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.
I dont think they are not trying to get the fun out of this skill.
I assume they dont want a few skills to dominate the game to much and try to strike a balance with all the skills.
You might be right about killing this skill and then they might adjust it again.
Thats why this is a beta right?
I think you got a good point here. Just not for every skill. Warpath is just spin to win.
However i do see a lot of combo options that we have to do if you want to do good damage. I actually love that playstyle.
I also like the playstyle of needing 2 buttons sometimes. The problem in some games POE for example is that self cast or needing to press more buttons is worse then making it easier (damage wise).
I dont think its fair that players who have to get RSI because they have to press 4/5/6 buttons to get there damage of (which i love btw) should get less damage then players that basicly need to hit 1 or 2 buttons.
I still hope that there is something for everyone, which means more viable builds with 2 buttons aswell. Is it really true though that there are not many viable two button skills in LE? Just wondering.
I agree, sometimes the more interesting skills (which is an opinion not a fact) are doing not enough damage while the skills that you say often in the ARPG genre are on the top of the game. I hope LE wont make the same mistake but so far i did see some really interesting builds with Orbs for example.
In ARPG game design there’s something called a ‘power budget’. Basically, an upper limit of how much power one slot can give your character before it breaks the game. For example, weapons have the highest power budget for damage but a very low budget for defense. This lets the designers keep things relatively balanced, because they know about how much power every slot should give. If you’re making a ring that gives weapon levels of damage you can see/fix the problem before it even gets to the alpha testing phase.
The LE power budget for skills is split between the 5 specialization slots. Individual skills tend to have a ceiling on how much power they can have because an overpowered skill can still be used in conjunction with 4 others. There are some cases where skills can trigger each other letting one skill functionally benefit from 2 trees, but they’re not common and tend to come with significant drawbacks and restrictions on how they can be used.
For example, I was playing around with a lightning archer. Detonating Arrow and Shift are obvious and Smoke Bomb is a nice buff for stronger enemies, but then what? Dark Quiver is fine if you enjoy the gameplay of running around grabbing the arrows, but I don’t personally care for it. The bow attacks can proc multishot, but since I’m scaling lightning damage it does almost nothing. Shift can proc shuriken and/or flask, but since I’m scaling bow damage rather than throwing damage that’s also pretty bad. Nothing else does anything at all. I enjoy the gameplay of dodging around with shift and blasting away with detonating arrows but I just got frustrated that I couldn’t do anything I liked with those last skill slots so I gave up on her.
There are some builds that use fewer skills, but for the most part builds that don’t plan on actively pressing 4-5 buttons are going to end up sacrificing a lot of that power budget allocated to their extra skill slots. It also restricts build choices because you’re forced into the few skills that can make some use of the extra slots, however small that is. It would be great if classes had more access to passive/triggered/autocast skills so players could play a build with fewer active skills and still keep some of that power budget, but the developers seem dead-set against it.
It’s like they have some strange blind spot where they make mostly good design decisions but can’t fathom why a player would prefer the gameplay of a 2 active skill build over a 5 active skill build, while still supporting minion builds that may have one or no active skills.
) 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.
