The fundamental difference between PoE2 and Elden Ring / Souls games is - every encounter is a stat check, not a skill check

I feel like you do ‘get gud’ with this game too though, compare yourself fighting Gregor versus when you fight him now. A lot of stuff is much easier once you know how to play the game, which is very souls-like in that sense. Both games reward you for understanding mechanics, and you can brute force in both games too with gear.

Yeah you can't take zero hits from mobs in this game. So if you have no stats you'll die. Accurate. Not a problem to me, not sure if some folks are trying to say the whole game is exactly a souls like. The bosses are, at least ideally, is the feeling I get. No enrage timers so if you play well you can survive doing slow damage, most or all dmg is avoidable.

I like the challenging boss fights. in poe1 without a dodge roll and wasd it felt clunky to fight bosses but here i have so much fun. what i dislike are white mobs that spam area effects that fill my map with killing zones. (i have a glass canon build so its my fault but i still dislike being one shotted by a white mob)

you can do all bosses taking 0 hits....

So how do you improve your stats? Better gear and level. How do you know If the new found gear is realy better? How do you know where to invest your skill points? Knowledge.

It's all about knowledge. Both games share this, that's why they feel so similar.

Not in maps yet but skills like disengage and dodge roll is literally the only defence i have atm. And its working out great for me.

Poe2 is def a skill check also. MUCH More so then poe 1 wich is mainly math.

PoE2 should be both a stat and skill check. The nature of these kinds of games (ARPGS) is that progression does require increased stats, and it should continue requiring increased stats, at least for the most part. There should be skill expression still, and fights where you can dodge every mechanic and overcome it while undergeared. This exists in PoE2 in some fights, and does in PoE1 as well.

We need to stop comparing PoE to dark souls. They are not remotely the same genre of game. I'm sick of everything being equated to a 'souls-like', or that being a souls-like is a new standard of what makes a game good. Souls games are clunky, slow and awkward. They are unwieldy. It works for them, but it's not what I want out of ARPGs even remotely.

Hades is a great game that is better compared to the ARPG genre that has skillful combat.

The comparison of PoE2 to souls games is silly

PoE2 is an RNG based mass loot game. Sifting through 1000s of RNG drops is the core gameplay element

Souls Games have predetermined loot drops from specific locations / boss fights. There is absolutely ZERO RNG involved in loot

This alone is such a massive core design difference that just because both games have a dodge roll should not be used as the main reason for comparison

It's ridiculous to compare the two. Street Fighter 3 has parry so its exactly like Huntress. 🤓

One thing I really appreciate with this game is that you can leverage skill to get you farther than pretty much any other ARPG. I'm specifically talking about the campaign here, I feel like skill doesn't matter as much in maps. But in the campaign, if you have weak items, but you are very skilled, you can still succeed. I feel like this is something that is missing from a lot of other ARPG's and it feels really good here. While skill does matter in maps, it is much more is about stat checks, like there's nothing your skill can do if your gear isn't good enough to take on swarms of enemies at a time.

Are we arguing that Poe should be beatable by ignoring gear? It’s an arpg made by grinding gear games, yea the chase for better and better gear is a core part of the game haha. Just because they adopted more difficult combat doesn’t mean they’re trying to make it exactly like a souls game

An ARPG isn't a souls game and can't be one imo. Souls games are supposed to be almost entirely skill based. Arpgs with exponential scaling are not.

This is not entirely true. You will have a hard time fighting stuff in late game souls without an upgraded weapon or any health. Sure you can "just dodge bro" but you can "just dodge bro" in PoE2 as well.

The actual problem with the game is that the power creep goes fucking crazy in isometric games like diablo or Path of exile, the more customization the more potential for power creep, so adding in more actual gameplay mechanics makes balancing way harder. Are people complaining because the game is actually hard or do they suck? did they get unlucky with drops? Should you make the game easier so people can comfortably kill bosses with bad loot? Is it too easy with decent loot now?

