Yeah. The best RNG insanity example is Zizarans death in hardcore SSF league.
Context for non-POE players:
Zizaran is veteran player that plays mostly Hardcore SSF (equivalent to hardcore solo chanllenge in LE). He is famous for dying to stupid shit, (walking to the easily avoidable super slow attack) but he has a lot of BS deaths.
His last character before I quit the 3.16 league was Max Block Gladiator. Character stacks attack + spell bloc, a lot of health and armour (works differently than in LE). He had basically around 80k EHP.
He was attempting (he used this character as boss slayer/carry) the Uber Elder fight iirc (or normal Elder fight). He used Maven influence (an NPC that gives random boosts to the boss and if you defeat it, she captures them and you can later on refight them for good loot).
Elder used one of his stronger attacks. Normally it does 5,4k damage to him, 8.2k with crit hit. Since he has insane recovery, living with 400 HP is not a problem, he gets it back in 4 seconds. Maven however empowered his attack WHILE ELDER WAS OFFSCREEN. Empowered attack does 8.8k damage after the math, finally killing him. In the 100 re-attempts (your HC league character moves to the standard league where you can test what killed you and continue farming) he did not die to that attack. All those attempts have been recorded on livestream.
To have that shit happen you need to : get 1 specific attack with around 800 difference of min-max on special boss, he MUST crit you and Maven must boost the damage (she has like 30 different boosts). Also, Elder must be offscreen to not receive the debuff from one specific skill Zizaran used (Defiance banner - when placed, affected enemies deal 15% less damage to you). Also, you of course need to consider that this happens 1/4th of the time, because he blocks 3/4th of the incoming attacks and spells (and block prevents all damage in POE).
Just because it’s “common knowledge” doesn’t make it correct. If you speak to some people it’s common knowledge that the Earth is flat. GGG don’t “nerf skills into oblivion” as you say, just because people on their forum & reddit react as if they did doesn’t make it so.
Have GGG painted themselves into a corner with the amount of more damage modifiers you can get? Absolutely, are they necessarily doing the best thing by not buffing some of the lesser used skills? Maybe not.
I just don’t have much time for the crowd that throw their toys out of the pram whenever GGG tweak some numbers down 'cause it’s always presented as “teh worstest skill evah naow!”
Can’t take your words at face value, but I guess you have a point, people usually over-react.
I am not a usual redditor on PoE forums, I can talk based on my shit experience with venom gyre + whirl blades (there a huge dps build with those with the “balanced” strength stacking and many smart/expensive combinations, but I’m not expert), a few posts I read how some skills got 20% nerfed from 7 different angles, effectively destroying the skill (I think was something bleed/chaos related?), and yeah, I’ve seen that type of comment on some PoE videos and forums.
Anyways, sorry if these comments makes you angry, not my intention. Not tha I am going back to that game anyways, couldn’t care less, just stating my perception/experience.
And we all know GGG does not give a damn on what people thinks, at the end they seem to do whatever they think is better for the game. Which is a good thing by itself, me agreeing to their decisions or not is not relevant after all.
PoE I love that you can literally play any class with any skill, with any damage type. This opened up so many build possibilities. I like the fact I can try and make new builds no matter what class I play with their different class specialties. this in my opinion has the upper hand in the arpg games.
The part I hate is of course the one shots ( i had over 8k health one time w/ 90% to all res still got one shot), but also I didn’t play from the beginning, and from reading. a lot has changed crafting use to be fairly easy. now its more complicated than not.
All though I like Last Epoch:
Last epoch is the opposite i wish it has more open playable styles any skill any damage type. (maybe will happen in future) I love the simple crafting don’t got to go to 5 different places to craft 1 item. its all right there at your forge.
