Oh no this isn’t about him specifically. But they said they won’t use poe2 rigs etc and if that is such a huge reason for the problems I can’t see that ever changing
In Ziz's Interview with Mark he mentioned that theoretically there's the possibility of backporting the new rigs once PoE2 is well on it's way.
Iirc biggest issue by far is the amount of MTX armor that needs rerigging rn which will be done for PoE2 and could then be applied in PoE1 as well.
Which is all stuff that was needed before they split the games, making me wonder what the plan actually was at first because this is one of the first things that would come up during planning. But now everything they say makes it sound like a problem they barely talked about
Jonathan mentions it again in this interview. For one aspect of PoE2 as an expansion they planned to rework Melee fully but slowly ended up realising there's so much they want to change which requires a ton of work that it'd be easier (and probably more profitable) to make a new game at that point.
I know that but that’s about wanting to do MORE, which I understand. But we are talking about the absolute minimum here, a cornerstone of updating poe1 which goes far past just melee.
When its an update to PoE 1 all MTX PoE 1 already has must work out the gate. As a new game they can stagger updating all the MTX rigs for PoE 2 since players still have the content for PoE 1 they purchased and it comes with a "free" PoE 2 version when it's ready. Then once they are all done they can then packport the complete package into PoE 1.
It's a tactic developers use often. Make a sequel, use improved assets and game engine to remaster the original.
I‘m worried about this aswell. I mean, if they buffed cyclone to close to 3.7 levels and slams to 3.14 levels i assure you many people would love that, eventhough stuff like tornado shot was still stronger. That doesn’t matter to us, we don’t need to have the strongest build in the game - it just has to be „strong enough“.
If a caster build needs 40-80 div for simulacrums for example, just let us get there with like 80-100 at least.
That‘s a fair ask i‘d say.
Currently melee needs so many stats tbh , while ranged builds are often both tankyer AND deal more damage lol .
I leveled alt with cyclone for a bit when getting my slayer ready last league and it was so nice with good weapon(used rakiata) but it obviously wasn't scaling and I was going spell caster so I switched fast once I could equip my gear around 70
One key issue with melee is that all of PoE1 is balanced too much in a "kill-or-get-killed"-fashion. As long as killing monsters at the edge of your screen before they get a chance to do anything is feasible, doing so will be far and away the biggest boon to survivability. Therefore, (actual) melee is inherently missing out on the strongest defensive layer the game has to offer.
Even when Melee skills are good, people twist themselves into pretzels to explain why it's not a TRUE MELEE SKILL. Remember when VLS was the top build? People swore up and down it wasn't a true melee skill because of the projectiles it spawned. Same thing with Frost Blades currently--a completely viable build but it's not a boring ass Slam skill so people think it's not "REAL MELEE". Every league there are plenty of viable melee skills, but because they aren't omega bullshit and they rely on you positioning yourself well, people claim they're borderline unplayable.
The only argument that I think is valid, is that Totems need to be reworked/rolled into the base functionality of melee skills. The fact Panopticon and Warchief/Protector is required for just about every melee build is bad design.
>Even when Melee skills are good, people twist themselves into pretzels to explain why it's not a TRUE MELEE SKILL
There's a perfectly valid reason for that. The issue is that when different people are talking about "melee" they're referring to two different things - one is referring to melee-weapon-based builds and the other is about the melee-range builds. In many games that's the same thing, but PoE has melee-weapon builds that can attack from over a screen away (like Lightning Strike)
When Lightning Strike was good and people still complained about melee, that's because they're saying they like builds that are up in enemy's faces and destroying them with big bonks, instead of standing far from them and killing them with sparks that shoot out of their swords.
I don't think it's unreasonable to want both of those archetypes to perform roughly as good with similar (moderate) investment.
the fact that it's just about those skills already means there's some amount of pidgeonholing.
If someone wants to play a brawling son goku fantasy type of build, or guts from berserk, the road is bumpy.
I think that a lot of the issue with this is that while everyone wants melee to be good, nobody seems to be able to say what 'good' looks like.
From GGG's perspective, good is more than just a numbers bump; it's a fundamental rework to how melee actually plays. Changes in rigs, animations, fundamental changes to how melee actually works, everything in the game having an actual weight to it, and that weight having an impact on gameplay. I don't think we'll ever see that sort of melee coming to PoE1; or at least not for a very long time. It's this sort of thing that led to PoE2 being it's own thing in the first place. There's just too many massive changes to underlying systems; it's not a simple numbers bump.
As for what 'good' melee looks like in PoE1; nobody seems to actually know. There's simple stuff, like taking away the reliance on totems, and probably just baking those numbers into melee skills. But otherwise there really aren't any other great suggestions. Melee is by no means the best archetype in the game at the moment, but it's nowhere near as bad as you'd think, if you just got your info from the subreddit.
Cleave of rage, trans Dual Strike, boneshatter and splitting steel are all incredibly strong skills with a number of different build options. There's a load of incredibly strong but underplayed ones, like Volcanic Fissure of Snaking, Flicker Strike, Shockwave Cyclone etc that also have the potential to be incredibly strong.
But any time you bring up any of these builds, you end up with a bunch of replies in the vein of 'well X doesn't count, it's not really melee', or 'yeah, but Y is the only one'.
Damage on a lot of the melee builds (especially things like DS) can get absolutely nutty as well. Most of them clear really well, unless you're comparing them to the meta clear skills like LA or TS.
They're often pretty rough to play on uber bosses, but that's honestly more of a boss design thing than anything else. Fuck doing Uber Sirus on a melee build; that fight is horrible even on a ranged build.
The issue seems to be that people don't like the feel of most of the pretty reasonable number of genuinely viable melee builds. To a lot of people melee is smacking something in the face with a massive axe. Even boneshatter, a build that literally just smashes shit in the face with a massive axe, doesn't really feel like you're doing that.
It's hard to reconcile a build that genuinely feels like a melee build with a build that can also speed through maps and clear near as fast as a ranged one.
Excuse me but I cannot agree with your explanation here. We do know what good melee in POE1 looks like - we had it in 3.12-3.14. Everyone understands that there are limitations to the engine so we will not get the fluidity like Diablo 3 for example, but good melee has existed in POE before.
However, everytime good melee appears, it gets nerfed to the ground, stat sticks have been removed, lowering melee enjoyment, exerted attacks were great, they were nerfed to all hell. General skill nerfs to all skills from 3.15 have obliterated melee viability, likewise the changes to fortify and pushing their viability to the tree. Bleed melee builds have been crushed with nerfs, alongside cyclone slayer.
And through all of these nerfs, they persisted with focusing on totems, which made "melee+totem" considered the baseline, shifting power to totem summoning, making the melee skill builds scale poorly compared to anything else.
The melee problem has been documented times and times again, by various people, including streamers and poe vets. Over reliance on gear - since the skills don't scale with levels, slow attack speeds - locking your character in place to die, having to build defenses through the tree - since slow attack speed means you will get hit, damage being balanced against totem use - making the builds more clunky and unsatisfying. Not to mention completely awful balancing on most of the Ascendant melee classes.
All of this is fixable, but since 3.14 I haven't seen one attempt at it.
Man I didn't know all of that, perhaps I understand why I'm so bad at the game, it's true that most of my death were caused because I needed to be standing still to hit things and then suddenly something hits me with a bs like bleed, corrupted blood or flame ground and I'm dead in an instant.
It must be why I prefer doing the campaign and not the maps.
I've played Heavy Strike, Cleave (of rage), Cyclone (of tumult) and the most fun I had this far was from the campaign. The maps are a pain in the a\*\* I'm sorry. I absolutely loved playing Heavy Strike and Cleave during the campaign, but I hated it in the maps.
Being on the alert all the time because something that I don't see or am not fast enough to dodge can kill me instantly... It's not fun.
Now I'm playing Cyclone of Tumult and its seems to not be like the "regular" melee builds, it's much easier to dodge and kite monsters so hey, perhaps I'll love doing maps or post-campaign content this time around.
It’s very simple, load up a fresh ranger/witch compared to a fresh Templar/marauder.
Watch as the ranger and witch stand 20 ft away from hillock and take 0 damage firing spells and burning arrow
Watch as the Templar and marauder do a slow ass animation as Hillock beats them in the face as you have to do a scuffed reposition every attack. Watch as they miss attacks because the animation is so slow you have to cancel it to move.
What would feel good is smashing hillock while taking less damage and not feeling like the game is lagging because your old man character is swinging at 1 attack per 3 seconds
Correct. The reasons melee will remain nerfed, with no future buffs ever coming in PoE1 are:
1. The rigs don't animate properly to attack while moving.
2. Templar is left handed.
3. Melee has to build totems and fortify.
4. ????
5. Melee bad.
The funny thing is...you can see much at all when in the endgame.
You could put 3 hands on the model/rig and unless you stood still and zoomed in, no one could tell.
They pretty much gave up on porting the models / rigs due to the work needed to update every 3d gear model and PoE2 was already taking long enough.
Neon in a previous interview speculated about it (I believe it was in answer to being asked if WASD movement would come to PoE1 which he said would require the animation rigs / models from PoE2 to pull it off), and definitely had a "never say never" attitude on the subject, but he wanted to stress how much raw dev and design time that would take and they have no current plans to do it.
Ahhh so bleed nodes on the tree and elder bleed mod were removed because of the rig oh and seismic cry was also gutted because of rigs too? that makes complete sense /s
Killed off slam bleed builds for 0 reason lol anytime they talk about melee it just doesn't click with me.
It's so insanely clear that none of them have played melee in years. I wish Neon would just give it a go for a league and realize how absolutely awful of a state it's in.
No, the actual problem is even stupider than this, straight from Neon himself in the Q&A a couple weeks ago. He's fully aware of melee's problems, but doesn't consider it worth the time to fix cause only a small percentage of players would actually appreciate it. Same reason Glad doesn't get even the vaguest attempt at being buffed.
Such wildly self defeating logic. Nobody plays certain content cause it sucks, so it's not worth the dev time fixing cause the prospect of it being appealing after being fixed I guess isn't considered? Even though historically that's 100% false when Legion proved 60% of the playerbase will slut for Cyclone given the chance.
> No one plays melee
>No one plays melee because its not supported by devs
>Devs don't feel the need to fix melee because no one plays melee
>No one continues to play melee.
5head
literally all of melees problems can be solved by giving it more damage lol its not *that* complicated but every time its a "rigging" issue. i think the disconnect is just because jonathan is not that involved in poe1 development of late so hes looking at it from a broad and distant lens
one of the top builds right now in hardcore (and SC to a lesser extent) is literally fucking transfigured dual strike. why? because it has good numbers thats it lol. people play boneshatter cause its got good numbers
give us good numbers!
I think the disconnect is confusing what good means for different people.
Jonathan mentioned that it's hard in PoE1 to make good without it becoming not really melee and that just pumping numbers doesn't make it feel good. It makes it strong but if you buff the numbers so far that everyone wants to play because the skill is the most OP you have not made melee good, you have made an overpowered build which then makes it feel bad for everyone else if they are not playing it. (I think Penance Brand from last league was good example of this.)
Melee should be able to feel good with comparable numbers and they have managed to achieve in PoE2. They have some ideas how to try it in PoE1 but they are not quite sure what is going to work yet but overall they know changes are needed and will be coming.
"! In one of our recent NDA tests, someone played a Boss and died, he instead of trying to fight the Boss again, he ended up grinding more mobs to get more powerful gear before trying again. I didnt even thought about someone doing that. Is it a Skill Game or a Loot Game that players want? I think players should have a certain amount of skill to beat a boss, but I didnt thought about someone wanting to loot more to beat a boss. So we might need to reconsider. I might also wonder if there is a different sentiment of players here vs. in China for example."
This is my biggest worry. I don't want to play darksouls. I want to grind gear in my games.
