What happened to Engaging Combat? Video Feedback.

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IonSugeRau1#1069 schrieb:

If you've played it, you might have heard of the blight mechanic. Speed is absolutely not a priority there since you're mostly required to protect the big bulb in the center, which means you don't have to move a whole lot. The speed argument falls flat on it's face there immediately.

Does playing the blight mechanic make it any less of a "loot grind" kind of game? No. Absoltely not.

VERY bad example......its for exactly these reasons that Blight is one of the least preferred mode of play out of anyone who plays PoE 1. Being forced into a 5 minute encounter regardless of your build strength, while also having to micro towers is and always has been exceptionally polarizing.

on the same subject, pretty good video too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mt9UhGNi60

my experience, unrelated to video.

stopped recently playing.
was doing some warrior, boneshattering for the most part.
tried some earthquake stuff.

you re in a map, you struggle to map, so you go get more dmg (market), work on your build / supports etc.

result, you struggle less in map but still struggle and dont clear fast enough BUT you start one shotting map bosses. so the main meaningfull part, the bosses, gets trivialized but you still loot shit cause slow. just lame.

game improved though thanks to running. but added attack time is still as lame as it was before. at least this time i reached t15 before getting bored.

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SerialF#4835 schrieb:

game improved though thanks to running. but added attack time is still as lame as it was before. at least this time i reached t15 before getting bored.

if you know how to abuse running, especially in campaign, i would say its even worse than AoE/1-shottng bosses. when Jonathan said 'combat will be optional' he was not lying. it made the game janky. having an option to skip entire areas is bad

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cowmoo275#3095 schrieb:

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IonSugeRau1#1069 schrieb:

If you've played it, you might have heard of the blight mechanic. Speed is absolutely not a priority there since you're mostly required to protect the big bulb in the center, which means you don't have to move a whole lot. The speed argument falls flat on it's face there immediately.

Does playing the blight mechanic make it any less of a "loot grind" kind of game? No. Absoltely not.

VERY bad example......its for exactly these reasons that Blight is one of the least preferred mode of play out of anyone who plays PoE 1. Being forced into a 5 minute encounter regardless of your build strength, while also having to micro towers is and always has been exceptionally polarizing.

Really? How does people liking it or not invalidate the fact that loot hunting is still the main scope of it? Which is exactly why I gave it as an example. You aren't being particularly genuine with your logic here.

Besides that, you're also wrong about It's popularity. It was received poorly initially maybe but everyone grew to love it. Afaik It's considered one of the best. Last time I've played, streamers were praising it left and right.

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SerialF#4835 schrieb:

on the same subject, pretty good video too

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mt9UhGNi60

my experience, unrelated to video.

stopped recently playing.
was doing some warrior, boneshattering for the most part.
tried some earthquake stuff.

you re in a map, you struggle to map, so you go get more dmg (market), work on your build / supports etc.

result, you struggle less in map but still struggle and dont clear fast enough BUT you start one shotting map bosses. so the main meaningfull part, the bosses, gets trivialized but you still loot shit cause slow. just lame.

game improved though thanks to running. but added attack time is still as lame as it was before. at least this time i reached t15 before getting bored.

The video is pretty good, I had already seen it actually.. but just like in Dreamcore's case, I don't really agree with the conclusion.

Sure, they totally fumbled it, but I don't think the right answer is to give up on it and neither do I think the current gameplay is fun. I also don't think they are completely unable to make it good if they put more effort into it.

Another thing I half agree with him is the fact that a lot of Uniques are indeed useless, but I think it has absolutely nothing to do with combat itself.

There is a huge list of claims that have been made pre-launch that turned out to be completely wrong, the game is becoming less and less what they said it will be.

I dont hate the game or ggg but i have definetly lost most of my trust in whatever they say or "promise" when it comes to the game

I dont know what went so horribly wrong for them to cause all of these issues.

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IonSugeRau1#1069 schrieb:

Really? How does people liking it or not invalidate the fact that loot hunting is still the main scope of it? Which is exactly why I gave it as an example. You aren't being particularly genuine with your logic here.

Besides that, you're also wrong about It's popularity. It was received poorly initially maybe but everyone grew to love it. Afaik It's considered one of the best. Last time I've played, streamers were praising it left and right.

1st: No....I'm not wrong about its popularity. Streamers do it at a certain point in their progression and then completely forget about it.

2nd: "How does people liking it or not invalidate"......excuse me? That's the entire argument at play here! People play a game because they LIKE the game. If they aren't liking it, the game is a failure. If players actively DISLIKE content, it is because the content is not meshing with the game loop.

The ONLY argument here is player preference and genre preference lol.


As to the "logic" here: you are leaping around to many different arguments. We are talking about "meaningful combat" first and foremost. Blight absolutely does NOT have meaingful combat: it is screen diahrrea where you hold a button as much as possible and hope everything dies in time. What's even funnier is, because its a tower defense shoehorned into an arpg, its arguably the mode of play with the LEAST amount of direct combat: the direct opposite of your points.

