what do you think about the POE2 presentation? and about the release of D4, there is a feeling that the gameplay is moving in an understandable direction, but the fact that d4 was released gives other developers the opportunity to pick up their fans in this market, there is 1 year before the release of poe2, as for me, they presented what diablo4 should have been. The good news is that in the new vision, the possibility of finding an unbalanced build is completely killed, with which you can close all the content, then the player will have to (try) bosses, and learn its mechanics.
well, ive tested d4 so you dont have to. this is what ive got:
- game is bugged as shit. example of a funny one, the devs wanted to sell stash tabs poe style, but they realized they cant because players actually also load other players stashes if they are near them, so adding stash tabs would nuke the servers
- monetization is…questionable. again an example, when you try to enter a certain menu, the cursor is snatched from you and transferred to the battle pass button; if you accidentally click it, you start the battle pass which you may wanted to save for later; exiting game in case of a misclick doesnt help
- trade is limited. meaning you cant trade uniques and some other things. the official response was that this is to combat bots. it isnt however. there are items in the game that are called uber uniques (shako for example), that have at least 10x lower drop chance than the mirror in poe (most people who played for like 10 years never saw a mirror drop); you cant buy them and those items are made to be best in slot, so basically they are carrot on the stick for the players to keep them in
- other factors such as shit itemization and full monster scaling which i universally hate in every game i see it in (yeah fuck you oblivion and skyrim)
so d4 will last as much as a watermelon in the blackest neighborhood of detroit. poe simply isnt getting any new players as you need a phd for it and a lot of time and money invested so sunken cost fallacy holds you in, and poe 2 is at least a year away and will be a separate game, so due to ggg’s business model, i dont expect it to be received well. this is because poe is reliant on psychological tricks to keep people in even when they wouldnt organically play the game, which causes massive burnouts, and 2 things with the same monetization scheme at once…yeah that wont work
the sad part is that d4 showed something unfortunate: marketing and shady strategies can make even the shittiest game turn a massive profit. business model > quality, for which i blame zoomers
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D4 isn’t going anywhere. Blizzard wrote the book on realeasing unfinished games just to fix them up as time goes on dating back all the way to Vanilla WOW. Its both a pro and con of modern game. D3 was trash but people kept playing it.
Im not a big fan of D4. I do agree monster lvl scaling does suck and the bosses are shit.
POE is a more complicated game but they hasnt stopped people from playing it. In fact alot of people like it because of that. I liked the presentation for POE2 looks good but you don’t need to sink any money into POE so idk why you are calling it a money sink POE is not a gotcha game it is 100 percent free. All the things you buy are just cosmetics.Time sink yes but not a money sink. You can play the game and if you dont like it you are out zero dollars. The fact that they can even make a game this massive while being free is crazy.
I’m excited about the druid. Its the only reason im going to play POE2. I know I’m not alone when i say it would be cool if grim dawn 2 had a shapeshifting class. I like that they decided to make it a separate game and not just an expnsion to the 1st. I hate never ending expansions.
Stash/currency tabs are not “just cosmetics”.
Also, try to play PoE seriously (with endgame, etc.) without buying those tabs.
Good luck with that.
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Can’t speak on D4 cause I noped out of the Diablo franchise after D3:RoS, even though D1 and D2 was what made me an ARPG afficionado in the first place. For PoE2 I liked a ton of what they presented, it shows they’re aware of the issues of PoE1 and are taking steps to address them. Namely:
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Slower combat, hope that remains true cause PoE1 becomes absolutely mindnumbing to play at higher power levels and forces a lot of really, really bad designs to generate any kind of threat to the player (like super spiky damage cause enemies only ever get to land one hit at most before they die). I could write an essay just on how that fucks up the flow of the game.
