The Larger Issue with Crafting and the Current State of Items in the Game
|
Seems like on-death gotchas and explodey mods are just part of the power creep arms race escalating at the highest levels of play.
As soon as explodey mod becomes de rigueur for surviving cheesy-ass deaths due to hidden or clutter-obscured monster cheats, GGG cranks it up a notch by releasing content that consists almost entirely of a) monsters that have on-death effects and b) raspberry cluster bombs that ONLY exist to volatile the player. Well, here we are. Where explodey mods on items are only one example of the arms-race model of game design. We also have culling strike to deal with the increasing roster of monsters that either self-heal, or are healed up by external factors (maven). Guess what? Now there's more entities than ever that gain significant buffs at very low life. You NEED culling strike on more and more builds, whereas before it was a nice luxury if you got it on a weapon, and a nice perk for going Slayer. We have tailwind and elusive on shoes that have become more and more essential to smooth gameplay with the passel of new monstertypes that spam adds on your location, or blocking/hindering terrain/roots, or disable travel skills entirely. It's like the content has "You must have this much innate movespeed multiplier to ride this ride". These mechanics didn't appear outside of certain specialized areas even when deadeye had been the top clear tool for years. They only appeared in droves with the migration of deadeye's landmark footwork skill on ordinary rare shoes. The take-home message to players is "chase these mods, because now you need them". Adding more VD/DD cheats to more monsters does NOT punish people abusing splodey chests. It punishes people who either can't or won't change their build to accommodate this, either through lack of resources or build constraints. It reduces build diversity to introduce mods that then compel the devs to add more of the cheats those mods circumvent, into the game at all levels. So long as we're picking apart Harvest and especially influence crafting, look at synthesized items. You have very little chance to get a "good" or useful synth implicit, compared to the deterministic crafting of a 7L or 8L weapon, hat, gloves, or chest. There's simply no comparison. RNG synth vs. eventual precise crafting of 8L item. How about Maven, Drox, Baran, etc. drop a family of influenced uniques that combine some of the more popular mods in sensible ratios for an open-ended build? You can still roll some nice things like supported by and AS/CS and whatnot, but ripping ascendancy perks right out of trees and putting them in drop pools seems bad for the game. [19:36]#Mirror_stacking_clown: try smoke ganja every day for 10 years and do memory game
|
|
" That's not a solution at all. It's just another gate for items to sit behind that renders 99.999999% of drops filter worthy. Every item that drops* should have a chance to be a jackpot find. You want to talk elegant? D2 did elegant where magic items rolled higher affix tier than rare items could and even grey/white items had a niche. *you still have to reward taking chances, doing harder content, and rolling maps harder so whether this chance is on a sliding scale that increases with content difficulty or is gated behind 'red maps' or T15 maps or whatever is up for discussion. What shouldn't be up for discussion is T11 Atoll spam, open/close map, play discord for best gear being a desirable end game. |
|
" That is not an elegant solution as it balances the wrong end of the spectrum by giving players more powerful items easier. They should make those influenced crafts much harder to get. Which in the first place means removing those add/remove influence crafts from harvest. What is the point of doing Incursion bosses as the rare items that he drops can not compete with influenced ones. The advantage of the loot mechanic behind incursion is that these items have special mods and you need to pray to RNGesus that the other mods are somewhat feasible. They should have done a similar thing with conquerors. Conquerors should drop regular rare (non-influenced) items with special mods that can't be obtained in a different way. If you remove the influenced type game mechanic, people can also not easily craft influenced bases and they are forced to farm conquerors for the best gear ingame. Heart of Purity
Awarded 'Silverblade' to Talent Competition Winner 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDFO4E5OKSE POE 2 is designed primarily for console. |
|
|
I think the point with influenced items is they were supposed to have a higher maximum threshold but its far harder to reach so rares still usually compete.
