I personally feel part of the shift could be attributed to how "strict" end-game has felt over the years. I feel every year the requirements for any character get more and more extreme, partly through player expectations, partly through balance and partly through content additions. This league in particular is a great case study for that I feel. Back in the day a character's only requirements were that it could clear maps without dying too often to be annoying. Then it became, can clear maps but also have ~2m dps to kill Shaper or Elder. Then it became, can clear maps without dying to Sirus empowered rares and has enough single target on a budget to clear the Atlas and guardians. Then we got Maven and then Eldritch as well. During this time, monsters also power crept. Map Mods, Rare mods and bosses all were buffed, nerfed, reworked or introduced which all put more and requirements on our characters. Remember when Spell suppression was introduced? It was supposed to be an option for dex side builds, yet we put spell suppression on everything and it wasn't too hard to fit it in either, so all builds ran it. Then it got nerfed and suddenly we found ourselves in a place where it "feels like" we need Suppression on every build which means we need 2 - 3 suffixes devoted to suppress on our gear. Same can be said for Chaos Resistance as it became more prevalent. Builds nowadays all have to meet a certain imaginary bar to even be considered worthwhile looking at so part of that falls to the mercy of general skill balancing. Some skills will never get any attention either on play rate or on youtube no matter how fun your build feels simply because it can't meet this bar and suddenly it becomes "pointless" to discuss them. Another issue is with all these requirements it can sometimes feel as though builds become too similar. If there is an efficient way to meet the bar in whatever regard, many builds and build archetypes will start to use it and all will use similar gear or strategy. Look at spell suppression for evidence on this, or when Determination, Grace and Defiance Banner were played on every build. Part of me as an oldie just misses the discussions for "bad" builds. They could do all the content, maybe not as well as others, but they could and because they could, they were worth sharing. Now it doesn't matter if you have 2m dps to kill shaper if you can't handle the juiced maps or T17s or Ubers. Your build is just not worth looking at in the eyes of the community. Lastly just want to say this isn't supposed to be hate towards the game or anything.. Not even meaning it to be a "It was better back in my day". Just an observation of what I've felt over the years.
That was the most beautiful comment I've read since coming back to PoE. Thanks for taking the time to share! You've put into words what I've tried ti express in the video - there is a change and a shift in the content and characters we play, and that may not be always a bad thing, but it is a noticeably observable thing.
Part of it is because things around building a character has been solved. A lot of things scale in similar ways throughout the years, character passive tree hasn't been reworked much ever since passive mastery was introduced. And also POB becoming increasingly feature rich and eliminated thinking need to create or improve existing builds.
I agree with the general sentiment, I think builds are still a focal point but so few new builds come out that do something unique enough to warrant a lengthy discussion
A feel the current balance patch has a much larger impact on this discussion meta than anything else you discussed here. While some people are always new players and will want to discuss general knowledge questions, the majority of people that will be participating in discussion about the game (on reddit or wherever) are invested players that want to talk about the newest things. This current patch made very few changes to player builds (mainly just revived archmage which got a lot of discussion initially but it isn't a very deep well buildwise since it is fairly linear to build, stack mana, then stack more mana so discussion dried up) but this patch made massive changes to scarabs/atlas tree. So of course everyone is talking about atlas trees it is the newest biggest thing. Next season when presumably we get much more minor changes to the atlas tree and hopefully some more character focused changes (like reworking lacking ascendancies) the discussion focus will flip back for a bit.
I enjoy the atlas tree as a means to accessing specific content that I want to play, and I'm glad that having three atlas trees means I can play different content on different days. That said, I feel extremely alienated from the common discussion around atlas trees because I can't get into the whole "divs per hour" craze in trade league. I don't want to treat PoE like a job. I want to make a cool character and kill monsters. The whole trade league mindset burns me out.
