Tit an Quest 2 has all i want and need

Off-topic
41

D4 skill tree is both active and passive. It is more like skill selection (then customisation) with some minor modifikation. Like whirlwind can apply bleed, hydra can apply damage over time. For clarity.
Also its important to note for people not playing D4 at least since like 1/2 year ago. A lot of the modifikations are applied on gears, and not just found on gears) which are actually fairly consistant with limited or no RNG. Igf you unlock an aspect (say edgemaster, which scale damage base on resource % you have), its unlocked forever and you can put it on any gears that allow it. It has same effect as picking a fix set of passive bonus from a UI or tree. It has its pros and con, Pro is it faster to swap gears for difefernt modifikation than from a UI, con is, you need to reapply same midifikation when you uograde your gears,.

End result is samilar, but approch is different. POE has skill and skill modifikation from mainly gems. It doesn’t even has a skill tree. It has a passive tree.

My take is you need a split of skill modifikation between skill trees (or equalivance) and gears. Balance between consistant skill progress (skill tree) and exciting RNG base skill modifikation. It doesn’t feel good when every thing came from gears (consistency/prediability and power fantasy-you are only as good as your gears), but it also feels bad when gears are just stat sticks with no excitement.

I mentioned long in EA that LE lean way too much into the formal (most skill modifiktion from trees) and itemization feels very dull, espcially leveling. Yu just Looks for bigger number in gears, or in craft bigger numbers on the forge.

42

not wrong, i m obsessed with games being as flexible as possible. and thus classless. my definition is definitely wrong but i m explaining how classless each game feels.

i am now level 40 (max in the EA currently) i have experienced playing with both skill and stats where i can either face tank or completely avoid such attacks.

the tailswipe is dashable tho you really need to be on point on the tell. theres a brief window before he swipes. tho if you’re bad at that theres actually a different way you can deal with him. just dodge the “water spout” attack and keep close to him. he will NOT do his water jet attack which is followed up with that tail swipe. also he will NOT do his ice projectiles either if you keep on him.

if you build defensively or are ranged. then i dont see why you’re not dancing. i dont speak for you. i now play a somewhat fragile melee build where i rely on actively dodging attacks. tho when i got to max, i could facetank everything most bosses threw at me but isnt that the beauty of having a good gear and a good build. i can now do both ways.

this is quite fair to say.

agreed

maybe you’re right on that. but not everyone likes to play a more defined role. i like making my own build. baldurgate 3 allows multiclassing to a great degree that classes seem more of suggestions rather than actual classes.

agreed. after playing so many procedurely generated maps. i find theres so much beauty in hand made worlds BUT i do understand how randomly generated maps can be good if we’re just mindlessly grinding endgame maps.

i thoroughly am disappointed with how blizz treated d4. and to me i dislike the game. BUT i will never say its a bad game. its quite solid in fact. many games like LE, POE etc are good games too but currently i just dont like them. its a preference.

fair point, tho there is a beauty you just cant get with randomly created maps.

i desperately wanted LE to be more of its own thing too. tho its looking like another POE to me. and if thats the case, why dont i just go back to POE.

and yet certain builds perform so well that players will gravitate towards them. its easy to shit on d4 for having a skill twig. but whats the point of a skill forest when people end up following build guides for the most part.

the ONLY 2 things i loved about undecember is unlike all the other games which i misclassified as classless, undecember seems to fit the bill much more closely tho there are “mastery” like passive constellations. tho non of your skill choices are tied to these constellations. the second is the bossfights. which is the best AND worst thing in the game as some of them can be challenging where you actively dodge attacks. but sometimes its unbalanced and just unfair.

the devs do not know what players want BUT the players still throw enough money at them so they can just go whichever they want at our detriment

43

People will follow build guides no matter what. They follow build guides in D4. They followed them in D3 and D3 was the most minimalist possible in regards to build choices.
The point of having a skill forest is that people that just want to have fun experimenting can do so (technically, you could also do that in D3, except you were done in a couple hours :laughing:).

Balance will get better eventually. No game in this genre ever launched with good balance. Too many variables make that almost impossible.
PoE required several years until they got their balance in check. Same for GD. D3/D4 never did.

Even a “simple” game like Starcraft required several patches and an expansion before they arrived at the much lauded balance they have.

