Is Path of Exile as addictive as Diablo 2?

YAY, I am off probation and can respond to this.

Note regarding my comments about D2, I played almost exclusively D2 Classic (hated LoD extras like charms and runewords), so my D2 comments are regarding D2 ladder classic

I have a few things to say on the topic. The information in all the links is very interesting, and does apply in part to all three games.

What I find interesting though is the assumption it is ALL gear related.

But it isn't, there are OTHER factors that are very important to take into account.

D2 --> Levels, to spells go up, stats go up, and items
D3 --> Levels (until 60 when it was boredom pre paragon), items
PoE --> Levels (passive skilltree), items, skill gems levels

What we see here is that D3, especially at level 60, all of a sudden the ONLY 'juice' was items. This hurt the game significantly, and paragon points really improved this significantly (though still the variety was not enough).

Take things like levels. If we look at a single character, sure, it can get 'boring' from the levelling portion later, BUT we should also consider that all three games had the whole 'new' character type, where you start a new character and play it differently.

D3 once more failed in this, by making all monks the same as other monks, D2 had some issues with diversity for some classes (D2 Classic, only din build is hammerdin, only useful sorc forz orb or blizz, amazon only lightnin jav/spear, barbs WC and WW, and no one liked nec's for laddering just for pvp), but in PoE there is thanks to a combination of passive tree + skill gems a wide variety so you can replay the game with different characters and be different.

In terms of addiction, D2 as scrotie said did do an AMAZING job of hiding the button you were pressing, so while playing you didn't realise it was you pressing the button that was giving you the juice, you thought you were pressing the button for the buttons sake, and juice was just there for you when you wanted it.

D3 didn't have this after level 60, because the juice was diluted and bland, all you got was this pap of items, none of which tasted good (partly AH, partly slow down of items), and you weren't gaining ANYTHING except items at that point.

PoE has a similar slow down lategame atm due to XP gain, items similar slowdown, and skill gems cap at 20. But the point to make is that this is similar to D2 in level slowing down as only able to run Chaos Sanc or cheat to do Baal in classic, your skills are all max level except ones you don't care about/synergy ones, and items that improve are hard to come by.



PoE does have a side effect that due to improved communication systems, social systems, (even if they are bad, they are better than D2's was), that you can SEE where you are on the item scale a lot easier than before. This is sort of an issue that is unsolvable, and I don't think it should be the focus on fixing this. I think the focus should be on showing that the apple juice is also tasty, and that you don't have to just be getting orange juice.

Items are always the longest running thing you can upgrade, because at a certain point your skills and your passives are maxed, finished, and done. But at a certain point items will be too, its just further ahead due to more RNG of the value range on the items.

While I agree that item mods can be improved significantly (Made a post analysing all the possible affixes and their value/worth, disappeared quite quickly though as apparently no one else cares), and it definitely should (Love Novalisks suggestions, they all look interesting to have as a random affix on rares), we also have to remember that this isn't a game of having ONE marauder as your only character ever, but like D2 having a WW barb, a summoner nec, a bone spirit nec, a hammerdin, a chargedin for entertaining PVP, and so on.




But finally, uniques. This is something that PoE has sort of, while not failed, but not been entirely successful. There are plenty of uniques that are very good, like searing touch, setup correctly and doing the right thing. There are broken BiS uniques that rares can not compete with at all except as perfect drops which are 1000x rarer than the unique itself, and there are low level levelling uniques.

But what we don't have are those 'tradeoff' uniques of low level to the same extent. They are there, sure, for some, but in some way this doesn't come through. You had uniques like tarnhelm, +1 to all skills, so significant in its effect that you wore it despite getting not much else out of it (some MF its true, but yeah). You had gloves like frostburn and magefist, completely changing your character because of the games mana/cast speed mechanics which would be just 'average' in PoE due to the passive tree.

So many of the 'omg' things just can't be recreated same for same, and the 'cool' items still sort of have this feel of that they are stat jugglers rather than amazing game changers.

