Why is PoE2 not successful ?

[thelee]

13 hours ago, Wormerine said:

Never run into issues you mentioned, though it might be due to me comprehending the idea quite quickly

Oh I comprehended the idea quite well. That's precisely why I *wouldn't* heal my characters even though literally anyone else in any RPG situation who sees a fighter at 10/80 endurance would, because I would be extremely aware that they were also at 95/320 health, so a simple 20 point heal takes them out of the range of a harmless knockout to be dealt with for a rest after the fight (along with the rest of the low health) and into a permadeath which would require a reload and having to do the fight again. Having to do that calculus is the least intuitive aspect of any cRPG i've ever played. And it's not like this is a one-time thing, every single run I did of PoE involved doing this calculus at various times. It happened in the backer beta even (I even left angry comments about this flaw in the feedback, because in the backer beta I had already encountered a situation where it was better to leave my wizard knocked out because healing them resulted in permadeath). Never mind that when your character has health < max endurance you start to encounter the fairly-unprecedented RPG situation where your characters are approaching death and you have lots of heals, but none of your heals will actually help you anymore (the only thing that can save you is Barring Death's Door which was such a niche spell in PoE1 that existed only to interact with this unintuitive mechanic).

The endurance/health confusion for new players was by JE Sawyer's own assessment as well. (As a former new player, it was most confusing during the original backer beta in which instead of a health multiplier, you had equivalent health and endurance and a fraction of damage was dealt to health while the normal amount was felt by endurance, and that fraction differed between classes. Mathematically the same, but a gigantic "huh???" to anyone coming from any other RPG.)

OK, maybe people don't like that a herald can keep your entire party up in perpetuity. Again, just because endurance/health was a thing that could do this doesn't mean that it was actually a good solution to that problem. (edit - Nor do I agree that it was a problem. I think if you are able to metagame a system into giving you infinite sustain in many combat situations, your reward should definitely not be permadeath during the long tail of other long fights.) (edit - the converse is true. if you can't muster the trivial dps to outpace a troll or battery siren's regen, you should not be able to grind out the fight anyway given enough de-aggros or enough time to put in 3 to 6x their max endurance's level of chip damage)

Edited November 26, 2019 by thelee

[IndiraLightfoot]

thelee is absolutely right on this. When I did a lot of the harder bounties and fights, I had to resort to that unintuitive non-healing crutch more often than not. The system was annoying in that way, and perhaps in its entirety. I like a reasonable amount of resource management like everybody else, but not drab versions or convoluted versions. I reckon this version was both of these things. And I do recall that the system was one of the most disliked things in PoE1 - it was almost "hated" on par with the spiritmeter mechanic in MotB.

[Boeroer]

It wasn't particularly well implemented - especially the edge case when health nears max endurance (and then got lower) like you mentioned are a bit weird - but I still like it better than the Deadfire solution for the reasons  mentioned. 

Some of the confusion you mention stems from unclear nomencalture though and not from complicated mechanics: endurance/health is clear, but what was called "healing" in PoE was actually just some sort of "catching your breath" in most cases. "Healing" should have been reserved for abilites that actually restored health, not endurance.

I'd still argue that all the confusion wasn't the result of a bad or complicated mechanic but of poor explanation and wording. I also wouldn't say that it's unintuitive. I understood the concept at once even though I didn't experience it before. 

Those unelegant "edges" where you would rather get your companion knocked out than go to 0 health could have been shaved off by some additional options like I said (like feigh death). Other options are already there: namely the maiming option as well as the abilites Wound Binding and Field Triage as well as potions of Infuse with Vital Essence.

I know those situations you talk about, but after utilizing the options above (even only two: maiming + potion) they were a non-issue. Not the best solutiuon for the underlying problem maybe but not as bad as you describe it either

On one hand you have a system that carries over the results of one battle to the next (via health depletion) - on the other hand a system that does not do that and where every battle is an insolated event. Both have their problems. I can't really see why one would argue that one of those approaches is objectively better. There is no better or worse when it comes to the underlying concepts - execution details aside. There is no reason to call one approach stupid or ridiculous nor to impute players who like a over b with stockholm syndrome (because they are obviously not clear in their head when they don't prefer b).

Edited November 26, 2019 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

Wow. This really is very interesting. I did all the bounties, even the hardest one, on Hard difficulty (or whatever it was one notch below PotD), and I never had to resot to that. I also never suffered from the system in the way you describe, although thelee is right in the sense that a couple of times I did rest precisely because one of my characters was so low on Health that they were close to permadeath and were not healable by anything other than rest.

