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

"

The_Reporter wrote:

"

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.

This type of a band-aid would only serve to create even LESS build diversity.

What Reporter said.

Like I said, glass should be associated with pilot skill. The solution isn't the simple upping of enemy HP, but instead:

1. Telegraph all damage. Period. Make it so good, fast mouse moves mean you can manually avoid getting hit at all. Even for melee; if you want to be a glassy melee, more WoW Rogue than WoW Warrior, that should be an option if your mouse skills can handle it.

2. Make the shortest, hardest-to-avoid telegraphs hit weakest; longest, easiest-to-avoid hit hardest.

3. Make exclusive defenses — the types you need to sacrifice clearspeed in order to acquire — effective against progressively larger hits. This way, if you cannot avoid the fastest telegraphs, that's fine — you've sacrificed clearspeed to gain the ability to ignore them.

I personally believe invulnerability should never be allowed, that there should always be something that will murder you if you don't avoid it manually. However, for very defensive characters, they should be able to effectively ignore most of enemy attacks and only have to worry about a few moves with very high wind-up times.

Without good telegraph design, it's not impossible to accommodate glass AND tank playstyles simultaneously. Speaking of history lessons: believe it or not, once upon a time tank was "OP" and glass was shit, back in Open Beta. As a glass advocate, I made a suggestion, which was implemented, to nerf life nodes to reduce the impact of defensive investment. In hindsight, that suggestion was monumentally stupid.

Regulator nailing the truth.

I honestly have not enjoyed the game properly since A4's release. I cannot put my finger on it, but I just hate the entire act (aqueducts are cool). I really wish they would make the story optional or drop it to one playthrough, which I have made posts about as well.

I also do not like the ascendancy classes and think most of those mechanics could have been more fun and build diversifying through the jewel socket system. The structure of their class trees is very boring and constraining. And the one class that is supposed to be the inbetweener has rigid hand picked generic stats from them.

I have resigned myself that builds simply have a level range where content is at the proper difficulty. Some of the more outlandish mechanical builds I have made could not even make it past cruel A4, but had a sweet spot along the way. The best thing you can do is not go beyond that point imo.

______


For me, if a build can make it to mapping and taper off around tier 10 then it is a success. Though I never make my builds with raw effectiveness in mind. I prefer to play off interesting mechanics (which are also not supported enough over the raw damage meta). Like you said, spark used to have a lot of mechanical choices that make it interesting, but all of them were removed.

Ah. I am getting carried away when I said I would not make another post like this... Suffice to say I agree.

"

Emphasy wrote:

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.

Bullshit.

Blade Flurry is not a melee attack, regardless of the bogus tag GGG put on it. BF is a ranged channelling attack that relies on cheesy, double-dipping exploits to be effective.

The current META is ranged double-dip DPS uber alles.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

1. Telegraph all damage. Period. Make it so good, fast mouse moves mean you can manually avoid getting hit at all. Even for melee; if you want to be a glassy melee, more WoW Rogue than WoW Warrior, that should be an option if your mouse skills can handle it.

This would be amazingly fun.

"

SudianX wrote:

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

1. Telegraph all damage. Period. Make it so good, fast mouse moves mean you can manually avoid getting hit at all. Even for melee; if you want to be a glassy melee, more WoW Rogue than WoW Warrior, that should be an option if your mouse skills can handle it.

This would be amazingly fun.

:)

One of the biggest issues with feedback threads discussing melee is that they treat the terms "melee character" and "tank" as synonymous. This is only the case if "melee" is synonymous with "cannot avoid incoming damage."

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

1. Telegraph all damage. Period. Make it so good, fast mouse moves mean you can manually avoid getting hit at all. Even for melee; if you want to be a glassy melee, more WoW Rogue than WoW Warrior, that should be an option if your mouse skills can handle it.

A good example of this concept is Argus, if you temp chain him the encounter plays real nice on a moderately fast melee. Got an edge of madness trickster with viper strike I tried that with and you can do the whole fight without getting hit once if you run when you should, move away when he takes a swing and then go back in for a few hits.