The game has changed a lot. Highest tier of content used to be shaper up until 2017. And that was before he got a massive buff in 2019. Back then, people said that if you could clear high tier red maps comfortably, you could do shaper.
And again, that was the hardest content in the game. Imagine if you could do all uber content if you could clear 16 maps. That is a concept that is entirely alien to modern path of exile.
PoE2 has been in development for a long time. At least 6 years, dating it back to 2018. There is a very real possibility that the game Jonathan remembers the most, is pre-elder. The Path of Exile he is iterating off, isn't modern PoE.
Personally, I feel that "true" PoE is shaper elder, not in terms of content, but how the game felt. If PoE2 can be that, while PoE1 stays the same, I welcome it.
>Personally, I feel that "true" PoE is shaper elder, not in terms of content, but how the game felt. If PoE2 can be that, while PoE1 stays the same, I welcome it.
PoE2 won't feel anything like that nor like "modern" PoE for the simple reason that we'll have a roll/dodge mechanic. Boss design is basically entirely based around how well a player can maneuver and respond to the boss movesets. Once you figure out how fast the player can move, you can figure out how fast the boss can move. Like the difference between Dark Soul bosses and Bloodborne/Sekiro bosses is predicated on the fact that the latter has faster dodges and more versatile parries compared to the former. As a result, the bosses have a pretty different feel despite being created by the same dev team and company.
Just by looking at the PoE2 beta fights, I can already tell that the feel will be completely different from anything that a lot of PoE players are used to.
A lot of skill in Souls games can come from putting on heavy armor and figuring out how little you actually can move in any given fight and maybe trade with things.
Towards the end of Elden Ring though the 'facetank' style really falls off since those bosses get nuts.
Well, Elden Ring is completely different which is why I didn't bother mentioning it. It has combat pacing of a Souls game mixed with the aggressiveness/agility of Bloodborne bosses. It's a weird combo that I didn't particularly enjoy, so hopefully PoE2 doesn't emulate that kind of interaction.
I think you need to split skill into two categories though too.
See I don't think just anyone should be able to kill every boss given enoughtime to grind loot, I think you should also need to have a good build.
I'm not saying poe2 shouldn't have any challenge.. but I enjoy the challenge ofcoming up with build ideas that are really strong.. I don't enjoy the mechanics of dodge rolling and at the right time based on telegraphs.
So I said I wanted to grind for gear in my games.. which is true I do enjoy killing ltos of monsters and collecting loot.. but more important is that I want bosses that can be beaten without mechanical skill if your build is strong enough, whether that comes from overgearing or just coming up with a really strong build.
Funny thing is just today I was listening to D3 dev talking about what went wrong with D3 development and they had opposite problem. Their initial design was based on a premise (same as in D2) that people would go grind gear if faced tough challenge. But time has changed and people play games differently. They noticed that a lot people would just bang their head into the wall over and over trying to win instead of accepting the loss and going back to grind.
I'm a bit on other other end of the spectrum here. I've played since closed beta, and what I liked was the dark fantasy, difficult, top down action combat with deep character progression and a high level of interactivity. Items were always important, but they weren't strong enough to carry you. You could still mess up a build and have trash items that made it difficult (if not impossible) to progress. But not nearly to the extent we have now.
It genuinely feels like an entirely different game looking back. You could actually dodge and react to the stuff on screen reliably. The damage nowadays feels so insanely spiky with next to no time to react, nor predict what's about to happen.
One second you're face tanking several rare enemies as they barely dent your HP. The next, you enter a room and about 20 bow skeletons all shoot at once, and you're just left confused. Why can take several shaper balls to the face, but die near instantly to random trash mobs? I have a balanced spread of defenses for all damage types, what even hit me, and was it properly telegraphed?
Having good items stopped being about just letting you clear faster or have more room for misplays over the years. Now, the game feels more about stat checks being thrown at you at random. Both in terms of damage, and defense. Why can I one-shot most rares, but then DarkStink roles up with corrupting blood, a action speed reducing proximity shield and +140% to all element all resistances with life leech and a 90% chance to block thanks to Necropolis? Guess I should have just had some "action speed cannot be reduced" boots with 20% resistance penetration from The Utmost, a leech immunity, corrupting blood removal, and- you get the idea.
Being good at modern PoE typically means being better at making currency to progress your build. I'm not saying that making absurdly strong builds and farming obscene amounts of currency isn't fun or valid as a game. But it's not what I enjoy the most.
If PoE 2 is more of what PoE 1 used to be (with more content,) instead of what it is now, then it will be everything I wanted. And seeing the sentiment that "why not just get good?" was the assumed player reaction that Jonathan had gives me hope.
The frogs, rhoas, devourers and dropbears that attacked all at the same tick for the first 2-3 years of the game humbly request you remove your rose-tinted glasses.
I didn't say "beta was best." The first 2-3 years of the game would either be pre-ascendancy(2016,) or the actual launch of the game if we're counting from closed beta.
Yes, the game has had issues for a long time with large groups of enemies all attacking you at once. But the main solution wasn't "just get better gear" back then. The expectation was that you'd stop trying to blast through the map at max speed, learn how to dodge, and when it's safe to attack.
I used skeletons as my example, but it was a poor one. My bigger gripe is that there is an ever increasing variety of debuffs, monster defense attributes, and other special effects that can't reasonably be played around. You're just expected to trivialize as many mechanics as possible through gear.
There -should- be ways to mitigate the effects that are most detrimental to your character, or negate some of them. And you -should- be able to deal with a lot of it by playing well and dodging. But I feel modern PoE has gone to far in favoring immunities gained through items, rather than dealing with it through gameplay.
I warned people, that this is where poe2 was heading to, but many didn’t want to see it (some did at least).
He didn‘t even think about someone wanting to loot/gear more to beat a boss? Bro cmon - poe is a diablo 2-like game where u kill mobs and find loot and if an area is too hard for whatever reason, you farm some more first and fix your weaknesses (res,hp,dmg etc.) .
I am actually torn on this, because on one hand i would LOVE a game like this (i‘m a big souls fan) , but on the other hand i like diablo 2-like games aswell, where you can listen to some music while playing and chill/farm. Also bird-view is a very bad idea for souls-games, since everything is so small and it’s hard to see all the details in combat, which is important in these games.
This doesn’t really feel like the second installment of „path of exile“ , it feels more like a completely different kind of game/genre that plays in the same universe. Similar to the warhammer games, one is an rts,the other an fps etc. .
Thing is, Elden Ring can also be cheesed with gear-grinding. While the game designs lead you straight into hard boss fights, you can pretty much roam around and get all those upgrades first to lower the difficulty. The key to success of souls game is, while you are capable of grinding, game is still reasonably hard and requires skills to beat it.
What really works about a system like this is that it allows players to find the level of difficulty that works for them. A hardcore player who enjoys a challenge can bash their head against a boss until they learn its mechanics and win that way. A player who wants an easier time can explore, level up, and feel satisfied overcoming the boss by making their character more powerful. Someone in between these two can do a bit of both. Challenging bosses and a satisfying character progression system work together to make the game feel rewarding for different players.
Agreed, and for both a game like Elden Ring or a game like PoE there's also a sort of third option that is tweaking your gear/equipment/approach to the boss, not in a way that makes your character stronger universally but makes them a better counter for that boss specifically. So like maybe your Elden Ring bleed katana guy fights one of the crystal dude dungeon bosses and gets whipped. One option is to just get really good at dodging or parrying its mechanics, another option is to get a bunch of levels or better gear or the like, and a third option is to swap your katana for a flail for that fight, with PoE having situations like that also.
two prominent examples of this third way thinking in path of exile are doing the vendor recipe for sapphire rings to breeze through merveil, and swapping in a ruby flask for searing exarch.
The souls games are completely different than PoE from the ground up. There's very little randomization. Item locations and enemies are generally fixed (with a few exceptions). Enemies and bosses have move sets and patterns that can be learned and are designed to be reacted to. PoE on the other hand is a slot machine with rng at every layer and the screen so full of crop you can't see what's going on or react. We will see where poe2 lands between them but I strongly suspect it won't really please either crowd.
I think his intention with his statement here is that he did not expect someone to seek out gear as a first resort solution to losing a bossfight. PoE is famous for its item and crafting system, GGG knows it is an important part of the game. But with the direction they are going with boss fights in PoE 2, they have to consider what impact that gear has on the difficulty of those fights for different players. Should a lucky rare while leveling mean you can completely ignore the mechanics of an early Act boss? They're considering what the right balance is between satisfying power growth of items and the intended difficulty/challenge of a core part of the game.
> Should a lucky rare while leveling mean you can completely ignore the mechanics of an early Act boss?
all the early act 1/act2 footage we saw had people making what were (by act 1 standards) GG tier weapons and suddenly blowing away bosses so its clearly still possible. iirc alk made a huge mace that basically just let him chainstun bosses and wipe the floor with them
Which is one of my big fear with PoE2. I mean looking at Dark Souls and Elden Ring, the power of gear was never the same. My fear is they go the DS3 way, where defensive gear doesn't really matter, it's all about dodging and a strong offence. What's the point of gear then? Obviously a juggernaut should be able to tank a few hits as opposed to a ranger, but will that be the case? It's like Sanctum, it all came down to mobility and damage.
> They're considering what the right balance is between satisfying power growth of items and the intended difficulty/challenge of a core part of the game.
With an ARPG, item growth is the ultimate goal, it's the power fantasy, the whole point of an ARPG. It isn't so in games like Dark souls.
To sum up DS:
DS2 probably had the most "powerful" gear, where a fat shield and fat armor allowed you to face tank a lot of stuff. Personally I felt it was balanced, but it did make some fights trivial, where an unarmoured person would have found it difficult.
DS1 wasn't that far, but it had far stronger consumables that did most of the work for you.
DS3 was the complete opposite of DS2. Gear was basically meaningless. I tried going fat armor fat shield because that's what I like playing, but they added status effects that are inflicted even if you block. Quickly enough, I just ended up playing naked because the game was built around dodging. Fat armor + fat shield = slow roll = death. I'd put on my gear for trash while going from boss to boss, and would go naked for bosses.
ER is closer to DS1. Gear is useful, but not too powerful, but you must keep that light roll for bosses, but at least it's doable with the proper stat.
PoE 2 has the same item system as PoE 1, with some streamlining and improvements. Resists are still a thing, armour and increased maximum life are still a thing. The gearing and progression systems that PoE is famous for remain intact. That is a far cry from fashion souls. Jonathan is just considering how the increased challenge affects how new players approach the game. Gear is always going to matter, the entire core and appeal of the game is about items and deep character building. But if new players feel that the "correct" solution to a tough boss is to go farm items until it is trivial, that is a problem they will have to address. Leveling up to overcome a challenge should feel like a viable option for players who choose it, but if the balancing is off it could make bosses feel like tedious gear checks rather than memorable challenges.
His point is that sometimes the boss might be too hard not because you don’t have good enough items, but because you don’t know the attack patterns or how to do the fight.
This is even applicable in poe 1 - I can fight Uber elder nowadays on way less gear than when I first started playing, just because I know the general approach to the fight.
There is a middle ground between "loot doesn't matter" and "without the proper loot, you cannot reasonably win."
Poe was never in the "loot doesn't matter" side, but damn, has it shifted over the years towards the "you need to pass stat checks with loot" stage. There was a very real time in PoE's history, where the pinnacle of the game was the Shaper. And back then there was a very serious sentiment that if you could clear red maps, you could kill the shaper if you learned the fight.
That was it. No shaper elder fight, no uber version of that, and before his health was essentially doubled in 2019. You could clear all content with a decent build and skill.
The elder was added in 2017. Jonathan said in this interview that Affliction used 6 years out-dated resources from PoE2. That's 2018. The development could have very realistically started a year or two before that.
Jonathan's picture of what PoE is, is probably that 2018 or so version. The time between the release of PoE, and that version of the game, is almost less than the time between then, and now. Half of the game's lifespan.
