gamedesign 101, how to make the slow methodical gameplay work(or make poe1 again)

this post reads troll, but i'm dead serious, the reason why i'm making the post is because i'm tired of playing the same projectile spammy ranged build all the time, i'd like melee to be just as good as ranged.
first half is about game design and where poe stands, second half suggestions on how to make poe a better experience.

GGG look, I don't know if you already knew, but throwing rng at players doesn't make a good game(being good at it doesn't justify doing it), rather than feedback and QA testing, take some time to think about what makes games fun first.

two quick examples of good design to establish the argument:

-in a soulslike game, fighting a boss and getting oneshot by a single telegraphed attack is good design
-)in a bullethell game getting shot at by insane amounts of super deadly projectiles, which move super slow and take 5+ seconds to hit you is also good design.
in both cases, you are expected to react and avoid the damage, and you get time to do so.

now if we want to apply that to poe, we need to remove random generation of encounters, reduce the number of enemy attacks coming our way to one at a time (like OG assasins creed) and zoom the camera out by a factor of 3x to give us time to read the mods on an (orange glowing)rare monster to let us figure out how to approach the fight.
now obviously those are not viable implementations, even though they would help avoiding frustration; via player death.


now poe's design is kinda like this:
"random monsters" X "random spawns" X "random map mods" X "random league mechanic" X "random rare mods"
the result: i would call a cocktail of unpredictable madness and impossible to see what's actually happening.
now obviously that is such a fundamental part of poe, we can't just change that, rng can be fun as well


tl;dr why are we actually constantly getting killed by everthing that sneezes our way? maybe that's actually bad gamedesign?

seriously why? maybe looking at how often players die is not a good metric to identify if the enemy does too little/much dmg.

look at any meta build since 0.1 to understand what i mean:
we project a wall of infinite damage in front of us and move as fast as possible, monsters die before they can turn around and attack us. big dopamine.
if we fail to do so, and the monster indeed turn around to oneshot us.(or maybe just rares in rippy T16 maps if we have mirror-gear)

if we were to try a super intricate 3way combo, we get sneezed on, frozen, and die between step 1 and 2 of the 3way combo.
the conclusion here is that we don't notice that monsters are too strong because we are also too strong ourselves. thus making 70% of skills garbage.

so with that in mind, i propose 2 ways to go forward for poe2:

either gravitate towards poe1, give us more powercreep and movement creep, and the poe1 andy that needs his dopamine hit to pacify, him will not complain about anything other than oneshots.

or here a step by step list of changes for slow and methodical combo gameplay:
-the maps need to be waaaaaay smaller with the same amount of monsters/loot (essentially fighting eat least 3 monster packs simultaneously/on screen rather than one)
-we need to have dmg like act 1 during the whole game including T16 maps arguably even less thant that, bosses and rares need lower hp to compensate.
-player survivability scaling has to be giga buffed, taking hits constantly, chugging flask,
moving/dodging around monster while taking their hits has to be possible even on squishy builds(to give us time to use dot/ignite dmg, drag melee monsters into ranged packs, set up combos and slow abilities etc)
-shotgunning has to be completely abolished like poe1 if you ever want properly balanced skills.

essentially when you design a game you have to adjust other stuff for every change you make, some things have to always stay in balance to be "fun", like:

slower player - smaller map
weaker player(more reason to combo well) - less monster dmg and less boss hp
price to run a map(tablets etc) - loot per map
effort to get a headhunter - loot/hour

99% of people talking about speed/loot/gameplay pace don't realise when it "feels slow", doesn't mean you need to become faster. you can also just reduce the distance to get the same result. what's important is what you see on the screen and that you can still recognise what's going on. otherwise flicker strike would be way more popular.

slow and methodical can work, you just have to strike a balance between time spent fighting monsters/loot per monster killed/time spent walking between fights.
ideally everything you kill feels rewarding and you have to spend 0 seconds between fights, and it will be fun. would you fight a white mob for 3 minutes if it gave you a diving 100% of the time? we just need incentive and action to be happy.

to me act 1 is 10 times more fun than t16 map, the ideal experience is that difficulty and power scale the same and endgame feels like act 1 just with way more loot.

as a side note, the way juicing strategies and rare monster loot rewards work, to let players print divines, it's fucked up; to the point of me not even bothering playing future leagues if it stays that way. or i'll play ssf if you balance loot towards solo play.

if you bothered reading this, thank you for caring, you deserve an ignagduk pet mtx.

I didn't read everything. They shouldn't be slowing movement speed / movement skills down. People wanna blow up stuff quick. This makes the game fun again.

What they should do is slow down accessibility. No fragment should lead to a direct boss fight (Ritual, arbiter). There needs to always be some effort for "special rewards". Expedition/breach are fine. This also gives meaning to movement speed. Now market will be less flooded as it takes much longer to kill the boss.

And no to cultivation orbs. If you wanna double corrupt stuff, people need to play. This will greatly slow down the economy and people will have more 'jobs'. Game will last longer.

I think every time they made the game "harder", the community reacted negatively to it.

0.2 steam reviews at start were horrible not only because Wisp mechanic was bad, but because they tried making everything hit way harder and live way longer, which resulted in a brutal slog during campaign. They tried to mask this with "lol sry math was bad", and reverted.

Every time a patch changes something into being less efficient, slower, grindier, the reception is mostly negative. Now they're doing "less density, more effectiveness" but if they overdo it, the reaction will be the same.

In fact, I'd even place a bet and say that people who want this "slow and methodological" gameplay are a crazy minority and vocal only on the forum. Most players want to play ARPGs for the rush, screen explosions, and dopamine hits.

To answer your question "would you fight 3 mins against white mob for guaranteed div" - no, hell no. If I wanted such long fights, I'd play a different game. I'd go back to WoW Raiding and bash my head against boss mechanics I need to study.

What do I want? I want to reset a map. Rush to a mob, obliterate that mob and pray for the 0.01% chance of a godlike rune, -I mean, support gem. I want to RP as a god in this universe who destroys all evil. Not be part of a masochistic struggle fantasy. Thanks

I think GGG wanted to make a different game than what we have here. I was sold for slower/methodical gameplay as well. Instead we got this little hybrid, that does not do anything better, than POE 1 and fails to deliver the initial promise. Why do we even have dodge? Telegraphed attacks are not killing anybody anymore, everything was nerfed, and we are pretty much back to POE 1 with 1 button, zoom zoom builds. I'm still enjoying the game, don't get me wrong, but I feel that vision was lost. Also recently I discovered `No rest for the wicked` and I love it. This game delivers what I expected from POE 2 and I can safely call it a masterpiece.