I treat those "div/h" discussions as mostly "what exactly constitutes those values". Part of why I enjoy strongboxes is I enjoy turning in cards and selling huge stacks of currency to people that need them for their crafts. Part of why I enjoy harvest farming is those giant pops when a field explodes in life force. That's what keeps me from burning out personally, identifying if I enjoy what those "div/h" strategies entail, not whether the number at the end of the day is big enough to warrant running it. Oh, and also how sustainable it is to run. It could be a mirror per hour, if it requires multiple trades for every single map, I'm not running it, period.
When i first played poe, the idea of having to download pob was wild to me. Now I love that I have 4 screens with 5 separate windows between them to min-max my information intake, it’s a huge part of what makes poe enjoyable is the game outside of the game to me.
Personally for me character growth feels like shit to me. Dealing with stat and resistance requirements basically mean I almost never want to change out gear and once I finish my first character my next ones are 100% complete before I even hit create character. Also going from 1-2 div per item to 10+ is barely noticeable and any upgrade after that is like 100+ and that is just as unnoticeable even at 10 times the investment. However profit progression is way more noticeable and feels great all league long with way fewer pain points to change up then character gear. Going from 1-2 div strats to 3-5 to 5-8 and finally 10+ feels so impactful and you feel the growth as you bump up your strat over the course of the league.
You have to be careful listening to this video. "Don't hear what I'm not saying" only appears once at 2:54. Love the three atlas trees this league. Just this last weekend had to repurpose the first of the three to try something different. You still need those orbs of unmaking once you get past number 3, but having 3 at one time has been a game changer for keeping me interested. Blight for 10 maps. Maven bosses for 10 maps. Red Alters/Beyond for 10 maps. I've never been a zoom zoom fast mapper, it is boring to me. This atlas tree change has really reduced the amount of boring. Getting stuck on one thing unless you pour 50 unmaking orbs into it. Or starting something new and it doesn't work out and then you're stuck with buying more and changing it. Now you can go do the other two atlases for a while before coming back and re-working it (I'm looking at you wandering path 2.0).
@@GoodGuyGaming3 I think now, its just assumed that if youre looking for currency strategies that youre playing one of a handful of builds. Im gonna correct myself and say melee is in a bad state, not simply melee bad. You can make it work, but it will be harder and more expensive than the alternatives. The issue is the amounts and varieties of damage we deal with now, bc melee used to be perfectly viable. But now theres so much damage coming in from so many sources and melee just cant clear it all before getting hit, and to build into enough damage you end up not thick enough with few exceptions or otherworldly investment. D3 had a good solution that ofc wouldnt work for PoE, where certain classes just took 20% less damage as a baseline.
This is what happens when you balance a game around no life gamers. Eventually you reach a tipping point where everything is so nerfed due to some broken interaction that they found. Just for the game to feel the same as it used to for normal players, then they have to chase these FOMO strats. The raw currency drop rate was nerfed again, most likely to make room in the table for T17s and the game feels worse for it.
Interestinf g discussion. It's kind of implicit that you need high-end build for almoust every strategy so people don't talk about builds when talking about top strategies.
I personally dont like the 3 pages. I have 2 set all the time and 1 i respecc constantly instead of farming my other strats. I would prefer if they reduce it to 2 pages total...and yes, i asked for it.
@@davidpowell3469 Yeah sounds like we have the same problem. I cant find a use for my third page that i wanna keep constantly. Iam absolutly sure thats a "me"-problem. Might also be the scarab changes at the same time. I think some kind of ramping cost for the pages might solve that, i dont think they should be that "free". Maybe lock them behind some more difficult content (Ubers, or maybe T17 map bosses and put 5slot back on legion) ?
![[POE 3.24] Which is better, more offense or more defense?](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/G8IH6hYEh-s/mqdefault.jpg)
![[POE 3.24] Which is better, more offense or more defense?](/img/tr.png)
![[POE 3.24] Who is ShitStain_Steve_Returns?](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/WtzYLZ7biR0/mqdefault.jpg)
I personally feel part of the shift could be attributed to how "strict" end-game has felt over the years. I feel every year the requirements for any character get more and more extreme, partly through player expectations, partly through balance and partly through content additions. This league in particular is a great case study for that I feel. Back in the day a character's only requirements were that it could clear maps without dying too often to be annoying. Then it became, can clear maps but also have ~2m dps to kill Shaper or Elder. Then it became, can clear maps without dying to Sirus empowered rares and has enough single target on a budget to clear the Atlas and guardians. Then we got Maven and then Eldritch as well.
