Game could be fun if faster

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Orbaal#0435 schrieb:

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Kalistri#2788 schrieb:

EDIT: Is this just me? Like, are you still 1-shotting 95% of everything when you got to temple? How much effectiveness have you got there?

Ive skipped 0.4 cause there were no changes to endgame, which is what Ive been waiting for since release.
State of the endgame sucks so hard, I cant bring myself to play it.


Temple might be harder content, which is fine.
You still have to go out of your way to find something that doesnt just roll over and die so you have a reason to use combos.
Which means combos are borderline useless, thats my entire point.

Well, my point isn't that temple is the solution to the issue of combos being useless most of the time, but that the existence of effectiveness is a sign that GGG is looking for solutions to that problem which will do more than simply making people like you and me happy.

You might not like it, but the game is better if it has varying difficulty with a default experience that caters to people who don't know what they're doing, and which incidentally caters to veterans who want to blast through everything and focus on the efficiency meta. This is not only from a mass appeal/profit perspective, but also for the sake of turning newer players to become vets without forcing them to immediately scale a learning curve that roughly resembles a cliff (I'm basically saying this because I'm hoping I can convince some of my non-arpg enjoyer friends to play the game when it goes f2p).

So I mean, the best solution is one where heaping on extra challenge is an option, not the default experience, and that's exactly how effectiveness works.

Maybe if you haven't played 0.4 you don't know what it is? It's a multiplier for monster health, xp and loot. I don't know what the maximum would be exactly, but at least 500% on normal monsters and 1k% on rares (to be specific, you might get 300% on humanoid monsters and 200% on normal monsters for a total of 500% on normal humanoid monsters for example, unless I'm misunderstanding how the numbers work with each other).

For normal maps you can get it through tablets, and the most you can get is a disappointing 33%; obviously a 33% boost to monster health is barely noticeable, even if you also have a WS with a bonus for monster life. My hope is that they give us a mechanic whereby we can apply more to maps in such a way that once you get it you can just have it all the time. Atlas nodes that increase effectiveness would be one way, perhaps another option would be that when they add an Incursion atlas tree they have a node where you can apply temple mods to normal maps; they could also simply increase the values you get through tablets.

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Kalistri#2788 schrieb:

So I mean, the best solution is one where heaping on extra challenge is an option, not the default experience, and that's exactly how effectiveness works.

I highly doubt this is going to be even close to a viable solution for one simple reason: Risk vs Rewards


If you allow players to stack risk or challenge or effectiveness or whatever its called, they will only do it if it yields significantly better rewards - which the temple ofc does.
If speedclearing "normal" content is more rewarding, then thats they will do and forget the temple ever existed.
However, if the new thing does yield better results, it will be the dominant meta. People will basically say: If you cant do XYZ, you might as well not play the game. It doesnt even matter if this statement is true or not (usually its not true but it doesnt matter cuz folks dont know better).

Then there is going to be a select few builds checking all them boxes, those will become meta obviously and thus the required items will be in high demand and therefore unaffordable for the vast majority of the playerbase.
Which means those players will be stuck forever doing mediocre and unrewarding content, unable to progress towards this very specific content and complain about it on social media.
Ill find ways around this issue. I always have, so I dont care as far as Im concerned. However this dynamic will lock most people out of this specific content and that will have consequences.


I dont need to play the temple to know that this precisely whats going to happen because it always does. Ive been thru this many many times in PoE1 and other games. This solution wont be an exception and will not work.
Its going to do the exact opposite of what you want it to do Im afraid.


Just for the record:
Im not against combos or anything like that.
I just doubt that GGG did think this through and realised they were going to enter an arms race with community they simply cannot win.
They´ve tried for more than a decade in PoE1 and community won every single time.
The only way I can see GGG "sucessfully" implementing combos is by enforcing it thru cooldowns or generator/spender gameplay, both of which I do hate with a passion. Ultimately thats why Im so worried about them even trying. I know GGG well enough to understand they will without a shred of a doubt double, triple, quadruple and quintdruple down on this concept before they change their opinion and I dont think its wise to go down this road.

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Orbaal#0435 schrieb:

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Kalistri#2788 schrieb:

So I mean, the best solution is one where heaping on extra challenge is an option, not the default experience, and that's exactly how effectiveness works.

I highly doubt this is going to be even close to a viable solution for one simple reason: Risk vs Rewards


If you allow players to stack risk or challenge or effectiveness or whatever its called, they will only do it if it yields significantly better rewards - which the temple ofc does.
If speedclearing "normal" content is more rewarding, then thats they will do and forget the temple ever existed.
However, if the new thing does yield better results, it will be the dominant meta. People will basically say: If you cant do XYZ, you might as well not play the game. It doesnt even matter if this statement is true or not (usually its not true but it doesnt matter cuz folks dont know better).

Then there is going to be a select few builds checking all them boxes, those will become meta obviously and thus the required items will be in high demand and therefore unaffordable for the vast majority of the playerbase.
Which means those players will be stuck forever doing mediocre and unrewarding content, unable to progress towards this very specific content and complain about it on social media.
Ill find ways around this issue. I always have, so I dont care as far as Im concerned. However this dynamic will lock most people out of this specific content and that will have consequences.


