End game combat feels too fast

I agree, I'm at t15 maps and might try the pinnacle bosses but I think endgame isn't as fun. The game is crazy good and Ive played way too much of it but maps is losing my interest.

In the campaign I kept having to change up my approach or learn new enemies skills to beat them. I noticed when the enemies changed and would change my style to adapt. Really impressive design. Now in maps its just popping big balloons of creatures. I had to leave my chosen character behind to go with a style that had big enemy clear. It's cool I guess but the novelty is wearing off.

When the game was demoed they showed the slower, smaller scale fights. I think they did that because its better. It looks better, it plays better, it makes more sense. If they showed the end game melting screens of enemies every instant until you get one shot I think a lot of people would have said wtf is going on here?

There is nothing wrong with fast gameplay, the problem is that due to map modifiers and modifiers on enemies there is a huge problem with scaling leading to unfair gameplay. You can expect people to react appropriately and quickly to an attack, but if the map mods push the enemies' speed far over what humans can react to we have a problem. A perfect game is a game that gives you enough room to technically complete it without any gear, no matter how hard and tedious the process is. It is humanly impossible to do this in PoE 2. There's always that insanely fast enemy, the enemy with a temporal aura, or some random bs ground effect that's impossible to see due to skill spam/terrain. Another example is the molten core boss, that spawns lava and if you don't kill him quick enough the lava goes to the end of the map and just kills you. Wasn't this supposed to be a skill based game? Because that's what I call a 'dps check'. Hitboxes in general also just feel wonky. It's either too realistic and doesn't give you enough leeway or just straight up disjointed. Perhaps part of it is the latency to the server idk.

"

LVSviral#3689 wrote:

"

Jonathan even said so himself, directly, that speed and "being able to kill larger crowds" is KEY for players to feel the character progression.

And Jonathan is confused and doesn't have a proper base understanding of how this works and that is why there are so many problems.

Slaughtering a horde of fodder enemies after becoming stronger is fun. Duh, but you can't base THE ENTIRE END GAME around this without amounting to anything more than an insanely over-complicated for entry, yet somehow simultaneously basic bitch piloted arcade mode that ruins everything that isn't blaster mashing.

Right now the game is balanced and designed where nothing else matters late game except getting more damage and wave-clear. All forms of nuanced content, progression and difficulty are most efficiently solved by blasting and the entire game is balanced to enforce this while leaving everything else in the dust.

EVERY. SINGLE. THING. BECOMES. POINTLESS. AND. DEAD. EXCEPT. FOR. BLASTING.

https://youtu.be/opm9xybEmmw?si=bC5IyyS5pULPHRlp

Found this great video where this guy goes through multiple materials where GGG talks about their intentions and shortcomings.

Jonathan does seem to contradict himself at times in his statements. And some of the bullet points from that 2023 video from exilecon seem to have been forgotten about too?? They were aware of damage multipliers on support gems and they did the same mistake despite that??! I'll point them out later on.

Overall, +1.
(less "zoom zoom 1-shot" pls [end-game/mapping])

Agreed. Game needs slowing down! Power creep will be INSANE at this pace.

expecting huge nerf at the higher end 😆

"

xonedl#1873 wrote:

expecting huge nerf at the higher end 😆

I would preferably see the difficulty behaving much like a sine wave, where sometimes u feel powerful enough, but other times overwhelmed. But with the balances and monster behavior of current game, being overwhelmed is kinda death to the character.

100% Agree, but i doubt they're going to change this unfortunately..

The issue isn't fast mapping, it was quite expected ... The game is still called Path of Exile. As soon as they showed Breach and Delirium as core endgame mechanics, it also involved fast and good clearing.

It's on bosses that there is an issue. Power level went over 9000 far too fast, to the point where pinnacle bosses becomes a joke. They are supposed to be the slower paced, more meaningful encounters of the game, but at that point it seems a bit too easy to overpower them. I do think that getting to that level of single target DPS is OK at some point, but that should be far far harder to reach that.

"

xonedl#1873 wrote:

expecting huge nerf at the higher end 😆

good observation but now try to look at the graphs and ask yourself - which one will retain players for longer?

i wish they would tone down the progress myself but it might just be the current state of capturing human attention in the current age