The Goodbye Thread

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AT2105 wrote:

When will HARD MODE come out - in 3.16??

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WickedSausage wrote:

Can someone fill me in on the outrage of this patch?
Like I know some things got nerfed, but is it really that bad?


I'm not exactly a super serious player and I have been able to do Sirius, Eldar, Shaper etc this league.
And that is without just copying an OP build, or relying on Dodge/block.

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WickedSausage wrote:

Can someone fill me in on the outrage of this patch?
Like I know some things got nerfed, but is it really that bad?


I'm not exactly a super serious player and I have been able to do Sirius, Eldar, Shaper etc this league.
And that is without just copying an OP build, or relying on Dodge/block.

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WickedSausage wrote:

Can someone fill me in on the outrage of this patch? Like I know some things got nerfed, but is it really that bad?

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WickedSausage wrote:

I'm not exactly a super serious player and I have been able to do Sirius, Eldar, Shaper etc this league. And that is without just copying an OP build, or relying on Dodge/block.

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Ruffleberg wrote:

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WickedSausage wrote:

Can someone fill me in on the outrage of this patch? Like I know some things got nerfed, but is it really that bad?

The main issue, which has been acknowledged by Chris, is that the current game backloads all the content. The Conqueror and Maven quests require too much unrewarding grind as the mechanics don't synergise until the quests are complete. In general, Chris believes that most content should be unlocked earlier and a relatively small amount of content is gated by grind.

The changes to flasks and support gems in 3.15 exacerbated this issue because they affect the moment to moment feel of the game. Most builds feel bad without rolled flasks, so even build functionality requires grinding for Baubles, Alterations and Instilling/Enkindling Orbs. All builds got shifted down in power reducing the amount of builds that can unlock the content gated by the Conqueror and Maven quests.

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WickedSausage wrote:

I'm not exactly a super serious player and I have been able to do Sirius, Eldar, Shaper etc this league. And that is without just copying an OP build, or relying on Dodge/block.

If you consider endgame as bossing then it might not affect you as much. A lot of the issues are related to setting up endgame map grind, having fun builds to map with and the economy between all the different endgames.

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C: It basically keys into the fact that - imagine experience progression in original PoE right? The goal with experience progression was getting to level 90 is an achievement. If you're in the 90s you're showing that you're a character who knows what they're doing. This is back when the game was a lot slower right? And the intention is that each level takes exponentially longer to get to and gives you just one passive skill as a reward. We were not doing a thing where you get to level 95 and get 10 passive skills and there's this kind of gating where you have to get to that to get your player power. To some extent the difference between level 95 and level 100 is 5 passives which by the time you got like 115 of them or something is completely irrelevant for the most part. Your last 5 passives are not doing very much for you. Because you’ve already got all the important things on the tree so the marginal cost is low. And so, obviously, nowadays it's faster to level up. Certain alternate game modes might not be but the problem is that when we've been designing our endgame rewards we’ve often gone and put quite a lot of power at certain gated points very high in the progression. Like, for example, the Uber lab is an example where you get a really impactful boost to your Ascendancies randomly somewhere in the middle of the endgame. And while we wanted that initially to be a Star Wars Galaxy style jedi unlock grind that's incredibly difficult, that takes you months or years to do bla bla bla. The problem is that you're gating a ton of power there. If that was a thing.. If we’d pitched it so there was this incredibly long grind to unlock like 2% more power. That's probably a better place than 20% more power. Because a 2% power unlock you don't really have to have. It's a nice thing you can work towards that you feel like you definitely need but it's not actually mandatory. And so we’ve taken mandatory things and stuck them right at the endgame when the correct thing to do is to have the mandatory things earlier and have the relative size of the rewards get smaller because that's a point where you're min maxing and fine tuning. And I think that the Atlas passive stuff and the whole design of the Atlas at the moment takes these big rewards and jams them right in the place where we should be getting diminishing returns to have the rewards be the right size. And this is something I only realised drawing graphs of it recently comparing the progression of power in good old Diablo 2 and good old original Path of Exile with current Path of Exile. There are these giant spikes and players think I need that giant spike physically to kill monsters. I need it. And therefore I have to jump through all these hoops. And if we had it so that giant spikes were frontloaded so you're getting most of your progression early in that endgame and having smaller incremental benefits. I personally think that would be a better system. Now this is something that I rant about philosophically that we’re still trying to work out what we’re even doing with the endgame. But anyway that's the rant.