Consolidated Feedback After A Year Of Playing

First of all I would like to address skills. Skills are hugely important, they define your character & optimising them is every player's goal.

POE is a game about primary skills & because of that fact it seems imperative that there are a good selection of primary skills available for the player to choose from. Initially it seems like there are a plethora of skills to choose from but with just a little experience you quickly realise that there are in fact just a few skills that truly cut the mustard. The problems with the others vary from damage output to mana costs to performance issues but in most cases it feels like their problems could be 'fixed' by stat adjustments & not the fact that they are just bad skills.

I want to talk about ranged skills first as I have tried them all & have more experience with them compared to melee abilities.

Many of the ranged skills that people choose to use today were the skills that people chose to use a year ago. Specifically Freezing Pulse, Spark, Lightning Arrow & Ethereal Knives. All 4 of these skills (& their respective typical support gems) have received at least 1 nerf & in some cases 2 or 3 yet they remain the most used & the most useable skills.

Arguably these skills are in a good place right now, they obviously work well within the game but not only that players are apparently having fun using them as well. I believe these skills should be used as a benchmark for the other ranged skills.

The current ranged skills that fall (too far) below this benchmark are:

Burning Arrow - Low Damage, lacking AOE, not really different to auto attack.

Ice Shot - Stats should be fine as the are the same as prenerf LA but for the most part the problem stems from performance issues.

Poison Arrow - Decent at low levels but outclasses at high levels also Chaos Damage is not like other elemental damages. Lack of other chaos abilities.

Puncture - Should be a support gem.

Split Arrow - Mechanically sound but needs a damage boost.

Fireball - stats are ok but it is very boring due to it's slow cast speed. Also falls into an area with a lack of fire skills.

Firestorm - Needs to many supports to make it good and even then it's not really good. Needs to be more responsive & easier to support.

Frost Wall - Lacks application scenarios.

Ice Nova - Good early game, outclassed later on.

Incinerate - DOA, mana cost does not match effectiveness.

Power Siphon - a good skill late game but it's dependency on a well rolled wand make it very niche. not only that it is the only wand specific skill adding extra niche to the nicheness.

Some skills were dead on arrival, an example being Arctic Breath. I truly feel sorry for this skill. It was introduced in Closed Beta at a time when Freezing Pulse Witches dominated the top of the table. Upon arrival almost every cold caster tried the gem either to self cast or to replace the popular ice spear totem, in both cases it was outplayed. High mana costs, slow cast speeds, lower damage & screen lag immediately banished Arctic Breath to the redundancy bin where it has dwelled ever since. Never once has this skill been shown some love, like a mother rejecting a newborn GGG turned it's back on Arctic Breath out the gate.

In a similar fashion Arc never really made it as a primary skill. It was introduced to the game at a time when there was almost no selection of Lightning Spells but once again it was outplayed by skills already in the game. I forget if Arc was ever fettled with post launch but to this day it remains a weak choice for a primary skill.

At the end of April this year we were told by GGG that they were "looking at rebalancing every skill in the game." They started out with Puncture, Lightning Warp, Freeze Mine & Discharge. Well I think we all know how that turned out but while Discharge is out of control Puncture is still a weak skill that should actually be a support & Freeze Mine seems like it is meant for another game entirely. Lightning warp is primarily used as a teleport so I think the users appreciated the increase in speed but the extra damage is essentially inconsequential.

Was it a good patch? Well, it sent the overall skill balance way off kilter but Discharge has been left as it is so are we to believe GGG consider it 'balanced'? It is very confusing.

Overall there are just a handful of ranged skills that work well & the majority of them fall too far below the benchmark, as they stand they are wasted time & effort, hopefully GGG come through with their statement to rebalance all skills but after their recent efforts I feel like the primary skill selection for the player is just the same as it was a year ago. When it comes to choice of primary skills I feel like there has been no progress whatsoever in a year, so if we are heading to an official launch in just 2 months then I fear we will get there with the game in just the same state as it was over a year ago in closed beta.

