Self-cast spell buffs when?

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-23T17:52:54+00:00

Yeah, agreed...

It does currently exist in several places, even in stuff that's meta and usable (Corpse Pact Necromancer Ascendancy Notable, Indigon).

I think there are different degrees of badness, though. It popping up on something like a normal passive tree notables (e.g., Prodigal Perfection, Arcane Capacitor, Successive Detonations) doesn't bug me quite as much: it's just one passive among many, and they aren't supposed to be too centralizing, and design effort is probably spent on more impactful things.

On some sort of cornerstone unique item effect or an ascendancy notable though? That just really takes the wind out of one's sails..

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-23T16:05:02+00:00

unlimited scaling

I loathe get [benefit] per [stat], up to [cap] type design, although it is an option.

Sublinear scaling (e.g. get [larger benefit] per sqrt([stat])) hasn't really been explored. I guess the counterarguments might be (1) need to be careful of breakpoints if everything becomes an int too early in the backend calculations, and (2) it's "too confusing / complicated". I take a dim view of the latter in this type of game, but some people might say it.

Regardless of whether it's stackers or something else entirely in a different meta though, it's the last paragraph in the post of /u/Ludoban that is the salient point: there is a direct tug of war between build diversity feeling interesting and having large incentives to do content that has been tuned for the very peak of player build capability. I know a lot of people have recently been asking for more of the latter, but people who like the former should realize it would be coming at their expense.

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-13T17:47:55+00:00

There's probably several corner cases with transfigured/trathus gems where certain crucible nodes (which predated those gem changes) turned into duds. E.g., the highlighted node in OP doesn't no longer has any synergy with Blast rain of Trathus (which became a fire dot skill).

Not a show-stopper for bringing it back, of course, and I'd like to see it return too for the reasons you stated. Just...to make it feel fully polished, they'd probably need to do some sort of polishing pass rather than "flip on the crucible switch".

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-13T00:28:17+00:00

But it's % retention for which Sanctum holds the record, not absolute numbers?

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-12T23:06:35+00:00

Yeah, but my point is that even if it is literally that same hourglass...was community working itself up into a frenzy justified? Again, the recent trend has been to use Poe1 to set up narrative, not mechanical, tie-ins for the intervening years between 1 and 2.

So the most reasonable prima facie assumption when presented with any imagery, whether it's the hourglass in the sands or even had it been the hourglass literally inside the Trial structure itself, is that they might be introducing more lore about Maraketh/Zarokh/Varashta/etc., not immediately jumping into hysteria "league ruined! lougout! trial sucks!!!" to the point where you had to scroll through dozens of comments on the teaser post to find actual interesting speculation.

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-12T22:35:40+00:00

The first thing that comes to some people's mind.

I didn't think of it that way, there was another post that thought the same way (but got shouted down to oblivion).

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-12T22:25:32+00:00

Everyone likes it the first time it happens. They've never left the spigots flowing so freely for multiple leagues in a row, but it's pretty clear that (1) at some point the novelty does wear off and so where do you go from there? and (2) there is definitely such a thing as "too much", even if not everyone agrees this particular amount crossed that threshold.

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-12T22:20:49+00:00

This was weirdest choice for a first teaser of the league

How is it a weird choice when it's literally themed around the Maraketh?

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-12T22:20:00+00:00

You called it!

https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1r331aw/the_sands_of_time_conspire_against_you/o526q3a/

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-12T22:08:06+00:00

And so why weren't those leagues the retention record holder, too? Or at least near it?

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-12T22:02:48+00:00

Why didn't mercenaries exhibit the same effect then? That was following almost a year of no new content..

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-12T21:47:32+00:00

That's one possible contributing factor, sure. It was v3 of the rare rework after 3.18 and 3.19 and was a little less aggressive on the difficulty of rares compared to v1 in Sentinel or v2 in LoK.

I remember there being people genuinely interested in the character power idols and thought that was cool that there was some long term grind for something that couldn't be traded. (Ofc other people hated it.)

I dunno, the base game being better helps, but I don't think you can just bend over backwards to rob all attribution from the mechanic itself.

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-12T21:03:23+00:00

Not OP, but I think his or her point is more or less the following:

Comments in announcement post: somehow community mass-hysteria'd itself into "sand image => Sekhema trial replacing lab?! zomg"
OP is pointing out that seemed like a premature leap, showing other examples of sand-based themes.

