To Jonathan's 'pacing' of the game dilemma. Wrong! ARPG combat 'cab be' quantified. (Explained)

Note: Numbers and percentages [%] used within the rest of this post are for example purposes only.

Introduction:

Pacing the combat involves carefully balancing the player's progression so that they feel powerful over time yet not to the point of breaking the experience. Here’s how you can quantify and structure the pacing of PoE 2's combat.

1. Early Game: Gradual Power Build-Up

Goal: Allow players to feel like their builds are having an impact, not too early yet not too weak, either, that creates a sense of progression.

Enemy Scaling: Early enemies should be relatively weak to give players time to experiment with their builds. This allows players to understand their character's abilities without overwhelming them.

Damage vs. Health Scaling: Start with low base damage and health scaling for enemies, making combat easy but still involving skill. Use soft caps where skills have noticeable effects but don’t allow players to "one-shot" anything right away.

Cooldowns and Resource Management: Introduce resource management mechanics (mana, cooldowns, etc.) early, which limits the ability to spam powerful abilities and encourages strategic play.

Tuning for Risk: Offer basic challenges that require players to use their full set of abilities. This can help them understand their build’s strengths and weaknesses, rather than just increasing raw damage.

2. Mid-Game: Building Momentum

Goal: At this stage, players should start seeing a significant improvement in their character’s power, but not to the point where combat feels trivial.

Enemy Variety and Complexity: Introduce more varied enemies with resistances, armor, and multiple attack patterns. This challenges players to adapt their builds and rotations while preventing them from overwhelming enemies with raw damage alone.

Scaling Difficulty Curve: Enemies should scale in terms of both health and damage output, while the player’s damage should also increase at a similar rate. This way, the feeling of progression remains, but it’s still challenging.

Skill Synergy: Allow players to develop their builds further by introducing synergies or synergies with items/skills that reward a more thoughtful build. This creates a sense of power growth, but without the risk of one-shotting enemies.

More Aggressive Pacing: Quests and combat scenarios can ramp up the stakes here, introducing tougher and more complex mechanics, such as timed encounters or larger packs of enemies.

3. Late Game: Mastery and Peak Power

Goal: Players should feel powerful, but the challenge should scale up, keeping combat engaging without making it feel trivial. TRIVIAL is the keyword here that was used in the Path of Exile 2 Dawn of the Hunt: Dev Insights with GGG interview! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiFLwjFI4S4 - Apr 8, 2025

Enemy Scaling: Late-game enemies should have higher health, resistance, and more complex mechanics that challenge a high-powered player. This can include immunity to certain debuffs, unpredictable attack patterns, or large groups of enemies that require strategic skill usage.

Boss Encounters and Design: Bosses at this point can have mechanics that require more than just high damage, forcing the player to adapt and think tactically. Boss health pools should be large enough that even powerful builds take time to bring down, ensuring a sense of challenge even when the player has reached their peak power.

Build Optimization vs. Raw Power: At this stage, the focus should shift from raw damage to build optimization. Players should feel rewarded for taking time to fine-tune their builds and combine synergies.

Endgame Activities: This can include high-level dungeons, modes, or other types of content where players need to keep evolving their build to stay competitive with scaling enemies.

4. Additional Systems to Control Power Pacing

Scaling Health and Damage: Both the player and enemies should have scaling damage and health as the game progresses, but at a rate that keeps the combat engaging. If enemies grow in difficulty too quickly or players outscale enemies too fast, it can create a feeling of imbalance.

Item Scaling: Gear should increase in power over time but come with diminishing returns. For example, if a player is acquiring legendary gear, it should offer huge bonuses early on, but by the endgame, those items are part of a larger strategy, not just raw numbers.

Crowd Control and Effects: Introduce status effects and crowd control mechanics at higher levels that affect both the player and enemies. This creates more nuanced combat and ensures that powerful builds aren't just about raw damage.

Level Caps and Soft Caps: Introduce a cap on the maximum damage or health scaling for both players and enemies, to prevent the player from reaching absurd damage thresholds. Use soft caps to keep the combat dynamic and prevent one-shotting.

Key Quantitative Measures:

Enemy Health Growth Rate: For example, enemy health could increase at a rate of 10-15% per difficulty tier.

Player Power Growth Rate: The player’s base damage should grow more slowly than enemy health, perhaps at a 5-10% increase per level, but their effective damage output can increase faster with synergies or item bonuses.

Boss Health: Bosses could have significantly higher health (e.g., 3x-5x regular enemies) but also have mechanics that prevent a single damage spike from eliminating them too quickly.

Cooldown and Resource Management: If the player's build is powerful, it should be balanced by resource usage (mana, stamina, etc.) or long cooldowns that prevent constant use of a single high-damage ability.

Conclusion:

The key is to pace the player's power with a balance of progressive scaling of enemies and powerful build optimization while preventing the player from feeling too strong too early, but also not too weak too early to the point of the game being/feeling 'sluggish'.

Gameplay should therefore feel smooth through and through towards mid-game all the way up to end-game (granted the 'execution' of direction is done correctly).

Early on, combat should focus on learning and experimentation, with the power progression ramping up in a way that keeps combat challenging, diverse and engaging from the start, mid-game, all the way into end-game with 'strong' player builds rewarding tactical gameplay rather than mindless one-shotting!

