Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[Varvarg]

they gutted some uniques, including the new trapper chest (LOL). They dont know what they are doing at this point.

Also, being a bit on the butthurt side, must we post a series of giant images? A short summary and a link would suffice.

EDIT: Agree with Damned Registrations, not that it will matter. Hated the juggling with leaguestones in legacy eew

 

[Saark]

they gutted some uniques, including the new trapper chest (LOL). They dont know what they are doing at this point.

They certainly need to take a look at all uniques that are affected by power/frenzy charges so none of them get busted. The frenzy charge generation on the new trapper chest was an odd thing already, now more so than before. It's not the end of the world though, almost no caster builds were investing into frenzy charges anyway, so if they got them for free they lose out on 12% damage. GGG clearly doesn't want people to piggyback off of mechanics that they don't invest in. Trappers also didn't care for frenzy charges either, and that was when the %damage was double-dipping for poison/ignite trappers. People are talking like this is gonna be a huge blow to a large amount of builds, but I just don't see where that's true. I can't think of a single build that invested into 5+ frenzy charges that will be hit by the frenzy-charge change. Power charges on the other hand were too readily available thanks to Assassins Mark, and something every single build went for if possible. It is now less attractive for melee/bow builds while providing some more spelldamage for caster builds.

I am personally in favor of any change that discourages people from using mechanics at full effectiveness because they get them for free (e.g. 3 endurance/power/frenzy charges, auto-cursing everything with huge blasphemy AoE, free 50% shock with Vaal Lightning Trap etc.) without ever investing into the mechanic itself. If people are honestly surprised that you will no longer be able to have 150% increased global crit, 9% increased base-crit and 20% more crit multi from running a 2link blasphemy/3link CoH-Herald setup then they didn't pay attention in the last 12-18 months, because the game is clearly heading this way and has been for quite some time now.

 

[ArchAngel]

they gutted some uniques, including the new trapper chest (LOL). They dont know what they are doing at this point.

They certainly need to take a look at all uniques that are affected by power/frenzy charges so none of them get busted. The frenzy charge generation on the new trapper chest was an odd thing already, now more so than before. It's not the end of the world though, almost no caster builds were investing into frenzy charges anyway, so if they got them for free they lose out on 12% damage. GGG clearly doesn't want people to piggyback off of mechanics that they don't invest in. Trappers also didn't care for frenzy charges either, and that was when the %damage was double-dipping for poison/ignite trappers. People are talking like this is gonna be a huge blow to a large amount of builds, but I just don't see where that's true. I can't think of a single build that invested into 5+ frenzy charges that will be hit by the frenzy-charge change. Power charges on the other hand were too readily available thanks to Assassins Mark, and something every single build went for if possible. It is now less attractive for melee/bow builds while providing some more spelldamage for caster builds.

I am personally in favor of any change that discourages people from using mechanics at full effectiveness because they get them for free (e.g. 3 endurance/power/frenzy charges, auto-cursing everything with huge blasphemy AoE, free 50% shock with Vaal Lightning Trap etc.) without ever investing into the mechanic itself. If people are honestly surprised that you will no longer be able to have 150% increased global crit, 9% increased base-crit and 20% more crit multi from running a 2link blasphemy/3link CoH-Herald setup then they didn't pay attention in the last 12-18 months, because the game is clearly heading this way and has been for quite some time now.

Curse radius got improved so that means Blasphemy radius is now better as well

 

[Saark]

Curses got +1 radius every 3 levels, which is basically a follow-up to the most recent melee-range changes and not much else. Blasphemy is still only going to be used by melee-builds or summoners that don't need auras to buff their minions because pretty much every other build that requires auto-cursing will be using a CoH-Herald setup, witchfire brew or corrupted gloves.

 

[ArchAngel]

Curses got +1 radius every 3 levels, which is basically a follow-up to the most recent melee-range changes and not much else. Blasphemy is still only going to be used by melee-builds or summoners that don't need auras to buff their minions because pretty much every other build that requires auto-cursing will be using a CoH-Herald setup, witchfire brew or corrupted gloves.

