What I dislike in PoE

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zero_nova
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I left PoE and many ppl over there left too. Various reasons, but technical issues that prevent your progress or kill your char and a clear repetition of them over many years is a sign of something wrong on the developers side.

RNG is like the god behind PoE.

The skill system combined with socket system is overcomplicated for a certain % of the players. There are millions of paths to follow in the passive tree, yet most of them lead to chars that hit a wall and won’t survive end game. Most players are going to fail in their path, which causes frustration. I don’t understand the logic behind the tree, there are life nodes, mana nodes, attack nodes, etc spread out in every direction. You must spend not some time, but a substantial time in studying it. Are all nodes meaningful? Some nodes provide +3% resist all. What is a node like that doing there when items already can provide +10% to + 80% resist? At least for me, a node that grants the same stat that an item grants adds flexibity at the expense of user friendliness.

For ex: you deal 1000 points of fire damage. But you have to take in account enemy's resistance to fire, critical chance, critical multiplier, enemy is burning or not, etc. You never know how much damage you are dealing and how much damage you are taking.

I have a feeling that smaller trees are more manageable than one tree for all. Including for the developers. Because one giant tree becomes fragile, where one change here can break something else far away due to unforseen consequences. That reminds of the butterfly effect. By one giant tree for all I didn’t meant one tree per class, but rather specialized trees for different aspects of the character. Another idea comes from “less is more”, meaning fewer nodes but nodes that can be upgraded somehow.

PoE’s tree has so many branches that I have no idea what was their philosophy behind it. For ex: node A increases elemental damage. Then a subclass node increases casting speed. Or the other branch increases fire damage. Then sub-subbranch node increases the explosion caused by fireballs. Some hierarchy like this could at least be more meaningful for players. In some ways the tree does have subnodes, but it also has detours and turn around paths that add to the confusion.

After some time I think I got what was their core idea behind the passive tree. For starters, all classes share the same tree. There are 3 axes: int, str and dex. Plus 3 hybrid axes int + str, int + dex, etc. Everyone can access any node anywhere in the tree, the differnce is how close or far away that node is from your starting point. This explains why there are so many duplicated nodes in the tree. Nodes that boost pretty much the same thing spread out in all places in the tree. With the exception that nodes related to Bow are all close to the ranger, whereas all nodes related to wands are close to the Witch. A witch can travel all the way around to bows, but it’s so far away that it’s probably not optimal. Maybe some players want to do that, but if the char just dies over and over that’s a build that nobody is going to go for anyways.

If I were a designer I would drift away from that massive tree. I’d have a hard time thinkering with “should critical chance be closer or farther away from life?”, “Should increased mana require more or fewer int nodes to travel to it?”, and so on. For me, if critical multiplies damage by 1.5, then either do it or don't. It's overcomplicated to add to the math conditions where the multiplier might be higher or lower due to some curse or whatever.

The sockets have 3 layers of RNG. Quantity + colors + links. Which means that some skills are locked out of reach unless you overcome RNG. The system creates a puzzle for you to solve, which seems to go in the opposite direction of the word ACTION. The links are sequential o-o-o-o, which naturally leads many players to think that the order of support skills matter, yet order does not matter. You can have two or three of the same support skill, but you have to learn by yourself that having two of the same support skill does not add, you can’t stack up + 30% + 30% + 30% added cold damage for instance. Not every support gem supports every other active gem. Sometimes a player is using gems that just do nothing together.

Propecies seem to be the perfect example of RNG over RNG. There are prophecies that grant you something that already exists in game, such a rare drop or 6 links. But if the prophecy itself is rare to get, what is it adding to the game other than more gambling?

Can drops be biased in one direction or must they be completely random? Most of the time you never find what you want. Kill a boss, some magic item with one affix drops. Open a chest, some alteration orb drops. You use the orb on some sword, some random affix is applied. It’s one layer of RNG over another layer of RNG. Killing a boss demands time and strenght. But clicking “roll the dice” demands patience and luck. Yet both methods have the same underlying RNG.

For ex: there could be a slow progress between +0.1% life leech till 10% life leech. And / or incremental upgrades to your gear that does not refresh the affixes every time. Diablo 2 mods do that.

There are special interventions that can happen at random anywhere. A lot of players complain that when they do not want it, it does show up. When they want it, they have to rely on luck because the game is randomly choosing to place it or not where you are. Imagine that you have 10 different unique content that can be spawned on some area (crystals, unique boss, portal to somewhere, magical chest of rewards, etc) if each one has 10% of chance of spawning, you have no idea which one you are going to encounter. If there are 100 unique content and the probabilty goes down to 1%, it becomes even more random and even more unpredictable.

