dear GGG a message of love that many others seem to support (Mathil Video link below)

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yamface wrote:

The real culprit imo that started spinning the game in the wrong direction was the introduction to ascendencies.

Oh shit, them there's fightin' words. Please do elaborate! Keep in mind the playerbase had been calling for prestige classes from the start -- people loved the openness of the Skilldrasil, but there was definitely room for stronger class identity, for specialisation.

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BlackPulsar wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

As for the death penalty: that's another complex issue. The big problem with the death penalty is, unlike virtually every other game with some sort of death penalty, there is no way of reclaiming what was lost. No grave to pray at; no corpse to retrieve.

diablo 2 had this and it was fun :) sometimes it was hard as hell getting my corpse back and i lost even more xp in the process :) also the corpse gave just part of the xp back not all of it and i think we lost gold in the process if we had it on us but i can't remember exactly.

Correct, corpse runs were an integral part of non-HC Diablo 2! While you only got part of your exp loss back, the point was you got some of it back. This only applied to Nightmare and Hell difficulties. Arguably more significant was when you died, you spawned naked in town, and had to run back to the corpse to retrieve your gear. You could always just start a new game wherein your gear-laden corpse would spawn in town next to you, but the desire to get back the experience and I believe gold was often too hard to resist. Of course, if you died naked, your gear-leaden corpse despawned, and bam, gear gone for good.

Now, Diablo 1 multiplayer was even more severe. When you died to a monster, all your items just showered to the ground, as well as your ear, of course. So before too long, cheeky hackers figured out how to code a fireball that tricked the game into thinking it came from a monster. Boom, lots of loot for PKing. I won't say those were the days, because good God was D1-era Bnet a mess but it was certainly a lot more interesting than anything PoE's served up for years.

Other games have post-death incentive as well, usually MMOs. I remember when you'd die in Everquest, you left a corpse on the ground with all your equipment. You had to run back naked, and use the /drag command repeatedly to get your corpse out of danger before the laborious process of retrieving your gear. When you'd die in Dark Age of Camelot, a grave spawned at your death site, and you had to /pray to get some of that experience back. And so on.

How the everloving hell GGG failed to implement some form of post-death risk vs reward recuperation of loss is beyond me. I don't recall ever asking them directly but I suspect it falls along the lines of 'no real point'. Exiles seem content to eat the shit of a ~10% exp loss for anything as random as a lag spike or some annoying mess of blah spewing damage everywhere. Just one more thing I could never, ever go back to.

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Turtledove wrote:

On top of what you say, GGG is in love with the level 100 chase goal and so the death penalty wouldn't be changed for that reason alone. I'll guess.

Now this one I DID discuss with Chris in person more than once. I remember asking him why there were no real power spikes from 90 to 100 as incentive, and he said something to the effect of level 100 being their Everest. You can climb it if you want, but you shouldn't feel obligated to. This was back in the days of PoE having essentially one grail, and that was the mighty 6L. Obtaining one of those for your character was much more important than gaining levels. And it was supposed to take 'years' for someone to get to level 100.

Not many people remember this but you're dead right about the preciousness of level 100 -- when the first level 100 character popped up in Softcore, GGG refused to openly acknowledge it because they calculated it was actually impossible to achieve it that quickly without some form of cheating, mostly likely RMTing Maps. It was only the first hardcore level 100 they openly praised. Fellow named Baker, as I recall (just checked youtube: yep).

Not long after that, 100 became easier and easier, until it was less Everest and more, I dunno, the gold pen you get for staying at a company for a certain amount of time. I mean, it's a decent enough achievement but the actions required to get 100 are essentially the same as those required to get to 90 or 95. It's a game of attrition against your boredom factor and that lulling sensation that can lead to stupid mistakes. But any build that can level from 89 to 90 can probably go from 90 to 100 over time. Again, just playing it safe...

I figure this is also why we have league achievements. They're so much demanding than just hitting 100. Which is more impressive -- a level 100 character, or a 40/40 tag? Hint: one shows up on the forum, the other has to be dug for.

