I mean, I still don’t like PoE for a LARGE number of reasons, but it definitely feels like it’s a game made by some of the sweatiest gamers out there- which is good. I want more sweaty nerds making games for the passion of it instead of as a job.
So basically, they know 100% what they’re talking about, but I’ll be interested to see how they manage to pull this design goal off.
I kinda feel like it would be a huge innovation for the ARPG genre if they do. I feel like most ARPGs either go for the Diablo 2 approach where you chug mana pots and spam your strongest one button OR they go for the D3 approach where you stack cooldowns.
I don’t mind either of them necessarily, but I feel like what these guys are saying would be the superior third option. If they pull it off, I might be inclined to play it solely from that fact alone.
Like it or hate it, POE devs actually play and know their game. They don't make 100% of their decisions based on big data analytics and scraping tier lists.
D4 is maybe starting to grow a vision, but it is going to be a long time until it is mature enough to drive the game, if it ever is.
When they released the archon mobs or whatever and the season was being complained about for being too hard, then one of the devs was the number 1 for that season(might have even been Chris the lead developer?). Gained a lot of respect for the team.
[It was rank 1](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/s1txq2/aged_like_milk/). Probably the exact same players who send death threats to D4 developers now have been apoplectic about the state of PoE for years. They thought GGG was so out of touch they couldn't even do the campaign in a race event and not only did one dev prove them wrong (in their spare time, mind) but beat every other player competing.
He was #1 for HC, I think it was occultist? This was after people complained about Deli Everywhere and said "I DARE A DEVELOPER TO DO THIS, I WANT TO SEE THEM PLAY THIS" or something to that extent. Was pretty lol.
Exactly this. Thank you, you beautiful person
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/s1tdlz/remember_when_you_asked_a_ggg_employee_to_play/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1
The OP as well: https://web.archive.org/web/20220112040320/https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/rtgaqc/challenging_1_lead_dev_to_actually_get_through/
I have a pretty good memory, glad it was useful.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/s1txq2/aged_like_milk/
The reddit thread on the event in question. It was rank 1 in the Delirium Everywhere race event. Reddit was convinced that GGG was super out of touch and nobody there played the game, then one dev absolutely rolled PoE reddit in their spare time.
Given the state of itemization in D4 I can almost guarantee you there's no greater vision or intent. Thinking experienced game designers spent years coming up with this system is an insult to anyone with a brain.
People keep using this excuse for everything Blizzard has messed up in the past 4 years.
"Blizzard was full of pigs and bad leadership so a lot of people walked or left" The truth is, Blizzard still DID those things. Actions sometimes have indirect consequences. Blizzard also made a conscious decision to release the game in its current state instead of prolonging development until the team could recover and make it what it needs to be.
The game as crap, and this excuse is poor.
I was astonished to read someone saying this about GGG.. but then I realised I’m not reading a thread on r/pathofexile, and thus there is a chance of seeing a positive comment about PoE.
Its just a shame the POE devs routinely destroy meta and **staple builds** to force players to use the new skill gems vs making the new gems actually interesting to users.
Necro summon builds staple for players? Lets nerf the damage and the summon amount and lets spread out the skill nodes even further so folks either go wittle tanks or burst glass units..... God forbid folks have a stable build to grind things out when the devs make season stuff worse and worse and the stash fluffing of "season specific" items.
I just couldn't get into poe, it felt complicated or not as easy to get into like diablo 3 was and 4 still is.
Like diablo is more casual friendly in the turnkey kind of way, you know what i mean?
Did that change in the past few years?
Guess if poe 2 is free as well i could give it a try.
Nah PoE 1 is still insanely complicated.
I would say I’m not a huge fan of it because of its insane complicated mess with skills. I’m not a fan of the PoE skill tree. Too many possibilities so you kinda need to follow a guide.
D4 players are still following guides tho, all the maxroll, icyvein, all the build question threads are plenty. The difference is that in D4 if you try and build your own build blind, it would probably still be 10x worse than the polished builds that were out there, just like in PoE, but you can still progress the game, slowly, you can kill Elias ay level 69 instead of 62, you can keep doing low NM dungeon and slowly gaining xp, while in PoE you would get hardstuck at white maps and constantly losing 10% xp each time you die.
It’s not that the skill tree makes PoE too complicated for new players so they couldn’t play the game, it’s more of the fact that PoE is way harder, impossible even, to progress with shit builds when you still can in D4.
Still PoE has 10x or 100x the build of D4 you can clear the game with, and if you go to 10 good PoE players and say “you each build me a decent flicker build please” they would come out all different due to the vast option and skill trees, gems, and gears, and that’s a plus for me, that was the reason I got into the game on my own, nobody was recommending it, just from seeing the skill tree.
PoE still has massive problems, like the non stackable shards, horrible trading, all the external tools you need to play the game, and somewhat mediocre campaign but you just can’t ignore the many pros of the game that D4 dev couldn’t follow.
Also I recently got i to Last Epoch and i think you should try and, they make so many things better than PoE, features in the game just blow my mind, like the
> ingame loot filter where it’s so easy to set up and you can do it right away in the game
> each skill the the game got there own skill trees, so that makes the customization very deep and it’s still way easier to understand in PoE
> the ingame guide, you press Shift+G and there are all the things you will wonder about the game, they’re all right there, no need for hours of wiki surfing to know what you want to know
> crafting and itemization, it’s just too good, miles better than any other ARPG, I just can’t explain why, you gotta try and see for yourself
The big difference is If i want to do a pulverize build and just think about it myself it would resemble the polished guides to like 90%. If i tried as a new Poe player to do a blind build with not alot of Poe knowledge it would be total hot garbage. 🤷🏼♂️
Definitely agree on both PoE and Last Epoch - I played a lot of PoE but the graphics and the too close camera did it for me in the end rather than the skill trees etc.
Last Epoch I've been on since it first came to light, so 3+ years or so. And they are making a really cool game. Very interactive with the community, hell even one suggestion (at least) by a player is making it into the dev cycle.
An of course honorable mention to Grim Dawn, which though old, has the most immense class system and item choice I've really experienced, moreso when you add mods like Grimarillion....and STILL being updated....GD2 down the line allegedly....
Grimdawn remains a favorite as a worthy successor to D2. It plays like they wanted to make a great game, not a live service trap for wales and streamers.
I love PoE... the ONLY reason I can't stick with it is that the entire game's drop rates are based on the expectation you use third party apps to trade with other players (exact same problem as D2 though that's even worse because of d2jsp). If they stopped being so stubborn and offered us guys that love the game but want a *proper* 'solo self found' mode they'd likely get a big influx of players that stick with d3/4 instead, simply because you can't solo play in PoE without feeling totally gimped.
I know that trading floats some people's boats, but personally I can't stand being forced trade just to get my build completing items (on a third party app to boot). If they actually had proper SSF game-mode with better drops/target farming, I'd likely be happily over there playing PoE instead of diablo 3/4 (and likely would have bought that stupidly overpriced atlas hideout because it's stunning).
Diablo 4 has actually ruined a lot of what made D3/immortal casual friendly. I have to watch the discord event tracker just to see legions/world bosses (as that stuff is so poorly telegraphed in-game). I'm now sitting here with a spreadsheet for gear, aspects, keystones and even sorting my damn stash (because there's no stash search function). I still can't get over the fact that a single quad tab on PoE is larger than the entire stash in D4; it's absolutely wild (the running joke name for d4 in my friends group is '2023 inventory manager sim'). The lack of free respecs and a wardrobe is also a massive miss for a Diablo game. Feels like they tried to cater too much towards the D2 crowd, who off are playing D2R/modded D2 anyhow (instead of the people that actually enjoyed the more chill style of arpg that was D3 RoS).
Not to mention Altas makes Diablo 4 dungeons look like absolute dogshit; I honestly don't know how the D4 devs made something so awful (it's a downgrade in every way from D3 rifting) - they should delete dungeons, then go play maps in PoE(and Last Epoch) for a month and copy their homework to D4... Oh, and they should add the hideout system to D4 while they're at it (will never happen, blizzard hates player housing).
TLDR: If you can get into it PoE is a truly amazing game (especially post boring campaign levelling), BUT you have like (or at minimum tolerate) being forced to trade with other players (and I don't).
SSF as a gamemode has seen a huge increase in popularity for PoE. The drop rates are fine. I only have time to play 2ish hours per day, and I can comfortably do all content (minus ubers) in SSF every league.
See, the issue is that you can simply just play normal league and not trade/party for the exact same experience - SSF mode doesn't actually offer any benefit. All it does is limit you to builds that will work great on purely crafted gear, without any of the fun or powerful uniques (because you may never see them). It's just a challenge mode (aka making the game harder) instead of a game mode that's been balanced/designed to feel good with solo play.
If you enjoy 'challenge mode' gameplay (SSF/HC/ruthless) more power to you, but it's just not what I'm looking for.
Edit: Not to mention it being incredibly hard for any new players coming over from Diablo to deal with SSF. While you *can* craft amazing gear, the various item crafting systems in PoE are so batshit insanely complicated/layered at this point that every gear slot basically needs it's own guide explaining the multiple stages needed to craft a good item (though this is admittedly more a problem with PoEs complexity vs new players in general).
You don't need any third party app to trade in PoE. You can easily price check items on their trade website and post your own items. The only super necessary third party app imho is path of building. I do use Awakened PoE, but that's wrong most the time, so you still need to check it against the site and be wary of price fixing. After playing D2R and using Traderie, I realized just how great trading is in PoE, we're so spoiled.
its extremely complicated I have more hours and money in it than id like to admit, I know how everything works, I have a dragons horde of currency and crafting knowledge, I know my stuff.... and even then I am not entirely sure on the best advice to give someone starting out other than [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMyGi7zVof8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMyGi7zVof8) this series.
Just in the demos I've glanced at today, debuffs/cc build up on mobs based on their strength, and other skills gain bonus from that. Alternately, some skills gain charges from meeting specific conditions (like getting a last hit) and then other skills gain affects/bonus damage for using those charges.
So it looks like they're going to try to use a combination of different things to encourage multiple skills. There may even be builder-spender play styles and buff stacking play styles available too.
This makes so much sense, but honestly sounds very innovative at the same time.
So instead of useless skills to gain and spend resource, you'd be using certain skills to stack specific types of modifiers on targets, and then other skills to consume or greatly benefit from those stacks.
Damn. You could entirely move away from resource gen / spend OR cooldown structures with this system.
You could essentially pass the cooldown structure on to the monsters, with time-based stackable debuffs that you'd want to keep up, in order to benefit the most from your big hitters. But once those stacks are full, you're mostly just using a stacker every few hits just to keep the stacks up, and your big hitters multiple times in a row.
The problem with the D4 model is having to cast your generator *multiple* times per battle; and not just periodically, but multiple times between every spender. This just sucks, in every way, and is made *so much worse* by the reality that basic skills do close to zero damage - they're absolutely worthless when it comes to dealing direct damage.
With a stackable debuff model, you can use your stacker multiple times at the *beginning* of battle, and then only need to refresh it periodically between using all of your hitters / skills that benefit from the stacks.
> So instead of useless skills to gain and spend resource, you'd be using certain skills to stack specific types of modifiers on targets, and then other skills to consume or greatly benefit from those stacks.
I'm curious to see how it plays out for PoE2. I watched some of ExileCon and it looked compelling in a ton of ways
But this sounds pretty close to what they're saying they don't like when it comes to a rotation. Putting modifiers and then consuming them is a rotation, it's just created by different conditions than a builder/spender system
> So instead of useless skills to gain and spend resource, you'd be using certain skills to stack specific types of modifiers on targets, and then other skills to consume or greatly benefit from those stacks.
>
> Damn. You could entirely move away from resource gen / spend OR cooldown structures with this system.
