POE is ACTUALLY dying not the drama queen kind, but the actual kind... From Developer Hubris

This was my first time getting to the maps stuff (when you beat Kitava for the second time.), and I already died on the first (simple) quest map. I simply died to a fking skull that killed me in 2 hits.. Wtf did GGG do for this game? I am seriously considering to stop playing because it is completely pointless to die with only 2 hits for a normal mob. My character has like 2k physical defense, all 50% res and 3.2k HP. Even Kitava couldn't kill me with 2 hits and I already died to a simple skull. wth

Whiny.

And way to passively criticise and minimise people's legitimate discussion and concerns about a game on its dedicated forum. In 2021.


Nice.

OP funny that you mentioned D2R. I just camne back to PoE after 4 years after ditching D2R. And I have a huge group of friends to play with and noone in PoE. Still...I have all the BiS items and I am level 92. Not interested in PvP and doing all the characters. I was pretty sick of cow and baal runs because there is no endgame and it's boring as fuck. Yes, the combat feels much smoother and better, drops actually mean something and the graphics are also much better. But if it's boring and there is nothing to do then it's time to wrap up. Maybe if they add more content and season/ladder I will come back.

Now regarding PoE I have no idea wtf is going on to be honest. There is just too much content I am not familiar with and I don't even bother to find out because it feels unecessary. The only thing I enjoy so far is the Atlas and Syndicate. And it's nice to see that Beyond is still present as that was one of my favorite leagues.

The combat is a total mess and I feel like I am getting eye cancer everytime the screen is full of monsters and explosions and rainbow colors. It is not clean like D2R in this regard. I was also so confused how the atlas works with all the watchstones, maven presenece and those four guardians or some shit. I bet that I am not using the mechanics correctly :-)
What I really like is the reworked passive tree, but I guess it was reworked many times during my break. This was always the main drive whern it comes to PoE.

The sheer amount of skill gems which exists to this day is very overwhelming. I didn't bothered to go through all of them just to find na ice combination for my build. It takes too much time. I just stick to the classic gems I know and guess what, it works.

And yes the drops totally sucks. I was already in the epilogue and had 0 chaos dropped. Now the only reason I am picking up rares is to sell them to a vendor for chaos. And of course unidentified because as you said, they are all trash 99,99 % of the time. Uniques ditto, had many dropped. Checking poe/trade...all worth 1 ac or 1 chaos tops.
But this was always the case.

Still. The illusion of the amount of content to do endgame and and the path of building a character is far better than in D2R. Did not tried Last Epoch yet as I don't support half baked products for full price. If it's going to be on atleast a 50% sale or fully released, then I will think about it.

Problem is that 30% (or less, when you use cluster its more but its still eq not passiv tree) power we have is from tree, and 70% (or more) is from op crafted items or uniqus which can be drop in end game. Other games, power from tree, lvl up, gear to just boost or to help spell work in other way...

This is problem, all focus on endgame, and normal 1-3h per day playing player can't do it.

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knorpl wrote:

Problem is that 30% (or less, when you use cluster its more but its still eq not passiv tree) power we have is from tree, and 70% (or more) is from op crafted items or uniqus which can be drop in end game. Other games, power from tree, lvl up, gear to just boost or to help spell work in other way...

This is problem, all focus on endgame, and normal 1-3h per day playing player can't do it.

That is very true.

I have to both agree and disagree with OP on some of the statements made here.

In general I feel like this league is a definite step up from the past few leagues.

Build diversity feels better to me, and this is as someone who often times plays 10+ builds a league. I really enjoy experimenting with new skills and build archetypes so I've run quite a few of them through the ringer. While some without question perform better than others at lower tiers of investment, I've had no issue making most of them work.

The defensive layer changes this league have also made a huge improvement to previously "unviable" builds.

It seems to me that OP has a thought for what builds should be able to do while ignoring archetypes. Some will be slower, some will be tankier, some are better are bossing, etc. Not all builds are the same and they shouldn't be, my first character this league was an Energy Blade inquisitor and I did everything up to A8 sirus with it just fine, my second character was a flameblast character and I also cleared A8 sirus and then farmed enough money to switch over to another character.

If you take the time to understand how these archetypes work, you can make them work.

