GGG You forgot Games are supposed to be fun

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soothingsun#7368 wrote:

There is probably hundreds of these posts. I've wanted to write this for a long time and really haven't been able to come up with the words.

The feeling I want to express is that I feel that PoE2 is a great game completely shafted by anti-fun balancing.

I want to contextualize my feedback by framing it in reference of another game I picked up over the holidays Shape of Dreams. This is a roguelite dungeon crawler where you pick 1 of several characters and outfit yourself a build out of a few active skills, a basic attack, a dodge roll, and a passive. I had and am having an absolutely blast increasing difficulty and mix and matching various skills, characters, etc.

Something that stood out to me while playing, is how easy it was to come up with various combos that naturally worked well together that felt good to use. For example, I fell in love with using a series of triggers to reduce the cooldown on multiple skills through the use of skill augments (remnants) and a skill that reduces the cooldown on other skills, that gave me fantastic uptime on all of my skills. Giving me snappy, fun, engaging gameplay.

The contrast with poe2 was mind boggling.

Take the volcano skill, on paper neat concept, tosses out a bunch of projectiles and when you slam it, it throws out more of them. In practice the setup, and ways to slam them don't mesh well at all, making it a seemingly dead skill. Its not a fun interaction and when you pull it off it doesn't feel like it does anything worth doing again.

I logged in tonight wanting to make a bleed spear build. Which, I'm certain is possible and maybe even viable. While looking at the skills I noticed some funny things. Blood hunt, only really usable after you've inflicted bleed on an enemy for a significant amount of damage. Okay.... So you won't use this skill because you've either already killed them orrrr you have better options because you already point blank range cause you had to be to get them to bleed in the first place.

Or the spear flurry ability (I forget the name sorry) where you jab a bunch and leave a spear behind that can be detonated with...... wait for it. A movement engage skill. Like I already engaged them, that's how I hit them.

Even spearfield is hilarious. Oh does 80% less damage if you use it with enemies around (not quite what it says)... okay, soooo why would I want to use this? I don't think anyone is looking to setup a big spear mine field and then kite enemies over it. Even if we were the measly explosion radius makes it feel bad to even try and use it.

About the only skill that makes sense is rake, a dash, that does more damage the the farther you travel and inflicts bleed. Literally a skill I want to use.

The game is full of these inconsistencies and just unfun mechanics at every turn. Take siege cascade. Skill does great damage, and has a cool target effect. I have a build that clears T15s with ease using it, only some mobs I can't hit to save my life cause they are too fast, even with every bit of projectile speed I can take and as much reasonable AoE the aoe is too small to even tag these mobs. Like I'm all for requiring investment to solve some problems but at some point, I stop and wonder why am I even trying to make these obscure builds work at all.

Ice shards is another I really wanted to work, but it just doesn't, You could give it a 100x more dmg multiplier after it "charges" and it would still be bad.

Another thing, its hilarious to me we have all these obscure resources for various combos, like why the French does a mechanic like volatility, which a single ascendency interact with it, have more passives than Crossbows on the skill tree. For some builds, namely my siege cascade build above, doesn't benefit from any of them. I take not a single crossbow node on my crossbow build despite being a merc and pathing by them.

I could spend hours talking about the unfun design decisions. *Cough* Why is life bad? Like life doesn't need to be bad, its bad because GGG refuses to address why its bad.

My point is this. Games are meant to be fun. GGG, you've clearly forgotten that. (except for the guy that balances bow, he apparently gets what fun is? Serious why are bows and lightning skills the clear favorites) If you want a summary of why, try typing fire/lightning/cold into the passive tree and counting the nodes.

Also freeze/chill and ignite specific nodes are bad, when all lightning nodes give more damage. If all other things are equal, why would you want to freeze or set something on fire (with flammability magnitude, seriously, you had something way simpler, called chance to ignite, don't make things more complicated for no reason) If you could just outright kill it instead?

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soothingsun#7368 wrote:

*Cough* Why is life bad? Like life doesn't need to be bad, its bad because GGG refuses to address why its bad.

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Slart1bartfast#0332 wrote:

+1

and don't forget the droprates. The Omens of Annulment/Erasure run currently for 16-20 div a pop. A fracturing orb for 10 divs. An Omen of Light for 12 divs. Liquid Isolation for 5 divs. Catalysts run for up to 60 exalts a piece. A lvl 20 uncut skill gem at 2 divs and a lvl 20 uncut spirit gem at 20 divs. Breach and Simulacrum splinters at 4 exalts and Runic splinters at 11 exalts a piece. Support gems like Dialla's Desire run at 35 divs, Rakiata's Flow at 94 divs, Rigwalds Ferocity at 20 divs.

It's like they don't want you to play the game.