What happened to Engaging Combat? Video Feedback.

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tarloch#1873 a écrit :

the problem is the concept, the game is a loot grinder.
its all about getting loot/currency as fast as possible. that means players will always find or try and find the fastest most efficient way to do that.

there is also no system like a GR where you can push as high as possible so there is no reason to have anything other than the build that clears fast.

meaningful combat is really at odds with the core concept of the game.
it will work in a scripted campaign but after that is is well "meaningless" and will not work

I don't think it's at odds at all. The only issues I see here is bad design of things like Atalui's or Rakiata's which boost your damage by like 300% alone. Then there is too much speed in the game — monster speed modifiers are just a issue imo. Player speed gets too high too fast — yes, you should get faster with better gear — but meaningful combat and visual clarity just don't work with 10 attacks per second with screenwide explosions… It's not at odds with the core concept, more like the approach they took. Rares are just stat sticks you need to kill before they touch you — ofc you don't get meaningful combat like this. And it is possible — if you don't play an insane leveling build, the first bosses are the best combat experiences in the whole game. You don't one-shot them, they have great mechanics, and they feel good to kill after barely surviving — or it feels good to see yourself improve, being able to do them without much issue after dieing 5 times on the first character you beat them with.

So why not make rares and blue monsters more of a challenge. Make rares more rare, give them modifiers that have actual counterplay, better visibility with less monster density from abysses and that stuff. Make them like mini-boss fights and give them rewards you can look forward to. Zooming through 500 rares — hoping they don't touch you before you kill them — and getting good loot for 5% of them does not feel good imo. PoE 1 already does that way better as well.
Some thought through mods — more specific, stronger and with some kind of counterplay. More like what Archnemesis was supposed to be — but slower, which is actually possible if all those speed mods would just disappear.
For blue mobs, make them rare and able to kill you if you don't respect them. Then you can also give them way better loot — for example a mod smth like this: Killing a mob of the pack empowers all the others and heals them. They have some kind of resistance making it impossible to onetap the whole pack at once — like 1 always survives. Then the last one has all the drops of the entire pack and is much tankier and scary — maybe gets some kind of extra ability. (NOT SPEED)
It would be much more interresting than zooming through a pack of blue mobs, that just drop an exalted orb if you're lucky…

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Grayeye#1799 a écrit :

That is the very core of the problem, you can not have both complex diversity and meaningful combat... The parameters will go wildly out of control without having extremely strict damage scales.

Imagine you want a skill to do between 70-130% damage, not below and not above, how do you consider things as shock to work? It makes enemies take 20% to the cap of 100% increased damage taken... so now your skill does 100% more damage then intended. Well, you either cap it at 2-4% increased damage taken or make hidden modifiers that states "damage from molten striken is not affected by shock".

That is one modifier, now there is only around 200-300 different ones... Attack speed, cast speed, critical damage multipliers, curses with a wild range... multipliers upon multipliers.

The criteria for meaningful combat is extreme limits on build diversity and upgrades in both the skill tree and on items... And there comes the problem with replayability and the longevity of the game.

For people to come back every 3-4 months you need to have more mechanics, more complexity and, most important, player goals. These goals manifest themselves often in the way of increased power, better items and harder content to overcome.

To have meaningful combat, whatever that means, you need to make everything more uniform, reign everything in hard.

I don't know if I agree on that. Let's say we are already in the endgame and just talk about maps and the 3 boss tiers. Also, lets say we bring stuff like Rakiata's and Atalui's more in line with other things — 300% more damage from 1 support is just flat out stupid.
Now there are too many factors for damage. But if you get the outliers that give insane boosts like some uniques, skill level on gear and the new supports more in line, maybe also give gems a ~10% more damage insted of ~20% — you stop having these insane numbers. Also, I think that the high-end things like t16 maps and t3 bosses might just need much higher scaling in their defense so they can't get oneshot by a not even maxed out build. Perhaps the scaling in characters is needed — but what's the point if it just trivializes all the content in the game. I don't think you should at any point be able to oneshot all the highest tier bosses that exist in the game — why learn game mechanics in the first part, if the goal is to not use them and just hold rightclick for 3 seconds to kill a boss?

It would be a truly AWFUL loot-based arpg if each and every encounter were "engaging". Even if only 50% of the encounters were engaging.

The sheer amount of time it would take to gear up and upgrade would be insane.

Engaging combat in loot-based games is for bosses. ONLY for bosses. PoE 2 has improved upon PoE 1 in this regard by leaps and bounds.

