PoE is stacked against the solo player

 I just killed Cruel Dominus (Ambush League) with my solo poison arrow, fire trap, rain of arrows evasion archer. It wasn't pretty and I knew I would be dieing so I made sure I had just leveled up so as to not lose much exp. The first wave of minions are usually no problem but I died once due to one of many desync moments. Battling the first incarnation of Dominus proved tougher than I had expected as the poison gas wasn't doing as much damage as I had hoped. The fire trap linked with more burning damage and added damage did better but I still died many times from lag and a couple of desyncs. Then the 2nd incarnation of Dominus was extremely rough. My chaos damage is rock bottom so the blood rain is brutal and standing inside the bubble is equally bad as I am supposed to move and evade attacks as I'm not tanky. Even with putting up my decoy totem on the other side of that Dominus creature to get it to turn away from me I still have the minions coming out of the blood pool mobbing me and all. After dieing over a dozen times Dominus was dead and I could finally move on to Merciless (back to the beach).

 Then as I was watching one of IzzyD's excellent PoE tips videos I came across this one: Group Farming Dominus (30 Second Runs). I knew that group playing is always easier than solo playing but wow. This is just another example of where this game stacks the deck against the solo player much more than in group play. There are many who choose to play PoE solo and it isn't really fair that GGG should stack the deck against us this badly. It looks like the group players need to have the difficulty increased as it looks like a walk in the park with Dominus in a 6 player group compared to a solo Dominus run.

 After moving on to Merciless, I cleared through The Beach and The Strand in less than 5 minutes so the normal crap we have to put up with zone content spikes is in full force. When it comes to difficulty, I don't have any problems with it per say, but when it comes to consistency, PoE is full of major imbalances right and left. GGG is very poor at going back and balance tweaking PoE. Maybe it's their limited team and the constant need to push out new content or maybe they consider it "good enough". Content difficulty for solo verses 6 players is way off, is far from "good enough", and GGG needs to go back and do a proper rebalance of PoE. I doubt it would happen as creating new content is more fun and it's only with new content that GGG can stay in business.

ps: I wonder for how long GGG can forgo the solo players needs and push their game engine with new spells and content before the whole PoE ship burns and sinks into the desync ocean.

How would you try to increase difficulty for group players?

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Nightmare90 a écrit :

How would you try to increase difficulty for group players?

If the increase in difficulty for groups that I read on last year is still the same, 2 players = 150%, 3 players = 200% harder difficulty, etc. then those percentages need to go up. It's really not fair that solo = 100% difficulty, 2 players = 75% difficulty, 3 players = 66% difficulty, etc. I understand that GGG wants to encourage group play but giving the group players that much of a content difficulty break is way off and is putting off a major quantity of solo PoE players (and why many don't play PoE at all).

It's not "harder difficulty", it's just an increase of monster's life.

@Arrowneous no, adding hp would mean make the game redicoulusly slow...you cannot talk about party balance unless you play the game like its ment ( trading for gear ) if you want to solo play solo and dont party up, partys already have the disadvantage of splitting gear ( that we all know in poe is vital) with other people. the only places that need more hp are highlvl areas imo but not because of partys just because im bored and there so damn easy, example is the atziri area, holly shit mobs are beefy I liek.

It goes both ways mate, sure its easier with people, but that's because there's 5 other distractions there for mobs to even consider hitting you really is depending on positioning, its completely different, but in the end...solo is were you can easy achieve the dps to clear anything in 2seconds the game becomes extremely easy ones your character is well equipped or you know what your doing, aka it becomes EASIER then team play, faster xp, faster kill speed, more loot(not if you're in party with dedicated mf ofc.) Solo with the right gear/pots especially the build your talking about can melt bosses in a few seconds. If your getting pwned then get a decoy totem, almost all my solo friends would never make a char without a decoy totem! its mandatory, its like having someone with you, you could also try skele totem.


Imo you haven't scratched the surface with Poe single-player possibilities :) the only thing not viable solo is drops being complete trash. not party size. if your still getting pwned then you're problem is that of every other solo player, your gear sucks because poe is an ONLINE only game based on trading.(literally based on trading) soooo playing it like a single player WILL not work in theory its just something fun people like to do, theres very very few builds that will let you get to endgame on selfound gear, maybe thats what you need to look at those builds :D goodluck! when i want to play selfound i play median xl!!

Last note on partys is how much dps you need in a party vs solo, imo the only reason dps can be pushes so high is partys because if you put 6people with decent damage in a party there damage becomes weak most of the times there are people who have mad dps and those people carry but alot of the time people in partys DONT have the dps needed :P play in hardcore youl see what i mean takes ages to get past stuff because mobs aready gain insane hp, the only time party is advantage is if you did your homework and your characters are pimp and dps, other then that solo + decoy is best by far.

But grouping is just as bad.
Screen is cluttered with effects and projectiles, you barely understand, what is going on.
Much more desync. If your hardware is not great, fps will suffer aswell.
You can die to some oneshot flameblast thinking that it is allied one. Or die to corrupted blood/reflect, because it is hard to notice with all these effects.

If you step away from group to pick some mobs, killing it will take forever.
And people can do just stupid things like pulling some strong boss, which you want to avoid alltogether.

And about cruel Dominus phase 2- you should move him down the stairs, adds will not attack you this way. Dominus himself supposed to be tankable by any build with proper use of granite/life/remove bleeding flasks.

 I guess I'm forever doomed to have a bipolar attitude toward PoE. I love build theory crafting, I love the passive tree, I love the play mechanics (minus desync), love the variety of zones, love the gems and socket concept, love that there is no gold standard, hate the wildly high RNG ranges, hate the one shotting from off screen and rogues, hate trade chat, hate pressing keys and having nothing happen (all too common and my pings to the game servers are under 100 ms), hate all the level 60+ one and two socket junk loot (wouldn't mind if we weren't fusing starved forever), etc. The fact that I'm not uber hardcore shouldn't prevent me from enjoying playing PoE, and most of the time I do otherwise I'd have quit long ago, but when the only way to proceed is to plan on dieing dozens of times to the zone end boss then PoE really needs a difficulty factor setting more than ever. We all have different playing capabilities and where some see PoE as fairly easy others see certain aspects as OP hard. The "goldilocks" zone is different for all and we need to be able to dial in our own level of challenging content and not be locked into a "one way fits all" play style.

Solo is the default difficulty, partying is the ez mode. I don't mind difficulty, but seeing how faster parties level up compared to soloing, feels kinda unfair.

I would even party, if the FPS drops wouldn't make it more risky for me. Ironic yes, the only thing that can kill you in a party is technical issues :P

Heh, try killing Cruel Dominus in a random group at the beginning of a league. You will see people die dozens of times before Dom is eventually down ;)

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Xavderion a écrit :

Heh, try killing Cruel Dominus in a random group at the beginning of a league. You will see people die dozens of times before Dom is eventually down ;)

you probably picked the worst party as an example here.

Dominus on Cruel is a giant freakin' wall for the solo player.
and if you happen to be self-found too, well you're just asking for trouble.

a party? man I ran maps with public parties when I could barely solo Docks.
yes, not long after league began.
parties just make everything exponentially easier.
yes, including Cruel Dominus.

smart players that know how to concentrate fire-power and work at least a bit as a team, just mow through everything.
and if you take a step-forward and have guys dedicated to running Conduit, buffing, toteming (and I mean buff totems, not Spork), cursing, Magic-Finding....

that's not a bad thing.
party in this game is done better in my opinion, than in TL2 for example where you can just face-tank it all if you are enough people and the AI gets confused.
but what is a bad thing is how much solo get completely fucking screwed in return.