Dear GGG, please lower the overall difficulty of the game

I miss the days when POE was a creative, exploratory game in terms of skills and passive tree. Nowadays there are too many things you HAVE to take and do in order to proceed that the actual creativity aspect is negligible.

And this is because of the difficulty of the game.

I really really really hate to do this (can't stress this enough!), but this is one thing that Diablo 3 does that is BETTER than POE. Being able to complete the full game on different difficulty levels is just such a nice feature. And if you want a bigger challenge for greater rewards, you are forced to rethink your build and gear and tweak until you can play a higher difficulty. But no part of the game is gated off simply because the baseline difficulty is off the charts.

I have played POE since the beta, I have no troubles with any content. I have created many of my own builds that can trounce all content BUT I recognize the fact that builds have to be planned well in advance, otherwise you end up with trash. This is not the game I started playing back in 2012. It's still good, but it is missing what made it so so unbelievable when it was first released. Not to mention the game difficulty actively discourages new players and discourages build experimentation during game play. You either have to have experiential knowledge, read a guide, or follow a build to even make it through white maps.

The most common argument is that you can choose content, and that difficulty levels are baked into the map tiers / watchstones / etc., but I just don't agree with this. I think there should be blanket difficulty levels with quant/rarity increases the harder the difficulty. People who want to enjoy an easier game can stick to the base difficulty, and people who want a greater challenge with a greater reward can choose the harder difficulties. But EVERYONE can access (and potentially beat) all content in their own timeframes and budget.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

You either have to have experiential knowledge, read a guide, or follow a build to even make it through white maps.

i think that was more true in open beta than it is now.

^nah I disagree, it's just that folks like us who have been around a LONG time have that base knowledge that it seems easy to make it through white maps.

But play with enough noobs trying to get through white maps and you see that the leap from act 10 to maps while relying only on the knowledge provided in-game is practically insurmountable. Hell, I've had three friends try to start playing in the last few months and all have given up before act 3 because they can't do anything without my help.

in open beta they wouldnt have beaten hailrake in tidal island. he was harder then that most of the act bosses are now.

most people in open beta couldnt beat white maps on their first build. im not sure its a bad thing, i dont believe its a problem if you cant beat a game on your first try. if youre not up for a game where you have to learn stuff over a long period of time and you have to go and go again this just isnt the game for you.

everyone hits a wall first time round, and that is how it should be.

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jsuslak313 wrote:

I miss the days when POE was a creative, exploratory game in terms of skills and passive tree. Nowadays there are too many things you HAVE to take and do in order to proceed that the actual creativity aspect is negligible.

And this is because of the difficulty of the game.

I really really really hate to do this (can't stress this enough!), but this is one thing that Diablo 3 does that is BETTER than POE. Being able to complete the full game on different difficulty levels is just such a nice feature. And if you want a bigger challenge for greater rewards, you are forced to rethink your build and gear and tweak until you can play a higher difficulty. But no part of the game is gated off simply because the baseline difficulty is off the charts.

I have played POE since the beta, I have no troubles with any content. I have created many of my own builds that can trounce all content BUT I recognize the fact that builds have to be planned well in advance, otherwise you end up with trash. This is not the game I started playing back in 2012. It's still good, but it is missing what made it so so unbelievable when it was first released. Not to mention the game difficulty actively discourages new players and discourages build experimentation during game play. You either have to have experiential knowledge, read a guide, or follow a build to even make it through white maps.

The most common argument is that you can choose content, and that difficulty levels are baked into the map tiers / watchstones / etc., but I just don't agree with this. I think there should be blanket difficulty levels with quant/rarity increases the harder the difficulty. People who want to enjoy an easier game can stick to the base difficulty, and people who want a greater challenge with a greater reward can choose the harder difficulties. But EVERYONE can access (and potentially beat) all content in their own timeframes and budget.

PoE is definitely missing some key elements many mmorpg enjoy that give daily or weekly boosts via limited drops to help everyone catch up and compete on the same level.

