Path of Exile - Community Q&A

Silver · July 6, 2016

The Path of Exile developers decided to head to their forums recently to answer some community questions regarding the games future.

Last week we asked the community for questions for our developers to answer. We received dozens pages of questions and have spent the week answering most of the ones from the first six pages. We're going to have to answer more of these questions in a follow-up post soon!

Originally, the intent of "Unique" tier items was to have... well, "Unique" items, that weren't going to be better than well-crafted Rares, but in some cases would enable different playstyles... Is this still the overall intent of Uniques? There's a few Uniques that are overwhelmingly Best-in-Slot for a lot of builds, and I was wondering if these were exceptions, or perhaps Uniques that worked out better than intended, or if you've relaxed the original design choice for Uniques?

Our preference is that most characters use rare items with just a few unique items. This will vary by build, with the most combo-ish ones requiring many unique items, and mundane damage dealers (like my favourite type of hardcore Marauder build) using almost entirely rare items.

It's very hard to hit exactly the right power level when designing a unique item. Some of them underachieve because the community doesn't work out their full potential, and some of them become far more powerful than you planned due to the community coming up with crazy combos that the developers didn't think of. That concept is the core beauty of Path of Exile's character customisation.

In addition, many of the most powerful uniques involve design-a-unique supporters who have very valid reasons for their unique being powerful. They want something people will care about, to leave a true mark on the game. It's very hard to hit the right power level here, especially as the metagame changes over time. To use a specific example, we nerfed Soul Taker many times internally before releasing it. It was a shadow of its former power. However, the vocal part of the community were outraged that we released such a powerful item, completely invalidating the process of crafting a rare one-handed axe. I kind of agreed with them, and wished we had pushed the nerfs harder. A few years later, I receive mail asking when we're going to buff Soul Taker to get it up to an appropriate power level.

What are the pros and cons of having high player power vs the environment?

Players like to feel powerful. Philosophically, we want people to look forward to coming home from work so that they can load up Path of Exile, smash some monsters and get better items for their characters. The power creep towards fast clear speed has definitely helped this feeling.

On the other hand, there are several negative issues we're dealing with. Higher clear speed means more combat going on per second. This affects both the server performance (costing us more money) and the client performance (in some cases, making it hard for people with lower machines to play in parties). These are areas that we're tackling at the moment with technology changes.

While some players and developers are concerned about the clear speeds, there's the subtle issue that now players are used to the rate of item acquisition from that speed. If we substantially rebalanced things so that it's a little slower, then this would affect the rate at which players accumulate wealth. It's very hard to say whether the prolonged playtime would offset the frustration of progressing more slowly.

Have you seen improvements in player retention with the subsequent improvements to content clear times?

Player retention is marginally better and players play for around 25% longer each day compared to the time period when gameplay was slower. We can debate all day about whether it's due to the clear times or not. I suspect it's that people want to feel powerful, rather than finish the maps quickly.

[...]

What's your stance on all the exploiters and peoples abusing various bugs and unwanted mechanics during the first days or weeks of a league, either breaking the economy or gaining unfair advantage? Is there anything done to act against those and protect the whole playerbase?

There are several factors in play here. The first is that Path of Exile is designed for players to try to take advantage of knowledge and gain economic advantage over other players. If you work out a smart way to craft, or you find a build that lets you get to Uber Atziri first and offer her uniques up for sale at top prices, then you are winning at Path of Exile. This is a game that rewards you for being smart.

As for people crossing the line and exploiting the game by abusing bugs, this is something that both happens far less than you think, and often is actually attributed to non-abusive behaviour coupled with tall stories. We often see people claiming exploits to explain how they got rich, but then when we investigate the accounts we find more mundane behaviour like faked screenshots, wealth pooling, RMT or just lucky drops.

Having said that, people who actually exploit the game are generally mercilessly banned along with their co-conspirators. It's usually pretty clear where the line is here.

Why haven't all basic skill gems been made available to all classes from vendors? Everyone hates making mule characters to get gems, and trading for them over and over again is annoying at best.

Surprisingly, not everyone hates characters having identity. There's a bit of a slippery slope when trying to optimise for the type of player that wants to instantly gain access to gems from all character classes. For them it's a harmless change, but for most of the playerbase it'd be hugely overwhelming and would break the immersion of you being offered appropriate choices for your character. I'm not saying we won't do this, but we'd need to find the right way to do it.

More information.

crpgnut · July 6, 2016

I have never played this or Victor Vran or Van Helsing. I loved Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and Diablo 3 though...in that order. Anyone have a favorite of these? What makes it your favorite of the action/loot rpgs? I may pick one of these up in the next few days.....

