Developer Questions and Answers

What percentage of characters have never visited the Dread Thicket?

Firstly - sorry if this was asked, but I wont read 51 pages to look for a similar question.

Q: Why did you make a Separate Mechanic for Trading in Divination cards and not just add them to the already existing Vendor recipes?

It would be more convenient to use(1 "Vendor" that I cant even use Ctrl in), and if its for the reasons of people not seeing Preview of they would get, you can just make it look like a black box of 4x2(or other depending on what max space the card item can be) or a few other ways.

Are there plans to make Leo easier to level?

50% of daily quests seem to be CTF or 3v3, which almost never find matches. I can sit in queue for hours waiting. Are there any plans to improve the pvp matching for these tougher to match formats, perhaps by showing how many players are waiting in a specific queue, or restricting the 3v3/ctf formats to time-based events (like races, with notification popups)?

Question1: You ever regret doing free to play? Or regret doing only cosmetics mtx? Do you believe you made more money with free to play than you would pay2play?

Question2: You ever regret implementing legacy item to PoE? What is the difference of lowering the leech values for example instead what you did with crit multi, quantity(which you didnt lowered values for existing item when you changed)

Congrats on achieving 2.0:

-Quality of Life improvements
-Best balance game has ever been with
-Lowering the desync for predictive and doing lockstep

Now you should focus:
-Better trade and democratize the indexing tools
-New rarity or making rares more build defining mods.

What about map crash problem, when all map portals lead to login screen? Do you know about this bug? Any ETA for hotfix?

Hello GGG, do you notice that many oversea players (especially Taiwan and Hong Kong, included myself) are playing on this server instead of Garena's server because the whole server is dominated by bots and they don't care. Is it okay if we play here? Will you guys do IP block in the future? Thanks!

Some of the people, like me, love MF.

But when we stack IIQ and IIR, the dropped unique mostly are "TOYS".

Therefore, I would like to suggest:

i) Increase the drop rate of T1 unique and T2 unique;

ii) Make the "TOYS" more useful;

iii) Take reference to D3, higher IIR will increase the chance to get 6 sockets or 6 link items;

iv) higher IIR will increase the chance of a rare/magic item to get T1, T2 or T3 affixes.

Apart from challenging higher maps, MF is also an interesting part in online ARPG. But, POE do not attach great importance to MF. So, it is the time to buff MF in POE.

I hope that in the future, there is an achievement which is called "Treasure Hunter".

Thanks GGG.

Question:

What do you think about the current state of trading and the economy? Do you feel anything needs to be done to stop the ever increasing prevalence of data and automation in the interim while an official solution is being worked on?

I feel that the current trade meta of using scripts and indexers, data and automation driving the economy, spits in the face of the game and it's design objectives - there is a jarring thematic juxtaposition between the world of Wraeclast and the methods people are using to trade within it, methods that aren't at all consistent with the theme of the game.

I have some mechanical questions, which I am unable to answer using the ingame tools and information:

Vaal Storm Call
Please Confirm/Deny:
-The damage displayed on Vaal Storm Call's Tooltip is the damage the final AoE-blast will deal.

Which one of the following is true?
-The lightning strikes that hit enemies while the marker is set deal the same damage as the final blast
-The lightning strikes that hit enemies while the marker is set deal the same damage as the final blast, except they are not affected by AoE-Damage-Modifiers
-The lightning strikes that hit enemies while the marker is set deal less damage than the final blast because they have a lower damage effectiveness
-The lightning strikes that hit enemies while the marker is set deal less damage than the final blast because they have a lower damage effectiveness and are not effected by AoE-Damage-Modifiers

A few more general questions about the skill:
-How often will lightning strike around the marker?
-Is there a limit on how fast after a hit the same target can be hit again?
-If so, what is the time limit on it?


