Share your endgame vision

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Meril#8494 wrote:

Hello community.
This thread is intended to be a place where you can share your personal endgame vision - how your dream endgame of poe 2 would look like. This is intended to be an expression of difference - you do not need to consider here what other players want, just state what you want for yourself. So for example if I write that I want "constant challenge", I do not imply that GGG should ignore the needs and preferences of more casual players and not also offer something for them. I merely state what I want for myself.


Here's my endgame vision:

fewer monsters that have more interesting abilities
I find the games combat becomes significantly less engaging once there is a large indistinct mass of enemies that I clear with large AoE abilities. What I would like to see instead is a style of gameplay were interesting things are happening on the screen and I need to respond to it in different ways: hide behind a rock when a chasing laser targets me, quickly crowd control a caster minion before it unleashes a devastating spell(it could get negative cc resistance while casting and the cast would be a long duration channel), decide how to deal with some eggs in the distance that will hatch powerful enemies if not destroyed quickly (but there is also a risk going too far into other monsters when quickly running towards the eggs) or suddenly be ambushed by monsters coming out of nowhere.

The main factors for combat situations to be interesting seem to be:
1) monsters have interesting abilities
2) those require distinct responses from the player
3) and those monsters can survive long enough for that to actually matter
4) combat situations can evolve dynamically (be it certain monster getting stronger / evolving during combat, sudden monster spawns / reinforcements / monster necromancy or the player running out of resources like health potions while needing to priotirize between different threats)

Currently too few monsters do something that requires a distinct response from the player - its usually just dodging some AoE effect and thats all that happens. There is also a lack of monsters that evolve in a meaningful way during combat like suddenly growing wings and getting a new set of attack-moves when being ignore for too long. Monsters on maps also get outgeared and then do not survive long enough anymore to pose a threat.


balanced combat experience - monsters need a chance too

For combat to stay interesting long term, monsters need to be able to pose a threat to the player. Basically for everything the player can do, the monsters need to have some way to deal with that and still pose a good threat: e.g. if the player can be really quick and kite monsters, there needs to be some mechanic that lets monsters deal with kiting: e.g. gap closing, slowing down the player, reflecting projectiles, or damaging him with thorns.
Combat needs to stay at a challenge level, were the player can die when he makes a serious mistake. It also needs to be slow (=low damage) enough, so that the player can perform skill combos and the monsters can use their abilities against the player. On the other hand the player also needs to have a fair chance versus the monsters and defeat them if playing well. Ideally for me the game would stay at a constant high challenge level for the entire endgame. (currently the mapping difficulty quickly falls off and mapping becomes a boring routine clear). This challenge should not come from monsters being able to oneshot the player. Instead it would be good design if the player mainly dies from making bad tactical decisions, not properly responding to what the monsters are doing or failing to dodge well enough.
Balancing also means that all player skills should be good in some situation and that none should completly overshadow the others.

PvP-like Rogue Exiles

It would be great if encountering a Rogue Exile would feel actually similiar to a PvP duell as it was advertised. Currently they die to quickly and the AI isn't acting that intelligent. At least if you level into them, they should become really challenging: I would let them scale with player progress to make it a fair PvP duell (if the player get +100% damage, they get +100% hp), give them a full set of human like behaviours like effectively dodging player abilities and a real AI like OpenAI (it performs really well in Dota2) and scale the difficulty in a way that only a certain percentage of players is able to defeat them: e.g. +2 difficulty exile = defeated by 50% of players, +4 difficulty exiles = defeated only by top 5% of players. The difficulty would be adapted dynamically: if too many players defeat the +4 difficulty level, it becomes harder with next weekly patch.

reworked map modifiers
The current map modifiers feel boring and generic. The damage modifiers tend too much towards one-shot threats instead of offering meaningful gameplay. I find they should be just removed, maps being made harder to make up for that and the map modifiers should just change what you'll encounter on the map: an ambush, traps, extra mini-boss, door riddle, content rewarding exploration, etc.

reworked league mechanics
The current league mechanics tend too much toward speed clearing. They also do not offer much in the sense of interesting gameplay content added (except for the related pinnacle encounters). They need much more content added and at least some of them should work with slower builds.
Delirium could be reworked in a way that the goal is to escape the fog and it becomes harder and harder to survive while staying within the fog. The mirrors could do interesting things. You see something in the mirror and a few seconds later something happens: a chariot charges across the screen in a line, a hand tries to grap the player if he's nearby or the mirror shatters to deal damage with shards.
Breach could be reworked to allow the player to enter the breach realm, similiar to the current pinnacle encounter. There would be mini-bosses, traps and exclusive pathways like the breach bridge in the breach world.
Expedition could be the ultimate "build your own encounter" mechanic if it would work in a way to build actually interesting encounters instead of merely adding generic modifiers.

Feel free to share your own endgame ideas.

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IILU81II#8410 wrote:

Maps should always drop ONE higher tier waystone (mob's infinite level scaling). At some point we'd have some real challenge that gives a reason to keep playing a 4 months league.

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vestolevs#5239 wrote:

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IILU81II#8410 wrote:

Maps should always drop ONE higher tier waystone (mob's infinite level scaling). At some point we'd have some real challenge that gives a reason to keep playing a 4 months league.

Try HC SSF.