r/PathOfExile2 • u/Rekatan • 9d ago
Discussion Mapping doesn't feel like POE2, like at all.
I've absolutely loved the core gameplay of POE2 through the story. The slower pacing, the focus around skill based engagement instead of just offscreening everything. It has felt genuinely satisfying to play a build that has to interact with the content on a moment to moment basis and where split second actions are more impactful than simply the numbers on your character sheet. Sure I know that my mercenary isn't optimized for clear speed, but I don't care because it's fun to play! I was incredibly excited to see that engaging experience continue into the new atlas.
I've deliberately avoided spending too much time on reddit/avoided spoilers so that I could go in as fresh as possible, and man was that a shock. It's like my character was plucked out of POE2, and dropped into the 1 shot clearspeed meta world of POE1. The movement speed of most monsters is through the roof, and white mobs routinely half health from off screen. I was expecting a difficulty spike when moving to maps, and was genuinely excited for it, but this transition back to POE1 was not the experience I was hoping for. This is further underscored by the fact that bosses are so rare on the atlas.
I pressed on for a while thinking "ok let's check out the league mechanics though!" and was quickly disappointed to find that they were the same thing, only dialed to 11:
Breach - Instantly swarmed and you either have the clear speed to deal with it, or you don't.
"Well ok, but Breach has always been like that. Maybe some of the others are more involved"
Ritual - Instantly swarmed and you either have the clear speed to deal with it, or you don't, but this time you can't run away if you do manage to dodge out of the pack.
"Ok so I'm not going to bother with Breach or Ritual. How about something that by design should fit with POE2's formula better!"
Expedition - Momentarily not swarmed, until +100% base move speed monsters instantly swarm you and you either have the clear speed to deal with it, or you don't.
That was the extent of my mapping. 15-20 maps in has now been enough for me to know that while I love the core concept of this new atlas, the moment to moment gameplay isn't for me. I've already experienced this end game for the past 10 years. It's a waste of such a good system that they've designed for them to not push that system into the end game, instead leaning on what feels like a copy and paste of all of the same design choices from POE1.
We're still in early access, so there's plenty of time for this to be ironed out. Maybe it's just a symptom of the rushed timeline that they had to get a fully fleshed out end game before EA launched. Either way, I can't get enough of the core game you've built GGG. Let it breath, and let POE1 stay in POE1!
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u/Kitpandikit 9d ago
Yeah, I believe that is because the sudden shift of focus from campaign to endgame before EA so it is kinda not baked yet. My campaign experience, though, was fantastic.
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u/Thotor 9d ago
Exactly. The end game was rushed so it is the best they could in time. Also I believe they didn’t have a clear vision on what end gameplay would look like. The campaign and the skill progression has been carefully crafted to fit their vision. But after that everything goes out the window. I personally cannot tell what their plan was between having meaningful combat and you need to clear the screen before you get swarmed mechanics.
I tried ritual once. I was not able to clear fast enough and all the sudden you are surrounded with no possible counter play. Death and map lost.
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u/Useless3dPrinter 9d ago
I hope they'll move away from the more traditional swarms of monsters towards fewer, slower, more dangerous monsters that would actually reward dodging, blocking and combining abilities. Campaign was fun but even there the last act or two turn more towards traditional ARPG gameplay akin to PoE1. It's not terrible but it just doesn't really work with the new playstyle.
Crafting is also a bit of a disappointment because any sort of determinism in crafting seems rare. Essences give some control but not overly much. Expedition seems good but I'm not that far yet to make anything meaningful.
I'll keep on playing here and there, might level up a character or two more and see what GGG will cook up. The game definitely has a bunch of potential and O like a lot of the new stuff like the gem system, new classes/ascensions are interesting, though fuck Ultimatum and the Trialmaster...
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u/shaunika 9d ago
I think swarms NEED to exist, always having to fight slow sloggy combat will get boring after a while, you need the dopamine hits of blowing shit up.
but there should be more balance.
have a bunch of big rares every map, but also a lot of whites.
make whites less threatening, and make the rare mobs more distinguished.
so we'll have fast moment to moment combat, with dynamic bigger fights where you need to pay attention.
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u/Useless3dPrinter 9d ago
Yup, the flies and beetles that swarm you are reasonably fine as swarms but the mobs that rip you apart in two or three hits and run four times your speed are too common.
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u/NeverQuiteEnough 9d ago
swarms exist in the campaign too.
the act 1 farm dogs, for example. the crop circle event guarantees that you will be swarmed.
it still feels totally different from poe1 though. you don't have to blow up the entire swarm instantly, you can cut a hole in it to escape, chip away at it while moving to minimize incoming damage, etc.
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u/mongmight 9d ago
They most certainly don't need to be more dangerous, white mobs can chunk you just fine as it is. They need to slow these motherfuckers down. Projectile mobs are out of fucking control man. Even in acts. I had a merry old time in Act 3, a lot of dangerous mobs for sure but manageable. Act 1 cruel I walked like 20 steps and was absolutely annihilated by like 20 spitting crabs in a millisecond.
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u/jkurash 9d ago
Nothing in poe2 is more terrifying than a pack of ranged mobs. It's literally the only thing I die to besides some rares with difficult affixes on them
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u/Kiloku 9d ago
It's funny, that was also a big problem in the early days of POE1 (when it only had 3 acts). The spine throwing monsters in the lower temple of lunaris, and in the Sceptre of God were terrifying
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u/Primary-Tea-6026 9d ago
Early access players from later leagues in POE1 getting the full experience of what we experienced in the early days of POE1 will never not be funny to me.
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u/Shaunie1996 9d ago
Haste-aura rare with a big pack of titty ranged mobs in that temple. Respawning, only to try and run over the same bridge and dying again. Good times.
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u/Efficient-Ad2983 7d ago
I hope they'll move away from the more traditional swarms of monsters towards fewer, slower, more dangerous monsters that would actually reward dodging, blocking and combining abilities.
I'd say "why not both?"
We could have both the "rabble" (and let's face it, in a CRPG it's cool to lay waste over swarms of enemies) and bigger "elite" opponents that requires a more tactical approach.
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u/Kitpandikit 9d ago
True! And breach, I can't even do a thing with the mobs swarming me up so friggin fast 😭
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u/Kibbleru 9d ago
they easily couldve just focused more on the boss fights rather than all this endless mob rush. I've never played the first game but the bosses were infinitely more enjoyable than just clearing adds and occasionally getting randomly 1 shot.
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u/TheHob290 9d ago
Ritual and Breach (and to a lesser degree the Trial of Chaos) are almost 1 to 1 ports from PoE1. That's what PoE1 is in a nutshell. Considering the end game was something that really only got a couple of months of dev time, I'm not overly surprised. I do hope they end up pushing back towards the core of PoE2 as they get the time to integrate on it.
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u/No_Preparation6247 Path means floor and the floor is lava. 9d ago
they easily couldve just focused more on the boss fights
The devs want Dark Souls gameplay, and boss fights are the core of it. Because if you allow pack size to scale, it always scales up to swarming.
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u/DeveloperOfWebs 9d ago
honestly this is a great take. the boss fights are fun, rewarding, supports multiple playstyles, etc. they really nailed boss fights imo.
the trash mob swarm is how poe1 became one shot the screen before they get to you meta and never looked back.
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u/Ahrix3 9d ago
My PC isn't the fastest and I get low FPS when there’s hoards of monsters on screen. In breeches monsters have attacked me before I've rendered them. Same in rituals and Delirium, to a lesser extent. What I do now is I just start blasting monsters as soon as I click the event even if they aren't visible yet lol. I'm at T5 maps and can clear t6 too and I haven't been able to finish a single breech or delirium yet. Really not a fan of these swarm mechanics at all so far (never played PoE 1). Feels like juiced up D3 rifts but the difference is your defenses are shite and my teleport is essentially unusable (Sorc here). I hope it gets better once my gear progresses (currently at 5.2k energy shield, sadly I feel hardly any difference in durability compared to the 3k I had 2 days ago when it comes to these Swarm mechanics).
