Paradigm Shifts I'd like to see in PoE2 (which would never work in PoE1)

1. "Shoot while moving" standard

One thing that makes defenses far more required in PoE — and to be fair, all current and previous ARPGs worth a damn (which is pretty much just PoE anyway) — is that manually avoiding threats by character movement normally means turning off DPS. Simply put, kiting is rarely the optimal strategy because kiting means lost DPS time. However, if you could kite and DPS at the same time, this wouldn't be the case. I'd actually be willing to go to WASD movement if it meant the mouse was DPS only and I could kite things viably in gameplay — even as, or especially as, a melee specialist.

2. The "2 out of 3 ain't bad" solution to balancing melee, ranged and caster

Like it or not, efficient farmers are going to farm content they one-shot-kill. It's inevitable and pointless to spend balance effort resisting. Instead, farming should be balanced under the assumption that everything will be one-shotted. And there's only three balance levers under those assumptions: range, AoE, and "attack" speed.

If you give any archetype all three of these things, then all powerful farmers will need all three to viably compete against it. That's why it's critical to NOT give any archetype all three. But if you give each archetype two out of three, they can be viable against each other while feeling distinct from each other.

It's far too late to balance this way in PoE2, because GMP and Chain have been in the game since forever. But it's not too late for PoE2.

Melee should have AoE and attack speed, but not range.
Archers should have range and attack speed, but not AoE. Single target all the way.
Casters should have range and AoE, but spells should take significantly longer to cast than attacks. Let them have the visually satisfying nukes, but make 'em wait for them.

That's how you balance 3 of the 4 major archetypes. Which brings us to...

3. Four attributes, not three.

A. Clerics
There aren't three major ARPG archetypes, there are four: melee, ranged attacker, nuke caster, and summoner. These closely model the four main Dungeons and Dragons classes of Warrior, Rogue, Wizard and Cleric. One major flaw in the current Passive Tree is the attempt to split Intelligence between two different archetypes.

A new Attribute appropriate to the Cleric archetype should be introduced. It can involve active healing and buffing of minions to accentuate the Cleric archetype. And while player skills get the "2 out of 3" balance treatment, minions should get 1 out of 3, because numbers are their second advantage.

B. The Passive Pyramid
A four-sided pyramid, a 3D shape, can be modeled in 2D by having the four sides flattened into a larger equilateral triangle, then placing 180° flips of that equilateral triangle against each side of that triangle, then the original triangles along those sides, ad infinitum. In this way a four-attribute Passive Tree could be expressed in a 2D space, much as a map of the planet Earth can be.

4. Telegraphing

A. Putting the Action Game back in ArpG.
Having threats players can't react to squanders the promise of real time combat. Unavoidable damage is the province of the turn-based RPG — obviously, defeating enemies in a single move is too good in such games, so defenses are required. In contrast, in an action game, your primary defense is not your stats so much as your reaction time and your movement to avoid threats.

PoE1, like Diablo 2 before it, is mostly designed as a turn-based RPG with the illusion of real-time combat. Kiting is heavily discouraged, taking unavoidable hits is taken for granted, and combat is little more than a Cookie Clicker simulator of "turns" that pass too quickly to be processed, granting the shallow illusion of complexity where depth is possible.

PoE2 should be designed from top to bottom to be a game where the absolute best can complete encounters without getting hit AT ALL. This should be fairly easy early on but require tremendous Action Game skill to achieve in the late game, but it shouldn't ever be impossible. I'm okay with it requiring Professional Korean StarCraft levels of APM for the final Big Bad of mapping, a level I'll never in my wildest dreams attain, but I should be able to find a YouTube video of some champion who is able to do Shaper Equivalent without taking so much as a scratch, pressing sufficient investment in Movement Speed — which should be available throughout the entire Passive Tree.

B. Defenses that matter, in exchange for reduced clearspeed
The great advantage of an ARPG, as opposed to a plain Action Game, is that players who don't have the high skills needed to complete content without getting hit can invest in defenses to make their lack of reaction time less relevant. Players don't need to kite that which they can tank. Assuming that such investment in defenses requires a trade-off in terms of clearspeed, GGG should not be shy about giving strong defenses to players in PoE2.

In PoE1, defenses are an element of clearspeed because kiting is inefficient. Kiting shouldn't be inefficient (see #1), so getting tankier to avoid kiting should be less about maximizing clearspeed and more about being unable to react to threats in time. This should be the game's customizable difficulty — invest more in defenses to make the game easier, but farm loot slower as a result. Balanced.

But players aren't going to want to sacrifice clearspeed unless their investment in defenses actually makes the game noticeably easier. So defenses should actually do something.