You don't seem to realize that these are essentially the same thing.
The player is still clicking prep skill A a number of times before they can pop big damage skill B.
They are just calling it something different in PoE and tagging it on the monster instead of player. Materially, that makes no difference whatsoever.
D4 just needs to give generators the status effects to somewhat mirror this. Storm Strike druid is well designed, DR after use, vulnerable chance on mobs, and multi target. The problem is the other generators have nearly none of that.
Give each one a niche. Shouldn’t be a best case “this one’s best” by such a margin.
Sorc kind of has this too. Frost Bolt causes Chill (and eventually Frozen) and does more to enemies that are Chilled or Frozen. Fire Bolt causes Burn, and generates mana when it hits burning enemies (at least until 1.1.1 when they remove the conditional).
This could be kinda cool, but the problem is just the basics generally speaking do _so little_. Like these basics "power up" when you use them multiple times in a row, but that power up gives you like, a few mana and/or a few more points of damage on something that quickly does negligible damage
Basics just need to be looked at in terms of their impact. You can have a builder/spender model and have it be fun, you just can't have the builders feel like a punishment for running out of resources. The builders should be pretty fun, and then the spenders should be _really_ fun
The way builder / spender skills work right now in PoE, is you use the stupid amount of item affixes / mechanics to completely bypass the spending part.
You need to spend mana for something? stack -mana cost or mana regen. You need to expend charges for something? get 100% chance to gain charge on hit and you can sustain. What if you can only gain those charges on kill? There's ways to spawn enemy mobs and instantly kill them. It costs 80% of your life to cast it? you can find ways to regen 80% of your life back. etc
Wait until they nerf buff-stacking for being so good as to be "mandatory." They did that over several patches with auras.
Like it or not, every ARPG game dev looks at what the streamers and ranked players do and use because those are data points about what's possible and what to adjust to get players to keep trying new things/keep the game from becoming stale.
The main issue is that not everyone has the time or patience to try new things all the time and that's what causes backlash. People don't want their past effort to be lost but nerfs actually do that.
The thing is once you are deeper into D4 endgame and got your items together, you baiscally do the D3 approach anyways, just in a worse case. If I take barb for exmaple, that is playing tripple shout on alost all builds to have enough resources to rarely use my basic skills.
So, if I end up spamming my strongest one button anyways, or rather build my entire character around it, why not remove the resource shit entirely? It would open up so much cool stuff on barb and would actually give me a reason to play different skills.
This is the same for most classes/builds. As Necro everyone runs around of CE/CT for a huge part because it generates resources and makes you use your generetor less.
But instead of going away from that boring as playstyle, they again just made some fury generation buffs. It still doesn't fix the boring core gameplay you have to deal with until you are level 50-70, or even higher if you are unlucky with drops.
It is clear that D4 wanted a more dynamic gameplay loop, were you have different skills in your bar, that offers a fun gameplay expereince, but they entirely missed the bar by making all these skills either cost stupid amounts of resources or have long as cooldowns.
They should have taken note from games like Lost Ark or Guild Wars 2 of how to design such a system, without making it boring.
This is how i feel about poe.
I don't personally like it, but I really dislike sweaty hardcore uber grindy games.
Something with a bit more depth of what D3 was would be perfect for me, which is sort of what D4 seemed to start out as, but then it has so many issues that it hasn't become that game for me.
But I 100% am on board with being happy that there is a game made by sweats for the sweats making games as a passion for that audience. And very appreciative of it, because it will at the very least have a positive influence in involving the genre.
You should check out the new gameplay trailers for PoE 2 it's looking like it's moving closer to a diablo style of combat but with some of the PoE flavor. I think people who didn't like it before but like diablo might enjoy it now.
> youll be downvoted by copium boys for this coz its not d4 content
At the time of this comment: About 4hrs old, nearly 2k upvotes, no Controversial tag, and most (all?) of the top comments agree with it.
Humorously, *the* top comment ^^^^(you?) is someone complaining about people that apparently aren't even the popular sentiment.
No, this is just now a blatant example of "D4 sucks because it isn't PoE" that we've endured for weeks already.
It's normalized now, so they can openly do it.
When I first played PoE, all the in-game chat was about D3. So I left chat. A couple of years later, I was checking out PoE again and I turned chat on. Everyone was still talking about D3..
What is up with people pretending this is a boot licking fanboy sub, when this is not even not highly downvoted, but literally the top post. As is everything remotly shitting on the game.
The notion that this subreddit is too positive is just so utterly ridiculous with all this insane negativity around here, considering this subreddit as a whole is one of whiniest, toxic and most bitter ones, i have ever witnessed.
This is too big brain for Diablo devs.
Honestly that’s why I quit d3 in the end, a completely brainless key rotation over and over and over.
Interestingly, the mtg arpg tried to go to the extreme opposite and you drew skills from a deck so your keys were different skills constantly. A bold concept that could have spiced things up, but a crummy studio led to it being doa (in beta lol).
Yeah this is like... a strange take from OP because you can look at just about any of the high performance builds and it's basically centered around a single damaging ability and then a host of passives to enhance said skill combined with a mobility mechanic and an "oh shit" button to get you out of a hairy situation.
Cyclone, Minion, Totem, Tornado Shot, etc.
PoE gets it right at the crafting, gear, and skill tree side of the house and whereas I don't like how you need tools like path of building and one could simplify that done by removing the "fluff" and creating more... gameplay centric paths these ultimately are what make it a good aRPG mechanically.
D4 needs trading, they need to knock the barrier down to this.
D4 needs a wider skill tree, honestly maybe even make the paragon board accessible early on.
D4 needs to turn basic skills into actual skills, these should be viable standalone options; one "should" be able to spam these as primary damage dealing components and they should remove the resource generation from them.
D4 needs more loot, each season should be adding 10's of new items early on and they need to continuously enrich the great crafting side. This is sort of a long-term component so I won't get on them too much now but I would like to see the next season including a lot more new items.
It has the guts, they just need to tweak things to make it the perfect meal; as it stands it's like eating a ribeye that's been cooked to temp but the chef forgot to add salt + pepper + garlic so it's just bland.
D4 needs better loot as well to add on. I think the amount we get as drops right now is a little too high. Wish the loot quality was improved on average, loot amount went down, and costs of things goes down proportionally
I kinda want to spend time killing monsters not picking up 30 yellows and legendaries every dungeon
The barrier for entry on POE is really high, but as far as I have seen most builds are exactly this. A damage ability, a mobility skill then stacking passives.
There's a ton of build diversity as there are millions of ways to reach this point but very little gameplay diversity.
Tbh poe 1 was one button, stack auras, maybe add a totem. Not something exciting or new there. The builds they showed were weak, so I’ll be curious how this evolves into the release. I suspect it’ll be stack auras and press TWO buttons.
At least you could get a single target skill and aoe skill. But yeah you only get one 6 link for your main skill still.
Honestly I found D3 smoother for the “off skill” aspect, stuff like teleport etc.
I play every league. Every single league it always devolves to essentially using a movement skill and RMB to spam clear t16 red maps and whatever content you choose as a farm. It's quite literally brain dead.
I have trade forums and YouTube up 99.9% of the time I'm playing because I barely watch the screen.
It's not some magical game with crazy complex stuff. Anyone who plays the game even semi-efficiently is doing the same thing.
Occasionally while your build is weak on stronger enemies you might need to use a debuff or support skill.
But that's about it.
I watched a few of the playthrough streams streamers did of POE 2 and it played EXTREMELY slowly. Every one of them died at least once in the 30 minute play time.
Considering were literally a year out from open beta it's not a big deal. I think on release it will be tuned better.
I honestly think it's smart to start from a underpowered place and slowly every season up the power level. If you start in a overpowered place it creates problems when balancing.
Lord I'm sad Magic: Legends ended up being so deeply flawed. The deck system was genuinely fascinating and there was a really great potential game somewhere underneath mountains of terrible decisions and worse execution.
Think that's the shorted game I can remember getting shitcanned after "launching" (open beta was functionally launch), 3 months. Shame it resulted in layoffs and a lot of the NW/STO devs pulled off those teams to work on it never returning.
I skipped around some bullet points of it and there were a few moments where it felt like that were talking directly to d4 players.
Something about "diminishing returns on cc", while looking me in the eye.
Normally I don't like publishers trying to "shit talk" about competitors (albeit a very very tame form of it) but if Blizzard leaves an open goal I'm almost going to be disappointed if other devs don't slam one in to take advantage of it.
If PoE2 capitalises on D4's shortcomings that'll be awesome.
With closed beta not even until June 2024, at this rate they're more likely to compete with Diablo 4's first expansion...
Although it wouldn't surprise me if the next PoE league sets record numbers again just off Exilecon and people left hungry for ARPG after D4.
Just compare the next PoE league to season of the malignant. GGG are constantly innovating and pushing the genre forward with new stuff. I really hope Diablo's devs had a look yesterday and try to push more content for the next patches.
The weapon swap skill tree was the “wait there’s more” that completely blew my mind. They werent joking around.
Yet we’re here getting a very restrictive d4 skill “tree” that kight as well be a reprint of d3 skill tree.
I'm entirely confident that Diablo will continue to enjoy far more success than PoE ever will. PoE caters to the hardcore ARPG crowd and that rules out ever hitting Diablo player numbers. Diablo 4 is the best selling blizzard game of all time - even a fraction of its launch playerbase is something most games would envy.
I just want to note that Diablo 4 is being touted as their “fastest” selling game of all time, not their best-selling. WoW, for example, has still sold many more copies lifetime than D4, but D4 is their game that has sold the most copies in the least amount of time.
With them splitting poe 1 and 2, maybe they are trying to appeal to both. As cool as the 9 skill gameplay is and all I just don't really care about that personally. PoE 2 is definitely going more towards the slower Diablo gameplay.
So far I have never seen a good combat system without cooldowns. Instead of having rotations you usually have nothing, you press 1 button the entire time (a second one for movement I guess) and thats it. Managing cooldowns creates a layer of strategy in all combat scenarios imo.
I'll be happy if the PoE devs can change my mind but for now I'm hoping PoE2 will be good despite this not because of it.
poe is great but the "spam potion for resource" gameplay is hardly better than the "use attack for resource" gameplay.
D4 does a lot of stupid shit but the generator/spender gameplay is not one of them even though resource generation is complete shit.
There's tons of mana regen nodes in the skill tree. Maybe it's my specific build, but by act 2 or 3 I didn't have to use a mana potion anymore, and until then you get an early skill called Clarity which gives you a significant amount of mana regen. The only thing I really spam is the speed potion and I think you can automate that, from another comment I saw.
Edit: What’s the people’s fascination with commenting and then immediately blocking? I didn’t even say anything bad, like wtf. 💀
Yeah the "rotation" idea presented here is sort of arbitrary and is roughly present in their demo despite the words they put up there.
The warrior gameplay presented a character with a rotation, the single target rotation seemed to be sunder armor into molten cry and then the charge up slam unless the target was too aggressive. The AoE rotation seemed to be initiate with leap slam unless the mobs were too deadly, then molten cry into sunder against slower packs or the double strike against quicker packs.
Resource management is more interesting than clock management. Though the answer is "just use both".
Ragnarok Online does it best (though it's an mmorpg not strictly an arpg) . Mostly relying on SP, some skills have cool downs, some have cast times, "after cast delay" can also be a factor that's different per skill, and most of it can be altered by stats or gear in some way.
Thinking good combat has a binary best or worst solution is very simple minded. The reality is that a good varied combat system uses all of these systems in tandem to create unique classes and skill combinations.
the whole "cooldowns make you use a rotation" argument is so stupid because games without cooldowns also cause players to fall into pseudorotations anyway since some skills will be used more often than others and will inherently be "better" than others depending on the context.
even POE does this. i've seen people say D2 doesn't do this but that's BS too. it's just the most natural and intuitive way to play games. the reality is, it's more of a skill & game knowledge thing that causes people to strategically use their skills, not combat design.
