The problem with combos is actually caused by enemy AI and how encounters are designed

The issue whit their "combo" ideas is that mobs are fast , mobs can teleport to u and u encounter such more very often
the game is built to "evade" the enemy attack and to react fast against that mob/boss its very hard to combo something that u need to react to and stay alive the longer u fight the more chances the enemy gets to ONE shoot u and its unavoidable the game is just build that way
the game itself forces u to kill or get killed and fast
there is no actual time to combo in many cases .
its a not a turn based game to be able to "combo" in a fast game the character need to be able to control the fight whit allot of CC and that is not really possible on most builds to begin whit .

i think that their vison of "combo" playstyle is just bad and annoying
it is simple as that, and that is why everyone is making 1 button builds .

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AintCare#6513 เขียน:

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ogmersault#4806 เขียน:

Combo vs rotation. There are plenty of windows to combo in the end game. There are also plenty of scenarios where its obvious you shouldnt be trying to. Reading the situation and determining when you should and shouldnt is the difference between setting up a combo, and just having a fixed rotation. IF you dont like this style of play, build around a singular skill instead. BOth playstyles are an option.

It might not work for you, but it works for me. Let me have fun with it. Go find your fun.

shouldn't it be the other way around? if you build for combos you should have situations where the combo is either preferred/required or optional. not the other way around... what you saying its like having a melee char that sometimes have to be ranged... oh wait

ummm what? Nothing you said resembles anything I mentioned. A meleee char that sometimes has to be ranged? What? If you are melee and youre trying to combo, sometimes you are going to have to sacrifice the combo, not become ranged.

Obviously there are scenarios where the combo is preferred. Like wise, there are going to be scenarios where you need to abandon the combo.

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UnholyKirin#7925 เขียน:

The issue whit their "combo" ideas is that mobs are fast , mobs can teleport to u and u encounter such more very often
the game is built to "evade" the enemy attack and to react fast against that mob/boss its very hard to combo something that u need to react to and stay alive the longer u fight the more chances the enemy gets to ONE shoot u and its unavoidable the game is just build that way
the game itself forces u to kill or get killed and fast
there is no actual time to combo in many cases .
its a not a turn based game to be able to "combo" in a fast game the character need to be able to control the fight whit allot of CC and that is not really possible on most builds to begin whit .

i think that their vison of "combo" playstyle is just bad and annoying
it is simple as that, and that is why everyone is making 1 button builds .

Their idea is that combos create an opportunity in gameplay, they arent required. I find plenty of opportunities in the end game to pull them off. You dont have to do them, plenty of builds can ignore them entirely. If it isnt your style of play, just dont play them. Maybe its for people like me that enjoy opportunistic scenarios.

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ogmersault#4806 เขียน:

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UnholyKirin#7925 เขียน:

The issue whit their "combo" ideas is that mobs are fast , mobs can teleport to u and u encounter such more very often
the game is built to "evade" the enemy attack and to react fast against that mob/boss its very hard to combo something that u need to react to and stay alive the longer u fight the more chances the enemy gets to ONE shoot u and its unavoidable the game is just build that way
the game itself forces u to kill or get killed and fast
there is no actual time to combo in many cases .
its a not a turn based game to be able to "combo" in a fast game the character need to be able to control the fight whit allot of CC and that is not really possible on most builds to begin whit .

i think that their vison of "combo" playstyle is just bad and annoying
it is simple as that, and that is why everyone is making 1 button builds .

Their idea is that combos create an opportunity in gameplay, they arent required. I find plenty of opportunities in the end game to pull them off. You dont have to do them, plenty of builds can ignore them entirely. If it isnt your style of play, just dont play them. Maybe its for people like me that enjoy opportunistic scenarios.

the issue is they are turning more and more builds into combo focused and less and less skills are viable for stand alone look at crossbows, everything now is combo based=/

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ogmersault#4806 เขียน:

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AintCare#6513 เขียน:

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ogmersault#4806 เขียน:

Combo vs rotation. There are plenty of windows to combo in the end game. There are also plenty of scenarios where its obvious you shouldnt be trying to. Reading the situation and determining when you should and shouldnt is the difference between setting up a combo, and just having a fixed rotation. IF you dont like this style of play, build around a singular skill instead. BOth playstyles are an option.

