Zoom is not fun. It's loot FOMO

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karsey#2995 เขียน:

The power fantasy of deleting screens and bosses in a few clicks turns the game into a mindless cookie-clicker casino and I don't understand the appeal of that for any significant amount of time without having what is essentially a gambling addiction.

What kind of gamers advocate for game design that enables them to circumvent gameplay?

It's people who aren't there to play the actual game! They're there for another reason, and the game is mostly in the way.

That last line raises an interesting question -> I wonder what percentage of AoE screen-wipe advocates are also 'pro campaign skip'

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arandan#3174 เขียน:

Something - which is not true - that I see repeated in regards to both games is that you need to clear 3 screens away in order to not be killed.
No, you don't.

I don't think that's been brought up here yet, but that's fair. The idea is more about easily wiping the screen. That you are basically walking and clicking while everything dies.

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arandan#3174 เขียน:

There are ways to build very tanky characters even in poe2, the problem lies in how easy (or rather difficult) it is compared to going full glass cannon.

Life scaling on the tree doesn't exist and building anything remotely survivable based solely on it requires extensive game knowledge coupled with late game items that have multiple sockets.

ES is much easier to scale, but also not very intuitive to the average player, since it's limited to one area of the tree and it will never occur to people with armour or evasion based characters that they perhaps need some layer of it on top of their health pool.

Hence we have a scenario where an average player is funnelled into building a 4-5k EHP character and thinking that they should be able to tank some hits with that. If that were the case, then anybody who knew what they were doing would be essentially immortal and the game would be even more broken than it currently is.

What we have here is a repeat of the exact same mistakes that poe1 has made.
We incentivise speed and screen clear not only via the loot structure, but also via how much easier and more intuitive it is to build low EHP, high damage characters.

That is largely true. The bottom left section has little choice but to scale mitigation, which is "life mileage" in effect. The top can scale ES or Mana with damage taken as Mana. etc

But unfortunately, just being able to scale Life on the passive tree alone, won't solve this issue. Just as it hasn't for PoE1.

The reason is that the incentive structure is intrinsically tied to loot acquisition, which is tied to clear speed. So even if the option to scale defenses existed, the 'correct' method for optimizing loot acquisition would still be to focus on clear speed.

If, the game were able to tie the incentive of gaining loot to defenses, then we're probably onto something. The game does/did sort of do this with the limitation of 1 portal. People didn't like that kind of punishment; possibly because they were still playing with a PoE1 mentality and didn't adjust to the demands of the new system, but also because of the real legitimate grievance with being punished so severely when the endgame at the time was half-baked and getting killed by a damage spike or on-death effect was so common.

So, I think a better way must exist. The game needs some sort of very lucrative endgame activity that is designed with an emphasis on demanding adequate defenses.

Investing into defenses would also naturally become a more appealing proposition if players didn't feel like it was a wasted effort after still being one-shot, and if multiplicative scaling didn't exist -> why get some defenses, when more damage is exponentially scaled. Exponential scaling is a problem.

And in order to remove the one-shot potential from monsters, players can't be able to instantly regenerate/leech their life pool back. These things are just not compatible. Monster one-shots exist necessarily to one-shot a sustain character's entire life pool, because it is the only way to kill those characters.

These issues are solvable. They just have to do it, and we just have to keep asking for it.

Cheers.

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WhisperSlade#0532 เขียน:

Well there is hope. I realize that there are numerous things that would have to be looked at: Energy shield, leech, regen, life on hit, and so on. But I don't think this is as large of a task as it first seems, to change those numbers. The work comes, in them having to then balance around them accordingly. Which means reducing monster damage immensely, and (I think wise, to also help with visual clutter) reducing the mob density (and appropriately increasing the loot/xp rewards, proportion to the time spent killing them, so no xp/loot is actually lost)

Thanks for your answers, they were good. Cheers.

You just reminded me life on hit exists. Yeah, they do need to revisit the sustain methods.
I'm happy we agreed in the end, that's not that common turn of events on the internet forums :D.

As for the Speed - ye I was initially assuming you meant overall speed, not only dps. It wouldn;t change much in my approach, but it would significantly increase the value of such option and many would just go for it to play market.
BTW i made a dodge-only build with Ab Aeterno and Queen of the Forest this league. Decently fun on mapping - and pretty much immortal. Bosses however took quite a bit of time...

The answer is PoE 2 ruthless, with dodge pre first patch, where you could be blocked by a mob. You want easy and zoomy you go normal (as it already is that), you want a fight you go ruthless. Can't come soon enough.

it's true - but there are no any meaningful itemisation. Only abyss provided something above the null + to flat or + to % dmg and so on. Afixes need rework with class/weapon specific afixes and so on.

and zooming should be a thing of poe 1 and not 2. We are to early to strong... end-game is about "game breaking" game by our builds - but problem is.. do characyter should be to strong from killing milion crabs and it grants us power to kill the gods? no.. we should be over-powered after the pinnacle boss content - after killing gods, but it should stay to it's core combat with synergies. Now only playable builds are one-skill builds. Which is kinda sad

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Rabarbar_Lichy#7553 เขียน:

The answer is PoE 2 ruthless, with dodge pre first patch, where you could be blocked by a mob. You want easy and zoomy you go normal (as it already is that), you want a fight you go ruthless. Can't come soon enough.

At first glance introducing ruthless mode this early into PoE2's development came across as a terrible idea but reading the quote below on the wiki and thinking about it for a while made me love the idea.

"This mode was designed as a pet project of Chris Wilson and other senior developers over 18 months. Features of Ruthless mode will have little to no impact on the core gameplay of the rest of the game. It is intended as a testing ground for radical changes and experiments. A change in Ruthless does not indicate that the change will also be made in the regular game."

imagine if 0.4.x had ruthless mode and frequent balance changes (read obliterating nerfs) throughout the league to maintain a vision of a mechanically difficult game which can be made easier with knowledge, items and skill but never trivialized.

now that's a version of poe2 i'd like to play!