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PoE2 on the other hand.. is an ARPG.. Action in the name. So yes, the ideal goal for it is to have good and engaging combat.

Again I ask you, can you look at this and tell me that you honestly think that this is good combat?

Well, I never really played poe 1 for the combat, but for the theory crafting part and the depth.

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You won't like what I'm going to tell you next but, player agency isn't truly real. No matter how much you believe it is, you are still confined to the boundaries the developers have created. But that's irrelevant, because what you're implying has nothing to do with this agency.

What you're actually saying is that the limits of power somehow have something to do with the complexity of the game, which isn't the case.

Well, im not advocating for total player agency, it quickly boils down to a philosophical argument about free will, but we can instead talk about depth, it is a better word for what im talking about. Vampire survivor as ARPG have 1 in depth, dark souls 2 or 3, PoE 2 perhaps 4, and PoE 1 is the current king.

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For your statement "combat that is hardlocked to deal, lets say 70-300% of "normal"" ... for example, you can have 300 different ways to get to that result even if the end result is hardlocked. That wouldn't limit diversity at all.. quite the contrary, in fact, when you don't have it "hardlocked", and we are seeing this with the current state of the game and how meta is shaping out to be favorable to only a few super specific builds and skills. This imbalance is quite literally gutting build diversity and player choice.

Well, Dark souls III have around 80 skills, and PoE 2 have around 140. But the problem is also that PoE 2 have 400 support gems, 40 spirit gems, and, in the future, 28 ascendancies, and they might keep adding abyssal ascendancies, and then there are the items and their range, unique items and so on, the "depth" is deeper then dark souls, and that is one of their problems. It makes balancing very hard.

We can see signs that they have tried to reign that in, with skills hardlocked to items, every class getting a unique passive tree start, support gems that doesnt support skills because of balance, uniques being in a abysmal state, and so on...

Perhaps the complexity(depth) problem can be overcome, but I have changed my main point to being that what PoE 1 players likes is to find something new, the feeling of a endless maze(that is not endless, naturally) to explore, a sense of freedom.

I still belive you can not make a game with 3-4 months overhauls in gameplay and balance that have any significant depth if the game is item(power) oriented.

Imagine trying to balance dark souls with poe´s itemization... it would be a nightmare, boots with 35%+ movement speed would break all boss fights, it have to be culled, defence values over 30% would break alot of boss fights, having minions in a boss fight that can be targeted would break some stuff, totems would break some stuff, flasks that doesnt run out of charges... 90% evasion... resistances... Or to put a abyss that produces more then 10 enemies would also break the game...

Meaningful combat dark souls style equal a very small box of player agency when it comes to power... And in a game where the point is to grind loot... it is a paradox in many ways for me...

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cowmoo275#3095 a écrit :

Unfortunately this comment here invalidates all the arguments you have been trying to make.

The fact that "loot grind" is a core concept in this game completely changes how players approach the game. Speed becomes the single most important stat, and there currently doesn't exist a single game where this isn't true. That is the very nature of a loot-based rpg.

Without understanding this, you can't possibly compare/contrast or talk about "design" in any meaningful way. Because you are missing the point.
Nothing else matters if you fundamentally do not understand how loot changes the equation of the entire game loop, including combat.

This is not really true, and I have the perfect example from PoE1 actually!

If you've played it, you might have heard of the blight mechanic. Speed is absolutely not a priority there since you're mostly required to protect the big bulb in the center, which means you don't have to move a whole lot. The speed argument falls flat on it's face there immediately.

Does playing the blight mechanic make it any less of a "loot grind" kind of game? No. Absoltely not.

However, if you refer to speed as an efficiency factor, there are ways to make the encounter faster, as far as I know, through a mechanic that the devs themselves have created (teal oils, I believe, increase spawn rate... therefore speeding up the process). But this proves exactly what I've been trying to say this whole time... this is only here because the devs have designed it so (or maybe allowed for it to exist because of other shortcomings in our case).

Now what do I mean by that last line? Dreamcore actually explained it very well in his video. When every other requirement for achieving your goals has been met or you're overqualified for it (damage, defenses, etc) the only thing that remains to make everything more efficient is speed. So of course, in our case, people will choose speed. If they were not overqualified for damage and defenses as they are... speed wouldn't be a problem anymore.

Interesting thing, that Dreamcore video has a lot of positive comments, from people who don't want PoE2 turning into PoE1, and likes to see better combat and speedup monsters and builds removed.

