Adjust the difficulty of the game please...

IDK what you guys expect to gain from increased monster life. Something that was almost universally hated in 0.2 btw.

Yeah best performing builds *maybe* won't be able to one-shot blue packs. Then off-meta builds won't be able to one-shot anything, SSF will turn into complete nightmare, and HCSSF will become even more of a ghost town.

I've been playing with armour-piercing rounds for that run&gun experience. It wasn't fun. They already nerfed it (though it was more of a collateral damage) in 0.4 and with increased monster life it'd be unplayable. With blue mobs you often just backpedal halfway through a map. Hell i even watched someone play it in a trade league and they still struggle with blues. Is this what you guys call "fun"?! Backpedaling away from trash mobs?

Another example, whirling assault now has just enough damage to not struggle with killing blue enemies on SSF gear. Buff monster health and it'll get back to struggling with white zombies on a T1 map.

Seriously what do you think the difficulty should be? Do you think increased monster health will make combat more meaningful and reactive? No, it'll just make it frustrating. It's not a turn based game. There's no active pause. There's hordes of enemies swarming at you. The game is closer Alien Shooter than Baldur's Gate 3 (though enemies are a lot slower in alien shooter btw and you CAN actually kite them which is not even possible in PoE2). The devs could reduce mob density to an absolute minimum and hell they could even add active pause. But it wouldn't be an ARPG.

Removing +skills on gear would achieve one thing: reduce gear pressure on caster builds which they don't have enough already compared to attack builds. And then again it sounds like trade issue more than anything.

Next, life regen. I'm sorry but life is capped at around 3k for most builds. Especially on SSF. Depending on your defensive setup, you can often get hit for 50% of it in a split second. Life regen is alredy a mechanic that requires a lot of investment to be worthwhile, and for most builds that have it it's just a form of protection against degens (which doesn't even always work because these green abyss puddles outight disable it. And flasks is one thing that separates life from ES because you can't (normally) recover ES with flasks.

As for mana, it's NOT supposed to be a resource that you need to care about during actual gameplay. It is something you need to consider when building your character, and oftentimes if you don't it can easily make the build unplayable due to mana issues. I can't imaging PoE where players are *expected* to run out of mana on a regular basis. What would you do, run around and dodge roll until you have enough to use a skill?

The only thing that'd be good with cutting regen is that it could've stop GGG reliance on one shots. But it wouldn't. For that to happen, they'd need buff life pools by like x5 AND remove any possibility of resetting a fight, which is very unlikely.

> Make them to jump on player when activated, affecting every enemy aroud them and then jump on the first rare enemy encountered.

Can we just... remove the damn thing from the game instead?

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Jyrlep#4788 a écrit :

If we remove +skill levels from gear, how exactly are we supposed to reach level 40 skills?

Right now, getting high minion gem levels is already borderline absurd. I have Skeletal Storm Mage at level 40, and my other minions are sitting at level 36 (no need to level higher, spirit reservation is the same) - and even that is almost impossible to achieve. It demands crazy-ass gear. Without +skill gear, I genuinely don't see how you're supposed to get anywhere near those levels, so "remove +skills" feels less like a difficulty tweak and more like ripping out a major progression lever.

On regen, I don't really buy the "cut all regen by 50%" idea because a big chunk of the problem isn't normal regen, it's the glitchy stacking nonsense from certain skills/mechanics. I call them bugs because it's not normal that you can cast one thing and stack regen to the stratosphere. Sure, it has a timer, but with enough cast speed you can basically outrun the timer and stack it forever. Those who know, know. Fix that first, then we can talk about tuning numbers.

Mob density, I'm with you in spirit. Fewer mobs with more life sounds better than "welcome to the random one-shot lottery". And monster damage needs to come down. I've seen builds with almost 90% armor, 10k+ ES, capped resists, and they still get deleted by some basic monster. That should never happen. If you're that tanky, the only thing that should one-shot you is a real boss doing a real attack, not a random trash mob auditioning for Uber Pinnacle.

So yeah - more monster health, less monster damage, and fix the broken regen stacking. I'd rather have fights take a bit longer than keep playing "guess which invisible sneeze killed me this time".

I understand your point about skill levels which is especially important for minion players (I play minions every league myself) but I think it can be solved with adjusting effectiveness of those skills for lower skill levels. Also there should be mods for minion damage/life on other gear than scepters (like there are mods for attacks on gloves and rings for example).

And you're right about regen. There's much more to be fixed than just numbers.

