Feedback after Ziz interview

Watched the recent interview with Johnathan, Mark and Zizaran

I feel like I now understand how to explain the changes needed in the game after listening to Johnathan and Marks perspective and what they envision according to each point of criticism

First is the very early game, Johnathan kept stressing how the monsters shouldnt be slowed down because every stage of the game should be challenging.

This does address that monsters are currently a LOT faster than players in Act 1, remember you have basically no gear, no skill points, certainly no movement speed. The monsters in the first few areas can absolutely be slowed down with NO possibility of players just running past them all which was the concern of Johnathan, practically it shouldnt be a concern and theres plenty of room to make the game more enjoyable , especially for new players.

Moreso the majority of monsters are so much faster that the dodge roll often is no way to avoid the incoming swarms when it is designed to be and should be.

I dont think the developers realize how many players they are alienating by making the first few areas far too difficult due to monster speed, they seem to cite a group of players who are really hard stanced on everything being really tough, this is out of touch for a few reasons:

1. those players are a vast minority, if they are the only players who can enjoy the game the game will die.
2. the monsters swarm too fast because they are too fast, they make dodge roll nearly useless, at this point it is no longer about skill and this is the critical point, it should be about gameplay skill and choices like items and skills, in early areas it is too fast for gameplay skills and character skills to make any difference and of course items are low quality at that stage.

Next big point:

Johnathan talked about players being "weak" at early levels and needing to power up as you progress, this is fine but it doesnt reflect the current state of the game due to again the monster speed and in a lot of cases the monster damage or lack of player defences and HP.

Weak players should be players who dont do much damage and have to spend more time to defeat monsters, so monster life as the developers thought was the easy way to fix monster power is NOT the way to address things.
Reducing monster speed and monster damage to where the game feels nice should be the way to fix things.

Weak player should not be a player who dies 15-20 times per area because all the monsters take 2/3rds of their life in one hit, all that does is force repetitive gameplay that can currently be overcome by brute forcing your way through multiple deaths, thats not using your brain or utilizing skills it is just grinding on until you finally level up and or find a better item.

Next point:
You should be able to play through the campaign using shop bought items, if shop items arent good enough the power levels are not balanced. Example:
In Act 2 just after youve got past the first big boss in Act 1 you encounter another boss with not much inbetween but this boss is ridiculously powercreeped compared to the Act boss youve just killed. The wolf swarms are near infinite, it should be only once, the wolves are too fast, it takes away from the actual boss fight.

Next point:
The passive skill tree should have far more increases to life, life nodes should be added to nearly all evasion and armour nodes until there is a reasonable balance between them and energy shield on the tree.

I felt that Mark pretty much saved the interview from reassurance that things would be worked on until people were happy and also addressing each point Ziz made specifically and directly.

Suggestion:

Melee. Melee is quite a mess, it can be improved significantly using an already working model in PoE2

Crossbows work with the default attack where the specific skill loads special bolts and these bolts are fired using the default attack. This works nicely.

Why isnt Melee the same? I can understand not wanting to completely uproot the whole system so the solution would be simply to add some new skills and call them augmentations or something , examples:

Poison weapon adds poison damage to the next 10-20 melee attacks, uses the default attack but adds poison damage to it from the skill gem, the skill to load up your weapon costs mana just like loading crossbow bolts.

Variants of this should do simple things like adding an AoE curve to the default attack to deal splash damage, adding Cold damage which works like brittle in PoE1 rather than scaling much damage enables crit, many options but the important point is keeping the normal attack and making it more playable.

The current melee skills are too far removed from simply hitting the enemy with a weapon, to see a new skill do forward roll then somersault into the air and doing a slam which does less damage than a default attack is practically a waste of time, is far too overcomplicated for low reward for mana spent. Many of these skills rely on an enemy already having stun buildup meaning you need to use default attack on it first or another skill so improving the default attack with loading skills like the crossbow would do a world of good to enhance gameplay in general and the other skills, boneshatter for example and especially payoff skills.

In PoE 1 the skill Lacerate makes an arc from the weapons that increase range and this provides an enjoyable melee skill, there is no equivalent in PoE2

The solution is to add more skills that have basic but logical and accessible ways to play the game.

Next point:

Johnathan seems to think people like to make glass cannon builds, he doesnt realize that people are forced to make glass cannon builds in order to get anywhere.
In PoE1 I made a glass cannon build which did a lot of damage but I soon made a different build which was defence orientated, did less damage but was far more enjoyable because the defences could actually be scaled to the point that if I played intelligently I could not die as often as to make the xp penalty for dying impossible to level up, people want to be able to enjoy levelling up and should not have to rely on public games to cheat the levelling by using glass cannon and aurabot combos.

