Balance in Path of Exile: Legion

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SpeedyParticles wrote:

Other games that force a meta are viewed as "terrible" within the greater ARPG communities. A Forced Meta (which basically translates to having Set Items and clearly "better" classes) is what killed Diablo 3 and other ARPGs, not so much the "power creep" meme. (although it's still a factor for sure)

This update may be "balancing things" or whatever (and I can see and agree with lots of good arguments for most of these changes, especially within the greater scope of GGGs future plans for the game) but I have to be honest here: this looks frighteningly similar to a D3-styled forced meta (geared towards melee obviously) - which is the philosophy that kills a lot of other ARPGs.

I'm looking forward to any more explanations or updates from GGG about why they just removed Elementalist from the game. I'm sure there's a very good reason for it...

this is just dumb design

Really like the the balancing, maybe except for the strike on the Elementalist's proliferation of elements... That was a good reason to pick that ascendancy and also made way for some fun builds and experimenting. Although, this change opens up for other ascendancies being more competetive in racing.

Looking forward to this weekend <3

Nerf with abyss jewels... WTF...? Are you going to destroy minions builds like Summon Phantasm ( Soulwrest builds ), Zombie, SRS ? Limitation of flat damage/flat life ( do you think that less flat life 'll be good for melee survability , also ?) sounds so stupid. You should know that flat elemental/physical damage with weapons doesn't work with minion damage. Are you going to compensate this or leave this shit ?
Dense fossils ... forget about crafting... return to past and pray to RNG Jesus - also stupid.
Generally, I'm not a happy with this ...

Welp....there goes my hype for 3.8 Time to find a new game.

Seems like improvements, buffs, and the league had a lot of time and attention.
Every reveal left everyone drooling (including me, a mostly caster player).

Then the balance team had 30 minutes to knock out their honey-do list.

I agree with nearly every change as far as something needed to be done.
I disagree with the approach taken for nearly every one of them as well, up to and including the manifesto itself.

Maybe not the case, but it really looks like little to no effort was made to handle these changes. It makes it a lot worse to have such a huge and impressive list of changes for melee that nearly everyone loves that obviously took a lot of time and effort (re-balancing nearly all early monsters, sheesh).


Example 1:

"The Elementalist's Beacon of Ruin notable has been changed, no longer granting proliferation of elements, and with a lower value of minimum shock."

So.. Beacon of Ruin is a notable that is no longer.. notable?
No mention of changes to counteract the complete removal of the primary reason to take it?
Is it really just going to be more ignite dmg, minimum chill, and minimum shock?


Example 2:

You had a section explicitly for accuracy that had me excited for those kind of changes. You even outright stated "There has been a particular focus on making Critical Strikes more viable for a larger selection of Melee builds."

Then later, you seemingly randomly throw in this:
"The Critical Multiplier passives near the Scion starting area provided far too much power through the Unnatural Instinct jewel. They have been changed to Accuracy passives instead."

That makes it REALLY seem like it is not related to either the accuracy changes or the critical strikes changes, but instead, someone on the balance team used a sledge hammer instead of a scalpel on the passive tree because of a single unique jewel. I have a hard time imagining that to be the case, but that's how it was written in the manifesto.


Example 3:

"Warlord’s Mark now only applies its leech bonus to attacks. The curse easily solved mana problems for casters with minimal investment, and after deliberation we've decided that solving mana problems for spellcasters should require more thought and a greater opportunity cost."

Agreed, 100%. How about next time you don't word it like a big f*** you to casters that went this route previously? Alienating even a small fraction of your player base with that kind of elitist attitude in a manifesto.. smh.

With the tree everyone knows, there's not a lot of easy ways to keep mana up as a caster (for a lot of builds at least). Why not couple something like this Warlord's Mark change with what the devs seem to think of as obvious alternatives for most builds that take a more reasonable investment?

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Raxefal wrote:

"

SpeedyParticles wrote:

Other games that force a meta are viewed as "terrible" within the greater ARPG communities. A Forced Meta (which basically translates to having Set Items and clearly "better" classes) is what killed Diablo 3 and other ARPGs, not so much the "power creep" meme. (although it's still a factor for sure)

This update may be "balancing things" or whatever (and I can see and agree with lots of good arguments for most of these changes, especially within the greater scope of GGGs future plans for the game) but I have to be honest here: this looks frighteningly similar to a D3-styled forced meta (geared towards melee obviously) - which is the philosophy that kills a lot of other ARPGs.

I'm looking forward to any more explanations or updates from GGG about why they just removed Elementalist from the game. I'm sure there's a very good reason for it...

this is just dumb design

Yep. It's not looking very smart, that's for sure.

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zipitzip wrote:

I agree with people being pissed about the constant cycle of promoting certain ascendancies only to shit on them 1 or 2 leagues later.

Ya know GGG, some people actually enjoy playing certain characters for more than 2 leagues. Was hyped for melee, not so much anymore, regret spending money again. Eh, I never learn. Standard.

I invest into characters to have them complete in standard. I spent 150 ex last league decking out an ES character... this really pisses me off.

I think that the ES issue can be solved by fixes to fossils, and new gear. Nerfing the tree/ascendancy makes it feel unplayable as legacy characters

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Soulrift wrote:

I think one of the biggest improvements to melee combat in PoE would be to emulate similar left-click behaviour seen in Grim Dawn: if you left-click and hold the mouse button on an enemy, your character walks up to that enemy and melee attacks it; if you continue to hold the left mouse button and move the cursor over to another enemy when the first one dies, the character continues to walk and attack. Therefore, to kill all the enemies in a group, you only need to press and hold the mouse button once, dragging it from one target to the next. This significantly decreases the confusion in melee combat caused by attempts to click on an enemy that instead result in a click on the ground, leading to a PoE melee character walking around enemies instead of attacking them.

They are making this.

Nice, now let's see some new Meta.

love all the tears here