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

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wiggin wrote:

But you are completely missing the point and suggest that I am just whining because my character didn't kill Izaro. Come on.
I am simply pointing out that certain approach in character creation would result in that situation. This approach was valid before but is not anymore. The design has changed. It is not a "problem" per se, it is just the way it is and some people may like it more and some people may have liked the earlier way better. And yes, in the end it can be about "I don't do enough damage".

It is also worth considering that it is not the genre that defines the games, it is the games that define the genre. Argumenet about anything being rooted into certain genre is invalid. The game creators can copy things that are awesome in their eyes from all the other arpgs but can discard ideas that are lame (like buying stacks of health flasks with gold in town).

If your character couldn't kill Izaro that's a personal/character problem not a game problem. Unless there is some "extreme" bug with him.

I agree with your approach position. It's just the "way it is", as I said previously and we need to adapt to GGG's game.

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And yes, in the end it can be about "I don't do enough damage".

Come on man. You know damn well in Diablo 2 if you didn't have enough damage for uber you couldn't do it. I assume you are still trying to persuade Brevik and the other developers about that too? Let's be real, required damage has been around in the aRPG genre since Diablo and it's an integral part of the genre and plays a yuuuge role.

If you don't have enough damage, that is either a skill design flaw (that needs buffing), or you have not invested into your character.

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It is also worth considering that it is not the genre that defines the games, it is the games that define the genre. Argumenet about anything being rooted into certain genre is invalid. The game creators can copy things that are awesome in their eyes from all the other arpgs but can discard ideas that are lame (like buying stacks of health flasks with gold in town).

True, however GGG is pretty close to the original aRPG genre roots from Diablo, which is where I draw the parallel and foundation. I like that, and I know you probably do too, but I still don't understand this damage / power creep stuff.

You are right. Certain skills and builds absolutely are horrible and cannot do Izaro. I'd argue back with.. you guessed it, find a new build / invest into your character more. Just because a certain build doesn't do enough dps for end-game doesn't create a "game design" issue. We dance to GGG's music.

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Unfortunately i have to agree with the OP. Damage is everything, and with the latest league they are even forcing you to follow this path.

People shouldn't look at ARPGs like they look at MMORPGS. In ARPGs there are only DDs. They have to invest enough into surviving and the rest into efficiency. That is mostly due to how such games work. You are not soaking damage for other players that gets healed backed.

The game is all about killing a lot of mobs, and damage is what does that. If really tanky builds existed they existed because they gained incredible defenses without sacrificing offensive ability, the best example is CI with high leech, leech essentially is a defense that scales with damage.

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Im very disappointed with the Breach league. If you dont have a certain clear speed you are not able to clear the content. You are denied. Your build, your playstyle, everything is denied. If you meet the DPS/clearspeed requiement you are free to enjoy the content.

No, this is not a gear check. This is META check.

Well it is a build check, meta check not quite. It is more in line what someone else said before, the gap between different builds is too high, those builds though don't necessarily follow a certain meta. Blade Flurry, Flameblast-Totems, Essence Drain, Warchief or Blade Vortex are all completly different metas, we have melee, melee totems, spell totems, dots and spells. A meta would mean that you can only play ranged attackers, or only ranged spellcasters, or only totems or only melees, which is not the case. In all categories you have certain builds that are far outclassing other skills of the same and often even other categories. Blade Flurry outclasses all melee skills and quite some other skills too, Flameblast outclasses essentially everything and Blade Vortex might be even worse.

So the issue is the gap. If all those builds are a lot closer to each other even if they are not balanced they wouldn't all off so far. Just compare Groundslam to Earthquake, there is a very high difference. Build checks are fine though, you should be able to make mistakes during that process, however the mistake should not be selecting the wrong skill to build around, which right now is often the case. There could be a few inferior choices or simply skill upgrades (you can easily upgrade Reave into Blade Flurry), but right now there are too many inferior options.

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Building a good defense and have moderate damage is not an option anymore. And with the armor/block/evasion nerf (map mods) it seems like GGG is supporting the all around damage meta.

