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

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1453R wrote:

Ascendancy usage levels is as much about FotM, player preferences, and current trends as it is about balance.

Lesser-used Ascendancies are not necessarily bad, they're just not as broadly applicable

Nah, some of them are in fact, bad. Or at the very least in a poor competitive spot given players have a choice. I don't think it's worth defending GGG on this, or somehow excusing it as too hard to do. I'd have to agree to disagree there.

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Phrazz wrote:

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DarthSki44 wrote:

Its hard, no doubt, but why is Gladiator such a meme lol. Please don't tell me it cannot be done.

It can absolutely be buffed, but can it be balanced? Giving it 10% too much is just as off-balanced as 10% too little. But I would bet my kidney that we'll see a Glad buff within the next two leagues. Not really sure who would want my kidney, though...

Then buff it!

I doubt very seriously we will see any significant dev changes before PoE2 is out however. (Beyond numbers)

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DarthSki44 wrote:

Then buff it!

I doubt very seriously we will see any significant dev changes before PoE2 is out however. (Beyond numbers)

I agree; buff it.

Regarding changes; I would call both the addition of T17 maps and the scarab rework pretty significant, so i wouldn't be surprised if they pulled something out of the hat for next league. Glad is in a real bad shape and has no real identity in the current environment. It "has" to be buffed sometime...

Some Ascendancies can end up in crap places, yes. But speaking to a point Phrazz made earlier, what seems easier: designing a 'good 'Ascendancy from scratch, or fixing an Ascendancy that has to remain true to a long-running identity and history? Gladiator largely has to be the Bleedy Block-y Dual Wield-y Guy, even though none of those things are generally held to be valuable in the current Streamer Meta. At least insofar as I understand it, I'll admit I don't really keep up with the Streamer Meta. I'll never be able to afford any of the thousand-divine things they do anyways and I'd rather spend my time playing, not watching someone else play.

Still, speaking to your other point, darth: why do people suspect PoE2 will be as dense, impenetrable, and new-player hostile as PoE1 is? You say the new game will be DoA if it's as impossible for newbies to get into as PoE1, and frankly I agree -0 but I see no evidence that this will be the case. You can point to PoE1 as the evidence, but honestly? PoE1 is overwhelming evidence against this issue to me, since Grinding Gear has built and run this game for fifteen years now and has to be agonizingly aware of its various shortcomings and pitfalls.

NPE is front of mind with the PoE2 team. We've seen just recently the new tooltip/in-game dictionary hover system, explaining every single term in the game. That's a huge booster. They're adding damage numbers like everyone wants, even though that really doesn't do anything to help new players. They're doing extensive blind testing with people who've never played PoE or ARPGs in general to try and spot pain points and make it easier to onboard. A lot of what they're doing is eliminating legacy jank that doesn't need to be as complicated as it is, such as the skillgem system or the alien zorth-dimensional math that is PoE1 leech.

Like, yes, if PoE2 comes out and is a bricked disaster for new players, that would be terrible and likely sink the game. I just...don't see why this is considered the most likely outcome? Why people are considering this the default result and screaming to the rafters about it? People seem to think game development is all about building the game early, then spending a lot of time fiddling and nit-picking with it to get it 'just right'. That really couldn't be further from the truth - I've heard so many times from so many developers that their game didn't come together as a functional game at all until quite late in development.

People point to the terrible Sorceress experience from the March LA event and say "SEE?! GAME BAD!" Which, yeah - clearly the game isn't ready for primetime. That's why the beta was delayed. But I can also point to the Ranger gameplay, where most everyone I've seen from the LA event who ran Ranger had an awesome time and absolutely loved it, and say "See? They're getting there. They can hit the mark, they just need to get everything else to this point."

Jonathan's talked numerous times about the things they learned from the LA event and how they're changing the game's early progression to be smoother and less prone to people falling in balance holes - he's clearly aware of the problems and working to fix them. So why presume they're going to fuck up and write the game off before they even have the chance to stick the landing?