As it stands there are many skills in the game that are currently a wasted use of development time, rebalancing them could result in list of primary skill choices for the player being more than doubled.

When it comes to melee I don't feel as qualified to talk on the subject. I have made a Ground Slammer with Dom Blow, a Cleaver & a Cycloner. I haven't leveled any of them above 60 and for the most part I have been using overpowered leveling uniques on them so I feel like my experience with melee has been made trivial so far. So all I can say for now is that between 1-60 you can pretty much use any melee gem & 1 shot mobs by using a few uniques in the game. Late game more issues present themselves but I think it is more of a survival issue for melee rather than a lack of viable skills, maybe I am wrong but I don't claim to be an expert in melee.

tl;dr There are just a few primary skills that work well, they should be used as benchmark to buff other skills resulting in much more choice for the player, removing redundancy & essentially creating content from nothing.

Totems are way too powerful. Not so much in terms of damage but the way that they bypass many mechanics of the game.
They have unlimited mana to cast abilities,
They cannot be cursed,
They are not damaged by ground fire or chaos clouds,
They pull agro,
They benefit from player's charges,
They have a long default duration,
They do not involve passive investment,
They share stats with the player,
They bypass reflect/thorns mechanics for the player.
Totems in POE have become the player in many cases, where the player behaves more like a minion of the totem rather than actually engaging with the game's mechanics. Totems should be a companion to the player.
Totems have had their nerfs in the past and I feel in terms of damage they are in a good place right now, what is the issue is the overwhelming list of game mechanics they bypass. They just trivialise the game.

Next I want to touch on mob skills & abilities. Act3 added many new mobs to the game & while a good selection of them have abilities we don't see in Acts1&2 there are also many that just run up to you and punch you. Far too many mobs in the game are 'run up and punchers', essentially meat bags where the aim of the game is to kill them between agro range and you smelling their breath. I understand they are only meant as cannon fodder anyway but I really feel like there are too many of them resulting in 'afk' mindless grinding.

Some mobs in POE are interesting. As a benchmark I will use Necromancers. Like them or loathe them Necros are one of POE's most interesting mobs. Coupled with their minions they present a unique situation to the player. Decisions have to be made between killing the mobs & focusing the necro, depending on the minions & the abilities of the necro each encounter with a necro is somewhat diverse from the last. They also present a diverse yet equally difficult challenge to both melee & ranged charas. With all that said Necros do have their problems, sometimes the AI doesn't seem to know what to do, maybe an issue with desync.

Act3 went whirling, leaper, charger mad! It seems like every other mob flings itself at you from the get go. Whirling bladers, rolling rock dudes, leaping sewer vaginas, flying ribbons & shield charging elite zooming towards you makes you happy when you get back to area with just 'run up & punchers'. With the chargers having an agro from offscreen & the rolling rocks desyncing literally every roll the addition of so many of these mobs has not added any enjoyment to the game for me. They make Act3 an unenjoyable place to be & due to their technical problems create frustration while making the game feel unpolished.

I called for the rolling rocks to be removed to Alpha almost immediately into OB as I felt like they made the game feel like an alpha. Many others also expressed the same opinion but as far as I am aware whirling blades was always far down on the list of priorities. If they make it to launch without being touched I will be quite disheartened as I really feel it lowers the overall quality & polish of the game.

What I am hoping for in the future is for more mobs with interesting abilities that create situations forcing the player to think, much like the necro example. Mobs with AOE, slows, ground denials, minion interactions, specific formations (tank & healer combo, glass cannon with meat shields, ect) are the kinds of things I think POE could really do with to make the grind that bit more of an interesting experience. The Weaver encounter was just made more interesting so I believe GGG know that more is needed but considering little else has changed in a year would it be safe to say not much will change between now & launch?

tl;dr Necros are a good example of mob design, too many mobs are boring & just punch you, some mobs abilities are broken & make the game feel unpolished, Weaver patch gives hope but not much has changed in a year...