"

Regulator wrote:

It didnt take long for GGG to realease their second expansion later that year, Forsaken Masters, and it didnt take me long after trying it and playing Beyond, to buy another supporter pack. It was also shortly after that i got accepted into the Alpha realm of the game, for testing purposes, i couldnt be more glad and happy at the time. Little did i know. Shortly after Bloodlines (and Torment) was released, but something had changed, or actually continued to get out of control since the previous league. The damage, the dps, the tooltip and everything related to them started getting extravagant. In a three months' time the top dps tooltips were reaching the hundred's of thousand or even millions. Ofcourse that was happening in standard. But the seed had been planted. And soon there were HC focused builds with 30, 40, 50 and some critical based reaching 100k+ dps. The damage was already done.

poewiki:

"

The Bloodlines league was a hardcore challenge league. In this league, each pack of magic monsters had a shared Bloodline mod that greatly influenced combat – sometimes while the pack was still alive, and sometimes after it had been killed.[1]

The league started along with the Torment league on December 13, 2014

And Chris stated they began console development in 2015. So obviously they started making game balance choices with consideration to console version way before that.

Spot-on, OP. Spot-on.

"

Bananaplasm wrote:

"

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.

Ofcourse you would have to bring different speccs closer together balancing-wise. But i think making enemies tougher is still necessary. I mean the difference is already there and i would argue that the difference between speccs that can teleport infinitely and oneshot enemies and a specc that runs slower and twoshots enemies is even bigger than the difference between a specc that takes 6 hits to kill mobs and a specc that takes lets say 8 to 10 hits. In the first scenario, travelling takes up a much bigger portion of the time you spend grinding, so it becomes an even bigger factor to distinguish efficient builds from nonefficient.

There are two ways gamedesign in an rpg can let the playercommunity hit a brickwall: The first is to increase enemy-defense significantly, so fighting monsters on a certain level simply doesnt pay out efficiency-wise anymore, which was Diablo 3s approach for a long long time, and the second would be upping enemy damage so being oneshot becomes the problem as soon as you face enemies that are on or above your "powerlevel".

The first approach implented in a extreme form is ofcourse the worst decision since it will only lead to boring fights as soon as you want to face a challenge. POE on the other hand is far far on the damage side of the spectrum, and it has its charme but i think POE is also too extreme. There is a fine line between those extremes and a game that truly aims for perfection in pacing and progression has to walk on this fine line.

"

1. Telegraph all damage. Period. Make it so good, fast mouse moves mean you can manually avoid getting hit at all. Even for melee; if you want to be a glassy melee, more WoW Rogue than WoW Warrior, that should be an option if your mouse skills can handle it.

Actually the game has very little non-telegraphed abilities. Every autoattack is telegraphed, because if you move away before the enemy makes a swing you won't get hit. Something you can very easily abuse with Blade Vortex or Cyclone, with an actual namelock skill though it is really hard, because you have to get through with your own autoattack and move away before the enemy hits, it still is possible in theory.

I'm not actually sure how many non-telegraphed attacks exist. Arc and Flicker Strike are unavoidable. And some massive spray attacks are rally hard to avoid, but in general you can already play pretty glass cannon like, some people even actually took the challange to play certain encounters with CI + EB.

As early as Rampage someone actually took on Atziri with a Poison Arrow char with only a single point of HP and it is doable, of course not with a melee, but even that shows that a lot is telegraphed.

"

2. Make the shortest, hardest-to-avoid telegraphs hit weakest; longest, easiest-to-avoid hit hardest.

So I dismissed the first point because it already kinda is the case, however this one isn't the case. And I don't even mind some weak attacks that are guaranteed to hit, or stuff like the Beam in Plaza and Torture Chamber you have to break, because again the damage depends on your ability to move. But there is a lot of failure in regards of dodgability and damage of enemy attacks, and one of the issues here is map mods. Multiple Projectiles and Chain are mods that often make it a lot harder to avoid projectiles, while there are also plenty of damage mods that make them incredible dangerous. Outside of maps if you look at Uber Lab or Atziri this works very well, because enemies have a set damage, but maps kinda break that and a lot of the map bosses are actually jokingly easy if there is no mod strengthening them in any form. They have to make the gap between incredible difficulty and incredible easy maps a lot closer, to achieve a good balance on damage.

