Example of over design:
Eye of frost might do extra spell damage if you have ailment talents that add damage per ailment, but in order to trigger a lowly chill effect you need to do damage over a threshold, and in order to do damage over that threshold you need several talents in ascendancy to get "add all damage to chill", which allows you to trigger chill if you shoot through fire wall enhancing the damage. Or you could add yet another ability to fulfill some niche purpose trying to get that bonus that's JUST good enough to make you wonder if you should try adding it somehow.
Exposure will give you 70% more damage, but firewall cannot be socketed with a gem that gives added exposure for some arbitrary reason. So you can try incinerate, but the duration only lasts a few seconds making it pointless unless you invest heavily into duration and keep refreshing the debuff through boss fights.
Curses can also amplify damage by 50% or so, but again, the duration is terrible unless you skill into it. And it is yet ANOTHER spell you have to add to the laundry list of things to enable and cast.
The game CONSTANTLY is fighting you just when you think, "Oh if we do this I will have a build that works". And there is some extra bit of design added to the game, that just infuriates you and makes your build broken.
This is poor design. There are too many edge cases, there are too many mechanics that are fighting themselves and confusing the player. This skill can do this, but this one doesn't chill, and this one does. It's so arbitrary, and the abilities you most want to do the thing can't do the thing, because the devs have deemed it unbalanced. So we end up with a laundry list of abilities like whack a mole trying to get a decent DPS. And it's like memorizing spread sheets trying to figure out what abilities allow for which mods and afflictions and under which circumstances.
I love POE 2, I enjoy tinkering with builds. What I don't like are the billion and one ways that the designers have added all these edge cases, and low durations, and little thresholds with no exposed data that make damn near all our builds worthless in the long run.
The game feels paralyzed by the thought of allowing players to be powerful and self sufficient. So every single little thing is low duration, gotta add gems and passives just to make them last long enough to get a volley of spells off.
Every skill is like 25% damage amp, gotta add more passives and gems to make it BARELY worth using.
The entire game is balanced around this 40%ish buff per ability, and every single ability has some arbitrary set of hidden problems that will annoy the hell out of you until you pump more talents and items and time and respects into figuring out how to get it to work.
Less would be so much more. Give us less talent points, but FFS just make them satisfying an usable out of the darned gate. Decent durations, decent amplification, WITHOUT constantly having to add more and more stuff just to make abilities and buffs feel worthwhile.
This is probably my biggest gripe with the game right now. EVERYTHING is nerfed out of the gate, to con you into dumping tons of more stuff just to make it worth using. It's so unsatisfying.
There's no reason for this, just make things worth having from the jump. 10 second durations instead of 4. 30% bonus instead of 20%. If you have to buff the scaling, FINE!
But as it is, the game just really kicks you in the dirt for seeing something cool, and thinking that it actually exists to be satisfying and useful.
Totally over designed. So much effort put into making things crappy, so that more and more design and code and elements can bring it up to be semi usable.
The base mechanics GGG has created for POE 2 are nothing short of revolutionary. The boss patterns, the movement oriented skills, the way abilities amplify one another in inventive new ways and the "Tempo" of ability use are all exciting as hell.
But here's where I see a distinct flaw in the development of POE 2: They are seeking maniacal control over progression so they can create a perfectly tailored experience all along the way, and this is leading to a linear, stale experience devoid of "magic". The magic of finding a truly powerful item with a mod you will use. The magic of finding a unique support gem that transforms how your class is played. The magic of a truly unique and viable build that doesn't have the exact same requirements of the same synergies adding to the same flat values of survivability and damage output predetermined by GGG.
In short, POE 2 is too controlling, it's terrified of letting the players have fun. And because of this, they balance to late game, and the lack of exciting items and mods has created a bit of a stale experience after the honeymoon phase ends.
I understand this is early access, I understand things will get better, but it FEELS as though the fantastic devs at GGG are spending far too much energy on GIMMICKY mechanics like the ascendency quest rather than building up the heart of what makes a quality ARPG: A SOLID as hell core (which they have) that leads to inventive builds from neat randomized and unbalanced things.
