Is Path of Exile as addictive as Diablo 2?

Funny that this actually is accurate.

The harder something gets the less fun most people seem to have, something I will never be able to understand because it should be the exact opposite.

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I would not play a perfectly balanced ARPG. In my estimation a perfectly balanced ARPG is a soon-to-be-dead ARPG. In a completely balanced ARPG all skills are cookie-cutter and it has no place for the players' personal experimentation.

"Soon-to-be-dead-RPGs" die for other reasons.
Not because everything is a cookie cutter.

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Dem countess/meph runs - like heroin. Yet to find something like that in PoE.

Do Docks and look at your GPU Load ;)
Maybe you will get what I am hinting at.

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D2 really did have a lot more types of items which made it harder to determine what was best.

I was always thinking to myself are these set items worth their set bonus or would I be better off just using a rare or unique instead.

And then you had ethereal items which would destroy permanently but had way higher implicit mods so you were poised with the trade off of OP item that will eventually be destroyed or keep a basic item until you find another basic item to upgrade it with.

The main Reason in itemisation of D2 an PoE/D3 is that D2 had items usable by every class.


In D2 for example the Angelic set offering Life MF AR on 3 Parts already. My favorite D2 Classic Set, because each class gained advantages.
There were Items helping each Class, such as Goldskin or in D2 Lod Skin of the Vipermagi.
My first Lod Barb even ran around with a 1.08 Harlekinscrest.
LoD hat the weakness because it turned D2 into an unique/set hunt. But D2 did that really fine. There were excellent uniques which where useable forever and not thrown away after some levels.
Bonesnap with CB, Steeldriver with high speed, Goldskin(resists), Setboni benifitting every class, Shard with 50FCR, The Ward an item for players not being able to find a good rare shield.

In the end you used rares but there were only a few throw away uniques and PoE has far too many 5 level->Throw away uniques.

D3 and PoE fail hard on that part. There are some items like Goldrim which could be considered the Thinking Cap of Diablo 1.
There are some build specific uniques but that's it.

Several Diamond Supporter uniques were designed to make their own build stronger or make cookie cutter builds stronger. Just look at Marohi Erqi the drawbacks didn't affect Groundslam (at the time of creation in CB) at all.

But most items you find don't help you at all. If they are pure Armor/Evasion/ES and possibly can't even use them.

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Back to the original point (as to be honest I only checked the thread because I enjoy reading hilbert rants)

My rants speak the truth and if you like my rants you should read me commenting popular scientific papers, well beside the fact almost everybody shreds those papers to pieces and puts the authors on a shamelist of their profession.

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#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.

Difficulty has to be executed in a non frustrating manner.

Compare Bullet Hell games to R-Type.
Surely Bullet Hell games are more difficult but you are allowed to screw up several times.
R-Type games are like 1 hit dead.
Other games gave you a fair amount of 1ups if you screwed up.

Same thing with side scrollers.
There was a difference between a well executed hard game such as Hagane/Ninja Gaiden or rather frustrating ones like Ghost'n Goblins.

One-Shot Gearchecks and Slowdowns are an easy but lazy ass way to make a game look hard. But in reality it's a pseudodifficulty. If you pass the game looks easy. If you get hit the game looks hard.

GGG has to do that from scratch:
First it has to start with received physical damage. Evasion characters must be able to survive some hits, after that Evasion can be limited to 50%
After that looking at ES values and typical mobsizes can be balanced.
And the last point is wouldn't it be smarter to cap Reduce at 50% and add max reduce nodes at the end of certain defense/offense clusters?

The goal would look like that on a perfect character without any nodes.
Evasion can survive several hits but also evades some let's say 50%.
ES can take more hits due a high ES, twice as much EHP than an evasion based build.
Reductionbuilds also get always hit but can the taken damage is 50%

Improvements such as a higher Evasion chance, multiplicative ES and more reduce will be acquired through the skill tree.

The difficulty will come how mobs deal physical damage!
For example Puncture is really strong against evasion and ES builds but weak against armor builds.
Then there has to be an ability where Evasion is strong and one where ES is strong.
Meaning some monster uses a skills which bybasses enemies Armor and Evasion-->ES is strong.
Some skill which bypasses armor, deals more damage to ES but can be evaded-->Eva is strong.

Then you add AIsets, pack patterns etc. For example weak mobs retreating to larget packs.
Such as squids. Giving squids an ink attack which heavily decreases your light radius.
Make mobs automatically attack players with ailments, don't attack users under the granite flask effect.
Attempt to evade projectiles if possible.
Give them abilities to weaken party play, such as conversion trap.

Same thing with elemental damage. First you make sure characters without high resists values don't get one shot.
Then to make hit harder you can add abilities such as far faster projectiles so players will be hit or tracking slow projectiles. Imagine Pieties thunderball would do 10% of its current damage but it will the balls will follow you for quiet some time (30-60 sec!)

This way you have choices to take the hit and fight or run away to avoid projectiles.

This is how proper difficulty management works.
But to me it looks like that:

Melee:"LT is ridiculous"
SporktotemCI/Ranged players rolling Size+Mobsize/raritymod:"OMG GAME TOO EASY."

Quarl:"Hmm let LT hit ranged players too"

Ranged+Melee Player:"Omg LT is ridiculous"

SporkCI:"lol game still too easy, only takes more time because the totem dies now"

The logical Quarl move yet to come had to be something like:"Totem characters can do damage again but reflect works against totem owners"
And suddenly SporkCI:"OMG I always get Shockstacked and killed LT is ridiculous"

Result: Nobody likes LT!
And what would happen if you reduce LT damage and remove totems can cast faster again like in CB?
The only players complaining then would be Totem builds because totems keep spamming the skills while melees and ranged players will just start clicking instead of holding the button.

