Path of Exile is a MAJESTIC incline

[Tacgnol]

Manifesto is exactly what I feared, nerfs again aimed at disrupting the 1% but are going to impact everyone else much harder.

Worst thing is I thought this might be the start of an actual overall look at slowing the game down and generally improving gameplay, but GGG again shows zero understanding of the current reality of the game.

If they're heavily nerfing DPS they should be improving survivability at the same time but considering they're nerfing fortify, increasing poison damage (of both mobs and players) and making ailments more dangerous they seem to be just generally making the game much more painful to play.

They constantly make characters more fragile, which makes people come up with higher dps/clear speed builds to avoid having to deal with all the annoying one shot and on death mechanics. If they want to nerf DPS heavily they need to also make characters easier to keep alive.

 

[Saark]

Survivability was at an all time high if you didnt go a full glass cannon build. Fortify is still massively powerful, Transcendance is still not nerfed, block has not been touched, evasion gets another defensive layer with ward, and crafting high-tier life/es gear is easier than ever. Aurastacking still works once you have the currency and makes you essentially immortal.

 

[lukaszek]

evasion gets another defensive layer with ward

whats the difference between ward and ES?

 

[Tacgnol]

Survivability was at an all time high if you didnt go a full glass cannon build. Fortify is still massively powerful, Transcendance is still not nerfed, block has not been touched, evasion gets another defensive layer with ward, and crafting high-tier life/es gear is easier than ever. Aurastacking still works once you have the currency and makes you essentially immortal.

I doubt I'll change your mind, as we've clashed on this point in the past, but there is still way too many one shots imo. Many of which have zero visual feedback or clarity as to why it happened.

If it was me, I'd nerf life/ES recovery to the ground. Reduce damage heavily. Make it so a big hit is a prolonged panic moment rather than "oh shit I'm dead, back to hideout".

 

[Lone Wolf]

whats the difference between ward and ES?

The way I understand it, the ward amount determines what kind of hit it can negate, but any hit will take out the whole thing. So, 1,000 ward would stop 1,000 damage, but even 1 damage will take down the whole thing. Kind of like a one hit shield, mainly there for evasion/dodge builds that tend to get 1HKO'd.

 

[Tacgnol]

whats the difference between ward and ES?

The way I understand it, the ward amount determines what kind of hit it can negate, but any hit will take out the whole thing. So, 1,000 ward would stop 1,000 damage, but even 1 damage will take down the whole thing. Kind of like a one hit shield, mainly there for evasion/dodge builds that tend to get 1HKO'd.

Yes, that's pretty much it. It takes 5 secs to recharge as well.

 

[ArchAngel]

Survivability was at an all time high if you didnt go a full glass cannon build. Fortify is still massively powerful, Transcendance is still not nerfed, block has not been touched, evasion gets another defensive layer with ward, and crafting high-tier life/es gear is easier than ever. Aurastacking still works once you have the currency and makes you essentially immortal.

Only for 1% of top players.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Make it so a big hit is a prolonged panic moment rather than "oh shit I'm dead, back to hideout".

I agree with this. A staple of ARPGs is the rising panic of seeing the big red pot (or bar) dissipate. PoE gives you too many ways to keep it entirely full 98% of the time, and killing you in a microsecond the other 2%. When the very top players in the world are watching 0.25 speed clips of their deaths, in order to figure out what happened, and still being unable to deduce the exact cause of the death, your game has issues.

What they have to do - at some point - is reset the whole board by capping or scrapping all sorts of effects that add up to immortality and omnipotence and gutting what the 1% use to break the game.

 

[Jaedar]

What they have to do - at some point - is reset the whole board by capping or scrapping all sorts of effects that add up to immortality and omnipotence and gutting what the 1% use to break the game.

The actual thing they are using to break the game are super rare items. The vision GGG seems to have for the game is that it is all about grinding your way to super rare items.

You can see the conundrum.

 

[ArchAngel]

What they have to do - at some point - is reset the whole board by capping or scrapping all sorts of effects that add up to immortality and omnipotence and gutting what the 1% use to break the game.

The actual thing they are using to break the game are super rare items. The vision GGG seems to have for the game is that it is all about grinding your way to super rare items.

You can see the conundrum.

Then they should not ruin the game for the rest of us.

 

[Tacgnol]

What they have to do - at some point - is reset the whole board by capping or scrapping all sorts of effects that add up to immortality and omnipotence and gutting what the 1% use to break the game.

The actual thing they are using to break the game are super rare items. The vision GGG seems to have for the game is that it is all about grinding your way to super rare items.

You can see the conundrum.

Mirror tier gear + aura bots.

The gear makes you merely OP, the aura bot makes you game breaking with most builds.

 

[lukaszek]

whats the difference between ward and ES?

The way I understand it, the ward amount determines what kind of hit it can negate, but any hit will take out the whole thing. So, 1,000 ward would stop 1,000 damage, but even 1 damage will take down the whole thing. Kind of like a one hit shield, mainly there for evasion/dodge builds that tend to get 1HKO'd.

do we know how high will ward go?

 

[Tacgnol]

whats the difference between ward and ES?

