10% Exp on death a little harsh

I know that there is a post on the forums on this topic almost every week, but perhaps one more will maybe get GGG to at least consider it. If not, at least I've said my piece.

So the exp on death as it currently is just really frustrates and lessens the enjoyment of playing PoE for me. Dying already feels bad enough in maps due to the limited portals, but the 10% exp loss just really rubs the salt in.
Reading some of the other posts I'm not in the camp of removing the exp loss on death completely, it certainly beats losing items, but I would argue that 10% is too harsh and that maybe 2% on death would be better.

For me as a casual player, that normally plays around an hour or two a day, the 10% loss normally equates to a whole day or two of exp progress gone. For the amount of times you are one-shot by rare-mobs that are crazily buffed or you die due to the game crashing/lagging out, losing that much progress seems disproportionate. If you don't learn from your mistake and die a few more times in the same map, then sure, losing a total of 10% exp and failing the map feels fair; but 50% does not. And losing 10% to the game screwing up does not feel good at all.

The 50% for me normally happens when trying out those new difficult boss fights that are touted out most leagues.
Trying to learn the attack pattern and getting overly punished for not spoiling the fight by watching a streamer go through it first does not feel great. And I quite like experiencing and actually playing the game for myself.
For the more challenging content the degree of exp loss just makes me avoid the content altogether, or only attempt it once I level up. Which based on the occasional death doing the higher level maps needed to level up normally takes a while, if at all.

I still hate fighting Sirus (only do it once for the challenge) and absolutely avoid the Synthesis bosses because of this.
Trying to learn the patterns with all the insta-kill attacks and DoT on-ground effects was not fun knowing that not only could I fail the content, but that every mis-step would result in a whole day or more worth of progress disappearing.
Sirus even more so as you have to go through the conqueror cycle again. Although the corrupting blood immune jewel certainly made it easier.

As it currently stands the 10% exp loss does not inspire me to improve come back and try again, it pushes me towards stopping playing.
And it finally did. The rationale for the Harvest changes, the challenge rewards not interesting me, the league being similar to Ritual, and the technical difficulties at the start of the two previous leagues, broke the camels back and I gave Ultimatum a skip (have played every league since Harbinger).

Maybe the next league will be more interesting and make some beneficial changes, but the 10% exp on death will always be a detractor to the game for me. It comes across as more harsh than fair.


TLDR:
- 10% exp loss on death is a little harsh, 2% sounds fairer to me.
- Currently the 10% loss just makes me avoid attempting content or stop playing altogether.
- The other issues recently really piled on, and the game became more abusive than enjoyable for me.

No it isn't.

I am a seasoned player starting out on the NES and started online gaming with Diablo 2 which I played for many years so I am used to harsh EXP penalties.
Yet despite sometimes being frustrated by the EXP penalty I am against nerfing it to the ground. Reason: The flaw is not the EXP penalty but GGG itself. Most of my rips come from server related issues or lag spikes so GGG should reflect on that. While unable to have a stable running game maybe allow 1 rip per day without any EXP penalty.

For bosses, maybe something like a "scarab of learning" which removes the exp penalty and all loot from aid portals. Maybe give a few extra portals.
Or you can just switch characters if you want to avoid EXP loss but a boss like Sirus wants to be farmed.

Death penalty is fine as it is, But the frustrating part is the game is too laggy at times and loading the enviroment is too slow, so sometimes you fight invisible monsters and die becouse you do not see them.

It's quite easy to lvl up to around 95, and the 5 last lvl are not that a big game changer actually anyway. But you have to work for those last lvls, Play safer content, do not roll dangerous mods, and do not play dangerous bosses. That content you can do on another character OR do it just when lvl up so you will not loose anything if you die on the attempt.

The lvl 100 should be just for the most passionate players, and not for everyone, if everyone will reach lvl to easily 100 I guess many will lose the intrest in the game.

"

ADevonport wrote:

Sirus even more so as you have to go through the conqueror cycle again. Although the corrupting blood immune jewel certainly made it easier.