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Gem slotting independent of gear slots. You can now have a LOT of 6-slotted skills as opposed to just the 1 or 2 of PoE1, which means builds will no longer be about just juicing one skill into the stratosphere and just spamming that for the entire game with an occasional gem swap. Spamming one skill all day long for damage while at the same time clearing entire screens of enemies in one click without those enemies getting to do anything was what turned me off of PoE1 eventually (that and the necessity to trade to get any decent gear, I’m an SSF guy through and through).
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Mana is no longer a pool 10-20 points deep cause everything else is reserved by auras. Mana and its sustain will now, hopefully, have more meaning outside of MoM builds. Fingers crossed that the game doesn’t devolve into Spirit stacking all day long, though.
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This isn’t an issue exclusive to PoE but pretty much every ARPG I’ve played since D2. D2 brought in weapon swap that almost every ARPG after that copied, and nobody ever used it. PoE2 seems to have finally given that system some meaning with the swapping skill allocations and passive trees.
There’s probably more I’m forgetting.
And even if all of the above fails, at least there’s a lot more classes to explore, with 3 ascendancies each. So even if I don’t end up enjoying the endgame of PoE2 and it devolves into what PoE1 was, there will be a lot to experiment with and enjoy while slowly levelling through the campaign, if nothing else. Plus it’s free so if all I end up doing is levelling and then I nope out, doesn’t cost anything but time, most of which I’m sure I’ll spend enjoying the game.
2 Likes
Far point. I forgot about that. I’m not a hardcore POE player. When I played Dominus was the finale boss and I made it all the way to him and beat the game and never spent a dime. I played a shit build to. Templar using ice cascade and some kind of undead minions. I wanted to like a death knight like in WoW. I can’t argue whether buying tabs is 100% needed to play the game or not. The game has changed a lot since then. All I can say is if you want to play through the game beat it once and be done it will cost you no money.
I stopped PoE years ago, but I had fun for the time spent. Only hardcore difficulty for the emotional roller coaster and related keyboard tossing. This also helped to not be too invested overall because death meant loosing everything - except for some storing and twinking.
In the beginning I did everything with mules to Dominus. But imho the real fun came with the extra map challenges and new season events. I also loved the complexity and odd calculations.
Ultimately bought a package for the purchase of stash tabs because I felt the so many hours of enjoyable play deserved some payment. Iirc, stash tabs were 1/10 of the price of Diablo 3’s box price! And ultimately it turned out that it was only a few dollars for a huge QoL gain.
D3, though…after seeing the early access - I didn’t want to dive deep into that and shell out more for each upcoming dlc.
Really? You blame zoomers for what previous generations have allowed? How tf is it their fault that they have been raised with this crap since infancy? It’s OUR fault for allowing this to happen, for allowing neuromarketing to exist, for not protesting against casino-videogames. People STILL simp for lootboxes, even though there are now quite a few studies that show how messed up that business model is and how it preys on those with lower impulse control (such as humans younger than 25 and humans with, for example, ADHD). The myth that whales in p2w games are rich still exists even though it’s clear that most people that over-spend on Twitch, FIFA, idle games etc are actually either children or people with gambling addictions.
WE have allowed consumerism to flourish and it’s still WE that don’t do enough to stop it even now that we know how bad it is. Children don’t stand a chance.
On the topic of D4 and PoE I agree with you. While PoE is a much better game than D4 and the monetization isn’t that bad honestly, it’s the psychological tricks they play to reel players back in as soon as they might try something new that pisses me off. I remember one of their staff explaining the process very matter-of-factly like there was nothing wrong with it at all.
We have two generations of children that do not even know what it’s like to play a game you like until it’s finished. All they know is endgame extended unto infinity and live service games.
