how fast poe2 will becom ultra fast speed race trash with 99% useless trash loot and NO craftin?

'A bit dramatic but not really off the mark' is almost certainly the most common reaction to my better posts (if people know it's me). I can live with that. :)

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Someone else mentioned the different incoming skill system, shifting from the 6L pinnacle (give or take) to skill gems themselves having slots. It's a very smart move in itself, in that it frees up regular gear upgrading (a cornerstone of any ARPG of the Diablo variety), BUT I am left doubting whether GGG are capable of balancing it any better than they do the current one. Just because they are embracing a smarter means of equipping and upgrading skills doesn't mean the way they balance those skills and upgrades will be similarly smart.

You have to remember that this isn't a new game. They don't get to start over with all new skills and all new support gems. So there's only so much they can change. Unless they are willing to overtly piss off a lot of people by outright deleting a bunch of existing skills and upgrades, OR can commit the time and resources to bringing all of them up to 4.0 standards.

Which is all to say, is it possible they're doing everything necessary to make Path of Exile 4.0 work as an expansion/overhaul/renewal of 'Path of Exile' *while delivering new league content on schedule*? Sure. Is it likely? Not unless they've somehow managed to recruit a lot more staff despite the goings-on of the past few years.

They deploy leagues severely undercooked. A league is nowhere near as complex as what Path of Exile 4.0 will be. And sure, that's why there'll be a beta (of a game permanently in implicit beta -- uwotmate). There was also a beta for 2.0 and 3.0 as well. The game still felt unfinished. I see no indication that 4.0 will land any more smoothly.

I implore you: do not be swayed overly by the polish of isolated, made-to-impress small-scale demos. This goes for both D4 and PoE 4.0. They might be a little more interactive than trailers or concept art but they are no less potent as marketing tools and you'd better believe they're treated as such internally.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Have a lovely rest-of-the-weekend and don't worry about me so much, okay? :)

Noted. Enjoy your free time and take care!

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Just because they are embracing a smarter means of equipping and upgrading skills doesn't mean the way they balance those skills and upgrades will be similarly smart.

This i fear alot. I fully expect something alike "Fusings are gone! Now you just need to spend more of less 1500 Orbs of Linking on a gem to add 5 links to a gem".
Or 6l-gems to drop at an obscenely low rate and not be alterable, meaning almost all gem drops will be trash.

But i guess im a pessimist about that.

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HerrImHimmel wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Just because they are embracing a smarter means of equipping and upgrading skills doesn't mean the way they balance those skills and upgrades will be similarly smart.

This i fear alot. I fully expect something alike "Fusings are gone! Now you just need to spend more of less 1500 Orbs of Linking on a gem to add 5 links to a gem".
Or 6l-gems to drop at an obscenely low rate and not be alterable, meaning almost all gem drops will be trash.

But i guess im a pessimist about that.

There is more than a little realism to your pessimism here. After all, they said 'no nerfs or buffs this patch' which was technically true, but then the across-the-board strengthening of rare monsters was a de facto nerf for a lot of builds. It was disingenuous and I'd expect the same 'sideways move' from PoE '2', because the beating heart of the game is the lottery, the drudgery of 'crafting' (if using currency orbs to essentially roll the dice is 'crafting' then I'm a ham sandwich). Unless GGG get the fuck over this weird notion that people need so much gambling just to play an ARPG, expect other mechanics to ever so slightly affect the way links work with gems.

It boggles my mind how badly they lost their way -- how could Diablo 2 veterans forget that the bulk of the 'gambling' for a fun ARPG comes with the drop chances, and not with turning your gear/skill setup into a slot machine with *fucking dire* odds of an actual improvement?

And here's an interesting little mind trick they play: imagine if you couldn't lose gem sockets or links with a jeweller's/fusing roll, only gain -- BUT at a very, very low chance. The majority of your rolls would do nothing, and none of them would be a loss, right? And yet I can guarantee people are more likely to roll 1500+ fusings to get a 6S/5L to 6L if they see a change every time rather than a change only one in a thousand. No change after 1000 rolls=it's not working, this is stupid. Always changes, but almost all of them worse than 5L=it's working, it's just not giving me the result I want -- better spin again, NEXT TIME FOR SURE...

It's fucking devious as all fuck and straight out of a casino's playbook.

PoE 2 is still mostly PoE 1 it's going to start that way.

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Someone else mentioned the different incoming skill system, shifting from the 6L pinnacle (give or take) to skill gems themselves having slots. It's a very smart move in itself, in that it frees up regular gear upgrading (a cornerstone of any ARPG of the Diablo variety)

This is what's tempering my pessimism right now though, this is a huge improvement to making finding items exciting again. Sockets contribute a ton to the amount of items that are so near an upgrade but it simply costs too many resources to make them work without your gems.

Though honestly, what if they just got rid of support gems? Do they do anything cool or interesting? Would we miss them in build planning or play styles?

