First Impressions of a PoE SSF Addict

Feedback and Suggestions
42

@Llama8 @Jerle
While i “overall” agree with you, that “so far” nobody really trashed the Game but only stated their Opinion, for me it often feels weird when i read such Topic. It remind’s me of the classic WoW Era, where a lot of MMO’s did popup, and when a MMO tried to be different, people complained with “you are wrong, you should do it like that if you want to compete with WoW, otherwise the Game will fail”, meanwhile other Games which tried to copy as much of WoW possible get trashed for being cheap WoW Rip-offs.

I mean don’t get me wrong, there are Games and Genre’s which i love for being consistent, the Reason why i dig ARPG’s so much is because most of them give us a different, unique Experience. This also stays true especially for Game-Series itself. I mean alot of people mourn about Diablo 3 and stuff, but imagine if they would’ve stayed consistent for Diablo 2. Than we still would’ve a mere Dungeon-Crawler with no Open World, no Skilltrees, not Class Identity and stuff. A lot of people tend to forget that there is as much of an change happened to Diablo 2 vs Diablo, as blizzard did with Diablo 3 vs 2. Heck, even for Torchlight 1+2 which were big hommage and loveletter to D1+2, it still was unique and fresh enough to be it’s own thing.

And look at Wolcen? What was the biggest hangup for the Community? That the Devs went from their initial unique Idea to a more Diablo 3 Esque approach, removing Open World to a more Linear experinece, removing almost everything what Wolcen initial idea made so unique. Or does anyone remember Sacred? I mean this is one of the very few ARPG’s (if not the only one) which was consistent. But ffs Sacred 1 was a masterpiece, and if you apply the community patches i’d argue the same goes for Sacred 2. But what about Sacred 3? Instead keeping up the stuff which made Sacred so unique, they tried to catch the Diablo 3 audience by making a cheap D3 Rip-off. Thank god, that’s what we needed yes. And than Topics like this pop-up and suggest that a ARPG to be good or being able to compete needs to be “more” like Path of Exiles. Yikes. I’d go even as far and argue that’s especially wrong considering the 3 biggest ARPG’s competitors (Diablo 3, Path of Exile, Grim Dawn) right now are very different Games.

I mean don’t get me wrong on this. I get that if you have your Favorite ARPG’s, there are Features which you would love to see carry over to other ARPG’s. Especially as ARPG Fan which played most of them like myself you know that feeling very well, but to say “for a ARPG to be successfull, it must be like this”, without possible considering that maybe the Game hit’s a different target audience, which try to get away from said Game(i mean seriously, PoE is one of the very few ARPG’s which i don’t like. I don’t find it very good but that’s another Topic), i mean i atleast didn’t buy into LE to get a PoE Ripoff (as example).

I mean, idk man. Maybe there are few Points which i’d say they are atleast good enough to look into it, but it really bothers me if someone comes up like: “If the Game want really to compete with something, it needs to be like something”, which IMHO is a pretty close-minded “Mainstream” mentality. I mean Path of Exile itself is the proof anyway, goes away from the classical Class-Identity and proper skilltree, to such a Final Fantasy 7 Esque Materia-alike Gem-Socket System(which is one of the reasons why i dislike PoE so much).

I mean okay, like you said he / she does give his/her perspective which Devs could take into the account, and i’m sure they won’t change it simply out of the competition thought they need to be more like PoE, but rather if they really decide to change, mostly due it might still fit their vision, but i can understand why the Guy you answered is so worked up about this topic(because that goes for myself as well). Especially if someone generalize so much, because i can tell you to 100% if they would change their Class-System to this Gem-Socket type of stuff, than i’m pretty much gone.

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43

But are you having a good time? Is it fun?
It shouldn’t matter if a build has 1-7 buttons it uses. It needs to be fun.

