Developer Questions and Answers

When are you introducing the transparent, low animation requiring discharge animation (mtx) to lessen lag and screenlighting spasms? As far as i am informed it has already been made and is awaiting release.

1. What about the set stuff (green color) as it was in Diablo 2? It's much more fun to collect sets, share them than many weak and unclaimed unique stuff that you released to the latest patches. You have a lot of Diablo 2. Why not implement this idea too? It can greatly diversify the game IMHO.
2. Why for the victory over Piety given 2 skill points and for the win over Dominus anything significant? Many of my friends just do not go to Dominus after defeating Piety citing the fact that this makes no sense. Rare map 66 level? They can buy a cheap maps higher levels by the time and use on it alchemic orbs or vaal orbs.
Why not give for a victory over Dominus more substantial reward? For example for the victory over Piety 1 skill point. For the victory over Dominus 1 skill point, 1 regret point & 1 rare corrupted 66-67 lvl map?
3. Didn't you see the opportunity to armour and weapons wears off? A repair is carried out with armourer's scraps and blacksmith's whetstones or a new type of orb?

With the ton of exciting new content likely to be released with Act 4, there will probably be at least a couple of new game mechanics and monster types introduced, which might change the efficiency of some of the existent or possible new skills and it sounds like a good opportunity to reassess/rebalance skills that fill a similar role. In that light it would be interesting to get some insight on how that rebalancing will be approached:

1. Will there be any changes to some of the core mechanics?
Something like how the base stats affect a character or other changes that might affect how one would approach making a build. If i remember right it was hinted in one of the last State of Exile Podcasts that something like that might be in the discussion ;)

2. Will we see an extensive rebalancing of existing skills?
In the current state of the game there are a few skills that just seem way stronger than any others since they offer both superior single-target and AoE damage and range to other options. Two prime examples would be Static Strike and Tornado Shot.
Static Strike for example comes with a huge single target damage effectivness of 187% (compared to Dual Strike with 170%), a decently high AoE damage effectivness of 77% and a roughly 3x bigger area than Cleave.

3. Will there be a more notable differentiation of single target and AoE skills?
Besides act and map bosses, few mobs currently have enough hitpoints to justify the use of a dedicated single target skill(-combination) and the currently available single target skills have only little more base damage compared some of the skills that cover a large AoE. It doesn't mean that multiskill builds aren't viable in the current state of the game and i frequently use them but it would be nice to see a bit more differentiation there.

4. Will there be more skills with interesting and advanced mechanics like Flame Surge?
I don't think it is an overly popular skill but i really like the fact that you have to put in some thought, build around it and use multiple skills to get the maximum effect. Of course it is also good to have skills with a simple and straightforward mechanic but it would be awesome to see some more skills like Flame Surge that require active planning and playstyle and reward that with superior effectivness once all comes together.

Bonus Question: will we ever get an Eaglefish pet as MTX or part of a supporter pack?!

This posted earlier:

"

Shimaran wrote:

Will there be one day any new end-game content or mechanic that could mitigate the lack of significant character progression past a certain level ? Excepted new levels and the (very) occasional gear update, I feel there should be at least one more way of making our characters better once we get around level 80 and beyond. (maybe a new kind of specialization ?)

Also:
Will there any new end-game content? aside from new maps.

Is it possible to include an option to disable other players skills animations on your side of the client, or at least for heavy graphic usage ones, such as CoC, discharge and vaal spark? I prefer playability over effects.

When can we start seeing general balance changes for HLD?

Do you think that some of the spike damage in the form of jumping monsters and devourers has to be rebalanced, or do you feel that all the monsters are in a good place right now?

I am playing an armor char, and it feels like I only have 2 states of damage "no damage at all from monsters" or "instant kill from jumpers".

How do you see the "Cwdt+EndCry+IC" change affection above issue?

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Is some speed/lag optimization still possible? I find that POE has not the best performance compared to other games, often more graphically challenging. Dragon age III, Skyrim, all or running much better on my PC that POE.
It also has an extremely long loadtime (sometimes 10 minutes), is this something that can be looked into?

Hey, GGG! Do you have possibility to add rag-doll physics and environmental destruction in game engine? That'll add a good variety to now tedious scripted combat. Thanks!

hi GGG!
im interested to hear if there is any plans to change the map system in any shape or form like a updated system for expansion or QoL changes?
Also is there plans for a different type of endgame exp system at all?
if theres a new act surely normal gameplay will go higher than lvl 66 zones so that will make 66/67 maps useless?
thanks for your time and keep up the work guys!!!

Hey there @GGG
Thank you all for giving us the opportunity to ask some questions:


1) Can you elaborate the state of unique chest armours and your plans to improve the situation?
Unique chest armours are dominating hardcore and softcore league on nearly any kind of build. It really seems when planing out a build you only have 4-5 choices. Lightning Coil (physical mitigation, better than any armour chest in the game); Cloak of Defiance (free MoM and good build synergy); Shavron's Wrappings (Low Life build enabler); Kaoms Heart (for high life builds which are using fire damage) Carcass Jack (if you could use more AoE and CoD/LC/Shavs/Kaoms make no sense).
Can we expect to see more diversity in the chest slot in 1.4?

2) "Path Of Multipliers" / skill gem/support gem/crit balance issues:
At the moment skill gems with build in multipliers, like Incinerate and Flamebalst and skill gems with good acess to external multipliers, like spectral throw, any kind of bow skill, Cyclone and some AoE skills are dominating in this game because of this mechanic.
Can we expect more different ways to boost damage on other skills, which don't have an "projectile/aoe tag"
How are you going to ajust those issues; nerfing only the support gems into the ground won't do the trick, as we have seen with the "crit multiplier" gem in the past. The overall mechanic is too strong so it doesn't really mather if you nerf a gem by 20-50% (as we have seen be the recent nerf of Flameblast). Stacking differnet multipliers is the way to go atm

3) Are you currently reworking some of the older uniques to make them "more usefull/interesting" to build around? Will we see some of them in 1.4?

4) Are you planing to implement an even more in depth crafting system to augment the current one. Will we be able to improve our items further with unique modifications and implicits in 1.4? Will you implement higher tiers of mods above levl 79?

5) Will there be more "endgame options" besides Atziri/Ueber Atziri & Maps in any kind of form in 1.4?
(yes or no would be a sufficiant answer to me if you don't want to go further in to detail)


Thank you for considering my questions!