Ground Effects. On Death Effects.

I want to have a discussion about a couple of, what i consider, issues.

that being ground effects. specifically ground effects that kill you, or can hurt you. this kind of lumps in monster on death effects. is this just a super lazy ass mechanic that is overused now-a-days?

delve is a perfect example, with those stupid ice spikes that shoot out then leave a DoT effect for whatever duration. it is easily the most frequent enemy you face in delve, and its basically the only thing that will kill a half decent build.

the biggest issue, in my opinion, is that its an effect after you kill the monster. it seems like the biggest way GGG are trying to combat the whole speed clear meta stuff, and how people want to go faster and faster and faster, is to make the only dangerous things you can face linked to monster death.
that is supposedly going to make you think about killing something too fast.

think about it, its all over the game. porcupines, bearers, corrupted blood, delve mobs, reflect, volatile, etc.

this seems to be acting like a negative dps-check. oh dps-checks. most mmorpgs will end up incorporating them into harder dungeons or instances, and its always recognized as a dumb lazy mechanic to artificially raise the difficulty bar.
do X amount of damage in X amount of time or your party is wiped. much hard, so wow. gameplay.



ground effects especially i think is a very....crowded category.
between skills that place effects on the ground like toxic rain, storm calls etc, various MTXs, all kinds of mobs on the screen, map overlay, elemental ailment ground effects, skill effects both mob and ours on the ground alike and every single telegraphed effect being showcased by...ground effects....how the fuck are we supposed to see anything now-a-days?

so yes, as all poe threads, this thread was born out of rage from constantly never seeing the delve death ground effect spike of stupid, because i spam over 250 toxic rain pods a second.
however instead of just coming here and bitching like most do, i wanted to turn it into an actual conversation and look to what we have and how we can go in the future.

betrayal is a perfect example. for the first couple of weeks so many people died and were having insane issues. actually not because of the members themselves, but because they spawned so many adds so frequently that you could not see the ground effects used to warn you of a big telegraphed hit.

this is increasingly becoming an issue the more effects we get and the more mechanics are introduced. i can't help but think the game is suffering for it.
i understand the need for it, honestly, especially the danger from monster death. otherwise the best defense would be an insane offense (which lets be honest, is kind of the case now for most of the game).

so how can the game progress and continue in the future without this issue being compounded even more??



personally i really like how volatile was changed to have an audio cue. this was a great addition and really gives you a heads up. however not everything could be swapped to that, because it would just be ear cancer all day long. with the introduction of custom loot filter sounds and the majority of people listening to music while they play, i don't really consider this a solution to the problem, but more of a temporary work-around.

i actually don't know. i haven't thought about it for too long, but maybe i'll continue to think about possible alternatives because the way i see it, GGG is going to need to get pretty damn ingenuitive for this to not become a thorn in path of exile's side.



TLDR: on death effects are dumb artificial difficulty trying to slow down the game. even worse when they're also ground effects, which is super crowded category of the game, causing issues hindering enjoyment.
what alternatives can we have to more and more ground effects? discuss

PoE is in a state where the player one shots the mobs and the mobs can equally one shot the player should they ever actually hit each other. Thus players build around being able to one shot mobs and GGG is left with the only recourse, booby trap killing of mobs with voltatile blood, corrupting blood, storm bears, ice spikes and IMO the worst offender, freaking lightning mirage.

Why did this happen? Simple, GGG does not want tanks to exist or for players to be able to tank any reason amount of damage because this would invalidate the content and players could simply brute force their way to 100 vs content that poses no actual threat. Systematic nerfs to player defense ( max resists, life nodes, etc) in addition to continously growing mob damage, rediculously badly tuned map mods that award little IIQ/pack size.

Why did this happen? The root cause is that ggg does not want players to progress exp and get to level 100 too fast(lol breachstones) because it shortens the overall net playtime and hurts their profit margins.

PoE also suffers from a serious visual clutter issue. In end game T15/T16 maps with sextants/prophecies/abysses/breaches/harbingers your fps will be less than half of what it is in mid tier maps or even T12-T14 maps. There is so much visual clutter dropping fps and making it impossible to see anything much less ground effects and the amount of skill clutter and persistent skill effects just compounds into a situation where players are resigned to play with sharp FPS spikes even with a top end computer.

so you think the foundational issue is GGG doesn't want people to reach 100?
i'd say the extreme high majority of people don't play to hit 100 or even consider it a goal (outside of now being linked to achievements).

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PoE also suffers from a serious visual clutter issue. In end game T15/T16 maps with sextants/prophecies/abysses/breaches/harbingers your fps will be less than half of what it is in mid tier maps or even T12-T14 maps. There is so much visual clutter dropping fps and making it impossible to see anything much less ground effects and the amount of skill clutter and persistent skill effects just compounds into a situation where players are resigned to play with sharp FPS spikes even with a top end computer.

see...what you say i completely agree, other than FPS issues. i mean sure there are fps drops but i wouldn't say thats the real issue with it unless you're some FPS elitist that needs to have 240+ at all times or you cry yourself to sleep or anything.

I agree.

People whine about optimization, trading, drops being bad, monsters not being a threat, clear speed, bad uniques, bad reward structure and so on, while the saddest things about PoE, is the visibility.

You know they are on a bad path, when shiny effects are the most dangerous thing in this game, just because they hinder you from seeing what's going on half of the time, and the rest of the time being just a reason for tired eyes.

They need to tone shit down.

I agree - can't see shit most of the time.

And party play is a psychedelic drug experience on its own...

On death effect/ground effect are so dangerous not because they are barely visible. They are dangeorous because those are the only "attacks" that canreach us in current state of PoE where you literally one shot whole screen before anything can even attack you.

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Antigegner a écrit :

I agree - can't see shit most of the time.

And party play is a psychedelic drug experience on its own...

oh frick, people actually play in parties in this game? i couldn't and never would because it was terrible 5 years ago let alone now, lol.

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Aynix a écrit :

On death effect/ground effect are so dangerous not because they are barely visible. They are dangeorous because those are the only "attacks" that canreach us in current state of PoE where you literally one shot whole screen before anything can even attack you.

this is a good take on it as well. where it isn't an immediate ground effect of a telegraphed attack (ALA kitava attacks) but more something you walk into as you're clearing, more like how delve is.


see this also introduces, or rather manipulates metas. such as freeze meta, where shattering things or blowing up corpses eliminates most of these dangers all together.

I kill syndicate member.
I open syndicate window try to read something and it covers the whole screen.
I died.
I have so much fun.

moved to feedback and suggestions, because this thread is basically neither!

makes sense

now it can die in this hole without further discussion or insight. cya

I once got instagibbed by a plague of frogs that were hiding in the shrubbery. I never saw them. They were bearers of the obelisk, and 20-odd obelisks appeared simultaneously, each of them spitting out ball lightning, and I was right n the middle of them. I was dead in less than a second.

So yeah, I do think the kill on death thing is a bit overdone. I'd rather the mobs hung around a bit longer to do their own dirty work.