ok, let me explain…
we have Items (swords/rings/amulets) that drops after we kill mobs, yes?
and we have Orbs for crafting items, yes?
And…we have Harvest/Essences/Div Cards/Delve fossils/ Bestiary… for? for what?
well…then tell me plz what’s wrong with Orbs and core mechanics of crafting in POE if you need use ALL of these leagues (and even more items like essences/beasts/fossils e.t.c) for another craft possibilities?
I just want to say that I want completely working(correct) mechanics in the game (craft/ loot) . in POE the craft mechanics are absurd
Your chances to find some good items on the ground = almost 0% , it’s absurd!
On the pickup bases thing - no. Unless its ilvl86+ or ilvl85+ influenced item, you do not bother to pick it up, unless its day 1 of the new league. League mechanics - the only uses for Bestiary were duping items (basically mirror craft) and Bestiary bosses farming (for either Farruls fur and similarly good items,which are like 2-3 iirc, then the recipe for the Aspect crafts), Temple has been so bad since Incursion ended that they fully reworked it in 3.14 (after 2 years!),etc.
Uniques - there are like 60-70 useful uniques (most of them are either build enabling or corpse removal uniques), then like 50 uniques with above average stats, others go to vendor (still over like 500 that i can put on paper without much thought) - no stop on the way to see the roll, straight to the “Sell items” window and “Accept” button.
For the crafting - Harvest nerfed to the ground, other methods except Essences (buffed) and fossils are garbage (RNG shitfest at its worst) and Maven orbing is out of control on the crusader ilvl86+ chests, because it can roll the proper explo chests.
Before I toss in my 2cp I want to point any late joiners who may have missed it to SayyadinaAtreides’ previous post on this thread. It does an excellent job of teasing apart design from implementation and how implementations that were once good may collapse as a game grows and evolves, but shouldn’t necessarily condemn the underlying design. Great read.
Regarding death penalty/xp loss: I think it’s vital for incentivizing more thoughtful builds and more thoughtful playstyles, but I agree with @Heavy that it shouldn’t gate content. Scaling this penalty out at the very late endgame ensures that it doesn’t prevent access to content while simultaneously encouraging more thoughtful builds precisely when you have the largest return on investment for thinking about your build carefully! What value would there be in reaching max level if you didn’t have to think about it to achieve it?
I’ll leave an open ended question in that regard:
If every time you died in LE, you knew for sure it was due to your own mistakes or misplay, would you be upset about an xp penalty?
I’m genuinely curious for others thoughts. (Whether this is achievable from a game design perspective is a whole other valuable discussion, but for the sake of this question let’s assume it can be done).
Regarding trading interactions: my first thought is “Convenience is oft the enemy of community”. At least for me personally I felt this in a number of ways over the past ~25 odd years of my online gaming: Halo introducing matchmaking as a departure from previous lobby-based systems (e.g SOCOM, CoD1), WoW introducing the dungeon finder removing any need to interact with the people you’re playing with, even EQ trading EC tunnel chatter for characters-as-npc merchants in the Bazaar.
Of course trade doesn’t need to be the driving force behind community, but it is something that fundamentally requires an interaction of different people, even if you decouple that entirely with an automated broker (e.g. Auction House). ARPGs, in my limited experience, don’t have too many inherent community-interactive systems but of course it doesn’t have to be that way, perhaps EHG has some other means in mind for fostering community engagement in-game? Ultimately that would be my only concern, and I’m actually excited at the possibilities.
I think I could be, yes. I don’t want to receive a penaly for trying something new. My mistake could be changing a setting in a skill, but after changing it I must test it. It could work perfectly for a while, then fail when difficulty increases. I would be punished for experimenting.
I see what you mean and you’re probably right, but this situation also exists.
That’s a good point, I hadn’t considered experimentation which LE definitely supports with the ease of re-spec. But I also wonder if that is exactly the right thing that should happen? Experimentation needs negative feedback (EDIT: To be fair, this discussion is more about how that negative feedback is implemented, so this point isn’t particularly pertinent, sorry abou that), otherwise everything would work and there wouldn’t be a point of experimenting in the first place. But I actually think MoF is designed precisely for this, as it lets you re-climb the difficulty in a very controlled way which arguably provides for relatively safe experimentation. But hey, just my thoughts
You understand that your contribution provides nothing to this discussion right? Posting to stroke your own ego makes you look like a donkey. This thread is explicitly for discussing this and similar topics. If you don’t like that, you do not have to read it.