Im not sure if it is devious per se, but it is very, very tiring for people like me. I like this game, but some core philosophies i just cant behind, and GGG cant and wont change it seems.

I also had a mental image of someone trying to bake a cake by shoving all the needed ingridients into the oven and waiting for 2 hours, just for all of those to have a 10% chance to actually become a cake, a 40% change to not chance at all and a 50% chance to vanish. How much more fun would baking a cake be then, eh?

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HerrImHimmel wrote:

Spoiler

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

It's fucking devious as all fuck and straight out of a casino's playbook.

Im not sure if it is devious per se, but it is very, very tiring for people like me. I like this game, but some core philosophies i just cant behind, and GGG cant and wont change it seems.

I also had a mental image of someone trying to bake a cake by shoving all the needed ingridients into the oven and waiting for 2 hours, just for all of those to have a 10% chance to actually become a cake, a 40% change to not chance at all and a 50% chance to vanish. How much more fun would baking a cake be then, eh?

Funny you'd put it that way, I once used cake-making as a metaphor for how crafting works in PoE that was almost identical to that one. It's some gentle gaslighting that something that employs almost no actual crafting but instead is just one roll of the dice after another is called 'crafting' in this game. It makes a little sense but then you go play Monster Hunter or ANY MMO or a survival game and you're like...oh that's right, THIS is what crafting in a game is meant to be: you put shit together to get a largely predictable result.

The key word is 'recipe'. If you follow a recipe closely, you'll end up with something recognisably like what you're going for. It might not be perfect; it might not even really work. But it'll be much closer than, as you said, throwing all the ingredients in random ratios into an oven at a random setting and expect a cake. 10%? That's mighty generous. As someone who spends time in their kitchen pretty much every day, I'd say if you not only don't follow a recipe but flagrantly just do the bare minimum (as described above), you've less than 1% chance of the result being even vaguely like what you want.

It's not crafting. It's fucking gambling. Bottom line.

Felt like adding my usual agreement on the communication being bad (usually not even just bad, but I feel intentionally setting people on the wrong foot).

Communication has also been used to shove blame to players. Hell, I'd call it Machiavellian at times.


Aaaand, yep, it is gambling. Lots of it. This is a big part of the hook.


Also a whole lot of cool stuff. And a lot of mess.


Regarding PoE 2: no idea what is all going to happen and I do look forward to it. There will be new ascendancies, for example. But as the end game remains the same atlas - either a clean sheet must happen item wise (bye bye to a lot we got) with some megaretune with some sort of 2.0 standard (existing one going legacy or something) or we'll just end up with the same pile.

In the first scenario there'd also have to be way more stability or the new standard will end up the same (no serious build up of value over time with very few players and everyone in the volatility of the leagues again).

I do know this: chances of it all being worked out in the way everyone likes it will not happen and there'll be some drama at least, but also a real huge hype towards it and plenty of stuff for streamers to hit and show for a while.


Kinda expecting a bigger PoE as it is with some stuff cleaned up (edit: so I guess I do have some sort of idea).

Guess we'll see :-)

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

It's not crafting. It's fucking gambling. Bottom line.

Of course it is. It has to be. Real, deterministic crafting in a loot/progression/RNG based environment will be very counterproductive, and almost destructive - in my eyes.

"Crafting" in PoE is probably already too powerful, making drops redundant. You're not looking for "good items for your character" - because they don't drop, you're looking for items with "one or two good mods, preferably fractured mods" so you can "craft" the item.

I've come to peace with the fact that PoE - in the endgame - has become all about crafting/trading, and that the only drops that raises your eyebrows, are either divination cards or currency - with the very rare occurrence of a good unique dropping, because of their market value - not their usefulness for your character.

"To be able to get a sense of success, the possibility to fail has to be present".

And, of course, every economy needs its sinks, be that currency or goods. Something has to be consumed. Something needs to disappear.

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Phrazz wrote:

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

It's not crafting. It's fucking gambling. Bottom line.

Of course it is. It has to be. Real, deterministic crafting in a loot/progression/RNG based environment will be very counterproductive, and almost destructive - in my eyes.

And yet no other ARPG has it to the extent we see with PoE. As I said, the vast majority of the 'gamble' with an ARPG should be at the very moment an enemy dies. And maybe some currency sink like Wirt/Gheed/etc.

D2 also had fairly clear deterministic crafting in those orange items. They weren't amazing but they were reliable.

Currently I play 3-4 ARPGs regularly (weird when I type it out like that; it seems so natural otherwise) and none of them have any sort of post-drop gambling beyond, say, socket rolling (Wolcen); neither Sacred 2 nor Titan Quest have any of it beyond a Wirt-like gambling vendor.

The notion of non-deterministic crafting of items by players (i.e. fucking gambling) in an ARPG is purely an invention of GGG's, and you'd do very well to remember that. It was how they capitalised on the basic notion that ARPGs are essentially gambling simulators.

As for 'something needs to disappear', do you know what the original intention of whetstones and scraps was? I bet you can guess. :)