Aside from the main quest line there is very little to actually do in POE. There are a few areas in the game that seem to be set aside as farming zones but other than that the player has very little options to vary gameplay. There is no specific reason to go to the side zones however & they aren't even efficient to farm either...so what are they for? Give us a reason to go there, make it interesting, make it something more than grinding Docks or Fellshrine & more than anything make them efficient. Min maxing is the name of the game and unless the farming zones are efficient zones they will remain redundant.

Shrines, traps, portals to random zones, mimic chests, scenery that attacks, doors that lock until the room is clear, ground denials, dynamic events & all things nice. They are the interesting things that break up the grind, that make every zone that little bit unique from the last. POE has some nice lore touches with the carved stones & graffiti but there is very little to make this Old Fields passthrough any different to the last. I really think before release we need something to make the game a bit more dynamic than it is, to have nothing is definitely missing the mark.

tl;dr POE needs more 'things to do' other than the main quest line to make the game feel dynamic & interesting. The current side zones have no apparent reason to exist.

CB was all about CI but the start of OB was all about life now we are back to CI but the changes have meant we are relatively in the same place we were last year. Patch 0.10.0 did nothing good for the game. Everything we were told it was going to do it didn't.

More than ever life is the least attractive option & if you do choose to go life you have to get just as many nodes as you did before & get life on all your gear. The health user gained nothing from 0.10.0.

I am not claiming to know how to fix it & I understand it is easier said than done but there is no doubt in my mind that what we have now makes the reliance on health nodes & life gear even more paramount than it was before. As there has been little said or done about the issue from GGG since 0.10.0 are we are to assume that they are happy with the situation heading into launch? I am very interested to know if GGG feel 0.10.0 'met it's goals'?

Right next to the health issue is Armour/Evasion & Resists. Armour & Evasion are allegedly intended to provide 'equal but different' forms of defense aside from just stacking health while resists are essential for everyone. The reality is that both Armour & Evasion don't really provide adequate enough defense to actually drop a health node.

With Armour Vs Evasion, Armour almost always wins. A little bit of Armour is something but a little bit of Evasion is worth nothing so you find that if you do want to go Evasion then you really have to spend many more nodes in it where as an armour equivalent will have more nodes to spend on either health or damage.

Iron Reflexes + Grace is a staple of many builds. It should not exist. As long as IR is in the game people will always gravitate towards it. CI in particular. Evasion will always essentially be 'converted armour' unless stacked to the max & even then Armour conversion is still better. Point for point Armour>Evasion so for IR to be a straight conversion it will always be the 'better' choice. It needs to be removed or changed.

None of the characters I have made have specced into pure armour or evasion, the reason for that is because life is all you need. Particularly when leveling. The only time armour starts to become a thing is in high maps where even small mobs start doing big hits to the armour equation.

Basically what I am saying is that health trumps both armour & evasion so they end up just being a byproduct of your tree & gear.

Max elemental resists are mandatory. I don't really know how I feel about that but it is what it is. They aren't that hard to cap so that is why I feel indifferent to it but as a concept I think it isn't really as interesting as it could be. I like the idea of not being able to max all your resists & having to specialise in certain elements, but the game is not in a state where certain areas only have certain elements attached to them. We find fire, ice & lighting mobs all within the same areas so it is up to the player to cap all 3. Maybe if maps could roll 'Contains only cold/fire or lightning mobs' players could specialise.

Hybrids are never the best option in terms of gear. You are almost always going to be better with a 'pure' es/ev/ar base item. The only exception is godly endgame gear for an EB user but for the other 99% of the game it matters not.

The passive tree at first glance is an overwhelming sight to behold but a player with experience will realise that there are many areas of the tree that either sit in awkward, hard to reach areas or are just redundant due to the use of highways to reach stretch goal keystones.

The layout of the tree has resulted in certain paths being objectively more efficient than others & certain combinations of keystones with their respective highways are now the 'cookie cutters' of the tree. This has left certain clusters of nodes that do not sit on those highways essentially redundant. It is not worth the points to get them, ever. This is compounded by the life nodes stacking.

