I wonder how many of these failed leagues will it take GGG for them to learn, if ever?
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I dont think there were a lot of very bad failure leagues the last few years.
A few outliers that kept in memory 3.15 grand nerfs that made melee dog water tier. Archnemesis for its loot goblins and introduction of some very melee unfriendly mods. Kalandra for essential being standard most of the leagues gameplay. To some degree Affliction for me personally. It had its great opportunities like That Which Was Taken. Great item. I hope they bring it back in some form. On the other hand the focus on magic find (item rarirty/item quantity) and the multi divine drops per maps with wisp juice where players gave it the nickname inflation league - and it infact hit standard pretty hard after the merge mirror prices essentially doubled from the divine standard since merge. But if we exclude those few examples over the years i think GGG has a very good track record. Necropolis as a patch was decent with new endgame stuff, new farming methods that do not require mf albeit mf is still the best farming option. I see the downsides too the brick mods acting as hard counters to build types especially with back to basics are not exciting and holds certain build types like melee down with a boot on its head. Last but not least I think Adorned Jewel was one of the few mistakes. Its too consuming and build warping but in a homegenous way. I feel like some rare jewels like the regular crimson/viridian/cobalt need more power to compete same is true for the rare Abyss Jewels. Also the mod pools are way too poluted right now to roll a good one. But overall on average I think the track record is pretty positive. Some stuff where GGG did nail it pretty hard and did a great job: - Tattoos including build enabling Keystone Tattoos - Crucible Weapon & Shield Trees - build enabling mods - That Which was Taken - some mods are build enabling - Recombinators - allowed the creation of pretty "unique" rare items - Scourge Items some were also build enabling esp. the Keystone ones - 3.13 Harvest Crafting aka the Golden Era of PoE. I never saw standard on fire like in this patch - Delirium with its Cluster Jewels - build enabling I think if GGG pairs the good innovations with decent archetype balancing like bringing melee more in line with spells and projectiles from a number balance perspective the endresult would be a wonderful next league. Last edited by zzang on Jun 4, 2024, 5:03:04 PM
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" They need to reconcile the melee popularity perspective that if melee is somehow dominant that means it's overpowered. To the contrary melee just happens to be more popular in ARPG genres. Always has been. They might've achieved a goal of making melee (especially gladiator) non-existent but the game is worse overall for it. DD might be very powerful but it's also very boring. | |
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^From the most recent interviews my impression is more that the devs actually dont like developing melee stuff for various reasons like animations for new gems instead of there being some internal guideline to keep melee low to the ground as it is now.
I could be wrong in that assesment though. | |
" This isn't about new gem animations though. The game has plenty of melee gems already. It needs power in them. There's no good reason why melee hits are weaker or even on par with ranged hits when ranged skirt most or even all of the damage melee soak. The only way to make melee work today is to play the most recent gem cut (ambi) or get replica Alberon's for chaos conversion. That's not a good sign for overall melee gems and supports which we know were nerfed to the ground between 3.15 and now. They wanted melee to be less popular and got a less popular game out of it. Play stupid games win stupid prizes I guess. | |
" I completely agree with you. In my naive world i just refuse to believe there is an internal guideline to make melee that bad in terms of numbers. There are a few outliers stack Alberons and Boneshatter Complex Trauma are among the few examples. Usually those outliers are brought up in discussions. But the overall picture looks pretty grim. Throw in the totem buffs where totems instantly die nowadays in the new t17 content and it gets very dark. | |
" sadly those are all gone. recombinators go for 15div a piece in std, some tatoos are like 150divs and some crucible items are worth a mirror or two. ok tattoos are still around but a shadow of its former glory. |
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Sometimes, just sometimes, you should really consider adapting to the world, instead of demanding that the world adapts to you.
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" Going back in time to 3.15 the conversation started around 18:00 of the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5Sorx3EhNY The motivation was fixing power creep. Yet we then went on to two consecutive years of DD builds farming the leagues with almost no rebalancing. Again I think what they saw was a lot of power players / streamers playing melee builds (streamers are players like others) and because more people play melee than anything else they disproportionally hit melee builds and haven't gone back on that decision. If melee are competitive with range more players will play melee. That's just how ARPGs are. When mages were two tapping bosses in Elden Ring more people still preferred melee. GGG might not use the words I do but I'm not a customer facing sort. I just say what I think. All those nerfs going back to 3.15 were the start of something awful for the game overall and they even admitted this with the player numbers and satisfaction. | |
" You have two completely different points here: 1) People will play melee regardless of power, see Elden Ring example 2) If melee is more competitive, more people will play it These appear to be two completely opposite points.... Additionally, your premise "lot of power players/streamers playing melee" lead to nerfs.....that is false. At its BEST state, melee was STILL less popular overall when compared to bow skills and especially minion skills. Spell skills went through a short lull before they got MASSIVE buffs in that one league that pretty much multiplied all spell damage by 2.5 - 3x. There were standout melee "moments" in PoE history, but it was NEVER so meta that it would warrant special attention (such as minions....tear). GGG has a history of nerfing melee.....for no reason. That is actually the primary reason why "GGG hates melee" is the meme. It's not that they attacked an OP skillset, its that they continuously attacked a NON OP or overused archetype. Like....over and over and over again. Last edited by jsuslak313 on Jun 4, 2024, 9:02:51 PM
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" Not two completely different points. Melee is disproportionately popular in ARPG games. That's it. So if melee is comparable to ranged in terms of power melee will be over represented. If it's somewhat less powerful it'll still be over represented. If you nerf melee into the dirt then it'll just be less popular and the game overall will be less popular too. That's where PoE seems to be right now. So it's true of all ARPGs whether PoE, ER, DS, Diablo, etc. 20 years ago you could query bnet and find many more people playing zealadins, smite and barbs than anything else. Some things just don't change. Admittedly current PoE might be different but that's only because melee is dogwater in power comparison. That said Jugg, Champ both get pretty good representation with niche builds still. Last league that was also true of Slayer. If Gladiator wasn't complete garbage it would also be heavily represented. |
