Game Balance in Path of Exile: Expedition

"

luckyfeel0w wrote:

I want to play PoE. PoE, guys. Not diablo, not LE and other slow games. I want to play the most dynamic and most diverse ARPG which is difficult only in understanding the game, and not in dull difficulty at the level of "beat one mob". DYNAMICS, SPEED is a feature of your game. Don't lose it. For fans of slow gameplay, there is an SSF.

THIS. There are great slow games to choose from. For me the fun is to craft a build, figure out a farming strategy, play trade, trade services. And that is NOT easy or too fast! If I wanna be involved in the fight itself and not kill 100 monsters per second, there are a ton of other options. Poe is about understanding the game, not having fixed meta builds everyone copies, not about combat skills. Nerfing everything just forces us to seek out and copy streamer builds. I personally don't care if streamers are getting 1 mirror per week or more and it's all too easy for them. NOBODY plays 16+ hours everyday. These people will always crush everything, no matter what. Casuals will always not get too far. The people in the middle, playing decent amount of hours and who understand the game, don't get anything from any patch... We wanna explore new builds for fun not because we are forced to not play the build we liked again. Stop balancing for the 0.01%. Balance for the 3% at least, I don't know man. Several leagues in a row with "It's all nerfs" patches and ZERO improvement to looting and drops.

"

askjosh wrote:

... choose exactly ...

Not a term I think PoE is popular for... Besides choosing starting class.

I really liked the idea of being able to eventually have a build that breezes all content. Usually I nolife the first month, get my starter completed, at least well enough to run all content while the meta settles and the OP builds are developed. Then I can spend the next month building the strongest character I can. Even with OP harvest it would take a few days to a week per piece of EQ to really feel like it was completed. Eventually by around the end of month 2 I have a build that crushes all content, usually 100 - 200ex sunk into it and I feel like I've "beat the game." Then I get bored and its time to wait and build up excitement for next season with some new content and new builds to perfect. Even with the nerfs to deterministic crafting that i disagreed with it was still fun to have something to go after that really feels worth it.

This is how I've played this game for years. It's how the game has developed overtime and in turn the game evolving this way is why I play it and not another ARPG. It's what I've come to expect and why I'm excited every league. This league and manifesto has made it very clear that this is not GGGs idea behind how the game should be played. It's not the spirit that GGG wanted and they're shying away from a game like this. I don't know if GGG is actually out of touch with their playerbase or if I'm just enjoying the game incorrectly but either way it really feels like they just pulled the rug out from under me. Obviously I'll be playing this league and I hope its not as noticeable as it seems to be but I dont see how it cant be. As someone who heavily invests time in POE even with OG broken harvest crafting it still took 2/3 of the league to complete an OP character. Whether or not I'm alone in the way I like to play I'm really sad that my vision of PoE is so different than GGG and will probably be enjoying it much less moving forward :(

"

askjosh wrote:

sometimes it is best to just yank the bandaid off hard and fast.

Absolutely. Yank it off hard enough to tear out the stitches and rip open the wound. That way you bleed to death quicker.

"

fallrim wrote:

"

delgar89 wrote:

Finally. Give me some damn challenge, not this games for babies that like to run on maps with their eyes closed.... About time this game goes back to its roots. League after league it was getting more ridiculous. Slow it, slow player movement, make mobs harder. Make the game viable in coop not a damn rat race on maps we have now. Thank you!

heres the deal fam, the game is as hard as you want it to be. you could for instance never use a gem over lvl 10, use only magic items, never apply more than 50 skill points, etc etc etc. you can literally make the game as hard and as slow as you want without GGG doing anything.

I'm min-maxer and I'll squish every ounce of possibility out of this game.
And I won't hesitate to use any wiki information to break the game even harder than was thought possible.

If the game is too hard for anyone, then oh well, all I can say is "git gut" because you can call current Path of Exile many things but hard ain't it.

"

Pat0k wrote:

Judging by your account name you're a 32 year old person. How exactly are you going to play so dedicated without being jobless or taken cared of by someone else? You're talking on the behalf of 10-15 year olds or perhaps even younger. The vast majority of people who pay game creator salaries are grown up people with decent income. Your DESIRE for harder game only kills the game. It's not about the difficulty but about enjoyable variety which doesn't overfill your cup.

Dedication has nothing to do with difficulty. You are contradicting yourself because you're speaking about "time" in a "gear grinding game". Grind doesn't equal the difficulty of the game. Your confusing those two things. Fixing one doesn't mean the other is good. Making the game harder doesn't change the fact that Atlas grind each league is a bad design in terms of time invested. We can count lots of other problems with the game other than how easy it is right now.