All your lightning damage is chaos damage? Well cool, but.... thats just a stat change

Boosted attacks, but no chest armour... cool, but thats a trade off that you judge

Staff thats strong, but you lose shield... cool, same sort of things.

Gloves that offer MF but less stats.... well yeah, thats a thing you look at if you need the stats, if not get MF

Helm that gives you +phys dmg but no extra damage taken... tradeoff as usual

Boots that give you less aspd but tons of health regen from frenzy charges... do you need life regen? Yes/no, use them/don't.

Boots that give you more summons/stronger... are you a summoner, take them then.

Imo PoE became no different from D3 but instead of boosting stats you boost Res,Defense,Mana.


PoE is quiet weak and no different from any average MMO which dies quiet fast.


Compare Combat:
The PoE combat system is poor and the mechanics are really lazy, such as one roll for all projectiles or all strikes.
Mana issues all over the place. Links decide the power of the spell and most of the time the mana costs will overwhelm regeneration and kill speed with several links.
The Potionsystem is poor. There isn't a single flask mod like refills 30% of the charges per minute.


D3 has a proper combat system and D2 also has a proper combat system.


Risk/Reward:
D2: There were always new rare mods to unlock in classic uniques to drop in LoD
D3: Poor because totally focussed on the AH.
PoE: Abysmal. There never was a risk reward. Other games reward you to do harder areas in terms of more gold.
In PoE you acquire far more currency grinding normal than cruel or merciless.
All you get doing high quantity maps without rarity is a full white item screen.

Drop Rates:
D2: Good since bossruns and MF runs didn't need much time.
D3: Totally unrewarding, items don't help you to progress.
PoE: Poor.


Crafting:
D2: Good
D3: Poor
PoE: Good idea but horribly executed look due lack of risk/reward and nerfed vendor receipes and horrible droprates.


Trading:
D2: besides a poor tradeinterface trading always worked till 1.10. There were many games where you could trade craft ingredients vs better items.
D3: because of one shot difficulty named Inferno using the AH was necessary because progressing was just a matter of luck especially on hardcore.
PoE: It was fine till the vendor receipe/chest nerfs splitting the community into 2 fields. The extremly rich and the extremly poor players.

End Game:
D2: Poor
D3: Poor
PoE: Poor
All 3 games have a poor endgame. In PoE you will end up grinding catacombs/lunaris/docks for a long time because mapdroprates outside of maps got heavily nerfed compared to CB. Sustaining a high level map pool can only be acquired throguh RMT.



Long Term goals:
D2: Level 99, many characters with a feeling they are finished(level 80-90), PVP EQ
D3: RMAH Profits. Paragon leveling which is a poor excuse for a missing Endgame.
PoE: Level 100?->Far too time intensive. Even several MMO players got sick of Mapping.
Perfect EQ?->Only way to get perfect EQ is via trading. You will never find enough orbs to craft your stuff.

PVP:
D2: The only reason that game stayed alive that long
D3: What PVP? A delayed Boring arena PVP.
PoE: Boring Arena PVP and CT with massive damage/level protection issues.
Crit shotgunning, Freezing in PVP(chill is already more than strong enough), unequal scaling of damage.


Builds:
D2: Till 1.10 it was just run to the level 30 skills and max them. There were the more powerful ones which resulted in cookiecutters, ok ones and weak ones.
In 1.10 there were more builds but that was heavily unbalanced and runewords didn't help at all by runes which were barely found/crafted in a legit way. There were the cookiecutter builds, there were those builds which needed some skillers and there were the poor builds which were really hard to play due immunities and high resist.

D3: Everything got reduced to items and stats period!Just like any MMO.

PoE: In CB PoE did quiet well besides the existance of some keystones. The skilltree was far more important.
In OB the most popular builds got nerfed and items especially for CI got nerfed.
But poor mechanics still exist up to this day. Such as a crit based build being far more effective than a constant damage based builds.