It's ironic then, Turtledove, that one of the greatest inspirations for PoE had a level cap of 20 -- and monsters just kept levelling past you. Your gear was pretty much standard at level 20, and it took a whole 20 hours to get there in the original campaign. In subsequent campaigns (which were basically the primary inspiration for what PoE '2' will be -- separate story paths to the same endgame) you could hit 20 in far less time. Indeed: in the mighty Guild Wars, character level was all but irrelevant. You didn't chase max level; you chased materials to make elite-looking gear and rare skills to equip, which you literally had to copy from the enemies that used them. It sometimes boggles my mind how a dev team that so venerated Guild Wars could get levelling, gear and story progression so wrong.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

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yamface wrote:

The real culprit imo that started spinning the game in the wrong direction was the introduction to ascendencies.

Oh shit, them there's fightin' words. Please do elaborate! Keep in mind the playerbase had been calling for prestige classes from the start -- people loved the openness of the Skilldrasil, but there was definitely room for stronger class identity, for specialisation.

I think the specialization role went too far. Technically you can play any skill in any ascendancy but it feels almost dysfunctional to be not playing the intended specialization, alot I'm guessing is due to ggg gradually balancing the game around a minmaxed build assuming the best specialization picked. A lot of the build archetype elements used to be in the passive tree itself but it then moved onto ascendancy nodes which are not reachable by anyone else. I always thought poe was in stark contrast with games like d3 because of how open and infinite the possibilities were, and then that happened. They added that similar kind of shoehorning into the game.

But more related to the guy I replied to, ascendancies imo is arguably the single biggest power spike/creep the game has introduced. As soon as 2.2 launched the gates flooded open wide with power creep of all kinds. Damage, speed, defenses, you name it. As broken as harvest crafting is, I still think it's behind the addition of ascendancy classes.

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yamface wrote:

The real culprit imo that started spinning the game in the wrong direction was the introduction to ascendencies.

I couldn't agree more. When the class you picked was meaningless beyond "where you started on the skill tree," you saw a LOT more build variety than you do now, even at the high end.

I mean, there are even unique items completely designed around build archetypes that doesn't even exist anymore. Once upon a time it wasn't unhead of to see "General"-style summoner marauders melee-fighting on the front lines shoulder to shoulder with their skeletons, swinging a Chober Chaber around. Or the archer version with a Null's Inclination.

Now, playing a skeleton build on anything other than a necromancer is automatically a meme; that skill has effectively been railroaded into 1/19th of all class options. Even before you get into the discussion on ascendency imbalance (which absolutely continues to be a problem, more than 4 years later), ascendencies giving such strong synergistic bonuses to specific skills and playstyles absolutely kills any possibility of true build diversity. It's hardly a secret that I enjoy designing and playing horrible, lag-inducing, game-crashing meme builds, but it kind of feels like there are no other options anymore if I don't want to repeat content, because the skill/uniques you use pretty much pick your ascendancy for you. And this in turn picks your starting location in the tree, which picks which passive clusters you take, which picks how you manage your defenses, and so on.

Let's say, for instance, I decide that I want to play a Bleed build. Right now, my choices are to either
A - Play a Gladiator
B - Be wrong (by which I mean, be measurably and objectively ineffective compared to a near-identical build with gladiator ascendancy passives)

There are only so many skills you can use to apply Bleed effectively, and some (puncture, earthquake, lacerate) are CLEARLY better options than others due to the specific nature of the skills.

So from what should have been a very flexible build concept, i.e. "I want to use attacks to do physical damage over time," we've been reduced to THREE possibilities. Four, if you count "puncture with a sword" (but I honestly don't, lacerate is just better). And those three will all be very, very similar to each other.

yep, ascendancies did a lot of harm. the dreaded 'archetypes' as well.

but this is because they no longer create a cohesive product, they are in 'additive' mode since Scion got added. that mindset that 'adding is always the right choice'. when facing bad mechanic or bad balance situation they always ADDED (a bandaid), never removed (a problem).

and it quickly outgrew the design capacity of the team. it forced them to solve and fix the issue's outcome, not the underlying cause. and like all treatments of this type - the patient is in sorry state now


Ill push it even further - we no longer need passive tree. when someone names the build, ie: 'Tectonic Slam crit Chieftain' you (if you understand the game) IMMEDIATELY and CORRECTLY can draw the passive tree, main gear pieces (in cheap and expensive price range) and imagine general gameplay.

there are very, very few oddball builds that warp my mind when someone speaks about them but pretty much any skill out there has ONE, clearly, objectively CORRECT way of playing it. in some cases like melee-poison - two, because Pathfinder's prolif ~~ Assassin+Bino's. there is no third option - both these choices make ALL other approaches 100% wrong, ineffective (and POE kills ineffective builds by swarming them with enemies they dont have power to kill in time)

there is some variety but skills like Lacerate, Pestilent Strike, Toxic Rain - these are one trick ponies as in the trick is to play them that one, correct way.

