[Megathread] Path of Exile

[Lorgar Aurelian]

I was already sketchy after launch, but after this patch my confidence in GGG, or at least the crew lead by Jonathan, is basically gone.

We'll see how the next PoE league is, hopefully it won't get delayed and I believe Mark still leads those.

I cannot understand so many of these design decisions and it continues to feel like Mark and Jonathan are designing on two different branches of the game and then merging together in a mishmash or some weird shit, man.

Ya I'm holding out hope for the new league as it's likely going to make or break POE1 and honestly if they end up putting 1 on life support for 2 full time I can't say im likely to stay with the franchise even though 1 is likely my second favorite game.

[NoiseTank13]

Man I’m happy I’m giving PoE2 a pass for now, this is the dumbest design I might have ever seen in an ARPG.

I raise you

[Edge-]

I raise you

I thought you were shitposting...

https://poe2db.tw/us/Syzygy

this is a real fucking gem

holy fuck what the shit lol

Also, is it just me or or do currency drops feel worse than pre-buff 0.1? I feel like I got out of A1 with nothing. Loot drops in general feel worse, but currency feels notably awful.

[Fencers]

Hammer of the Gods died for Syzygy.

I am not sure if I enjoy this game. LOL

[Gorsameth]

I raise you

Let me get this right, Ignite, armour break and stun slam build.
And the payoff for inflicting this unholy trinity upon the enemy is 10% extra damage?

After going through the process of igniting, armour breaking and heavy stunning an enemy I want to do 5000% extra damage, not intimidate them.

[Aoewy]

[Fencers]

Changes coming:

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3746205

Many people are reporting that gameplay is feeling too slow. Sometimes this comes in the form of people saying that monster life is too high, or player damage is too low, or areas are taking too long. In this post we will talk about some of the things we have already done, and more of the changes we are planning on making.

Huntress Specific Concerns
One of the major concerns that we have seen for the Huntress is that a lot of the power of the class is locked behind the Parry mechanic, and some players do not wish to Parry. Getting Frenzy charges without Parry is an option available to the class later on, but there are no other early game options that don't involve Parrying.

We want to give early game players an option to get Frenzy charges without Parry, but we have to be very careful not to make this too easy and remove the rewards for doing the Parry combos.

In order to do this, we are adding a new Skill on the second row of the Spear skills called Cull the Weak. This skill is effectively the same as Killing Palm on the Monk, but for Frenzy charges. If a monster is in Culling Range, using Cull the Weak will charge towards the monster, kill it instantly, and give you a Frenzy charge. This skill should be patched in over the next few days.

We also want to improve the feeling of Parry more generally. Two issues we have identified are that in some cases it feels like you should Parry monsters but don't, and that in other cases you get Heavy Stunned in cases where you feel like you shouldn't. We are currently investigating improvements to these.

The other bit of feedback are players who don't want to enter melee range at all. While the primary role of the class is incentivising a ranged/melee hybrid playstyle, we do think we can improve on this type of gameplay somewhat while still incentivising using both types of attacks.

To make this type of gameplay feel better we are going to be buffing the speed of Spear throws generally, but especially Lightning Spear. The damage will remain the same, meaning that you will get approximately a 25% buff to DPS from using only Lightning Spear. Some other spear throws will receive slight speed increases too, but they generally have other mechanics that mean that attack speed on them is less relevant.

Player Minion Damage and Life
One of the areas of major balance adjustment in 0.2.0 was the minion life and damage curves for players. In the 0.1.1 endgame, minion characters were getting very out of control values mostly due to being able to significantly increase gem level on these gems.

We previously significantly reduced the growth of minion life and damage as these gems gain levels, and the intention was to mostly hit the top of the endgame, but it seems that this had an unintended effect on campaign play as well.

We are making a change to increase the damage and life that minions get during the campaign to be more similar to before, while still keeping the scaling nerfs that were introduced to the higher minion gem levels for the endgame.

Monster Life Too High
One of the first things we looked at when considering clearspeed concerns was the monster life curve. We found that monster life through most of the campaign after Act 1 was probably too high. We have made an adjustment to lower monster life by 25% through most of the campaign and this change has been deployed already.

A second issue we found was that the life bonus on Rare Minions was incredibly high. One of the reasons why this feels particularly bad is because these monsters are still White, but had more life than Blue monsters. This calibrates players' expectations incorrectly and makes Rare fights harder than they should be. This number has been set back to what it was in 0.1.0 which lowers rare minion life by about 60%. This change has also been deployed.

Large Area Sizes
Many players are reporting that areas feel like they are too large. Normally when this is the case, the main reason is due to other concerns such as monster life or player damage being incorrect, or just a lack of entertaining content in the area. However, we are checking to see if there are any outliers that players are spending too long in to see if any changes to area size need to happen.

