PoE2: How to fix the game (keen to know ppl's thoughts)

I'm gonna save the preamble about why PoE2 sucks rn etc. The game has amazing bones, it feels good to play and I want it to be successful. But we need to stop pretending like a few balancing changes are going to fix fundamentally broken systems.

My suggestions:

- Scrap the Ascendancy Trials. The rogue-like elements aren't fun, they occur too early in the story and don't respect your time. Your build often isn't anywhere near optimised enough for them not to feel like bashing your head up against a wall. If a whole secondary market develops to have your character carried through the trials, you've failed as game devs. The bosses are cool, so keep them, but just make it a series of back-to-back boss rooms (one for each 2 new ascendancy points). You can keep the honour system and chaos trial system for the boss rooms, just don't have the stupidness of running through 9 rooms with stacking modifiers each time.

- Fix the economy. The loot buffs were nice, but they don't address the underlying issue. The 1% run the economy. No unique in the game should be selling for 600 Divines. Introduce scaling price caps or limitations on no. of trades above 200 Divines per day. The issue is that the build-defining uniques that trivlialise the game are unobtainable to the average player, and so the average player cannot farm at the same level as the 1% that control the economy.

- Rework the item corruption mechanic. All this mechanic does is encourage the hugely wealthy players to reroll uniques and discard them, uniques that would otherwise benefit new players. Make Vaal Orbs combine two items, i.e. randomly replacing 1 or 2 affixes from the base item with 1 or 2 affixes from the added item. Imagine the fun that could be had by combining uniques. Instant build diversity, instant economy fix (non-meta uniques still valuable). Introduces a whole new endgame crafting mechanic that's about creativity, not just slamming BIS meta uniques.

- Make weapon skills scale with multiple attributes. It doesn't have to be the same attributes, e.g. you could make Spear of Solaris scale with DEX/INT, but Rake could scale with DEX/STR. Allows for more diversity and thematic builds. You should be able to make different weapons work with different classes rather than it always being suboptimal by a huge margin (unless you find some crazy unintended interaction).

- Make the game less projective-centric. Projectiles just have a huge advantage over melee. I'd like to see melee skills get exclusive or scaled-up on-hit effects (heralds, cast on crit/hit/etc.) with more diverse elemental damage built-in.

Overall, the game has massive potential. The game just doesn't respect our time - the mechanics introduced to create 'difficulty' are actually just annoying and make me want to stop. When I die I don't feel like I misplayed or will play better next time, I just feel like I have to start all over again.

No, thanks. In my opinion, all suggestions are bad. Try to achieve something in the game before saying what should be changed.

Solution is much simpler than you think: back to before patch 0.2......

Should remove juicing. Mostly because it doesn't even seem to work for everyone.

I need rarity and quantity on towers and waystone along with a laundry list of buffs to rares and bosses to get around 4 exalts in a map. Some people doing the same thing and claiming multiple divs and dozens of exalts in a map.

It seems like it has to be a very specific, high end strategy to get any form of return on investment.

The minimum bar for getting rewarded for your time is rediculously high.

Just have a baseline rarity built in to content level and waystone tier. Actually make the rewards scale with difficulty not the very niche min/max juicing that is necessary today.

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Topazlol#5592 a écrit :

- Scrap the Ascendancy Trials. The rogue-like elements aren't fun, they occur too early in the story and don't respect your time. Your build often isn't anywhere near optimised enough for them not to feel like bashing your head up against a wall. If a whole secondary market develops to have your character carried through the trials, you've failed as game devs. The bosses are cool, so keep them, but just make it a series of back-to-back boss rooms (one for each 2 new ascendancy points). You can keep the honour system and chaos trial system for the boss rooms, just don't have the stupidness of running through 9 rooms with stacking modifiers each time.

Ive done the trials on 3 different classes now and I cant say I agree.
In terms of difficulty ive found them fairly easy and I think that they look alright and feels like they fit in with the act 2 and 3 campaign. Also fun to have something to look forward to so you get a quick break from the campaign to go get your ascendancy points.