I’m a big fanboy of PoE and to me it is one of the greatest bastions of gamedesigns and I couldn’t agree more with that statement. But how it FEELS is completely different. And that’s the magic you want baby. Not everything has to be possible, but it has to FEEL like it’s possible. PoE has this nailed down to the f*cking wall (having the gear being so deep helps). Most players know that CwC Cyclone flame wall won’t work. But maybe. Just maybe. If you could get that Kaom’s Heart…maybe you could make it work…

It will definitely not be easy. It’s going to take a tremendous amount of effort to rival Diablo and PoE. Especially keeping in mind that those devs are working on next versions too that vie for our attention. I absolutely think the studio is up to the task though (I wouldn’t be posting such lengthy novels otherwise) but sure as sh*t it ain’t gonna be easy. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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44

It’s a tough line to find between being unique & trying new things but also doing things in a similar enough way that you’re not confusing the **** out of the people trying to play your game.

I loved Sacred 1 & 2, #3 was an abomination…

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45

I won’t argue that, but the thing is, doesn’t it go the same for Path of Exile. Like i said, there are three major competitors right now with PoE, Diablo 3 and Grim Dawn (and soon i guess this korean grinder called Lost Ark) and each go their own direction. Sure there might some stuff where they inspire them from the other competitors, but overall. I mean if we say, they would go more the PoE direction, you would atleast confuse the D3 or GD crowd, if they go more GD than the same for D3 and PoE… and so on. So on which audience they need to focus so they don’t confuse the s*** out of people?

While i agree with you, that’s atleast how i feel as well, i’ve yet to add something in this. With my Argument above, i didn’t meant to trash Sacred 3. For People (and i know for sure there are some people who infact do) who love/like Sacred 3, all power to you. I didn’t mean to offend you. I simply tried to make a point that going with the standarts and mainstream isn’t everytime in the interest of Fans or Players.

46

TheLightningYu

Your posts are so true.
I have the same ref as you, play the same game and love every series because of their uniqueness. You’re right too on telling that D1 and D2 are really different and it’s a good thing.

The only A-RPG I don’t like is POE. I play during alpha and beta, and could not support the gem system, even if I find it really interesting in concept.
I dont like that my build depend only on the loot (passive in PoE is a farce to me, at least at the end of the beta…).

Some other point in the thread are very interesting like power of item when seeing them.
Shard could have different color depends on the rarity too.
Color may depends on the total number of affix as proposed.
Another possibility (but hard to implement I think) is to color them depending on how well they match your loot filter.

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47

For me personally this is one of the downsides of PoE, the fact that almost any build will come to a point where the pace of combat is hilariously fast botheres me.

GGG already did some effort to reduce that by a little bit, with the big 2H changes and now with the relatively big cooldowns skills they added. But still PoE’s pace is one of my biggest gripes about the game. And the fact that you can clear more than one screen or more in mere fractions of a second is NOT enjoyable for me.

I would argue that PoE 1.0 had the same or less character building potential than LE currently has.

That is not true. While not everybuild has it, there are alot of builds that use certain instant cast stuff autocast on leftclick.

On top of that many of PoE’s builds (not all) revolve around ONE skill, with some occasional other skills within the rotation(some builds don’t even have more than 1 active skill to use)

In LE you have a relatively small number of useable skills at once, but for each and every builds you are using them ALL. Even with some skills as “autocast”, Builds in LE use more active skills on average than PoE’s.

EHG is already making attempts to remove anykind of “autocast” behaviour for skills. We will get to a point were autocast will be no longer present in LE, i am sure about that.

I don’t say PoE in general or PoE 1.0 is bad, i played a fair share of PoE myself for a decent amount of time. But PoE 1.0 was not that far away from current state of LE and PoE 1.0 was slightly longer in development.

I am pretty sure that LE within the 2 next major patches has more content that PoE 1.0.

I do agree that you shouldn’t just comapre LE to PoE, but to other simialr games. You mentioned Grim Dawn, whic his fair. But the statement that LE has virtually nothing in common with PoE is not true.

LE did take alot of inspiration for several other aRPG’s but also introduced a fair share of their own innovative ideas.

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48

I will just leave my 2 cents here.

PoE did a lot of great decisions and design choices, but design of combat or pacing is not one of these. Also I would like to see LE staying away from PoE’s style of character progression and “customization”.

3 Likes
49

If it was easy there woul’d be a lot of arpgs out there ^^. I think LE hits a sweet spot between the mind numbing ease of D3 and the total (unneeded) overload PoE is. Sure D4 and PoE2 will be there in the future and will be played but right NOW LE is the only intresting hack and slay that might see a realease in the somewhat near future.