It might not work for you, but it works for me. Let me have fun with it. Go find your fun.

shouldn't it be the other way around? if you build for combos you should have situations where the combo is either preferred/required or optional. not the other way around... what you saying its like having a melee char that sometimes have to be ranged... oh wait

ummm what? Nothing you said resembles anything I mentioned. A meleee char that sometimes has to be ranged? What? If you are melee and youre trying to combo, sometimes you are going to have to sacrifice the combo, not become ranged.

Obviously there are scenarios where the combo is preferred. Like wise, there are going to be scenarios where you need to abandon the combo.

abandoning a combo, do you mean esc+logout or dying? when i start a ritual/breach or merely move in certain maps, retreat is not an option, you either finish w/e you started or you die OR you never start it in the first place and spam one skill when this scenario is expected to happen- hence my joke about melee that has to go ranged (against the char archetype)

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abandoning a combo, do you mean esc+logout or dying? when i start a ritual/breach or merely move in certain maps, retreat is not an option, you either finish w/e you started or you die OR you never start it in the first place and spam one skill when this scenario is expected to happen- hence my joke about melee that has to go ranged (against the char archetype)

When youre surrounded by mobs in a tiny circle and have no chance to retreat, you think there is a difference between being ranged and being melee? If you are in melee range, it doesnt matter if you are holding a bow, or a sword...and its obviously not a good time to be trying to pull off combos. Thats my point.

Getting mobbed in ritual is literally the mechanic. Your build can do it, or it cant. Welcome to path of exile. You dont have to interact with all content, just like you can choose not to run maps with affixes that will kill you. learn the limitations of your build.

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ogmersault#4806 เขียน:

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abandoning a combo, do you mean esc+logout or dying? when i start a ritual/breach or merely move in certain maps, retreat is not an option, you either finish w/e you started or you die OR you never start it in the first place and spam one skill when this scenario is expected to happen- hence my joke about melee that has to go ranged (against the char archetype)

When youre surrounded by mobs in a tiny circle and have no chance to retreat, you think there is a difference between being ranged and being melee? If you are in melee range, it doesnt matter if you are holding a bow, or a sword...and its obviously not a good time to be trying to pull off combos. Thats my point.

Getting mobbed in ritual is literally the mechanic. Your build can do it, or it cant. Welcome to path of exile. You dont have to interact with all content, just like you can choose not to run maps with affixes that will kill you. learn the limitations of your build.

ok, so if we assume 'combo-builds' having an innate limitation and cannot properly engage with half of the end-game then why are they trying to make more and more things combo-like? this 'path of exile' sounds a bit confusing

and yes there is a difference between being ranged and melee even in ritual/breach. its the duration

Visual clarity and the combat pacing falls apart in the endgame when content becomes juiced. The problem is you don't want to get rid of stuff on screen or make it an "avoid the bad zone" game with obvious indicators because those solutions sacrifice a lot of what makes PoE different from other games. They also need ways to actually kill powerful characters so some stuff has to be "unfair".

When there is a lot of this "unfair" stuff popping off in juiced maps where you can't see anything then there is no real skill or decision making. Ultimately you just have to out-stat almost everything in maps. That is a fact.

This is not so much a problem with combos. There are combos that can be good regardless of what is going on, and speed will no longer be an issue. If a combo intended by the devs is bad or too finicky, then they can just buff it with QOL changes.

It is however, an apparent contradiction in the game's core design philosophy, and a very big problem that I don't know how one would even approach solving. My only solution is to throw combat pacing out of the window at a point where it is ultra end-game, which is basically what already happens.

GGG is obviously pathologically married to the combo idea. All the issues you brought up are valid but there's one core underlying issue that is simply not really fixable in the context of POE without turning it into an entirely different game:

The fact that a session involves killing hundreds if not thousands of monsters.

