GGG: stop giving new players reasons to quit the game

I have made dozens of posts about ways to improve POE2, and thinking them over, I think most of them require exactly the same mindset shift....

GGG: Stop giving mainstream players reasons to quit the game out of frustration.

You FINALLY realized you need to make respec costs low. Good for you.

Now...

Make venom quest repeatable.

Make ascension changable.

Make Sanguimancy an optional node in blood witch.

Make it so you can "upgrade" your skills right from the Skills Panel when you have uncut gems in your inventory/stash (the current upgrade system is 100x more confusing than POE1)

Add a directed crafting method that can "improve" an existing item to soften item RNG for unlucky players. (even POE1 has this!)

Make gems "effective downgrade" to the highest level you have stats for instead of disabling or failing to equip or failing to craft (with a dismissable warning), so players can learn your attribute system softly instead of harshly.

Make auras auto-enable, and have a more visible display when they are inactive on skills page

Make the three types of uncut gems have wildly obvious different visuals instead of looking nearly exactly the same and confusing everyone

Make Waypoint -> Endgame -> ziggaurat node teleport you to the ziggurat refuge.

Make Doryani sell unlimited numbers of white maps through tier-4, maybe tier-6 (because they need to get "into" maps before you can make them fight map sustain)

Make "boss" Map node designations not disappear when you fail them, so players can repeat and practice and learn to kill the boss. Drop a "bonus reward" chest from the sky for completing a map node on the first try (aka without death).. Carrots not sticks.

Consider removing map death XP penalty, or making it so you no longer earn XP for re-doing a failed node, rather than removing xp for death. (i'm mixed about this)


....then stop trolling players with the recommended builds and starter skills...

Monk should get Ice Strike at level 1 and save Falling Thunder for level 14. Lightning skills are horribly RNG dependent, and charge generation dependent, and complicated to make perform. Falling Thunder does not even generate bell charges! Ice Monk is 100x easier to understand and gear. Start them there. Let them learn to find the freeze bonus nodes to feel like they are understanding the game. Let Lightning be the endgame place they graduate to if they want higher dps.

Warrior should not be handed a shield at level 1, but a 2 hander and boneshatter. Since boneshatter and stun are the non-optional mechanics warriors need to understand and use succeed early, not active block, not guiding rolling slam animations. Let them decide to equip a shield later after they decide if they are going down the direct damage, double 2h, or totem damage path.

Witch Skeleton Warrior should be moved to a level 5 gem, to avoid them falling into the noob trap of making a giant melee army that doesn't perform. In early levels let them use their Scepter built-in skeleton warriors and pick their gem cuts from ranged-minions or direct damage.

Rework the recommended support gems to be *dynamic* and show *everything* that will have a positive effect on the average single skill DPS (including stacks of things like Rage). This will hide traps like putting Fire-Infusion on a Cold spell, without making a recommendation set so small it's gimping player damage like now. Make a gemcut hover tooltip show the simple dps estimate change for choosing that gem.

....and when you get through all that...

Add a flyout "bonuses" sidebar to the passive tree that summarizes what bonuses ONLY your passive tree is giving you in total, maybe with some kind of damage/power estimate.... If maxroll.gg can put it into their beta web planner, you can figure it out.

Make the expanded view of a Skill in the Skills panel show each support gem VERTICALLY with it's name and an ultra-condensed version of the effect, so when people are watching a streamer or a video, they can accually READ the names of the support gems, instead of just seeing some random colored circles. Make it only expand one skill at a time.


Frankly, none of these things will affect future veteran POE2 players *AT ALL* except adding a directed crafting bench.. They are only to help new players not throw your game out the window out of frustration. This will help the health of the game, make everyone happier, and make you more money. Embrace it all the way to the bank (and an even better game!)

Agreed, and they can significantly decrease boss HP or significantly increase player damage while they're at it.

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Agreed, and they can significantly decrease boss HP or significantly increase player damage while they're at it.

Every boss through Maps Tier 5 is killable within 2-3 minutes with a good decent skill and passive spec... The problem isn't the boss HP or your damage, the problem is that you don't understand why it's bad or how to make it better.

