Path of Exile Questions Thread - July 22, 2021

Questions Thread - July 22, 2021
Beginning of a new era...
How to make identifying magic/rare items exciting again.
Some thoughts from Chris
Slower game? Yes. But what about all the timers, progression and rewards?
Allcraft with Chris Wilson is now live!
@GGG today I was going to buy 40ish slots, but after the first click it said its maxed at 255, any way to extend this please?
What even is a "casual player?" I play more hours than most people here and expect way less in return
3.15 Build Selection Flow Chart
Me planning my league start
Kripp's back! For 24 hours a day at least for a week.
Corrupting fever now impossible to cast, my build is completely broken
GGG, while we're nerfing everything, please also nerd the amount of clicking in the game.
If the mana modifiers are going live, which they are, please allow us to turn off the "My mana-is-gone" speech.
Path of Building Community v2.4.0: 3.15 Passive Tree and gem nerfs
3d model i made, printed and painted.. hope you like it
Three Noteworthy Interactions from the 3.15 patch notes
PoE easier so that Quin69 can still play confirmed.
Introducing, The Worlds Worst Loot Filter
Multistrike vs Awakened Multistrike
When you are non-streamer and trying to make link 6 manually
Path of Exile 3.15 Gem Changes by the Numbers
all the NEW/CHANGES passive highlighted
Nugi's take on Aurabots not getting nerfed
Watching ALLCRAFT just ensured me I love Chris Wilson’s ideology about the game
Join the Wyrmsign Enthusiasts Club!

Questions Thread - July 22, 2021

Posted: 21 Jul 2021 05:00 PM PDT

Questions Thread

This is a general question thread on. You can find the previous question threads here.

Remember to check the wiki first.

You can also ask questions in any of the questions channels under the "help" category in our official Discord.

The idea is for anyone to be able to ask anything related to PoE:

New player questions
Mechanics
Build Advice
League related questions
Trading
Endgame
Price checks
Etc.

No question is too big or too small!

We encourage experienced players to sort this thread by new.

We'd like to thank those who answered questions in the last thread! You guys are the best.

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Beginning of a new era...

Posted: 22 Jul 2021 11:30 AM PDT

submitted by /u/Illustrious-Stress20
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How to make identifying magic/rare items exciting again.

Posted: 22 Jul 2021 04:27 AM PDT

submitted by /u/galenorla
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Some thoughts from Chris

Posted: 21 Jul 2021 10:00 PM PDT

Hey Reddit,

We've read heaps of feedback on Reddit over the last week, and wanted to address some of the topics that have come up a lot.

There has been speculation that I have personally been driving the balance changes to match my original vision for Path of Exile. There is a little truth to this, in that I want to restore areas of the game that were important but have been eroded, but almost every area of specific balance work is the product of a large team of designers working together for a long time to come up with solutions to problems we want to address.

We care more about making a good game than we do about vanity metrics like player concurrency records. I suspect this is because we're gamers first and businesspeople second. The direction Path of Exile was going in over the last year was breaking player records but wasn't really leaving us happy with our own game.

For more than a year we've been accumulating changes that we were worried about releasing because they would affect the way people currently play Path of Exile. We understand that our game is an escape for some players and if that is potentially disrupted, it could be very upsetting for them. We have great appreciation for the fact that Path of Exile has become part of your lives. When someone comes into my office with a prospective nerf, more than half the time I suggest we don't do it because it would hurt a build without a sufficiently good reason. We try to be very cautious and to care about your experience with Path of Exile.

Unfortunately, we've been hitting a breaking point with power creep recently and really need to address it. Meanwhile, much of the community has grown increasingly unhappy with the direction the game is heading in. It honestly feels to us that this is in part because we've moved further away from our own vision over time.

So, you're unhappy and we're unhappy and that means it's really time that we start to correct things. The changes we are making in Expedition are a carefully-considered set that sound daunting but probably have less overall impact on the way you will play the game than you suspect they may. These changes really open up possibilities for the future and put us in a good position for working towards the release of Path of Exile 2.

When I'm writing to the community, I usually try to avoid saying what is fun and what isn't (as it's quite subjective), but we are very confident that the new Path of Exile is going to be more fun. There's a wealth of powerful new builds out there to discover and we honestly can't wait to see what you come up with.

