I think GGG is going in the wrong direction the pacing of the game,aoe => an open discussion

Totally agree with the OP.

Give it another year or two and there will be absolutely no RPG aspect left, only the action shooter parts. But then the competitors will thrive, because some people actually like RPGs...

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yamface wrote:

That's probably true only because most people who wanted a slower playstyle already left the game. In turn, GGG caters to the feedback they get from the current players, who are mostly in favor of faster playstyle. It's an infinite feedback loop.

@ the topic:

A lot of this faster playstyle is coming from the power creep over the years, and it's something that needs to be addressed. Every game I've played that didn't try fixing the power creep problems ended up collapsing. It always got to the point where the fundamental aspects of those games turned into broken systems.

Hell, even games that are trying to fight back power creep are still struggling to maintain their core gameplay. Just look at WoW.

There is so much win in your post, All of my favorite developers are gone now or remain in name only these days, Blizzard, Free Radical Design, Bethesda and quite a few more, GGG is one of the few left that still has a chance to make some changes before its too late, too late being tenacent takes over completely or the company itself collapses.

This is one of the few games available that has such a rich customization as to what your character becomes, Many of the things that i love about the game are getting removed over time because of this power creep.

Totem nodes for Chieftan for tank-totems, Heirophants additional totem basically neutering him, Older minion builds no longer being viable in the endgame or even Item Rarity my #1 build becoming pretty pointless these days, even at 800% item rarity these days the content is modeled in such a way that its just a bad joke for the work i have to put in to reach that point compared to years ago.

If it weren't for GGG and Larian Studio's i think i would have given up on games all together and resigned myself to a sad existence of binging tv and anime until i perish.

@GGG

I love your game GGG, but its YOUR game, Show it some love and don't let the literal masses drive your development, Take suggestions that you like, Listen to feedback, but develop YOUR game within the vision that brought it to life in the first place.

Maybe even take a good look at who's played your game the most, who's spent the most money on it, and those who obviously supported you in the very beginning some of which who payed thousands upon thousands of $ getting you to this point and ask them about all of this, Bethesda stopped doing that and its pretty clear where they are going, right down the toilet.

I see so many users on this forum aflame with rage and disappointment, Most think posting here on your official forums is a complete waste of time because reddit is your only focus, The people who post here are likely some of your longtime and most passionate supporters.

To be fair, Chris himself stated that "slow builds are bad". With the understanding that kill fast = more loot, there will always be a speed meta.

The question becomes how much do you limit it. Well, that probably gets trickier. If you slow the game down by an arbitrary rate (i.e. hard caps to movement speed), then it removes a bit of the charm of the game itself.

Customization is king. I think what they would have to do is correlate movement speed with squishiness so they work inversely. Maybe put in nodes that allow you to increase speed, but have to take reduce your life to do it: i.e -2% life, +5% movespeed.

Maybe injecting more choices like that would make it make more sense.

It's not so much the speed of the game that I'm concerned about, just making sure that all the options for building characters actually have a point. And with insane fast gameplay that only rewards a small number of max-efficiency builds so much of the game's glut of content isn't worth touching.

By that I mean skills, gear, ascendancies, passive nodes, you name it - all sorts of interesting stuff that doesn't really cut it if you're trying to be successful. It's a real shame, and why "balance" has been my battle-cry for such a long time. It's tied to every other topic under the sun that people bring up on this forum: speed, difficulty/ease, powercreep, trade - you name the gripe, it's usually in part a result of bad balance decisions.

Balance can't and shouldn't be perfect. Some builds will always outshine others. But right now we have a situation where the best builds aren't like 10% or 20% better than the rest, but multiple times as good. That magnitude of discrepancy matters. Reduce the gap between builds - just reduce it, not homogenize the game - and a lot of other issues will be indirectly improved (albeit not entirely fixed).

