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Imo GGG is notoriously bad at providing ample signals for dangerous attacks.
I remember back in breach league getting one-shot by Uulnetol, the physical breachlord, on a 10k ES 10K evasion character. The attack was a few small flying red projectiles , in a completely red arena, and red boss, with NO sound indicator whatsoever. How are you ever supposed to do content like that? (for anyone curious its the attack explained in this video: time mark 1:09)+ Show Spoiler +
There are some examples of great boss fights though. Dominus has excellent sound cues and visuals for his attacks. It's a fun and fair fight, thats pretty challenging (although not after doing it countless times over the years of course).
Kitava is also a good fight imo, his attacks have good cues, there are no hard to spot oneshot attacks, the attacks which are extremely dangerous LOOK extremely dangerous. And its another example of a fight that you can learn relatively safely and become skilled at.
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Kitavas range attacks can be hard to see the cue of because you can't see his whole model.
I think I'm finally satisfied with all my shitty cwdt molten shell build theorycrafts. I present to you the shitty assassin molten shell heartbound loop cast on crit zombie death-heal thing. Thanks for the support. https://pastebin.com/e9We19Ap
The good: It's not terribly expensive. Can even work on a budget!
The bad: It's not reliable to trigger molten shell before the cooldown is over, nor to trigger the cwdt on cooldown.
I made a higher-end build with 7,5 aps (and cdr), but it would also need extra damage taken to trigger cwdt on cooldown, and sacrifice MoM.
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On December 16 2018 19:02 r.Evo wrote:
The point isn't how much power creep we had since, the point is that people aren't used to figuring out mechanics anymore (and that this league makes it really difficult because of the clutter). Ch'aska was absolute terror on release. A couple people figured her out and she was manageable after, then GGG came with the nerfbat regardless 1-2 weeks later.
Same thing here: Loads of people complaining who are just straight up terrible in some form who drown out reasonable criticism. Narutos death for example that he posted was pretty bullshit, but that's something entirely different than "but I never had to get chaos res before", "but 3k life and my sunder mace char without RT was totally fine last league and now the game is so hard" or "but I always did 3-4 damage mods and it was fine this is so overtuned".
If anything this league shows that (again) the regular game is undertuned as hell.
I guess if you come at the current balance as way too many builds destroy everything then yeah. My issue with balance is that defensive options have been pidgeonholed into a handful of ascendancies, and the remaining options go for extreme damage while hoping for the best. 6k life, mom, freezing everything and a handful of defensive flasks are pretty much all you can get on a huge amount of builds. The game hasn't just been built with a threshold level of defence, a threshold level of offensive output is also required, and often it's impossible to reconcile the two.
I honestly blame ascendancies for the arms races that's happened since their implementation, without them, spell block would most likely be achievable by people who aren't gladiators.
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I blame GGG wanting (rightfully so) to make their game more popular. Giving players power is something that makes things more popular on average in the short term, making things more difficult is something that makes the game less popular on average. Ascendancies are just one step in that entire thing.
This is easily the most invasive league mechanic since... Invasion? And people are collectively losing their shit, but for loads of wrong reasons.
I don't get how you can keep saying its the players not wanting to figure out mechanics at the same time as conceding that the game makes it impossible to even see the mechanics.
Because a lot is happening at the same time:
1) Shitbuilds are exposed which haven't had issues previously due to avoidable league mechanics and consistent power creep.
2) Shit attitudes that want stuff spoonfed are exposed ("but why should I get chaos res/roll less damage mods/rank some members down?!?!").
3) Bad design decisions by GGG are obvious (clutter) but are a lower priority overall due to the first two categories being a vocal group (or even majority) of the playerbase and hard to fix in retrospect.
Examples:
Nugis death. Bullshit death and something he would have never died to if he saw the circle on the ground.
Quinns death. Also bullshit, not sure if he would have died to it regardless but that thing needs to be telegraphed.
What does the majority complain about? The damage. The oneshot abilities in itself. What will GGG address? The damage. The clutter will stay exactly the same, but the numbers will get tuned. Mixed into this type of "feedback" are loads of people who are just genuinely bad at the game and are used to content that they massively outscale. Think about what a joke exiles or beyond are at this point.
If GGG would fix the telegraphs and reduce clutter by removing a good chunk of these adds the league mechanic would be amazing, I'm highly doubtful this will happen though.
