I'm sick of zoom meta. (Speed creep created bad combat and game balance)

UPDATE: Amazing news, GGG separating the games. Those of you who like this current devolved mess of PoE1's speed creep can still play it! PoE2 hopefully will take correct design directions. Fingers crossed for the vision, great thinking on GGG's part! Immediately going to buy supporter packs!


I've found myself significantly less engaged every league since harbinger.
I just zoom meta to 36/40 or 40/40 (If I can stomach it) and go to a different game.

I think it was pretty damn fun around the time of Perandus/Prophecy league. But the glitz and glam wears down after a few years.

A lot of the combat has lost its meaning. I don't like dps checks, I like mechanics checks.

I believe you can have interesting builds without devolving the combat of an arpg to a clicking simulator where you have 0 visual clarity.

Zoom meta also brought about some of the worst shitty monster balancing. AN was a good idea, but our characters speed is too obscene for it to have worked. (It also really messed up reward balance.)

Came here to leave this feedback after seeing the PoE2 trailer and seeing the pacing/clarity of combat there. It's gorgeous.

Hope GGG follows the vision.

Edit 2 Jan 2024:
Great league GGG. The transfig gems were quite fun. I got bored of the OP ones and had a ton of fun killing ubers w/ self-cast ball lightning of static.

Edit 11 Jun 2023:
All that cool combat in the trailer? I just want you guys to realize that you won't see ANY OF THE COOL STUFF because you'll be too busy flying everywhere, having glitchy animations with insane effects, aps, cast/sec, and dying to instagibs via ground effects, death effects, etc. which is the only way GGG can balance around the speed creep.

Edit 12 Jun 2023:
A solution to poor game balance is not to directly avoid the parts of the game that are unbalanced. Suggestions to "Go to ruthless / play diablo 2" don't really address wanting a more fleshed out combat experience.

Wanting a more deliberate combat experience and balanced game around that, including loot survivability visual clarity etc. is more because zoom causes devolution of the game in these aspects for the sake of a short-lived power fantasy.

Edit 15 Jun 2023:
My complaint is more about speed creep and the negative impacts its had on game balance, visual fidelity, and the action elements (namely depth) within the game. Zoom meta is a symptom of a disease.

GGG, I hope you really meant it when you said you wanted to use PoE2 as a big reset button. Conviction to stick to the vision can be a good thing.

Notable Quotes from thread

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Pizzarugi wrote:

HH encourages zoom meta.

Timed leagues necessitate the zoom meta.

In order for us to do something about this incessant need to go fast, GGG first needs to stop adding content that punishes you for not being fast enough, as in remove the timers in these problem leagues. After that, rework or remove the chase unique that turns any non-summoner build into a 1-minute mapping nightmare.

"

Draegnarrr wrote:

It isn't complicated really they just need to remember that speed is its own reward without mechanics directly rewarding speed as well.

Take legion for example, not only does a fast character get significantly more loot, they also encounter the mechanic faster. The result is a fast character isn't getting a linear increase as they should.

Simplest solutions to this are things like expedition where your initial choice is just that, a choice, rather than being based on character speed to begin with. Fast characters still clear the encounter they setup faster as they should but they aren't double dipping due to their speed.

Players generally behave like any suggestion of removing speed is terrible and it'll go to just being snail paced but it really won't, speed is the core precept of ARPG design as its the most noticeable form of player power. Even in "slower games" a good character goes far faster than a slow one and its focused as a stat after a certain point.

GGG don't always screw their paradigm up either a great deal of the speed meta is actually how player mentality and approach to the game has changed over time. I think measuring anything in div/hr is completely degenerate for example but it has become increasingly popular for players to focus speed in search of a higher and higher currency earner.

My old man yells at cloud moment about all this is GGG have created, permitted and encouraged far too many crutches for a game purported to have challenging endgame and crutches just feed the speed demon. Just look at mageblood, its ludicrously rare/expensive while simultaneously allowing you to run even a shit build at maximum speed once you get it. Its no wonder players focus on earnings and going faster and faster.

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alhazred70 wrote:

Ruthless improves combat moderately for a few days or weeks per league because you don't have the ability to teleport yourself out of every positional mistake and your skills are under scaled because you lack supports. Thats about the extent of it... this is not engaging combat and everyone who wants engaging combat does not also want a 1000x grind multiplier, aweful map sustain and the gutted Ruthless Atlas tree which looks more like someone vandalized the data files by deleting stuff than it looks like a thoughtfully designed game system.

