Fair warning: This is a long post...
Hey Chris - thanks for this update. For the past couple of years, I've had a lot of thoughts on the changes in the game and the direction GGG wants to take the game in, and how seemingly every league, we are moving away from the goal instead of towards it. My hope for this post is to bring this to the attention of the dev team and get responses to some of my questions, or at least, have the team read it.
For background, I've played PoE since ~2012. This was around the time when Maelstrom of Chaos was the endgame, Fellshrine farming was a thing, Vaal oversoul was the final boss in the game, Ruthless was a game difficulty and support gems were used to modify a skill rather than providing "more" multipliers to it.
First, I'll start by highlighting some aspects of your post, then add my own thoughts at the end.
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Firstly, we have prepared a list of what all the mods actually do.
Each league, PoE gets more and more in the territory of needing spreadsheets and 3rd party tools to play the game. Is this deliberate? With the current monster system, we're moving further into that spiral. Does GGG realistically expect players to remember off the top of their head what each of these mods do? If the answer to that is yes, that's fine, but it would be nice to clarify that going forward, this is how it will be. For reference, in Closed beta, we had monster modifiers that directly explained what it does. A monster might have the tag "Cannot be stunned". A few years later, we went into the nemesis system where the clear tags were replaced with more obscure ones like "Unwavering". Now, we're in "Steel infused" which to new players doesn't immediately relate to "oh that means it cannot be stunned".
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For example, the Mana Siphoner mod doesn't affect melee characters as
much as some players think, as it has a donut-shaped area of effect. If
you get close enough, it doesn't apply to you. We can understand that
this is unclear without an explanation.
If it is unclear without an explanation, why isn't there an explanation in-game. We have a tutorial system that goes into redundant details for something a player can just read the ingame UI like what health does and what skill gems do, but we have no explanation for something that is completely invisible to the player. How does a player that doesn't read reddit realize that mana siphoner doesn't affect them in melee range?
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If you have a concern about a mod making an encounter basically
impossible for your build, let us know what you're playing and how it
feels. We'll make sure to take it into account with our balance pass
early this week.
With the speed that PoE has been growing, GGG has been doing a great job adding new innovative content to the game. The downside of this is that they get barely tested. Frankly, I don't believe for a moment when each league, after week 1, you say that the changes were "extensively tested". Either you're lying, which I don't think is the case, or your QA team is disconnected from the real players, where they do sanity tests and spot checks using preloaded gear, which doesn't remotely come close to actual testing of running through the entire game with an untwinked character, using a skill that isn't completely broken. If what I'm saying sounds unreasonable, please upload a stream of your QA team clearing the game untwinked with something like split shot or sunder. How do new players realize which skills are overpowered and which ones are not viable. With a system like PoE where your choices are semi-permanent, there is a good chance that most players brick their build completely with this kind of approach, further driving new players away.
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The theory is that a hard fight results in more items. And it does, on
average. Sometimes you get very little for killing a difficult rare
monsters, and sometimes you get that unique item you've been looking
for, or a shower of rare items. A fundamental part of Action RPGs is the
wide variance of outcomes, rather than having deterministic results.
I have heard this several times, and have a counter argument I hope you can explain. Can you post the rarity and quantity bonus that rares get? Currently, if I can kill 20 monsters with a single skill in less than a second, while it takes 5 seconds to kill a rare, that's about 100 normal monsters I can kill in the time it takes to kill a rare. Unless the rare has more than 100 times the drop rate of the regular monster, it is mathematically a better option to ignore the rare. How does your explanation account for this fact?
Further, you say Action RPGs thrive on wide variance rather than having deterministic results, which is true, except that this is directly counter-intuitive to your previous claim about rares being more rewarding. If the system is completely un-deterministic, why would I take the effort to kill a rare, when I can kill a normal monster with much less effort. For reference, Diablo 2 solved this with the concept of treasure classes and monster levels, where certain bases and uniques were gated behind certain treasure classes and monster levels respectively. This made players actually want to engage those. In PoE, this is lost.
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Our goal is that rare monsters are worth the effort to kill, with
appropriate experience gain, item drop quantity and item drop rarity
bonuses.
From what I mentioned above, this isn't realistic unless the rare monsters have an experience gain and drop rate equal to about a hundred times that of a normal monster.
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should be called "Hasted AURA", from your description
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Incendiary, Permafrost, Dynamo
These are all similar mechanics, yet I can immediately identify Incendiary and Permafrost as being related to fire and cold respectively but Dynamo doesn't immediately relate to lightning. Maybe it's just me, but renaming it to something like "Lightning infused" or "Shocking" or even "Electrifying" is clearer than Dynamo.
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Deadeye, Juggernaut, Trickster
Again, it is unclear what exactly these do, from the name itself. If your goal is to simulate mini-ascendancies for monsters similar to player ascendancies, that should probably be a separate system, independent of modifiers on the monsters. From the modifier, Deadeye seems like something with increased accuracy, Juggernaut sounds like a monster that stuns, Trickster sounds like a monster that can camouflage periodically, or flicker around.
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Flame Strider, Frost Strider, Storm Strider
The magma bolt and frost bolt spawn at the monster's location and travel towards the player, while the lightning mirage spawns on top of the player. Why is this inconsistent? From my experience, storm strider is unfairly threatening compared to the other two because it doesn't give a cue to the player, nor is there time to react. Make the mirage spawn at the monster's location and travel towards the player, thereby making the player dodge it - more mechanically challenging, feels less like a cheap shot.
