[April 12] Initial Development Manifesto Feedback

If you want to make the meele offensive nodes a bit more attractive, and make meele more survivable at the same time, add some minor HP, armor, or resistance increases to the meele offensive nodes. For example, a +8% 2-handed weapon node could also give +2% Health, or a 1-handed damage node could give +2% Armor. This would give players some much needed defensive boosts when they devote points to meele-related offensive passives.

So tell me why D3 can have such a nice game engine and still work. I never recall ever seeing some sort of pvp hacks on D3?

Melee is so easy to fix, its actually so so simple. I'm gonna take a page out of the League of Legends book.

In LOL, tank characters have a shitty time dealing dps, thats why they input the Atma's impaler that converts 2.5% of max life to physical DPS. All melee needs is a keystone that adds % max life to melee DPs. That way melee can stack all life nodes and still have good dps to compensate for the lack of survivability up close.

Also, D3 does this well, a % of your strength added as armor and life regen. Why strength on POE doesn't add these things is absolutely a mystery to me.

This is where POE fails so miserably compared to other games - sure D3 failed but their core fundamentals feel right e.g. Melee skills feel melee and powerful, intel skills feel smart and tactful and etc... you get up close and personal with mobs. POE melee skills feel like Pseudo ranged, otherwise if its not Pseudo ranged, you get horrible skills like leap/sweep/cleave that hit this tiny little half circle which you need to conc effect for any decent dps; which then makes that circle even smaller.

Inability to use arctic armor with blood magic - again absolutely stupid - the whole point of arctic armor should be to benefit melee and increase survivablity at close range. Most melee being blood magic cannot even use this and most people who use mana would rather save their mana for skills that are less trash.

If GGG spent the majority of their time actually listening to the players and taking on board feedback vs. releasing garbage uniques that have no use what so ever (like the ice tomb, new long bow and etc...) we'd actually be getting some where.

Now with the new lightning thorns affecting range, there are a whole lot more deaths/rage threads cause of this which truly shows how overdue this update was. GGG should start listening and stop doing a Jay Wilson.

I guess I didnt see this soon enough. I really do like the changes you guys made to melee as far as adding splash...

Multistrike isnt useful for my char or build. I play a different kind of build I wish I could show you guys but I don't think you do builds of the week anymore.

The other problem is reflect monsters. Ranged tends to get an advantage to avoid this problem with totems and distance.


The other factor I run into is visual, I can't see hardly anything half the time. The white items clutter the screen so much. I miss the old filter for white items but I also dont wanana lose maps and 6 socketed items along with linked items.

Finally, another problem is the way in which your monsters attack. They attack in sync, this is a huge problem. It takes you from full life to zero in seconds. They do all the same attacks at the same time. So a volley of arrows hits you all at once. It makes block near useless, it makes life all the more necessary yet unavailable. With distance this can all be avoided.

Oh yes,and desync, it's been covered before but I wanted to add that cyclone does not work, multi strike is also a huge desync issue for melee.


Thanks for listening, I know it's a late response to a few weeks old thread but I'll send my feed back anyways :)

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Players are not picking challenging enough map mods. There are several that make the map "harder" in a way that just means they find more maps without any additional difficulty. We will probably change these so that they actually make the level harder

I think you shouldn't change that, hitting those mods require to use some (a lot ?) of currency on your map for it, their is already a price to pay to get those mods.

And I think many people use challenging map mods when they have good gear and want to maximize item drops. The problem it's that having mobs 50% stronger with big chaos damage and all the cut throat mods you want, increase a bit the item drop (still can have few rare drops), but no experience bonus. Cut throat maps mods are promising you high risk of death with little little hyprothetical reward.

As it's impossible to ensure a good item in a map (RNG), an experience bonus for cut throat maps could be nice, as sometimes you struggle to get higher level maps (Who didn't have only 66-68 map drops in his 70-72 map ? :p( it can be another solution to make XP in your 68 cut throat map.

Considering that the most succesful marauders are spellcasters at the moment, maybe that melee patch is long overdue. :)

One way to also bypass the desync issues would be to fit the skills the actually prediction handling. For example whirling blades (as it was alrdy mentioned in the manifesto) is quite doubtable, that it will ever be in sync. Fast skills that make your char overcome a great distance will be alaways a problem. Remove them, rework them. Just as an additional solution.

Loot Allocation

"Item tension", to me, is not fun. Seeing a group of players in combat stop what they were doing and hover over item drops like flies on shit is, to me, pretty sad. It's also slow, while designed to be fast, because regardless of the timer people are still manually allocating loot and taking time away from doing damage by cluster-humping drops and ninja-looting. This system is dated, and to me it is obvious why games no longer use it. It makes individual honesty extremely important, while at the same time masking information about what they are doing (i.e. group member runs ahead and opens chests). Many systems have been developed which GGG apparently dislike, such as short 1-line party notifications when a rare/orb/%gem is looted or the ability to random drops on your own as a full party with full disclosure with /random 1 100, need/greed/pass, etc etc. Item tension might be fun for shits and giggles, but in most situations it detracts from the group dynamic, which is pretty much non-existant right now in PoE. Just take a look at the public party tab.
The characters here are "exiles" and the devs want a "cut-throat feel", but combining this with a f2p ARPG audience creates a situation which, again in my opinion, is mostly negative.

Desync

Situation is out of hand, making the game hard to play at all. Lack of build diversity and the huge disparity between melee and ranged can also be partially attributed to which skills cause desync, as well as being in melee range while desync'd being extremely deadly.

The chance of this post being read is slim to none, but:

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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.

I might be in a minority here, but I don't want to see this happen. What I want to see happen is melee becoming better DPS than ranged.

As an example: think about your typical first-person shooter. There's normally some kind of combat knife or something... and for reasons that aren't realistic, it normally does insane DPS. As in, instantaneous one-shot kills. No ranged weapon in those games, save giant rocket launchers or some such nonsense, is capable of such things.

Is survivability a problem with those weapons? Sort of. You need to be able to get within melee range. But after that... no. It's not. There are no survivability issues when your enemies instantaneously drop.

That's how melee should be in Path of Exile. Ranged should do low enough damage that monsters will get to them, and they'll need to weather out the storm. Melee should do high enough damage that the only thing they have to worry about is ranged attacks... because once they get in position, forget about it.

"Melee survivability" isn't really a factor in achieving this desired end-state.

What Scrotie said.