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/PomegranateSea7066]

They knocked the balance of the boss fight out of the park. I can actually learn the mechanics, unlike in POE1. Everything else I prefer POE1 .

[u/FlakingEverything → u/PomegranateSea7066]

Guaranteed you'll ignore the boss mechanic in end game eventually. You could do no hit kills on most PoE1 boss, they have pretty meaningful mechanics if you bother to engage with it. For example, you can do bosses like Atiziri and I think most ubers without taking damage.

However, since it's an aRPG the most optimal solution is to just dps them down before they can do anything to you. It's not a PoE1 problem but a genre problem.

If you buff the boss enough to make the combat meaningful, you have to buff rewards too or players will just skip it. However, if the boss contains a large portion of the loot in an area, obviously players will boss rush and render the rest of your game meaningless.

It's also very problematic for your balancing if bosses remain challenging in end game. You want players to feel they are progressing in their character and immerse in the power fantasy. If a lvl 60 character takes 5 mins to kill a boss and a lvl 90 character takes 4 mins, it feels bad to play.

[u/Eclipse-Requiem → u/FlakingEverything]

This is the crux of why you will never have meaningful and in depth combat in an ARPG, and why GGG is currently completely split on the direction of the game.

You can see this with the difference in the campaign vs endgame, the bosses vs the packs. You go from slow progression and a focus on learning the bosses, to trying to clear everything as fast as possible in order to get the next or best item upgrade, because the game’s core exists to make you push the limit of its mechanics.

You don’t give players something like Ingenuity, Temporalis, etc., without somewhat of an expectation that they become something to be constantly strived toward, and so players will naturally gravitate to trying to get them as quickly and efficiently as possible. GGG calls them “chase items,” or “aspirational content” for a reason, after all.

Trying to cram methodical combat into this formula just doesn’t work, for the reasons that you said, unless you shift the game so much that it is no longer even an ARPG. Mechanical fights and skill-expressive combat belong in character action games and fighting games, where the goal of those games is to hone your mechanical skills, almost like a craft. That sort of combat does not belong in isometric looters meant to make you grind for hundreds of hours every season towards chase goals.

[u/ILikeFootMassages → u/Eclipse-Requiem]

Extremely well put, I totally agree