What We're Working On

So many nerfs, to steer gameplay in the direction of a version of the game that we won't even see for a few leagues...

Meanwhile, various QoL changes the community has been begging for for years never even seem to get mentioned, let alone materialize in-game.

As a whole, the changes probably aren't all that bad, at least as they pertain to GGG's vision for the game long-term. But why make them all at once, during a temp league, with no balance to the other side of the equation? Players just don't feel rewarded for the challenges they face, having to dig through mountains of garbage to find anything useful, with few deterministic options available for crafting.

20 new types of currency for the new league, despite their acknowledgement of how much wrist strain is required to pick up currency, let alone pick through the rest of the drops. Harvest mechanics were a step in the right direction, but as with anything the community almost universally enjoys, they killed that. Trading is still an abysmally painful process of copy/paste until someone at their keyboard wakes up from their grind-induced slumber to make a quick trade.

The feedback from the community, from casual players to streamers/the top 1%, has been pretty negative for a reason: they don't feel heard. GGG has a vision for the game that can't be realized until POE2 is released, so we only get part of it. We get the part that's [/i]not[/i] fun, that greatly diminishes build diversity, with lots of punishing interactions with ailments and status effects, and provides little rewards for those that try to adapt to the only way we can play now.

Instead of "X is harder and Y will cost more mana, but now you can do Z, with more rewards coming!" we just get a giant itemized list of nerfs to bring the game in line with some future vision of the game that won't be released for months or years, that the average player has no investment in beyond how the game plays currently.



An Expedition is a journey, but we need to see that the destination is worth it.

i dont really like the patch but what ever... it not like it gonna change anything so keep nerfing... we can take it... hey im not gonna play in september anyway ...

"

lotting2782 wrote:

september anyway ...

And I even know why :)

At least be men/women and own your changes. If you are going to nerf things and force people out just stick with it. Now you are walking back herald/spellslinger changes LMAO.

No thanks
I won't be your beta tester again and again, because you don't know how to do your job.
To err is human, to persevere is diabolical

I'm personally fine with nerfs in player damage, and buffs to monster life, however things I'm not OK with are nerfing players' access to defensive mechanics and limiting build viability.

Things like monster regen heavily punishes low damage. I've had to skip normal rare monsters because they out-regen the damage I'm doing to the point that it takes almost 5 minutes of running around to kill them and I get absolutely nothing for the time invested. It feels bad when the best solution to deal with difficult encounters in the game is to avoid them and run away.

I get that the fear of giving players access to too much defense results in cheesing, but now there are just so many things in maps that we need to avoid.

No regen, reflect, curses, etc.

Yes, we can get things like reduced curse effectiveness and ailment avoidance on the tree and gear, but then that bites even further into our damage. This results in even lower damage, and also giving up defenses in other areas.

GGG created a meta where the best defense was to constantly move and kill monsters before they could hit you, because things like 'powerful crits' and 'extra damage as X' would always create the possiblity of being 1 shot no matter how strong a build was.

When you're reducing the player damage, and access to defensive options, but not reducing but even buffing monster damage in the process, it creates a really frustrating meta where you're disincentivized from running difficult mods and encounters, where map bosses are EASIER to deal with than powerful rares with mods like regen, reduced dmg taken + crit, extra fast etc...

I'm going to continue playing this league and giving it a shot, but I'm not happy with the way these nerfs were implemented. You want a slower game, so you lower player damage, but you don't lower the monster speed and damage which was created as a response to the speed that players have, you end up with a game where monsters are overtuned and players are just getting beaten down every map in 1 hit.

Is that the game you want? People just dying in 1 hit to everything or nothing?

I saw someone's post on here saying they only plan to run magic maps and avoid alching maps, I have to agree with the number of dangerous mods you can roll and the cost you'd have to pay to reroll maps with rippy mods, you'd probably get a better return on investment transmute/aug/alt crafting maps than using rares, I'd probably only run rares and vaal the maps just for completion bonus and continue to run blue after with chisels to increase the output.

The power level of these monsters is just absurd. Some of these encounters and boss fights are so dangerous that you exhaust your flasks by the time the fight is over, but with damage nerfs, you're going to run out of flasks and still not be able to kill the boss, and some of these fights do not allow you to open a TP out of the game, so you basically have to have a log out macro handy to refill your flasks and avoid dying.

So glad I decided to play softcore this league, I've already died so many times to absurd mechanics!!!

This reminds me of the 2.6-3.0 nerfs that happened, did you guys not learn from all the feedback you received during that period with how unhappy people were to avoid making these huge level of changes?

You have fast development cycles of around 3 months, which is enough time to make incremental nerfs and fixes to your game, why do you feel the need to cram in so many untested changes into a single release?

Overall, whichever game designers and developers pushed this change and ignored all of the other voices at GGG saying not to follow this approach needs to be benched and have their power reined in before they continue to do further damage to this otherwise wonderful game.

You can't just build a game to be super fast zoom zoom for 10 years and then one day just say, wait, players need to slow down. Because the game mechanics are all intertwined!
You put the boots on the ground and you have a different game playstyle, but there's still huge mob density, game mechanics where moving fast and positioning are key, using flasks when 50 mobs shoot at you and you can't even see if you have bleeding on or not, fast mobs with huge damage that are just not fun to play against when all you hear is "not enough mana" and get to a huge mob damage wall when you reach maps...
But i like the league mechanic and i hope it goes core.

Also, why copy the mobs resist to x element from D2?? You have a good game here, no need to keep on copying stuff that no one liked anyway!

where the boxes?

I agree with this sentiment, monsters resistance, reflect/ no regen/leech mods, and monster regen all need to be heavily toned down. Nobody likes it, it doesn't add depth or strategy, and it doesn't make the game better in any way.

If I'm wrong, someone please explain how the above results in POE being a better game than without it.

Bring back 3.13 please ...