The XP Penalty is the worst thing in Path of Exile, remove it !!!

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LimeKoala wrote:

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Echothesis wrote:

GGG cannot be bothered to smooth max damage spikes and modifier stat stacking

It could also be the case that they actually can't do that even if they tried. There are many factors in the damage calculation and they might not be able to actually get to a point where the results are actually fair and not just "too much" or "too less" (dealt by monsters).

But I also have a sentence from Chris (??) in the back of my mind where he said that players should expect to die in the game from time to time. So that users can try and cope with it, or try to reduce the frequency, but still have to expect that it will happen eventually. But I can't recall who exactly said that and when.

Taming damage calculation is a massive problem, and although I have no idea about whole system of doing it, first step seems obvious: remove unlimited multiplicative scaling, e.g. "More/Less" modifiers (I remember someone else here suggested it too).

Dot damage already has a system with only a single "Dot multiplier" in place, where additional bonuses boost this multiplier additively, not multiplicatively. Same system can be made for hit damage, and all more/less modifiers converted to "increased/reduced damage multiplier". They will still be stronger and rarer than direct "increased/reduced" damage by itself (thus worthy of being placed onto support gems), but not as busted as "more" is now.

Of course this will trigger recalculations across whole math model of the game, but I still hold to my "laughable" opinion: if someone made a mess like this and wish others to pay for visiting it, any amount of effort required to fix glaring disparities would be justified.

GGG attitude of "all this mess is playing in our favor anyway, most loyal part of our audience will consume our product even if we will just lazily bounce meta back and forth" may be a good business, but won't help their reputation.

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Echothesis wrote:

GGG cannot be bothered to smooth max damage spikes and modifier stat stacking.

Cause the system works just fine the way it's supposed to work since years.
Almost like it's the way they want to have it lol. The system would be changed by now after all the years if it was that bad.

But I guess they just don't "bother" about the needs of "casuals" and the weird ideas they come up with. (the requests to simplyfy everything down to the bare minimum). That would be a more accurate statement to be honest.

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Pashid wrote:

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Echothesis wrote:

GGG cannot be bothered to smooth max damage spikes and modifier stat stacking.

Cause the system works just fine the way it's supposed to work since years.
Almost like it's the way they want to have it lol. The system would be changed by now after all the years if it was that bad.

But I guess they just don't "bother" about the needs of "casuals" and the weird ideas they come up with. (the requests to simplify everything down to the bare minimum). That would be a more accurate statement to be honest.

Relax, no one of note among GGG read this forum, so nothing will change and you can enjoy you superiority over "casuals" :)

And no, evening out max damage does not mean simplification, you are trying to swap terms for the sake of expressing the point. Being able to create more and more builds that work (from those which are too weak now) is not the same as pushing much fewer numbers of builds to absurd broken levels of oneshotting screens and bosses by fitting in 2-3 more "More" mods. When you start multiplying multipliers, you willingly lose any control over balance.

Suggestions like mine would actually improve diversity, more ways to make viable builds equals to more complexity of the game overall, not to simplification.

Neither you nor I know if current state is "intended", but I am at least trying to think about someone other than myself too, and offer solutions to fit as wide audience as possible. While you are just caught in GGG trap for a long time, and gladly consider yourself "not a casual", and part of some abstract "closed club of true masters" just because you are replicating current league's ways to reach busted OP damage, to the point where combat turns into oneshot fiesta.

Judging from PoE 2 trailers so far, GGG are actually trying to slow down and even out the game, which is closer to what I've spoke about in this thread, than current state of PoE 1 is.

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Echothesis wrote:

Suggestions like mine would actually improve diversity, more ways to make viable builds equals to more complexity of the game overall, not to simplification.

This is where you are dead wrong.
You should be right - in theory - but you are not.

Ive been around and playing this game since when we had about half as many active skills, half as many support skills, no ascendancies, no atlas, no pantheon and no dmg multipliers except for crit multi and atk/cast speed.

Back then a viable build required 3-4k life, 75% ele but no chaos res and about 100k dps. As long as you could achieve that, you could steamroll the game. IF you could drop and sustain T14 (highest tier back then) maps that is.
Because the atlas didnt exist, most players would stall out in the T8-T10 region, roughly hit lvl 80-85 and simply wouldnt be able to drop/sustain higher tiers.
In theory this should open up possibilities and lead to more viable builds right?
Except it didnt.