That's my thing. If they biff it then yes, that's a huge problem that could very well sink them as a company. That would be bad. But they know this, and are doing everything in their power to Not Biff It. So...why is everyone assuming they'll biff it?

I mean I know why, everyone in these forums hates everything Grinding Gear does. This place is the single densest collection of bitter, nasty, petty, awful hatelords I have ever seen in ANY game community ever, bar none. But it's stil just such a weird stance to take. "Wait and see" means assuming neither undue success nor unwarranted failure.

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Phrazz wrote:

I would call both the addition of T17 maps and the scarab rework pretty significant

I didn't play this league but I did see most of the commentary on T17 and scarabs as being a mostly negative change. I wonder how GGG sees it.

Now that might be a function of people being unhappy may choose to speak more & louder than those that are happy.

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DarthSki44 wrote:

I didn't play this league but I did see most of the commentary on T17 and scarabs as being a mostly negative change.

...It's still a significant change?

Ironically, the scarab change is generally rejected by Ultrajuicers more than anyone else, and it's rejected because it's being seen as a dumbing-down of endgame juicing. Instead of a dozen weird bizarre interlinking systems that were obtuse and impenetrable to new players but which could be manipulated in eldritch, deeply unintuitive ways by people with five thousand hours experience to produce an unholy hellstorm of loot, they simplified the system to be easy to approach and use for ordinary players. Ultrajuicers got mad, but I honestly quite enjoy the new scarab system and the fact that scarabs are far more common than they used to be. Common enough you can actually use them, instead of just ignoring them because nobody except Ultrajuicers could get any benefit from them and Ultrajuicers never bought them in quantities not written with four digits.

The scarab change is an example of dedicated PoE1 masters rejecting a more PoE2-style change intended to make the game more approachable. Streamer memers reject the system because it's harder to squeeze twenty mirrors per map out of it, but the common masses that don't bother posting are likely perfectly fine with the change since they never bothered using any of the old Ultrajuicing mechanisms scarabs replaced anyways. To them Scarabs are a pure buff - they get a new thing they can use and do that never really helped them before.

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1453R wrote:

Still, speaking to your other point, darth: why do people suspect PoE2 will be as dense, impenetrable, and new-player hostile as PoE1 is? You say the new game will be DoA if it's as impossible for newbies to get into as PoE1, and frankly I agree -0 but I see no evidence that this will be the case. You can point to PoE1 as the evidence, but honestly? PoE1 is overwhelming evidence against this issue to me, since Grinding Gear has built and run this game for fifteen years now and has to be agonizingly aware of its various shortcomings and pitfalls.

This, I think, is the most interesting discussion to have.

PoE1 development and the decisons haven't been by mistake. For all the manifestos and "vision" memes what we got was really how the GGG devs wanted the game to be. For good or bad, it was what it was. And truthfully hard to argue with the overall sucessful era. (Despite the things that drive me crazy)

So that said, why would you anticipate a different course for PoE2? Why wouldn't they ever have changed course in more than a decade in PoE1 if they thought it was beneficial for the game? It seems far more likely we would get something more similar than different when it comes to philosophy no?

Perhaps it may be, that things are shifting, to be different with 0% GGG ownership and CW taking a significant step back. I'm not entirely sure tbh.

I also think there still is this almost intangible sense that PoE has to be anti-casual, that the barriers for entry are somehow worn as badges of courage. If PoE2 is far more accessible will the more elite Exiles turn up their nose? In the same breath, the pressure from Tencent to appeal to a wider swath financially makes all the sense in the world.

I don't know what philosophy will win out, or if they find some unicorn state in the middle that make both happy. If couch co-op and console focus were to be taken into account one could assume they are leaning towards accessibility, but frankly, I'm going to have to see it to believe it.

Again I will reiterate that I haven't seen anything in terms of what PoB provides that has been integrated into PoE2, or simplified to the extent that you won't even need the information to begin with. I think this is a very large question that will be answered in the beta.

