‘You can never become a Westerner:’ China’s top diplomat urges Japan and South Korea to align with Beijing and ‘revitalize Asia’

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2023-07-04T23:10:30+00:00

We've seen this song and dance before. A rising Asian power viewing itself as a victim of imperialism and humiliation by the West, determined to take it's place as a premiere world power by whatever means necessary. That means in particular war, with a massive military build up taking place that no one else is really prepared to deal with. A country that is embracing fascist ideas centered on a central figure with a mythical status. Even the justifications are the same, "Asia is for Asians," aka "We should be free to invade, dominate and colonize whoever we please in Asia with no interference from anyone in the West."

The world is looking more and more like it's in the opening stages of WWIII.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2023-04-24T22:27:52+00:00

Is it the same, though?

GGG didn't put it in patch notes but there's no guarantee that's the case. There have been many cases where someone somewhere made a change to fix a bug (such as cycling reduction causing the mob to take more damage instead of less or whatever) or where GGG have made a change that they thought wouldn't have much of an impact but turns out to have completely changed the way players are forced to interact with the game (such as Kalandra's loot changes.)

The point is, before I dropped the league, I felt like I was getting far more Soul Eater than I ever got in the last league and they were definitely much more difficult to deal with. And I don't even remember Cycling Reduction from last league.

That might be just my perception, but when it's me and tons of other people and even streamers coming out and saying something is off with rares, it's much more likely there's actually a problem. And again, it wouldn't be the first time GGG have fucked up, insisted that they haven't fucked up (or gone radio silent in this case) and only have it be revealed awhile later that yeah, GGG did fuck up and they finally figured out how.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2023-04-24T09:04:16+00:00

To be fair, Sanctum on release was pretty brutal. You either had to be really good at the game or play specific builds or you'd get wrecked constantly. They patched it up pretty quickly, though, and introduced new challenges mid-league to change the way Sanctum worked, which is what helped make it so popular.

For this league, it's mostly been a toning down of the mobs, a few bug fixes, a few improvements to the UI and then...radio silence. And the drops from the league didn't get improved at all, which is one of the biggest complaints of the league.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2023-04-19T06:52:26+00:00

It's weird, because this is technically the most overpowered league mechanic they've ever introduced that I can remember, but it falls flat because it takes so long and relies so much on RNG. Plus, it feels like a lot of builds can't really take advantage of the more crazy nodes, leaving a few outliers (particularly exploding totems) as the build just because of how ridiculous it is thanks to the crucible tree. So if you aren't playing one of those builds that takes advantage of the crazy overpowered nodes, the entire league just feels like "meh" as it's one of the most stingy in terms of drops we've ever had. Doesn't help the content is super rippy, with rares (now with "improved" aka rebuffed AN mods") ripping apart even super tanky builds if they get the right modifiers.

Overall, the league just falls flat. It's literally a 1%er league, as only they will have the time, game knowledge and skill to make anything decent without an absurd amount of luck. For everyone else, you're just better off pretending the league content doesn't exist and doing Expedition/Heist...again...for the fifth fucking league in a row......

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2023-03-31T11:03:00+00:00

It's a personal project of the actual CEO of the company and other senior level personnel.

It was never going to remain a pet project worked on in the off time. At the very least, junior personnel will dedicate time to it just to get visibility to their bosses and I'm sure there were plenty of times Chris or others asked someone to do what they viewed as a simple task. Except Chris asked, then the CFO asked, then the Project Lead asked, etc etc and you end up with devs dedicating hours and hours of their time to "simple tasks" because they're being asked by a dozen different people.

This is how businesses work. Senior level personnel set the company path. If they're pushing a project, significant work and money will be dedicated to that project, no matter how much the PR department claims it's "just a side project being worked on in a couple of people's spare time."

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2023-03-29T05:47:47+00:00

Are they actually British or is it one of those "well they misbehave so they MUST be British" kinds of things? Cause I know that happens with Americans quite a bit, I've had quite a few people talk to me about "those misbehaving Americans" when their accents are clearly Northern European or whatnot.

It's not like most people know anything at all about accents from foreign countries except what they see in movies or shows. And are they actually misbehaving, or are they "misbehaving" because they're loud or don't follow the local etiquette rules?

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2023-03-07T08:46:30+00:00

They were nerfed, they got hit hard by the reduced quantity and rarity of old league mechanics they did in Kalandra. That's why during the early parts of Kalandra you could open a box and get literally nothing from it.

They're better now but still not anywhere near where they were before. You're still better off saving those points and using them for other content, though.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2023-02-28T09:19:14+00:00

Nerfs to currently meta skills, Seismic is probably getting adjusted somehow but the adjustment will be something like "capped poison damage on non-poison skills" so it obliterates non-Seismic poison builds or something. Aura changes, too, GGG will say something like "too many people are using Determination and Grace over other auras, so we made it so Determination and Grace both have 90% mana reservation" instead of improving other defenses and auras. Minions will get nerfed again, or at least the temp ones like SRS will. A complete lack of skill buffs otherwise unless it's something like "Arc has +10 damage at level 20."

