Dear GGG, please lower the overall difficulty of the game

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Char1983 wrote:

You defend a system because you think is good - which is fine - and you think it is good because it benefits you.

Close but not quite true.
I think its a good system because it rewards knowledge first and foremost.
Currency and playtime are also imporant but nowhere near as important.

I did put in the effort to learn and gain knowledge, in fact Im still doing it and thats whats really helping me to get ahead of the curve.

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Char1983 wrote:

Never had a lvl 100 character, don't care about it, don't want to instagib everything, but want to make progress. Harvest still took a lot of hours to "finish" a character.

This one I dont get.
You could progress before Harvest and you still can progress all the way after the Harvest nerfs.

You dont need Harvest for that nor an easymode or whatever.
What you do need is the willingness to learn and improve yourself.
PoE has a very steep, confusing and at times frustrating learning curve. Been there plenty times myself...


Im aware we´ve been sparring here on the forums for how long? A year? More than that? Dont know, dont care tbh.
Im more than willing to help out, if you are willing to learn and gain that knowledge for yourself. You always could and still can craft pretty insane gear or at least "good enough" gear to beat everything the game has to offer.
No need for meta-builds or dozens of exalts or anything like that.
A solid plan and the knowledge how to execute that plan will do.

Ive mentored many others before and have a pretty good idea about what Im doing and why Im doing it.
So if you wanted to Id show you the ways, thats up to you.
Its far from impossible and Im serious about it. Not a bait or anything like that. Your call.

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Anthron wrote:

Which do you think is easier?

I dont think it matters all that much.

Knowledge, efficiency and reasonable goals are far more important than how you slice your playtime.

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Marxone wrote:

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Anthron wrote:

Why should people who have less time to play not be able to enjoy the full content of the game for the same hours played?

Imagine wanting to finish game that recommends 70 hours to finish but you want to finish it in 10 because REASONS ...

When did I say I wanted to finish the game sooner or with less time? I said that the game is easier when you play in larger chunks then in smaller. This makes people that play in large chunks play in 'easy mode' cause its, you know, easier.

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Marxone wrote:

No, you can't expect the game to be same for you at half of the time investment than others. You should be expecting that if you spend 10 hours within a week to get you to the same spot as spending 10 hours within a day, but that would mean you are comparing your time spent with somebody at the same knowledge / skill level, which I assume is not true, because usually the "visible examples" are those at significantly higher experience / knowledge and skill levels

So the question is, are they the same. If you two players in a league each play for 100 hours one in the first 3 weeks and one over the whole 15ish weeks will they have a different level of difficulty?

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Orbaal wrote:

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Anthron wrote:

Which do you think is easier?

I dont think it matters all that much.

Knowledge, efficiency and reasonable goals are far more important than how you slice your playtime.

So you don’t think that the trade market availability and inflation of currency has any effect on the difficulty of the game? Why would SSF be considered a more difficult mode in this case? If SSF is a more difficult mode then logically anything that limits your ability to trade makes the game more difficult. In my opinion it is significantly easier to use trade and out of game utilities when you have larger chunks of playtime, making it easy mode for people who do play in those chunks. If it was about knowledge, efficiency and reasonable goals then SSF would be a lot more popular because there it actually is about skill.

I think that the trade market and things like TFT warp the balance of the game making everything about how much you can grind, sell, and buy. Because of this GGG must compensate in game difficulty due to the availability of broken items to a limited set of people. People that if they took those markets away would complain more than all the ‘To difficult’ threads and then ditch the game in a heartbeat.

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Anthron wrote:

So you don’t think that the trade market availability and inflation of currency has any effect on the difficulty of the game?

If we are talking about SC trade, then no it doesnt have a major impact for the vast majority of people.

Inflation of currency is most definitely a thing but the item market also saturates very very quickly. About 2-3 weeks into a league items that would have sold for a lot before are now borderline worthless because of the saturation.
Those two factors do neutralize each other to a degree.

However, if you play one the FOTM or meta builds be prepared to pay the "meta-tax". Items for those builds are in extremely high demand and thus the market for those items doesnt saturate nearly as quickly.

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Anthron wrote:

Why would SSF be considered a more difficult mode in this case?