That held until harvest, prior to being able to slap/reroll what you wanted to on an item a common explode chest was explode + some meh mods and a multimod for life etc. Harvest then made it so you just get the specific influence rolls you want (if they are tagged, FUUU mana/stun mods) then fill the rest in over time. You buy an influenced base and get it to a certain state, at which point it just becomes a numbers game of how many rerolls it takes to be decent. Like for example if I bought an 86 shaper shield you can roll any pair of mods you want then guarantee recovery on block, dual influence items are usually a step more complicated but its the same principle. tldr basically loot in general is messed up and every system feeds back into it and messes it up in its own way. A full overhaul will be needed if they keep so many systems in place. |
|
|
Its long lasting fairy tale which was on few occasions was well discussed witch Chris - basically 99.99% of things which drop are either not worth of looting or are currency picked up out of habit. That, as announced, should be addressed in POE2(we will see). Was a good idea to substitute loot with such sophisticated crafting system? In my opinion absolutely no.
|
|
" Spot on, the whole post! Even if you can now still say "but you don't really need the explodey chest to clear all content!": give it another 2 or 3 spins of the arms race wheel and it's definitely so. (I just shortened it because long quotes with short answers suck.) May your maps be bountiful, exile
|
|
|
I don’t like crafting. I don’t Want crafting. I hate the direction of POE. Give me a league with no item crafting ( orb crafting dropped rares is fine ) but this harvest / influenced mod crafting has just killed the game for me. Played since open beta. This is not an arpg anymore. Loot does not matter, crafting mods does. It’s not fun. It’s not fun. It’s not FUN. Have I mentioned it’s not fun? I want to have fun again. Job of crafting is not a game, it’s a crafting simulator.
|
|
" Yeah, so many times I hear the bullshit about 'U dun need da tailwind mirrortier to pla ma game!' but try it out in the endgame without those mods or some other way to circumvent all the stuff game throws out at you: only realistic 'gameplay style' to cope with baran level of modded stuff is move like a jetplane never stopping, and killing everything preferably with one shot and one shot only. You can't even engage meaningfully with half the content without a strict dps and mv speed check due to timer mechanics. Ever tried clearing monoliths with single-target skills and no half-screen wide AoE? It feels like shit. Ever tried Alva? How about breachstone runs or friggin delirium mirror? Oh, my newest favorites are maven invitations with 900 bosses on your screen simultaneously, you'd better instaphase them all or you are screwed so bad it isn't even funny. It has nothing to do with skill because those all are gated behind mv speed and dps checks you need to have first. Sure, you can clear content without explody but people tend to gravitate on having the mod because everything tends to get dangerous after they die, and the 'real' skill check on those situations usually isn't your gamer daddy reflexes but how bad your framerate drops (because let's face it, the most challenging mechanic about PoE these days is the dreaded lag monster time and again). Also while we are at it, every monolith incidentally tends to also drop my framerate for the first couple crucial seconds under timer. I just run like a blind chicken hoping to hit the pinata in time. Last edited by vmt80#6169 on Apr 7, 2021, 6:56:41 AM
|
|
" This. The normal loot is being made more and more meaningless in every league, while we get more and more of it (Hello Metamorph and Delirium). The probelm is the "rare" items area ctually common now, the influenced items are rares, Uniques are niche or core (depends on the build) or totally useless. The rest (white/blue) is simly just a clutter. The best solution would be to massively reduce drops and make boss-specific mods that you cannot obtain in any other way for more bosses + drops of common (white) bases in spefic maps / encouters etc. for crafters to use currencies on. Or add a way to craft bases using various combinations of currencies in a crafting bench. This way we can have boosted currency drops instead of thousands upon thousands of useless "rares" all over the place, because you could use the currencies in actual crafting. I have not played ANY other ARPG game that floods you with loot THIS much for no reason besides confusing new players with thousands of items to choose from. Loot-base ARPG should be focused on meaningful loot from DROPS, not crafted items. Make rares actually rare, or rebalance the idea of item rarity completely (base, modded, unique - that would be more than enough). Also introduction of item sets would be interesting, as many players love collecting those and it keeps people playing a lot. (yes the tradability here might be a problem, as it might easily kill the rarity of set pieces) |
|
" I said it a few times in the past and I will say it again: Most league mechanics are pretty much the same - DPS check while racing vs. a timer. The only difference is the way mobs spawn. Abyss, Breach, Delirium, Syndicate hideouts, Alva's incursions, Monoliths, to some extend even Delve. => this is all the SAME playstyle, the same build type and pretty much the same mechanic, it just has different rewards and looks diferent, but in the core there is little difference. The whole game is made into an AOE speedrun, where all enjoyment of the game is pretty much gone, all that matters is how fast you can clear the maps and how many can you do in as little time as possible, Most mechanics are just meaningless, because you don't even engage with them with this kind of playstyle. "Don't play that way then." you say? Well guess what, if you don't play this way, you can't really do this content at all, and thus missing out on major portion of the game. |
|
