How do you define hard?

How do you define hard?

This is not meant to be another bitch session. We have more than enough of those. This is meant to honestly find out what you like and dislike.

A lot of people, including myself, have expressed dislike of the zoom zoom play style. I don't have a problem with GGG slowing the game down by making it slower and harder. I think it's good for the game. When they made Act 1 harder, I think that was a good thing. Even after that change I think it was still easier than when I first started playing.

However, there are good kinds of hard and bad kinds of hard. So what makes a game hard to you? What is a good kind of hard and what is a bad kind of hard?

To me, I prefer tactical kind of hard. I like longer lasting fights that require some tactics. Maybe hit and run. Maybe switching flasks or gear for a known boss. Maybe using special skills like frost bomb to counter a specific mod.

The easiest way to make a game “harder” is to add hit points. Just type in a bigger number for a variable and done. I don't consider that hard though. It just takes longer. Walking in real life is easy. Walking a kilometer takes longer than walking 10 meters, but it's not harder. I don't have a problem with devs doing this, as long as it's not the only thing they do to make it harder.

Cheesy kind of hard:

We are seeing more and more on-death affects and ground affects. A few days ago the area was completely clear. I was bold enough to click on a piece of loot. Got one-shot by some type of on-death effect – probably an exploder.

I'm pretty casual. I've played thousands of hours, but I like to take my time. When an area is clear, I pause and take a drink of my coffee. I don't want to get killed by one shot on-death affects or fast degen – especially when there is so much clutter I can't even see it. Yes, I know it can happen. I know I should move. But I shouldn't have to. And it can happen in the middle of a fight when the screen is full of fireworks.

On death affects are just cheesy and not fun.

Super fast mobs. Some of these guys can outrun MS plus movement skills, and do it continuously. You are pretty much forced to face tank them. Sometimes we expect it and know what we're getting into, like the Gauntlet events. That's fine. But for the base game it's cheesy.

Off-screen one-shots. I'm not going to beat a dead horse on this one. But it belongs on the list.

Neutral kind of hard.
I'm all for having mobs that not every build can handle. I don't think there should be a build that can handle every kind of mob in every situation. That's OP and shouldn't happen. It's part of the game to know what your build can handle, and stay away from fights you know will be trouble.

Anyone remember how dangerous some rogue exiles used to be? Remember when Minara could instantly summon a bunch of zombies and completely surround you so you couldn't move - and do it early in Act 1? Remember Magnus being able to devastate you in Act 1 from off-screen? Some of those exiles are not anywhere near as dangerous as they used to be.

So what is hard to you?

To me, "hard" comes when there is a huge difference between the regular play and the encounters that are too hard (and yes, I know that's circular). "Hard" is relative. For instance, I consider the fight where you find Innocence first quite hard. It's head over heels more difficult than anything that you've encountered so far.

It's not difficult for someone who knows what they're doing and is prepared for it.

It's not all that challenging when you're overleveled and well equipped.

But it's hard. It sets the tone for what you have to accomplish at that level.

Good Hard

- Learning the fight, watching for boss tells, learning where to be, when to dps, when not to.
- Figuring out a decent passive tree / gear stats with builds that you dont need to take on endgame content


Neutral to Bad Hard

- Ground effects, reflect mobs, zoom zoom


Bad Hard

- Crafting being horribly non-intuitive slot machine (crafting mechanics in PoE, just like loot boxes, are literally designed for gambling addicts encouragement and behavior)
- The very complex balance of stats required for an endgame build requiring 3rd party software to solve, generally requiring use of gimmick mechanics (i.e. not building off pumping physical to swing a sword, instead you need igniting totems using your bow skill, or modified skeleton minions using a specific chest to ignore resists, etc.)
- Overly complex mechanics for no real reason (Archnemsis inventory management and recipes that could just have been rare drops)

Good hard: Longer boss fights with learnable mechanics and multiple ways to deal with them (armor stack, manually dodge, evasion, etc). Some of the best "let's see how good your build is" skills are Dominus' stream of lighting projectiles, the wolf boss' stream of projectiles (degens are actually a good way to test skill as well, as much as many would would disagree). Something that basically can't one-shot you, but will shotgun or drain you quickly if you're undergeared/unprepared.