I don’t think it’s the devs fault. They have to comply with orders from above. It’s the bigwigs that get paid the most from the game (and that don’t actually care about it other it generating money) that force this, most likely.

44

Sometimes, that’s all a game needs. One good 60 hour playthrough of a well-designed world used to be the norm. Such worlds have a way of feeling more immersive; the design space is used in a different way because the developer knows they can get away with doing a thing once without expecting player to repeat it ad nauseum.

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Don’t get me wrong I had a blast but it’s like every other game. Once then then engage autopilot and get faster and faster to be done with. It’s a good experience to have but it get’s old instantly what is a “problem” with handcrafted content. I like it Though but as I said it get’s old ultra fast.

46

actually they can at the cost of lowering down their scope. it becomes impossible because the audience, demands games to have 10001 different skills as theyre constantly being compared to POE or the like.

also these gamers get upset when their obviously overperforming builds get nerfed.

GD has a large build disparity where some skills can blast the entire screen while basic attack builds have to go at a slower pace. and yet players dont ever feel the need to follow a build guide. simply because the end game content does not require them to.

just saying its impossible is an admission that the game devs dont care or are not trying enough.

i do agree balance will be better but the disparity is still huge. starcraft achieved balance because it was required. took them 10 years i believe? GD too did not start off balanced, which is true but we see there has been a lot of care made into making things more balance. i can clear all non optional content using my melee necro occultist. 2 pet classes combined yet play them petless without using spells. and i can do that because the hidden bosses feel 100% optional and their drops dont really feel BIS as there’s many other gear that compete with the gear.

its a hard decision. do you want money or do you want to make the game you want to make? POE is a great example. its arguably the “best” d-like right now and a lot of people tie chris’s name to it zealously. many misguided fans are quick to pin all of GGG’s current failure due to the lack of chris and keep asking him to comeback to save POE. the reality is POE in its current state was NEVER his vision. he wanted a more slower game more akin to how players started out playing Diablo 2.

all his decisions were driven by player feedback on a game they wanted. he could not nerf stuff efficiently as he needed to keep existing happy players happy as happy players are more likely to give money.

in fact he’s in a very ironic place where everytime people attribute the success of POE to him, its a gentle slap to his face because POE now is NOT the game he would have wanted to make. its like having an aspiring painter who wants to paint the next mona lisa, but to make ends meet painted furry art, but has a massive furry art following. and any attempt for him to paint his mona lisa is met with harsh feedback telling him they dont like it.

another good example is NRFTW. it has a lot of things going on for it. i really love the deliberate combat in the game, and they’re really doing their own thing. but their money is drying up. they have no real sources of additional income as they only sell the basic EA key with no cosmetics. their player base is abysmal but the game IS the game they wanted to make. they also are busy trying to rebalance the game and you really dont need a build guide to play, tho i would argue you would need to atleast know the basic outline of what you should try to achieve for the bare minimum.

imo, balance is achievable. the problem are the players. would players be happy if being balanced meant things would be more bland?

back when i played warhammer inquisitor i felt that their passive tree was a joke. 3% increased attack speed? omfg thats so weak. how are players going to feel the impact of leveling up? it took me a long time to realize that they were being careful, trying not to let players achieve too much power too fast. they also implemented a lot of caps so that players simply could not get above 50% crit chance for an example.

GD too has some caps, such as attack speed for a 2hander is capped at 3 APS iirc. ironically D3 also had the biggest nerf where they slapped a 50% attack speed nerf very early on release and nerfed all attack speed rolls on gear also by 50%. tho they kinda gave up on balance anyway since they wanted players to chase items indefinitely to fuel their auction house.

in my opinion, its still on the devs. how do you balance a melee player hitting an enemy 2 times a second. and a summoner gets his pet to hit at the same rate, then suddenly he has 2 pets. thats double the rate. then 3. where is any semblence of deliberate gameplay when all the player does is sit back and let his pets go to town? pets by themselves are hard to balance. make them strong and it outperforms active playstyle builds. make them too weak and they become such a pain to play, people would just not play pets.

i also believe that in too many modern d-likes, devs just simply give up trying. they want players to have fun. most players are fine with using build guides anyway. and most players seem to like blowing shit up with little consequence.

47

TQ is a fantastic ARPG, but the doubling down on Greek aesthetic just doesn’t appeal to me. It’s not that I dislike Greek culture - I just find real-world civilizations in fantasy settings dull and unimaginative. Ancient Greece has been done to death in movies, games, and literature, and I’m tired of seeing it. TQ2 might be great, but I’m not interested.

