On September 17 2025 04:53 Gescom wrote: You definitely have some kind of severe damage problem. Boss fights are like sub one minute with low risk of death to you during campaign if your build and items make sense.
I mean, yeah, I definitely do have a damage problem. I do have flat damage on my gloves and rings, 2 damage supports + lightning pen on my main skill (lightning spear atm. but I tried the others and they all feel dog shit), leveled my gems, made sure I get damage on the tree, made sure I upgrade my spear as often as I can, got 4 ascension points... I'm literally doing everything I can and I'm still sitting at sub 1k tool tip DPS while those bosses have 200k hp for whatever reason. I suppose it's because spears are one-handed because I don't remember having as much problems on my warrior or sorc back in 0.1. Still, I don't think I did any sub 1 minute kills on them, either, which would be completely fine. Anyhow, either one-handed weapons/spears are completely outside of any reasonable balance discussion or I'm somehow missing something important...
Also again, I don't have trouble with anything but bosses, so my point with the boss HP compared to normal mobs still stands.
On September 16 2025 23:07 Southlight wrote: I think they have an identity crisis of sorts but I understand where they were going. Personally I sort of enjoy the boss fights, but I can also understand the pacing whiplash. It's probably too late now, but I think if they wanted to lean into the bossing then end game should have revolved more around boss fights and less map blasting (and have smaller maps during the campaign), but they tried to do both and now you have this bizarre dichotomy.
Yeah, they definitely have an identity problem. They're really in this weird space where POE2 is way too similar to POE1 in a lot of ways (e.g. league content like breach/ritual being overwhelmingly similar), yet want the games to coexist as distinct products. They keep trying to reinvent the wheel (e.g. the mapping system w/ towers, tablets, etc) and it often feels like they're doing it for the sake of being different from POE1, rather than it being independently good/better.
I've often posed the question in my head of "why does POE2 exist?" because it just doesn't feel like a sufficiently different product rather than just an alternate version of POE1 with ramped up scarcity and better graphics.
I'm not sure how solvable of a problem it really is. They're naturally going to want to reuse assets and development between the two games, which is often going to result in many of the core mechanics (notably league content) being redundant.
Bossing feels like the only area that POE2 really excelled in, though I think dodge roll being the only movement in the game greatly detracted from the experience/gameplay variety. Originally bossing was going to be a big focal point where every map had a big boss that was taking up 1/3rd of the time and giving 1/3rd of the loot, but that quickly got squashed and now map bosses are pretty rare.
They've just kept steadily moving away from bossing as a focal point of the endgame since pre-release, and mapping is steadily moving closer to the brain off blasting of POE1, though it's way more of a slog to actually get from the "everything is a giant bag of hp, why am I fighting a white mob for 20 seconds" to "finally clearing quickly, mapping is starting to feel good." It's kind of a weird place to be. POE1 mapping is popular for that reason, but then you're back to the "why does POE2 exist if you're just going to steadily make the game more like POE1?"
I dunno. I don't have a solution for it. Obviously people are still playing the game and the numbers were pretty good, so there's an audience that enjoys the state of things. We'll just have to see how many people keep coming back league after league and how many are done after the novelty of their first few characters wear off. We also need to see what the POE1 numbers will look like for a fresh league that doesn't have huge server problems driving people away.
PoE 2 exists because some people at GGG don't actually like what PoE 1 has become. The fast zoom exploding everything offscreen loot fest that has basically come to define the genre.
They tried to turn PoE 1 into a different slower game, the players cried bloody murder. They tried again, the players rebelled again. Until eventually it was split off into its own Ruthless mode that most people don't touch.
I'm pretty sure that is what PoE 2 was supposed to be, slow combat, even white mobs taking effort to kill ect ect. But that's not the game that most people want to play, so now PoE 2 is trying to retain its big player count and, like PoE 1, being transformed into a game that the designers didn't set out to make.
It is fundamentally at odds with the design philosophy that created it and what the players playing it want.
And as a developer you could chose to keep PoE 2 as what it was originally designed to be and keep the 2 games existing side by side each catering to a different audience but in the end $$ talks and that means the game follows what the players want, and they want PoE 1 with prettier graphics, not Ruthless.
Yeah, I think that's one of the reasons Chris Wilson left. When he interview David Brevik, he said he was jealous of him working on a game all by himself and create something he envisioned. With the way PoE has developed for the past few years, Ruthless and PoE2, I think it's pretty clear that PoE has strayed very far from what Chris Wilson envisioned, even though people claimed otherwise.
