding while not hindering progression as it can be fitted towards it.

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Kulze wrote:

Yes, the strongest builds got around 30 million dps or so. That's scaling.

no.

it's power creep.

merciless, runic (and now all the ele equivalents), % added as chaos, etc and etc - and that's just on the weapons. and that omits implicits...

additionally, new gems with more multipliers
additionally, new affixes with - to enemy resistances
additionally, new ways to penetrate enemy resistances
additionally, new ways to apply curses/enemies have additional curses
additionally, base quality can now be 30
additionally, quality can be upped to 48
~7L gloves/helms
spell gems just got buffed to deal higher damage at lvl 20

the scaling hasn't changed. increased and more still mean the same.

you don't know what you're talking about (see a pattern?).

If you want a challenging content go play ssf hardcore

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Dettlaf wrote:

If you want a challenging content go play ssf hardcore

then what?

play with white items only? 3L max? ffs, this game is basically candy crush now.

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robmafia wrote:

"

Dettlaf wrote:

If you want a challenging content go play ssf hardcore

then what?

play with white items only? 3L max? ffs, this game is basically candy crush now.

i mean it makes the game challenging. Ist that want you want ?

Purely steamrolling through every content and making each single item in the game obsolete isn't the way to go either though.
And I'm not talking about the mods itself. It doesn't matter a lot which ones will be added in the future of nothing is changed at the base-system.
At 1 trillion damage? How does it feel different?
Make bosses automatically kill you when they hit? What's the difference for most builds right now?
Nothing! And that's a problem in game-design, not power-creep.

From the player-side it's bad if you can kill bosses with a single short, specifically end-game bosses and their equivalent. Shaper is supposed to be one such, nonetheless you can 1-shot him by now, uber-elder will follow soon enough with the same progression. The lack of more content after that is what it makes bad.

Yes, you're supposed to get more powerful with new equipment, that's a given and important. But those upgrades have to be sensible in context with the content delivered.
For instance: Vanguard belts, who uses them? They don't have any place in the game at all right now, a styg is always better with a life/ES jewel inside, both are seen as the same 'tier' of base though, nonetheless are vastly different as no use is for flat evasion/armor anymore.

Has anyone focused on defense instead of effective life, dodge or flat reductions in those last leagues? Sure, it's good to have it as the little bonus on the side, but as it is now... all equipment could instead simply loose their armor/evasion rating and it would feel nearly the same.

So, how to alleviate this issue, because having a completely useless system in place which is supposed to be a core one is definitely a problem.

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Dettlaf wrote:

If you want a challenging content go play ssf hardcore

That won't change it either, as HC is affected by the scaling-issue as well. You get one-shotted as easily as otherwise, the major difference there is your damage potential and max effective life pool, as well as it being harder to work up towards flat damage reductions, those are gated behind uniques often, or mechanics you won't even get to before it's borderline useless to have access in SSF HC.

The 1-shot from uber-elder is purely unfair for HC players, the syndicate spawns with their high damage output and chaotic nature are as well. You won't go delving for bosses as those have the same issue by sporting quite a sizeable amount of mechanics you won't be able to survive a single time. That's bad design.

Yes, reaching lvl 100 should be a major achievement, and especially in HC, though it shouldn't be a gamble.

All of the numbers in this post are examples, actual balancing would be different than what I suggest.

I agree on the scaling aspect of it. There are a few things you can do to counter some of the issues, but they come from WoW, a game thats notoriously unbalanced lol.

The first is make level factor into hit chance. Such that if you are low enough level then you literally cannot hit an enemy or boss. This limits rushing by quite a lot. Likewise, the enemies and bosses get bonus to hit you and they are more likely to crit. So for example, if the boss is level 90 and you are 85, then you have a -50% chance to hit and the boss has a +50% chance to hit and crit against you. And the same is in reverse. So you could always do older content. The main issue with this is that once you get past I think level 80? you will be over leveled for all content and have 0 challenge... which is why content in this game should scale to level 100. The xp chart can be separate from the bonuses related to level in order to keep the last ten level grind that GGG values so much.

Another thing is that the scaling of areas in the ten acts should be based on the assumption that you cleared every single map. Right now, you can rush through the acts only killing what gets in the way and you'll be on par, if you clear maps you'll end up 10+ levels over the areas youre currently in very fast. It should be restructured so that if you only kill what you need to, then you will end up under leveled, and then you can't "accidentally" over level and make act bosses a joke. XP should be less than what it is across the board as well, if we assume my previous suggestion is implemented.

So, with those changes you may finish act 10 by like 85-90 if you killed everything, and then you have 10 levels for maps. And you know what, why not make end game maps go over level 100. Lets say t16 maps are level 105. So when you run them you always run at a disadvantage to your chance to hit and to be hit + getting crited.

Along with those changes, every single bos should have the clutter on the ground cleared up so you can see all of the mechanics and the telegraphs for them so that physical dexterity can help you avoid damage. So that even if you are at a -50% evasion rating you can still do all of the bosses if your phsyical dexterity (the players actual hands) is good.

Damage should be scaled down to avoid one shots. Or, you could go the borderlands route, if you have ANY ES (sheild) over 50% filled, then you cannot be one shot. In borderlands if you have over 50% shields, and you get hit even with something that does millions of damage, it will drop you down to 1 hit point. In PoE this could be such that if you have ES and you have more than 50% of it full, then if you get hit you cannot be one shot under any circumstances, and your life drops to 1 (if the hit would have killed you). With this, you would also lower the recharge rate of ES since everyone would want some ES now. What you could do is make the recharge start rate of ES be based on the maximum amount of ES that you have. So, if you are trying to get by with like 4 ES or something just for the one shot protection, it takes longer to begin to recharge than if you had 4k ES.

i was just referring to kopogero's adding mods to SSF leagues.


the way i see, some players want the end game content to be for 1% or less of the population.

that may sound attractive but let's be real, that is just ego taking over, not looking at the big picture.

the game should be accessible to most players, not 1%.

it inevitably creates an ugly environment.

however, newer content should be very difficult for most players, then eventually should get easier by power creep. the power creep of offence / defence. im not gonna go there b/c it'll derail.

anyway what i love about kopogero's idea is that it will offer some elite players a chance to show it on twitch or give them a great challenge at no cost to them.

gtfo with that ego bs.

it's not one's ego that trivializes the game.

and the game should be balanced around the good/knowledgeable players - for OBVIOUS reasons. balancing around the lowest common denominator would... actually, it wouldn't change anything, it's clearly what ggg's been doing and why the game is so terribly easy.

I would say it totally is about ego. You don't faceroll end game content because you have knowledge or skill, you faceroll it because you googled a build, copy pasted it, and sat at your desk for 12 hours a day for 3 months. If it were really about skill then it would be about something the player themselves have to do, not something they could just google and copy.

You exemplify skill by limiting yourself and accomplishing what others do without those limits, not by copy pasting a build. If someone wanted to show they were skilled at PoE, they would beat it without taking hits, they would do hardcore no hit runs, they would do mouse only runs, they would purposely pick the lowest dps skills and make builds around them, they would actually do things that require skill and exemplify that by adding limitations. Do a run where you take chaos inoculation and also have no ES. Do that shit, kill uber elder in SSF, and then you can say you have skill. Throwing on two poets pens and ripping through content because you googled a build that a famous streamer made isnt skill.

People don't do those things, why? Because the end game isn't about skill or knowledge of the game.