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

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Emphasy wrote:

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.

Exactly, I often mention that you start to notice how many good fights this game actually has if you play a weak char. Most players can't know about it because the boss is killed in under a second by their optimized levelling or endgame setup, and newcomers often jump right into those by following a build guide and either meet the stat check or not, instead of having to study the encounter.

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Emphasy wrote:

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.

Well, the melee definition is fairly simple - 'if you need to go in and sniff monster armpits for whatever reason it's a melee build'. So, if you use AC-Blight combo and you use conc on Blight to start the chain reaction sooner, that's very similar to Infernal Blow and much more melee than Blade Flurry, also, Wild/Static Strike are melee but EQ or Frost Blades aren't.

So, if you note the popularity of certain skills we do have a meta, it's 'ranged AoE dps or close range dps for boss farming if it's broken (BV), leech sustain unless your dps is broken otherwise (ignite)'.

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Emphasy wrote:

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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.

First, you're forgetting about reflected damage, which is 100% untelegraphed. Second, it's not fair game to say "of course not with melee" in this discussion.

Third, I think a good design concept is that monster attack speed will be proportional to attention demanded. You might tell me that a single autoattack is avoidable, but what about an entire pack of them, you couldn't avoid them all anymore. I think "white" enemies should be slower, precisely because they can use advantage in numbers to make them harder to approach without getting hit; I think "boss" enemies should have very fast attacks which demand constant attention. Basically, I'm saying to move Vaal Slam from the boss monster to the white mob. This is the polar opposite of the fast-autoattack-pack.

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Emphasy wrote:

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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.

You said "you need far less points" in defense. You're assuming that every player, regardless of pilot skill level, needs the same amount of defense. Regulator's claim is that this is true; you need enough defense to survive some the cheap untelegraphed/fast-telegraphed damage the game throws at you, then everything else has to go in offense because further defenses don't make the game easier. I am advocating a system where the defense you choose reflects the piloting skill retirement you're aiming for.

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raics wrote:

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Emphasy wrote:

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.

Exactly, I often mention that you start to notice how many good fights this game actually has if you play a weak char. Most players can't know about it because the boss is killed in under a second by their optimized levelling or endgame setup, and newcomers often jump right into those by following a build guide and either meet the stat check or not, instead of having to study the encounter.

Exactly, and this is one of the plague of PoE : cheesing a boss, to not need to deal with its mechanics at all.

And then GGG create huge and over tanky shit (@hi breachlords) to "compensate" ..... Only it changes very little for these 'abusing' builds, but is a big "fuck you" to the rest of the community.

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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.

No
As I just said, they are already doing that, and it's terrible.
Go ahead and fight the breachlords, you will see.

Cheesing bosses needs to go as much as possible, and if you don't want to screw maybe 90+‰ of the viable builds (if not 95+%), couple of combinations need to be nerfed to the ground.

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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? Is this a result of another problem? Is the hype train and the short attention spawn reasons that GGG blatantly incentivizes going full damage? Is that playstyle of killing as fast as possible the only way to enjoy or even get to try the new content? Isnt tanking 5 or 6 hits from the boss giving the same joy as killing the said boss in less than 20seconds? Isnt effectively controling or countering the boss' abilities as thrilling as killing it in one barage of air dropping/swirling knives? Cause PoE offered all of those options once upon a time, and with expansion after expansion and patch after patch all options were toned down with only one prevailing and thats damage.

It was a well written post, and I'll take a stab at answering it.

I don't think it's so much of a change in design philosophy as it is a consequence of the design philosophy that always has been.

Even moreso than the challenge of the game or the exploration of Wraeclast, I think the main draw of POE has always been the customization of the character. As time has gone on, there have been more things to customize (like Ascendancy classes) and more options to fill the choices we already have (new items, new skills, etc). Giving us more options both fulfills the core design philosophy of POE to build a character the way you want, and gives players the things we want to maintain our interest (new items to find, skills to play with, etc). It all sounds good, right? But there is a sinister side to it all- more options means bigger differences in power level between builds. The best characters start to break the game, average difficulty starts to adjust to the new meta, old builds can't keep up. Due to progression, it is necessary for the game to have a difficulty and power curve for characters that aren't yet optimized (how else would you start?). Due to customization, the difference between optimization is large.

Imagine we played a game where you get a set of blocks with numbers engraved on them, and I give you challenges where I say a whole number and you return the set of blocks that sums to the closest value. For example, if your blocks have numbers '2' '5' and '8' and I challenge you with the number '11' then your response should be 8+2. The closer you are the more points you get. Now imagine you get more blocks every few rounds. The more blocks you are given, the closer you can get to any challenge number I test. The game effectively becomes easier because you are able to get closer and closer with the more blocks you are given. Now the person who is engraving these blocks and giving them to you may have difficulty calculating how close you can get to a given challenge number with the whole set of block available to you- even if I give the engraver a list of all my challenge numbers in advance- because they have other priorities like making sure all the blocks are finished before we play our game, the engravings are legible, trivial & obvious solutions are avoided, and so forth. You can see that after you have been given enough blocks, there ceases to exist any challenge number that I can give you that would be of any interest, and that's actually not the engraver's fault. While having more options to build your answer makes the game more interesting at first, it also ultimately destroys the game over time.

When you're able to replace 1 item that is strong with another 1 that is slightly stronger for what you need from it, but slightly weaker in other aspects, then GGG has provided you a new option that hasn't power-creeped the game in the sense of raising all the numbers, but they have offered you a better solution to optimize your character. They didn't make the game easier per se, although they did make your character stronger. The outcome is the same as making the game easier, but the reason why it happened isn't.