The thing is, I think I wouldn't feel as bad about the bosses taking longer if the rest of the game also felt slower and more meaty. But again, the difference between normal mobs and bosses are too big. Blasting through an area only to tickle a bos for 10 minutes is too stark of a contrast in pace and just feels way off and bad. As you said, they are trying to turn PoE2 into a screen explody game - and I think while retaining the meaty combat for bosses. I don't think that's a good idea because I'm not sure what audience they are trying to please with that but maybe there is one and I'm just not part of that. I would much rather enjoy PoE2 as a game with generally more meaningful combat.
In general I think this is a problem with live service games, both for devs and players. You just need to endlessly reiterate the game until it inevitably becomes something that wasn't envisioned by the devs nor something people originally fell in love with. It will change its audience to a significant degree throughout its lifetime. It's why I'm very sympathetic towards the notion of devs following a "VISION", even if players don't like it. I still think that it will generally be for the better and create more distinct games for different audiences instead of everything being a wash.
I feel like the problem with the initial release version of PoE2 was, that it played more slow and methodical. But the Maps where bigger that those of PoE1. So it really took ages to clear a Map - or just arrive at the next story beat (I played a pretty unsupported Build as well. so that was also part of it). That really didn't work well together. If they wanted to slow down the speed of the fights, they needed to adjust the amount of enemies kill and the amount of walking you had to do to progress.
Now they cut them down and added sprinting. But also my Deadeye just shreds the story enemies including most bosses - so it plays much closer to PoE1 anyway.
My takeaway of that interview for Chris leaving was it felt like it had more to do with wanting to go back to game development rather than company management.
I wouldn't be surprised if it came to a head around Kalandra, which was the second time in a (relatively) small period where he'd missed something that had a relatively large effect on the game and a lot of negative player feedback. That was probably when he started seriously considering the notion of giving up game director to focus more on his CEO role, since trying to do both was leaving holes.
Wanting to follow his own vision for a game is probably at least some part of the overall decision, since control of creative direction can be pretty important to your overall satisfaction in the job.
As to POE2, my problem with the gameplay was that it was slow while also being uninteresting. You need combat to be a lot more interactive where you're actually reacting in meaningful ways to what enemies are doing in order for fighting small numbers to feel interesting (which is basically what bossing is) but that just doesn't work (or at least has never worked in an iteration we've seen) for ordinary trash mobs. I'm not sure that kind of combat for ordinary enemies even fits in the genre. The painfully slow movement with huge maps full of nothing and clunky collision (pushiness) of enemies that felt like lagging were all definitely contributors.
I think it is fine. Because the game is in development they are trying new things compared to PoE1. Some work and some doesn't so they drop the ones that doesn't work. I think it is nice they are not stubbborn and keep them only because they are different and new.
On September 26 2025 12:13 BLinD-RawR wrote: yeah but towers weren't working and finding rares along the map was a chore.
I think there were better solutions for towers. E.g. make them not random so you always have the same number of (or none) overlapping maps, regardless of the area. The boss change seems "fine" but I would have liked them to seperate the bossing and mapping more as they intended. Idk, I would map in PoE without any map bosses existing. Maybe make map completion dependend on less than x (e.g. 50) monsters left in the area.
Overall I think I would prefer the games to be more different, especially in combat. But right now they are trying to make it like PoE, just zoomzoom, 1 billion monsters and effects, you don't see anything, just blast. For example, I don't know why they add a mechanic like Abyss, which is literally just shit tons of monster (but green). Especially in the campaign it ruins the amazing atmosphere they have created in the acts. Why not look for a mechanic that fits more to the combat style of PoE2? Or at least don't add it to the campaign (you don't have to, just because that's how things worked in PoE...). I enjoy the blasting in PoE but I don't need a second game like this and PoE is far superior in terms of build crafting so my choice would be easy.
I rage quit my Amazon at the last interlude boss (the double boss that heals). No way I'm going to kill that. I could ask a friend but I asked myself "why?"... I don't even feel like progressing the build because I already looked up solutions for problems I have with my build, e.g. frenzy charge generation, and there is literally no satisfying solutions. This is a real bummer because the problem solving is my favourite thing in PoE. The solution can be silly and somewhat inefficient but it needs to be cool and fun in my eyes. That's not happening in PoE2 right now, at least not with my Amazon. I started a Warrior instead and so far I get the impression it's not one-handed weapons that are too weak but spears. It could change but in A1 the damage I'm doing is ridiculous.
I thought there was no chance of it being breach redone, but with the passives all removed from the tree it's hard to expect anything else. I hope it's more enjoyable than the current form.
On October 20 2025 17:32 BLinD-RawR wrote: no more wrist flicking to unstack divination decks, which is 100% a feature worth a short video.
that shit was ass to do.
Will that increase the price of stacked decks a bit? I think it might.
Hard to say. Pretty sure opening stacked decks is typically negative expected value so it's mostly for gambling, but more people may want to gamble since it'll be streamlined. There also might be lower supply as more people opt to open their decks quickly rather than sell them.
EPT
.
