Hard to swallow unpopular opinion of... ever.

Giving players a chance to fail and abort content
without killing them with bonkers dmg spikes would not ruin HC.


You're doing a map/boss/any content and start taking progressively more dmg because your build/gear/playstyle sucks. You push a bit longer, learn more about the fight/monsters BUT you don't die. You come CLOSE to dying, and manage to portal to safety or log out.

If it's a limited portal map/boss/special thing, you now failed.
You didn't die, but you didn't get any loot or achievements from said event, and wasted time and resources for the chance of trying.

Does this take anything away from the elite base?
No. Quite the opposite. Now there's more demand for their services.
"Hey, I can't do this thing alone, wtb help".

Casuals don't have to spend days or weeks to grind their next toon back to that same point, and elitists have more high paying customers to buy their boosts. This literally benefits everyone.

The biggest thing this change would do is save players a LOT of time.
A far greater, more flexible time window to pull out and avoid a full character reset. What's the downside? Nothing.

Here's how dmg works now vs how it should be:
(official data obtained by NASA, I paid $500,000 for this chart)




- Here's how a current Atziri fight looks like:

Player goes in. Gets hit. Dies. Wtf?
And then repeats ten times on ten different build for ten weeks.
While learning hardly anything and having no fun. Just raging to a quitting point and giving their money to another game.

- Here's how a Atziri fight would look with the improved dmg design:

Player goes in. Gets hit. Almost dies and goes "holy shit THAT thing did THIS to me and I ALMOST died. Tries again. Still takes too much dmg. Has to abort thinking "I need better gear, rework my tree and try again".
He learned something. He isn't discouraged or demotivated or frustrated.
He's glad he's still alive. He's going to farm for upgrades, which *wink wink* makes him more likely to buy stash tabs to make currency.

He doesn't need to replay the entire 50, 100 or 200 hours of that chars lifetime but can get another try with a lower loss; the portals are used up, he has to get another set of that map/fragments/special whatnots.
But the risk of him dying IS STILL THERE.
Don't even need to mention how ridiculously lethal delving is.

The majority of HC players will eventually die anyways.
Everyone does. Pulling the rug under them every time at step 1, 2 or 3 is such a uncalled for sadistic stupid design. Let players venture further, let them explore and learn on their own. Nobody feels satisfaction in watching hours of guide videos and just mimicking them like a fucking uncreative MONKEY.

The whole essence of POE is supposed to be creativity.
Let players come up with new random builds. But we can't because you are so mad keen on one shotting us before we even get a chance to step back to adjust our stuff and try again.

Anyone replying with a "that's what softcore is for" is obviously trolling or can not fucking read what I said, or understand why that is a completely reasonable design change to ask for. You wouldn't be anything "lesser" due to these changes. If these changes were to cut the "retry" penalty for casuals from 100 hours down to 10 minutes, and push their average progress status from the low 50% to a good 70% then what is it to you?

If they can now learn and maybe even solo Atziri and Shaper and delve to 500,
then you should have no trouble moving on to uber Atziri, uber Shaper, uber delve to 5000. Something they can and will never be able to do.
So you still get to keep your proud e-peen privilege gamer swag.

Fight me.

*edit*

"durr so why u play hc then??"
- Because softcore has zero thrill, dying doesn't mean anything. There's 0 risk, no feeling.

Question is how would you implement this?

If you just balance out dmg spikes to a slightly increasing damage over time, like you shown in your 2nd chart, it will be only a "incoming dmg vs. recovery of ES / Life) which will decide if you can survive or not.
With all the options we have for recovery (e.g. my Jugger has ~ 4,xk life recovery / second) its mandatory to have dmg spikes.

So if you want to change the dmg concept you need to review as well all defences and recovery concepts.

Maybe NASA can deliver some more data on that. Would be apreciated.

Best regards
Bernhart

Edit: Looking at the charts again. They are not accurate. E.g. if dmg is 0 the chance of dying is 0. In the first slide the chance of dying will reach 100% if dmg > your life pool. In second slide the chance of dying will be 0% as long as your recovery > dmg.

