Path of Exile or Path of progressively one-dimensional playstyle? A history lesson

Indeed, good post. I'm in the same boat, even though I haven't been invested into this game nearly as much as you, I have been following it around for about 4 years as well and witnessed the same thing with pretty much the same exact feelings.

Unfortunately this development seems to be fully endorsed by the developers and isn't just something that happened due to the ever-increasing creativity of the playerbase judging by Interviews and the latest episode of Build of the Week. I have to wonder how anyone could enjoy a video showing yet another ranger deleting screen after screen (and off-screens), including bosses. It seems to work for the majority, though and is unlikely to change. Deeps or go home.

I have been looking for similar ARPG's lately but PoE still has that *something* extra no one else has that makes me stick around - for the time being.

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dudiobugtron wrote:

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Hunwulf wrote:

TL:DR?

More gameplay strategies used to be viable. Now it's all about that dps.

I think the OP meant that now there is only one viable strategy towards implementing maximum dps over anything else: kill before getting hit. This effectively nullifies counterbalances and strategies built around understanding an enemy and developing survivabilitly measures. This makes the game more one-dimensional. The OP's criticism is not about "clear speed" -- maxing clear speed is still the inherent goal of all ARPGs (there is nothing else to do in games like these than kill stuff and get better at it -- we're not here to admire the scenery). Instead, his criticism is that PoE used to have vastly open variable options towards attaining this goal, but now (if he is correct) the possible paths towards achieving that goal have been significantly narrowed: kill before getting hit.

It's all about DPS if you make it all about DPS. I can see how four years of playing has gotten you to the point where you are now; there hasn't been that much new content and after playing the same content over and over it's only natural to want to be done with it as quickly as possible. It's impossible for any developer to create new content as fast as players can consume it. At the same time, as someone who has only actively played the game for half a year, I still find it incredibly deep and complex. Since March this year I've played five different builds, some more successful than others, and I still have several more I'd like to try.

It's not just PoE either. In any grindy game players want to get over the grindy parts as fast as possible and pit themselves against the endgame bosses. Over time more and more efficient builds are discovered, and the speed-conscious players adopt them. Balance is a pipe dream - as long as there are different builds, there will be a "best" build, or at most a handful of builds which are considered top tier. The only way to achieve balance is to simplify the game so much that it becomes possible to enumerate all of the variations and equalize them against each other.

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databeaver wrote:

Balance is a pipe dream.

If we're talking about actual balance - yes, of course.

But I'm not an unreasonable man and I don't think OP is either, I'd settle for apparent balance, way better in my book than glaring imbalance.

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Dungeon and Dragons (from 2nd edition up to 4th plus some videogames based on it like Dragonshard and D&D online), Planescape : Torment, Elder Scroll series (mainly Morrowind and Oblivion), Diablo series (mainly D2) , Baldur's Gate series (mainly all of them repeatedly), Pathfinder, Gothic (I-II and a bit of III), Mutants and Masterminds, Icewind Dale series, Heroes of Might and Magic III (my most played game by far), Might and Magic (you know which ones), Divinity : Original Sin, Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2, WoW(vanilla only), World of Darkness (both classic and new), Sacred, Warcraft (II & III), Grim Dawn, Age of Decadence, Titan Quest

If I may say so: I believe you and I we just come from a different era of gaming where in Gothic II you spent over a 100 hours before joining a faction, always trying to build that perfect character.

I am lacking the long term experience with Path of Exile but in my "preparation" (choosing a starter build) for Essence League I have made the very same observation:

I am playing on a Laptop and suffer from terrible FPS in Boss fights and hence have trouble dodging the "big one-shot hits", so I was trying to build as tanky as possible to in order to compensate for my lack of movement. In the end I am just playing SRS and BV since their damage is so massive and can be stacked up before hand that it doesn't matter if I cannot perform any action for a few seconds since the boss is going to be dead in that time-span anyway.

I have, by no means, proceeded into end game content this League, but the resemblance of your tale and my observations is striking!

