Dear GGG, please lower the overall difficulty of the game

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

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.

Isn't that the point - if you can't beat the boss, you probably don't need those additional watchstones?
I mean if your build isn't capable to do casually any T16 map layout, there's no point to have them, especially if T16s aren't fully gated behind those. Only some good layouts which start at T1-4 and need 4 watchstones to be upgraded fully.

So by helping you screwed natural progression into higher maps.

yeah exactly. if you cant get 4 you probably shouldnt have 4.

i dunno if that is a conscious design choice or happy accident but it works out that way.


if you just want to comfortably farm low to mid juice t16 maps, and you want control over which maps you run from favourites etc then 2 is optimal, and that kind of player will easily get 2 by that point. youll have 50 t16 layouts to chose from, its a good endgame place to be at.


if you cant get 3 yourself then you probably dont have enough favourite slots unlocked and using 3 will water down ur t16 pool too much to really exercise control over your map drops. its nice to have yellow maps to sacrifice in the harvester for atlas missions and frags, which you lose if you run 3 stones.


i do think it works out quite well in terms of the right kind of player having the right amount of stones available to them. if everyone had 4 stones most people i think would throw all 4 in and then there would be a lot more complaining on the forums about map sustain. with only t16s dropping you obviously have to exclusively run t16, if youre not supplementing map drops with delving or avlas temples or the right atlas passive skills and youre not mega juicing you might struggle sustaining maps at that level, and you wont be dropping anything below that you fall back on.

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NaGawyvern wrote:

Oh so how about you try one of the following builds:
Champion Molten Strike: deletes the entire game and immortal - Poeninja playrate: 0.2%
Champion Spark: Deletes the entire game even harder - Poeninja playrate 0.7%
Necro FR: Clears the entire game on a 5ex budget and is also probably the most complicated build in the game - Poeninja playrate 0.04%

I guess the problem has three aspects to it:

• The game is too hard
• Necessary gear is too hard to acquire
• The game is too complicated

"Easy" leagues are ones where one or more of those aspects is easy. Harvest league was easy because acquiring gear was relatively easy. Legion league, I don't know about, because I didn't play it, but probably was easy because the enemies weren't as buffed as now. Other leagues (mostly older ones) were easier because the game just didn't have as much stuff to it (Pantheon powers, ascendancies, cluster jewels, the latest revamp of the skill tree... but also ways of crafting gear like tailoring orbs, essences, veiled chaos orbs, lots of things were added that make the game just simply more complicated. Not necessarily a bad thing, but the fact that some of those things are so powerful they are almost mandatory is at least potentially problematic.

You can combat all of the difficulty aspects in this game:

• Cheesy mechanics make the game easier
• Farming hard and buying gear makes gear easier to acquire
• Following guides makes the game less complicated

But what about those that want to play what they feel like (not cheesy mechanics), don't want to play the game like it is work (not farm hard), and make their own builds (not follow guides)? For them, this game has little to offer at the moment, unless you invest a LOT of time into it. And that lots of time has to be in a limited window of time, as well, given that the game resets (effectively even on Standard) every three months.

As for your Necro FR, can you play that without a guide given that it is "the most complicated build in the game"?

well the only fun or goal I have with this game rn is collecting legacy stuff on std lol.

TO be honest I don't thnk the problem is being hard. I think the game is too easy cause u have a lot of ways to exploit stuff making unfair, frustrating and "hard" to people that don't want to exploit shennanigans.

U explode screens of useless mobs with useless effects and then boom ur dead cause 1 tiny attack or effect amoung 100000 is deadly and gave u 10k damage. Its cheap and directed to people that play so much that this is the only way to kill them and ggg made clear they want to kill streamers/no lifers.

How do u kill a no lifer or streamer that have 10k hours and logout macro? Yeap the only way is by them not SEE what a hell is happening on screen.

So yeah, its not fun to play atm for a lot of people and honestly ggg is too stuborn to realize their mistakes so I don't see this scenario changing in the future.