In PoE 2 the defences of armour and life simply do not scale to an acceptable level to the point where many builds are forced into ES, before this league I made quite a few builds that had potential but simply could not swim in the endgame due to having insufficient life total, I was forced to build a couple of spark builds that featured ES as defence and ignored life and armour and it was these builds that actually became playable (not overpowered!) 7-9k ES compared to a life armour build that would only achieve 3k life and would keep getting oneshotted by mobs.


After the recent big patch the vast majority of playable builds have been nerfed to the ground, not just in terms of damage like the spark skill but also in terms of defences like nerfing Ghostwrithe armour, there was no need for the defensive nerfs and the Sorceress ascendancy was the reason spark was overpowered, it was fairly well balanced on the Infernalist for example, nerfing spark made it unplayable on anything other than a Sorceress. Skills should be aimed to be balanced in order to work acceptably well on a wide range of builds and not pigeon holed to certain classes/ascendancies

Next big point:
Theres currently a huge amount of disconnects happening and the game appears to roll back on rejoining.
Example playing an area in the campaign, get to the boss, kill the boss get the achievement and loot and then game disconnects, not only does the achievement and loot disappear but the whole area has to be played through again with waypoints lost.

Maybe have more server checking that saves progress so you can understand if your loot/progress is actually safe.

Next point:
Movement speed. Movement penalties for armour should be reduced to 0 or even becoming positive based on stats, it makes sense that a build that has a lot of strength would be able to run around with heavy armour, and that a build with lots of dexterity would be able to move faster if they have enough strength.

Example a generic build might be able to get 200 to each stat, the movement penalty solution should be for builds that have considerably more to a specific stat, so heavy armour should be useable without penalty for a build with 500 strength, and if a build that has 500 strength and 500 dex could use that armour and actually gain movement speed but more typically the same movement speed bonus could be gained with say 300 strength and dex using a less heavy armour.

Without this builds almost completely rely on movement speed on boots, balancing stats seems like a great alternative that glass cannon ES builds will be unable to do.

Maybe changing the generic life str , evasion dex bonuses for stats would make the game more rewarding and would enable for more life and evasion nodes on the tree, and maybe a special keystone adding the original life for str etc or even special ascendancy.


Last thing, the two handed weapons able to be equipped on one hand with triple requirements should be an ascendancy for the Warrior and not a keystone, make it special, make it a build its a really good potential. Make a special two handed unique that has that ability for non warrior builds.

They lost me after Jonathan made the comment about making more then one character each season is unreasonable.

Well I am quitting and will be back maybe after a few years. Hope Mark is running the show by then.

Ziz forgot to ask why Sparkmage was nerfed 4 times when 1 time was a enough to kneecap the build

While I didn't agree with every response from the devs (nobody bats a thousand) This interview alleviated 90% of my concerns. Well done guys, its good to know that all the hard work put into the solid foundation of this game didn't go to waste. I can't wait to spend the next decade of my life exploring PoE 2. Much love to all the devs and keep up the good work.

I disagree with some of your points here.

1. It feels like hating on monster speed is “the current thing”. I have had no issues with monster speed, and I am pretty bad at this game. The wolves are easy as hell, in fact I’m happy they come over so fast that I can kill them more quickly. Perhaps people are just pulling too many groups, they’re over extending and then asking to nerf enemies. How about no? I don’t want this game to be grouping up mobs and blasting them right out of the gate. It’s good to feel ”not very strong” at the start

2. Crossbows are the most clunky and hated weapon in the game right now. The only reason it’s getting good comments since 0.2 is because it’s much stronger than other weapons. Stop jumping on such short term balance, and look at the underlying mechanics. Sure, you can have a poison weapon skill, look at smith of kitava which is exactly that. It’s clunky as hell..


However, I agree with some others:
1. Agreed on player movement speed. I’d implement it as follows: keep the current movement speed as default since it feels “not strong”, but make movement speed implicit on each boot so you get that default 10% ms upgrade the moment you find your first set of boots, which then sets the new default movement speed for the game.

2. Shop items should more frequently be better. Also rerolling per level has an issue: what if you’ve already overleveled and still don’t have a good weapon/armor? We should be able to reset the shop somehow (probably at some small cost so you don’t just reroll infinitely until you hit the jackpot)

I feel if Johnatan really trust his own vision of the game and how possible changes resonate with his own self, this will become a great game. Just don't self-cancel your own self-resonance Johanatan by trying to include all kinds of contradictionary feedback.