Arena Competition is once again Dead - Snapshotting needs to be removed

General
41

Is it? So instead of numerical adjustments which at least bring those skills back into the possible position of being played we gotta wait on it being a mastery rework?

We’re supposed to have 15 masteries. So basically since 1 Mastery per patch gets reworked we gotta wait nearly 4 years to make a full round if EHG gets it together to provide 4 Cycles per year?

Gotta say that’s kinda shit :stuck_out_tongue: Unacceptable pacing plainly spoken. Which is what I’m repeatedly saying: Their content-pipeline is a mess and needs severe adjustments on how they tackle content overall. It’s not working and never has to date.

And that’s a problem. Those bandaids need to be at least effective enough to allow playing those without it feeling like you ‘simply picked wrong’.

And that’s not a good state. ‘Eventually’ people also leave a game despite devs which give it their all. Why? Because ‘their all’ sometimes isn’t good enough if they stay railroaded in their thought-process. Risky but big moves are at times mandatory, with the option to rollback should it miss the mark by miles.

And I agree… just doing bandaids is bad. But ‘EHG doing the right thing’ is not something I personally see either. If that would be the case then why do we have a Boss-Ward system which formerly had the specific goal to not affect low DPS builds… now suddenly doing exactly that especially much? Or why can we skip dungeons rather then them being fixed? Or why do we have Mastery Respec rather then a proper rework of how a player is introduced into them since it’s presented really early… and hence can easily lead to picking something you got no clue about yet?

I mean, it’s nice you trust in EHG so much, but blind trust is more dangerous then scepticism, it enables people to stay in their lane when they’re supposed to switch it, leading to those exact mentioned outcomes.

And you think this process wouldn’t play into properly fixing it afterwards? Nothing taken away from it? There is knowledge behind the band-aid to realize ‘this is what the skill is exactly missing to feel good and work’, so instead of blindly throwing a option at players and missing by a landslide dialing more tightly into a reliable good feeling afterwards is the possibility.

It’s not wasted time to do that stuff, quite the contrary.

They applied tons of bandaids which gradually dialed into the actual ‘sweetspot’ before then making a grand rework of the respective mechanic. Not without reason the Atlas has been majorly reworked several times, up to the point where player-agency (the major issue) has actively been solved via first introducing the Atlas tree and then the Scarabs in modern form, allowing extremely distinct choices on how you wanna play and what you wanna see for content at any time nearly.
Same with dialing in with their individual crafting mechanics. Eternal orbs were too powerful, so they put it into Bestiary. That was still too strong there so they changed it into only affecting magic items… and there it works well! Or the itemization for finished Incursion temples since that caused problems with third party trading.

Those are all band-aids, but nonetheless they dial in into finding out the specific details of what exactly was wrong or non-optimal with those systems.

Exactly, that’s a big part of what we need!

And that’s not hard. Pure numerical changes are easily done and easily removed again… if EHG finally would get their stuff together to ignore outcries about ‘but my build mid-cycle!’ and do it early, heavily and immediately.
To dial into the specific sweet spot you need several iterations, and you can’t do that if each iteration is 4 months apart when you need 5 of em, you never get done with anything, especially not when the content around it changes and destroys the initial premise established over and over along that road.

It is, it’s what GGG’s engine runs off of partially… but given we’re talking about Unity underneath all sorts of weird nonsensical things can happen. Unity is known for having issues with a variety of common mechanics which no engine realistically should’ve any issues with. It’s a cobbled together thing that’s massively bloated nowadays.

If content is severely misbalanced then that’s a cause to speak up.
Disparity is normal… but severe disaprity is not. ARPGs are RNG heavy enough to allow success with a non-optimal mastery or skills commonly… but when that is basically non-existent because not even the RNG layer can make up for it then a problem exists.
LE has that issue with many many builds…

Still competitive, still a bad state.

How about you get off your high horse and back down to earth behaving like a normal civilized human?