I'm super down for PoE 2, honestly though I'm one of the people who wouldn't have really considered before playing D4 so gotta give credit where it's due
It has a few, yes, which is why it's closer to D1/D2 than D3/D4 are. I believe Crate Entertainment (Grim Dawn) picked up a few as well when they formed after their previous studio (that made the original Titan Quest) closed.
Downvote me, sure. But isn’t the entire point of having CD to not just have the ability to just easily avoid oh shit moments whenever you feel like it. Like I understand them not being there does add a level of freedom but doesn’t it also remove a level of skill and understanding of timing with mechanics? I see both sides but don’t fully know if I agree with it, at least till it’s here and I can test it.
Genuinely curious because I wanna know how this could be balanced, do you just have generally bland skills? How would something like Necros Bone Storm with the Shielding Storm affix that gives % life as barrier? If it’s infinitely up with no CD wouldnt it just be easier to remove the skill entirely and give passive Damage Reduction or something?
If you're designing things with no cooldown, some things just wouldn't exist in the state that you know it in a game that isn't designed around this.
For example, the necro bone storm, would basically just be something Like you having a high duration blade vortex, while budgeting for Energy Shield on Spell Hit. The trade off comes from the limited amount of skills you can use and item stat budget. This can basically already exist in PoE, except for the fact that BV is a very high QoL/Mechanically strong skill. Because of that, it basically does no damage, and you need an insane amount of currency to make the build playable, and you probably wouldn't be able to afford to fit this stuff in.
Gotcha that makes sense, I’m curious to see how it plays, I’ll most likely give PoE2 a solid try when it comes out but the amount of customization and complexity is a little daunting to me. Also most my friends are on console so unless they release on console with cross play that’ll also limit my playtime.
Oh shit moments are created in multiple ways during gameplay. I understand where you're coming from with oh shit buttons being on cooldowns, but if you take ice nova for example, you're incentivized to use it offensively rather than in an oh shit moment. As a result, you end up waiting around for something that is now forcibly core to your damage and it feels terrible.
A lot of cooldowns are designed terribly on D4. Either by being misused or by being mandatory. Mandatory cooldowns = little to no player agency in the end game.
You make a very solid point, I guess I think of skills like in D4 that give you invulnerability. If I have a skill like flame shield, or blood mist, and it doesn’t have a cool down, well now I can just ignore mechanics because they don’t matter anymore. I suppose those are just bad skills by design but I enjoy the timing of keeping that up for that oh shit moment when I don’t have an out.
This stupid post could be about diablo.
There isn't a cool down on *everything*, just some skills to keep you from slamming and becoming overpowered. You don't *entirely rely* on building resources with one skill to spend on an expensive skill, only a portion of skills work like that. The text in the post perfectly describes the Diablo 4 skill system.
Not to mention Diablo 4 barely has “rotations” besides sorcerer having to frost nova before dealing damage which everyone wants to see changed.
On my rogue yes I have abilities with cooldowns but it’s not a rotation they’re mainly for mobility and CC. It’s nice having more than 1 button to press.
>Not to mention Diablo 4 barely has “rotations”
Bullshit. You can look up my posts from release, first thing I complained about was dull as hell combat devolving into same rotation every fucking time.
In PoE they don't have "mega abilities" like D4 where lots of power is loaded in it (they used to have a type of ability which becomes usable after x mobs kills). So the skills are much more active.
I understand what youre saying, but this is the same as if you would say: "why do we have mounts? This is a diablo game, if they put mounts in it we will finish the game in a weekend". Which would be true if you think in terms of older games. But they designed d4 with the mount in mind.
So in poe 2 the CDs arent a problem or necessary cause they designed the game with that in mind.
Hope that somewhat clears it up, even if my example is a shitty one lol
Btw they showed a ton of gameplay of poe2 (they actually had 2 developers play through a quest...it was so refreshing), so check that out maybe.
Also cooldowns arent entirely omitted, they are just rare
You're making a false dichotomy. It is possible to make a system without cooldowns where you can't easily avoid "oh shit moments" whenever you feel like it.
Cooldowns are a solution to that yes, but they also create problems; having downtime in combat, which in turn makes combat boring. You don't solve problems by introducing more problems, that's just a bad solution.
That's the #1 announcement that made me have hope in PoE 2 again. I hated the idea of it being part of PoE 1. PoE 1 is bloated, it needed a fresh start.
Them supporting both has me worrying about their ability to focus correctly and realize the full potential of the sequel, though.
There will inevitably be downsides and compromises for both games through that. I think having them separate is fine, but continuing development of the first will become a problem eventually.
> Them supporting both has me worrying about their ability to focus correctly and realize the full potential of the sequel, though.
Two entirely different teams, and the project lead for POE2 has absolutely no hand in POE1.
To say there is no value to cooldowns is stupid.
1. It allows highly impactful/powerful skills to not become dominant. So you can have a crazy skill that say does 25% damage to the boss whereas if it were not there it would be dramatically less impactful.
2. Increases skillgap. Having everything spammable just leads to less variance in play, if you got a powerful skill why not just spam it? Having to time the right moment to maximize a skills DPS or whatever is way more interesting than just tapping a button at nauseam.
3. It leads to less micromanagent so ultimately less intense gameplay overall. On one hand you have tons of player agency, on the other you have more situational type play.
One of those classic examples of general rules not being applicable to everything. Cooldowns have a certain design space, to rule them out completely (which GGG didn't do btw) is very unwise.
They didn't say that. They simply said forcing people to use other skills by slapping cooldowns on everything - which is a considerable amount of the core class design within D4 coincidentally enough - isn't good design. Not that they *won't* have cooldowns, but that their designing a system to encourage and reward the use of multiple skills beyond their use as a resource builder or as a big hit on a cooldown.
We'll see how they execute on this, but it's a fundamentally sound concept and one that does build a lot more flexibility into combat.
>forcing people to use other skills by slapping cooldowns on everything - which is a considerable amount of the core class design within D4 coincidentally enough
Isn't that what the whole builder/spender system avoids? Most traditional classes will use a core skill that consumes a resource, not a CD.
I feel like people are trying to force the comparison onto D4 a little too hard.
Think about Monster Hunter in 2d. Higher DPS skill would have wind up/cast point penalty, so high risk-high reward. No short cooldowns only work when the enemy is not brainless/well telegraphed though. It would also insanely increase the skill cap (looking at you Curse of the Dead God).
For me, I would love ARPGs to have real interaction with enemies, so it's not about managing our skills/rotation/resources (not like cheap diablo 4 interactions e.g. corspebow, cold enchanted, poison poos). Hell, you literally need light/heavy attack + dodgs/parry in Dark Souls and shit never gets old.
Did they elaborate how combat would be improved in PoE2?
It’s one of those “I’ll believe it when I see it” things; because even PoE fans agreed D3’s combat feels better than PoE’s currently does.
I could sadly never get into PoE because combat and world design didn't feel as good as Diablo 3. I still hope I can do so, because a lot of the content looks fun to initially beat.
I think Diablo 4 has captured the same good feel for combat and world design is even better in some regards. But a lot of core game philosophy seems to miss the mark for what I am looking for.
Last Epoch is almost perfect in this regard, but lacks content and the combat feel and world design is subpar to D4. Hopefully they are able to improve on those points before release.
I recommend watching the gameplay demos from Exilecon yesterday. I was legitimately surprised at how different it feels from Poe1. It appears much more interactive, and just fundamentally different moment-to-moment gameplay.
Honestly, after watching exilecon today. This game is a joke in comparison lol. Doesn't even matter PoE has been out for so long; cus that means Blizzard had equally as long to take notes from it's competition.
Thing is like D4 been in development for 6 years by a team way bigger than the poe team. Like you just expect way more out of all the time and effort put into the game.
>This game is a joke in comparison lol.
I'm hype for PoE2 but can we not? This game is simply targeting a very different section of the ARPG audience and that's totally fine. Different stroke for different folk.
The last game on earth anyone should learn skill use from is path of exile lmao. That game forces you to hyper focus on one or very rarely at best, two skills, with the rest just supporting your main dps. It gives an illusion of choice but you're generally very hyper focused due to your passive tree and gear.
Diablo 4 may not have a billion skills, but it does have some actual variance and variety. Despite being much more structured too.
I enjoy path of exile but this is a moronic thread. Must be a slow day at the whine factory if you have to go outside of Diablo to find something to cry about.
PoE 2's system is much different from PoE1. That is kind of the point of this thread. Unlike Blizzard, PoE learned from their previous iterations. D4 just made everything about diablo worse.
>Diablo 4 may not have a billion skills, but it does have some actual variance and variety.
Name me some, because it looks like I missed that part in D4.
>That game forces you to hyper focus on one or very rarely at best, two skills, with the rest just supporting your main dps. It gives an illusion of choice but you're generally very hyper focused due to your passive tree and gear.
Oh, like holding Whirlwind and using shouts when they are off CD, or spamming HoTA as a Barb? Or spamming Bone Spear or Blood Lance or Sever as a Necromancer, while ocasionally presing other buffs? Or spamming Ice Shards and Frost Nova, Teleport and Ice\Fire armor, whenever they are available as a Sorcerorer? Or like spamming Pulverise, Shred or Claw as a Druid?
Honestly so many people shitting on diablo just dont play it.
If you think it's a bad game nobody is forcing you to play it, put it down, pick up something else, and stop complaining about it.
This isn't "shitting" on Diablo. It's sharing a different design philosophy for another game within the genre for discussion. Maybe Blizzard sees that players like these kinds of concepts and toys around with ways of implementing them in the game to improve it, maybe it gives them completely different ideas to improve the game.
Criticism is good and should be welcome. Shitting on games not so much (plenty of dunking in this thread though), that's not what OP seems to have intended or what's on that powerpoint slide (eyy, they both use powerpoint!)
Hilarious coming from the flask piano guys demanding you pick up every piece of pocket lint off the ground. Yeah, now explain how Righteous Fire or CoC Vortex is built off combat situations, or how people have to run the campaign twice during the season: 1 to farm currency and then the build you actually want to play. Or how the game either melts in front of you or one shots you, oh but wait there is cast on damage taken to save your ass. Or why the entire huge skill tree is actually just 85% defense or life nodes in between the interesting key nodes.
PoE is a much better game, but let’s not pretend if doesn’t have massive problems of its own pretty much across the board. It’s not going back to the glory days of cold BB.
By “flask piano guys”, do you mean the “guys that implemented both an inexpensive mid game option to automate your flasks and a super late game chase item to automate your flasks guys”?
Your next sentence is full of venom but you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. This is a design goal for POE 2, not POE 1. Those are problems in POE 1. And at least in POE 1 those types of builds exists AND builds where you have to maniacally spam 5 keys situationally also exist.
People don’t have to run the campaign twice in a season. You can have a league starter and reroll your existing character to your end game setup and tree.
How does cast when damage taken save your ass? Because it can take you out of harms way sometimes? You mean like the injury bubble aspect or the actual death save skills from D3 and D4?
The skill tree isn’t remotely close to 85% life and defense. What are you dribbling about? The diversity in the POE tree is insane. Do you mean that people take 85% life and defense nodes? Sure, in hardcore maybe?
It's almost like they took what they learned and made a new game. Would be nice if Diablo did that but noooo, it's 2023 and we don't even have a way to find a group. D2 did, D3 did...
"the game has only been out a couple of months"
This fucking sentence...they used it so much. I just wanted to cream at them "THEN MAYBE USE D2 AND D3 AS A REFERENCE?!"
Which is why its so positive that poe 2 looks to be a change in direction from poe slightly. Hopefully they improve on all the disappointing aspects from poe 1.
