An Open Letter to GGG RE: One Portal

To start, I've been an avid and consistent player of PoE for years. I, like everyone, was excited for PoE2. When they announced the one portal mechanic I immediately knew that it was a bad idea, but I was open to giving it a shot.

I've now played PoE2's endgame enough to give my opinion. It is an absolutely horrible decision, and should be reversed immediately for the future of PoE2. The old saying here is never so true, if it aint broke, dont fix it. PoE1 had the six portal mechanic, it was balanced, but fair in my opinion. It didnt give the solo player too many chances to attempt a map/boss but it also limited party play in a way that felt fair. It was balanced, it was effective, it felt right. The penalty for losing experience at super high levels felt brutal, but was acceptable.

Now I admit, in PoE1 being able to zerg bosses was too much. PoE2 fixed this, resetting map boss and pinnacle boss HP is the right call. If you cant complete the boss all in one go, you shouldn't beat it. But the soul crushing penalty of losing not only the map progression, the boss attempt, the exp, the map modifiers, etc all in one go is too much. It's too far. You wanted to bring in a wider audience, of all the various early access things affecting PoE2, they can be fixed. This design decision and commitment to it, cannot.

New players that are struggling through the campaign and learning the game for the first time are not used to PoE. The growing pains are harsh, but they can get over it. Once they get to endgame however that will all change, I promise you. Let's face it GGG, you've never been able to fully eliminate the random, out of nowhere, bs deaths. Us dedicated PoE players can forgive that, and truthfully dont expect you to ever be able to eliminate it. And thats okay. The game istself fantastic and we can get over it. However, with PoE2's decision to unnecessarily punish the players for this shortcoming is something that cannot be overcome, no matter how much you think it's possible.

To the people, and design engineers at GGG continuing to defend this one portal idea. You're wrong. Listen, you're wrong. Swallow your pride, admit your mistake, and move on. To the white knight forum warriors that try and defend it, you're wrong, no matter how much get gud you try and spew.

I hope, for the sake of this game, you fix this as soon as possible. I love GGG, I think they're the best developers that exist, but they can make mistakes. It's okay, us PoE vets will forgive you. I promise you, the uninitiated will not, and move on.

Revert it back to the six portals before it's too late.

I agree.

New player here. Its a huge loss when you die and feels really bitter that you are punished so much for it.

Punish us a little if you must I'm not here for Diablo but this feels so extremely heavy handed.

Love the one portal if you die change. Death needs to have weight and they landed in something fair

I agree. One portal adds something to the game. I like feeling like shit when I die. Makes the feeling when you don't die that much better.

+1
So many threads now talking about this bad mechanic. Hopefully they remove it in january.

"

Poe2WarriorMan#6401 wrote:

Love the one portal if you die change. Death needs to have weight and they landed in something fair

There's a game mode that exists for you if you like this style, its called hardcore.

"

Prototype20#1877 wrote:

"

Poe2WarriorMan#6401 wrote:

Love the one portal if you die change. Death needs to have weight and they landed in something fair

There's a game mode that exists for you if you like this style, its called hardcore.

I think you need to go edit this response as it was not thought out very well


Unless you want to tell me right now that hardcore mode is the same as dying in a map on standard in poe2


I’ll remove this if you correct yourself as you have made a horrific suggestion

It would be more punishing for a glass cannon build to get 6 portals in a juiced map to die 6x and lose 60% xp if they had it. The xp is slow enough in this game that the 10% xp loss is plenty of a loss when you play glass cannon. you will never hit lvl 80 that way

You want death to have weight, there's already weight in the game in standard, its the loss of XP. I'm not sure how many lvl 100s you've achieved in PoE1, but i feel that's enough for the standard game mode. Losing hours of grinding at level 99 is plenty.

If you want more, play hardcore.

"

Lonnie455Rich#2087 wrote:

It would be more punishing for a glass cannon build to get 6 portals in a juiced map to die 6x and lose 60% xp if they had it. The xp is slow enough in this game that the 10% xp loss is plenty of a loss when you play glass cannon. you will never hit lvl 80 that way

I’m pretty sure that’s the point they don’t want you building some all out offense delete things builds anymore as it doesn’t engage with things they WANT you to engage with

ie: rares
Bosses

And their abilities/mods

It’s probably why they are quick to squash things that are over tuned offensively as they would stand out EVEN more if they just went full/mostly glass cannon

I also think the devs want you interacting more with the balance between offense and defense not having a catch all in offense for something that can just off screen clear and what not