Yet I still hope you are wrong and that it is possible and viable to play defensively! Cause otherwise my cause to play end-game without a new machine is a lost one ;)

I registered in 2011 but I started playng seriously when the game went out of beta at the beginning of 2013. At that time, 15k dps was far from godly. An average lowlife build was pulling 100, the mirror dagger boys were pulling 300k. Lowlife projectile shotgun CoC was already in the millions. And then we had prolif flameblast, which was oneshotting the entire screen, bosses included, with next to no damage investment. And people started discovering minmaxed coc discharge builds, and mjolner builds, and then we had the incinerate - cyclone - poison arrow meta, and then Havoc discovered the vaal sparker, and then bladefall and poison appeared, etc... Bottomline: there have been top-tiper, hard-hitting, godly builds at any point in PoE's history.

Apart from that, your sentiment can be described with one word: powercreep.

I'm not sure if it's avoidable in an ARPG which gets quarterly expansion packs. GGG are trying to keep the game fresh and afloat and that's now they are doing it - perhaps there might be another solution and their methods might not be the best but hey, it works for them and we aren't the owners of a successful game studio, are we? What do we know?

Also, the playstyle you are complaining about existed three years ago, it's just that information about the game wasn't that widely spread yet. Don't underestimate the power of a large and well-established gaming community to discover optimal game theory and basically to break the game.

Not saying your complaints are baseless, I also think there are some issues with the game and I also think the Awakening was a turning point. It's just that IMO you're at least partly burned out and there are many reasons you aren't enjoying PoE as much as you used to, however you're putting them all in a big lump called 'PoE sucks' which isn't entirely accurate. Do like me, have some breaks. I've had a break of over a year, a break of 3-4 months and a break of 2 and a half months and they help a lot to keep the game fresh.

Interesting read, one point stuck out, though.

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Regulator wrote:

And i cant but compare this with some of the games i mentioned before in the intro, why even if it had the same design and basic principles as them has PoE changed so much?

The main differences between the games you mentioned in the intro and PoE are: none of the mentioned games are F2P, and only a couple (WoW and maybe Grim Dawn?) are designed around permanent development/updates. A lot of the games you mentioned are heavily scripted story-based affairs. They, most likely, don't have that much in common with PoE design-wise. Some of them have some similarities in setting (grim fantasy RPG-ish stuff), but that's about it, from my point of view.

Other than that, pretty much agree with Bars above.

Definately no complaints in the op just some observations from my point of view.
As i said, i still thoroughly enjoy the game when i play im just disappointed with this decision to leave out other elements and focus on that path.

As for the damage values i got it pretty right, with even builds from that era (check mathil's and havoc's atziri and uber when they were first indroduced 15k and 14k respective - HC and STD). Im also talking HC, mirrored gear only applies to STD. CoC wasnt even close to top end builds in HC at that era, and all those builds mostly skyrocketed after Forsaken Masters.

I vividly remember going Pillar Of the Caged God with Abyssus in nemesis (yes when it costed 2c in HC leagues, figure why and think a bit about it in correlation with the rest of the points made, while in today's damage era even in HC abyssuss goes for 20c!), and having 18k dps GS was like godly doing highest content and shit.

Yes i know the playstyle existed in 2013 i was playing it. Thats why i wrote this thread, this playstyle is obsolete now and started to be after forsaken and mainly after the awakening, due to many additions and decisions. And im citing many reason why this keeps happening.

I might be unhappy about another thing and have made a very big complaint about it, but this has nothing to do with burning out or having done it "all". Is just the way i see it in HC, GGG promotes and incentivizes players to get damage with the design decisions they make. Bosses oneshotting means that its better to go for damage to give them less time and chances to do so, bosses being immune to 1million effects means that you must use raw damage to bring them down, leagues being the same for both HC and SC players means that GGG CANT implement mechanics that would be totally accepted and enjoyed at the same level from both sides, adding content that completely ignores your defences (traps) incentivizes even more forfeiting them (almost) completely (P.S. in the OP). Every single support gem having more and increased damage while also lowering the downsides makes them all more generic and of similar purpose/use.

Powercreep surely has some effect on the design but its not the whole thing and certainly is very different from what im explaining/saying.

Also i made that comparison not because they are similar to the gameplay or design (some of the games i mentioned are strategy and tabletop), but to the way they approach the fights. PoE had many similarities with many of them in the start, but with the passing of time they choose to tone down some options and focused more on what i said.

PoE doesnt suck, i still consider PoE the best ARPG out there, i never even said that, i might critisize it harshly from time to time, but i never generalize the critisism. Yes some aspects might suck for me, but the game as a whole is still superb.

Again, these are observations from an HC point of view, simply put the game itself promotes damage over anything else. Not clear speed (while that somewhat similar but not the same) but damage above anything else and thats whats sad for me to see and realise.

