Time to rethink the vision?

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Phrazz wrote:

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Tsokushin wrote:

I disagree on several points, harvest allowed people to play the game as-is with trade as something there if you wished to engage with. As the game is now, trade is something you're routinely forced to engage with as you're not feasibly going to get an upgrade on your own.

As for balance, at the very top end in "aspirational content", there's far more pigeonholing than before. They've slapped in the new elemental ailments, and there's no way of cleansing them outside of a few builds that can include purity of elements or reach 100% elemental avoidance or dodge for that matter. The flask affixes don't affect them at all.

The Harvest discussion has been had 23746 times, so we just have to agree to disagree on that one.

When it comes to aspirational content... Content like that is SUPPOSED to funnel out "the weed". You're not supposed to be able to do it with every build. It's the top of the top, and wouldn't be the top of the top if every build could just walk through it. There's supposed to be pigeonholing. You ALWAYS get people feeling entitled to do everything with everything, no matter how they try to classify something.

Elemental ailments are a joke these days. Between Pantheon powers, flasks, ailment avoidance on gear, A LOT of different nodes on the tree (including several masteries), purities, 25% reservation skills (Tempest Shield/Arctic Armor) and jewels, every build should be able to handle ailments pretty easily.

You say aspirational content is supposed to funnel out "the weed", then why is it there is a history of nerfing the builds that do such things easily? Any time a new "top build" comes about, they find a way to tone it down substantially.

As for elemental ailments, you missed the main point. Sap/Brittle/Scorch are not affected at all except by purity of elements and avoid elemental ailment chance. There are no other means to deal with them except those explicit methods, which means there's a lot less builds that can feasibly either clear it, or do so in a timely manner.

As for being for pigeonholing, I guess build diversity isn't an issue with you?

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Tsokushin wrote:

You say aspirational content is supposed to funnel out "the weed", then why is it there is a history of nerfing the builds that do such things easily? Any time a new "top build" comes about, they find a way to tone it down substantially.

As for elemental ailments, you missed the main point. Sap/Brittle/Scorch are not affected at all except by purity of elements and avoid elemental ailment chance. There are no other means to deal with them except those explicit methods, which means there's a lot less builds that can feasibly either clear it, or do so in a timely manner.

As for being for pigeonholing, I guess build diversity isn't an issue with you?

Because the aspirational content isn't supposed to be easy, that's why builds making that type of content easy, often get nerfed.

Sure, Brittle, Sap and Scorch may be harder to "solve", but still; elemental avoidance on gear is 'pretty easy' to come by. Brittle is also pretty easy to mitigate these days, as crit reduction/avoidance is also pretty easy to come by. Plasyers aren't trained to "think" defense, and it will probably take some time to train them.

Build diversity is important to me. Very important. And I think that underused skills need to be buffed. But no, I don't think every skill and every build should be able to do EVERYTHING the game throws at you, including the top of the top. I like that 0.1% of the content needs to be targeted with builds meant for that content.

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Phrazz wrote:

Because the aspirational content isn't supposed to be easy, that's why builds making that type of content easy, often get nerfed.

Sure, Brittle, Sap and Scorch may be harder to "solve", but still; elemental avoidance on gear is 'pretty easy' to come by. Brittle is also pretty easy to mitigate these days, as crit reduction/avoidance is also pretty easy to come by. Plasyers aren't trained to "think" defense, and it will probably take some time to train them.

Build diversity is important to me. Very important. And I think that underused skills need to be buffed. But no, I don't think every skill and every build should be able to do EVERYTHING the game throws at you, including the top of the top. I like that 0.1% of the content needs to be targeted with builds meant for that content.

Nobody is asking for aspirational content to be easy. It's mostly what is even the point when it gets downed in 1 day anyway. Furthermore, it's content that the vast majority will either never see or never experience. Beyond even this, this goes back to a point even you made, that not every skill is capable of being in there with the same investment.

And this underlines the flipflop or mixed signals you give to the devs. You want them to buff underused or weak skills, but in the same breath are ok with most builds being unable to do aspirational content.

Which is it?

As for players not being "trained to think defense" that doesn't really fall to me. I've been anti-clearspeed since the day I played this game. I even wrote a huge topic about it here: https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2569312

Of course, that was back when I cared and thought the game would develop more into something I liked. I think when it comes down to it, the builds I make and play more closely resemble Chris' vision of this game than the builds that they target nerf or the things that need buffs. And that has the greatest sense of irony.

So, it takes no gumption for me to say that you're wrong in that there should be builds absolutely incapable of tackling this aspirational content. It should only be a matter of skill or time investment.

But, the subject of time investment inevitably brings us back to harvest because it was the only way you can reasonably guarantee necessary mods for your particular build and not be gated by impossible RNG odds. It was also the only way to tinker and upgrade gear progressively.

But doing such things seems to be anathema to you. So, to tie it back into the thread at hand, Chris' "vision" is disastrous, especially when it comes to the feedback players like you are giving. So, I'll pose a simple question. If you had to choose between Chris' "hardmode vision" or pre-nerf harvest, which would you choose and why?

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Tsokushin wrote:

Which is it?

I'm not giving mixed signals, it's just you mixing them up.

I love build diversity. I want 'most' skills designed to be main skills to be able to beat the game (acts+atlas). While we are pretty close to that, there's a bunch of skills falling behind, and are in dire need of a rework and/or buffs. I think GGG should take a long, hard look at weapon scaling skills versus gem scaling skills, because I think the disparity there is growing too large.