I'd like to talk about some specific topics that have come up on reddit in the last week:

What is your motivation behind increasing the mana cost of so many support gems? Why wasn't this mentioned in the game balance manifesto?

During the gamewide balance assessment we did for 3.15, we identified many support gems that just cost too little mana and needed to be adjusted up to the fair baseline for their effects.

We mentioned this in the manifesto as:

"We have also taken this opportunity to make mana multipliers on support gems more consistent. In general, mana multipliers have gone up slightly, but several gems have had mana multipliers lowered as a result of this pass."

At the time of writing, we hadn't worked out final values for these gems and hence the manifesto section was written vaguely and inadvertently downplayed the extent of the changes. I'm sorry about this and we'll try to be clearer in the future. This is especially disappointing because our main intent with the manifesto was to make sure that it had detailed and transparent explanations for most of our big changes.

Why did you remove the Cold Damage Over Time stat from Hypothermia?

We're going to be re-adding cold damage over time to Hypothermia, granting 29% more at gem level 20.

Hypothermia was never intended to be a cold DoT support gem. It just had the cold damage over time stat added because cold DoT builds needed more support gems at the time. As there are now more alternatives and the support gem was effectively two different supports combined into one, we decided to remove it.

A lot of players have found the removal confusing or jarring and we don't really have any balance concerns with it being there, so we've decided to add it back for now. We will remove it from Hypothermia again when we create another cold DoT-focused support gem in future.

Do you really believe that Ultimatum had poor player retention because it was too rewarding?

I was interviewed by Jason at VentureBeat and we chatted about the Ultimatum league. The take-away line that is quoted from this interview is that I felt that Ultimatum had bad retention because it was too rewarding, and people are quick to point out that this was not the problem with Ultimatum.

I agree.

The quote from the interview is as follows:

"Retention during the league was poor. I would say it was in the bottom 40% of leagues, a bit below average. And this is partly because for the league, both its combat was a bit spammy and its item rewards were a bit spammy," said Wilson. "These are two things we hadn't determined during playtesting that became apparent over the course of the league. And so the fact that it was quite heavy with its reward systems meant that players played it for less time than they normally would, and this was quite useful to learn from." [...] "So overall player numbers dipped a little more than they would have done by the third month, which is disappointing, but it's a consequence of the way that Ultimatum was designed."

To put my thoughts into a considered, written reply (rather than an off-the-cuff answer to an unexpected question in an interview primarily about Expedition): There were two big problems with the Ultimatum league from my point of view:

The encounters themselves didn't have great combat. They achieved challenge by just spamming a whole lot of rare monsters at you and it was hard to follow what was going on.
While the core Ultimatum double-or-nothing item reward system was decent, the absolutely massive spam of items that occurred after these encounters was unnecessary and only contributes to the problems that Path of Exile has with items currently.

I absolutely agree that the first of these points (spammy encounters), alongside other meta issues (stale metagame, etc.) contributed far more to poor retention than the heavy rewards did. The rewards issue is more of a long-term problem and I should not have implied that it was related to the immediate performance of the league.

In this clip, you mentioned that you weren't going to make sudden, extreme changes to the game - are these changes in line with that statement?

The balance changes we're making to Path of Exile in 3.15 are not the type of drastic changes that I was referring to in that clip from 2019. The changes they made to that Marvel Heroes game were ten times as impactful as what we are doing here. We are not fundamentally changing how Path of Exile is played to anywhere near such to a significant degree. We are not looking at one-minute map runs and saying that they should now take ten minutes. Yes, the balance changes do have an impact on the design of many builds, but those builds will still be capable and appropriately powerful afterwards. I know the changes are daunting to look at before you're able to experience them in game, but there are so many more opportunities for viable builds now, and we're expecting it to be a lot more engaging to play.

By the way, I stand by exactly what I said in that 2019 interview. We often discuss making larger changes to the game and we cite the points mentioned in that clip as the reason to be careful, to not change too much at once, and to seek community feedback on the changes. We have been carefully following your feedback and will continue to do so once you've had a chance to play and let us know how it has affected your builds in practise.

Why didn't you nerf aurabots? Is this favouritism from developers?

