Zizaran and build viability!

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raics wrote:

Sure, I mean, the question in regards to build viability is 'does this game need to give you this or that amount of power'. The answer to that is obviously no, the amount of power a player needs to have ultimately depends on how hard the content is, and GGG can make it as hard or easy as they want and the power can come from wherever they want. That cat can be skinned in so many ways it probably thinks the entire thing is in impossibly poor taste.

It depends how you look at it there is for once the viability aspect of making whacky builds work and for the biggest part for me deterministic crafting is about aspiring end game content. Min/Max builds and if one is done i can happily start the next project.
Currently drops feel out of place to make up for the good feel that was given to us in patch 3.11 and 3.13.

I dont buy the "Harvest was a mistake" yet it was implemented twice in a row in addition to a content patch that had basically crafting with Mavens Orb as end game. You can disagree or tell me you did not like it but for me patch 3.13 was the most fun experience since i joined this community.
I dont mind other implementations that make all Atlas areas more or less equal for crafting farm or if they make crafts tradeable. In the end only the 0.01% will end up with the often cited quad elevated t0/t1 rares that the ordinary player will look up to. Is not that what Chris tries to explain when he talks about Aspiring content - people looking up to what others do?

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zzang wrote:

It depends how you look at it there is for once the viability aspect of making whacky builds work and for the biggest part for me deterministic crafting is about aspiring end game content. Min/Max builds and if one is done i can happily start the next project.
Currently drops feel out of place to make up for the good feel that was given to us in patch 3.11 and 3.13.

Well, in that case the egg clearly came before the chicken, the aliens brought it.
If wacky builds weren't so wack there would be no need for raising the player power in the first place. Again, that's an extremely shitty way to make bad things good.

Wack concept example - we all know that attack/spell hybrids are on extremely shaky legs in poe because of how much specialization goes into making a skill work, you just can't afford to do pull it off. So, one option was to raise the power of both attacks and spells until they start working on half the investment, and I hope I don't have to elaborate why that isn't a good idea.
A much better way to enable it was what they did with inquisitor's instruments branch, you reward people for using both enough to compensate for the drawback. Of course, that shit is pretty awful but it kinda works and it could be good with some polish, I appreciate the attempt.

Or using attacks and minions, I always liked playing that but it was honestly pretty horrible. But then they added those passives that apply minion damage and attack speed to you, herald of purity, holy relic, and suddenly the concept works well enough not to tear your hair out. Now tell me, can you imagine what would happen if they simply buffed minions to the extent where they would perform good on such a build?

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raics wrote:

Well, in that case the egg clearly came before the chicken, the aliens brought it.
If wacky builds weren't so wack there would be no need for raising the player power in the first place. Again, that's an extremely shitty way to make bad things good.

Wack concept example - we all know that attack/spell hybrids are on extremely shaky legs in poe because of how much specialization goes into making a skill work, you just can't afford to do pull it off. So, one option was to raise the power of both attacks and spells until they start working on half the investment, and I hope I don't have to elaborate why that isn't a good idea.
A much better way to enable it was what they did with inquisitor's instruments branch, you reward people for using both enough to compensate for the drawback. Of course, that shit is pretty awful but it kinda works and it could be good with some polish, I appreciate the attempt.

Or using attacks and minions, I always liked playing that but it was honestly pretty horrible. But then they added those passives that apply minion damage and attack speed to you, herald of purity, holy relic, and suddenly the concept works well enough not to tear your hair out. Now tell me, can you imagine what would happen if they simply buffed minions to the extent where they would perform good on such a build?

I dont think i said that it is required to raise player power. Its all there already what is neccessary is just gated behind current bad crafting implementation this is what i think we can agree on.

As for experimental build concepts i tried some whacky stuff like melee Strike Skills. They can work if you invest a ton of currency. Or you play half naked with a Forbidden Rite totem.
Again im not advocating for some imbalance infact i rather close those gaps are bring them closer together. I think you understood me wrong on this.

Its also not about aliens bringing something first. The game or the ARPG genre as a whole stepped into the next evolution phase with deterministic crafting of 3.11 and 3.13. GGG for some reason changed their mind twice in a row for 180 degree and now try sell us that drops should be good but they arent and they can not be equal to crafted items due to the bare existance of Mavens Orb and Awakeners Orb so basically there goes the vision of lottery ticket drops outside of dropping a mirror and then mirroring a crafted item becuase thats what they are used for.

I guess i cannot convince you but i also dont need to i guess at this point the community is polarized anyway. All im saying aside from making whacky or super niche builds powerful determinstic crafting served as aspiring end game content which i heavily enjoyed. And the current iteration of 3.15 is really lackluster or i might be dreaming and 3.15 is fine and endgame is fine and chase items are fine and build diversity and viability is fine and no one complains right?

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Phrazz wrote:

Yeah, well, no harvest is (was) an imbalanced tool that lets you forget about/ignore build viability, because you overcompensate with close-to perfect gear. Fun for a league or two, I'll admit, but far from a good solution.

One of the reasons why I care about this subject, is that I like to play Strike skills. I like to be in the middle of the fight, and I feel that I'm interacting more with the game when playing a Strike skill, than I am playing huge AoE screen-clearing skills.

I agree and I prefer up close and personal melee myself. Strike skills tend to make up some notable stinkers. Still, Double Strike, Pestilence Strike, Smite, Elemental Hit and maybe a few others are still viable in a skill gem class that's probably the most notoriously poor.

