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

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Acrosis wrote:

Well whatever option GGG chooses, they will get bad forum PR anyways.
You change the unique to have a downside, QQ will flood the forums.
You keep OP and completely broken uniques, there is still QQ, albeit slightly less.

People flooded the forums over losing like 20-30% overall armor and 7-8% total ES. I never hear people talk about silverbranch but they announced the nerf and people lost their shit.

Personally I'm in the let it all burn camp. People are assholes in general regardless of what you do people will rage.

Well, that was kind of the question I'm posing to GGG, why not just let it happen and deal with it.

I kinda agree with a lot of these issues, although not with some of the solutions or the analyses of why they are a problem to start with. Why people goes for certain builds & gear instead of other, etc.

Other issues that should be tackled and are linked with issues exposed by the OP: solo vs. group playing; intrinsic & explicit mods on rares and current ilvl progression; difficulty progression in endgame content etc.

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Xendran wrote:

The point of that post isn't about lioneye. It's about the fear of changing something because they feel it's "rude".

Do they care more about small temporary forum PR than the game?

Well, that will cost them the success of their company. Unfortunately we have just about 3 months before some of the necessary deep changes to the game can be done, because when the game is effectively released a lot of the core mechanics will be set up for good.

If the foundations are not strong enough by then, the life expectancy of the game will shorten and the game will die sooner rather than later. Short-term rage quitters will be a minority, most will come back and if the game gets better, it will be healthier for the finances of GGG. If not, the game will die. There are a lot of games which had gone though drama periods just to come out stronger of them, GGG seems to be terrified by these situations, and the compromising is killing the game.


But there may be other issues missing though going on here other that game balance, that is marketing issues and which is the target playerbase of GGG is trying to draw attention and retain. Problem is that 'ideal' playerbase they are trying to target (hybrid ARPG/theme-park MMO/sandbox gamer fan) may not exist (in long enough numbers), so in the end trying to compromise in some of their decisions they are hurting their own product.

I would just like to say I especially agree with the quest rewards being too limiting. And I also hate drop only gems, I'm looking at you multistrike.

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lethal_papercut wrote:

Treat the cause not the symptom.

I think the biggest candidate to fit this is that unique items are tradeable at all.

While that reeks of heresy to many an aRPGer, we have to acknowledge that we are no longer in the youth of internet communication. In fact, conversely, free trade of everything nowadays is more anti-aRPG in that it is expected that an item is bought rather than found.

Make unique items bound to account on drop and bound to character on use.
No longer will any unique, however powerful, be the go to choice, as you simple don't have that choice. Finding one of these items will be even more awesome and prompt rerolls and longevity.

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TheAnuhart wrote:

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lethal_papercut wrote:

Treat the cause not the symptom.

I think the biggest candidate to fit this is that unique items are tradeable at all.

While that reeks of heresy to many an aRPGer, we have to acknowledge that we are no longer in the youth of internet communication. In fact, conversely, free trade of everything nowadays is more anti-aRPG in that it is expected that an item is bought rather than found.

Make unique items bound to account on drop and bound to character on use.
No longer will any unique, however powerful, be the go to choice, as you simple don't have that choice. Finding one of these items will be even more awesome and prompt rerolls and longevity.

Well that wouldn't work since there are build-enabling uniques. How would someone play an FB character if they can't get an FB to drop?

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Acrosis wrote:

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TheAnuhart wrote:

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lethal_papercut wrote:

Treat the cause not the symptom.

I think the biggest candidate to fit this is that unique items are tradeable at all.

While that reeks of heresy to many an aRPGer, we have to acknowledge that we are no longer in the youth of internet communication. In fact, conversely, free trade of everything nowadays is more anti-aRPG in that it is expected that an item is bought rather than found.

Make unique items bound to account on drop and bound to character on use.
No longer will any unique, however powerful, be the go to choice, as you simple don't have that choice. Finding one of these items will be even more awesome and prompt rerolls and longevity.

Well that wouldn't work since there are build-enabling uniques. How would someone play an FB character if they can't get an FB to drop?

Several ways.

1) LG can be a 1 in 1 billion drop. FB can be 1 in 1000. etc.
I've been lucky to find 2 LGs, I must have vended 50 FBs, so that mechanic is already in game.