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Magma barrier, Ice Prison, Mana Siphoner
Magma is related to fire, Ice is related to cold and Mana Siphoner is related to........ lightning? Sounds like someone loved the baran mobs, made that into a rare modifier, and named it with the first thing they could remember from the baran mobs' ground effect.
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Invulnerable - Every 9 seconds cannot be damaged for 4.5 seconds
Clearly one of the most hated mod on this subreddit, but I can understand if this is the goal GGG wants for the game. It forces you to wait for 4.5 seconds before you can damage the monster. This is in line with Chris wanting to slow the game down, but with the current implementation of the game where damage and defense are not equally balanced, this ends up being a death sentence unless you can kite the monster. I'm OK with the game being slow or having to read a monster's affixes to engage with it, what isn't OK is reading the mod, understanding it and realizing that there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Currently, I just bypass the monster if I see this aura around the pack - it just isn't worth the time (goes back to the effort vs reward point I made earlier).
Now, I have some thoughts related to your post, but not directly quoting it:
The paradox of game balance in PoE
There are three things that GGG seems to want, that are relevant here:
1. The game needs to be slower (players shouldn't be bursting entire screens of monsters without looking at them)
2. The game needs to be more challenging (rare monsters should provide a significant challenge compared to normal monsters)
3. Every 3 months, GGG releases a new expansion with new skills, and needs to attract players to be economically sustainable for PoE.
These three points are inherently in conflict with one another, at least in the current iteration of the game.
#1 and #2 make me think of a more Dark-souls like playstyle where normal monsters aren't much of a threat but occasional rares (mini-bosses) challenge the player. However, in the current iteration, rares are not mechanically challenging. They are just challenging stat-wise. To be mechanically challenging, the monsters need to be much slower and telegraph their attack so the player has time to react - think Vaal/Shaper/Dominus/Voll slam, Atziri storm call, Elder's ring of death, Sirus' maze attack, etc. A hasted rare in a map gives a player barely 0.5 seconds of notice before it attacks. This makes its damage seem cheap compared to the boss' damage.
Additionally, boss difficulty is balanced by the fact that the player's focus is entirely on the boss during the fight. The boss model is huge, the boss is the only threat in the area and the player can concentrate on the boss. With rares, this is different. There can be multiple rares on the screen at the same time. Their model isn't as visually captivating to the player, and their effects aren't static. With Shaper, I know his set of attacks before I enter the fight. With a rare monster, I don't. Combine this with the lack of time to read the mods and react to it, we end up with a cheap feeling.
#3 is in conflict with #1 and #2 because, every new league, we have new skills, new items and new mechanics that have to be powerful enough to attract new players and retain old players. This means that there is a constant power creep inherent to the game. I have always felt that influenced items were the worst thing to happen to the game. They shifted the focus of items from the traditional armor, evasion, energy shield, life, resistances, damage mitigation, etc to the much more powerful yet samey feeling tailwind, explode mod, elusive, additional curse, etc mods. Unfortunately the power creep does a lot more to offense than it does to defense, because player psychology inherently loves killing monsters more than staying alive through a lot of damage.
Add to this, the huge visual clutter the game has got over the years. Most skill effects in the past couple of years have been a mess of light and particle effects. This is made worse by the MTX system where you can barely see what's happening on the screen. I still remember in CB when PoE was touted as a grim, dark and gritty environment that was inspired by people that were tired of games moving towards flashing lights and cartoony graphics, yet here we are, where PoE's flashes of light and particles are much worse than most comparable ARPGs on the market. How is a player supposed to engage with a mechanic if they cannot even see it? However, this model is necessary for PoE's sustenance, which makes it unavoidable, yet, in conflict with #1 and #2.
Game balance and power creep
Continuing on the topic of power creep, one of the fundamental problems with the game currently is the huge gap between the floor and ceiling of the game. It causes a situation where game balance is nearly impossible. If balanced around the floor, the game becomes trivial for the ceiling, and if balanced around the ceiling, the game becomes impossible for the floor. Currently, we are erring on the side of the latter, where mechanics are released overtuned to balance the 1% of players that hit the ceiling too quick and trivialize the game, and the "economy", which GGG in my opinion, places too much importance on.
The solution to this is to either bring up the floor which would mean a complete overhaul of the item and skill system which takes a LOT of effort, or bring down the ceiling, which is sure annoy a lot of the playerbase that has gotten used to the level of power they currently enjoy. While the 1% is at the ceiling, there is still a significant number that is close enough to the ceiling to be annoyed by this change if it were to happen.
The harvest crafting system was yet another band-aid on top of the broken item system that is currently in the game. What the game currently has is not crafting, it is gambling. Every chaos orb is essentially a new rare item you gamble from a vendor. Every exalt orb is a slot machine you spin, where there are an unrealistically large number of slots for you to get the result you want. Somehow, there is a disconnect here between players and the design team, where the design team feels that this provides excitement. It doesn't. Gambling might be exciting to a small group of people that don't realize how odds work, but for the large majority that are remotely familiar with math, it isn't.
A brief note on build diversity, this is something GGG has been working towards - making more skills viable. Unfortunately, this is directly impacted by the game's stat-based difficulty (as opposed to mechanical difficulty). The more the game is balanced around the top end of builds, the more players would gravitate towards the broken skills, thereby reducing build diversity. In a way, making the game more difficult is actually hurting build diversity more than helping it.
While I appreciate GGG's effort in trying to mitigate the problem, I'm afraid that some of the decisions seem to be in the wrong direction, with the decisions directly undermining the proposed goal.