Actually in all my totems builds I plan to use self cast curse connected with Arcane Surge.

 

[Varvarg]

we have the tulfall unique. they will probably, hopefully, rework it however

 

[SirSingAlot]

super funny how fast GGG was back paddeling after reddit went full rage after the charge change announcement (which funnily enough was like 2 sentences with the "another quick note" introduction)

instead of giving a solid explanation they are like "chill, if you dont like it, we can change back...ITS UR GAME"
feel like they too too much on their shoulders at one time.
Xbox, FOO, ES changes ect
i understand what they intend to do (nerfhammer into new meta), but they should be careful and not just randomly change things because they can

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Hyperion]

I wouldn't say Chris backpedaled, exactly, but reminded everyone the game is still in beta for another week. Instead of crying about it and insulting the company, fucking test it out before you start spamming the shit out of the Reddit and forums. His response, particular the first paragraph, was NOT happy with the community at large, that's for damn sure. He took offense to it, and I don't blame him for it one bit. The change is jarring, but like Saark said, charges have always been an insane power boost for very little investment. After 2.0, and the introduction of Blasphemy, it was magnified because it was automated even further with the curses. At least manual Enduring Cry is an opportunity cost of another Warcry, and an actual button press on occasion.

In the community's defense, however, blindsiding everyone with a change of this magnitude with only a week remaining probably isn't the smartest of moves. Especially when the final week is more or less crunch time.

There's a common misconception in the community that our balance team doesn't play Path of Exile. They actually do play it, a whole lot. We have people with level 100 hardcore characters, multiple famous community members who have come to work for us and you may not even know it. The minimum requirement to join our QA team is 1000 hours of PoE experience, and we still turn people with that prerequisite away if they're not good enough at the game. Our design, balance and QA team are experts at Path of Exile. I would not accept any less. They put substantial work into each change, planning out not only what it affects now, but what it affects in the future. These changes are all considered in the big picture of the other planned changes.

While processing player feedback in preparation for 3.0.0, we found four requests that we could address simultaneously with our proposed charge changes:

• Nerf total crit chance available. It was getting too close to cap, too easily.
• Nerf the Assassin. This was frequently requested.
• Provide more uses for power charges on spellcasters (especially non-crit ones).
• Make it less mandatory for general damage dealers to invest in frenzy charges.

We recently made these charge changes in the beta, and received an immediate negative reaction from a vocal portion of the community. While we firmly stand behind the intention of this change, it's very clear that the community not only misunderstood a lot of the consequences, but also generally didn't like the direction of the change.

We make this game for you guys, so if you don't want the change, we aren't going to force it in purely to solve long-term problems. The short-term and build continuity do matter as well. We hope to get feedback from your playtesting in the next few days of the beta, so that we can make a decision this week about whether it remains in this form, is reverted, or is made in another form.

We communicated poorly about the changes and their motivation. While we may lament the community misunderstanding the consequences of the change, it is clearly our fault for confusing the community. While it has been crazily hectic recently, we do need to stop and take the time to more clearly explain what we are testing, and why.

Almost all of these changes are on Beta. Please playtest them and let us know the results of what you find. We'll post again after the weekend with our findings also.

Thank you for your time, support and occasional overreactions. We expect nothing less <3

 

[Gerrard]

Our design, balance and QA team are experts at Path of Exile.

 

[Saark]

Criticism like "GGG doesn't know/is shit at their own game" is particularly hilarious. Back in closed/open Beta the QA team was still playing with their dev-accounts and you would regularly see a bunch of people with a GGG tag in the top50 of the HC ladder. Neonspyder in particular was in the top10 for multiple leagues, and I reckon he still is one of the best HC players around.

They don't do themselves any favor by citing stuff like "25k ES builds" or "still doing over 1million poison dps in beta" when trying to justify nerfs to the community though. I'd be fine if they just said something like "the data suggests that further nerfs are required" and then be done with it.