In many games there is the concept of Rock - Scissor - Paper. Applying that to resistance would mean that while you can have 100% resist fire, you cannot have +100% resist all elements. It doesn’t look too much fun to watch streamers with builds that just spam a skill and grind to death without much trouble as fast as it can.

Is there a point where complex customization becomes more bothersome than fun? Damage being split in four or five classes and with different multipliers being applied under different conditions. It becomes a puzzle, a math game. What’s the difference between +10% increased weapon damage and having +10% increased [weapon type] damage? Combine the skill tree with gems, all affixes from all gear and affixes from flasks and you have like 10 million combinations.

The progression curve in PoE is weird. Most of the crafting is restricted to high lvl, meaning that you don't craft anything until you reach high lvls.

They keep it hardcore because the hardcore fanbase is adamant to change how the game is. I've realized that Abyss, Delve, breach, synthesis, incursion, etc have the idea of making the player rush and kill as many monsters per minute as possible. There are even players that complain about the complexity, the game just does not tell you what something is and what to do with it.
Istaryu
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I don't mean to be rude, but its not the game's fault if you, and others fail to understand or research game mechanics.
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Prime_Evil
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zero_nova wrote:1 - RNG is like the god behind PoE.

2 - The skill system combined with socket system is overcomplicated for a certain % of the players. There are millions of paths to follow in the passive tree, yet most of them lead to chars that hit a wall and won’t survive end game. Most players are going to fail in their path, which causes frustration. I don’t understand the logic behind the tree, there are life nodes, mana nodes, attack nodes, etc spread out in every direction. You must spend not some time, but a substantial time in studying it. Are all nodes meaningful? Some nodes provide +3% resist all. What is a node like that doing there when items already can provide +10% to + 80% resist? At least for me, a node that grants the same stat that an item grants adds flexibity at the expense of user friendliness.

3 - For ex: you deal 1000 points of fire damage. But you have to take in account enemy's resistance to fire, critical chance, critical multiplier, enemy is burning or not, etc. You never know how much damage you are dealing and how much damage you are taking.

4 - I have a feeling that smaller trees are more manageable than one tree for all. Including for the developers. Because one giant tree becomes fragile, where one change here can break something else far away due to unforseen consequences. That reminds of the butterfly effect. By one giant tree for all I didn’t meant one tree per class, but rather specialized trees for different aspects of the character. Another idea comes from “less is more”, meaning fewer nodes but nodes that can be upgraded somehow.

5 - PoE’s tree has so many branches that I have no idea what was their philosophy behind it. For ex: node A increases elemental damage. Then a subclass node increases casting speed. Or the other branch increases fire damage. Then sub-subbranch node increases the explosion caused by fireballs. Some hierarchy like this could at least be more meaningful for players. In some ways the tree does have subnodes, but it also has detours and turn around paths that add to the confusion.

6 - After some time I think I got what was their core idea behind the passive tree. For starters, all classes share the same tree. There are 3 axes: int, str and dex. Plus 3 hybrid axes int + str, int + dex, etc. Everyone can access any node anywhere in the tree, the differnce is how close or far away that node is from your starting point. This explains why there are so many duplicated nodes in the tree. Nodes that boost pretty much the same thing spread out in all places in the tree. With the exception that nodes related to Bow are all close to the ranger, whereas all nodes related to wands are close to the Witch. A witch can travel all the way around to bows, but it’s so far away that it’s probably not optimal. Maybe some players want to do that, but if the char just dies over and over that’s a build that nobody is going to go for anyways.

7 - If I were a designer I would drift away from that massive tree. I’d have a hard time thinkering with “should critical chance be closer or farther away from life?”, “Should increased mana require more or fewer int nodes to travel to it?”, and so on. For me, if critical multiplies damage by 1.5, then either do it or don't. It's overcomplicated to add to the math conditions where the multiplier might be higher or lower due to some curse or whatever.

8 - The sockets have 3 layers of RNG. Quantity + colors + links. Which means that some skills are locked out of reach unless you overcome RNG. The system creates a puzzle for you to solve, which seems to go in the opposite direction of the word ACTION. The links are sequential o-o-o-o, which naturally leads many players to think that the order of support skills matter, yet order does not matter. You can have two or three of the same support skill, but you have to learn by yourself that having two of the same support skill does not add, you can’t stack up + 30% + 30% + 30% added cold damage for instance. Not every support gem supports every other active gem. Sometimes a player is using gems that just do nothing together.