(The dangerous thing, isn't if a certain skill or skills fall behind. The dangerous thing is when whole archetypes/playstyles falls behind. And I feel like certain weapon-scaling melee archetypes are falling dangerously far behind these days.)

But very deep delves, 30 wave Sim, Uber Timeless conflicts and stuff like that? To me, that falls outside what I view as "regular content". It's the hardest stuff the game has to offer, and it should require the player to build around it. It SHOULD be aspirational for 99% of players. It SHOULD be VERY hard for an Average Joe to beat the first league they try.

Should there be more skills able to beat that content? Sure, I agree. Should ALL 600(?) skills in the game be funneled into a preset scaling, where the requirement is to beat everything? Not so sure. Where would the sense of choice be? The sense of exploration? Accomplishment? Should all skills be able to beat everything going crit? RT? Conversion? Where's the fun in exploring a skill's possibilities and limits, if you KNOW every skills is carefully designed to do absolutely everything?

As for Harvest; I actually think that adding Harvest into the core game in Ritual league was the worse decision they ever did. It was very fun as its own league, but I don't think that level of determinism has a place in these kind of games in the long run. In my eyes, PoE needs LESS focus on crafting, and more focus on drops. You use the words "reasonable guarantee", while I think less stuff should be guaranteed in the game.

None of us are right here, it's just a matter of opinion and what we like from our experience.

They are committed. They have a time limit. The only people that CAN matter to them are those who accept the inevitable. Everyone else is just screaming in from the void.

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Phrazz wrote:

I'm not giving mixed signals, it's just you mixing them up.

I love build diversity. I want 'most' skills designed to be main skills to be able to beat the game (acts+atlas). While we are pretty close to that, there's a bunch of skills falling behind, and are in dire need of a rework and/or buffs. I think GGG should take a long, hard look at weapon scaling skills versus gem scaling skills, because I think the disparity there is growing too large.

No, these are mixed signals, let me show you. I'm going to be cutting up your post to exemplify this.

Quote #1

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(The dangerous thing, isn't if a certain skill or skills fall behind. The dangerous thing is when whole archetypes/playstyles falls behind. And I feel like certain weapon-scaling melee archetypes are falling dangerously far behind these days.)

Quote #2

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Should there be more skills able to beat that content? Sure, I agree. Should ALL 600(?) skills in the game be funneled into a preset scaling, where the requirement is to beat everything? Not so sure. Where would the sense of choice be? The sense of exploration? Accomplishment? Should all skills be able to beat everything going crit? RT? Conversion? Where's the fun in exploring a skill's possibilities and limits, if you KNOW every skills is carefully designed to do absolutely everything?

These are the contradictory points that you make when I refer to mixed signals.

1) The inherent mechanical difference between skills render such choices as ultimately divergent choices between playstyles. Take something like sweep. Sweep isn't so bad in a vacuum, it's just that so many skills have much better aoe and single target while not being constrained to weapon stats to scale.

2) What is aspirational content at the moment will be walked over in the future. Take shaper. 200k dps was enough to kill him on release comfortably. Nevermind the fact double-dipper ignite builds one shot him, I took a 2h glacial hammer build to his face in Harbinger. He's laughed off right now. So, for you to say that not every skill should be able to make it through aspirational just means you're ok with skills becoming utter crap as time goes on. Your current dissatisfaction with the game will continue as your view continues.

3) The big one. Harvest gave you the tools to tinker weapons to enable mechanically weaker skills to strength. Which is why I'm honestly always wondering why people like you hated it.

As for better drops? There's 5 different damage types on weapons with multiple weighted tiers and that's just counting prefixes. Not even the suffixes like crit, bleed, or attack speed. Weapon skills don't have a scaling problems, they perform just fine with really good weapons, they have an RNG problem with getting weapons of that quality, but that's a problem harvest solved.

Now, more on the note of archetypes falling behind and your notion of all builds shouldn't be able to head into aspirational content. This is your quote:

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Where would the sense of choice be? The sense of exploration? Accomplishment? Should all skills be able to beat everything going crit? RT? Conversion? Where's the fun in exploring a skill's possibilities and limits, if you KNOW every skills is carefully designed to do absolutely everything?

Playstyle. Challenge in making use of mechanically weaker skills (which you will never see streamers use btw). The fun in tinkering your own build into completion. The fun in making a build idea work to X degree. Taking specialized builds like boss killers and speed-farmers and tweaking them into good all-rounders capable of beating aspirational content while maintaining prowess in their realms of specialization.

These are all the reasons that would still exist if every build had some push to be in "aspirational content" with enough theorycrafting behind it to make them work, and the resources to get the gear to do so.

And the last touch of this post, to remain more on topic. Nobody outside of the HCSSF types will stay in hardmode. This vision of the game is made for a very scant few, and I wager some people will try it out and immediately quit just like they did with 3.14 and 3.15 changes.

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Tsokushin wrote:

they have an RNG problem with getting weapons of that quality, but that's a problem harvest solved.

Precisely, GGG has a gambling problem. Then they project their addiction to gambling onto the players, with hundreds of layers of RNG. Players complain about this, because this is the similar issue with lootboxes that even some governments have stepped in to curb.

GGG vision that players enjoy endless RNG, is obviously not substantiated. As evidenced by loud complaints about RNG. But also mass exodus of players that are not as addicted to gambling as the devs predict.