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Sakanabi#6664 a écrit :

REWORK AZMERI WHISPS. Make them to jump on player when activated, affecting every enemy aroud them and then jump on the first rare enemy encountered. Maybe put a timer on it or something. Right now they often force players to run thru unexplored areas wich encourages blasting.

Wow, good idea. I hate following wisps too.

Agreed with first as even made a post about it. Not having +skill on gear makes such gear just useless. Affix is too ultimative.

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Sakanabi#6664 a écrit :

REMOVE +SKILL LEVELS FROM ALL GEAR except amulets and/or rings and some uniques maybe. Reduce caps to +3 for specific group (lightning, projectile etc) or +1 to all.

I'm kinda fine with this, but I think a better solution would be to make these implicit in some capacity. I think removing them altogether is a miss.

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Sakanabi#6664 a écrit :

REDUCE ALL SOURCES OF LIFE/MANA REGEN BY 50% - They should provide skill sustain but not invulnerability. This also allows to tone down many if not all one-shots.

Yeah, no, this sounds absolutely horrible and would make plenty of builds entirely impossible or extremely obnoxious to play. All this does is reduce variety in building. These things aren't that powerful in comparison to many things in the game.

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Sakanabi#6664 a écrit :

REDUCE MOB DENSITY EVEN MORE, then increase their health by the same amout, then reduce size of all areas by the same amout.

This 1. won't happen because the backlash would be astronomical and immense almost instantaneously, and 2. sounds absolutely horrendous.

I am actually mostly fine with mob density now, but lowering it even more makes absolutely no sense to me, nor did you provide a constructive reason for lowering it. In my opinion, they should simply lower some map sizes and keep mob density as is, though it should still be checked out on some maps since it's way too low (e.g. trenches or w/e it's called).

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Sakanabi#6664 a écrit :

REWORK AZMERI WHISPS. Make them to jump on player when activated, affecting every enemy aroud them and then jump on the first rare enemy encountered. Maybe put a timer on it or something. Right now they often force players to run thru unexplored areas wich encourages blasting.

This sounds fine. +1 to this.

I have to agree that in campgain having + level to skills is just too strong . Whoever gets lucky and find one either in their shop or their friends shops or as a drop . They will push the campgain so fast solo.

This level increase is just too good early game. One of the main reasons why most of the gear early are just garbage drops because you dont depend on the weapon DPS in their categories fire,light,cold,phys crits and attack speed but you mostly depend on the level increase and spam that gem to clear.

please god no

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JosiahWilleth#3299 a écrit :

please god no

+1 to please god no, but the Steve Carell version.

The game is hard and long enough! Spending 5 minutes on a rare monster that sucks the life from you and gives you 1 white and 2 blues and an augmentation orb is enough torture. Maybe if they made the drops of the more difficult monsters better then I'd be for it... But I'm having a difficult time getting enough life now in Patch 4 then previous patches.

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Sakanabi#6664 a écrit :

... but not by overtuning rares and adding more one-shots.

instead

REMOVE +SKILL LEVELS FROM ALL GEAR except amulets and/or rings and some uniques maybe. Reduce caps to +3 for specific group (lightning, projectile etc) or +1 to all.

REDUCE ALL SOURCES OF LIFE/MANA REGEN BY 50% - They should provide skill sustain but not invulnerability. This also allows to tone down many if not all one-shots.

REDUCE MOB DENSITY EVEN MORE, then increase their health by the same amout, then reduce size of all areas by the same amout.

REWORK AZMERI WHISPS. Make them to jump on player when activated, affecting every enemy aroud them and then jump on the first rare enemy encountered. Maybe put a timer on it or something. Right now they often force players to run thru unexplored areas wich encourages blasting.

Just my opinion. Maybe I'm wrong.

The + to skills thing really does not matter, it will just be replaced by the next best stat. All they need to do is adjust the skill scaling itself.

The main way to do this is remove a lot of the + more damage/speed multiplier support gems and remove the negatives from other supports like multi shot/fork ect. This will allow for more interesting interactions and your support gems will be more about changing the way a skill actually functions rather than just finding the best damage boosts to fit in your 5 slots.

Life and Mana regen are already reasonably difficult to get and play an important part in balancing your toon. In fact very few builds actually get mana regen because its just difficult to have enough sustain for it to work, they rely on % mana on kill and flask + uber damage to kill bosses before they oom.

Mob density is actually in a good place right now I find it to be quite reasonable. These types of adjustments can be good or bad, not sure about increased health, maybe only for rares to make them actually put up a fight. White mobs are there for me to get satisfaction in blowing them up.

Love your idea for the whisps, no time limit required just let it cling to the next rare or boss you find. Also adds a bit of strategy to it, can force it onto a boss.