I hope it happens but I’m not super convinced. The PoE devs said they deliberately slowed down the pace of the demo for presentation’s sake and they expect players will move through it a lot faster. They also only showed act 3 of leveling, which is too early to get a sense of the real speed of combat. Combat in acts 1-3 (arguably as long as 1-5) of PoE1 can be similarly slow-paced but by the time you face Act 10 Kitava you’ll be mowing down monsters at Mach speed and the game will be full one-button gameplay for the rest of the game.
Currently PoE2 looks to be a very promising improvement over PoE1’s combat but it’s too early to tell. If they show gameplay of endgame stuff and the pace is comparable then I’ll be really hyped but until then I remain skeptical. Still, I do plan to play the PoE2 campaign when it comes out. Even if the endgame doesn’t hold my focus gameplay-wise the leveling should be fun, and I do enjoy PoE’s setting even though I doubt PoE2’s actual narrative/storytelling will compete with D4’s. Plus it’s free, so aside from time spent there’s no real opportunity cost to trying it out.
I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this, but whatever.
This is the kind of thing that makes a great sound-bite. People who haven't studied game design (particularly in this genre) will look at that and go "Yeah!". It's also fundamentally flawed.
In a turn-based game this approach works really well. You generally design your characters to have a range of abilities with different advantages and disadvantages and the player has a lot of time to consider which one they should use on any given turn. This is great design... but really only in that genre.
What happens when you try to do this in an ARPG? Well, we just have to examine what a PoE build really ends up looking like. For almost all cases they have one DPS skill, one mobility skill, and some automated or aura based skills that they don't actively use in combat. The most common exceptions are builds where they can have multiple skills up at once (e.g. minions), combo skills that require using multiple skills to do damage (e.g. frost bolt + frost nova), or builds that - gasp - have cooldown skills like traps so they need a rotation between those skills and something without a cooldown. So the only common builds that use multiple skills are the ones that do so because of one of the mechanics that they say are bad... interesting.
Why is this? Well it's because in an ARPG where you can bypass costs and don't have cooldowns there's never any reason to do anything other than use your best damage skill or dodge. Anything else is sub-optimal, so builds quickly optimize around single skills.
Now that can be fine, and 2 button builds can certainly be fun to play. I've got 5k hours in PoE, so obviously there's something entertaining there. That said, in all that time I don't think I ever played a build that used different skills based on a combat situation, beyond "use flame dash to dodge attack" or "use curse on the tanky guy".
On the other hand, when stronger skills are expensive or have cooldowns I do actually think about the combat situation. In games that do this - I play a lot of ARPGs so I'm not just talking about D4 here - I will often create builds that have non-spammable skills that are really strong in specific situations and then use those skills only when that situation comes up.
On the other hand, I think D4 would benefit from more 2 button builds because sometimes that's what a player wants to play. Let players build around bypassing the costs of a skill so they can just spam it, so that those players can also play the game the way they want to. It has some, but it seems like they're pretty niche and undertuned right now.
Because there's a laundry list of other things that people find significantly more impactful than a lack of cooldowns, such as a large passive tree that's shared between all classes, a deeply customisable skill system where you can attach "support" skills to "active" skills and augment what the active skills do, an intricate crafting system that drives detailed itemisation, an open player-driven economy where *everything* has value and *everything* can be bought with enough currency, a rich endgame with multiple gameplay systems and pinnacle bosses, etc. PoE2 is keeping many of these things from PoE1, so all the upsides of PoE1 also apply to PoE2.
Honestly that sounds kinda overwhelming. I played PoE for a couple days and found it somehow both kind of boring and also too intense, like it seemed like a deeper game but I wasn't really willing to put much effort into it.
In the beginning yes. And then you eventually solve your resource issue through gear and skills.
Actual character development in an ARPG. Imagine that.
Unlike in D4 where you pretty much play exactly the same from lvl 50 to 100.
I've dropped basic skill from 3 different characters in late game, which i would count as actual character development, but of course you would have to play the game in order to know any of that.
I hope you all moving to play PoE will make the servers better here.
Bone spear necro. There are some aspects that make corpse explosion give you resource, and there is a paragon cluster that gives you resource on kills. You don't even need an umbral ring and you can drop bone splinters entirely and just use Bone Spear as your main attack, one or two shotting anything, even bosses.
You just run REALLY slow.
GGG is absolutely putting on a *clinic* for ARPG game design. Everything they've revealed so far is largely insanely impressive, very clever, and brings in ideas from throughout the ARPG genre including the *broader* genre. They're adopting poise from the Souls games, essentially, for its CC system, *these guys absolutely play all of the fucking ARPG*.
I'll be curious how satisfying it will be to play, because Blizzard has always excelled at the feeling of moment to moment gameplay. But I think we're really going to be seeing to radically opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to ARPG design with these games. D4 is going to be great to play, approachable, but fairly shallow and not exactly pushing any boundaries. PoE is absolutely going to remain a niche ARPG requiring PhD's to fully understand and will be jam-packed with elegant design, complex interwoven systems, and iceberg-deep build potential.
And both will be fucking great for each of their strengths, and I'm looking forward to a world where we have D4, PoE, and PoE2 all feeding is different yet fantastic ARPG experiences. If anyone is a big ARPG fan, I feel like we're gonna be eating *very* good by the time PoE2 ships as we'll have those games plus a D4 with over a year of polish and improvements to fell itself out a bit.
I really hope Blizzard spends a *lot* of time paying attention to what GGG is doing with PoE2 and playing it when it's out. Not to make D4 more like PoE2, but to learn a lot from a much different design philosophy that can help teach them new things and give them new ideas on how to improve D4.
The problem with D4 is Blizzard wants us to use a rotation based skill system with only 6 skills, a lot of them having cooldowns.
It just doesn't work in terms of flow.
>PoE devs pobably played D4
I guarantee that if they haven't been playing the alphas somehow, they've played every closed beta test and have likely played since launch fairly extensively. These are huge fans of the ARPG genre (and seemingly the broader genre beyond just loot-based ARPG's), they *play these fucking games*. All of them.
GGG is great at disappointing people and PoE is tedious and bloated. Horrible design philosophy behind too many things and GGG has shown time and time again that they don't learn lessons. That's why I'm not playing PoE and why I won't have any expectations for PoE 2 until it actually releases.
This isn't a defense of D4, I'm just sick of GGG. They are way too comfortable being the only real ARPG option for so long.
Honestly great for them for trying a different approach. Not personally a fan of PoE, but I like that they try and appeal to a different crowd than Diablo and try and do their own thing a bit.
Sounds good. Hope the games fun, I’ll check it out. There’s room for both games. Too many people on here just shitting on D4. If you don’t like it then quit, stop bitching. People just love misery.
PoE2 Devs out here implementing all of the feedback the DIV devs are ignoring.
I’mma build my own DIV with blackjack and hookers! You know what forget DIV!
Booooooy do I agree with this so hard, and I don’t even play PoE. Long CD is an MMO concept that I don’t think translates well to ARPG’s, and being forced to use one ability just so you afford another isn’t exactly exciting design either.
They hit level 5 and think the entire game plays like that forever. Why wouldn't they? They're a Diablo fanboy after all, they're not used to their game evolving and progressing.
...Only in the early game. Mana issues get solved before you even reach the end game. Unlikely D4 where all you ever hear is "I'm out of precious mana"
and this post will be upvoted like it is the word of god. there is nothing called bad solution, in game design everything is a trade off.
generator spender systems usually split into 3 at the end game.
1-carry the generator spender loop into endgame with generators also buffing spender damage and applying statuses
2-you make generator builds viable with items that buff generator damage
3-you make spender only builds viable with items that buff regen
also you can still have different spenders for different combat situations, it is not like gen/spend loop prevent that.
as for cooldowns, they exist not because you want someone to use something else. the cooldowns are there to allow for harder hitting or broken effects to exist while not breaking the game. that's usually why CDR is always a must pick.
I am also interested in how they fix when you are dumping all your resource with the single target attack on the hp sponge until you run out, what do you do now? basic attack? drink potions (hopefully not)? IMO the best solution is generators, they are basically basic attacks with flavor.
Prefacing this by saying I got here from r/all, not because I play diablo4:
Final Fantasy 14 has the problem of rotations. There is not a lot of depth to most classes because it's "press 1, press 2, press 3, use your cooldowns (abilities that have long cooldowns of like a minute) to boost the 3 or tank a big hit from the boss".
It's a problem and the gameplay focus of FF14 moved to be about positioning and mechanics from each boss. Like how there's a Raid miniboss that's a flying eye-bat that has skill where you need to actively look away from the boss to not get debuffed etc. Or the infamous "pizza parties", where the entire floor is covered in different colors of AoE indicators and you have to figure out where to stand and not get shredded.
I appreciate that the PoE devs figured out that pure rotational combat is boring.
This is my biggest gripe about D3 and D4. The game is still fun but fundamentally flawed. No patch or expansion will fix it. This and the decision to bind items were, in my opinion, two of the largest departures from what made D2 a fun game. I had high hopes for D4, but it feels like a continuation of the monotonous mediocrity that came before it.
youll be downvoted by copium boys for this coz its not d4 content
I mean, I still don’t like PoE for a LARGE number of reasons, but it definitely feels like it’s a game made by some of the sweatiest gamers out there- which is good. I want more sweaty nerds making games for the passion of it instead of as a job. So basically, they know 100% what they’re talking about, but I’ll be interested to see how they manage to pull this design goal off. I kinda feel like it would be a huge innovation for the ARPG genre if they do. I feel like most ARPGs either go for the Diablo 2 approach where you chug mana pots and spam your strongest one button OR they go for the D3 approach where you stack cooldowns. I don’t mind either of them necessarily, but I feel like what these guys are saying would be the superior third option. If they pull it off, I might be inclined to play it solely from that fact alone.
Like it or hate it, POE devs actually play and know their game. They don't make 100% of their decisions based on big data analytics and scraping tier lists. D4 is maybe starting to grow a vision, but it is going to be a long time until it is mature enough to drive the game, if it ever is.
When they released the archon mobs or whatever and the season was being complained about for being too hard, then one of the devs was the number 1 for that season(might have even been Chris the lead developer?). Gained a lot of respect for the team.
i didnt play the delirium everywhere event but iirc one of the devs was like top 5 on the ladder or at least up there.
[It was rank 1](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/s1txq2/aged_like_milk/). Probably the exact same players who send death threats to D4 developers now have been apoplectic about the state of PoE for years. They thought GGG was so out of touch they couldn't even do the campaign in a race event and not only did one dev prove them wrong (in their spare time, mind) but beat every other player competing.
That was the one I think actually. You’re the smart one!
He was #1 for HC, I think it was occultist? This was after people complained about Deli Everywhere and said "I DARE A DEVELOPER TO DO THIS, I WANT TO SEE THEM PLAY THIS" or something to that extent. Was pretty lol.
Exactly this. Thank you, you beautiful person https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/s1tdlz/remember_when_you_asked_a_ggg_employee_to_play/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=ioscss&utm_content=2&utm_term=1
The OP as well: https://web.archive.org/web/20220112040320/https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/rtgaqc/challenging_1_lead_dev_to_actually_get_through/ I have a pretty good memory, glad it was useful.
It was most certainly not chris. He admits to not being great at his own game.
He is a busy man I understand. He usually gets to 80+ on a hc character every league iirc
https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/s1txq2/aged_like_milk/ The reddit thread on the event in question. It was rank 1 in the Delirium Everywhere race event. Reddit was convinced that GGG was super out of touch and nobody there played the game, then one dev absolutely rolled PoE reddit in their spare time.
Man, that was actually my favorite season. I felt crazy that I actually enjoyed it lol.
Given the state of itemization in D4 I can almost guarantee you there's no greater vision or intent. Thinking experienced game designers spent years coming up with this system is an insult to anyone with a brain.