We don't have a specific plan that we are ready to commit to yet. We like how auras individually work, and feel that stacking a bunch of auras on your own character also has appropriate costs. We know that dedicated aura support characters are very powerful but we don't have a specific plan ready for 3.15 to address this, so it hasn't been included in the patch. We have given all of our balance changes a lot of thought and testing, and want to apply the same standards to a potential aura change.

Some players speculate that because Mark (Neon) played this build in the past, he is protecting it from nerfs. A plan wasn't brought to him for approval in 3.15 and we had a lot of nerfs already so we didn't go out of our way to rush one in.

Do you make game balance decisions based on incorrect data from the community wiki?

There was a 4000-upvote thread about how we balance skills by looking at incorrect data on the wiki and making decisions based on those numbers.

We don't use the wiki for doing balance work. The numbers that we tweak in our internal tools are an entirely different form than the final values you see in the game or on the wiki. What happened in this case was a mistake while preparing the patch notes. The person preparing the patch notes often copy/pastes the formatting for skill stat descriptions from the wiki and then adjusts the values to the correct ones based on the skill's balance history. Unfortunately with over a thousand distinct patch notes to write, many of which only getting final values in the last few days, mistakes were made and a few values were left unmodified and incorrect.

This led to a misleading patch note and a lot of confusion. This was a mistake and it shouldn't have happened. But I can assure you we aren't balancing based on wiki data when we have it in a significantly different form in our internal tools.

With over a hundred developers and thousands of changes going into each expansion, communicating everything clearly is a challenge. We will continue to improve this process and welcome any feedback about how we can make changes to Path of Exile in a way that is better understood and less upsetting to players. If you have feedback about what you would have preferred us to have done differently during our pre-launch period this time, please share it with us. In the meantime, I'm going to get back to playtesting Expedition. See you on Friday!

submitted by /u/chris_wilson
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Slower game? Yes. But what about all the timers, progression and rewards?

Posted: 22 Jul 2021 06:04 AM PDT

I'm very much in favour of slowing down the game.

But seriously, there are so many timers and dps checks in the game that force people to play fast. Why have exactly none of them gotten a revisit alongside the slowdown?

What about Legion timers, which are notoriously short, Incursion encounters, Breach, Delirium and what have you?

And what about the regen mechanics on bosses or maven witnessed bosses? You just can't kill them without enough dps anymore. No amount of tactics and strategic gameplay is gonna change that.

And most importantly, why have none of the reward mechanics been touched alongside the nerfs.
If it just takes longer to kill anything in endgame, it will just take as much longer to progress anything.

If you slow down the game, fine, great even.
But you also have to adjust rewards accordingly.

It took me 3 weeks to kill Sirus 5 last league and I wasn't fine with that.
And I won't be fine with it taking 4 weeks now instead.

I think the idea ist good, but there is a lot still missing for this to feel anywhere close to a good revision.
You are missing half of what needs to be done but still ship it, because who cares, right?

PS: Why does nobody care about Chris openly stating that they are just not testing their skill balance changes? He said when the patch notes where made the skill changes weren't finalized yet. The Patch notes were released 3 days before the release, even if they started writing a week before, a week before isn't enough to test all these changes.
This is going to be rough.

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Allcraft with Chris Wilson is now live!

Posted: 22 Jul 2021 01:05 PM PDT

submitted by /u/Kryt0s
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@GGG today I was going to buy 40ish slots, but after the first click it said its maxed at 255, any way to extend this please?

Posted: 22 Jul 2021 02:43 AM PDT

submitted by /u/turdtwisterx
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What even is a "casual player?" I play more hours than most people here and expect way less in return

Posted: 22 Jul 2021 05:00 AM PDT

I will typically put in 4+ hours a day in PoE for the first 2 weeks of a league (after that, I'll either play more, less or not at all depending on a variety of factors), and I've been playing for years.

I have never:

Killed A8 Sirus
Killed Uber Elder
Completed The Feared
Killed Aul
Finished The Cortex
"Completed" the Atlas
Done any ultra-lucrative Grand Heists
Crafted or owned mirror-tier gear
Had a build that did more than like 15m DPS
Done 36/40 challenges
Made more than a total of 40 ex in a single league

And I'm okay with this.

To clarify, I'm not talking about the hours being casual so much as the way I play being casual.

