Why POE2’s Direction Is Worrying for Veterans and Newcomers Alike

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1453R#7804 wrote:

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Querker#1809 wrote:

But that will happen with POE2 anyway. The "pro" good at POE1 not because there is an option to blitz around, but because he knows how to do that, he has mechanical skills to sustain such speeds and react to something happening and he understands the game enough so his character is not dying after jumping in the next monster pack. POE 2 has a blink since day 1, together with other options of travelling like leap slams, stampede or flicker. And those, who invested more time to learning how to make them work will make them work. So prepare to get more frustrated.

"Enigma" is considered the most overpowered runeword in d2 for the same reason. People adapted to using items with teleport charges. And they are flying through the game with somewhat comparable to poe1 speeds.

There's zero "mechanical skill" involved in PoE1 play, nor does anyone using a PoE1 Zoomer Boomer Blaster Master Must-Go-Faster build "react" to a single goddamn thing. They can't. They physically, biologically cannot; they've made their build move faster than the human nervous system can process data. Those builds are faster than the physiological reflexes of the human body, and generally designed with some manner of autotargeted triggered movement like Bodyswap to account for this.

Someone running a "normal, ordinary, and expected" PoE1 build does not actually play PoE1 - they simply hold down the Explosions button, watch the utterly unreadable chaos on their screen, and listen for their loot filter to tell them when they need to let go of the button long enough to pick up one of their five hundred thousand drops.

This is the level to which all of you folks are trying to push PoE2. And the rest of us will protest vehemently until and unless it happens, at which point we will simply quit PoE2 like most of us quit PoE1, and the second game will wind up as dead in the water as the first.

that's because my dear uneducated wannabe gamer looter ARPGs are NOT balanced around "mechanical skill"... they're balanced around numbers, builds and game knowledge...

And by the way, if try to make one of those "PoE1 Zoomer Boomer Blaster Master Must-Go-Faster" builds on your own without the knowledge of the game I guarantee you that you won't make it out of the campaign or you'll barely make it into maps... and THAT is the challenge of the game... a challenge that is intellectual and not a "space key timing check" that is literally designed for zero IQ gamers that cannot bother to actually LEARN SOMETHING...

Go make a blaster build in PoE1 without a guide... I dare you!!!

You lack the game knowledge... but you don't want a challenge... you want an artificial bullshit challenge of only needing to learn to hit space key at the right moment because you don't have the mental capacity to learn to play an ACTUALLY challenging game that requires you to learn stuff...

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Blade_Dancer_90#3602 wrote:

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1453R#7804 wrote:

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Querker#1809 wrote:

But that will happen with POE2 anyway. The "pro" good at POE1 not because there is an option to blitz around, but because he knows how to do that, he has mechanical skills to sustain such speeds and react to something happening and he understands the game enough so his character is not dying after jumping in the next monster pack. POE 2 has a blink since day 1, together with other options of travelling like leap slams, stampede or flicker. And those, who invested more time to learning how to make them work will make them work. So prepare to get more frustrated.

"Enigma" is considered the most overpowered runeword in d2 for the same reason. People adapted to using items with teleport charges. And they are flying through the game with somewhat comparable to poe1 speeds.

There's zero "mechanical skill" involved in PoE1 play, nor does anyone using a PoE1 Zoomer Boomer Blaster Master Must-Go-Faster build "react" to a single goddamn thing. They can't. They physically, biologically cannot; they've made their build move faster than the human nervous system can process data. Those builds are faster than the physiological reflexes of the human body, and generally designed with some manner of autotargeted triggered movement like Bodyswap to account for this.

Someone running a "normal, ordinary, and expected" PoE1 build does not actually play PoE1 - they simply hold down the Explosions button, watch the utterly unreadable chaos on their screen, and listen for their loot filter to tell them when they need to let go of the button long enough to pick up one of their five hundred thousand drops.

This is the level to which all of you folks are trying to push PoE2. And the rest of us will protest vehemently until and unless it happens, at which point we will simply quit PoE2 like most of us quit PoE1, and the second game will wind up as dead in the water as the first.

that's because my dear uneducated wannabe gamer looter ARPGs are NOT balanced around "mechanical skill"... they're balanced around numbers, builds and game knowledge...