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Topazlol#5592 a écrit :

- Fix the economy. The loot buffs were nice, but they don't address the underlying issue. The 1% run the economy. No unique in the game should be selling for 600 Divines. Introduce scaling price caps or limitations on no. of trades above 200 Divines per day. The issue is that the build-defining uniques that trivlialise the game are unobtainable to the average player, and so the average player cannot farm at the same level as the 1% that control the economy.

You shouldnt put a limit on how much you can trade.
Your lack of ressources or whatever your problem here has nothing to do with other players having hundreds of divines. Its not related.

The overwhelming majority of builds that are used require uniques that you can get for 5-10ex.

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Topazlol#5592 a écrit :

- Rework the item corruption mechanic. All this mechanic does is encourage the hugely wealthy players to reroll uniques and discard them, uniques that would otherwise benefit new players. Make Vaal Orbs combine two items, i.e. randomly replacing 1 or 2 affixes from the base item with 1 or 2 affixes from the added item. Imagine the fun that could be had by combining uniques. Instant build diversity, instant economy fix (non-meta uniques still valuable). Introduces a whole new endgame crafting mechanic that's about creativity, not just slamming BIS meta uniques.

I cant follow your logic here.
You cant get your uniques because someone else is trying to corrupt their unique? I fail to see how its related.

I would think the corruption system would benefit more casual players then anyone else. Its a cheap way to try and gamble for profit. Since most uniques that are used in builds are very cheap you can try to corrupt them and if your lucky you can make a decent profit.

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Topazlol#5592 a écrit :

- Make weapon skills scale with multiple attributes. It doesn't have to be the same attributes, e.g. you could make Spear of Solaris scale with DEX/INT, but Rake could scale with DEX/STR. Allows for more diversity and thematic builds. You should be able to make different weapons work with different classes rather than it always being suboptimal by a huge margin (unless you find some crazy unintended interaction).

Im probably misunderstanding something.
Currently weapons dont scale with any attribute. (besides very special uniques)

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Topazlol#5592 a écrit :

Overall, the game has massive potential. The game just doesn't respect our time - the mechanics introduced to create 'difficulty' are actually just annoying and make me want to stop. When I die I don't feel like I misplayed or will play better next time, I just feel like I have to start all over again.

Would be more useful if you were specific about what mechanics you are unhappy with?

- Re-design some unused skills to be viable in fast-paced endgame. So more people can have fun playing their favorite skill.

- Fix skills that are bugged/unclear from day 1 Very frustrating when you are looking forward to make a Death Knight build that will have death aura around using Blasphemy with Decaying Hex and then you find out Decaying Hex do not work with Blasphemy and then you even find out Decaying Hex do not scale with increases to chaos damage :-D (EA in a nutshell).

- Re-design skill tree to allow for more unconventional build variety. So people can play their favorite ascendancy together with their favorite skill and defense type. Remove unnecessary travel nodes, shorten paths to different class starting points, add more variability to each section of the tree (like minions to the bottom, energy shield and meta skills energy generation to the left, blocking to the right etc.).

= make one of the main strengths of PoE - the vast build diversity and freedom to play the character exactly as you want, offensively AND defensively - the main strength again.

Trying to control prices is the worst thing you can do and it never works, if you are curious try to learn how markets work in general.

All the problems with the game stem from the fact that GGG feels that deliberately creating non-gameplay obstacles in the experience will make people like the game better.

They probably analyzed Souls-like games and reached (wrongly) this conclusion. They probably also think people liked Diablo 2 because Diablo 2 had item identification.

As long as they are not designing games to play smoothly and for fun, they will keep making design decisions that lead them to deliberately sabotaging their own product.

GGG isn't incompetent. They are just misguided.

Code some decent AI for the monsters. You've proven it to us by coding these hyenas to just stand back and stalk around. Just, make them way better than this. I want formations of monsters with shield walls n shit.

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Decaying Hex do not work with Blasphemy

@Khann, I agree with your message, but the reason why Decaying Hex doesn't work with Blasphemy is because then we can build a 1 button Dark Effigy (chaos totem) build which is totally unthinkable..

Can u imagine going around, cursing your enemies with the help of Blasphemy, applying Decaying Hex which will enable you to use Dark Effigy after that?

Such nonsense...

Your Death Knight power fantasy is not allowed. Well, only if your knight will have like 1k mana and 100-200 mana regen to sustain the curse mana cost.