Some notes on balance - part 1.

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Qarl wrote:

(1) Decisions matter. You can make your character better by making better decisions about its build. As this is possible, you make your character worse by the decisions you make. So, in this case, balance isn't about making everything equal. Having decisions matter means that randomly built characters tend to be much weaker than ones that are well thought out. (Although, it should be noted that we want to make it easy for people to see what they need for their character, and have early paths of strength obvious).

I appreciate the time you took to type this out, but I feel obligated to state my thoughts on this matter.

I think the GGG implementation of "decisions matter" may be complex and ornate at times (such as the passive skill tree), but in general is like a chess player who can't think move than one more ahead.

The quoted section is actually almost entirely from the "one move only" perspective. I feel the game does a reasonable job of making decisions matter for brand new players who are just getting familiar with the game's mechanics. However, what about the second time around? If they first tried a melee Marauder, and now they try a bow-and-arrow Ranger... does their itemization change? On the surface, yes... but in terms of making sure they drop Alterations until the Life affix pops up (hopefully with a resist), things are the same. In terms of getting loot, IIQ and IIR are absurdly powerful regardless of your build. In terms of resource management, mana flasks will eventually turn to crap, so you're shoved into EB or Blood Magic or Clarity or some other perpetual-casting mechanism. And so on.

The trick here is build dependence. Every rule should have an exception which can turn a great passive into something that's skipped, or a good rare affix into a bad one.

PoE is currently rampant with "best choices" which are not build dependent in any way. Which means: the number of new decisions to make after an initial process of trial and error is surprisingly shallow on some fronts, despite being deep in others.

This is most glaringly apparent in maps. The way that people roll maps has little or nothing to do with their builds, and complicated guides on the subject rarely even refer to which build the reader is running (except for Blood Magic and CI). The map affix system is in dire need of reform to make it build dependent, with certain affix combinations being very strong for certain builds while also being horrible for others, and no affixes like Labyrinthine which are strong regardless of your choices.

This stuff also has economic implications. For example, the way that currency are build-independent (equal need for affixes/sockets/links regardless of build) has led to geenerally established exchange rates, breaking GGG's goals regarding trade parity in the in-game economy; this in turn leads to "gold farmers," streamlined botting, and therefore streamlined RMT. It is my belief that all items in PoE should either find a way to become build-dependent (for example, putting implicit mods favoring one build over another on maps and ensuring at least two types of maps available at each level), or find a way to become non-tradeable (I consider orbs-as-currency to be a failed experiment; they should be account-bound until consumed).

I really hope that GGG can take "decisions matter" to the next level, and start thinking two — or perhaps even three or four — iterations ahead. Although only the insane would doubt the dedication of the GGG staff, I sometimes have very deep doubts about their strategic planning.

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Moosifer wrote:

With fire, my personal thing is lightning and fire skills seem backwards. Besides a few, which have popular builds around them, it seems there are too many slow/high damage (relative) lightning skills and too many low damage/fast fire skills.

I think that's deliberate. You shouldn't expect the game to serve you up a pre-packaged, fully synergetic-with-itself skill; you should need to put the work in yourself. Otherwise, the game has been played for you, and there's no synergizing for you to do on your part.

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SL4Y3R wrote:

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Morsexier wrote:

I wonder if this means we should be looking at a Totem\LowLife\Spork adjustment sometime soon.

Unfortunately, they *just* did it recently. Well, kinda recently. It didn't seem to take though.

I believe another swing is needed.

I agree, but it's important that the swing is targeted in the right area. Further nerfing totem damage (or cast speed) would be bad, as it's already difficult to justify what Ancestral Bond does to your DPS. The thing about totems that's OP currently is how it's too easy for them to tank for you. What we specifically need is an extra-strength totem life nerf; make totems as brittle and glass-cannony as their masters, and all of a sudden players have to make some actual strategic choices (so I put my totem close for maximum DPS potential, or will the monsters just kill it if I place it too close?). Then expand the Minion Life gem to Minion and Totem Life so that those players who want their totems to take survive more damage can burn a socket on it if they feel so strongly about it.

