Developer Questions and Answers

Any plans to make freeze somehow usable in bosses? With diminish return or things like that, Its currently the only status ailment that doesn't help the player in boss fights.

In what way is life technically better than es?

One more quick question: With the new SSF style gameplay finally enabled, when will it be possible to buy / trade all ORBS from the NPCs in town? i.e. Chaos, Blessed, Exalted, Divine, etc.


I've asked this in the past and the reply I had gotten was confused for gems, instead of orbs. For the developers, it wouldn't seem to be too hard to do especially if it's possible to program it to work with the Forsaken Masters work at level 6.

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Archangell wrote:

Any plans to make freeze somehow usable in bosses? With diminish return or things like that, Its currently the only status ailment that doesn't help the player in boss fights.

I'd also love to know the answer to that but more so with Chance to Flee. That's something that has great potential but of course doesn't work. Seems like a total waste.

When the team was designing Path of Exile's currency system, was there discussion around whether the currency would be exclusively used by players to craft or was the expectation always that currency would be balanced to act as a sort of replacement for gold in other games (e.g. chaos & exalted orbs more often used for trading than for crafting)?

In act one the cannibals spawn in the same areas as zombies/drowned. Why didn't the cannibals eat the corpses?
Do the cannibals only eat some organs that aren't required in zombification?

Hello GGG team!
Happy to play your game for the past years. Wonderful game.
Over the years, allot of items have been added to the core game, which is great, more things to get/have. But over time occasionally some get nerfed, because they end up being to powerfull, or in some rare cases, buffed! :)

I'd like to mention a recent case for example:
Reach of the council, now im not criticizing the nerfs, but it went from 6 arrows, to 4 arrows, and now 2 arrows.
Or an older case, while unexpected, that Chris already talked in the past, the Minion instability with Blink/Mirror Arrow, which got a nerf pretty quick at the time.
Now to the question.

How does the testing for unique items, or even mechanics work in the GGG office? (Any more info on the testing that GGG would like to share is welcome, Ex: Is it hired people, or even players, how much time and creative ways they try it out).
While i also think its hard to see which items may be strong, weak without some data, hence the nerfs and buffs before new leagues with the last league data.

But some major items in my opinion are just broken or were, and get so many nerfs over time. While its not the end of the world it makes some players a bit unhappy with the changes, but like i said before im not saying this is bad, the nerfs are there to make the game healthier.

Will you ever fix the tooltip for skills with broken and/or useless tooltips? Including, but not limited to all minions, Caustic Arrow(DoT portion doesn't reflect modifiers to AoE), Elemental Hit, and Righteous Fire(DoT portion).

It's very satisfying to see your tooltip go up as you improve your gear and level up and I find myself missing it a lot without it almost to the point that it makes me not want to play those builds.

Are you committed to develope and support PoE another 5-10 years (and only PoE), and have you ever thought of PoE 2 ? PoE has the potential to survive the ravages of time even better than Diablo 2 though..

Your employees, are they working around the clock the whole year (apart from vacations) or is there a delivery on request (freelancer)?

What is a 100+ work force going to do after the X-Box and 3.0 cornerstones? I don't ask for spoilers, but it's hard to believe that the pace will be the same after GGG's growth since 2015. Are you willing to expand even more? Tell me when you enter the stock market. I'll be the first one buying shares..
^^

Right now the game pace is too fast. You dont really get a feel for any of the content, the leveling process is just being rushed through and mostly there's no real sense of danger unless its "on death" mechanics we're talking about. When do you intend on doubling down on the current clearspeed meta?

I remember a couple of years ago, when the sacrifice of the vaal came out, you were talking about risktaking vs possible rewards, and how the player should stop and think: Can i really do this?

I havent felt like that in-game for a very long time now. The breachleague being a possible exception, but that is just a small portion of the game.

More monster damage certainly wont solve the problem, because most builds tend to either crush all the content or die to a spike, if anything, the monster elemental damage needs to be mitigated so armor builds can actually feel relatively useful. Eva/Es builds atm are either doing completly fine or being one shot to random "on death" mechanics or spikes.

Which leads to the main problem: As a player in present PoE, you wanna kill everything before it even hits you. That is bad, because if it happens, it basically renders all the content through a one-color filter. All the different settings, enemies and mechanics that you've worked on blend together and in the end becomes just another thing to click and kill before moving on.

The game needs to slow down.

This is my honest opinion about the current state of PoE, i would love some feedback or opinions.