Because SSF requires very solid knowledge about item acquisition.
Whether its crafting, div-card drop areas, boss drops or whatever else it might be.
SSF also requires very basic builds which do still scale nicely into endgame. You simply cannot rely on dropping rare items and thus many builds are simply unreasonable at least early on.
And lastly SSF requires way more discipline or stubborness when it comes down to grinding. Whether you do drop what you want/need or not, you have to keep going and make due with what you have - spam low lvl areas for days if need be.

Not many players have the knowledge required and even less are stubborn enough to make work.

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Anthron wrote:

If it was about knowledge, efficiency and reasonable goals then SSF would be a lot more popular because there it actually is about skill.

Skill? No not really. I disagree.

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Anthron wrote:

I think that the trade market and things like TFT warp the balance of the game making everything about how much you can grind, sell, and buy.

No GGG balanced intentionally around trade because way too many builds are flatout dysfunctional w/o very specific gear.
Trade solves this issue easily.

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Anthron wrote:

Because of this GGG must compensate in game difficulty due to the availability of broken items to a limited set of people.

This an excuse thrown around by many and is just not true.
The players you are referring to are dealing 100+ million dps and delete toptier bosses in splitseconds.
Thats absolutely not what GGG has in mind when they are designing bosses. If they tried to balance around those people, you´d need 100+ million dps to end the fight in some 5-10 mins or whatever duration GGG has in mind.

GGG doesnt care about those guys. They are a tiny fraction of the total playerbase, an anamoly far from the norm and there is absolutely no content for them that would actually require this level of gear.

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Anthron wrote:

People that if they took those markets away would complain more than all the ‘To difficult’ threads and then ditch the game in a heartbeat.

If you took those markets away, the people you are talking about would be reduced from dealing 100+ million dps to only dealing 10+ million dps and they would still roflstomp the game at will.

Funny stuff... normal folks complaining about the difficulty.

Try playing one handed because you have severe spinal damage. Arthritic hands that lockup. Add in gabapentin and a ton of opiates. Add in old age ( 60's ).

Yep im a shaky drugged up one armed old grumpy ass gimp...

Now watch as the game difficulty increases league by league because of nerfs and increasing dependency on items.

Then on top of that watch as the only two builds you can effectively played get gutted ( specs/totems ).

Watch as the flask system becomes much more difficult.

And folks are complaining about difficulty...

Yep... its tough for some of us.

NS

Wow, this blew up in the past few days!

I think that I would do better if at least one of the following were the case:

1. Environmental DOT/degen effects expired during battle to allow lower DPS characters to more reliably clear certain fights*,

2. Gear crafting was more deterministic**,

3. "More" effects were converted to "increased" effects and numbers tone down both player side and enemy side,

4. Gear farming was more deterministic**.

It took forever to beat Sirus (A0) one time on SSF (RF build), and #1 above would have been enough to get the job done earlier. As it was, the fight took somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes. Granted, Orbaal did point out deficiencies in my build for 3.16, and I think that most of those would work even in SSF.

I do think that players are always going to have to grind things out in POE, and that shouldn't appreciably change, but it's always going to be a challenge for a novice player with limited time to advance given POE's ever-increasing complexity. I'm honestly not sure I would have stuck with POE if it were as complicated in late 2017 as it is now, and while I'm not sure *what* should be done, I think *something* needs to change.

* Sirus floor degens, several variations of "slow the player down", other hard-to-see effects that can lead to quick PC death

** I haven't tried the new currencies yet, but the amount of work to craft a decent item is ridiculous now

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1. Environmental DOT/degen effects expired during battle to allow lower DPS characters to more reliably clear certain fights*,

i agree on this,if someone is able to dodge or survive bossmeachnics they should be "allowed" to kill the boss in an etream long fight

sure degens can and "should" take a good amount of the area if the fight goes long,but they should never cover everything

something similar can be said about burning groud on high tier maps,i had fights where nearly the whole boss arena was covered in burning ground and if the boss has phases with dmg immunity,it gets really bad

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Orbaal wrote:

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Anthron wrote:

So you don’t think that the trade market availability and inflation of currency has any effect on the difficulty of the game?

If we are talking about SC trade, then no it doesnt have a major impact for the vast majority of people.

Inflation of currency is most definitely a thing but the item market also saturates very very quickly. About 2-3 weeks into a league items that would have sold for a lot before are now borderline worthless because of the saturation.
Those two factors do neutralize each other to a degree.

However, if you play one the FOTM or meta builds be prepared to pay the "meta-tax". Items for those builds are in extremely high demand and thus the market for those items doesnt saturate nearly as quickly.