Uhm, sir, have you played Sunder, Molten strike, Pre-Slam updated Earthquake, Heavy Strike (or any strike skill there is)? Sunder after rework went from 5% melee characters (it was the best melee skill to level up with) to who knows what because it has just one guy over level 90 that plays it in trade league (0.0% people took it according to poe.ninja builds section in Scourge, 0.1% in HC Scourge, etc.). Due to how it works its just worse fucking upheaval without any damage nor potential mechanics that could make it more interesting. Strikes are basically nonexistent, even the new ones are used only for Culling strike (Behead has like 20% kill treshold) - the only exception is flicker strike, but it has several mechanics that make it smooth. Preupdated Earthquake (after nerfs somewhere around 3.5) was garbage because if you walked away, shockwave (that dealt most damage) did not happen and it had like 2 sec delay. It took several gear power creeps with reduced cooldown recovery (affects the delay) and less duration passives to make it viable again (and slam oriented support skills). Blade Vortex got hammered as the last thing - a skill that is based around having increased duration got base duration lowered by 20% because reasons (it is nearly impossible to sustain it now). Also, they killed leaguestarting with trigger skills , since they made them use mana (Spellslinger is literally dead, since you reserve 90% of the mana with just trigger skills and you need mana for every proc it does) - they gatekeep it either behind -total mana cost (you need to get recipe from veiled affixes) or Replica Conquerors Efficiency jewel (not available at leaguestart). So do not tell me that people overracted when they pulled these shits.
P.S: Oh my, I forgot about the 3.0 changes to poison - it double dipped, they nerfed damage by like 80% before 3.0 went live, then they removed double dipp and forgot to compensate for 3 or so leagues (so 3.3/3.4). Nothing weird about that, GGG tends to pull a lot of those.
I think the problem is what people consider viable. People set the bar WAY too high. If a skill steamrolls all content in the game and allows you to put every possible stacked mod onto a high tier map with no risk, it probably isn’t balanced. Balance isn’t the game having no challenge. That is why Hardcore is so popular in PoE. Those players want the added challenge because meta skills are entirely too strong.
Pretty much, they dont want people to use it for a while
Also the skills you are referring in general were grossly overpowered and some were left alone for many leagues and some still are barely nerfed
Tornado Shot / Blade Vortex / Blade Blast / Toxic Rain / Essence Drain and more than I cannot immediately list
in Expedition they nerfed everything while at the same time releasing Eye of Winter and Forbidden Rite. Forbidden Rite had to immediately be nerfed after the initial league to use with totems and Eye of Winter is still gross with Mines/Traps alone
I played around with Eye of Winter in Expedition and played it to 100, if they release another new skill thats good good chance ill play that too
GGG also revert nerfs as well. I played fucking Static Strike Occultist in Scourge league with a total of 0.3% players playing it
The biggest issue is the stupid player mentality needing someone to tell them whats good because they cant do anything for themself, weak minded players who shouldnt be playing PoE in the first place. People like that SHOULD be playing LE
Yes. It probably isnt balanced. But when GGG nerf a skill, the next league it will go from moonwalking Maven to struggling with yellow maps with investments. GGG deliberately make skills OP and nerf OP skills to the ground to force a meta rotation each league.
Again, not a long PoE player, I can talk based on my relatively short experience and quite some reading/watching. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Yeah, another aspect I don’t like. That “shaking the META” mentality, in practice, seems a bit random, some skills always survive any nerf bat, some are downscaled to still strong or at least usable, but other skills are destroyed.
Is so hard to measure what is “viable”, from what I’ve seen and experience, there are so many interactions, between the huge array of uniques with special properties, corruptions, unique jewels and cluster jewels, and of course the passive tree and your class.
Pretty much any skill can work If you find the right class, build and interactions, but is more about finding how to abuse the system to make it possible. I feel it is because the huge item and mechanics bloat the game suffers. Is downright near impossible to balance everything in such context, but instead of keeping all skills viable, they focus on their seasonal aspect, and lets “shake the META”, I feel many skills were left in the dust.
As another ex-PoE player with thousands of hours of builds & play under my belt this sums up the worst of it perfectly for me.