And plainly spoken if a mechanic allows you to get basically immortal and is the cause of an oversight that’s commonly a cause for a immediate mid-cycle patch, no matter what someone thinks about it that their build now is ‘worse’.
And if it’s mentioned by the devs it should actively be counted as exploiting as well and hence be a ban-able offense.

Your argumentation is utterly disgusting and appalling.

This has nothing to do with competing. Competing is about personal skill, using a exploit to avoid needing any skill and saying ‘I’m at the top, look at me how great I am!’ is just sad. Makes the competition loose all value.

42

Showing you my gear, but you can’t even grasp the strategy—still blabla talking about imagined “immunity”, I’m literally laughing my ass off.
I tried explaining with the Jordan example, but you still didn’t get it. What can I say?
Let me dumb it down further: After the Lakers won two championships in 2000, the NBA introduced zone defense rules in 2001.
The Weak just complain like, “Shaq only won because the no-zone-defense loophole existed,” “Shaq’s was always use bullshit skills,” or “No one bothered competing because you had to use boring brute-force dunks and exploit unintended game mechanics.”
Hilarious, right? Anything beyond your comprehension isn’t a “rule”—only what you think matters.
That’s why you’re childish and I won’t waste any more time engaging in meaningless battles with you.

43

I have a button (Warcry) that makes me immortal for one second. I reduced the cooldown of that button to below one second. I now play arena with permanent damage immunity. I played to rank 1 with damage immunity. I am therefore the greatest player in the game, with the highest skill, everyone else is weak and has less skill than me. Nobody else understands what is the essence of competition and everyone is stupid except for me. Why don’t other players just get buttons that makes them immune to damage permanently?

LOL

Play in a vision arena tournament and I’ll shit on you.

The fact that you are using basketball analogies to defend permanent damage immunity in an ARPG as fair or balanced or even remotely intended is truly HILARIOUS.

44

Skills need to be individually analyzes to figure out why they’re not worth it. Is it simply not doing enough damage? Is it not being able to sustain said damage? Is it not being able to clear?
That takes time. Time that will have to be wasted again when it’s analyzed again for the rework, which will likely invalidate all the patchwork you did before. So it’s overall wasted time for little gain.

There’s a reason not even PoE does this. You have dozens of skills that are used by less than 0.1% of players and they don’t all simply get numerical upgrades (which is all skills in PoE do, really) for a new patch. Because of all the time required for it.
GGG buffs a few per league, but most remain barely usable for a long time.

2 per season actually, so far. Lich and Necro are coming next, which closes Acolyte, since Warlock is fine since it was introduced.

It wouldn’t. 2 or 3 seasons later there are a lot of uniques and mechanics that interact with the skill and you’d need to analyze it again.

45

Does it? That’s kinda what the playerbase swiftly zeroes in though. ‘This feels bad because xyz’. Sure, it’s not always the exact reason… but you get the direction from it at least.

And the time isn’t ever ‘wasted’, especially not for a rework, quite the contrary as stated.
A rework needs to have the knowledge of why a skill needs to work the way it works. This includes cooldowns, mana cost, damage, scaling potential, scaling methods, mechanical conversions if the skill has them and the items available to interact with it for said conversions.

If someone goes along and says ‘Yeah, meteorite is not a good skill’ then we already know it’s either the skill itself numerically or the interactions commonly used to make it happen. For meteorite the only reliable way to build it is through fireball triggers since the animation is shorter and it absolutely churns into your mana.
Yes, we got mana stacking options but it still does, and those mana stacking options don’t come with strong enough upsides to make up for the missing defensive measures otherwise provided in those slots.

