Incline Path of Exile II - early access begins December 6th

[ItsChon]

From another interview, no life nodes on passive tree in poe 2, to encourage build diversity.

Really? I have a hard time believing it. So everyone will have the same HP, except those with higher strength or +Life gear?

That will only make +Str passives and +Str/+Life gear more valuable, basically pushing everyone in this direction if they want HP for survivability. Diversity?

Maybe they'll have passive HP scaling depending on your class.

 

[ArchAngel]

From another interview, no life nodes on passive tree in poe 2, to encourage build diversity.

Really? I have a hard time believing it. So everyone will have the same HP, except those with higher strength or +Life gear?

That will only make +Str passives and +Str/+Life gear more valuable, basically pushing everyone in this direction if they want HP for survivability. Diversity?

Maybe they'll have passive HP scaling depending on your class.

Probably best to just give more life bonus to Strength stat and then give random Strength bonuses to melee passives. That way melee characters will have more Life and bonus damage. They can reduce bonus damage from those passives to compensate for Strength boosts.

 

[Ismaul]

From another interview, no life nodes on passive tree in poe 2, to encourage build diversity.

Really? I have a hard time believing it. So everyone will have the same HP, except those with higher strength or +Life gear?

That will only make +Str passives and +Str/+Life gear more valuable, basically pushing everyone in this direction if they want HP for survivability. Diversity?

Maybe they'll have passive HP scaling depending on your class.

Sure, but it wouldn't change the problem, would it?

If you want to spec into more life than what your class gives, gear will be the way in addition to Str passive nodes. Not sure that gives us more diversity / build choices.

But we'll have to see how it is in reality. They hid the passive tree during ExileCon, which likely means it's still in flux.

 

[Zeriel]

I never like this idea of "well, everyone who is smart does the same thing anyway, so just remove the choice and bake it into the base game!". Because it often isn't true. Yeah in hardcore almost everyone just picks up as much health as possible, but there are builds that don't and that is part of the fun of the game, being able to choose for yourself whether to invest in a balanced build or not.

Dumbing down never ends well.

 

[abija]

Really? I have a hard time believing it. So everyone will have the same HP, except those with higher strength or +Life gear?

https://youtu.be/D-zznPPwJ3M?t=1415

(my reasoning was very similar with Zeriel's and since the guy seemed genuine my only logical conclusion was they fail badly at math in that design team)

 

[Peachcurl]

If they remove health nodes... do other defences get the same treatment? What about energy shield for instance?

 

[InD_ImaginE]

If they don't change the design of "here are some passvie that can radnomly one shot you or screen vomits that can oneshot you from outside your screen" then removing HP node will just result in either going to STR or other defensive nodes.

The issue why people goes for defensive nodes be it HP or the others is in the game content, not in the skill tree.

 

[ADL]

This quote should put all the doomers at ease. Path of Exile II might be slowed down compared to the break neck speed of the original but that doesn't mean it's being dumbed down.

 

[Ismaul]

https://youtu.be/D-zznPPwJ3M?t=1415

Thanks, hadn't seen this.

They do have an explanation though for cutting Life from the tree, they want players to focus on getting defenses instead of just piling on more life. Funny, Chris Wilson was against it at first, same reaction as us. But it's true that Life is kinda the boring choice, the easy choice, a way to ignore some monster mechanics rather than thinking up a proper build that incorporates defenses.

We'll see how it goes.

 

[CountNemo]

1 and 2 being separate games is interesting. Guess 2 will be the hardcore vision and 1 will be more zoomy.

I *really* hope so.

 

[CountNemo]

https://files.catbox.moe/v3uxmp.mp4

Pretty sums up the whole stream. I have 0 expectations, it seems they want to go for that sweet blizzdrone money with uber-slow game pace, flashy animations, no movement skills, shoehorned specs (support gems basically mean nothing but skill flavour now also you can't use arbitrary combinations of supports and primaries) and nerfed flasks. I wonder if they understand that this 'taktikul' gameplay gets stale after finishing campaign and doing one or two bosses, PoE/old Diablo games were never about tactics, it was always about mowing down packs of mobs and efficient farming of bosses.

As if teleporting around like a fucking spaceship shooting lasers that blow up your entire screen is "fun gameplay"

Your dopamine receptors are truly fried.

 

[ADL]

 

[ADL]

 

[Peachcurl]

I wondered how they'd avoid having all those cooldowns. Having more and more reasonable combos looks like a good approach.

 

[Perkel]

I wondered how they'd avoid having all those cooldowns. Having more and more reasonable combos looks like a reasonable approach.

combos seems nice mechanic to deal with 1 ability spam, imho best way to deal with 1 ability spam is to introduce concept of "burn". Basically the more you use one skill the more it cost at each cast. That burn rate could be adjusted per skill too. So something like fireball could have 10% burn rate which means that each time cast after another fireball cost increases by 10% which quickly adds up. While huge skills can have something like 200%. Lorewise could be explained by skill preparation as in charcter expect to cast few fireballs after one another and is prepared to do that.