This is also why the introduction of things like an emphasis on Chaos rolls in crafting here in LE terrifies me. I stuck it out for probably 6 months past time I should have left in one game, I won’t be doing it again if RNG creeps in too much here. There’s a time and a place for RNG, but it should be a clearly defined and caged in area where you are totally aware of it being there. When Devs start to use it as a crutch for everything, it becomes a problem, and games of skill switch to games of chance.
Yes, but who sets the philosophy? It doesn’t just emerge out of nowhere, it comes about as a result of the employee’s viewpoints/etc & the changes they make to the game.
this is exactly right. PoE suffers from an substantial amount of tedious bloat.
I just hopped on r/pathofexile and there’s some new unique which was good for “omniscience”. i just played the game last league (only for 2 weeks, lol) and my reaction was, “wtf is that ?”. The shear amount of crap in the game makes it too much tedious and not enough fun. just the amount of things you can collect alone is crazy (shards, essence, oils, fragments, etc…).
somehow people don’t seem to understand, or more likely ignore, is that REQUIRING a 10 page loot filter to make the game playable is a very, very bad sign.
and that explosion of junk extends into the graphics, can’t see anything, can’t see telegraphs because of the clutter. LE is so, so very much better in that regard.
PoE is a mess. I used to love playing it, so i’m sad.
Also, for the record, i like playing through the story. LOL.
I’m with @Jerle on this one. I don’t get it why so many people are trashing on PoE. I play it since beta and sure i also recognize that i get burned out after so many years each patch. But i still enjoy the first 1-2 weeks of each season and then switch back to LE or Grim Dawn which is exactly what i want and like. Each game has its advantages and disadvantages and even though i spend more time on LE these days i also think that PoE is the best arpg out there.
But yeah…why should you compare a beta game to a 9 year old fully developed heavy content game. It’s simply not fair and does not make sense imo. But LE is also pretty much the best beta game i have ever played.
Path of Exile could be so good if it had an updated game engine with some REAL gameplay. It’s just a cookie clicker screen exploder right now and that is YAWN.
What would you expect from the putative new game engine? That has nothing to do with any of the issues brought up in this thread - content bloat, “lack of gameplay”, difficulty scaling, mp, zoom zoom meta, etc. Those are all design issues.
I think the engine is completely fine. I usually level up together with 2 friends every league start. We try to play with 3 builds that synergieses well with auras/curses etc. 1 week before league start we only hang around in pob (best part of the league btw^^) And we always love the story leveling (most people hate the story as well). But the story is the only place where you are able to see whats going on the screen. There, group play feels very smooth and fun but once we arrive in maps we cant see shit anymore. And once the gamespeed is too high there is no chance to interact with each others builds to play strategic. That forces us to split up and play by our own. Thats what i hate about poe and sadly story leveling is about 5% of character developement for non casual players. Also the game is getting packed with unneccesary new league mechanics (at least they start to remove stuff now). And since they nerfed harvest, crafting became boring and unrewarding again. I think those are the only things i hate about this game.
Like i said, advantages and disadvantages in every game…
Diablo 3 has the best multiplayer and gameplay experience killing monsters but no further content and its too easy to reach endgame gear. Therefore character developement feels non excisting and i would more consider it an arcade game rather than arpg.
PoE has the best character developement with gear and passives but can be overwhelming for new players and became way too fast in gameplay and unnecessary complex with content.
Grim Dawn the best story/character leveling experience and gives you a feeling to complete a char which i like but lacks endgame content and replayability after several hours.
LE has the best crafting and skillsystem and could compete with d3s MP experience. But LE is far behind on a technical standpoint and im scared that time will not be enough to polish it to compete with poe2 or d4.
Mostly exactly how I would describe these two ARPGs I am familiar with.
On this, I am not sure if it is necessarily true about the MP experience. I hope so (that was my hope of hope when backing this game). But we havent seen anything MP related yet, and the way Mono is structured doesnt make me optimistic about how it’s MP mode will play out.
LE definitely does have devs who are very receptive to feedback so hopefully that will count for something. Keeping my fingers crossed.