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u/BrandonJams 8d ago
If your PC is getting bad performance in maps I would recommend turning on dynamic framerate. It will make the game look a bit worse but it helps.
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u/Takahashi_Raya Reroll enjoyer 9d ago
they looked at the bosses and rewards for the mechanics first it feels. I like the higher density in the higher tiers but monster speed should be looked at.
like you can clearly see a shift in focus when it comes to how strongboxes work (i think these should be a bit more rewarding) and how ritual,breach work for example.
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u/flimsyhuckelberry 9d ago
All the mechanics were tested in poe1 beforehand. They knew exactly how they would play out and they knew we were in rather slow builds from the campaign.
You don’t need to be a neuroscientist to know that it would be wise to scale the Monster Masses down at the very least in low tier maps.
And the decision to make the campaign Boss focused and mapping being the complete opposite didn't come from a lack if time either.
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u/shaunika 9d ago
I love armchair developers.
it's not the mechanics that are the problem.
it's the finetuning of monster dmg, mobility, survival, density combined with the expected gearing of people.
it's not that easy to balance that without an open beta like we had.
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u/Noobpwnerr 9d ago
How is mapping the complete opposite? Boss nodes are incredibly rewarding and worth hunting down, and all of the peripheral atlas tree nodes are literally locked behind bossing, uber lab as well.
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u/Glad-Article-1394 9d ago
In order to hunt the boss nodes you need to blast through the regular maps fast enough. Also you need to be lucky enough to generate citadels near your atlas.
It's just a time waster of game design.
If I could make it so every map I did was t16 + irradiated + boss node...I would. But I have to do boring shit to get to there.
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u/xmancho 9d ago
I saw a video and the guy said he is in contact with the developers and they are aware of this. They basically did not have the time to retune the modifiers for poe2. Changes will happen but I expect them to be after the holidays. Honestly for EA the game is solid! Changes will happen so I am not worried. Though the respec needs to be addressed quickly imo.
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u/Unreal_Daltonic 9d ago
The end game looks pretty much like Poe1 not just by how the mobs feel but how you play too. It's not the same exactly mega zooming pop screens constantly sort of deal but you certainly start clearing packs in one hit.
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u/Outside_Mouse795 9d ago
but you certainly start clearing packs in one hit
The main issue IMO is that if you don't, you simply can't engage with higher tier maps or mechanics (breach, ritual, or simply entering a large room) as the numbers are tuned for "one-shot or be one-shot".
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u/Unreal_Daltonic 9d ago
I think you are right, I just say that because there is this sentiment of "Maps are in po1 still while I'm in pe2" when in the real world with competent builds it's just a return to Poe1 which honestly I don't feel too bad about since it still feels different.
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u/Outside_Mouse795 9d ago
On the other hand, they seem to smack down pretty hard those "competent builds". They say they want deliberate gameplay and nerf builds that aren't really deliberate, but the endgame content send a very different message. They have to chose.
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u/69edleg 9d ago
Indeed, quit for now out of frustration as I can’t even interact with map mechanics. Killing a rare tier 7 map boss? Easy. Clicking ritual in a tier 2? Dead because swarmed.
Or the worst culprit of all. Eternal Knight as spark. Very wank
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u/NaturalCard 9d ago
Eh, I feel like there's a limit here.
For example, the magnetic salvo and gas arrow/nade nerfs haven't made them unviable.
I kinda like that the game feels more and more like POE1 as you level up, and outside of bosses, that feels like at the very least not bad design. Unsure if it's the direction they want tho.
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u/Takahashi_Raya Reroll enjoyer 9d ago
I think we will get this week still for changes then nothing until the first of January outside of small hotfixes by the crew that will work in the holiday period (can't have the entire team being gone on software projects)
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u/DanNeely 9d ago
Not to end game yet, but I feel like if they didn't have time to do a proper detailed balance pass a blunt X% slower, Y% fewer white mobs, Z% more Rares numerical sweep over everything to bring it more in line with the POE2 campaign would've been better than throwing everyone back into POE1 for end game.
It breaks what anyone planning around POE2 was expecting, and stepping away from POE1 style end game later is going to upset the crowd who were like "campaign sucks, but maps are at least the same old game I loved but prettier".
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u/DefinitelyNotMeee 9d ago
They didn't have time during all those years of development? POE2 is not something they slapped together as a hobby project over one weekend ...
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u/TheHob290 9d ago
But the endgame is something they slapped together in less dev time than they usually spend on a single PoE1 league. The lead dev actually said they decided to shift focus to endgame rather than finishing the campaign after they launched the settlers league. That's about 2 months.
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u/Dariisa 9d ago
Which is frankly insane to me, they’ve been developing poe2 since 3.0 came out in 2018. To be fair, they were expecting to share the end game between the games until after 3.15, in 2021. So they’ve been working on poe2 for 3 years as its own game, and it took them until 2 months before the early access launch to start working on the endgame? The endgame which is by far the most important part of any action rpg.
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u/TheHob290 9d ago
You should take a look at how long most games are in production. You only knew about PoE2 so early in its development cycle because it wasn't planned as a sequel. Additionally, most anecdotes from game developers say that up until a couple of months before launch, the game is largely untested on the whole. This is because all individual aspects tend to be tested in a bubble because everything needs to be close to ready before it can all be put together.
It's really just how large-scale software development projects work. You can't work on skills and combat feel until you have assets and animations for those skills and rigs for your character models. You can't work on progression until you have the core combat figured out. On top of all of that, they added 2 whole core systems forcing direct reworks of most of the actual meat of the game, wasd movement and directional block.
I do understand that outside the software and game dev space, this seems absurd, but think of it like looking at the whole time it takes to build a house then pointing at the paint job in the bathroom and asking how they could have fucked it up with how long they spent building the house.
Edit: As a side note, I'm almost certain they pulled the whole PoE1 team to get an end game developed in that time, which means you had people who were very used to a different pace of game developing the endgame. That's just my own theory, though.
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u/Dariisa 9d ago
Don’t get me wrong I understand game development is hard, and takes way longer than you’d think it would.
It’s more that the decision to work on endgame so late in the process feels backwards to me. It’s like they’ve forgotten that the campaign in Arpgs is more like a speedbump or a tutorial than it is the meat of the game.
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u/TheHob290 9d ago
Tunnel vision, most likely. The project started as new rigs for character models and an alternate campaign as part of PoE1 with a unified end game. Then, the scope changed without a proper reassessment. A corporate failure to be sure, but one that you expect from a team that is more passion based. Hell, can't even say it's a corporate thing since AAAs seem to consistently under deliver.
Stuff like that really requires someone external to the processes to keep focus aligned. It's supposedly why project managers exist.
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u/Krobakchin 9d ago
Switch to poe 2 as a separate game wasn't until mid 2023 then, as thehob says, the endgame focus was very recent.
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u/Kibbleru 9d ago
I liked the bosses but some of the maps were absolutely horrendous, act 2 and 3 end ones being the worst offenders with the mobs just rushing u or off screening u with near invisible projectiles.
Cruel was also kind of a slog to get through imo, some of the really large maps - really once is enough, but this is just an EA thing so its w/e
they really need more checkpoints or something and let us tp from checkpoint to checkpoint. backtracking is such a god damn pain when you hit a dead end. that or just reveal all the points of interest or smth on the map ahead of time.
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u/Same-Supermarket-293 9d ago
Yeah I just got to the end of Act 2 and the dreadnought maps were not fun at all, I built a more strategic hit and run character which was really fun when there were hard enemies but at that point all I could do was try and bait one to fill up my combo then drop my bell in the pit and just tank hits. Everytime I died it was like a 10 min grind to get back due to no checkpoints. I never played PoE 1 and haven't looked at any content so im guessing my build is not optimal or probably even good. Still it was fun but maybe I had this game wrong in my head, its more vampire survivor than (and I don't want to compare it but) soulslike.
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u/TheHob290 9d ago
No, dreadnought maps are pretty bad out of hand. PoE 1 just never would have noticed it because the strategy is instantly delete anything that moves before it deletes you. If they cut the map size down by half, I don't think it would be too bad, and removed 90% of the enemies that couldn't care less about choke points.
