Discussion re: A Couple of Points from the Tri - Jonathan Interview

I enjoyed listening to this interview a lot, and it definitely reinvigorated in me some excitement for PoE2, that might bring me back to the game sooner rather than later once I see some of what was discussed being implemented. Link to interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01eP5vTQMvI


In particular, Jonathan went over a couple of things that I wanted to give some further discussion to.


25:41 - Skill scaling - Tri asks a question, and Jonathan brings up an example, that is really relevant to my experience with PoE2 buildcraft and character fantasy for my first character in game, and I hope that it is a change that they ultimately decide to go for.

When I was deciding what to play for my first character in PoE2 I took to the website and looked down the list of Ascendancies to see what resonated. For me, it was the image of the Infernalist, slinging flaming skulls at enemies to blast and burn them in some sort of infernal conflagration, which captured my imagination and led to my choosing of Witch for my starter class. Unfortunately, this build ended up to be very unsatisfying for several reasons, primarily that it failed to live up to the character fantasy promised by the game's own art asset.

The main issue for me was that, after specing into fire damage and ignite, Raging Spirits, which I wanted to be my main damage dealer, unintuitively, did not scale with fire damage at all, despite their skill appearance, art assets and reliance on a fire spell to summon. I was not familiar with SRS from PoE1 and thus had no prior expectations or understanding that they are considered minions that only scale with minion bonuses. On top of this, none of their fire-related skill gems scale the damage with fire damage bonuses either. Every other infernalist was having an easy enough time using the skill as supplemental damage for a Skeletal Arsonist minion swarm build, something I had no interest in whatsoever.

With a lack of damage conversion or scaling gem options to ameliorate the issue, I eventually switched to a minion bonuses spec, relying on stacking curses and offerings to buff the Raging Spirits damage enough to struggle into endgame (which necessitated running minions to sacrifice, something I didn't want to have in my build...). It was certainly different from what I imagined my build would feel like when I picked the class and ascendancy based on the available imagery.

Another related issue I had was the seemingly quite distinct build paths. For Witch you have Minion Swarm, Physical Bone Spells, and Chaos Spells and there are not many synergies or interesting combinations to be found between them. In the early game, I quite enjoyed the curse, contagion, impending doom combo, and wanted to tie this into my fire and raging spirits builds, but there wasn't really any way to do this aside from using up gem slots for some paltry bonus damage that wasn't worth the cost. The restrictions on support gems seem maybe a bit too rigid to allow for interesting synergies to work out - e.g. the Withering Touch support cannot be slotted in Raging Spirits. Also, some things that intuitively feel like they should work, e.g. Hex Blast triggering Impending Doom from consuming curses, do not.

So, in conclusion, I would personally like to see a wider array of scaling options for various skills, as discussed in the interview, as well as more accessible damage conversion options and less support skill gem restrictions to facilitate more synergies that could open up a much more interesting breadth of buildcraft, which PoE2 is currently lacking. It sounds like Jonathan currently wants to address this with the Uniques system however...


40:33 - Bosses for all zones - Tri brings up that the PoE2 pitch included boss encounters for every zone in the game, to which Jonathan says that there are in excess of 100 boss assets ready and waiting for further development and implementation, although they may not all be ready for 1.0 release.

Here I want to reiterate my personal belief that the early game boss and mini-boss encounters throughout the campaign zones are the best content that PoE2 currently has by a long way, and I really would encourage GGG to make adding more of them a high priority. If the game could get to a point where each zone has a map boss plus 3 or 4 mini-boss encounters, I feel like the game would be in a much better place content-wise, where the maps feel a lot more dense and engaging.

That said I would also like to see more side quests, points of interest, special interactables, and lore interactions throughout the campaign maps in general. They touch on the approach to the PoE2 campaign later on in the interview, with Tri suggesting that GGG wanted to make the campaign more of an actual piece of content to be played, engaged with, and appreciated, as opposed to something to skip to start grinding the endgame. Personally, true or not, I like that approach, and think that the randomized campaign maps detract from this. I would like to see GGG take some inspiration from my favourite aRPG Grim Dawn in this regard, moving towards a more bespoke campaign map design rich with content, lore and secrets.


There were other interesting points brought up about the fire damage type vs cold and lightning, and about Unique item drop rates and late game Unique design etc. but really worth checking out for yourselves if you haven't yet. I always appreciate when devs discuss their game development fairly candidly like this, and look forward to more interviews in the future.