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Qarl wrote:

We want decisions about your character build to really matter. Part of this stems from the game being, to a very strong extent, about items. For them to be important, the items your character wears need to matter. We don't want items to be strictly tiered and transitive in nature. In many games, you want the gear for your class, and then you want to keep upgrading the tier of those items, until you get the maximum tier item for your character. While this does work for those very character-centred games, in Path of Exile we want the items to take more of the limelight. Items are not just supporting pieces to a class progression you walk through.

While this item-centered philosophy sounds appealing, it seems to have led to a situation where a handful of overpowered items have become a whip-cracking tail that wags the dog. And when the excessive power of these BIS items proves to disrupt overall game balance, GGG's response has been to make global scaling adjustments to fundamental game mechanics in the Passive Skill Tree, rather than tone down the specific items whose extreme properties are the cause of the imbalances. In many cases, this approach has impacted large numbers of players who don't even use these OP items, far more than those who can afford their steeply inflated trade values. Two recent examples:

Koam's Heart (+1000 Life): When boosted by %Life nodes, this Unique armor produces grossly inflated HP totals. GGG's response: cut the incremental percentage of all Passive Tree life nodes by ~25%, significantly reducing the defenses of all HP-based builds across the board.

Rare Vaal Regalia (800+ Energy Shield): When boosted by %Energy Shield nodes and multiplied by Infused Shield node, high-end rolls of this Rare armor produce grossly inflated ES totals. GGG's response: cut the boost percentage of Chaos Inoculation ES nodes by ~40%, significantly reducing the defenses of all CI-based builds across the board.

The impression these examples leave is that GGG's reactive policy for addressing emergent game balance issues is to use global Passive Tree manipulations to reign in the excesses of overpowered end-game items.

regarding totems, obviously it needs to be attacked from many angles, but maybe something simple might help like making monsters more likely to target you over your totem unless its specifically a decoy totem, regardless of where the damage is coming from. I once heard Kirpp say he didnt like Decoy totems because all totems are decoy totems, perhaps thats not such a good thing.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

regarding totems, obviously it needs to be attacked from many angles, but maybe something simple might help like making monsters more likely to target you over your totem unless its specifically a decoy totem, regardless of where the damage is coming from. I once heard Kirpp say he didnt like Decoy totems because all totems are decoy totems, perhaps thats not such a good thing.

This is also kind of true with parties and summoners; monster behavior is a little too predictable. I don't think this should be a totem-specific fix: I think monsters should just be more random in general regarding target acquisition, perhaps setting probability somehow inversely proportional to enemy distance and rolling for which to attack, instead of just always going for the closest thing. Good point though.

Without trying to be mean, starting with the so called "melee-buff-patch" every buff/nerf patch was a big fail in my eyes and also for alot of other people. You didn´t support any build diversity. Maybe the huge load of fanboys here in the forum made it look like you did everything right but most people on my friend list actualy quit the game because of those recent nerfs/buffs.
If you want to compete in races or on hardcore:
You´re forced to play a nonemelee class
You´re forced to play an es based char

Even with Kaoms heart you´re not coming close to any es build and Kaoms is locked on anarchy/onslaught...

There were so many good ideas on how to fix those things in the forums or on reddit, yet almost none of those have been implemented.

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RogueMage wrote:

Two recent examples:

Koam's Heart (+1000 Life): When boosted by %Life nodes, this Unique armor produces grossly inflated HP totals. GGG's response: cut the incremental percentage of all Passive Tree life nodes by ~25%, significantly reducing the defenses of all HP-based builds across the board.

Rare Vaal Regalia (800+ Energy Shield): When boosted by %Energy Shield nodes and multiplied by Infused Shield node, high-end rolls of this Rare armor produce grossly inflated ES totals. GGG's response: cut the boost percentage of Chaos Inoculation ES nodes by ~40%, significantly reducing the defenses of all CI-based builds across the board.