After playing D3 (and ROS, but no Necromancer) I was 100% certain I wouldn’t play D4 unless I got it for free, and then only out of curiosity. From what I have seen so far, it’s mighty bad. I welcomed the return to a darker story but it’s still shallow and cringy, like D3 was. The gameplay isn’t that much of an issue, but they continued to make the same mistakes they did with D3 so I’m really uninterested in seasons upon seasons of the same (now with battlepasses, because why not?). I’m in my 30s, here’s something that won’t happen: me paying for battlepasses and other such junk when I already pay full price for an AAA game. There’s a video out there of all the times devs used the word “store” in one of their 1h+ gameplay reveals. It was over 200 times.
Honestly PoE1 has had a lot of problems over time and GGG has genuinely did a lot to try and fix them. Many times they have succeded, other times they mitigated the problems, sometimes they went overboard and created new problems.
Desynch was such a massive problem in the beginning, but nowadays I have never felt it.
At the beginning of the game Evasion builds were 100% softcore only, because 1 failed dodge and you were dead. They have done more and more to fix it: evasion also gave you another chance at rolling to avoid a critical hit was a fantastic idea. It wasn’t really enough though, even when players were playing with a shield to have yet another chance at not getting 1-shot. So they added another layer: Acrobatics, which started to feel great. At some point (they added more layers, I don’t really remember more than the game basically not allowing more than two consecutive hits if you took more than X% of your HP in damage from the last one, maybe it was just that hey increased HP from nodes) evasion builds became not only HC-viable but also incredibly strong.
My point is, there’s a lot to learn from PoE (and even Diablos mistakes). I’m not saying GD should be more like either, but there are common aRPG problems that Crate would do well to follow and try to not repeat in their game.
What? It’s not even remotely hard. If you’re playing SSF, stop hoarding items you will never use and if you’re not, trade items for currency. Problem solved. I have never bought an extra stash, played for over 2000h and never felt the need for one.
I only watched the trailer for POE2. For all my dislike of POE, the game looks superb. And I have really high hopes for the fact that it’s a separate client. Maybe this one will actually work on basic technical level.
And people saying you don’t need to buy stashes in POE are delusional, lol.
not saying you dont have a point, you do. i know that people learn to like, or at least tolerate, what they have grown up with (for example everyone in serbia loves turbo folk and we all know its absolute shit). same happened with zoomers, they are a generation that simply doesnt know better and everything you said is completely true 
that being said, i always blame zoomers for everything, its an internal joke on jsp so when i say that in random conversations people look at me judgementally 
i do think they are extremely fucked up as a generation, but im well aware its not their fault 
what i disagree with you is that you dont need stash tabs in poe, you definitely do i know because im eastern european, we typically dont pay for shit, the only games i paid for were diablo 2, titan quest and grim dawn. so in poe for example i cant stand ggg (company that produced poe in case someone doesnt know), and i would rather put my money on james harden winning the ring than put it into ggg’s pockets. ehm so, ofc i have given exactly 0$ to ggg and my experience was this: from 2013 or whenever the game was made, up to like 2018ish, you could play without tabs. now, 2 days into the league and your stash is fucked. for example, out of 4 tabs, i would put currency in 1st, maps in 2nd (these would be completely filled), essences/splinters/all partial gear etc in 3rd (possibly some space left), and the rest of the gear in 4th. not to mention selling anything is severely gimped even if you pull this off due to lack of premium tabs. poe CAN NOT be played without at least 30~60$ put into tabs, you absolutely need at least 1 premium, currency, map and essence tab at least, if you dont wanna play with both hands behind your back. so poe is in reality p2w no matter what ggg says
I’ve been thinking about the things they’ve announced a little bit more over the last few days and here’s a thing that kinda worries me.
So, in PoE1 skill power is based to how many support gems you have on a skill, which in turn is based on how many sockets there are on the item the skill is socketed into. And since you can only have so many 6 socket items on a build, you’ll always have a skill or two that’s just way above the rest and you just use that to kill everything. Hence 1 button builds.