So far only TL3 is there and TL3 is to light hearted to invest much time in it from my point of view but D4 and PoE2 is nothing we’ll see the next year… at least that’s what I think but what do I know ^^.

Then again LE needs to proof itself on the market because right now it’s a bit of a rolercoaster. I realy like the change with the defences for example and I talk about this since forever and now we finaly get some changes. Then again they wanted to do different approaches and they fend off each and every criticism about the system in place and now they change it. Let’s see if future changes water down the game or change it to something even better but I realy hope they stick with their vision.

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50

I kinda find it weird to like poe ssf loot and commenting on LE loot, let me explain better:

  • If LE loot and stats are a copypasta of some other game the closest one is PoE, same stuff of %life, flat life, crit chance & multi, same system of affixes and suffix spaces. It’s just a matter of work hours to add another 500 variety of affixes
  • (Big IMHO here) PoE loot is actually worse than LE, but as standalone point of view (not comparing to LE) it is just horrible in an ARPG.
    You have a tiny inv space and limited TPs, the gear is in the ground UNID. You need to setup the filter to hide 99% of the loot, then you need to take additional steps to loot unid stuff to then id the what, 20 items in the tiny inventory and throw another 99.9% of it. We are in the realm of 10k items to get a 1-5% upgrade, entire days or a week of grinding random mobs and looting crap with no progression (target farming is almost null and those encounters with a loot table are awfully rare or need an additional multi tier fragment farming). The system is so much intentionally diluted that it screams for RMT to buy a 10%+ upgrade in a matter of clicks.

It would require a possibly impractical overhaul, but if I would steer LE gear into some direction I would point it to GD.

That one is the ultimate SSF experience and is made for the player not for the RMT house, you really want to hoard stuff in it and the game does nothing to stop you, the philosophy is so much better, you can target farm, sure there are some super rare chase drops (never farm certain rings from bosses and expect quick loot heh) but you can make a run somewhere and find yourself with satisfying amounts of purples+blues+MIs that may not be the ones you need right now but you don’t want to throw them as these are completely powerful items that rather need to be hoarded for your future toons.

So at some point you find yourself with hoarded gear for 5-20+ possible combos and classes and you just have to roll new toons and then these toons will keep dropping uber gear and so on

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51

Yeah, I would like to see things like MIs in LE, though how they would work given the differing skill systems I don’t know.

52

There’s a lot of POE talk here. I understand and accept that it’s ok to compare LE to another game to make certain points. But discussions often spiral out of control once comparisons start to happen. All I can say is I really like the foundation of the item system and crafting. It has really good potential. They just need to add more depth and change the presentation of items (rare, unique, etc).

53

Removed edit.

54

There were intented. I remember dev post where time rift allow you to go to some specific epoch and fight boss that there the only one to drop one unique! (actually the boss from prehistoric drop one I think).
It’s not MI, but unique. You can make the same by making “unique” base item droping only by some named boss with random existing affix.
In the same way, you can make affix only drop from some type of monster/boss

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55

Yes, that’s true, they could “just” add a number of random affixes to a “unique” that only drops from certain mobs.

56

I have experience with PoE as well, strictly SSF. There are the things I’d like to see and the things I hope I never see in LE.

  1. The game in PoE can be beat. Outside the Delve mechanic (which I don’t like), the there is a finite difficulty after which you can consider the game beaten and can roll an new build. Games with “infinite difficulty” offer “endless progression” that trivializes all builds except the strongest one because no matter how well you do, you reach a wall. You inevitably lose, the matter is that which wave/greater rift, etc. All that changes are the numbers. I’d rather play 100 hours and leave satisfied than play 200 hours and leave with the feel of defeat.

  2. PoE has SSF universe, even though poorly implemented.

  3. Gems based skills - I actually like that, but this is my opinion. I always prefer to have options rather than not have an option. LE has other ways to provide options. Let’s see what happens. Also, increasing the skill cap past 20 for individual skills should be something to consider.

