After playing the demos today - PoE2 makes combat a lot more fun
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One of PoE’s worst design flaws is that the combat outside of some very specific end game boss fights can never be made meaningful. The mechanics of the game are simply too clunky to make it work. Outside of boss fights and the occasional overpowered rare mob, players and mobs both generally follow the pattern of stopping and whacking away at each other. You win by having dps and range or by being tanky and not caring about what hits you. Every attempt to make basic combat more interesting and dynamic has failed because of this.
PoE2 is slower so far - but it makes the combat(especially in boss fights) dynamic, challenging, and fun. Take for example the monk vs the devourer: you’ll probably die on your first attempt, maybe your first several attempts - but there are things you quickly learn - he has a projectile AoE skill that’s hard to dodge but you can try to stay in melee so he doesn’t use it out hide behind his body segments. You can cull the adds for power charges and then use them on your big AoE skill to do massive damage and mega stun the boss. You can get his hp down like 50-70% this way and just need to melee him for the rest. This doesn’t take long to learn, it makes the fight go a lot quicker, and it feels good to develop your skills so early. This doesn’t only apply to bosses either, even packs of monsters have a learning curve for how your character should approach them to maximize clear speed and minimize risk. Now I haven’t described yet exactly how this is different from a tough encounter in PoE1, but it all comes down to the animation system. It is so incredibly smooth and fluid. Attacks, even default attacks, feel good to land and use. You can cancel out of any attack to roll at pretty much any time. Almost none of the skills have cooldowns (just unleash and frost bomb from what I’ve seen so far). The games I would compare PoE2’s combat to is monster hunter or a fighting game, not the trashy cooldown and skill rotation MMOs. You use big hard hitting skills when you have the opening and faster but weaker skills when you do not. Positioning and crowd control matter a great deal for creating those openings and avoiding damage. From what I can tell, the vision of PoE2 is to marry PoE’s unrivaled build customization with actual meaningfully fun and engaging combat (not just on bosses but they’re extra good) and add a crap ton of content on top. What I’ve played so far is very clearly living up to that promise. It could easily shape up to be a much better game than PoE1 even if they don’t bring in the maximum zoominess that PoE1 has. I just wish it’d be here sooner lol. Last bumped on Aug 1, 2023, 1:57:05 AM
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Slowing down combat : every-time GGG moves in this direction, the majority of players dislike it.
Alot of players (including me) just simply want to spam 1 skill, slay juiced packs of magic mobs and get showered in loot. That is all. Lets be real the zoominess is 90% of the fun. All this stuff about rolling, dodging, swapping weapons, using 5 skill rotations, a white pack takes 10 seconds to kill, and every rare mob takes 2 min to kill, and every boss has 6 skills to watch for and 4 different phases.. that is not where the MAGIC is at. That ain't it chief! Maybe GGG could quell all this backlash by just releasing a late game char in POE2 and showing it blitzing some mobs.. because right now all we have is the the streamer gameplay showcases, which were frankly a BORING FIASCO - all they did was generate NEGATIVE HYPE. On the other hand.. BRAVO for 3.22 could not be more hype for an autobattler :) | |
" Agreed. PoE 2 reveals were a disappointment. Gameplay was wayy too slow. Even for a campaign. I was cringing watching them fight act bosses so slowly. Damn. Watching Ziz trying to fight some mobs tediously - he made a good effort to try and look cheerful but it was frankly disappointing. We've been waiting FOUR years for PoE 2 since the 2019 Exilecon when they revealed PoE 2 footage - and this is what we get? And STILL it's not ready? Why are you making an announcement and hyped convention, that doesn't even reveal that much, for a CLOSED BETA, that is ONE YEAR away. All of this PoE 2 hype was just a big letdown. I was excited for 3.22 though Last edited by Ceryneian on Jul 29, 2023, 4:50:56 AM
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lol if you only care about zoomzooming at lightspeed oneshotting unique bosses - it doesnt mean that 90% of playerbase cares and wants it too
There's no magic in killing a unique boss in 1-2 seconds, it means nothing good It's probably to show all the beaty, and after releasing u can find a good dps weapon to zoom zoom like u all do in standard |
