1 Mill Kill Feedback (Abuse and Balance Rant)

Hello. First of all, I enjoyed the game. Below you'll find a lot of criticisms but it doesn't mean the game isn't great. I've spent some time playing PoE 1, but not much, one of the things that were off putting for me is how much I don't know about the game because it's been going on for a long time, so in that regard PoE 2 is something I really have been looking forward to. That said, here are the things I didn't like - I'm sure you know about most of them but may be something here could be useful.

User Interface
- Tooltip system is great, you should keep expanding it
- Gemcutting interface should be accessible without having an uncut gem in your inventory, skill preview videos should be available without needing to fulfill attribute/level requirements
- UI should be more clear on what support gems could be cut, it's really been a while until I found out that there's a "show recommended" checkbox. Same goes for spirit gems, current categories duplicate gems and for new players aren't informative that as a monk you could benefit from ranger skills (same goes for weapon skill gems that do not require the use of the weapon)
- Leaning an ascendancy "gem" skill, putting supports into it and respeccing it causes you to leave your gems inside (possibly conflicting with using same support gems but not sure about that)
- Now that you've removed distinction between "increase global phys dmg" and "increase phys dmg" on weapons you're confusing players even more. Also confusing the trade site, cuz there are two "increased physical damage" mods and there's no distinction between them leading to searches not finding any weapons if you're looking for the wrong type of mod. Renaming and tooltips on how weapon mods work are needed here. It's also weird that increased ele dmg with attacks on weapon scales not the way other weapons do. Crit damage bonus should also be displayed on weapon because this mod affects it in an unintuitive way
- Use different colours on items for flavour and "how it works" texts. A lot of people still don't read the tooltip (neither did I know how to use an omen) because the text is greyed out
- Mod tiers should display max tier for the mod
- Pls develop a death log

Playability
- May be it's WASD movement, may be it's new layouts, but sometimes even the smallest bump on the road can prevent you from moving and it's infuriating. And some maps have A LOT of bumps. I feel like mouse movement had some pathfinding and that's why it felt better, but perhaps PoE1 just had less bumps. With a lot of stuff going on on screen and navigating mostly by minimap it's very easy to die because of this. Also some layouts contribute to this by having different nooks and crannies where you have to circumnavigate around one-millimeter bump on the corner before actually entering a passage
- Projectile physics are bad. I mean physics are great, but why does this neat engine show off need to make the experience miserable? I spent some time playing bonestorm and on some maps it was unplayable. Wide row of projectiles, half of them disappear when you're running on corridor maps. Enemies are on top of the stairs? Your character would shot at the stairs instead of the enemies. Swarm of small flies bites your character? Projectiles shoot right over them and you have to target at your feet instead. Fighting boss on The Forge? Of course if your cursor points off the platform the projectiles will target at your feet instead of the boss. Please remove the physics from targeting, make every mob have a hitbox at a certain height and use that height for source/target. Grenadiers have it even worse I hear.
- Delirium fog should be removed from the game. You guys have made such a beautiful game and 90% of the endgame is black and white with a repetitive "soundtrack". When I opened another game the other day my first thought was "wow, this game is vivid". It was fine as a league, but having it as one of the core mechanics is awful. Not to mention that fog also covers the ground and PoE2 has A LOT of ground effects (may be it's not really a lot, but that's the only stuff that actually kills you), and as I said there is a lot of bumps that stop you from moving and you can't really see anything in the fog.

