[Megathread] Path of Exile

[rogoth]

well, that's almost every single pre-existing build nerfed into the ground for no seemingly good reason, have fun keeping casual players happy when they log in to find they can't play what they have been playing for the last 5-6 months, I'm sure it'll go down great, and not just that, but nerfing stuff that doesn't even see any use, talk about out of touch.

[Fencers]

damn, feel like that hammer of the gods change is a mondo nerf and makes the skill much less applicable to non-stun builds

I think a lot of players are having ridiculous reactions to the nerfs.

"I don't want to play a zoom-zoom game where I press 1 button and blow up the screen!"

"I can't press 1 button and blow up the screen? What?"

The problem with Hammer of the Gods is mechanical. You could juice the hit to such a point that any ailments applied off the relative hit damage could scale to ridiculous heights.

Many of the nerfs are system interaction adjustments.

[Edge-]

https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExile...out_the_patch/

GGG got jokes yo, tablets will now add four times as many things to maps as they did before in T15.

[Snakepit]

Don't forget this line:
Many Skills have had their base damage and/or damage growth per level rebalanced

All those are not in the patch notes. It's absolutely possible that those won't be significant or might f*ck things up even more, but theoretically there's a chance that some skill might be there in the explicit nerf notes section, but is counter-balanced with the rebalance that is not in the patch notes. So I guess we'll see and know for sure once the patch hits and we see exact rebalance numbers. I'm cautiously positive (or hoping at least).

[Fencers]

I think that is the most things you can have.

[Edge-]

Don't forget this line:
Many Skills have had their base damage and/or damage growth per level rebalanced

All those are not in the patch notes. It's absolutely possible that those won't be significant or might f*ck things up even more, but theoretically there's a chance that some skill might be there in the explicit nerf notes section, but is counter-balanced with the rebalance that is not in the patch notes. So I guess we'll see and know for sure once the patch hits and we see exact rebalance numbers. I'm cautiously positive (or hoping at least).

we're missing the numerical changes

we're also missing the 100+ support gem data

which makes these changes functionally useless information as we're missing a huge amount of the context around them.

honestly i'm actually more annoyed than anything with the way they're rolling this out. if they want to surprise us don't give us deeply incomplete patch notes so early roflmao, just ship everything on day 1

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I think that is the most things you can have.

GGG heard that and said we're gonna double that number of things

[Fencers]

They used to do side-by-side number comparisons (RIP Bex) when skills were adjusted this way and you could see the results. Or rather you could guesstimate say, a 5% nerf either at the top or bottom of the progression curve.

They should have just imported a table with past values along a scale and used a table with the new values side by side.

No need to really type that out as it's just a data export grid. Vagueness sets you back here.

I am gonna have to pack up my shit and move across the street to do grunt work for GGG. The ambiguity is irritating.

Edit: Also, I still don't understand tiers. So when people say to look at POEDB, it means fucking nothing to me.

[Edge-]

Edit: Also, I still don't understand tiers. So when people say to look at POEDB, it means fucking nothing to me.

poedb has the full list of tiers so you know what max is

still not sure why GGG are refusing to revert to the system from PoE1 if they can't put a "T4/7" or "T1/8" or something so you know the maximum tier value into this existing system.

[Fencers]

In fairness, I am just being stubborn because I feel put upon by GGG's crazy tiering system. I recognize this is the Karen in me.

[Edge-]

20% increased phys damage with armor break is very good now, apparently before fully broken armor was like at best a 5% damage increase which is hilarious.

hopefully armor breaking will not be bait anymore and won't be so tedious for phys builds, it does look quite attractive at a 20% more multiplier, tho.

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some of these changes to support gems feel like they push them into such narrow niches

overcharge support no longer gives less shock duration, which seemed like a fair tradeoff for bonus shock magnitude

it now reflects shocks back on you, meaning that unless you're shock immune or something the support now seems to come with some pretty major risks.

the existing version in poe1 without the downside isn't even super useful, and even if this doesn't reduce the skill damage the shock reflect makes it seem arguably worse/even less viable.

