New player feedback on Labyrinth & Game in general
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The fact that dying in the labyrinth forces a restart of the entire instance just plain ruins the game for me.
My first experience with this was on "Cruel". I died on the end boss, but my totems killed him. Loot dropped, yet I couldn't get back in to claim the loot and the prize. Very frustrating. I eventually passed "Cruel". Prior to this death, I didn't even know that staying alive was a requirement. I'm now level 76, and just spent 40 minutes going through "Merciless" difficulty lab levels, only to die on the end boss, again. First off, as new player selecting a mode other than hardcore, to have to deal with a hardcore mechanic is a tall order. If I had wanted hardcore, I would have chosen hardcore. It feels as if the end boss deals way too much damage compared to the first two encounters, creating the perception that you were led into something that was unchallengeable. To be honest I'd have preferred to fail at the start, and not waste so much time just figuring out how difficult the task will be. The truth is that none of these "trials" prepare you for the end boss encounter, which combines a boss fight with different trap mechanics, a combination of which you've had zero exposure to. Limiting the field of battle by restricting it with traps isn't fun, it's just annoying. Dead ends, and finding my way through a maze are useless and uninteresting challenges, though I could live with these if need be. Gating ascendency points behind such levels is extremely detrimental to the health of the game. As a new player, all I can think about is how many times I'll have to push characters through this idiotic requirement, just so I can enjoy playing them. After following this line of thinking, the choice becomes clear. It's not worth the frustration. The best solution is: don't play the game. ----- Character Played: Templar: Totem Hierophant League: Flashback Standard (BRE001) About Character & leveling:
Spoiler
Used Spark, Glacial cascade until level 50 or so, then swapped to Arc, since that's the skill I was interested in using for the build.
Randomly found a few uniques that boosted mana regen, and a gem that gave damage when no mana is reserved, so I unreserved mana for additional damage. Was running Mind over matter for defense, so this made sense as well. Main damage came from casting totems which cast arc. I also would cast a curse every now and again, on top of flask management, and the lightning golem. Leveling felt really bland pre-level 25 or so, after that it started to pick up some speed (with increased movement / cast speed becoming available, and more interactive. If anything to improve this, I'd say make movement, mana regen and cast / attack speed items and skills available earlier on to make leveling more of a joy than a burden. Having more uniques drop that could help in this capacity might help, as I didn't really find any uniques for my build until about level 45. After level 45, the game started to pick up, especially as I approached the 60's and had acquired a few uniques (and ascendency point) that benefit the build with more movement and cast speed. Level 70+ was getting interesting, but alas, here we are. ----- Quite enjoyed the game for the most part. Started out in the flashback league, which allowed me to experience many other previous league mechanics. Likes:
Spoiler
Maps allowing randomized risk and reward is really cool.
Mobs using skills players use. Variety of enemy monster type. Crafting systems, while complex, and harder to learn, are very useful after learning. For example, how to recolor, number, and link sockets on items. League specific mechanics I found to be pretty fun and engaging, especially to clear maps with, even when I was dying to them. Capturing beasts did not seem like a fun mechanic. I quickly learned to just kill beasts. After this all was well. Skills and passive options being shared between classes often mean that builds are more balanced between the different classes. Huge plus! Passive tree being so large was intimidating at first, but after poking around a bit, I found the skills are distributed fairly well. Each increase in offense or defense felt noticeable as I gained certain node clusters, and felt fairly balanced throughout the leveling process. Item interactions can be very intricate. Upside to this one is that items can give birth to some pretty interesting builds. Customizable stash tabs, etc, felt good, even though these cost extra. Premium tabs do feel good to work with. Having them flexible for public trade is nice too. Really cool skill animations and graphics. Skills feel impactful. Enjoyed the ability to assign any skill to the mouse buttons (not necessarily for moving the character). Loot filter allows player to tailor loot to their level or preference, which can be nice. Story was somewhat interesting. Even though I wasn't following every little development, I felt I could generally follow along just by playing the game. Totem hierophant felt beginner friendly. There were other choices (block based / defensive builds) that also looked beginner friendly. ----- Dislikes:
Spoiler
Maps with excessive dead ends. This was definitively a pattern for level design. Often times there wasn't even a good reward or any monsters down the dead end. Very annoying.
