To everyone whos scared of power creep

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Kulze wrote:

I played a similar character last league, feels shite, deleted the character and sold the equipment rather early in the league, wasn't worth bothering to upgrade him for league-mechanics.
Standard character mainly.

Try out a Scourge arrow, Winter Orb, Molten Strike, Blade Vortex or any other meta-build in comparison. You'll see what I'm talking about.

I do have quite a few one button deletes the whole screen char and yes Hank the Tank is a little slower but in reality it's almost impossible to die with Hank and for a beginner it's the safest, cheapest and easiest to upgrade char ever. And he is able to delve too. He is one of the best allrounder chars ever. If you can clear all content with a pure phys REAL melee char but you feel you are too slow then the real problem is that casters and ranged chars in general had too much power creep already. Every single char that is faster/stronger than Hank is op. In fact even Hank is somewhat op. There was a time believe it or not when the chars actually had to fight the mobs and were not able to just delete them by pressing one button and that was pretty good. But don't worry they will never go back because otherwise they had to adjust the loot drop rates completely and that would be lots of work plus once players got used to 1 button boom you can't simply take that away without loosing a big part of your playerbase. PoE was a niche game for old D2 players but that was a long time ago now it's a mainstream faceroller and the only guys that are scared of power creep are a few old players like myself but don't worry ggg will completely ignore us and the power creep will go on and on.

Exactly my point about the power-creep and that gating items via level, reworking the whole base-mechanics and mods as well as reworking all measures of defense and offense are quite important.

Hank looks like a build I would strive towards... 2 years ago.

Right now he looks like utter crap.

We can keep the fast-paced style we have now, we can also keep killing content in the same speed we have now. It just needs to be 'implemented' at the proper part in progression rather then as early as we have now.

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MortalKombat3 wrote:

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grepman wrote:

on average, poe content doesnt push you back all the time either. eventually you get all the endgame maps and swim in them.

You're just lying through your teeth.

wow, accusing me of lying ?
I have bought zero maps since summer of 2013 and yet somehow always got enough in every league via playing. but yes, sure, I'm 'lying'

I do the chisel recipe. I do zana mods on t12+. I sometimes do sextants. and map pool grows and grows. this doesnt mean you stop running lets say t14s when you have t15s.

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or huge amounts of time into farming lower-level maps.

funny, youre now hypocritical. you just said that in poker IN THE LONG RUN you will make it. same thing here. no one said what is the 'long run'
there are some poker pros that have had streaks of losses as much as several years and were forced to drop to lower stakes. yet in the long run they are still winners.

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Playing this game, eventually you'll lose all your points. Sure, there is a possibility, that you'll keep your points for a while, or even gain some, but that's only due to extreme luck. In the long time, you'll get bankrupt.

not true. investing currency in maps leads to sustain. maybe not of t16 content (in most leagues, t16 though is sustainable) but surely t15s

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Mere fact, that those items are very infrequent (and therefore, valuable), already limits power creep enough. There is no need to limit it behind level requirements as well.

again, it works if you have infinite currency. and you can get a lot of currency grinding lower level maps. what level restriction does is that it gives you something to look forward to equipping.

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Though it seems you didnt read what i wrote here.

Ive read your accusations just fine. you seem to be unable to cope with an idea that in games about grind, the amount of hours you put in is superior to amount of 'skill' or whatever you have.

you seem to think that if you play the game perfectly you should always 'win'. this isnt the case in poker, this isnt the case in rng games, and this certainly isnt the case in games about grind.

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grepman wrote:

Ive read your accusations just fine. you seem to be unable to cope with an idea that in games about grind, the amount of hours you put in is superior to amount of 'skill' or whatever you have.

you seem to think that if you play the game perfectly you should always 'win'. this isnt the case in poker, this isnt the case in rng games, and this certainly isnt the case in games about grind.

It's a balance of both. If I just want to get 'stronger' via investing time I would play 'Clicker Heroes', 'Adventure Capitalist' or any other 'clicker-game', that's the pinnacle of just watching numbers grow higher and higher. Highly enjoyable for many, not what this genre is about though.

ARPGs which are good offer a balance of both worlds. You both need a good amount of personal skill as well as invested time to reach the intended goal then, with the disparity between people growing bigger if one of those or even both aren't sufficient.

So, if I know PoE in and out, hence how to position myself, how to upgrade perfectly, where to farm up every item most efficiently it needs to be a MAJOR upside towards those which only invest tons of time. The same goes the other way around, if someone knows everything but only invests 1 hour a day, the one investing 8 a day should still be superior in the end.

This balance is scewed in PoE to an extraordinary degree right now. The base game which should provide a way to simply 'sink' time into to slowly build up has hurdles attached which are quite skill-based. And the side-content which should reward primarily skill is gated behind time-sinks.
That's the main issue which has to be addressed towards that regard, not one OR the other.

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Kulze wrote:

At lvl 75 you definitely shouldn't even remotely be able to use each and every item in-game. The highest base isn't gated at lvl 80 without reason. And lvl 80 isn't the highest level commonly reached either.

At the moment we have a very small sample of mods gated behind ilvl 86 items, also ilvl 86 is fairly low for a game where you'll more then often reach lvl 90 before even getting to the last 'major' part in progression. This still is shaper at the moment for T16.
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Right now everything after 86 are literally 'vanity levels', just there to add a bit of extra juice to your character, not needed in the least though. That's a shame to have 14% of possible character progression being literally useless besides min-max regards.

Funny thing about all this balance stuff is that you really don't need any item with a t1 roll to complete all content PoE has to offer. It will help a tiny bit, but is in no way mandatory. So in reality the "vanity levels" start before 86 already. Coupled with the tedium that is the 98-100 grind it's really not hard to see why getting to max level is no priority for most players.

But if something is not really desirable, then it looses meaning quickly. So for people who are going all the way it's probably a little disappointing to realize that hardly anyone cares about their (admittedly impressive) achievement. Which is a bit sad really. Watching streams of the league start race got more and more boring the closer players got to 100. Leveling in PoE is just not interesting, it's merely something that happens and is a prerequiste for stuff. But when you get to 90+ and the best you can hope for is a bit more life/ES then that's not enough for me to pay attention to as a viewer. I think Mathil's cosplay got more hype than all the race streams combined.

Give us a reason to start caring about the leveling endgame again!