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Phrazz wrote:

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DarthSki44 wrote:

I didn't play this league but I did see most of the commentary on T17 and scarabs as being a mostly negative change.

...It's still a significant change?

Sorry should have been more clear. If said significant change was received poorly, would it make you pause, or step back, from making more significant changes in the subsequent legaue given the focus on PoE2?

That's what I meant.

Mm. That's a fair discussion to have, yes.

I'll say I anticipate a different course for Path of Exile 2 because Path of Exile 1 exists and will continue to exist. They're not turning PoE1 off, no matter what the Nopium-chewing forum memebabies say, so why create PoE2 as a game that directly competes with PoE1? The new game is directly intended to be a new experience, informed by and paying homage to what came before and taking the best ideas from it while presenting those ideas in a fresh, modern guise with a new take on the old vision. I believe Chris and Jonathan when they say that they want to keep working on and developing both games, and that PoE2 was split off of 1 because they couldn't in good conscience ruin what people loved in PoE1.

If PoE2 was just more of the same game with a shiny new wrapper, with no real differences from PoE1? Why would they have taken the enormoous PR hit they took when they announced the split? Why would they have cut the second game off the first the way they did? if they didn't think PoE2 was going to be a fundamentally different experience, why not simply stick with the original plan and patch it into the first game?

PoE1 has not dramatically changed course in twelvish years of operation because it's a successful game, and for the moment it's Grinding Gear's only successful game. They know that doing the sorts of things they wanted to do would quite possibly sink their existing game and leave them all out of a job, because the Religion of Zoom people cannot be satiated by anything but ever-spiraling lootsplosions and clearspeed increases. Between technical limitations with their ancient system and Community Expectations, they've backed themselves into something of a corner in PoE1 and we all know it. See the endless stupid "Vision(TM)" memery dumb fucks in the forum constantly spew when Grinding Gear does literally anything to try and get players to, y'know...engage with the game rather than Cookie Clicker their way to twelve thousand Mirrors.

Grinding Gear doesn't need to make a new game for those people. They have their game, and it will continue to provide a revenue stream. They can afford to court a new audience with PoE2, and in fact courting a new audience is the correct decision to make. Going after people for whom PoE1 is too jank, too dense, too fast, too explodey, too cluttered, too much is a way to draw new people into the fold and provide a better experience for existing people who love the idea of Path of Exile but absolutely hate what it's become (hi).

Every message I've seen from Jonathan, Mark, Chris, and anyone else on the subject has affirmed to me that this is what they're doing - they're making a new, modern ARPG that falls in line with what they want a new, modern ARPG to do and feel like, while keeping in mind what players need and want out of such games. Jonathan's talked several times about keeping watch over other games in the genre to make sure PoE2 is metting any new Industry Standards that come out of them - when a new game does something really well and players love it, he knows that's now a thing they need to deliver on as well if they want their game to succeed. PoE1 can't do most of those things, and is mostly going on inertia and momentum at this point.

I saw something attributed to the PoE2 dev team a bit back, saying that Diablo 4 was Blizzard taking the ARPG in an MMO direction. They want to use Path of Exile 2 to take the ARPG in an Elden Ring direction instead, without going so far that it stops being an ARPG. I'd never been a Souls gal before ER, but damn if I don't love me some Elden Ring. All the evidence of my eyes and ears points to them treating PoE2 as a paradigm shift, a chance to do everything right instead of doing whatever works and getting by as best they can.

Some people hate the new direction. That's fine. I am super jazzed to see where it goes because Elden Ring plus Path of Exile-level buildiness and customization is damn near a Dream Game for me. They are speaking my language and I am unafraid to admit that.

People can call me biased because of that, but I still think there's no reason whatsoever for them to try and chase exactly the same market they've already got cornered with PoE1 and every reason to branch out into new, uncharted (for Grinding Gear) territory.

Now if only they'd bend on the selectable genders thing...but hey. Trans girl gonna trans, and I get why they're not doing it even if I disagree with and dislike their reasoning.