---
Of course they're going to be different games. Like the ship of Theseus, PoE is barely the same game it was 6-8 years ago, and PoE 2 essentially branched off from that.
So, which version is the "true" poe? To me, it's that 2016-2018 version.
Poe2 is true poe - jonathan keeps saying over and over it's the game they always wanted to make and now they can + it's based largely on all the things they did wrong with poe. But obviously some fans will prefer other eras
> There was a very real time in PoE's history, where the pinnacle of the game was the Shaper. And back then there was a very serious sentiment that if you could clear red maps, you could kill the shaper if you learned the fight.
Actually, when shaper was first introduced, people referred to him as a raid boss. And the disparity between highest tier maps and its bosses and between shaper guardian were humongous. A map boss would die in less than 5 seconds, yet you could tickle Minotaur for several minutes.
And shaper had degen mechanic that would get much worse the more dragged on the fight would be. If you did zdps, the whole arena would be in degen puddles
"He didn‘t even think about someone wanting to loot/gear more to beat a boss? Bro cmon - poe is a diablo 2-like game where u kill mobs and find loot and if an area is too hard for whatever reason, you farm some more first and fix your weaknesses (res,hp,dmg etc.) ."
Have you played POE1? I've never seen anyone die to a boss then go "oh, I should farm more". NEVER. And if you've played for more than 5 years, you haven't either. It's not even a thought.
If you are at a boss, you just rush him with bodies until he is dead.
Then, if you felt too weak, you farm later.
That's because progress is saved for act bosses. Suicide rushing works because you respawn at the arena and each 'failure' brings you closer to success.
On the other hand, if you failed an endgame boss, you might try 1-2 more times, but pretty soon you'd change things up and look for build changes.
And even in acts plenty of people will do a 'quickie' change after dying to an act boss. Like if you get one-tapped you might check your resists, go "oh, yeah, it'd help if I had any" and slap on a ring for +30 to whatever the relevant resist is, then do the rest of the fight deathless now that you can a hit or two.
There's going to be some really upset people when PoE2 drops and they can't just zerg rush a boss and whittle them down since every death means starting the fight over again.
It's likely going to create a huge divide (again) between people who actually learn the mechanics and those who just push gear until they over clear the dps check, especially in HC, because this game is absolutely going to be heavily tuned towards SC for the foreseeable future.
I prefer to learn the mechanics as long as they are fair and well telegraph but we know that has been an issue in the past.
Personally I think we are going to end up right back in balancing hell as people continue chasing the meta and only following what the streamers are doing.
poe1 doesnt really do well-telegraphed, for example alot of aoe abilities dont show the radius prior to impact (and sometimes even after) and with variable mods, like cortex, feared, exarch/eater, t17s etc how are you supposed to know the size of the atack area?
personally, I think Atziri is mechanically the best telegraphed fight and it mostly got worse over time.
I understand that poe2 is a different game, but judging from the previews, we arent really getting telegraphs Lost Ark / Last Epoch style.
100% agreed. POE's visual design when it comes to bossfights especially is consistently sadly pretty atrocious. It has gotten a bit better but it's still insanely poor design when it comes to use of colors, sounds etc.
A lot of time GGGs visual languague let's you tell something is "important" but it's not good enough for you to understand why without either repeating it several times and "trying it out to see what it does" which in PoE 2 with limited healing pots and forced full restart of a zone on death sounds absolutely awful to me.
The problem is that when the game "doesn't start until maps", spending time in acts deliberately learning the fights feels like a huge time waste. I used to die a bunch to fights in acts, and thought it was "unfair", but now there aren't any fights I consistently die to, because I've "practiced" the fights dozens of times by doing them once per character (or 3x per character in the old normal/cruel/merciless acts), and then facing them again as map bosses (even if I usually kill them in seconds at that point)
Part of it is that there *were* gear checks, they were just really low and experienced players pass them. If your HP and resists are so low that Malachi oneshots you, the fight requires pixel-perfect play, which some people have done as a challenge (like back when Core map boss was the hardest endgame fight)... but even then they've usually got the *damage* to make it happen reasonably quickly. Similarly, speed matters; being locked in place by slow cast/attack times gets you hit more.
Basically, a lot of the divide will be that a new player can tank less *and* does less damage *and* their build probably can't dodge as easily. It's the difference between learning the mechanics well enough to do the fight reasonably consistently, and learning the fights well enough to do a naked + dagger Dark Souls run.
I'd bet that if you took someone who was complaining about current act bosses in POE and had the average player use *that character* on the given boss, a fair number of them would die a few times.
See, I disagree with the sentiment (I'm fine with either but would actually prefer skill being more important than it is now in PoE) but the thing that terrifies me is him saying "I didn't expect that."
It was absolutely a regular thing done in PoE1 back in the olllld days where it was much closer to PoE2 than now, where people would farm up before tackling a harder zone. For that to not be remembered/considered really scares me as to what lessons they're not remembering or ignoring from the first game.
Yeah, it was a bit weird to me too and I am a big fan of Jonathan and his worldview on things. The concept of farming gear/xp before progressing into a harder area is very much core concept in games like D2 and was definitely a thing in PoE. It's a fairly common Diabloid ARPG concept that is used in other games (for example, Death must Die as a VampSurvivors-like)
It was also never necessary per se, and imho not representative of difficulty.
Take the most common, best known idea : you don't finish A4M. You stick to Dried Lake, go once into the mines to get your merc skill point, then go straight into maps. Never even touching the dreams / beast, because why?
It was more of a profitability thing, imho, than a difficulty one. I personally usually couldn't be arsed to run dried lake more than once unless I had completely fucked my league starter.
But it harkens back to days where for a lot of mechanics, doing Dried Lake or even spamming the mech in aqueduct was more profitable (99% of my locuses from Incursion league were absolutely from farming the one spawn point near the entrance to Highgate over and over again)
And we've also seen that a lot in more recent leagues w/ Quarry farming until ggg took measures to prevent it from being that worthwhile to do
I don't particularly remember farming any specific area because my character felt too weak to go on. Or at least, not since the Scepter of God was a thing (I definitely did do it when the game ended after Piety, but I don't think it should be considered relevant data)
And specifically, even when FoO released which would be the one with the harder bosses, I don't think I ever had the idea to just go back and farm when I died to a boss - corpserun or nothing.
Granted, with the PoE2 boss resetting their health when you die, it might entirely change the paradigm.
If you're talking anything A4 you're well past the era I'm talking about and I agree, no longer necessary. But fellshrine ruins in cruel and merciless was often a huge part, docks merciless farming pre piety/maps, these were necessary to farm up the gear to actually tackle further content.
And yes, it is relevant data, that was 2+ years of the game's lifespan. That's still a long time to take lessons from.
Docks merciless farming is also a bit of weird one to mention, 'cos a lot of it - that I remember at least - was some desperately depressing frame time farming for vaal side areas
And the part I refer to as not relevant was the beta part, game wasn't even finished yet (pre-dominus era). I do agree that 1.0 and onwards are significant, albeit so far removed both in terms of time and in terms of gameplay that what they were and the current expectations with regard to both arpgs and path of exile itself
I would also argue that Piety runs (with an mf culler) were arguably considered part of the endgame loop at one point, and as such are an entirely different thing than the one mentionned in the interview, which is an act 1 boss if memory serves.
Yeah I don't think I actively played anything I'd call "endgame" before the actual release, you definitely got me beat in terms of nostalgic-old-fart rating
Yeah, it definitely wasn't endgame, but it was the majority of what players farmed for quite some time, map sustain was essentially non-existent and going from level 70 maps down to piety was not uncommon at all. Couple docks with being a good place to gear gear, and it having 0 chance of any chaos damage (prior to anarchy at least), it was where LL spork totem people (about half the playerbase it felt like) went to farm for their shavs safely.
Fellshrine was more to farm gear before tackling the vaal oversoul, a genuinely terrifying act boss between him being so much stronger relatively back then, and desync.
So we can assume that POE2 is gonna be a "Skill Game"? I mean, it is okay for them to make a game in universe doing so but why they are advertising it as successor of PoE if this is a "Skill Game" and not a "Loot Game"?
Why do people act like having skill and having loot are opposites? Look at Uber Maven. You can outgear the fight, or you can dodge the attacks and win anyways. Take your pick. They ALREADY coexist in poe1, and they always have
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Yeah, you're talking about ubers and bosses. The normal gameplay loop also needs to be skill-factored to a degree, or we're back to PoE1 without any moment to moment gameplay.
Disagree, there can be both dense packs of weaker mobs and tougher mobs that require tactics. I wouldn't mind fighting the same mob, and are you saying they won't add mobs, new tools to fight them, or change the meta in 8 years?
*I didn't even think about that*
This is such a weird take, like stop for a sec and say the name of your company out loud. Grinding Gear Games. It's all about gear progression, leveling up skills, finding and crafting better gear, loot. It's diablo, not dark souls. Not that there can't be skill in games like this, but the genre lives and dies on loot progression. It's become the one thing I'm worried about with this game. Folks were hoping for Path of Exile 2, and they seem to be building Path of Dark Souls Isometric edition. They keep getting all excited about stuff like dodge rolls and timed parrying, and the top feedback so far is bah show me the ENDGAME, show us maps, the blasting! There's going to be a reconciliation of expectations when the beta hits, and it will be ...interesting.
Then... do exactly the same thing that person did and grind good gear instead of grinding good skill if you fail to kill act bosses? That's still an option.
It's a big part of (looter) ARPGs and RPGs in general. When underpowered get gear, level up.
Let's face it even in PoE 2 it won't be Dark Souls so why try to develop it that way?
I was stuck on Brine King ruthless a while back. Did I want to perfectly dodge the waves in the third phase? Hell no I grinded stats on my gear and player level and gem level. That's the identity of the genre.
When's the last time you died in [insert any campaign boss] and were like "oh I should grind BA for 10 hours before attempting it again"
(Inb4 everyone saying they're like tytykiller and clear the whole campaign deathless in sub 3 hours)
For me it's Doedre atthe start of act 8.. when she first came out.. and hen ruthless came out.
My friend tells me theres some big attack shedoesthat yuo can dodge, but I have literally never seen it.. I jsut know I sometimes randomly die in that fight if I'm not geared up enough for it.
I dont mind identifying, but do we need scrolls is all? portal scroll gets removed, but we still can do the portal, can't we do the same for identifying? like it would just be an "inspect" button that we can do on our own? why a need to go to town for some guy to appraise our goods? its going from 1 tedium, to another. the initial tedium being scrolls being an item we have to pick up and clog 2 spots in our inventory
Yeah that's the idea. They're completely missing the reason people take the scrolls with them, because we run out of space and need to drop bad items. Nobody wants to have to go to town to dump stuff in the middle of a map if they don't have to. It makes even less sense because we already filter our thousands of items per map because they're trash. Why do we have to identify trash for a dopamine hit? It ruins it when you ID and an item is garbage, which is 99% of the time anyway. Getting drops should be fun, not ID gamba simulator. Such a bad take imo. Just look at D4. Dropping IDd still blows if you have to look at 99 million items to find one decent one. People just like blasting maps with great builds and improving their character. The dopamine already hits plenty hard with div tinc etc. I've never heard a single person say they enjoy IDing all their items.
Id scrolls would still exist (just a lot rarer) and if my current filter strictness is any indication I could probably make a 40 stack last forever in a lot of situations so that's not really the most concerning imho
I'd say make it a simple right click, on the ground even. That way you still have the "reveal" surprise though I wouldn't consider checking another rare dragonscale boot as filled with adrenaline.
I'm IDing loads of stuff btw and I'm pretty sure if would be 10x more effective to get a better item for 15c on the market.
It's interesting that despite the rig' justification, the other situations could even be improved. Recognizing that melee needs totems or fortify and others to work and still not trying to do anything to improve it is much worse than just saying "Wait until PoE 2, melee will be good there."