The only way to put the genie back in the bottle is to either give us less options or give us less progression. I didn't talk much about progression because it's pretty self-explanatory. Neither of these paths appear to suited to GGG's business model (or any other game developer's business model for that matter). Why would people keep coming back if there weren't anything new to progress toward, or if there weren't any new options for your character? The problem is that some of these things that we want destroy other things that we want. The abundance of customization and progression have destroyed any reason to play the game in a suboptimal fashion- so instead we all focus on clear speed over defense.

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PolarisOrbit wrote:

The only way to put the genie back in the bottle is to either give us less options or give us less progression.

Good post overall, but I disagree with this part. You forgot "hide the challenge number." Force players to reverse engineer it through experimentation, then after a little while change it again.

However, one issue with this is the Internet. Current reverse engineering progress, to include a fully solved puzzle, can be shared via the Internet, which threatens to functionally reveal the hidden challenge number for those who keep up with the community. Content creators (streamers, build guide creators, etc) are incentived to create popular content, so they'll provide the correct answers people are looking for (until it becomes boring).

That's why I've been promoting individualization of the challenge number; that is, different challenge numbers for every person. In PoE terms, the way to go that is to make it so build optimization is tied to piloting/mouse/reflex skill — the higher your skill, the glassier the optimization; the lower your skill, the tankier the optimization.

This could be further subdivided. For example, consider a telegraph for an enemy attack that is very difficult to notice (small, briefly displayed) but that occurs a long time before the attack. You wouldn't need to be particularly fast at the mouse to avoid this, but you'd need to be very observant. If you then used damage types, etc so you could stack defenses specifically against that type of attack, you could tank specifically against poor observation skills to cover that weakness, while still needing good reaction time for obvious telegraphs.

Because player skill tends to grow as they play more (both in terms of interface familiarity and in understanding enemy attack patterns), player skill is a moving target. This makes it the ideal subcomponent for your "challenge number." Although, admittedly, on a long enough timeline player skill would likely cap off at some point, at which point the player could settle on a final optimization. Until the next balance shakeup, anyway.

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Fruz wrote:

And then GGG create huge and over tanky shit (@hi breachlords) to "compensate" ..... Only it changes very little for these 'abusing' builds, but is a big "fuck you" to the rest of the community.

Makes me wonder about the viability of "super armor".

Imagine a stat that bosses can have which is the exact opposite of armor -- guards more against larger hits. Forces player damage to scale sub-linearly.

(Of course, wouldn't be needed if GGG didn't hand out massive player power with every new unique item and skill gem nor the exponential reality of double-dipping.)

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Utterly agree with the OP. There is no downside to going for mega-dps, in fact, only more upsides than if you avoid it. Combine that with the hilarious power creep over the last few years and bob's your uncle.

Players move and attack so fast that enemy AI has virtually ceased to exist.

as long as the game is DESIGNED in a way that makes some builds just 20 times (not an exageration!) stronger than others.. this discussion is a waste of your time

right now POE is designed in this way. nothing is being done to fix this because noone gives a damn.

the only thing designers did was to overtune the end game content so the 'meta' builds have at least something to remember during their right-click-to-victory effortless journey

this is attrocious 'design'. but it catters to the ones who need some form of 'success' in their lives - so game gives them 'success' in big lumps. receivers do not really worry if that makes their game shallow and boring in the long run. they have gotten their 'success' so for them it is the best game ever.


all these 'CI vs life' fiascos, meta etc discussion are all a result of one thing: ggg designers no longer care about this stuff. they are happy with few meta builds, ignore the rest. it is a cash grab at this point. cattering to the lowest denominator.

at least 4 major patches were total blunders balance wise. NOTHING got fixed. poison and double dip is ruining any form of build diversity, the power creep makes all defensive options redundant, because CI + GR + VP is BETTER in every f.. way than all other crap combined. has anything changed? NO.

so why do you guys expect changes? the business model works: tease -> milk -> abandon -> tease ->..

you guys care about what is happening more than the designers

ps. please no 'but you can play anything you want'. it is an old bs that only the desperate use. sure, you can. but remind me why anyone would do it? self-punishment? ive done enough 'non-meta' builds and few meta builds. i dare anyone who played blade flurry to go back and play any other 'melee' skill..

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sidtherat wrote:

dare anyone who played blade flurry to go back and play any other 'melee' skill..

Despite a fair number of players claiming it gets impossibly boring after half an hour? :)

Efficiency matters aside, showering the screen with bullets, homing weapons and such are trademarks of top down shooters, remember the toothpaste gun from Raiden? However, the reason it works there is you're busy with dodging all the time, it wouldn't be possible if you also had to position yourself to do damage in addition to avoiding it. In PoE you don't have to bother with dodging most of the time so autoaim skills get boring fast.

I blame console for all this. ppl like the one shot aoe clear speed meta by in large and console players moreso. Yes I'm saying it seeped into game the whole 3 years they've been working on port. They put us like a frog in cold water and turned up heat slowly so we wouldn't realize its becoming a console game. if they offer a offline version i'm DLing 1.0 or 1.1.

Edit and what you say about DPS is true. at least an order of magnitude more. I was looking at my first build guide the other day and DPS is 10x higher today, same build and gear! gems were buffed, ascendancy, jewels, heralds etc happened since then.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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The_Reporter wrote:

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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.

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.

This works well to telegraph on most things. High end bosses like shaper/uber not so much.



lvl 21 temp chains boosted w/ lvl 5 enhance and 30% increased enchantment then when i get hit CWDT vortex slows even more.