Open Letter to GGG From Hardcore Player

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Tokintom#3043 написал:

LOL ggg don't look at the forums unless they are deleting posts talking about RMT and their inability to police their own game.

Why do you too make topics for GGG to read, then? Sounds a bit silly if you don't think they'd ever read them.

sorry op but i cant agree at all. i have played alot of hc in poe2 and the game feels very fair. in fact i think its too easy.

what ground effects are you talking about? shade walker is the only one thats coming into my mind and this one is only dangerous because it disables regeneration.

i cant even think of a dangerous on death effect thats not telegraphed very well.

deaths in poe2 are always a skill issue. i have yet to see a death thats unfair.


try getting better. you said it yourself. played d2 for 25 years. obviously most of the game feels like a walk in the park for you now.

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Lymez#5507 написал:

sorry op but i cant agree at all. i have played alot of hc in poe2 and the game feels very fair. in fact i think its too easy.

With that opinion you are a lonely monk on a big lonely mountain. I don't even know an arpg on the market with hardcore mode that is more challenging than poo2. Is there one? On EA release even players like carn played sc, lol.

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Strickl3r#3809 написал:

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Lymez#5507 написал:

sorry op but i cant agree at all. i have played alot of hc in poe2 and the game feels very fair. in fact i think its too easy.

With that opinion you are a lonely monk on a big lonely mountain. I don't even know an arpg on the market with hardcore mode that is more challenging than poo2. Is there one? On EA release even players like carn played sc, lol.

poe1 is 10 times more challenging. its not even close.

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Strickl3r#3809 написал:

On EA release even players like carn played sc, lol.

so what? the game was new. i started playing sc too. carn barely played poe2. most poe1 streamers barely played poe2. obviously they are not as good in poe2 as they are in poe1.

I mean the new league mechanic includes losing augmentations on death. ON DEATH.

Sorry folks but GGG just completely forgot HC even exists. Even Zizaran is planning on going SC next league.

Shame.

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Lymez#5507 написал:

i have yet to see a death thats unfair.

Just to name a couple:

- Azmadi's "death from every angle" one-shotting attack. It's very hard to avoid if it comes from a sword that's off-screen.
- Arbiter: during the circles phase, he will sometimes block the path to the next circle with his shaper beam.

The game is very easy for ES builds, and very hard for life builds. That said, some of the life builds have amazing clear speed which is something SC players are very willing to trade survivability for. So it's "balanced" if you, once, again, ignore that HC even exists.

TLDR: Fuck instant death lava.
Cannot balance HC how you want with SC exisiting too.
Game elements do exist for a reason if they are reoccuring.
Feedback is still important to optimize these elements tho.

To be honst I feel like the "death" to hc comes from SC powercreep and playstyle. The same things happened in Poe1. Early poe1 used to be more HC balanced until a certain point in ~2017/2018.

What you say makes sense in a game where you cant clear anything beyond your screen. I feel its a kind of precaution so that 1hp SC builds dont end up with no risk. One way of catching them when they try to follow up on what they have "done". running into a groundeffect and dying to it even though they killed the enemies offscreen.

While I get your complaint. I have been a poe HC gamer ever since I started in 2016 iirc? Have there been stupid deaths? Yes.
Did I feel cheated? Yes.
I theorycrafted my fav buidl last league taht was really tanky and had unique gear. what did I die to? Instant death lava. I didnt know that shit was instant death. and while it should have been obvious I didnt know. I never really played a super melee build before. SO while I was fighting the molten somthing boss the lava spawned on me and I instant died.

Death is part of the game we are playing. Part of life. And thats what makes life/playing fun. The possibility of dying at any moment.
There is always going to be bullshit deaths. But you there must be reasons why certain elements are being used over and over again even though we dont like them. Some have been changed with time but others are reoccuring.

Without rng/surprise elements the game would become stale. The elemental difference between hc/sc is the approach we go into the game. We know we can die and we are building our characters as tanky as possible while trying to do as much damage as possible. This is the charm of hc.

Idk. why I elaborated so much.

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Lymez#5507 написал:

poe1 is 10 times more challenging. its not even close.

Path of exile 1 is not more challenging on hardcore mode than Path of exile 2, certainly not.

I do think the game should be on some levels like boss designs for exemple balanced around hardcore mode, it would make GGG save a great amount of time and they would make less stupid difficulty balancing.

It will be a +1 for me GGG you have to consider better hardcore players.

