Game Balance in Path of Exile: Expedition

As a casual player (paid into the beta way back when it was just a website). Holy crap has it seriously been ten years???

I'm a little worried. I play the witch, almost exclusively. Mostly because I play so little, I also play minion builds as I enjoy them the most. I rarely have to much trouble with trash but summoning minions during boss fights is rough as most bosses have some form of movement themselves and tend to rip through minions like paper tissue. Reducing their health from paper already is worrisome but add to that having to stop moving to recast them (especially zombies and specters, the later of which you can't get in many boss fights already). I die in boss fights a lot already and often use other peoples builds (as I play irregularly enough that I'm not confident making my own), I don't know what the heck the dev team is thinking. I have no issues with anything else I'm reading but I see a huge nerf to unstable minion builds and a huge nerf to already very weak minion builds as it is.

Am I missing something? Is there a buff that I don't see somewhere or maybe I'm not realizing?

I have been having a blast the past 4 leagues each time leveling one character while never spending more than 3ex, completing at least 12 challenges, running juiced T16s, beating all the conquerors and ultimately failing to Sirus. I was psyched to get him to 25% this league and was thinking perhaps next league I might actually defeat him.

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

I guess Chris had other ideas.

I'm straining to see a single positive change in all of this. These nerfs don't slow the game down, they bring it to a halt.

The flask changes force us to play reactively instead of proactively, in a game where even the tankiest of builds can get instantly killed. Freeze immunity was important because stopping for even a second often means death. Bleed immunity was important because there's barely any visual indication of it until it heavily chunks you.

The movement skills you nerfed didn't have enough of an opportunity cost? What does that even mean? What opportunity cost are skills supposed to have beyond you placing them in your limited sockets on your limited skill bar and pressing the button to make them happen? Should I tool my entire build around a dash skill that does no damage and only holds three charges?

What is even the point of having crafting in the game if it's considered too "deterministic" every time it's even remotely good? Why don't you just make it a gacha game at this point?

You guys are so concerned about your content being trivialized... but it's the same content we've played a million times. We want to get through acts and enjoy the endgame quickly because we've played through the same stuff every league with only minor changes every time.

You shouldn't have to play the game for 1000 hours every league to succeed in endgame content. You're just making the gameplay loop more time consuming and less fun, and out of all my friends and myself who love this game, none of us have any desire to come back and play this league.

I hope you guys figure out what "fun" is again by the time PoE2 comes out. All of my excitement for it is draining away with each manifesto you release.

How I missed Dom party....

I hope POE can create lots of core content into the game Raids like.

This will discourage those 100k death count per league build as they cannot enjoy or get the reward for this content.

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Izrakhan wrote:

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IBSPL wrote:

Atlas clusterfuck grind not touched at all. Wrist killing splinter clicking not touched at all. Nerfs and "balance" making grind even longer and longer.

That's the concerning thing for me as well.

The game has cultured a zoomer way of playing the game and has matched that culture with game design choices to match the zoomer approach. From garbage loot being 99% of the drops to huge packs one shotting players and boss mechanics being more and more one shot in nature just makes me think taking longer on anything in this game is going to be met with lower participation numbers.

It might not even be the rewards this time but mobs one shotting because they lived long enough to connect. It should be fun in spectator mode anyway.

This is because, and well this is what people don't understand ( and yes they will not get the same experience as in 2013, they will get a clusterfuck mush of frustration and madness), the game has been made to scale almost to infinite based on scaling attributes of mobs ( some more deadly than others, and some combination being impossible to be made), in order to keep the game challenging at higher levels GGG thinks that good implementation is to scale the mobs health/ damage/attributes so that the game remains challenging. This means that the players cannot have a cap to power, meaning they can scale to a hard cap to match that challenge.

This is done via either gear or stats.

Ultimately if a designed char can reach the challenge gap in let's say month's of playing, then if you add trade to that equation in theory it can reach it in less than month's with either luck or well trade, good management skills bla bla bla.

What I am trying to say , it's not that people are zooming through lower content. It's that the high end demands are so high, that people do not see value in trivial items that do not match the gap of the end challenge and just want to rush to end game gear.

In order to bring diversity to the games core, they need to change how classes work in terms of ascension and how skills interact with other skills , or personalize skills to builds ( which they are poorly trying).

Not nerf everything to hell, and again buff the mobs, just to keep the game challenging. This will back fire so hard, that I can foresee how people who think that they will get the challenging experience will quit in 2 weeks, and the other players who actually play the game to the end of leagues will have the struggle of the life trying to even like playing.

The game was not easy anyway for most of the players, there are just shanigans like Hateforge that ruin everything ( and it's mostly because GGG has barely any clue on how to balance this puddle they are in)

Oh look there are some cool games over there that I want to try out!

Buh-bye~

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With every league release, we review and rebalance many aspects of Path of Exile to update and reinvigorate old mechanics while trimming some power from strategies that stand too far above the rest.
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Nope. You don't.
With every "league" You are destroying the fun of majority of the players with the hope to invest money again - so called "nerfing".

I am again warning you that this is a serious problem, and You can do it in much better way.

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phlaistar wrote:

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delgar89 wrote:

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.

Some of my friends would totally disagree here. Almost everything is "easy" if you know how things work. And if u call urself a min/maxer I assume you know which gears to grind to reach ur goals asap. Many people don't. And making the game harder doesn't make it easier for the average player.

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delgar89 wrote:

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.

Agree and Disagree... Economics are a not even small part of PoE gameplay and being bad at "grinding gear" or having bad rng in drops does indeed increase the difficult if u compare this with someone who got a mirror on league start. But - the game doesn't become more difficult by making the mobs hit harder or the player less harder. I'm wrong - it does - but it also becomes more frustrating. And that's not even bc u die more (but also bc u die more) but bc PoE isn't good in telling what u did wrong. Getting off screen one shots is - imho - no good game design and needs a rework before making the game harder. If I can activly dodge enemy abilities and therefor need "skill" - this makes a game harder. Off Screen One Shots can't be dodged and most deadly skills aren't even visible to dodge. But just lowering Player DPS and raising Enemy DPS ends in an calculation check (Enemy.DPS > Player.HP = Player.Death) and doesn't involve skill but gear. And so grinding gear and invested time is in fact part of a games difficult.

As I stated there are countless problems with the game, not just the ability to zoom zoom one shooting mobs and bosses.

But not welcoming a change into the right direction is strange.

About your friends, PoE stands out thanks to how complex of a game it is. First hint is given when you open your skill tree.

Lacking know how is part of learning the game. Learning process doesn't determine if something is easy in gameplay in the end or not.

The will to learn the game doesn't determine it either.

I won't even start playing

Wow GGG you completetly killed the hype, is not funny just TO DIE and loose hours playing and effort. How to waste a good game with 1 move, nice, well done now I'm not going to play the league, thank you.
:(