The New Patch Represents the Dev's Ultimate Vision For the Balance and I Hate It

When I say this, I don't mean they don't intend to change things beyond this, rather I mean the new patch confirms my worst fear about their desires for this game.

Ultimately, they want us to be overwhelmed.

I played PoE for a while, and this was something that I eventually had to come to terms with. A meta would develop that would make the endless grind somewhat playable, and inevitably the devs would nerf it. Every patch they would be like "we're listening" and then do the literal exact opposite of what the community asked them to.

They used the exact kind of language that Arrowhead used in their blog. Talking about how they wanted people to rely on other skills or builds but refusing to buff the less used ones. Eventually it got to the point they clearly saw nothing wrong with the balance because they would "buff" something, only for it to be slight tweaks to the numbers and mechanics in a way that made it clear they thought they could fucking placebo the player base into liking it.

Or even worse they would randomly decide that it was too easy to get things and nerf drops to the point it crashed the economy. They seriously gutted an entire mechanic essential for the crafting system and called it "not a nerf".

It was a cycle I followed along for a few months because I just wanted to love PoE so much, but I couldn't because every patch was the same. "We know you have this issue, we're going to fix it," months before the patch. Then right before it they would release super vague patch notes. Then they would release extremely detailed patch notes that were still super vague about the issue everyone wanted fixed. Then the patch would come out and the "fix" would either be a complete lie or the most half hearted limp dick shit of a fix you ever saw.

The only time people got excited was when the devs would make a mistake and accidentally make something worth their while. The rest of the time it was just pure depression.

And the reason for this was because ultimately, it was in line with their vision. They wanted players to grind harder. The medicore skills no one wanted to use? That was the balance they spoke of. All the skills that were actually effective were mistakes, which would be rectified the moment they could figure out a way to bullshit an excuse.

Eventually I, and many other players grew tired of the bullshit and had to leave. We had to come to terms einr the fact that the game they had made was the game they wanted to make, and it fucking sucked because they refused to balance it in a way that was fun.

I can't be sure, maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, but I'm getting the same feeling from Arrowhead. When the point about primaries all being shitty to use because they literally cannot keep up with the number of enemies was brought up, the Devs said you are not "supposed* to be able to handle the little guys with just your primary, you are supposed to have players come equipped with anti-swarm strategems.

The shitty-ness of primaries is by design.

Similarly, we have to use strategems to take out heavy units like chargers- makes sense. But none of the strategems or anti-heavy weapons allow you to individually engage with heavies effectively. Even if they let you one shot the heavy, the cool down will be so long multiple other heavies will spawn well before your strategem comes back online. This forces you to have multiple players with anti-heavy strategems to cover each other.

The constant heavy spam is by design. The shitty-ness of anti-heavy weapons is by design.

They outright told us that Shields allowed us to ignore many of the effects that make the game fun, like the constant slows, staggers, and one shots from heavy units. Because of course, you aren't supposed to play around the debuffs silly, you're supposed to suffer through them so your allies can save you.

The overwhelming amount of bullshit that disrupts play is by design.

Like I see people complaining because this is a PvE game and this shouldn't be a sweatfest like a lot of people treat it. You're right. Getting sweaty shouldn't be mandatory. But I've seen PvE games go down this route before, and it's always because of the same reason.

The. Devs. Want. The. Game. To. Be. Sweaty.

They want difficulty 9 missions to only be possible to complete when run by a well oiled machine of a four man team. One where each player has anti-swarm and anti-heavy strategems, along with carefully coordinated weapons loadouts.

Literally "one reloads while the other is firing" type shit.

But the problem with this approach is several fold.

First of all, sweaty games make sweaty metas. A very large portion of the game becomes avoiding dealing with bullshit as much as possible, as opposed to engaging with the mechanics effectively. The shield is popular because it's literally this, it's meta because the only defense to getting slowed is to not get slowed, and you are inherently not supposed to be able to fight off everything around you alone, so that means either a shield or another person covering your ass.