Don't label quests that give skill points as "optional". It's obvious to me that these are not optional. Why not simplify the process of skill point leveling by simply rewarding the player with extra skill points upon completing certain acts? That would make the currently "optional" quests truly optional, and also motivate them to push their character forward through the story, rather than stick around and complete every little side quest, even though they are completely overgeared / overleveled for the content. Requiring Trading. I'd prefer the ability to find items by myself, or only have to trade when necessary. I opted to not go SSF as I heard the item drops are tuned the same as non SSF. Retuing drops for SSF (tailoring them to the classes also) would make going SSF easier. As a new player with zero currency I found it necessary to collect anything of value and put it up for sale, so as to get enough to buy what I would eventually need for my build. Trading (cont.): The time spent on having to trade distracts from gameplay. Middle of a map? oh well have to exit so I can sell this item.. Middle of a quest? Oh well, have to go to town to sell other item. (You get the idea) Limited inventory space (why not offer "big inventory" as a microtransaction?) "Chromatic" Items: While a nice bonus for selling a tri color linked item, this became easily annoying as picking up these items was always worth doing, and forces more trips to the vendor on the player. Simply dropping chromatic orbs or giving the option to convert them on the spot would help. Currency items take up inventory space. Really found it annoying that AFTER having disinchanted everything i'd collected after questing (or while questing), I'd end up with 25% of my inventory taken up by currency items. Why not make these common currency items integrated with the character so that they don't take up inventory space? Quest items take up inventory space. On occasion I'd be hauling around a huge orb or scepter just thinking "I'd love to destroy that right about now to make room for the unique item that dropped". Item interactions can be very intricate. Downside to this one, not everything is intuitive for a new player. While having to look up one affix on an item in the wiki is okay, multiple lookups for certain items ARE required to even get a basic understanding of how they function. Requiring the use of "Move to" skill as a skill button. Simply allowing the player to assign this to a force move option would have been nice, as it would not have taken up space on the skill bar. Don't use "downscale resolution" as default graphical option. I couldn't figure out why the game was getting fuzzy graphics until I turned this off, and instead downscaled the framerate when the going got rough. Wayyy too much unimportant loot dropping. Can't play the game without a loot filter, which means the player has to spend time managing their loot filter, and even then I was still overwhelmed at times. I estimate I spent more than half the gametime not killing monsters, but rather picking up loot and trading. Stuff never seems to drop in a pile either. For example, if coins or blacksmith parts drop, they sometimes drop individually, rather than in a pile of 10, even though they came from the same monster or chest. Annoying. Certain "Unique" elite monsters were very hard to see. Oftentimes I'd be cruising along, acting as if there was not a threat nearby, then get almost oneshot. Movement abilities don't always work. In particular I was using "Lightning warp". Rarely if ever did it allow me to warp over barriers, as was it's purpose in the build, and even then, sometimes it cast so slow I would die anyway. Certain levels would have separate areas that have the door icon. I kept thinking these sub areas were different levels, so I would avoid them If I were looking for a quest item. However, the quest item was actually in the sub level, through these passages. Giving sub areas a different icon on the mini map would go a long way as far as helping players identify where they need to go. Too many flask slots. Having to manage a character's stability through the use of (sometimes) regenerative potions doesn't always lead to stable gameplay. In my case, this was hard for me to manage casting skills AND flasks all at once (too many buttons to push). I'm more inclined to say that this is because there are too many potion slots. Why not make it so that the player only has to push one button to activate them all? or simply combine all effects of flasks into one master potions? If anything, limiting it to 3 flasks, but giving them more passive properties (such as regen) would go a long way. 5 is a bit much. ----- Hope this helps. Last edited by Cratic1321#6606 on May 8, 2018, 10:08:59 PM Last bumped on May 11, 2018, 3:11:45 PM
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Thoughtful feedback.
