PSA: All the PoE2 Footage You've Seen is from the Equivalent of Acts 1~3

A long way to say that ad footage means nothing. The game could be great or terrible, no way to tell from footage.

I don't really care about footage.

Sure; nice, updated graphics are cool for the first few hours into the game. Animations are important, but they're more about "feel" and timings than just pure looks, which don't really transfer that great in PR footage. Artstyle, on the other hand, transfers well, but GGG have always nailed that.

I care more about what they are saying. What they have chosen/decided to talk about, focus on and what they deem important to tell us. This is where most of my doubts come from.

I couldn't care less about WASD, and think it will be a balancing nightmare, indirectly forcing everyone to use it in the long run, when it is/becomes the center of all balance/additions. I couldn't care less about forced combination spamming, and I've always felt that being forced to do 3-4 skills on repeat instead of 1-2 actually makes combat more repetitive (read: Daunting/tiresome) in the long run.

So, yeah... What they deem important to talk about and show us are the key factors to me. Hype is for kids, I remain a firm skeptic.

"

Glorfndel01 wrote:

PSA: All the PoE2 Footage You've Seen is from the Equivalent of Acts 1~3

...and you know this how?

Answering this one in specific because it's quick and easy on mobile: because they've said so. The recent footage from the Los Angeles influencer event that people started fuming about was explicitly Act 1 and a bit of Act 2 in a six-Act game, played from level 1. Compared to PoE's ten Acts, Act One-and-Change is roughly equivalent to Acts 1-3.

Jonathan has outright stated they're not done cooking endgame yet. Hell, I found a podcast from three days ago where Jonathan admitted that divorcing damage from support gems entirely was not as easy or as successful as he'd hoped, GMP in particular is very difficult to design in a way that makes it feel good on average skills without making it overbearing in edge-case jankery. He said the team often - though not always - cones back to the way something was done in PoE 1 after experimenting. They simply do so with a greater understanding of why that thing works and how to tweak it to work better. And if they're still figuring out the precise role of support gems, why the hell would they have finely tuned and exquisitely balanced endgame footage to give people?

The footage people want - some endgame monstrosity firehosing its way through a map instagibbing everything - cannot be created until the rest of the game is in order. Endgame is the last thing the company builds because it HAS to be - they can't build and tune endgame until they know what an endgame character looks like, and they won't know that until they pin everything else down first.

Phrazz is correct, honestly. Listen to their words, listen to what they're telling you they want to do. I adore the idea of WASD movement, I love the multispec skill tree and versatile skill use, I'm absolutely down for the idea of skills-as-tools. All the shit they're talking about in PoE2 sounds amazing to me.

If it doesn't sound amazing to you? Legit. Totally valid. Not liking the ideas they're talking about is absolutely kosher. Complaining that the footage is slow/weak/fragile/bad - i.e. any version of "undertuned" - is dumb. Of course it's undertuned, the game isn't finished yet and nobody playing it has a clue what they're doing. Nobody's figured out the Stormblast Mine Leveling of PoE2 yet. Dead gods willing there won't be one, and you actually level using skills and passives relevant to your desired build rather than playing the exact same build on every single character to level 85 before burning a hundred regrets to figure out your actual build.

Either way however, judging PoE2 by current footage and assuming this is precisely what endgame will look like is folly. Find footage of a new player with no PoE experience doing the Western Forest and ask yourself "how closely does this resemble ultrajuiced endgame content run by masters of the game?"

Now, realize this is what y'all have been doing to Path the Second.

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1453R wrote:

I adore the idea of WASD movement, I love the multispec skill tree and versatile skill use, I'm absolutely down for the idea of skills-as-tools. All the shit they're talking about in PoE2 sounds amazing to me.

We're (yet again) on different planets here.

To me, WASD is a freakin death star of a genre if it (through balance) forces everyone into using it, directly or indirectly. And I don't really see a path that doesn't lead to that scenario. They have even been pretty direct about it; it WILL be an advantage. And I find it kind of ironic that a person that has repeatedly called PoE "Shooter'esc" is welcomming WASD, as well as the new ranged footage we've seen (I might be mixing you up with someone else here. If so, I'm sorry).

And we clearly are on different planets when it comes to the definition of the word "versatile", too. If a skill 'forces' you into a three-combination repeat, only to create some sort of on-hit moment for you to maximize your output, what's versatile about it? Nothing; it's the opposite of versatile.

You might be mistaking me for someone else, yeah. I'm in this cesspool only infrequently, and my primary gripe with PoE 1 is the ludicrous scaling and overbloat of the game - the crushing hyperdominance of Religion of Zoom and the fact that the game doesn't even stsrt until you get to 100M Pinnacle DPS and 1M+ EHP. Numbers absolutely no one save the ultra elite can ever aspire to.

