Should the Delve difficulty scaling be inverted?

Right now Delve monster damage as you go deeper scales extremely high, but their hp doesn't increase anywhere near as much. This has resulted in, essentially, almost pure glass cannon builds ruling the deep delve meta - there's no point stacking HP or damage reduction (short of some sort of immunity) since even the slightest tap will kill you regardless. It's entirely about killing them before they can touch you. Should that progression be changed? PoE already doesn't really reward you much for building tanky, so should Delve be the place where tankiness counts for something?

Hmm, if the deep delve had tons of hp, and the same damage, then it would just invert to damage sponges whittling away at things. The opposite of glass cannons but not really more balanced?

I dont know if you could change it though, I mean skills do millions of dps these days. Would you have 20 million hp rare monsters at the depths?

That might only push glass cannons even further, because there are 30+ million dps builds.

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trixxar wrote:

Hmm, if the deep delve had tons of hp, and the same damage, then it would just invert to damage sponges whittling away at things. The opposite of glass cannons but not really more balanced?

I dont know if you could change it though, I mean skills do millions of dps these days. Would you have 20 million hp rare monsters at the depths?

That might only push glass cannons even further, because there are 30+ million dps builds.

If they made it so that you had to kill the monsters to get past them then the darkness would fix the balance on builds that can't kill fast enough. Then you would need both survivability/sustain as well as massive damage.

The problem is that this would require some extremely large changes in how delves work and I don't think GGG is willing to put in that kind of effort for something that risks breaking one of the most popular parts of the game.

the problem is with the game as a whole. GGG hates defense and has nerfed it time and time and time again to the point where the game has evolved to what its been for the last while - offense is your best defense.

delve just highlighted this problem more than anything else so far. but the fundamental issue still holds true even in high tier maps and the like.

if GGG wants to revert this gameplay now, i just don't see how it can be done without a complete and total revamping of the entire game. we're just too far gone, now.

another thing that would need to happen is BUFFING defense, instead of the constant nerfs to it time and time again.
even in 3.8 apparently flesh and stone was so defensively OP that it was nerfed to only give reduced damage taken to ATTACKS. because defense is the devil


not to mention even if you do go full defense you can still be 1 shot by the most random of shit. so whats the point? there isn't one. play softcore and go full damage where your defense will be from freezing and killing them before you can be touched

It is what it is, and players have adapted to it. The problem comes when other players start comparing their characters to ones who are designed to delve deep. Deep delvers can't do many of the things a normal well made character can.

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xMustard wrote:

if GGG wants to revert this gameplay now, i just don't see how it can be done without a complete and total revamping of the entire game. we're just too far gone, now.

Probably true.

Even if you made defense viable, it would be so much slower than just offense that there would be little point.

You'd have to cut non-gimmick builds to about 500k-1M dps, rework encounters to lower damage but maintain higher pressure over time.

It would just lead to leech/high regen being more key than now though. There is always another meta. Blow em up, sprint away is probably as good as any and more fun than most?

Quite frankly, I don´t know. Delve is hard. Very hard. Even harder then back when the Delve League was. Or so it seems. But I do now this: Delve is one of the best things that happened to Path of Exile. And am so happy for that. I don´t know what we would do without Delve.

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Exile009 wrote:

Right now Delve monster damage as you go deeper scales extremely high, but their hp doesn't increase anywhere near as much. This has resulted in, essentially, almost pure glass cannon builds ruling the deep delve meta - there's no point stacking HP or damage reduction (short of some sort of immunity) since even the slightest tap will kill you regardless. It's entirely about killing them before they can touch you. Should that progression be changed? PoE already doesn't really reward you much for building tanky, so should Delve be the place where tankiness counts for something?

Wouldn't the inverse be being practically immortal but everything taking forever and a day to die? Just saying....

GGG doesnt allow this game to have tanks. Too difficulty to balance and too likely to cause player rentention issues when every scrub is rocking an immortal build and getting to 99-100.

In my opinion yes - damage scaling and hp scaling should be inverted in delve.

The high damage scaling is layered on top of delve map mods which makes 1 shot on high toughness characters incredibly common on depths 2k+. This is the level where even the best juggernauts / 30k ES occultists would struggle.

One just needs to look at the league ladder where deep delving is dominated by glass cannons as the mantra is simply "don't get hit".