The Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Harmful Content

I don't mean literally everyone but I tend to stay ahead of the curve. It's not noticeable here but it's clear on reddit where I can see myself get downvoted one week then upvoted the next saying almost the same exact thing.

A year or so ago, id have praised this as fine consolidated feedback. Unfortunately, while GGG may listen and respond to feedback, theyve proven increasingly unlikely to act upon it. At this point its really hard to see more of the same oft-repeated feedback having any real effect on GGGs development process or the game itself.

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Xendran wrote:

Tried to prevent the game from spiralling into this, didn't succeed.
If GGG wants to continue making money, they'll get it eventually.

Indeed. The amount of striking similarities between the the development of PoE and HGL, and between the decisions of GGG and Flagship, has become rather disturbing as of late. And as Flagship so aptly proved, not getting it is definitely an option.

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KoTao wrote:

A year or so ago, id have praised this as fine consolidated feedback. Unfortunately, while GGG may listen and respond to feedback, theyve proven increasingly unlikely to act upon it. At this point its really hard to see more of the same oft-repeated feedback having any real effect on GGGs development process or the game itself.

"

Xendran wrote:

Tried to prevent the game from spiralling into this, didn't succeed.
If GGG wants to continue making money, they'll get it eventually.

Indeed. The amount of striking similarities between the the development of PoE and HGL, and between the decisions of GGG and Flagship, has become rather disturbing as of late. And as Flagship so aptly proved, not getting it is definitely an option.

Oh god, I forgot about HGL. That game was kinda fun, but got tedious fairly fast, and failed at higher levels. There was the unable to be killed guardian build, which was so boring to play because it was only burn damage, and you just tanked your way through everything. And then there was the RRR marksman, with ricochet and rebound, where you land one crit and everything on the screen dies. And skills which were completely broken, such as the air strikes and grenades.

Then they entirely remade the MM class, compeltely, and it was far more boring but more balanced, while the other classes were just a mish mash of not quite effective or ridiculous

+1

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pneuma wrote:

Whatever feelings exist for not wanting to scorn diamond/eternal supporters need to be quashed.

Until you have gone through this process yourself, you can't know how completely wrong you are.

Other than that I'd say your post is pretty spot on.

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Aux wrote:

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pneuma wrote:

Whatever feelings exist for not wanting to scorn diamond/eternal supporters need to be quashed.

Until you have gone through this process yourself, you will realize how completely wrong you are.

Other than that I'd say your post is pretty spot on.

Yes, having spoken to those diamond supporters (less so to eternal but assume its the same), the actual input they have is not the specific balance numbers in the end. It is all GGG

Frenzy is a good single target skill and I like it because of the frenzy mechanic. I think all of the skills can be good single target though that's why I didn't bother mentioning it. I also am not referring to early game because here any skill can kill. I haven't ever heard of someone doing puncture with a bow and I would guess it's just bad, or it's highly underrated but I am going to guess bad. Nobody can judge ice arrow effectively because you will get kicked from a party so damn fast if you use it... I have no idea how good that skill can be. Split arrow is generally considered worse then Lightning arrow because La and it shares the same concept as la, Hit a lot of targets.

I personally do not want every single skill to work like lightning arrow, You know just spraying the skill. It's fun but this a RPG where people play different roles for different benefits. Similar to dark souls I can use a halbred when I want to attack multiple targets from afar or I can switch to a short sword for faster speed.

I'd like to be able to do Aoe,Chain,Burning,Chilling,Shocking type damages, I don't want to just do it all at once. I made my own feedback thread awhile back explaining how disgusting it is that everything is thrown together and there will never be equally balanced elements so long as this continues but it didn't get much notice. Poe has literally turned build diversity into a giant blop of characters who have all benefits at once.

We still need more skills and I mean a ton more skills. Why is there no Ice claw or an extra benefit to puncture if used with a claw? What about thunder claw or Flaming claws. How about some specific skills for daggers as well? I mean you want build diversity but you sit here and ruin the things that do work while making the stuff that barely works even weaker but yet we haven't been seeing news skills that were mentioned?

Desync is a core issue, It is just going to get worse as more stuff is piled on top of it, Yet you are not even keeping us updated on ways you are tweaking the skills that cause this.


I thought their overall goal was to make an online action packed role playing game with a lot of different skill choices and potential ways to make builds. Yet we see the same builds being ran and we see something nerfed.

Unfortunately though as I have mentioned I can't even fully test out builds because I am in onslaught and people die so much everything is always expensive. I

I don't even want to see act 3x in the current state of balancing. No doubt everyone will QQ about how hard it is. Even though few actually know how hard this game is and it is those who buy new gear all of the time.