"

3. Make exclusive defenses — the types you need to sacrifice clearspeed in order to acquire — effective against progressively larger hits. This way, if you cannot avoid the fastest telegraphs, that's fine — you've sacrificed clearspeed to gain the ability to ignore them.

Well the thing is right now defense is incredible cheap and the reason is CI. For life builds the balance is still mostly good, you always invested about half your non-Pathing points in defense and offense and there were always options to go a bit more in either direction, however for CI that doesn't work, because you need far less points, and there actually aren't as many ES nodes anyway. I actually looked back at an old character just to notice that they way a skill him wasn't so much different, however the value those nodes had changed a lot over time. It was a lot easier to sacrifice a bit of HP for Block and you actually gained survivability by that.

"

Speaking of history lessons: believe it or not, once upon a time tank was "OP" and glass was shit, back in Open Beta. As a glass advocate, I made a suggestion, which was implemented, to nerf life nodes to reduce the impact of defensive investment. In hindsight, that suggestion was monumentally stupid.

Actually I would disagree with that. Because those characters just felt like tanks. But they had about the same investment in damage and defenses as todays characters have, they outcome was simply a lot different. And of course you had certain mechanics that made building damage incredible meaningless, because you could permastun pretty much every boss without much damage :P

Opting for defense points in the tree just felt better and opting for damage felt a lot worse. You still did both, because after all the power of a character essentially is the product of defense and offense. And for that a product gets the greatest if both factors are of similar size, because the amount of skillpoints is fixed. Getting more increased damage after you already have a shitton isn't meaningful and the same goes for getting increased HP after you already have a lot. Which is why block was so powerful, because it doesn't follow that rule.

"

I honestly have not enjoyed the game properly since A4's release. I cannot put my finger on it, but I just hate the entire act (aqueducts are cool). I really wish they would make the story optional or drop it to one playthrough, which I have made posts about as well.

I don't like A4 as well. At least we get one playthrough removed and playing a lot of different things is hopefully a bit better, it is still about the same time to reach endgame.

"

Bullshit.

Blade Flurry is not a melee attack, regardless of the bogus tag GGG put on it. BF is a ranged channelling attack that relies on cheesy, double-dipping exploits to be effective.

The current META is ranged double-dip DPS uber alles.

Well Blade Flurry actually does well in every form. As pure physical, as poison+chaos, as elemental (even without HoWA), so no, you don't need to double dip. Of course as an assassin with essentially 400% poison damage right of the ground you would be stupid not to use double dipping, but it does work without.

Also your melee definition is questionable considering the game mechanics. If the majority of melee skills behaves similar to Blade Flurry, than Blade Flurry belongs in the same category. And also a lot of those actually melee gems are quite old, with Wildstrike being the only younger one. So they pushed melee away from single target namelock skills and since they did this all those AoE skills are melee.

Right now we don't have a specific archtype meta, people just pick the best skills. Flameblast doesn't benefit any more than Fireball from Double Dipping, it is just a shitton stronger in general. Warchief is just incredible strong and Essence Drain as well. If there is a meta then it is CI.

"

And Chris stated they began console development in 2015. So obviously they started making game balance choices with consideration to console version way before that.

Spot-on, OP. Spot-on.

Honestly people think too much about that console thing and totally forget that a fast paced and quick gameplay is as compelling for the steam audience they targetted. Slow strategic games are just not as popular as fast action packed ones. It might fit consoles as well but the console development is not really needed as an explanation for that.

"

A good example of this concept is Argus, if you temp chain him the encounter plays real nice on a moderately fast melee. Got an edge of madness trickster with viper strike I tried that with and you can do the whole fight without getting hit once if you run when you should, move away when he takes a swing and then go back in for a few hits.

Honestly a lot of boss fights are actually well designed. You can avoid incredible amounts of damage and you often notice instantly when a boss is not following this style. A fun boss is one where you didn't just win because you had the right gear, but also one were you felt you made the right decisions during the fight and executed them well.