That was never an option. When this was an option it was because you had an offensive option that provided so much power that your defensive route didn't mattered. With Incinerate you could go full defensive and have still high damage. Usually your defensive and offensive nodes are often split about equally, although the CI meta currently allows for more offense, because there aren't too many ES nodes you can actually take.

Those mods would make sense, if they would at the same time improve the mod pool of maps in general. If you would only be able to roll 3 (or 4 with corruption) damage increasing mods on you such mods wouldn't be so bad, because they would remove others. I would say reduced armor and block is any worse than being cursed with Vulnerability or 30% more mob damage etc. but right now too many of them can stack together which makes it hard for life based characters to eat the damage at this point.

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Who knows, maybe it's just the natural evolution of the genre as a whole going on within the scope of one game, but if that's the case you can't expect to keep around those that don't enjoy it.

Actually during the existance of Path of Exile we had two important things happening.

a) Gaming has grown a lot. When I was in school when you played with someone you could expect two things, it was a male and he was either at school or a student, gaming though expanded a lot with a lot of woman playing as well and gamers getting older but also drawing in older audiences

b) The nostalgic gamers, that played D1 and D2 did grow, they have family a job and might not have the time to invest so much time. So even part of your core audience might not mind changes to the game, which made it faster and more accessible, because it fits better with their live

So I'm not sure, I don't mind the changes it is still the same game, I'm just using better items now, because I get them easier. The game isn't any easier, just the tools to handle the difficulty are more accessible.

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Emphasy wrote:

The game isn't any easier, just the tools to handle the difficulty are more accessible.

It isn't 'just', it's everything, look what the same 'just' did to life - CI balance :)

You know, this might be a bit hard to put into words, it's something you spend more time feeling than actively poring over but I can try.

I'm thinking the problem is in the goal, we can probably all agree that the goal of an ARPG is to make a strong character, you make your choices with that in mind. Now, the main problem is that if you go for the optimal choices the game becomes way too easy and if you don't, you go against the core of the genre, and that's why I'm saying it 'feels wrong'.

As it happens, I've been exploring that particular area a lot, and this is what it boils down to. Having to knowingly pick a build that has lower ceiling doesn't feel good in itself, and there's one more thing, you know the build is subpar so you're less likely to fully invest in it because you know it won't be able to do all content anyway, which also contradicts the genre basics. If you take the other route, pick a strong build and hold it back on purpose during its development so it would hit the ceiling more slowly, that feels even worse, not to mention that few players have the self control to do it.

So, the problem is that if you aren't a netflix player so you want to enjoy the game more than the movie, you won't be trying to get as strong as you can for this reason or other. Now, if I'm playing some pvp game like CoD and the server is full of people holding the gun upside down I won't mind using the crappiest setup possible to gimp myself, the point is to have fun, not build a powerful class.

What I'm saying is that PoE ends up working best in races if you disregard the time incentive. On a basic level, you're doing your best to get strong and you're still hitting brutus or merveil with 150-200 life and 40dps, which was once a lot more dangerous than it is now.

Well, dunno if I'm presenting all this properly but it should be making at least a bit of sense.

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Bars wrote:

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

I disagree. I don't think everything has powercreeped evenly, and there's a core concept which has been lost. As another said earlier:

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onomastikon wrote:

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

I almost fully agree with onomastikon here; I'll explain my disagreement.

So let's say the game offers players a mutually exclusive choice: defense or offense. If it's fully about clear speed, then the only valid choice is offense. Is there any alternative objective to clearing faster? Yes; clearing easier. The way it should with is...

1. High pilot skill req vs low pilot skill req
High loot/hour vs lower loot/hour
Reward per unit time tied to piloting skill

2. High loot/hour vs lower loot/hour
Offense vs defense
Clearspeed and loot/hour are inexorably linked

Therefore: Glassy builds should be associated with high pilot skill requirements, while tankier builds should be easier to play.

Maxing clear speed within the context of one's level of piloting skill should be the goal of ARPGs.

