[Feedback] Diablo II and Path of Exile

Here is my take on the matter:

Look at Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction. Development stopped in like 2002?2003? Yet, here we are in 2021 and people still play Diablo 2 as well as make mods that make small or large changes to the game.


Look at Path of Exile. I'm sure it has its following. But over time, I have liked the game less and less because we received more and more.



Maybe Diablo 2 is so good right now because they snapshotted development to a point in time the game was in a good spot and left it there. Mods make some changes like Path of Diablo/PD2 added corruption systems inspired by PoE, but nonetheless it feels like the same game. Path of Exile doesn't feel the same as it was a few years ago.


Path of Exile, my personal snapshot would be in Breach. Back when the game had a lot fewer systems, skills, and it was pretty straight forward.


As this game moves forward, for me, too much is added and it overwhelms me. Sometimes keeping it simple is better. It just feels like a different game.



I am hyped for PoE2. Kind of hoping it is PoE's chance for a comeback, for me that is.

That's just a sign of burnout. Even the most hardcore pizza lovers will throw up if they have been eating pizza all day every day for 365 days. Take a break from PoE, play D2, after months you will feel the same thing about D2, and come back PoE eventually.

I think there is room for both. I've just started playing Grim Dawn and while it's the same basic genre as PoE, it's a very different game. I love that GD doesn't use Wisdom or Portal scrolls, that there is auto pick-up for currency and crafting loot, I like the Devotion and Reputation mechanics, I like that you can max a skill out quite early if you invest in it rather than waiting for the gem to level to 20.

But, on the other hand, I like PoE's crafting bench, that any class can use any skill, that skills get greater utility by combining them with different support gems, that you get a passive tree to buff your character rather than just putting every point into Physique. And a bunch of other aspects too.

They're both great games, I enjoy both, and there is room for both.

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CaptinSupreem wrote:

[..]
I miss D2-style set items.

And runewords.

And mercenaries.

And decent PvP.

[..]

Oof... you make me seriously consider playing it again for a few hours... or days... or weeks...

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drklrd wrote:

I do miss runewords, and for a moment I believed that's where they were going with the blight oils, setting up an enchantment system based on oils similar to runes, but then GGG just stopped and went back to regular put item in and just click to randomly get something.

I am very curious about the next iteration of the Harvest mechanic, it's implementation was a much needed improvement.

That's what I would like to see, not prefixed set items but custom items with some puzzle elements to it, some lore added o why certain oils combine to make those enchantment, not just here's a new mechanic, it just works trust me.

Yeah, the determinism of runewords was absolutely amazing. You knew EXACTLY what you were getting for your investment - with slight roll variations, but still

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drklrd wrote:

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jeerinho wrote:

Take a break from PoE, play D2, after months you will feel the same thing about D2

After a while he's gonna find the D2 systems overwhelming ? LOL

My fault for being too brief in my statements. LOLOL

Actually I wanted to say that ppl will get disinterested even sooner if new stuff don't get added to the game every few months. But agreeing with changes and new stuff does not mean I agree to more grinds, so I hope certain content to be simplified, revamped or cut.

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Speaking of D2 runewords, I just realized the similarity to dragon shouts in Skyrim. Match certain combinations and overpowered stuff happens. And now I feel warcy stacking in PoE could have a bit of influence from those two as well.

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CaptinSupreem wrote:

DII has day/night cycles, PoE doesn't. Nuff said.

I miss D2-style set items.

And runewords.

And mercenaries.

And decent PvP.

And dynamic rain in outdoor maps.

And the decent, coherent story line and characters (until D3 ruined it all).

Each of those systems have trade offs

unique items and rune words in d2 were most certainly more impactful. but the downside was that they generally limited the pool of top tier items to .. be exclusively rune words and unique items.

It largely made rares and magic items worthless.

It is also not sustainable. d2 had a fixed set of content. It has what it has. Can you imagine how much of a cluster fuck mess it would be if it had to constantly introduce new runewords and uniques constantly.. because that is what poe has to do. 700 unique items.. that is a lot of crap.