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raics wrote:

But I'm not an unreasonable man and I don't think OP is either, I'd settle for apparent balance, way better in my book than glaring imbalance.

PoE is a very complex game. What should be the balancing target? If GGG balances 6L setups with the best possible uniques, very few players are going to achieve that and most will cry that they are underpowered and can't kill stuff. If they balance for 5L setups with good rares, there will be players running around in 6L setups and OP uniques one-shotting everything.

If GGG balances the game so that the highest DPS glass cannon builds take ten seconds to kill a boss, then everyone else will cry that killing bosses takes ages. If they balance boss HP for a reasonable build with both offense and defense, then those glass cannon builds will one-shot bosses.

I hear pathfinder with blade vortex and certain flasks is pretty damn overpowered right now. How are they going to balance that specific combination without making one of the components vastly underpowered in any other setup? How are they going to find every such combination and balance them before someone makes an OP build based on it?

If you have some insight on how to balance every (reasonable) build for every (at least moderately skilled) player even within 50% of each other, I'm very interested in hearing it.

The game has changed from "plan your build's defenses and offenses and strike a balance" to "one shot the entire screen before a random projectile one shots you".

This is what happens when developers introduce bigger numbers for the sake of hype. A lot of the current uniques cater to the "wow" factor of the average gamer (because who doesn't like critting for 9 million dps), but are terrible for the longer term.

Here is how it works: Introduce a unique with awesome power (everyone goes nuts over how awesome it is) --> People get extremely powerful builds with it --> Increase the game's difficulty (aka "and then we doubled it" on monster HP and damage) --> Game gets harder --> Introduce a new unique with awesome power with makes this new content easier.

It's a constantly increasing curve. In the end, you have a scenario where balance hardly matters. The power spike to so high that the idea is to kill monsters before they kill you.

Here are a few examples of the culprits:

1. Flasks - At one point, flasks were used to sustain health and mana. Today, most builds definitely use (or would, if they could afford it) a Taste of Hate, an Atziri's promise and a Vinktar's. Why? They give more damage. I recall that GGG's stance on not having pants in the game was around the argument of "more item slots dilute the importance of each existing item slot in light of gameplay balance". I respect that decision, because it was the right decision. However, they have made the exact mistake that they wanted to avoid, with these flasks. Where flasks were once primarily to restore one of the two pools (hp/mana), now they add an additional layer of gameplay which dilutes the existing ones.

2. Overpowered uniques gated behind hard content - This argument has never worked in games. Making an item overpowered with the justification of gating it behind hard content is a bad concept. Gamers are more intelligent and creative than the developers give them credit for. It's only a matter of time before people figure out how to beat the hard content, and then you have a flood of overpowered uniques which trivialize the game. This leads to the problem I mentioned at the start - a constantly increasing spike of difficulty and items to compensate each other. Examples of these are items like Atziri's acuity, Atziri's disfavor, the newly released Shaper sword, etc.

3. Focusing the entire game around damage - Which physical based build doesn't run Hatred or Herald of Ash today? Almost everyone that scales with phys damage has Hatred in their build. Why is this? Because it's a huge damage boost. Why do they need this damage boost? It goes back to the original argument of "One shot the screen before a random monster one shots you".

4. Defenses are in a crappy place - Why bother with defenses armor/evasion when you have have a larger pool and one shot the screen with your awesome damage? This topic merits a thread of its own, but I feel that the three basic defenses (armor, evasion and energy shield) are completely wrong in today's PoE. Maybe when the game was first designed, they made more sense, but the way the game has evolved, they simply don't make sense. The reason is that, two of the three (armor and evasion) are mitigating factors while the third (energy shield) is a pool. If you think about it, ES is more comparable to HP as a gameplay mechanic. This is the reason there is a huge disparity between ES and life builds right now. The game and the passive tree are designed around ES being a mitigating mechanic, when in reality, it is a pool. This is also why you can easily get 12k ES from the tree (similar to how you can easily get 12k armor or evasion from the tree), however, getting 12k life from the tree is simply not feasible. It would take a massive rehaul of the system to balance the defensive mechanics in the game, and at the moment, the developers seem to be more occupied with new content rather than looking back at the existing content and addressing its flaws.



Overall, I still love PoE, however, the more it has grown, the more it has deviated from the spirit of a real ARPG.