Why POE2’s Direction Is Worrying for Veterans and Newcomers Alike
" Dude, could you please just open a seperate thread and laying down your hopes there? Cause this here is a very constructive thread so far and nobody, literally not a single person has doubt about the seasonal business model, not even GGG themselves as it can be read all over. This topic here is about the longterm problems that a vastly punishing game model causes. And the feedback OP gave is reflecting and outlining the serious threats of the punishment 'vision' concerning the longlivity of PoE2. Please start a new topic about alternative business ideas, it's off-topic in here and your one-sentence noise ist not bringing the constructive criticism to any progression. |
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" 'Clarity' aside, your proposal is that an entire reset is mandatory for the playerbase to acclimate to a new activity? I don't think you're giving them enough credit. I also don't think a reset is mandatory. Painpoints are to be expected in EA and I think this is just one of those cases. Characters aren't meant to have a build that excels at every single activity at once. Optimizing a build for breach necessitates weakening it in other areas. That's good design. |
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" False. If you don't like the discussion between ":Veterans and Newcomers Alike" you can ignore it. |
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" Agreed. While I do like the idea of slower combat, it needs to also have more tactical options, as well as enemies that engage you tactically instead of just DPS. Low-damage enemies that create a tactical hazard can, and should, be just as dangerous as high-damage enemies. Then, when you mix them together, you get a much more layered combat experience. For example, if the Black Striders' ranged web attack did little damage, but had a stacking slow debuff, they'd become an entirely different threat. Also, I agree that slowing down the "town" to have a dozen extra clicks, does not add anything to the game beyond tedium. Why does the Well even exist? Why do I need 3 different vendor interactions when selling? " I both agree and disagree. I think one of the main issues currently is how powerful gear is, coupled with how little actually drops that's useful for your build. For example, I hit a hard wall with Zalmarath on my Minion Witch. I had not found any replaceable gear since mid-Act 1, due to +X to Minions. I did some gambling (after trying and failing at crafting an upgrade) and swapped my L4 Scepter with +1 to Minions with a L8 Scepter with +2 to Minions, and just with that change, I steamrolled the boss. Like, I went from a 4 minute fight that got him down to half health, to a 2 minute kill. So, its not really that the difficulty is tedious, its that gear drops are both too rare and too powerful. For me personally, I've found the boss fights to be rather fun and engaging overall. " The Well is dumb and should be removed. As for the Utility Flasks, I'm torn on that. While I did like the extra utility, it started to feel like your Flask rotation was more important that your skills. Charms are a sort of compromise, but I'm not 100% sold on them yet. " Agreed. We need an actual Crafting Bench, and we also need Orbs of Scouring. Its hard enough to find the right piece of base gear, but now you have one chance to craft it into something useful, and if you get a bad roll (and odds are you'll get a bad roll) you just throw it away. " Agreed. Drops are scarce, and most of what drops is not useful for your build. Crating mats, Regal and Exalt (especially Regals), are still way to sparse to be fully utilized when leveling. The problem is that PoE tries to embrace a massive variety of builds. This requires a massive variety of stats on gear. Sadly, gear drops are super sparse in general, coupled with horrible crafting, that you're pretty much forced to gamble for gear, burning through your shared gold supply, making it harder to level and alt and nigh impossible to do a respec. " Yep. All the power has been moved to gear and removed from the tree. Even Notables are uninspired. The tree has been reduced to Stat Nodes, due to high stat requirements on everything, and a few basic clusters. I'd say that >50% of the tree is redundant and adds nothing to any character. " I'm going to both agree and disagree here. I think the skill gems are "safer" than what PoE1 had, and the Supports aren't nearly as interesting or fun. Couple that with gem levels and qualities, and other little nuisances and you had a robust system. However, tying skills to gear was just bad. It was a good idea at the time, but it made gearing up much more of a pain. Not only did you need the right gear (which is already difficult enough to find in PoE2), but then you needed to socket it, color it, and link it, all of which could require 100s of crafting orbs while you're still trying to get through the campaign. I will agree with GGG that the new Gem system is much more player friendly, and it removes one of the biggest hurdles to the game. " Yes and no. We're 2 weeks into a beta and both we and GGG are still figuring things out. While I do think that a number of areas are much too large, especially in Act 3, I think the overall pacing of the campaign is fine. However, I would like to see the ability to turn areas into "Maps" upon completing the campaign. This would allow you to apply mods to areas when leveling alts, which I think would add enough variety to keep things fresh. " While I understand the idea behind Ascendancy Trials, I'd love to see them add in a number of options to Trials that allow them to be tailored to specific play styles. For example, Sehkemet was pretty fun on my Ranger and Witch, but the entire concept of not taking damage is antithesis to a melee character. There should be a different mechanic for melee. --- Really, points 2, 4, 5, and 6 are all related: Gear. Putting so much importance on gear over anything else in your build is the biggest issue that needs to be looked at. Bad drops = bad gear = high difficulty, which forces you into crafting. Without any Scouring, crafting boils down to finding the right piece of white gear only to craft useless mods onto it and throw it away. This forces you into gambling, with what little gold you have, making it harder to do any respecs. But then you realize the Passive Tree is too passive and the only thing you really respec are stat nodes when you realize how high the stat requirements become. The cherry on top, and the most ironic thing, is that with so much emphasis and importance on gear, Uniques are some of the worst trash-tier items in the game. Last edited by CycloneJack#6077 on Dec 21, 2024, 11:00:22 AM
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" In these modern interwebs, you can chose the topics of discussions, did you know that? And you're hallucinating some business models ideas that are not questioned by anyone in this topic here. A wise man once said, insanity is 'denying the truth no matter how obvious it is'. You have been given examples of GGG speaking about seasons and don't stop one-sentence-trolling about it. Start a new topic. Make your points there. Everybody's happy. |
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" But if a mechanic is being introduced and you log back only to understand that exactly your character cant face such challenge - will you quietly close the game and wait for a next update? But the next update will keep in mind that current update provided some currency/skills and make the next challenge even more demaning. All the while the economy is overinflating and you have no quick means to utilize all the stashed equipment that becomes obsolete as the overall level of the characters rises. So you face a choice - either you start from the beginning in a "kinda ssf" environment cause early drops now mean nothing and make a new toon with the said challenge in mind, or never come back. You want to reach a destination. We ask for an interesting path (no pun intended) to it, where every decision made from lvl1 has its consequences. The game is supposed to be interesting as soon as you wake up on the beach, thats what ensures replayability. Last edited by Querker#1809 on Dec 21, 2024, 11:07:46 AM
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Did you ever have to trade for gear before endgame in Diablo? Diablo 2? Diablo 3? Diablo 4? Last Epoch? Lost Ark? Marvel Heroes?
Nope. Loot off the ground is good enough to carry you through the campaign in all of those games. GGG just wants to be sadistic for some reason. |
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" Isnt poe1 trade came as an extension to d2 "runes as a currency" mindset? I guess, people were doing that a lot earlier than you think. LE also caved in by adding merchants guild. D3 and their auction house was a catastrophy, but it also existed. Cant say anything about other titles, but some of your examples seems to be incorrect. If you havent participated in such sctivity doesnt mean that its not presented. |
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" None of these games require you to trade in order to beat the campaign. |
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" And even though they existed, you 'never' felt like you "have to use it", as the person you are quoting was referring to. Sometimes, just sometimes, you should really consider adapting to the world, instead of demanding that the world adapts to you.
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