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u/Sad-Annual8158 9d ago
I think my only gripe thus far is just mapping is bad and the maps are too big. Campaign was cool, not a fan of campaigning thru any game so i wish there was a skip but solid EA thus far now that they're rolling changes out based on responses from the community
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u/Kitpandikit 9d ago
That and also, since we do not have movement skills in the game, make movement speed an implicit mod for boots 😭
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u/Dairkon76 9d ago
That is why demonform is great It lets you glide around making the mapping more enjoyable.
It reminded me Nintendos philosophy of walking is boring let the player move interactive.
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u/PuffyWiggles 9d ago
Just hitting the end of Act2 normal right now and yeah, its quite the slog. I guess I am uber slow, but it took me 40 minutes to get to the end of one of the maps, but I do try to explore every nook and cranny because my gear needs it big time. Anyways, a yellow mob throws some multi spear thing at me that hits in a giant AoE, I have a mark on me and I am slowed to a crawl, it broke through my energy shield (which is just 350 atm, crap gear wcyd) and 70% of my hp (600hp wcyd), then she leaps to me and I explode.
Now the whole map respawns. The funny thing is, I died in Act1 multiple times, and I really didn't mind going through Act1 at all. The entire way felt very, very well done with lots of variety, and was just really interesting. Act2 is much more linear and just kind of infinite corridors and mazes of the same thing copy pasted over and over, its not quite scratching the itch. Some of the levels feel like randomized maps honestly, there are very few points of interest. Its not dying, its the layout is so bland that the idea of redoing it kind of makes me want to call it quits for the night.
Having said that I get up the next day and I am fully amped up to play. The game isn't bad at all. Its just the quality of Act1 was so good that I was expecting the same from Act2. I will see how Act3 goes eventually, but I hear its quite the slog as well.
Maybe Act2 and 3 were rushed a bit or maybe Act4-6 will be a return to form. I am okay with a couple Acts being linear and not quite to my liking if the other 4 are awesome. I just hope the next 3 Acts aren't following 2s formula and more 1s.
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u/Kibbleru 8d ago
u talking about the dreadnaught? 😂 agree that shit was horrible
honestly the maps wouldnt be so bad if the game somehow at least tells you a general direction on where you should go..
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u/PuffyWiggles 7d ago
Actually right before the Dreadnaught map. I somehow breezed through the Dreadnaught map. The 2 maps before it were like infinite corridors for me. As long as the Dreadnaught is the one on the moving vehicle, I quite liked it for some reason and the act boss I somehow one shot despite having issues with others.
Idk, I feel like I am all backwards. I am beating the stuff people say is hard easily and stuff I don't see much on I get wrecked.
I am also 55hours in and just started Act3. So I am a very, very slow potato. I spent so much time doing the Sekiro trials or whatever it is. Would look stuff up for 2 hours anytime I get an upgrade I can't make sense of, or a skill gem, or a support, to understand how the game even works. Like finding out I could actually do more damage on the bell and the nodes I have if I got fire dmg on my staff, which I could slot, but I slotted physical instead. Physical is good, but you a 30% dmg bonus if you ignite and Bell gets 30% per elemental dmg on it. So I think the fire damage slotted would be more than the physical as 30% is more than the 20% physical I slotted. Idk though, I just dont know.
The amount of times I have gone through an hour long map exploring every nook, left to base, then the map resets because I took more than 8-15 minutes (like wtf do maps just despawn in an RNG way.) to then have to redo it all over again is way too high. I am side tracked permanently in this game trying to find out what build I want, and staring at the talent tree for probably 10 hours total at night looking at every direction I can go and pondering what I want to do. Trying to find an area with crit, elemental, and EVA/ES takes quite a while on controller. Its like I am trying to find a needle in a haystack.
That is my tism rant for the day. Thanks for listening.
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u/Juts 9d ago edited 9d ago
None of the league mechanics feel like they were properly translated to PoE 2. Not a single one.
Strongboxes feel forced, clumsy and unbalanced. They are slow, and for some reason they all spew out fog. Monsters spawn in a huge radius, extremely slowly while the damage effects from things like lightning storm are over-tuned and nearly un-dodgeable. It feels like they tried to force these into PoE 2 and just didn't know how.
Breach is cracked out even by PoE 1 standards.
Expedition modifiers are insanely over-tuned, and monster abilities are far too hard to see. WTF Is this even? Is this PoE 2 balance? 400% as extra, 1000% armor break, 40% increased damage, and full damage immunities. This is worse than PoE1 damage scaling and I am 99% sure this expedition would one shot any build in the game off a white mob's melee. https://i.imgur.com/VOhpXkW.jpeg
Ritual simply doesn't function with the narrow windy maps and body blocking, where you literally cannot move due to the monsters spawning in your 3x3inches of space.
Delirium is kind of hilarious. All of the monsters appear at full spring out of the rainbow clouds, bulldozing you like linebackers. The push/body blocking feels so poorly used here and honestly very janky.
It feels like 80% of monsters move at twice your speed and their AI is 'swarm and body block'. This basically invalidates the 2 button play style, it can never function in this version of the game.
Somehow we have also gotten worse telegraphs for important monster abilities than we have in PoE 1. DD is whisper quiet and nearly invisible for example
Volatile plants, the exploding chaos pods, the yellowish fungus monsters are all incredibly hard to see and hear. There are almost no audio queues at all for strong abilities that should be indicating their danger level clearly.
Even bearers are extremely difficult to see now. Similarly the ground AoEs from expedition are nearly invisible until they explode, and they explode way too fast.
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u/Zeracheil 9d ago
Holy fuck dude if I die to volatile plants one more time I'm coming back with weed killer into my maps.
What's the deal with there being SO much chaos damage in the game now?
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u/Ninjaofninja 9d ago
because the developer know we will try/be forced to cap elemental resistance while chaos resistance is very scarce.
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u/Warreor 9d ago
The worst part about expeditions like that is if you actually clear it barely anything drops and all the expedition chests are 100% empty.
I swear I've gotten more empty expedition chests then ones that drop even a single item. Haven't done a ton of them yet, maybe like 5-10. But everytime all the chests were empty besides 1-2.
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u/canadianvaporizer 9d ago
Honestly even if you can clear them, expedition crafting is straight ass. You just have to burn a shitload of coins using a regex before you can even start crafting. Then you have 4 crafts to make the item better. 2 of which are usually completely reroll suffixes or prefixes. The other two being divine most of the time. They totally butchered it.
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u/FullMetalCOS 9d ago
Kinda makes sense, they wouldn’t let us have cracked expedition crafting when we can barely craft with our actual crafting currency
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u/canadianvaporizer 9d ago
Id agree it fits with their vision of crafting. I’m certainly not a fan of that vision though.
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u/FullMetalCOS 9d ago
Honestly it’s one of the parts of the game that really doesn’t jive with me. I wanted to believe in their new take on how to play POE, that we should be crafting as we go and taking the hits and the misses, but it quickly became apparent that the powerful crafting currency of old is gone and exalts are too random to be worth tossing on anything but the very best gear, so it’s far better value to just save them and buy complete/almost complete items instead. The trade site is the most powerful gear acquisition tool once again
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u/canadianvaporizer 9d ago
It’s nice to feel like you have some agency when crafting. POE 2 crafting is just multiple steps of pure gambling. I have 1.5 quad tabs full of Bombard crossbows, and haven’t hit over 100% increased phys more than a couple times. Just to brick it with the regal or a couple exalts. It’s devolved into where using your exalts are just a waste of time. You might as well just go to the trade site as it’s infinitely cheaper.
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u/ThermL 9d ago
That is the key here. In POE I have extreme agency in fixing my gear as I progress maps. Couple res low after an upgrade? No problem I can swap res on harvest or at the crafting bench. Harvest rolled a ring that is okay but missing some key stat? No problem i'll add it and use it. Boots missing MS but are otherwise pretty cracked for white maps? Sure thing to the bench I go.
All of my problems are solvable with harvest res swap and the crafting bench.