Archangel · July 6, 2016

Path of Exile is F2P, only reason to not at least try it is if you lazy to create an account on their site or you got some monthly limit on download.

It is a decent game if you are bothered by extreme RNG that this game is full of, and awesome game if you don't care about that.

Nameless one · July 6, 2016

crpgnut said:
I have never played this or Victor Vran or Van Helsing. I loved Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, and Diablo 3 though…in that order. Anyone have a favorite of these? What makes it your favorite of the action/loot rpgs? I may pick one of these up in the next few days…..

My favorites are Grim dawn, modded Titan quest, Path of exile and Diablo 2 in that order.I never played Diablo 3.I played nearly all other aRPGs like Victor Vran, Van Helsing , Torchlight series, Sacred series, Dungeon siege and none of them are as good as games mentioned above.

Path of exile has great character development system with largest variety of skills out of all mentioned games, it has good loot system, random events, nice grim atmosphere and game gets updated often.What isn't to my tastes is combat.Most skills have no cooldown so combat can get bit spamy.
Also currency system is, which most people praise, it doesn't work that well in practice.I think game would be better with classical gold system.

Brumbek · July 6, 2016

crpgnut said:
I have never played this or Victor Vran or Van Helsing.

Victor Vran is a nice little 20 hour romp, as you know. It's fun but not deep at all. Van Helsing is a great game, but very limited also.

Path of Exile is my most played game, with over 1,000 hours. I just keep going back because it is such an intellectual rush to play new characters and devise new builds. PoE is insanely deep. And it's legit free. There's a reason why many of the Diablo 2 faithful say PoE is the true successor to the crown.

Nameless one said:
Also currency system is, which most people praise, it doesn't work that well in practice.I think game would be better with classical gold system.

Totally disagree. It works exactly as it should. You have roughly 10 different items you pick up and can use to actually do stuff like improve items. You can choose to not use them but trade them with other players. It's a brilliant barter system that fits perfectly into the lore.

crpgnut · July 6, 2016

Okay, you guys have convinced me to look at POE. I've been hopping from game to game recently: Heroes of Steel, Bastard Bonds (which was a lot of fun), Fable Anniversary (too much on rails), Heroes of a Broken Sky (meh), Titan Quest (been there done that), etc.

@Nameless One: by modded Titan Quest, what are you talking about? I'm tired of the regions and monsters. Does your mod change the world or just the skill trees and such?

@Brumbek, et al: Okay, I love playing mages and exploration. What would be a n00b friendly class to play in POE that matches my criteria? Can you avoid some of the combat or is that all the game is about? Are there towns and quests or just hordes of monsters?

Nameless one · July 6, 2016

crpgnut said:
@Nameless One: by modded Titan Quest, what are you talking about? I'm tired of the regions and monsters. Does your mod change the world or just the skill trees and such?

There are 2 I really liked.

Soulvizier which adds one new region and nearly completely overhauls all classes, adds tons of new items, hundreds of hero monster types and makes game overall harder.Kind of like Grim dawn with veteran turned on.Bassicaly enhances original game inevery wat but it's still same campaign.You can find it on moddb

Lilith which is new campaign with changed classes.I don't know where to find it since titanquest.net has been sgutdown but there is probably thread with link on steam forum.

crpgnut said:
@Brumbek, et al: Okay, I love playing mages and exploration. What would be a n00b friendly class to play in POE that matches my criteria? Can you avoid some of the combat or is that all the game is about? Are there towns and quests or just hordes of monsters?

Mage (witch) is noob friendly class

.If that isn't easy enough just take Marauder and face-tank everything.

Cities and combat areas are separated.There aren't many quest but they give good rewards there are some minor quest which Masters give which just increases reputation with them(important for housing).There are lot of random things, some minor, some major that can happen and it's generally good idea to explore whole area to find them.

JDR13 · July 6, 2016

I played PoE as a Templar, and I found that class to be very noob friendly. That said, it really doesn't matter which class you choose because the game is so easy. You can't adjust the difficulty level at the start of a new game, and the only way to make it harder is to complete the game and start a second run with the same character.

I made it about 3/4 of the way through before getting bored. It's not a bad game, but it's too repetitive for my taste. It's still the best F2P game I've played though.

Brumbek · July 7, 2016

crpgnut said:
Okay, I love playing mages and exploration. What would be a n00b friendly class to play in POE that matches my criteria? Can you avoid some of the combat or is that all the game is about? Are there towns and quests or just hordes of monsters?

I recently played a Witch using the Firestorm skill (gem unlocks at level 12). That's a very powerful and effective build for new and old players. An Arc Lightning Witch is also very fun if you want to shock everything in sight.

I could link you to build guides, but honestly the fun of PoE is to try to figure out how to build your character. Warning: you will be very lost and confused and not understand much when you first start playing!