That aside, I can see the reticence on WASD movement. They have indeed made it clear they expect it to be the new default and that most people will be using it, and a big reason for the delay of the beta was to accommodate the redesign that WASD needed. I think it'll end up being a net positive for the new game, even if it does further complicate PoE's button bloat, but I'm also more used to other action games where more precise character movement is important.

Click-to-move can never do better than vaguely "Ehhh, close enough" when it comes to movement, and whether people believe it or not that puts enormous constraints on both skill and enemy design. The whole game has to go along with the "Ehhh close enough " paradigm and that means a whole lot of options and opportunities are just off the table altogether. It's like Zizaran's irritation with cross platform development in a way, save click-to-move is the "console limitations" of character controls.

I'm hoping the game is not necessarily as rigid in its combination systems as, say, the Monk gameplay from ExileCon the Second. That was indeed kinna painful to watch. I am holding out hope, however, that with 240 advertised active skills at launch and an equal plethora of support gems - as well as the possibilities inherent in unique items - that the actual execution of 'Combo' abilities wil be dramatically smoother and more fluid than the painfully stilted Monk gameplay was.

I'm looking at it more in terms of the Huntress gameplay from EC2 or the Mercenary showcase. The Merc could open a fight with a barrage of flash grenades to stun everything, throw out ice walls to block access and create chokepoints, then hose things down with crossbow fire until morale improves. It CAN execute combos but it's not necessarily reliant on them, favoring instead smart use of each skill to do what the skill is good for. And the Huntress simply used whichever skill was right in the moment without much thought to capital C Combos, which is EXACTLY what I want and why Huntress will probably be my first PoE2 playthrough.

Setup > Payoff, which is what both the Monk and Sorceress seem to favor and what everybody us always complaining about, is the weakest form of multi-skill gameplay, especially if the setup is useless without the payoff and the payoff is always pointless without the setup (see: Contagion > Essence Drain - and those two are actually very good by Setup > Payoff standards). I have faith they'll do better than that in other classes, though.

My vision of versatile is "I have a skill that's good at controlling space, I have a skill that's good at clearing packs, I have a skill that's good at spiking individual hard targets, I have a defensive skill that gets me out of bad situations, I have a few other skills with different utility, and using them all intelligently in combination is the ideal." As opposed to the Path 1 paradigm of "I have a skill that's great at killing everything, and every other skill socket on my character is devoted solely and exclusively to making that one singular killy skill EVEN KILLIER so I can have only two buttons- 'Move' and 'Kill Entire Screen'."

Chiming in here: I also hated wasd when I tried it with an ARPG. Said game is already dead I believe. I don't mean Eitr, which to this day I feel was ahead of its time. I actually don't remember which game it was, only that it had a Sabaton collab at some point.

Anyway hate WASD arpg, love controller arpg. And...they are pretty much doing the dame thing: driving a character rather than directing it.

So wouldn't the solution to hating PoE 2's WASD but perhaps overall liking what the game might do be hooking up a controller to your pc? Last I checked steam made that very simple now. And I know from experience that with clever trigger usage developers can make very complex controller schemes that don't feel weird or awkward.

I get it: this means surrendering to and acknowledging the idea that PoE 2 is made to be played with a controller (what a fucking weird thought)...but if WASD is a primary design approach, I can't but see it that way. And I think it's honestly the only way to fluidly do action now. Especially scoot and shoot, or run and gun, or slink and plink. You get the picture. Twin stick shooters are fun.

Also, aren't plenty of big pc games now made to be played well on controller? The division isn't that cut and dry anymore. And as I said elsewhere, how many games we love on m+k were merely m+k because that's how it was done and that's all we had? Conversely, thrustmaster was a huge investment to simulate certain game conditions. And I maintain games that thoroughly use haptic feedback via the dualsense controlller are worth giving up the m+k (cyberpunk 2077, for example).

The biggest loss with an arpg going controller vs m+k is targeting. Absolutely. That I concede and that I will always miss. But what you gain is, imo, worth the loss: genuine action and tactile immediacy. Also, let's not pretend that most endgame ARPG builds require much in the way of targeting...

In a way, controller ARPG usage is how I stopped worrying and learned to love the spam. You might not mean me, Phrazz, but I have been decrying PoE as a bullet hell/shoot em up game for *ages*. And I maintain that a m+k ARPG doesn't need to be that, shouldn't be that. But controller? Fuck it, shoot away. If that's the price one must pay to play one's character rather than simply tell them where to go and what to hit, I play it gladly. I have been a MUCH happier ARPG player since accepting that.

