No life on the passive tree in PoE 2
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agreed, Donkey. There are a lot of unknowns and speculations that do make this argument hard to suss out.
I still don't see how 5% life nodes is any more boring than a 5% armor node, or a 5% es node, 5% evasion node, etc. Nor do I see how they function any differently, apart from having diminishing return. Yes I agree that if they offer higher life rolls on gear, and LESS ES rolls this might balance the power of ES on the tree a bit in favor of other defenses. But the same can't really be said for hard-capped mitigation/avoidance. To me, stacking life nodes will be exactly the same as stacking armour/es/evasion nodes. There isn't going to be any more choice or interest in the new model vs. the old model UNLESS defenses work differently on a fundamental level, or there are oodles of new defensive toys in the work. But their statement of removing life = more creativity and interest just doesn't hold true for me at all. @zz/baha: I appreciate the opinions and I do understand them, but I still don't see how any of your points change the fundamental reason why they are removing life in the first place. At least not with the information we are given. Even if the way they balance item rolls shifted, or the damage dealt by enemies: the systems still remain fundamentally exactly the same. The only difference is that we won't be increasing our life on the tree. So we will be left with a new "capped" lifepool, similar to capping resists or capping suppression, and will need to "boringly" stack armour/eva nodes. No fundamental difference. Last edited by jsuslak313#7615 on Aug 5, 2023, 7:11:51 AM
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I have a feeling this is actually to make it easier for them to balance the things that are supposed to and not supposed to kill you. With PoE1, you could have 1k life or you could have 20k life and anything in between. On the higher end and with defenses, the pinnacle/uber moves that are supposed to one shot you won't. The game balance works very differently when your character is pseudo-immortal or when your character dies to a stiff wind.
Better balance on that front will also mean noobs who skip all the life nodes in PoE1 don't ragequit as fast. |
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" What else is there to do? Innocence forgives you Last edited by SilentSymphony#3358 on Aug 5, 2023, 10:07:08 PM
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" Of course not. They'll also reduce sources of player life on everything else while buffing monster damage, because that's how GGG "balance" works. Ultimately nothing will be viable that can't insta-phase and one-shot uber endgame bosses and off-screen clear everything else, because everything will one-shot player characters (and then the devs will complain that those masochistic enough to keep playing their path of ruthless garbage until they reach that point are "trivializing" their otherwise unplayable content). It's the same problem with survivability POE1 has had and which has helped drive things progressively more towards a glass cannon zoom meta over the years (though this has notably reversed somewhat in POE1 in the absence of the POE2 devs), but far far far worse. In POE2 they're removing most sources of player damage (no damage supports, so wtf is even the point of all those 6-links?), so damage is going to be significantly more gear-dependent, which means it will compete with defensive stats even more than in POE1. And it also seems they're removing most sources of player defense in POE2. In addition to the massive reduction in overall eHP, there will be no actual utility flasks, and probably no sources of ailment mitigation except the new purely reactive utility flasks (which, given that POE2 will almost certainly have no flask automation, will make the game actively hostile to anyone lacking the reflexes of a fucking teenager), and also defensive auras are probably non-existent or nerfed into uselessness or turned into some conditional or reactive garbage that's not active/available when you actually need them. The one place you might be able to find some survivability is on gear (which is where you also need to get most of your damage), but which will be far less available in an economy fundamentally based on ruthless with gold, and with fundamentally crippled crafting options that make the crafting in POE2 sound more like D4 than POE; and that's assuming you can even get your hands on the basic crafting currency it does have, again thanks to that ruthless with gold bullshit. Also, instead of wisely copying Last Epoch by making everything identified (which should've been a no-brainer now that it's a separate game and they don't have to worry about existing unidentified items in standard) and having an easily configurable in-game loot filter, or even just greatly reducing the quantity of drops across the board but making the stuff that does drop more likely to be good (like they did with talismans for one league, making them actually worth picking up for a brief time), they've just removed most drops and replaced them with gold. Which will be largely worthless by their own admission and intent (perhaps fortunately, if it's as difficult to pick up as it was in the ruthless with gold event, which it probably will be). And the only other thing that'll drop besides gold appears to be screen-cluttering-but-ultimately-worthless occasional white items you can't filter out because there are no item filters in POE2 and you can't use as crafting bases because you also have no crafting currency in POE2 (I played the ruthless with gold event to act 10 iirc and only got one or two transmutes and maybe an augment but didn't see so much as a single alchemy orb the entire time, and the crafting currency drops seemed similarly terrible in the ExileCon demos of POE2). It's also worth noting that some of the best changes to POE1 (the atlas passive tree, mechanics like spell suppression and mana reservation efficiency, passive skill tree masteries, utility flask automation, influence mods as implicits [which greatly reduces the initial barrier to entry into using influenced gear]) happened without those who got moved over to POE2 development and most or all of that probably doesn't even exist in POE2 in any form. Some of the worst changes to POE1, on the other hand, have been largely driven by attempts to align POE1 with POE2, such as the huge mana cost increases we saw in 3.15, and 3.18's Archnemesis as a core mechanic, which is apparently even worse in POE2 than the worst version we ever got of AN in POE1. Even with all of POE1's overly rippy bullshit that'll kill you so fast you're usually left wondering why you're dead, I'm quite certain you're going to have worse survivability in POE2. The lack of life on the POE2 skill tree is part of a larger picture, and everything I've seen thus far of that picture suggests POE2 survivability will be worse than it is in POE1, not the same and certainly not better. Fairgraves was a slave trafficker specialized in the kidnapping and transport of children. He was not "a good man".
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" Thanks for reading the thread instead of just trollposting something completely unrelated to it....oh wait.... In no single post was anyone asking for the life nodes back. This is merely a discussion on the reasoning behind the removal of life nodes for PoE 2 and whether or not it will have the devs intended effects. I don't care what they do, as long as its thought out and makes sense. To me, this particular change will not do what they think it will do. Not asking for life back, just pointing this out. What else is there to do? Take a minute and read before gut reacting to a title... Last edited by jsuslak313#7615 on Aug 6, 2023, 1:42:17 AM
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