And by the way, if try to make one of those "PoE1 Zoomer Boomer Blaster Master Must-Go-Faster" builds on your own without the knowledge of the game I guarantee you that you won't make it out of the campaign or you'll barely make it into maps... and THAT is the challenge of the game... a challenge that is intellectual and not a "space key timing check" that is literally designed for zero IQ gamers that cannot bother to actually LEARN SOMETHING...

Go make a blaster build in PoE1 without a guide... I dare you!!!

You lack the game knowledge... but you don't want a challenge... you want an artificial bullshit challenge of only needing to learn to hit space key at the right moment because you don't have the mental capacity to learn to play an ACTUALLY challenging game that requires you to learn stuff...

Copying someone elses meta build is challenging, got it. This shows how much challenge you’re willing to take, you’ve self reported, thank you for your cooperation.

For all intensive purposes if a genre is called “action” rpg, lacking action is not what someone would expect. Might as well play jrpg when spreadsheet gives you deterministic results.

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Victini#7730 wrote:

goddamn this is a longass thread that no1 at ggg will ever see cos by the time they come off holiday it will be like 100 pages long and they will see it and be like "nah"

Do you genuinely believe that they have not been using AI to summarize threads?

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Sutopia#6937 wrote:

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Blade_Dancer_90#3602 wrote:

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1453R#7804 wrote:

There's zero "mechanical skill" involved in PoE1 play, nor does anyone using a PoE1 Zoomer Boomer Blaster Master Must-Go-Faster build "react" to a single goddamn thing. They can't. They physically, biologically cannot; they've made their build move faster than the human nervous system can process data. Those builds are faster than the physiological reflexes of the human body, and generally designed with some manner of autotargeted triggered movement like Bodyswap to account for this.

Someone running a "normal, ordinary, and expected" PoE1 build does not actually play PoE1 - they simply hold down the Explosions button, watch the utterly unreadable chaos on their screen, and listen for their loot filter to tell them when they need to let go of the button long enough to pick up one of their five hundred thousand drops.

This is the level to which all of you folks are trying to push PoE2. And the rest of us will protest vehemently until and unless it happens, at which point we will simply quit PoE2 like most of us quit PoE1, and the second game will wind up as dead in the water as the first.

that's because my dear uneducated wannabe gamer looter ARPGs are NOT balanced around "mechanical skill"... they're balanced around numbers, builds and game knowledge...

And by the way, if try to make one of those "PoE1 Zoomer Boomer Blaster Master Must-Go-Faster" builds on your own without the knowledge of the game I guarantee you that you won't make it out of the campaign or you'll barely make it into maps... and THAT is the challenge of the game... a challenge that is intellectual and not a "space key timing check" that is literally designed for zero IQ gamers that cannot bother to actually LEARN SOMETHING...

Go make a blaster build in PoE1 without a guide... I dare you!!!

You lack the game knowledge... but you don't want a challenge... you want an artificial bullshit challenge of only needing to learn to hit space key at the right moment because you don't have the mental capacity to learn to play an ACTUALLY challenging game that requires you to learn stuff...

Copying someone elses meta build is challenging, got it. This shows how much challenge you’re willing to take, you’ve self reported, thank you for your cooperation.

For all intensive purposes if a genre is called “action” rpg, lacking action is not what someone would expect. Might as well play jrpg when spreadsheet gives you deterministic results.

No, copying a build is not challenging... making your own IS!!! In PoE2 you HAVE to copy one of the 10 at most viable builds to even play the game...

Also I wrote MAKE A BUILD ON Y0UR OWN!!! I specifically said that but you have no arguments because you're not capable of coming up with one...

Go tap space key all day monkey brains!!!

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maquino85#7657 wrote:

You’ve got 4 friends and one of them is in endgame where 99% of the problems mount up? Well that’s just swell. You made a great point. Maybe if you add another friend who has heard of poe2 and shows signs of interest we can just put this whole argument to rest.

Mm. Your block chance. vs. The Point seems to be very high.

I was providing evidence, anecdotal as it might be, that what Kaukus and other PoE1 supervets claim to be the case - the idea that nobody expect POE1 supervets has any long-term interest in POE2 and no new players trying PoE2 at the moment have any intention of sticking around - is erroneous.

Kaukus' entire argument rests on the idea that the only thing PoE1 supervets value is the "depth" of the original game's decade of bloated, patchworked interdependent systems, and the only possible audience for PoE2 is the PoE1 Supervet crew. He dismisses out of hand the idea that new players could be interested in PoE2 for any reason beyond those reasons he thinks PoE1 did better than the new game - the only people who will EVER play Path 2 for any length of time, for any reason, are PoE1 supervets.