Class fantasy
- Initially I wanted to play physical blood mage, but in the current state neither is worth playing;
- Phys spells don't have anything good, people are crying out for exsanguinate or something, because right now there's bone blast (clunky having spell tied to you wand, has delay - not fun to play), excavate (or what's that cool cone of bone spikes called) which is fun but it doesn't deal much damage because it's also a minion skill (so it's useless on bosses which have almost no minions in PoE2), bonestorm (which you have to charge and projectiles suck and it also needs power charges that make it go sparkly blue instead of something bloody which kinda ruins the fantasy) and I guess that's all of the physical skills. Not much. Also you can break armor and bleed but it's near impossible to utilise it, those interactions work for attacks and have almost zero synergy with spells
- Blood mage needs some work: adding health costs to spells instead of converting costs feels weird, why am I paying for skills with health but run out of mana? Why does it set base crit chance instead of multiplying it - it means that running elemental spells with low base crit is more beneficient. Why does it make all damage apply bleed when only physical damage can benefit from it (and still the support for this is lacking)? It's also center around health stacking but there is no health stacking in this game, instead all nodes boost ES. There are no melee spells but blood globules appear in melee.
- Invoker implies it can manipulate all elements but basically it's melee stormweaver focused around cold and lightning. Elemental expression can trigger fire damage, sure, but its damage is non-existent. Clearly there was an effort to make possible utilizing spell damage/triggered spells while using melee weapons, but there are no options for melee spellcasting and elemental expression is a spell. My build (I am now playing lightning flicker strike) mostly consists of elemental damage increases, but still elemental expression has 20 times less damage than my attacks (mostly because of HoWA which is broken). There's simply not enough damage in playing melee+spells because you have to either go attacks or spells. You can't utilize "cast on" without damage because it requires damage to apply ailments and if you can consistently apply them, it means the spell part will have no damage.
- Who designed Chronomancer? It's meant to manipulate cooldowns, are you aware that the game doesn't have skills with cooldowns? And even if you use supports that add cooldowns, those aren't really worth it. Especially if you're restricted to using only unique support gems, which means you will only have 2 or 3 usable cooldown buttons with 6 second cooldown.

Meta
Currently there are only two viable options, either go MoM or go HoWA:
- 100% MoM is too much. Eldritch Battery needed rework, sure, but with 100% MoM it means you go CI, have 1 HP, convert all ES to mana and need nothing more. Archmage boosting damage without having to spend a lot of mana is also wrong way to go. MoM shouldn't go over 90% damage taken from mana or it allows you to build nothing but mana.
- HoWA is a bit too good as well, but may be it's the other builds that are too weak to keep up. Basically when you pick up HoWA (and may be lightning dmg increase per 10 intelligence) you don't need much else damage-wise.
- Greater Lightning Bolt
- To me it looks like the game is balanced to have a more slow curve for most of the builds in the game and the problem is mom/howa breaking that balance. Although I'm really not sure how any other builds are supposed to kill endgame bosses save for that builds that do it through overkill damage and breaking icewalls etc.

Endgame balance
- Monster health/damage scaling is almost non-existent going from t1 to t16 maps. May be this decision was made to accommodate for new players, but in reality it leaves a gap. You only need ~50k tooltip DPS to clear T16 easily, but you need 200+ to clear endgame bosses/simulacrum. High level maps should be more difficult.
- Nothing but ES matters. Armour does nothing, dodge provides decent quality of life but you constantly die from ground effects, ES passives are too strong, health stacking doesn't exist. In PoE1 ES was a high-end defense mechanic that was expensive and required running Vaal Discipline and some skill to recharge when needed, here it's the only way to go and you can just convert your health potions to ES potions. There are no health nodes on the tree and ES nodes are twice as powerful compared to PoE1. Another nail in the coffin for the blood mage.
- Corpse explosion / Volatile plants damage inconsistent with everything else in the game but may be it's just me. Also dying to volatile stuff (or other ground effects) because it's blocked from view by item tooltips is getting old.
- Curse effects don't scale with explicits and that makes them easiest suffixes in the game which is weird