[Nzx]

I am going to play a huntress for a bit to fuck around with spears and then rest from PoE2 (again) I think. It's frustrating to hear "oh they don't want it to be like PoE1 that's why they made it a separate game" when we don't really have the option of going back to PoE1 right now because it's been the same fucking league for a year, explicitly because of PoE2.

I don't think it's out of line for people to be frustrated when GGG have taken the name "Path of Exile" and made a sequel that doesn't really take the parts most players enjoy about PoE1 and improve on them, instead making a different game entirely, and taken all of the development resource away from the game people like in order to do it. If Ubisoft released Rainbow 6 Siege: 2 and it had bullet sponge HP, CoD-style health regen, and no "Bomb" gamemode people would be rightfully pissed off.

I played grenadier Witchhunter at PoE2 release. It was incredibly tedious, clunky, and the 'combo' mechanic amounted to oil grenade -> gas grenade -> explosive shot -> dodge roll on white mobs. I burned out so hard I didn't make it past something like T5 maps. When I eventually convinced myself to play Sparchmage Stormweaver the game was actually fun again. These changes, at least absent the gem scaling/new supports, seem to imply that GGG want my Witchhunter experience to be what PoE2 is all about, and I don't think that is for me. Which wouldn't matter, but they haven't been capable of adhering to their commitment that PoE1 development wouldn't change as a result of PoE2, so now the game I do like is copping it for the sake of a game I don't really like and that sucks.

[rogoth]

I think a lot of players are having ridiculous reactions to the nerfs.

"I don't want to play a zoom-zoom game where I press 1 button and blow up the screen!"

"I can't press 1 button and blow up the screen? What?"

The problem with Hammer of the Gods is mechanical. You could juice the hit to such a point that any ailments applied off the relative hit damage could scale to ridiculous heights.

Many of the nerfs are system interaction adjustments.

So I guess the majority of the nerfs being numerical nerfs both in terms of raw numbers going down, and some numbers being tuned to be additive instead of multiplicative, is just me not reading things correctly, is that right?

or are you referring to some other imaginary nerfs that aren't visible to the rest of us?

the kind of sweeping and game changing nerfs detailed here should be something that is communicated with players well in advance to give people time to either adjust to them, or stop playing because it's no longer something that interests them, that's the level of change being put forward here, they have completely and irreparably destroyed the stormweaver as well as the spark build that was popular within the stormweaver passives, they have dismantled stat stacking as a viable way to play gemling builds, not just by destroying the function of many passives and skills, but by removing the items that made stat stacking possible to begin with (multi layered nerfs here), they have completely removed the ability to play icestrike invoker, the most popular build currently, these nerfs are adding artificial difficulty to the game because they refuse to expend resources on balancing the game around the numbers previously, and would rather save time/resources nerfing everything into the ground leaving the other stuff intact, than taking the time and resources needed to adjust the game world around what players were already doing, it's lazy game development and saves them money by being lazy, so in their eyes, it's a win/win situation.

not just that but they did an interview a while back talking about nerfs, and said that they would only change individual aspects of things that they viewed as being out of bounds, last time I checked, removing entire builds from the game and nerfing everything into the ground in many aspects isn't just 'one thing', it's a game wide change which means that they intentionally lied to people back then about their intentions regarding class balance, knowing full well they had such sweeping changes in mind a few months later, which I find abhorrent.

[Fencers]

So I guess the majority of the nerfs being numerical nerfs both in terms of raw numbers going down, and some numbers being tuned to be additive instead of multiplicative, is just me not reading things correctly, is that right?

A lot of nerfs targeted the interactions such as Ingenuity, Archmage, Grim Feast, HOWA, and so on. Adjusting the numerical values and operation is how one would adjust the interaction of skills and items.

the kind of sweeping and game changing nerfs detailed here should be something that is communicated with players well in advance to give people time to either adjust to them, or stop playing because it's no longer something that interests them...

There is at least 6 hours of video footage with the developers discussing the patch since March 24th. They mentioned rebalancing and talked about the intended and unintended effects in the game and rebalancing in all of that footage.

To quote Mark, "The whole game will change. Forget everything you know about the game."