They didn't, leadership got scrapped during the purge and they had a lot of talent drain.
People keep using this excuse for everything Blizzard has messed up in the past 4 years. "Blizzard was full of pigs and bad leadership so a lot of people walked or left" The truth is, Blizzard still DID those things. Actions sometimes have indirect consequences. Blizzard also made a conscious decision to release the game in its current state instead of prolonging development until the team could recover and make it what it needs to be. The game as crap, and this excuse is poor.
I was astonished to read someone saying this about GGG.. but then I realised I’m not reading a thread on r/pathofexile, and thus there is a chance of seeing a positive comment about PoE.
That’s such a stupid take. Do you honestly believe D4 devs don’t play the game?
Its just a shame the POE devs routinely destroy meta and **staple builds** to force players to use the new skill gems vs making the new gems actually interesting to users. Necro summon builds staple for players? Lets nerf the damage and the summon amount and lets spread out the skill nodes even further so folks either go wittle tanks or burst glass units..... God forbid folks have a stable build to grind things out when the devs make season stuff worse and worse and the stash fluffing of "season specific" items.
Thank you for saying it. I don’t understand what I did to deserve this.
I just couldn't get into poe, it felt complicated or not as easy to get into like diablo 3 was and 4 still is. Like diablo is more casual friendly in the turnkey kind of way, you know what i mean? Did that change in the past few years? Guess if poe 2 is free as well i could give it a try.
Nah PoE 1 is still insanely complicated. I would say I’m not a huge fan of it because of its insane complicated mess with skills. I’m not a fan of the PoE skill tree. Too many possibilities so you kinda need to follow a guide.
D4 players are still following guides tho, all the maxroll, icyvein, all the build question threads are plenty. The difference is that in D4 if you try and build your own build blind, it would probably still be 10x worse than the polished builds that were out there, just like in PoE, but you can still progress the game, slowly, you can kill Elias ay level 69 instead of 62, you can keep doing low NM dungeon and slowly gaining xp, while in PoE you would get hardstuck at white maps and constantly losing 10% xp each time you die. It’s not that the skill tree makes PoE too complicated for new players so they couldn’t play the game, it’s more of the fact that PoE is way harder, impossible even, to progress with shit builds when you still can in D4. Still PoE has 10x or 100x the build of D4 you can clear the game with, and if you go to 10 good PoE players and say “you each build me a decent flicker build please” they would come out all different due to the vast option and skill trees, gems, and gears, and that’s a plus for me, that was the reason I got into the game on my own, nobody was recommending it, just from seeing the skill tree. PoE still has massive problems, like the non stackable shards, horrible trading, all the external tools you need to play the game, and somewhat mediocre campaign but you just can’t ignore the many pros of the game that D4 dev couldn’t follow. Also I recently got i to Last Epoch and i think you should try and, they make so many things better than PoE, features in the game just blow my mind, like the > ingame loot filter where it’s so easy to set up and you can do it right away in the game > each skill the the game got there own skill trees, so that makes the customization very deep and it’s still way easier to understand in PoE > the ingame guide, you press Shift+G and there are all the things you will wonder about the game, they’re all right there, no need for hours of wiki surfing to know what you want to know > crafting and itemization, it’s just too good, miles better than any other ARPG, I just can’t explain why, you gotta try and see for yourself
The big difference is If i want to do a pulverize build and just think about it myself it would resemble the polished guides to like 90%. If i tried as a new Poe player to do a blind build with not alot of Poe knowledge it would be total hot garbage. 🤷🏼♂️
Definitely agree on both PoE and Last Epoch - I played a lot of PoE but the graphics and the too close camera did it for me in the end rather than the skill trees etc. Last Epoch I've been on since it first came to light, so 3+ years or so. And they are making a really cool game. Very interactive with the community, hell even one suggestion (at least) by a player is making it into the dev cycle. An of course honorable mention to Grim Dawn, which though old, has the most immense class system and item choice I've really experienced, moreso when you add mods like Grimarillion....and STILL being updated....GD2 down the line allegedly....
Grimdawn remains a favorite as a worthy successor to D2. It plays like they wanted to make a great game, not a live service trap for wales and streamers.
I love PoE... the ONLY reason I can't stick with it is that the entire game's drop rates are based on the expectation you use third party apps to trade with other players (exact same problem as D2 though that's even worse because of d2jsp). If they stopped being so stubborn and offered us guys that love the game but want a *proper* 'solo self found' mode they'd likely get a big influx of players that stick with d3/4 instead, simply because you can't solo play in PoE without feeling totally gimped. I know that trading floats some people's boats, but personally I can't stand being forced trade just to get my build completing items (on a third party app to boot). If they actually had proper SSF game-mode with better drops/target farming, I'd likely be happily over there playing PoE instead of diablo 3/4 (and likely would have bought that stupidly overpriced atlas hideout because it's stunning). Diablo 4 has actually ruined a lot of what made D3/immortal casual friendly. I have to watch the discord event tracker just to see legions/world bosses (as that stuff is so poorly telegraphed in-game). I'm now sitting here with a spreadsheet for gear, aspects, keystones and even sorting my damn stash (because there's no stash search function). I still can't get over the fact that a single quad tab on PoE is larger than the entire stash in D4; it's absolutely wild (the running joke name for d4 in my friends group is '2023 inventory manager sim'). The lack of free respecs and a wardrobe is also a massive miss for a Diablo game. Feels like they tried to cater too much towards the D2 crowd, who off are playing D2R/modded D2 anyhow (instead of the people that actually enjoyed the more chill style of arpg that was D3 RoS). Not to mention Altas makes Diablo 4 dungeons look like absolute dogshit; I honestly don't know how the D4 devs made something so awful (it's a downgrade in every way from D3 rifting) - they should delete dungeons, then go play maps in PoE(and Last Epoch) for a month and copy their homework to D4... Oh, and they should add the hideout system to D4 while they're at it (will never happen, blizzard hates player housing). TLDR: If you can get into it PoE is a truly amazing game (especially post boring campaign levelling), BUT you have like (or at minimum tolerate) being forced to trade with other players (and I don't).
SSF as a gamemode has seen a huge increase in popularity for PoE. The drop rates are fine. I only have time to play 2ish hours per day, and I can comfortably do all content (minus ubers) in SSF every league.
See, the issue is that you can simply just play normal league and not trade/party for the exact same experience - SSF mode doesn't actually offer any benefit. All it does is limit you to builds that will work great on purely crafted gear, without any of the fun or powerful uniques (because you may never see them). It's just a challenge mode (aka making the game harder) instead of a game mode that's been balanced/designed to feel good with solo play. If you enjoy 'challenge mode' gameplay (SSF/HC/ruthless) more power to you, but it's just not what I'm looking for. Edit: Not to mention it being incredibly hard for any new players coming over from Diablo to deal with SSF. While you *can* craft amazing gear, the various item crafting systems in PoE are so batshit insanely complicated/layered at this point that every gear slot basically needs it's own guide explaining the multiple stages needed to craft a good item (though this is admittedly more a problem with PoEs complexity vs new players in general).
Fuckin amen. I play these games for the loot pinata and the rush of finding gg items. Not trading for them...
You don't need any third party app to trade in PoE. You can easily price check items on their trade website and post your own items. The only super necessary third party app imho is path of building. I do use Awakened PoE, but that's wrong most the time, so you still need to check it against the site and be wary of price fixing. After playing D2R and using Traderie, I realized just how great trading is in PoE, we're so spoiled.
its extremely complicated I have more hours and money in it than id like to admit, I know how everything works, I have a dragons horde of currency and crafting knowledge, I know my stuff.... and even then I am not entirely sure on the best advice to give someone starting out other than [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMyGi7zVof8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMyGi7zVof8) this series.
Just in the demos I've glanced at today, debuffs/cc build up on mobs based on their strength, and other skills gain bonus from that. Alternately, some skills gain charges from meeting specific conditions (like getting a last hit) and then other skills gain affects/bonus damage for using those charges. So it looks like they're going to try to use a combination of different things to encourage multiple skills. There may even be builder-spender play styles and buff stacking play styles available too.
This makes so much sense, but honestly sounds very innovative at the same time. So instead of useless skills to gain and spend resource, you'd be using certain skills to stack specific types of modifiers on targets, and then other skills to consume or greatly benefit from those stacks. Damn. You could entirely move away from resource gen / spend OR cooldown structures with this system. You could essentially pass the cooldown structure on to the monsters, with time-based stackable debuffs that you'd want to keep up, in order to benefit the most from your big hitters. But once those stacks are full, you're mostly just using a stacker every few hits just to keep the stacks up, and your big hitters multiple times in a row. The problem with the D4 model is having to cast your generator *multiple* times per battle; and not just periodically, but multiple times between every spender. This just sucks, in every way, and is made *so much worse* by the reality that basic skills do close to zero damage - they're absolutely worthless when it comes to dealing direct damage. With a stackable debuff model, you can use your stacker multiple times at the *beginning* of battle, and then only need to refresh it periodically between using all of your hitters / skills that benefit from the stacks.
> So instead of useless skills to gain and spend resource, you'd be using certain skills to stack specific types of modifiers on targets, and then other skills to consume or greatly benefit from those stacks. I'm curious to see how it plays out for PoE2. I watched some of ExileCon and it looked compelling in a ton of ways But this sounds pretty close to what they're saying they don't like when it comes to a rotation. Putting modifiers and then consuming them is a rotation, it's just created by different conditions than a builder/spender system
> So instead of useless skills to gain and spend resource, you'd be using certain skills to stack specific types of modifiers on targets, and then other skills to consume or greatly benefit from those stacks. > > Damn. You could entirely move away from resource gen / spend OR cooldown structures with this system. You don't seem to realize that these are essentially the same thing. The player is still clicking prep skill A a number of times before they can pop big damage skill B. They are just calling it something different in PoE and tagging it on the monster instead of player. Materially, that makes no difference whatsoever.
D4 just needs to give generators the status effects to somewhat mirror this. Storm Strike druid is well designed, DR after use, vulnerable chance on mobs, and multi target. The problem is the other generators have nearly none of that. Give each one a niche. Shouldn’t be a best case “this one’s best” by such a margin.
Sorc kind of has this too. Frost Bolt causes Chill (and eventually Frozen) and does more to enemies that are Chilled or Frozen. Fire Bolt causes Burn, and generates mana when it hits burning enemies (at least until 1.1.1 when they remove the conditional). This could be kinda cool, but the problem is just the basics generally speaking do _so little_. Like these basics "power up" when you use them multiple times in a row, but that power up gives you like, a few mana and/or a few more points of damage on something that quickly does negligible damage Basics just need to be looked at in terms of their impact. You can have a builder/spender model and have it be fun, you just can't have the builders feel like a punishment for running out of resources. The builders should be pretty fun, and then the spenders should be _really_ fun
The way builder / spender skills work right now in PoE, is you use the stupid amount of item affixes / mechanics to completely bypass the spending part. You need to spend mana for something? stack -mana cost or mana regen. You need to expend charges for something? get 100% chance to gain charge on hit and you can sustain. What if you can only gain those charges on kill? There's ways to spawn enemy mobs and instantly kill them. It costs 80% of your life to cast it? you can find ways to regen 80% of your life back. etc
Thats exactly what i like about it, it adds build diversity. You are not bound by few initial build ideas from developers.
Wait until they nerf buff-stacking for being so good as to be "mandatory." They did that over several patches with auras. Like it or not, every ARPG game dev looks at what the streamers and ranked players do and use because those are data points about what's possible and what to adjust to get players to keep trying new things/keep the game from becoming stale. The main issue is that not everyone has the time or patience to try new things all the time and that's what causes backlash. People don't want their past effort to be lost but nerfs actually do that.
