Developer Q&A Answers

Great post. Thanks for taking the time.

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Are there any plans to improve upon AI pathing (or is it being done currently)? the most obvious example of its current limitations now are probably strongboxes. they're intended to literally be an ambush of a group of monsters, but more often than not (especially in enclosed maps like catacombs) there are stragglers in adjacent rooms who forgot about the whole ambush thing. conversely, sometimes a monster will notice me from several screens away. as i understand it, these issues can occur with minions as well, though not as frequently.

The strongbox case you are talking about isn't really a problem with pathfinding as such. It's more to do with monster placement by the strongbox. The monster probably would successfully find a path to the player, but the monster can't see the player because there is a wall in the way so it never targets it. We could potentially add code so that monsters spawned by strongboxes start by issuing a pathfind to the location of the strongbox that spawned them, but I doubt it was ever really seen as a problem by the gameplay programmers who created that feature. As for monsters from far away noticing you, monsters will usually only target you if you are less than roughly the edge of the screen away, however, monsters move about randomly when they are idle. This means that their random movement will take them into attacking range occasionally even when you are standing still.

Very often I have to go out of a room, around the corner, etc. to find the stragglers and when I finally kill them I am far enough away from the box that nothing is allocated to me. If the monster can't see through the wall, it's never going to wander back my way. Wish it were possible to have the monster be aware that it's tied to the box somehow so it knows to look there first.

Shapeshifting:

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Chris wrote:

How would this work? We get this request a lot but whenever we discuss it, we can't really work out a good system. What happens to the player when they're shape-shifted? Can they use their regular skills? Would we need to animate the shape-shifted figure to have all the regular animations of the player classes? What if we just sold it as a microtransaction skin to cover these costs?

I imagine it working similarly to Raise Spectre, where you target a creature's corpse and consume that essence, which is then saved in the skill. Using the skill while not targeting a corpse would transform you into that creature (rarity of the corpse wouldn't matter), granting you its passive abilities (chaos degen bears) and skills (so your skill bar would have the creature skills as well as Shapeshift so you can return to your original form).

I think your items would be maintained, but other socketed skills would be unusable. Also, whatever Support gems you have supporting Shapeshift would apply to the creature skills as well (though that might get out of hand). I could see a true Druid build that uses multiple forms (Bear for tanking, Stygian Revenant for ranged, Undying Evangelist for Utility) to be effective.

This would require minimal new animations because the creatures already have animations for their own skills. I expect it would either be duration based or drain mana like old Arctic Armour did.

Nice read, I do have some difference of opinion on a couple of things though.

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The problem here is that then you can just force-spawn the area several times to force the Prophecy to happen. This takes away any exploration and also allows you to force specific Prophecies to happen in the best possible area for them. Both of these were large issues for us.

I'd argue that the problem here is that you don't allow this force-spawning and it's what, imo, makes Prophecies lackluster at end-game. When I get a prophecy such as 'The Fortune Teller's Collection' for example I'm thinking to my self "where can I make the most out of this". Now when the system is setup in a way where I can't make the most out of it without having to pay one to several chaos sealing and reusing it I feel cheated. And the reason I feel cheated is that in order to know that I can't get the most out of it means I have to chisel and roll the desired map. Proceed to run said map only to realize I just did it for nothing. And if I want another shot at it I have to spend a chaos worth of silver coins to start the whole process over again further adding to the map rolling cost.

Now I think the system in it self is great for leveling and early gearing/end-game, but once you're in to maps on a more full time basis it simply falls short due to the lack of control we as players have over it.

Edit: Also, the most frustrating thing with prophecies that I can think of is the fact that zone specific once aren't prioritized. Worst case for me was opening 4 cemetery maps to get the zone specific...which also wasted three prophecies I had no interest in having triggered in a T2 map.

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Talismans were highly tradeable.

Not really, you released Talisman one league to early, imo, as the i-lvl support in the API only arrived the last couple of weeks of Talisman. It was, as far as I see it, the biggest downside of the league. Other than that only thing I'd change before putting it in the core game as a long term grind would be to remove white talismans (slightly upping the magic/rare drops as a result) as they served no real purpose.

2.4.0 changes everything we know about endgame?

CHOO CHOO MOTHAFAKA!!! ALL ABOARD!

So i know i'm a bad guy always posting bad messages about poe and playing since years non-stop so it calms it all down and still see the real questions unanswered... will there be a way to just stop the rain from lagging me to death in any zone with a nice 3 years old amd graphics processor (which handles d3 perfectly even if i didnt last 2 weeks before thinking "fuck this, poe is 10000 times better" ?), will we next time get some real LEAGUE ? with special mechanics ? ... Will we someday get some real servers where people dont get 5000 ping spikes so i can also play hc leagues in france (yes it was already bad and it got worse with your sound shit fix), i mean with all the money i have spent for "poe support" i would already have paid a server for 1 year guys...
Sorry to be the pain in the ass, love your game, wouldnt stop playing it, but please, keep it as it was years ago, less beautifull, but with better playability, people dont like poe because it's fancy... just because it's a godly fucking game ! graphics are for kids that have no money, so they dont buy mtx, annoy people, go for normal people who dont care about shiny rain effects and support you because they love your work !
Tons of love from France

On removing cruel, I think it would be pretty easy with the release of a new act.

You put back in some of the areas removed or shortened previously, you give the normal and merciless lab 3 ascendancy points instead of 2, and you have a new bandit style quest in act 5 so that you move cruel bandits to normal act 5 and you create a fourth "bandit" quest in act 5 merciless.

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Is Shavronne's Mutant Fish from the Vaal Temple supposed to six link any item in your inventory? That seems a little too powerful. I don't want to tell you guys how to balance, but that seems pretty broken.

For any system in the game, we like to have some very rare outcomes that are really powerful. It keeps people hunting for those elusive ones even when they've seen most of the other content we've created.

Wait what, Is this a joke or am I severely missing something here

Shapeshifting could just disable all skills, and all Supports linked to it would affect the Default Attack.


As for the new background loading, for someone with an SSD it hurts me more than helps me. Before I could load everything in the beginning and never freeze/stutter in game, but now, my game has huge freezes when I first enter a zone.. It's rather annoying/scary.


I hate mercenaries in ARPGS; I want to be a lone badass killing monsters, not have some random AI follow me and help me and mess up the aesthetic/feel of my character.. They just don't fit imo.


As someone who Races only for the collection/bragging aspect, I really do look forward to those Permanent Skin Transfers (and the braggart in me kind of wants them earlier, performance be damned,) but I know that I'm probably a minority in a minority and will just have to wait patiently until it's ready..