Dear GGG, this is why people play one button screen destroying meta builds.

Because they are the only thing viable in a game where every other skill just falls down. You want us to play fancy combos while a pack of 40 monsters are rushing at us with 9000HP at mach Jesus. If you play other builds you just die a lot. If you play the meta one shot spark / infernalist / monk before and now lightning spear you can handle the game. Until all skills in the game are viable, there will be no build variety. People will gravitate to the only thing that is fun (because it works). Right now if you try and play fangs of frost with parry its a slog through a Cambodian jungle with a pocket knife, not even a machete. Last league there were about 4 meta builds and the rest of the skills in the game weren't worth trying. Now its pretty much just lightning spear.

Again ... play your own product.

agreed...

they need to give us enough defenses to take 5-10 hits... to give us the time to execute something meaningful.. then give us more crowd-control and movement abilities, and some kind of longer cooldown combo, giving us the incentive to stall and collect enemies to line them up with a big combo window.

When you can just press one button to delete the screen with no cooldown, no meaningful gameplay will ever happen.

But if you look at POE1, its no surprise this is how the skills ended up.

ARPG players want one button builds because they are not nascar drivers they are mechanics. 99/100 are not trying to get meaningful combat out of a game. if people who play this game are saying that they are lying, as 80% of players played amazon for its ease and when shown deadeye was easier they all immediately switched. They dont want variety, they dont want challenge. They want things to go BOOM and a dopamine drip feed to hit at just the right time. And it is their right to want that but lets not pretend this is about meaningful combar, combos, set up, or anything...On the venn diagram of ARPG Players and Intricate combat systems the overlap is less than 5%

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MeanBob_Games#6853 wrote:

On the venn diagram of ARPG Players and Intricate combat systems the overlap is less than 5%

I'd say the 250k POE1 peak (which is the king of one button builds) vs 23M elden ring sales, ~3M D4 players (which is not hard, but does have multi button combos), and the success of many other more engaging games, says otherwise.

As I understand it, the entire point of POE2 is to court the mainstream gamers who do not want engaging gameplay, not one button slot machines (or they would be playing POE1 in larger numbers). That's why the POE2 EA numbers are 2-3x bigger than POE1 ever was... because of their promise this would occur...but they are not delivering on that promise.

Perhaps there is more of a Diablo-4 like middle ground, where they structure the scaling to keep the majority playing engaging combos during the campaign... and then let the one button silliness take over around T5, beyone where mainstream players typically make it, and the POE1 mindless grind crowd cares more about their zoom zoom.

Yeah, I wish there were fewer massive, homogeneous packs in the endgame. Can't we have encounters similar to those in the campaign but, yunno, a little harder and with more modifiers?

I wanna use all my traps and conditional melee and stuff, not just spam bouncing projectiles.

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KuroSF#6521 wrote:

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MeanBob_Games#6853 wrote:

On the venn diagram of ARPG Players and Intricate combat systems the overlap is less than 5%

I'd say the 250k POE1 peak (which is the king of one button builds) vs 23M elden ring sales, ~3M D4 players, and the success of many other more engaging games, says otherwise.

The entire point of POE2 is to court the mainstream gamers who do not want a one button slot machine but engaging gameplay. That's why the EA numbers are 2-3x bigger than POE1 ever was... because of their promise this would occur...but their promise is failing, and if they dont fix it... POE2 will be back to insignificant POE1 size playerbase (and revenue)

Yes i understand all of this. Its also fundamentally incorrect as someone who has played every RPG From Software has created, Diablo 1-4 and PoE2 and other ARPGs.

Do you think people dont blast through From Soft games? The only people who think those games are so hard they cant be blasted through are bad players...and this is the sentiment i hear echoing through the PoE community in regards to this.

The player crossover isnt there no matter how much tencent wants it to be. Whenever I tell other souls players I have been playing PoE 2 they look at me like im oozing ebola.

Combo-based gameplay: let your projectiles pass through Flame Wall to power it up.

In reality: even before your Flame Wall casting animation finish, 3 mobs are already face rubbing you and another two is back there spitting huge poison puddles the size of the Pacific and speedrunning volatile plant spawning tournament. So between trying to stay on the move and getting light stunned so much you feel like you're doing a robot dance, 80% of your Sparks won't be hitting those Flame Walls before they hit the enemies, and you eventually realize it's just vastly more efficient, vastly more powerful, and vastly better feeling to just Mana Tempest and spam Spark right from the start.

Slow and methodical gameplay ends by the end of Act 1. Sure you can play slow and methodical, and I can also decide to tie my left and right shoes together when I run a marathon. It's just that it feels stupid most of the time since you know there's a much easier and much more effective solution that also requires less effort.

hmmm I reached t15 maps with lightning spear, blasting everything. Thought I'd give Rake/Bleed Ritualist a go.
Was pretty fun during the campaign, mostly because I had currency to fund good gear and trying new bleed build combos works with campaign mobs.

Now I'm in maps and climbing the tiers and can feel it very quickly turning into a slog. The mobs come from all directions and I struggle to keep up. This is with a pretty high DPS spear too. Can I do it? Yes. Can I be bothered hacking my way slowly through each map? Not so sure...

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Kraythax#2592 wrote:

Because they are the only thing viable

I would love it if one of you would define "viable" in this context.

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KuroSF#6521 wrote:

they need to give us enough defenses to take 5-10 hits...

To paraphrase Jonathan, an actual person responsible for a game...

But the balance between survivability and immortality is haaaaaard~