With the patch that nerfed the HP nodes there was a big change to damage of mobs because some players having acquired extremly good EQ cried about the game being too easy while they mainly played dualtotem builds and rolled size+ pack/magic/rare maps.
This change totally ruined the idea of builds, because several bosses only turned into a Gearcheck + One Shot mechanic. No matter what kind of skilltree you have. A boss will always one shot you if you fail the gear check. Such as 75% resists, on high maps 90% resists.
This is no different from MMOs. Simulating difficulty by Gearchecks, while MMO target profit from subscriptions/real money market.
This is a really sensetive area because PoE has Evasion and Reduction mechanics!

A proper way would be to improve the AI, especially the Boss AI.
For example in JA2 1.13 we have an extremly difficult setting, which results in the starting area already having over 300 soldiers and you invade with only up to 18 mercinaries.
Players found out they could abuse the Patrol AI and cover camping so the soldiers will trigger interrupts or run towards a location where shots have been fired, this resulted in the highest difficulty becoming a Sniperfest and ather weapons were used for interrupts only.
We fixed the issue by adding several AI sets so instead of running towards the shot location some soldiers will blindfire Mortars into unviewable spots blind fire grenades/machinegunrs.
Sniping became far more difficult because once some soldiers have been killed by sniper rifles, the other soldiers will take caution not to run into open areas.
We added AI sets such as Soldiers killing civilians decreasing the towns loyality against you.



So in summary: PoE isn't additive. It's frustrating and it will drive the majority of players away.

D3 was an utter failure. The only thing D3 did quiet fine was a fluent combat system.
D2 had several weaknesses but it did well on some areas which is a reason the game was active for quiet a long time.

PoE did fine in CB. In CB PoE felt much like a polished D2, with some issues such as risk/reward, spell costs and unrewarding endgame. Players should remember how hard it was to acquire the high tier uniques or even white items because maps ranged from level 60-69.

But when PoE became OB it got worse because of several nerfs and a heavily shifted content of itemlevel 64 to itemlevel 77. The required time to beat the game heavily increased.
The kill speed heavily decreased. Several changes aimed to fix single issues raised more issues.
PoE simple is a game you grow tired off after some time. Regular players will get frustrated and quit because of basic issues.
Races are the only thing keeping players playing the game and even then a horrible shedule and uncreative repetive events will also decrease the amount of players over time.
Mods besides Turbo got introduced because players got bored of normal 1h 90min 120min 180min etc.

For example look at the Vaal Pact issue on the new skill tree which "will be polished"(unthoughtful last minute changes like chaos resitance are the result of "polishing)

After some time there will be a typical Quarl move: "Moved Vaal pact node closet to the ES classes." because he couldn't create some Scion only nodes and keep the middle highway.

hmm that is a pretty accurate account of the situation.

I really dont get why they changed the game so much from cb , i mean sure cb had some issues.
But daaaaaaaym it was fun,


It feels as if the devs were afraid that the pace was too smooth. Seems to me they were afraid that perhaps players were progressing too quickly and added last minute bullshit in an attempt to artificially prolong the experience.

like adding 200% more hp to bosses and mobs to "cough" increase difficulty.

I remember when you could actually experiment very loosely with builds and create alot of stuff.


now if you dont build the most ridiculously efficient build in the game exploiting some balance issue , then you are fucked.

Now that much lauded experimentation is left only to the people rich enough to by the best shit.

or the people who enjoy restarting characters a billion times until they give up and look up a character build online.

"

Saltychipmunk wrote:

I really dont get why they changed the game so much from cb , i mean sure cb had some issues.
But daaaaaaaym it was fun,


It feels as if the devs were afraid that the pace was too smooth. Seems to me they were afraid that perhaps players were progressing too quickly and added last minute bullshit in an attempt to artificially prolong the experience.

like adding 200% more hp to bosses and mobs to "cough" increase difficulty.

I remember when you could actually experiment very loosely with builds and create alot of stuff.

now if you dont build the most ridiculously efficient build in the game exploiting some balance issue , then you are fucked.

Now that much lauded experimentation is left only to the people rich enough to by the best shit.

or the people who enjoy restarting characters a billion times until they give up and look up a character build online.

