Drawing inspiration and copypasting are two different things though and it does feel a bit like the latter is being used in some of the recent designs.
Ok so after reading the thread, and hearing complaints about me apparently not giving it enough time, heres my rebuttal.
All arpgs follow a strict formula that for some reason is never deviated from. You don’t need to dump 200 hours into a game to see where its heading.
All the skills and trees are available to see from the get go, so telling someone “just wait until you’re higher lvl” is absolutely pointless. In this regard, you can in fact plan a build ala PoE very easily, and then accumalate gear to aid that approach.
Guild Wars stands out as innovative and unique to me. I clocked over 8000hrs in that beautiful game. Each class in Guild Wars was distinct in a way that gave them a role that nothing else could fill the same way. Sure there was some overlap when it comes to DPS etc but there was always something very specific about them that made them stand out. Mesmer is a prime example. (Inb4 a bunch of flamers start crying that its an mmorpg, not an rpg)
Now, understand that in SOLO games, that class distinction gets thrown out the window because you have to be able to do everything yourself obviously. And it boils down to 3 simple categories - damage, healing and defense.
In LE and other games, those are mixed together through mechanics such as life drain. In essence, you can’t escape the standard formula, its understandable up to a point. NOW, the other part of the standard formula is curses, afflictions etc like bleeding and poison. DnD did a good job covering a lot of that stuff, with confusion, domination etc. GW branched out on one particular thing - deep wound. I can’t recall any other rpg that had a mechanic that stood out like that, and it was an integral part of PvE and even moreso PvP. For those who don’t know, it dropped the targets max health by 20% and healing effects by 20%.
Now, even though the skill systems between GW and LE are totally different, they and all other rpgs still end up at the same point. In GW you chose an elite, and built around it. In LE, you choose skills and build around them. How those skills end up is what is lacking here in LE.
So you can get summons to do this or that, get spells to do this or that. Thats fine and all, its a good system, but the point is that people calling it unique have no idea what that word means. You can try to argue that LE does it better if you really want, but unique? Sorry, its not. End of discussion.
Now, since this thread was originally focused on how I think the classes are stale as hell, I have put in more time and gotten to lvl55 on my summon necro, and heres the list of problems encountered (mind you, some of these are balance issues which I assume will be addressed at some point)
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Minions are pathetically weak. I have 6 archers, 4 death knights spamming SoS (lol) and 2 blood golems… I have specced pretty much every single point into buffing them damage and speedwise… And im still outgunning them by a pretty big margin with Hungering Souls and a half decent investment in INT points (think im around 54 INT atm)
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Rip Blood seems only useful as a heal, the damage is laughable, but having 2 blood golems makes that even heal neglible when you can kite around and avoid all damage
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Summoning spells CD time is a hard one, on one hand you can skip buffing your minions with extra% life and quickly resummon on death, but if you extend the cooldown to balance that, then it requires a necessary investment into minion life or your own/minion defenses or both, which also means less investment in your own supplemental damage, and at this point if all of that gets thrown out of whack then it defeats the purpose of having a summoned meatshield army. Ideally, no builds should “require” investment into something that might balance out a single aspect of the build yet throw the rest out.
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Some skills don’t appear to actually add damage from their trees or your gear, Rip Blood and Bone Curse especially. I tested both with a bunch of different gear on the test dummy, and the numbers changed so little i figured it didnt change at all coz of standard RNG.
Anyway, its seems a few people agree with my inital assessment, and they mostly seem to be in the “seasoned gamer” age bracket. The ones that don’t, well thats your opinion and you’re welcome to it, just don’t try to claim things are unique or interesting when they’re clearly not.
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While you certainly can see some stuff on paper, not everything can be judged, by purely looking at tooltips and skill trees. There are so many things that can augment a skill, you really can’t say how this behave/feels, without actually playing it. Same goes for baseline skills sometimes.
Regarding your comments about minions, rip blood and bone curse show me, that you most likely did not understand some of the more fundamental core things in LE, how to scale your damage.
Minions are not weak, Rip Blood and Bone Curse do really nice damage and are very well scaleable.
But this would go way off-topic now.
Regarding the OP: While LE does have alot of inspiration from other games, it most dcertainly has some pretty unique skills and most importantly, all classes play and feel very different.
Even very similar playstyles like Necro or Lich Summoner compared to a Beast Master Summoner for example, do play alot differently, while being the same archetype (Summoner)
Classes in LE have very cool and strong identity, even Masteries within the same base class.
I do agree, that some of the older stuff (like older skills or old passive trees) definitely need some overhaul or rework, but that’s all a proccess that’s already underway. (For example the slight meteor skill tree adjustments, Forge Guard and Spellblade passive tree overhauls etc.)
Actually i understand it all too well, coming from PoE, which is why i think it might be a bug. Increasing base dmg, inc dmg, more dmg, skill specific increases from idols, all tried and didn’t really change much. If the damage curve is higher at higher levels, say 90+ then ill try testing again.
Heres the list of reasons why that statement is wrong -
- direct dmg
- aoe dmg
- DoT
- tracking dmg (or magnetic or heatseeking if you like)
- projectiles
- multiple projectiles
- etc etc
See where this is going? This leads back to the standard formula I was talking about. Whether a tracking skill is a fireball, ice orb, flaming skull or whatever, it will still behave and feel the same as any other game with those. THAT is why I and many other people CAN say we know exactly what to expect. I would totally accept if they LOOKED cool as hell though, like D1 hydra. Gamers are especially drawn to things that look awesome, regardless of whether they are same old same old or not. PoE took this to a whole new level, and in fact im pretty sure thats the only reason that toxic sh*tshow has survived so long.
