0.1.0d Hotfix 1

I like the balance hotfixes an patches, and your quick reaction for broken ability’s. Keep working 👍

Please, reconsider not nerfing CoX to the ground, there is a fair middle ground that you can balance it.

... <sigh> I'm sad. I think I'm sad because I'm torn. I have always loved & respected GGG, and still do... but I'm torn. I (think) I see the direction they're trying to go with POE2, but for some reason I think they're hitting it a bit too hard and doubling-down on things they should really just leave alone or come to some sort of real compromise. GGG, in my opinion, is fighting too many battles and not really winning the war, but on the same token so is the player-base.

I think one thing GGG watched was the vision Blizzard had with D4's release, and how the player's cried and screamed (myself included), and watched D4 completely cave. GGG's takeaway was "ok, when we release POE2, we ain't gunny do that!"... and they're standing their ground. Ok, fine, but your current stance and unwillingness to even budge a little is doing more harm than good, imo.

This is why I'm torn... I see/understand (or think i do lol) GGG's perspective, likewise the player's. This is a very very difficult position for all parties involved to be in.

All I can really do is speak for myself and how I'm feeling and choosing to interact. I'll just say this, I personally will not be playing/supporting POE2. It's not the game style/direction I can see myself having an enjoyable time in. As much as I wanted POE2 to be how I was hoping, I can tell that it just never will be.

At this point, I kinda wish I was not allowed to play EA. Perhaps a good mix of around 10k players should have privately been invited and done at least 3(ish) months of back-and-forth with GGG to iron out a lot of what's been discussed/patched so far, then once that was stable, then send out maybe another 10k openings. To hype hype hype, right before the holidays nonetheless when everyone has vacation and/or no school, then open the whole thing to EVERYONE... maybe wasn't the best strategy? idk (shrugs). I have figured out though that this version of POE isn't for me... at this time, because to me, the whole point of an ARPG is an eventual fast paced screen clearing build (with high investment in mats and time). Right now, I just see POE2 as a "you'll barely make it at every stage and feel like you're trudging with mud-soaked boots on the entire time". For me, that's not fun.

Ok, so while I'm on-board with most of these player concerns/complaints, I thought I'd offer my perspective. I'm not naive enough to think my opinion really matters in the long run, but I'm also not self-loathing enough to think that this will never get seen by GGG. I do feel somewhat better that I have a voice/opinion and that I was able to get it typed out and posted. Hey, it's the small wins, right? :) Peace everyone!

Dear Exiles and Dear GGG,

I think Path of Exile 2 is absolutely amazing, especially because of the challenge it offers, the boss design, and the diversity of enemies. However, what really bothers me is the restriction regarding gameplay speed and the power of certain skills and classes. I also dislike the limited possibilities for crafting items.

The size of the instances in the acts, combined with the low movement speed, feels like a very artificial way to stretch the playtime, which significantly reduces the fun. While I find the frequent updates, including bug fixes and adjustments, fantastic, the constant and short-term nerfing of many builds within such a short period is simply ridiculous.

The reasoning behind the balancing changes makes little sense – unless some players feel so disadvantaged that it ruins the game for them. Creating different builds is one of the biggest challenges and one of the most enjoyable aspects of the game! It's incredibly frustrating when these builds are rendered useless after such a short time, just because they are deemed too strong.

I see, so the changes are actually meant to save money on servers, promoting slower and less fun gameplay because they also won’t budge on local processing.

All this to avoid high server load like they’ll have with PoE1 (which, by the way, hasn’t stopped it from being a success).

Gimme respeck points, need play smth else now, i cant even finish 6 act, and cant farm gold for respec :C so sad

"

XIAIX#5093 wrote:

I think one thing GGG watched was the vision Blizzard had with D4's release, and how the player's cried and screamed (myself included), and watched D4 completely cave. GGG's takeaway was "ok, when we release POE2, we ain't gunny do that!"... and they're standing their ground. Ok, fine, but your current stance and unwillingness to even budge a little is doing more harm than good, imo.

Aren't they budging though? They're implementing teleportation between checkpoints which was asked for quite a few times. I see them more unwilling to compromise their vision and i think it's a good thing. People seem to forget that they are testers at the moment.

GGG Nerf whatever you need but let us respec after our char is no longer viable to even run maps.

to players that enjoyed poe1, one button builds are completely eliminated with no cast on X during the map. even though jonathan promised (at the cost of damage / survivability) one button builds would still exist.

no more automated buffs, no more automated utility, no more automated debuffs, no more extra damage spells, even though cast on X requires major investment (which jonathan said you could do all these things with investment)

in order to make an attack based build cast on crit character you need passives increasing

attack damage % (with this new change, which was NEVER required in the history of POE)
attack speed %
spell damage %
critical hit %
critical bonus %
defenses
gain % meta skill gem energy (with this new change)


i could see them nerfing it by maybe 25-50% max.. but by 90% + attack damage counts towards energy?

Going from one cast every other pack to one cast per 20 packs is simply insane.

the majority of cases i run the entire zone and do NOT proc a single cast on shock or cast on crit except on the boss.

the only thing i had automated was power charges and charged staff for my INVOKER MONK.

poe 2 is officially dead for anyone that enjoyed poe 1. this is just sad.

I don't post often here.

But honestly, what the fuck. Why? Can you give some reasoning? CoC requires some decent investment in the tree and gear to proc at a semi reliable rate. I spent a lot of time rushing through cast on ignite leveling because I knew a change was coming to that and I hit 58 right before the downtime for the first patch. Log back in, just try to use CoI to see the change. It's nuked completely unusable. Glad I got to 58 and can change to CoC. Take the time to put on the gear and redo the tree at a considerable gold cost. It feels pretty good. Nice, this feels like in PoE 1 when a pretty good (not like the scores of super op builds there) build comes online. Cool the rest of the campaign should be a little easier and I'm excited to get it into maps.

Then the hotfix and it becomes functionally useless. I don't know what threshold you guys want of a build to perform in POE 2 before it's nerfable for being too powerful. But right now it feels pretty low. Low enough that I don't really want to play much of anything, because it's either going to be a slog to play, or inevitably nerfed. I've spent 100s k gold respeccing so far. My monk is unplayable and I don't think I can get it to a playable state without a complete respec. And if I could I honestly don't know what I'd play with it. But having the complete reset would be nice.

If you guys are going to completely delete builds in hotfixes, give us the free respec at least.

Really enjoyed the first few days. Now i'm feeling like my time is going to be wasted no matter what I do. Probably going to go back to classic wow for a few months while you guys try and figure things out. At least I know they're not going to make my priest stop healing in a hotfix xdd.

Also let me make it very clear, I WOULD NOT recommend this game to any of my casual IRL friends in its current state. Already had one friend almost ragequit because of the cast on freeze change. They're playing this game and genre for the very first time, and are slowly working through the campaign, log in and suddenly their build is bricked and can't progress. They're not going to read the forum and try and figure out what happened. They're just going to uninstall.