What Regulator's OP claims is a fundamental breaking of core build balance. If sacrificing clearspeed doesn't make the game easier, there's no incentive to sacrifice clear speed at all.

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Therefore: Glassy builds should be associated with high pilot skill requirements, while tankier builds should be easier to play.

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What Regulator's OP claims is a fundamental breaking of core build balance. If sacrificing clearspeed doesn't make the game easier, there's no incentive to sacrifice clear speed at all.

This. You really hit the nail on the head there. This is the main issue here. You dont get to choose one of the two scenarios. You need to go full glass-cannon in order to complete most of the content.

I didnt liked this before eighter, but i could still clear the content to an extent, at my own pace, my own way, but this league was designed about speedclearing. Nothing else mattered. And to be honest, i dont really like the direction this league pointing towards.

And all of the above revolve around the stuborness to not improve armour and evasion to a higher efficiency level - they lost it when ES became new blue life that scaled to more than double the value of a normal HP pool...

Not implementing a limit to the amount of instant leech, although regular leech has one when dealing with that cool ES = life, well we all know how the new Uber Sponge turned out, and they actually worked on the leech mechanic and improved it versus packs and lowered it versus single targets - not to mention that uber broken Vessel of Vinktar that gave 200% old leech values, did no one thought that it will be a broken addition to the game as the Carnage Heart had only up to 20% and came with a huge penalty of 25% to the HP pool? Shock as a penalty for Vinktar, when it should have reduced all your EHP by at least 50% for the duration to actually feel it's a double edged sword...

They should find ways to kill you without resorting to one shot scaling of damage - any more than 2 hits/DoT etc. that gave an opportunity to react towards the dangers and overcome them...

Cap armour to a 75% reduction, but also make it reduce the highest amount by exactly 50% of your EHP pool, so you could get the hit and then use another tactic so the next one doesn't kill you, and even evasion should work the same, as you evaded when hit half the damage of a crushing one...

They went with Stun immunity up and down, when a Stun resilience so you could get stuned by monster but not so easily again, would have been better, heck even support some monsters with traps that lock you in place for a few seconds, then everyone would have to get a bit more creative when faced with the progression of projectiles, spells or dangerous enemies towards him - dropping totems, using Vaal Immortal Call, summon decoys etc.

GGG has to find a balance regarding the rewarding of paying attention enough to the game and it's dangers, and the speed clear without giving a damn and see that you died due to beautiful "pop the weasel" mechanics... Give us some melee, and I mean melee as in weapon range up to 14, with more incentive to disregard current speed meta, by just allowing us tankability to overcome any obstacle if we also pay attention - I want my Juggernaut to feel invincible, but not invulnerable...

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

What Regulator's OP claims is a fundamental breaking of core build balance. If sacrificing clearspeed doesn't make the game easier, there's no incentive to sacrifice clear speed at all.

+1, this is the tl:dr version.

Alot of those problems can be easily solved by upping mob-hp. What sense does it make to design enemy behaviour and combat dynamics if combat is over in a heartbeat because you cut through everything like butter? This is a fundamental gamedesign-flaw, the biggest one in POE in my opinion, together with the overabundance of extremely highpaced spammable movement skills and aoe that fills the whole screen.

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Nerkal wrote:

Alot of those problems can be easily solved by upping mob-hp. What sense does it make to design enemy behaviour and combat dynamics if combat is over in a heartbeat because you cut through everything like butter? This is a fundamental gamedesign-flaw, the biggest one in POE in my opinion, together with the overabundance of extremely highpaced spammable movement skills and aoe that fills the whole screen.

Upgrading only mob HP won't do a thing. You'd just push everyone into meta builds and cut lower end builds. Speedbumps habe to be intrinsic.
There is simply no downtime. Flasks went Form HP refiller to damage amplifiers. Skills cost nothing. ES Guerilla tactics became perma leech steamrollers.
But why bother? It fits the bill. Imagine sitting on the couch and suddenly you have to slow down. Could as well do something else.