Path of Exile

Honestly I prefer the 1-attack/1-move/all the passives shit. When I'm playing ARPGs it's to mow through things like a grain combine. Spin-to-win baby.

Seriously I'm in this for the one arm bandit roulette

AladainAF said:

Shits gonna be active next season. Is Jonkimble actually going to play next season? I'm disappointed, first time I actually played hard and well, he didn't. lol.

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I'll be there, don't you worry you handsome furry!

James said:

This is a common line of thinking from people who suck, but it's not actually the case at all. Player skill absolutely has a huge impact on what you can do with any given build, and the whole point of your build is that it represents *your* play style. You can play a super fast auto-bombing boom boom blowup fuck doll, but that's only because *you* want to. There are many perfectly viable play styles that can do the highest level of content, figuring out how to do it on your own is what makes PoE great.

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I appreciate the backhanded insult, but that's not really what I meant. Even watching "pro" PoE players, the solution to difficulty with a given build is always figuring out how to stack more life/resist/etc into it without losing too much damage output. It's essentially never "let me modify my play to succeed differently." You're not wrong that there's a build for any play style, but that's the inverse of my point.

Regardless of your play style, stacking passive attributes isn't as fun as compared to managing active skills. You're free to disagree there, and that's fine.

And I'm telling you that you're totally wrong. Just because you have to know how to stack damage multipliers and defense layers doesn't mean player skill still isn't a huge factor in this game. It's absurd to suggest the only thing that separates your average player from Mathil or Ziz or Havoc or Uberdan or take your pick is a little bit of mechanical knowledge.

Captain Suave said:

Regardless of your play style, stacking passive attributes isn't as fun as compared to managing active skills.

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I did not catch the entire argument, but I think PoE does give you the choice to manage skills, most people are simply happy with fewer choices to manage. These games are inherently grindy, so people like to autopilot.

The last few leagues especially allowed you to use several skills without too much of a sacrifice, since items that were previously 4 sockets are now allowing for 6 or more links through elder/shaper mods, and many utility skills no longer have a cast time and are easier to include.

Also, you absolutely COULD make a build with 10 active skills. But, no one does that, becuase its not FUN.
from active casting curses, to warcrys, to frostbomb, frostwall, orb of storms, vortex, cold snap, molten shell, blood rage, spell totem supports, anc totem, decoy totem, traps, etc.

There are a TON of support skills you could be using. but no one does because it slows you down.
This is a situation of the devs giving players choice. anyone can use any skill. And players choose the optimal strategy. Other games, with "managing active skills" require devs to force players to only use certain skills, so players can not actively choose optimal choices.

Seriously, first thing I do in SSF after finding optimal skill combos. I try to automate it as much as I can. Leap slam+coh+warlords+arcane surge?
Which is what most people do. put fortify, curses, immortal call etc into a trigger of some kind.

You COULD manually cast all that stuff. Lets you play reactive, gives you player control. you COULD run 3 curses, and use whichever curse makes the most sense on a per enemy basis. you only need warlords for the 1-2 NPCs that can actually damage you most of the time. or, after your EVADE fails and you take a hit. so, you COULD be running a dps curse, and only swap to warlords when you took damage.
But its EASIER to just run warlords all the time. and, just deal with having that lesser damage value.

GGG did just make a bunch of skills INSTANT cast, which is directly intended to increase use of those active support skills, since they can now be cast any time, even during animation lock of things like Multistrike, and movement skills.

Cursing for example in PoE. active casting. Spell totem-auto chain casting with range. Blasphemy aoe auto. Curse on hit-orb of storms, Curse on hit-split arrow with pierce, Curse on hit-leap slam. So many options. Many of us complain about the "more multipler" problem with active damage skills. but there is some places where there is still crazy options for mechanical change to a skill.

Mr Creed said:

I did not catch the entire argument, but I think PoE does give you the choice to manage skills, most people are simply happy with fewer choices to manage. These games are inherently grindy, so people like to autopilot.

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I telling you guys, a PoE arpg based idle/clicker game! make a fortune!

Mr Creed said:

The last few leagues especially allowed you to use several skills without too much of a sacrifice, since items that were previously 4 sockets are now allowing for 6 or more links through elder/shaper mods, and many utility skills no longer have a cast time and are easier to include.

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yes. builds with a map clear skill, AND a separate boss killer is very viable these days.
Last league my flame surge elementalist. Orb of storms in gloves was enough to clear maps with ease. While flamesurge in chest was doing the boss killing.

I love the one mash one button and let the points/gems do it all thing. Then again I played EQ2 and that fucking game put me right off having hotbars worth of shit everywhere.

