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

"

Kaboinglefop wrote:

Making this tedious != making the combat engaging.

"

Kaboinglefop wrote:

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.

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 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.

"

Kaboinglefop wrote:

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.

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 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.

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

"

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.

"

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.

"

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?

"

eldest-bike4 wrote:

"

Kaboinglefop wrote:

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.

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 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.

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

"

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.

"

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.

"

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?

Op not like bad combat BUT play explo totem THE MOST broken build ever released that make even uber meaningless

Gg

"

didira wrote:

I'm not up for reading all the posts but this seems to be about a player experiencing poor performance when you're forced to go fast and frantic.

You can see everything if there's nothing missing.

"

innervation wrote:

"

Kaboinglefop wrote:

Making this tedious != making the combat engaging.

I think players conflate a lot of things that have very little to do with engaging combat. Speed has nothing to do with engaging combat.

A fight in which I lose if I play poorly and win if I play well is engaging combat. A fight in which my inputs matter on the win/loss outcome is engaging combat.

These things are independent of speed.

I think GGG knows this but by the time they really figured out what they wanted, their sandbox was already out of control - and they had already set a precedent for leagues of 'we provide new toys, we wont nerf you if you break them'.

"

Wiesl_1404 wrote:

"

Kaboinglefop wrote:

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.

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 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.

I would suggest that we could/should have it both ways to satisfy various player types. There are people that just want to zoom (it is the main reason some people play PoE for, just they are able to do so) and there are also people who want visceral, meaningful, engaging combat where mechanics matter.

PoE 2 would be a great opportunity to create endgame content for both player types. Delve in some way was an approach to do so in incentivizing players to build and play differently - it is by no means perfect, but it covers the basic idea pretty well; almost any well-rounded endgame build can do depth 500 but after that, if you want to go deeper, you need to do things differently to go further.

Imo, it would be great if there were many different systems/areas/dungeons/bosses in PoE 2, where you have to do things differently to succeed. That would satisfy multiple player types, give people more stuff to do, incentivizes them to create multiple different characters/builds to do different content and everyone could have it their way they want - everyone wins. I must say that this will only work if every type of such content is equally rewarding (which is a balance issue that needs attention and continuous care and iteration to get it right)

Zoomers win, because there is content to just zoom
Methodical players win because there is content to do so
GGG wins because people will stay engaged longer and by covering a multitude of ARPG player types PoE will attract more players naturally.

Hopefully GGG will get it right.

"

Kaboinglefop wrote:

The player base is pretty polarized around the balance of the game to be honest, and GGG can't keep everyone happy.