I should be grateful that they’re making an attempt at good game design rather than making changes that are even more obviously terrible? I mean… I guess. It is kind of their job to make a fun game. If the skills aren’t fun to play, then their customers will go find a game that is. They’re not doing us a favor by trying to keep the skills functional, it’s in their own best interest.
That’s actually why I’ve even bothered to post my thoughts on the change. They seem to be competent game designers who are genuinely trying to make a fun game. That alone is sadly something of a rarity in this genre for some reason.
Personally, I’m what you’d call an alt-o-holic. While playing a character I’ll see an item drop that I want to try or just think of a build that I think will be fun, and so I’ll abandon the previous character and make a new one. Devouring Orb has been the only build I’ve played in LE that actually held my attention long enough to get into empowered monoliths and I still liked going back to him. It just felt fun to play, particularly in the way it let me focus on the positional aspects of the game.
With a functional 66% reduction to fire rate, I’m just concerned that my strongest character and the build I had the most fun with is going to now be something that I never want to go back to. It was also the only character I had that was strong enough to try to go for legendaries, so now that’s basically also off the table at least as far as things I can do right away with the new patch.
That one change kind of took me from “I can’t wait for the new patch!” to “Meh, I’m having fun with Siralim right now so maybe I’ll boot up LE at some point and take a look”.
Are you sure this assembly has become unplayable?
The fact that it will stop cleaning the entire monitor at the touch of a button, as for me, does not mean that you cannot play through it.
I doubt it’s unplayable. But for me, the fun of that skill was very contingent on how it felt when using it to move through the monolith. It may still have a reasonable damage output for its investment and be totally playable as a result, but if the fun isn’t there for me anymore then I don’t care.
What is the pleasure of playing for you?
Passing high difficulty like a hot knife through butter, due to skills with overestimated efficiency?
Well, no offense, but I don’t think it’s objective and that developers should support this kind of gameplay.
Disclaimer - This response is going to come of as rather pedantic. You have been warned, so skip it if that bothers you.
First - The changing nature has really only been a thing after PoE became popular. If you look at the majority of the genre - D2, Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and even recent indie games like Chronicon - the developers never really changed how builds worked. Excepting anything that exploited a bug, for the most part builds that worked at launch continued to work for the life of those games. They may have been outclassed as expansions introduced new more powerful options, but they didn’t break.
Second, did you not read the part about me being an alt-o-holic. I have 18 characters in LE. I just haven’t enjoyed playing any of them as much as the Devouring Orb character.
I was being polite, there’s no need to make insinuations you know nothing about. My DO build wasn’t exceptionally strong, it’s on par with my other builds other than what you’d expect from the character being higher level. If there really were interactions that made the build overpowered then I’m sure they could have nerfed those without killing the fun.
I just had fun playing it, probably for the same reason I enjoy minion builds in ARPGs. It’s normally my go-to for the genre, but for one reason or another the minion builds in LE that I’ve tried have tended to fall kind of flat. DO worked for me though.
While I agree mostly, games like D2 also don’t add near as much. I view PoE seasons like CCGs. Every season new things come out and old things get changed. They want each season to be fresh and not just a repeat of the prior season.
Just think about how it would evolve the game if they didn’t nerf old league “winners”. The new league would come out and everyone would just jump on the “best build” from last league. The game would get extremely stale and there would be a noticeable drop-off in players. In order to combat this, the creators/devs would have to release new, more powerful things to shake up the league. That leads to rampant powercreep, which is also very bad for games. Power creep leads to old stuff becoming obsolete, also pissing off players that worked for those things.
The best way, if you intend to continually add lots of content, is to change old skills to make each season fresh. The skill may get nerfed too much and new things end up being too strong, but that will change next go round. The nerfed skill may come back at some point and be on top again. The thrill of changing leagues is the discovery. I assume since you have 18 alts, just like I do, that the experimentation with new build ideas is what is fun. When they change a skill drastically, it basically feels like a whole new skill to theorycraft around. I get bored quickly with the same old thing. Just like how they did Maelstrom. The change makes me want to try it again.
Hi mate!
With all the respect I have to disagree with your statement on Grim Dawn and PoE “patches not changing how build works”. I’ve played both for a long time as Steam shows (1429 hours on Grim Dawn and 2633 hours on PoE [actually much more cause I’ve played it on Stand Alone also for a bunch of time). I have at least 5 broken builds in Grim Dawn because of changes over time and some more on PoE. I’ve always played seasons. So I have to disagree with you on this statement, HOWEVER, I completly understand what you said. I bought Last Epoch some days ago and also liked more the VK Devouring Orb. I’m still on the beginning of Monolith (played the game for only 25 hours, now i’m lv 65) and reading the patch notes took me off a little bit also. Ok, I will obviously test the build to see if it was gutted (after D3’s season [10 days or less maybe? ) but still understand what you felt. It’s like DO is so shining and interesting build that rest is “more of the same”. So yeah I understand you.
Once your game has a large breadth of content and has a business model based continual season resets then I’d tend to agree. LE isn’t there yet, it doesn’t even have the entire class list filled out.
If they took the fun out of DO but there was also a Falconer build that I liked and the there’s a character reset happening so I don’t really need to care how viable my old characters are, then this whole problem never happens. Perhaps LE gets there at some point, but it isn’t there now.
It probably doesn’t help that there are a lot of things that the developers find fun that I strongly dislike. For example, I basically can’t stand a build with more than 3 active skills, and they seem to think that builds are only fun when using 4-5. It makes it hard to find things that I can really enjoy, even if I think the overal game design is really good.
This could easily just be that the game is still in development. That is what beta is for. They probably found that DO was basically the only skill that VK specced. It needed to be balanced. It was a skill that people often put on autocast as well, which EHG doesn’t want. It goes against their design. If a skill gets set on autocast with the numlock trick, you can guarantee the skill will get a rework. VK as a whole is a cool different idea and I think people like it for that. LE said they are going to do seasons at some point after official release, so they probably won’t stop tweaking skills.
Again, I am just the same. I pretty much just want to use 1 or 2 active skills and fill the rest with passives. Lots of reasons for that. That’s probably why Primalist Wolves is my highest build.
The truth is we are going to have a very similar discussion over changes to skill every single patch due to beta, and its not a bad thing.
Was the same in 0.8.3 over eq werebear and wraiths and now 0.8.4 over D.O and S.O, and more for the foreseeable future.
Chill, take your builds with a grain of salt. Especially if u gonna play a meta build that is plastered all over internet and spam constantly in global chat for being “so op so good”
Change is the constant, spare yourself the nosebleed.
I was more under the impression that it was the waypoints that were difficult to read. I think it’s just some choices of colors or contrasts not working very well together.
) but still understand what you felt. It’s like DO is so shining and interesting build that rest is “more of the same”. So yeah I understand you.