The reason why any given meta (most efficient tactic available) exists is because players want to "beat" the game as fast as possible and with the least amount of effort needed.
This effort does include understanding how to scale things.
Even back then players would follow any build guide as long as it promised to be "Atziri viable". Normal Atziri mind you, not Uber Atziri.

After that builds had to be "Shaper viable" and after that "Uber Elder viable" and then "Maven viable" and so on.


The vast majority of the playerbase doesnt give two shits about how the game works and doesnt even try to understand how to create a viable build. That takes effort, which is precisely what they are trying to avoid by following any given meta, since meta means its already established that this is the most efficient way to do it.


Now YOU might enjoy tinkering around with builds. Thats fine and nothing wrong with that but you are in the minority.
Especially new players and casuals are far more likely to follow the meta than doing anything else. Just read the complaints on GD or look at the builds players are playing over in Gameplay & Help. They have zero clue what they are doing, even if they are following a guide and you can tell this is the case first glance.

The game NEEDS the "no-lifers" or "pros" to figure shit out and post guides, so the casuals and new players can follow those guides. Both, pros and casuals are needed to make the game work and enjoyable for everyone but the assumption a majority of new player or casuals would actually put in the effort to create their own builds is evidently incorrect and has nothing to do with balancing or complexity.

There has to be an incentive for the "pros" to do what they are doing, which always has been far more powerful builds than the average casual could ever hope to achieve. If you take that away "pros" wouldnt have a reason to stick around, figuring stuff out and posting guides.
Thats going to hurt casuals the most, because now there is no established meta to follow, now they have to figure it out themselves and if that was what they wanted to do all along, then why arent they doing it right now?
The answer is: Because they dont care. They simply want to beat the game, whatever that means to the individual and they dont want to read the wiki, study craft of exile, learn PoB and some more.

They want to launch the game, kill shit and feel like a god, while watching Netflix and NOT having to study or learn anything.
Nothing wrong with playing the game like this but the game shouldnt be catered towards this group, because thats how you end up with a shallow and boring games just like so many of the ARPGS out there.

And thats what you are asking for, whether you intended to do so or not.

@Orbaal i think you are missing his point. What he is saying has nothing to do with pros, casuals and meta. Just with healthy game design.

It's not healthy to have differences in efficiency/performance that go in the 10000%s. Yes, there need to be differences, there also will always be differences, no matter what you do.

Options will never end up being entirely equal and that's fine. But the degrees matter a lot here. In D2 a typical MF soc had like 6k damage, while a full blown PVP soc had like 25k. That's a reasonable difference, it clearly shows the difference in effort, gear and knowledge that went into the build.

But in POE? The same build, the same skill and yet the damage can vary between 5 million and 5 billion. Same with monster mods. Stacking modifiers can cause otherwise balanced monsterdamage to spiral completely out of control. Both of those contribute massively to the binary gameplay POE is plagued with. There is no difficult content. Depending on the dps number content is either impossible or super easy. The gap is way to wide. Reducing that wouldn't help the people who think that only the most broken thing available is "viable" but for everyone who prefers variety as long as the gap isn't too big it would drastically increase choices if the gaps weren't as absurdly big as they are.

I've said it in a bunch of topics and i'll say it here as well, "more" multipliers are a deadly poison to any kind of skill balance and POE will suck on that front until the end of time as long as they remain a core part of the game.

Orbaal, there is truth in what you say, but let me clarify 2 points, assuming game somehow starts moving in the above-described direction (let's pretend it could be possible for a minute):

1) Those who enjoy tinkering around with builds will still have numerous incentives to do so (in my opinion). Now we do have 2 times more active skills, ascendancies, atlas, pantheon and so on. Before, they were tinkering with limited number of setups chosen for the ability to fit in enough power (both offensive and defensive), to meet excessively high requirements on beating various uber content.

If those requirements would be relaxed, along with reduced multiplicative stacking, more ways to "steamroll the game" would open, and they will likely be less expensive in general. You think those tinkerers will pack and leave. I think they will continue to explore new active skills, just because it will be new, and because they will be (and already are) bored of steamrolling with seismic, DD, now SRS, and with must-have aurastack, so all mana-related mechanics go out of the window in 99% cases for example. Imagine "melee renaissance" era :)

GGG is scared to death of situation "there is nothing left in the game to do", but they could study other games experience instead of doubling down on tightening RNG. I mentioned Elden Ring here before, it did not lose anything from having a spell that almost oneshots bosses (if you do it right). Tinkerers have had their fun with it, and then proceeded to compete in building other things, not walked away saying how they "beat the game". All the while "causals" were spared from having to fight each boss in melee, if they did not wanted to.

