Does GGG Play this game?

Yes.

Firstly, the answer is yes, they do play their own game, Jonathan has spoken a few times about how they have to intentionally do strats they normally wouldn't during the campaign to recreate the experience of less knowledgeable players. What he said in the Ziz interview made it clear that he likes the difficulty where it is and is worried that if he makes it too easy then he might not enjoy it himself any more, and then he won't make as good of a game. The "vision" that people keep going on about is at least partially Jonathan, Mark and other lead designers just making a game for themselves, and they are pretty good at games. There's a video of Jonathan fighting the viper boss during an interview, dodging all the attacks and everything while holding a conversation. There's no question that they play the game.

Secondly, dunno what your defenses are and all that, you do need a bare minimum to get by in maps, but it is possible to get by without instantly killing everything if you have some kind of crowd control to start your combo. Freeze them, pin them, distract them with minions, whatever you can use to open up a window in which you can do your combo. You will probably need a few points in the appropriate passive tree nodes to support it. This is actually something that I really like about the game, because it's an active style of defensive gameplay, on top of having a stat that passively defends you.

That being said, if you're playing ssf, you might need to take a bit longer to farm before getting up to higher level maps. That's just the nature of not having access to trade; the campaign is fine without it but once you get to maps you're going to have to replace trade with a bunch of extra grinding. I think you can migrate to trade league if you're not interested in that?

No.

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TrunktenUK#3407 a écrit :

XP loss from death is completely warranted because if you keep progressing through levels and are close to or at max from dieing often and never really figure out how to become strong the conclusion will be the player at an even bigger loss.

There are many games that hinder progression via a players inability to understand how to be strong (Elden Ring, League of Legends and many more) that are loved, its totally bizarre to exempt because of "traditions of the genre" or some other pathetic "genre" excuse.

Yeah, except this logic is non-sensical. So the player should improve by depriving them of one possible form of progression, i.e., gaining points on the skill tree? Nah dude, the only reason this game has exp loss is because their holy grail D2 had exp loss. There is no other reason.

Additionally, you can do the math yourself, exp progression is exponential in PoE/PoE2. So the amount of exp loss barely means anything below lvl90 and only starts to really hurt lvl 93/94 and up. Are you seriously going to argue that someone who has reached that point needs to "figure out how to become strong"?

Furthermore, GGG adding Omen of Amelioration to the game just shows you that they are very well aware of how annoying and needless this mechanic is, and allow you to essentially buy your way out of it. If it is so essentially for improvement, why are you allowed to circumvent it most of it with an item?

The argument with other games is also a fail, because if you compare say Elden Ring you will notice two things: It is a skill based game where you can beat everything in the game without spending a single skill point and second you can regain your lost progression via active gameplay. Neither is true for PoE2.

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Slart1bartfast#0332 a écrit :

Yeah, except this logic is non-sensical. So the player should improve by depriving them of one possible form of progression, i.e., gaining points on the skill tree?

Ofc you would use the solo player game Elden Ring as an example when these games have to have plenty of slight conveniences for profits from a mainstream audience.

Players aren't deprived they're encouraged to build and look into things properly to win so much harder than they would of just with an almost no f's given approach.

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Slart1bartfast#0332 a écrit :

only starts to really hurt lvl 93/94 and up. Are you seriously going to argue that someone who has reached that point needs to "figure out how to become strong"?

That's another reason and why not. You're going to want to provide penalties toward unskilled/over-rushed play to the addicted 10%-20% of the playerbase who make these levels and who start to mess with the economy depending on how no life they play.

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Slart1bartfast#0332 a écrit :

The argument with other games is also a fail, because if you compare say Elden Ring you will notice two things: It is a skill based game where you can beat everything in the game without spending a single skill point

"Skill based", that needs to be said in contrast? Really?
Maybe I can get an idea of the skill level of games "out of 10" from a chart or something.
Also no one who actually likes gaming, plays without utilizing tools like skill points, its a weird flex, an appreciated 10 min youtube watch about bugged/niche mechanics, whatever but I only want to discuss in seriousness.

There's a huge bias with how a certain group of players/"veteran's" are viewing PoE2 right now although certain feedbacks are of course warranted, like the map respawns imo are now perfect in contrast to the extreme no death state they were always in before. This game since 0.2 is very friendly towards progression imo with that respawn change, if there's no exp loss on death it's just gonna elevate to even more over the top "mainstream overwelcoming" practices, which some veteran's/sweats will say is good but they'll complete the game within a few weeks and sweat something else but that's perhaps what they love to do because they lack proper passion/commitment principals.