I dont need to play the temple to know that this precisely whats going to happen because it always does. Ive been thru this many many times in PoE1 and other games. This solution wont be an exception and will not work.
Its going to do the exact opposite of what you want it to do Im afraid.


Just for the record:
Im not against combos or anything like that.
I just doubt that GGG did think this through and realised they were going to enter an arms race with community they simply cannot win.
They´ve tried for more than a decade in PoE1 and community won every single time.
The only way I can see GGG "sucessfully" implementing combos is by enforcing it thru cooldowns or generator/spender gameplay, both of which I do hate with a passion. Ultimately thats why Im so worried about them even trying. I know GGG well enough to understand they will without a shred of a doubt double, triple, quadruple and quintdruple down on this concept before they change their opinion and I dont think its wise to go down this road.

This gives me the impression you didn't read my post, especially my description of effectiveness. The point is that by tying the reward you get to monster health, it means you can kill things with no effectiveness quickly or kill things more slowly with high effectiveness and get the same reward.

If it's balanced correctly, the player that kills ten monsters gets the same reward as the player that kills one monster with ten times the amount of health.

Then someone who wants to blast through monsters is happy and someone who wants to have a fight with each monster is happy. Also someone that is newer to the game can do the same content at the normal level and okay, they don't get the same reward, but it doesn't lock them out of content.

From there, all GGG needs to do is make it so that doing a combo yields more damage than spamming something.

Btw, you say you're not against combos but you only listed the kind of combos you don't like. What kind of combo do you like?

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Kalistri#2788 schrieb:

Btw, you say you're not against combos but you only listed the kind of combos you don't like. What kind of combo do you like?

I like player agency above all. So I wanna be in charge of combo-ing whatever I want, whenever I want, for whatever reason.

I dont want the game to tell me:

- You must use weapon X or else you can use this skill
- Oh also you cant use said skill unless you charge it up with skill B
- Oh also you cant use it multiple times, its on CD now so use skill C instead.
- Oh and over here is the perfect area of the skilltree to boost all of it.

Cool. Why would I play this?
The game already decided everything for me. Thats not PoE


And yes I misunderstood your post. I honestly dont think thats possible in a live service game like PoE.
Whenever any new league with new powercreep launches GGG would have to rebalance everything to make your concept work. Thats not going to happen.
The opportunity costs are way too high, not even remotely close to acceptable.

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Orbaal#0435 schrieb:

I like player agency above all. So I wanna be in charge of combo-ing whatever I want, whenever I want, for whatever reason.

I dont want the game to tell me:

- You must use weapon X or else you can use this skill
- Oh also you cant use said skill unless you charge it up with skill B
- Oh also you cant use it multiple times, its on CD now so use skill C instead.
- Oh and over here is the perfect area of the skilltree to boost all of it.

"Player agency" still doesn't tell me what kind of combo you do like, and every other point here is again about stuff you don't like.

Are you sure you like combos? What would you do with this agency if you had it?

Anyway, I've heard all these arguments before so they're easy to respond to.

The argument about weapon restrictions is perhaps valid for the moment, but short sighted. It's going to be much better in the future when they add say... a skill that's like thunderous leap but particular to maces rather than just slapping the same skills on every weapon.

I'd say the criticism of being short sighted also applies to the arguments about charges and cooldowns as well. Presumably, since you're all about player agency, you're not against this stuff being in the game for people who do like this kind of thing, and it's already the case that if you don't like that kind of thing you don't have to use those skills. This will only become a more relevant point in a few year's time when they've added a few dozen skills to each category.

Regarding charges in particular, you not only don't have to use those skills, you also don't have to use most of those skills with charges. There's perhaps an issue with balancing charges vs no charges versions of skills, but it's less of an issue with charges as a concept for this reason.

Regarding the skill tree I'm not seeing it the same way you are. I mean, firstly, what's the alternative here? They put the nodes for particular damage types scattered about everywhere? No thanks.

More importantly though, you do have different options depending on what your build is like. For example, you can focus more on attack nodes if you're weapon swapping to another weapon, or you could focus more on the element of your attacks if you want to swap to caster gear and use spells. There's also stuff that's specific to kinds skills like projectiles or area abilities, so you could focus on that. I'm enjoying figuring out common threads between skills and ways that I can use the skill tree depending on my build.

Btw, I kinda get an impression like you haven't really tried exploring weapon swapping and using different skills aside from whatever the game recommends to you?

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Orbaal#0435 schrieb:

Whenever any new league with new powercreep launches GGG would have to rebalance everything to make your concept work. Thats not going to happen.
The opportunity costs are way too high, not even remotely close to acceptable.

What opportunity costs? Instead of putting interesting combat mechanics in the game, what should they do instead? Just make a game that's PoE 1, but pretty? They would simply end up with the same player base that's already playing PoE 1, because PoE 1 still exists.

(Side note; you know PoE 2 is already a success story from a financial standpoint, right? They've already won in that sense.)

Here's a real opportunity cost: there's a huge gap in the market within the arpg genre right now. The first arpg that creates an experience where people look at streamers and understand that there's combat happening is going to get a whole lot of players who have never looked at arpgs before, not to mention all the people who never went past D2.