9 - Propecies seem to be the perfect example of RNG over RNG. There are prophecies that grant you something that already exists in game, such a rare drop or 6 links. But if the prophecy itself is rare to get, what is it adding to the game other than more gambling?

10 - Can drops be biased in one direction or must they be completely random? Most of the time you never find what you want. Kill a boss, some magic item with one affix drops. Open a chest, some alteration orb drops. You use the orb on some sword, some random affix is applied. It’s one layer of RNG over another layer of RNG. Killing a boss demands time and strenght. But clicking “roll the dice” demands patience and luck. Yet both methods have the same underlying RNG.

For ex: there could be a slow progress between +0.1% life leech till 10% life leech. And / or incremental upgrades to your gear that does not refresh the affixes every time. Diablo 2 mods do that.

11 - There are special interventions that can happen at random anywhere. A lot of players complain that when they do not want it, it does show up. When they want it, they have to rely on luck because the game is randomly choosing to place it or not where you are. Imagine that you have 10 different unique content that can be spawned on some area (crystals, unique boss, portal to somewhere, magical chest of rewards, etc) if each one has 10% of chance of spawning, you have no idea which one you are going to encounter. If there are 100 unique content and the probabilty goes down to 1%, it becomes even more random and even more unpredictable.

12 - In many games there is the concept of Rock - Scissor - Paper. Applying that to resistance would mean that while you can have 100% resist fire, you cannot have +100% resist all elements. It doesn’t look too much fun to watch streamers with builds that just spam a skill and grind to death without much trouble as fast as it can.

13 - Is there a point where complex customization becomes more bothersome than fun? Damage being split in four or five classes and with different multipliers being applied under different conditions. It becomes a puzzle, a math game. What’s the difference between +10% increased weapon damage and having +10% increased [weapon type] damage? Combine the skill tree with gems, all affixes from all gear and affixes from flasks and you have like 10 million combinations.

14 - The progression curve in PoE is weird. Most of the crafting is restricted to high lvl, meaning that you don't craft anything until you reach high lvls.

15 - They keep it hardcore because the hardcore fanbase is adamant to change how the game is. I've realized that Abyss, Delve, breach, synthesis, incursion, etc have the idea of making the player rush and kill as many monsters per minute as possible. There are even players that complain about the complexity, the game just does not tell you what something is and what to do with it.


1 - Just like any arpg.

2 - Some of these nodes you mentioned like the 3% resists are just on the way to get more important ones you want for your build. If you want a certain Keynode but you have to get that insignificant one to get there because from your starting point its faster to get there by getting it, thats what you do. Its less about minor nodes having perfect stats for your builds or for survivability and more about how efficient you want your pathing on the skill tree to be. Mix-maxing skill points basically.

3 - A lot of people want a damage chat on PoE to know just how much their skills deal or how much damage they took , or what was the killing blow they recieved because with that many particle effects and explosions going on in end game you barely get what rekt you. Im not sure if that will ever be implemented though, or damage float numbers by that matter. As for your true damage you can always import your character to path of building , you will know exactly how much dps you deal there, but i agree its a hassle.

4 - This comes down to theorycrafting niche builds. If you want a Marauder that uses dual poet's pen you want some wand nodes, and you have to go to witch's side to get those. And bear in mind it used to be a gg build before poet's pen was nerfed into a brick a few patches ago. Its all about thinking outside the box of stereotypes. The class you pick only determines where you start in the skill tree, if you want to go to other class places to make your build work, one giant tree is the best option, and thats GGG intention all along, freedom of theorycrafting.

5 - Again, you have to plan your pathing before actually allocating the skills. I recommend you use path of building before rolling a character to avoid going around a longer way than you have to for the build you want. You dont necessarily need faster casting nodes when you build into fireball, as you can get that with faster casting gem or bonus from an item for example so you can just get the fireball ones and mosey right along to other stuff more important. Like i said on point 2, minor nodes you HAVE to take are only in the way because its the fastest route to the important stuff you want. Like i said, path of building.

6 - Exactly. You can still make a bow witch work if you want, thought it'll be very niche and you will most likely need certain uniques to enable the build, and how expensive or not those uniques can get, who knows.

7 - Read point 5.

