Regen kills meaningful combats. It's the root of your problem.

Dear GGG,

If you seriously want meaningful combat, recovery needs to take a huge nerf. At the moment players still have remarkable recovery sources, that's why you can't never balance it out.

This is the loop that your game initial design has put you into:
1.Player fights and kills a pack of mobs, takes damage
2.Player has too much recovery, goes back to 100%
3.Player fights and kills another pack of mobs, takes damage
4.Player has too much recovery, goes back to 100%
5. Rinse and repeat.
-> Player is immortal, game is boring.

So to combat this, you cranked up mob damage to eleven, no, twenty, no, ten thousand. Now there are two outcomes:

A. Player wins:
1. Player fights a pack of mobs, one-shots them, takes no/some damage.
2. Player has too much recovery, goes back to 100%
This is basically PoE1. If you wanna go down that route again, sure.

B. Player dies:
1. Player fights, fails to one-shot mobs, get one-shotted instead
2. Recovery doesn't matter, player dies
3. Player tries to crank up their own damage instead of playing more tactically

I don't believe either of these outcomes is your definition of "meaningful combat" because if it is, then what you should do is just make Poe2 a face-lifted version of Poe1. When player has enough regen, small combats don't matter.

Now let's dissect an example of meaningful combat without every single normal monster having full capacity to one-shot players. Yes, you guessed right: the Souls games.

It's nearly impossible to find a mob that can one-hit kill players in thpse games, not counting higher difficulties (NG+) or botched/naked/glasscannon builds. Even the bosses kill you in at least 2 hits. Many armoured builds can take even more before going down. But why do even the small encounters with something like a skeleton or an imp so impactful? Yeah you get the idea.

When you take damage you HP stays there. Without flask charges you don't heal. While very encounter rarely kills you out right, they drain your resources and if you fail to manage your resource you'd face the final boss with a nearly empty HP bar. (Of course, there is: A. Healing spells, but they drain your "mana" and the "mana" flask does not refill either; and B. Regen items, but their rates are so excruciatingly slow nobody wants to you them)

In the Souls games, all battle matters. That's how you make meaningful combat.

Now let's take a look at PoE2. You know what to do:

- Regen needs to go. Or at least watered down so it doesn't render chip damage from small encounters meaningless anymore and flask management can come into play.
- Energy shield needs a rework as well. Otherwise all players will need stack up ES which recovers for free.
- Mana may require a rework too
- Monsters need to deal WAYYYYYYYYYYYY less damage, obviously.
- The last, but most important: the loots need to be buffed by A LOOOOOOOOT. You want meaningful combats, sure. But a meaningful battle not only needs to present high risk with lasting impact, it must also promise great rewards, too. Soul games threaten you constantly, requires you to remain tactical in any situation, but each monster we kill gives an equivalent of 5-10% of the EXP bar and boss fight can level you up 5 at a time. My fellows who play huntress broke their finger to combo one mob, don't just give them one scroll of identification in return.

I doubt any of your staff would deign taking a look at this, but I like the game and I want it to succeed.
Love.

EDIT: Ok I'm gonna go ham on this topic because most people aren't able see that huge recovery potential and impactful small encounter don't mix well.

A guy below points out that limiting regen would make people go back to refill anyway.

Valid, but if the devs are to stick to their vision then it should cost portals to go back and refill.
Now, before you start screaming at me, look at the point above that I made: "monster damage must be nerfed, hard".
When monster damage is lowered, players wouldn't die so often (less exp loss, yay). Any trip back-and-forth would be to refill their flasks, not because of you die and respawn. The number of refills should be relative to the difficulty of the map.

Oh no, how about trading? Well. That's where the real problem arises: that would not be an issue if GGG implements instant buy-out instead of clutching on "player friction".

Hell, just make PoE2 a graphics-updated version of PoE1, idc. Go ahead and give me a game of one-shotting which looks prettier, make up your mind Johnathan sir.

EDIT 2: To the players, what would you prefer to have in a map (thank Gordyne#2944 to remind me of this aspect of gameplay):

A. A gear-check that kills you outright if your equipment doesn't match the number

B. An attritional expedition that slowly wears down your character until you run out resources and have to make a call whether to press forward or go back home to recuperate and avoid the EXP loss.

Pick your poison.

You are arguing for turning this into Diablo 1. Won't be fun, except for a select few.

leech life makes warrior builds viable. even with 85 phys resists and 90 elemental warrior can still be one shot by a white mob if you dont notice a caster in a sea of monsters on screen.

without investing in it i would be out of flask charges after a few packs.

most builds dont bother with it as they go elemental which cannot leech.

leave me alone your idea is half baked.

Hell no.

"

xxn1927#3319 написал:

You are arguing for turning this into Diablo 1. Won't be fun, except for a select few.

It's as simple as this really.

All post-D2 ARPGs are heavily tied to recovery. If it's not Potions, it's globes. If it is not Life Regen , it's shield. More so, if you can beat each of the single packs in a map, you can beat the map. It doesn't even matter if we go with OP's suggestion, we would have to kill Town Portals as well, because at any time you are starting you just TP and recover somehow. Even besides that, some people like Templar-style classes, and that means auras.

A true souls-like experience in an ARPG requires really bold choices, but the PoE2 team are not aiming towards that. I do fear OP might be correct that a true souls-like experience is the only way to really have the style of combat the Team wants.

Yeah let's reduce build variety even more. Why even have nodes in the passive tree other than damage?

Life regen is not even good in PoE2. It won't let you survive burst damage without massive investment (and even then it's meh), and cannibalism solves healing between packs. And leech nodes are among least popular on the tree.

Not sure why there was a comparison to Diablo 1, you spam potions in that game too.

Not all ideas are good ideas - case in point - this particularly bad one.

Sincerely hope no one ever takes your game design advice OP.

"

Sardekar#4803 написал:

Not all ideas are good ideas - case in point - this particularly bad one.

Sincerely hope no one ever takes your game design advice OP.

Sincerely hope no one ever takes your advice, too. Oh wait, you didn't give one. What you just say is "Your idea is bad. Period" without even one analysis.

Okay, so let me have a go at your style then.

Not all comments are good comments - case in point - yours particularly bad one.

Sincerely hope no one ever takes your comments seriously.