Despite how people feel in the forums and reddit, where everyone already understands the language of the efficiency-meta, it's not especially common that people who are experienced enough with games to understand something like PoE, that they will watch someone running around vacuuming up xp and think "yeah, this looks engaging and fun". Most people got over the "power fantasy" in games after playing around with a cheat engine giving them god mode when they were kids.

If PoE 2 launches with gameplay where the most rewarding content is something more than "Okay, you can complete the toughest fights in a few seconds; now do it 1000x over", it's going to be massive.

I agree that this means constantly fighting power creep, but that's something they're already doing in both games. It's kinda weird to say that it's not going to happen when it's always happening. Maybe you haven't thought much about it, but PoE 1 really could be even faster if they really stopped trying to put the breaks on constantly. Hopefully with PoE 2 they can design the game from the start so that doing this is a bit easier.

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SplashKing#6352 schrieb:

I want the game to be much slower. The endgame shouldn't be much faster than gameplay during the campaign.

Covering the entire screen in explosions and not being able to see literally anything every league is fun for about 10 minutes.

I'd rather have more damage and less skill speed.

I shouldn't have to cast 15 spells per second to trigger 200 projectiles to kill things. Why can't I just cast a few big spells that do the same amount of damage?

It would be so much less spammy, much more visually clear, and actually make different builds feel different instead of being the same blow-up-the-screen-instantly-but-pick-your-color-of-explosion simulator.

Agree.

At the end of the day, we can only have meaningful combat when we can see things happening, capable of reacting and engaging with it.

Offscreen, Spammy, hoards and clusterfk is not it.

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Kalistri#2788 schrieb:

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Orbaal#0435 schrieb:

"

Kalistri#2788 schrieb:

EDIT: Is this just me? Like, are you still 1-shotting 95% of everything when you got to temple? How much effectiveness have you got there?

Ive skipped 0.4 cause there were no changes to endgame, which is what Ive been waiting for since release.
State of the endgame sucks so hard, I cant bring myself to play it.


Temple might be harder content, which is fine.
You still have to go out of your way to find something that doesnt just roll over and die so you have a reason to use combos.
Which means combos are borderline useless, thats my entire point.

Well, my point isn't that temple is the solution to the issue of combos being useless most of the time, but that the existence of effectiveness is a sign that GGG is looking for solutions to that problem which will do more than simply making people like you and me happy.

You might not like it, but the game is better if it has varying difficulty with a default experience that caters to people who don't know what they're doing, and which incidentally caters to veterans who want to blast through everything and focus on the efficiency meta. This is not only from a mass appeal/profit perspective, but also for the sake of turning newer players to become vets without forcing them to immediately scale a learning curve that roughly resembles a cliff (I'm basically saying this because I'm hoping I can convince some of my non-arpg enjoyer friends to play the game when it goes f2p).

So I mean, the best solution is one where heaping on extra challenge is an option, not the default experience, and that's exactly how effectiveness works.

Maybe if you haven't played 0.4 you don't know what it is? It's a multiplier for monster health, xp and loot. I don't know what the maximum would be exactly, but at least 500% on normal monsters and 1k% on rares (to be specific, you might get 300% on humanoid monsters and 200% on normal monsters for a total of 500% on normal humanoid monsters for example, unless I'm misunderstanding how the numbers work with each other).

For normal maps you can get it through tablets, and the most you can get is a disappointing 33%; obviously a 33% boost to monster health is barely noticeable, even if you also have a WS with a bonus for monster life. My hope is that they give us a mechanic whereby we can apply more to maps in such a way that once you get it you can just have it all the time. Atlas nodes that increase effectiveness would be one way, perhaps another option would be that when they add an Incursion atlas tree they have a node where you can apply temple mods to normal maps; they could also simply increase the values you get through tablets.

The real issue right now is that 33% effectiveness on maps feels pointless.

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Exilion99#5481 schrieb:

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SplashKing#6352 schrieb:

I want the game to be much slower. The endgame shouldn't be much faster than gameplay during the campaign.

Covering the entire screen in explosions and not being able to see literally anything every league is fun for about 10 minutes.

I'd rather have more damage and less skill speed.

I shouldn't have to cast 15 spells per second to trigger 200 projectiles to kill things. Why can't I just cast a few big spells that do the same amount of damage?

It would be so much less spammy, much more visually clear, and actually make different builds feel different instead of being the same blow-up-the-screen-instantly-but-pick-your-color-of-explosion simulator.

Agree.

At the end of the day, we can only have meaningful combat when we can see things happening, capable of reacting and engaging with it.

Offscreen, Spammy, hoards and clusterfk is not it.

I agree 100%. And I do hope GGG will tune towards the more meticulous combat further the development goes. Even though there are problems in the core at the moment as was pointed out in this thread, it is nothing they could not redo almost entirely (and might be on it as most everything in the endgame currently feels, frankly, somewhat like a placeholder).

Regardless I am actually having a lot of fun in the game currently. The changes last patch with reduced density and upped monster health were a step into right direction for sure.