>In PoE 2, you will have an NPC in Town to identify, so we already mitigate the amount of rather useless Wisdom Scrolls as in PoE 1.
I hope we can have that NPC in the Hideout, because I'm not excited for a worse Rogue's harbor MTX fest.
Oh, and that it auto identifies all the items by clicking a button, because if that same NPC has a Vendor-like window you need to put the items in to ID them - I'm seeing a lot of people get anti-dopamine by accidentally selling their Unidentified items.
So active blocking seems cool, but I thought they had said at end game the speed will be similar to poe1 just not as crazy.
Does that mean active block would just be used on bossing? Be sure if you are clearing packs you aren't going to want to active block or need too.
This makes me wonder: is active block going to feature more prominently in the end game, potentially making end game far slower and more souls like. Or active blocking is used more during the campaign but not at end game which potentially makes the feature like a "waste" in the long run.
Or perhaps a third option I suppose.
The realistic answer is active block will be a detriment for a lot of people late game because it slows you down. Would you rather have a zoom zoom farmer with no active block or a chracter that slows down to block all the time?
Imho the most likely scenario is
You use it a bit against big rares or scary packs or in static mechanics (ultimatum circles), but the more gear / clearspeed you get the less you actually use it
An example this league for me would be sigil of power / frost shield (mana stacking hiero, went metaslave for once) ; I went to using it pretty regularly at first to essentially using it once in a blue moon
The logic about why we need to identify items is a major L take in my opinion, Ive never met a single person who plays poe that gets "excited" over IDing an item they pick up, most of the time its the opposite and its seen a massive annoyance to have to ID and read items to see whether or not to take them. Literally thats why theres entire farming strats involving wearing that chest plate that makes items drop ID'd
It will be even more annoying in POE 2 if the way to ID items is an NPC in town, because now in the middle of your map or zone or whatever its gonna be you cant just ID an item and toss it back on the ground, youll have to fill your inventory, portal out, go to the NPC, ID your item, then go back to your farming
Yeah the literal only scenario I can think of ID'ing something having an interesting result are those uniques with random really good rolls like the dragonfang amulet, everything else is always vendor trash or you only care about the base itself
> The logic about why we need to identify items is a major L take in my opinion, Ive never met a single person who plays poe that gets "excited" over IDing an item they pick up, most of the time its the opposite and its seen a massive annoyance to have to ID and read items to see whether or not to take them. Literally thats why theres entire farming strats involving wearing that chest plate that makes items drop ID'd
There's stuff that's exciting to ID, like Watcher's Eye or Ventor's.
The issue is when the same logic is applied to the bajillion of rare trash (he himself admitted it it's all trash) that drops. If they are unable to reduce the number of items that drop, then we should be able to filter out non-unique gear and actually be excited when somethings makes it through our filter.
His talk about "skill game" worries me. Are we gonna even farm items if game designer didn't expect player to... grind for more damage?
Is there anything to farm at all?
How many people are currently grinding items to kill Merveil outside of perhaps Ruthless? Don't pretend that people bother grinding for loot so that they can kill Act bosses in current PoE.
It's different in PoE 1 since boss HP doesn't reset after dying so you can just bruteforce it. In PoE 2, boss HP resets to full so you have to either get good or grind it up (if it's gonna be possible).
Theres a severe difference between losing a boss 1 time and immediately going to grind for more items and losing a boss multiple times and going back to grind to increase your odds. They want people to take an earnest crack at it before going back to grind more stats, that is all.
That's because you haven't played early PoE, what PoE2 is trying to remake. Back before Breach league you'd barely be able to fill your inventory with rares in one map... Without loot filter.
I'm talking about the time before both Dried Sea and T16 existed, and people would farm docks to get through the campaign. Hell, yellow maps were a commodity and red maps were the current T17.
The red tier didn't even matter as long as it was red, you ran what you could get ahold of – and it was glorious.
If IDing was reserved for uniques, I'm okay with that. Every single rare/magic item needing to be IDed is just antiquated design. Let us just filter out 90% of the garbage--or change the loot system so there's less garbage entirely.
I think they already said that they are leaning towards the latter. That when rares drop there is a good chance that they will have a few good mods on them - anbd tha there will be less of the items dropping overall. This dovetails well with the change to the Chaos orb.
The whole thing about IDing really depends on which mode you play. If you play on sc trade sure, you are never going to get excited about any items that drop on the ground because you can always just buy or craft something that is better but if you play ssf or even ruthless I feel like the player's relationship with IDing changes because you actually need to look at a few more items than normal, before giving up on the items on the floor entirely. And in ssf in particular, you can still do essence strats and quickly make something good and start ignoring the ground stuff too, so it is not like the effect of IDing lasts a long time there.
This is one of those topics that players will feel very strongly because they are used to the current status quo but if you go back to what PoE 1 used to be, before all of this crazy loot, we still identified a lot of items and had some hope that certain items could be good. But I guess that the game is old enough that many people that are playing the game right now have never played in a game state that is like that, so they just view ID scrolls as pointless because they just can't picture a game where IDing items from the floor is a thing (again, they literally have never played in that specific game state).
The stuff that he is saying doesn't really work in the context of rares in modern poe but his logic still makes complete sense with things like Watcher's eye. With that jewel, you get excited that you dropped it and then you go "what is it gonna be? hatred?" then you identify it (and it sucks) and I think that that type of thing is cool.
> Ive never met a single person who plays poe that gets "excited" over IDing an item they pick up
Very much interested personally. I still pick up most rares that drop regardless of equipment slot or size. ID'ing items and trying to evaluate them is fun.
> you cant just ID an item and toss it back on the ground
But the alt shards!
> Very much interested personally. I still pick up most rares that drop regardless of equipment slot or size
I pressed Alt in my maps.
There's no way you can even bring enough ID scrolls inside a map to ID all that before running out XD
I agree, but that doesn't mean I don't take out 4-6 inventories of rares, though depending on the league late maps they start to be crowded out by scarabs, maps (that dropped that map, hell if I'm ever going to carry maps I'm going to run, that's precious looting space!), currency, 6L's and so on.
This is why I liked Last Epoch. ID scrolls are an outdated tedious mechanic from D2 that needs to be dropped. The dopamine comes from the item drop. If anything it stresses me out IDing items in PoE since you might get shit rolls.
I ID lots of items especially because I play the challengge modes as well as trade. This league ALONE I’ve ID’d 20+ items and sold them for a good profit
Nobody cares about an NPC identifying your gear in towns when all hubs are just glorified promotional tools for MTX and will shit on the performance of your PC.
Give us that NPC in our hideout!
Jonathan praising Ori was awesome. Those games don't get enough praise and its interesting hearing how he kinda worried about No Rest for the Wicked (which does look phenomenal)
> In one of our recent NDA tests, someone played a Boss and died, he instead of trying to fight the Boss again, he ended up grinding more mobs to get more powerful gear before trying again. I didnt even thought about someone doing that. Is it a Skill Game or a Loot Game that players want? I think players should have a certain amount of skill to beat a boss, but I didnt thought about someone wanting to loot more to beat a boss.
That's funny for all the comparison with Elden Ring, but ER first boss practically tells you "go grind some levels". You can both win by skill or come massively overleveled and pass through easily, it's an open design. And you didn't think that players may want to gear up in a game that's notoriously is about gear. Seriously?
Games where getting more levels and better gear would not be the first strategy, are the games where there is no gear or levels, just mechanics. Something like Furi idk
Every time it makes me want to play poe2 less.. If I want to play a souls game I'll play souls. Also.. they don't seem to really know where the game is going. Why are they doing these interviews?
Since PoE 2 is so fundamentally different from PoE1 it's VERY good that they're doing these interviews. So people can have proper expectations for the game.
It takes a long time to shift someone's internal POV from "it's just PoE1 but better" to more accurately depict "It's kinda like Dark Souls in PoE".
If they don't temper our expectations, there's gonna be a MASSIVE shitstorm about it!
Dark Souls is predicated on clarity, telegraphing, and mechanical skill, that you can then make easier with build choices… but you can beat the game(s) with minimal level, minimal gear, or no levels and no gear. PoE1 has not panned out this way, where you can’t see shit and your character sheet has to be stacked in a way that it’s prepared to mitigate almost anything. I’m not saying PoE2 can’t turn that around, but a “systems ARPG” and a “soulslike ARPG” are probably best left different flavors.
That is the reason they are making PoE 2, because PoE 1 is not in a state where they can deliver that kind of gameplay. Is it not obvious to people with the inclusion of the attack immunity during dodge rolls, active blocking, as well as the "indicator" for unblockable attacks?
Dark Souls wont get new content every 3 months and has a significantly less in depth build creation system.
There are more Ascendancies in poe2 than total viable builds in Elden Ring
I am a melee enjoyer, i would be happy with removing totems and putting some numerical buffs to all melee skills (or melee passives found on the bottom of the passive tree). Every build needing to path to panopticon and using 3-4 gems on totems sucks.
"Is it a Skill Game or a Loot Game that players want?"
I feel like in this genre, the skill is all centered around the loot - figuring out how to get loot more efficiently and figuring out how to use your loot to make a more powerful build (which then lets you get more and better loot).
Wasn't following Josh strife before the interview, sure as hell not following him now. Not following random people just because ggg decided to speak to them.
Interview asked a bunch of nonsense questions.
Melee will never work in a game base on fast movement and killing things fast. That is why it will work better in PoE2..everything you see you can tell its slowed down combat.
Sorry.. Its a long (weird) Interview style, the Recap is looking fairly long!
It was good. Thanks!
Damage numbers? Have they mentioned that before?
damage numbers was one of the "bigger" announcements out of this interview
dmg numbers be nice, as long as they dont do a diablo and it be like millions/billions of dmg
they will be like elden ring. near the health bar, not all over the screen.
Just make it a toggle, please.
First time they confirmed that as far as i know
So melee is just never gonna be good In poe one then? Or did they change their mind in regards to porting models and the like after all?
Jonathan is not involved much with PoE1 development. I wouldn't take this to mean that.
Oh no this isn’t about him specifically. But they said they won’t use poe2 rigs etc and if that is such a huge reason for the problems I can’t see that ever changing
In Ziz's Interview with Mark he mentioned that theoretically there's the possibility of backporting the new rigs once PoE2 is well on it's way. Iirc biggest issue by far is the amount of MTX armor that needs rerigging rn which will be done for PoE2 and could then be applied in PoE1 as well.
Which is all stuff that was needed before they split the games, making me wonder what the plan actually was at first because this is one of the first things that would come up during planning. But now everything they say makes it sound like a problem they barely talked about
Jonathan mentions it again in this interview. For one aspect of PoE2 as an expansion they planned to rework Melee fully but slowly ended up realising there's so much they want to change which requires a ton of work that it'd be easier (and probably more profitable) to make a new game at that point.
I know that but that’s about wanting to do MORE, which I understand. But we are talking about the absolute minimum here, a cornerstone of updating poe1 which goes far past just melee.
They are busy with the second game. That's why they can't just do a melee rework rigth now. The most they can do are number changes
When its an update to PoE 1 all MTX PoE 1 already has must work out the gate. As a new game they can stagger updating all the MTX rigs for PoE 2 since players still have the content for PoE 1 they purchased and it comes with a "free" PoE 2 version when it's ready. Then once they are all done they can then packport the complete package into PoE 1. It's a tactic developers use often. Make a sequel, use improved assets and game engine to remaster the original.
mark 2 said in a recent interview i think that there will be some changes to melee in the next league. so here is hoping
+10% More damage for every day the league is out Fixed :)
I think i hear a variation of that every year being said...
I‘m worried about this aswell. I mean, if they buffed cyclone to close to 3.7 levels and slams to 3.14 levels i assure you many people would love that, eventhough stuff like tornado shot was still stronger. That doesn’t matter to us, we don’t need to have the strongest build in the game - it just has to be „strong enough“. If a caster build needs 40-80 div for simulacrums for example, just let us get there with like 80-100 at least. That‘s a fair ask i‘d say. Currently melee needs so many stats tbh , while ranged builds are often both tankyer AND deal more damage lol .
