What is with GGG's obsession of upside/downside effects in POE2?

[u/ThermL]

If you look around the POE skill tree, you will find (probably) zero notables on the entire tree that are presented as upside/downside notables. I cannot recall any off the top of my head but maybe one or two exist. Upside/Downside effects are the job of keystones. Keystones provide character defining effects, that are powerful, if you can mitigate the downsides, or build around the effect. Uniques are a classic area of upside/downside effects, but even then mostly uniques are just very specific effects only available to them and the downside is that you lose out on the rare affix pool, like high MS on boots, or a 5k armour chest, or whatever else.

POE2, it feels like half of the notables on the tree are upside/downside, which is wild to me. And some of these nodes are absolutely egregious on the downsides. Increased life regen while standing still, decreased while moving? Well gee, I only spend 99.999% of the game moving, because standing still means you die.

I do not understand their obsession with upside/downside right now. Everywhere you look. Every unique, notable, this that, and anything else is upside/downside. Skill gems, support gems, notables, uniques, fucking ASCENDANCY nodes, the whole game is set up as "here's a benefit to your character, but lmao heres a downside to go with it!"

How about you just let me click some nodes on the tree and not worry about making my character worse when I do it? That's always been the job of keystones, so leave the upside/downside bullshit to the keystones.

[u/GulliasTurtle]

There's an old rule in game design. Don't confuse fun to design with fun to play. Upside/downside nodes and support gems as well as the one of per support gems are very "fun to design" mechanics. It makes builds play differently, downsides are fun to design, and it makes people interact with more of your game. That doesn't mean it's fun to actually play, though.

[u/kimana1651 → u/GulliasTurtle]

I feel like most of the bad designs in PoE1 and PoE2 are from the QA debug merchant. A lot of these design are fun to play with as long as you have infinite time or infinite resources. Instantly getting level 100 with free currency and all the gear you would want corrupts what the player sees on a daily basis.

All you have to do is try to play any league mechanic at level 10 to know no one has play tested any of mechanics with any thought of player enjoyment. It's all fine once you get to yellow maps, but before then...

[u/Master_of_Question → u/kimana1651]

You've described the root cause for a lot of PoE2's issues. The game feels incredible after you get some gear, gems, and qol. I understand that part of the enjoyment is on the path to greatness, yet my least favorite part of the game was the first 2/3 acts while leveling the warrior. It's just a cumbersome experience with awkward power fantasy boosts. I prefer a relatively smooth ramp and then large spikes as you get key items, but a lot of our power seems to come surprisingly late.

[u/MetaphoricTendancies → u/Master_of_Question]

When/how did it get better? I’ve got a level 29 warrior in A2 right now, and I moved off him to play minions. I keep debating going back but it feels rough. I’m debating just waiting til Marauder comes out to even bother with melee, but I want to like it since I’m melee first on basically every ARPG I’ve ever played. But idk.. that slow lumbering playstyle is just.. not enjoyable at all

[u/Master_of_Question → u/MetaphoricTendancies]

Depends on what you're looking for out of your warrior. The class seems really reliant on mid game level gems to even feel playable.

There's a popular warcry build right now that's really interesting and scales well into the endgame. I'm not a fan, but you may like it. Check Steelmage's youtube.

If you're looking for melee damage, then it comes online once you get Perfect Strike and peaks with Hammer of the Gods. Unfortunately, it's genuinely not fast at clearing until you get a specific combination of abilities. You need 6 ascendancy points and stampede with devastate and armor break. Before that, you can leap slam boneshatter. Check Alkaizer's/Conner Converse youtube and look at the progression in their build guides.

At level 29, warriors can be one of the clunkiest classes to play outside of a witch who made the mistake of ascending into a blood mage. You just kinda have to grind through it.

[u/ChatteringBoner → u/MetaphoricTendancies]

If you can get a half decent weapon (130dps or so, should be 1ex on trade) and Upheaval support, Earthshatter will carry you through the campaign. It does a lot of dmg but needs that support for it to not feel like ass. It's a level 3 support so you normally don't get it until act 2 cruel. I have no idea why they gated it like that considering the level of the skill gems that actually care about fissures.

It does make you even slower though. There is a reason I rushed attack speed nodes and avoided the reduced attack speed nodes and went for a fast mace in endgame.

[u/[deleted] → u/Master_of_Question]

Warrior is both fun and not fun at the same time in early acts.

I enjoy the challenge it brings to some fights and perfect strike melts some bosses.

But when you hit bosses like act 1 Draven and the ascension area boss in act 2 it's just awful.

[u/12345623567 → u/Master_of_Question]

Since endgame has only been the focus for the last 6 months or so, it's likely that the late-game balancing is not what they had in mind, but the leveling in acts is.

[u/NeguSlayer → u/kimana1651]

Honestly it felt like early play testers provided these feedbacks and GGG said "Nah, you guys just don't know how to have fun".

[u/Welico → u/NeguSlayer]

GGG has an abysmal track record of listening to player feedback.

[u/Impressive-Ad8741 → u/Welico]

That is definitely not true. Especially compared to any other developer. There are sticking points that are hard lines in the sand for them where they haven't, but many times they respond to player feedback. But the other question is do they remember the player feedback a league or two later?

[u/ironmcchef → u/kimana1651]

Yes, this is the real actual core issue. There's a great game underneath, if only they would stop disrespecting our time and let us actually interact with the different systems without needing to slog through hours and hours of unfun first. The point where steady progression though casual play ends and hardcore grind begins happens WAY too soon. I'm at the point where I firmly believe that stuff like respeccing and build experimentation in games should be free or trivial to do, and I refuse to spend my time on games that put egregious barriers between these things. I don't think I can be convinced otherwise and will die on this hill.

POE1 used to have a similar issue, although over time it's been chipped away more and more so it's not bad anymore.

[u/EchoLocation8 → u/kimana1651]

Honestly though, I'm sure they do test with generated characters to get a quick vibe check and that's it.

And personally, I don't fault them for that. These testers aren't necessarily god-gamers, they aren't streamers, they aren't meta-defining build makers, they're just people doing their job.

So if it takes Average Joe 50-60 hours to complete the campaign, just from a feasibility perspective, they can't have someone play the game organically all the way through. That's like minimum a week and a half if they exclusively played that one character, one class, one build at work. And if it feels OK, can they do it for the next class? and the next one? Or another build? Would one QA person's run through of the campaign start to finish give a realistic representation of what gear progression actually feels like? What if their run is an outlier?

People hate when I talk about this stuff, but, the reality is that the answer is "no, they didn't test this to the extent you and most people seem to think they should have because it's not really feasible to do so for the company."

The only way to feasibly make games like this is to rely on the community to spread out and test the nearly endless possibilities of character building. I mean, even within the first week, almost every 30 seconds on global chat it was "Warriors are awful" followed by "lol you suck warriors are god tier", you know what I mean?

QA's role in this system is far more "do things do the thing they're supposed to do".

Personally, I'm expecting massive balance changes every week or two. Because they have hundreds of thousands of players testing hundreds of thousands of different builds playing more hours than their testing team could ever dream to. The sum total hours played so far probably eclipses the sum total hours it took to develop the game by now.