No matter what is done it will never be enjoyable to repeat a combo hundreds of times in a row during a session. The combo-cucking of the game design is never going to produce an enjoyable result. It simply isn't. It doesn't matter what you change around the edges, It doesn't matter how much you pretend to enjoy it in message boards, It's simply a fundamentally flawed gameplay loop.

There are ONLY 3 solutions to this:

A: You massively reduce the amount of monsters you fight in a given map/session. You would need to have pretty much every enemy feel like something halfway between a rare mob and a boss and have at most 2-3 being fought at any given time and often just one. Each enemy would then need to loot-pinata in a satisfying way to account for the increased amount of time being spent killing each one. at this point it wouldn't really be PoE anymore but it could actually be a good game which works too I guess.

B: You meet in the middle on the combo-cucking and leave combos in the game but make them only incentivized to be used periodically or situationally. This would be something more like Last Epoch where you have a single button of main skill that will clear most trash but also 2-3 other abilities which might be mid-length cooldowns, involve combos or resource spenders which are used to either periodically blast a ton of enemies and speed up clearing or maximize damage output for Rares/bosses. Pretty much picture Last Epoch, the keyword being "periodically" , you shouldn't need to combo white mobs ever. Even with this solution GGG is currently doing a bad job! because most of their combos are pre-ordained in the game design instead of being actually interesting emergent metagaming. They would still need to drastically change their approach to how these combos work.

C: You just stop combo-cucking the game design and accept that one-button builds will be the norm, stop trying to shut down automation and force combos into everything. Accept that Path of Exile 1 is actually a really good game, many would say one of the best games ever made. You can make things more engaging and difficult, you can still slow things down a bit, you can still take it away from being a potential "second-monitor game" but the combo-cucking will need to stop. You can still have 2-button builds like ED, you can still have other buttons that need to be pressed like buffs or some isngle-target booster or whatever, just like PoE 1.

As a side-note almost as important as addressing this is for GGG to stop sacrificing their gameplay/game design at the altar of pretty animations. Yeah, if you let players clear at a speed that doesn't feel like ass you might not have exaggerated over-the-top animation that everyone is paying attention to, that's fine. We want a game, not a movie. Including wack skills that seemingly only exist to show a pretty animation like the infamous SoK forging bullshit needs to stop. Nobody wants to stop to watch an animation every 10 seconds. I don't need to watch my character do a tripple backflip just to cast a spell. I'm here to turn my cool ideas into cool builds through the medium of your game, I'm not here to watch eye-candy.

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AintCare#6513 เขียน:

you listed abilities/mob density not mob behavior

How is enemies shooting projectiles off screen or swarming you not a behavior? Not to mention how this pretty much defines on how a player interacts with the combat itself.

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AintCare#6513 เขียน:

monAI which usually governs things like frequency of skill use, how they agro, where they move etc.

A monster can't occupy the same space as another monster, so they take the shortest path in order to attack you, that is their AI.

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AintCare#6513 เขียน:

hence my statement about monAI which usually governs things like frequency of skill use, how they agro, where they move etc. density is still not AI.

You're the one getting monster per square meter and how they're programed to engage in combat confused.

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AintCare#6513 เขียน:

i wil still say mods are non issue, denisty is non issue if what i mentioned earlier would be adjusted

What you mentioned earlier is that:

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AintCare#6513 เขียน:

imo everything you mentioned will be manageable if the enemy AI is less aggressive and more manageable in terms of pulling mobs.

You said yourself that the problem in your opinion is that monster packs aren't very manageable, and guess what? Their AI and some of their modifiers like temporal bubble/chains directly influence this.

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AintCare#6513 เขียน:

i don't think this goes in line with your title since this has nothing to do with enemy AI.

Lastly, the title of my post is about how both enemy AI and encounters are designed. One isn't excluding the other. That's why i put things like off screen projectiles, how deadly some of the monsters are and certain monster modifiers all in the same list. They all affect the combo philosophy in my opinion.