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" He's absolutely right that slowing down has universally lead to backlash in PoE. It's a challenging goal - if that's the game they want to make, how better could they go about it than making an entirely new game and separating it from the first? There's no doubt that the combat is far more involved and slow. I typically can't stand multibutton builds in poe but that's mainly because it's just going through the motions and not interesting. If it's the case that there is actually a need to do such on the fly decision making and it isn't just a matter of 1-2-1-2 damage combos, that's a different animal. If it's the same as PoE 1 but everything now needs multiple stages of setup, that's not good. It looks amazing. Whether or not it IS amazing most of us won't know for another year. It's insane to me that they decided to run an exilecon when even the beta is almost a year away - that's an absurd lead time for a game that's already been announced at a previous con 4 years ago. I was super hyped, half-expecting them to announce the beta like "coming in the next few weeks" or something - they said next year and I was like... "huh? what are we doing here then?" |
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" If you only care about killing campaign bosses as 10 minute fights and moving like a snail through campaign, it doesn't mean that 90% of playerbase cares and wants it too. Too much grind and too slow gameplay is NOT good. We've all seen the backlash D4 got for their patch. Like is GGG for real? Let's stop kidding ourselves that majority of players like grinding their heads against a grindstone and moving like turtles through screens. We don't. Last edited by Ceryneian on Jul 29, 2023, 6:17:50 AM
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Don't assume my cares I'm usually playing HCSSF and finishing acts within 7-10 hours and when i played HCSSFRuthless i was in top20 with the first 48 hours
I don't enjoy ultra-slow gameplay but the zoom-zoom-finish-map-in60seconds is just cringe There's a golden middle and i guess they're trying to find it The showcase of their gameplay is just to show how beaty game they are making with the mechanics etc. Imagine playing Summoner with 30+ minions or RF = impossible to be slow phased |
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I am not a fan of headhunter, insta-blow-up-multiple-screens-at-once gameplay. But I thought they found a golden middle ground with the Path of Exile II 2019 gameplay footage.
Personally I don't think the characters movement are too slow but it is very tiresome to watch a streamer whack at a rare mob for 3 minutes. The game now feels too slow and a lot of times players are required to retreat with an army of monsters following them while they are on the verge of dieing. Also I am not a fan of the new skills. The old 2013 skills had much more "oomfph". I still remember the old fireball or ice nova: they had serious impact. Heart of Purity
Awarded 'Silverblade' to Talent Competition Winner 2020. POE turned into a ratrace for the most div/hour. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDFO4E5OKSE | |
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I remains to be seen how slow POE 2 will be at the end. After watching the videos i am honestly not sure anymore that it's going to be slower.
From what i've gathered they stick with the usual GGG approach of "Lets not put hard caps on anything" and frankly, they won't ever manage to make people use different situational skills if they keep allowing them to just outscale the restrictions of those situational skills. I can already see that whole idea falling into obscurity a few weeks into the beta. When good players make builds they won't go thinking "Okay let's use knives if the enemy gets close, and that CC skill when i am surrounded and the nuke when i have time". They'll go "Okay the nuke does a ton of damage in a wide AOE but has long casting time and high mana cost, so how do i reduce casting time and mana cost to 0?". And if the game provides the means to accomplish that then we will end up with an exact replica of POE 1 gameplay where nobody cares about using 9 situational skills but instead just covers the screen in meteors accompanied by debuffs and guard skills. And when that happens we will end up with pretty much the same speed and stuff like dodge roll will become a meme. I am hopeing POE 2 turns out different game play wise so that idealy GGG can then stop trying to slow down POE 1 in all the wrong ways but i am not convinced that's going to happen. On a positive note, it seems they finally abolished that flawed support gem system where ever support gem had to have the highest possible damage modifier on it to be viable. So maybe now supports will actually do what they are supposed to do, change how skills work. If all the more multipliers for damage are gone for good that can also mean that you can no longer scale the damage to absurd numbers and just one shot endgame bosses. I REALLY REALLY hope that's the case. It causes so many other problems down the line especially with endgame boss loot needing to be balanced around people who do the fight in <5 seconds. Last edited by Baharoth15 on Jul 29, 2023, 7:11:06 AM
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" They said that the characters in showcase are made weak intentionally so people can see what's actually happening. And it was act3 with terrible gear. Ofc it looks way slower than what you expect. |
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