Quick fixes and 0.2.0

Congratulations on a successful EA. Like most players, I enjoyed PoE2 immensely, and it looks like the foundation is there for a game surpassing the original. I am eagerly awaiting 0.2.0 as Druid and Huntress are the two classes I'm most interested in.

With all that said, PoE2 is rough around the edges. I suspect everyone that reads these forums is well aware of the numerous issues. I would like to raise two points that I have not seen addressed before that would certainly help with those issues (and one can be done very easily).

Trade / AH will likely not be fixed in 0.2.0. But some things can be done to patch up the most glaring issue and the most common complaint.
- Are you tired of not getting a response when you whisper? Are you tired of the item you want suddenly going up in price by 100 divs and the seller whispering you back "How much do you think it's worth?"? If you want these two issues to drop in frequency, all that is needed is for GGG to remove the buyout price by tab function. That's right, all those inconsiderate players that use a dump tab and then ask you to price their items for them will now have to do the work themselves. Not only will this provide a valuable moral lesson about the virtue of putting in the work, it will also massively reduce the number of items listed at prices their seller has no intention of ever selling for. To top it off, if the sellers have to price their items individually, they are also far more likely to respond to a whisper. Sounds pretty good right? It should be a popular idea for everyone that isn't asking their fellow player to do their work for them.

Next up - resistances. In PoE1, resistance was pretty easy to come by after the campaign was done. Not only were there several options in the passive tree (usually combined with sweet stuff like +max res or doubled into other cool stuff like +%spell block through jewels), resistance was pretty easy to cap through mechanics and lack of mod conflicts. As of yet, that doesn't exist in the PoE2 tree, and suffixes are already pretty packed for amulets, gloves, and helmets (expect more of that coming as well). While I hope that the dev team is hard at work brainstorming something more fun for resistances than the previous patch-and-done model that we currently have, until then I have a quick fix - flatten the resist effects. Instead of giving 0 - 75% resistance to damage, scale it on a curve such that each point of resist gives slightly lower effect than the previous one. That way resist becomes an actual choice that competes against other effective health pool choices instead of a basic requirement of capped-res-or-die. Or an even easier fix - cap res at 50% and reduce the elemental damage of enemies by a similar amount; the effects on the game design will be similar - capped res will be less do-or-die. This should help balancing end game content quite a bit as elemental damage numbers can be scaled against a smaller health pool interval rather than the health pool * 4 of PoE1. I mention this because the campaign has a pretty tight curve in both damage and health, while the end game is all over the place. Constraining the end game numbers somewhat on certain vectors will make balancing a lot easier, resulting in more enemies doing damage to the player but fewer enemies skadooshing the player out of nowhere.

Thank you for reading my blog.