48

fair enough. its similar to how TLI actually has a solid foundation and could be played to a far extent while ignoring its P2W aspect but players choose to avoid it entirely plainly because of its art direction. NRFTW is also suffering something like that. i like the game but i really am sick of their distorted human forms.

49

It’s not, unless you launch the game with only 2-3 skills. And even then you’ll likely fail.
The problem is that these kinds of games have way too many interactions which cause unpredictable outcomes. And players are better (through sheer numbers) at breaking the game than devs are at making sure it can’t be broken.

We can agree that PoE has a pretty good balance these days. And yet, every single league, jungroan will find a dozen different builds that completely break the game. Builds that are such an outlier that they have to be immediately nerfed. And this is after more than 10 years of working on balance.

Just look at Starcraft, once again. It has 3 “classes”. Each “class” has about 25 units, or skills, and 15 buildings, or gear. There are no modifiers outside of this.
And yet it took them a little over 2 years to get balance right, with the Blood War expansion.

And with what they already knew, Starcract II wasn’t evenly balanced at launch either.

Balance is a tricky thing when you have lots of moving parts that interact with each other in an exponential way. You tweak numbers one way and players find that it breaks something else somewhere else.
So what you do is simply bring the strongest builds down while buffing the weakest ones until they’re all kinda in the same range.
And you keep doing that forever, because each new thing that you add will likely break something and the jungroans of the world will find it.

That is debatable. For example, Callagadra drops her visage which is BiS for any retaliation build.
Even if a lot of retaliation builds died when they introduced sunder.

Each boss usually has something that is BiS for a build, even if it’s not BiS for all builds. Or, in Lokarr’s case, a BiS set for leveling.

Those aren’t the devs decisions, though. Those are management decisions. PoE prospered because their management are dev players at heart and make decisions based on the game, rather than the money. D4 doesn’t because their management make decisions based on the money.
The devs just do what they’re told, even if they’d like to do something else. Either that or they leave, but that doesn’t help the game either.

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and why does it fail? its because players have too high expectations.

i do agree that having few skills can be less attractive. but thats the entire curse that GGG is experiencing right now with POE2. POE1’s legacy is 10001 different skills/supports/items that they cant afford to have a steady release of just a few classes/ascendancies/skills. thus they will not be able to make the game balanced.

i cant fully agree. tho at the upper level of gameplay things seems “all the same” for the most part. theres a huge disparity between a regular folk organically trying to do their own thing vs a min maxer. 100k dps vs millions to billions dps is a huge jump.

but that aside, some skills are just mechanically better. a good example is tru melee vs ranged/aoe. if you have “zero range” in your face melee. you need to smack the enemy directly. but if you’re up against say uber sirus. you’ll have a chock full of area denials which makes you do zero dps since you cant even reach him. that is a level of balance that GGG has effectively given up on. they made bosses better in POE2 but at the end game everything is just back to zoomy content. remember how maces used to be compared to “everything else”?

to be honest for poe2, i felt the game should have been balanced around maces and everything needed to else needed to be nerf. now it doesnt matter. everythings just a dps vomit.

fully agree with that take. and thats why some game devs implement hard/soft caps. ggg actually did this well with evasion where evasion starts giving sharp reduction of effectiveness the nearer you get to 50%. some games make cooldowns use a formula to make it unreasonable to get to 100%, while some just cap it out at 40%.

theres many ways to deal with exponential numbers, and its up to the devs NOT the players to figure it out.

tbh i dont know enough about retal to comment but i ll take your word for it. its a shame that it’s BIS for that build. i prefer if it was competitive but never BIS. even tho i’ve never played retal. knowing this makes me slightly unhappy.

as for lokarr. despite being BIS for leveling. it feels totally unnecessary. leveling gear tends to taper off pretty quickly anyway.

sorry that i used devs rather than management. i was having EHG (pre buyover), GGG and Crate in mind. they’re both the management and devs. i dont care about blizzard enough to bother with this distinction. you’re right on the proper terms.

as for POE prospering because of them listening to players. i literally just wrote about how they made compromises to their vision to make the game players wanted instead of the game they wanted to make.