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I applaud you sir for calling out GGG. (even though I haven’t kept up on the thread at all)
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Less so in 0.8 I suspect given they removed the 5s of 150% more damage & auto-critting every 6s from Illusion of Pain/Cursed Limbs.
You basically only enumerated most of the changes to a skill that are more or less numeric.
You did not think about any heavily augmenting skill nodes.
On top of that there are skills, where you simply can’t say how they “feel”, when playing until you tried them out.
And there is the issue i think.
You think you know everything, because you have alot of experiences in other games.
That is a huge mistake, i see many people doing. While experience in games like PoE certainly helps to grasp mechanics and game systems faster/more easily it does not grant you all the specific game knowledge in LE instantly.
If i had to bet, from the sound of it, you only did try to scale those skills with increased or more modifiers, which basically do nothing if you do not increase the spells base damage, because in LE “Spells” do have almost non-existing base damage (other than PoE, where spells do in fact have the most base damage compared to other skills).
In that case you need to have adaptive spell damage or other flat added damage.
If you already did/tried that, i really can’t see why you would they they scale bad.
Bone Curses damage is fine, even without that very strong interaction.
I never used that interaction and bone curses just did fine.
Ill be polite and not mention learning to read instead of just skipping over stuff to get to your own opinion.
You do realise that some bugs don’t affect all users right? It could be a bug with the overhead number popups, it could be mechanic, i don’t know, you don’t know.
I absolutely read what you did write, that’s why i specificlly mentioned, it sounded like you “only” tried increased/more multipliers.
Well considering you’re a “community tester” maybe you should take potential problems seriously instead of instantly brushing things off with stupid assumptions. It doesn’t look good for you or the devs.
But it’s a 300% DPS loss (150% more & x2 for auto-critting), you can’t exactly react like that’s nothing.
Cherry-picking parts of a post to reply to is hardly new, or specific to Heavy.
Yeah, but I think Heavy’s point was that LE doesn’t work the same way to PoE regarding damage (& previously resists/protections but they changed that since people had issues getting their heads around it), so you can’t assume that a thing works the same way. Damage is a good example, in PoE, sources of “more” are prolific, in LE they mainly only come from the skill’s tree itself rather than being able to stack 5-6 +50% more modifiers in addition to damage conversion shenanigans.
It’s probably not a bug, it’s more likely the % DR mobs get in higher level zones.
He does, he just has a decent idea of how the game works so things you see as problems, aren’t (which isn’t always a good thing). Plus his idea of a “problem” may well be different to yours. For example, I think that the Rogue not having any support for 2-h weapons is a problem, but the other testers don’t (they’d be wrong, but that’s their prerogative).
Don’t always assume that you’re right & that people will therefore agree with you.
I don’t assume I’m right, I can only say what I tried and the result of those trials. As for the skill mechanics, people here seem to act like math is so difficult that nobody understands it. If that mentality is gonna proliferate into the greater player base, and it in all likelihood will, then i can see yet another toxic community in this games future.
I tested on the training dummy, does that also get higher DR?
Nope. Mobs get a % damage reduction based on the area level but the training dummy doesn’t, which is why you’ll do anything up to ~10x more damage against the dummy than against mobs.
It’s not the maths is difficult, it’s that it’s slightly different.
Yeah and it’s all explained quite well in the ingame guide. Which is why all these replies saying “you just don’t understand it” are ridiculous.
Which, in my experience, people often don’t read, they assume that thing X works the same in LE as it did in PoE/GD/D1/2/3/etc.
Quoting to enforce this point.
Have to say this attitude in this forum is really problematic and pervasive since months now
Here’s the thing though, everybody has different opinions of what is good or otherwise for the game (as is apparent in this thread & many others including those where you & I have disagreed). Heavy takes things that he sees as problems seriously & argues for them, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be things that you or I think are problems & vice versa. That’s what I was trying to get at in my reply to that particular section of Jesse’s post.
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This section is an open section and is called “Feedback and suggestions”
Now let’s look at how TESTING is done.
Normally you pay people to test your stuff and they tell you what’s going on.
The name comes from physical objects (imagine with input and an output) that had a real “return loop” that altered the input hence the name “feedback loop”
There exist scenarios where you have short sessions and why not sometimes done by people of a target pool who never played a game or genre or almost, with the intention of seeing how “it tastes raw”
Here in this board we are giving MY and OUR feedback, for FREE and after countless hours. Done by more or less experienced people, and having played like 20h should not matter too much actually, you just take it into account and give it weight.
Now take someone who’s been asked to play the game for 5-8h or for 1 week and he comes back saying: skills A and B don’t look good, I didn’t know how to make C work, D was boring.
As the developer who paid and engaged somebody to test your stuff, would you tell them: i know buddy but you need to play another 200h, and i disagree with a lot of stuff you said, and that other one works it’s just you need to make it work (?)
I understand you are a so called “evangelist”, but this is not the right place to evangelize, this is the feedback section, and you have to evangelize this game in places like “what arpg to play?” threads.
The devs are to take our feedback (or not actually) and convince us with a patch and a release, we are here because this is the channel we have to write down our impressions (hoping for a fix/etc), not to “get convinced” of how much we should play to appreciate something, and so.
I am going to link below the threads where I’ve spotted this attitude, you don’t really need to dig much actually. It is pervasive and let me warn you again, this is very damaging and turns any potential new “evangelists” away more than keeping them because the impact is that you feel like the “feedback secion” while in good faith is actually obfuscated/derailed and counter-argued ad-infinitum