Is lowering numbers really less lazy than increasing numbers?

You are letting usage scenarios cloud the maths, developed meta builds would use bottled faith because their crit values were very high already and it was a superior flask that fulfilled the same niche but cost 10ex+.

This is corroborated if you go take any league filter by crit builds then tell poe ninja to discard all builds with bottled faith (which is like 90%) the remainder pretty much all use a diamond until they get bottled faith.

Diamond flask was a white flask available as a quest reward or practically anywhere, we are talking dying sun, atziri's promise, cinderswallow levels of power dropping as a trash drop you could roll curse immune and duration on lmao.

If there was a white flask that said 30% more area damage or something like that people would have claimed it was the most busted shit ever and a stupid addition but that is what diamond flask has been for years. This is a good example of how overpowered elements can become the furniture of a game without people realizing how badly they stick out.

That's my point, If you think sweeping nerfs are needed to see whats busted you aren't looking at where power comes from because its abundantly obvious. They nerfed for different reasons.

I took quite bad league starter - ice shot/barrage.
Yet story nor maps were/are not an issue.

Sure it's sligtly harder but it's way more fun than last leagues when you reached godmode with archmage and got to T7 maps with basically story aquired items.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

You are letting usage scenarios cloud the maths, developed meta builds would use bottled faith because their crit values were very high already and it was a superior flask that fulfilled the same niche but cost 10ex+.

This is corroborated if you go take any league filter by crit builds then tell poe ninja to discard all builds with bottled faith (which is like 90%) the remainder pretty much all use a diamond until they get bottled faith.

Diamond flask was a white flask available as a quest reward or practically anywhere, we are talking dying sun, atziri's promise, cinderswallow levels of power dropping as a trash drop you could roll curse immune and duration on lmao.

If there was a white flask that said 30% more area damage or something like that people would have claimed it was the most busted shit ever and a stupid addition but that is what diamond flask has been for years. This is a good example of how overpowered elements can become the furniture of a game without people realizing how badly they stick out.

That's my point, If you think sweeping nerfs are needed to see whats busted you aren't looking at where power comes from because its abundantly obvious. They nerfed for different reasons.

Not all problems are abundantly obvious though.

I never said flasks werent a clear example, flasks have been a clear example since they introduced offensive flasks years ago. Atziris Promise, Taste of Hate, Vinktars, Rumis (though Rumis is the only defense flask listed but it gave a huge amount of inherent block in its original form 40ATK/20SP).

Im saying that in order for them to actually objectively look at and change things they need data, by nerfing things severely they can see things more clearly because they lowered the baseline drastically, which means all problems will show up well above the baseline now.

If you really want to get into the nitty gritty of it, with like what i mentioned in my original post, the true powercreep these days is mostly tied entirely to itemization power creep.

You see the same trend everytime they introduced new crafting to the game, we saw it when they added OG mastercrafting, we saw it when they added in essence crafting. I wasnt here for this but im sure they saw it when they added in beastcrafting, fossil crafting, Harvest crafting especially, betrayal crafts and updated mastercrafting (whenever that happened). In addition to this we see it everytime they try to "out do" previous items, lightning coil is a fantastic example of this. We also see this problem pop up due to things like divination cards making a lot of things far more easily accessible than ever before.


A lot of the issues are tied into itemization. Not soo much with the trees or ascendancies.

No ones saying glaring issues arent obvious, but sweeping nerfs help to address that in more ways because regardless of how we "think" something might not be balanced, that might not necessarily actually be the case.

For example poison. Everyone thought it was a double dip issue or certain items/skills were the issue. They removed double dipping. Poison still insanely strong regardless of the nerf, turns out the base functionality of poison was simply just completely over tuned. Good example of this exact case was Poison Blade Vortex or Bladefall. They nerfed the skills in addition to removing double dipping and it was still ridiculous until they actually addressed poison.

Essentially my point is, regardless of the glaring issues, our subjective opinions of what the issues actually are, arent always right. Which is why sweeping nerfs helps address that by gathering the actual facts and numbers in regards to the functionality of things.

Nah sorry your poison paragraph suggests you don't know where power is :p, everyone knew where BV or BB poison power came from the moment they reworked said ascendancy, if they didn't realize it needed a cap that is their failure not the players.