2) Assuming 1) works, those who come here just to "beat the game", and don't want to learn crafting and such, they will still have guides to choose from, maybe even more kind of guides than now, and most importantly, those guides will be easier to follow. You yourself pointed out how single deviation from the guide can ruin everything for a newbie, waste his investments and ultimately cause him to stop trying (not always, but more likely).

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Baharoth15 wrote:

@Orbaal i think you are missing his point. What he is saying has nothing to do with pros, casuals and meta. Just with healthy game design.

No I didnt miss that.

Back in the days a regular build would have 100k dps whereas the min/maxed version of the same build had 500k dps.
Thats roughly the difference you mentioned and considered healthy.

Thats all fine and dandy, still doesnt change the fact that the moment a build popped up that could deal 600k dps, everyone and their dogs would pivot towards that build and consider builds dealing less dps than that as unviable or not worth the time.

Forget about PvE games like PoE and look at dedicated PvP games.
Even a difference of 1% is considered an unfair advantage and players wont settle for the thing providing 99% power if there is something better providing 100%.


Again: Im not saying the game cant be better in terms of balance.
What Im saying is it doesnt matter as much as you would think. Whatever is perceived as the most powerful option available is going to be the thing players are flocking towards en masse.

This isnt about balance. Its about how human beings operate.

Yeah you should'nt compare balance in pvp games with that in pve games. The impact in pvp games is way bigger plus pvp games have an actual skill component and aren't mere statchecks. Plus from my experience at least pvp players are way more tolerant to differences than the poe community. In those games you wont find people bitching because there are Tier 1 and 3 choices.

You are right that there will always be someone complaining no matter what you do but that can't be an excuse to let things grow completely out of control without a care or even worse like in GGGs case to actively foster it by buffing the ceiling while nerfing the floor.

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Echothesis wrote:

If those requirements would be relaxed, along with reduced multiplicative stacking, more ways to "steamroll the game" would open, and they will likely be less expensive in general. You think those tinkerers will pack and leave. I think they will continue to explore new active skills, just because it will be new...

No they dont.
Well, some might but not many.

We had this era of relaxed requirements for years. My builds would ready to take on Shaper (Big bad endboss back then) day 2 or 3 of any given league but I couldnt get there just yet because it took longer to unlock Shaper than it took to meet the minimum requirements.
Thats pretty much the environment you are mentioning.

So, what happened?
Did players explore weird hipster builds? Nope.
What they did do was min/maxing the best builds available and were competing over how many split-seconds it took them to kill Shaper.


Were casuals content with being able to get to Shaper and kill him?
Nope, they were pissed because it took them 10-15 minutes when highlights reels on YT showed them pros could flatout 1shot Shaper.

The pros would buy all available Shaper sets and kill him multiple times per hour, dropping the desired loot and over time saturate the market for those items.
By the time the casuals got there Shaper couldnt drop anything valuable anymore, because the pros had already saturated the markets demands just days after launch.
So the casuals had to face the bitter reality that they had been working towards beating a boss for days or weeks even only to drop an item worth a few chaos at best.


Even if the balancing was better and a min/maxed build only had 5x the power of the not min/maxed version, it still means pros can kill Shaper in 2-3 mins when it takes casuals 10-15 mins.
Resulting in pros killing Shaper 20+ times per hour whereas casuals might be able to do 2-3 times per week, because casuals dont have the resources to just buy Shaper sets and have him on perma farm.

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Baharoth15 wrote:

You are right that there will always be someone complaining no matter what you do but that can't be an excuse to let things grow completely out of control without a care or even worse like in GGGs case to actively foster it by buffing the ceiling while nerfing the floor.

Agreed.

Just remind real quick what happened after 3.15 was launched, when GGG brought out the big guns and nerfed everything across the board?

How happy where players back then?


Its not like GGG wasnt trying. Its more like the players not allowing them to do it and threatening to boycott the game in case GGG dares to reduce the playerpower in any significant way.

And once more:
Im not saying the balance couldnt be better.
Its about how human beings operate. If you kick them out of their comfort zone by any means, they will riot and prevent change from happening.

Its easy to blame GGG while ignoring the part the playerbase is playing in all of this. And yeah GGG did corner themselves by allowing this to go on for years without intervening much much earlier. But that ship has sailed some 5+ years ago and now players will actively prevent any change they perceive as negative.

Both sides are to be blamed here, not just GGG.