[April 12] Initial Development Manifesto Feedback

Somethings that weren't talked about and alot of people are looking for some answers are CURRENT TRADE SYSTEM & ITEM SKINS are you guys thinking about these at all or ....

To the melee vs ranged issue:

I stopped playing just because of this.
I always played melee characters in almost every game I played. I like to run up and hit the monsters in the face. It is no fun for me to kill them off-screen.

So, how does this in other games work: archers, mages and other ranged type characters have almost no close-combat defense, they need to utilize spells and skills, kiting, and other stuff and avoid getting hit at all.
Melee have heavy close combat defense, usually they are much slower, they just run to the mobs, kill them in a few hits, taking and mitigating most of the damage. They dont have to kite too much. But most of all, they are the only characters capable of wearing heavy armor and using shields to get better defense, and an axe or sword or hammer does way more damage than an arrow, even in real life.

Casters cant cast in heavy armor, archers cant really aim and shoot quick in heavy armor in most other games, this just doesnt make any sense. Why would anyone ever play a melee character, if this would be possible?

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.

Possibly solutions are maybe restricting defense types to character classes or skills (?), heavily nerfing all kinds of ranged AoE damage, so ranged characers have to invest a lot more in offensive nodes, rather than being just as defensive than a melee and dealing way more damage from a safe distance. It is important of course reducing the damage spikes and one hit kills which can occur even with an extremely defensive character. These are just my ideas, I like this game, but it is just simply broken now, melee is close to unplayable while it should be just as good or even better than ranged, and thats how it works in most other games. Maybe not he best ideas, but others have posted other good ideas to solve this issue, I agree with most of them.

lol just make the client authoritative over sync issues. noone cares if a small number of people cheat for tiny advantages - walking through monsters useless if you're half decent at a very not-hard game (except desyncs...), speedhacks very easy to detect and still not hugely useful, pvp completely meaningless anyway - when the game is totally unplayable so long as desyncs are still a thing.

as for drops, it's entirely pointless to actually play this game when you can just try to screw ppl on trade all day. I recently did a char up to lvl67 and didn't find/craft a single piece of equipment that I then used (took it all from my old one, got given a piece or two by a friend) and didn't come remotely close to finding enough currency to buy anything worth using off trade. I've since started another character who at level 40 seems to be following the exact same path.

I still enjoy this game (for now, rapidly diminishing), but i can't recommend it to anyone until these are fixed. i've seen it enough times before, promising game driven hard into the ground by incompetent devs because they just want to keep releasing garbage instead of fixing major problems.

"

ruskyandrei wrote:

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.

100% agree on the "... 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). "

Everything else about the game I'm sure they'll like, but the silly things like death on load screens and death by desync are holding this game back more than most people realize.

Some things are from myself, others from stuff i read from posts...

life over all: something must be done so that life isn't as important as anything else, saw someone talking about buffing how much life you get from lvling up and nerfing life nodes in a way to other keystones become more attractive.

melee buff / survivability: one way i though could be to add a passive to make armor vs hit don't scale and work as elemental resist: if its 50% dmg reduction, for all atks it would be 50% mitigation... that could boost survivability enough for melee.

leagues: posted that as a suggestion already and gonna post it here too: crafters league: no armor/weapon drops, that you would only buy and only drops are currency, maps and gems with a large boost to currency drops (they would drop as often as whites, blues, rares and uniques...) the only source of items would be vendors and you would craft from there. trading in this scenario would be more interesting as currency loses value and good crafts are traded with a need as value, dont serve you, have no value, serves you and you trade just because you need.

mtg, magic: for some reason as chris talked about it one thing came to mind: more interaction and/or restrictions and multiple trees.

interactions and restrictions: out of mind there is the wand that cant be used if u are CI... things like that could occur in the passive, as it could use str, int and dex requirements for some passives... this also can be true for gems and other items, meaning you could make a gem for ppl who use CI and only who have CI can use it.

multiple trees: i'm not talking about one tree for each char, but multiple trees that u can choose as you create another char, each tree with the same model: a start for each type and a central cluster... each tree may or may have not the same passives and keysotnes but i was thinking of multiple trees with different main keystones that would make another views to the game and other interactions...
multiple trees would allow future implements a lot easier than remodeling the whole unique tree.

last i can think of... the all balanced 7º ??? starting in the middle... (??? is the name of it... that i dont have a clue of what he would be...

"

Kindred1 wrote:

Somethings that weren't talked about and alot of people are looking for some answers are CURRENT TRADE SYSTEM & ITEM SKINS are you guys thinking about these at all or ....

More beta manifestos are on their way.

Please address "PATH OF HP NODES"

Thank you for the rest so far.

"

ruskyandrei wrote:

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.

It seems they are set on only updating entities that go way out of sync, which is unfortunate and a big reason for their problems.

"

Dreggon wrote:

Desync request: Have a 'ghost' version of your character which is entirely server-side and is communicated to your client, i.e. if my client says I'm in a hallway but the server says I'm currently being reamed by three rare mobs in the room I just left, I can see my character's ghost being attacked. This would also allow you to have enemies attacking your server location since it would be clear as to what is happening.

When I first read this I thought "Neat idea..."
Then I read it a second time. How would this work? Your ghost suffers the exactly same latency as does your character. So how could your client tell where your ghost is based on server calculations at any given time? The only thing your client can do is show where your ghost was based on server calculations 50-250ms ago.

Or to take a different approach: Why on earth would your client, if it could tell the exact position of your ghost, then not use it to place your character? There would be no desync then...

Physical vs Elemental:
As some already pointed out - armor is the issue here. Lots of melee relies on fast attack speed which in turn leads to lower dmg per hit but at a faster rate which means it is much more affected by armor than a slow hard-hitting physical attack. My thoughts behind this are that a majority of melee players are forced to spec into life-leech or life-on-hit abilities to survive in close-combat. Life-On-Hit greatly benefits from more hits... hence the desire for fast attack speed. Life-Leech is actually fine and technically works better with slower weapons but you have to still have a larger health pool to absorbed the longer periods of time between swings. Problem is that playing with slow hard-hitting weapons is actually a lot more boring than playing fast. Faster attacks also have more opportunity for on-hit effects.

Physical Crits should provide +10% ignore armor ability that stacks up to 5 times. This should be a debuff on the mob, but you could make it instead a buff on the player (to encourage elemental folks to switch over to physical) for some time and see how it pans out.

Few people take weapon-specialization passives
This goes back to they physical vs. elemental discrepancy. If you would add +6% elemental dmg to many of the weapon specializations you would see a lot of people start taking them. Even if you fix the physical vs elemental I think you should still provide + %elemental dmg on weapon specific passives.