So how does this connect to game speed? Well, the good builds are crazy fast and the bad ones are slow. Through careful balance changes, speed up some slow builds and slow down some particularly fast ones; GGG can more easily make decisions about speed (and everything else) if there aren't so many outlier player choices in both directions.

The issue is GGG's balance changes are never careful and always go way overboard. So here we are. Cyclone will be deleted next league and replaced with the next broken god-mode way of playing. Players who want to go fast will play that mode, which GGG handed to them and required little intelligence to figure out, and then those players will condescend to everyone who doesn't play identically.

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鬼殺し wrote:

The moment GGG came up with the idea of keeping the relationship between active skills and support gems flexible, they'd already relinquished the notion of effective single target and embraced the very real possibility that any single target skill would function unequivocally better as an AoE.

I am going to disagree with that, what screwed up close combat melee ( especialy single target ) isn't the fundation of the whole system, it's the fact that GGG keps increasing monster density + speed, and that they kept giving range archetypes more and more free movement.

Those are two key things to why melee single target has been doomed for a while in PoE, but there could have been a way with the original system imo.
Unfortunately, there is no going back now.

And Legion was such a missed opportunity here, it's crazy ... their "reworked" movement skill, but made it completely accessible to everyone, missing one big chance that they had to give melee characters something that range characters did not have.
( They kind of tried a tiny bit with "close combat" though I guess )

Well, you did imply that it was enough of a reason to make the balancing quite pointless ( to a certain extent ).

The loot system sure was a things, that was qutie a change, but I would personally rather have melee have their own advantages in term of combat regardless of loot.

Change is the biggest hook GGG has to offer.

I don't see them giving it up for any reason.

Peace,

-Boem-

The trend towards the AOE speed meta is one thing but what Im having problem with is the design trend with timers for league content.

Going for a slower build for maps works just fine, sure you get less loot/min but thats fine.
But when it comes to league content you really don't have a choice...

Take Incurion, Synthesis and Legion for example... If you want to engage that content you are forced to go the aoe speed meta route. Prime example is incursion where you either unlocks the links to the next room in the temple before the timer runs out or you don't. And if you don't... well no temple for you..

@OP

You are some 3 years too late.

Also, all this talk about AOE is too easy to get, AOE is too strong, mourning times when you had to choose between AOE and single target skills simply ignores the reality PoE is at. Biggest limiting factor we currently have to our gem and skill setup is how many sockets and skill slots we have available. If GGG gives us more gem sockets and/or more skill slots to use those skills, I will happily utilize separate AOE and single-target skills, however, at the moment it is impossible. We have so much stuff to compete for gems sockets and skill slots it is nearly impossible to do it all--primary clearing skills (AOE), movement skill, defensive active skill, buffs (can include golems), utility/support skills (warcries, banners, totems), single target skills, vaal version of your skills, curses, auras, focus skill, stances.

I'm already forced to not use CWDT setups, golems and warcries on my builds because I can not fit them on a skill bar. I already gut my movement skill to be the bare minimum, eg. my Leap Slam only has faster attacks attached to it, no Fortify or other utility supports because I need those sockets for other skills.

So no, I do not support any notion to make the game more slower or require even more distinct gem setups. In fact, I hope GGG stops introducing new skills to the game and looks at what we have and streamline it and remove obsolete or underperforming skill categories. Good example for skill category to get ax are golems. These summons are no longer up to par with power level of other skills. Golems should be revamped to single skill gem for summoners and their utility should be moved to other better utilized skills (or simply removed, noone really misses their buffs anymore in current PoE).

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Baron01 wrote:

I'm already forced to not use CWDT setups, golems and warcries on my builds because I can not fit them on a skill bar. I already gut my movement skill to be the bare minimum, eg. my Leap Slam only has faster attacks attached to it, no Fortify or other utility supports because I need those sockets for other skills.

what do you mean with "cant fit them on a skillbar"
cwdt skills dont need a slot on the skill bar,they just need the additional socket for the cwdt gem