 

[Hyperion]

They were probably aiming for transparency when they mentioned those specific examples. Had they been so vague the community probably would have been even angrier because nobody would have known what the Hell they were talking about. Honestly, this shitstorm doesn't seem any worse than the river of tears that followed the CoC nerfs, tbh. Come launch and everybody's neck deep in the new content and they'll forget about it 'till the next nerf and they can bring up their old memes.

Nobody likes it when their favorite shit gets nerfed, but at the end of the day, it's a game built around theorycrafting with an everchanging meta. If you can't adapt to that, your mentality should probably change a bit. It's the same thing as it is with politics, and the government passing laws / bills. Once something goes into effect, regardless of how successful and fruitful it is for the country at large, taking it away from those who benefit / enjoy it is not an easy task.

 

[Damned Registrations]

They changed basically nothing between now and back when one of them said life was a better option than ES but now it's nerfhammer time. They clearly don't have a fucking clue and are being led around by reddit which in turn is basically just parroting popular streamers. It's incredibly obvious from the way they design skills, uniques, and mechanics in general. Severe lack of foresight.

 

[Saark]

I think the biggest mistake was to postpone a lot of balace changes to 3.0. Nothing really changed over the past year and a half, whenever changes were discussed or announced the outcry on the forums/reddit was larger than before (which is to be expected - with a growing userbase the vocal minority will become bigger aswell) and now a whole lot of stuff that could've been spread out and rebalanced over the course of a year hast to fit into a single release. 3.0 looks like a giant nerfhammer as a result, and some stuff will need to be retuned after FoO hits. From the comments Chris and some other devs have left on reddit and with the most recent manifesto it seems that they are kind of fed up with all the negativity, and even though some of that is definitely deserved I can see them going back to their original style of keeping player-feedback to a minimum and following their own design goal instead.

 

[SirSingAlot]

i found it particulary funny that they even defended themselfs having "experts" and that the people behind the changes arnt newbs to the game.


and yes, it seemes they want to force BIG changes on us now. like many of them at the same time.
thats just too much to swallow for some players anyways, as they feel crippled and fun taken from them, but the more important issue is that introducing many medium changes step by step gives much better information on what to tweak and what maybe wont be needed.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Varvarg]

they gonna revert this, you can bet your asses on it. too much money invested in 3.0. They needs your cosmetic munnies

 

[Gerrard]

Criticism like "GGG doesn't know/is shit at their own game" is particularly hilarious. Back in closed/open Beta the QA team was still playing with their dev-accounts and you would regularly see a bunch of people with a GGG tag in the top50 of the HC ladder. Neonspyder in particular was in the top10 for multiple leagues, and I reckon he still is one of the best HC players around.

They don't do themselves any favor by citing stuff like "25k ES builds" or "still doing over 1million poison dps in beta" when trying to justify nerfs to the community though. I'd be fine if they just said something like "the data suggests that further nerfs are required" and then be done with it.

Looks like someone needs a reminder about experts like Rory "Life is technically better than ES" Rackham.


How about that XBox version tho.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Saark]

Looks like someone needs a reminder about experts like Rory "Life is technically better than ES" Rackham.

People have been quoting that line for months, without ever using it right. It wasn't stupid because it was factually wrong, which it isnt because 'technically' life is quite a lot better than ES. It was stupid because when the main-issue is that you can easily get twice as much ES as you can get life, comparing 1life to 1ES doesn't help anyone.
This whole notion of the community having more data and knowledge about the game than the developers is ridiculous, GGG is about as secretive as you can get about internal numbers which is why there is still a couple of mechanics-threads on the official forums where people like Rory, Mark or Qarl have to tell people how certain mechanics actually interact with each other. But I guess the community still knows better than them, right? People use Path of Building and cannot reach the numbers GGG is talking about, while not even trying how the game actually plays with those builds, and the developer who most certainly has more accurate models suddenly knows less about the game than these people that haven't played those builds for a single second - yet they talk as if they have hit lv100 with them multiple times. In the eyes of the community those builds are already dead when 3.0 hits and absolutely unplayable. Which is fucking retarded. Nowadays people are using Path of Building results as a basis for how the game should be balances, when all it really should be is a very helpful tool when you want to know whether an item, gem or passive can increase your DPS or survivability.

