I started playing it just before Act 4 was released
Patch 2.0, which was the one that released Act 4. They streamlined the game, and made it plainly obvious they were catering to the crowd who wanted to skip through the main game and rush into maps to grind, grind, grind. Skill balance was completely thrown off, most of their ideas to try and help balance melee and make it similar to ranged backfired, and put it further behind ranged. Characters were slowly but surely made more powerful with little done on the enemy side of things to balance. Their solution was to add more monster HP and damage, which resulted in nothing except the danger of being one-shot.
Wish I had the quote, but the employee who is in charge of skill development and balance said something along the lines of he only fixes abilities he deems fun to play.
Skipping through the main game to maps is the thing you want to do when you play your fifth league and did the main game content at least 3 times per each character. Really, after getting upwards of 50 characters to maps, you start to think about the main game as a way to gather momentum to charge into the endgame. Its the same for everybody who had at least a few characters at 80+ char level. At endgame, so around level 70-75 you get access to all of the items, skills and ways to create your character the way you envisioned it. Most of the good unique items are restricted to level 65+
And the end game grind is the meat of a game like this. It presents you with a challenge, one that you can influence in its difficulty, and allows you to match your build against it. That is what appeals to most of the high level players, facing a new challenge and seeing if their build will be able to do it. Sure, a looot of people play the meta builds, like BV pathfinder this league (Its great, you should try it!) but they ultimately do it to either grind currency and items more efficiently or as a way to ensure that their first character in a league will be able to do most or all of the new content.
What exactly could be and endgame in a game like PoE, other than a grind of some sort? Its either grind for currency, or for items, or for experience to level up. You really can't support it with a narrative because it would require that you either have a plot that lets you level to max level and somehow gives you best items, or a plot that would only be finishable to the top 1% of players that manage to grind to level 100 in temp leagues. Either way, somebody would be angry, and I am willing to bet that gating plot behind obscene level requirements and difficulty would make more people angry since they cant see the end of the game because of that.
I am first to admit that the game became easier in the recent times, maybe since 2.0. That is a result of a lot of factors. Some of them are new unique items that are quite powerful, new skills that are strong, ascendancy classes that are pure power increase without costs, the playerbase becoming more skilled at the game and being able to use the new items/skills/mechanics to their advantage, the addition of jewels that can make or break some builds, and most of all, the synergy between all of those factors that multiplies with each other. If somebody plays a strong ascendancy class, with one of the strong skills, and also uses a strong unique or two, he will murder mobs quicker than Hutu killed Tutsi.
Lets think what could be done. Certainly increasing the hp and damage of mobs was not satisfactory. Another way would be to decrease the strength of certain skills and item/skill/ascendancy combos, which was done in the last league announcement with Cast on Crit, but then the meta shifted to BV and other skills.
What would be a good balance for the game? Any ideas?