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I don't think people want to play a game where they have to make a decision to get less or worse loot. That's just unfun.
I'd also point out that temp leagues have always been you the player as the play tester. It was explicitly stated at the beginning and I presume hasn't changed all things considered. I'm not sure GGG would be able to get it right even if they went back to four month league schedule either.
People give Diablo 3 a lot of shit, but forcing players into the 'viable build' with set pieces is probably one of the smarter design decisions in terms of balancing.
On December 17 2018 09:28 r.Evo wrote:Quinns death. Also bullshit, not sure if he would have died to it regardless but that thing needs to be telegraphed.
I feel like this is a bad example for your point as well. It's an "off screen" kill which always sucks, but he's also fighting a rank 3 chaos boss with no chaos resist and doesn't even slot in a defensive tool like a chaos resist flask. I can't help but feel he deserved that after reading the reddit comments about his build/situation. If he did some stutter step between attacks instead of just standing there attacking would he have died?
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Why would you take MoM on an ES build? Genuine question, friend and I noticed quite a few builds take it despite being CI/LL. Is it primarily for the mana nodes behind it?
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I think I can clarify a few of the issues people have with the current state of PoE.
There are two types of difficulties in a game: the "nintendo hard" difficulty, where you feel that the game may be cruel but is not unfair. Examples for this are the classic nintendo games, Super Meat Boy, most FPS games, and so on. At no point do you die to something other than your being unskilled. If you were skilled enough, then you could theoretically do everything on the first try (even though these games tend to be mechanically demanding enough that very few do). Then there is "invented difficulty", in which the game pulls something in which no matter how skilled you are, it is unreasonable for you to expect it. The kings of this are the speedrunner-only games, like I Want to be the Guy/Boshy/etc, where you have no way other than to memorize the tricks the game pulls.
The moment a game relies on "tricks" rather than mechanical difficulty, then it is incredibly frustrating. Now, games tend to blur the line by making tricks recurring and you are able to prepare to work around them (PoE example: frost nova/corpse explosion one-shots from high level strongboxes), and then get the fig leaf of "that isn't a trick, it's a mechanic", and that's kind of true, but still kind of BS. But the straight up tricks? You know, like when Elder used to explode with massive damage after he dropped the loot, as opposed to every other boss in the game, specifically to fuck over the people who built the mechanics around the rest of the game, that was specifically some dev going "so many players in HC are gonna die lol".
PoE is based around one-shots because the balance assumes that you can have an exit macro, and has to assume that because if you aren't able to supply a strong enough server backbone, then you've got to allow that to the HC players. As PoE has very easy sustain with flasks/leech/regen, the only way to add risk to the HC players is to get some ridiculous damage out there, and make it fast enough that the "exit to log in" macro button won't save them. Every league this gets pushed further because the power creep is real. And a lot of the time, GGG use "tricks" rather than mechanics for it.
Spoilers ahead: in the syndicate boss fight, there's no cue to the invulnerability phase. I think everyone who has played that fight with the "I want to go in blind the first time for new content" attitude has found that frustrating. I think a lot of people are annoyed with the visual clutter making it hard to discern whether you're about to get nuked or not in plenty of parts of syndicate encounters, making those hits more "trick" than "mechanic"... but the lines are kind of blurred here. These things recur enough to be planned around, and anyone who plays more than "I'm back from my day job, lets play for an hour" has already gotten used to them.
But that being said, the way that the community collectively goes "git gud" on these things is allowing GGG to get away with eroding what is the other content in the game by making it mechanically less related to these encounters.
And that's the real issue with "tricks".
If the tricks recur enough, then the game isn't "nintendo hard" anymore. If you're the most skilled player in the world, the game will not allow you to beat it. And that's incredibly frustrating, especially when what you considered the core of the game has given you a list of skills you need, and those are trivialized by a small amount of the content.
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I think this is worse than invasion.
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It's really not that bad. Yeah, they're over-tuned, but honestly, if you actually think about what you're doing and concentrate most of the abilities aren't that bad. There are a few things that legitimately are a little ridiculous and it's odd to have in-your-face league content with the numbers pushed so high compared to bosses and super bosses, but yeah.
You have to ask yourself what do you actually want to die to? If your honest answer in your heart of hearts is nothing then you will always cry foul when something kills you.