You're trying to make a point that fixing the game out of its pathetic state and making it harder IN gameplay will take the enjoyment of the game. If you mean you won't be able to watch your favorite streamer while taking care of ur babies while paying the minimum amount of attention to the game - then yes you're probably right in that case any amount of difficulty will RIP the game in an instant.

I love when people are making an argument based on their opinion. You're talking about 10-15 years olds or even younger, in the meantime gamers below 18 years old make only 21% of the whole population of gamers.

During a 2020 survey, 38 percent of video game players still come from the 18 to 34 age demographic, and six percent are 65 years and older.

Games like Dark Souls, Sekiro's incoming Elden Ring are massive hits each time. Your confusing age with being a casual gamer. But even if not your confusion your point would be correct if not for the fact that casual gamer doesn't equal playing games on easy difficulty setup.

IF you said that casual player makes the biggest portion of gamers you would be correct. But that doesn't make you right that the game should be as easy as a monopoly. Different games for different audiences. If you enjoy exploding screens of monsters and not even seeing bosses abilities second day of the league then that's ok. But don't back it up with some financial arguments made from thin air.

"

Dafii wrote:

man dude you´re speaking out of my soul :)

Yea man game was at its best when Kripparrian still played it and softcore league was called scrubcore.
When you had to make parties to run a higher tiers of maps because the cost of crafting them was too high for a single player to maintain the high tier map pool.
When playing in a party actually made sense because:
- you couldn't explode the whole screen
- you couldn't run the whole screen in 2 secs
- bosses weren't a joke, sometimes half of the party were leaving the maps at bosses of being afraid of losing exp

That being said I don't want to go back to that extreme but I don't want to the game to stay on the other side of the extreme we are right now. Being in an extreme of me calculating my damage in shapers per second and not wanting to play in parties because it looks like and rat races make me sick.

League after league I'm discussing with my bodies how the game becomes easier and faster than it was a league before. And how bad playing in party is with how the game become.

"

Bebedora wrote:

"

askjosh wrote:

sometimes it is best to just yank the bandaid off hard and fast.

Absolutely. Yank it off hard enough to tear out the stitches and rip open the wound. That way you bleed to death quicker.

With GGG it's more of castration.

RIP Archmage, as usual if GGG nerf smth - you do it on a bad all layer style (Harvest says hello)
Meta: chaos DOT skills, bowers, trappers, stupid totems and shield throw smth.
BTW you brag about wrist pain and no auto-stacking of currency and shards, WTF?

Oh well, Diablo themed Heist here we go.

Slowing the game is good, but again in a WRONG way.

-GGG can set a temp level cap and update it every week.1st week lets say level 80 is the cap, next week 90, next 95 and +1 for every 5 days? Or rebirth system after 95 each rebirth gives +1 levels etc etc...Or honor level system .... there are many ways to do it. But creating a game only for pro players is NOT the way if you want to have bigger player pools. Your way will reduce the player base.

-GGG can slow the game BY DROP. Can develope a dungeon can be played once a week and lets say 100 floor, every 20 floor drops something good. Removed valuable drops from the game. Again there are many ways to do it!

-GGG can give us a trade platform. GGG's way to slow player is give them pain to trade. If they trust their developers can do it with game mechanics, not giving- offering painful trade crap. Again poor development!

[Removed by Support]

This gonna be interesting...

"

askjosh wrote:

Many of those nerfs were needed. That said they probably shouldn't have done them all at once but then again sometimes it is best to just yank the bandaid off hard and fast.

As for the new game mechanic I think it is going to be meh early on but late game the ability to create custom maps where you can choose what to spawn will give the player a ton of agency in the game and allow them to choose exactly how challenging they want to make it.

Have you ever tried doing endgame without the current 10-30 meta builds? How many of the unid corrapted red maps you've done? With just a bunch of info from the manifesto ( much more to come), you won't be able to do now even white alchemed map. If you really think poe need all those nerfs in terms of the more casual players - you're wrong. Like mentioned above, for me poe - first 3 days on weekend - grindfest, and after, i can afford to play 3-4 hours at most per day, we got a job to do. And artificially slowing down the gameplay - ain't the issue. But i don't want to be forced to play 1-5 builds, which seem's like be the case for poe. If i was willing to - i'd go to d3 with their * one trick set meta* gameplay. And yes, even as casual i like to do endgame, not always the way i wanted, coz i like trying new things, and i don't want anybody else decide for me how to play. I've played PoE almost since the release on my second account, and i must tell you, falling permastun bears on hardcore ain't burning me as much as those changes. The game was special in a ways, and could find it's own playerbase niche, but with all this stuff ( not having anything with interesting hard gameplay), but another butch new and much more oneshot things to have without the reasons i'll wait for poe 2 i guess.