If something has to be balanced it either must be hard for everybody or one build has an advantage while it has big disadvantages against other builds.

Astute analysis. With regards to build diversity Hilbert nailed it. GGG can do three things: adjust skill balance, add build-specific counter mobs, and mobs with build-specific weakness. Crit mobs, common to CB, are an example of build-specific weakness. They are strong against AR/ES but weak against EV.

On difficulty Hilbert went through the trouble to get specific and I'm glad he did. He raises some excellent points about good difficulty versus time sinks and gear checks. Defensive mods, like increased regen, are an offensive gear check, they aren't challenging. Faster projectiles, slow tracking projectiles and environmental hazards are all good difficulty. Diablo 3's caltrops are an example of environmental hazard. Their reincarnation for EvP, or as flasks, would create more positional strategy.

This has been a very good thread.

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Veta321 wrote:

Astute analysis. With regards to build diversity Hilbert nailed it. GGG can do three things: adjust skill balance, add build-specific counter mobs, and mobs with build-specific weakness. Crit mobs, common to CB, are an example of build-specific weakness. They are strong against AR/ES but weak against EV.

I like GGG as much as the average forumgoer (well, probably more than average), but their one failing is that they are simply slow, and for such a player-friendly developer, their decision-making processes remain opaque compared to their current contemporaries (Grim Dawn and yes, even Blizzard, which is taking many right steps with RoS, and actively communicating them).

The nine-month Open Beta brought no acknowledgment of problems, no analysis and no subsequent sweeping change to the game, there haven't been any indication of how strong GGG's grasp on the big picture that pneuma alluded to in his feedback thread (probably the best thread of OB feedback for me) as lost, remains. And I can't help but fear that with GGG's new rhythm of four-month large additions and two-week regular updates they are prepared to commit to, developer insight will be doomed to remain something of the past (not that I have any problems with that schedule, I think it's admirable).

Yea enigma is on par with so many other items lol, so hard to decide!!

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Veta321 wrote:

This has been a very good thread.

Major funding for this thread is provided by :
Blizzard, Inexium, ScrotieMcB, GGG, and you and all the others.

"

DutchRudder wrote:

Yea enigma is on par with so many other items lol, so hard to decide!!

When I was 12 Enigma didnt exist and I didn't even have internet or LoD so I played D2 vanilla a lot.


Oh iron maiden how I loathe thee

So is it safe to assume that the difficulty of the game and diversity of builds are in reverse correlation?

Maps are still an avenue in which to expand and focus on build diversity. I've been trying to push this to Carl with less success than I had hoped.


Good itemization should come in the form of a player identifying an item - which then gets the gears in his/her head turning. He/She should have to look at something and think: "Can I make something out of this?" or "This would be great if done with..". Currently only uniques fulfill the role of a keystone towards the build development puzzle - rares don't do this.

Back to the earlier point, maps have the potential to improve build diversity by changing the rewards. Carl told me that he wanted players to feel smart about rerolling maps. I concur but item quantity does not make for an addictive experience - far from it.

What I've been trying to push is for making extremely dangerous affix combinations incentivize players with rewards "too good to pass up" such players begin to think about builds designed to deal with specific affix combinations (and be dismal @ other areas). For that to happen, we should move the design paradigm away from flat IIQ bonuses and bland affixes. Interesting ones such as: "Cannot use flasks, "Cannot leech life", "Ranged attacks deal half damage", "Monster melee attacks splash", etc should be emphasized.

From there we can correlate the two. When you have a set of problems to tackle, you naturally look towards solutions for said problems. If maps (post-game) made it so that you had to turn to creative and interesting ways towards getting to that carrot, I think PoE would be infinitely more addictive over anything else on the market. Give the players a problem and the tools. Let them find the solutions.

As a final word, you should never be able to steamroll everything on one character. Either be a jack of all trades, master of none; or be a master. Not both.

ehh , wouldn't say the game is too difficult. difficult and challenging games require the player to think out side usual trains of thought to succeed , like dark souls what made it fun was that all the enemies and bosses had patterns unique to them and you had to learn the patterns to beat it.


but there isn't much learning to be had here.


Players will simply hit a gear wall. The enemies will hit too hard to tank , or the player wont do enough damage to kill at an acceptable pace.

or skills cost too much mana to maintain.


It just happens , there is no way to overcome it except by getting lucky with the drops.


in cb that gear wall was 100% in end game which was fine , maps were end game.
in ob the gear wall happen right in the middle of the third act cruel when most character builds arent even interesting.

They did progression wrong , both gear and gameplay. but fixing either would have solved the other.


diablo solved its progression by introducing those standardized unique items , think how the occulus was the go to sorc wand for most people despite it being only acquired at the mid 40s. It didnt matter if your other gear was crap , that item could make the game doable for you and then the rest fell into place, you could build around it.



those mid level items were end game viable.

most uniques in poe that come around the mid 40s you will not see at end game, part of it is the crappy mods on them , but the other part is the fault of the socket system.


cant get a 5l on that one item because its to low an ilevel , to damn bad.

This means at a point items are purposefully made worthless to progression due to these socket walls. It was fine for diablo because the gems didn't do much, but here gems are EVERYTHING. This isnt even considering how getting links on items is pot luck.


99% chance to progress backwards 1 % change to progress forwards , that is poe's orb system.


at least diablo had the courtesy to make gambling


now that i think about it all these newer diablo clones seem fixed on making gear the engine of progression . Diablo's engine of progression was the skill trees.