And like Boeroer, I definitely think the system was better than Deadfire's.

Edited November 26, 2019 by xzar_monty

[Boeroer]

I think it's pretty save to say that resting when having low health was the behaviour that the designer expected.

I think thelee at al. mean the situation where health drops from max (or high) to zero over the course of one single fight (bounties, boss fights etc.). This can happen if you rely on strong "healing" (restoration of endurance) but use chars with low CON and/or low defenses and DR. So basically glasscannons. CON's influence on endurance isn't that big, but its impact on health is quite significant. If you tend to use low CON glasscannons and like to prevent knockouts with lots of healing (instead of good defenses and/or DR) you will run into that problem quite often.  

Solo runs naturally have longer fights - so during a solo run you will also experience this a lot more which might blur your judgement on this mechanic. For most players that use a party and don't min-max a lot I suppose it was a non-issue.

Edited November 26, 2019 by Boeroer

[Wormerine]

20 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

I know those situations you talk about, but after utilizing the options above (even only two: maiming + potion) they were a non-issue. Not the best solutiuon for the underlying problem maybe but not as bad as you describe it either

By the point I played PoE1 for the first time maiming and injuries were already in. Perhaps, that helped me to avoid some frustrations @thelee talks about. I did indeed encounter situations when I would allow a character to get knocked out, before his health runs low, or decide not to revive someone.

[Boeroer]

Which is not so bad I think - having to make those decisions. Real world example: you wouldn't want some wounded boxer to get back up if an additional blow would endanger him or maybe even kill him. You'll tell him to stay down or throw the towel. At first this kind of mechanical quirk sounds ugh. But I don't think it is that bad. It is indeed very frustrating if your guy gets revived unintentionally (like from Second Chance) though. Happened to me sometimes. Luckily you can always reload so it's nothing that got me ranting...

Edited November 26, 2019 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

22 minutes ago, Boeroer said:

Solo runs naturally have longer fights - so during a solo run you will also experience this a lot more which micht blur your judgement on this mechanic. For most players that use a party and don't min-max a lot I suppose it was a non-issue.

Ah, good point. This may be one reason why I never even thought of this before this discussion, such was the extent to which it was a non-issue. I don't do solo runs, and I don't min-max (coming from PnP, I regard min-maxing as very much a no-no).

Heck, I gotta say now, folks, talking about this stuff really makes me yearn for a proper CRPG of this genre to try. But I suppose there aren't any. At one point, I even tried Temple of Elemental Evil, but it wasn't very good, I only got to maybe level 4 or 5 before I chucked the whole thing.

[Boeroer]

While we are at "PoE vs. Deadfire" when it comes to mechanics: which approach did you like better for the per-encounter abilites?

• PoE: picking an ability like Crippling Strike and Blinding Strike and then get x uses per encounter?
• Deadfire: picking an ability that feeds from your non-replenishable resource pool (like Guile)?

I am undecided. While I like the flexibility that a resource pool gives you it also makes it so that abilities compete for said resource and that it's generally a bad idea to pick too many active abilities. In PoE picking an ability always meant that you increased the uses.

Maybe there yould have even been a hybrid system that would have given you the flexibility of a resource pool but wouldn't punish you for taking too many active abilites that feed from that pool?   

[xzar_monty]

Like you, I am undecied. I really have no opinion on that.

Btw, in PoE, on gaining levels, I overwhelmingly favored "per encounter" abilities over "per rest" ones, because the former seemed so much more useful, given how rare it was that you absolutely needed to rest.

[thelee]

On 11/26/2019 at 8:45 AM, Boeroer said:

While we are at "PoE vs. Deadfire" when it comes to mechanics: which approach did you like better for the per-encounter abilites?

• PoE: picking an ability like Crippling Strike and Blinding Strike and then get x uses per encounter?
• Deadfire: picking an ability that feeds from your non-replenishable resource pool (like Guile)?

I am undecided. While I like the flexibility that a resource pool gives you it also makes it so that abilities compete for said resource and that it's generally a bad idea to pick too many active abilities. In PoE picking an ability always meant that you increased the uses.

Maybe there yould have even been a hybrid system that would have given you the flexibility of a resource pool but wouldn't punish you for taking too many active abilites that feed from that pool?   

