I Strongly Dislike the Defense Systems in PoE - from a new player

I have limited experience with the game compared to most who will read this, but I hope my thoughts will resonate with you, regardless.

Defenses aren't fun.
It's great fun to one-shot hoards of monsters.
It's not fun to plan defenses when theory crafting a build.
It is absurdly boring to block an attack.
It's even more boring to die over & over and backtrack each time (new player).

When I craft a build I go "Ooh it would be sweet if I had a ton of increased AoE and cast speed to nuke a screen of mobs with some rapid casting!" not "I need to hit 12K evasion so I don't get hit 95% of the time at this level in the game that I'm not even familiar with"

The customizability of games like PoE are what make them enjoyable and re-playable, but when you're forced to take the same aura's and tree nodes with every character so they can survive, it's like they might as well not exist. Furthermore it's not easy to understand. How am I supposed to know what type of damage types and ailments I'm going to be up against? How would I know the accuracy rating of each boss? Why is it essentially a requirement to use PoB to play this game?

There's a balance I can respect where a pure glass cannon can be a work of art if played by a skilled enough player, and I can respect a fully defensive Chad who can sit in the largest attacks for their friends, but this community seems to be obsessed with maxing out resistances and reaching landmarks in their evasion or armour, uninterested in learning to dodge everything manually or doing no damage (as am I). And I believe that is because the gameplay isn't fluid enough and requires numbers to do the dirty work for you.

I've been playing a few witches and nearly every spell I enjoy requires I stay still to cast it, requiring I have adequate defense when I can't manually dodge something during a cast. I've noticed the more popular builds use only skills that allow for the fastest mapping and highest mobility, meaning many of the skills noobs might want to play with would just put them at a disadvantage. Is that a bad thing? I don't know. I've had some fun with my ~100 hours and it is fun trying to get the slower skills to work, it's just not fun trying to understand the mess of defenses in this game.


Here are a few separate suggestions:

1. Put more educational content in the game. Allow us to know stats of monsters and bosses before we fight them. Put info of boss attack patterns and how to avoid them in the game. Put info in the game of how the defense systems work.

2. Put defenses in a completely separate tree and reserve skill points specifically for the defense tree. This way the player never feels like they're missing out and they have a proper introduction/path to what defenses should be like on their PoE characters. You could get multiple skill points every 3 levels or so, one for the offense/regular tree and one for the defense tree.

3. Make the gameplay include more mobility and telegraphed attacks. I hate to bring up Dark Souls, but those games are truly perfected with a simple dodge-roll, well-telegraphed moves, and a focus on HP as it's primary defensive stat.

4. Eliminate defensive auras and flasks. You're typically required to spec into reservation efficiencies and flask uptime, which is boring, defense-wise. Activating a temporary defensive flask with no real feedback couldn't be more boring imo. You could just give every character the effects of these auras or flasks at all times and make other more interesting skill tree selections take extra points to get to for retroactive balance.


In conclusion, I realize I don't know what I'm talking about all that much, but this is my biggest hurdle to enjoying this game. Feel free to disagree and/or offer advice. I'd love to hear from more perspectives.
Hopefully my noob input is valuable.

the main defense in poe is an attack, and what did GGG do with this problem? Nerfed most of the skills, defensive mechanics in the game and at the same time adding too strong ordinary rare mobs, bravo.
Most experienced players will also play on the strongest meta and also destroy content, there is no way to give everyone this opportunity, they will only fix more.
and they don't notice or they don't give a shit that the meta is more or less the same for a couple of years.
someone from the main ones there loves poisons too much, that's a freak

1. Big yes, the act's do have some of this but it's not obvious enough for new players. Hopefully they've fully rectified this mistake in POE 2's campaign. You need clearly themed monsters that introduce you to damage types for example.

e.g Red Skeleton with Fire Arrows = fire damage
e.g Blue yeti, freezes on hit = I tend to find the new ele-ail reflect works indicates this better in POE but ofc you need to be doing ele damage.
Green Insect poison on death. = One of the clear ones right now is in A7.
Red Swirly shit = Corrupted Blood introduced in A8 but it's difficult for a new player to know what and how to deal with it outside HP pot spam. You need get the name of the debuff and google mitigations.

2. Cool idea which would mitigate the "Missing Out" feeling, the single tree does works fine though. It's on you to balance it accordingly and look for the signs of weakness in your build as you go. If you come close to death or start taking increased damage in an area -> stop and figure out why. I would say my builds (hcssf) wind up around 70/30 defence and damage and some would argue that should be 80/20.

3. Telegraphed attacks I somewhat agree with i.e. a new boss you've not encountered is pretty much guaranteed death because you have no idea what it is doing. Once you've played it several times its very easy to follow. How does dark souls do it any differently?

If anything the game has too much movement speed and skills. It gets so fast you can't read or do anything to the confetti on screen. At that point you either have the defence and damage or your dead. I think that's bad game design but the ADHD redditors love it.

4. The mastery changes in this patch were a great step forward to stopping the mandatory grace/determination aura's in every build. They introduced a number of masteries that provided worse but low cost alternatives to those defences as well as DMG increasing build diversity. They should definitely continue to think down this path to prevent mandatory pathing in the tree.

You kinda started at a poor time honestly.