In fact, you brought up Blight to defend whatever point you were trying to make when in fact it does a better job defending MY point: loot is the main driver, not combat. Players will even play blight if the rewards are good enough, regardless of the fact that the combat and engagement is one of the worst across all of the league mechanics available in PoE 1. But because it has an artificial time limiter on it, the vast majority of players avoid it because TIME and speed are paramount, even over potentially greater rewards sometimes.

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raV#3445 schrieb:

There is a huge list of claims that have been made pre-launch that turned out to be completely wrong, the game is becoming less and less what they said it will be.

I dont hate the game or ggg but i have definetly lost most of my trust in whatever they say or "promise" when it comes to the game

I dont know what went so horribly wrong for them to cause all of these issues.

Maybe they don't even know themselves…

I guess they tried combining PoE1 zooming with more methodical gameplay… which just didn't work out too well. This patch they went more into the PoE1 style of things, I think the endgame felt pretty boring and midless very quickly.

After thinking about it four a couple of hours it all boils down to two things.

The inability to make a combination out of engaging combat and loot.

Path of exile is loved because of the loot, that is what keep people grinding. Then what is really loot, what is the soul of loot? It is power. Increases in player power. People will not grind if the power gained is not enough to be worth the time invested.

Two different kind of games, diablo II & dark souls. People dont run a thousand bhaal runs or a thousand countess runs because of engaging gameplay, it is all about the dopamine loot. And people dont play dark souls to grind loot, but the engaging combat, the soundtrack & atmosphere.

And if they want to engaging combat they can not have a loot-grind system, not one that works anyhow, because loot is the same as power, and you can not increase the power for players in a meaningful way that makes it worth to grind it without breaking the strict combat rules that engaging combat demands, which is a very thight low/max damage ceiling.

They can make PoE 2 have a endgame that have engaging combat, but that in effect means that the total skill tree with ascendancies can not give more then 20% player power, the difference between a 5 link and 6 link cant be more then 5%, the difference between a bad item and best in slot no more then 10%, or else the engaging combat model completly breaks down.

It is partly because the lowest damage ceiling cant be to low, or else player would quit en masse because, and at the same you cant have the highest damage ceiling to low either, because how do you convince a player to grind an 100 extra hours for loot when he doesnt really gain any new power?

Disclaimer, all the numbers are arbitrary, im trying to explain the schism between between a loot-grinder and a engaging combat simulator.

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Grayeye#1799 schrieb:

They can make PoE 2 have a endgame that have engaging combat, but that in effect means that the total skill tree with ascendancies can not give more then 20% player power, the difference between a 5 link and 6 link cant be more then 5%, the difference between a bad item and best in slot no more then 10%, or else the engaging combat model completly breaks down.

It is partly because the lowest damage ceiling cant be to low, or else player would quit en masse because, and at the same you cant have the highest damage ceiling to low either, because how do you convince a player to grind an 100 extra hours for loot when he doesnt really gain any new power?

Disclaimer, all the numbers are arbitrary, im trying to explain the schism between between a loot-grinder and a engaging combat simulator.

Much of this is exactly the problem faced in this genre.

A couple things to add: loot needs to be plentiful enough to keep us coming back for more. And for loot to be plentiful, battles need to be short and plentiful. Loot pinatas are great, but we can see from D3 that it is NOT the preferred mode of play for many of the people that choose THIS game over that one. The game can't ONLY be loot pinatas. Similarly, folks want to feel overpowered when they invest into a build. Yet another issue that we see with D4: when the enemies scale with you and you never actually feel more powerful.....people begin to hate the game.

If the "action" were the focus a la dark souls, and battles overall were reduced and slowed down, then the loot naturally slows down, and the entire game loop devolves and people stop playing the game. This is not the game that people who picked up PoE 1 and PoE 2 expect to play. It never WILL be the game, it simply can't be.

The bit about the differences in power between the bottom and the top is a perpetual problem of GGG, seen in extremes in PoE 1 and already rearing its ugly head in PoE 2. They appear to have an inability as a studio to run proper balancing. Much of this re: PoE 2 comes from their conflicting images for the game. They claim they want contradicting design choices, and ultimately fail at both. They claim they want methodical battles, but introduce skills and passives that increase speed to the same levels as PoE 1. They take all the lessons they "learned" from 13 years of PoE 1.......and pretty much ignore them, falling into the same traps as before, or worse: they take the most hated parts of PoE 1 and make them central to PoE 2.

We are playing a loot-based arpg. That is what PoE 1 and PoE 2 are. Trying to make them something else is going to be futile and result in a crappy game. We saw this in the initial release where....they forgot to program in loot and naturally people hated the game. Uniques are still awful.


What they need to do is define "engaging combat" within a loot-based arpg, and then figure out the issues from there. I think if you talked to 10 different programmers on the PoE 2 team, they would all have completely different responses to "what is engaging combat".