Maps
I kinda get what you were trying to do with forcing players to run all kinds of layouts and setting up maps instead of just getting atlas points and then buying maps, so mostly it's great, but there are a few hiccups:
- obviously there are bugs: maps with 5+ connections being actually not connected to one of the shown connections, maps/towers/clusters with no access to it, once my citadel moved to another completed map and was shown as completed, rares not spawned correctly sometimes (once on Mire one rare was that bee-like thing that swoops in from the air and it spawned outside one of the huts; Charged Staff's shockwaves hit things through walls (which is a bug in itself, but if you fix it, game will be less playable because there's so much projectiles/fissures like stormwave that disappear after hitting some kind of bump) so I was able to kill it but wasn't able to loot Divine Orb that surely dropped from it)
- then there are doubly punishing layouts - a lot of times I had breaches on Forge/Crypt and it's obvious that they are bad, so I mostly use those layouts to set up the good ones, but in those tight corridors breaches only spawn like 10-20 initial mobs, and then close after 10 seconds because you haven't killed enough mobs, it's stupid and there should be some minimum amount of monsters spawned to keep the breach going.
- UI could be improved, for example you could show how many maps there are to be affected by a tablet (currently it only shows it when there's less maps than the tablet is for); it's also not really clear if a map could be affected if it's almost out of the range.
- hunting down rares is exhausting, the amount of backtracking is insane; in PoE1 players just knew where to run on certain map layouts, you obviously wanted to get rid of it, but finding every single rare is cruel. especially because there are a lot of mobs that are hiding from you (being a flock of crows, being underground, waiting to swoop in from the sky, being invisible, being a rock etc); in my opinion all of the rares and league mechanics should be visible on minimap (either all the map from the start or in a large radius around you); tracking number of breaches on the map would be great too, since there are only random-based increases to overall number of breaches.
- picking up splinters one by one is awful. as well as running around picking all the items after breach. I'm sure you've heard all the complaints about it, I hope you do something about it.
- irradiating tablets are kind of useless especially since addition of overseer tablets; not sure but I think I saw it irradiating maps which already have bosses, which with my atlas tree already irradiate areas, and if that's true that's not how it needs to work. if it had a chance to corrupt maps and there was some kind of corruption tablet, it could be more interesting.
- double corrupting atlas node is useless. when you corrupt a waystone and it goes badly - you throw away the map, it's okay. when you double corrupt your map once it's ON THE ATLAS - it's a waste of the set up atlas spot, which isn't something you can buy from trade. Setting up a spot with 140% quantity and letting it go full-suffixes isn't something anyone will want to do. Especially if they already went through corrupting 10 waystones to get t16 with good mods because you removed uncorrupted t16 from the game (which also kinda sucks)

League mechanics
- Breaches are okay, save from doubly getting hurt from bad layouts and having to pick up splinters one by one.
- Delirium is not a mechanic. There's no point in having deli mirrors in your maps, half of the atlas talents don't work in instilled maps, delirium fog is awful (see above), simulacrum allows for huge afk play/botting (see below)
- Rituals aren't great gameplay-wise as well. You go blink-blink-reroll-reroll and that's it. Fishing for some high-end items, doing NOTHING in between. There's no splinters to collect, no special mobs to kill, no loot to get. The mechanic just isn't there to play.
- Expeditions are just a little bit better than rituals. Crafting potential is there, but the only point to run logbooks is farming the boss. Which appears randomly, which is stupid. I mean people just open the logbook, find out there's no boss and open another one. There's really no point in any other loot, it's worse than while mapping.

Headhunter
There always have been and always will be mods that are worse or better than others, work worse or better with some builds, but there are a few mods that really should go away:
- there's this mod that sometimes teleports you behind random monster's back - it just feels wrong. in the early days after launch it also crashed instance sometimes, but now it's doing better, but still it's a very bad mod to steal, being tugged back like rubber-banding or being tossed into a large pack of monsters is really frustrating.
- there's also a mod (not sure it's the one with stealth or not) that makes monsters ignore you. There are a few problems with it - mobs ignoring you persists even after the mod is gone, some hidden (underground etc) mobs don't activate because of it, bosses and most mechanics ignore you making the game easier, and the only way to get rid of it is getting out of the map. Needless to say it's breaking and abusing the game in some ways, I don't think mods like this should transfer to a player, but at least you need to fix it not expiring.