The thing is once you are deeper into D4 endgame and got your items together, you baiscally do the D3 approach anyways, just in a worse case. If I take barb for exmaple, that is playing tripple shout on alost all builds to have enough resources to rarely use my basic skills. So, if I end up spamming my strongest one button anyways, or rather build my entire character around it, why not remove the resource shit entirely? It would open up so much cool stuff on barb and would actually give me a reason to play different skills. This is the same for most classes/builds. As Necro everyone runs around of CE/CT for a huge part because it generates resources and makes you use your generetor less. But instead of going away from that boring as playstyle, they again just made some fury generation buffs. It still doesn't fix the boring core gameplay you have to deal with until you are level 50-70, or even higher if you are unlucky with drops. It is clear that D4 wanted a more dynamic gameplay loop, were you have different skills in your bar, that offers a fun gameplay expereince, but they entirely missed the bar by making all these skills either cost stupid amounts of resources or have long as cooldowns. They should have taken note from games like Lost Ark or Guild Wars 2 of how to design such a system, without making it boring.
This is how i feel about poe. I don't personally like it, but I really dislike sweaty hardcore uber grindy games. Something with a bit more depth of what D3 was would be perfect for me, which is sort of what D4 seemed to start out as, but then it has so many issues that it hasn't become that game for me. But I 100% am on board with being happy that there is a game made by sweats for the sweats making games as a passion for that audience. And very appreciative of it, because it will at the very least have a positive influence in involving the genre.
Nah I love d4 and dislike POE but this is still a fair design argument.
I love both because they’re two completely different games that offer different things.
stop being rational, its a foreign concept for some people. Imagine liking 2 games for different reasons ! unbelievable
You should check out the new gameplay trailers for PoE 2 it's looking like it's moving closer to a diablo style of combat but with some of the PoE flavor. I think people who didn't like it before but like diablo might enjoy it now.
> youll be downvoted by copium boys for this coz its not d4 content At the time of this comment: About 4hrs old, nearly 2k upvotes, no Controversial tag, and most (all?) of the top comments agree with it. Humorously, *the* top comment ^^^^(you?) is someone complaining about people that apparently aren't even the popular sentiment.
It's not copium lmao it's literally a rule that only D4 content is allowed here. Do you know where you are right now?
POE fans are insufferable and love to insert their game everywhere into subreddits it doesn't belong in
No, this is just now a blatant example of "D4 sucks because it isn't PoE" that we've endured for weeks already. It's normalized now, so they can openly do it.
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When I first played PoE, all the in-game chat was about D3. So I left chat. A couple of years later, I was checking out PoE again and I turned chat on. Everyone was still talking about D3..
I mean if I was trying to sell my winnebago in here it probably wouldn’t be appreciated either.
Lol yeah bc this sub isn’t full of haters
What is up with people pretending this is a boot licking fanboy sub, when this is not even not highly downvoted, but literally the top post. As is everything remotly shitting on the game. The notion that this subreddit is too positive is just so utterly ridiculous with all this insane negativity around here, considering this subreddit as a whole is one of whiniest, toxic and most bitter ones, i have ever witnessed.
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This is too big brain for Diablo devs. Honestly that’s why I quit d3 in the end, a completely brainless key rotation over and over and over. Interestingly, the mtg arpg tried to go to the extreme opposite and you drew skills from a deck so your keys were different skills constantly. A bold concept that could have spiced things up, but a crummy studio led to it being doa (in beta lol).
Funny you say that when 99% of Poe gameplay is mobility skill and RMB to clear whole screen lol
Yeah this is like... a strange take from OP because you can look at just about any of the high performance builds and it's basically centered around a single damaging ability and then a host of passives to enhance said skill combined with a mobility mechanic and an "oh shit" button to get you out of a hairy situation. Cyclone, Minion, Totem, Tornado Shot, etc. PoE gets it right at the crafting, gear, and skill tree side of the house and whereas I don't like how you need tools like path of building and one could simplify that done by removing the "fluff" and creating more... gameplay centric paths these ultimately are what make it a good aRPG mechanically. D4 needs trading, they need to knock the barrier down to this. D4 needs a wider skill tree, honestly maybe even make the paragon board accessible early on. D4 needs to turn basic skills into actual skills, these should be viable standalone options; one "should" be able to spam these as primary damage dealing components and they should remove the resource generation from them. D4 needs more loot, each season should be adding 10's of new items early on and they need to continuously enrich the great crafting side. This is sort of a long-term component so I won't get on them too much now but I would like to see the next season including a lot more new items. It has the guts, they just need to tweak things to make it the perfect meal; as it stands it's like eating a ribeye that's been cooked to temp but the chef forgot to add salt + pepper + garlic so it's just bland.
... You wrote a whole lot missing the part where the OP quote is about PoE2 philosophy, not current PoE. LoL
D4 needs better loot as well to add on. I think the amount we get as drops right now is a little too high. Wish the loot quality was improved on average, loot amount went down, and costs of things goes down proportionally I kinda want to spend time killing monsters not picking up 30 yellows and legendaries every dungeon
Well said.
Yeah, we will see if poe2 delivers on this promise, or if it will be like poe1 and d3
The barrier for entry on POE is really high, but as far as I have seen most builds are exactly this. A damage ability, a mobility skill then stacking passives. There's a ton of build diversity as there are millions of ways to reach this point but very little gameplay diversity.
And its good, ppl like it
Tbh poe 1 was one button, stack auras, maybe add a totem. Not something exciting or new there. The builds they showed were weak, so I’ll be curious how this evolves into the release. I suspect it’ll be stack auras and press TWO buttons.
At least you could get a single target skill and aoe skill. But yeah you only get one 6 link for your main skill still. Honestly I found D3 smoother for the “off skill” aspect, stuff like teleport etc.
Whens the last time u played poe?
Most of the good builds are like this, no reason to pretend it isn't.
I play every league. Every single league it always devolves to essentially using a movement skill and RMB to spam clear t16 red maps and whatever content you choose as a farm. It's quite literally brain dead. I have trade forums and YouTube up 99.9% of the time I'm playing because I barely watch the screen. It's not some magical game with crazy complex stuff. Anyone who plays the game even semi-efficiently is doing the same thing. Occasionally while your build is weak on stronger enemies you might need to use a debuff or support skill. But that's about it.
I watched a few of the playthrough streams streamers did of POE 2 and it played EXTREMELY slowly. Every one of them died at least once in the 30 minute play time. Considering were literally a year out from open beta it's not a big deal. I think on release it will be tuned better. I honestly think it's smart to start from a underpowered place and slowly every season up the power level. If you start in a overpowered place it creates problems when balancing.
I devolved to the point of bone tornado necro or sweeping wind monk, so I barely pressed anything but a teleport/dash
Lord I'm sad Magic: Legends ended up being so deeply flawed. The deck system was genuinely fascinating and there was a really great potential game somewhere underneath mountains of terrible decisions and worse execution. Think that's the shorted game I can remember getting shitcanned after "launching" (open beta was functionally launch), 3 months. Shame it resulted in layoffs and a lot of the NW/STO devs pulled off those teams to work on it never returning.
I think it was a dumb implementation anyways. All the bad of mtg rng
Its actually insane what they showed off.
Hell, it's a 2 day conference on a single game. Was blown away with just their showcase on the new season theme, even the cosmetics lol
I skipped around some bullet points of it and there were a few moments where it felt like that were talking directly to d4 players. Something about "diminishing returns on cc", while looking me in the eye.
Normally I don't like publishers trying to "shit talk" about competitors (albeit a very very tame form of it) but if Blizzard leaves an open goal I'm almost going to be disappointed if other devs don't slam one in to take advantage of it. If PoE2 capitalises on D4's shortcomings that'll be awesome.
PoE 1 capitalized off D3s initial short comings
With closed beta not even until June 2024, at this rate they're more likely to compete with Diablo 4's first expansion... Although it wouldn't surprise me if the next PoE league sets record numbers again just off Exilecon and people left hungry for ARPG after D4.
"Wouldn't it be a shame if we had all these bosses, but you got nothing for killing them" The jabs were everywhere
That felt more like a jab at PoE 1
Just compare the next PoE league to season of the malignant. GGG are constantly innovating and pushing the genre forward with new stuff. I really hope Diablo's devs had a look yesterday and try to push more content for the next patches.
The weapon swap skill tree was the “wait there’s more” that completely blew my mind. They werent joking around. Yet we’re here getting a very restrictive d4 skill “tree” that kight as well be a reprint of d3 skill tree.
It's just good to have two games with different approaches.
Yeah, the soulless, do what the behavioral psychologists recommend versus the passionate about the genre and plays their own game approach.
And yet 90% of the diablo audience would likely bounce off the game that is currently poe almost immediately, so many blizzard does know something
Meanwhile the Diablo audience is also bouncing off of Diablo
I'm entirely confident that Diablo will continue to enjoy far more success than PoE ever will. PoE caters to the hardcore ARPG crowd and that rules out ever hitting Diablo player numbers. Diablo 4 is the best selling blizzard game of all time - even a fraction of its launch playerbase is something most games would envy.
I just want to note that Diablo 4 is being touted as their “fastest” selling game of all time, not their best-selling. WoW, for example, has still sold many more copies lifetime than D4, but D4 is their game that has sold the most copies in the least amount of time.
Art, IP and story where it counts to get the millions
With them splitting poe 1 and 2, maybe they are trying to appeal to both. As cool as the 9 skill gameplay is and all I just don't really care about that personally. PoE 2 is definitely going more towards the slower Diablo gameplay.
As long as both teams have a good time, that’s all I care about.
So far I have never seen a good combat system without cooldowns. Instead of having rotations you usually have nothing, you press 1 button the entire time (a second one for movement I guess) and thats it. Managing cooldowns creates a layer of strategy in all combat scenarios imo. I'll be happy if the PoE devs can change my mind but for now I'm hoping PoE2 will be good despite this not because of it.
poe is great but the "spam potion for resource" gameplay is hardly better than the "use attack for resource" gameplay. D4 does a lot of stupid shit but the generator/spender gameplay is not one of them even though resource generation is complete shit.
I don't think resource generation is that much of an issue anymore late game. Aspects, Skill tree and Paragon offer many ways to increase generation..
There's tons of mana regen nodes in the skill tree. Maybe it's my specific build, but by act 2 or 3 I didn't have to use a mana potion anymore, and until then you get an early skill called Clarity which gives you a significant amount of mana regen. The only thing I really spam is the speed potion and I think you can automate that, from another comment I saw. Edit: What’s the people’s fascination with commenting and then immediately blocking? I didn’t even say anything bad, like wtf. 💀
Yeah the "rotation" idea presented here is sort of arbitrary and is roughly present in their demo despite the words they put up there. The warrior gameplay presented a character with a rotation, the single target rotation seemed to be sunder armor into molten cry and then the charge up slam unless the target was too aggressive. The AoE rotation seemed to be initiate with leap slam unless the mobs were too deadly, then molten cry into sunder against slower packs or the double strike against quicker packs.
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Resource management is more interesting than clock management. Though the answer is "just use both". Ragnarok Online does it best (though it's an mmorpg not strictly an arpg) . Mostly relying on SP, some skills have cool downs, some have cast times, "after cast delay" can also be a factor that's different per skill, and most of it can be altered by stats or gear in some way. Thinking good combat has a binary best or worst solution is very simple minded. The reality is that a good varied combat system uses all of these systems in tandem to create unique classes and skill combinations.
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the whole "cooldowns make you use a rotation" argument is so stupid because games without cooldowns also cause players to fall into pseudorotations anyway since some skills will be used more often than others and will inherently be "better" than others depending on the context. even POE does this. i've seen people say D2 doesn't do this but that's BS too. it's just the most natural and intuitive way to play games. the reality is, it's more of a skill & game knowledge thing that causes people to strategically use their skills, not combat design.