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For the items, I think it's kind of silly to talk about picking up some rare that's "usable".
It's entirely possible to get usable gear off of the ground, but that isn't the gear you take into endgame content, if it was there would be no point in crafting. POE isn't some casual pick up some 800 pdps sword off of the ground and go swinging, it's meant to be something where you make small incremental upgrades over time and go into harder and higher tier content.

this isn't diablo 3, you dont get your full set in a day and go do GR120s

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It's clear you aren't happy with the game, but the concerns you're bringing up feel more like an annoyance because they don't fit what you want the game to be, as opposed to actual issues.

Again, POE is not diablo, or diablo 2, and it isn't meant to be. If what you want is a diablo 2 experience then by all means play D2 and have a blast, but don't try to rip down POE because it isn't that.

3 month development cycles and systems bloat has just kinda made it feel like they lost control over the game or who they're even really designing the game for.

The crafting system itself has evolved over time into a pretty bloated and game dominating monster.

Quick development cycles means some systems don't get fully fleshed out the way they should and leads to many weird build balance decisions.

Meta builds pulling further away with more builds falling into the camp of "viable but require a ton more currency to make work, so you're faster playing the meta builds to get the currency to play what you want" which ends up feeling bad with the quick leagues.

The knowledge required of how to operate and properly use so many systems to make profit is just overwhelming without watching a million youtube guides.

Who is the game even targeting as an audience? It feels like the decisions they make are targeting the most hardcore of players to keep them in, but then you have public comments like Chris Wilson made about not being able to suffer another "bad" league where income (and player retention by the statistics we can see) is suffering so severely but the aforementioned issues require more and more player knowledge and investment that will keep pushing newer players away.

IS the game bad? Not at all. The core gameplay is super fun. But it feels like power and system creep just went out of control to where it really wants you to play super hardcore, but the quick league turn around and mentioned power and system creep (especially with crafting) really push new people away.

edit: It also sucks that you can't be critical of the game without being trashed or told "just quit," which isn't a good attitude because people are, but also can't be supportive without being flamed either.

I think it all started going downhill when they released act3.

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Begravlsnat wrote:

I think it all started going downhill when they released act3.

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Longtime player (since launch). Have about 3000 hours in PoE and I recently, finally quit. I don’t really think I am going to be changing any minds here, but I thought I would at least explain why I have decided to throw in the towel after all of these years. Don’t get me wrong, POE was and maybe still is a great great game. But it’s just not for me anymore.

I’m basically a casual player at this point in my life. Would like to be able to just jump in a few hours every week to blow off some steam, but POE has reached a point for me where that isn’t actually possible any more.

Because of my “casual” status, the majority of my time in POE has actually been in standard soft core, because I simply don’t have the time to start from scratch every few months, which is what the last couple of leagues have forced me to do. For me, a big part of any rpg is continuity and character progression. The idea of having a character for years, that you may have to tweak incrementally now and then or find a new BIS item now and then is incredibly appealing for me.

I have to say, one of the most annoying things the developers have done in the last couple of years is to intentionally over buff an item or skill knowing full well that they would be either nerfing it back to earth the very next league or just flat out destroying it completely. For me, the buff to cyclone and it’s subsequent nerfing was the beginning of my realization that this was their MO. I didn’t think that much of it, but the last year or two has just been too much. I usually have a roster of about 6 characters and after the last year or two of changes I have 1 that is playable. The rest of them are literally unplayable. To me, this suggests the Devs have no respect for my time. Like I said l, I just want to be able to log in every now and then, tweak a character and be good to go without having to completely rebuild a character from scratch every 3 months.

I have no problem when developers introduce new items or content in good faith and later discover that there were unintended consequences and that things have to be adjusted or “balanced” later. But when items or skills are intentionally made OP and then promptly destroyed the next patch—well that is just lazy and destructive game design IMO. 3.16 saw max block gladiators basically destroyed. And heaven forbid you used spectral shield throw, because the devs destroyed it literally one league after knowingly buffing it to the moon.

On top of massive and puzzling class specific changes (can someone explain to me how I am supposed to use Defy Pain? Or why they had to remove the intuitive and actually useful life/mana leech notable for it?), the radical changes to core ARPG mechanics (like getting rid of dodge—I mean, wtf is spell suppression??? Lol), the completely ludicrous, convoluted crafting system (I hate crafting—if I wanted to craft, I would take up pottery), innumerable types of currency and shards, bloated league mechanics, one shot deaths and increasingly poor performance—I’ve finally had enough.