Mercs are kind of pointless.. in poe Mercs worked in diablo 2 because the balance in diablo was such that even the greatest of builds could not trivialized everything. the damage scaling simply never got to the point that rendered them redundant.

Poe is WAAAAAAY past that point when the expected starting point of a good build is "one shot everything at least a screens worth in every direction all the time".

As for pvp. that only works well with simple systems. the more complex the game.. the less practical pvp is. Again d2 had its damage scaling under control such that the top tier builds were maybe doing 5 - 10 times the damage of a normal build.

Poe is a game where one end game build is doing 500k dps and another is doing 50 - 500 million dps. You can't balance pvp with that kind of stupid as hell discrepancy

You would need to gut most of this game's scaling systems (specifically anything that multiplies damage) for pvp to be anything other than a joke.
even at the best point.. the only decent pvp in poe was low level pvp .. and that was ruined once people started making low level 6 links and silly powerful weapons

I do miss dynamic weather. So many games seem to be ignoring that and its annoying.

As for the story. Poe's story is not the worst thing ever.. the big problem is that the core of it is based on 2013 style poe and the budget limitations are obvious. My hope is that poe2 will give them the opportunity to up the presentation of the story.

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Not really. Some of the best items in D2 are ethereal zod'ed rares, and so they should be. All the top tier runewords were almost impossible to make legitimately anyway (you could dupe them of course but that wasn't how it was designed).

for all intents and purposes those rares did not exist for most people either and I would argue to a greater extent than rune words.. especially when you are talking zoded ethereal weapons

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One might argue that more doesn't equal better.

One might argue you don't sustain a profitable player based without having more.

That is the core concept of a live service. d2 is nice to put on a pedestal. But Diablo2 was not trying to maintain a thriving community for 10 years. The fact that it has a decent one was a nice bonus there really wasn't much activity on the devs side after lod came out.

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That's a problem with PoE though, not the mercs. For me, having a merc to kit out and run around with as a really lame aurabot was fun, and gave my less-useful items a purpose. Besides, having a merc in PoE would be the only time you ever saw anyone else in a map.

If you want a crap aura bot.. thats an animate guardian.

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Yes and no. MMO's and other ARPG's can figure it out. There is no functional limitation on programming it all in. It just takes time and money.

Those other MMO's and ARPG's are also built with pvp in mind and have their mechanics restricted because of it.

This is why top tier itemization in a game like guildwars was as dull as bricks... too keep that balance. You couldn't have many interesting / impactful mechanics specifically to avoid the runaway synergies that kind represent what makes poe .. poe.


Again pvp in poe was the most successful at low level.. specifically because fewer and fewer mechanics are in play in the early game. And even then .. with that handicap .. pvp was a garbage fire.

[Original Poster]

I guess what I'm trying to do say is that Diablo 2 could have potentially have gotten lucky. If you look at D2's past, it wasn't always great. Lord of Destruction and the patches leading up to the end of development made the game shine. If development continued on D2 for lets say 6 more years, it would have had the same chance of having a similar issue as PoE, over-development

That is my opinion of course.


And yes, burnout does play a role in all of it. I went back to play Path of Diablo and Project Diablo 2 and eventually got burnout.


At the same time, I can say I "came back" for heist among other leagues and I haven't been enjoying PoE. So while burnout can happen in PoE (It has in the past when I was enjoying it), the issue I'm having is actually a lack of enjoyment.

If I were to compare the feeling, it would be imagining "daily quests" from WoW. Every league seems to add some new reputation or bar we must fill up. I enjoyed much simpler leagues like Breach/Abyss. (Its not just that either. It's having to unlock crafting every league. as well. Just things like that... I just want to login and smash stuff and find loot.)

The argument there I guess is to skip it all or play standard. (Pre-emptive reply). Well, you don't feel like your part of the community playing standard.



Anyways, Path of Exile is a good game and most of this is biased. I guess it comes down to how many feel the same way?

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raserei wrote:

The argument there I guess is to skip it all or play standard. (Pre-emptive reply). Well, you don't feel like your part of the community playing standard.

YES, come to Standard. We have cookies! :P