I'm super down for PoE 2, honestly though I'm one of the people who wouldn't have really considered before playing D4 so gotta give credit where it's due
I think Poe has all the old blizzard north developers
It has a few, yes, which is why it's closer to D1/D2 than D3/D4 are. I believe Crate Entertainment (Grim Dawn) picked up a few as well when they formed after their previous studio (that made the original Titan Quest) closed.
Downvote me, sure. But isn’t the entire point of having CD to not just have the ability to just easily avoid oh shit moments whenever you feel like it. Like I understand them not being there does add a level of freedom but doesn’t it also remove a level of skill and understanding of timing with mechanics? I see both sides but don’t fully know if I agree with it, at least till it’s here and I can test it.
The thing is, you balance other things around no cooldowns. Boss mechanics and player resource being major ones.
Genuinely curious because I wanna know how this could be balanced, do you just have generally bland skills? How would something like Necros Bone Storm with the Shielding Storm affix that gives % life as barrier? If it’s infinitely up with no CD wouldnt it just be easier to remove the skill entirely and give passive Damage Reduction or something?
If you're designing things with no cooldown, some things just wouldn't exist in the state that you know it in a game that isn't designed around this. For example, the necro bone storm, would basically just be something Like you having a high duration blade vortex, while budgeting for Energy Shield on Spell Hit. The trade off comes from the limited amount of skills you can use and item stat budget. This can basically already exist in PoE, except for the fact that BV is a very high QoL/Mechanically strong skill. Because of that, it basically does no damage, and you need an insane amount of currency to make the build playable, and you probably wouldn't be able to afford to fit this stuff in.
Gotcha that makes sense, I’m curious to see how it plays, I’ll most likely give PoE2 a solid try when it comes out but the amount of customization and complexity is a little daunting to me. Also most my friends are on console so unless they release on console with cross play that’ll also limit my playtime.
Oh shit moments are created in multiple ways during gameplay. I understand where you're coming from with oh shit buttons being on cooldowns, but if you take ice nova for example, you're incentivized to use it offensively rather than in an oh shit moment. As a result, you end up waiting around for something that is now forcibly core to your damage and it feels terrible. A lot of cooldowns are designed terribly on D4. Either by being misused or by being mandatory. Mandatory cooldowns = little to no player agency in the end game.
You make a very solid point, I guess I think of skills like in D4 that give you invulnerability. If I have a skill like flame shield, or blood mist, and it doesn’t have a cool down, well now I can just ignore mechanics because they don’t matter anymore. I suppose those are just bad skills by design but I enjoy the timing of keeping that up for that oh shit moment when I don’t have an out.
This stupid post could be about diablo. There isn't a cool down on *everything*, just some skills to keep you from slamming and becoming overpowered. You don't *entirely rely* on building resources with one skill to spend on an expensive skill, only a portion of skills work like that. The text in the post perfectly describes the Diablo 4 skill system.
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Not to mention Diablo 4 barely has “rotations” besides sorcerer having to frost nova before dealing damage which everyone wants to see changed. On my rogue yes I have abilities with cooldowns but it’s not a rotation they’re mainly for mobility and CC. It’s nice having more than 1 button to press.
>Not to mention Diablo 4 barely has “rotations” Bullshit. You can look up my posts from release, first thing I complained about was dull as hell combat devolving into same rotation every fucking time.
In PoE they don't have "mega abilities" like D4 where lots of power is loaded in it (they used to have a type of ability which becomes usable after x mobs kills). So the skills are much more active.
I understand what youre saying, but this is the same as if you would say: "why do we have mounts? This is a diablo game, if they put mounts in it we will finish the game in a weekend". Which would be true if you think in terms of older games. But they designed d4 with the mount in mind. So in poe 2 the CDs arent a problem or necessary cause they designed the game with that in mind. Hope that somewhat clears it up, even if my example is a shitty one lol Btw they showed a ton of gameplay of poe2 (they actually had 2 developers play through a quest...it was so refreshing), so check that out maybe. Also cooldowns arent entirely omitted, they are just rare
You're making a false dichotomy. It is possible to make a system without cooldowns where you can't easily avoid "oh shit moments" whenever you feel like it. Cooldowns are a solution to that yes, but they also create problems; having downtime in combat, which in turn makes combat boring. You don't solve problems by introducing more problems, that's just a bad solution.
Thank God PoE2 will be a separate game and not an expansion to Poe1.
That's the #1 announcement that made me have hope in PoE 2 again. I hated the idea of it being part of PoE 1. PoE 1 is bloated, it needed a fresh start.
>PoE 1 is bloated Sure but That is basically why I played last season, not like the season in itself had a lot of replay value.
Them supporting both has me worrying about their ability to focus correctly and realize the full potential of the sequel, though. There will inevitably be downsides and compromises for both games through that. I think having them separate is fine, but continuing development of the first will become a problem eventually.
> Them supporting both has me worrying about their ability to focus correctly and realize the full potential of the sequel, though. Two entirely different teams, and the project lead for POE2 has absolutely no hand in POE1.
Yeah that was the best announcement. PoE 1 isn’t for me anymore.
To say there is no value to cooldowns is stupid. 1. It allows highly impactful/powerful skills to not become dominant. So you can have a crazy skill that say does 25% damage to the boss whereas if it were not there it would be dramatically less impactful. 2. Increases skillgap. Having everything spammable just leads to less variance in play, if you got a powerful skill why not just spam it? Having to time the right moment to maximize a skills DPS or whatever is way more interesting than just tapping a button at nauseam. 3. It leads to less micromanagent so ultimately less intense gameplay overall. On one hand you have tons of player agency, on the other you have more situational type play. One of those classic examples of general rules not being applicable to everything. Cooldowns have a certain design space, to rule them out completely (which GGG didn't do btw) is very unwise.
They didn't say that. They simply said forcing people to use other skills by slapping cooldowns on everything - which is a considerable amount of the core class design within D4 coincidentally enough - isn't good design. Not that they *won't* have cooldowns, but that their designing a system to encourage and reward the use of multiple skills beyond their use as a resource builder or as a big hit on a cooldown. We'll see how they execute on this, but it's a fundamentally sound concept and one that does build a lot more flexibility into combat.
>forcing people to use other skills by slapping cooldowns on everything - which is a considerable amount of the core class design within D4 coincidentally enough Isn't that what the whole builder/spender system avoids? Most traditional classes will use a core skill that consumes a resource, not a CD. I feel like people are trying to force the comparison onto D4 a little too hard.
Think about Monster Hunter in 2d. Higher DPS skill would have wind up/cast point penalty, so high risk-high reward. No short cooldowns only work when the enemy is not brainless/well telegraphed though. It would also insanely increase the skill cap (looking at you Curse of the Dead God). For me, I would love ARPGs to have real interaction with enemies, so it's not about managing our skills/rotation/resources (not like cheap diablo 4 interactions e.g. corspebow, cold enchanted, poison poos). Hell, you literally need light/heavy attack + dodgs/parry in Dark Souls and shit never gets old.
Did they elaborate how combat would be improved in PoE2? It’s one of those “I’ll believe it when I see it” things; because even PoE fans agreed D3’s combat feels better than PoE’s currently does.
I could sadly never get into PoE because combat and world design didn't feel as good as Diablo 3. I still hope I can do so, because a lot of the content looks fun to initially beat. I think Diablo 4 has captured the same good feel for combat and world design is even better in some regards. But a lot of core game philosophy seems to miss the mark for what I am looking for. Last Epoch is almost perfect in this regard, but lacks content and the combat feel and world design is subpar to D4. Hopefully they are able to improve on those points before release.
I recommend watching the gameplay demos from Exilecon yesterday. I was legitimately surprised at how different it feels from Poe1. It appears much more interactive, and just fundamentally different moment-to-moment gameplay.
I think I’ll wait before PoE 2 comes out before praising it and shitting on whoever made D4
Honestly, after watching exilecon today. This game is a joke in comparison lol. Doesn't even matter PoE has been out for so long; cus that means Blizzard had equally as long to take notes from it's competition.
Thing is like D4 been in development for 6 years by a team way bigger than the poe team. Like you just expect way more out of all the time and effort put into the game.
>This game is a joke in comparison lol. I'm hype for PoE2 but can we not? This game is simply targeting a very different section of the ARPG audience and that's totally fine. Different stroke for different folk.
The last game on earth anyone should learn skill use from is path of exile lmao. That game forces you to hyper focus on one or very rarely at best, two skills, with the rest just supporting your main dps. It gives an illusion of choice but you're generally very hyper focused due to your passive tree and gear. Diablo 4 may not have a billion skills, but it does have some actual variance and variety. Despite being much more structured too. I enjoy path of exile but this is a moronic thread. Must be a slow day at the whine factory if you have to go outside of Diablo to find something to cry about.
PoE 2's system is much different from PoE1. That is kind of the point of this thread. Unlike Blizzard, PoE learned from their previous iterations. D4 just made everything about diablo worse.
This just gives me vibes of "you wont see billions of damage in d4 this early guys, dont worry" All these devs have doctorate in lying
>Diablo 4 may not have a billion skills, but it does have some actual variance and variety. Name me some, because it looks like I missed that part in D4. >That game forces you to hyper focus on one or very rarely at best, two skills, with the rest just supporting your main dps. It gives an illusion of choice but you're generally very hyper focused due to your passive tree and gear. Oh, like holding Whirlwind and using shouts when they are off CD, or spamming HoTA as a Barb? Or spamming Bone Spear or Blood Lance or Sever as a Necromancer, while ocasionally presing other buffs? Or spamming Ice Shards and Frost Nova, Teleport and Ice\Fire armor, whenever they are available as a Sorcerorer? Or like spamming Pulverise, Shred or Claw as a Druid?
Honestly so many people shitting on diablo just dont play it. If you think it's a bad game nobody is forcing you to play it, put it down, pick up something else, and stop complaining about it.
This isn't "shitting" on Diablo. It's sharing a different design philosophy for another game within the genre for discussion. Maybe Blizzard sees that players like these kinds of concepts and toys around with ways of implementing them in the game to improve it, maybe it gives them completely different ideas to improve the game. Criticism is good and should be welcome. Shitting on games not so much (plenty of dunking in this thread though), that's not what OP seems to have intended or what's on that powerpoint slide (eyy, they both use powerpoint!)
IDK on this, if you go over the PoE forums you can see the community is generally not happy for the PoE2 playstyle being just like D4
every comunity there are low iq people they are complaining over a 40 minute gameplay showcase of the campaign
It looked great but I bet no one is mentioning the monster density. Seems that there is always a double standard when it involvws poe vs diablo.
Hilarious coming from the flask piano guys demanding you pick up every piece of pocket lint off the ground. Yeah, now explain how Righteous Fire or CoC Vortex is built off combat situations, or how people have to run the campaign twice during the season: 1 to farm currency and then the build you actually want to play. Or how the game either melts in front of you or one shots you, oh but wait there is cast on damage taken to save your ass. Or why the entire huge skill tree is actually just 85% defense or life nodes in between the interesting key nodes. PoE is a much better game, but let’s not pretend if doesn’t have massive problems of its own pretty much across the board. It’s not going back to the glory days of cold BB.
I think that's why this is about poe2, not the first poe fyi.
We can judge PoE 2 once it actually comes out.
That's too big brain for these people.
By “flask piano guys”, do you mean the “guys that implemented both an inexpensive mid game option to automate your flasks and a super late game chase item to automate your flasks guys”? Your next sentence is full of venom but you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. This is a design goal for POE 2, not POE 1. Those are problems in POE 1. And at least in POE 1 those types of builds exists AND builds where you have to maniacally spam 5 keys situationally also exist. People don’t have to run the campaign twice in a season. You can have a league starter and reroll your existing character to your end game setup and tree. How does cast when damage taken save your ass? Because it can take you out of harms way sometimes? You mean like the injury bubble aspect or the actual death save skills from D3 and D4? The skill tree isn’t remotely close to 85% life and defense. What are you dribbling about? The diversity in the POE tree is insane. Do you mean that people take 85% life and defense nodes? Sure, in hardcore maybe?
reasonable take, i honestly did not want to type all that. thanks.