I feel many areas of the tree could do with a buff & I think we could also see the repetition of Keystones. Many of the cookie cutter trees come from having to reach a certain combination of Keystones (e.g. CI+IR+US) and then picking up whatever else is on the way, if there were more keystones then players could actually specialise in certain areas of the tree instead of just taking highways.

One of the only builds I know that actually stays in 'it's area of the tree' is a claw/dagger shadow. Almost every other build I have played is either stretching to get Keystones or Health Nodes. The example that highlighted it the most to me was kripp's cold caster Marauder. I had tried to make crit based caster witches but in almost every respect the Marauder (or Shadow) was better. It felt odd to have the best crit caster be a Marauder. In some ways it makes a mockery of the whole class system.

We all know the contentious uniques out there & I am sure there are many more in pipeline. While I feel the current situation means there are only a few really outstanding uniques creating item imbalances I try to remember that there are still 100's of supporter uniques to come & any GGG want to add, so I think we all just have to hold our breath & wait and see what happens. It is surely going to take a long time to implement them all but hopefully between now & launch we see many more added giving us a better understanding of what it actually a balanced unique. Hopefully when all is said & done everyone will have got better at making them & if there are still any outliners then they can be dealt with. Just don't take too long implementing them would be my advice.

When it comes to rares I think it safe to assume that once all the uniques are in the game there is going to have to be some adjustment to rares' stats otherwise they are going to become completely redundant in endgame. It will be a case of Normal - Magic Gear, Cruel - Rares, Merciless - Rares & Uniques, Endgame - All Uniques. Not the end of the world if it turns out like that though.

I love magic finding. It is what I have done most in the game. From my hours of experience I can say without a doubt in my mind that increased quantity/rarity via gear & gems is absolutely too powerful. The difference between wearing lots of MF & none is night & day in terms of drop rates. In both a single player & multiplayer scenarios it is absolutely advantageous for players to be wearing magic find.

There has been a lot of talk about in the forums but I don't believe removing it is the right decision. It does add more choice to gear decisions & I feel that is a good thing but it should never be as strong as it is now. In a game all about finding stuff it is a no brainer to wear powerful magic find gear.

IMO a player should only ever be able to get 20% quant & 50% rarity. That is a nice bonus but not really worth going out of your way for if it doesn't interest you. With that the values on gear would have to be dropped very low. +3%IIQ Max, 8%IIR Max on each slot of gear would be my suggestion. It's just too strong.

Brings me onto Drop Rates & Currency sinks & lord RNGesus. Assuming the player has zero magic find they will have a very unrewarding experience in terms of finding loot & currency on a new account. I have played enough hours & leveled enough charas to know what the RNG in this game feels like, and I can tell you if you are still here after a year you are a masochist. I play self found, solo & I must be fucking crazy cos I have somehow persevered through the harshest of RNG times to still be here today. It compounds the Magic Find issue and I feel if that was addressed then the base magic find could be increased by 50% across the board.

RNG on items is too high by late game (69+). I do not see why gear should still roll bracket 1 stats on a level 79 piece of gear. Harking back to the rares vs. uniques point I think part of the reason rares will lose out to uniques is because of their wild RNG.

Punishing drop rates, massive RNG & the addition of weak stats to 'dilute the item pool' is just too much. I appreciate the need for RNG in these games but I really think you guys took it a step too far.Particularly as the game now seems to revolve around 4 month leagues & not a long drawn out grind in Standard.

If 4month leagues are 'where it's at' then I feel the RNG should be tailored a little more for players to end up reasonably geared at the end of the 4months.

Maps as an endgame is a great idea. Paying for maps as an endgame is horrible. As a solo player I cannot justify spending all my currency rolling maps for negative return. It just doesn't make any sense & it is totally unrewarding. A player should not go broke just trying to run relevant content. I no longer run maps and only level my charas to lvl80.

For me, at this point in time, POE has no endgame. I have taken to leveling alts so I have a full set of builds ready to go for launch. If after launch GGG continue to ignore endgame & the map system by ploughing straight into Act4 I fear they may not have many players left to see it.