The Nugi death is a great example. People went crazy over it, but the truth is he was fighting a guy who puts big orange circles on the ground and kills you if you stand in them. "But the clutter makes it unfair!" The clutter makes it what it is, which is something that can kill you. Nobody dies to Vaal slam, even turbo-ghosted-Vaal-slam, because you can process it and move out of the way. You can do the same against Elreon and other Syndicate members, but it's more challenging -- or actually challenging at all. There's a lot of shit on the screen that doesn't matter (or rather doesn't need conscious processing) that's trying to get your attention and you have to let it wash over you and stay focused on what does matter. When I do Syndicate content now I actively remind myself to ignore everything and focus on the boss animations and it works. I like the Nugi death and think it's fair enough. He stood in the fire because he forgot to actively look for it for a second. The visual clutter deaths I have a problem with are when you literally can't see the floor through all the shit and you get stuck on some invisible doodad and die because you can't move.
The Quinn death is also eh. If you think it's legit to off-screen the enemy then it should be legit for the enemy to off-screen you. Keep it on the screen and actually watch its animations and that stuff won't happen. People die like that more because they're scared to try to outplay the fight. If you treat it like Shaper, like an enemy that can be learned and outplayed you won't die like a dog like that. Yeah, it's still bullshit when you die offscreen because you portal out and despawn animations for active skills or whatever, of course.
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On December 17 2018 11:44 Duka08 wrote:
Why would you take MoM on an ES build? Genuine question, friend and I noticed quite a few builds take it despite being CI/LL. Is it primarily for the mana nodes behind it?
There are Guardian builds that use the "mana as extra ES" ascendancy node to get really high ES numbers, in which case the mana nodes behind MoM are worth it. Other than that I can't think of any reason.
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Imho Syndicate just shouldn't spawn all these extra Mobs and it would be fine. I'm in SC, still not in red maps and play Arc-Mines so i tend to not have any issues except when the map mods are truely ugly. And I Play with 0 effort, i still don't even have a flask to get rid of curses and, aside from essence worm, wear SSF-Rares.
I run Tempchains + IAS/IMS + DMG Mod maps whiteout even checking (and then die because i can't get any distance between me and the Syndicate :p). But iirc i haven't died more than a handfull times yet...
It just feels really weird when the safehouse fights are way less dangerous than the encounters in normal Maps (let alone when they combine with a red beast).
Imho the main issue is how totally brain afk you can clear maps because normal map mobs are just a joke. Buffing normal mobs up to incursion levels would be good for the game.
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Someone probably AGAIN typoed a decimal on dmg and now no one in GGG knows if this was the designed balance, haha.
Removing clutter, doing something about non telegraphed attacks and removing auras, should do already enough probably, leaving it still like rippiest league.
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All this talk about one-shots in maps has gotten me quite nervous about my own HC experience. I decided to try HC this league, and I'm enjoying it tremendously. However, I've never actually gotten into maps before, even in SC. I last played in Incursion, and stopped shortly after Act 10. So I've realised a lot of stuff is gonna be able to kill me in HC because I've just never seen it before, and that's gonna cost me a 20-hour character. Which is fine, I mean, that's part of HC, but I imagine this'd happen a LOT if I haven't done maps before, and 20 hours is a long time to build back up in order to learn from that mistake. However, after playing HC, SC doesn't seem quite the same.
I've been thinking about a self-imposed challenge that punishes death but is still easier than HC, for when I begin maps. For instance, dying might mean that I can't play that character for the rest of the day, or I have to delete one random equipped item. Has anyone done something like this, and do you have recommendations?
Which leads to another question - is there a way to transfer a character from HC Betrayal to SC Betrayal, before the character gets killed and goes to Standard? I think if I make it past Act 10 Kitava with a HC character, I might "retire" it to SC if there's an option to do so.
Perhaps I should just make a scout character in SC with the same build, and accept it as the price of doing business as a noob in HC.
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On December 17 2018 17:17 Lachrymose wrote:
The Nugi death is a great example. People went crazy over it, but the truth is he was fighting a guy who puts big orange circles on the ground and kills you if you stand in them. "But the clutter makes it unfair!" The clutter makes it what it is, which is something that can kill you. Nobody dies to Vaal slam, even turbo-ghosted-Vaal-slam, because you can process it and move out of the way. That's where I call bullshit.
If people are good enough to dodge slams then that is the player doing what you taught him and that's a good thing.
You don't then curse and make it harder and harder to see the slam coming until it does kill them.