Death penalty/XP loss
I think EHG’s current implementation is really good because there’s enough incentive to not die without “taking away your stuff.”
In the arena, your run is flat out ended. If you’re an arena-pusher, it means you have to go through all the trash waves to get to the waves that have any meaning. Having to endure mindnumbingly easy content is punishment enough if you ask me. And if you’re trying to climb up the ladder, not making it to the next wave can be the difference between ranking up and not ranking up.
In monos, you lose mono progress and have to go through praying to RNGesus to hurry up and give your boss again. When you’re trying to complete as many runs as possible in the shortest time possible, anything that sets you back’ll be annoying as hell and make an already repetitive activity feel even more repetitive.
Trade interactions
Based on my limited online experience with games that don’t have a marketplace, I don’t think trade would promote community or meaningful interactions. Convos in trade chat (and often other chats) is usually just wtb/wts spam. The person to person interaction is just opening a trade window and trying to finish the trade as quickly as possible.
Even group content doesn’t really foster community anymore if you ask me. If there’s no finder, you get “LF (insert whatever is the meta spec) tank/healer GS X+, experienced only” and “LFP big dick DPS, GS X, experienced” spam. You enter a dungeon, maybe there’ll be a “hi” at the start of the run, maybe not. You get to the end, there’s maybe a “thanks” or “good run.”
And IMO LE does a very good job with the screen clarity and seeing stuff happening on screen.
So if you die, most of the times i relatively clear.
Of course there are some situations were you may receive damage from multiple sources and it’s not 100% clear what killed you or did the most dmg, but those are edge cases.
Well, also consider lag and DCs. 11th can do their job maximally right and there will still be unfair deaths.
With the stakes upped, it will also put pressure on new content being balanced in one go. It will also put some sort of a cap on how crazy things can get.
While I kind of like an XP penalty to some level, I also know that it will bring some level of drama that requires many factors to come together well to be kept to a minimum.
It also limits the fun of the true softcore players to a degree. Some players want to stay away from hardcore as far as possible and simply have a fun time. A friendly setback after a mistake is good enough - often some time investment (keeping character progress) will do.
For people that want stronger penalties, there could be modes or challenges one can opt for, so they can distinguish/challenge themselves further.
Yes, because this is not the only reason for dying, there are multiple reasons (and in reality its a combination of these)
Not having good enough gear
Not having good enough build
Not having good enough skill/misplay (which is what you mentioned)
Arguably (and controversially as well) the main reason for dying in aRPG’s is actually predominantly 1 and 2. In terms of success reflecting typical skill, aRPG’s are really on the bottom of the level of games (especially when you compare it to competitive shooters/MOBA’s). Typical success in aRPGs are often a combination of knowledge and time investment. This is just a factor of how the state of endgame in aRPG’s which is that most of the time you are dealing with lots of monsters that have hyper inflated health/damage values so success is basically a factor of having in enough defenses to survive being able to kill the monsters before they kill you (and at its worst it turns into wackamole).
If aRPG’s difficulty level scaled in terms of AI for example (i.e. as the game progress the mobs AI would get smarter/better) then this may change, but the fact is that dying is rarely a matter of skill apart from the primitive reaction time needed to use a potion/mobility skill when you get hit and reach low health. You can also often die just as a result of bad luck, i.e. massive crit on a big hit thats not avoidable because its instant (and the best players in other aRPG’s have often died because such reasons). This is the reason why knowledge is so important, it basically reduces down to the most efficient way to organize your characters defenses while still having the necessary offence.
In my opinion, the premise of this question is wrong and also misleading (whether its deliberate or not). Most people that justify the EXP death penalty do not realize (consciously or not) that in reality, dying has little to do with misplaying/skill (especially considering that mob/boss AI tends to be very primitive and its not hard at all to memorize this). Case in point I can now beat certain empowered mono bosses while watching documentaries on my second screen, good luck doing this in a game like Dota2 while versing other real players.
In regards to the current state of LE, simply put if you die a lot of the time you cannot progress in later monos. You basically hit a point where if you die enough, you lose more progress then you make and you cannot access the endgame content. This is often enough a signal telling you that either you do not have enough gear and/or your build needs work, which is fine since the main source of investment in these games is about build knowledge and farming the right items.