In the meantime, we did notice that there are some areas that don't have sufficient checkpoints, so we are doing a pass of adding some more of these.

Crashes and Disconnects
On launch day we had a severe and common client crash in town. The "Failed to deserialise object" crash. This crash was fixed on the first day, but there are still other client and server crashes that remain.

Currently the number of client crashes is actually a bit lower than in 0.1.1 due to working around the somewhat common nVidia driver crash, but the rate of server side crashes is approximately 6 times higher, which results in you getting suddenly disconnected.

Thankfully, server side crashes are significantly easier for us to debug, and we believe that we should be able to resolve most of these within the next few days.

Of course, we will continue to work on client crashes as well, but as the primary crash we had in 0.1.1 is now resolved, we believe that we should be able to fix the remainder of these fairly quickly.

Quality of Life Features
We are additionally working on a few extra features that should be released relatively soon.

The first one is adding a system for Bookmarking locations on your Atlas map. This system will allow you to save locations with a name on the Atlas so you can find them later.

Another is adding Stash Tab Affinities for more item types including Socketables and Tablets, and updating the Flask Affinity to include Charms.

And another is adding a way to rebind Spectres and Tamed Beasts so that you can experiment with these options more easily.

I am not Ben or Jungraon, but if I can't parry in endgame then there is no fucking way most people are going to be able to parry either. I am a totally average player. It's just not possible to parry shit in maps. Horrible design.

[Aoewy]

Player Minion Damage and Life
One of the areas of major balance adjustment in 0.2.0 was the minion life and damage curves for players. In the 0.1.1 endgame, minion characters were getting very out of control values mostly due to being able to significantly increase gem level on these gems.

We previously significantly reduced the growth of minion life and damage as these gems gain levels, and the intention was to mostly hit the top of the endgame, but it seems that this had an unintended effect on campaign play as well.

We are making a change to increase the damage and life that minions get during the campaign to be more similar to before, while still keeping the scaling nerfs that were introduced to the higher minion gem levels for the endgame.

This is wild - I haven't play minions myself, but from Ghazzy video, a guy who breath minions, he was saying that its just as bad if not worst in maps. Like, he went full on minions stats while neglecting his own survivability, and they were getting destroyed in tier 1 white map with no juice. So if I'm reading this right, that wont change, they will just be a bit better for the campaign? Holy panic band-aid

[rogoth]

This is wild - I haven't play minions myself, but from Ghazzy video, a guy who breath minions, he was saying that its just as bad if not worst in maps. Like, he went full on minions stats while neglecting his own survivability, and they were getting destroyed in tier 1 white map with no juice. So if I'm reading this right, that wont change, they will just be a bit better for the campaign? Holy panic band-aid

something that wasn't mentioned, and isn't talked about, the new spectre skill gem, the minion made from that skill gem is functionally dead at endgame because of the scaling nerfs, because it's one big minion that usually gets focused down first by enemies, and the collective nerfs to EVERYTHING related to minions makes keeping this minion alive a herculean feat, it needs a MASSIVE rework to minions in general and frankly it's embarrassing how badly botched this update is for many builds when they are scrambling to hotfix so many things they broke.

[Fencers]

GGG claim it was a bug, but nerfing Twister on top of everything going on is kind of hilarious.

Jonathan said they can get to full release by end of the year? I have my doubts.

[Snakepit]

Jonathan said they can get to full release by end of the year? I have my doubts.

That was absolutely incredibly obvious won't happen right when they announced the early access, even before releasing it last year - You have 6 classes, 3 acts and a crapton of skills, passives, system updates etc etc etc to introduce - knowing how development works being a developer myself (although not in gaming) - the 12 months MIGHT've been just enough if they were shipping absolutely bug free, with minimal testing, and not breaking or needing to fix anything existing - just as pure development effort with the maximum happy path. And since reality is never a happy path... Poor Jonathan, the believer

[Edge-]

https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/vi...ge/1#p26045856

Fairly big minion buff patch, seems like they should actually be able to kill things now, at least.

Spear buffs are kinda lol, but I guess start small.

Early boss balance changes so you can actually parry attacks from them is funny.

I don't really care at this point, I'm pretty much off this update already and apparently there's a Ritual bug where you can get 0 cost deferrals/rerolls so people are printing invitations and shit, which GGG is going to have to clean up best we are the testers (what fresh economy?).

Looking forward to the Ziz interview, hopefully he'll be as direct as he was after Kalandra and it's funny he's interviewing them again after another apparent disaster-league launch.

Real talk - them approaching EA like live is a mistake. 3-4 month patches where they can't make meaningful changes until the next patch just isn't going to feel good, the game isn't in a good enough state for that. They need much more frequent bigger patches and balance patches, which class releases/act releases being the economy resets players want. But I just don't see this, "Welp, this is the game for the next 3+ months, enjoy" working well.