I largely agree with your list of positives. At it's best, POE is a lot of fun to play. On the other hand, the game certainly has a lot of "friction points" for mundane things (like item management, as you mention) that end up taking more time than they need to take. FWIW, labyrinth is the most hated part of the game, hands down, and your reaction as a new player is not unusual. Believe it or not, it used to be even more irritating to run and quite buggy, to boot. So, you're actually seeing a "shortened, simplified, bugs largely fixed" version of what they first released when lab when live. Now that prestige classes will finally leave lab in 4.0, will GGG get it right this time or will they find new ways to repeat old mistakes? Last edited by EnjoyTheJourney#0109 on May 9, 2018, 8:39:43 AM
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I read the whole post, and agree with almost all of it. There's some very good feedback here, so I'll just poke at a few things where you're off (either your own fault or GGG's fault).
" The labyrinth boss gets more powerful from failure to interact with his prior mechanics - for example, sometimes he'll generate charges throughout the fight that you can remove with a charge disruptor in the arena. If you don't remove them before you make him go on, he keeps them forever. Or on one of the phases sometimes he brings up elementals that merge with him and add damage. If you don't kill them before they reach him he'll have added elemental damage from then on, including future encounters. It's really badly communicated to the player that they're persistent, but that's why you felt the third fight was disproportionately hard. " These quests are optional as in "you can complete the act without doing them". If you're just playing the game normally you want as much power as possible, so you're going to do them, but if you're racing then they're a decision to make - do I sacrifice 3-5 mins for a passive point or do I skip it and make it up with levels? GGG has given up on racing, but the philosophy is still there. It might be more useful to distinguish skill point quests from other random quests, like how in part 2 it's almost always god kill quests that give skill points, but the optional labelling is correct. " Resolution downscaling could be significantly improved in general. I would personally love it if they got rid of the blur filter and just gave me straight pixels. It's easier to distinguish what's happening when you're not looking through fuzz, and new players will see "oh it's getting more pixelly" instead of "why the fuck is this blur filter on my screen". When I started writing this bit I was going to disagree, but the more I think about it the more I agree with this one. " 5 slots is the perfect amount of slots. You're not meant to button mash all 5 at once even though that's what streamers do. Activating several of the same type of potion at once does not stack, and the power of players is greatly proportional to how many types of flasks they can get away with carrying. My preferred setup is 2x life flask + quicksilver + stibnite + mana. With 3 flasks max I couldn't do that. There's also the matter of secondary effects on flasks that would be crippled if we had fewer slots - antibleed and antifreeze are mandatory, people like anti-curse flasks, evasion flasks, anti-burn, etc etc. Right now the game is balanced so that you have to have a wide range of effects, to the point where GGG was considering reducing flasks on the Xbox version to 4, but ended up keeping 5. This is probably the thing I disagree with you the most about. GGG is highly unlikely to address any of this, but one more post on the issues is never a bad thing. Maybe in a couple years they'll change their minds. |
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I am amazed that we still have the Lab in this game after all the hate from the players and how quickly GGG dumped Bestiary.
Still hate the lab always will. |
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" Wait until you try the uber trials. It's a joke. Most chars wouldn't be able to complete all of them solo. Most of the in-the-know poe players use global 820 and get thru by walking thru "unlocked" trials. It's a f**king joke. Just dump all this f**king lab cr*p, and be done with it. |
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"I hear you. The same thought crossed my mind as well. But, eliminating the crafting options associated with Bestiary is a lot easier than eliminating ascendancies, even on a temporary basis. Also, when an absolute shitstorm of criticism hit the forums following the release of lab and multiple streamers were also loudly complaining about lab on twitch and youtube, critics were publicly labeled and dismissed as a "vocal minority" by a senior GGG exec. There's no way anybody higher up in GGG could have known how what percentage of players enjoyed lab, as all they could do is look at engagement statistics (given the rewards for running lab, of course those looked good). It wasn't a very good PR move to publicly dismiss those criticizing lab and the basis for their judgment wasn't sound either. But, when opinions harden around a particular point of view, minds can be slow to change. It probably didn't help that lab was brought into the game shortly after a fair amount of resources were spent developing PvP based on a small but extremely vocal minority constantly lobbying for it, and