The looting patch was possibly the single best patch this game has received in the last 12months. There is no doubt in my mind that looting options were a purely positive addition to the game. I see more public parties in general, I see PA & SA parties, I see public map parties which didn't even exist before the patch & I feel all my posts have been vindicated by the results. I always said everyone will be a winner & it turns out they are. <3

I made a huge mistake in D3 of buying all my gear so I decided in this game I would not make that same mistake so now I play solo self found. It has given me the stamina to wait for those good drops because it all came too easy in D3. But lately even my stamina is drawing thin. As a solo player the full weight of the games multilayered RNG is square on your shoulders. It is just too much. The solo player does not see adequate return for their time invested.

Multiplayer can be fun & hectic from a gameplay standpoint but from a min maxing standpoint it is a no brainer. The problem comes to a head once you start doing maps. The only way to proceed to the highest level maps is in a group of dedicated players. It is offlimits to the solo or even the slightest of casual players. Not because they can't handle the content, but because they aren't lucky enough to find it. Content locked behind RNG stinks & when you know you can't even get there without grouping even though you could handle it is a step too far.

The bonus' from playing multiplayer should be focused on promoting the social aspect & not be attractive just because without it you can't progress. The experience boost & magic find bonus' compound the issue further.

Trading in POE is archaic. There is little to help the player find their buyer/seller & it ends up quite time consuming. I personally couldn't care less. I enjoy solo self found, I believe finding my gear & not trading for it is the most rewarding way to play. As a solo self founder it does make me a little sick to know that the drop rates have been adjusted to account for trading but I realise there will never be a solo league so I have resigned myself to the situation.

If I were intending to trade I am sure I would have a lot more to say about POE's trading system, or lack of, but as it is I simply just do not care about trades, the state of the economy, exchange rates or any of that stuff. I just feel sorry for the folks who are still trading for all their gear. Whatever floats your boat.

I am really pissed at GGG when it comes to MTXs. I have been vocal about it in the past but essentially I feel like GGG have failed to capitalise on certain windows of opportunity to make money.

OB launch was a massive chance to make money, 70k players online at once & a great hype about the game with players eager to drop some cash on something cool. What were we offered in terms of MTXs...garbage, that's what. The dances (WTF!), skins for Fireball & Firestorm (unpopular skills) & a crown that makes you look like Santa Clause. Sorry to be so blunt but the offerings at launch were dismal.

Like any game there is a drop off after the initial hype and many players left the game, a chance to suck some of their dollars gone, they will probably never return. I am annoyed at GGG for having such a poor selection of MTXs at launch, not only did they fail to make money but they also failed to offer the players something cool. Everyone lost out.

Since then there have been a few more decent MTXs but also a fair few rushed ones. The latest being the Skull Hood. It could have been the coolest thing ever, as it is it looks like a goofy scream mask. The latest choice to make an Aura MTX after lowering their quality & still not actually making skins for the popular primary skills is a little embarrassing at this stage.

When will you offer MTXs for the popular skills & aspects of the game???!

Pure EV is certainly WAYYYY to fragile compared to a similar value of armour, its ridiculous, and as long as that is true IR holds too much weight for sure. But I have a dual dagger ranger going atm with ar/ev life based hybrid and its really good at tanking. The first melee Ive played where I can just faceroll someone like Kole in lunairs/maps without even considering the chance I could die. The stats are 5k armour and 8k ev, ish.

The 5k armour is essential, well at least 4k, more so than the ev and there is the problem you rightly mention. But once you stack 8k ev on top someone like kole can only hit you once out of every 3 or so shots. With 3k life, 5k armour, a granite and 3 endurance charges you can take that 1 slam at point blank and you know at the most hes going to be able to get off 2 or 3 slams before you kill him, so youre fine. My 24k armour IR EK marauder could take a hit off him no problem, but I certainly wouldnt be sticking around for the next one given he can sometimes just throw down 2 in quick succession. No probs Im ranged but if I was melee I would feel a lot less safe with IR than I do my hybrid.

Ill be honest I havent tried full ev since the patch with acrobatics, glide, the full package, but with no damage reduction in play I cant help but feel its got to be a seriously risky strat.