Also, I'm going to preface this by saying that I do think certain things are more of a slog than they need to be at this point (especially RNG-gated stuff), BUT I don't understand this mentality that you should be able to put in casual hours and receive hardcore/tryhard-level rewards -- especially when you don't actually need them to complete most of the content. I play the game fairly casually compared to the people tryharding, and I don't expect amazing results for doing this.

Forgive me for using the dreaded "E" word because I think it's abused way too much, but when did people become so entitled? I see this mentality creeping into a lot of genres, including actual competitive ones where players are legitimately angry that they don't stand a chance against the people who spend hours a day studying and tryharding a game. Isn't that sort of the point of anything with any sort of depth?

If you consider yourself a casual player, then why aren't you okay with just being reasonably powerful and killing stuff? 'Cause it sure isn't difficult to get pretty strong in PoE. You don't need to be a god to do any of the content I mentioned above. People have literally cleared everything in the game minus The Feared with like 2 million DPS and budget gear, and you can easily reach the 2-10m DPS mark in like a week or two of casual playing, depending on the build.

I don't burn myself out by trying to reach some arbitrary mark because of FOMO. I play until I get bored, and then I just stop until the next league or the league after that if I feel sufficiently tired of PoE. I will literally ignore entire mechanics for leagues at a time because I just see them all as choices being offered to me. I don't like doing Incursions or Heists for example, so I just don't do them. I let other people do them and trade for the drops they have. I just run the other stuff I like. The game is designed that way, so you're never forced to do everything. To me, the fact that FOMO makes you feel like you need to do everything says more about you than the design of the game because trade partly exists so that you don't have to do the shit you don't want to do.

I see so many people who are upset because they say it takes too long to complete an A8 Atlas or complete all 36 challenges. Who says you need to do any of those things? Who even said that PoE is meant to be a game you can easily 100% every single league? I don't think that's a realistic expectation to have. Nor do I think it would be interesting if you could do it casually in like a week every league. The challenge is there for people who want to invest the time/effort. It is no way a pre-requisite to getting geared, killing shit and having fun running maps with your build.

I have friends who burned themselves out getting 36/40 one league, so what did they do? They took a break for a league or two, or they just played more casually the next league. They didn't go on the subreddit to complain about how the game doesn't respect their time and how they think it needs to be easier, so they can do the same thing again every league. You know why? Because they're usually more casual players. You know, the ones who are supposedly more focused on just having fun and not caring about ultra tryharding the game?

Could I play more efficiently and do all the things I haven't done yet? Definitely, but I don't really give enough of a shit to most of the time, and that's my point. I also don't expect to be rewarded if I don't feel like putting in that effort.

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3.15 Build Selection Flow Chart

Posted: 22 Jul 2021 12:55 AM PDT

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Me planning my league start

Posted: 22 Jul 2021 07:00 AM PDT

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Kripp's back! For 24 hours a day at least for a week.

Posted: 22 Jul 2021 11:22 AM PDT

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Corrupting fever now impossible to cast, my build is completely broken

Posted: 22 Jul 2021 04:44 AM PDT

submitted by /u/Siderit
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GGG, while we're nerfing everything, please also nerd the amount of clicking in the game.

Posted: 22 Jul 2021 05:44 AM PDT

I'm getting older, and my job involves heavy use of the computer. I've had to quit Ritual and then Ultimatum because of the finger/hand pains that still lingers to this day, and no amount of stretching or rest has really helped because I still have to use my hands at work.

I don't need to feel the "weight" of the loot. That's complete bullshit.

EDIT: I get it, autocorrect made me look stupid. Stop being a nerf.

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If the mana modifiers are going live, which they are, please allow us to turn off the "My mana-is-gone" speech.

Posted: 22 Jul 2021 11:37 AM PDT

I still want to hear everything else my characters have to say but I don't want to hear them bitching about the mana over and over.

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Path of Building Community v2.4.0: 3.15 Passive Tree and gem nerfs

Posted: 21 Jul 2021 06:31 PM PDT

Announcement

3.15 Tree update is out with support for almost all the new nodes and fixes for some crashes.

I also made the mad choice to implement all skill gems changes from the 3.15 patch notes, which resulted in 8 long hours of going through each line 1 by 1 until they were all done. 6000 lines manually edited later and all the gems should be accurate at lvl 20/21 to what the patch notes show. I'm almost certainly not going to do this again, but this league is looking pretty brutal from the nerfs so I tried to help where I could.