I think the most important part was the talk past 1 hour mark about the atlas and towers.

Jonathan essentially admitted that the towers and the map aren't in a great spot and that a lot has to be changed because right now it, as a whole, just feels bad.

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iHiems#0168 wrote:

I think the most important part was the talk past 1 hour mark about the atlas and towers.

Jonathan essentially admitted that the towers and the map aren't in a great spot and that a lot has to be changed because right now it, as a whole, just feels bad.

I was always under the impression that the current endgame was a bare-bones thing that they got in just to give the early access a little longevity past Acts 1-3 and a skeleton to build from. I played through some of the map grinding once, got bored, and decided I would focus most of my playtime on the campaign and progressing alts since the endgame is obviously not in a finished state worth sinking time into for me.

I don't know if it ever really will be a part of the game for me though... I've been playing a lot of Last Epoch at the moment while I wait for the Grim Dawn: Fangs of Asterkarn expansion to release, and grinding through monoliths is not all that gripping for me, although its ok for arcadey drop-in gaming sessions. PoE mapping doesn't seem all that different.

So personally, I'd prefer if GGG focused on finishing and deepening the campaign experience first before getting to the proper endgame development, although development probably doesn't work in such a linear fashion. Jonathan does sound aware of some of the shortcomings of the endgame mapping, so hopefully they have ideas on how to improve it incrementally in the meantime for people that do want it.

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NO1SEjk#5089 wrote:

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iHiems#0168 wrote:

I think the most important part was the talk past 1 hour mark about the atlas and towers.

Jonathan essentially admitted that the towers and the map aren't in a great spot and that a lot has to be changed because right now it, as a whole, just feels bad.

I was always under the impression that the current endgame was a bare-bones thing that they got in just to give the early access a little longevity past Acts 1-3 and a skeleton to build from. I played through some of the map grinding once, got bored, and decided I would focus most of my playtime on the campaign and progressing alts since the endgame is obviously not in a finished state worth sinking time into for me.

I don't know if it ever really will be a part of the game for me though... I've been playing a lot of Last Epoch at the moment while I wait for the Grim Dawn: Fangs of Asterkarn expansion to release, and grinding through monoliths is not all that gripping for me, although its ok for arcadey drop-in gaming sessions. PoE mapping doesn't seem all that different.

So personally, I'd prefer if GGG focused on finishing and deepening the campaign experience first before getting to the proper endgame development, although development probably doesn't work in such a linear fashion. Jonathan does sound aware of some of the shortcomings of the endgame mapping, so hopefully they have ideas on how to improve it incrementally in the meantime for people that do want it.

The thing is that for many people, me included, the campaign in arpgs is kinda like a "tutorial" and the real game starts only at the endgame. I'd rather not have to play the campaign at all past my first character in a league if possible. Granted I'm not saying they should give up on campaign because people who like campaign and the lore exists, but yea.

While it's true that the endgame was/is barebones, the atlas and towers system was something that wouldn't change much based on what we heard in the past.

What I mean is, liking it or not, until now for all we knew we would have to superimpose 3 towers and play bad maps that we didn't care forever, including on full launch. Now with the interview we know this isn't the case and that GGG is aware this (the towers and how the atlas progress itself) is just bad, which completely changes things.

That's fair enough, and yeah, at least they've identified it as a problem that they know can't ship this way in the end. The most important thing I guess is that now, players such as yourself know that they know, and can find a little bit of anticipation in that. It takes interviews like this one and the Zizaran one to find that information out though - GGG seem generally quite forthcoming with info so long as they get asked the right questions in these specific kinds of settings.


I come from playing aRPGs like Torchlight 1/2, Diablo 2/3, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, Titan Quest and Grim Dawn, so replaying the campaign over and over and mastering that content is kind of what I know! PoE and LE (I suppose D3 rifts too) are quite different kinds of game for me. They actually remind me more of Warframe than other isometric aRPGs, and that was a grind that I recently decided to put to rest for good...

I am still interested to see where they take the endgame, because it would be cool if I felt compelled to work through it to challenge the pinnacle bosses, but right now PoE2 feels best, and occupies a farily unique niche in isometric aRPG games, when you are fighting the early game bosses and mini-bosses. So they need to find a way to make the late game grinding feel just as compelling I think.