The impression these examples leave is that GGG's reactive policy for addressing emergent game balance issues is to use global Passive Tree manipulations to reign in the excesses of overpowered end-game items.

I agree with this... to an extent. However, the problem was not just Kaom's heart or 800+ ES chests (or 700+ es shields, or 400+ es circlets). It was that stacking life was strictly superior to every other defensive option in the game, with energy shield being a close second with CI or Shavronne's. Not that this has been solved, mind you - given the choice between 8% more life or 30% more armor on my facebreaker, I'll take the 8% more life pretty much every time. This is more of a systemic problem with how damage works in the game.

A far better example was the nerf to Righteous Fire builds and elemental resistance nodes. I'm fairly sure the obvious problem with Righteous Fire and high cap elemental resistances was not "Righteous Fire casters were broken", but rather "Low-life Righteous Fire casters with Shavronne's and Zealot's Oath were broken". The solution to that problem should never have been "make Righteous Fire harder to use" (and let's be honest - people still use low-life RF, and given what I recently saw running a few high-level maps in group, it's still stupidly overpowered. What the nerf fucked was all the non-Shavronne's RF builds. High-life burn degeneration RF builds got it especially hard - they do considerably less damage, have worse sustain, and can't keep RF up reasonably - but even normal health-based RF casters are worse-off. The problem wasn't RF. It was Shavronne's.

So at the end of the day we are forced to spork since it requires minimal gear. These dual totem builds are practically the only ones that can stack iiq/iir and still get enough damage to kill things. I know we the emphasis needs to be on gear but man, We need a way to obtain the gear.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

The thing about totems that's OP currently is how it's too easy for them to tank for you. What we specifically need is an extra-strength totem life nerf; make totems as brittle and glass-cannony as their masters, and all of a sudden players have to make some actual strategic choices (so I put my totem close for maximum DPS potential, or will the monsters just kill it if I place it too close?). Then expand the Minion Life gem to Minion and Totem Life so that those players who want their totems to take survive more damage can burn a socket on it if they feel so strongly about it.

Or make some mobs completely ignore totems.
In fact most bosses do that already.

I'd be very careful about Totem Life balance though.
Not everyone picks up PoE to play a strategy game.
Dropping a totem has a default cast time of 1.0 sec, which is enough to be a *strategic decision* when it comes to butt-clenching situations.

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GGprime wrote:

Without trying to be mean, starting with the so called "melee-buff-patch" every buff/nerf patch was a big fail in my eyes and also for alot of other people. You didn´t support any build diversity. Maybe the huge load of fanboys here in the forum made it look like you did everything right but most people on my friend list actualy quit the game because of those recent nerfs/buffs.
If you want to compete in races or on hardcore:
You´re forced to play a nonemelee class
You´re forced to play an es based char

Even with Kaoms heart you´re not coming close to any es build and Kaoms is locked on anarchy/onslaught...

There were so many good ideas on how to fix those things in the forums or on reddit, yet almost none of those have been implemented.

When you refer to races you're talking long-term ones, right? Because Witches, Rangers, and Shadows haven't been doing so great in 1-2 hours bar parties (well, Rangers just got buffed so they may start doing well), and they've certainly been doing poorly in Descent.

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TheTenthDoc wrote:

When you refer to races you're talking long-term ones, right? Because Witches, Rangers, and Shadows haven't been doing so great in 1-2 hours bar parties (well, Rangers just got buffed so they may start doing well), and they've certainly been doing poorly in Descent.

I´m talking about the endgame. It´s hard to balance few hour races and there will always be a favorized class/build. But imo it´s not ok that an endgame life-build has 8k life while es goes for the 20k mark.
And yet again they nerfed alot of melees with the latest patch. I lost 1/3 of my armour for example. It´s not that it hurts me alot but it´s just so unnecessary. Same goes for endurance charge nerf and the 5% max eleres nerf...so many wrong decisions made.