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Ydoum wrote:

I was literally about to quote and reply on the very same thing.

Yes, Harvest WAS a solution to build diversity. With the ability to craft very specific set of unique items, you could make the weirdest skills and playstyles work within the league's timeframe.

Harvest was generally just a stat smasher. It might work but it's not a reasonable solution because of that. You're just raising the bar not equalizing the variance in performance.

Personally I hate the current version of it also. It's very disruptive. Every time it shows up I have to clear it, portal, grab the gear I was working, then sit at the bench in the middle of a map clear.

I'm not trying to pretend gear progression is fine either. I ever wrote a decent sized forum post about how to better streamline it while keeping the value of current crafting options. As Chris said, "A little bit of crafting to make them perfect".

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3165626

What's suggested is very similar to how Diablo 1 and somewhat how Diablo 2 itemization works which is why I was annoyed when Chris kept going back to comparisons. The main difference is D1 removes roll options as level increases while D2 decreases the chance of lower rolls.

At this point where lots of builds lost even 70% of damage, f*uck the Harvest too. You would still need to sink lot more time and currency just to be where you were one patch before. Not to mention flasks and mana.
Game is hopelessly nuked.

Its just a hc vs sc thing, Zizaran plays only HC and this game would be very different in its current state if it was balanced for HC.

Making any build usually involves a problem-solving phase where it is less viable than a fully resolved build. In HC its very easy to die during that phase, hence hc players tend to go towards safe builds.

Of course there will be builds that will do better against certain types of content, and that kind of imbalance is good. If he wants to build FR totem which has insane single target dps but squishy, it won't be viable in certain scenarios in hc.

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Phrazz wrote:

Firstly, I liked the interview overall. Good job.

That said, on the most important subject of the whole interview, build viability, you got totally swallowed by Mathil. No critique to him, he just went into it like a debate, while you went into it as a pure interview. Mathil also has a couple of luxuries that 'most' players don't have; 10+ years of knowledge and 8+ hours of game time per day.

Cheers Phrazz. I'd like to add the point that Chris was being a negotiator. I think Ziz did the best he could and found a tough spot there. I think that he of the three understood that this entire thing is mostly about reducing distance between GGG and the playerbase.

Saying that the community has changed and does not put in enough effort is counterproductive to reaching this goal.


Bringing forward an email that notes a social factor, without weighing out the actual impact and discussing it, is weak and should have been removed from the table. However, that is a negotiating stance. Adding a soft factor using a complex description that is hard to unravel was strictly used to make it harder on the other participant.

Pure negotiating tactic.

Poor honest Ziz :-) running into that.

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kaepae wrote:

was strictly used to make it harder on the other participant.

Of course. His grin and paypal joke said it all.

I'm not saying Mathil is 100% wrong, though. From his point of view, he can make 90% of all skills work in an endgame scenario. But as I said previously, he has several years of experience, a lot of time on his hands and is, quite frankly, a very good player when it comes to positioning and reflexes.

If that's the basis required to view certain skills as "viable", then we mortals are surely doomed :P

As someone who watches both Mathil and Ziz's streams a lot, I gotta go with Mathil here.

Ziz typically doesn't play too many off-meta or wonky builds, both him & Steelmage gravitate towards OP builds (they do play mostly ssfhc so this is completely justified) whereas Mathil has taken a huge amount of weird playstyles and made them into effective/viable builds.

So in this debate, Mathil was coming from a place of personal experience while Ziz was just trying to 'represent the people who don't have a voice' which sounds good in theory, but came off as sounding disingenuous. Ziz also typically doesn't create his own builds that often, so again his lack of experience in this area was clearly showing in the discussion.

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stalkingjackal wrote:

As someone who watches both Mathil and Ziz's streams a lot, I gotta go with Mathil here.

Ziz typically doesn't play too many off-meta or wonky builds, both him & Steelmage gravitate towards OP builds (they do play mostly ssfhc so this is completely justified) whereas Mathil has taken a huge amount of weird playstyles and made them into effective/viable builds.

So in this debate, Mathil was coming from a place of personal experience while Ziz was just trying to 'represent the people who don't have a voice' which sounds good in theory, but came off as sounding disingenuous. Ziz also typically doesn't create his own builds that often, so again his lack of experience in this area was clearly showing in the discussion.

I only made it an hour in the other day, i had to pause it. Ive heard Ziz interviews before and its not only because of the "trying to be the champion of casuals", hes just extremely disconnected every time and clearly just doesnt understand game design and what good game design is, it makes it really difficult to listen to and makes it feel like Chris is repeating himself on the same points that should be interpreted the first time from the game design point of view. This is really a good example of why players/people who play a lot shouldnt be taken seriously in regards to game design, just because you play the game a lot doesnt mean you know what good game design is.

Like "why does ground loot suck, why do chase uniques suck, why cant we target farm things, etc". Then going on to the pro-harvest garbage which should inherently answer all of that because it directly relates... Yeah just stuff like that. I know its not only because hes trying to "speak on behalf of casuals" because ive heard her personal views expressed in the same way in similar podcasts.

Gonna try to finish it after i mow my lawn. But damn, yeah, didnt expect this to be difficult to listen to. Mathil is clearly more understanding in this from a game design point of view.

Edit - Pretty funny hearing Chris on Harvest though, he 100% understands he fucked his game up with it and should have never put it in to begin with. Its nice that they can openly admit that, most companies wouldnt admit a huge mistake like that.