Is Path of Exile as addictive as Diablo 2?

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Lyralei wrote:

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.

Very much agree with your thinking. While maps already achieve this to a degree, they have much more potential to encourage build parity. Combined with the additional mob mechanics Hilbert suggests, this could create build parity as a function of meaningful choice -- not the illusion of choice and not without wrong choices.

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DutchRudder wrote:

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

Enigma doesn't do you much good if you get hit. You also forget Chains of Honor and Fortitude are just as good, and other Runewords are excellent for niche builds (and much cheaper I might add than Enigma). I didn't even mention shit like Ormus Robe that can be pretty good when rolled correctly, or Tyreal's Might. In fact, CoH and Fortitude are pretty much the best armors for characters like WW Barbs, Frenzy, Bowzons, etc.

high end rune words were also considered end game , you definitly did not need them to do anything other than farm baal fast and farm hellfire torches

Probably the most interesting topic I've seen in a while.

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Saltychipmunk wrote:

high end rune words were also considered end game , you definitly did not need them to do anything other than farm baal fast and farm hellfire torches

Yeah you did not need to run a Grief PB or have an Infinity to farm for end game items. In Path of Exile, you need to have literally some of the best gear possible in order to just barely survive initial burst.

Funny people are mentioning runewords and of course the ever-popular Enigma comes up, but I personally hated that runeword. Never bothered using it and much preferred a 3-piece Tal-Rasha's set, but then again I never liked teleporting all over the place either, so it worked out for me. However, personal stuff aside, one thing that I think GGG could take away from the discussion of runewords is how some of them were made and some of the benefits they provided. That is, the ones that weren't things like: Enigma, Infinity, Ice, Faith, BotD, Grief, etc, etc. Two of them that I recall and had an absolute load of fun with were:

Dragon - http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Dragon

Rift - http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Rift

Voice of Reason (Rift's little brother) - http://diablo2.diablowiki.net/Voice_of_Reason

The reason I had so much fun with them was due to the fact that while they were no where near as powerful as some of the previously mentioned RWs, that wasn't what drew me to them. Rift in particular was EXTREMELY fun to use on my Paladin and it's no secret that it was called a 'Rift-a-Din' (I didn't come up with the build or name originally) due to the entire build being built around the runeword. That's right...I didn't build around any particular skill or what not, just ONE PIECE OF GEAR and the build grew out from it. At the bear minimum you only needed to use 'Zeal' as your main attack skill because Rift was dependent on how many times and how fast you could attack to get those sweet Frozen Orb procs. The other two main skills were Conviction since you needed to lower enemy cold resists for Rift to function well, and Holy Shield for blocking defense...that's it...you could tweak anything else you wanted but those were the three main things you needed aside from a 4OS scepter to activate the runeword.

As far as other gear was concerned, you were mostly after cold-damage gear to help up your FO damage, and while the ultimate pieces may have been things like Nightwing's Veil (sp), cold damage charms, and a few other things, Rift was actually an extremely flexible runeword for gear. You could also get lesser gear like Vampire's Gaze, or the aforementioned Dragon armor, a solid pair of rare boots or unique boots, and the only real 'required' piece of gear aside from Rift was usually a Ravenfrost ring, or some other piece that had the 'Cannot Be Frozen' mod on it. The only real disadvantage to Rift was that it wasn't anywhere near as powerful for uber bosses and life/mana leech wasn't as strong because the RW had no physical weapon damage mods on it to amplify the damage and no real Crushing Blow either. However, it was more than functional for running around killing hordes of regular monsters, Chaos Sanctuary, Worldstone Keep, Nil's dungeon, and certainly the good ol' cow run.

But what really made Rift and Dragon so special to me were the way they were constructed. Both relied upon the 'On Striking' or 'On Attacking' mods for Hydra and Frozen Orb proccing. There was something completely badass about running around as a Paladin, smashing things over and over again with 5-Swing Zeals, and then watching 3-4 Frozen Orbs go flying across the screen, and 2-3 bundles of Hydra heads popping out of the ground and shooting everything up. There was something to be said about the sheer AOE potential these runewords brought to the table even if they weren't along the lines of the more powerful RWs or gear pieces, but that's why you also had a second weapon switch for something like that if you so chose. With that said, both Dragon and Rift brought a lot to the table, but they also had real tradeoffs and you weren't invincible and still had to compensate in other ways, which is a good thing.

There are a few other runewords I could mention, but the main gist of what I wanted to get across was that GGG could take a look at some of them and realize that RWs offered quite a bit in terms of making Diablo II so addictive. Yes, there were definitely the OP ones, but ones like Rift and Dragon weren't so OP, were a bit more niche (I know Dragon could be used in other ways, too), and yet they were quite potent and fun without branching into the OP category. Voice of Reason gets an honorable mention as well because it's 'Rift' that can be used at an earlier level and was more flexible because of its weapon choices, AND could be used by more than just a Paladin or a polearm wielder. Basically what I am getting at is when you have gear or 'specialty gear' like this, it can open up doors for experimentation as well as giving people something to look forward to as they go along in their character building.