From the interview today, looks like he knows Exactly what he's doing. ;)

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chobo999#2010 wrote:

From the interview today, looks like he knows Exactly what he's doing. ;)

Jonathan literally said, "Well, I don't know that... once again... So, I mean we get this question a lot, right? Just the like, what is the pace of the game supposed to be? And um... I honestly find it hard to answer that because of the way that like... There isn't really an obvious way to like to even 'quantify' that given the players have so many different abilities." Word-for-word.

Clearly he does not. He's all over the place in that interview. He didn't even really try to quantify (much less really explain) what a smooth and rewarding gameplay 'pace' is or even feels like, but who most would consider an average Joe like myself can? I mean I been around since PoE 1 Open Beta, but still. A player not actively on GGG's team shouldn't be able to answer the question on 'pacing' a game better than he did.

And the fact that he summed it up to 'players having so many different abilities' said it all. It's not just an 'abilities' issue. There's more to 'pacing' a game than whatever 'abilities' allow/don't allow players to do in conjunction with their 'power' levels and how they translate into end-game.

0.2 has been out for how long...give it some time ;)

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chobo999#2010 wrote:

0.2 has been out for how long...give it some time ;)

You missed the entire point of my response. Jonathan has been onboard with Path of Exile on GGG's team since 2006... This is not a PoE 2 / 0.2 'Patch' issue; this is a dev issue who could not answer what was to me a very simple question to answer. Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiFLwjFI4S4 - Apr 8, 2025

Had Chris Wilson still been onboard, he would have provided a more coherent response (even if/when people disagreed with him). The man himself was a powerhouse for what it took when it came to: integrity, ideas, speaking to players, doing his homework, applying himself, etc.

This was briefly talked about in another Thread.

COPY/PASTE:

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GrumpyMcElbows#2847 wrote:

This was the future of PoE. PoE 2 was Chris's vision for PoE 1. Lake of Kalandra and all of the preceding leagues going to back to Expedition were supposed to help transition into PoE 2. Kalandra and rolling Archnemesis wholesale into the core game is why we got Ruthless and why GGG spun PoE 2 off into its own game. Ultimately, we don't know what happened behind the scenes, but I have the suspicion that's why Chris left -- Chris was adamant that PoE 1 still transition into PoE 2, despite the backlash, and Jonathan et al. argued that they should hedge their bets and split PoE into two. Ruthless was supposed to be Chris's pet project as he took a step back, but once that also bombed, he didn't have any reason to stick around. Again, that's just speculation, but... Where there's smoke, etc.

Chris helped create and led the development of a great game that I love. Although I disagreed with an awful lot of decisions going back to 3.5, I appreciate all of the passion and effort he put into the game. But if this is what PoE is supposed to be, I'm not exactly clamoring to bring him back.

"

chobo999#2010 wrote:

This was briefly talked about in another Thread.

COPY/PASTE:

"

GrumpyMcElbows#2847 wrote:

This was the future of PoE. PoE 2 was Chris's vision for PoE 1. Lake of Kalandra and all of the preceding leagues going to back to Expedition were supposed to help transition into PoE 2. Kalandra and rolling Archnemesis wholesale into the core game is why we got Ruthless and why GGG spun PoE 2 off into its own game. Ultimately, we don't know what happened behind the scenes, but I have the suspicion that's why Chris left -- Chris was adamant that PoE 1 still transition into PoE 2, despite the backlash, and Jonathan et al. argued that they should hedge their bets and split PoE into two. Ruthless was supposed to be Chris's pet project as he took a step back, but once that also bombed, he didn't have any reason to stick around. Again, that's just speculation, but... Where there's smoke, etc.

Chris helped create and led the development of a great game that I love. Although I disagreed with an awful lot of decisions going back to 3.5, I appreciate all of the passion and effort he put into the game. But if this is what PoE is supposed to be, I'm not exactly clamoring to bring him back.

The spoiler in my OP literally says we actually do not want a PoE 1 clone but we also do not want our agency/freedom of what we can 'do' with our builds gutted, either! Not even I always agreed with Chris Wilson, the man himself, but at least he had coherent answers to players' questions and never came off like he didn't know wtf he was talking about! In other words, there were more questions than answers from Jonathan and Marks' interview.

Least you know the history now...... ;)

Doing maps rn, not getting literally any items or even 1 Ex a map that I would use to check an item.
No item upgrades in sight or worth a single ex(because I'd need EX to see).

Feels really bad

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chobo999#2010 wrote:

Least you know the history now...... ;)

With all due respect, I 'am' the history of Path of Exile and I still speak in the present -- admitting to you and everybody here in these PoE 2 Forums -- where PoE 1 went wrong with how it became a sensory overload, one-shotfest. Lol. I already knew about what you cited :) None of that is news.

Conclusively, if GGG cannot figure this out to appease almost everyone (which will not happen, I hate to say it), then they need to implement a new League flag like I suggested here https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3745945 that is similar to how the game is now (slow, limiting, etc.) except that: allows more player agency/freedom over one's build, is a little more fast-paced (but not to one-shot speed from start-to-finish), and that feels smooth while also not being 'trivial' (as Jonathan put it).

Yes. There is, in fact, a way to achieve that level of gameplay/combat pace balance. The developers, however, need to really 'want' to achieve that goal vs. leaning too far to one side on the tightrope and risking death from a high-up place in the process.