The way I understand it, the ward amount determines what kind of hit it can negate, but any hit will take out the whole thing. So, 1,000 ward would stop 1,000 damage, but even 1 damage will take down the whole thing. Kind of like a one hit shield, mainly there for evasion/dodge builds that tend to get 1HKO'd.

do we know how high will ward go?

Judging by the screenshots on the league reveal, it seems quite a low amount on gear.

High tier base helmet had 127 ward iirc on one of the screenshots.

I think they said it scales with passives though, so I imagine you'd be able to get it into the low thousands quite easily.

 

[lukaszek]

whats the difference between ward and ES?

The way I understand it, the ward amount determines what kind of hit it can negate, but any hit will take out the whole thing. So, 1,000 ward would stop 1,000 damage, but even 1 damage will take down the whole thing. Kind of like a one hit shield, mainly there for evasion/dodge builds that tend to get 1HKO'd.

do we know how high will ward go?

Judging by the screenshots on the league reveal, it seems quite a low amount on gear.

High tier base helmet had 127 ward iirc on one of the screenshots.

I think they said it scales with passives though, so I imagine you'd be able to get it into the low thousands quite easily.

yeah, basically im not convinced it can compete going hybrid ev+es

 

[Tacgnol]

whats the difference between ward and ES?

The way I understand it, the ward amount determines what kind of hit it can negate, but any hit will take out the whole thing. So, 1,000 ward would stop 1,000 damage, but even 1 damage will take down the whole thing. Kind of like a one hit shield, mainly there for evasion/dodge builds that tend to get 1HKO'd.

do we know how high will ward go?

Judging by the screenshots on the league reveal, it seems quite a low amount on gear.

High tier base helmet had 127 ward iirc on one of the screenshots.

I think they said it scales with passives though, so I imagine you'd be able to get it into the low thousands quite easily.

yeah, basically im not convinced it can compete going hybrid ev+es

I get the impression it's mostly aimed at pure evasion and acrobatics builds to help you mitigate the occasional attack that slips through.

I'm dubious about how effective it would be though.

 

[Jaedar]

What they have to do - at some point - is reset the whole board by capping or scrapping all sorts of effects that add up to immortality and omnipotence and gutting what the 1% use to break the game.

The actual thing they are using to break the game are super rare items. The vision GGG seems to have for the game is that it is all about grinding your way to super rare items.

You can see the conundrum.

Then they should not ruin the game for the rest of us.

Yes well, GGG seems to have a different view on the top%. Chris even said something about "enough people are living vicariously through streamers" on the last q&a, implying (but not clearly stating) that they think that making streamers go slower is a at least as important as how the game is for normal people, because enjoying the game through streamers is so common.

This seems absolutely insane to me, to the point that I assume he misspoke and meant something else, but I can't figure out what he actually meant.

Maybe people who watch streams just buy way more mtx than everyone else.

 

[Tacgnol]

What they have to do - at some point - is reset the whole board by capping or scrapping all sorts of effects that add up to immortality and omnipotence and gutting what the 1% use to break the game.

The actual thing they are using to break the game are super rare items. The vision GGG seems to have for the game is that it is all about grinding your way to super rare items.

You can see the conundrum.

Then they should not ruin the game for the rest of us.

Yes well, GGG seems to have a different view on the top%. Chris even said something about "enough people are living vicariously through streamers" on the last q&a, implying (but not clearly stating) that they think that making streamers go slower is a at least as important as how the game is for normal people, because enjoying the game through streamers is so common.

This seems absolutely insane to me, to the point that I assume he misspoke and meant something else, but I can't figure out what he actually meant.

Maybe people who watch streams just buy way more mtx than everyone else.

Chris has made similar remarks before. It doesn't help that he has admitted many many times in the past that he plays the game as HCSSF and almost never hits maps.

All his experience of the game these days is pre-endgame content.

 

[ArchAngel]

What they have to do - at some point - is reset the whole board by capping or scrapping all sorts of effects that add up to immortality and omnipotence and gutting what the 1% use to break the game.

The actual thing they are using to break the game are super rare items. The vision GGG seems to have for the game is that it is all about grinding your way to super rare items.

You can see the conundrum.

Then they should not ruin the game for the rest of us.

Yes well, GGG seems to have a different view on the top%. Chris even said something about "enough people are living vicariously through streamers" on the last q&a, implying (but not clearly stating) that they think that making streamers go slower is a at least as important as how the game is for normal people, because enjoying the game through streamers is so common.

This seems absolutely insane to me, to the point that I assume he misspoke and meant something else, but I can't figure out what he actually meant.

Maybe people who watch streams just buy way more mtx than everyone else.

At this point I don't care who buys MTX, if that ruins the game for most of us, they should change from F2P into game+expansions model

 

[Tacgnol]

What they have to do - at some point - is reset the whole board by capping or scrapping all sorts of effects that add up to immortality and omnipotence and gutting what the 1% use to break the game.

The actual thing they are using to break the game are super rare items. The vision GGG seems to have for the game is that it is all about grinding your way to super rare items.

You can see the conundrum.

Then they should not ruin the game for the rest of us.