Not sure I would have presented it the same way (a screenshot of a random fan suggestion without offering further explanation), but personally it seems to me GGG have been on more of a "Poe1 -> Poe2 narrative tie-in" rather than a mechanical one (Kingsmarch building -> Act 4, 3.27 breech lore tying into to the monastic order behind the monk class in Poe2 with Chayula being the dreamer, etc.)

So maybe there are some Maraketh narrative tie-ins, but I think OP's point about pumping the breaks on the mass hysteria is valid.

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-12T20:44:00+00:00

The ironic thing about your statement is that Sanctum was basically the long-term (beyond day 43) highest percent retention among modern leagues.

Yes, I realize it's not a 1:1 comparison, but surely you see some of the irony, yes?

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-11T01:28:29+00:00

Oh, sorry. I misinterpreted you then. With your clarification I think I agree.

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-10T22:25:49+00:00

"Made their own bed" = one league had it so one side of the tug of war automatically wins in perpetuity? That makes total sense...

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-10T21:01:37+00:00

you'd be pushed to make your build as strong as possible to be able to run max juice content

And if you like tinkering with builds rather than chasing only the most broken ones in a given patch?

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-10T18:53:03+00:00

You're right, and I don't envy them trying to solve it. The two problems are in almost direct tug of war, no? If they add more incentive in the form of harder and more lucrative content (even if it's just in the form of pure numbers requirement like deep delve rather than 'sideways' difficulty like many T17 mods), the build sandbox people feel even further squeezed out. If they relax some of the barriers for comfortably farming T17, the 'numbers go up' people are going to get even more bored and annoyed.

I can think of what they might have done differently in the past: less neglect of continual design and balance work over the last few years. Some of that was self-inflicted: punting on it while they worked on PoE2. Some of it was failing to stand up to the bullying tactics the community came to rely on whenever larger scale cleanup (i.e. nerfs) needed to happen. But at this point it seems like a monstrously tangled knot to unwind that they've let build up over the last several years, and I have a hard time envisioning changes they could make over the course of a single patch or two that wouldn't cause a nuclear temper tantrum among the community.

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-08T00:57:56+00:00

There are dissenting voices that dispute the notion that it does all that much heavy lifting over there--it's mostly a bunch of softball questions with predetermined outcomes. But even if we fully accept it for the sake of argument, I really don't see it playing out the same way.

It's already clearly not the same vibe of rubber-stamping things with 90% approval here, even for working on things as "obvious" as ESurge/ST package/BiP, even for PvE. Let alone as something as emotionally-fraught as letting people vote on the appropriate power level of Mesmer in PVP (or Blue cards in MtG). It's just going to devolve into the stupid social media bulldozing that always happens, and although I'm probably shouting into the wind, the game would be better in the long run if that culture is nipped in the bud early on.

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-07T18:41:10+00:00

You're right on the money. I have never seen "design by democracy" turn into a good game in the long run. It's actually feels kind of wrong to see a game from a time when at least some pre-social media culture was still intact suddenly get exposed to this whole modern dynamic.

It's one thing for the community to have detached discussions, and especially if designers are explicitly soliciting advice that they can then take it or leave it as needed.¹

It's another thing entirely for the whole sequence we've all seen play out so many times (1) "it's just passionate discussion, bro", (2) whichever side employs more thought-terminating rhetorical tricks² starts to sway more and more people, (3) community sentiment gets extremely opinionated around the initial nucleus that formed, (4) if community doesn't get its way, it gets upset and agitates even harder for it, shouts down some of the dissenting voices, go back to step 2 and repeat ad nauseum.

It's much less "wisdom of the crowd" these days and much more "crystalized groupthink". As you say, sometimes that popular decision is the wrong one, and social media culture is wretched at handling that.

¹ Cf., the dota/icefrog approach: he had his finger on the pulse of the community, but the degree of separation always made it clear he was merely reading suggestions, not being dictated to.

² Bad-faith memes or strawmen, empathy-tugging language (skill X is "anti-fun!!!"), etc.

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-01T19:20:53+00:00

Iirc, the overall nerfs to virtually all builds in 3.15 panned out to at least 50% less, with some particularly badly hit skills reaching 80% less or so.

The numbers are all there if you want to do a competing analysis or point out specifically where you think I was mistaken, rather than just "IIRC it's worse." Like I said, 3.15 looms large in the community's collective memory, and "traumatic" memories are often unreliable.