The same thing is true regarding my Magic the Gathering example from the OP. Consider two different situations: one player is preparing for a fun match with friends who don't have a super-high skill level, the other is preparing for a world championship tournament against some of the most difficult opponents in the game. In the former, you can get away with a lot more than you could otherwise, allowing all sorts of interesting yet "silly" combos to prove effective. However, when you increase the difficulty level, the number of viable strategies begins to diminish, and the number of cards which are labeled "trash" increases. Even in the most diverse and healthy of high-competition metagames, you might have 80 or 90 cards viable out of about eight or nine hundred, which means 90% of the cards you print, from the perspective of competitive play, are considered unplayable trash, even if you have 6 or 7 wildly different builds to choose from. And that's pretty close to a best-case scenario; if one or two builds dominate all others, you could easily be looking at 97% trash.

Bringing it back to PoE: Raising game difficulty raises the standards for builds; this makes some builds no longer viable; this makes more items into trash where they used to have value. This is the downside of increasing difficulty, and it's something designers should be aware of.

That said, I am not against raising difficulty. It increases those moments of adrenaline when you're near death and you barely squeak out a victory and you feel utterly awesome, and it also rewards things like positioning and battle tactics instead of putting those gameplay elements on auto-pilot. These are good things. But with the good comes the bad, and that bad is that more loot turns to "trash," loot-finding enjoyment goes down, Julio realizes he's not getting the juice anymore, and poo is flung all over the forums.

In all fairness, I should have listed this as another reason why Diablo 2 was successful, and Diablo 3 (especially early) wasn't.

The solution in the OP still applies; rather than advocating lowering monster difficulty, I still advocate better itemization and build balance. The better balanced items and builds are, the more difficulty it can withstand without destroying loot-finding enjoyment; the less balanced they are, the more the developers will have to lower difficulty in order to compensate and keep loot-finding fun.

Should GGG lower the difficulty of Path of Exile temporarily, until they better balance the strongest builds in the game against each other? It's actually something to seriously consider. But it's also a slippery slope thing; it looks strange to increase difficulty later after reducing it, and long-term increased difficulty is the direction we want to be going in.

"

Saltychipmunk wrote:

hmm that is a pretty accurate account of the situation.

I really dont get why they changed the game so much from cb , i mean sure cb had some issues.
But daaaaaaaym it was fun,


It feels as if the devs were afraid that the pace was too smooth. Seems to me they were afraid that perhaps players were progressing too quickly and added last minute bullshit in an attempt to artificially prolong the experience.

like adding 200% more hp to bosses and mobs to "cough" increase difficulty.

I remember when you could actually experiment very loosely with builds and create alot of stuff.


now if you dont build the most ridiculously efficient build in the game exploiting some balance issue , then you are fucked.

Now that much lauded experimentation is left only to the people rich enough to by the best shit.

or the people who enjoy restarting characters a billion times until they give up and look up a character build online.

To be fair, regarding the gameplay up until the end of cruel, it still feels very smooth and good (and gives me my juice anticipation then actual juice). Merciless is a bit of a rollercoaster (and for most of my builds, the time I have to stop, grind to increased my level because I am below level cap (level 45 at level 53 area), which brings it down), and especially act 3 merc just feels like a punch to the gut.

But part of that is just act 3 feels bad, and hopefully 3x will fix that smoothness. Even cruel going to act 3 feels like a bit of a jump in difficulty which doesn't have the reward feeling.


You get a jump in difficulty which is programmed to be 'give me more juice', but you don't get it, thats bad

"

To be fair, regarding the gameplay up until the end of cruel, it still feels very smooth and good (and gives me my juice anticipation then actual juice).

Try to play any caster build, with discipline, low level clarity(can't be leveled because even without discipline you have barely any mane left) and a 3-4 linked spell with a higher base cost.
If the spell doesn't have got AoE Damage you will run out of mana and mana charges quiet fasts and must wait a half minute till clarity refills.