Endgame play should be rewarded but seeing atlas tier progression tied to anything other than the core quest bothers me, any watchstones that change the TIER of the maps in the atlas should be garunteed drops from the core questline for defeating story-difficulty bosses and not tied to endgame optional content such as Uber-Elder etc.

GGG could get away with adding weekly and daily content rewarding more deterministic crafting methods, currency rewards and other stuff which again is only available in limited supply, They could add untradeable items as well for some of these means of gear acquisition so that it does not too heavily impact the market.

Lastly on adding optional difficulty levels(ex: Easy/Normal/Hard/Hardcore) each difficulty would set the item quantity, item rarity, amount of exp lost, and even the amounts of exp gained could be more or less depending on the difficulty chosen.

I don't think the game overall should become easier.

The fact is that skill balance is so poor that there's always an outlier, you can call it a meta build despite what turned out to be Meta this league, I wasn't expecting it at all.

The abundance of damage trivializes the game. That's just a fact. Skill choice and the "easiness" of scaling damage is the only thing in this game connected to difficulty.

Problem connected to the economy is that some skills have clear cut way to reach good dmg numbers on something like 2 ex budget, some skills have problems to reach those numbers with 20 exalt investment.
Any build that scales with unique items is very easy, as it does not require slot machine they call crafting (unless very specific usecase with clear step by step 100% success rate crafting method exist - ie +3 bows etc).

PoE content is huge, there's FOMO when you know the content is there but you can't reach it. I don't see how lowering the difficulty would make the game more interesting or approachable.

"

jsuslak313 wrote:

I miss the days when POE was a creative, exploratory game in terms of skills and passive tree. Nowadays there are too many things you HAVE to take and do in order to proceed that the actual creativity aspect is negligible.

And this is because of the difficulty of the game.

I really really really hate to do this (can't stress this enough!), but this is one thing that Diablo 3 does that is BETTER than POE. Being able to complete the full game on different difficulty levels is just such a nice feature. And if you want a bigger challenge for greater rewards, you are forced to rethink your build and gear and tweak until you can play a higher difficulty. But no part of the game is gated off simply because the baseline difficulty is off the charts.

I have played POE since the beta, I have no troubles with any content. I have created many of my own builds that can trounce all content BUT I recognize the fact that builds have to be planned well in advance, otherwise you end up with trash. This is not the game I started playing back in 2012. It's still good, but it is missing what made it so so unbelievable when it was first released. Not to mention the game difficulty actively discourages new players and discourages build experimentation during game play. You either have to have experiential knowledge, read a guide, or follow a build to even make it through white maps.

The most common argument is that you can choose content, and that difficulty levels are baked into the map tiers / watchstones / etc., but I just don't agree with this. I think there should be blanket difficulty levels with quant/rarity increases the harder the difficulty. People who want to enjoy an easier game can stick to the base difficulty, and people who want a greater challenge with a greater reward can choose the harder difficulties. But EVERYONE can access (and potentially beat) all content in their own timeframes and budget.

the way i see it, aspirational content should be optional, where tougher content exists but you lose nothing for not doing em.

but in poe, some content are downright not balanced, yet watchstones/atlas passives are gatekeeped behind them. i really hate the fact that GGG should be aware of this but intentionally left it this way. they should be very well aware that most players wont be able to clear everything.

things that most players cant clear is aspirational content, but their insistence on gating stones/passives behind them makes them hardly optional. you literally lose out if you cant complete them. thus the average player should farm up exalts and fatten the wallets of players who can clear those content by buying their carry/clear services.

on steam less than 1% player base have "cleared maven" achievement unlocked. yet maven holds a watchstone.

i too use d3 as a good benchmark. you can push greater rifts to higher tiers but you NEVER lose anything for not being able to push insane high tiers. you lose out time as you need to grind more as doing lower tiers grant less rewards but you're never actually locked out of content. d3's rifts are a perfect example of optional and aspirational content.

and yeah i really share your sentiment of experimentation. when i played LE, i went in blind and tweaked while i progressed. there was an organic growth where MY BUILD became better.

in poe, unless you know what you're doing "MY CUSTOM BUILD" is likely to suck.

gone are the days 500k dps was huge. you need at least 4mil dps in today's environment to actually stand a chance at clearing the pinnacle bosses/harder invitations now.