Then again i'm a lazy fucker, in a game like this I want it all mapped to my mouse - screw using the keyboard at all.

Xevy said:

Hopefully he's just making an official version of PoB. Basically the way they destroyed PoE trade with the official trade API.

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???

Poe.trade is 1000000000x better than trying to use the fucking official version of it. I tried to shop on the official version 2 times and it was fucking awful.

James said:

This is a situation of the devs giving players choice. anyone can use any skill. And players choose the optimal strategy. Other games, with "managing active skills" require devs to force players to only use certain skills, so players can not actively choose optimal choices.

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That's a poor framing of the point. Giving players sub-optimal build choices is false variety. Everyone plays these games to attempt to maximize the potency of their characters within the game's design constraints. If the globally optimal approach is to automate your character, then no shit, everyone will do that.

Just because they CAN do something different doesn't mean it feels like a good play experience by comparison. The rest of PoE is designed around the capacity for automization, so yeah, big surprise not using it feels worse. The perception that you are effective compared to alternatives is important. I could try to play the game with my feet, but that doesn't mean it's an experience that increases my enjoyment. It would easier if the game entirely played itself, but that's not fun either. There's a spectrum of allowed automization in any game, and all I'm saying is that I think PoE went too far for my taste. Plenty of people here disagree, than that's fine.

Captain Suave said:

Giving players sub-optimal build choices is false variety.

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Yeah, if you're arguing about a game where class design is on-rails to fulfill specific raid requirements ala WoW, sure, you might swing this argument if you're a Blizzard dev with their head shoved so far up their ass it makes sense. But this is not even remotely an argument in PoE, where "sub-optimal" is largely undefined. You're arguing for dumbed down game design because you're used to playing dumbed down games. That's fine, but PoE will never been dumbed down.

you decide what is optimal for your playstyle. its not false variety at all in this case.

POE to me is in the meta. I believe your point has some validation in that at the highest of levels you boil things down to a single or double step action and play as efficiently as possible. There might not be much room for single character customization beyond optimizing a few gems for different situations (which I think is enough variety but hey). However, POE really allows you to make many characters a league. I think in incursion I had 5 or 6 characters, each built for a specific play style and each built to exploit the maximum efficiency in what they were built for. That meta right there is what I love. The meta of having tons of currency rolling in, flipping shit and reading markets. Knowing fotm/week builds and being able to exploit the market. Getting a sweet lab layout and running it 100 times in a day. Hitting a huge enchant and having enough currency to roll another build. Having a mapping strategy, and targeting certain Divs. The meta in this game gives players more choice to play how they want then a game built strictly around having to press more buttons. I think you narrow your overall design goals when you design strictly from pigeon holing how you want something to play out rather then hitting the over all design goal of what an ARPG is, which is a loot simulator.

James said:

You're arguing for dumbed down game design because you're used to playing dumbed down games.

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No, I'm arguing for a game that's less about meta-statistics and more about moment-to-moment player interaction. Perhaps not the best anaolgy, but sometimes PoE feels more like an ARPG skin on Factorio. If that's what you're looking for, great, enjoy (see post above this one - more power to him), but it's not definitionally better game design.

Caliane said:

you decide what is optimal for your playstyle. its not false variety at all in this case.

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You're reversing the point in the same way as James. It's about absolute performance relative to all builds, not whether or not you can choose your own play style that carries it's own local maxima. The strongest builds all fall within a narrow range of play styles (obviously depending how you choose to define "play style", which we'll undoubtedly disagree on). "You're free to play the game inefficiently" isn't much of a talking point, IMO.

zombiewizardhawk said:

???

Poe.trade is 1000000000x better than trying to use the fucking official version of it. I tried to shop on the official version 2 times and it was fucking awful.

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That's fine. If you don't like, you know, seeing all items for sale. Or copy pasting items to PoB directly from the website to see if it's an actual boost to your build. Or searching for suffix/prefix tiers being correctly listed.

I hated the official site too, until I learned all that other stuff. Now I have a few complaints still, but it's vastly superior. Upgrade your horse and buggy to a model-T, bro.

It has all the best features of poeapp now, even relatively new stuff like being able to add the affixes on an item to your search with one click (i.e. search for Belly, click button and instantly populate search with %life and all res so you can filter the trash rolls), plus stuff like being able to see the true breakdown of prefixes/suffixes and search for items with open prefix/suffix and not just an open affix. I think the official site is cheating and has information about items not available through the API--or simply has direct access to the DB and doesn't use the API at all, which seems likely--because iirc the poeapp guy said it wasn't possible to show affixes accurately.

And Poe.trade isn't even remotely in the same league as the other options anymore.