POE is a broken mess and is not the game that they wanted. POE ruthless is closer to what Chris had in mind and “everyone” hated ruthless. whenever people like you point out how POE/management listened to players, its a slap across chris’s face as its another remark on how people dont like his vision.

and the “best part” is chris cannot ever verify this. he can only suffer in silence and let his new game do the talking.

51

This forum is just depressing…Looks like POE fanclub than LE forum. I am active in many arpg communities (D4, TQ2, PoE/PoE2) , and NO community talked about other games more than LE forum.

So many bias and misinformation and the amount of POE fanclubers and D4 haters, in a foum about LE. Which beg, why even be here. Juts go play PoE since its the best arpg according to people here already.

PoE has the one of most absurd MTXs prcing in gaming (not just arpg). Chris sold GGG to 10cent for passion, and not $$$? Also the game literally has predatory lootbox, and have actual P2W in their chinese versions. GTFO on this passion vs greed nonsense.

I probably play PoE more than most people here, & spent so much they give me free keys for PoE2 as high value customers (spent over 500bucks) , but some of the claims are just fanb bias or not true. GGG devs were known for NOT listening to players (unlesse they face backlash like give streamers and firends first in queue, overcharging of MTX like mouse cursors). I have like 1000 posts in over a decade at GGG forum. many feedback from players since forever was ignored, and even made to PoE2. When they feedback, the tune was, “we know better than you,”, and the recurring concenous among forum members is the game was design for the 1% and GGG only listen to the streamers. Famously Chris when asked about end game bosses not accessable by most players, His reply was, they can watch their favorite streamers beat the bosses…

And balances are all over the place for the lifetime of the game. e.g Melee has been bad like forever.
…
To get back to topic, I want to point of the misguide thinking more is better. At some point it get diminshing return, and ever regress. Many experiments was done, and the principle is same. Here is an exmaple, When peopke were given a lot of favor of ice cream to choose. After they ate the icecream, that they were ask how satisfying were they with their choices.
Same experiemnt was done again but with more LESS favor, but each more distinct (choco vanilaa, strawberry) . Same question was asked, Turned out MORE people are more satisfied with their ice cream choices when the options are less. Because they were more certain of the choices! If I love choloate and there is only one choloate, then of course I am happy with my chocolate ice craem, Now if there are 10 different chocolate, then you might question if you pick the correct choloate favor…

The point being, its better to have enough distinct skills that support different fantasy, then buffet amount of skills that many are smiliar. Lessor skills also make it easier to balance.
Also when there are too much options (make worst when thery are minior differnces between them) it can confuse players which are the best to use, and it turned into a min-max balance. Obviously too little is also an issue. The underlining point is to find a sweet spot.

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Killed him at lvl 16. “Run away” works, dodge just NOT. and “keep close” may not work too cus I was a poison dot Archer :roll_eyes:Arena shape reminds me Lagon’s harbinger fight
Pan was much easier, all attacks are pretty well telegraphed

53

Yes I see that, but even with that argumentation your ranking don’t make sense objectively. TQ is not very flexible beyond the boundaries of the 2 mastery choices.

And I am not sure how some of these games “feel” calssless to you when they are clearly not :thinking:

A portion of the community gravitating towards very strong builds will always be a thing, in any game.

BUT

If you cut the very extreme outliers, LE is a lot better than a lot of other ARPG’s already.

Also the people that follow build guides “for the most part” are only a fraction of the entire community, nobody really has the numbers on how many people do homebrew builds and how many people follow build guides 1 to 1 and how many people do a mix of following a build guide and maybe adjusting it slightly to their desires.
But simply the possibility of as many homebrew builds as LE has to offer is a gigantic plus for me and basically the single main reason why I sticked with LE for such a long time. Even after 4 digit playhours I still tested and discovered new things that were totally “viable” (e.g. I could complete all content with it).

Also I never shit on D4 for anything. I never said its a shitty game, I just don’t like when people make it a superior game compared to a lot of other games. It mainly has the numbers because of the huge franchise, nostaglia and marketing budget.

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There’s always a huge disparity between homebrewed builds and min-maxed ones. The only way that doesn’t happen is if the game is so simple that even a 5 year old will get there, like D3.
The more complex a game is, meaning the more meaningful choices it has, the bigger the gap between yolo builds and minmaxxed ones.

Balance isn’t the difference between those. It’s whether or not any build can complete all content or not. And if the top build is not vastly better than the bottom one.