Yes well, GGG seems to have a different view on the top%. Chris even said something about "enough people are living vicariously through streamers" on the last q&a, implying (but not clearly stating) that they think that making streamers go slower is a at least as important as how the game is for normal people, because enjoying the game through streamers is so common.

This seems absolutely insane to me, to the point that I assume he misspoke and meant something else, but I can't figure out what he actually meant.

Maybe people who watch streams just buy way more mtx than everyone else.

At this point I don't care who buys MTX, if that ruins the game for most of us, they should change from F2P into game+expansions model

This is always an issue with F2P even if it's a purely cosmetic model and not P2W.

Whales always end up becoming the most important customers.

 

[Saark]

Only for 1% of top players.

Most players outside of that niche do not find themselves in situations that can oneshot you in the first place - unless it is well telegraphed abilities by bosses or uniques in maps.

 

[ArchAngel]

Only for 1% of top players.

Most players outside of that niche do not find themselves in situations that can oneshot you in the first place - unless it is well telegraphed abilities by bosses or uniques in maps.

Nah, I think way more players than 1% reach red maps

 

[Saark]

If you get randomly oneshot the moment you step into redmaps, its not really a random occurence, its because your build has no defensive layers, or at most one. Thats not the game being shit, thats people being shit at the game.

 

[Jaedar]

Only for 1% of top players.

Most players outside of that niche do not find themselves in situations that can oneshot you in the first place - unless it is well telegraphed abilities by bosses or uniques in maps.

Nah, I think way more players than 1% reach red maps

Let's look at steam cheevos as a proxy.
36% of players have vaal oversoul achievement. If we use that as a proxy for someone who didn't just download it cus its f2p and is in it "for the long haul" so to speak, then we can consider the following:
14.7% have the achievement for entering a map.
8.3% have the "use your first watchstone".
5.9% have the complete all white maps.
4.3% have all yellow maps.
3.3% have kill the shaper.

So I'd estimate that a bit more than 10% of players reach red maps and about 50% of players reach maps.

Obviously this data is a bit shitty since some achievements were easier to get historically and harder now, and there is no Sirus achievement. I think shaper was a lot easier to get than Sirus (source: I have shaper but not sirus), so I hesitate to speculate on how many % kill him, but I guess it's more than 1.

If you get randomly oneshot the moment you step into redmaps, its not really a random occurence, its because your build has no defensive layers, or at most one. Thats not the game being shit, thats people being shit at the game.

There is some truth to this statement, but I'd also argue that no reasonable amount of defensive layers will completely prevent you from being oneshot. And perhaps more importantly, the game does a shit job at preparing you for it. You can easily go from "kill everything before it touches you" to "get one shot left and right" with 0 explanation of why you are dying. Do you lack hp? resists? regeneration? Did you need to dodge more attacks manually? Would adding 1000 armor help or not?

 

[Saark]

I'd also argue that no reasonable amount of defensive layers will completely prevent you from being oneshot

If that is your only actual goal, theres plenty of ways to achieve that. The easiest one would be Transcendence.

I do agree that not a whole lot of players reach red-maps in the first place, but then I don't really consider anyone who hasnt even finished the Labyrinth to be an actual "player" of the game. Once you remove the lower echelon of players who maybe have 20-50hrs in the game and barely finished Acts1-10, PoE is one of those games with a fairly large percentage of players that consider themselves "experts" even if they clearly aren't.

But despite the amount of people spending considerable amounts of time in PoB being much higher than in other games where similar min-maxing is possible, most of these min-maxers in PoE are still whiny manchildren who cant build a good character or not die every second map for shit. Even if they copied Dans latest HC character, theyd probably still rack up dozens of deaths, and not because the game is unfair, but because they simply suck at the game. And sucking at the game is fine for 99% of it, but there are times where you actually need to know how to deal with certain bosses or combination of mapmods/affixes, and its not due to the tools being given to the players being inadequate, but the players simply aren't using them. They look at a timeless keystone and if it doesnt give any damage its generally considered "useless", same as flasks with big defensive benefits.

Now the question is, whether this is really a problem of the game not offering solutions to the "oneshot" issue, or if its an issue of it being underused, or not accessible enough, or it being an obscure unexplained combination of mechanics that no one understands unless they played the game for 5000+ hours. I would argue that its just people wanting to have more DPS in PoB, and neglecting defenses, instead of coming up with innovative ways to make their character more tanky. The main issue that PoE has, is that for the largest share of the game you do not need multiple layers of defensives, and increasing your DPS will provide more safety than any extra EHP would. But if you keep dying every second map to that one remaining percent, is it really worth it? Maybe slowing down the DPS progression will shift these ratios a bit, and being able to out-dps everything is not as feasible of a thing anymore and thus people will educate themselves a bit more on how to build defensive characters, not just chase the biggest PoB DPS number.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Yo, the mana cost multipliers on gems now... YOOOOOO...

3.14 level 1 support gems being better than 3.15 lvl 20 support gems... YOOOOOO...

Savagery, on an unseen scale. Shit is more harrowing than the Battle of Verdun.

Trap build, totem build, let's go.