On build convergence and implicit promises and frustration

The sales for this early access were an astronomical success. We're still seeing incredibly high numbers of players. The argument that we're seeing "massive player drop-off" is silly.

All that said... it is frustrating how many people dismiss that it was the marketing of a slower and more deliberate game that pulled in so many people. Myself included. PoE will never be a Soulslike, but the campaign bosses hit that same feel. "Fixed Melee" is the other thing that pulled me in. I played PoE1 forever ago, and I always felt like a spell caster, because the way the game works basically forces you down that path. Fireball is cool but I also want to swing my sword.

Warrior in early campaign plays very close to what the marketing promised. And by that I mean an armor/life/mace build with Titan Ascendancy. There were some frustrations, but it worked. Mostly. As the enemy density increases, as the speed that enemies move and attack increase, walk+melee attack feels worse to the point of unplayability. I'm not going to dwell too much on the several overlapping problems I have with the "warrior" design, suffice to say that the challenges that the game presents to you seem explicitly designed to funnel everyone down the same strategy.

An explosion by a different name is still just an explosion. When Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erd Tree first released, the final boss was overtuned enough that most builds found it nearly impossible to overcome. This lead to people converging on the one or two things that could consistently deal with the problems that he presented, Greatshields+Status Effect pokes, or Thorns Spells. We went from a game where things were balanced such that lots of different styles could feel powerful and viable, down to two. The power fantasy was broken. Our agency felt violated. This got fixed, now fighting him with a "normal" build doesn't feel like sticking your hand in a blender.

GGG loves handing out blenders. The problems that they present to players force specific strategies, and punish others. This wouldn't be a problem if:
-they didn't punish you so harshly for failure.
-they mixed the different strategies that work for different enemies/events.

Deleting the screen is too easy to do, and too effective. There is only upside for designing your character to work that way. This means that, for most of the more difficult parts of the game, the only winning move is not to play. If you're interacting with the challenge, you've already made a mistake, it should have been dead 10 minutes ago. All builds lead to Rome. It doesn't matter if I'm doing Herald of Ice quarterstaff nonsense, or Archmage nonsense, or poison explosion nonsense, it's all functionally "Press button -> clear screen. Repeat."

I really hope that the plan isn't just for every part of the tree to end up with different flavors of fill the screen with damage, and hope for the best. That's what it kind of feels like right now though.

TL;DR When all you're given is nails, you start trying to turn all of your tools into hammers.

If you're still here, here are my spitball ideas to fix some of the problems I have with melee, armor, and AoE nonsense:

- Armor should automatically contribute to block chance. Historically shields went away as armor became better at doing the job without taking up a hand. Let armor block things.
- Make AoE worse by having it's damage be divided evenly between every enemy inside of it. This makes those explosions great at small enemy clear, but much worse if there are some beefy guys inside of it.
- Instead of the above, have the damage of an AoE become smaller automatically the bigger it is. Divide the damage by the radius or something.
- Have accuracy apply to projectile skills, not attack skills. Magic loses it's free pass, slow melee attacks don't miss after a ten second wind-up.