I am begging you all to understand the difference between real difficulty and fake difficulty

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just_dont#6539 wrote:

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ErdrickDragonsbane#5911 wrote:

Outcome is not reasonably determined by the player's actions

Yes it is. Player's actions are in fact very much the only thing that determines outcome. Unless we're talking about a timely nerf patch, but even that can be adjusted via player's actions.

Okay, I feel the need to chime in here a bit. The "only thing" is a very strong statement here. I will give a few examples of outcomes that are outside the player's control to at least a marginal extent.

1. Obtaining gear early on in the game. This has been improved drastically, but it was improved with a quantity increase, not a controllability increase. We have almost no direct control over item acquisition in the early game.

It is entirely possible to check vendors on every level up and spam out every currency item onto every good base we find and still end up with unacceptably bad gear.

I ran into a situation in my first playthrough where a vendor was selling an incredibly good item that I could not afford. I was unable to grind enough gold to buy it before I leveled up. If I really wanted it, I would have had to make a new character to farm gold on.

It is also totally possible to beat act 1 almost entirely naked regardless of class. I think act 1 is incredibly well designed and doesn't suffer too much on the bad design areas expressed by the OP. However, gear acquisition doesn't magically improve as you progress. It remains a nearly uncontrollable factor that boils down to "pull the slots more"

2. Unknown telegraphs. This is something that Jonathan mentioned in an interview right before the early access launch. Zizaran asked how viable the game was for hardcore on a first playthrough. Jonathan replied that it wasn't viable because even though boss attacks are telegraphed, you don't know what they are telegraphing. This shouldn't be the case. A boss telegraph should make it at least marginally obvious what they are telegraphing, especially if it is meant as a one-shot mechanic.

That being said, I think the game for the most part does a very good job of informing the player through the telegraph. Most attacks are quite obvious what is coming from the telegraph and can be appropriately dodged even when seeing them for the first time. This isn't true across the board though. Some attacks are not clear the first time you see them or require you to already be moving before the mechanic is entirely obvious.

This is especially egregious when some boss telegraphs seem to perfectly track the player with very high turning speeds and have hitboxes larger than their visuals that can appear to miss while still clipping you for full damage. Or when a boss has walked into a corner (which can be your fault, but isn't always a reasonably controllable factor) and uses a tracking telegraph from the corner. Or when some attacks are unclear on whether they can be dodged or blocked--such a the titan's projectiles being unblockable or the monkey's slams actually being blockable.

3. Wobbling boss pushboxes. Bosses have pushboxes. They cannot be passed through. They cannot be dodged through. This is fine, it isn't the issue. There are a few bosses in the game that are comprised of many individual pushboxes or that change in size during certain attacks. These bosses have an effect on the player that is sometimes completely unfair.

If you start a dodge roll, you are committing to an action of movement. Your desire is to get a known distance away from your starting location or use the 100% evasion mechanic to dodge something. Sometimes you are avoiding an attack. Sometimes you are avoiding adds. Sometimes you really need to get off of the burning ground as fast as possible. However, sometimes when you dodge in the proximity of a composite or size altering boss, you can get clipped or touched by part of one of the bosses pushboxes and regardless of which direction the boss was coming from or which direction you are dodging, the entire momentum of the dodge roll is removed. You must sit there and watch your character roll in place, unable to do anything simply because the boss turned to look at you, rotating its oblong pushbox into your side.

It's not like this is an unbeatable mechanic... you can just not dodge anywhere near the boss. The issue is that it's unclear why this is happening or how it actually works. It often just feels like bosses have a lot of friction or are sticky sometimes. It took a lot of experimentation and watching recording for me to even discover what kept eating my dodge in certain fights. Often you can dodge directly into a boss and the game will appropriately roll you to the side around the boss... since this is generally the intuitive result. You do the exact same thing on a quadrupedal boss and suddenly it doesn't work for some reason. It is because they have 4 individual pushboxes or an oblong, rotating pushbox and you rolled into it thinking it would work like the circle ones. As much as I like the thought of the realism of this, it doesn't play out that intuitively as a game mechanic. At least not on the medium sized bosses. It mostly just feels janky and unclear.

4. Dodge or die. Some mechanics in the game seemed designed as "dodge or die" mechanics. That would be okay given you always had the space to do that. There are a few places in the campaign where enemies jump out of walls or over your head to block your path and surround you. These encounters in the campaign seem at least marginally thought out in a way that makes sense and you can play around it.

The issue is that not every time is it perfectly scripted. You get the scenario where enemies jump behind you on a bridge with 2 rare monsters that then scatter the bridge with elemental boom circles and suddenly you are being told to fight these flying enemies on a bridge (since you cannot pass through them) and also to dodge or die. This is extremely rare to run into an unwinnable scenario like this, especially when the usual solution is just "one shot them and leave", but if/when it happens and you can't just pull infinite damage on them and leave, it doesn't feel fair.

