Dear GGG: You NEED to watch this video! I cannot emphasize this enough! WATCH THIS!
" Yep. BUT with right balance even this can be fixed. Big damaging AOE can remain - but for special cases only, where (in a certain place) horde is running at you. And the game has 3 inbuilt mechanism to prevent AOE spamming - mana cost, cast time, cooldowns. In a good tactical gameplay AOE should not be the optimal variant ALWAYS, in all combat situations. It must be expensive to use for ordinary combat and should be thrown only on big packs that you encounter RARELY. Interesting to note, that we already see this in Comet skill design, for example. If you play Comet in a normal way - you ll never use it on every enemy you meet. But no one plays Comet, because monsters' speed is insane and you will die faster than you cast it. So poeple use only "instant AOE" now. Because, yes, as OP Video stated, this is the only varitant to play the game now. |
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" IIRC they were talking about pinnacle bosses, which are just the top 1% of the problem. Any semi-decent build will melt map bosses right now, before they even start with 'mechanics'. There were only a handful of good boss fights I had in maps (= fights where the boss isn't constantly frozen or stunned) and that's with crappy SSF gear. Eg. one of those was the double Hillock map, where you have to pay attention to one, while bursting down the other. While it's true that this is just the first iteration of the game and things will change, some design decision makes me fear 'blasting' is exactly the direction GGG wants to go for endgame (which means it will eventually end up looking and playing like Poe1); - Huge maps & fast mobs (no way you are setting a 3-skill combo for every pack) - Dense Atlas with many nodes - Large amount of on-death effects and ground effects (= PoE 1 design, where those effects are the only way to kill fast players) - Lots of 'oneshot' moves (again, the only way to kill fast players) - Ritual; tiny crammed space where you get swarmed and can't see shyt. One-shot everything or get destroyed - Breach; have to blast or the encounter ends almost immediately - The high number of 'splinters' you have to collect to face endgame bosses is designed for blasting a huge amount of maps and encounters. Endgame bosses are just victims of players having to blast. When night falls She cloaks the world In impenetrable darkness Last edited by morbo#1824 on Jan 18, 2025, 3:40:16 AM
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+1000 to OP video
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+1
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+1 this game has no identity and no direction. it's a mess of different ideas and none of them focused properly
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" Exactly. Would be nice if GGG try to make happy not everybody, but just someone. Then it would have a direction and some people would love it, it would have a core playerbase of real fans. Last edited by Suchka_777#4336 on Jan 18, 2025, 3:45:18 PM
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" Yep. The funny thing too is there can even still be a place for both, since there are so many ways to do different content types. Atlas passives, tablets and league content can let people choose between engaging combat or zoom zoom wave-clear fodder. Trying to mix it all together by default is unnecessary and problematic. |
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" They do have a direction and identity. A badly misguided direction and a identity no one want but the blinded fanboys. It lack quality and depth. It is a game that is born out of ego. |
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So I came up with a pretty cool (I think) build.
It isn't super effective (it's good enough but it can't blast away whole screens of mobs every half second) but it's really fun to play. You have to WASD, think about positioning, actually aim your skills, manage cooldowns etc. It plays a lot like a top down zombie shooter (in a good way). Lots of fun, lots of micro decision-making as you play. Wouldn't bear to play meta btw. Looks dumb and mind numbing. And as you may have guessed it lacks the blasting capability. So breach is out of the question for me. I'm kind of slowing down big packs of mobs and kite them around. Can't pop them. Delirium is basically the same. Ritual is also not for me. Not enough room for maneuvering (map terrain often makes it even worse, imagine ritual spawning in a tight corridor and also having a rat tornado or volatile plants). So I just skip it about 60% of the time. Feels really rippy unless you can essentially cancel all the ritual mechanics by just blasting the whole screen instantly. That leaves expeditions. So I'm thinking okay that's what I'll do and look over expedition tree. And what do I see? A node says your expedition chests become juicier buuuuut.... they despawn after 5 seconds. What does that mean? The devs envision me blasting. In every situation. That's their vision. But there's hope. Seems like whoever designed most of the actual skills was aiming at making gameplay fun and strategic. Not the meta cast-on gems, things like escape shot or flash grenade. So I'm hoping this latter vision wins in the end. And if not, I'm sorry but I'm not speccing into zoom zoom bullsh*t. I'm not playing a game that isn't fun. |
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" Zoom-zoomers will always hate going through campaign though. I'm not sure if there is a realistic way to make game really fun for them. Sadly, GGG will try regardless. |
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