Percentages vs plusses, DISCUSS

[Azarkon]

If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?

My point being, if you're going to present the system as a colour coded moron-friendly simplification, why even bother with all the complicated stuff behind the scenes? if a player's actions can't directly affect / manipulate the mechanics, then you're simply playing a game of chance.

Complicated - ie not human friendly - calculations are different from 'deep system.' A lot of the times, they're there simply because of design goals. For example, in WoW, armor is implemented as a scaling damage reduction % because they want to avoid flat damage reduction. They want to avoid flat damage reduction because it overly favors high-damage attacks and armor rating. They don't want to implement high-damage attacks for every class in order for them to not get destroyed by heavy armor users in PvP, and they don't want to open too great of a gap between heavy armor users and light armor users in PvE because then it becomes difficult to create monsters that don't one-hit-kill cloth users, which isn't fun. Therefore, they went with a DR% design. To this end, the choice was motivated by high-level design goals, not by whatever is easy for players to calculate, and not by the desire to add depth.

PoE, too, has design goals. Indeed we know about them from Sawyer's various updates. These design goals also aren't necessarily terrible. But the difference is that I don't think PoE ever spent a great deal of time in play testing, because there are obvious issues with the game's combat system. For example, the terrible implementation of RtwP, especially with respect to the engagement mechanic, that makes fights a total mess. By contrast, WoW's combat system, though equally complicated behind the scenes, was sufficiently polished at release to have ironed out the bulk of these issues. Playing WoW for the first time, you felt the intuitiveness of its gameplay as a player even when you didn't understand the mechanics behind them.

The itemization issues are the same deal. I don't think it was ever sufficiently play tested, because I have a difficult time believing that Sawyer is so set in his ways that he'd plan to make it this dull. Course, it's equally difficult to see how all of this got past Q&A, but ... +12 accuracy +10% damage on an end game artifact? Come the fuck on. Even in a low-magic setting - and PoE is not a low-magic setting - it'd be hard to argue for this crap.