[April 12] Initial Development Manifesto Feedback

Wouldn't more servers reduce the latency and help alleviate the desync problem for most (if they were properly placed)?

Very exciting news !

But, i've got a question

"Season Three and Four are where we'll start experimenting with completely different ways that league events can run (i.e. starting at different parts of the game or with major functional changes to the way the game is played). The plans are very exciting!"


so, imagine we start level 45 for 1 hour race ===> after 1 hour playing, we'll keep on hardcore a level 45+ character ??? Looks weird. No one would start a level 1 char anymore (except for level 28 pvp)

I don't have a huge amount of experience with melee and/or physical damage, but here are some observations I feel I should point out:


A) tl;dr: Phys crits already basically give "armor penetration."

Does physical damage really need an effect on crit? I'd say it technically already has one simply due to the way physical damage mitigation (i.e. Armor) works. The more physical damage is done, the harder it hits...a crit generally hits pretty hard. Think of it as adding armor penetration to the attack.



B) tl;dr: Flat physical mods aren't affected by passive increases to physical dmg.

I'm guessing people aren't taking physical damage nodes because flat physical modifiers on gear (Iron Rings, Meginord's Girdle, "added physical damage" mods, etc.) are apparently not affected by these nodes, so people aren't getting much DPS value out of the them. Apparently this is planned to be changed to work the way elemental works (which does modify damage from flat mods).



C) tl;dr: More sources of elemental damage + better scaling makes converted damage (or ele + ias stacking) hyper-efficient in comparison to pure physical. Also, ranged physical is severely lacking a competitive support gem.

The Weapon Elemental Damage gem. This gem adds an enormous "more" damage modifier - the most efficient source of damage right now (as far as I'm aware) is converted physical. People get themselves a good physical base to work with and convert all of it to elemental (using things like Hrimsorrow gloves, Lightning Arrow/Strike, Blackgleam/Chernobog, etc.). Add in the fact there are more ways to add elemental damage (especially based on your physical damage) than there are actual physical damage modifiers (Hatred + Anger + Wrath, Added Fire, etc.). Combine a Melee Physical gem with Weapon Elemental, convert all of it to elemental, all of a sudden your damage skyrockets.

Ranged physical (bows/wands) do not currently have anything to compete with the Melee Physical gem, which is why you'll see the vast majority of them going elemental + attack speed.

Off the top of my head, the only way I can think to balance the converted damage issue (double dipping the huge "more" damage modifiers) would be to change the way converted damage works in damage calculations. Currently you get the best of both worlds, you get to have your cake and eat it too. It would be a nerf to the converted damage builds, but it may be worth looking into if you feel this needs to be addressed.


For curiosity's sake, I'm running a very strange build right now (CI+GR+VP Physical (pure, not converted) + Crit Bow Duelist: ~180% increased Evasion and ES from the tree - Not sure if that would be useful for you guys at GGG to look at once it's leveled up some more (only in early 30s right now), but I figured it's pretty relevant to the topic, so I'll chuck it out there just in case.

To Chris and the other Devs, a big thank you for taking the time to create the Manifesto as it is an excellent idea.

In regards to server synchronization, I do have a few questions -

Does the gateway system affect server-client sync? Other games have regional based limitations on who you can play with whereas in PoE the gateway system allows people from all over the world to play in groups together. Since players from x gateway can play with y gateway and this increases latency for one or both, I imagine this increases the chances for desync to occur.

Wouldn't the amount of servers spread out geographically in more data center locations reduce desync overall as it would improve latency times? For example only having servers in Texas creates higher ping times for people playing on the East Coast of North America, if there was a data center on the East coast, ping times would improve for those players.

In addition, if servers were spread out more in regions that you service, wouldn't a model of "Wait until data arrives back from the server before doing anything" work better?

Thanks,

~Sky

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timtwins wrote:

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Rastand wrote:

I am new but i read that physical damage nodes are not being taken and melee is lacking damage mitigation.

Ok so a keystone is out of the question so why not add to melee weapon specific nodes a 1-2% damage mitigation from all sources? will bow user go out of there way for a 2% mitigation in the back of a weapon node cluster? I would not think so.