During this time, monsters also power crept. Map Mods, Rare mods and bosses all were buffed, nerfed, reworked or introduced which all put more and requirements on our characters. Remember when Spell suppression was introduced? It was supposed to be an option for dex side builds, yet we put spell suppression on everything and it wasn't too hard to fit it in either, so all builds ran it. Then it got nerfed and suddenly we found ourselves in a place where it "feels like" we need Suppression on every build which means we need 2 - 3 suffixes devoted to suppress on our gear. Same can be said for Chaos Resistance as it became more prevalent.
Builds nowadays all have to meet a certain imaginary bar to even be considered worthwhile looking at so part of that falls to the mercy of general skill balancing. Some skills will never get any attention either on play rate or on youtube no matter how fun your build feels simply because it can't meet this bar and suddenly it becomes "pointless" to discuss them.
Another issue is with all these requirements it can sometimes feel as though builds become too similar. If there is an efficient way to meet the bar in whatever regard, many builds and build archetypes will start to use it and all will use similar gear or strategy. Look at spell suppression for evidence on this, or when Determination, Grace and Defiance Banner were played on every build.
Part of me as an oldie just misses the discussions for "bad" builds. They could do all the content, maybe not as well as others, but they could and because they could, they were worth sharing. Now it doesn't matter if you have 2m dps to kill shaper if you can't handle the juiced maps or T17s or Ubers. Your build is just not worth looking at in the eyes of the community.
Lastly just want to say this isn't supposed to be hate towards the game or anything.. Not even meaning it to be a "It was better back in my day". Just an observation of what I've felt over the years.
That was the most beautiful comment I've read since coming back to PoE. Thanks for taking the time to share! You've put into words what I've tried ti express in the video - there is a change and a shift in the content and characters we play, and that may not be always a bad thing, but it is a noticeably observable thing.
Part of it is because things around building a character has been solved. A lot of things scale in similar ways throughout the years, character passive tree hasn't been reworked much ever since passive mastery was introduced. And also POB becoming increasingly feature rich and eliminated thinking need to create or improve existing builds.
I agree with the general sentiment, I think builds are still a focal point but so few new builds come out that do something unique enough to warrant a lengthy discussion
A feel the current balance patch has a much larger impact on this discussion meta than anything else you discussed here. While some people are always new players and will want to discuss general knowledge questions, the majority of people that will be participating in discussion about the game (on reddit or wherever) are invested players that want to talk about the newest things. This current patch made very few changes to player builds (mainly just revived archmage which got a lot of discussion initially but it isn't a very deep well buildwise since it is fairly linear to build, stack mana, then stack more mana so discussion dried up) but this patch made massive changes to scarabs/atlas tree. So of course everyone is talking about atlas trees it is the newest biggest thing. Next season when presumably we get much more minor changes to the atlas tree and hopefully some more character focused changes (like reworking lacking ascendancies) the discussion focus will flip back for a bit.
I enjoy the atlas tree as a means to accessing specific content that I want to play, and I'm glad that having three atlas trees means I can play different content on different days. That said, I feel extremely alienated from the common discussion around atlas trees because I can't get into the whole "divs per hour" craze in trade league. I don't want to treat PoE like a job. I want to make a cool character and kill monsters. The whole trade league mindset burns me out.
I treat those "div/h" discussions as mostly "what exactly constitutes those values". Part of why I enjoy strongboxes is I enjoy turning in cards and selling huge stacks of currency to people that need them for their crafts. Part of why I enjoy harvest farming is those giant pops when a field explodes in life force. That's what keeps me from burning out personally, identifying if I enjoy what those "div/h" strategies entail, not whether the number at the end of the day is big enough to warrant running it. Oh, and also how sustainable it is to run. It could be a mirror per hour, if it requires multiple trades for every single map, I'm not running it, period.