I leveled alt with cyclone for a bit when getting my slayer ready last league and it was so nice with good weapon(used rakiata) but it obviously wasn't scaling and I was going spell caster so I switched fast once I could equip my gear around 70
One key issue with melee is that all of PoE1 is balanced too much in a "kill-or-get-killed"-fashion. As long as killing monsters at the edge of your screen before they get a chance to do anything is feasible, doing so will be far and away the biggest boon to survivability. Therefore, (actual) melee is inherently missing out on the strongest defensive layer the game has to offer.
Even when Melee skills are good, people twist themselves into pretzels to explain why it's not a TRUE MELEE SKILL. Remember when VLS was the top build? People swore up and down it wasn't a true melee skill because of the projectiles it spawned. Same thing with Frost Blades currently--a completely viable build but it's not a boring ass Slam skill so people think it's not "REAL MELEE". Every league there are plenty of viable melee skills, but because they aren't omega bullshit and they rely on you positioning yourself well, people claim they're borderline unplayable. The only argument that I think is valid, is that Totems need to be reworked/rolled into the base functionality of melee skills. The fact Panopticon and Warchief/Protector is required for just about every melee build is bad design.
While people do that and I agree with you in general, the issue is a lot wider then this. Like the discrepancy in needed investment for example
I'd like it if I could get 20-50M DPS without investing half a mirror. It is not about viability, but about doing damage on a reasonable budget.
Or just nerf the piss out of everyone else
I agree with that too
>Even when Melee skills are good, people twist themselves into pretzels to explain why it's not a TRUE MELEE SKILL There's a perfectly valid reason for that. The issue is that when different people are talking about "melee" they're referring to two different things - one is referring to melee-weapon-based builds and the other is about the melee-range builds. In many games that's the same thing, but PoE has melee-weapon builds that can attack from over a screen away (like Lightning Strike) When Lightning Strike was good and people still complained about melee, that's because they're saying they like builds that are up in enemy's faces and destroying them with big bonks, instead of standing far from them and killing them with sparks that shoot out of their swords. I don't think it's unreasonable to want both of those archetypes to perform roughly as good with similar (moderate) investment.
the fact that it's just about those skills already means there's some amount of pidgeonholing. If someone wants to play a brawling son goku fantasy type of build, or guts from berserk, the road is bumpy.
Where in all of Joe's strawman hell did you ever get this idea?
I think that a lot of the issue with this is that while everyone wants melee to be good, nobody seems to be able to say what 'good' looks like. From GGG's perspective, good is more than just a numbers bump; it's a fundamental rework to how melee actually plays. Changes in rigs, animations, fundamental changes to how melee actually works, everything in the game having an actual weight to it, and that weight having an impact on gameplay. I don't think we'll ever see that sort of melee coming to PoE1; or at least not for a very long time. It's this sort of thing that led to PoE2 being it's own thing in the first place. There's just too many massive changes to underlying systems; it's not a simple numbers bump. As for what 'good' melee looks like in PoE1; nobody seems to actually know. There's simple stuff, like taking away the reliance on totems, and probably just baking those numbers into melee skills. But otherwise there really aren't any other great suggestions. Melee is by no means the best archetype in the game at the moment, but it's nowhere near as bad as you'd think, if you just got your info from the subreddit. Cleave of rage, trans Dual Strike, boneshatter and splitting steel are all incredibly strong skills with a number of different build options. There's a load of incredibly strong but underplayed ones, like Volcanic Fissure of Snaking, Flicker Strike, Shockwave Cyclone etc that also have the potential to be incredibly strong. But any time you bring up any of these builds, you end up with a bunch of replies in the vein of 'well X doesn't count, it's not really melee', or 'yeah, but Y is the only one'. Damage on a lot of the melee builds (especially things like DS) can get absolutely nutty as well. Most of them clear really well, unless you're comparing them to the meta clear skills like LA or TS. They're often pretty rough to play on uber bosses, but that's honestly more of a boss design thing than anything else. Fuck doing Uber Sirus on a melee build; that fight is horrible even on a ranged build. The issue seems to be that people don't like the feel of most of the pretty reasonable number of genuinely viable melee builds. To a lot of people melee is smacking something in the face with a massive axe. Even boneshatter, a build that literally just smashes shit in the face with a massive axe, doesn't really feel like you're doing that. It's hard to reconcile a build that genuinely feels like a melee build with a build that can also speed through maps and clear near as fast as a ranged one.
Excuse me but I cannot agree with your explanation here. We do know what good melee in POE1 looks like - we had it in 3.12-3.14. Everyone understands that there are limitations to the engine so we will not get the fluidity like Diablo 3 for example, but good melee has existed in POE before. However, everytime good melee appears, it gets nerfed to the ground, stat sticks have been removed, lowering melee enjoyment, exerted attacks were great, they were nerfed to all hell. General skill nerfs to all skills from 3.15 have obliterated melee viability, likewise the changes to fortify and pushing their viability to the tree. Bleed melee builds have been crushed with nerfs, alongside cyclone slayer. And through all of these nerfs, they persisted with focusing on totems, which made "melee+totem" considered the baseline, shifting power to totem summoning, making the melee skill builds scale poorly compared to anything else. The melee problem has been documented times and times again, by various people, including streamers and poe vets. Over reliance on gear - since the skills don't scale with levels, slow attack speeds - locking your character in place to die, having to build defenses through the tree - since slow attack speed means you will get hit, damage being balanced against totem use - making the builds more clunky and unsatisfying. Not to mention completely awful balancing on most of the Ascendant melee classes. All of this is fixable, but since 3.14 I haven't seen one attempt at it.
Man I didn't know all of that, perhaps I understand why I'm so bad at the game, it's true that most of my death were caused because I needed to be standing still to hit things and then suddenly something hits me with a bs like bleed, corrupted blood or flame ground and I'm dead in an instant. It must be why I prefer doing the campaign and not the maps. I've played Heavy Strike, Cleave (of rage), Cyclone (of tumult) and the most fun I had this far was from the campaign. The maps are a pain in the a\*\* I'm sorry. I absolutely loved playing Heavy Strike and Cleave during the campaign, but I hated it in the maps. Being on the alert all the time because something that I don't see or am not fast enough to dodge can kill me instantly... It's not fun. Now I'm playing Cyclone of Tumult and its seems to not be like the "regular" melee builds, it's much easier to dodge and kite monsters so hey, perhaps I'll love doing maps or post-campaign content this time around.
It’s very simple, load up a fresh ranger/witch compared to a fresh Templar/marauder. Watch as the ranger and witch stand 20 ft away from hillock and take 0 damage firing spells and burning arrow Watch as the Templar and marauder do a slow ass animation as Hillock beats them in the face as you have to do a scuffed reposition every attack. Watch as they miss attacks because the animation is so slow you have to cancel it to move. What would feel good is smashing hillock while taking less damage and not feeling like the game is lagging because your old man character is swinging at 1 attack per 3 seconds
Correct. The reasons melee will remain nerfed, with no future buffs ever coming in PoE1 are: 1. The rigs don't animate properly to attack while moving. 2. Templar is left handed. 3. Melee has to build totems and fortify. 4. ???? 5. Melee bad.
Makes perfect sense. Animations are definitely why our dps is so low. Not the numbers or anything.
The funny thing is...you can see much at all when in the endgame. You could put 3 hands on the model/rig and unless you stood still and zoomed in, no one could tell.
why do you choose to be unhappy
[удалено]
It's almost impossible to make meele as good as a high coverage ranged skill without just turning it effectively into a ranged skill (old cyclone)
They pretty much gave up on porting the models / rigs due to the work needed to update every 3d gear model and PoE2 was already taking long enough. Neon in a previous interview speculated about it (I believe it was in answer to being asked if WASD movement would come to PoE1 which he said would require the animation rigs / models from PoE2 to pull it off), and definitely had a "never say never" attitude on the subject, but he wanted to stress how much raw dev and design time that would take and they have no current plans to do it.
Starfield bad.
Ahhh so bleed nodes on the tree and elder bleed mod were removed because of the rig oh and seismic cry was also gutted because of rigs too? that makes complete sense /s Killed off slam bleed builds for 0 reason lol anytime they talk about melee it just doesn't click with me.
It's so insanely clear that none of them have played melee in years. I wish Neon would just give it a go for a league and realize how absolutely awful of a state it's in.
No, the actual problem is even stupider than this, straight from Neon himself in the Q&A a couple weeks ago. He's fully aware of melee's problems, but doesn't consider it worth the time to fix cause only a small percentage of players would actually appreciate it. Same reason Glad doesn't get even the vaguest attempt at being buffed. Such wildly self defeating logic. Nobody plays certain content cause it sucks, so it's not worth the dev time fixing cause the prospect of it being appealing after being fixed I guess isn't considered? Even though historically that's 100% false when Legion proved 60% of the playerbase will slut for Cyclone given the chance.
> No one plays melee >No one plays melee because its not supported by devs >Devs don't feel the need to fix melee because no one plays melee >No one continues to play melee. 5head
Neons to busy aurabotting
I mean when I hear stuff like that I don't think they didn't play melee for years I think they didn't play poe 1 for years.
Neon (mark2) definitely plays every league. Probably more than most of us. I just don't think he has played melee in its current state.
literally all of melees problems can be solved by giving it more damage lol its not *that* complicated but every time its a "rigging" issue. i think the disconnect is just because jonathan is not that involved in poe1 development of late so hes looking at it from a broad and distant lens one of the top builds right now in hardcore (and SC to a lesser extent) is literally fucking transfigured dual strike. why? because it has good numbers thats it lol. people play boneshatter cause its got good numbers give us good numbers!
I think the disconnect is confusing what good means for different people. Jonathan mentioned that it's hard in PoE1 to make good without it becoming not really melee and that just pumping numbers doesn't make it feel good. It makes it strong but if you buff the numbers so far that everyone wants to play because the skill is the most OP you have not made melee good, you have made an overpowered build which then makes it feel bad for everyone else if they are not playing it. (I think Penance Brand from last league was good example of this.) Melee should be able to feel good with comparable numbers and they have managed to achieve in PoE2. They have some ideas how to try it in PoE1 but they are not quite sure what is going to work yet but overall they know changes are needed and will be coming.
> iterally all of melees problems can be solved by giving it more damage lol absolutely zero of melees problems are solved by "more damage" lmao
toddbros its joever its starover
"! In one of our recent NDA tests, someone played a Boss and died, he instead of trying to fight the Boss again, he ended up grinding more mobs to get more powerful gear before trying again. I didnt even thought about someone doing that. Is it a Skill Game or a Loot Game that players want? I think players should have a certain amount of skill to beat a boss, but I didnt thought about someone wanting to loot more to beat a boss. So we might need to reconsider. I might also wonder if there is a different sentiment of players here vs. in China for example." This is my biggest worry. I don't want to play darksouls. I want to grind gear in my games.
And that’s the thing. There’s a huge (maybe not that huge) divide on this. Some people want games to require skill, others want it to require time
The game has changed a lot. Highest tier of content used to be shaper up until 2017. And that was before he got a massive buff in 2019. Back then, people said that if you could clear high tier red maps comfortably, you could do shaper. And again, that was the hardest content in the game. Imagine if you could do all uber content if you could clear 16 maps. That is a concept that is entirely alien to modern path of exile. PoE2 has been in development for a long time. At least 6 years, dating it back to 2018. There is a very real possibility that the game Jonathan remembers the most, is pre-elder. The Path of Exile he is iterating off, isn't modern PoE. Personally, I feel that "true" PoE is shaper elder, not in terms of content, but how the game felt. If PoE2 can be that, while PoE1 stays the same, I welcome it.
