Character Balance in Path of Exile: Lake of Kalandra

I don't know enough about this game to make by own builds successfully, but I'm really excited to see a new meta where skeletons aren't always a recommendation and where I don't always have to end up speccing into aura reservation just because it is the only way to live. I'm really excited even though I have beginner knowledge.

These changes are genuinely horrible, monsters deal way too much damage, 70% of skills are not worth using, visual clarity is horrible, and still isn't getting fixed and all you do is nerf pretty much everything that enabled players to survive. Players didn't use defensive auras because they were the "easiest" way to survive, they used defensive auras because they were the only way to survive after monster damage got buffed to make the game harder. I pretty much skipped sentinel league and hoped that the next league would be better, but now I'm very disappointed and hopeless for this league as well.

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This has led to the combination of Defiance Banner, Determination and Grace feeling near mandatory for characters in hardcore leagues, and very attractive elsewhere.

And you honestly don't see this as a problem?
Why do you think a set up for increase survivability feels mandatory?

I'll help you with it.

Problem: Shit hits too hard and we keep adding in a lot of bullshit mechanics that have a high probability of killing a player with a single hit at an increasingly high rate each league.

Solution: Remove or massively nerf the above mention - Additionally, we will actually play our own game to realize how bad we keep screwing up.

Hi Matt Hill, if you get this far, have a nice day.

Favorite builds gutted, defense gutted, bloat increased x2 every season to make the game more unappealing to return to. Why the hell would anyone play the game who isn't into theory crafting and spending a majority of their time making sure you're not making a toaster build?

This game has turned into a complete joke. If you want to make changes that lead towards Path of Exile 2 then do it all at once. In your current game, it makes zero sense to do half of the crap you guys are doing every season. Complete waste of time game where none of your progress matters so why would people theory craft for a build that will be deleted anyways?

*Arakaali's Fang - my all time favorite item in game - removed from game. That is UNFORGIVABLE!

*Alternative, Stone Golem Death Wish - golem life nerfed!

*Cancer tumour AN mods still in game!


What is this racialism against second hand minions? Isn't game supposed to be fun or whats the goal here?

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bringo322 wrote:

i'd play the league even if GGG shit on my doorstep so who cares what i think

This is exactly the comment I was hoping to find on here, as it is extremely accurate and relates to 99% of the commentors in this thread.

I just want to throw my 5 cents out there.

The only real change that's being done here is nerfing the items and the builds. Sure that might be a good idea for the top 5% who plays the game because it's too easy for them.

But the mid 40% will start to suffer.

The bottom 55% (me and others) will definitely suffer. We are already clueless why we are dying and we still haven't managed to kill all the bosses after 1 000 hours in the game.

Think about that for a while.

GGG is clueless what does "fun game" means. Once again, very disappointed, basically half of the mechanics i have used is nerfed. Especially defence stacking and aura reservations. How players supposed to even stay alive with all your previous changes to monsters? Dead league already, damn i miss the old times. Hopefully i'll have something better to do during this league, not really into masochism.

First of all, much love to the GGG development team. People's criticisms tend to assume the worst about the developers when the explanation is probably much simpler: they likely have different goals, expectations, and perception of the state of the game than the players' goals and expectations and perception of the same. Hope you all are doing well and don't take any of the criticism personally!

That being said, critical responses aren't unwarranted, given that each player wants to have fun; when their experience playing the game falls short of that, it's natural and good for players to talk about why that's the case. (Not that said poor experience necessitates the developer changing anything - it could simply be an irreconcilable difference in goals - but the feedback is still useful and their experience meaningful.)

And it's an unfortunate fact that many, many players experienced deaths - many deaths! - playing on the 3.18.x patches. I know that skilled players can avoid many of these deaths; one only need look at hardcore players or highly skilled streamers to see that. But their good experiences don't change many other players' bad experiences and the fact that, even after investing time to learn the game, the average player will not be nearly as skilled as they are. So it's troubling to see defenses overall appearing to be nerfed (less space for auras, both offensive/defensive, due to mana reservation nerfs; less flask uptime due to 'Gain when Hit' modifier nerfs; removal of Gravicious hybrid Life/ES mod; nerf of 100% increased Global Defenses mod; nerf to availability of Spell Suppression for left-side builds; nerf to Defiance Banner).

Many of these nerfs are admittedly deserving when looking solely at the rate of their use, but these changes don't provide other ways to resolve the problems which players are facing. Especially with the addition of Archnemesis modifiers to the game, though I'll refrain from commenting more on that - first because we don't know what other changes you have planned for Archnemesis, and second because I had a whole other topic (see https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3274092) dedicated to that problem (namely, that Archnemesis modifiers seem to be a better fit for a Bossing mechanic than a Mapping mechanic).

Overall, I'm concerned that my experience, and that of many other players, will continue to be filled with lots of deaths. It's not wrong to say "but you're dying because you're unskilled". Of course that's the case. But we unskilled players still want to have fun, and I've found that even after spending lots of hours looking at streamer and hardcore builds, trying to improve my own, and following guides, I still can't become "deathless". I'm still not really hardcore-viable. I still die a lot, even after investing a good deal of my build into defenses, and that's not very fun, especially since my damage feels heavily limited due to my heavy investment in defenses (which don't even give me the feeling of strength and durability I desire).

It's understandable if many players' vision of the game and game difficulty differ from the developers. I hope it doesn't exclude me from having fun, because I really love a lot of this game - I talked elsewhere about how much I love the sound and visual design of the Dominus and Sirus fights, for example (see https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/3265754). I would like to play it a lot more. I played to 38 challenges in 3.17 and had a blast, but struggled to stay engaged in 3.18 due to the deaths and difficulty in killing rare Archnem mobs in maps. I sincerely hope the dev team considers our collective feedback and can help resolve the problems that players are having, so that they can have more fun by experiencing strength and durability in maps/bosses instead of a brutal grind with random deaths and a feeling of poor damage against random mobs.