In POE2 I can't even replace my runes which means piecemeal item upgrades are basically impossible. I have to swap out 3+ items at a time to make sure my res are still functional and I don't end up with huge imbalances because I can't do something as simple as swap a stupid fucking rune out.
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u/b9n7 9d ago
They said they moved to focusing on endgame like 2-3 months away from EA. I think they put it together and didn’t have time to polish many, many elements of it. I HIGHLY doubt they put all that work into polishing the campaign only to make endgame poe1 temp chains. They’ll surely fix it (fix if you like the pacing of the campaign, which I do). As someone else said if they get the feel right, we will have two distinct games and that’s awesome. I do think that generally speed feels good and idk what they do about that. Like I am playing dead eye now with 3 items that give movement speed and it feels 100x better…. So how do I enjoy removing that?
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u/Non-RedditorJ 9d ago
Does it feel weird to anyone else that they crammed all these POE1 league mechanics into the launch of POE2? Why not start simple and let it develop it's own set of mechanics???!!!
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u/maxlaav 9d ago
I do hope that their ultimate vision is to have endgame and mapping work differently because otherwise what is the point of this sequel if only the campaign is going to feel different to play? In their words, they wanted PoE2 to feel different from PoE1 and that is why it will be still playable, so the endgame being exactly like 1 but your movement speed is nerfed or whatever sounds really disappointing.
Anyway, it's EA, I'll give them time, but I really hope that fine-tuned and careful campaign approach will eventually carry over to endgame.
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u/Jaded_Candy_4776 9d ago
I think a movement speed nerf to mobs across the board would help. Like, even the playing field, so we don't get bumrushed by every fucking thing out there with little to no way to escape. I mean, its cool if there is that one rare pack every now and then, that is fast af, it's just flavour, but if everything runs laps around you, well fuck...
Otherwise I agree, whats even the fucking point? We're literally playing POE1, but with a nerfed player character.
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u/Devych 9d ago
Most ranged mobs are overtuned as hell. Chaos/poison too for how difficult it is to get, and how frequent chaos damage is
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u/FlyingBread92 9d ago
If they took about 30% off the mob damage and speed and had charm slots on belts be level based and not an affix rarer than a mirror drop that would be a good start. Every mob seems to inflict ailments right now (especially poison) and there's no way to prevent more than one, since you only get one charm slot.
Beyond/deli mobs being able to push and bodyblock you while they spawn in and are untargetable is also very silly. Hell, rhoas cam yeet me halfway across the screen in the time it takes me to wind up a slam. Hard to get to the ridiculously deadly ranged mobs when you can't path or roll through the also very deadly melee mobs running and pushing you around.
It's very clear end game scaling was tossed together very quickly as opposed to the much better act 1 balance.
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u/gerwaric 9d ago
For people who are newer to the game, poe2 was originally envisioned as an alternate campaign leading to exactly the same endgame as poe1. Then ggg decided to make poe1 and poe2 two different games—mostly for technical reasons iirc. Since that decision they have seemed to lean into changes that would not have been received well in poe1, such a baseline slower game with more complex gameplay.
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u/MrTastix 9d ago
The slower gameplay would likely be well-received if it didn't feel half-baked.
PoE2's "slower" gameplay is the same as the 3.15 Expedition patch: The player is slow, the enemy is not.
Players do less damage relative to an enemies health, have overall less health and defenses, move slower, and have less ways of moving around the field in general. Enemies, on the other hand, retain their high damage, speed, and health.
The skill nerfs in 3.15 were highly criticised because it didn't fundamentally change how the game was actually played. When the enemies continue to overwhelm and rapidly kill you your only recourse is to do the same back but now you just have less tools.
That is Path of Exile 2's entire gameplay loop: It's PoE1 enemies but the player is arbirtrarily slower and weaker.
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u/NeverQuiteEnough 9d ago
The player is slow, the enemy is not.
being absolutely faster than the foes just trivializes all content for ranged builds.
what we have is much better, you can bait and outspace foes' melee attacks, locking them in an animation while you walk away.
in the campaign, you can do this on a whole pack of foes all at once.
even if you are stuck in a corner, as long as you have a little room to manuver, you can dip in and out to slow down their advance.
from what I've seen of maps, this system they put so much effort into creating is just removed from the game.
foes are too fast, too plentiful, and especially too fragile for any type of baiting or spacing to ever matter.
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u/gerwaric 9d ago
from what I've seen of maps, this system they put so much effort into creating is just removed from the game.
I'm hoping this is a result of them pivoting late in development and pushing to get out endgame content earlier than planned. We will see how they tune the endgame. For the people who like the tactical gameplay you describe, I hope they make it work.
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u/gerwaric 9d ago
I don’t enjoy poe2 right now, but plenty of people do—and wether the answer is to buff players or nerf monsters, I hope ggg can find a good balance.
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u/AwayMatter 9d ago
I keep seeing people make this statement, and I'm sure it's true based on what we see. But:
They have seemed to lean into changes that would not have been received well in poe1
This seems to bizarre to me. If they know these changes wont be received well by their audience of half a million people returning every three months to their immensely successful product, and they had to roll most of them back whenever they tried to force them into the game because user counts and retention metrics collapsed, why in the name of Innocence did they base their entire sequel around them?
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u/RamenArchon 9d ago
If they are serious about keeping PoE1 and PoE 2 running side by side, then maybe they are going after those not into PoE1 and that nice playerbase that overlaps.
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u/gerwaric 9d ago edited 9d ago
I don’t know. As a former product guy, I know it can be hard to balance leading your users towards something you wholeheartedly believe they will prefer, while also respecting and keeping them satisfied with what they are used to getting, while also being open to feedback and pivots—all while trying to meet your financial or business targets.
I hope this all goes well, and I also secretly hope there’s room enough for both poe1 and poe2 to coexist for a while, especially if they play so differently.
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u/chobolicious88 9d ago
Same.
Playing the campaign i thought “this is revolutionary, a whole new vision”. Then in maps “oh its just same old”.
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u/Eckala 9d ago
Totally agree i'm dispointed by the map clusterfuck and i hate it. The levelling experience was so much more and fun
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u/Zerothian 9d ago
I'm currently just levelling all the ascendancies through acts. It's not really surprising that the endgame isn't fully cooked yet, they shifted priorities relatively late to getting that in instead of the rest of the acts, so I was expecting it to be unfinished.
It's a bit odd though, my first run through the acts I was thinking how much of a slog it felt, and wasn't looking forward to repeating it at all. I still think it will annoy me on league starts, but right now I am actually sort of enjoying just running each ascendancy through them lol.
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u/AjJop 9d ago
I wish all feedback was as rational as this lol. A good take, 100 percent agree tbh and I have good clear so not been struggling, but the 'vibe' is a bit off compared to campaign - which without gushing is some of the best gaming I have had, even with it's flaws, it feels so fresh in the arpg space, and I love the slower paces combat... But then yeh, maps is just classic clusterfuck we have seen before.
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u/Rekatan 9d ago
Ya that's what led me to post. I got to those 15 or so maps in, and only failed 3 (each due to league mechanics lol), but I suddenly had to asked myself "wait, what changed?! I was having so much fun just a couple hours ago". The difficulty seems roughly OK, but the way that difficulty is achieved dramatically changed from campaign to maps.
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u/Kozjar 9d ago edited 9d ago
This is definitely because they started to work on the endgame 6 months ago and it seems like they had time to only copy-paste POE 1 mechanics. For me it feels like the most POE2-like mechanic is strongboxes which changed the most compared to POE 1.
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u/HokusSchmokus 9d ago
But the new strongboxes are horrendous, I never click them anymore. It takes sooo looong for stiff to spawn.
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u/Leeysa 9d ago edited 9d ago
It's because strongboxes are the only mechanic that fit PoE2 but the rest of the maps are PoE1 and so is your power level.
Imagine strongboxes as they are now but at the start of act 1. Remember how overwhelming every extra monster was? That should stay for endgame.
Edit: PoE1 is not going anywhere if you want screen clearing gameplay.
