I'm enjoying the dificulty, it's story slog and map navigation getting to me. Bit overdesigned too.

The overworld map is confusing, towns don't stand out, there aren't clear indicators of where to go.

I really just want to jump in and kill monsters and get loot, the direction of play feels a lot more muddy and confusing than other ARPGs.

Also, there are just SO MANY extra mechanics it gets draining. I'm trying a warrior for the first time and i'm already feeling like this game is overdesigned and i'm reading over these skills like hobble and hit chances and light stuns and heavy stuns and it's like...

GOOD GOD CAN WE LIGHTEN THE LOAD OF STATS AND MECHANICS HITTING US IN THE FACE FOR 2 FRIGGIN' SECONDS. I'm literally in zone two and just wanting to find a decent one handed mace and the game just bombards you with endless crap right out of the gate, the sheer volume of mechanics is just so tiring.

I want to swing a mace at a skeletons face and see its head explode. I want attack speed and then more ways of getting attack speed. I don't want to have to worry about 50 other tertiary mechanics that sometimes are important on certain enemies. I'm sick of this rock paper scissors BS.

Also, I spent 10 friggin' minutes trying to find where it shows how much damage i'm doing in the character panel, then looked elsewhere and couldn't find a reliable means of just finding out my characters' DPS, or how much my alt weapon DPS compares to my main hand.

This game is trying to do too much, and fumbling the absolute core mechanics as a result.

I get the feeling the internal team is getting overburdened with overdesigned BS from the designers and burned out trying to get this damn game in a decent state.

LESS IS MORE YOU GOOFBALLS! Reduce all these mechanics to only what the game need THEN EXPAND ON MAKING GETTING THOSE CORE MECHANICS INTERESTING IN A MULTITUDE OF WAYS. The sheer volume of menus and stats and panels explaining all this tertiary crap just gets in the way.

I just want to enter a damn zone, smash things to pieces and get phat lewts. Pls make the game hard and challenging, but stop overdesigning this crap it's ridiculous.

I absolutely concur. I can't imagine being on the team trying to make sense of all these conditional skills and mechanics. I've never played a game as convoluted as this.

It's like they've got 50 teams and none of them are working together.

"

InsanityClouds#9303 wrote:

I absolutely concur. I can't imagine being on the team trying to make sense of all these conditional skills and mechanics. I've never played a game as convoluted as this.

It's like they've got 50 teams and none of them are working together.

It's a massive factor in regards to how good a game is that isn't talked about enough. If the developers who are tasked with implementing all these systems just keep having to change things over and over again because of poor planning devs get tired, they burn out and ultimately the game just starts to not perform well for a multitude of ways.

There is nothing worse in gamedev than to have to undo poor decisions and burn what energy you have left regressing.

Most of these wounds were unnecessary.

POE 2 wants to be better by having more mechanics than other games, but the best games don't have a volume of mechanics, they have very tight and clean mechanics.

And this is why POE 2 is in a fragile state right now, too much design bloat, too many modifiers too many bizzare conditionals and tradeoffs.

They need to get back to simple, clean, and fun without getting too much in their head about secondary mechanism and states. None of that matters if the core is all mucked up and convoluted.

Stun, damage, attack rate. Too many tertiary considerations like trigger rates and secondary aoe's and all that jazz. It's just too much, and it kills the cleanliness of UI and design.

I think they should have explicitly stress that testing can be INFURIATING, I mean this is already considered a norm for those that has been playing their games long enough.


GGG has the tendencies to crank up the stress level to nearly "impossible" levels during testing phases, if it comforts you somehow from knowing then try googling for PoE1 testing phase.

Even early bosses like Brutus can just ohk players every one or two seconds.
Oh, maybe or maybe try this boss: Vaal Oversoul.

I agree the slower combat / higher individual mob difficulty could certainly be fun and a breath of fresh air.

But the entire game needs to be redesigned around it. Literally everything, monsters, bosses, maps, drops & items, etc.

I honestly don’t think they have the stomach to do it. They MAJORLY have dropped the ball, it’s almost like leadership was entirely focused on player and ability design to hit their “vision” and ignored everything else, so the team built PoE1 mobs, maps, etc. Then they realized how bad they fucked up and did a 25% mob health nerf in a pure panic move.

I don’t think they have the stones quite frankly to admit how bad they messed up in 50%+ of what they’ve built so far and start over on it (which is what they need to do if they’re set on this “vision”).

"

pattw555#0071 wrote:

I agree the slower combat / higher individual mob difficulty could certainly be fun and a breath of fresh air.

But the entire game needs to be redesigned around it. Literally everything, monsters, bosses, maps, drops & items, etc.

I honestly don’t think they have the stomach to do it. They MAJORLY have dropped the ball, it’s almost like leadership was entirely focused on player and ability design to hit their “vision” and ignored everything else, so the team built PoE1 mobs, maps, etc. Then they realized how bad they fucked up and did a 25% mob health nerf in a pure panic move.

I don’t think they have the stones quite frankly to admit how bad they messed up in 50%+ of what they’ve built so far and start over on it (which is what they need to do if they’re set on this “vision”).

I feel like i'm taking crazy pills. Do these guys not know they are making a loot based RPG?

The #1 aspect of these games being fun is getting good loot with simple and powerful mods on them. Everything feels so overly complex. Some skills do tons of damage, others don't. I don't know why.

It was fun my first run to obsess over all these things, but now that everything has changed and i'm playing it again, I just don't want to deal with this nonesense. I just want to find good drops, equip those drops and slaughter monsters.

I still want difficulty, I just don't want that difficulty making the game a total slog 100% of the time.