Poison was also unplayed after the double dipping nerf until those ascendancy reworks there was a big gap before we got to poison BV and it was entirely hinged on said ascendancy changes.

Tbh all this is convincing me of is that maybe they don't have any idea what they are doing maybe they did have to nerf everything to make it obvious enough to them.

And your right players are frequently wrong or don't fully understand interactions but if you got 10 experienced players together and asked them where the power came from in specific scenarios the consensus would be right basically every time. I mean PoB will do it for you too :p

I'll give you another one they've touched on but still haven't addressed, EE. EE is extremely busted on minion builds infact auras are busted on minion builds in general but EE especially so. Automatic no-brainer scaling taken on 100% of experienced player trees unless specifically going for hipster phys/impale.

Seismic Cry, or Archmage were similarly obvious though they got those in a fashion that rendered one destroyed and the other so-so.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Nah sorry your poison paragraph suggests you don't know where power is :p, everyone knew where BV or BB poison power came from the moment they reworked said ascendancy, if they didn't realize it needed a cap that is their failure not the players.

Poison was also unplayed after the double dipping nerf until those ascendancy reworks there was a big gap before we got to poison BV and it was entirely hinged on said ascendancy changes.

Tbh all this is convincing me of is that maybe they don't have any idea what they are doing maybe they did have to nerf everything to make it obvious enough to them.

And your right players are frequently wrong or don't fully understand interactions but if you got 10 experienced players together and asked them where the power came from in specific scenarios the consensus would be right basically every time. I mean PoB will do it for you too :p

I'll give you another one they've touched on but still haven't addressed, EE. EE is extremely busted on minion builds infact auras are busted on minion builds in general but EE especially so. Automatic no-brainer scaling taken on 100% of experienced player trees unless specifically going for hipster phys/impale.

Seismic Cry, or Archmage were similarly obvious though they got those in a fashion that rendered one destroyed and the other so-so.

I literally played void battery poison BF after double dipping was gone and it was completely fine... You 100% did not need to play assassin in order to utilize poison after the nerfs... (Just checked my old character sheets, i played it dual VB as occultist and went to 93 with it back then before i stopped playing it).

Edit - Not going to say 100% right on the poison stuff but i vividly remember playing that after that character failed to scale arc, i swapped to VB poison BF and it functioned great. I could be misremembering but im almost positive.

Minion builds have been an issue though for a while since they started buffing them consistently. Didnt minions go over a period of virtually 2-3 years of nothing but buffs ? Correct me if im wrong. But yeah i mean that also ties into the whole "aura stacking" thing as well which has existed forever.

EE at its core, not really broken in my opinion, but sure, in certain use situations.

10 experienced players ? I dont agree with that either. Everyone at the end of the day has their own subjectivity. Those 10 people would obviously have their knowledge niches and their own subjective views on what to change, what issues are, etc. But other people wouldnt see it the same way more than likely. Theres not a single person who has all the knowledge path of exile has to offer, not the people playing the game for 10 years and not even the developers. Games too vast to say that 10 experience people could solve all of path of exiles issues over night, its really not that simple.

We arent even addressing everything i said either, its just a cherry picked portion. I also said regardless of that reasoning theyre seeking to lower player power (rightfully so). Im making an assumption of their reasoning, its the most logical assumption to make from sweeping nerfs outside their direct reasoning of wanting to curb power creep before it gets any worse.

What we are seeing is also leading into Path of Exile 2. The games are likely drastically different from each other in certain senses (i mean this is an obvious one, we can see that in the game play theyve spoiled us with for POE 2).

Ultimately, at the end of the day, i guess its just peoples opinions on how they want to view/take it in.

For me buffing numbers or adding in addition content thats even harder, introducing more powercreep, that further forces people into the meta isnt a good thing. Id much rather see them bring everything back, normalize things, then address the content and adjust accordingly. Which seems to be what they want to do.

And honestly, i believe that 3.15 wasnt even entirely what they wanted to do, i think they honestly wanted to do a lot more but with the problems of the community already being unable to cope with minor changes, a large more fleshed out patch would have received the exact same response.

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

For me buffing numbers or adding in addition content thats even harder, introducing more powercreep, that further forces people into the meta isnt a good thing. Id much rather see them bring everything back, normalize things, then address the content and adjust accordingly. Which seems to be what they want to do.