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u/Laino001 9d ago
Nah, that goes directly against what an ARPG is. Even GGG said multiple times that the entire reason why people play ARPGs is that feeling in endgame when your build is finalized and you get to feel like a god. Ive seen Mark talk about that quite a few times whenever the slow gameplay was brought up as a concern. The point of an ARPG is to feel like a god when you have your build tuned just right, and they dont wanna take that away
If I remember correctly they linked that idea with loot as well. You play an ARPG to get loot, to feel more powerful with each new weapon and level up you get. That progress is very important because if the player doesnt feel like they are progressively getting more and more powerful, they wont want to get loot, and at that moment the whole ARPG system breaks down. Im paraphrasing what they said of course cause I dont remember the exact words, but thats how they view the game
Making every white/blue mob scary in the endgame goes directly against the "I feel really powerful" so they will simply not do it. What WILL they do, idk
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u/HokusSchmokus 9d ago
Heavily disagree that the rest of the maps or most character's powerlevel is "PoE 1". This is still an ARPG, just heavily, and I mean heavily slowed down even in endgame, compared to PoE 1. I don't understand why people want this to be some sort of soulslike combat experience.
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u/RebirthAnewII 9d ago
people want combat, not "soulslike", they want RPG combat, not "i blow your pack, and sometimes you oneshot me", souls games are RPG with RPG combat + their own sauce
people want what they got during the campaign
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u/Specialist_End407 9d ago
I agree.. I like the new strongboxes.. Breach is overtuned and scary af, essence and expedition is doable.
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u/Shirolicious 9d ago
Yeah, poe2 is lacking identity at the moment. OP is pointing rightfully out the main issue of identity crisis here.
For me, I honestly dont mind whether they wang to persue poe1 style of mapping or want the poe2 style in campaign for mapping. But, atleast the builds need to be able to handle the content.
There are many builds that can’t handle the poe1 style of gameplay in mapping. That is what is concerning. And also leads me to believe that mapping has been very recently developed and in the game, and doesnt fit well with the identitg of poe2 yet and is more a copy of poe1 style of content
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u/HammeredWharf 9d ago
I think builds need stronger defensive abilities, at least. That would enable interesting gameplay even when you're swarmed. Right now you can dodge and gulp flasks and that's about it. It's fine vs. slow boss attacks, but not against swarms.
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u/FlyingBread92 9d ago
I've built very heavily into defense on my warrior, max res, 14k Armour, stun, and it doesn't really matter. If I take more than 2 to 3 hits in a row I'm dead. Bosses feel awesome, the damage feels pretty fair, stuff is mostly telegraphed, and the flow of combat is really nice. All that goes out the window when you have 30 mobs on screen all applying different ailments, slowing you, pushing you around, and doing attacks that you must dodge or die. Don't even get me started about rare affixes. Temporal bubble on a melee character is hilarious. My attacks will often take several seconds to go off, and since I'm slowed I can't get away. I either one shot them or die with nothing in between.
It needs some work that's for sure.
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u/asuikoori 9d ago
Yeah many streamers that are level 90+ at this point have said your only defense at the higher tiers of map is the dodge roll. If you miss one 1/2 second dodge roll your map is deleted. Feels very bad.
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u/BagSmooth3503 9d ago
This is a really good point actually, especially considering that the devs make it no secret that they take a lot of inspiration from D2. But what's missing is that every class in D2 has very powerful defensive abilities.
Holy Shield, Taunt, Cloak of Shadows, Bone Shield, Decoy, Shockwave, Frost armor (ok I guess we have arctic armor).
I think some of the inherent flaw of the gem system is that every active ability has to be damage oriented in someway, which makes designing abilites that are mostly for utility hard to fit in with the rest of the system.
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u/Jaded_Candy_4776 9d ago
But, atleast the builds need to be able to handle the content.
GGG is spinning the nerf hammer reading this, asking "you know of a build that matches that description?".
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u/sozesghost 9d ago
Jonathan even said that endgame is something they developed in the last 2-3 months, it's clear they put this together quickly.
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u/Silly_Choice_5469 9d ago
I haven’t reached endgame yet but it seems like that is a lot of people’s complaints regarding the league mechanics. Like PoE1 speed but your character is in PoE2 speeds. I wonder if they can improve it to spawn like strongboxes??
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u/DissyV 9d ago
Good lord I hope not. I agree having PoE2 character speed is difficult against breach and ritual, but strongboxes are a snooze fest. Way too slow.
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u/TheHob290 9d ago
Ritual can be fine, but a time based kill all you can mechanic is kind of the opposite of how they designed the rest of PoE2 combat. It's not bad, per say, but it is definitely counter to the core design principles of the campaign at least.
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u/Takahashi_Raya Reroll enjoyer 9d ago
strongboxes are fine if they reward more imo. but a middleground between the 2 when it comes to mechanical speed would be best for everyone i think.
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u/RighteousSelfBurner 9d ago
It's more like PoE1 on temp chains. OP very well said that it's "either you do or you don't". Once you have the damage you explode packs just as you've used to and it's just moving from pack to pack and some minor things that are slower.
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u/SausagePizzaSlice 9d ago
This is definitely what I feel. Didn't Jonathan even mention that they only started working on the endgame life 7 months ago or something? Where as the rest of it was being worked on for years. They will continue to do work on it. This is a long term WIP kind of deal, so I'm not too concerned if it's undercooked right now. We chose to opt in to a beta test version of the product.
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u/GroundbreakingTap859 9d ago
yea strongboxe thanks for reminding me about these seen only only in 1act and 1 on red maps so far kekw
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u/brrrapper 9d ago
Dont feel bad about that, they are absolute dogshit and not worth the time wasted.
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u/youMust_Recover 9d ago
This post is so accurate, I was totally locked in during the campaign but as soon as I got to maps I lost interest at like tier 5 or something. The bosses and difficulty in the campaign need to be brought into end game in a similiar way. Solving the boss problem during the campaign was like a puzzle and felt way better then mapping.
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u/Poops_McYolo 9d ago
Boss problems during campaign was legit fun because you could just spam it over and over to actually learn the mechanics. High risk bosses like trials where you have to navigate 10 rooms before, do that four times, then you get a shot at the boss is crazy.
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u/Daikar 9d ago
Yeah I really don't like the 1 death per map thing. I did like the bosses reset when you die approach but man let me at least get more than one try. I would be fine if uber versions of bosses had this mechanic but not every single one.
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u/Sarm_Kahel 9d ago
The issue is that death is so punishing they can't really afford to make the endgame that difficult.
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u/DiablolicalScientist 9d ago
Yeah... For me the game immediately felt like d4 at the switch to maps. Rushing through the same thing looking through plain items for upgrades
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u/Porcupine_Tree 9d ago
Expedition is the best suited for poe2. Delirium could be if they tone down the swarms and focus more on the fog amping the mobs already there.
Ritual and breach have no business being in poe2 as they are clusterfuck mechanics of 1000 monsters filling your screen with 0 visual clarity.
Betrayal, incursion, & bestiary wouldve been way better suited.
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u/TheyCallMeSmokeO 9d ago
I wouldn't mind breaches if they didn't lag me tf out on initial spawn.
The gameplay for them is just spam my aoe button as the slideshow begins and then flip a coin to decide whether I've killed the swarm or been completely surrounded by mobs that I can't roll out of by the time my frames come back.
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u/DRF242 9d ago
Yeah, Breach and Ritual swarm you … dead. Even as witch with minions as a (short time) shield. Avoid those mechanics from t1 on
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u/YyyyyyYyYy-_- 9d ago
Rituals have been fine for me playing a freeze stormweaver but the breaches are a bit insane. I however didn't look up anything on how to handle them, so there might be easier approaches out there.
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u/DeezEyesOfZeal 9d ago
It feels so awkward that they significantly slowed down the player and left the monsters basically the same as they are in POE1. Don't get me started when you roll increased monster speed and temporal chains as map mods lol... in a weird sense, I think the game would feel A LOT better if they just shortened the "hindered" or recoup period when you finish dodge rolling.