2) Only bind high tier unique items, let others remain fully tradeable.

3) As 2 but while tradeable, some unique items retain bind on use.



There are umpteen variable bind mechanics available to GGG.

LG/Kaom's/Shav's/ST are only an issue because anyone can, and will, choose them instantly.

The thought "Wow, what can I do with this?" has long been replaced with "Wow, this will fetch a good sum".

The thought "Wow, I'd love to find one of those" has long been replaced with "How much will that cost me?"

The idea to use rares and maybe one day find a unique, but not expect it, has been replaced with buying that unique before ever using a rare for the slot (level permitting).

People are pissed that some uniques are a no brainer choice. The issue is not their power, but that they are such an easily available choice at all.

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pneuma wrote:

Let's get right into it, separated by topic and with a few words before each and roughly ordered by severity within:

Unique balance

Whatever feelings exist for not wanting to scorn diamond/eternal supporters need to be quashed. Paying to design an item overpowered by design should be a mark of shame, not something that every donator should strive for. These have been getting worse recently which says that more overhead and checking is required before uniques go into the game.

A process must be decided on and stuck to in order to start removing the unbalanced uniques from the game, be it a downtime + database cleaning or simply discontinuing them. Legacy item issues harm new players to the game, so please keep that in mind when flippantly accepting legacy into the game.

Shavronne's Wrappings

Makes all non-Shavs low life infinitely less strong. As a build enabler, it should not also be on an extremely high base armor. Its synergy with RF (3x spell damage multiplier alongside PA) is simply too much to balance against. Needs "cannot be used with ZO" or "cannot regenerate ES" more generally or RF needs "does X% more damage while you have energy shield" such that RF cannot be kept up without effort. It should still be possible to fight your way through the burn with flasks and other skills, and your reward should be the gigantic damage multiplier.

Auxium

Yet another no downside, overpowered unique. All but removes two of the scariest things (chill/freeze) to lowlife/CI builds. Overshadows every rare belt and asks nothing in return. I also have no clue what happened here.

Eye of Chayula

No downsides to the one build that needs stun immunity the most: CI. This is the nearest in this "list of badness" to be acceptably balanced. It doesn't need much, just a little change like 30% reduced ES. The theme of this item should be "less es/life, immune to stuns" not "immune to stuns, only use this if you're CI".

Auxium, Shavronne's, Chayula,...
On one hand I agree to you that no-brainer items that completely remove certain build weaknesses are not my idea of good design.
On the other hand, WHY DO THESE WEAKNESSES EXIST IN THE FIRST PLACE? Is it fun to be one-shotted by a WIDE variety of TRASH MOBS? Is it fun to be permachilled/frozen until death? Does being permastunned by tittybitches rain of shots gives great gaming experience?

Some really good feedback in there. 2 points come to mind when reading your post.

Firstly, having high levels of armor is not overpowered. Getting it from a single keystone is. Get rid of iron reflexes? maybe... but only if there's something viable to replace it to achieve high levels of armor. Removing it at the moment would force people into endurance charges or spending far more passive points than is fair (realistically most players would just get more hp nodes...).

Secondly, I agree that labyrinthe and larger area map mods should be removed as it is a pain wasting huge amounts of orbs for a single overpowered affix. However map drops would need to be buffed to compensate. It's far too hard/RNG to get into high level maps already without removing the best map/exp producing mods there are.

Edit: also WED gem should not be nerfed at least not for melee. Melee are already behind in terms of survival so a huge WED nerf like 40% less ele damage would be crippling and just another nail in the coffin. Perhaps a nerf to it's range effectiveness could be implemented or (and it seems my points are beginning to follow a pattern now) other melee supports could be buffed to accompany a WED nerf.

Every unique listed is difficult to get and/or expensive. That's the trade off. For non full-time players there is virtually no chance of getting 5ex orbs for Lioneye or the 10 or whatever for Shavronnes, etc.

Players like the TC forget what it's like to be starting out or not living and breathing PoE. You think everyone is playing like you. If you've spent 1000's of hours in this game then yeah, you are going to have items and the knowledge to be able to use skills and do things that some players aren't. That doesn't mean GGG need's to completely overhaul the game.