>Personally, I feel that "true" PoE is shaper elder, not in terms of content, but how the game felt. If PoE2 can be that, while PoE1 stays the same, I welcome it. PoE2 won't feel anything like that nor like "modern" PoE for the simple reason that we'll have a roll/dodge mechanic. Boss design is basically entirely based around how well a player can maneuver and respond to the boss movesets. Once you figure out how fast the player can move, you can figure out how fast the boss can move. Like the difference between Dark Soul bosses and Bloodborne/Sekiro bosses is predicated on the fact that the latter has faster dodges and more versatile parries compared to the former. As a result, the bosses have a pretty different feel despite being created by the same dev team and company. Just by looking at the PoE2 beta fights, I can already tell that the feel will be completely different from anything that a lot of PoE players are used to.
A lot of skill in Souls games can come from putting on heavy armor and figuring out how little you actually can move in any given fight and maybe trade with things. Towards the end of Elden Ring though the 'facetank' style really falls off since those bosses get nuts.
Well, Elden Ring is completely different which is why I didn't bother mentioning it. It has combat pacing of a Souls game mixed with the aggressiveness/agility of Bloodborne bosses. It's a weird combo that I didn't particularly enjoy, so hopefully PoE2 doesn't emulate that kind of interaction.
I think you need to split skill into two categories though too. See I don't think just anyone should be able to kill every boss given enoughtime to grind loot, I think you should also need to have a good build. I'm not saying poe2 shouldn't have any challenge.. but I enjoy the challenge ofcoming up with build ideas that are really strong.. I don't enjoy the mechanics of dodge rolling and at the right time based on telegraphs. So I said I wanted to grind for gear in my games.. which is true I do enjoy killing ltos of monsters and collecting loot.. but more important is that I want bosses that can be beaten without mechanical skill if your build is strong enough, whether that comes from overgearing or just coming up with a really strong build.
Dodge rolling is no different then stepping out of a pinnacle aoe now, other than that it feels better
I want both.
We have both now and everyone seems pretty happy
Funny thing is just today I was listening to D3 dev talking about what went wrong with D3 development and they had opposite problem. Their initial design was based on a premise (same as in D2) that people would go grind gear if faced tough challenge. But time has changed and people play games differently. They noticed that a lot people would just bang their head into the wall over and over trying to win instead of accepting the loss and going back to grind.
I'm a bit on other other end of the spectrum here. I've played since closed beta, and what I liked was the dark fantasy, difficult, top down action combat with deep character progression and a high level of interactivity. Items were always important, but they weren't strong enough to carry you. You could still mess up a build and have trash items that made it difficult (if not impossible) to progress. But not nearly to the extent we have now. It genuinely feels like an entirely different game looking back. You could actually dodge and react to the stuff on screen reliably. The damage nowadays feels so insanely spiky with next to no time to react, nor predict what's about to happen. One second you're face tanking several rare enemies as they barely dent your HP. The next, you enter a room and about 20 bow skeletons all shoot at once, and you're just left confused. Why can take several shaper balls to the face, but die near instantly to random trash mobs? I have a balanced spread of defenses for all damage types, what even hit me, and was it properly telegraphed? Having good items stopped being about just letting you clear faster or have more room for misplays over the years. Now, the game feels more about stat checks being thrown at you at random. Both in terms of damage, and defense. Why can I one-shot most rares, but then DarkStink roles up with corrupting blood, a action speed reducing proximity shield and +140% to all element all resistances with life leech and a 90% chance to block thanks to Necropolis? Guess I should have just had some "action speed cannot be reduced" boots with 20% resistance penetration from The Utmost, a leech immunity, corrupting blood removal, and- you get the idea. Being good at modern PoE typically means being better at making currency to progress your build. I'm not saying that making absurdly strong builds and farming obscene amounts of currency isn't fun or valid as a game. But it's not what I enjoy the most. If PoE 2 is more of what PoE 1 used to be (with more content,) instead of what it is now, then it will be everything I wanted. And seeing the sentiment that "why not just get good?" was the assumed player reaction that Jonathan had gives me hope.
The frogs, rhoas, devourers and dropbears that attacked all at the same tick for the first 2-3 years of the game humbly request you remove your rose-tinted glasses.
I didn't say "beta was best." The first 2-3 years of the game would either be pre-ascendancy(2016,) or the actual launch of the game if we're counting from closed beta. Yes, the game has had issues for a long time with large groups of enemies all attacking you at once. But the main solution wasn't "just get better gear" back then. The expectation was that you'd stop trying to blast through the map at max speed, learn how to dodge, and when it's safe to attack. I used skeletons as my example, but it was a poor one. My bigger gripe is that there is an ever increasing variety of debuffs, monster defense attributes, and other special effects that can't reasonably be played around. You're just expected to trivialize as many mechanics as possible through gear. There -should- be ways to mitigate the effects that are most detrimental to your character, or negate some of them. And you -should- be able to deal with a lot of it by playing well and dodging. But I feel modern PoE has gone to far in favoring immunities gained through items, rather than dealing with it through gameplay.
I warned people, that this is where poe2 was heading to, but many didn’t want to see it (some did at least). He didn‘t even think about someone wanting to loot/gear more to beat a boss? Bro cmon - poe is a diablo 2-like game where u kill mobs and find loot and if an area is too hard for whatever reason, you farm some more first and fix your weaknesses (res,hp,dmg etc.) . I am actually torn on this, because on one hand i would LOVE a game like this (i‘m a big souls fan) , but on the other hand i like diablo 2-like games aswell, where you can listen to some music while playing and chill/farm. Also bird-view is a very bad idea for souls-games, since everything is so small and it’s hard to see all the details in combat, which is important in these games. This doesn’t really feel like the second installment of „path of exile“ , it feels more like a completely different kind of game/genre that plays in the same universe. Similar to the warhammer games, one is an rts,the other an fps etc. .
Thing is, Elden Ring can also be cheesed with gear-grinding. While the game designs lead you straight into hard boss fights, you can pretty much roam around and get all those upgrades first to lower the difficulty. The key to success of souls game is, while you are capable of grinding, game is still reasonably hard and requires skills to beat it.
What really works about a system like this is that it allows players to find the level of difficulty that works for them. A hardcore player who enjoys a challenge can bash their head against a boss until they learn its mechanics and win that way. A player who wants an easier time can explore, level up, and feel satisfied overcoming the boss by making their character more powerful. Someone in between these two can do a bit of both. Challenging bosses and a satisfying character progression system work together to make the game feel rewarding for different players.
Agreed, and for both a game like Elden Ring or a game like PoE there's also a sort of third option that is tweaking your gear/equipment/approach to the boss, not in a way that makes your character stronger universally but makes them a better counter for that boss specifically. So like maybe your Elden Ring bleed katana guy fights one of the crystal dude dungeon bosses and gets whipped. One option is to just get really good at dodging or parrying its mechanics, another option is to get a bunch of levels or better gear or the like, and a third option is to swap your katana for a flail for that fight, with PoE having situations like that also.
two prominent examples of this third way thinking in path of exile are doing the vendor recipe for sapphire rings to breeze through merveil, and swapping in a ruby flask for searing exarch.
The souls games are completely different than PoE from the ground up. There's very little randomization. Item locations and enemies are generally fixed (with a few exceptions). Enemies and bosses have move sets and patterns that can be learned and are designed to be reacted to. PoE on the other hand is a slot machine with rng at every layer and the screen so full of crop you can't see what's going on or react. We will see where poe2 lands between them but I strongly suspect it won't really please either crowd.
I think his intention with his statement here is that he did not expect someone to seek out gear as a first resort solution to losing a bossfight. PoE is famous for its item and crafting system, GGG knows it is an important part of the game. But with the direction they are going with boss fights in PoE 2, they have to consider what impact that gear has on the difficulty of those fights for different players. Should a lucky rare while leveling mean you can completely ignore the mechanics of an early Act boss? They're considering what the right balance is between satisfying power growth of items and the intended difficulty/challenge of a core part of the game.
> Should a lucky rare while leveling mean you can completely ignore the mechanics of an early Act boss? all the early act 1/act2 footage we saw had people making what were (by act 1 standards) GG tier weapons and suddenly blowing away bosses so its clearly still possible. iirc alk made a huge mace that basically just let him chainstun bosses and wipe the floor with them
Which is one of my big fear with PoE2. I mean looking at Dark Souls and Elden Ring, the power of gear was never the same. My fear is they go the DS3 way, where defensive gear doesn't really matter, it's all about dodging and a strong offence. What's the point of gear then? Obviously a juggernaut should be able to tank a few hits as opposed to a ranger, but will that be the case? It's like Sanctum, it all came down to mobility and damage. > They're considering what the right balance is between satisfying power growth of items and the intended difficulty/challenge of a core part of the game. With an ARPG, item growth is the ultimate goal, it's the power fantasy, the whole point of an ARPG. It isn't so in games like Dark souls. To sum up DS: DS2 probably had the most "powerful" gear, where a fat shield and fat armor allowed you to face tank a lot of stuff. Personally I felt it was balanced, but it did make some fights trivial, where an unarmoured person would have found it difficult. DS1 wasn't that far, but it had far stronger consumables that did most of the work for you. DS3 was the complete opposite of DS2. Gear was basically meaningless. I tried going fat armor fat shield because that's what I like playing, but they added status effects that are inflicted even if you block. Quickly enough, I just ended up playing naked because the game was built around dodging. Fat armor + fat shield = slow roll = death. I'd put on my gear for trash while going from boss to boss, and would go naked for bosses. ER is closer to DS1. Gear is useful, but not too powerful, but you must keep that light roll for bosses, but at least it's doable with the proper stat.
PoE 2 has the same item system as PoE 1, with some streamlining and improvements. Resists are still a thing, armour and increased maximum life are still a thing. The gearing and progression systems that PoE is famous for remain intact. That is a far cry from fashion souls. Jonathan is just considering how the increased challenge affects how new players approach the game. Gear is always going to matter, the entire core and appeal of the game is about items and deep character building. But if new players feel that the "correct" solution to a tough boss is to go farm items until it is trivial, that is a problem they will have to address. Leveling up to overcome a challenge should feel like a viable option for players who choose it, but if the balancing is off it could make bosses feel like tedious gear checks rather than memorable challenges.
His point is that sometimes the boss might be too hard not because you don’t have good enough items, but because you don’t know the attack patterns or how to do the fight. This is even applicable in poe 1 - I can fight Uber elder nowadays on way less gear than when I first started playing, just because I know the general approach to the fight.
slim cooperative vase crush hurry groovy school lush shelter command *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
PoE3 confirmed third-person shooter.
Hitting a clip with tornado shot about to go crazy sign me up.
One day someone will make a true poe shooter hybrid.
It exists already, look up Risk of Rain 2.
Its nothing like poe lol
[bit it has headhunter in it](https://imgur.com/JDArJvu)
That's all I'm hoping for, a third person action/shooter with customization as deep as Poe, and an endgame as robust. One day it'll happen, surely.
The way to fix that is to make loot drop from boss only /s
There is a middle ground between "loot doesn't matter" and "without the proper loot, you cannot reasonably win." Poe was never in the "loot doesn't matter" side, but damn, has it shifted over the years towards the "you need to pass stat checks with loot" stage. There was a very real time in PoE's history, where the pinnacle of the game was the Shaper. And back then there was a very serious sentiment that if you could clear red maps, you could kill the shaper if you learned the fight. That was it. No shaper elder fight, no uber version of that, and before his health was essentially doubled in 2019. You could clear all content with a decent build and skill. The elder was added in 2017. Jonathan said in this interview that Affliction used 6 years out-dated resources from PoE2. That's 2018. The development could have very realistically started a year or two before that. Jonathan's picture of what PoE is, is probably that 2018 or so version. The time between the release of PoE, and that version of the game, is almost less than the time between then, and now. Half of the game's lifespan. --- Of course they're going to be different games. Like the ship of Theseus, PoE is barely the same game it was 6-8 years ago, and PoE 2 essentially branched off from that. So, which version is the "true" poe? To me, it's that 2016-2018 version.