The problem is that they have to address the content first, and they just didn't. PoE is still super spammy and zoom zoom nonsense and their changes made it worse. Harming players ability to preemptively solve problems while still covering the screen in effects and spawning a screen full of monsters so it's nigh impossible to react and keeping the overall speed the same made it so players had to kill even faster to not die.

At the end of the day we're still living in a world of Vaal Pact instant leech monster design, we just don't have Vaal Pact instant leech.

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j33bus wrote:

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

For me buffing numbers or adding in addition content thats even harder, introducing more powercreep, that further forces people into the meta isnt a good thing. Id much rather see them bring everything back, normalize things, then address the content and adjust accordingly. Which seems to be what they want to do.

The problem is that they have to address the content first, and they just didn't. PoE is still super spammy and zoom zoom nonsense and their changes made it worse. Harming players ability to preemptively solve problems while still covering the screen in effects and spawning a screen full of monsters so it's nigh impossible to react and keeping the overall speed the same made it so players had to kill even faster to not die.

At the end of the day we're still living in a world of Vaal Pact instant leech monster design, we just don't have Vaal Pact instant leech.

Yeah, i think we will see content majorly adjusted in the next patch, followed by even more massive changes for the Christmas expansion.

Funny enough one of the builds i had planned for this league was a Bloodseeker build, but after i found out the splash jewel was changed and that low PDPS weapons are functionally dead after my RWOE starter, i didnt even bother.

I mean i guess its entirely up to peoples opinions as to which should be done first. GGG chose the harder option for sure but i wont hate them for that.

As someone who has played melee strikes for soo long its pretty hard for nerfs to personally affect me. Im used to playing the game in a "subpar" way most the time. Here and there i make other things for fun and testing but most my play time is pretty much allocated to playing things that function at a lower baseline.

For me the nerfs, regardless of affecting me pretty hard since i really never touch meta, was more or less a "meh, im used to it" moment. Though i get that for most people this isnt the case and things like this are probably a lot bigger for them.

For me a nerf is just a big ol "meh".

The thing is they didn't adjust content first which is the problem. It feels like a doomsday scenario because they did the exceedingly stupid order for this. Couple that with GGG's long history of not really paying any attention to how their game plays when they release content anyway and it's pretty obvious where people's lack of faith comes from. It's not like they've ever adjusted content around changes to player efficacy before. They've always been very head in the sand about the fact that the content they output asks players to play a certain way.

Of course back on to the topic of lazy, absolutely nothing is lazier than the map system. It's just a completely hands of way of gating content without designing content well.

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Tin_Foil_Hat wrote:

We arent even addressing everything i said either, its just a cherry picked portion. I also said regardless of that reasoning theyre seeking to lower player power (rightfully so). Im making an assumption of their reasoning, its the most logical assumption to make from sweeping nerfs outside their direct reasoning of wanting to curb power creep before it gets any worse.

Oh absolutely I was just going after the argument that its because they don't know why things are powerful as a basis for nerfs. The problem with your assumption is that its entirely hinged on them being incompetent which is why i don't really accept it as the reason. I think GGG make plenty of mistakes but you can't look at where we were and not realize how we got there.

I actually think the nerfs are good for the game I've thought it needed it for quite a while now, however I wouldn't have left blatantly overpowered things in the toy box for so long either which is part of why the backlash is so strong currently.

Only thing i'd like them to do is lump their changes in together, substantial modifications could have been made this league to go with the reduction in player power - not to put the power back because that defeats the point but in favour of rewarding a slower pace or diminishing the number of objectives we are expected to complete.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

Only thing i'd like them to do is lump their changes in together, substantial modifications could have been made this league to go with the reduction in player power...

I dont think that would be a smart approach.

Right now the changes are limited to a small fraction of stuff they could have changed. Which means when they are starting to analyze the data and arent happy with the results, they know exactly where to start rebalancing stuff because its limited in scope.

The more stuff they do change, the harder its going to be to figure out why specific things didnt work out the way they were hoping/expecting it to work out.


I expect more blanket changes to other stuff in the future but also limited in scope so its easy to track the origin of issues.
Thats obviously pure speculation but it makes far more sense than changing everything at once - even if thats the longterm goal.