NGL, the day GGG introduced maven, i already knew i was not gonna be happy. i hard rage quit but came back later. now, i can no longer see myself playing temp leagues.

one other thing i hate is the fact "league starters" exist. if a friend wants to play poe, i m torn between telling him to go blind and enjoy/explore the game vs following a meta build.

you dont need those 2 watchstones or the small handful of extra passives tho. theres a couple of character passives that are gated behind getting to lvl99 and 100, virtually no one has them, and thats fine. having your entire atlas be t16 maps is gated, sure, and before this patch you couldnt have your entire atlas be t16 so there was nothing to gate, and it wasnt an issue.

in 3.16 with all stones in ur atlas half ur maps were t16, now its easier to get half ur maps to t16. so its less gated than it was before, but somehow its now bad because theres extra bits that didnt even exist before but are gated behind doing hard stuff?



there are always rewards behind hard content and you always lose out on those rewards by not doing that content.



in 3.16 people were slamming poes lack of player retention because steam was showing about 70k concurrent players after a week, which means it probably had about 120k total including the non steam users.

we checked diablo 3s player count a week after their last league launch and they were at about 18k players total.

theres reasons d3, despite doing a number of things better than poe, has really shit player numbers and even worse player retention. a big one is the complete lack of endgame content and rewards tied to that content to bother farming for after a couple of days play. its a poster child for how bad an arpg is when you buy into the idea that very casual players should be entitled to get the vast majority of the content you add to your game just by turning up, how that can take actually quite good gameplay/systems etc and just flush them all down the toilet of irrelevance in the face of having nothing for experienced players to play for.

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exsea wrote:

on steam less than 1% player base have "cleared maven" achievement unlocked. yet maven holds a watchstone.

I always see this mentioned but why does having a watchstone put it in the mandatory content list? They were mandatory prior because you couldn't access higher tier maps without them.

I've been playing the whole league with 2 and never really think about it, about the only time Its come up is I was thinking maybe i'd farm cemetery for some stash cards and I'd need another watchstone to do that efficiently.

But it isn't like farming a degenerate map for exalt cards is content I should always be able to explore there are other options available.

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Draegnarrr wrote:

"

exsea wrote:

on steam less than 1% player base have "cleared maven" achievement unlocked. yet maven holds a watchstone.

I always see this mentioned but why does having a watchstone put it in the mandatory content list? They were mandatory prior because you couldn't access higher tier maps without them.

I've been playing the whole league with 2 and never really think about it, about the only time Its come up is I was thinking maybe i'd farm cemetery for some stash cards and I'd need another watchstone to do that efficiently.

But it isn't like farming a degenerate map for exalt cards is content I should always be able to explore there are other options available.

i have all 4 watchstones, i never use more than 2.

for most people 2 is optimal, 3 can be quite good depending on what maps you want to run.

4 is only optimal for super juicers, were talking massiveboy players running 4 sextants, 4 scarabs, delirious, bench mod, the whole 9 yards mapping strat. if youre that kind of guy whos gigajuiced to the point where its unthinkable not to have all 4 sextants running all the time then you can easily beat maven and uber elder.


2 is pretty much where its at for optimal control of favourite map drops and sustaining t14-16 content. i can sustain favourited t16 maps endlessly with 2 watchstones, 2 sextants and a couple of self found scarabs/frags thrown in the pot.



4 watchstones is a really bad strat for most people imo. very much a niche choice.

edit: i carried my mrs through maven and uber elder, and then i found out she was just using 4 voidstones because she had them. she often runs t13, 14 maps etc, i had to explain to her how they worked and then she took 1 out. if you cant get 4 you probably dont even understand enough about the mechanics to be trusted with 4 tbh.