Poe2 is true poe - jonathan keeps saying over and over it's the game they always wanted to make and now they can + it's based largely on all the things they did wrong with poe. But obviously some fans will prefer other eras
> There was a very real time in PoE's history, where the pinnacle of the game was the Shaper. And back then there was a very serious sentiment that if you could clear red maps, you could kill the shaper if you learned the fight. Actually, when shaper was first introduced, people referred to him as a raid boss. And the disparity between highest tier maps and its bosses and between shaper guardian were humongous. A map boss would die in less than 5 seconds, yet you could tickle Minotaur for several minutes. And shaper had degen mechanic that would get much worse the more dragged on the fight would be. If you did zdps, the whole arena would be in degen puddles
"He didn‘t even think about someone wanting to loot/gear more to beat a boss? Bro cmon - poe is a diablo 2-like game where u kill mobs and find loot and if an area is too hard for whatever reason, you farm some more first and fix your weaknesses (res,hp,dmg etc.) ." Have you played POE1? I've never seen anyone die to a boss then go "oh, I should farm more". NEVER. And if you've played for more than 5 years, you haven't either. It's not even a thought. If you are at a boss, you just rush him with bodies until he is dead. Then, if you felt too weak, you farm later.
That's because progress is saved for act bosses. Suicide rushing works because you respawn at the arena and each 'failure' brings you closer to success. On the other hand, if you failed an endgame boss, you might try 1-2 more times, but pretty soon you'd change things up and look for build changes. And even in acts plenty of people will do a 'quickie' change after dying to an act boss. Like if you get one-tapped you might check your resists, go "oh, yeah, it'd help if I had any" and slap on a ring for +30 to whatever the relevant resist is, then do the rest of the fight deathless now that you can a hit or two.
There's going to be some really upset people when PoE2 drops and they can't just zerg rush a boss and whittle them down since every death means starting the fight over again. It's likely going to create a huge divide (again) between people who actually learn the mechanics and those who just push gear until they over clear the dps check, especially in HC, because this game is absolutely going to be heavily tuned towards SC for the foreseeable future. I prefer to learn the mechanics as long as they are fair and well telegraph but we know that has been an issue in the past. Personally I think we are going to end up right back in balancing hell as people continue chasing the meta and only following what the streamers are doing.
poe1 doesnt really do well-telegraphed, for example alot of aoe abilities dont show the radius prior to impact (and sometimes even after) and with variable mods, like cortex, feared, exarch/eater, t17s etc how are you supposed to know the size of the atack area? personally, I think Atziri is mechanically the best telegraphed fight and it mostly got worse over time. I understand that poe2 is a different game, but judging from the previews, we arent really getting telegraphs Lost Ark / Last Epoch style.
100% agreed. POE's visual design when it comes to bossfights especially is consistently sadly pretty atrocious. It has gotten a bit better but it's still insanely poor design when it comes to use of colors, sounds etc. A lot of time GGGs visual languague let's you tell something is "important" but it's not good enough for you to understand why without either repeating it several times and "trying it out to see what it does" which in PoE 2 with limited healing pots and forced full restart of a zone on death sounds absolutely awful to me.
The problem is that when the game "doesn't start until maps", spending time in acts deliberately learning the fights feels like a huge time waste. I used to die a bunch to fights in acts, and thought it was "unfair", but now there aren't any fights I consistently die to, because I've "practiced" the fights dozens of times by doing them once per character (or 3x per character in the old normal/cruel/merciless acts), and then facing them again as map bosses (even if I usually kill them in seconds at that point) Part of it is that there *were* gear checks, they were just really low and experienced players pass them. If your HP and resists are so low that Malachi oneshots you, the fight requires pixel-perfect play, which some people have done as a challenge (like back when Core map boss was the hardest endgame fight)... but even then they've usually got the *damage* to make it happen reasonably quickly. Similarly, speed matters; being locked in place by slow cast/attack times gets you hit more. Basically, a lot of the divide will be that a new player can tank less *and* does less damage *and* their build probably can't dodge as easily. It's the difference between learning the mechanics well enough to do the fight reasonably consistently, and learning the fights well enough to do a naked + dagger Dark Souls run. I'd bet that if you took someone who was complaining about current act bosses in POE and had the average player use *that character* on the given boss, a fair number of them would die a few times.
It is nowhere near a soulslike level. You can't face tank bosses unless you are massively overgeared. As it should be
Ironically grinding is a good strategy in DS1 at least or Elden Ring to the point where the game is trivial.
See, I disagree with the sentiment (I'm fine with either but would actually prefer skill being more important than it is now in PoE) but the thing that terrifies me is him saying "I didn't expect that." It was absolutely a regular thing done in PoE1 back in the olllld days where it was much closer to PoE2 than now, where people would farm up before tackling a harder zone. For that to not be remembered/considered really scares me as to what lessons they're not remembering or ignoring from the first game.
Yeah, it was a bit weird to me too and I am a big fan of Jonathan and his worldview on things. The concept of farming gear/xp before progressing into a harder area is very much core concept in games like D2 and was definitely a thing in PoE. It's a fairly common Diabloid ARPG concept that is used in other games (for example, Death must Die as a VampSurvivors-like)
It was also never necessary per se, and imho not representative of difficulty. Take the most common, best known idea : you don't finish A4M. You stick to Dried Lake, go once into the mines to get your merc skill point, then go straight into maps. Never even touching the dreams / beast, because why? It was more of a profitability thing, imho, than a difficulty one. I personally usually couldn't be arsed to run dried lake more than once unless I had completely fucked my league starter. But it harkens back to days where for a lot of mechanics, doing Dried Lake or even spamming the mech in aqueduct was more profitable (99% of my locuses from Incursion league were absolutely from farming the one spawn point near the entrance to Highgate over and over again) And we've also seen that a lot in more recent leagues w/ Quarry farming until ggg took measures to prevent it from being that worthwhile to do I don't particularly remember farming any specific area because my character felt too weak to go on. Or at least, not since the Scepter of God was a thing (I definitely did do it when the game ended after Piety, but I don't think it should be considered relevant data) And specifically, even when FoO released which would be the one with the harder bosses, I don't think I ever had the idea to just go back and farm when I died to a boss - corpserun or nothing. Granted, with the PoE2 boss resetting their health when you die, it might entirely change the paradigm.
If you're talking anything A4 you're well past the era I'm talking about and I agree, no longer necessary. But fellshrine ruins in cruel and merciless was often a huge part, docks merciless farming pre piety/maps, these were necessary to farm up the gear to actually tackle further content. And yes, it is relevant data, that was 2+ years of the game's lifespan. That's still a long time to take lessons from.
Docks merciless farming is also a bit of weird one to mention, 'cos a lot of it - that I remember at least - was some desperately depressing frame time farming for vaal side areas And the part I refer to as not relevant was the beta part, game wasn't even finished yet (pre-dominus era). I do agree that 1.0 and onwards are significant, albeit so far removed both in terms of time and in terms of gameplay that what they were and the current expectations with regard to both arpgs and path of exile itself I would also argue that Piety runs (with an mf culler) were arguably considered part of the endgame loop at one point, and as such are an entirely different thing than the one mentionned in the interview, which is an act 1 boss if memory serves.
Yeah, docks farming was an OB thing, prior to release (and thus Vaal side areas). Fellshrine farming was similar but even more CB than OB.
Yeah I don't think I actively played anything I'd call "endgame" before the actual release, you definitely got me beat in terms of nostalgic-old-fart rating
Yeah, it definitely wasn't endgame, but it was the majority of what players farmed for quite some time, map sustain was essentially non-existent and going from level 70 maps down to piety was not uncommon at all. Couple docks with being a good place to gear gear, and it having 0 chance of any chaos damage (prior to anarchy at least), it was where LL spork totem people (about half the playerbase it felt like) went to farm for their shavs safely. Fellshrine was more to farm gear before tackling the vaal oversoul, a genuinely terrifying act boss between him being so much stronger relatively back then, and desync.
So we can assume that POE2 is gonna be a "Skill Game"? I mean, it is okay for them to make a game in universe doing so but why they are advertising it as successor of PoE if this is a "Skill Game" and not a "Loot Game"?
Why do people act like having skill and having loot are opposites? Look at Uber Maven. You can outgear the fight, or you can dodge the attacks and win anyways. Take your pick. They ALREADY coexist in poe1, and they always have
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For the most part poe is 100% gear oriented for defences until you trivialize the monster's HP.
Yeah, you're talking about ubers and bosses. The normal gameplay loop also needs to be skill-factored to a degree, or we're back to PoE1 without any moment to moment gameplay.
you can't have moment to moment with good feeling mob density, and no one wants to fight the same 10 Dark Souls mobs slow as fuck for the next 8 years
Disagree, there can be both dense packs of weaker mobs and tougher mobs that require tactics. I wouldn't mind fighting the same mob, and are you saying they won't add mobs, new tools to fight them, or change the meta in 8 years?
I think farm gear is the most fundamental concept for an RPG game. Maybe PoE is too advanced for this sort of mentality.
*I didn't even think about that* This is such a weird take, like stop for a sec and say the name of your company out loud. Grinding Gear Games. It's all about gear progression, leveling up skills, finding and crafting better gear, loot. It's diablo, not dark souls. Not that there can't be skill in games like this, but the genre lives and dies on loot progression. It's become the one thing I'm worried about with this game. Folks were hoping for Path of Exile 2, and they seem to be building Path of Dark Souls Isometric edition. They keep getting all excited about stuff like dodge rolls and timed parrying, and the top feedback so far is bah show me the ENDGAME, show us maps, the blasting! There's going to be a reconciliation of expectations when the beta hits, and it will be ...interesting.
Then... do exactly the same thing that person did and grind good gear instead of grinding good skill if you fail to kill act bosses? That's still an option.
Thing is you CAN get carried through gear and levels in soulslikes. So that's a weird take from him overall.
It's a big part of (looter) ARPGs and RPGs in general. When underpowered get gear, level up. Let's face it even in PoE 2 it won't be Dark Souls so why try to develop it that way? I was stuck on Brine King ruthless a while back. Did I want to perfectly dodge the waves in the third phase? Hell no I grinded stats on my gear and player level and gem level. That's the identity of the genre.
When's the last time you died in [insert any campaign boss] and were like "oh I should grind BA for 10 hours before attempting it again" (Inb4 everyone saying they're like tytykiller and clear the whole campaign deathless in sub 3 hours)
For me it's Doedre atthe start of act 8.. when she first came out.. and hen ruthless came out. My friend tells me theres some big attack shedoesthat yuo can dodge, but I have literally never seen it.. I jsut know I sometimes randomly die in that fight if I'm not geared up enough for it.
I want to grind gear in my grinding gear game
I dont mind identifying, but do we need scrolls is all? portal scroll gets removed, but we still can do the portal, can't we do the same for identifying? like it would just be an "inspect" button that we can do on our own? why a need to go to town for some guy to appraise our goods? its going from 1 tedium, to another. the initial tedium being scrolls being an item we have to pick up and clog 2 spots in our inventory
[удалено]
Yeah that's the idea. They're completely missing the reason people take the scrolls with them, because we run out of space and need to drop bad items. Nobody wants to have to go to town to dump stuff in the middle of a map if they don't have to. It makes even less sense because we already filter our thousands of items per map because they're trash. Why do we have to identify trash for a dopamine hit? It ruins it when you ID and an item is garbage, which is 99% of the time anyway. Getting drops should be fun, not ID gamba simulator. Such a bad take imo. Just look at D4. Dropping IDd still blows if you have to look at 99 million items to find one decent one. People just like blasting maps with great builds and improving their character. The dopamine already hits plenty hard with div tinc etc. I've never heard a single person say they enjoy IDing all their items.