8 - Normally if you're not getting trolled you can just ask on global chat wether or not same supports will stack, obviously the answer is no. The order of the support does matter , but yeah not in the location of the sockets. They matter only by importance. If you have a 4 link socket armor you will have to prioritize some supports over the optimal ones you'd put on a 6 linked armor. That's really the only order of importance, supports wise. As for which supports affect which active skills, when you hover your mouse over a support gem or active skill a tooltip will show on the side showing which gems you have and which ones are affected or not. Affected with have a green checkmark, no effect with have a red X over them.

9 - Prophecies are just there as something optional. Youre not losing out on anything by not caring about them, but why wouldnt you? Also , some prophecies are very expensive for trade when you seal them , like Kaom's Sign upgrade prophecy, can reach up to 15 chaos on early league. Others are useless, and others are eh, ok i guess? Some prophecies are chain prophecies though you will need to complete 4 chains to get one piece of the key each if you want the map to beat The Pale Court "ubers".

10 - You can use certain currency or prophecies to influence the stuff you can get in mods. Also , if you play Incursions you can directly affect which types of items the temple has , like building towards a Vault room will grant you a room with currency in it, the higher the tier the better the currency can drop there, not guaranteed you will get exalts there though but its got a much higher chance than a t1 Vault for instance. There are ways to turn the RNG more into your favour, you just have to grind through. Trading helps. Im ssf so that advice doesnt apply to me.

11- Well if you mean the past league gimmicks that became core, like Betrayal ambushes, you can normally antecipate them. Betrayal is uh...wonky. If you enter a map that has Betrayal events loaded your PC will lag when you load into an area. Like unnaturally a lot. Thats how you go "ok betrayal farm here" ; also note that if you have a specific event like Betrayal on that map you will NOT get Alva spawns for Incursion, but your main league gimmick (in this case synthesis) will still spawn because its not core yet. Abysses will spawn too if RNG wants them to spawn. In anycase once you get experienced with the telltale signs of which content the game loads on the map youre loading in you can antecipate anything before it even starts.

12 - Who said that? You can stack resistances to all 3 elements to get 100%+, however the cap is 75% , everything else is overhead uncapped resistances meaning if you hit a map where an enemy deals a fire attack that naturally pierces 70% fire resistances and you have 100% then you will resist 30% of that fire damage assuming theres no conversions to other elemental types. CI builds (chaos innoculations) are immune to all chaos damage, they get 100% chaos resists soon as you get the node, even if the tooltip shows -60% after all acts are done. In that case the 100% chaos resist counts as 100% avoid in D2. Since chaos isnt an element though it cant be put in the same class as fire cold and lightning, so all those 3 arent avoidable unless you use some item that says so, or major keystone in skill tree or ascendancy.

13 - The fun is in theorycrafting something and sticking to it until you can beat end game with it or you hit a wall and rethink your strategy. How you do that though that depends on what you need to change, items or skill nodes. Sometimes you even have to offset disadvantages on gear to make said build works. For instance my armor has a ton of energy shield % but i take 5% more damage whenever my ES isnt at full value. It certainly is a math puzzle, and if youre not willing to do number crunchings you can always use one of the guides at the forums, just build something up and load their profiles on PoB, no need to calculate stuff yourself, but where's the fun in that. 10% inc weapon damage means all burst damage on any weapon, which means that if you have it you can use whatever weapon you want, they will all benefit from 10% more damage, unlike weapon type which restricts that mod to that type, like maces, swords, etc depending on where the mod/skill node is at.

14 - You can craft stuff during level 2 if you have the stuff, but obviously thats not end game gear. What it means is , keep the high lvl currency you farm as you go along to craft mid/end game gear only. Using a Chaos Orb to reroll a lvl 2 rare glass shank is a waste of a chaos for example.

15 - Well , its true that the end game is usually killspeed/screen clear speed. As for the content its something you have to figure out either by googling or youtubeing or experiencing it, i do agree they should make the content objectives more streamlined for people who skipped the leagues where these gimmicks were before being core in the game though. What PoE players usually do is wait for the big name streamers to get their hands on early access to a league and watching them talk about what this league will be about and its mechanics. Other than that , straight up googling or experiencing it yourself.