Flicker Strike
May be it's intended but calculating damage/crit once per cast is working weirdly. Maybe it's just me going full lightning damage and crit that's the issue, but having full duration flicker strike do 100k damage or 3mil damage depending on crit and damage roll is weird. Intuitively I'd expect every hit to calculate damage separately, making its output more consistent. Since maps are really weak it's not noticeable, but on bosses it makes all the difference, I can one-shot boss with a lucky cast or I can cast it five times doing no damage. Add its RNG not expending charges to that and you get a casino

The loot
- no other mod on atlas/waystones scales drops like item quantity does. it's driving the whole farm meta and other mods (except for things like additional breach which take another mod slot) aren't worth anything.
- party quantity (or rarity or whatever it is) is meta and sometimes it sucks. I mean I get it that if there are six people playing one map they should get something in return for their time. But with the costly and time-consuming map setup it's almost required to play with some friends. While it's good that being mostly a solo experience the game encourages me to bring someone over, it creates a nasty feeling. I can't run my own good maps. If I'm setting some maps up, I can't just go and run them when I feel like it, I'm better off waiting for my friends to come online and "leech" the map. (not sure if that's a widespread term, what I mean by it is friends come by, boost the drops, but the host loots all the most valuable ones, it makes sense when you need a few hours running maps to set up a few good ones, you help each other out by doing this in turns).
- while full-on party play is superior it requires some set up - someone needs to set up a lot of maps, some people go full-support, some go culling. It requires effort to function and may be it's okay that it's so rewarding. But there are two issues - first one being that current high-end maps are weak, and you don't even need a super carry to run them with other 5 characters doing nothing.

The abuse
The second one is worse. With maps being weak, with party quantity/rarity present, with support characters not doing anything but running beside you, with such thing as culling and having those gloves that do the culling for you (kills are considered to be yours), with everything above. The botting potential is enormous. I have an acquaintance who made himself a rarity culler and tried a follow bot on it. It went so smooth so now he runs six characters while only playing one. Here's just facts:
- getting a follow bot to function is easy and it seems like it doesn't attract bans;
- gearing up six characters to survive t16 maps costs almost nothing, the only costs are for carry and rarity. other four characters could even be naked I guess, they are mostly to buff the loot, but can provide 100% blocking, carry amplification, monster disabling etc;
- my friend farming high-end content for a month and got 2 million kills (and 100-200% rarity on gear) have only looted 3 tier-zero uniques in a month; the dude with follow rarity bot have got 3 tier-zero uniques in a day; the difference is so colossal that there's no point in playing without a rarity culler following you;
- you might say that botting is the issue (and it partly is) but setting up all the same to farm simulacrum doesn't even require you to use bot, because the game even teleports all the characters for you. :D

This automatisation is legit! And that kinda makes me sad that you need to abuse the game, having all those characters doing nothing but standing near you, just to play the game efficiently. May be culling should be removed from the game, I don't see other options, it can be abused either way. As long as culling/support characters don't need to press any buttons, don't need to PLAY THE GAME to do their thing they shouldn't be part of the game.

Been waiting for a while to reply so you get back up top with this well-written feedback.

Plenty of points I agree with, especially points 1 & 3 under playability.

Thank you!

There's some stuff I didn't even feel like writing already, but as important.

Not only the endgame rotates around ES, I think right now it's also balanced around Grim Feast - all the hits are kinda big, but with constant overflow you just play 2x ES, you don't need to recharge it, you don't need the potions (which are converted from health to ES super easily - that node should be farther off from CI imho). All of this invalidates recharge speed/delay modifiers as well as health modifiers and adds to the gap between mapping and bossing, because you could be unkillable on the maps but the boss will one-shot you without stacked up Grim Feast.

Also weapon swap is underwhelming. I guess the problem will go away once we have two weapons per stat base (i.e. once monk will be able to use daggers etc), but as of right now it has almost no uses, save for movement speed set or a utility vine arrow and so on. It would be cool if it were possible to switch to another set for bossing, but that requires you to have two good weapons instead of one. Also having another set doesn't increase the number of gems you could utilise.