Wasd for isometric ARPGs can die in a fire though. It was clunky back when we used it for Gauntlet (and sometimes arrow keys and ghjy if we had friends over), it has never not been clunky.

Is this a get with the times thing? Maybe. If it enables really fun arpg gameplay I don't see why they shouldn't do it.

Apologies if I have misread the situation or am missing a crucial detail in my argumentation. As ever, I reserve the right to be wrong.

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hasatt0 wrote:

Having an absolute blast playing bash barb in d4. If D4 can get melee right why can't PoE? Bump up damage numbers, give a cleave effect, come up with some bombastic sound effects. What's stopping devs from making melee fun.

Yeah Bash Barb feels good imo. It's the closest to a traditional melee playstyle we can get i guess.

Don't play D4, have no idea what a "bash Barb" is. But I went and checked a few videos, and what I saw was...basically Heavy Strike. Just...Heavy Strike. Snappier Heavy Strike perhaps, but the one version seemed to throw a shockwave to attack multiple enemies, and none of the others showed anything whatsoever save boss killing. Which consisted of "hit the boss with Heavy Strike a bunch of times, occasionally mixing in some other skill, until it died", with varying levels of overgearing to make the fight whatever length the player could afford.

If this is The Pinnacle of Melee - just snappier, slightly more modern Heavy Strike - then I guess I've been right about TRU MELEE people the whole time. It really is 'we want Basic Bonk strike skills that do nothing except whack one guy once with one weapon to be the best build in the game and anything other than single-target strike Basic Bonk is NO TRU MELEE'.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with this thread, but man that's depressing. Speaks to Forever's point about how modern mob-dense ARPGs just...can't really do that, and how there needs to be more than just Basic Bonk to melee or melee will always be dogshit. You can have your Lame Single-Target Slappin' Stick Whack, but if that is the only-ass skill you ever use? Then you have no one but yourself to blame for how slowly you go through Wraeclast slapping one demon per swing while fifty others all try to eat your face off.

Anyways.

The "Driving vs. Directing" thing is very apt. Note that many of the best/most popular/Favoritest Skillz in PoE1 are the ones that largely automate targeting, or which cover a wide enough area that "dear grid coordinates" is the operativce phrase, because precision movement and targeting in this game is a gods damned chore. You click on a spot, the character goes to somewhere vaguely nearish that spot, and then you click the skill button and hope it catches what it's supposed to. You can place skills like traps, totems, Orbs, and what-have-you more precisely with mouse than with thumbsticks, but the character itself doesn't have precision of movement.

I've seen more than one high-profile streamer express an opinion like "I hated the idea of WASD movement, I was absolutely prepared to shit all over it, then I played it for five minutes and was all nah this is fantastic." It's gonna be a weird adjustment for an isometric game, to be sure, and it may very well be that controller is best for certain builds. But like the man said, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Gaming has evolved since the days of Diablo 2; Grinding Gear challenging the sacred cows is a good thing. Better, more modern and fluid controls can only be a plus, since the clunky old click-to-move interface is still there as a backup if the WASD somehow turns out to be dogshit despite every indication being otherwise.

As for TRU MELEE nonsense? Meh. MEH. Gimme my spear and shield and my crossbow and flash grenade launcher, give me a Raider-esque Ascendancy on the Huntress, and I will be delighted to weave in and out of melee fluidly and naturally with lightning javelins, flurries of stabs, ice walls and flash bombs, and all that good shit while the Marauder and Warrior players are all complaining that they can't clear faster than a dedicated clearing build by Heavy Striking each individual demon in Wraeclast to death one at a time.

Gawd I cannot wait.

Threads like this one, where the statements made indicate a certain level of fandom and dedication, remind me how passionate people are over PoE.

The "i R mad" threads are easier to scan for intent, but you people actually have me reading line for line.

Good on ya.

Fwiw my "melee" chars on div are a 360 degree flurry rogue, a bloodsword necro, a kratos style chain flinger and, probably the most melee of em all, a flicker strike, sorry, shadow step shadow damage rogue whose main clear is big ole shadow damage explosions.

I am not sure there has been "true melee" in an arpg since D3. At least not fully competitive.

I still despise D3's usage of weapons as stat sticks with little regard for actual utility but DIV does it too -- only less chaotically. A sorc cannot use a bow as a stat stick, but a necro can use a 2hsword as one. Which I suppose is fine. Death knights and all that.

In the end, what it comes down to is this: is a game enjoyable enough that you as a player are willing to compromise or revise your stance on certain factors?

If yes, good. If not, next game I guess.

Also: know your limits. I refuse to use bow skills on a melee rogue so I accept that the character will definitely "end" sooner than he really should. I had fun,so that's fine. Finding an a or s tier build I enjoy playing is just as much fun. :)