What could GGG do?

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Col_Jessep wrote:

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antsea wrote:

Seems like most of their balance changes have been geared towards the top 1% of players.

I have to agree with this statement. I looked into going CI when I rerolled and decided against it since I cannot afford the gear to make it save. And I'm using that term loosely...

The last patches moved the survivability away from the skill tree to better gear. You need more life, ES, armour or evasion on gear while spike damage, reflect and desync become more problematic.

While this might be an acceptable challenge for geared players it will absolutely destroy players who are late to the party.
Just imagine you are completely new to PoE. You have no experience which mobs do what kind of damage, you have no leveling gear in your stash from your last character and you will be broke. Recipe for frustration once they hit the gear wall at level 50. Go cookie cutter or go home.

I was going to criticize this in another thread. The way the game is right now, you rely WAY too much on gear rolls, which rely WAY too much on RNG. And meanwhile, your controlled aspects which are Levels and Passive Skills provide minuscule bonuses.

You need Life/ES and RES but you NEED gear to get a decent amount and gear isn't always available. Not to mention that they rarely have the right sockets, colors AS WELL as the stats you need. And since orbs are rare, crafting isn't as encouraged or even possible in some cases. They need to find the right equilibrium between controlled aspects and RNG ones because the more you rely on RNG, the more frustrating the experience is.

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antsea wrote:

Seems like most of their balance changes have been geared towards the top 1% of players.

If this is true then that is very sad. Why should the top 1% of elite no-life players dictate to the rest of us what the endgame upper level item values are? So what if there are builds that are OP and the no-lifers have figured out how to use that to create a a super powerful character? If the no-lifers can play a character to level 100 and retire it in a year then I say that PoE is "working as intended". Any arpg is going to have builds that are great and builds that suck and we the players have to learn what works and what doesn't. That's one of the reasons we like to play an arpg, to explore the unknown and learn by trying different combinations of armor/weapons and experimenting with all the skill conbinations that GGG gives us to work with.

If GGG listens to these 1% top players too much and nerfs gear that would help the other 99% of us then that is wrong. The best thing GGG can do is create an Uber League for these 1% top players to give them a harder challenge without forcing the rest of us to suffer just because these no-lifers play PoE as if it were a full time job and have mastered it and are now bored. I say to them, "get a life" and let the rest of us continue to play PoE. The current level of difficulty is plenty hard enough and works for me.

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Vegnarus wrote:

I was going to criticize this in another thread. The way the game is right now, you rely WAY too much on gear rolls, which rely WAY too much on RNG. And meanwhile, your controlled aspects which are Levels and Passive Skills provide minuscule bonuses.

This is just now becoming a huge problem for me. I started playing Anarchy with a friend and while he has gear that will carry him through merciless I was rather unlucky so far. We can't share gear because he is going CI spellcaster and I'm trying to build EV based Ranger. Now we are both stuck farming in cruel until I can get enough gear to progress in merciless. There is no way for me to compensate the -40% elemental resists in any reasonable way.

I'm so glad we didn't start in Onslaught where the gear requirements are even more brutal.

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ventiman wrote:

you forgot how easy it is to get armor values on the str character and how hard it is to get on an int character who cares if i have 6 k es when i have a dmg reduction of under 15% for physical

i had map rhoas hit me for 6,5k es on my summoner with no armor

lol those rhoas hurt anyone. Something that hits for 6,500 damage needs 78,000 armour to mitigate it by 50% and even then 3,250 damage for a life build is often near fatal and there is no life build that is sporting 78k armour to my knowledge.

Armour isn't very effective vs very hard hitting mobs.

Becoming OP and blasting through shit like a god is a big part of the reason aRPGs are fun. The devs shouldn't be too concerned about it. They damned sure shouldn't balance the game around such builds/gear.

to me the whole es nerf looks like a really lazy solution

it would be much more work to rework the es mods and limit possible max es on the gear without hurting the little ppl they just took the lazy route

which is sad

Think about when more areas are added and thus the average level requirements on gear start going up to, say... 90.

Then these items won't be as amazing as they are now.

Low life + Shav rly OP and they faceroll and oneshot everything they wanted.
6L Shav only go higher in prices every week (4-7 days and +1-4 ex in price)
No links Shav most wanted in trade chat + party name pub with WTB WTB WTB no link trash useless Shanv! PST PST PST

Gear with 1k+ ES and uniques with buff for ES/CI normaly more popular, then other.

Poor ppl start to be hard and thats work for life/CI so they start to waste more nodes on def and survives, less on dmg and other nice node.

Problem with builds more bigger: there 20% popular and usefull builds and 80% gems need hard rework/buff and thats must be #1 now.

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Barry wrote:

I agree, it seems they're making sweeping balance changes to make endgame gear less powerful, effectively giving the dick to people already struggling.

yes yes yes yes

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Col_Jessep wrote:

Now we are both stuck farming in cruel until I can get enough gear to progress in merciless. There is no way for me to compensate the -40% elemental resists in any reasonable way.

That's pretty much what happened to me except I made it to Act2 merciless. At the time my ES was about 1100 and my resists were all negative. I never did find that gear. I gave up and had my son barter for some. Even after I had the new gear, I never did find the gear I might have needed. To this day, I still cannot imagine crap like 800+ on my armour. I'm THRILLED that I have 3200ES and my resists are all near max.

Too bad I foolishly tried to improve my situation with crafting because now that character is effectively dead again. He lost 1/3 of his total DPS from the crafting debacle and while I suppose he could try to farm his way out of this situation, 29 levels of farming returned nothing. I'm not exactly hopeful that another few weeks of farming will turn up even one piece much less several.

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I'm so glad we didn't start in Onslaught where the gear requirements are even more brutal.

My onslaught character is stuck before even normal Piety... although to be fair, when I say "stuck" what I mean is "stuck unless I trade". But going out and finding your own gear in this game is a ridiculous exercise.

Good thing they nerfed my ES to keep my character balanced. This patch makes me glad I'm not playing POE anymore.