Actually what he say is more or less correct. The skills they nerf may not become the worse skill ever. But it’s almost certainly become unviable.
In fact, GGG had let on they deliberately do so to shake up the meta to get people to try different builds.
Why do you think otherwise?
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.
TLDR: player agency is forgotten by GGG, that’s the ROOT of the problem, it’s not Chris, it’s philosophy…
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…
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.
+1 This is almost 99% of my approach to all of these games. As for PoE start, that is the best time for our small 4 man guild as well. We push through the campaign and then will do only unique maps as a group once we hit maps. Grim Dawn is the only one I really do not play very much its just meh to me. I have not played D3 since season 8, I completely uninstalled all Blizzard titles way before the scandels due to poor customer service.
I wouldnt say that it is okay. It has problems with too many things - it can easily overflow the server with certain things (have you seen 1000 stacks of poison in the endgame map, like 100% delirious T19? it crashes either you, or server shuts down, happens a lot on Frankfurt/Amsterdam gateways during the league). That could be solved by engine that can actually handle real time calculations better. The second big thing is internal latency current engine has - it is impossible for me to go under 15 ms, it is the base that engine will have 100% off the time. Now add the server latency, SSD latency, monitor latency, cpu and gpu latency and you see that it can add like 20-30% latency to your normal latency. This problem was enhanced on the Vulcan introduction, where the textures took on some setups up to a minute to pop in. They are trying to fixing the hole in the hull with bandages, which of course does not work. And if you played early POE, do you remember desync (whirling blades back and forth for epilepsy, yay) and how much time it took them to upgrade that into current Lockstep?
I like this mature evaluation. Every arpg has pros and cons.
Im fully playing LE now but its still too young to call it a winner. Because Poe was a winner too, till its not.
Just watch the latest d4 update, some of the features they will be bringing are going to be hard to beat
Agree 98%… And nothing to discuss here.
Uhm… Well I am seeing they coming, we will probably get yet again the best core gameplay experience, but 2500 DPS weapons at lvl 43, or parangon upgrade like 35% power to a skill, will fall in the same design pit D3 fell long ago: absurd scaling that makes gearing uninteresting and shallow progression, ideal to have a short good time and for casuals.
PoE Engine is good, its just trying to do 4000 things at once and still does 3990 of them well but might fail on a few so people complain about it incessantly but the only answer is: remove all league mechanics and monsters. is that the game you want? apparently
Same but you wouldnt notice anything under 100ms anyway, if you say you ‘notice it’ you are just lying imo. I can play 180ms and not notice anything barely… just excuses. I used to push group ladder playing D3 on 300ms and still was fine, can play PoE 450ms on garbage Frankfurt servers its not good but its playable
Performance in PoE is the best its ever been. I play on Australian server and get maybe 4 lag spikes in 5 weeks and amazing performance the last 2 leagues in general due particle and item culling