I was thinking of just increasing the numbers on items, to make it easier achievable… Very curious what kind of dynamic change they are going to present with “another kind of GB”…
You may think you don’t care, but the fact remains this is being touted/developed as a multiplayer game, so even if you never play MP, eventually the MP will be integrated and touch every part of the game design. The longer it lingers in the background, the worse for the game overall IMHO. Obviously if there are technical issues that don’t support the amount of players or whatever, I can understand they wouldn’t want to prematurely release it and get a bad reputation. But, from an efficiency standpoint, I feel like they may be shooting themselves in the foot by holding it back.
Example: they spent around 2 months on this last patch, and a big effort must have gone into retooling the way defense works. But it is extremely likely that defense will need to be re-tooled for MP just by nature of the game (buffs, heals, auras, taunts, etc are all integral to combat defense), so that means down the line they are going to have to go through this all again.
Just my two cents. If it ain’t ready, it ain’t ready.
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We don’t know whether they have internal testing already - and rebalancing a quite finished thing seems easier, to me at least.?
Nope, I KNOW I don’t care. It’ll be here when it’s here and I do not care when. If they never implemented MP it wouldn’t affect my enjoyment of the game in the slightest. The only thing that could possibly affect me would be if they just suddenly outright said, “no more solo play multiplayer will be the only mode of playing.” And even then I’d just be like "Okay, got my money’s worth moving on.’
Things I’m actually interested in, and care about, are why I commented ‘marvelous.’ Like the potential for those other phase 3 things, new areas, new Sentinel Shield Bash skill, new user interface changes, etc. Multiplayer? Zero interest. Yes, of course, it will have an effect on the game and its final product, still…don’t…care. still…not…interested. My caring about it really isn’t open to interpretation. I don’t. No ‘think you don’t’ about it.
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Lol one man telling another how they supposed to feel 
We don’t know if the protection changes are BECAUSE of MP. It’s all speculation at this point. I’m good with their priorities and what they have planned so far. What matters is the substance, not the order.
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:motorcycle: let’s rock
So Rogue, Dual wielding and …? 
Overall I think this is a great change, making all fights have the same penalty and not just the last 1 or 2 like last time I did the campaign. And spawning at the boss and not at the start of the zone is amazing. However out of all of my friends I’m the best ARPG player, because I play them way more then they do. And even I struggled with a lot of these fights, I’m sure in time, like with PoE I will get better at these fights and be able to do them without dying. However for a first playthrough you have no experience, making some of these bosses, especially later ones, very challenging. I know at least 2-3 of my friends if they were to buy this game could not finish the game with death resetting boss fights. Don’t get me wrong, I love challenge, and actually having to learn the fights will be great, but the game needs to be accessible. Bosses will need some crazy balancing compared to last I played, when 0.7.10 goes live I will do another play through the story and see how it feels as I remember at some point certain nerfs to enemy HP and damage, although I do not recall if that included bosses.
I do think having the high HP and high damage bosses heavily encourages using the crafting system to get decent items. But with a bit of bad RNG (and I’ve had even my first craft on an item fail) and you wont be able to get better equipment.
Balance is going to be a big deal for this game for launch, keep that in mind, someone choosing a weak end game build cant be made to struggle through the campaign, they should struggle in the end game when builds matter, while leveling/story they need to be able to beat the content.
I need to complete many more playthroughs before i can give a full and valid opinion on balance for experienced players but right now the beginner friendlyness is lower then I would like. Dont make the PoE mistake where people are literally scared to play because of no new player friendlyness.
I kinda agree with you. That’s my impression as well. I do wish MP is here sooner so we can better gauge it’s impact on the game.
But I’ve learnt over the years that these devs often have good solid thinking in terms of how they go about their design process and philosophy. So even though in this instance I am anxious to see them push out MP, I’m more than willing to trust their process.
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The difficulty of the current story bosses is very low imho. There are some with hard hitting attacks. But mechanically the fights are not very challenging. This first starts with Liath and Lagon and continues with the monolith bosses.
One difficulty challenge is the spikyness of enemy damage. That’s what is going to be addressed with tweaking the defensive systems/stats and skills. But for the story bosses there are just very few memorable fights. Most of them are just standing still and spam abilities till the boss dies.
I don’t mind dying at a boss during the first playthrough. You can try instantly untill you get it right. No setback besides the hp bar. And to be honest: The health bar not resetting at bossfights when the player dies feels like the absolutely noob mode to me.
The discussion of @LizardIRL and @Tibone on his podcast had a bunch if very good points. The game doesn’t teach you some important mechanics currently. This is getting better in the future. Being able to beat a boss despite repeatedly dying does not help. This delivers a false impression of how mechanics (should) work in this game.