-1. PoE has the mechanics of having to grind endlessly to unlock just one attempt at a boss encounter, after which you have to grind it all over again, a process that takes too long for everyone other than traders or dedicated farmers. I hope that I don’t see this design choice ever again.
-1.a. The developers allowed content from prior leagues to stay (nice) but failed to address the boss gatekeeping mechanic, thus making the content almost nonexistent (bad).

-2. Crafting is waaaay too unrewarding and low yield outside trading. I hope LE is much closer to Diablo 3 that PoE in terms of player agency.

-3. Trading. The tail wags the dog. I’'d get rid of that completely and replace it with a carefully crafted gambling system to a mitigate bad luck as presently done in Diablo 3. I ordered the game right after learning that they got rid of trading. For dedicated traders, I’d recommend Fidelity.com and the like.

-4. Death penalty and very slow progress towards the final levels. Avoiding content should never be the result of a game design. Take note of Grim Dawn. There was “penalty” too, but I never worried about hitting level 100 at the max difficulty. It was slow, but not unreasonably so. Currently, the leveling past 60-70 in LE feels very slow and just boring. I haven’t played in a while but still have hopes for the game.

-5. PoE is unreasonably grindy to my taste and I have moved on. The reward for playing a game should be playing the game. Not reaching some artificial goal. In the latter case, gaming becomes an unpaid job. I have seen opinion where people want lower drop rates or what not. It reminds me of employees asking for a pay cut because the job feels too easy :blush:

57

I hope they don’t do that. Farming the same content over and over is a job, not a game. I’d much rather have world-only drops, backed by crafting and gambling systems.

58

i play poe since 21 july and this game since few days, all i wanna say is this game is more newbie casu player friendly, starting poe now is a bit hard, i made ssf too there, i made 3 char to 80 before to find one who can survive higher map (lvl 13 not even more :stuck_out_tongue:) i dont look for guide build ect,i like find myself. Here i ve fun,and happy i dont loose xp when i die lol. Atm i dont want to reroll wich is also good point bc i use to do 10 lvl 50 before have 1 to 100 for exemple,i like my paladin :slight_smile:
Also my PC is 10y old with a gtx 660 and i keep crash & crash in poe, like 9/10 in new league, 3/10 rest of content. Here game is new and absolutly 0 crash, so happy :smiley:
So i love both game,i wish them both a long life, because i ll play both long time
:slight_smile:

59

Good post.

I was expecting random levels in the Mono. Perhaps that is still to come, but I’ve heard very little about this recently and/or I misunderstood it from the beginning.

There are aspects of POE I clearly detest and some business decisions were almost desperate. However, I consider Chris Wilson to be one of the lone intellectual figureheads in the video game industry. This is a very rare thing when the large majority of the rest of the industry is cucked out of its mind. This is putting it nicely.

Itemization:

60

While I agree that PoE is kind of the gold standard of ARPGs and is the “best” in terms of overall systems that I value (char builds, items, etc), unfortunately it’s also a very alienating game, and gets more so over time. I have tried many times over the years to get different gamer friends interested in the game, but have only succeeded twice. It’s the kind of game which once it really hooks you, you’re in it for the long haul, but it is exceedingly more and more difficult to hook someone.

The complexity of the passive tree, the skill gem linking system along with all the exceptions, the bizarre trade system that requires you go in and out of the game, the ramp up of game difficulty and punishing progress (does anyone really enjoy having giant blocks of resistance taken away lol?), the ever changing additions of new crafting systems… for veterans with hundreds/thousands of hours, none of these things are issues and may even be benefits, but for a new or more casual player, they are a pretty huge hurdle. The best example is the skill gem system. I remember telling people how awesome it was and how much creativity it allowed for, and how it was almost like you were writing your own computer algorithm for certain skills (like cast when xxx happens). And then I realized that last part that I loved may be a real turn off for a lot of gamers lol.

I see LE fitting into a space between Diablo 3 and PoE, with interesting and deep systems that get deeper the more you play, but aren’t hard to digest from the getgo. It may never have the complexities that PoE does, but in this case that’s probably a good thing.

61

I think long time Final Fantasy players are really drawn to PoE. FF7 did Materia which is basically skill gems, and even had the same linking system. FF10 had the sphere grid which is basically the same as PoEs passive tree.