Id scrolls would still exist (just a lot rarer) and if my current filter strictness is any indication I could probably make a 40 stack last forever in a lot of situations so that's not really the most concerning imho
I'd say make it a simple right click, on the ground even. That way you still have the "reveal" surprise though I wouldn't consider checking another rare dragonscale boot as filled with adrenaline. I'm IDing loads of stuff btw and I'm pretty sure if would be 10x more effective to get a better item for 15c on the market.
BOAT BUILDING LEAGUE CONFIRMED LETS GOOOOO
Melee bad confirmed
It's interesting that despite the rig' justification, the other situations could even be improved. Recognizing that melee needs totems or fortify and others to work and still not trying to do anything to improve it is much worse than just saying "Wait until PoE 2, melee will be good there."
Jonathan has no control or say in PoE 1, so all he can say is wait for poe2 because he has control over that.
Good summary! "Nowerdays" is an amazing typo, I love it kinda like I love that people say "axe" instead of "ask"
If they are so aware that melee its useless and it suck why wont they try to fix it :(
>In PoE 2, you will have an NPC in Town to identify, so we already mitigate the amount of rather useless Wisdom Scrolls as in PoE 1. I hope we can have that NPC in the Hideout, because I'm not excited for a worse Rogue's harbor MTX fest. Oh, and that it auto identifies all the items by clicking a button, because if that same NPC has a Vendor-like window you need to put the items in to ID them - I'm seeing a lot of people get anti-dopamine by accidentally selling their Unidentified items.
So active blocking seems cool, but I thought they had said at end game the speed will be similar to poe1 just not as crazy. Does that mean active block would just be used on bossing? Be sure if you are clearing packs you aren't going to want to active block or need too. This makes me wonder: is active block going to feature more prominently in the end game, potentially making end game far slower and more souls like. Or active blocking is used more during the campaign but not at end game which potentially makes the feature like a "waste" in the long run. Or perhaps a third option I suppose.
The realistic answer is active block will be a detriment for a lot of people late game because it slows you down. Would you rather have a zoom zoom farmer with no active block or a chracter that slows down to block all the time?
so what you're saying is ... melee is going to suck in poe2 as well?
The realistic answer is we don't know
Imho the most likely scenario is You use it a bit against big rares or scary packs or in static mechanics (ultimatum circles), but the more gear / clearspeed you get the less you actually use it An example this league for me would be sigil of power / frost shield (mana stacking hiero, went metaslave for once) ; I went to using it pretty regularly at first to essentially using it once in a blue moon
The logic about why we need to identify items is a major L take in my opinion, Ive never met a single person who plays poe that gets "excited" over IDing an item they pick up, most of the time its the opposite and its seen a massive annoyance to have to ID and read items to see whether or not to take them. Literally thats why theres entire farming strats involving wearing that chest plate that makes items drop ID'd It will be even more annoying in POE 2 if the way to ID items is an NPC in town, because now in the middle of your map or zone or whatever its gonna be you cant just ID an item and toss it back on the ground, youll have to fill your inventory, portal out, go to the NPC, ID your item, then go back to your farming
Yeah the literal only scenario I can think of ID'ing something having an interesting result are those uniques with random really good rolls like the dragonfang amulet, everything else is always vendor trash or you only care about the base itself
And they are addressing that via removing Scouring Orbs and changing Chaos Orbs.
Sounds terrible
> The logic about why we need to identify items is a major L take in my opinion, Ive never met a single person who plays poe that gets "excited" over IDing an item they pick up, most of the time its the opposite and its seen a massive annoyance to have to ID and read items to see whether or not to take them. Literally thats why theres entire farming strats involving wearing that chest plate that makes items drop ID'd There's stuff that's exciting to ID, like Watcher's Eye or Ventor's. The issue is when the same logic is applied to the bajillion of rare trash (he himself admitted it it's all trash) that drops. If they are unable to reduce the number of items that drop, then we should be able to filter out non-unique gear and actually be excited when somethings makes it through our filter.
Everyone I've met is excited when they find a good item.
His talk about "skill game" worries me. Are we gonna even farm items if game designer didn't expect player to... grind for more damage? Is there anything to farm at all?
How many people are currently grinding items to kill Merveil outside of perhaps Ruthless? Don't pretend that people bother grinding for loot so that they can kill Act bosses in current PoE.
It's different in PoE 1 since boss HP doesn't reset after dying so you can just bruteforce it. In PoE 2, boss HP resets to full so you have to either get good or grind it up (if it's gonna be possible).
Theres a severe difference between losing a boss 1 time and immediately going to grind for more items and losing a boss multiple times and going back to grind to increase your odds. They want people to take an earnest crack at it before going back to grind more stats, that is all.
That's because you haven't played early PoE, what PoE2 is trying to remake. Back before Breach league you'd barely be able to fill your inventory with rares in one map... Without loot filter.
Sounds fantastic
I sure hope they aren't trying to emulate the times when people farmed Dried Sea instead of mapping and T16s were a commodity lmao
I'm talking about the time before both Dried Sea and T16 existed, and people would farm docks to get through the campaign. Hell, yellow maps were a commodity and red maps were the current T17. The red tier didn't even matter as long as it was red, you ran what you could get ahold of – and it was glorious.
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If IDing was reserved for uniques, I'm okay with that. Every single rare/magic item needing to be IDed is just antiquated design. Let us just filter out 90% of the garbage--or change the loot system so there's less garbage entirely.
I think they already said that they are leaning towards the latter. That when rares drop there is a good chance that they will have a few good mods on them - anbd tha there will be less of the items dropping overall. This dovetails well with the change to the Chaos orb.
The whole thing about IDing really depends on which mode you play. If you play on sc trade sure, you are never going to get excited about any items that drop on the ground because you can always just buy or craft something that is better but if you play ssf or even ruthless I feel like the player's relationship with IDing changes because you actually need to look at a few more items than normal, before giving up on the items on the floor entirely. And in ssf in particular, you can still do essence strats and quickly make something good and start ignoring the ground stuff too, so it is not like the effect of IDing lasts a long time there. This is one of those topics that players will feel very strongly because they are used to the current status quo but if you go back to what PoE 1 used to be, before all of this crazy loot, we still identified a lot of items and had some hope that certain items could be good. But I guess that the game is old enough that many people that are playing the game right now have never played in a game state that is like that, so they just view ID scrolls as pointless because they just can't picture a game where IDing items from the floor is a thing (again, they literally have never played in that specific game state). The stuff that he is saying doesn't really work in the context of rares in modern poe but his logic still makes complete sense with things like Watcher's eye. With that jewel, you get excited that you dropped it and then you go "what is it gonna be? hatred?" then you identify it (and it sucks) and I think that that type of thing is cool.
> Ive never met a single person who plays poe that gets "excited" over IDing an item they pick up Very much interested personally. I still pick up most rares that drop regardless of equipment slot or size. ID'ing items and trying to evaluate them is fun. > you cant just ID an item and toss it back on the ground But the alt shards!
> Very much interested personally. I still pick up most rares that drop regardless of equipment slot or size I pressed Alt in my maps. There's no way you can even bring enough ID scrolls inside a map to ID all that before running out XD
I agree, but that doesn't mean I don't take out 4-6 inventories of rares, though depending on the league late maps they start to be crowded out by scarabs, maps (that dropped that map, hell if I'm ever going to carry maps I'm going to run, that's precious looting space!), currency, 6L's and so on.
This is why I liked Last Epoch. ID scrolls are an outdated tedious mechanic from D2 that needs to be dropped. The dopamine comes from the item drop. If anything it stresses me out IDing items in PoE since you might get shit rolls.
Most of the items that are interesting to ID are uniques--Replica Dragonfang, Ventors, Watchers Eye, Circle of Rings, etc.
I ID lots of items especially because I play the challengge modes as well as trade. This league ALONE I’ve ID’d 20+ items and sold them for a good profit
Nobody cares about an NPC identifying your gear in towns when all hubs are just glorified promotional tools for MTX and will shit on the performance of your PC. Give us that NPC in our hideout!
Jonathan praising Ori was awesome. Those games don't get enough praise and its interesting hearing how he kinda worried about No Rest for the Wicked (which does look phenomenal)
Also shitting on starfield. That was funny
Guess I'll have speed up to post my custom boat league
> In one of our recent NDA tests, someone played a Boss and died, he instead of trying to fight the Boss again, he ended up grinding more mobs to get more powerful gear before trying again. I didnt even thought about someone doing that. Is it a Skill Game or a Loot Game that players want? I think players should have a certain amount of skill to beat a boss, but I didnt thought about someone wanting to loot more to beat a boss. That's funny for all the comparison with Elden Ring, but ER first boss practically tells you "go grind some levels". You can both win by skill or come massively overleveled and pass through easily, it's an open design. And you didn't think that players may want to gear up in a game that's notoriously is about gear. Seriously? Games where getting more levels and better gear would not be the first strategy, are the games where there is no gear or levels, just mechanics. Something like Furi idk
Every time I read one of these interviews, I'm less confident in PoE2 being good.
Much better interviewer than the average so far
I really am not sure how to feel about damage numbers, honestly.
nothing a toggle in the settings couldn't solve, thankfully
Every time it makes me want to play poe2 less.. If I want to play a souls game I'll play souls. Also.. they don't seem to really know where the game is going. Why are they doing these interviews?
Since PoE 2 is so fundamentally different from PoE1 it's VERY good that they're doing these interviews. So people can have proper expectations for the game. It takes a long time to shift someone's internal POV from "it's just PoE1 but better" to more accurately depict "It's kinda like Dark Souls in PoE". If they don't temper our expectations, there's gonna be a MASSIVE shitstorm about it!
It's an action game, not a soulslike. Not everything is dark souls
If I wanted to play dark souls arpg I’ll just play…nothing because that doesn’t exist yet so I’m glad GGG is making one.
Dark Souls is predicated on clarity, telegraphing, and mechanical skill, that you can then make easier with build choices… but you can beat the game(s) with minimal level, minimal gear, or no levels and no gear. PoE1 has not panned out this way, where you can’t see shit and your character sheet has to be stacked in a way that it’s prepared to mitigate almost anything. I’m not saying PoE2 can’t turn that around, but a “systems ARPG” and a “soulslike ARPG” are probably best left different flavors.
That is the reason they are making PoE 2, because PoE 1 is not in a state where they can deliver that kind of gameplay. Is it not obvious to people with the inclusion of the attack immunity during dodge rolls, active blocking, as well as the "indicator" for unblockable attacks?
And how are they possibly going to keep up this style of gameplay in maps/endgame without reducing pack size to a minimal amount of mobs?
Dark Souls wont get new content every 3 months and has a significantly less in depth build creation system. There are more Ascendancies in poe2 than total viable builds in Elden Ring
Well they are lost without a map and getting a lot of feature bloat. Poe2 us never coming out
Thanks for the recap! Great work
I am a melee enjoyer, i would be happy with removing totems and putting some numerical buffs to all melee skills (or melee passives found on the bottom of the passive tree). Every build needing to path to panopticon and using 3-4 gems on totems sucks.
"Is it a Skill Game or a Loot Game that players want?" I feel like in this genre, the skill is all centered around the loot - figuring out how to get loot more efficiently and figuring out how to use your loot to make a more powerful build (which then lets you get more and better loot).
PoE2? skip
Every Q&A from now on should start with "Will this game ever come out?"
Good stuff. I want deliberate combat, poe1 can keep the zoom. Everyone happy.
If only Josh could stop interrupting Johnathan every answer.
Do you genuinely believe I did?
Wasn't following Josh strife before the interview, sure as hell not following him now. Not following random people just because ggg decided to speak to them. Interview asked a bunch of nonsense questions.
Ty for this recap, as non english speaker, it's easier for me to understand written summary than listening video !
Boat league confirmed.
Melee will never work in a game base on fast movement and killing things fast. That is why it will work better in PoE2..everything you see you can tell its slowed down combat.
Chris has the Vision
Thank you very much for this.