Lets just say that I if died so much to random shit in D2 I would not remember it fondly or maybe even not at all.
D2 also had decent allrounder gear that was relatively easy to get, POE has nothing of the sorts and the natural grind for something useful beyond life and some resists is hundreds of hours.
In D2 100 mephruns would get you some serious equipment. In POE you can easily go 100 maps without an upgrade or anything notable.
Finally the RNG range and quantity of RNG gates probably beats Korean MMO levels and this is not something to celebrate.

Creativity? Please, you spend most of your points into HP totals, travel and defence layers. After that you grab closest or mandatory damage. After that your character is still full of holes and you struggle to plug them up with equipment. Thats it and I feel like "requirements" have long since squeezed out all possible space that could have been used for innoviation in terms of opportunity cost (skill pts, character gear slots which are finite).

I dont even know what the positives are supposed to be at this point. There is a lot to do? Doing a lot of something I dont enjoy is not on my list of goals in life.

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Char1983 wrote:

[*]The game is too complicated

Great post tbh but just to cherry pick I personally think this is the #1 for why players think the games difficult, because when you know how it works it isn't.

I have to be an encyclopaedia for my friends when they play because so many mechanics have very specific rules that aren't explained anywhere and even the internets answers are fairly nebulous and sometimes incorrect.

Its simple things like spell damage scales fire trap, why doesn't it scale fireball? When are modifiers explicit or implicit, why doesn't phys damage % scale phys spells?

The answers almost always make sense, especially if you know how GGG use terms but you need a book or years of experience to actually remember them.

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Bosscannon wrote:

Lets just say that I if died so much to random shit in D2 I would not remember it fondly or maybe even not at all.
D2 also had decent allrounder gear that was relatively easy to get, POE has nothing of the sorts and the natural grind for something useful beyond life and some resists is hundreds of hours.
In D2 100 mephruns would get you some serious equipment. In POE you can easily go 100 maps without an upgrade or anything notable.
Finally the RNG range and quantity of RNG gates probably beats Korean MMO levels and this is not something to celebrate.

Creativity? Please, you spend most of your points into HP totals, travel and defence layers. After that you grab closest or mandatory damage. After that your character is still full of holes and you struggle to plug them up with equipment. Thats it and I feel like "requirements" have long since squeezed out all possible space that could have been used for innoviation in terms of opportunity cost (skill pts, character gear slots which are finite).

I dont even know what the positives are supposed to be at this point. There is a lot to do? Doing a lot of something I dont enjoy is not on my list of goals in life.

Agreed, most of the stuff taken on tree is mandatory nodes and you gotta put all your eggs in a basket to make your build feel a bit better

I miss the times where you could just have something because you found it nice to have in the build and not cause it was mandatory or your build falls apart.
Some will call this excess power I call it fun and its what I am missing.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

i think when we talk about the difficulty of aspects of the gameplay it actually matters a lot to put those opinions in the perspective of what the characters the player is playing or referencing actually are. i dont think you can have a serious conversation about game difficulty without it.

is the problem the monsters are too difficult or is the problem that the player hasnt managed to find a suitable build? and if not why not? is this a passive, skill choice or gear problem?

The existence of "suitable" and "unsuitable" builds is a problem in itself. There shouldn't be such a thing as an "unsuitable" build in Path of Exile.

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Andreuswolf wrote:

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

i think when we talk about the difficulty of aspects of the gameplay it actually matters a lot to put those opinions in the perspective of what the characters the player is playing or referencing actually are. i dont think you can have a serious conversation about game difficulty without it.

is the problem the monsters are too difficult or is the problem that the player hasnt managed to find a suitable build? and if not why not? is this a passive, skill choice or gear problem?

The existence of "suitable" and "unsuitable" builds is a problem in itself. There shouldn't be such a thing as an "unsuitable" build in Path of Exile.

People often make this mistake. "Build diversity" isn't the same thing as "bad builds get to win." If content can be beaten by ANY build, regardless of how poorly conceived and constructed, it means that the game is too easy to incentivize proper build execution.