Bad hard: Invulnerability, near invulnerability, rares that take 50x longer to kill than a boss. I know ArchNem has been yelled about since day 1, but the problem isn't the fireballs, venom spheres, or even the lightning mana drain one. It's being able to slaughter a T16 boss in 5 seconds, but a T14 rare taking over a minute (with all 3 elements used, as much pen as I could get).

Pretty sure the mob had the all elements affix and at least one of the single elements affix. Happens more often than you'd think.

Lastly, Sentinel is SUPER fun, until buffed-and-now-invincible Betrayal dudes literally appear out of thin air and get buffed. The first sentinel type you get just shouldn't buff uniques. Make that the yellow one only.

Shags has the right of it. Innocence is a great example of good, fair difficulty. When you face him the first time, he is a big jump in complexity over anything up to that point. He telegraphs some very nasty attacks with his vocal cues (vocal cues that weren't in the alpha version -- oh boy THAT was fun), he has a one hit kill slam, and he has two forms with the first still feeling like a decent PoE boss for that stage of the game.

I'd also add that Vaal Oversoul was an excellent boss during the beta. The similarities are hard to miss: he also has a one hit kill slam, and beam that you need to run in a circular pattern to avoid, and a fairly large room-wide 'cluster aoe' (the ceiling rocks used to WRECK FACE). Naturally that's all very much a thing of the past, but in its heyday, Oversoul was a beast.

Even further back, Chatters used to terrify us. As did Hailrake. Hard to believe, but true. We had virtually no gear to speak of, and both of them could do something that felt blatantly unfair at low level: they could freeze and then just whale away at you.

For me, there are three distinct phases of playing an ARPG difficulty wise -- early game vulnerability, mid game comfort, late game drudge. I've always been a fan of the first phase, which could be why I like rogue-likes so very much. The game is simpler at that point, but still challenging. You have few tools and have to be wary of pretty much everything. Mid game comfort sort of speaks for itself: you've got your gear, your build is rolling, and even if you come against a wall, chances are you can handle it. And the last phase, well that's when I nope out and start a new character. It's not that I find it inherently difficult -- it's just that it's either no fun for a character I've come to really enjoy *because it hasn't been facerolling content so far*, or it's no fun because it's the same fucking thing, over and over again. Don't offer me a game with hundreds of build possibilities and expect me to play only 2 for weeks or even months. If I wanted that, I'd go play an MMO -- and even you have stuff like FFXIV where you can literally change classes on the fly.

Speaking of, FFXIV has a weird mix of great difficulty and not-so-great difficulty too. I'm not a fan of having to watch guides on how to beat a boss before facing it (I mean, that's essentially spoiling yourself) but it seems par for the course there. At least for a fairly casual player. But the overall difficulty of open world encounters is pretty fair. Enemy attacks are well telepgraphed. There's level syncing for lower level events (a light version of what Guild Wars 2 does). So like I said, bit of this, bit of that.

But back to PoE: the balance between the three stages I mentioned fell out of whack pretty early into the game's development. When there was two acts only, the first stage was about half of act 1, the middle was probably up to early merciless act 2, and then the drudge and Maelstrom of Chaos. Same with three acts, give or take. And four, although Act 4 in and of itself has always had a tiring effect on players due to its contradictory nature: it's both stuffed with cool 'legendary figures of Sarn' content but also drags it out. I recall seeing a major dev playing through the game back when 3.0 landed and his status was simply 'why is act 4 so long' or something of that nature. Indeed. Why.

Anyway by the time we get to said 3.0, we have ten acts and a well-established post-game campaign 'Atlas' system. If we look back to the stage division of earlier PoE and apply to what we nave now, the first stage (early vulnerability) should be most of act 1, the comfortable stage should be the rest of the campaign and maybe early to mid Atlas, and the drudge everything from there onward. That's with a relatively 'organic' character, not a meta monster or a twink.

I make that judgement based on the fact that Atlas has actual story, which means it's no longer strictly 'post game grind' as Mapping was in its inception. If GGG want people to play and experience it, it shouldn't be the third stage drudge from the start. But since they never really readjusted their thinking and realised that Atlas might be anything but 'post game grind' even though they injected narrative into it, the third stage grew -- and in both directions.

And that's where PoE is now. The second stage has been swallowed up by the third to the point where even early campaign has end-game attitude. And surprise, quite a few people don't find that fun. It really doesn't bode well for Path of Exile '2' being nothing BUT campaign. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if (when? if?) it lands MUCH easier than the original campaign simply to encourage people to choose it over the OG story.