The more defense you invest, the less your death count will be exponentially. Never stop min-maxing your defense. Also, It is harsh to level after 95. You have to learn about what kind of damage going to kill your build.

"

For me as a casual player, that normally plays around an hour or two a day, the 10% loss normally equates to a whole day or two of exp progress gone.

I honestly wished people wouldn't exaggerate like that. Your highest build is level 95, the rest is 94 and your gear doesn't look all that bad, there is no way you actually need 1 not to mention 2 hours to get 10% XP. Once you try to go past 97 that might start to get accurate but i am fairly sure that even on my way to 98 it didn't take me that long to make 10%. An hour maybe, but not 2 and that's on a slow slam build, not some zoom zoom stuff. Just make sure you don't overdo it with map mods when you want to level to reduce the risk of dying and you should be able to easily level up any of your builds within a week with 1 hour of playtime per day.

As for the trying out new boss fights thing, you have several builds available, just like most people. If you are still busy leveling one of your builds by the time a new boss is introduced and that caught you by suprise somehow, just attempt him with one of your other builds?

The only real argument against death penalty is the existence of lags and game crashes but at least in my experience, dying to them is a rarity. I can count the number of lag/crash induced deaths i had at one hand in 3 years of playtime. And even if it was as bad as people make it out to be, GGG should just provide the option to play offline so this stuff is no longer an issue. Would be a way better solution than removing the death penalty and would help with making hardcore more reasonable to play.

Thanks for some constructive response.

You're right I may have over exaggerated a little. I was going by how I normally earn around 2% experience per map from level 92-94 and that it normally takes around 10 minutes per map (That may be slow or I may be misremembering how long it takes me). Although there was one map Tier 12 or 13 that had 2 damage mods that after two deaths I took it really cautious and it took me 25 minutes to complete...that one I did notice the time.

During the league I generally only run two characters (1 single player, 1 co-op) and even then I normally priortise the one that performs better when they get to maps. So while I may have a few characters in my profile, those are the "successes" from previous leagues. So they may not be as useful for attempting bosses as I was more overly complaining at the exp loss in leagues.
The level 95 sunder beserker was during heist league (who I actually had a lot of fun with), so the extended time of the league may have contributed to that as the ceiling I hit is normally level 94.

I was basing the potential 2% exp loss on death to the level I was getting from maps. A basic "you died in this map so you don't get that experience" is what I was thinking. But it was also coloured by the times you die multiple times in a map and how if you are already struggling knowing that you need to do 5 maps per death to recoup what you just lost is not great. Especially since some of the times it's not entirely clear what just killed you, and hence hard to know how not to fall prey to it again.
A single death could therefore just be unlucky, and hence sustained dying was my preference of prompting me to look at the build while also not being overly harsh. The balancing act of having consequences on death and keeping players around. If players want overly punishing then there is always hardcore.

So yes 2% may be an over nerf in that regard. The question I had when I died to things that seemed to come out of the blue, or boss fights I was trying to learn, was "how much of a set back should this be?"
10% seemed to high of a price for each death, and thinking about it now 2% is probably too low.
- Maybe losing 5%, the equivalent of 2 or 3 maps is a happy medium?
- Maybe a curve where the more times you die in a map the less exp you lose?
- Maybe dying to a unique boss takes less exp from you?
- Or maybe the mob that killed you keeps a % of the exp you lose so that you can get it back if you kill it?
I don't know if these would be better or even technically feasible, but I can certainly relate to some of the numerous posts on the exp on death topic.

Now to my only real argument:
I had four deaths to technical issues in Ritual League between levels 90-94.
- Cemetery map: game did the lag thing where game freezes for 5-10 seconds and then everything goes super fast and swarms you. Was almost hilarious if it wasn't for the 10% loss.
- Harbinger reinforcements: Too many monsters caused the fps to plummet and died from being unable to react.
- Heist contract: game hard crashed in the escape phase
- Heist contract 2: tried a map after the first heist, didn't crash. So I tried another heist, made sure to exit before triggering the alarm to save the items in case it happened again. Hard crashed again on the escape phase.