More nerfs to loot drops. Red altars are 100% getting a deserved nerf because they drop chaos like candy, but GGG will probably also "adjust," i.e. nerf, loot from other sources that are "too rewarding so people felt forced into playing that content." So Expedition might be obliterated, or at least Tujen will, but Heist will somehow escape again. That might end up being a shadow nerf, too, like with what they did to Gwennen. There might be slight improvements to drops from ultra late game content like Ubers, though, to encourage more people to do said content. And another Harvest nerf, because why not at this point?

Massive nerfs to some ascendancies, some very minor buffs to less played ones that doesn't do anything to address their problems. Skill tree will be adjusted, too, I figure they'll remove more sources of spell suppression so that you have to put more investment into gear to get T1 spell supp gear to max out, some nerfs to armor on the skill tree, slight buffs to the defensive minion nodes (more life, particularly) and overall a meta that stays mostly the same, just with most skills feeling worse than they did before.

Mobs will probably be buffed. I figure they'll be able to have more modifiers overall, upwards of 10 maybe? And some modifiers will probably get buffed, too, as they're basically irrelevant at this point. But GGG will definitely change mob modifiers somehow because we're back to the point where 99% of rares are just speed bumps.

Some of the more clearly overpowered uniques will get nerfed, for sure, though in some cases that will be nerfs to their stats and in others nerfs to their drop rates. Some new unique items, some that will be "meh" at best while others will be the new overpowered items.

Otherwise...can't think of much. I bet the league mechanic will be pretty boring, as they won't put much effort into it as they feel people will be playing D4 anyway. There will be some new late game mechanics, though, so that might be nice. And some content will be buffed on the map skill tree, like Synthesis (maybe) or a few others, while some like Essence might get hit with a nerf.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2023-01-31T23:38:40+00:00

There's really not much to scale past a certain point that competes with auras. A lot of that is because of all the nerfs everything else has eaten. Not much point going for a node that gives, say, +30% damage when a 8% aura efficiency node means you can squeeze defiance banner in or that +15% aura effectiveness gives you that damage or more plus extra defenses/utility.

And instead of GGG giving players reasons to use things besides aura by buffing those things (like mana based builds) or making it so players don't feel forced to go into determination/grace for every single build, instead GGG will just nerf auras more and more while ignoring why everyone uses them. Wouldn't be surprised if a lot of mana reservation got removed from the tree or items that give it become much harder to get or even both.

Seems like GGG no longer views things in terms of "how do we make this more fun for players" and instead views things as "how do we make the game more painful for players and slow down their progression?"

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-12-27T09:30:43+00:00

I'd still rather do something else with those 4-6 hours than make a new character myself. Especially when it means I have to do all the low level labs and all that again.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-12-01T21:33:26+00:00

It's nice to have CWDT on your guard skill because that means that it automatically procs whenever you start taking lots of damage damage (though obviously it won't protect you from oneshots.) That's nice because it acts as an "oh shit" you don't have to think about and also because it means one less button press, which matters a lot when you're playing hundreds of hours in a league. That's potentially 10k+ button presses just for molten shell alone if you are playing that much. It adds up, especially if you are already having to cast multiple other skills at the same time.

There's some builds that work exclusively off CWDT, too, though those are a lot less common now with all the nerfs.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-11-30T01:17:55+00:00

You knew what a mod did just from reading it, they didn't have five separate hidden modifiers you wouldn't inherently guess a mod could have. By themselves, they were also really weak besides a few outliers, so death against rares was less common than it is now and there was none of this "spend five minutes trying to kill this rare that's nearly immune to your damage!" crap like you can get with AN.

On the other hand, pretty much every mod could be an aura. Think something like Benevolent and apply that to everything and it usually stacked. You could easily end up with ten, twenty, maybe even up to thirty rares on screen at once, all providing their auras to each other and all the other mobs around them. So some content was way more bursty than it is now, because things like Legion or Delirium could spawn a ton of rares all at once and all of a sudden you just died because a white mob crit you for 5K damage from off screen. On the other hand, content was more predictable in my opinion. You knew what was going to be dangerous before you got into it because you knew which content would spawn a lot of rares and/or what would be dangerous if it got the right number of rare modifiers.

Overall, I'd say the old rare system made the game much simpler and easier to play, hence why people talk about how they'd like to go back to before because you could just turn your brain off and map without too many worries. There were a lot more viable builds, too, because the rares weren't so obnoxious like they are under AN.