then PvP (predictably) didn't become popular. Senior executives at GGG may (understandably) not have been keenly interested in listening to any group they considered to be a vocal minority shortly after PvP had such a disappointing response from players. Regarding uber trials, I've completed them and uber lab multiple times while playing SSF. It just usually takes until the late 80s or level 90, in my experience. Last night I was speaking in SSF chat with a particularly unlucky SSF soul who didn't get the last trial until level 94 for one character. That is just insanely bad RNG, akin to using 5000 fuses and not getting a single 6-link. Now that prestige classes will finally leave lab in 4.0, will GGG get it right this time or will they find new ways to repeat old mistakes? Last edited by EnjoyTheJourney#0109 on May 9, 2018, 9:45:18 AM
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Cratic1321, I've added you to the list of people thinking labyrinth needs to be fixed and your thread to the list of labyirnth complaint threads. Over 380 threads discussing labyrinth problems with over 990 posters in support
" Wiser words have NEVER been spoken on this forum. Chris Wilson said the stupidest thing he's ever said when he tried to turn this thought on its head and said something like, "We wanted to give a taste of hardcore to softcore players with the labyrinth." He made this statement when labyrinth was first released. GGG must still fix two thing with labyrinth. 1. Fix this complaint by adding checkpoints or waypoints or something to labyrinth. 2. Make getting access to endgame labyrinth more predictable. " I agree completely with your sentiment. I stopped playing this game for months until GGG cut back significantly on the horrible content in the first two labyrinths. Labyrinth is crap not fun content. Learning boss fights, for me, is one of the great fun things about this game but learning Izaro is horrible crap because of the Labyrinth. Therefore, I suggest "cheating". Use a play guide. Here's a good one. zSavage's Brief Guide on how to Kill Izaro Over 430 threads discussing labyrinth problems with over 1040 posters in support (thread # 1702621) Thank you all! GGG will implement a different method for ascension in PoE2. Retired!
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This is going to sound dismissive, but is not meant to be:
Your feelings and opinions are not new. Not by a long shot. Lab is arguably one of the most polarizing things in the game. Typically as soon as a post like this one pops up, someone else will feel duty-bound to start a "Lab is Da Best - Rah Rah" thread. I just posted this in another thread: The first two labs were gutted from previous form in order to allow all players more easy access to at least the first 4 points in the Ascendancy tree. Prior to this, they were still fundamentally easier than Merciless and Uber labs, but still very long and relatively rippy to the uninitiated. I would expect that the Lab will no longer be modified in any way for the remainder of the game, outside of a complete restructure on how Ascendancies are handled (if they are pulled from Lab) and I believe the chance of that to be vanishingly small. |
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" That is a very good conclusion of a very long analysis done on the labyrith issues of so many players. The solutions proposed would demystify the labyrinth for sure but will make it viable for every player, which is more important IMHO. GGG could even add a little bonus (e.g. keys), if someone didn't die and therefor didn't use any of the checkpoints (or what ever it will be). This would keep up the challenge for those who like it. To make the access to the eternal labyrinth more predictable, I propose a mechanic that allows to summon a map containing a trial. For instance, this can be done by using an Offering of the Goddess. This would allow players to do all trials after finding and completing the first one. If it is too powerfull then Offering of the Goddess may not drop in summed trials. On other solution can be to add a drop to the merciless labyrinth providing a token that can be combined with a map in the map device to summon a map containing a trial. Another solution can be that the trials found have a lower chance to spawn than the trials missing. The only reason, the access to the eternal labyrinth is made unpredictable is to slow down the progress of players. Therefor, it is likely that GGG will add something else to slow down if predictablity is increased. I might be a good idea to explore possible ideas to do that as well to make the proposed solutions more appealing to GGG and therefor more likely to being implemented. However, there might be a show stopped resulting from code design. It seems to be that GGG is removing content rather than doing massive redesigns. Maybe there is place for revamping the labyrinth with 4.0. Since I like the labyrinth, I would love to see improvements that make other players also like it (or at least no longer hate it). :) Let's explore new playstyles - Play it your own way, not just like the others.
Quality management is one of the most underrated success factors in every business... |
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Lab is completely optional and not story-blocking for new player. If someone feels that experience is too hardcore he could just ignore it.
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