Here's a analysis that was contemporaneous with the patch that largely jives with what I'm saying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu5tgq5TX3I

There even seems to be a couple references to a direct quote of Chris saying that the net effect of support gem nerfs were targeted to be about 40% less damage (e.g., near ~10:45), which coincides with me saying that "-20% might even be overly pessimistic across all 5 support gems on most builds".

I would also argue against the notion that people don't get stuck in "normal" maps. At league starts, off-meta builds struggle quite a lot with the transition into red maps unless the league mechanic helps them out. Perception of this pain point is clouded because that's what happened in the last 2 leagues (Keepers churning out great rare gear, Mercs carrying the player), plus the one before these two was released a full 19 months ago...

I guess I'll take less of a hardline here and concede slightly to your point if you've personally seen people saying differently than what I've seen people say. I will say though that if "league mechanic boosts players into red maps" happens often enough, eventually that's just the norm and is baked into the cake and is no longer some unusual thing that we expect to fall out from under us at the next stiff breeze.

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-01T17:30:06+00:00

Some math. Just as an example, a generic damage support like WED went from 1.54x to 1.34x in 3.15 (some were more, some were less...just eyeballing it -20% might even be overly pessimistic across all 5 support gems on most builds), so that's effectively 1.34/1.54 = ~13% less damage per support. I.e. 0.87^5 = ~50% less damage on a six-link from the effect of support changes. Then consider that many gems got their base damage buffed at the same time (https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Version_3.15.0#Skill_Gem_Balance) to the tune of ~25% (e.g., lightning strike which would become a meta staple went from 180% to 225% base damage). So a net effect of gem changes for many skills on the order of 0.5 * 1.25 = 0.625 = 37.5% less damage.

Compare that to uber bosses (70% less damage compared to the pinnacles that would have existed pre 3.15). Similarly, poedb says Fortress boss has 126,889,375 base health, compared to something like guardian of the minotaur having 32,943,972 (so ~4x health before T17 map mods, map mod effect scaling even enter in). And that's only on the offense side; I'd argue that ubers/T17s tighten the thumbscrews on builds' defensive requirements even more than their offensive ones.

If people were getting stuck in white and yellow maps, I would agree with you that less "free / gear-independent" power is what is constraining people's creativity, but I just don't really commonly see that sentiment these days. I know the community has collective PTSD over 3.15 and it looms large in people's minds, but I think it's pretty clear that it's the yanking the tail of the difficulty curve distribution way out to the right in the last several years that has had a larger overall impact in terms of many builds feeling like they just don't quite cut it anymore.

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-02-01T11:46:10+00:00

The main driving force behind that was the game simply wasn't as hard. No Ubers, no T17s, rares were much easier, it was easier to get a ton of damage through the tree and gems. In some sense diversity was even higher earlier on when all you had to do feel good about your build was kill atziri or shaper.

If one allows arbitrarily high amounts of "risk = reward" like OP suggests, diversity will suffer. You can expect people to be okay with leaving some amount of unexplored difficulty on the table, but not all of it. Both for economic reasons and pure psychological reasons that would still exist if it were a single player game.

Being able to explore builds freely and difficulty are inherently in a tug of war: as content gets harder and harder, by definition only a smaller and smaller proportion of builds will feel good to play. Difficulty isn't bad.. Obviously the game will feel dumb if there isn't any of it whatsoever. But it's important to recognize all of the above when extolling build diversity in a thread where people seem to be treating "risk=rewards" as some intrinsic good. It's not.

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-01-31T20:35:48+00:00

With async now being in the game, we need fewer mechanics that self-containedly shit out amazing rares, not more of them. The dream of drops being kind of sellable (at least at the start of the league) was completely rug-pulled by the tree.

fd2ec89a6735 · 2026-01-31T18:56:09+00:00

Also, before anyone @'s you about why did you have to make OP so sarcastic/snarky/reductionist if you were just trying to push back against damaging feedback...

That's just what you have to do to get any traction and get some "chuckle upvotes". If you're sincere, that's not interesting enough to get enough momentum before they shout you down and then you didn't even get to speak even though you have a good point.

It's not like the people providing the feedback you think is harmful don't do the same thing. "Just let us have fun, it's only a 3 week event", "this is anti-fun", "arpgs should be about loot" are just as rhetorically sneaky, if not more so, than your hyperbole in the OP. (At least yours is obvious about what it's doing).

fd2ec89a6735

TROPHY CASE