Secondly, it means the meta becomes increasingly mandatory just to play the damn game. The only games without a real meta are the games where most everything is viable enough to be used without too much struggle. That's it. You cannot balance a sweaty game to the point there isn't a sweaty meta. No one has ever managed it and Arrowhead will not be the first.

Let me be clear, the harder your game is, the less player creativity you will see as people stick to what they know works. It's why most people end up using high tier weapons, strategies, decks, characters, etc in competitive games. Player creativity and long hours of high difficulty bullshit are mutually exclusive.

Third of all, it basically eliminates long term casual players that just aren't naturally skilled. Like me. I am not going to play a game where I have to suffer through dozens of hours struggling just to survive on max rank missions just to seem meaningful progression. And I am certainly not putting in hundreds of hours grinding the frankly pathetic rewards from the mission difficulties I have fun in.

Oh sure, I could "get gud", but fucking why? Why should I work my ass off to get better at a fucking video game that I specifically bought because I thought it would be a casual couch game? If I wanted to get sweaty, I'd go back to playing fighting games.

Fourth, it makes your enjoyment highly tied to what sort of group you get. If you don't have a highly effective group, you suffer. Please do not come to me with humble brag bullshit about how you can carry at difficulty 9 by stealthing all the objectives. In fact, that's proof I'm right because it means that when you don't have a good team, the only way to have fun is to avoid playing the fucking game.

I mean, that's really what the whole "stealth and split up" is: meta revolving around not engaging with the game as much as possible.

You want a game mode where people can get extra sweaty? Fucking yeah go for it. Give us an endless mission with escalating rewards. Give us a nightmare difficulty operation with massive bonuses.

But they had better not be the only way to see decent progress, like now with difficulty 9 missions.

You want us to engage with mechanics? Reward us for it.

Bug breaches are nonsese there is no reason to fight, give us an objective for completing so many of them, or have the number decrease if we complete some objective associated with them.

Random patrols bring us nothing, maybe decrease them when we take out all the hives.

Give us bonus objectives when we've completed everything, or pop up randomly to give us a reason to stick around.

And for the love of God, enable us to specialize more so the swarm guy can feel effective dealing with the swarm on his own, while anti heavy girl deals with the chargers, otherwise you force us to pick strategems that are both powerful and versatile like the railgun.

Shit, let us outfit a guy with a cleanse build to keep the debuffs off us. Like go ahead and make us work for it, but make it satisfying and rewarding to do so instead of a chore we go through to play the game.

Because that's what the game is very quickly beginning to feel like for a lot of people: a chore.

And don't give us any bullshit about future content. Balance the game you have, not the one you want to make two years from now, and maybe we can talk.

Edit: Let's TLDR this

The devs want us to cooperate and engage with content. We want to cooperate and engage with content. The slow progression means people beeline it for the hardest content. The most effective way to deal with the hardest content is to not engage with it at all.

Therefore, the devs should be trying to make cooperation * easier by making specialization more obvious and powerful instead of just making solo play harder, and increase rewards across the board so we go up difficulty levels when we feel comfortable and have learned how to be that well oiled machine.

I have no problems with the game being overall higher difficulty, I have a problem with their response to typical sweaty behavior being a typical "lol we know better than you," nerfs the solution instead fixing the problem

Edit 2: I don't care about the railgun. I hated the railgun. I hate the way it played. I hated railgun/shield meta. Fuck the railgun. Shit the fuck up about the railgun.

The problem was nerfing it within the context of the current game, acting as if the state of anti-heavy strategems and weapons is acceptable when heavies are spammed at you.

They tried to get people to stop running around not engaging with the content and just made it more important to not engage with the content. Because that's what happens when you throw a problem in players' faces they can't reasonably solve with the tools available.

By the way, it should come as no surprise to anyone, but I've been reported to Reddit care. As I've struggled with suicidal ideation in the past, I've always considered the abuse of such an important resource to be personally offensive.

It's a game. I'm complaining about a game online. Don't mock the hundreds of thousands of people, many of which are children, the disabled, and veterans, we lose every year because you got pissy I complained about a game. It's pathetic.