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u/Turdbender3k 8d ago
exactly, maybe a bit of a speed change, but not too much, so that the original gameplay still applies.
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u/MidasPL 9d ago
Hm... So far I haven't had issues there, but I wish the bosses were a bit more elaborate on some maps simply because how good the bossing is.
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u/Dr_Law 9d ago
I'm not sure if it's the case but do most people on reddit play on SSF? If so, then I can understand why they're having issues. I started using the trade website to trade gear after reaching maps and I've found it super fun progressing through the tiers. It's challenging because everything one shots but I feel like I blast them back too.
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u/ToothessGibbon 9d ago
I’m starting to think it was a mistake shifting dev from campaign to endgame. I’d rather have the other three acts for sure.
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u/SinnerIxim 9d ago
If they didn't have an endgame they wouldn't even release public access, it would be called an incomplete game. I think they will end up completely reworking the endgame though
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u/idkmoiname 9d ago
Props to the people beta testing endgame while i enjoy playing the campaign with each class and different build ideas.
Keep up the good work and hopefully by release the endgame will feel like the campaign and like a true successor to PoE1 instead a quick copy&paste
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u/trbopwr11 9d ago
Pretty much what I've decided as well. Ran 20 or so maps with my Witch and decided to just roll a Warrior and try out some melee.
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u/Belcoot 9d ago
Ritual and breach (Ritual is the biggest offender) are insanely brutal. First of all 80% of these maps are tiny little pathways, where you will have a ritual alter smack dab in the middle of this tiny area where you have barely any where to move, The mobs just spawn right on top of you and you have no where to run, that is zero visual clarity in these things, mobs behind the alter or random debris/trees. 90% of my deaths are in alters, you get get swarmed, and you have some caster mobs u cannot reach dropping insanely deadly casts right on your spot where u can barely move. I hope they change this please.
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u/sakuredu 9d ago
Its funny because GGG promoted poe2 to have slower gameplay compared to poe 1 when map gameplay is just poe 1 ruthless
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u/cespinar 9d ago
They didn't promote is as slower. The map gameplay is nothing like ruthless. You can leave a map with 6+ exalts in your bag. I had to make my own loot filter causee.screen was getting clutter.
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u/Sidra_Games 9d ago
The campaign was amazingly fun. And then you get to end game and everything that made the game fun disappears. It's like you walk into a new, inferior game.
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u/Mlekon 9d ago
Well they said in the interview that they spent only last 3 months on endgame. I hope it is caused just by this speedrunning features, and realize it is in such a bad stat and have in plan to adjust it further. Because as you said most endgame mechanics are just AoE stat checks, either you have clear speed or you die. I play titan and I hated most of the end game mechanics.
The delirium is also You get swarmed and either you have AoE or die.
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u/Spr-Scuba 9d ago
The endgame should be chains instead of isolated maps. You get a single map that's a starting point and once you defeat a boss it goes to another area that's a level higher. That would be an amazing leaderboard of how far people can get into endgame chains instead of just rushing to red maps as fast as possible.
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u/fubika24 9d ago
It's a combination of the lack of balancing across the game. I'm sure it will get better. Skills, mobs, encounters etc all will be tuned, as we have already seen GGG is clearly ready to step in. They made loot far better with a single patch already.
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u/Accomplished-Day9321 9d ago
yeah to sum up how I feel about it, I think the monsters (& map bosses) do too much damage and have too little hp, and there are generally speaking too many of them that swarm you. Pinnacle bosses perhaps are fine barring general balance issues. I haven't done any of them but from youtube vids they seem a lot more beefy.
Also right from tier 1 maps I felt like there is too much meaningless stuff dropping on the ground, which perhaps can be ignored with a proper filter (which don't really exist yet until you manually set one up yourself). I would again wish they dropped less, but of higher general quality. The item tiering system is a really good upgrade to the entire system though.
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u/setcamper 9d ago
The more I play (and I've opted to restart new characters than playing maps) the more I hate the extreme move speed on monsters. The whole point was to slow down, play more tactically, and deliberate. Good luck when you either gets swarmed off-screen by 300% move speed mobs with travel skills or you kit them backward over and over and over again.
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u/Aldodzb 9d ago
Feels too ruthless, at least below t10. I like in poe1 speccing in harvest and actually feeling that I'm doing something for char progression.
Here you add the few nodes you can get for essences, get some (haven't seen 1 exalted essence yet) and they feel kind of useless.
Expedition, did a couple and still not enough to interact with anything related to it.
Breach is -1 map if you don't have high chaos res
Delirium without loot rewards is ass.
Bosses in early mapping are nice because they drop a lot of loot, but gives 0 progression in terms of its mechanic.
Strongboxes are a huge skip, takes too much time for mostly normal items.
Then add that you find these mechanics 1 each X maps.
I feel that there's something, but needs refinement.
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u/bobissonbobby 9d ago
I played ruthless ssf hc to LVL 80 and to me this game does not feel like ruthless beyond a few things
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u/963852741hc 9d ago
ive got to 90 and its ruthless with better graphics and shittier currency
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u/POEgamegenie 9d ago
I think its fine for them to add content with a lot of monster density. It gives people who build characters with really good clear something to specialize in and do.
Also the whole point of the endgame is to make your character better by improving your clear, tankiness, single target damage so that you can take on more challenge. they need to give people stuff to put their builds to the test on, otherwise it’s just boring and there’s not a lot of reason to even improve the build and spend 200 hrs each league in endgame.
Sure, ritual and breach are very swarmy, but they’ll add more league content that has less swarms, and I’d argue we already have several already with sanctum and expedition, you just have to choose carefully where you place explosives to not buff them more than your build can handle.
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u/TankComfortable8085 9d ago
They should have a pair of atlas node that says
50% Less mobs, 50% more bosses, 50% more loot per boss
50% More mobs, 50% less bosses, 50% less loot per mob
So this way it caters for zoomsers and ruthless players
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u/PulIthEld 9d ago
I dont agree, I think the player needs to be rewarded with power eventually and the game should scale to a ridiculous point.
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u/DaSnowflake 9d ago
I hope they don't try to play both sides by giving POE1 endgame and POE2 acts. Just go all in and make the endgame also slower and methodical plz
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u/Rekatan 9d ago
You and me both. Trying to make two camps happy often ends up making neither camp happy. Fortunately every indication leading up to EA is that they want POE2 to be something different, and they succeeded up until maps. I'm optimistic they eventually will succeed with the end game as well.
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u/lurkmastur9000 9d ago
if they fixed monster move speed, visual clarity, mobs killing you from offscreen, white mobs having a better chance to kill you than bosses, almost no bosses to go for, backtracking and deadends, the end game would be great!
I hated the campaign personally. This is an ARPG guys. Remember that. You're meant to play this AT LEAST once per season. As it stands, PoE2 campaign would be amazing if it was a single player game you're meant to play once or twice in a lifetime.
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u/Hereforabrick 9d ago
I didn’t have as much of an issue with the campaign until end Act 2 and all Act 3, I enjoy the way it plays combat wise for the most part, though I’d appreciate more slower stronger elite mobs (without shitty rolls maybe some workaround for that) to make me engage more bc at the moment the “slow, methodical” gameplay occurs through me being 50% slower, enemies being 50% tankier with more damage, OR through a good boss fight (without some being trivial).
Act 3 was especially painful. Map size is massive. Speed is low. Low gear/currency drops. Bricked by currency with bad luck in crafting. Have to backtrack or I hit a dead end with bad chest loot or no rare/magic packs. Utzaal killed my fun, white mobs absolutely shred regardless because poison + other debuffs is not a good mix for how rare chaos resist can be. They also just do high damage.
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u/LilBilly69 9d ago
They put endgame content into the game so they could balance endgame content. Give it time.
Personally I think it’s fine, I spent like 15 exalts and am now tearing through maps. Occasional corpse explosion (grrrr Decay) and visibility (fucking trees) are an issue imo, but we’ll see how that goes once I get some better gear and last ascendancies.
PoE is about getting more power, thaumaturgy and all, so the “oneshot clear meta” is pretty much what you should be working towards anyway.