Speaking of bridges some enemies seem designed to specifically destroy you if you meet them on a bridge. They have a long telegraphed slam that must be dodged to the side and they are too fat to dodge past and can hit the full length of any bridge in the game twice over. If you see them start the slam on the other side of a bridge, your options are kill them before they complete the slam or get off the bridge and move to the side.... which sometimes just isn't possible due to the lack of movement speed and length of some bridges.

5. Rituals. Same issue as above but instead just throw into mobs popping up out of the ground, projectiles and effects flying everywhere, the player getting knocked around by waves of blood, rest shredding dot tornadoes, enemies can't be passed through and the arena is the width of a single file line of enemies. Some of these arenas are so small that the fight might as well be an auto-battler. If there are any mechanics spawned by any rares in these small arena fights, you are forced to tank them in a lot of situations just due to the size of the arena and the ability to pass through the trillion monsters spewing from the ground.

This wouldn't be the biggest of deals if there was enough space to walk around and there was some logic to the enemies popping up from the ground, but it ends up just being you flying around in a pinball machine hoping you don't land on the boom bumpers.

6. Visibility. Yeah, it's just not good. You throw in breech, delirium and a ritual while using abilities that kick up dust and you just can't see anything. Those purple ground circles? Pretty sure they don't even render in this situation.

To be clear, I don't actually die *that* much. I am currently playing what I believe to be an incredibly tanky character that can handle most of the situations I described above in tier 15 fully exalted maps... most of the time. The complaint is that when it goes wrong it often doesn't feel like there was something I could change in the moment. Watching a recording you can see it in hindsight sometimes and go "oh if I walked to the left, I would have lived" but there sometimes just isn't. Sometimes the answer was "why did you try to do the mechanic in that map? That ritual was clearly unbeatable" ... and that just feels wrong.

This isn't a case of "oh you rolled 4 damage mods on your map" it's a case of "the map generation RNG says you should roll a new map. Go spend the resources again."

Sorry for the long ramble, but the short "yes" "no" responses are not good enough for me on this topic. The game has some sources of fake difficulty in it. Pointing at the whole game and saying "look at all the fake difficulty" is also not correct in my opinion though. There are points where it exists, some of which I think are bugs or polishing issues, other places I think the game is an absolute masterpiece and has nothing wrong.

Well, I do agree with the spirit of your post - indeed, not "absolutely everything" is controllable by the player, but well - it what makes game a game. It's within reasonable limits of what we can expect from a computer game.

In particular, I think there's simply NO way to become too undergeared - main cause of real early game undergearing comes from players not recognizing the fact that even a white item can be a very meaningful early upgrade over some shiny rare, or even worse, unique.

I also don't think many specific causes of "sudden deaths" matter too much at all, since deaths are largely meaningless in the game (except some particular ones like in trials or in hardcore, but hardcore players are expected to err on the side of caution a lot).

20 minutes !!

20 minutes fighting the same mob.
20 minutes running after it as it teleports again and again and again .
20 minutes until my hand hurts it hurts from non stop mashing for 20 minutes.

This is a gateway boss.
it should die like a fart in the wind.
20 fucking minutes ....

SOme guy playing OP build of the week is going to kill it in 20 seconds
and tell me to get gud i just fucking lived for 20 fucking minutes on this piece of shit!

This isnt difficulty its fucking stupid.
If you cant guarantee a consistent encounter on a gateway boss ...
take it the fuck out

So true. PoE 2 is basically entirely fake difficulty. Tanky mobs/bosses that take 5 years to kill aren't difficult. It's also just unfun game design. This is why people will always gravitate to the strongest builds atm, because playing a build that can delete mobs is at least coming close to some kind of fun gameplay.

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just_dont#6539 wrote:

I also don't think many specific causes of "sudden deaths" matter too much at all, since deaths are largely meaningless in the game (except some particular ones like in trials or in hardcore, but hardcore players are expected to err on the side of caution a lot).

Deaths feel pretty meaningful in high tier maps. Losing hours of experience, losing out on many maps worth of sustain or losing out on the rewards for the central map of a tower setup feels incredibly bad, especially if you spent a few dozen exalts for the tablets and deli orbs... and to be clear, they have the same bosses as the campaign, but are sometimes faster, have additional attacks, such as delirium slams.

This is exaggerated even more by the fact that you cannot re-use the tower setup. You must now travel far enough away to find another tower cluster to try again.

Or worse yet, if you lose a citadel. They are so incredibly rare that losing one just means you get to spend 4+ hours trying to find another one. I actually don't even have a proper estimate on how long it takes to find a new one, since I have only found 2 iron citadels and 0 of the other two... I'm on a level 91 character blasting maps at light speed.