When i first played poe, the idea of having to download pob was wild to me.
Now I love that I have 4 screens with 5 separate windows between them to min-max my information intake, it’s a huge part of what makes poe enjoyable is the game outside of the game to me.
That's crazy and awesome, mate. "Mix-max my information intake" what a setlntence, what a time to be alive!
Personally for me character growth feels like shit to me. Dealing with stat and resistance requirements basically mean I almost never want to change out gear and once I finish my first character my next ones are 100% complete before I even hit create character. Also going from 1-2 div per item to 10+ is barely noticeable and any upgrade after that is like 100+ and that is just as unnoticeable even at 10 times the investment. However profit progression is way more noticeable and feels great all league long with way fewer pain points to change up then character gear. Going from 1-2 div strats to 3-5 to 5-8 and finally 10+ feels so impactful and you feel the growth as you bump up your strat over the course of the league.
I guess that's another aspect to this. Character progression feels worse than atlas progression in terms of the currency output.
You have to be careful listening to this video. "Don't hear what I'm not saying" only appears once at 2:54. Love the three atlas trees this league. Just this last weekend had to repurpose the first of the three to try something different. You still need those orbs of unmaking once you get past number 3, but having 3 at one time has been a game changer for keeping me interested.
Blight for 10 maps. Maven bosses for 10 maps. Red Alters/Beyond for 10 maps. I've never been a zoom zoom fast mapper, it is boring to me. This atlas tree change has really reduced the amount of boring. Getting stuck on one thing unless you pour 50 unmaking orbs into it. Or starting something new and it doesn't work out and then you're stuck with buying more and changing it. Now you can go do the other two atlases for a while before coming back and re-working it (I'm looking at you wandering path 2.0).
g3, could I suggest you put some kind of limiter on your audio so you don't distort.. thanks :)
Yup! The audio came out really wonky (I had just moved my mic prior to recording) and have since fixed it. Ty mate!
Here's your character build discussion - melee bad
Haha has been, and will continue to be. PoE 2 is the one shot for many to give Melee a try and for GGG to "get it right".
@@GoodGuyGaming3 I think now, its just assumed that if youre looking for currency strategies that youre playing one of a handful of builds. Im gonna correct myself and say melee is in a bad state, not simply melee bad. You can make it work, but it will be harder and more expensive than the alternatives. The issue is the amounts and varieties of damage we deal with now, bc melee used to be perfectly viable. But now theres so much damage coming in from so many sources and melee just cant clear it all before getting hit, and to build into enough damage you end up not thick enough with few exceptions or otherworldly investment. D3 had a good solution that ofc wouldnt work for PoE, where certain classes just took 20% less damage as a baseline.
This is what happens when you balance a game around no life gamers. Eventually you reach a tipping point where everything is so nerfed due to some broken interaction that they found. Just for the game to feel the same as it used to for normal players, then they have to chase these FOMO strats. The raw currency drop rate was nerfed again, most likely to make room in the table for T17s and the game feels worse for it.
Interestinf g discussion. It's kind of implicit that you need high-end build for almoust every strategy so people don't talk about builds when talking about top strategies.
I personally dont like the 3 pages. I have 2 set all the time and 1 i respecc constantly instead of farming my other strats. I would prefer if they reduce it to 2 pages total...and yes, i asked for it.
@@davidpowell3469 Yeah sounds like we have the same problem. I cant find a use for my third page that i wanna keep constantly. Iam absolutly sure thats a "me"-problem. Might also be the scarab changes at the same time. I think some kind of ramping cost for the pages might solve that, i dont think they should be that "free". Maybe lock them behind some more difficult content (Ubers, or maybe T17 map bosses and put 5slot back on legion) ?
Turn your mic level down dude damn. Every word peaks your audio.