(adding flat damage to skills made that issue MUCH worse. but when i pointed that out many years ago people ignored me, oh well)


One note: Chobber Chabber was a templar's weapon and still is. Templar had minion nodes nearby and that archetype of melee+minions+auras stuck with us till this day. Guardian can do amazing things with minions. and i have an oddball DomBlow Marauder with 2h Kongors - it does the endgame just fine.

but these are exceptions. there is no chance in hell anyone sane is going to make duelist Essence Drain or stuff like that


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but.. is that a PROBLEM? problem in itself? the problem I see is that GGG creates (willingly or not) these pre-made win scenarios and is perfectly OK with some of them being 10 times (or 100 times) better than the other GGG-made scenarios. that sucks massively and that is something they dont seem to be brave enough to address

what seems to happen when something underperforms:
- uuuh, Skill A is weak and noone wants to play it? here, there is DIFFERENT skill B that is better in every way and you should be fine!
- but.. what about Skill A? i kinda like it but it simply miss damage/xyz?
-oh, you still here? play skill B

thats why we have so many skills (remember, adding is always better!) while the same 7 occupy the top spots of the charts. GGG tries to add alternatives to the too strong/too weak instead of simply bringing top ones down a notch and improving the weak ones.

or they do a completely weird-on-mushrooms rework like in case of Dual Strike.. like WTF is that rework?

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

The topic thread didn't really lend itself to much direct discussion, but I thought it a decent enough spring-board for related issues. Happy to cease if that's what's desired.

As for the death penalty: that's another complex issue. The big problem with the death penalty is, unlike virtually every other game with some sort of death penalty, there is no way of reclaiming what was lost. No grave to pray at; no corpse to retrieve. That experience loss is permanent and absolute. This doesn't encourage risk-taking or skill-developing. All it encourages is playing it safe -- so the only time a person will play any way other than safe and boring is immediately after levelling, and even then probably not at the higher levels. It's a genuinely awful system poorly implemented that is purely punitive but yet again, people are used to it and it is baked into this image that POE is somehow hardcore and elite. Anyone calling for it to be removed or even refined is thus an easy target for elitists (who are themselves so rarely actually elite)...it's an ugly situation, but one that really only concerns the boots on the ground. GGG are basically high command thinking not of individual experience but of collective gains and losses.

The challenge is making a build that can do all or almost all content whilst also going for lvl100. Experiencing all of the game whilst leveling. Not just some build that does only Breachstone rotas or 5 way legions with Headhunter.

It does encourage you to play safe which is good as there is a feedback loop for what you should/shouldn't do and tells you what aspect of your build is weak. Compare that to just doing everything blindly because it doesn't matter if you die 5 times every map. It also encourages you to make builds that can do everything as that is more fun instead of just running a single piece of content like Breachstones.

Just because before ascendancies existed you could play a skill as any character doesn't mean there was greater build diversity, there would almost exactly the same skill tree that was the 'correct' setup with a dozen or so minor difference in travel. It was really only an aesthetic choice, or at most a case of a 1-2% min/max situation. The 'right' and 'wrong' skill tree setup has always been there.

I'm not saying ascendancies were a superior choice, i'm suggesting that they are a subjective design decision that gain individual identity at the cost of perceived build freedom. You may not like the choice, which is fine, but trying to condemn it on the grounds of being objectively worse is just trying to make the argument that your opinions are more valid than someone else's. The argument of 'that bit I don't like is the cause of all the problems' is a natural point of view that we all have, but it is rarely accurate.

There are many legit issues with the game that have been pointed out, but there is also a lot of pointing at random aspects of the game as the 'causes' which is just denying the multiplicative complexity of layers of game content, the global gaming paradigm, and the benefits/problems caused by increased financial success with a creative product.

And build diversity in general was certainly not greater in the past, there was just a less established dominant meta (due to fewer players, less media visibility, less widespread community knowledge, less gear diversity, less content diversity etc) with considerably less absolute power differential between the 'top' builds and 'mediocre' builds.
Technically there is a smaller percentage of total builds that can do all the content, but that isn't nearly the same thing, given that the choice of builds and in game content and play styles is far greater than it ever was.