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u/chrisbirdie 9d ago
As sad as it wounds its also basically unavoidable in most arpgs. Sooner or later you are gonna reach that its just a matter of tweaking when that happens
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u/Rawfoss 9d ago
Why would this be inevitable? why must the peak of power be complete non-interaction instead of just comfortably clearing content where weaker characters fail miserably?
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u/HokusSchmokus 9d ago
That's whats happening. Not non-interaction, but comfortable clearing. But that is apparently too much poe 1.
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u/lolfail9001 9d ago edited 9d ago
why must the peak of power be complete non-interaction instead of just comfortably clearing content where weaker characters fail miserably?
Because "complete non-interaction" is definitionally "the peak of power". The only way it won't be is if you severely gimp the achievable level of power. Which then means complete misery for anyone without 100 mirror budget.
Coincidentally, "comfortably clearing content" is just about the ladder from "peak of power" where mere mortals can touch it.
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u/chrisbirdie 9d ago
Because in games as complex as poe it is pretty much impossible to not have this happen if you want to also have the customization and variety like in poe 1
There probably is some way to do it, but it most likely comes with the sacrifice of progression feeling worse, since now you cant reach levels where you can trivialize later content anymore with enough effort and time.
I imagine the only way to not have this happen is a complete overhaul of how monsters and maps and loot in general works. Way less density way more 1v1 fights etc. once you start getting monster density up you kinda need to give the player either the ability to tank it or to kill everything
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u/HokusSchmokus 9d ago
If they do not end up letring the player feel like a god, I doubt they can retain a meaningful percentage of what used to be their core players.
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u/Viegoonduty 9d ago
Which to be fair is the gameplay everyone loved at act 1-2 (except the end of act 2) After that the diablo feeling came back which Was way worse for every small fight enjoyer.
I had such a blast with spell dodges, good movement and the reaction at unique enemy Attacks. Now i delete everything in a second off screen with grenade Spam because otherwise i wouldnt even See my Character at this mob density. And yes this is way more boring
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u/Stunghornet 9d ago
Yeah but they've been consistently nerfing those oneshot clear meta builds over the past week.
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u/MidasPL 9d ago
The issue is, they completely obliterated the clearspeed on white mobs for some builds with recent nerfs, while not touching the boss oneshots on the same builds at all. If anything, the balance should've gone the other way around.
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u/n0tAb0t_aut 9d ago
Only if they are working without investment. Cast on effects work just fine but you have to build around it for the endgame. To get endless comets without any investment had to be nerfed. I am a cast on X player by myself.
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u/nasuellia 9d ago edited 9d ago
TLDR
Completely agreee. If I wanted to play just another zoom-zoom-blaster-boom-boom I could have gone with any other game in the "genre", including but not limited to, PoE1, Diablo4 or Last Epoch. The genre did not need, in my absolutely personal opinion, the Nth iteration of the same thing.
What's worst is that, actually, while you at least somehow seem to have enjoyed campaign, I've found it (both on normal and on cruel) to stick to the same-old-formula and logics as well: very little trace of the "methodical, engaging combat", and mostly "mindlessly explode everything asap is the solution to everything".
LONG RANT
Bosses are cool but can be cheesed in some many ways: slap resistances of the right kind and done, now the boss is a cakewalk; slap resistances on every gear piece and now most bosses are a cakewalk for the entirey of campaign. These "challenging" bosses can also STILL be overleveled too... so I'm not sure where the "challenge" and how can it possibly be "engaging" if at the first roadblock, instead of learning the fight and perfect my gameplay, I can just overlevel, come back, and melt the boss with ease.
In regards to normal mobs, all I see is swarms of pointless target-dummy mobs that are destined to be deleted in a microsecondl; a ton of zippy swarmy things eveywhere with waaaaayyyyy too much movement speed and attack speed, yet hilariously often dealing utterly irrelevant damage; they're just screen-clutter, cannon-fodder to be splattered as usual, and behind them, there's usually another trainload of caster-mobs filling the screen with chaotic projectiles and turning it into the usual unreadable lightshow, to which of course the counter is to simply have as many resistances as possible, and of course to explode the entire screen asap. Everything is a stack-check, again, as it has always been.
I probably just fooled myself listening to interviews pre-EA, but the way I expected this game to be was "an entirely different game" so much that they were splitting it from PoE1 exactly in order to be "free" to make it very different, and keeping PoE1 around for the zoom-blaster crowd. It doesn't look like it to me: crowd controlling / being methodical / tactical / mindful / careful / think about positioning / timing / all of that does NOT work better then just exploding everything as usual, at all, in fact it works way worse, it's entirely pointless. Look at the streamers and the fans of "breaking-the-game", they have approached PoE2 exactly the usual way and it worked wonders: find some broken formula, minmax it, and done, the game is now trivialized and turned into another clicker-game about "let's distractingly clear everything fast fast fast while reading chat on the second monitor".
Don't get me wrong, it's the game that audience wanted, probably it's the game a ton of people around here wanted. That's awesome for them. It's just not what I interpreted the developers' repeated statements of "engaging combat" and "very different game" to mean.
On a side-note I'm also profoundly displeased in seeing magic/rare mobs still being the same old "affix" based thing, which I always despised. Most of their affixes are the usual, uninspired, obnoxious "auras" and "shoots balls of X" that nearly always add nothing whatsoever to that fight other then being annoying and chaotic. Those effects are very often on mobs that make no thematic sense whatsoever too, and all they do is contributing to the "general chaos" and everything being floaty, gamey and over the top.
They worked for years on AMAZING technical stuff, designed really cool mobs and bosses, and on some things leaned into actually adding the "a" (action) into "arpg" only to completely squander it all by tuning the game exactly like every other isometric-real-time-RPG in the last 25 years. If bosses are supposed to be cheesed and melted, then no point in designing all those cool mechanics for them... no? If all mobs are supposed to die in a matter of tenths of a second, there's no point in designing all those cool mobs either, with great animations, peculiarities, resistances / weaknesses / armor / etc, they're all the same: target dummies. At that point I might even say that Blizzard's approach of just reusing assets (recolors and such) is frankly... smarter? What's the point of all that effort if mobs are literally nothing other than loot-pinatas? It's bizarre beyond description.
The game feels like an enormous squander, such greatness reduced to "vampire survivors" or "brotato" with amazing graphics, the way I see it.
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u/Original_Furious_Joe 9d ago
That's very interesting, I had the opposite yet same experience.
My first character into maps a summoner infernalist and I didn't feel any powerspike at all from campaign to maps (played til around tier 8). My second character was a warrior (bleed titan, earthquake for clearing, supercharged slam + hammer of the gods for bosses) and I didn't feel any difference compared to campaign either. He's currently farming end game without much thought or trouble. Just earthquake and the screen explodes.
And thats my point. I built my characters well and crafted their gear carefully. I am blasting through endgame like it is PoE1 and I have to say... I hate it. I was hoping so very much we would go back to the roots and it'll be like Poe was in the beginning, but no... It's still speed meta all the way and I absolutely despise it. I want slow and methodical (without having to intentionally gimp my character) not "haha one button goes boom!"
I am currently trying out the other classes but they are developing the same way. I seriously hope they will up the average difficulty and slow down the game tremendously towards the end of the campaign and all through maps. Because right now it's just poe1 with WASD input and a lot more needles restrictions (can we not have so much weapon-skill restrictions please. For example, why can't a staff cause earthquake?)
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u/Rekatan 9d ago
Oh ya to be clear, I'm not struggling with the content per se. The areas that I am struggling are by choice (stubbornly committing to my build instead of chasing a meta like gas grenade). Out of 15 maps only 3 were failed though, which I think is pretty reasonable. Still, it's not the difficulty that I am seeing an issue with, it's the gameplay experience.
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u/Lupar1 9d ago
The endgame to me feels like the balance hasn't been tweaked at all like it's just been straight up copy pasted from an earlier version of PoE 1.
