Some notes on balance - part 1.

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lethal_papercut wrote:

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Inexium wrote:

Taking the time to answer the questions the community are having is pretty "epic"


Now you should give every player the feeling that he matters : What about expanding friend list ? Here :
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/453695 ( or at least the few players who commented on that thread)
http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/456572


On topic
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Amazing read, thanks for time it took from you.

Please don't come in here trying to push your inane agenda on friends lists that literally noone is interested in but yourself. protip, when you are the only person responding to your threads they probably aren't worth the paper they are written on.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

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.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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).

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Powertrip wrote:

Throwing currency chances at an item in the hope of a favourable stat roll, imo, undos the experience of planning a build. I don't feel rewarded if I chaos an item and get good stats, I do not feel as if my spike in power is as a result of my gaming skill or build map, i just feel lucky. Neither does giving a guy from trade chat a few chaos for an item make me feel any kind or reward for my skill or decision making.

One the one hand, yes, a passive build is a question of intellect and the ability to see patterns in the multiplying of damage and defense.

On the other hand, the acquisition and crafting of gear boils down to whether momma needs a new pair of tights.

Does not compute to me.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

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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sidtherat wrote:

items that you let slip trough your alpha testers

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Hilbert wrote:

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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.

We want items to have intransitive relationships, as well as transitive ones. Intransitive means that the items are not comparable by strictly looking for bigger numbers. Rock-paper-scissors is a game with intransitive relationships between the moves, as opposed to a game where a bigger number always wins. So, for intransitive relationships between gear, sometimes we will want an item with smaller numbers for specific purposes. The answer I most like to see to the question “Which of these two items should I wear?” is “It depends.”

Sadly you fail in that case. Especially on weapon based characters.
The only thing you do in PoE during progress is to switch the weapon till you reach a high level so you can use the fastest weapon on elemental damage builds or a mid speed high damage weapons on physical builds.


For example elemental damage is 3 times stronger than physical damage there isn't any drawback faster weapons. You use the DPS system which is bad.
You should switch to an absolute damage system and weapons should have something like an effectivity multiplier.
Meaning slow weapons do far more damage than a fast weapon on hit, or even increase ailmentduration/stun.
Fast weapons should have a lower chance on ailments and possibly less effectivity.

Same thing goes for Armors. The Movementspeed not affected by armor multiplier should be kicked.
Heavy armors(Defense only) should reduce the crit multiplier.
Light Armors(evasion) should reduce the crit chance.

Hybrid armors should have got lower drawbacks in terms in movementspeed their base values should be increased but they don't affect crit multipliers/chances at all.

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(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).

And here the "unlimited amount" of builds fails.
At the moment you only aim for certain nodes on the shortest path.
I am missing bigger ideas on the skill tree such as heavily connected skillwheels so you don't end up on a highway and take all good nodes on the path.
Imo there should be far less Highwaynodes(but bigger ones) and the concentration should be based in linked skill wheels.

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Synergistic options. These create a great deal of potential for making a good character by choice. The game system has to allow for different things to work together in positive ways. This makes balance more difficult, as things cannot be balanced in a vacuum.

If I say I want to play a melee bow hybrid the idea is screwed from the start because the damage nodes are mainly for all types of weapons instead of 1 handed and 2 handed damage.
Also most nodes become unimportant if you aim for high crit/AoE.

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Build versatility and emergence. We want players to have lots of tools available to them, and we want them to be able to be combined in different ways. A player has access to gear stats, skills, supports, keystones and flasks, all with interacting elements. This gives a lot of flexibility, and leads to players being able to discover emergent things that had not been considered. We design to make this possible. We try to make things in a way that allows for interesting things to happen. Things would be much easier to balance if we restricted players’ options.

There is no versaitility if you keep certains skills and combinations more powerful than others.
For example projectiles spells will always be better than non projectile spells because projectile spells are affected by far more gems.
This weakness created insane combinations like Hatred EK/BT-Added Fire + other gems.
There should be more strict rules to keep damages in balance.

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As the game has this kind of emergence, many of our balance decisions have to be reactive. We have to react to balance problems that crop up due to how the game is played. This is not the only way we balance, but it has to be a factor. If something becomes too dominant, it has to be addressed.

You do that much faster than stuff that becomes totally unused.

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An example of something that needed to be balanced after being introduced would be the first versions of multistrike

Multistrike has a heavy drawback that it is not interruptable.
That was a heavy drawback to Zeal the 1.02 D2 because if you skilled it too much you had 26 hits not interruptable(enjoy Iron maided) so blizz changed it to max 5.
I would even suggest a similar change to D2. Add 1 attack ever 2 levels, reduce the effectivity every 5 levels and boost the damage and speed every levels.

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(and multicast),

What are you talking about? Do you mean Fork/Chain/LMP/GMP?

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An example of us not buffing something "known to be weak" is Eldritch Battery. We had players demanding this be strengthened for a long time, but we did not change it, as we had seen it being used well. In the last few months, the community view of the power of this Keystone has basically reversed with no change to it. Burn damage also fits this; we were told for a long time that it was the worst status ailment, and that it needed to be buffed. We knew it was strong, and did not change it. Over time, it has gone from being considered very weak to very strong without us changing it. All that changed was the discovery of its usefulness.

Eldricht Battery is only used because your manasystem is abysmal rendering into 3 casts no mana skills on 5-6 link.

The burndamage was demanded because a majority of skills don't deal big fire damage to much fire damage but many minor hits like Inferno, Firestorm, Righteus Fire.

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Build-based characters, not class-based. The synergistic options and versatility and decisions mattering are things we value. They don't make things that easy. The freedom players have in making their characters makes it very easy for players to converge on imbalances in the game. Very slight imbalances between options can result in characters gravitating to very similar builds very quickly. We work to avoid that, but our players are very canny. We are sometimes told that there are only a very few builds that work in high-level play, but when we look at high-level characters, there are more builds represented here than in many similar games. However, when players do converge on similar options, we need to make changes that can be less than popular.

Our players usually start our game thinking in terms of the class they choose first, and then work out what builds they can do. After playing for a while, they start to think in terms of build, and then work out which class best supports the build they want to make. Because of these two styles of play, it changes how we approach balance changes to the passive tree.

Really?
If I look in terms of progression speed I would rather start as Templar Duelist and Ranger than Mara, Shadow and Witch.
In the end it doesn't matter much but in terms of wasted time it matters really much.
And one reason I hate Endgame is the far too slow gameplay.
I don't want to infest more than 10h for a level 70 character but PoE pushes it to 20h+ even with rushing that's horribly MMO strategy.