Should PoE still be advertised for its variety in abilities and options?

sure any build can do any content.

problem is most builds can not do content effectively.

poe has very limited variety in abilities and options. You either play the meta and breeze through content - eventually farming the most efficient way with leechers to increase drops for yourself.

or you try to play the game for fun and constantly die out of no where due to a sub par skill selection. Your time feels wasted as the drops are abysmal due to the ones playing meta dictating the play for everyone else.

the only way to fix the game would be to severely limit damage outputs and bring the meta skills closer inline with other skills. Then everyone will have to suffer through the 2 minute boss fights, but atleast the fights could be engaging and not about killing it before it can hit you.

sadly i prefered poe from a few years ago to now , where the difference in power was much smaller and any skill could be made to do well.

The devs have no clue how to make a good arpg now that it is so out of control with 10% chance content made for people who play several hours a day..

The main problem of PoE is not the meta nor the build variety. The main and only problem of PoE in recent days is :

You can't make a build work if you treat the game like a game. Some currencies have an abysmal loot drop rate, forcing players to use the broken trading system where in reality you should be able to target farm everything in a fair amount of time.

Having the best gear needs you to throw tens of exalts at it, when in reality, if you don't trade you won't get those exalts unless you make PoE your day job...

I really hope that the reintroduction of Harvest in 3.13 will solve that problem...

"

TorsteinTheFallen wrote:

Not everyone has that feeling of "competition".

That's tits and tats. You can maybe balance a barbie simulator around the assumption that players won't be doing their best to stomp the game into the ground as hard as possible. The theoretical depth of game systems in PoE has me rather firmly convinced that it was supposed to be a serious game.

Maybe most builds are 'viable' but it depends.

If by fun we mean player should be able to acquire items in higher tier areas, I can assure it is not fun nor viable to SSF most builds. You can argue this is a wrong way to play PoE in the first place, to which I'd argue defining 'right' and 'wrong' way of enjoying a game is a messy concept. To me, playing PoE in the right way is no fun at all.

Trade leagues are different altogether. To use a WoW expression, you could go kill piggies in the forest to grind enough chaos and trade for all the shinies. And surely you can have fun without the shinies, as well as you can have fun playing other genre games than arpgs.

However, from SSF perspective everything in PoE is designed more and more to suck any fun away, meaning you absolutely need certain kind of build to access higher tier areas and farm them at least semi-effectively.

"

raics wrote:

"

TorsteinTheFallen wrote:

Not everyone has that feeling of "competition".

That's tits and tats. You can maybe balance a barbie simulator around the assumption that players won't be doing their best to stomp the game into the ground as hard as possible. The theoretical depth of game systems in PoE has me rather firmly convinced that it was supposed to be a serious game.

Over 50% of the PoE playerbase has no idea wtf they are doing either than just playing the game.
1% is focused on stomping things to the ground, prob less because stomping requires knowledge, time and arguably skill. And whatever you do they will stomp it either way.

You should read what people are talking on Reddit. Rly it differs a lot from this forum.

As someone said before: game before the 2018(Tencent) was for fun. Now the game is just for money and China's playerbase.

Just check the file:
Annual Report for 2019(March 31st)

You can cleary see that Tencent will juice all of this beast out and will leave dead body for players who actually loved(and still loves) this game.

"

zzang wrote:

Guys straight talk.

Well here is another one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAvapWY4IG4

PoB: https://pastebin.com/EP5CpzGV

CI Aura Effect Stacking + Armour Stacking with Transcendence of course otherwise armour would be friggin garbage.

up to 2 Million Armour without Armour nodes or Armour gear pieces thats how you roll today if you want high armour values.

This build is awesome, but I can't help but feel like everyone saw this coming at the end of Delirium league.

I will seriously never understand why it's always REDUCED mana reserved instead of LESS mana reserved... it's like GGG honestly sees no problem with every single build running 9 auras at all times.

not since 3.9, now it must be meta or high dmg, meme builds work for mirrors, but in 3.8 you could essentially hate crime the game in a tabula rasa, and gearing was nearly 100% optional based on if you felt like it... not anymore.


Now only meta builds with about a 50ex budget feel playable at all. Sure, maybe YOU can enjoy cheap builds, but not me. I need minimum 50-100ex for a build to feel legit.

"

Rakie1337 wrote:

Now only meta builds with about a 50ex budget feel playable at all. Sure, maybe YOU can enjoy cheap builds, but not me. I need minimum 50-100ex for a build to feel legit.

If you need 50-100ex for a build to feel playable, its not the game that has an issue, its you.

"

Rakie1337 wrote:

not since 3.9, now it must be meta or high dmg, meme builds work for mirrors, but in 3.8 you could essentially hate crime the game in a tabula rasa, and gearing was nearly 100% optional based on if you felt like it... not anymore.

exactly my thoughts. 3.9 changed the game dramatically imho.