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ArmyOfLight#2593 написал:

TLDR: Fuck instant death lava.
Cannot balance HC how you want with SC exisiting too.
Game elements do exist for a reason if they are reoccuring.
Feedback is still important to optimize these elements tho.

To be honst I feel like the "death" to hc comes from SC powercreep and playstyle. The same things happened in Poe1. Early poe1 used to be more HC balanced until a certain point in ~2017/2018.

What you say makes sense in a game where you cant clear anything beyond your screen. I feel its a kind of precaution so that 1hp SC builds dont end up with no risk. One way of catching them when they try to follow up on what they have "done". running into a groundeffect and dying to it even though they killed the enemies offscreen.

While I get your complaint. I have been a poe HC gamer ever since I started in 2016 iirc? Have there been stupid deaths? Yes.
Did I feel cheated? Yes.
I theorycrafted my fav buidl last league taht was really tanky and had unique gear. what did I die to? Instant death lava. I didnt know that shit was instant death. and while it should have been obvious I didnt know. I never really played a super melee build before. SO while I was fighting the molten somthing boss the lava spawned on me and I instant died.

Death is part of the game we are playing. Part of life. And thats what makes life/playing fun. The possibility of dying at any moment.
There is always going to be bullshit deaths. But you there must be reasons why certain elements are being used over and over again even though we dont like them. Some have been changed with time but others are reoccuring.

Without rng/surprise elements the game would become stale. The elemental difference between hc/sc is the approach we go into the game. We know we can die and we are building our characters as tanky as possible while trying to do as much damage as possible. This is the charm of hc.

Idk. why I elaborated so much.

The biggest problem for me isn't just losing a character once in a while, but the fact that the game has been bleeding its HC playerbase for years now, and it's even worse in the sequel.

Hello All

I do appreciate how involved and thoughtful this discussion has been, so I would like to add a little nuance here. POE 1 is quite balanced in terms of HC. I played the Keepers of the Flame league (great fun, btw GGG, great league) and I never even bothered with SC at all. By the time POE 2 rolled around with the current league I had 4 chars, all HC and no deaths on my record. So it is certainly, eminently possible to get through the campaign and early mapping with a thoughtful build boasting well layered defenses.

The tools are there and there is a significant lack of one-shots moments in POE 1. Of course, you can easily die to mistakes, but that's as it should be. My main problem with POE 2, while I am loving it on SC, the screen clutter combines with too many ground effects and one-shot mechanics in certain fights, and, we lack the tools to deal with this currently.

One example I experienced last season - I was chasing down and Abyssal rift and it spawned something like 8 elites, all possessing massive hit boxes. The map was one of those multi-elevation types, wherein you were on ledges and the like, often having limited space for ingress / egress. The elites were so large that they formed a wall and trapped me entirely. This combined with the ground effects they were casting made my death absolutely unavoidable.

That's the problem in a nutshell. There was no better or worse decision to make. Now I'm not saying that the same situations don't exist in POE 1 sometimes, but in that game you have travel skills. I cannot imagine playing HC without them, because I know I will occasionally, even inevitably be cornered, because you can't know what lies beyond every corner.

The same goes for D2 (a back to the drawing board example). Once you are in Act 3 every class has access to Teleport. One of the great beauties of that game design, a philosophy GGG loved and ran with to superb effect, is that every character can use every skill. Whether it's through a staff with charges or a runeword, you can build yourself all the tools you need to get out of jeopardy.

For an apples to apples comparison, the only real differences between my summoner witch in POE 1 and my summoner witch in POE 2, is that in POE 1 my witch has Convocation and Travel skills. Things get dicey and she can summon her pack to protect her, or blink out of danger using any one of a number of useful travel skills. These options aren't available in POE 2 and I'm honestly not certain why. Maybe they will be eventually, a short range blink type teleport does not trivialize content in my opinion. It simply provides you with an option.

I will add one further point, I go out of my way, on my HC summoner in POE 1, to have a certain number of minions defensive, meaning they can reliably taunt. This is another thing that is not available in POE 2, sadly. I cannot count how many times mobs have ignored an entire field of enemies to make a beeline to my char and there is very little I can do about that.

In short, POE 1, D2, they too have procedurally generated maps and challenging content, so you will eventually be in such dicey situations. The difference is that the conditions in POE 2 currently make it hard to see the walls closing in (visual clarity) and we do not currently have a toolset sufficient to respond reliably.

Here's hoping that we will at some point.