I approach weapon swap from the point of Grim Feast being at the same time OP on maps and useless on bosses - it would be kind of nice if you could swap it out for bossing without having to fiddle with gems manually. I do realise that could be even more OP, but I think that balancing Grim Feast should be done separately, not via it being useless at bosses. May be you could add weapon bases/mods with +1 gem slot, so you could have different gems for different sets - right now you can have different spirit skills, but gem sockets aren't enough to accommodate it. Also unique support gems restriction really makes it not interesting to use - but if I could have another gem setup on the other weapon with the same supports I use in the first set - that could be fun to play around. I know that using another weapon gives you another gem slot in the form of base weapon attack but let's be honest noone's gonna use basic attack ever - may be that slot should come in such a form that you could replace the basic attack "gem" with your own.

Crit immunity is an issue. I agree that it wasn't an interesting stat to build in PoE1, but having almost no ability to protect yourself from crits is kind of worse. I mean I saw a vid where 99 lvl HC dude died to one Arbiter hit while having 22k ES - I don't know but am pretty sure he died to a crit. Even if he didn't such a random death to otherwise survivable hit is something that could happen, and even if it's okay on softcore it's the worst that could happen to you on hardcore.

Maps and Precursors tab - pls, I'll pay anything

T16 drop from Arbiter - those were nice, easy leveling. Removing them completely is somewhat harsh

while i agree with most of what you wrote i have to disagree about blood mage ascendancy, the ascendancy is pretty damn immortal. what does suck are the associated "default" skills. i am running her melee and have no issues at all she is even my charcter with 4th ascension on lowest lvl i done so far (she finished it at lvl 74), 8k life (overflown), 5k ES(overflown), 2.5k mana for total of insane 15.5k effective health with pretty mediocre gear.

Well I'm not saying it's not doable, I'm saying it's out of sync. Some nodes are tied to spells, but there are no melee spells, while some nodes are tied to melee. Some tied to causing bleeding with ele/chaos damage, but bleeding only interacts with physical damage, but +crit node doesn't work for physical spells. Leech and overflow are tied to health, but ES is far superior in this game and health stacking has no support from passives. Costs are paid with health, but still require 100% mana cost as well! It's a mess, even though I like the initial idea behind it.

As for immortal - with overflow skills and current monster health it's pretty easy to be immortal, you don't need a lot of damage for high-tier maps. Can you maintain current amount of sustain but having enough DPS to do pinnacle bosses?

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Sh4dd0w#3193 schrieb:

Well I'm not saying it's not doable, I'm saying it's out of sync. Some nodes are tied to spells, but there are no melee spells, while some nodes are tied to melee. Some tied to causing bleeding with ele/chaos damage, but bleeding only interacts with physical damage, but +crit node doesn't work for physical spells. Leech and overflow are tied to health, but ES is far superior in this game and health stacking has no support from passives. Costs are paid with health, but still require 100% mana cost as well! It's a mess, even though I like the initial idea behind it.

As for immortal - with overflow skills and current monster health it's pretty easy to be immortal, you don't need a lot of damage for high-tier maps. Can you maintain current amount of sustain but having enough DPS to do pinnacle bosses?

done +4 xesht and simulacrum, didnt done expeditions at all (logbooks just never spawn bosses for me) and have king only at +2 so far (insert rant about audience rates)

granted the bosses dont melt like they do on my monk but i done the whole passive build much more skewed towards defense and she can just stand in xeshts face taking everything (besides the fireball i guess, didnt tried tanking that yet)

Alright, well done! But I guess you're still playing a blood mage monk and most of your damage comes from HoWA, which pertains my points about class fantasy and balance.

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Sh4dd0w#3193 schrieb:

Alright, well done! But I guess you're still playing a blood mage monk and most of your damage comes from HoWA, which pertains my points about class fantasy and balance.

thank you and absolutely, as i said i agree with most of your points, just saying the ascendancy itself is by no means weak (she can survive shit my monk can dream of) just it doesn't have proper support (btw to get around the life cost from sanguimancy i resorted to basic staff attack as main damage ability)

Probably the best feedback here. Agree on all points.

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nssbob#7600 schrieb:

btw to get around the life cost from sanguimancy i resorted to basic staff attack as main damage ability

Well that makes me even more sad about the class fantasy, although good thinking on your part :')