Well, their official stance on the HC debate is - and will probably always be: "Deal with it".

Anyhow, when I see players advocating that "more people will buy services" is a good thing, I fundamentally disagree with everything.

Wonder what your game will look like when you publish it. Let us know.

How do you have more than 100% chance of dying?

"

DudeTheLegend wrote:

"durr so why u play hc then??"
- Because softcore has zero thrill, dying doesn't mean anything. There's 0 risk, no feeling.

So you play HC because of the risk, yet you want to eliminate/reduce those risks because you don't want the risk?

"

Gulch wrote:

"

DudeTheLegend wrote:

"durr so why u play hc then??"
- Because softcore has zero thrill, dying doesn't mean anything. There's 0 risk, no feeling.

So you play HC because of the risk, yet you want to eliminate/reduce those risks because you don't want the risk?

We have a winner!

"

Gulch wrote:

"

DudeTheLegend wrote:

"durr so why u play hc then??"
- Because softcore has zero thrill, dying doesn't mean anything. There's 0 risk, no feeling.

So you play HC because of the risk, yet you want to eliminate/reduce those risks because you don't want the risk?

Yup OP is deeply confused.

He thinks he likes HC, but he really doesn't.

Come on. Play standard and end your misery because Hardcore is not for you.

i get OP's point but basically in the new version you just wouldn't die and outgearing content would be trivial.

You have two paths for balance, gear gated or skill gated (an oversimplification but works for OPs graphs)

1st is providing a series of hoops until you can recover/tank/deal damage enough to kill a boss, that is OP's new graph.

Second is values they are easily attainable but with spikes that require manual input for damage/evasion in lieu of gear. This is where we are currently at.

Personally I think #1 is unbelievably boring and leads to very hollow feeling content but i've had my fill of MMOs so thats probably why.

#2 could be better in GGG's case as their real issue is the gap between defensive and not defensive characters is enormous, as is their gap between scaling options and certain skills.

"

Bernhart wrote:

Question is how would you implement this?

If you just balance out dmg spikes to a slightly increasing damage over time, like you shown in your 2nd chart, it will be only a "incoming dmg vs. recovery of ES / Life) which will decide if you can survive or not.
With all the options we have for recovery (e.g. my Jugger has ~ 4,xk life recovery / second) its mandatory to have dmg spikes.

So if you want to change the dmg concept you need to review as well all defences and recovery concepts.

Many ways to balance these issues.
One example could be boss fights having a phase where they apply some dot or direct dmg on you, and this stacks in manners eventually killing the player, while still giving him a good feel for it.
The stacks can be removed by ending the phase, meaning you need enough dps to push the boss out. Or you can fight with far less dmg but more mitigation/regen, which seems riskier unless you know what you are doing.
Third option, fight mechanics, move to a thingy to remove or reset a dot stack, aka player skills, actual knowledge of the game. A lot of this is tactics in games such as WoW, what to do when why how to avoid lethal dmg etc.

The good thing about this is also that you can play a tank or glass cannon, as long as you know the fights. Having a pure flat cap on incoming dmg is bad because it forces players into specific builds/gear/nodes because if you don't have 10k es/ehp you WILL get hit and WILL die.

I would much prefer if flat dmg from multiple sources was reduced, and other sources have a % based life/es penalty. This would smooth the curve a lot to allow more dps builds, who even then would still notice big risks in doing end content as low life dps vs high life tank builds.

I'm not saying this is easy by any means.
This would probably require years of tweaking and testing and rebalancing monster dmg and even creating new monster skills and fight mechanics.
And I can't give you any solid numbers here aside of my dope meme graph.
But I stand behind it that this would be a far better design than what we have now.

In short the goal of my suggestion is to allow players to push and try hard content further before bailing out. To experience and play the game for themselves and learn from mistakes, and this can be done without KILLING THEM for every single mistake in a 100 actions per second spamfest, while still keeping the rewards locked behind proper gates.