While on forums there's much less of it. I think that means that current forums are mostly consists of PoE1 fanboys who like zoom on maps at a lightspeed exploding screens, while actually this is not the entire playerbase in PoE2.

Anyways will see what GGG decide to make in the end and at release.

My only hope is if they end up making PoE1 again they also will add ruthless leagues to play the game with visible mobs and skills just to play casually and have fun from playing the game in combat, not only buildcrafting.

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cowmoo275#3095 a écrit :

It would be a truly AWFUL loot-based arpg if each and every encounter were "engaging". Even if only 50% of the encounters were engaging.

The sheer amount of time it would take to gear up and upgrade would be insane.

Engaging combat in loot-based games is for bosses. ONLY for bosses. PoE 2 has improved upon PoE 1 in this regard by leaps and bounds.

Yea, you don't want every pack of white mobs being a engaging challenge in the end. They just shouldnt be one, I don't want to need 10 seconds of casting Arc, or doing some full rotation just to clear every pack. Especially when there are 100 of those in a map.

But what speaks against making blue and rare monsters different? Right now, you mostly ignore everything in a map — just kill it fast enough, and it's good. Blue packs are essentially the same as white packs. Why do they even exist then? I never noticed better drops from them as well — maybe because I don't even notice if a pack is blue or white if I don't accidentally hover over a mob and see it for the 10ms before it dies…
Blue packs should be more rare, have mods to make them a small challenge — especially if you don't care. They shouldn't be some minute long fight, but also not 1 skill use… then you could also buff their loot — it's still a game that should feel rewarding, and I think that a blue pack that takes 10 seconds of your time and actually drops something feels way better than 5 blue packs you oneshot and drop 1 ex…
Also make rares more — well — rare. Then give them modifiers that do something else than just flat out damage boosts. Make them visible, engaging, and give them counterplay. Then again — a rare that is a small challenge and drops something good is surely better than 10 rares you can zoom through and have a like 1% chance of dropping something that matters. Also, might help with maps feeling like a slog — where you just run at everything — clear it and hope there is no rare that suddenly oneshots you because you didn't kill it fast enough. The mindless zooming is already possible in PoE1 and imo it feels way better there than in PoE2. We don't need the same game twice — especially if PoE2 feels just worse in the things PoE1 does great already. The vision they had was different from PoE1 — but rn it just evolves into a worse version of it.

GGG confused engaging combat with annoying combat.
Many played sneak archer in Skyrim not because it was overpowered, but because it simply was the most fun next to other char archetypes. Similar analogy exists here.

Warrior is honestly the most fun in early campaign. The whole melee schtick stops being fun when you realise that chilled + maimed + tempchained == sucks ass very bigly, and that you will most likely be chillmaimtempchained because to deal damage you have to get hit in most cases and you are so slow that those curses land on you and now you are even more slow and now you realise you would rather play something fast that can actually kill things rather than play the game at 0.5x speed.


Wow, what a surprise that suddenly majority plays ranged dps zoomzoom. Which makes devs believe that zoomblasting is the way to go. In reality, they need to remove all those annoying dumb shit mechanics. They have to actually grab a melee mace grug and try to play their own game, only then things might change.

It's an arpg where you are meant to overpower the game. That is the dream. Arcade bosses have nothing to do with rpg elements. Outthink and overcome with basic dodges. No one likes to die to one shots when they have 52000 armor.

You are able to complete the game in basic gear. And season start is challenging. I am guessing your death count is high. But, when you take your role as the hero or find the sword of truth, you should be able to overpower.

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Henide#3803 a écrit :

GGG confused engaging combat with annoying combat.
Many played sneak archer in Skyrim not because it was overpowered, but because it simply was the most fun next to other char archetypes. Similar analogy exists here.

Warrior is honestly the most fun in early campaign. The whole melee schtick stops being fun when you realise that chilled + maimed + tempchained == sucks ass very bigly, and that you will most likely be chillmaimtempchained because to deal damage you have to get hit in most cases and you are so slow that those curses land on you and now you are even more slow and now you realise you would rather play something fast that can actually kill things rather than play the game at 0.5x speed.


Wow, what a surprise that suddenly majority plays ranged dps zoomzoom. Which makes devs believe that zoomblasting is the way to go. In reality, they need to remove all those annoying dumb shit mechanics. They have to actually grab a melee mace grug and try to play their own game, only then things might change.

Something I also found really fun very early in the campaign was parry last league, when huntress dropped... it didn't last long however...

bump, good thread OP