I hope these kind of deaths do become a rarity, but yeah feels bad when it happens repeatedly. It made me liken it to the notion of "is it not better for 5 guilty people to go free than 1 innocent to be falsely imprisoned?", and so the exp reduction could be to account for dying to these issues.

I'm not sure whether they would move the game offline due to the potential for cheating and the showing off aspect that sells MTX (I liked when the Rogue Harbour was its own instance), and while it may help with the server lag issues it may not stop the hard crash ones which could be caused by bugs in the program. Then again I'm not an expert so could be wrong here.

They wouldnt include level 100 in league challenges if it wasnt easy to get with enough play time allocated to achieve it. You can get .5-1% at 98 in T12-13 maps depending on rolls and layout. Generally its around .5, of course this is counting trial master so that EXP is going to be cut by quite a bit next league.

However the fact remains, at a certain level threshold if you actually care about leveling its all about running easy maps that you have no risk dying in. For most people thats T12-13 rare maps. T14+ speeds it up, sure, but you have a larger inherent risk of dying due to monster scaling, its more of a waste of maps not rolling them decently as well.

If youre playing META which most people seemingly do, then that risk is virtually a non-issue as youre probably clearing maps in sub 4 minutes anyways and nothing in maps can kill you unless youre incredibly unlucky or roll something like reflect while not paying attention and kill yourself to your own map mod.

I got to 98 very quick and 95 on my Gladiator very quick. My 98 Sabo has enough random RNG deaths though to probably easily have enough exp to go from 98-100 multiple times. Most my Sabo deaths are oneshots in ultimatums from a bullshit bug, i also have quite a few dc/crash and freeze deaths pre-rare nerf from ultimatums as well. That character could easily be 100 in any other league that wasnt this one.

As for my Gladiator i confirmed bugged beyond oneshots when i started dying on a ridiculously tanky character regardless of layered defenses (beyond mobs corpse exploding monsters that are suppose to disappear and phase out after death, ultimatum mobs have insane life pools its literally the only possibility for me to die on either characters while in ultimatums).

Basically what it boils down to, if you actually care about hitting 100 and leveling, you avoid what can kill you.

how dare you criticizing the most beloved mechanic by "all" players in poe?
i mean the penalty would be ok if there wouldnt be that many oneshot mechanics
or monsters in general that do quadrillion damage
but hey we just have to "git gud" right? and thats ez
we have to build a better character and better defenses even though we play off meta we still need defenses right?
so you just go grind white - yellow maps and play with the default lootfilter so you see every rare, you pick them up and identify all of them until you find something good, oh its boring? well then try trading i mean there are alot of things to buy, oh you say that everything is expensive?, well you have to grind more juiced up maps to make more currency, oh you die alot in juiced maps? well you have to just juice less and get better defenses, wait we had that allready right? so you just craft your own gear :), ohhhhh right i forgot it just cost many exalts and many other orbs to get a halfway decent craft because its actually not crafting its using a slotmachine :), so how do we get good gear?
right we play in a premade 6 man group and all of us run a magic find build while doing white maps so we have like 100 mirrors in one week, ohhh that feels like only group play is viable??, yeah because you can actually have someone who only picks up items and the others kil stuff, so is it actually possible to somehow play this game without watching 5000 guides on youtube on how to play the game?,

i could proceed but im tired
so the answer is just git gud and dont die :D

edit: every argument in this forum or reddit is invalid and absolutely "unheard" even though its been a thing since closed beta when it was still at 15% on death
chris wilson at exilecon said
there are penalties in the game "no one" is complaining about them

10% is really harsh, not for beginners. level up is almost impissible after level 80. I know GGG want you to spend money to buy more gears, but this really demotivate the people. If you cannot trade better gears better you give up. Exa and Divine orb are too rare to be able to do fair trades.