POE 2 has more than enough fun elements that things like curses, expose effects, etc. can be icing on the cake and fun to get in item mods or other tertiary ways. As it stands, the talent tree feels as though it's designed to punish you rather than reward you for simply trying to play the darned game.
All these convenient nodes that increase duration, amplify effects. But if you invest into stuff that make the game playable and fun, you're ultimately limiting your power vs builds that require a lot more discipline, but are so much less fun to play.
When at every single turn the player has to choose between choosing builds that are fun and enjoyable to play vs. meticulously overdesigned systems hell bent on punishing you, the fun starts to bleed out, and you start to wonder if the designers want us to suffer or actually enjoy the darned game.
POE 2 feels pulled in 2 directions. Should we make it fun and approachable? Or do we need total and control over every single facet of the players potential DPS, armor, survivability, etc.
WAY too much effort is being spent on having spreadsheet like control over character power, and once you see through all the random mods and just see that every single element is designed to be 40% this, or 40% that, the game just feels WAY too controlled, and there's no magic here. There's no fun exploration.
Some ideas:
Stop being so afraid of interesting and rare item mods. Make these items drop maybe once a week max and make them no drop. Make finding wacky items that make you play experience unique a big part of the game, maybe this player finds something that makes them tankier, or faster, or deal more damage in a neat way, or amplifies an ability that usually sucks.
Make a magic find system similar to honor, but have it regen slowly as you kill enemies, starting at 0 at any given time. If you take a hit, it goes back to 0. Trash mobs add nothing to the meter. This will add a sense of tension without the gut wrenching 1 shots the game feels deadest on throwing at the player in so many ways.
Make abilities USABLE and worth having OUT OF THE GATE. Sick of trying curses only to find the buff blows, they cost 500 mana, and the duration is 4 seconds, they take a full second just to take effect. Not EVERY SINGLE THING needs to be some kind of puzzle that needs unlocking in 50 different ways.
It's ok for a game to be fun. It's ok if things are just satisfying and enjoyable.
So much effort has gone into making this game ultra controlled, to ensure nothing is "broken". And for what? To make sure the top 1% of players have a perfect experience in end game?
It all adds up to an illusion of choice. An illusion of progression. Because in the end there is WAY too much micromanaging of builds and power spikes, and the like.
I don't feel like I'm about to find an item that will inspire a crazy build. I feel like I'm playing a 1 hit kill action RPG that has a tremendous amount of content and systems all designed to hide the fact that there is no actual build diversity. There are no toys. It's an overly complex machine meant to throttle you at a very exacting pace, or at least that's the end goal and everything is being created to that end.
There are so many fun little systems here. But I'm not sure this game knows what it wants to be in the long term, and in the meantime it's starting to feel like much ado about nothing.
suggestion
Revamp the skill gem system, randomize it. Make unique gems with unique mods drop that cannot be traded. These will be more powerful and more zany than existing gems and REALLY challenge us to create unique builds and make us wonder, "Wow I wonder what unique powers and builds the future of my character will provide?" A bit of a combination of randomness and player strategy would stem from this.
As the game stands too much power progression is predictable, there are no fun random chance with crazy uniques, interesting item mods. Everything is maxing resists, maxing damage resist, damage output, etc.
There is a SEVER lack of randomization to how we play our builds and set them up around interesting randomized skill and other mods that are rare and interesting to compel us to create new and interesting things.
Final Thoughts
This is early access, it's entirely possible these randomized elements are coming online in time, but it's a bit alarming to see how much effort and resources GGG has put into making everything "Legitimate".
What's healthy for this game isn't playing it safe, it's not taking measured design and patches to ensure the economy stays safe.
Make wild changes, allow the players to find fun stuff.
WIPE THE SERVERS EVERY FEW MONTHS! It's crazy that we are developing the game in a way that hamstrings design experimentation when there is so much that needs to be explored.
It will be painful, but if we communicate to the player base we're finding the fun, and that this will lead to a better game in the long run, it will be worth exploring new ways of adding power spikes, and wacky builds, and finding the fun.