Another proper and harder way to deal with that is just to design game in a way where skills have ups and downs. So fireball can be completely useless on some monsters while skill y can be extra lethal.

 

[Peachcurl]

That kind of burn isn't a bad idea Perkel, but it probably feels a bit worse than combos, because you're punishing repeated use instead of rewarding a wider spread of skill-use.
Although, it may have upsides for diversity of viable skill combinations.

Regarding skills being more useful/useless for some monsters: yeah, that works somewhat, but I personally hate that concept unless it's entirely limited to boss fights (or similar).

 

[Perkel]

Like I said it is an option. I found it one of jrpgs i played back in the day. Don't remember now which one but it worked there well.

Burn is system wise and very easy to implement.
Combos are medium hard to implement
Designing whole game around ups and down of skills is obviously very hard.

So it is a question of work/$$$ to implement.

When it comes to combos obviously someone has to design those combos otherwise you will have skills without ones and thus no system in place which further means some skills won't be used without combos.

 

[darkpatriot]

confimed from dev talk:

- no scion, no center-path through tree

Awesome, I never liked design of doing melee witches and caster marauders/duelists.
I want more class identity, not less. It is why I didn't like any of the Ascendancy changes where they put important unique powers to the general passive tree.

I don't like it. I always specialized in trees/playstyles that were not the the ones intended for those classes because I find that interesting. Melee witch with just summons and no other spell casting was the character I played the most. Now it is going to take even longer than before to get to the trees I want.

 

[Zeriel]

I have some strong concerns for the combo focus of gameplay. Inevitably they will balance around using combos all the time, and it reduces gameplay into Simon Says. Somewhat fine for endgame boss encounters and movement, but distilling all gameplay into "do what the dev wants you to do or else, perform for us" really sounds awful. If you have to do stuff like this, I'd prefer it was an option for speccing into, rather than something that is just baseline. (Like, for example D4's rogue thing where you can get combo pts for all abilities if you want, but it's not baked in.)

I hope I am wrong.

 

[ArchAngel]

That druid video looked very cool. But none of this matters until they show us how the game plays in at least yellow maps with decent gear.

 

[ADL]

Featuring 100% less ummmms and uhhhs

 

[Ismaul]

imho best way to deal with 1 ability spam is to introduce concept of "burn". Basically the more you use one skill the more it cost at each cast.

It's still the same mentality that you need to punish players for not doing what you, the dev, want them to do. Same as with cooldowns.

That's not great design, as players will feel they're constantly at war with the system. Better design means giving incentives not to spam one ability.

But really, who cares if some people like spamming one ability? As long as it's not the most optimal way to play, and there are incentives to diversify, it's fine to let players have simpler options. Reminds me of D&D design goals: the Fighter base class is meant to be simpler to play, less complex, more spammy, while other classes are meant to be more involved like the Wizard. But even Fighters can be built with more complexity, if you build into combat maneuvers for example. Maybe all classes can have simpler and more involved styles of gameplay.

I have some strong concerns for the combo focus of gameplay. Inevitably they will balance around using combos all the time, and it reduces gameplay into Simon Says. Somewhat fine for endgame boss encounters and movement, but distilling all gameplay into "do what the dev wants you to do or else, perform for us" really sounds awful.

Yup, that's the opposite issue to the one where spamming one ability is optimal. Hopefully the combos aren't forcing a way to play, and maybe the optimal way to design that would be to have multiple ways to combo with each skill, so it doesn't end with everyone having to use the same combos, or having to do the same sequence of abilities for optimal play. But like Perkel says, that requires even more design work.

Let's hope they're aware of this. But if not, people will complain, and GGG being GGG will listen.

In fact, maybe the solution is not to have skill X combo with skill Y, but skill X being able to combo with any skill having the tag/effect Y. Taking the Druid gameplay for example, maybe the Volcano ability can combo not just with the stomping ability, but any skill that hits the ground. In fact there was also the Rampage skill that combo'd with it, so GGG might already be doing this.

 

[Perkel]

imho best way to deal with 1 ability spam is to introduce concept of "burn". Basically the more you use one skill the more it cost at each cast.

It's still the same mentality that you need to punish players for not doing what you, the dev, want them to do. Same as with cooldowns.

It's called game. Game is a thing where players navigate in set of rules set by game maker. You can argue whatever solution is bad or not but arguing that rules exist in game is invalid in first place.

Like i said there are better ways to do it but all of them require much more effort.

 

[ArchAngel]

I've watched druid gameplay video a few times now, I am pretty impressed. This is by far the best we have been shown so far.

 

[ADL]