The response to, "Zones are still too big" being, "Can we offer you another checkpoint, which was supposed to be a band-aid temporary solution but looks like it's becoming a core part of design in this trying time?" energy is incredibly lol. Why are they so fucking committed to these labyrinthian zones of awful.

[Fencers]

This spear adjustment might be pretty good. Increasing the attack speed as a base and lowering the MP costs alongside the increased scaling could curve so that adding supports at mid to endgame would allow you to engage more often and aggressively. A big problem deeper into the game is the clunkiness of moving between melee & range while being surrounded. It's why Rake and Frost Spear (whatever it's called) are the only go-tos for mass swarms.

You can't fight off the backfoot when you are meant to engage/disengage and aggressively block for charges. That was a contradictory design. This could be a solution.

- - - Updated - - -

I saw the most recent Kripp video and thought it was very well stated.

However, I think Mr. Llama is right on the money. As I myself said, the scarcity of items and the long stretches you can go without any meaningful upgrades is a core issue.



None of this would feel so sluggish if there was a means to reliably and continuously improve yourself in the game. I shouldn't be using the Act 2 Cruel weapon in tier 10 maps. Llama also talks about skill curves.

I resonate with this commentary as Diablo 2 is, without question, the game I have played the most in my lifetime.

[Edge-]

woof, looking at that ritual bug

this economy seems fucked unless GGG takes some serious action and can find out how to remove all the exploited invitations and currency and stuff from the economy without catching too many strays

wonder if they'll keep the ziz interview at this rate

[Fencers]

Sweet mercy, Recombinators are garbo.

[Cyclone Jack]

Changes coming:

I am not Ben or Jungraon, but if I can't parry in endgame then there is no fucking way most people are going to be able to parry either. I am a totally average player. It's just not possible to parry shit in maps. Horrible design.

The fact that Parry/Frenzy Charges are a core aspect of an entire class is poor class design. The fact that they still expect players to use 3-5 abilities to create a single combo payoff while still having the same end game design is poor game design. Just looking at the plethora of end game issues shows that those designing the end game are not actually playing the game. The fact that they're having to do knee-jerk reaction patches to the issues they caused shows that 0.2 was not sent through QA and was rushed out the door; most of these issues should have been caught before it was pushed out.

There is no QA, there is no Product Management, and there are far too many designers pushing in different directions. These are huge red flags.

And the only way this game hits 1.0 this year is if its rushed out the door (like every patch so far) and they spend the next 1-3 years redoing all the stuff that doesn't work.


Also, I love this:

Many players are reporting that areas feel like they are too large. Normally when this is the case, the main reason is due to other concerns such as monster life or player damage being incorrect, or just a lack of entertaining content in the area.

People have been complaining about area size since 0.1 launched. Most areas from Act 2 onward could be decreased by ~15-20%, and the areas in the second half of Act 3 are absolutely massive and could be cut by 40-50% easy.

[Khaza-R]

Any word if they're extending Phrecia since even more 3.26 time is going to get eaten up by this clusterfk PoE2 patch?

[Fencers]

The fact that Parry/Frenzy Charges are a core aspect of an entire class is poor class design.

Well, it's more to say it is a core aspect of a weapon group's early to mid-game power.

And even that wouldn't be a mistake if there was robust support for the weapon type and scaling so that it didn't feel so underpowered without those aspects.

Killing a white monster pack with the basic attack skill being the most efficient and optimal damage option doesn't feel good to many players.

We have skills that use up power charges in POE1 too. There are just more supports in gear, tree, and skill gems for those abilities and they scale better. The idea isn't wrong, unworkable or contradictory game design. How it was implemented in POE2 is... uh, lacking.

[Edge-]

Any word if they're extending Phrecia since even more 3.26 time is going to get eaten up by this clusterfk PoE2 patch?

Nope. And right now we're all worried GGG is going to steal those devs back to try to unfuck 0.2 instead of letting the PoE2 team figure out how to fix things with their own resources.

[Cyclone Jack]

We have skills that use up power charges in POE1 too. There are just more supports in gear, tree, and skill gems for those abilities and they scale better. The idea isn't wrong, unworkable or contradictory game design. How it was implemented in POE2 is... uh, lacking.

Having skills that generate and use charges is fine. Making it a core aspect of a weapon type (You are correct, it is technically tied to a weapon and not the class) is not. Imagine if, in PoE1, you needed Frenzy Charges for Daggers to deal appropriate damage. Not more damage, appropriate damage. Charges of any kind should be very much optional, and you should gain additional benefit from utilizing them, not just break even.

Then again, balance in PoE2 is literally all over the place all at once.