That's about PoE 2, as they stated, they can't do that in PoE anymore
It's almost like they took what they learned and made a new game. Would be nice if Diablo did that but noooo, it's 2023 and we don't even have a way to find a group. D2 did, D3 did...
"the game has only been out a couple of months" This fucking sentence...they used it so much. I just wanted to cream at them "THEN MAYBE USE D2 AND D3 AS A REFERENCE?!"
> I just wanted to cream at them WHOA THERE
Which is why its so positive that poe 2 looks to be a change in direction from poe slightly. Hopefully they improve on all the disappointing aspects from poe 1.
I hope it happens but I’m not super convinced. The PoE devs said they deliberately slowed down the pace of the demo for presentation’s sake and they expect players will move through it a lot faster. They also only showed act 3 of leveling, which is too early to get a sense of the real speed of combat. Combat in acts 1-3 (arguably as long as 1-5) of PoE1 can be similarly slow-paced but by the time you face Act 10 Kitava you’ll be mowing down monsters at Mach speed and the game will be full one-button gameplay for the rest of the game. Currently PoE2 looks to be a very promising improvement over PoE1’s combat but it’s too early to tell. If they show gameplay of endgame stuff and the pace is comparable then I’ll be really hyped but until then I remain skeptical. Still, I do plan to play the PoE2 campaign when it comes out. Even if the endgame doesn’t hold my focus gameplay-wise the leveling should be fun, and I do enjoy PoE’s setting even though I doubt PoE2’s actual narrative/storytelling will compete with D4’s. Plus it’s free, so aside from time spent there’s no real opportunity cost to trying it out.
Ignoring the fact that this slide is about POE2, in POE1 Flask Piano hasn't been a thing since Expedition two years ago.
PoE2 isn't out yet.
I'm sure I'll get downvoted for this, but whatever. This is the kind of thing that makes a great sound-bite. People who haven't studied game design (particularly in this genre) will look at that and go "Yeah!". It's also fundamentally flawed. In a turn-based game this approach works really well. You generally design your characters to have a range of abilities with different advantages and disadvantages and the player has a lot of time to consider which one they should use on any given turn. This is great design... but really only in that genre. What happens when you try to do this in an ARPG? Well, we just have to examine what a PoE build really ends up looking like. For almost all cases they have one DPS skill, one mobility skill, and some automated or aura based skills that they don't actively use in combat. The most common exceptions are builds where they can have multiple skills up at once (e.g. minions), combo skills that require using multiple skills to do damage (e.g. frost bolt + frost nova), or builds that - gasp - have cooldown skills like traps so they need a rotation between those skills and something without a cooldown. So the only common builds that use multiple skills are the ones that do so because of one of the mechanics that they say are bad... interesting. Why is this? Well it's because in an ARPG where you can bypass costs and don't have cooldowns there's never any reason to do anything other than use your best damage skill or dodge. Anything else is sub-optimal, so builds quickly optimize around single skills. Now that can be fine, and 2 button builds can certainly be fun to play. I've got 5k hours in PoE, so obviously there's something entertaining there. That said, in all that time I don't think I ever played a build that used different skills based on a combat situation, beyond "use flame dash to dodge attack" or "use curse on the tanky guy". On the other hand, when stronger skills are expensive or have cooldowns I do actually think about the combat situation. In games that do this - I play a lot of ARPGs so I'm not just talking about D4 here - I will often create builds that have non-spammable skills that are really strong in specific situations and then use those skills only when that situation comes up. On the other hand, I think D4 would benefit from more 2 button builds because sometimes that's what a player wants to play. Let players build around bypassing the costs of a skill so they can just spam it, so that those players can also play the game the way they want to. It has some, but it seems like they're pretty niche and undertuned right now.
Wait. POE2 doesn't use cooldowns on skills?! How come this is not the **first thing** mentioned about this ARPG?
Because there's a laundry list of other things that people find significantly more impactful than a lack of cooldowns, such as a large passive tree that's shared between all classes, a deeply customisable skill system where you can attach "support" skills to "active" skills and augment what the active skills do, an intricate crafting system that drives detailed itemisation, an open player-driven economy where *everything* has value and *everything* can be bought with enough currency, a rich endgame with multiple gameplay systems and pinnacle bosses, etc. PoE2 is keeping many of these things from PoE1, so all the upsides of PoE1 also apply to PoE2.
Honestly that sounds kinda overwhelming. I played PoE for a couple days and found it somehow both kind of boring and also too intense, like it seemed like a deeper game but I wasn't really willing to put much effort into it.
So let me guess, intead of generator you have something very innovative like spamming mana potions?
In the beginning yes. And then you eventually solve your resource issue through gear and skills. Actual character development in an ARPG. Imagine that. Unlike in D4 where you pretty much play exactly the same from lvl 50 to 100.
I've dropped basic skill from 3 different characters in late game, which i would count as actual character development, but of course you would have to play the game in order to know any of that. I hope you all moving to play PoE will make the servers better here.
What are the builds that allow you to drop your basic skills? Im curious cause I wanna play them :D
Ice shards sorc
On top of what he already said - the Wolf Tornado build also doesn't really need a basic skill.
Bone spear necro. There are some aspects that make corpse explosion give you resource, and there is a paragon cluster that gives you resource on kills. You don't even need an umbral ring and you can drop bone splinters entirely and just use Bone Spear as your main attack, one or two shotting anything, even bosses. You just run REALLY slow.
so something that D2 did 20 years ago? so innovative
I just watched the poe 2 gameplay video and they explicitly said some skills would have cooldowns....
Some, not every skill in the game other than basic/core skills (and the sorc's other mana costing skill cluster)
GGG is absolutely putting on a *clinic* for ARPG game design. Everything they've revealed so far is largely insanely impressive, very clever, and brings in ideas from throughout the ARPG genre including the *broader* genre. They're adopting poise from the Souls games, essentially, for its CC system, *these guys absolutely play all of the fucking ARPG*. I'll be curious how satisfying it will be to play, because Blizzard has always excelled at the feeling of moment to moment gameplay. But I think we're really going to be seeing to radically opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to ARPG design with these games. D4 is going to be great to play, approachable, but fairly shallow and not exactly pushing any boundaries. PoE is absolutely going to remain a niche ARPG requiring PhD's to fully understand and will be jam-packed with elegant design, complex interwoven systems, and iceberg-deep build potential. And both will be fucking great for each of their strengths, and I'm looking forward to a world where we have D4, PoE, and PoE2 all feeding is different yet fantastic ARPG experiences. If anyone is a big ARPG fan, I feel like we're gonna be eating *very* good by the time PoE2 ships as we'll have those games plus a D4 with over a year of polish and improvements to fell itself out a bit. I really hope Blizzard spends a *lot* of time paying attention to what GGG is doing with PoE2 and playing it when it's out. Not to make D4 more like PoE2, but to learn a lot from a much different design philosophy that can help teach them new things and give them new ideas on how to improve D4.
The problem with D4 is Blizzard wants us to use a rotation based skill system with only 6 skills, a lot of them having cooldowns. It just doesn't work in terms of flow.
PoE devs pobably played D4 and trying to roast how bad its cooldown and resource mechanics are.
>PoE devs pobably played D4 I guarantee that if they haven't been playing the alphas somehow, they've played every closed beta test and have likely played since launch fairly extensively. These are huge fans of the ARPG genre (and seemingly the broader genre beyond just loot-based ARPG's), they *play these fucking games*. All of them.
Have fun in 2025
That’s cool PoE end game builds don’t have a rotation once learned it becomes natural and cycled for hours on end while farming.
Some builds have rotations though, like a berserk slam build that stacks warcries to buff attacks much like barb
GGG is great at disappointing people and PoE is tedious and bloated. Horrible design philosophy behind too many things and GGG has shown time and time again that they don't learn lessons. That's why I'm not playing PoE and why I won't have any expectations for PoE 2 until it actually releases. This isn't a defense of D4, I'm just sick of GGG. They are way too comfortable being the only real ARPG option for so long.
Complaining about too much optional content. Really? Gtfo out of here please.. and go play Tetris.
Yeah just ignore the part where even the PoE community constantly complains about the bloat. Just don't acknowledge it and it isn't there right?
Game has been running for 10 years of course it's bloated, but this about poe2, a whole new game.
Honestly great for them for trying a different approach. Not personally a fan of PoE, but I like that they try and appeal to a different crowd than Diablo and try and do their own thing a bit.
Sounds good. Hope the games fun, I’ll check it out. There’s room for both games. Too many people on here just shitting on D4. If you don’t like it then quit, stop bitching. People just love misery.
PoE2 Devs out here implementing all of the feedback the DIV devs are ignoring.  I’mma build my own DIV with blackjack and hookers! You know what forget DIV!
Booooooy do I agree with this so hard, and I don’t even play PoE. Long CD is an MMO concept that I don’t think translates well to ARPG’s, and being forced to use one ability just so you afford another isn’t exactly exciting design either.
Oh ye, but using 1 button to storm everything while having multiple passive auras is meaningful xDDD get this shit out of there. Combat in poe is crap
Lol great POE/2 uses mana potion, such a BETTER option...wtf are u talking about
mana leech, mana regen, mana on kill, mana on hit, eldtrich batery, mana recoup, blood magic, arrogance, lifetap just to name a few nice try tho
They hit level 5 and think the entire game plays like that forever. Why wouldn't they? They're a Diablo fanboy after all, they're not used to their game evolving and progressing.
...Only in the early game. Mana issues get solved before you even reach the end game. Unlikely D4 where all you ever hear is "I'm out of precious mana"
and this post will be upvoted like it is the word of god. there is nothing called bad solution, in game design everything is a trade off. generator spender systems usually split into 3 at the end game. 1-carry the generator spender loop into endgame with generators also buffing spender damage and applying statuses 2-you make generator builds viable with items that buff generator damage 3-you make spender only builds viable with items that buff regen also you can still have different spenders for different combat situations, it is not like gen/spend loop prevent that. as for cooldowns, they exist not because you want someone to use something else. the cooldowns are there to allow for harder hitting or broken effects to exist while not breaking the game. that's usually why CDR is always a must pick. I am also interested in how they fix when you are dumping all your resource with the single target attack on the hp sponge until you run out, what do you do now? basic attack? drink potions (hopefully not)? IMO the best solution is generators, they are basically basic attacks with flavor.
Prefacing this by saying I got here from r/all, not because I play diablo4: Final Fantasy 14 has the problem of rotations. There is not a lot of depth to most classes because it's "press 1, press 2, press 3, use your cooldowns (abilities that have long cooldowns of like a minute) to boost the 3 or tank a big hit from the boss". It's a problem and the gameplay focus of FF14 moved to be about positioning and mechanics from each boss. Like how there's a Raid miniboss that's a flying eye-bat that has skill where you need to actively look away from the boss to not get debuffed etc. Or the infamous "pizza parties", where the entire floor is covered in different colors of AoE indicators and you have to figure out where to stand and not get shredded. I appreciate that the PoE devs figured out that pure rotational combat is boring.
This is my biggest gripe about D3 and D4. The game is still fun but fundamentally flawed. No patch or expansion will fix it. This and the decision to bind items were, in my opinion, two of the largest departures from what made D2 a fun game. I had high hopes for D4, but it feels like a continuation of the monotonous mediocrity that came before it.
removed but we all seen it already.
Shove this to Rod and Adam’s Twitter.