Player defense is in the worst position it's been since I can recall. Beta maybe but beta had 1/10th the enemies and it was more based in manual avoidance.

Anyways, Defense is at 1:10 ratio to offense right now and it's still not reliable on purpose. By comparison I made a defensive character for Ultimatum league which had 1.4 mil phys eHP and 800k elemental with insane recovery but I only did about 3-4mil DPS.

A character like that is impossible to make now. 130k eHP is the high end now and it can be taken from you by debuffs, maps mods, exposure and everything else. That Ultimatum character's defenses were mostly in the form of flat DR, not armor or resists.

An easy comparison of this is Basalt Flask. Currently it gives 20% more armor. It used to give 15% reduced damage taken. DR like that can't be taken from you. Armor can. DR was also removed from Ascendancies. Slayer is one of the few who still have it. Dodge cap was replaced which feels better leveling but is objectively worse high end. We're at a real messy transition period.

"

AmpegV4 wrote:

4. The mastery changes in this patch were a great step forward to stopping the mandatory grace/determination aura's in every build. They introduced a number of masteries that provided worse but low cost alternatives to those defences as well as DMG increasing build diversity. They should definitely continue to think down this path to prevent mandatory pathing in the tree.

Fully agree with problems regarding the movement speed spectrum of characters.
Preached it myself many times.

The Masteries didn't change much for me other than just not taking most of them now. They put 12% Reserve in mana. 3 Point easy grab. Then another 20% somewhere else and back to aura stacking. Keep in mind they also left the Cluster jewel reductions you can grab and get 50%. They didn't really change much. Just removed the good stuff and said "use cluster jewels now".

I'm using Determination, Tempest Shield, Blasphemy, Discipline and Vitality. They removed a lot of good Defense masteries like Defend with 150% Armor while not low ES, Gain 5% of Evasion as extra Armor, Chaos Resists all around and Chaos damage leeched as ES.

Some example cool masteries no-one is discussing it because it requires playing the game and not reading guides.

---

8% dmg for each aura and herald - I have 6x8 = 48% increased dmg for 1 point arguably a cluster of passive skills.

"40% increased arm/eva while leeching", coupled with trickster or slayer leech effects not removed = 1 point free determination/grace with no mana reservation.

"15% more life if no life modifier on armour" opens up a lot more options for body armour slot.

"The attack cluster in shadow, gives +1 projectile. +1 free ancestral call off the mastery -> ton's more options, no need for multi-projectile or ancestral call + their respective damage reductions.

The chaos rez cluster moved between shadow and witch: the mastery now provides a few interesting options:
- curses can't lower ele resists.
- ailment immunity if you have 1 ailment.
=> which you can situationally spec into and out of as you need.

This patch has opened up a lot of build options and has been a lot of fun to play, for those that do that.

"

AmpegV4 wrote:

If anything the game has too much movement speed and skills. It gets so fast you can't read or do anything to the confetti on screen. At that point you either have the defence and damage or your dead. I think that's bad game design but the ADHD redditors love it.

I have ADHD and hate the zoomer play style I prefer to be methodical and precise, my favourite play styles are generally the hit slowly but hit hard builds. I also favour the sorts of builds that can ignore mechanics because I can never remember what everything does. So from an accessibility standpoint PoE is pretty bad, one of the reasons I am personally looking forward to D4 as it would be something for me to play during downtime in PoE leagues.

Ailments should have diminishing returns like CC in WOW.

First ailment application - 100% duration
Second applicatiion within 8 seconds - 50% duration
Third application within 8 seconds - 25% duration
Fourth and more - Immune, ailment doesn't apply. This lasts 8 seconds after this time it resets.

8% For each Aura / Herald was already there.

40% Evasion/Armor while leeching is new but they also took away 40% damage. Leech is in a bad place and has been for a while compared to LoH / Regen which they nerfed. Determination and Grace get used because they give you %More also. Not increase.

They nerfd LoH of course, made Cast Speed options a meme with a single Crit option.

15% max health is a nice gimmick. Once in a while it's okay and now all but one life option sucks. Regen 2% while moving, Pot heal 50% more on low life, 15% reduced life cost. Gone.

Curses can't lower Ele resists is cool. Unfortunately I can't find reason to invest into any Curse wheels and I'm playing an Occultist right now. The wheels are so weak.

Probably the most interesting change / strongest they made IMO is the stun wheel by Ranger giving them 96% chance to avoid stun, way too strong IMO yet so many of wheels suffered downgrades.

All the X every 3 second stuff just isn't for this game. Good for some other game.
Overall they yet again nerfed our defenses and it's still far better to use auras.

Facepalm on the more/increase arm/eva I didn't notice that. It would better if the mastery was like 20-30% more. They need cheaper but worse alternatives on the masteries as it makes the tree more flexible.

There were a couple of other nice situational ones.

"Spell suppression is lucky" is decent in progressing and when SS is difficult to get on a build.

"25% chance of inverted monster resistance" is a low cost but worse alternative to stacking pen and -resists.

Personally i'd like more of this so you can potentially spread more defensive layers but not necessarily cap everything.

also fyi curses don't lower resists is in the "protection mastery" wheel, where you can path 40% chaos rez not the curses masteries.