So then it becomes simple already, doesn’t it? To acquire the respective damage needed and being half-way reliable you need to abstain from defensive measures.
So the solutions hence are to increase possible defensive measures respective for meteorite… or to allow it to become a offensive tank-style skill by reducing the full mana cost of meteorites triggered through fireball down to 40% while also re-working fireball itself (since it’s not in a good state as well) to not cast one after another fireball but instead for multicast doing all of them at once in a fan-shape.
Why? Because the fan-shape allows multiple triggers at once for meteorite, making it a large AoE skill (as one would expect) without extra AoE investment being substantially needed, the extra triggers allowing you to attack in the rough direction rather then exact and if the damage is too high respective to mana cost then nerfing it down to 70% specifically through the trigger would be a good start.

Here you go, that’s meteorite fixing for example.

A vast amount actively does! Not all well enough and several miss the mark… but the majority of skills actually do get adjusted.

Also PoE’s skills being solely ‘numerical upgrades’ is very much nonsense. You get a boatload of mechanical adjustments. In Settlers this included Blink Arrow for damage conversion. All Warcries being changed at once. All attack skills with flat damage values being changed at once and all Banners being changed at once.
Mechanically mind you. Not numerically.

The core difference is that each skill-gem in PoE is more or less a major node in LE comparatively… not quite but the closest example.
And in LE we don’t get individual nodes substantially adjusted mechanically every Cycle for now… maybe in the future.

Dunno, outside of Chain Hook I actually don’t know any unusable skills in PoE… well… and Flicker Strike, but that’s more of a meme skill then a proper one, fun to play simply but not ‘good’.

Fair, roughly 2 years is more… on par with the standard of the sector, that’s true.

Numerically, yes. Interaction-wise nope.
For example Black Hole won’t ever be good to play as a core skill because the cooldown is just so large that you can’t do it. Unreliable. That won’t change even with massive changes to damage or in-built defensive measures… you’ll simply die during Echos since you’re helpless when you miss enemies. And vast numerical changes will lean into making it a simple boss killer since it would need to do ridiculous amounts of damage to warrant the hefty cooldown.

That are core mechanical aspects which EHG hasn’t ‘dialed in’ to a proper state simply. Much like Fireballs ‘chain-casting’ rather the casting them all at once, leading to detrimental outcomes for a stat which is supposed to make your skill better.

As for the numerical stuff? That’s the least of worries overall, you can change them swiftly and dial in, but mechanically it takes time to find the proper sweetspot, which is also nothing that’s changed by items commonly. Cinder Strike for example will never feel nice, why? Because it’s a 3-hit combo which only has specific scaling mechanics for the first hit, even going so far as to allow removing the follow-up hits because they’re actively detrimental to you. And since you’re stuck in animations - and while being a relatively quick one - this means you’ll have a high chance to die because you get ‘stuck’. Heck… animation cancelling is a primary aspect of modern ARPGs for a reason, to allow reaction and not be stuck after committing like in a Souls-Like. That Volatile Reversal for example is actively used as a method to break out of animations is wild… that’s how bad it is to get stuck in one.

There’s a whole ton of mechanical work to be done for many many skills which aren’t solely ‘band-aids’ that get thrown out the window but would stay important even for a rework.

46

Do you? Ask 10 players and you’ll likely get 10 different answers.
Ask players like Abomb and they will tell you that it feels bad because it doesn’t do 10 trillion damage and thus can’t compete to be the #1 skill. And if it can’t compete for the #1 skill, then it’s utter garbage.
Ask players like myself and Llama and we might say that it doesn’t feel fun to play with (whatever that means for each of us).
Etc.

I mean, that’s kinda what I said, except for the first part. They would have to analyze the skill to figure out why it’s not working and then add a patchwork to it so it can kinda function until you have time to rework it.
And when you do have time to rework it, you’ll have to analyze it again because of all the new stuff and all the new patchworks that have been introduced. The previous time you wasted in analyzing the skill really isn’t worth much anymore because you have to basically start from scratch again.

So, you mean reworking the skill? That’s not patching a number, like you were proposing. It’s changing how the skill works. It’s what they’re already slowly doing.