"

Merciless is a bit of a rollercoaster (and for most of my builds, the time I have to stop, grind to increased my level because I am below level cap (level 45 at level 53 area)

Another thing which was far better in CB. If you normally played the game you were level 58 in a 58 area.
But due experience changes, higher HP you must exp hours to relevel yourself for hours because the devs think "Players shouldn't be able to reach level 60 within 9 hours"

"

But part of that is just act 3 feels bad, and hopefully 3x will fix that smoothness. Even cruel going to act 3 feels like a bit of a jump in difficulty which doesn't have the reward feeling.

Act3 will always fill bad as long the Devs don't decide to drop some quests which forces you to visit side areas.
D2's most hated act is Act2 and Act3 is even uglier than A2 in D2.
Act3 wasn't hated in D2 because getting they Organs was straight forward:
Eye a chest in a small area close to the entrance.
Brain a chest in a large dungeon which has only a few monsters(you don't get constantly blocked)
Heart a chest in a tiny level 2 sewer which can easily be found if you know that Basar of Kurast = Book Upper Kurast = Entrance to level 2.
The only thing you needed as help is entering both bazar entrances for a short time to figure out the maplayout.
Flail = Straight forward.


Rescue Clarissa, Get Tolmans Bracelet to be able to be able to enter the sewers aka progress.

Get the Ribbon Spool, Get the Thaumatic Sulfite. Go down 3 levels in an oversized temple......

It would be much better if Clarissa would be optional, there are no sewer keys and solaris has only 50% of its current size.

"

You get a jump in difficulty which is programmed to be 'give me more juice', but you don't get it, thats bad

There is no jump in difficulty in PoE. It's a pseudo difficulty.
Gems level up slower compared to CB, because the same content got pushed further away some levels. The CB level 20 gems required level 60 and usually you had level 19 gems at level 77-78. Now you are at level 18 gems at that point.

The HP and Resists of mobs have been increased and Penetration gems became 33% effective as in CB-->Combat got far slower.
One way to fix it would be fine. But GGG did both one reason regenerating mobs are extremly annoying because they take longer to kill than act bosses, if you are underleveled/same level.

In CB players complained there were too many nasty aura mods such as crit+accuracy, the red and golden damage aura and of course far too many reflect mobs.(Glass cannon builds were viaable back than but they had negative resists and died because they hit too many mobs.
In OB the mods were shifted to really defensive mobs and you meet many Double Regen, Addional Life+ Regen+ES, Resists+Reduced Physical damage, Endurace charge mobs etc. in fact undangerous rares which take longer to kill.

The Lifenerfpatch introduced poor MMORPG One Shot Gearchecks. Meaning if you fail to have 75% resists certain bosses will One Shot you. Meaning no matter how you skilled. The game got 100% reduced to used gems and Items.
Purity on High Level on Maps with high Elemental Damage Bosses is a must.
The damage vs 0% reduce is that big that not a single character will survive a hit. Even white mobs deal so much damage that they will almost one Shot you or one shot you if you have some several HP nodes.
How does it make PoE any different from D3 1.02 inferno?

Beat'm Ups are a Genre where higher difficulties were executed the correct way because each difficulty uses different AI sets.
And higher difficulty isn't ramp up HP by 100% each difficulty, increase damage by 100% each difficulty and make it pierce the block with +15% chance each difficulty.

Or why is Re4 a good game and Re5 isn't? Beside the atmosphere.
Re4 always had you on low ressources and you were overpowered and the Hard mode increased HP only by 30%-50%(bosses) making ressource management harder(something you don't have in PoE. There is no Famine mode and you can always go to act1 normal to refill flasks)

And Re5 only tries to overpower you but you always have enough ressourced to kill every single monster in the game.

Hilbert, you use to annoy me but I find myself agreeing with you very much recently.

What I never understood about GGG. There was a massive migration from D3 to POE after 1.03 in the long wait for 1.04 when GGG had it's open weekend. People came over from D3's rigid builds and insane difficulty and fell in love with POE's seemingly endless build options and easier end game. People still died, and POE was tough but you didn't feel like the game was laughing at you like you did with D3.