PoE certainly isnt an arpg for everyone , its very complex probably the most complex ever with a huge learning curve, but with time and dedication it all becomes second nature. Im not surprised it has put you off though like i said its can be very overwhelming with so much to take in for people used to grim dawn or D2.
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TL;DR Kappa
I quit because it got super boring in the way that the game was played. Char with aoe skill vs screen of enemies, everytime it's a build/gear check vs area you are in. Mobs hit hard ? run around the corner and wait for them to come one by one - amazing AI. At least median has some content where supreme gears will not save you and you need to adapt your gameplay vs it.
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Prime_Evil
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Spoken like someone who never tried end game maps like Hall of Grandmasters. Not even the godliest of gears can save you there if you dont know what youre doing. And thats only one example. Try uber Elder. story acts and early maps are the tutorial shit.
zero_nova
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1 - I have the impression that randomizing socket's numbers, colors and links are a way to prevent everyone from accessing every skill combination. But many ppl become really frustrated when you have the sockets that you need, except that they aren't linked. You use 1000 fusings, no success. 2000 and still no luck. Yet, you can be lucky to get the links with just 5 fusings.

The wiki doesn't contain much info about the chances of each mod, link or the drop rates. Maybe GGG changes that too often.

Their philosphy that randomizing almost everything helps in keeping the content non repetitive is true, but at the same time excessive RNG is bad.

12 - I was talking about the concept of being immune to one element while being weak against the other. But I don't know if PoE is designed to have this because everyone can have max resist all.

I didn't read anything about power creep in PoE. But they have a problem with it. Resistance vs Attacks. 100 def vs 100 attack, if they both grow endlessly the game becomes boring.

Many ideas come to my mind when I look at that passive tree. For ex: suppose that rather than having to spend str - str - str - some special node. There was

str \
str | - Special node
str /

If you spend one str node, special node has less power. If you spend 3 str nodes, special node is more powerful. This means that distance to travel is shorter if you want, but the special node scales if you "plug in" more str nodes to it. Maybe they had this idea years ago during development but decided against it.

What came to my mind was something like no classes at all. One main tree that has core aspects of every char. Then secondary trees where you specialize in something. Seems that Last Epoch did something like that by having trees per skill.
Istaryu
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zero_nova wrote:1 - I have the impression that randomizing socket's numbers, colors and links are a way to prevent everyone from accessing every skill combination.


That is not true. Generally, an item with higher str requirements have higher chance to roll red sockets, similarly green for dex items, and blue for int items. Check this for example:
I set a filter for 6sockeeted body armors with 150 str requirement at least. Most items you see will have at least 3 red sockets because of the red socket bias.
http://poe.trade/search/oamiugoeburine
PodolskyV
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All that shit about passive tree and skill sokets so boring to read that I don't even bother to play PoE. I think that ARPG genre is stuck at dead end currently and should develop in other way. The devs should try to make combat fun and challenging first of all instead of making gameplay of holding one button and press some other buttons from time to time. MXLS is good because following factors: good flow dynamic gameplay from the start, real diversity in builds that affects playstyle, smooth learning curve and good endgame content, but combat in it's core are outdated surely. Would the devs make customisation characters more complicated, MXLS turn into shit nearly as PoE is because PoE lack some strong sides of Median, but overal it's close to MXLS and overcomplicated though.
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Prime_Evil
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PodolskyV wrote:All that shit about passive tree and skill sokets so boring to read that I don't even bother to play PoE. I think that ARPG genre is stuck at dead end currently and should develop in other way. The devs should try to make combat fun and challenging first of all instead of making gameplay of holding one button and press some other buttons from time to time. MXLS is good because following factors: good flow dynamic gameplay from the start, real diversity in builds that affects playstyle, smooth learning curve and good endgame content, but combat in it's core are outdated surely. Would the devs make customisation characters more complicated, MXLS turn into shit nearly as PoE is because PoE lack some strong sides of Median, but overal it's close to MXLS and overcomplicated though.


I mean, youre the guy who asked people about whats meta for werewolf druid builds here, so im not surprised theorycrafting stuff by yourself with the "boring passive tree and skill sockets" of PoE overwhelms you. But youre free to your opinion ofc, no matter how wrong that opinion is.
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I am overwhelmed by the stuff in PoE. Got to the middle of act 5 last night. A lot of stuff is dropping and there is just too much content for me to grasp. Already have access to this hideout thing, monsters hunts + that camp, now got access to mining and labyrinth runs. Plus some new unseen materials are dropping which i need to google and learn about. And since the char is good at killing and progressing i am blindly rushing forward through areas. This feeling that i should slow down and explore more is constantly tingling. Feels like game forces me into this brainless hack and slash. And since maps are refreshing after a few mins? going back after boss fight to finish exploring becomes another fast map run....