This DOES NOT include support for the new gems released 30 mins ago. Those will be added on the 3.15 release day and after.

If you find a bug, make a report on our GitHub page here: https://github.com/PathOfBuildingCommunity/PathOfBuilding/issues/new/choose

Changes

Add 3.15 passive skill tree ( ppoelzl )
Add level 20/21 gems from 3.15 patch notes ( LocalIdentity )
- BEWARE: numbers may not be 100% accurate
Add 3.15 uniques ( Wires77 )
Add 3.15 flask changes ( Helyos96 )
Update Evasion, Poison, and Consecrated Ground calculations to 3.15 values ( ifnjeff )
Update Alchemist's Genius to 3.15 value ( Wires77 )
Update Gem tooltip generation ( PJacek )
Drastically accelerate searching for application updates (from 50s to 2s) ( ppoelzl )
Add 20 Quality gem DPS tooltip comparison ( 7e11 )
Add weapon crit to mod breakdown ( PJacek )
Add space and newline before custom mods on Timeless Jewel nodes ( Nightblade )
Add Trial Galecaller Spectre ( Kayella )
Add support for Fishing Rods ( aletrop )
Add support for many Alternate Quality gems ( PJacek )
Add support for "Perfect Crime" and "Bomb Specialist" ascendancy nodes ( Nostrademous )
Add support for Chip Away brand cluster notable ( LocalIdentity )
Add functionality for Blood Artist notable ( pundm )
Add skill parts for Smite ( Wires77 )
Add support for Gore Shockwave skill ( LocalIdentity )
Add support for Divergent Close Combat ( Wires77 )
Add support for Unnerve belt enchant ( Wires77 )
Add support for Rathpith Globe and legacy Femur of the Saints ( Wires77 )
Add support for Replica Siegebreaker burning ground ( ifnjeff )
Add support for Non-vaal Skill Damage during Soul Gain Prevention ( Wires77 )
Add support for reworked Arborix mods ( LocalIdentity )
Add support for Warcries have infinite power ( pundm )
Add Trap and Mine speed essence mod ( pundm )
Add parsing for Increased Chaos Damage Over Time Mod found on weapons ( Puddlestomper )
Add support for Fiery Impact ( celuck )
Add unique variant of Commandment of Inferno ( PJacek )
Add unique helmet The Fledgling ( ppoelzl )
Add missing Fire Burst radius ( quashtaki )
Add missing Pride aura radius ( pundm )
Fix power report crash when loading builds ( Wires77 )
Fix error when the power report is not initialised yet ( Nostrademous )
Fix Minion skill tooltips not working correctly ( Nostrademous )
Fix FullDPS comparison for Alternate Gem Qualities ( Nostrademous )
Fix FullDPS comparison of enabling/disabling flasks ( Nostrademous )
Fix Blood Offering appearing in gem list ( PJacek )
Fix multiple bugs with General's Cry Mirages ( Nostrademous )
Fix Disciple's cooldown to apply to all Sentinels ( Wires77 )
Fix Triggered skill parsings ( LocalIdentity )
Fix support for Petrified Blood ( Wires77 )
Fix Blood Stance not granting More Bleed damage ( LocalIdentity )
Fix maces/sceptres and thrusting/non-thrusting swords counting as different weapon types ( Wires77 )
Fix interaction between Agnostic and Pious Path ( LocalIdentity )
Fix The Agnostic life recovery calculation ( roastpiece )
Fix Anomalous Chain Hook ( PJacek )
Fix Divergent Stormbind Quality having More AoE instead of Increased ( Wires77 )
Fix Alternative Quality for Precision ( czarandy )
Fix Mana Reservation mods ( pundm )
Fix "increased Impale Effect" of Dread Banner only applying to attacks ( Typepluto )
Fix parsing for Sacrificial Garb implicit ( Wires77 )
Fix Wildwrap Attack Speed mod ( LocalIdentity )
Fix wording on Eyes of the Greatwolf ( pundm )
Fix wording on Ngamahu's Sign ( pundm )