It's honestly a ridiculous argument on the face of it - if the only possible audience for this new game is the exact same audience PoE1 has already captured, why the hell did they make a new game at all? They already had that audience, and could've easily retained it indefinitely for a tiny fraction of the cost and effort. All they had to do was keep adding ridiculous levels of power gated behind obscure mechanical quirks one can only discover by watching Ziz or Mathil for a thousand hours, then continue to tune literally the entire endgame of POE1 specifically and solely for those builds. PoE1 supervets eat that shit up and can be fed an infinite amount of insane powercreep for the rest of their lives with a smile on their face and a song in their hearts.

The rest of us are tired of chasing that garbage. The million-plus DPS builds I've done the last couple of times I've bothered with Path 1 that would've been excellent achievements five years ago are now trash meme ultragarbage in modern POE1, and the endgame shows it. Builds that reasonably could have challenged the Furthest Endgame in War for the Atlas now can't even access the content in the current PoE1's "endgame." The outrageous level of scaling is no longer a gratuitous "reward" for Winning The Game and a way to show off or enjoy your power trip, it's an absolute necessity.

Why should that level of nonsense be an absolute necessity simply to see the content and attempt to challenge it yourself?

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1453R#7804 wrote:

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maquino85#7657 wrote:

You’ve got 4 friends and one of them is in endgame where 99% of the problems mount up? Well that’s just swell. You made a great point. Maybe if you add another friend who has heard of poe2 and shows signs of interest we can just put this whole argument to rest.

Mm. Your block chance. vs. The Point seems to be very high.

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Why should that level of nonsense be an absolute necessity simply to see the content and attempt to challenge it yourself?

I have that stat maxed out.

I agree with your points on the PoE1 systems tbh. I think they are ridiculous and a barrier to entry into the game and don’t add very much fun in a way that couldn’t be done in a much simpler more approachable manner.

That said, I think PoE2 is pretty terrible right now once you get to maps and 3rd ascendancy you realize you’re just being punished by some sadistic game designers who seem to be designing the game for masochists. If there were improvements to speak of over the old PoE1 systems that would be one thing, but as it stands now crafting is literally burning currency, trading is worse than ever and the absence of an AH even more unforgivable, and the balancing and general speed/style of the gameplay are exactly the same as endgame poe1 but with far worse level design, sustain and astoundingly dispiriting punishments for failures often beyond the players control.

Also I like the idea of a souls like arpg but this is a very poor implementation of one. It seems like a good one at first when you have very bad gear, because a souls like game requires that gear play a minimal role compared to skill. However, the game quickly becomes 99% defined by gear and level and 1% by skill. That’s normal for this genre but it certainly isn’t what they tried to pull off, I wager, since it’s the same as poe1. To pull off a real souls like arpg you need to make respeccing and rerolling new classes basically the point of the game and this game definitely does its best to actively discourage both of those. It probably just doesn’t work or requires a complete rework of the game philosophy and itemization, but I applaud them for trying.

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Blade_Dancer_90#3602 wrote:

that's because my dear uneducated wannabe gamer looter ARPGs are NOT balanced around "mechanical skill"... they're balanced around numbers, builds and game knowledge...

Previous examples of the genre were, yes.

Current examples are not.

The most successful example of the "ARPG" genre of all time is not Path of Exile. It is not even Diablo. It is the Borderlands series, which takes all of the "looter" fundamentals of the ARPG genre and mates it to an FPS combat engine. Borderlands is one of the best-selling game series of all time, with explosive popularity that effortlessly dwarfs any Diablesque ARPG.

You can argue that "looter shooters" are different from isometric Diablesque ARPGs, sure. I can further argue whether the distinction is meaningful. Both are loot-centric "action" games with a focus on buildcraft and improving your character power through the acquisition of Better Stuff. Borderlands simply made playing the game itself fun, as opposed to the Diablesque formula of making "Playing The Game", moment to moment, be a boring and annoying tax you have to pay for the dopamine hit of Finding Cool Stuff.

Path 2 is attempting to do much the same, by combining the essentials of strong action games with a core of "looter" gear progression to create something new. Frankly, most of the players I know and talk to on the regular are of the opinion Grinding Gear didn't go far enough - loot is too strong at the moment compared to player capability, numbers are overtuned. Damage, both incoming and outgoing, in the endgame is too high. Both players and monsters are getting one-tapped too easily, and it should change.