Personally I would like to see a game where the “action” part of aRPG plays a more significant role in the player development/skill of the game but this would require significant deviation from the D2 formula (i.e. as mentioned before, rather than mobs only scaling in HP/damage, they actually perform better AI/tactics as you progress). In any case at least currently I prefer current balance that LE has struck, because the loss of EXP on death mechanic is a gimmick that has been mindlessly copied from D2 and in games in like PoE all it really tells you is that its a combination of your build is wrong and/or you havent farmed enough items with the former being solved by netdecking and the latter being solved with time sinks. At least with LE’s death mechanic, you can fun exploring builds without feeling compelled to netdeck because of the unjustified exp death loss mechanic found in other aRPGs.
I have about 70 hours in Outriders. Incredible potential and some really good ideas. The main issue there is that the content is too little at the moment.
Regarding death penalty, it all depends on how grindy leveling is at the highest levels. Grim Dawn had death penalty but I barely notice because even the 99 to 100 leveling happens within a reasonable time. Also, in the Grim Dawn mechanic, you can pick most of the lost XP back from your corpse.
In PoE, on the other hand, the leveling process at 90+ is just disrespect to players’ time. Thus, a moment in PoE arrives when dying 1-2 times in a map after a good couple of days results in giving up on the season.
BTW, PoE devs said that they were perfectly OK with players hoping do to well in the beginning of each season and giving up after 2-3 weeks.
Indeed this is also correct. I actually remember that getting from 90-100 wasn’t as hard as it is now but what happened is that at one point high level players/streamers managed to abuse a combination of an extremely powerful meta build plus high level maps giving a lot more EXP which allowed people to get to 100 faster than GGG liked in the season.
At this point GGG then increased drastically the amount of EXP required after 90 which of course had the consequence that unless you are playing such a strong meta build getting to 100 takes a ridiculous amount of investment.
This actually gives me the impression that the current design for the EXP mechanic in PoE has nothing to do with signaling players that their build is wrong or an indicator of actual skill but rather as a metric to see how far you progress in a season. Since there is no other numeric way (ergo metric) to figure out how “successful” you are in a season they ended up using EXP so conclusively they needed to make sure that getting to 100 wasn’t too easy otherwise everyone would be able to do it in a month or so (which is what I mentioned in the first paragraph).
I mean abstractly gold could be used instead of EXP (which also adds an interesting dynamic since you can also spend gold for items which can create difficult decisions, such as do I spend a lot of gold which puts me behind in the season ladder however lets me get a really good item that will over the longer term pay for itself) but PoE deliberately doesn’t have gold, so the only thing they could use is EXP.
Apologies that I wasn’t clearer with the question, but I include 1 and 2 in the group of “your own mistakes or misplays”. In fact for me personally I consider that almost more important than the last, since you can work to create builds that can effectively ignore mobs and just facetank with insane sustain.
I think this also highlighted for me why I am not bothered by xp loss: I don’t view xp as progress! To me progressing in a game like LE is learning more about the game and becoming better at engaging with it. In this vein xp loss is simply a tool in assisting your learning, because reaching level 100 isn’t my idea of “winning” it’s an accomplishment on the way of learning and progressing in the game. Of course not everyone will share this sentiment, and so it’s reasonable others feel differently.
Taking my previous comment into account, I would argue this is precisely due to you skill at the game
I would like to point out that this is true as well with the echo system. If you die enough you will not be able to progress a monolith.
While I understand your sentiment, xp loss on death has existed in many games before D2 and outside the ARPG genre as a whole. EQ had exp on death, tons of MUDs have xp on death. It’s a concept much larger than D2. In fact not having xp on death is strange to me. But I agree it doesn’t mean it’s the best mechanism for negative feedback to inform learning.
I suppose my stance is better summed up as: “I believe it’s important to have a negative feedback system to inform learning, which does not gate content”. But I think it’s important to keep in mind that reaching content more slowly than others is not gatekeeping, that’s just a learning curve. Someone with tons of ARPG experience is going to learn quicker than someone without, mostly because they have less to learn.
I agree completely! I think that would be incredible. And I’m actually optimistic that LE might be able to work in this direction. I’ve noticed (and this very likely is intentional but I haven’t seen the commentary about it, not that I’ve looked much it just came to mind) that there are no modifiers on echoes that increase mob pack size. I love this! In my mind it’s a departure from “mobs as food for the build”, although that’s still true to an extent. But having less mobs gives opportunity to more dynamic mob behavior because the player can actually engage with it.
Thanks for the thoughtful response! Definitely helped me consider my opinions more carefully.
