Tired of hearing about how easy LE is. Ever play lightning arrow in POE and clear all the monsters off screen and never see them? Talk about easy and DUMB! But there is a solution. First don’t pick an S+ tier build unless it’s your favorite style. There are other things you can do too, such as not put all your skill and passive points into damage. And then there is gearing. You can nerf your own build, but it is way harder to do the opposite and min/max. Devs always try to balance builds but it is impossible with every single one. Do your own “tinkering” to maximize your what’s fun for you.
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I don’t. The campaign is still too easy. I also rarely upgrade gear (because lazy) so it’s not like I’m massively over gearing the content.
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I didn’t pick an S+ Tier build, I made my own, and the campaign is too easy. Early monoliths are too easy, empowered at 100c is the first real jump in difficulty, I’d rather that the difficulty ramped up a bit more during the campain and regular mono’s and then it is less of a spike gong from regular to empowered.
Campaign is not supposed to be difficult. It is a tutorial. Sure it could and should ramp up a bit. But would you rather go through the campaign of POE 2 after 0.2 patch? Especially act 1-3. If you played POE 2 from launch acts 1-3 were difficult but still fun. But from act 4 through endgame with meta builds it was a breeze too. No real difficulty ramp up like you have with corruption in LE. And empowered monoliths is where the real endgame starts.
I would have to say if you polled all gamers the vast majority would say they don’t want a difficult campaign. That’s not what a campaign is for. It is for learning and progressing into endgame grind. Do you think Diablo 4 players enjoy the campaign? They skip it on new seasons. POE 1 and 2 players? It is just a means to the end. Most players don’t enjoy campaigns and would rather skip it. Hell at least LE gives you the option to skip a lot of the campaign especially with alts.
I’ve not played POE2 so can’t really comment on it, but I’ve seen that there has been quite a lot of negative comments about it, whilst still retaining quite a high player count, so despite the outcry, there are still lots of people that seem to enjoy the game.
I played Last Epoch last season/Cycle and the campaign seemed like it was harder than it was this season. It could be that I just got better at the game, but I do think there has been some big power creep this season that has made the campaign quite a lot easier.
I think it is fine for the most part, but should ramp up a bit faster so the jump to 0c mono’s to 100c isn’t quite as sharp. Difficulty as you ramp corruption is fine.
ARPG’s supposed to be easy. Lvl up fast, pew pew loot and move on.
In the early diablo years they call them hack n slash for a reason.
You have a valid point. Power creep is up. But what is more fun, to die or delete monsters? A perfect balance is impossible that is why a perfect ARPG will never be possible for everyone. Just play what you have fun with. If not, try something else.
Blasting monsters is always fun. I just think the difficulty curve is a bit off.
At some point you’ll go from blasting without a though to, WTF was that I’m dead in 1 shot!
For most people it is going from normal mono’s to empowered, so if the difficulty gradually increased towards the end of the campaign and early mono;s, then it’s not such a big spike going into empowered.
Just my thoughts anyway.
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It actually increases in acts 8 and 9. Not too much, but it does. And it also keeps increasing during normal monos, you’re just outleveling them constantly. But if you use glyphs of envy that will happen less.
Anyway, normal monos to empowered monos is a bigger jump because the curve is increasing corruption in normal monos. It’s just that nobody does that. But it is there.
Or you could just go play on 1500-2000 corruption where mobs hit twice your HP pool, and you can get easily oneshot.
Yes, just play with a naked character, no points at all, then you’ll have challenge! Not like the developers are supposed to provide that within the framework of the game.
As an extra challenge, play blindfolded! It really ramps up the difficulty! If that’s not enough… use your feet for keyboard&mouse, it adds another layer of difficulty. Then you mgiht start to actually have a hard time at last!.. 
If I need to jump through hoops to experience any sort of difficulty then the game developers have balanced it like crap, simple as that.
Ah yes, who doesn’t know those 10 hour long tutorials? Just what any game needs.
Yes… quite a bit. From start to finish you shouldn’t have a single ‘spike’ of difficulty happening, ever. Currently there’s 3 major ones in the game. 4 maybe even if we count the Harbinger fight at the end of normal monoliths.
No, I instead expect the devs to neither make us waste our time entirely (no challenge means no feeling of reward. First time story is just that… works one time) and also not laugh as they watch us getting pummeled before we can even blink.
That’s literally their core job in terms of balancing.
I’ll have to disagree and also say that said majority has no clue about the psychological aspect of gradually scaling progression then.