I was hoping for at least some kind of discussion. Bump.

Interesting. But...

1) No. Manually moving and dodging telegraphed attacks yes, but I don't want even more builds in this game to work like autobombers, mirror archer, blade vortex, winter orb, etc. Yes, kiting means you lose DPS time. That makes sense, and should be encouraged, not trivialized. I like tactical play, but running around while still damaging the boss isn't it. Other games manage just fine with kiting meaning you're not also damaging the enemy, so I don't see why we need to be an exception to that common sense expectation.

2) "Melee should have AoE and attack speed, but not range." - With enough AoE, you effectively do have range. Case in point - Tectonic Slam. Something tells me you like to play melee...

"Archers should have range and attack speed, but not AoE. Single target all the way." - this would require removing practically every source of added projectiles and projectile modifications in the game, as well as practically reworking a whole slew of skills themselves. And would lead to riots.

"Casters should have range and AoE, but spells should take significantly longer to cast than attacks." - similarly gamebreaking (rapid casting is practically the entire identity of some skills and/or support gems), and similarly unpopular.

Overall, I think your entire tripartite breakdown here is flawed. Far better to work with the usual split I see people use of damage versus defense. Let melee be tanky and strong but more risky, and ranged have less survivability and maybe even damage but safer (cos it's ranged).

3) Tbh, I don't see the need for this at all. Summoners don't need their own attribute. What does that even achieve anyway? And who says all casters are nukes? Fireball is one of the most basic spells in any game, and is almost always just a basic-ass ball of fire that you keep shooting at enemies just like an archer shoots arrows. There are plenty of wizards that aren't about charging up some Discharge/Divine Ire-type 'nuke'. Just cos D&D does stuff one way doesn't mean that's how every other game should.

4) This one I agree with. And it does look like they're headed in this direction already. Boss designs in the game have shifted over the years towards more a tactical, telegraphed style of fight. Now they just need to reign in player power to ensure we actually have to engage with those mechanics rather than skipping them entirely with overtuned DPS. And reducing player clearspeed, and making defenses count for something, is good too (as a general direction, rather than necessarily being tied to some sort of melee v/s archers v/s wizards archetype system - I'd like there to exist a variety of combat feels for each of those playstyles via different skills, rather than all skills within each archetype feeling like they play much the same).

"

Exile009 wrote:

Yes, kiting means you lose DPS time. That makes sense, and should be encouraged, not trivialized.

If DPS time means standing still AND defensive options are strong, the defensive option is the speedclearing option.
If DPS time means standing still AND defensive options are weak, then everyone needs to kite it, including the defensive builds — and the point of investing in defense should be not needing to kite as much.
Only when DPS time does NOT mean standing still AND defensive options are strong, does the speedclearing build avoid the defensive option AND the defensive option allows the player to avoid kiting.

Simply put, the more players are forced to stand still when attacking, the more OP tanking becomes because it becomes an offensive consideration. Again, it's two out of three: you can't have viable (but optional) kiting build options, viable (but optional) tanking build options, and stationary attacking all in the same ARPG encounter.

"

Exile009 wrote:

"Archers should have range and attack speed, but not AoE. Single target all the way." - this would require removing practically every source of added projectiles and projectile modifications in the game,

If the line between "Archer" and "caster" was hard — yes. But it doesn't necessarily need to be hard. For example, a support gem could add multiple projectiles (+AoE) add have a "less Attack Speed" multiplier (-Speed), maintaining the "2 out of 3" balance. Such archers might feel like casters, but they'd be balanced against melee.

I get your point that PoE is mostly popular with players who don't care about true melee being viable — either players who use Archer or Caster archetypes, or who are okay with PoE's collection of "melee in name only" ranged skills that use melee weapons. But there's a huge untapped market of true melee fans out there, and they aren't happy with PoE because their preferred playstyle is simply not viable in this game.

"

ScrotieMcB wrote:

I get your point that PoE is mostly popular with players who don't care about true melee being viable

uhhh...I never said this tho. Nor was it implied or intended. You don't need this game to be "mostly popular with players who don't care about true melee" in order to have a lot of people who would be upset at archers and casters being ruined. And whether the line between archers and casters is hard or not, your proposed change would completely a ruin a lot of archer and/or caster builds.

Oh and btw, since you were upset at the lack of discussion on the post earlier, I'm fairly confident that that's because it's in the Feedback and Suggestions section of the forum. Hardly anyone ever comes by here, or indeed to quite a few of the other sections as well. It's why I typically put my posts in General Discussion first, even if the mods eventually move them to Gameplay Help later (where they languish completely lost and useless, thereby helping no one).