An example is Cleaving ( ax ) 15% damage with axes AND 2% damage mitigation from any source or Razor's edge 12% damage to swords 20% accuracy rating AND 2% damage mitigation from any source.

both are 3 nodes back and you could easily place these through out passive tree.

what do you think?

I really like this idea.

Thanks i think it would help a little most builds could only afford maybe 8 to 10% maybe, but every little bit counts

My feedback:

Synch

Pathfinding seems to be the major culprit here. I am willing to dumb down pathfinding algorithm for the players, in favour of more consistent (and hopefully deterministic) results. Nothing is more frustrating than pathing in a way in your client and ends up in a different place on the server. Dumb pathfinding works for the player since we are all microing making small movement at a time. Smart pathfinding can be kept on mobs.

Map

I'm all for more map accessibility, and agree that the experience gate need to be reconsidered. Since the game is all about tradeoff, can we have a system that trade loot drop in favor of experience. A system similar to Malestrom of Chaos that increase in monster level every 10 zone. You will have to grind to it (which is less boring) and receive no loot in the process. The max level can be capped at player level - 10 (So an 85 can only be grinding 75 mobs).

Or some players suggest: A map mods that increase experience gain, with negative quantity %. Or a mods that remove experience penalty for higher level, but grant no drop.

I know the idea of extremely hard to reach lvl 100 is to make sure you got something to do even if our gear progression is almost perfect. As of right now, perfect gear progression is way easier to reach than perfect lvl progression. People could still be grinding for years for lvl 100 while their items unchanged.

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Chris wrote:

As a long-term change, we will be making sure that many monsters have the ability to deal area of effect damage so that they're more challenging to parties and summoners.

From my point of view, its a bad decision to let nearly every type of monsters have some kind of ranged attack (as now), and then even add some area damage ability on top for most of them - even if both abilities dont interact together.

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Chris wrote:

We are likely to make it easier to acquire the lowest levels of maps... We're discussing specific chests that drop only maps, and a system where Merciless Piety has an extra drop slot that has a reasonable chance of dropping a map.

I'd not expect doing Merciless Piety runs as an "easyfied" solution to collect maps ^^, especially for the fact that maps start dropping much earlier - at least - in act 3. Special, randomly spread 'map drop' chests could be fun, although.

Offtopic remark: sometimes its not desired to (directly) quote dev's messages for some unknown reason (leading in a missing "Q" button) - this time its obvious for the fact of the closed thread, but the quote button is present, causing a 'denied' error message...?

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In this game, archers and mages can get every type of defense melee can, they can wear every kind of armor without drawbacks, they deal more damage and even more AoE damage, and they are not even close to the mobs, they arent risking anything. this is a pretty broken system as it is now.

Exactly.
And there is no problem of hit amount. There is the problem of armor efficiency while fighting in close combat.

Maybe just make armor bonuses-multipliers on close combat weapons?
They would multiply the armor you've got on you by some amount like 1.6-1.9
It's a nice solution because the multiplier would work only if you've got that weapon chosen.
So you can not have the multiplier and shoot with your wand.
You have to equip and have actually CHOSEN THE CLOSE COMBAT WEAPON with the multiplier for it to work.

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Chris wrote:

"The physical-elemental disparity will be addressed. There will probably be an on-critical effect introduced for physical damage (which may be as simple as a guaranteed stun, but the options are still being considered)."

--> what is with Marauders who have taken the "resolute technique" node and cannot deal critical strikes? For them (also basicly all melee characters who play stun based like Ground slam stun builds) there would be no difference with the intended changes.

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Chris wrote:

We will add more survivability options so that characters who get close to monsters have active ways to stay safe. We are investigating ways to add survivability specifically to melee characters in ways that don't also benefit ranged characters.

Rather than nerfing powerful ranged builds to reduce the disparity, we will make sure that melee builds can be built to be powerful enough to compete

sounds very good! A thing I'm always a bit worrying about, is that (most?) of the support abilities (in general) dont add a real bonus as viewed from the damage/cost relation: so like having 50% more damage for 150% cost. Of course this changes for most of the support gem progresses, but there's no "direct" initial benefit...