People are up in arms about some of these changes when the real issue is that due to how big GGG has gotten some of the devs actually don't know anymore how some mechanics are working if they themselves didn't work on them. For example Vinktars shock has apparently for quite some time been a 30% shock instead of the 50% that shock usually provided, and noone knew about it until now. Mark himself didn't know about that one until he took a look at all shock/chill related uniques after doing the freeze/chill/shock overhaul. This is an actual issue because when there is too little oversight there won't be patch notes for certain changes, the community will work (and complain) about outdated information and instead of talking about how the game plays, they will talk about how they think the game plays after fiddling with Path of Building for 2 minutes. While GGG won't immediately be able to realize why, their internal numbers will differ from the ones the community gets and the internal disconnect leads to another one with the community. Situations will occur where they have a design goal and in order to reach it stuff will have to get nerfed, but due to the disconnect between devs more than the required nerfs/changes will make it in, resulting in a clusterfuck. I am fairly sure GGG realized that this has become a thing because situations like the vinktars change have occurred more frequently during the past couple of months, and it is something they will have to adress internally rather quickly.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[Grunker]

Looks like someone needs a reminder about experts like Rory "Life is technically better than ES" Rackham.

Quoting that line out of context as if he meant it was strictly better in that meta is a perfect moron detector that shows you've only read hyperbolic reddit posts that did the same instead of actually listening to Rory's argument. Which was that 1 life is better than 1 es, which is technically true. The reason it's stupid is just as Saark says: the problem with ES at the time was pool size and not effectiveness of the defence, which Rory ackknowledged. Only thing left to wonder about is why the fuck Chris used that example in the infamous podcast segment, but then I guess he forgot that the butthurt community does not forgive gaffes.

 

[Gerrard]

Looks like someone needs a reminder about experts like Rory "Life is technically better than ES" Rackham.

People have been quoting that line for months, without ever using it right. It wasn't stupid because it was factually wrong, which it isnt because 'technically' life is quite a lot better than ES. It was stupid because when the main-issue is that you can easily get twice as much ES as you can get life, comparing 1life to 1ES doesn't help anyone.

There is no "using it wrong", what he said was retarded, and you just said it yourself. Nobody cared about the "downsides" of ES.
Also, I don't believe ES is dead either, and it will most likely end up showing how dumb their idea of a closed beta test like this is, because these people have no incentive in reporting exploits when they can hope they make it to the live game and then they can use them for their advantage

As for the Vinktar """nerf""" it is a perfect example of them not knowing what the fuck they are doing, because it still has 20% leech.

 

[Saark]

There is no "using it wrong", what he said was retarded, and you just said it yourself. Nobody cared about the "downsides" of ES.

I'm gonna say it again: What Rory said wasn't retarded, it was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek "technically life is better than ES". In the context of what was said beforehand, this was 100% factually correct. It was then used to bash him for weeks because retarded people took it out of context and made it look like he was actually convinced that Life builds are better than ES builds, which is not what he said. It was stupid of him to say something like that because he should've known better than to joke about something the community felt so strongly about. But he's clearly not a PR person, neither is Johnathan for that matter, and it shows in every single interview. Other companies wouldn't let people like them do live-interviews for that exact reason - retarded people in the community will always be on the lookout for quotes to put out of context to make them look bad.