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exsea wrote:

i used to make a balanced character where i tried to add tons of defense.

maven's invites taught me that defenses mean shit when you dont kill off bosses quickly. you might be able to tank 1 boss, what about 2, what about 3 then, or why not 10?

if your dps is piss poor, maven would heal up all the damage you've done.

then we have shaper/elder/maven with permanent floor degen effects.

ggg also reworked fortify.

the moment i slotted something else to replace fortify, my dps jumped. i also realized the truth.

defences mean little when a random AN mob with certain deadly combinations pop out.

why bother

the best defence is offence. kill everything before they kill you.

i've learned to embrace it and enjoy it.

on the extreme side of things, there was a person on reddit, did ubers a hundred times? when asked to share her build, people were shocked to see her hp was under 3k?

who need defense when she takes down ubers in seconds?

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Sukhoi_01 wrote:

for the type of ARPG PoE2 is shaping up to be I don't think we'll have to worry about zoom meta becoming a thing, but people will always want to maximize their time in the game, which will inherently mean finding the fastest builds. I want the game to provide the min-max for bossfight combat to be similar to what was shown in the demos at Exilecon. I want the bossfights to feel meaningful and challenging, but I don't necessarily have an issue with people using their biggest skill that can kill everything to clear and then speeding through to the next group of monsters. As long as it feels good to play and doesn't get out of control. I want a contrasting game to PoE1, which I hope doesn't just maintain its speed meta but leans into it. I find both fun.

i rly hope poe2 will be RLY slow and fun <3

pls pls poe2 be slow!!!

Can someone actually come with those "good mechanics" they keep talking about instead of just moaning about zoom meta? Or better yet, how will them simply delete power creep, which they seem to be intentionally ramping like a truck without breaks?

The answer is: Ruthless. Have fun there.

"

AdRonZh3Ro wrote:

Can someone actually come with those "good mechanics" they keep talking about instead of just moaning about zoom meta? Or better yet, how will them simply delete power creep, which they seem to be intentionally ramping like a truck without breaks?

The answer is: Ruthless. Have fun there.

Ruthless does not innately solve the issue with speed creep.

Also, there is a difference between speed creep and power creep.

Good mechanics would be like pre-bugged sirus, umaven, etc.

Combat with some actual thought. Again, speed creep is different than power creep.

They have acknowledged (if you go back to exilecon where poe2 was announced) that they want to use PoE2 as a big reset button for the speed creep issues.

The problem is, to combat the speed creep, we have the horrible lack of visual clarity and poorly communicated combat.

I would like the entire game to feel like my souls level 1 dark souls 2 scholar of the first sin runs.

(╭☞ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )╭☞
ｄｏｎｔ　ｔａｌｋｉｎｇ　ｐｌｅａｓｅ
(╭☞ ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )╭☞

First off, the hell's speed creep? You mean the speed of the monsters?

Also why not just play Dark Souls then? You basically want a literal overhaul of the game.

Unfortunately, every time someone brings this up, Chris wheels out his anecdote about how LoL nerfed speed once and it made everyone quit.

Then GGG buff clearspeed some more in the next patch.

Play non meta builds, problem solved.
The game offers plenty of options and you even get to enjoy everything on a slow low dps build

In the current state of the game -which I don't necessarily like- zoom zoom is necessary for item drops. It's nearly impossible to drop a good rare in this game so we need to kill more monsters to drop more currency and bases in order to craft better items.

I would agree with your point if this game was like d2, where rare items are never perfect, many uniques are BiS, and crafting is limited, so you actually should be identifying all rares, specially jewelry. I would like PoE2 to have a bit of d2 in this regard.

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Iggy5150 wrote:

In the current state of the game -which I don't necessarily like- zoom zoom is necessary for item drops. It's nearly impossible to drop a good rare in this game so we need to kill more monsters to drop more currency and bases in order to craft better items.

I would agree with your point if this game was like d2, where rare items are never perfect, many uniques are BiS, and crafting is limited, so you actually should be identifying all rares, specially jewelry. I would like PoE2 to have a bit of d2 in this regard.

Very much agree.

"

Pashid wrote:

Play non meta builds, problem solved.
The game offers plenty of options and you even get to enjoy everything on a slow low dps build

Unfortunately, it's not about the dps or power creep.

It's the fact that the game is balanced around a very high speed benchmark, including monster speed, death effects, etc.

it's a speeeeed creeeeep issue.

rolling and parrying, more mechanics are fun imho,
that type of gameplay it's why I like the uber fights.

I actually quite liked doing sirus when he first came out with 150k dps on hardcore.