Q&A with the Developers!

Is there any other associates on the team that are equally as desirable as bex, seems like she already has a full dance card?. Dont get me wrong, these other mooks dont stand a chance when my charm takes hold, but she cant be the only intelligence gal around the place?

Does anyone at GGG play Race for the Galaxy? Is it anyone's favorite game?


Are Ancient Devourers in Untainted Paradise going to be fixed, or will they continue to spawn in absurly large, simultaneous packs?


Will you create a Descent 3?


Is PvP season 3 coming soon?


What's the latest news on paid leagues?

My question is mostly About Summon Skeleton! seems that the last big change with the gem 50% damage reduction to anything added to them! seems to be painfully complicated? the gem itself shows nothing of sorts so makes you wonder if dmg reduction was actually applied. Minion Dmg to skele also 50% less? weird!?
Ele dmg bonus i understand i guess but notw its everything?phys chaos ? only thing you can add with out a penalty is faster attacks? minion speed? anyways some clarifications would be nice.



i am sure this is said lots! but Minions stats for zombies and skele would be awesome to see a chart on there armor res dmg crit etc! be cool! maybe people would try different builds!
Also the new jewel that lets you summon 3 mages! COOL! but awkward! i feel like you cannot gem for both of them effectively not know how skele dmg works right now

Last QA session you mentioned that you were planning to improve Path of Exile API for better integrations with 3-rd party services. What's your progress so far on this thing? And if possible, could you give us a short list on the API's new features?

Perhaps these questions were asked before but I will ask them anyway. I also understand that this is probably too long to count as questions, but what I feel is important is to communicate these with the developers rather than expecting a concrete answer, although that would be great as well.

Regarding your work:

Are you using any tools to help you balance the game? For example some tools to automatically go through various possible paths (for example after specifying some requirements like required life etc) to have some metrics on whether there are some cases that are unbalanced. Or if you have some procedures to test the various skills, for example measure the damage they deal in various situations (for example various configuration of enemies around you). Of course I am sure you need to manually check new skills to see how they work, if they are fun etc but I am asking this because I suspect that balancing this game must be a very huge task to the point that it is impossible to be able to balance it perfectly for all builds etc!

So regarding the game itself:

Based on my previous question there is the question on how you feel regarding having various skills that are not so balanced, at least from what we as the community see. For example if you compare the incinerate gem before the talisman patch with skills like fire nova mine etc they are like day and night. Generally I have noticed that there are usually some skills that are OP, meaning that with average/good investment they have very good defenses and great damage, then there are most skills which need great investment but if you invest a lot they work quite well and then there are those skills that even if you buy the best gear they just can't compete. What is your view on this? Is this a result of balancing being very hard, or is this done on purpose because a) you want to promote some skills and b) you want to force people making new build by abandoning their previously OP skills? If it is the latter though, wouldn't it be better if people would be making on average all the builds at each time?

Another question I have is about defenses. Perhaps this is just my opinion, but I think that especially after awakening armour seems to be the king of defenses especially for hardcore. First of all, armour can potentially save you from a large hit (meaning that you won't get one shotted), while evasion for example cannot. Also there are many monsters that armour is much better dealing with the with armour rather than other defenses, like rhoas, those frog like enemies etc and especially enemies who has physical spells like evangelists. Evasion can be great for SC, but that mostly works great for some builds like caustic arrow which can be played from distance. The problem though is, sometimes in this game you can't play from a distance and enemies will attack you and you are going to die. And then there is Energy shield. This defense seems to be the ones with the most problems. In the past energy shield was fine because for example for a CI build you could use leech as the main form of recovery (which I think every build should have in one way or another) but now leech doesn't work well in many situations like bosses. Also in the past whether you went for CI/Low Life or EB, you could combine ES with block to further enhance the defense. I understand you can still do that, but I think that now block builds can mostly be done for life builds and for ES builds the available block is just minimal. I understand that in the past these mechanics were too strong, but now ES is too weak I think. So what is your view on this? Do you believe that all defenses are strong and balanced? If not are you planning to do any changes on this?

Will the effects on Spell and Attack Damage of the Instruments of Virtue node in the new Inquisitor tree proc on triggered spells (such as CoC, CoDT, etc)?

What are the plans for guilds? Are there coming more features any time soon? In the beginning you talked about a special guild hideout and on the website there are some specific guild feature that still tell me "coming soon"

Offline trading
Do you plan to implement offline trading anytime in the future or is it a resolute no? It would really help if we didn't have to wait for people to be online or have time to trade with us.

Steam loader
Some games on Steam handle the updates via their own loader. PoE uses Steam to deliver patches, which means copying the almost 7.5GB file to another place on the disk even for a small patch, which takes quite some time. This made many people who could play PoE over Steam go over to the standalone loader.
If they used the Steam loader, all of their friends on Steam would know they're playing PoE, which would give the game more visibility. Also the game would rise in Steam stats, which again, would give the game more visibility.
Do you have any numbers you can share about how many people use standalone vs Steam and how much bandwidth is saved by using Steam for patches?

ShaderCache
There are currently 20.000 files in my ShaderCache folder. Could you please elaborate on what these files are for? Does the game ever read from them on other gaming sessions, or are they just for the current session?
If they're indeed needed for another session, wouldn't it be better if they were all in one file, that could be easily defragmented? Because currently they're all over the disk and reading several small files from all around the HDD means a big performance drop.

HI and thnx for the good work!
I want to ask is any chance to put Greek language in the game?