Tooltips
-Will Aura tooltips ever display aura effectiveness from gear and passives?
-When dual wielding with one weapon that is not usable with a skill, will that skill's tooltip ever correctly show Damage, Attackspeed and DPS based solely on the weapon it is usable with?
-When using a skill with a random portion (Elemental Hit, Wild Strike) would it not be possible to average all possible outcomes? Sure it might not entirely reflect the truth as there is a part of luck involved, but really, if a skill deals 1-10,000 damage every 1.00 seconds, averaging it to 5,000.5 DPS is right about the same. I'd especially like it if all conversions could be accounted for in the tooltip, for example stating three (likely different) values for a possible addition of fire damage if Avatar of Fire is specced.
-Alot of Skills use percentages of health, mana, energyshield and all other kinds of things. Could the tooltip reflect this and name actual values? For example, yes I know how much %life Righteous Fire will burn me for, but what I'd really hope to see in the tooltip is how much damage it will actually degenerate me for?


Firestorm
Removing the reduced time between fireballs as quality is somewhat disappointing. It made the whole skill feel more special, and added another layer of complexity - do I increase the duration, reduce the time between strikes, or increase the damage?
-Any hope for a new Keyword "Interval" with support gems, passives and (unique) gear, which could increase or reduce the frequency of anything that happens multiple times over a certain time? Thinking Firestorm, Icestorm, Fire Nova Mine, Lightning Tendrils, Vaal Storm Call, Herald of Thunder, and some others.


Passive Tree
A while ago you stated you wanted Notables to actually be notable. You've changed lots of passives since, and I enjoy most of those changes. However, there are still a number of notables that seem very lackluster. Two examples are "Ash, Frost and Storm" and Master of Force, which each only grant a higher version of the normal nodes before them, making the whole cluster seem very linear (people will simply average out the damage-per-point) with no added benefit.
-Will you strive for even more diverse and interesting notables?
-According to your statistics, which is the least specced Normal, Notable and Keystone passive?
-Do those statistics change if weighted by classes?
-Do you feel there are too few critical strike nodes and clusters mainly for swords in the Duelist-Marauder area? Especially, there's not a single crit node or cluster for general two handed weapons.
-What's the point of all that accuracy for non-crit weapon types? 99% of the time People will spec Resolute Technique anyways. (Bows not included)


Game Mechanics
With the addition of the Warbands "Redblade" mod which has the user take physical damage as fire damage, what happens if the player also equips the rat cage which causes him or her to take fire damage as physical damage?
-Infinite loop, game explodes
-100% incoming damage -> 90% + 10% (Mathematically correct)
-100% incoming damage -> 91% + 9% (each conversion applies only once)


Thank you for your time and continue the great work.

I would absolutely love to see a way to modify the level of maps in some fashion. I have personally found that once I start to hit the 74-78 map tier and above I find myself running the same specific maps over and over again with not much other than dailies in-between (this is just my experience in what has been mostly solo play).
The higher the map levels get the more this effect intensifies. After a while, I find myself very much missing the varieties of maps I was running while in the 68-73 tier. Being able do modify the levels of maps in some fashion would greatly increase the potential map variety available and help extend the time before that inevitable bored feeling starts kicking in.

I very much agree with what I believe is an intention to tie specific difficult design elements to certain signature maps. However, keeping the level modifications within certain tight restrictions might help offset the impact on that.

The best suggestions I've seen so far, while staying within existing frameworks, is the introduction of a new currency orb that would either:
- Re-roll the map's level inside of its tier (68-73, 74-78, 79-82)
- Modify the level within a limited range, for example between -2 and +2, of its current level.

I personally prefer the limited range option, and it be could designed in two very different ways:
- By adding an otherwise unobtainable prefix/suffix mod to the map whose value would be re-rolled only within its limited range by further currency spent.
Such an orb might have a drop rate maybe around the current Blessed rate?
- As an inherent change to the level of the map to allow continued gambling on its level. This would theoretically allow such things as a level 82 Tropical Island or a level 68 Core. However it would assuredly require an amount of currency spent that would ruin any RoI potential of such a map, keeping it an oddity.
Such an orb might have a drop rate maybe around the current GCP or Regret rate?


Is anything like this or other methods something that would be considered, or are unmodifiable map levels something that you feel is best left as is?

As always, thanks for the great game and also for doing things like inviting the asking of questions.