And I haven't really talked about the specifics of 'bad hard'. I think you've got that down. Unfair mods that punish otherwise intelligent play, mods that drag an encounter out, mods that force you to run *after* the fight is over...all that shit screams 'we had no idea how to make this fair and challenging that forces you to adapt tactically, so here's unfair and frustrating that punishes your core build decisions and contradicts the basic premise of the game as we ourselves framed it: harder, faster, FASTER.'

I seem to repeat this every second day but it never stops being true: GGG have only made one game and it shows. I think they've always had a long term vision as a business but the design and balance itself seems much less well managed. From league to league, they just bounce around adding stuff and liberally shoving the difficulty sliders around -- because the long term vision of the business never had much to do with any of that.

The long term vision probably didn't include a true Path of Exile sequel either. Which, in this context, means that once their one and only game started to embrace 'bad difficulty', which is MUCH easier to make than truly 'good' difficulty, and its popularity/success continued to grow, that was it. Why put in the effort to make 'good' difficulty when people will support/love/praise/come back for more 'bad' difficulty?

Oh, shit. I didn't answer the OP's final question. It's implicit throughout, but 'hard' to me is when a game forces you to reassess your approach in that moment. When it challenges your complacency thus far. When it makes you take another look at your resources and skillset. I don't think PoE could ever be my idea of 'hard' because it's essentially a strategic game (most of the work is done before you even leave town), you have SO many resources at your disposal, and the 'skillset' involves things like 'dealing with a terrible trade system', 'micromanaging resources' and 'studying the wiki to learn terms that otherwise don't mean a thing at a glance'.

In no universe are those my idea of fun or 'hard', at least not in an ARPG. Again, sometimes I think PoE reaches too deeply into the rank well of MMO difficulty tricks, but without the necessary counterbalance of a nice big open world and lots of banal shit to do in the downtime.

Good hard was doing uber elder with a 500k dps groundslam Jugg when it was a new fight and I failed after 20 minutes

Bad hard is attempting to craft any item not on a fractured base so I can reach the level of power the designers now assume I have when I don't.

Testing my mechanics is good, testing my patience isn't.

Should mention that due to their design ethos its almost impossible to design a satisfying fight anymore as most will skip it, Maven was pretty good though all things considered but her "phases" are nothing more than attempt to make 100m dps zoomers actually do something to kill the boss.

Until they address the breadth of dps/defences they've power creeped into fights they add will be unsatisfying for a chunk of the playerbase. This is represented pretty well by the story bosses that hold up well because our power is curtailed in normal play.

From a game design perspective you'll find that ability to correctly tune difficulty appears at the opposite end of a scale to player power, the more player power the more difficult it becomes to design challenging content that's satisfying. I can't think of any exceptions to this off the top of my head.

Posit: there is no way to design good or bad hard until they cap both player and mob stats (dps and survivability) because the range is simply too high now.

Maven doesnt encourage you to slowly learn the fight while losing exalts worth of invitations (ptw? RMT-GGG megaconspiracy???), she encourages you to upgrade to 10M dps so you insta-phase her.

The range in reasonable builds having between 0 and 250k armour, 75 and 90 resists with additional reductions, 500k to 500M dps, and mods adding mob damage between 5% and 5000% more damage just makes any reasonable hard-vs-easy balance impossible.


Note Dark Souls/Elden Ring has superb balance. But different builds hit between 400 to 2000 damage, and are probably closer in total dps.

You can choose between a game that has good balance, and one that allows huge variation (including failed builds and near immortal bulds), but not both.

1. The problem in PoE about difficulty for me is the complete lack of visual representation of a deadly threat.
2. Even after being one shotted there is no sign if this was a 'sum of stacked occasions' or a single hit my character wasn't able to cope with.

A visual representation of a deadly threat to my character and a death info are both things i repeat claiming for years.

Hard but fair is great.

POE today is either easy or it RNG's into existence something unfair and you r now straight ded OR stand for minutes hugging a damage sponge OR have to walk away entirely. Sux.

"hard" is if you have to decide to leave a fight or not.

and because most players slap "arpg" on poe and decide that it means that there is no unbeatable content while running with their against the challenge they can't win, it's just that: a challenge which most players fail.