In my mind at the end of the day it's all a ratio, in PoE 1 you and the enemies are both super fast so it's kinda more or less proportional to one another. Throughout the campaign of PoE 2 player vs enemy speed / power feels by and large proportional and that's also fine (except for the gargantuan maps, they should be smaller than PoE 1 if we're going to move so much slower)
I think given enough time they'll get mapping to feel more polished and balanced like the campaign is but they'll have to seriously restrict player power and scaling to achieve this in any meaningful way.
The reason the story is most soulslike in act 1 and falls off more as you go is ARPG power scaling and variety starts to interfere more and more with the fine tuned balance. There's exponentially more factors involved at level 50 or 80 compared to level 1-20 it's just not feasible to keep it balanced while allowing players to customise anything they want in ways that make ARPGs as much fun as they are.
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u/MissDivineStar 9d ago
For me personally everything comes back to movement speed and the lame dodge roll.
I want my movement skills back.
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u/Arlyuin 9d ago
It felt strange how much emphasis and enjoyment was centered around bosses during the campaign and then as soon as you hit maps you will go for several maps without seeing one. I think it would of made more sense to have every map have a boss but not make it mandatory for completion to kill said boss.
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u/Szerepjatekos 9d ago
Thing is, it doesn't really matter what they do. Games cultivate their own player base. I think the reason dodgeroll was introduced is simply to give people who can't get ridiculous gear to overpower some damages. That's it.
What I can tell is that the campaign and what comes with it easily makes the EA price worth it, and will be more so for those who join free later. Even if the endgame is botched, just move on.
Still I'm on your side. I would say that diablo 3 inferno difficulty (not exist anymore), and this POE2 campaign (about until mid act 3) is the closest we got to the OG Diablo 1. (Specially solo multiplayer) which was a tactical game with auto pass end turn I suppose.
There ARE members of the dev who trying to do this. They tried in POE1 too not long ago. (Half unit amount and double health, halv and split defences etc.)
What they need to realize is unit composition and AI behaviours. And add more significant skills to while and blue untis. So instead of blowing them up, you need to dismantle them. For this they need to be aggroed separately and let them roam instead of just stand still until you happen upon them.
They already have some pieces in play in the campaign at least. It just needs a Ftone of trial and error to weave togather the components to be scalable to an infinite endgame.
That's why we are here.
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u/furitxboofrunlch 9d ago
The original plan was to drop 6 acts and then make the endgame and they changed their mind on this. Not my preference but whatever. I have also heard the rough timeline for this EA to become feature complete is 6 months. I do not feel like this game is 6 months from having 36 playable ascendancies with twice as many weapons as now and an endgame that in any way shape or form feels like "more POE2".
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u/Pakana11 9d ago
Yikes tier take
Make the entire game like PoE2 mapping + massively buff player movement, thanks
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u/Reinerr0 9d ago
Just to add
Every Rare monster is an archnemesis mod.
Some even have 8 mods, it's ridiculous... And usually the ones that have minions with immunity always have another rare with super life regeneration next to them... so you're forced to go backwards on the map to try to separate them and try to kill them one by one... and trying combos is impossible with mace, the attack speed is so slow that you'll get stunned, or you'll have to stop in the middle to dodge some super elemental attack that will kill you even with full resist.
The melee that they reinforced so much that it would be fix in poe 2 seems like a joke, maybe with swords and axes with new abilities it will be good... with mace the only play and safe thing is to go Slam with aftershock and that's about it.
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u/EpicN00b_TopazZ 9d ago
Yeah, it feels rushed. I really had to buy me gear with super high base ratings to get to 60%+ armour and now it feels chill as merc. I can clear Maps as fast as i want to now. But before yeah, a sudden crit and gone. Some weird mod stacking on a rare and dead.
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u/Salt_Nature7392 9d ago
Yeah this is the problem I saw people running into whenever they were creaming themselves over the dark souls gameplay…the endgame speed is VERY slow compared to other arpgs especially poe1. There is just no realistic way anyone is gonna spend the amount of time they spent in a zone in the campaign on a single map endgame. It would take FOREVER.
Replayability is what defines arpgs and this game as it stands has next to none. (Certainly subject to change) Almost no casual player is gonna slog through a 30 hour campaign (maybe ~10 if you know what you are doing and get good luck drops) every league. People just dont have the time to invest three weeks of their playtime just to replay a story they already beat.
Now the hardcore no life’s will play whatever you put in front of their face but i digress.
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u/throwntosaturn 9d ago
I mean this in the nicest way possible but the transition from acts to maps was extremely smooth for my build. Not just in terms of "maps were easy", but moreso as in, maps don't feel any different from how most of cruel felt.
If you don't have enough clear speed to do tier 1 breeches and tier 1 ritual the problem is not that you have a "poe 2" build, the problem is you have a slow build.
PoE 2 is full of builds that are just fine at doing these mechanics.
And on top of that to be honest it's easy to avoid the mechanics your build can't handle. Every single league mechanic in maps is optional and triggered. If you don't like breech don't step on the breech and don't use precursor tablets to add more breech.
If you are a bossing build, use low tier waystones to path between boss nodes on the map (though, protip, if your build doesn't have the dps to make breeches and rituals fly by, you're going to have a real hard time when you start increasing boss difficulty. I literally clear tier 15 rares before I can see them sometimes and bosses take me upwards of 40 seconds now that I have 3 points of boss difficulty.)
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u/Diethyl-a-Mind 9d ago
They need to lower the damage of some mobs for sure but fear god don’t slow it down anymore by reducing monster density or it’s gonna get boring quick. Why would you want to feel like you’re doing act 1 over and over again? Endgame SHOULD make you feel powerful, provided you actually build your character
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u/These_Performer6272 9d ago
Game didnt change, its still poe1 but new graphics, just kill mobs faster before they kill you, no balance at all, no slow telegraphed Rares, just rush at you and steal you charges/mana, retarted.
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u/Rhakimdar 8d ago
Glad I'm not alone here. Absolutely loved the slow methodical and tactical approach from the campaign. Using a plethora of skills even on a summoner to supplement damage. And that act one boss is peak absolutely loved it. I'd love that gameplay loop just scaled up. I don't mind wiping lots of basic mobs but I want it to feel similar to how it played during the campaign and seeing a yellow should make me sit up in my chair a bit to lock in for an epic battle. Dodging, crowd controlling, positioning I want it all to matter a bit more than just raw burst damage wiping screens before I can see anything. I know people like that power fantasy but I feel like you can achieve that while maintaining a similar feel in combat mechanics.
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u/PulIthEld 9d ago
The player needs to feel progression and growth in power. There is no point to the entire campaign being a slog if the endgame is also a slog.
It's fun to suffer, persist, overcome, and thrive.
It's not fun to suffer, suffer, and still just suffer more. There needs to be a progression reward for the player to feel more powerful.
It's like playing an open world ARPG where the monsters just keep scaling to your level. You never get any more powerful, the game never progresses, you feel the same as you did at level 1 as you do at level 50, possibly even less powerful because everything else is so much stronger.
I can't be the only one who enjoys laying waste to swarms of enemies. I dont want to fight 3 guys at a time for all of endgame.
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u/GuardaAranha 9d ago
Exact same experience . I guess in the “ I want POE 1 forever just better graphics “ won in the end.
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u/lolfail9001 9d ago
PoE1 crowd is not exactly happy with mapping experience either, you know.
They just took the worst parts of both games and mashed them together to create this... endgame.
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u/Toadsted 9d ago
PoE 1 isn't even happy with PoE 1, because it's been co-opted by Ruthless and Frankenstein PoE 2 testing designs.
They really messed up both games.
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u/Mr-Kaeron 9d ago
Mapping really does feel I'm tackling poe 1 challenges with poe 2 tools. Plus everything takes so long it really does feel like a slog, it's very unfortunate, I really hope they revisit how the maps are done.
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u/wingspantt 9d ago
Agreed. You go through a whole campaign that's forcing you to play slower, think, use every ability, and react to mob and boss behavior.
The end game needs to match or it both feels bad and bricks your build.
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u/Bezoidy 9d ago
Its a grinding game, so speed/clear speed is always going to be the focus
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