It is unlikely a product owner will ever make a statement to the benefit of, "stop playing because it's no longer something that interests them" for any product. That's stupid.

and would rather save time/resources nerfing everything into the ground leaving the other stuff intact, than taking the time and resources needed to adjust the game world around what players were already doing, it's lazy game development and saves them money by being lazy, so in their eyes, it's a win/win situation.

There is no way you would have a judge of what they intend if they do not show or tell you their intent. Your intent, how you would like things to be, is not relevant. You are not developing the game. You can not assume the way things were was how they would be or serve as a baseline.

Conveniently, they did tell us that was not their baseline.

not just that but they did an interview a while back talking about nerfs, and said that they would only change individual aspects of things that they viewed as being out of bounds, last time I checked,

The addressed that and said their policy change in the March live stream. The development became more fluid.

We are still in early access. These are not "forever" characters nor is that the intent (also stated by the devs a week ago).

It's EA. The game is unfinished and they are in the process of developing the game. POE1 was the exact same way in beta- for years. Even after 1.0, POE1 was rough and changed tremendously in the first year of official release alone.

[Snakepit]

100% with Fencers here - "to give people time to either adjust to them" - what is there to adjust? If you want to keep a character, you get full passive reset, if you don't, you get a full fresh league. This is EA, and not just EA, but a mere 0.2 patch with several more major ones to come. If the game was launched straight from 0.2 and you didn't have 0.1 as a base, you probably would've been just fine. Stuff was broken. Or was playing too fast. Until they launch the full game, they are in their right to swing things around as much as they want. I might be in the minority, but I'd rather have this nerfed version where every single improvement and action matters and you feel every bit of progress, rather than the zug zug fest that D4 has become. Not to mention that it's much better to throw a major nerf bat and start moving up from there and releasing the leash bit by bit till they fine tune, rather than skyrocket everything and people get used to that, then every nerf would feel like a shotgun blast, over and over again.

P.S. And patch hasn't even launched, we haven't even hand-tested the changes and new interactions. Let's wait and see, I'm sure there'll be enough viable builds clearing enough content, you won't have to suffer too much

[Fencers]

Logging in. I am ready.

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Can't say I am enjoying Huntress so far. Many skills feel so weak.

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Changing the layouts is slightly annoying. I feel lost.

[Edge-]

Can't say I am enjoying Huntress so far. Many skills feel so weak.

Changing the layouts is slightly annoying. I feel lost.

Can't be lost if you never learned the original seed used at launch : 3

I'm enjoying spear/huntress so far, though only like level 8ish. Explosive spear is surprisingly good damage/good for clear if you can manipulate groups of mobs into it. Lightning spear is slow AF but feels great. Need more ways to generate frenzy, but I do like the functionality of parry as a "weaker" version of block with a very strong debuff that enables other things.

Still dicking around and lots to figure out, but I'm kinda here for this.

[Fencers]

I, of course, went all-in on Lightning Spear. Perhaps that's the problem. I should try out a few more combos.

But if I am not throwing spears of lightning, what am I even doing as an Amazon? I could just play Monk or something.

[Snakepit]

Crashes, crashes, crashes, if you keep "Dynamic Resolution" on, it goes to like 640x480 permanently. Managed to reach level 5 after maybe 10 restarts due to crashes, and now I am stuck in a permanent "Unknown object type serialized by server" crash loop ONLY on the huntress, but I can log with my other standard league characters. I remembered Jonathan saying in the interview "we've fixed 99% of the crashes" and I wonder if this belongs to the remaining 1%, or it meant "we've fixed 99% of the crashes TILL NOW, but we've been very creative in introducing new ones"

[Fencers]

Crashes, crashes, crashes, if you keep "Dynamic Resolution" on, it goes to like 640x480 permanently.

Oof. This sounds bad. I haven't run into anything unusual performance-wise. I did notice some stuttering in the Sekamas trial area. But it went away.

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Spear auto-attack still the best damage I have. This kinda sucks.

[Edge-]

I, of course, went all-in on Lightning Spear. Perhaps that's the problem. I should try out a few more combos.

it's nice for clear so far, but for single target seems fairly dookie. buffed frost fang actually kinda slaps pretty hard even without supports (via parry buff), too.

edit: scratch that, empowered explosive spear is great. i'm chuckin spears left and right