One last thing about runes in Diablo II I want to mention...despite the extremely low drop chances of the 'high runes', Diablo II did something VERY RIGHT with crafting runes. There were recipes that were 100% guaranteed to allow you to upgrade lower runes to the next tier (3 runes for 1 of the next up to a certain point and then you needed 2 runes and 1 of the appropriate level jewel) and you can sorta see that in the map recipes. However, the main point is that these recipes had no 'gambling' aspects to them...you got the right stuff together, you got the next rune. This guaranteed method gave players a sure-fire way to get high runes, and while it could certainly take a long while, you could still reach that goal. This is more directed at things like jewel socket and fusing crafting, but...yeah...I think I made it clear enough for that. :)

One more quick thing, to answer the question for the OP is that no, Path of Exile is not addictive as Diablo 2 for the simple reason that there are too many factors that frustrate the player. There's a reason why the POE community consists of only niche hardcore gamers, and that's because we are the only ones who will put up with buggy gameplay/imbalanced gameplay together (desync + huge spike dmg = tons of frustration).

This is all on top of RNG (which should be improved in the new patch; 4 links will no longer make people rage) that players have to deal with, along with arguably unsmooth combat (even with no desync).

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Lyralei wrote:

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.

Very good points! Maps are rare items too, and thus the same principles apply to them: each affix should have a time when it's best, no affix should be best all the time. The only way to realistically do this is to make affixes build-dependent; a life-based melee build should have its own "free IIQ" affixes which are decidedly not "free IIQ" for a CI-based caster. (By "free" here, I'm also including "very easy," even if it is technically a slightly more difficult situation.)

However, we don't want to take this system so far that it makes group map play impossible. What we'd like to see is rotating party "carries" where a diverse group relies on particular group members while others are penalized by particular affixes and therefore must rely on others. This doesn't work if the build-specific map affixes are so strong that they outright kill players — the Blood Magic affix, while seemingly build-dependent and therefore good, is an example of taking things too far.

In the instances which affixes are not build-specific, they should be fun. For example, instead of all these different curse affixes (Temporal Chains is not fun), there should be a single "Monsters cast random Curses" map affix. Instead of "Area has 2 unique bosses," "Unique boss is accompanied by a Rogue Exile." These do the same job, but are much, much funner.

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Tanakeah wrote:

Funny people are mentioning runewords and of course the ever-popular Enigma comes up, but I personally hated that runeword. Never bothered using it and much preferred a 3-piece Tal-Rasha's set, but then again I never liked teleporting all over the place either, so it worked out for me. However, personal stuff aside, one thing that I think GGG could take away from the discussion of runewords is how some of them were made and some of the benefits they provided. That is, the ones that weren't things like: Enigma, Infinity, Ice, Faith, BotD, Grief, etc, etc.

What's funny about runewords is that people rarely look at the mechanic that makes runewords possible — runes themselves — and how the interplay between runes and runewords shapes the game as a whole.

Like PoE's orbs, D2's rune/runeword system created a multi-currency economy which led to far more interesting trading than a single-currency economy ever could, far superior to the previous Stone of Jordan and gold systems; unlike PoE's orbs, the rune/runeword system did a better job of making individual currencies more build-dependent, since individual builds cared about specific runewords (sometimes, about specific runes) more than others, which in turn led to more interesting exchange ratios between currencies. Like PoE's orb, D2's runewords created a market for high-quality white items, an economy which wouldn't exist otherwise. However, with this new economy came an incentive for rune-hoarding, wanting to save your runes for the absolute best base to craft on, because wasting all of that wealth on just any item would be a loss of value. D2 tried to tackle this problem by simply making runewords very, very powerful, so that the player would be tempted to grab this power as quickly as possible and hoard as little as possible; this pushed designers to make runewords overpowered enough to have the proper economic effect, while having some negative consequences in the gear diversity department. PoE, in contrast, does not even attempt a mechanic to discourage its own very similar currency-hoarding problem.

Lastly, D2's runes were much more scarce and non-random; PoE's orbs are relatively much more plentiful but subject to RNG, which isn't necessarily a bad choice, but does effect how players look at currency, especially if they're pessimistic about luck and have a strong preference for low-risk behavior. Although some people consider this a problem, I don't, because risk-takers can shoulder the burden on RNG and offer completed crafts for trade, which the luck-haters can purchase for a small convenience fee, allowing them to bypass the RNG; the free market solves the problem in my eyes.

In terms of a mechanic for PoE that discourages orb-hoarding, I have a thread on some ideas regarding that here. Personally, I do not want to see runewords in Path of Exile, because I view it as a consequence of D2's particular multicurrency system, and we already have a multicurrency system in this game. D2 did a good job at not only making awesome, fun runewords, but also at making awesome, fun uniques, which is something we can and should do in PoE.

In terms of vendor formulas: it seriously needs to be 2 of a map of the same name -> 1 map of the next level. 3 is way too much.

bump

id say yes but ill get back to you in 10+ years on that one. For what its worth I already think PoE is the superior game.