I hit 73 in hardcore doing fireball with lmp and stacking cast speed... I had 1k damage per fire ball and I cleared content pretty fast. Dare I say it was easy? Well that guy died because I couldn't afford to stack the needed regen spell damage and life on top of armor chaos resist and regular resist and using windscream for dual curse.

I dumped currency into that guy, The wand I used cost me like 2 something exalteds at the time, So did his ring and even the boots where going for an exalted. I was up to 1.80 cast speed with enough mana regen to constantly cast all of my skills. His gems where at like level 16 and I still had plenty of room for growth, Hell I was only using 4 links. The simple issue was that my guy had no room for armor. I couldn't drop regen because that's what he was based on. My previous knowledge of Diablo 2 told me that the best way to get dext since it wasn't anything but an atribute needed for skills was to stack it on gear. I had 25+ dext on gloves 50+ dext on my ammy and another 20+ dext on my armor. I was at 2.6k life and I hadn't even finished upgrading + my boots had no life on them.

The game is easy but it requires gear that nobody is finding, How can you even balance a game that requires items if nobody even has the proper build enabling items...

What they are doing makes no sense to me, It seems like they are playing a different game then we are.

Read every word in your OP, and almost the entire thread.

Recommended reading for any concerned fan, imho.

THANK YOU!

Sort of surprised to not see the curse/aura issue up there. They're pretty glaring exceptions to Qarl's recent balance post in the tradeoffs and "it depends" department. Every build benefits by using at least one curse and directly benefits from multiple auras. Curses are the least offenders here because of the hardcap on the number of curses and the investment required to push beyond that cap, either through the tree or through gear. Auras, however, are a little out of control given how general their boosts are and relative ease of being able to run many. I realize that GGG wants players to have the ability to pick from a suite of synergizing mechanics, and thus a single aura cap would be destructive. But by the same token, if builds are running every aura that benefits them whatsoever, and spending little to do so, then the decision-making burden on players is drastically lightened. I propose that some sort of cap on the number of auras available be introduced in addition to the mana reserve, and some additional passives added to increase the power and number of auras. Perhaps in the form of a keystone such as:

Tranquility
15% increased Aura effect
Can use 1 additional aura
Cannot curse

Or perhaps an equally-potent (and melee enabling) option to convert auras into area debuffs through a socketable that inverts the effect of an aura. So, for example, Determination would reduce nearby mob armor by ~30%, Grace would reduce their evasion rating by ~1000, and Vitality would degenerate ~1.5% of mob max life per second. Obviously numbers and interactions would need to be tweaked, but my overall point is that the current state of the aura game needs to involve tougher, more build defining choices and bigger tradeoffs.

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Real_Wolf wrote:

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KoTao wrote:

A year or so ago, id have praised this as fine consolidated feedback. Unfortunately, while GGG may listen and respond to feedback, theyve proven increasingly unlikely to act upon it. At this point its really hard to see more of the same oft-repeated feedback having any real effect on GGGs development process or the game itself.

"

Xendran wrote:

Tried to prevent the game from spiralling into this, didn't succeed.
If GGG wants to continue making money, they'll get it eventually.

Indeed. The amount of striking similarities between the the development of PoE and HGL, and between the decisions of GGG and Flagship, has become rather disturbing as of late. And as Flagship so aptly proved, not getting it is definitely an option.

Oh god, I forgot about HGL. That game was kinda fun, but got tedious fairly fast, and failed at higher levels. There was the unable to be killed guardian build, which was so boring to play because it was only burn damage, and you just tanked your way through everything. And then there was the RRR marksman, with ricochet and rebound, where you land one crit and everything on the screen dies. And skills which were completely broken, such as the air strikes and grenades.

Then they entirely remade the MM class, compeltely, and it was far more boring but more balanced, while the other classes were just a mish mash of not quite effective or ridiculous

2023:

Oh god, i forgot about PoE. That game was kinda fun, but got tedious fairly fast, and failed at higher levels. There was the unable to be killed CI Dischargebuild, which was so boring to play because it was only burn damage, and you just tanked your way through everything. And then there was the Lioneye Crit LA archer with LMP and Chain, where you land one crit and everything on the screen dies. And skills which were completely broken, such as fire trap and discharge.

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Uvne wrote:

Sort of surprised to not see the curse/aura issue up there. They're pretty glaring exceptions to Qarl's recent balance post in the tradeoffs and "it depends" department.

I made a thread about this issue that fixes it in a nice simple clean way.