There is nothing wrong with players being good enough to avoid the mechanics you put into to game, so long as they do it in the intended way, and punishing them for it created a very dangerous situation that can drive players away from your game.
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Game devs should not be trying to kill the players, this is like game design 101 shit, there should be a real threat of death if you ignore shit you shouldn't, but death should not be the intent of any design.
So what do I want to die to? I want to die to knowing the mechanics, seeing the mechanics, but not doing the mechanics. Which means I don't want to die to anything if I play well.
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On December 17 2018 21:56 ThaddeusK wrote:
Game devs should not be trying to kill the players, this is like game design 101 shit, there should be a real threat of death if you ignore shit you shouldn't, but death should not be the intent of any design.
So what do I want to die to? I want to die to knowing the mechanics, seeing the mechanics, but not doing the mechanics. Which means I don't want to die to anything if I play well.
Like dark souls? where a naked character can beat the game.
General damage you take should be somewhere. Where should it be though?
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On December 17 2018 20:09 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2018 17:17 Lachrymose wrote:
The Nugi death is a great example. People went crazy over it, but the truth is he was fighting a guy who puts big orange circles on the ground and kills you if you stand in them. "But the clutter makes it unfair!" The clutter makes it what it is, which is something that can kill you. Nobody dies to Vaal slam, even turbo-ghosted-Vaal-slam, because you can process it and move out of the way. That's where I call bullshit. If people are good enough to dodge slams then that is the player doing what you taught him and that's a good thing. You don't then curse and make it harder and harder to see the slam coming until it does kill them. There is nothing wrong with players being good enough to avoid the mechanics you put into to game, so long as they do it in the intended way, and punishing them for it created a very dangerous situation that can drive players away from your game.
You have to do something to make it harder and harder until it kills them or it stops being a game and transitions completely to a slot machine. That future of non-escalating differently coloured Vaal slams until the end of time sounds shit.
If you just make the slams in the game faster and faster until they start to kill people because their reactions aren't fast enough it's going to feel shitty. You're just going to die because you have above average latency. Your path to progress past whatever kills you is get better internet or mirror ES gear.
Making it harder and harder to concentrate on the mechanics is the mechanics and the solution is get better at the mechanics. It's fair and reasonable.
On December 17 2018 21:56 ThaddeusK wrote:
Game devs should not be trying to kill the players, this is like game design 101 shit, there should be a real threat of death if you ignore shit you shouldn't, but death should not be the intent of any design.
So what do I want to die to? I want to die to knowing the mechanics, seeing the mechanics, but not doing the mechanics. Which means I don't want to die to anything if I play well.
I don't believe in your post-modern game design. The game is in overcoming some challenge. If there's nothing to overcome there's no challenge and there's no game.
If you provide no obstacle to doing the mechanics then the only reason to no do them is because you choose not to, so you're advocating for the only way to fail is to choose to fail. That's the same as removing failure from the game, the same as removing the game from the game.
The game is already asking you to play well and this league it means concentrate well, it means spot the dangerous things in the cacophony and react to them correctly. You're just not playing well but it's easier to say the game failed you than you failed the game and advocate for a game you can't lose.
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Syndicate fights can be pretty bullshit, but every league there's a similar crowd of people who just want to farm the top endgame content endlessly without any effort and who create dozens of angry reddit threads when they die or can't forever chain t16 maps or whatever the newest meme is
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Game has been steadily getting harder since Abyss. I remember after I got back to PoE and made a 2500 life Ranger archer how people in the guild made fun of me but I did manage to almost get to red maps with it.
With Abyss shit got real. 5000 life guy in yellow map? You get destroyed by Abyss rares if you didn't know what was happening. And screen clutter was already beyond anything before then (including Breach). And it was accompanied by lag.
At that point I gave up on going mostly DPS and only some into defense. All my characters are from that point built almost like HC characters. And it mostly worked in all leagues so far (including rippy Bestiary) until now.
This league, I am currently in low yellow maps and Syndicate is mostly destroying a character that is as tanky as all others I would make so far since Abyss.
Part of it is visual clutter but that one is worse for melee or some channeling characters than a totem one that I am using (not Arc). Bigger part is just too much life and damage from enemies and their adds.
If I am already sacrificing offense for defense and still getting randomly killed unlike ever before, the problem is bigger than not being able to see all the one shot mechanics..
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EPT
