[April 12] Initial Development Manifesto Feedback

about the on-crit effect for physical damage

make it based upon the weapon type they're using. this will make weapon specific crit passives more desirable.

a slashing weapon should add a bleed. a blunt weapon could mini-stun. i don't know if there's a piercing weapon, but piercing could lower the armor of the enemy for a duration.

the slashing bleed effect would stack with the other bleed, making it quite deadly. having an armor reduction effect would be good because 1 crit would be good to make the rest of your attacks suddenly do more; kind of like a shock version for melee.

having a on-crit stun effect would be a bad idea. we already remember the broken perma-stun.

having an on-crit effect and some stronger melee passives would make melee ultimately as viable to ranged.

in terms of defense. i think if you make armor simply better, as in reduce dmg better than it does now, that should be good enough.

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Riffmaker wrote:

Great Manifesto!

tldr: Armor and evasion needs to be improved, melee weapons should have defensive stats built into them and there should be some crowd control melee-esque skills to cut back on the amount of mobs hitting you in the face in the first place.

Defensive stats on melee weapons is a bad idea. There is absolutely nothing stopping you duel wielding swords and casting spells from range.

Please, do not add an on-crit effect to physical damage to balance physical&elemental! It won't work!
On hardcore, almost every physical melee goes for resolute technique, because we cant afford going for crit build, otherwise melee would just die for lacking HP and other defenses..

Elemental damage is much better compared to Physical, because you can have 3 elemental damage types, which you can easily increase through weapon elemental damage mods on items and passive skill tree. They also doesnt decrease prozentual like physical..

To buff Physical damage, you should decrease the amount of physical damage is reduced by gems, maybe buff the physical increase damage nodes..

But if you add only on-crit effect to physical attacks, most of melee players (maybe all) on hardcore wont profit from it!

Regarding the desync issues:

Having played D3 quite a bit (which I would assume uses a similar system), I have never experienced the amount of desync that I get in PoE.

My biggest gripe, and very easy to reproduce, is when using cleave. It is often the case that of 10 mobs in front of me, only 5-7 will actually be hit by a cleave attack. It is at that time that i realise that some of them are not *actually* in front of me and I have no way of telling where they really are which forces me to make some random moves in an effort to reposition the mobs.
This is with 50ms latency btw. Charging mobs, and large melee packs are other common situations where desync can ruin your day.

The desync issue is the only real problem I have with the game at the moment. It is the only reason I do not push more friends into playing it (because I don't want them to get frustrated and give up because of it).
Every other issue can be fixed and improved later, but this is critical.

One thing is that most of the big "armor smashing" mobs are melee range. Those gorillas, rhoas, Brutus, Merveil and more. Right now the metagame is to get just enough armor to mitigate the ranged mobs, and then kite the melee mobs. What you need to do is make the big hits more spread out between melee and range. You can do that with spells like vaal's avalanche.

One thing that has been bugging me as of late are chisels.
Why are mapdrops independent from playercount but chisels are not?

One of many hindrances of soloplay.

Accessibility of areas shouldn't be restrictive as it is right now imo-

Melee Balance:

A couple suggestions for melee balance.

1: Have all projectiles, by default, do more damage at greater range. Point blank would think invert the range scaling, making them do more damage at close range. Enemies could occasionally have a point blank mod.

2: Personal defensive/offensive toggles which scale off of nearby enemies.
Sample gem:
Perseverance:
+10% more defenses for the 1st enemy within x radius.
+1% more defenses for each additional enemy within x radius.

3: Melee attack support to grant endurance charges. Ideas : Red Gem Grant Endurance Charge on Miss. This would make the 100% accuracy node less appealing for tanks. Not pure melee, but melee designed since bow users would miss less anyways.

edit: Is there just one feedback thread all four manifesto items?

I don't have any questions. I just wanted to say thanks for posting this manifesto. It is very informative. Thanks for explaining the desync issue in a way even I understood. I really like this game and it looks like it will get even better. Thanks GGG!

Feedback about maps mods:

Most of us try to roll mods like Maze, Area size, monster pack (density) along with stats that increase the number of rares and champions, they basically make maps more fun and last longer (but not easier, which is fine).

My thought is that some (if not all) of these mods should be innate to all maps, specially the Maze/Areasize mods.

Maps without the maze/areasize mods are generally pretty small and do not last very long, they are even smaller than their counterparts found in acts! which is kinda bad imo considering the rarity of maps, specially high level ones. But even if maps weren't rare at all, bigger maps is always better, the fun simply last longer, it's an ARPG afterall so dungeons should be big and last somewhat long (aka not 5 minutes).

"Guaranteed stun on melee crit" feels way too similar to "freeze on cold elemental crit".

I'm sure the guys at GGG have thought of that, but it feels important that different characters get different benefits. That is, CI characters shouldn't be just like health based characters only with a larger "effective health" (energy shield) pool.