And yet there are still dozens that haven’t been changed in years even though they are barely played by anyone.
For example, Flamethrower trap. One of the least used skills in the game and it hasn’t been changed in 4 years.

Seems like it should be easy to just “increase the number” and thus GGG must be incompetent for not doing so.

There aren’t any that are unusable in LE either. Just so vastly underperforming that no one picks them. Just check poe.ninja builds and check the bottom of the skills and you’ll find lots and lots of skills that aren’t used by even 0.1% of the playerbase.
And many of those have been like that for years now.

Not even 2 years. Sentinel is done, so are Runemaster, Falconer and Runemaster (being the newer masteries they don’t need a rework). So there are 9 left (8 if you consider Sorc as having already been reworked). That’s 4-5 seasons, so a year to a year and a half.

Sure it can. All they need is to add a unique that adds increased cooldown recovery speed based on int, for example, and everything has changed for the skill. And now they have to analyze everything again.
So it will really depend on what they add and what it does. And since they add a bunch of stuff that affects a bunch of different stuff, it’s not unlikely to happen either.

47

Yep, and from there you get the discussions, and inside those discussions you get the details suddenly coming up.

Initial feedback is broad and only showcases ‘something is off’ at best when it’s a rather common notion. But for detailed discussions you suddenly get quite a ton of surprising takes.

And yes, ABomb will say it’s worthless, but also everyone having read 5 posts realizes that ABomb is utterly useless in regards to feedback. And simply saying ‘it doesn’t feel good’ is at least a step further. That means that mechanically something is not ‘in the right place’ usually.
Players really quickly find out if something is mechanically ‘off’ or if it’s solely the damage, it’s rarely mixed up surprisingly.

Core functionality of skills doesn’t change. Only details on how they do scale normally.
The only time it does is when major reworks happen, like the Banner reworks for PoE. Otherwise it’s ‘dialing in’ to a overall functional state. Examples of that are removing so called ‘shotgun mechanics’ from skills, meaning them hitting the same enemy multiple times via a single cast without it being intended to happen, or converting damage not as intended and so on.

The only exception is when cross-interactions through new items or mechanics come and are overlooked, which needs to happen no matter before or after a rework, as it has to be taken into consideration in both cases.

You mean they can’t use the same method as multishot has to cast several fireballs? The code’s already there, no difference in functionality. So that ‘rework’ is a 30 minute one. The second part of it is giving the auto-cast functionality a modifier.

If that’s enough to count as a complete ‘rework’ then all hope’s lost for the game anyway.

Flamethrower Trap build, T17 showcase included, T17 mind you is nothing 99% of players attempt since it’s too dangerous to do for most builds.
This build is a HC viable build btw even.

But yes, it needs adjustments to be on par with most other builds, it’s viable though. Not something we can say about many skills in LE, can we now? :slight_smile: Killing Aberroth reliably? Or even getting a shot at uberroth?

Acid Flaks viability for a core skill is non-existent.
Black Hole as a core skill is non-existent.
Cinder Strike as a core skill is non-existent unless I missed something.

Just off the top of my head.

In PoE I’m talking about killing uber-maven. I don’t know any skill which can’t beat that fight outside of Chain Hook… reliably.

Why? Because in PoE you can build defensively, in LE you can’t for high-end content. The avenues in PoE are so manyfold that you can - with extreme investment - become nigh unkillable. In LE you can have a fully fitted 4 LP set and still will be dead depending on class after a single hit.

Meant ‘per round’.

Yeah, that would be atrocious game design. ‘Unless you have this unique it’s not playable’ is not how good design goes.
So unless EHG want to position themselves as garbage tier designers that won’t happen.

It’s already far too prevalent anyway. Uniques are supposed to elevate already working skills to become stronger… not skills being entirely reliant to even make stuff work.

You can play fireball in PoE without a single unique and do decent. You can also do it with Flamethrower trap. You can do it with friggin Leap Slam if you’re masochistic for some reason… people have done it even!
In LE? Show me a working unique-less Acid Flask build at 300 corruption.