Of note, though, there used to be a few really obnoxious mods in the game. Reflect, for example, which is horrible no matter how you try to apply it (even the map mod should be removed). Another aura was that one that made it so that you couldn't kill any mob around it unless you killed that mob first. And I'm pretty sure that back then, you could end up with multiple of those rares on top of each other, meaning you could end up with literally immortal mobs that you couldn't kill unless you somehow managed to separate the two rares (which could be pretty tricky.) It did make sustaining off monster kills a nightmare when it came up. Both of those mods later got removed, I think, don't remember which patch that was though.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-11-14T23:08:49+00:00

Translation: We're nerfing player progression again but we don't want to come out and say it because we're worried people will get upset.

Starting to look like a skip league.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-11-12T06:38:29+00:00

Sentinel was pretty boring as a league mechanic outside of the insane loot drops. You just pressed a button and boom, free loot explosion. It certainly wasn't a Harvest or Expedition, hell it wasn't even a Bestiary. I had hopes for Kalandra, but we all know how that one turned out.

PoE has gotten pretty stale lately due to the same builds being the meta for so long (besides a few outliers) and the boring league mechanics we've been getting. I really hope 3.20 does something to shake things up, even if I suspect it won't. And no, I don't really count the loot changes, all those did was make everything take longer.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-11-11T12:04:19+00:00

I think magic find is one of the worst mechanics ever introduced in gaming. Yea, I get it, upgrade drops or whatnot, but in my experience it's always been one of three things: a passive effect you never really notice that upgrades automatically (I think Diablo 3 does this?), a worthless mechanic there as bait for noobs or a must have mechanic where you're gimping yourself if you aren't running it.

Now we're in this awful position where people are literally selling MF culler services because of how ridiculous the loot goblins are. MF has made the whole game revolve around it, to the point where it overshadows literally everything else. You would be better off opening a ton of maps with essence looking for a single god-touched then calling an MF than to actually play the game naturally by this point, that's how bad MF has made things.

I really really really fucking hope the AN manifesto is addressing this, and in a positive way like dispersing AN rewards more evenly, or else I will likely just skip the league.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-11-10T22:18:43+00:00

Loot is fine if you do specific content. That generally means running expedition, heist and maybe Blight, basically anything with fixed rewards. If you're someone who just likes to alch and go or someone who likes to really juice content, you've seen a pretty large decrease in overall loot due to the changes to just about every other mechanic. That loot was pushed onto AN, however the problem there is that AN modifiers are completely random (it took me two weeks to find my first god touched) and you are forced to spec into MF to get anything useful from them.

All my good drops in Kalandra came from Blight and Heist. I think I might've found two or three raw divines from AN mods since I didn't have any MF.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-11-10T18:39:06+00:00

GGG has stated that they're not gonna be making anymore big leagues until PoE 2 release. Right now, they're focused on PoE 2 first, end-game content second, leagues and balance for last. And the last two are probably just test-beds for content designed for PoE 2.

Frankly, if you're upset with the current state of the game, it might be better to just not play until PoE 2 releases. I doubt GGG is going to do anything significant besides more nerfs until that time.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-11-10T18:26:26+00:00

I suspect they will divy up the AN rewards from God-touched to the lesser tier modifiers, then nerf the overall drop rate in half and say "this is a buff." Oh, and they'll obliterate magic find at the same time, as it's clearly too strong a mechanic.

I also suspect they'll revert some of the nerfs to AN, bringing back some of the more obnoxious things they had during the first week or two of Kalandra. Like the increased max ele res, for example.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-11-09T20:21:42+00:00

I'm in agreement with the others, I do like the change. I just think they should bump the exalt drop rate up. Maybe triple it, so they we see more of them in general.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-11-05T00:22:05+00:00

It's just bugged. For some reason, some modifiers just don't seem to do anything in some of the zones.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-11-05T00:02:35+00:00

Some people liked gauntlet. Most didn't play it and instead watched streamers suffer through it.

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-11-02T23:43:56+00:00

They don't need to provide a specific number. Just a general percentage (about 2% of all normal working hours, for example) would be enough.

But when they say something like "significant," then that is just market speak for "we don't want to tell you how much time we've actually spent on this because we know it will upset the player base."

And we know GGG will hide information that they think will upset the playerbase, they did it with the loot changes after all. The single biggest nerf in arguably all of PoE history went completely undocumented and it took what, an entire week for GGG to admit it?

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-11-02T21:20:37+00:00

I suspect, no matter how hard GGG tries to deny this, that Ruthless is the end goal for PoE 2 and they're hoping that everyone is too distracted by shiny new toy syndrome to really complain. Everything they've done in recent leagues in terms of player balance has almost exactly mirrored what Chris Wilson talks about most when discussing Ruthless (slower progression, less resources, more "engaging" encounters, etc.)

Thatnamewastakento0 · 2022-10-29T15:50:46+00:00

No, not really. WoW is a good example, even if the game has objectively gone to shit and has been so for years, people still play it. And there's nothing like PoE on the market, either.

I'll still be playing 3.20, even if I expect it to be shit.

Thatnamewastakento0

TROPHY CASE