The campaign is supposed to teach you what it then provides in a ramped up state in end-game. For that it still needs to challenge you. Not ‘make a single mistake and you’ll be made into mincemeat’ challenge… but a normal challenge of ‘you have to actually do stuff’. Which it doesn’t. It fails entirely at that. I still remember leveling up my mage… and standing in close-combat range while face-tanking bosses, waiting for their health-bar to deplete. That’s just an awful experience.
Mind you, that was with a really shitty build that hasn’t been up yet, I put several points into the wrong nodes and had no clue how exactly to build it at the time.
PoE 1 is decent campaign wise. It does stuff, it’s not yawn inducing, it’s not overly long, it does provide some forms of small challenge at some places still… early game a bit too slow to ramp up but hard to fix.
0.1 PoE 2 was a prime example of a proper hard campaign.
LE should be around 75% of what PoE 2 provided in terms of difficulty and it would be perfectly fine to deal with… because PoE 2 does a fantastic job in forcing you to learn how to deal with bosses during the mini-bosses already. LE does jack there.
They didn’t call them 'Hack’N’Slash only back then… it’s still the genre name by the way. ARPG is everything which is real-time and RPG. Dark Souls is a ARPG as well as a reminder.
Also as a reminder… neither D1, D2, Dungeon Siege or Sacred were ‘easy’ back then. They had a mediocre difficulty and each one of them managed to provide a proper one, 20 years ago. I would expect a modern game to not unlearn that stuff but to perfect it, not going back to being in the stone age of gaming instead.
Dieing long-term.
Deleting monsters for a few hours.
Either too much and they stop being fun swiftly.
Also doesn’t need to be perfect… but if I can put it into the hands of someone who’s never played games and they don’t wildly struggle then something is as wildly wrong.
No worries, with the new champions and with some of the woven echoes we have that as well! Far earlier! Suddenly dead from… who knows?
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Not technically true. There are many real time RPGs which aren’t ARPGs. ARPGs are RPGs that are focused primarily on the action. They have a story and RPG elements, but the action is the main focus of the game.
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Name one then and I’ll tell you the genre it actually has.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of real time dungeon crawlers from the 80s and 90s. Games like Dungeon Master.
More recently, you have Dragon Age, for example. Or the FF games after ATB was introduced.
Those are commonly falling into the category of so called ‘CRPGs’, which are classically named ‘Computer-RPGs’. Derived from the round-based structure of pen&paper games, hence having a fixed timeframe for actions implicated in them.
That makes them a TRPG with a visual ARPG overlay.
They’re still real time RPGs that aren’t ARPGs, though. That was the point.
Some of them are, some not.
Baldur’s Gate for example is a classic TRPG even, it’s not meant to provide the ARPG functionality primarily, albeit it does as a extra.
A classic example of a ARPG would be Diablo 1. When there is no round-based function available anymore, hence enforcing the reaction time basis and dexterity of the player as a skill instead of analytical solving of the problems at hand.
The dungeon crawlers with the grid-based movement for example were early adoptions of ARPGs as they missed those round-based options. Modern derivates of that are games like ‘Stoneshard’ which went back into the pure TRPG but the same underlying systems, while for example ‘Legend of Grimrock’ goes into the ARPG segment.
Then we have the ‘pure’ CRPGs of modern time like Baldur’s Gate 3, which still offer a combination. Though you can clearly see the rounds happening. Depending on play-style you can play it as both, which is the deciding factor for the naming there. Albeit BG 3 is not meant to be played without the pause function and analytical problem solving, it can be done with enough knowledge and dexterity though, it’s quite hard nonetheless to micromanage well enough. Same goes for BG 1 and 2 as examples.
They are just both genres at the same time simply. Much like nowadays you get simulation platformer adventure games (Adventure games and RPGs have been combined, though initially they were separate, a distinction between linear story progression and branching).
My distinction for aRPGs is actually simpler: they’re real time games that have RPG elements but that focus primarily on the action (combat) over story.
If an RPG focuses more on the story than the combat (even with real time), they’re not aRPGs, but one of the other multiple sub-genres of RPGs.
Yes, and then you miss categorizing it properly though. Which is fine personally but leads to problems in discussions. Already bad enough that people don’t know the difference between a rogue-like and a rogue-lite nowadays anymore… or what even are the defining factors of a ‘rogue’ game and the difference between that and permadeath, leading to people buying into products thinking that’s their genre and then getting ‘something’ but not remotely anything they’re signing up for