48

Core functionality in LE changes all the time. Just look at mana guide, gordian prism, ravager’s dart, etc, only to name a few added this season.
This means that if they had looked at focus in 1.0 and they wanted to rework focus next season, they’d need to analyze it all over again.

They most likely can’t. Unless the skill is already coded for it, you can’t just patch the code that way. Just like you likely can’t use the same code for Smite, or Acid Flask, or any other projectile skill really.

What you said is like saying that they can turn fireball (or any skill) into a movement skill in 30 minutes because summon skeletal mage can already do it.
That’s not how programming works.

EDIT: submitted by mistake, will carry on.

Uby is not being for most builds being able to do it, so we can discount that.
But Aby? Sure. I’d say pretty much every build in the game right now has an easy shot at him.

So all skills are viable in LE in the same way they are in PoE.

And I’m willing to bet that most of the skills people complain about have someone somewhere doing 1k+ corruption with them.
But just like in your example of the build above, having someone be able to make a super build out of it doesn’t mean the skill itself is in a good place.

If less than 0.1% of players are using that skill, then something is wrong with it. Even if it can delete Uby in 1s.

Can kill Aby:

Can kill Aby:

Last season it could delete bosses at 1k corruption, so I expect it only got better now:

That was just an extreme example of how a new unique can change a skill for more than simple numbers. They have added plenty already that change a skill at the interaction level.

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49

You’re naming items, not skills.

Items are a layer above skills, not the other way around. You design items with the skills in mind instead of skills with items in mind for a reason.

So if they had looked at Focus in 1.0 and then afterwards done the items that means it changes accordingly. Which is obvious.
Doing it the other way around is utter nonsense, you don’t put a roof on your house before setting up the walls.

If the cast-types are not done in universal classes then EHG is plainly spoken inept, that’s a core fundamental aspect of programming such stuff, you layer it from the bottom up to allow scaling for the future accordingly. And if it’s not done because of early mistakes (happens a ton, GGG has decade old issues existing too which are overdue for a change, so does also Torchlight, and we don’t need to talk about D3/D4 even) then it needs to be fixed ASAP rather then later.

That’s exactly how properly handled classes work though in game design, absolutely, 100%.
There’s only 2 possible routes of programming paradigms to follow with a project of this scale with the hence necessary mutability: OOP and FP.
And both allow this structural setup to happen. It’s a core foundation of a large-scale project even.

Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying, you can turn Fireball in 30 minutes in a skill which first teleports you like Teleport does, then following up with the animation for the fireball and executing the cast. Or you can have the animation and then teleport as the fireballs fly out in the direction you pointed.

If that functionality for their code-base is not available then plainly spoken they got a ridiculously huge problem. Skills are - outside of specific unique bits - highly repeated chains of processes, so re-coding them individually is the height of nonsense design-wise.

Fair, very limited functionality, but acceptable. If we take 300c running into account without ‘I need 2 LP items through the bank to even do it’ then it becomes quite problematic.

And the Acid Flask one is nice, good find, really bad though for echos as we can see, with very heavy investment already.

As for Black Hole: Can it also run echos? Or is it just a bossing thing? Because ‘viable’ is ‘all content’ currently in LE.

Cinder Strike: The whole build is based completely around a bug… with basically no damage on Cinder Strike. If it still exists then that’s a negative for the game, not a positive.

50

Items that change the core functionality of skills. Which is often the case in LE.

I think you’re missing the point. Plenty of uniques will influence skills in several ways. Not only do some change the core functionality of skills, like the above examples, but many also change the way these skills interact with affixes.

For example, another 1.2 unique (just the first example I found): Downfall of the righteous. Adds fire and necrotic DoT leech. This alone can change a skill from feeling like crap to feeling good.
This means that if they had looked at, for example, wandering sprits (a necrotic skill) and spent time analyzing what it needed in 1.0 and then adding a patchwork to buff it up, when they went to actually rework it now in 1.3 they would have to spend the same time analyzing it again, because the skill changed a lot due to the uniques introduced.
And quite likely the skill would still feel “meh” because all it got was a number bump.