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You make some good points. I must admit I agree there were no memorable bosses besides the last couple because I actually had to learn the fights, which I think is good, although it did feel they were bit overtunned for some attacks, or maybe its just me. I think with the balance tweaking to fix any spiky damage will make the fights feel fine with the new resetting. Once you learn the bosses attacks and lead up animations it’ll be more about improving you damage to make the fight shorter. The more I think about it and the more opinions like yours I hear about the more I get into the idea of the fight resetting. I found in the early story dodging was so easy, you had almost too much time to avoid attacks, by end game and late story attacks became harder to dodge, meaning they expect you to improve over the course of the story, which naturally makes sense. I’m excited to play the new patch when it comes out and try these changes to see how they feel when implemented, along with that loot filter. Thanks for your feedback on my thoughts in my comment, its always good having someone else give there opinion opening your eyes to things you may have missed in you initial thoughts.
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It will be interesting to see how they deal with the multiplayer in boss fights and overall difficulty. I agree I believe we can trust the developers, they know what they’re doing.
It’s kind of “chicken and egg” to me. But in this case I’d say the sooner you have the entire chicken, the better the egg will be.
The fact is balancing and other changes are already being made based on what’s happening in the “wide” early access release, which I think is fantastic. But it’s also a fact that a full MP version will drastically alter the population/community and change the dynamics of the game. From the economy to trading to probably every skill, MP will affect and be affected. Again, I’m not saying everyone has to “care” in the sense that they need to like it or hate it, but the effects will trickle through the game regardless.
Concrete example: I’ve played over six hundreds of hours of PoE and in that time I’ve had a unique that I actually wanted or needed drop maybe once or twice. I’ve had exalt orbs drop exactly twice. I’m fairly certain if the game was developed as an SP game this would not be the case. now the good news is I can usually use the trading system to get a particular item. It’s not nearly as satisfying as earning it myself but that’s how the game was developed. Shift to LE, I have a couple hundred hours played and nearly every build I’ve tried I’ve been able to roll or have the unique I wanted drop. I really love that but is that system going to work in a full MP economy? I have no idea but that’s just a single detail of how far reaching MP will be.
A small test group can only simulate so much, that’s already been proven. I like the addition of more community testers but even they will still only represent a very small percentage of the real player base. The larger player base always ends up exposing things that testers do not, that’s the whole point of beta testing.
I cannot wait for patch to drop. Please also try to add in some mtx for armour sets guys, I would love to drop some $$ on the game to make my characters look cool.
Bye bye Glancing Blows, you will not be missed!
Can’t absolutely agree with you. For example my melee cold Shaman build often has to count on ranged attacks like totem or cold meteors and can’t just stand behind the boss until boss death.
So died once in fight with Admiral and the we fight took more time compared for example with Sentiel or Beast master.
Yeah. I said “few” and “most”. Admiral Harkon is the perfect exception and also I good example of what I meant with “spiky damage as a difficulty challenge”. He is one of the bosses you actually have to move a bit, because he has a strong necrotic attack, that may kill you very fast, if you stand in it.
In fact every boss is a bit harder for a melee character.
The “imbalance” of the current difficulty I see in some attacks being absolutely meaningless (big telegraphed attacks where you thing “woah, have to get out of this”, but when you actually get hit you recognize, it doesn’t hurt) and others being a bit to overpowered.
This is not only because of skill damage, but also because of the current protections system. Streamlining this is what the next patch is supposed to do.
Is there some way to know what it does? If still on totems and proc’ing like before but with no active skill description could confuse new players. So hopefully its been added in some other way(passive trees) or has some in game description.
Assuming they’re treating it like the other skills they’ve removed in the past (I’m mainly thinking of Mark for Death), they removed the active skill, but you can still proc it in other ways, such as idols (not totems) and other skills (Reaper has a node that procs Mark for Death, as does Bone Curse).
Since Mike said that just the active skill has been removed, it’s reasonable to assume that you can still proc it via the idols (% chance to proc on melee hit).
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Nope its just a terrible metric to balance your games outgoing damage around. I posted this would be removed over a year ago - at least in its current form
Everytime they code a skill to do damage they have to take into account GB 50% mitigation…everytime
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It also limits build creativity. You’ll always have 4 prefix slots occupied by GB, no question. Then it’s a choice combination of hp, dodge, and resists. Then you move on to other affixes that augment your offense or utility. Removing GB automatically gives you 4 prefix slots opened up for other affixes. Not to mention the damage disparity between regular hits and DOTs… I’m so glad GB is going away in its current iteration.
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