Combat and loot is what the game is about, although it is wrapped in a very well-written town quest system like Diablo 2. The lore and NPCs are surprisingly well-developed for a fairly basic game like this.

PoE isn't for the faint of heart, but you sound like someone who knows how to analyze, experiment, and persevere in the pursuit of epic power.

crpgnut · July 7, 2016

Well, I generally play the games once. I may start 20 characters, but once I finish the storyline, I'll be done with it. I won't move up to veteran and play the same game again. That doesn't float my boat at all. I played on standard instead of the other thingamajigs. I did start as a witch and was surprised that the nick WickedWanda hadn't been taken. As you said, I'm not sure what is going on and the combat didn't grab me much, but I'll plug away at it and see if it grows on me. I'm reading a book a night, so that takes a couple hours each evening too.

I see other peeps in the towns but when I go outside, I'm by myself. Does it stay like this? I like it. Makes the game seem mostly single-player; at least once you turn off the incessant chat.

JDR13 · July 7, 2016

crpgnut said:
I see other peeps in the towns but when I go outside, I'm by myself. Does it stay like this? I like it. Makes the game seem mostly single-player; at least once you turn off the incessant chat.

Yes. Unless it's changed since I played, you can't see or interact with other players outside of towns in the standard mode.

crpgnut · July 7, 2016

JDR13 said:
Yes. Unless it's changed since I played, you can't see or interact with other players outside of towns in the standard mode.

w00t! Thanks, JDR. That will give me a little staying power. I looked at the skill list and it is full of passives. However, I have a little pack of zombies as fodder and my little fireball, so should be good for a few levels.

Archangel · July 7, 2016

crpgnut said:
w00t! Thanks, JDR. That will give me a little staying power. I looked at the skill list and it is full of passives. However, I have a little pack of zombies as fodder and my little fireball, so should be good for a few levels.

That is passive skill tree.
You get active skills only in form of skill gems that you socket into your equipment and later you combine them together to get all kinds of effects.

crpgnut · July 7, 2016

Okay, good to know Aa. I've only found two gems so far, but I barely scratched the surface. I've got 4 zombies and a little fireball for my gal. Does she only use wands because I keep finding daggers too all the time? Also is inventory always so small? It seems silly to have a loot game and only be able to carry 15 items or so....

JDR13 · July 7, 2016

I don't remember if there's a way to increase inventory size, but there's a stash chest in every town for your character to keep extra loot. As far as weapons go, you'll sometimes get loot drops that don't benefit your character class. Just ignore them or grab high-level stuff to sell in town.

crpgnut · July 8, 2016

Is this like Titan Quest where your stash is available for other toons too? If so, I should probably keep the yellow and gold items for other test characters. I'll probably play a couple levels with anyone who can sling spells and see which one I like best. It seems like every yellow I find is for archers, so I should play an archer, so I can find yellow and golds for a witch

Drithius · July 8, 2016

yeah, stash is shared between characters.

Archangel · July 8, 2016

crpgnut said:
Is this like Titan Quest where your stash is available for other toons too? If so, I should probably keep the yellow and gold items for other test characters. I'll probably play a couple levels with anyone who can sling spells and see which one I like best. It seems like every yellow I find is for archers, so I should play an archer, so I can find yellow and golds for a witch

Technically there are not classes, classes only start on different parts of the passive tree and get a bit different skill gems from quests.
You can play all kinds of character with each class.
Like Barbarians can play Life Mages (use Life to fuel spells and Strength gives bonus damage to spells).

zahratustra · July 9, 2016

crpgnut said:
If so, I should probably keep the yellow and gold items for other test characters. I'll probably play a couple levels with anyone who can sling spells and see which one I like best. It seems like every yellow I find is for archers, so I should play an archer, so I can find yellow and golds for a witch

Remember that in PoE number/color/connection of the sockets can be more important than the color of the item. But yeah, I've also created new chars because of all the different gear drops.
And remember that you can make quite a number of mules (you can create up to 20 characters IIRC) to carry your gear when you'll run out of storage space.

Path of Exile - Community Q&A

Silver

Spaceman

crpgnut

SasqWatch

Archangel

SasqWatch

Nameless one

Wizzard

Brumbek

Keeper of the Watch

crpgnut

SasqWatch

Nameless one

Wizzard

JDR13

SasqWatch

Brumbek

Keeper of the Watch

crpgnut

SasqWatch

JDR13

SasqWatch

crpgnut

SasqWatch

Archangel

SasqWatch

crpgnut

SasqWatch

JDR13

SasqWatch

crpgnut

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Drithius

Magic & Loss

Archangel

SasqWatch

zahratustra

SasqWatch