Also, I don't believe ES is dead either, and it will most likely end up showing how dumb their idea of a closed beta test like this is, because these people have no incentive in reporting exploits when they can hope they make it to the live game and then they can use them for their advantage

None of this makes any sense, because GGG isn't waiting for player feedback to change things. It's the other way around, GGG changes things, puts those changes in the beta and then waits for player feedback (that they mostly ignore, thankfully). You are right though, ES isn't dead. But PoB-warriors that never got a character to level 60 in their lives were out for blood when the ES changes got announced, crying about how not a single build will ever use ES now. Some of them have been so persistent that they still take every chance they get to ask about those "25k ES" builds because they are convinced that they know more than GGG. Same goes for the people that are 100% convinced that not a single build will ever use damage over time again.
None of this has anything to do with the beta though. The first two waves of the beta were pretty much exclusively there to have people test and find bugs for act 5-8. The third wave was mostly for testing the new performance changes. Wave 4 is the first (and will be the last) deployment of actual balance changes, which includes the new Bleed Keystone, new Threshold Jewels, reworked flasks aswell as the new shock/chill and PC/FC changes. I don't think they will in any way react to player feedback, which is a good thing, because those changes aren't as big as most people claim they are. As someone said earlier, people will forget all about those "game-breaking" changes as they currently put it once FoO releases.
As I already said earlier, I think it was a big mistake to delay a lot of these balance changes and roll them out together with all the new acts because all the people who cannot play the beta will read about all those changes and nerfs and think they have a huge impact, but don't get the chance to try them out for weeks to see that it's not that big a deal.

As for the Vinktar """nerf""" it is a perfect example of them not knowing what the fuck they are doing, because it still has 20% leech.

I actually like the way they handled nerfing the most broken item in the game. Don't change what is the most iconic and important part of it, but remove other bonuses to force the player into compromises for one of their flask-slots. Vinktars got nerfed by quite a huge margin and is now in line with other flasks. Atziris Promise generally provides more damage than Vinktars now, and depending on the build there is at least 2 more flasks that also increase damage more than Vinktars. Vinktars provides more sustain though, but that sustain only works for Vaal Pact builds due to the leech cap.
Losing 66% of its %more damage is a huge blow to the item, and losing the mana leech might look like a small thing but it's actually the biggest nerf the item could have gotten. You will have to invest into mana-regen through either Warlords Mark, manaregen on the tree, getting the manaleech boot enchant (which doesn't work on bosses) or use rallying cry/a manaflask. All of these are considerable trade-offs that weren't necessary before. Vaal Pact+Vinktars will still provide huge amounts of sustain, but when you cannot get 15k+ effective health anymore that doesn't matter as much. Getting that amount of sustain requires you to heavily invest into it. Losing the manaleech and having to find a substitute for that will cut into your damage and/or survivability aswell, and most life builds will get oneshot by abilities that you could just leech through before 3.0.
Afterall the problem with Vinktars wasn't that the flask itself was stupidly broken (which it was), it was the combination of Vinktars, easily achievable high effective health (which got nerfed) and Vaal Pact (which no longer works for those high EH builds) that made it no longer a choice but a necessity for every single high-end build.
They also nerfed a few of the flask effectiveness nodes, so that obviously affects Vinktars aswell.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The shock nerf to vinktars won't matter, everything but guardian tier bosses is an offscreen blip kill anyways, and for the guardians people will just use vaal lightning for their shock like everyone without vinktars does. Mana leech is also relatively trivial for 99% of builds since you need like .0001% leech to have more mana than you'll ever spend with your 5 billion dps build.

And your defense of that quote is laughable. The context of that interview was heavily downplaying how insanely broken ES was at the time, not acknowledging it. He mentioned that they have arguments over things like that, which is insane, because it wasn't even close to being a grey area.

I mean, am I the only one that remembers an entire league being basically dominated by a single fucking ring? 100% bleed and poison chance, yeah, that seems fucking balanced. GJ team. Way to display your superior knowledge of game mechanics.

They might have inside info about whether chilled ground stacks additively or multiplicatively with some other obscure slowing effect, but they clearly don't grasp basic fucking math or this whole double dipping thing never would have been an issue. Hell, they even did this exact same shit before back when conversion was double dipping. And now they're introducing another fucking movement attack skill, which is either going to be insanely OP and give retarded clearspeed, or be utterly useless and just tickle everything beyond baby maps. My bet is on some OP garbage to drive hype for the new changes and skins for the new skill, just like they do with every release of new skills. Then they'll nerf it into the ground a while later while retarded fanboys sagely nod about their wisdom in handling this unforeseeable balance issue.