In PoE2 they said we can have like 6 or something 6socketed skills and that skills will have a variety of areas they excel in and we’ll be picking the right tool for any given job. My concern is that, if they design the game in a way where you’re just going up against a very diverse range of threats and you have to address those in different ways, builds will be heavily incentivised to go into piano mode. Now, imagine if you were playing GD and every build was the equivalent of, I dunno, a Barrelsmith build, spamming 2-3 skills on rotation in between auto-attacks and such. That’s not gonna be a game you’ll want to play for an extended period of time due to fatigue (physical and mental) and it would eliminate stuff like spin-to-win builds etc., since they don’t provide the necessary variety to succeed.
Essentially, I’m wondering whether they aren’t trading one problem for another. You go from “1 button solves everything” to “if your rotation doesn’t involve at least one setup/debuff skill, one damage skill and 2 utility skills on the side for immobilise etc., you’re not playing a valid build”.
i kinda like the old d2 system with hotkeys, not sure why other games didnt use it. it rewards speed and reaction time, and even the most retarded mf char uses like 7-8. and you could use twice that if you wanted to. my shit tier mf light sorc used charged bolt, chain lightning, static, teleport, telekinesis, tp, bc/bo on swap after 2nd or 3rd ladder day when i got cta. so…thats the system i prefer and i dont like the skill system in poe at all, where you are limited to what, 8? also fuck cooldowned skills in particular
so umm, ive noticed that poe players arent very…normal. they dont actually enjoy playing the game. a typical poe player enjoys theorycrafting a build (done in path of building so no need to start poe at all), and then perfecting the said build (trading for the right equipment, again done with external applications). the only part about the build that a poe player actually does in poe is grinding currency for the gear, which they admit isnt very fun at all and gets repetitive very fast. basically poe players voluntarily go through an 8~12h unpaid job, every day, just to create a build that will go to shit in 3~4 months because thats when ggg starts a new league, shifts the meta and reworks the skill trees. for example i dont like the constant gear changes in grim dawn either, but at least here i resolve that issue by cheating and making all the gear in minutes
so i expect the same from poe 2. needless complexity and not too much fun
edit: what i was trying to say but ofc forgot, is that poe players want a 1 button kill build because playing poe isnt about fun, its about grinding for gear (grinding gear games wasnt very subtle heh), and it needs to be as fast, efficient, and tolerable as possible
edit #2: checking to see if the number of edits appears in the upp right
edit #3: it doesnt
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GGG announced that PoE2 will not be an override of PoE1 and both will be maintained with staggered seasons.
So I think the slower combat will definitely be in PoE2, as PoE1 remains to fill that feature for those that want speed. Full release PoE2 is likely 2+ years away though.
I know they’ll be separate, what I mean is, you can have as slow combat as you want at release, but it’s not gonna stay that way. Game will get figured out, power creep will happen, and devs might cave into the demands of the PoE1 crowd that wants their game to be super zippy. I mean when they introduced Archnemesis in PoE1 trying to slow the combat down the response from the hardcore PoE crowd was so negative they pretty much scrapped the whole thing. So I’m hoping slow deliberate combat will stay at the core of PoE2 and they don’t gradually veer away from that turning it into another speedfest.
POE2 presentation was impressive.
Graphically, the game looks great, and the slower, more tactical combat makes it interesting, unlike the color explosion that is POE1, D3 and even D4 to some extent.
With Titan Quest 2 announcement also emphasizing slower combat, I hope it’s a start of a trend. Basically, D2 and GD have exactly the right pace of combat, in my view. Anything faster than that makes the game ridiculous.
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Be careful though, the PoE2 preso was essentially early game SSF, it could get a lot crazier from there. Though I imagine with the dodge roll mechanic there is almost a mandatory slowdown in there (if it can’t be sped up).
The dodge roll is supposed to scale with movement speed. But they did specifically say they want PoE2 to be more deliberate, with longer skill windups etc. Question is how long that commitment will last through power creep.
Oh sure, I expect the endgame to be faster. But they did stress a few times that it is going to be slower than currently.