I like Deadfire's approach in broad strokes because it "rationalizes" the system a bit more. I think the main problem was the instances where it was poorly balanced: for martial classes, most abilities should only be 1 resource with uncommon 2 and a rare more than that, which is generally true, but violations of that make the class seem overly constrained (corpse-eater barbarian and rogue mostly, paladin to a certain extent for all the high-level stuff but they could also regen their resource if single-classed). Also Brilliant was way better for casters than martial for a related reason.

I think a way to fix the "ability economy" you mention would've been to let picking up a new martial ability grant you an increase to your power pool by +(ability_cost - 1). That way you're less incentivized to stick to a few cheap low level martial abilities all the time (especially for rogue where their abilities escalate in cost very very quickly), and each ability you pick up never gives you fewer uses of abilities (whereas in the rogue case, you could go from 5 encounter uses of crippling strike and/or escape to picking up shadowing beyond and suddenly if you use this shiny new ability you only have 2 crippling strke/escape left, for a net loss of two abilities per encounter just from trying to use a shiny new ability).

From a "rationalization" perspective I also like Deadfire because sometimes the level-up choices in PoE1 seemed arbitrary in whether they were per rest or per encounter. Of course, Deadfire also threw that out the window a bit by having item effects be mostly per-rest but also sometimes per-encounter for Balancing Reasons(tm) *shrug*.

Edited December 2, 2019 by thelee

[thelee]

3 hours ago, Boeroer said:

Which is not so bad I think - having to make those decisions. Real world example: you wouldn't want some wounded boxer to get back up if an additional blow would endanger him or maybe even kill him.

There are certainly "interesting" tactical decisions to make. I have definitely (and this is probably not very common for players) used AoE to deliberately knock out my own party members because they had something like a druid regeneration active and I wanted to pre-empt them from hitting the "permadeath" range (e.g. eder is at 20/80 endurance but 40 health and if i wait too long the regen will have their endurance catch up to their current health). That is certainly an emergent tactical decision to make.

But I think it says more about the relative solidness of the rest of poe1's system rather than to the actual merits of the endurance/health system; i don't think comparisons to real-world help much in eliciting the merits of a game mechanic. It was certainly interesting and good that I could do the above given the other parts of the system (e.g. I am personally a little saddened by the greater prevalence of foe-only aoe in deadfire), but the fact that I felt the need to is not.

Edited November 26, 2019 by thelee

[Boeroer]

I agree that the rationalization is better in Deadfire. I was also thinking about your suggestion that taking an active ability should raise your resource pool. So maybe that's not the worst idea of all times.

 

[Wormerine]

6 hours ago, Boeroer said:

• PoE: picking an ability like Crippling Strike and Blinding Strike and then get x uses per encounter?
• Deadfire: picking an ability that feeds from your non-replenishable resource pool (like Guile)?

I think I might have liked PoE in this regard more - limited about of individual skills meant not abusing them. In Deadfire it is a bit too tempting to have one or two combo and use it against most enemies. Though, I used more skills in Deadfire overall. Because of their limited nature, I tended to save abilities for when I mean it (applies both for per encounter, and per rest), rarely using them. I think that is why classes with replenishable sources (Ciphers, Monks, Chanters) were my favourite, as I wasn't holding back. 

[Boeroer]

And it's not that the abilities of classes with refilling pools are any weaker than the ones of classes with fixed pools.

[uuuhhii]

resource pool are certainly a improvement from per encounter and per rest

maybe every class should have some way of generate resource in combat

not just a few class and ability

[Boeroer]

I agree. We once discussed some unique mechanics with which Barbs, Rogues etc. could regain some of their resources in another thread some time ago. 

 

[kanisatha]

I am really loving this discussion about the comparative pros and cons of combat mechanics and gameplay between PoE1 and 2. The depth of some of the analyses presented here is truly incredible for someone like me who loves to play games with complex mechanics but without myself getting too caught up in the details. But to the point of the thread, would it not make more sense that instead of comparing PoE1 to PoE2 we should be comparing the PoE games (either one or both of them) to, say, the D:OS games? Very much unlike the PoE games, the D:OS games had (for me) very simplistic, superficial and easy to figure out combat mechanics: no classes; every character has the same set of abilities; all abilities have cooldowns; a standard resource pool for using abilities where that pool is regenerated not just every encounter but every round within an encounter. Seems to me, very sadly on a personal level, those who like and want complex and sophisticated mechanics are a very small group that is concentrated here in this forum, whereas most gamers - and even classic RPG gamers - very strongly prefer simple and easily understood mechanics such as those used in the D:OS games. So, if they want to sell well, is this what all future cRPGs should aspire to wrt combat mechanics? Please share your thoughts as I am truly curious about this question.