That would be true in most games, but in LE, the “specific unique bits” happen quite regularly. If you look at all the unique transformations skills have in LE that no other skill has, you’ll see that it’s a lot more than most games.
Which means that any generic parent class you want to apply would have to be coded with all of those unique behaviours embedded in it. Which also means that any class that inherits it (so all skills) would have all those behaviours embedded in them, even when none of them use 99% of it.
Which only leads to unnecessary bloat.

Why should drain life know how to spiral, orbit, spread shoot, channel, nova, target seek, etc, when it will only ever use 1-2 of those?

It’s much more clean and efficient to define all that behaviour in a skill’s unique class. The parent class should only have the general things that apply to everything, like damage calculations. That’s programming 101 for OOP (which I’m fairly sure is what they use).

I doubt there’s a single DPS skill that can’t do 300c in 1.2. It might have issues, it might be clunky, it might be slow, it might have all sorts of issues for players to complain about. But I sincerely doubt there’s a single one that can’t do 300c.
I even doubt there’s any that can’t do regular Aby.
1.2 was a huge power creep, with lots of great items, but especially with lots of great idols easily accessible.

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51

Upper layer, skills are lower layer. It’s really really important to differentiate between them.

That’s entirely reliant on the testing environment though, if EHG has a baseline for reliable feedback given in their environment related to the base damage of skills as well as the overall uptime expected (for example 40% at bosses and 80% in echos, solely as example, not realistic numbers, skill-dependant obviously) then new additions even if done in the future get immediately picked out if they go outside of a pre-set limit.

That’s how long-term ‘zoning in’ for balancing works in complex systems, you need a respectively complex testing setup that’s solid… takes a shit-ton of time but is necessary as otherwise you either don’t get it done or it takes absolute ages.

Which isn’t always true, it depends entirely on how the respective class hierarchy is set up in OOP. Or how much you break down the respective functions which the other functions are based upon in FP.

I prefer FP because I think the readability is better and with clean coding you get overall more effective results as a end-product compared to OOP, but that’s another topic and currently not professional business standard sadly it seems.

Because that should be in the parent classes for the skill anyway, leading to the unique class for the respective skill.

If they use OOP (highly likely) then multiple inheritance with virtual inheritance is a given, so having several parent classes at once inside a single unique class for the skill wouldn’t be a problem. You get one parent class for ‘execution type’ like shoot, orbit, spread shoot, channel and so on… and you get one for example related to ‘movement’ like rooted, teleport, traversal and so on.

If you want to avoid that you go a step further via ‘self-modifying code’ and let the immutable values be written down after all of that to reduce the call-amount and hence system load. Debug nightmare though.

Yeah, that’s a very very fair point. Made some ‘more then wonky’ builds at least doable. I wonder how many are left which are not ‘realistically’ doable… meaning a ‘mediocre player’ (which is above average joe by a lot) being able to play ‘comfortable’ at that stage.

52

I dont know what is happening in his video per say, but its certainly not damage immunity.

His warcry is 3 second cd. he has 62% cdr. so its 5/1.62 = 3.08 so he is only damage immune 1/3 of the time.

He is simply killing enemies as they spawn. Im not sure what the interaction is here, tornado aoe being huge I guess? Enemies dont even really get to interact with him, they spawn then die

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53

Yeah, that’s what I thought. He certainly doesn’t have the ~401% CDR that would be required to hit <1 sec.

But don’t forget, @TrundleGod is just that much better than us, so we must be wrong. And that additional 8% CDR that was added (in total) that is being used on the idols is truely game breaking.

The range on the Storm Bolts cast by Tornados does appear to have a few issues with it, even ive noticed that it can hit mobs off screen from the Tornado/Primalist.