In PoE you can complete everything with any build you want. Some will be better at one mechanic than another, some might require a bit more skill than another, but you can pick up almost any skill and know that it’s possible to complete anything you want in the game with it.
This isn’t true in LE, though. With the introduction of Uby, there is now content that only a few builds can complete, not to mention that the difference between the top and bottom builds is huge.
It’s not true in GD either. Because some builds have no chance of doing Crate or other superbosses which have BiS items gated behind them.

That will always happen in any game. Even outside of ARPGs, ranged is always better than melee. Even in Elden Ring, a game that is supposed to reward you for your melee skills, magic ranged is much much easier.

This is something that can’t ever fixed because it’s a fundamental issue to the playstyle. Pure melee will always be a lot slower. Minion builds will always be safer. There’s no single game that implemented both where this doesn’t happen.

So the only question is: can either of those playstyles do all content? If yes, then it’s fine, if not there’s an issue.

I actually never said that, you misread what I wrote.

55

I really do not like the use of “min-max builds” in this context, even a homebrew non-meta build can be min-maxxed, just within its own boundaries.
I personally love min-maxxing a build, but I never play anythign that is even close to meta. But still within a builds boundaries you can have huge min-maxxing.

I would call it homebrew vs meta builds.

I disagree, you can’t do everything in PoE with any build, if you exclude Uber Pinnacle Bosses I agree though. Uber ABerroth is in a very similar spot than Uber Pinnacles in PoE from a power progression standpoint.
But if you exclude these Uber Bosses you can play pretty much anything you want in both games.

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56

I was mostly referring to the difference between someone who doesn’t have deep knowledge of the game winging it, vs someone who does. Their builds will always be better because they know the interactions and how to squeeze the numbers better.

A newer player that doesn’t follow a build guide will almost certainly make wrong decisions. Wrong, in this case, being sub-optimal.
So, even with meta builds, a new player creating an ES VK will always have a big disparity between their build and one you make, for example, because you’ve been doing ES VKs for years and know the ins and outs.

I did say that with the introduction of Uby (although this also happened with Aby, though to a lesser extent) this is the case.
If you ignore both iterations of Aby, then yes, any build can do all content.

But the main difference is that in PoE you know that pretty much any skill can do all content, even ubers. You might have to min max a bit, follow a guide (since PoE is massively over-complex), but it can be done.
This isn’t the case in LE, though. If I choose a zoo minion build, I can’t do Uby. I’ll even struggle with current Aby. Even if I follow an optimized build guide.

I love LE and prefer it over PoE, but obviously balance is better there. Which is a normal thing. Like I’ve said before, balance requires time to get a handle on and LE only just started on that path.

57

You say that as its fact, but it isn’t. There are totally skills or setups that can’t do them.

There are so many skills in PoE that get barely any play and if they do get some level of play into deeper endgame they usually utilize some sort of meta interaction just applying it to another sub-optimal skill.

I am playing Path of Exile for many many years and I never defeated an Uber Pinnacle Boss (since they got introduced). Now you can say my builds suck or that I am a bad player, but I played so many builds that I couldn’t bring to the level where Uber Bosses would be feasible, even if I would migrate to trade (I exclusively play SSF or Private League with some friends). All these builds would require so many substantial changes that I would consider it a different build.

In LE I can kill regular Aberroth with any skill/build for sure, even without pulling out the most crazy meta strats/synergies.

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58

I don’t think this is true, even with the Aby nerf. I doubt a zoo minion build can kill Aby, for example. They all die much too fast.
Not to mention sub-optimal skills like Acid Flask (without pulling out crazy meta strats/synergies).

More builds can do Aby now than they did before, but I still don’t think any build can do it.

59

Well, what kills them? pull them out of whatever that is.

Minions are tanky enough to survive most mechanics unless they are exposed for a long timeframe and for recovering after some incoming damage you need to account for by giving them enough sustain.

Aberroth has no permanent screenwide sustained damage, its all area based and you can make your minions move out of stuff. If they die very quickly by one specific mechanics you either build them not tanky enough or you don’t move them out properly.

60

I think i killed Abby couple months ago just standing there and throwing Acid flasks directly, maybe using shift to move was crazy meta synergy. :slight_smile:

So it’s doable, but understand people don’t like it currently
Still waiting for Buffs tho haha.

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