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

AR and EV do not really need any buff. they work as intended and do their job very well

it is just that The Sponge builds are 10 times better in every f.. way. and you can ofc add AR and EV to The Sponge via flasks and whatnot


game got dumbed down to a point when we should move to 'toughness' metric from d3 anyway. 'buffer' + 'replenish rate' matter a lot more

we once had a complex, intricate game. these elements are still there. but stuff has been added that eclipses all the old and replaces it.

note: i bet most players never actually gave AR/EV a fair shot. and i do not blame them. CI + instant leech is far superior in every way.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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.

I do not agree that it was a bad idea, considering the state of the game at that time. But its implementation and, more importantly, the ramifications of that implementation were not well considered.

I think I had a good understanding of the problem at the time: the offensive nodes on the tree were weak enough compared to the defensive ones such that investing in defenses not only made the game easier, but improved clearspeed better too, due to the ability to ignore more telegraphs and spend less time manually evading. However, I had weak understanding of where to go from there, and my solution created new problems equally as bad, essentially reversing the problem. Getting the diagnosis right while getting the cure wrong solves little; if your doctor correctly identifies that you have early-stage colon cancer and prescribes LSD to fix it, your doctor sucks.

Regarding spending less time manually evading: this is one reason why I feel hit-stuns (vs players) are a very interesting facet of ARPG design. On the plus side, they can make players lose DPS time when hit, which solves the "tanks save time not manually evading" issue mentioned earlier; however, in PoE bring very tanky makes one essentially immune to stuns, so it doesn't really work here. On the negative side, stun-locking can make it so a fast telegraph followed by a slow telegraph can prove fatal for a tanky character which is supposed to be nigh-immune to fast telegraphs, at least as far as survivability goes. Something along the lines of "you can move while stunned, but cannot attack" would probably be best.

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gibbousmoon wrote:

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raics wrote:

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monkuar wrote:

It's not about "i don't do enough damage" it's about "How much time and effort should I invest to build a character capable of doing this"

Take your pick
1 day with character A
2 days with character B
A week with character C
A month with character D
Never with the rest of the alphabet

The main complaint here is that A and B require too little time, not that D requires too much or that all should require the same. And I'm not even arguing the 'Never' part, it should exist too or you can't really 'lose' the game.

I don't know why you would say that last part, unless you feel that noobtraps have a legitimate role to play in ARPGs? (I do not.)

A poorly made character should fail, yes of course, but if your point of failure happens upon your choice of skill, before you've even begun to play--or, even worse, upon your choice of a class, on the character select screen--then something is seriously wrong. The illusion of choice, provided by a glut of useless gems, does not add to the game in any way, and in fact makes the game worse than if those gems did not even exist.

Having a greater variety of viable skills (active gems), as well as a greater variety of viable loadouts (support gems), makes the game much more interesting and fun both for single-player and party-based play.

And for that reason, Glacial Hammer needs another 6% buff, I think.

Well, that conversation was about making a character able to tackle the hardest possible content. I do feel that not all builds should be able to do it simply because not all players aim for it, and I also firmly believe that no builds should be able to trivialize it. Having a highest tier encounter that's possible for every decent build doesn't really work even in games with a lot lower gap between build tiers.

Most skill combos that make sense in current state of the game are indeed able to reach 'decent' level on my power scale and that's probably a good thing because that's the lowest point most players aim for. Nonsense concepts and straight messed up builds, obviously enough, shouldn't work.

I went quickly through the OP, last paragraph is exactly my thought. Now I am playing more D3 because it has became basically the same, except at PoE i can get gear more quickly, because of trading and in D3 i can see the numbers. Otherwise basically the same experience. No strategy needed, just build, stack "good enuf" dmg reductions and otherwise all out on DPS.

PoE is probably the best example of current Arpgs where the way of glass cannon is the best way, all the way out, just leech through shit, don't care about the mechanics, as long as you keep boss kills under 5 seconds which is one slap of 5 flasks, everything is all fine and dandy.