[Boeroer]

I think it's ok if mechanics are simple - as long as they allow for nice character builds. Sometimes they are not even that simple but simply well explained and rational in themselves - not many exceptions, no tables to look up etc. 

For example Dragon Age Origin's mechanics don't seem to be very complex. But in tandem with the effect combos that you can discover it allows for some nice and cool character concepts. For example I made a CC mage and mostly focused on stacking several seal spells on the ground in order to create that one truly awesome repulsing seal that sends enemies flying in all directions. At first I thought "meh what a boring ability system" - but actually it was ok the way it was.

Edited November 30, 2019 by Boeroer

[Wormerine]

1 hour ago, kanisatha said:

But to the point of the thread, would it not make more sense that instead of comparing PoE1 to PoE2 we should be comparing the PoE games (either one or both of them) to, say, the D:OS games?

Those games have so little incommon, that I wouldn't even know when to start. They use vastly different systems, with different objectives (singleplayer vs. multiplayer, RtwP vs Turn based), though there is one thing that D:OS does very right: it's mechanics are very visual.

A lot of gameplay revolves around enviroment, buffs and debuffs and combos are intuitive (stacking/cancelling of status effects) and generally things work as one would expect. Overall, there is no need to dig into numerical mechanics behind D:OS as "themes" express what is happening and what will most likely happen in an accessible way. I don't think it is necessarly simple vs. complex, but raw mechanics vs. intuitive theme. Of course, creating a nuanced, complex system, and presenting it via a strong and consistant theme is another layer of difficulty on top of creating said systems. However, watch any game's forum and people are more likely to discuss "realism" when things don't feel right, rather then actual mechanics - it is the layer that is the most easy to engage with. When D:OS does fall back to gamey mechanics (like skill/spell slots) those are very basic, so one can understand how it works on a glance. 

[kanisatha]

I only presented D:OS as a possible comparison because it sold well. But any comparison with a relatively similar game that sold well would be ok. I just feel that a big problem the PoE games had was that their combat mechanics were not intuitively understandable or relatable to a lot of people (and this beyond just that they were not well explained within the game). Even such basic elements as attack and damage and armor were not simple and straightforward and easily understood as to how they worked. By contrast, in D:OS, you didn't even need to have them explained to you to be able to (easily) understand how these mechanics worked.

[Boeroer]

You know what? What if they had made a mechanics lesson/explanation that would have been presented before the game starts (skippable of course). Done in a P&Paper rulebook manner (meaning description + examples) and in style of all the other scripted scenes and ship combat "on sepia paper" you have in the game. With those watercolor drawings/paintings left and right which help to visualize the explanations and examples. Fully voiced. Like if the Dungeon Master read the rulebook for you. Maybe even interactive so you could navigate to certain chapters. Not necessarily superlong an in detail, but at least to cover all the basics.

Do you think that would have worked? And would that have been worth the effort?

Edited November 29, 2019 by Boeroer

[xzar_monty]

That's a fair point. Baldur's Gate II, for example, does have a tutorial where you get to do some really simple stuff -- can't really remember what.

[Boeroer]

I mean besides the VO that can't be too expensive, right?

[kanisatha]

8 hours ago, Boeroer said:

You know what? What if they had made a mechanics lesson/explanation that would have been presented before the game starts (skippable of course). Done in a P&Paper rulebook manner (meaning description + examples) and in style of all the other scripted scenes and ship combat "on sepia paper" you have in the game. With those watercolor drawings/paintings left and right which help to visualize the explanations and examples. Fully voiced. Like if the Dungeon Master read the rulebook for you. Maybe even interactive so you could navigate to certain chapters. Not necessarily superlong an in detail, but at least to cover all the basics.

Do you think that would have worked? And would that have been worth the effort?

Yes I think something like this could've mitigated a lot of player angst. But at the same time, I have gone to some of the PoE wikis out there where the combat mechanics are explained in numerical detail, and have to say some of how those numbers work just makes you want to throw up your hands in frustrated resignation.