Saturation never has powerful items drop to a significantly low level, rarity of items will always keep that in check. In POE.ninja you can pretty easily see that price for most items settle after a week but price increases massively outpace them. If you can not increase your currency acquisition to match you will never get higher tier items and worse if you fall behind you will start a downward spiral.

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Orbaal wrote:

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Anthron wrote:

Why would SSF be considered a more difficult mode in this case?

Because SSF requires very solid knowledge about item acquisition.
Whether its crafting, div-card drop areas, boss drops or whatever else it might be.
SSF also requires very basic builds which do still scale nicely into endgame. You simply cannot rely on dropping rare items and thus many builds are simply unreasonable at least early on.
And lastly SSF requires way more discipline or stubborness when it comes down to grinding. Whether you do drop what you want/need or not, you have to keep going and make due with what you have - spam low lvl areas for days if need be.

Not many players have the knowledge required and even less are stubborn enough to make work.

And these are needed because of access to trade... right?

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Orbaal wrote:

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Anthron wrote:

If it was about knowledge, efficiency and reasonable goals then SSF would be a lot more popular because there it actually is about skill.

Skill? No not really. I disagree.

But you just listed all the extra knowlege and skills needed to successfully play SSF. How do you dissagree?

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Orbaal wrote:

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Anthron wrote:

I think that the trade market and things like TFT warp the balance of the game making everything about how much you can grind, sell, and buy.

No GGG balanced intentionally around trade because way too many builds are flatout dysfunctional w/o very specific gear.
Trade solves this issue easily.

Exactly! With out trade or lower access to trade builds become dysfunctional, and you usually dont find out until well into maps. If you can not get the currency to trade then you are stuck, you go to the forum to complain and people tell you to get gud its your own fault.

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Orbaal wrote:

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Anthron wrote:

Because of this GGG must compensate in game difficulty due to the availability of broken items to a limited set of people.

This an excuse thrown around by many and is just not true.
The players you are referring to are dealing 100+ million dps and delete toptier bosses in splitseconds.
Thats absolutely not what GGG has in mind when they are designing bosses. If they tried to balance around those people, you´d need 100+ million dps to end the fight in some 5-10 mins or whatever duration GGG has in mind.

GGG doesnt care about those guys. They are a tiny fraction of the total playerbase, an anamoly far from the norm and there is absolutely no content for them that would actually require this level of gear.

That is flat out wrong, delve continues scaling down and absolutly requires gear super high level.

If it wasnt worth it would TFT have almost 300,000 members

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Orbaal wrote:

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Orbaal wrote:

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Anthron wrote:

People that if they took those markets away would complain more than all the ‘To difficult’ threads and then ditch the game in a heartbeat.

If you took those markets away, the people you are talking about would be reduced from dealing 100+ million dps to only dealing 10+ million dps and they would still roflstomp the game at will.

Then why have them?
The answer is simple, prestige. You cant look down on the peasants if you dont have your ivory tower.

We do agree on quite a bit stuff but disagree on specifics, thats fine.


Now the things I listed as required for SSF are in my mind purely knowledge based.
Which is why I didnt agree to the term "skill" but I guess thats a technicality.

And you are right in that highend items will always be either rare or in high demand and thus more expensive.
Thats precisely what I meant when I mentioned "reasonable builds" or "meta-tax".
You are picking your own build. You should know what items are required and what the total cost of the stuff you cant craft yourself is roughly going to be.
If you cant fund the build of your own choice, well yeah thats your own fault.
Who else would you blame?
Either learn to craft or how to farm currency or pick builds you can fund.
Doesnt justify changing the game at all.


Delve builds btw are an awful example because those builds dysfunctional in any other context. Those builds would struggle to clear a regular map because those are highly specialized for the Delve environment and cant do much else.
Consequently the deep delving folks are a tiny subset of a tiny minority of the entire playerbase and totally irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.


Why have 100+ mill builds? Dunno
Do you mean why does GGG allow it or why are people going for it?
If its the latter: I guess its great for highlight reels on YT. Generates clicks and thus money. Maybe its for bragging rights.
I have no idea. I usually stop gearing long before I reach that stage because being this overpowered gets old real quick plus the costs for items increasing the dmg by a whooping 1% are unreal. Why would I spend this much if Im already deleting everything effortlessly?
Doesnt make sense to me but evidently it does make sense for some players.