OB hits, they ramp up the difficulty to inferno type levels. Now all builds are built off the same skeletons. Even if they are unique they have 10-20% different passives than a cookie cutter build, if that.

I fell in love with the diversity the game offers. But whenever I try a really unique build, basically something that doesn't share the same skeleton as all the other's, my progress is why more difficult and the gear required to make it work is tremendous.

The stuff with act 3x makes it look like they are adding in more difficult mobs through their AI and skills but I'm really hoping they lower damage, elemental in particular.

"

Real_Wolf wrote:

But part of that is just act 3 feels bad, and hopefully 3x will fix that smoothness. Even cruel going to act 3 feels like a bit of a jump in difficulty which doesn't have the reward feeling.

The first time I entered A3 merc, a large blue pack spawned just offscreen to the entry point.

Welcome to A3 :D

I didnt even see the waypoint.

B.

"

Moosifer wrote:

Hilbert, you use to annoy me but I find myself agreeing with you very much recently.

What I never understood about GGG. There was a massive migration from D3 to POE after 1.03 in the long wait for 1.04 when GGG had it's open weekend. People came over from D3's rigid builds and insane difficulty and fell in love with POE's seemingly endless build options and easier end game. People still died, and POE was tough but you didn't feel like the game was laughing at you like you did with D3.

OB hits, they ramp up the difficulty to inferno type levels. Now all builds are built off the same skeletons. Even if they are unique they have 10-20% different passives than a cookie cutter build, if that.

I fell in love with the diversity the game offers. But whenever I try a really unique build, basically something that doesn't share the same skeleton as all the other's, my progress is why more difficult and the gear required to make it work is tremendous.

The stuff with act 3x makes it look like they are adding in more difficult mobs through their AI and skills but I'm really hoping they lower damage, elemental in particular.

Hilbert annoys me all the time, even when he's right. But I digress. ;)

As I explained above, there are two different solutions to that problem:
1. Reduce difficulty, make more borderline builds viable again because standards aren't as high
2. Increase balance between builds, make more borderline builds viable again by bringing them in line with the current viable builds

#2 is the best in the end, but it's also the hardest on the developers. Now that I think about it, at a certain point it becomes impossible. GGG intends to continually introduce new content, which includes new skill gems, new uniques, all sorts of new stuff. One does not simply balance that stuff to a high degree of precision running right out the gate; the level of balance needed to sustain truly hard difficulty and diversity simultaneously is too big of a job to perform over and over again in such a manner. You need something where you can just release it and have it be somewhat in the right ballpark, based off just a small amount of alpha testing and trusting your gut; it's important to have realistic expectations here of balance upon release.

That said, we probably do need to reduce difficulty in a few places — not all of them or some kind of global reduction, but in a few targeted areas. I think elemental damage is a good area to specify, because if you don't have capped resists, some things hit like a truck. Of course, there is always the "balance" method too, and some things like making Ruby/Topaz/Sapphire flasks more appealing might help to ease these issues without weakening the monsters. But something should be done to address such issues, because if the monsters are utterly unyielding in a certain area, that's an area which is now longer allowed to be a build weakness, and thus certain builds are no longer viable.

I still think the primary focus should be on increasing balance and not on reducing difficulty. However, at a certain point GGG needs to get real about how much time they have and the issues which need fixing, and sometimes choose the easier option (temporarily) instead of the ideal one. Build diversity is the key, more than anything else, to determining the success or failure of an ARPG, as the OP explains; if we truly are forced to choose between diversity and difficulty, we shouldn't be choosing difficulty.

I dunno, the bringing everything up to the powerful builds seems like power creep. In fact the entire OB experience so far has felt like the power creep. CB's popular/strong builds were nerfed, builds that were gaining popularity stayed the same and OB added new powerful builds. Ones that weren't powerful were mostly nerfed by the changes to the popular builds and nerfed further by the buffs to monsters.

I'd personally like a step back on damage, player and mob, similar to what was done with life.