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Blade_Dancer_90#3602 wrote:

And by the way, if try to make one of those "PoE1 Zoomer Boomer Blaster Master Must-Go-Faster" builds on your own without the knowledge of the game I guarantee you that you won't make it out of the campaign or you'll barely make it into maps... and THAT is the challenge of the game... a challenge that is intellectual and not a "space key timing check" that is literally designed for zero IQ gamers that cannot bother to actually LEARN SOMETHING...

The overwhelming majority of Boomer Zoomer players in PoE1 copy other players' builds. Almost none of them attempt to create their own build from scratch. Even many of the people who write build guides are doing so after iterating on a build they tried from someone else.

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Blade_Dancer_90#3602 wrote:

Go make a blaster build in PoE1 without a guide... I dare you!!!

Why would I? Build guides are "game knowledge." Copying a build guide proves nothing save that you know the methods of automagically generating the couple thousand divines you need to afford the stuff the guide writer tells you you need in order to clear endgame. And yet, clear endgame they do. All the while crowing about their superior game knowledge.

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Blade_Dancer_90#3602 wrote:

You lack the game knowledge... but you don't want a challenge... you want an artificial bullshit challenge of only needing to learn to hit space key at the right moment because you don't have the mental capacity to learn to play an ACTUALLY challenging game that requires you to learn stuff...

How is learning to read the ebb and flow of combat, learning the abilities and mechanics of enemies, and learning how to combine skills effectively less "artificial" than simply making the content numerically impossible to access or clear without requiring the player to use numerous third-party tools to analyze items and find the strongest affixes? The only "knowledge" check in Path the First is "do you know how to use Path of Building well enough to make a build that hits the arbitrary numerical breakpoints the game requires?" and "do you know how to generate enough currency quickly enough to assemble that build in the game, rather than just in PoB?"

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1453R#7804 wrote:

why the hell did they make a new game at all?

Reminder, this is why :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcd9BfVw7hQ (Path of Exile 2 Announcement)
You can watch everything, or start specifically at 5:05

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rob_korn#1745 wrote:

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1453R#7804 wrote:

why the hell did they make a new game at all?

Reminder, this is why :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcd9BfVw7hQ (Path of Exile 2 Announcement)
You can watch everything, or start specifically at 5:05

I completely understand the technical reasons why it eventually became a completely separate game, but I still wish they had somehow figured out a way to go with the original idea announced in this video (ExileCon 2019):
- 1 game
- 2 campaigns
- double the ascendancies
- 1 endgame

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1453R#7804 wrote:

You can argue that "looter shooters" are different from isometric Diablesque ARPGs, sure. I can further argue whether the distinction is meaningful. Both are loot-centric "action" games with a focus on buildcraft and improving your character power through the acquisition of Better Stuff. Borderlands simply made playing the game itself fun, as opposed to the Diablesque formula of making "Playing The Game", moment to moment, be a boring and annoying tax you have to pay for the dopamine hit of Finding Cool Stuff.

Path 2 is attempting to do much the same, by combining the essentials of strong action games with a core of "looter" gear progression to create something new. Frankly, most of the players I know and talk to on the regular are of the opinion Grinding Gear didn't go far enough - loot is too strong at the moment compared to player capability, numbers are overtuned. Damage, both incoming and outgoing, in the endgame is too high. Both players and monsters are getting one-tapped too easily, and it should change.

Agree, this basically echoes my previous statement.

I think that if they want this to be a skills game not a find the best way to farm divs and buy a set of gear to insta screen clear game they need to kind of restart itemization and skills from scratch though because if that’s what they were aiming for they completely missed the mark

The endgame is just a worse version of poe1’s endgame. The point is to smash maps at increasingly faster speeds to farm currency at increasingly higher div/hr to buy increasing better gear to smash maps at increasingly faster speeds… that doesn’t fit a skills / soul like game at all. The endgame should be increasingly harder bosses with possibly better drops but with limited power creep or more flair/prestige type rewards and a much stronger bias towards hanging out in towns to show off your elite shit like old school mmorpgs

In a mmo, gear is important but the difference between a poorly geared max level and a well geared max level character isn’t like a billion dps. The rewards for end game raiding are honestly equally or more about showing off than increasing your character power