My suggestions to improve this are (a) the passive-tree summary flyout... (which should also work during respec to show you *deltas* to your current spec)... and (b) a directed crafting system to make it easier for you to have passibly decent gear even if you are one of the massively unlucky players (who exist!)

They could also improve the starter skills and recommended gems to stop trolling players.

No. The game can't have a massive passive tree but not make any selection of passives viable.

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The game can't have a massive passive tree but not make any selection of passives viable.

It's not possible to have a massive passive tree in the POE style and also make any selection viable.
The only way to make any selection (mostly) viable is to make selections incredibly constrained.. like D4's incredibly constrained skills tree. Even Last Epoch (which is a middle-ground in complexity) has more and less viable specs.

Just consider that you can just take attribute in a path around the map and never take any small passives or notables. There is no way to get ride of this without killing what is POE about POE, and I don't think that is a great direction.

The POE1/POE2 passive tree is a puzzle for players to figure out.

The problem is that the puzzle has too much hidden information that is too hard to learn in-game.

The DPS estimate on the skills panel is a step in the right direction for this.. but this should also be shown in more places, like item comparison tooltips and the skill bar hover-over tooltip, to increase visibility/understanding.

They should probably also experiement with ways to highlight nodes in the passive tree that compliment the gems you have socketed, so players have some handholds of what might be good to head towards based on the skills they selected.

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Andreuswolf#0361 wrote:

Agreed, and they can significantly decrease boss HP or significantly increase player damage while they're at it.

Currently I have yet to see a boss which lives for more than 10seconds including Pinnacles.

I think rather than upping any dmg, they should tone down monster and player dmg so they get prolonged tactical fights - rather than the instant kill fiesta we currently have

Also Nerf Energy shield

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Currently I have yet to see a boss which lives for more than 10seconds including Pinnacles.

I'm with you.

The trouble is that the spread of experiences players are having is VERY VERY large...

From "bad gear RNG, no idea how to spec gems or passives"

...to... "POE2 pro who oneshots everything starting at level 8"

THis is a very hard problem to solve.

I think it should be tackled in two different ways:

(a) give the new player more handholds to understand the POE systems and soften the loot RNG so the player outcomes don't have such low lows.

(b) consider adding a boss mechanic similar to Last Epoch "timed shield phases" so half-geared are required to engage with boss mechanics, uber-geared players can blast the shield, and new players can play around the shield timing to kill the boss with much lower dps.

"

Currently I have yet to see a boss which lives for more than 10seconds including Pinnacles.

I think rather than upping any dmg, they should tone down monster and player dmg so they get prolonged tactical fights - rather than the instant kill fiesta we currently have

Also Nerf Energy shield

This is what I want soooooo bad. I want the game to be more like what the first three acts felt like. I didn't like the original PoE because it was "kill immediately or get killed immediately". I just don't see a lot of build variety happening with the passive tree like it is, so if endgame is going to end up like original PoE I have a hard time coming up with why I wouldn't just play the original

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KuroSF#6521 wrote:

"

Currently I have yet to see a boss which lives for more than 10seconds including Pinnacles.

I'm with you.

The trouble is that the spread of experiences players are having is VERY VERY large...

From "bad gear RNG, no idea how to spec gems or passives"

...to... "POE2 pro who oneshots everything starting at level 8"

THis is a very hard problem to solve.

I think it should be tackled in two different ways:

(a) give the new player more handholds to understand the POE systems and soften the loot RNG so the player outcomes don't have such low lows.

(b) consider adding a boss mechanic similar to Last Epoch "timed shield phases" so half-geared are required to engage with boss mechanics, uber-geared players can blast the shield, and new players can play around the shield timing to kill the boss with much lower dps.

The damage shield in LE was next to the crafting the worst experience I ever had, it makes getting stronger feel unrewarding and pointless.

I'm not interested in being answered with "I killed this boss in 15 seconds, get a better build" every time I voice any criticism about the game's design. If that happens much more, people are just going to stop playing, the game will die, and honestly at that point it'd deserve it.