Poe2 is a bad arpg and bad souls game

Right, and the reason this patch feels bad is because we’re not getting the natural loot progression meet these stat checks at the normal pace of the game

I dunno what souls games you are playing, but all of them were gear checks to me as well and for 99.9999999999% of the playerbase.

thats why its a GRINDING GEAR GAME

i dont wanna get better skill level by doing the same fight over and over,I just wanna farm.a bit more ans then comeback and destroy it

exsctly what i am getting from poe2, love modifying my build and seeing progress as I trade, craft and find new items

love the market game too, sometime ita more beneficial trading then playing but i love trading in this game, buy low, sell high, rip off noobs or ppl in hurry to sell or finding disparities between stuff for easy money....

last league I was the monk ice strike quarter staff main and i believe only crafter, made banks on ppl selling stuff they didn't knew the value, crafting it a bit and reselling it for multiple exalt.or even div profit

The game is pitifully easy and boring now.

You can out dps almost any skill check in ER my dude.

Is that a bad thing? Let’s be honest, this whole game is about grinding currency to get better equipment so you can more easily do hard content. That’s kind of the entire point.

Exactly…

Can we stop comparing POE2 with ER / DS games please? Thanks.

The fundamental difference is they are games from completely different genres xD

People comparing these two licences exclusively because :

• dodge roll
• "game hard"

is honestly crazy to me. Have they even played these games or is this just paroting catchphrases to win imaginary online arguments ?

Have you ever watched streamers like Zizaran play PoE 1?
Run past most most monsters until Blood Aqueduct, farm it for a few levels, then rush to maps. Why? Because it's efficient.

Yes, we need stuff from monsters to actually be able to play the game, but it shouldn't be more efficient to ignore 75% of monsters in an area, to then just catch up in an easy to farm zone. The big focus will always be on "what's the bare minimum i can get away with", and GGG doesn't want that to involve running past monsters, and instead of actually engage with them.

The ideal scenario would be ARPG gameplay when mapping and souls-like gameplay when bossing. Obviously, it’s difficult to balance that way but I think they’re leaning way too far in the difficult/tedious direction during mapping. Bossing is actually reasonably tuned if they nerf skills that can one-shot bosses.

Also loot needs to be tuned wayyy up

Viper fucking sucks. But yes

You can't get darkmoon greatsword by killing a random ad at a 0.0001% chance. Comparing POE 2 with soulslikes is stupid because the experience is different. Instead of a tailored experience with carefully tuned powerspikes (vigor non-linear scaling, for example) and designated item drops from bosses, ARPGs instead give you a huge quantity of shit items, in hopes that one or two of the shit items are less shit. It's more dopamine that way. However, POE 2 is giving you a designated amount of shit items, which just feels bad.

It's a bit of both tbh, I've enjoyed actually having to learn how to beat the bosses and fight them over last league when I just one shot everything.

Very accurate, ive done like 4-6 tries on some bosses and never complained about it. But when i die to white mobs constantly and combining every single one its really frustrating.

Im in act 3 and eventually found a really good crossbow and its easier to kill white mobs for now but this brings up another problem, the fun is locked behind finding a good weapon. Where some people have found a really good weapon in act 2 and are still using it for another 2-4 more acts until they find a better one.

All the powers locked behind the weapon.

I appreciate ggg trying to find more fun in moment-to-moment monster fighting. But compared to poe1 I think they have reduced the joy in progression, experimentation, and loot (to some extent) such that the average fun of playing is reduced (or at least delayed/slowed). For loot, I do like that it is not just a scour loop like poe1. I don’t like how rarely I am changing gear and how precious I feel about using crafting currency. Definitely a fan of letting ggg cook. Huge respect for that team. Poe 2 is already incredible on like 20 other axes.

Edit: I should note that the loot thing is a feeling. If you compare to poe1 blasting where you wear one set of gear through like 8 acts and then trade for vastly superior-to-finding-on-ground gear in early maps then it make sense on paper to say poe2 is better. But in a lot of ways it doesn’t feel more fun.

So what you're saying is you want to be God without any effort and just face roll with white level 1 gear through the entirety of the game

The difference is only one of these is really a loot hunting games. Thats why it will never be a souls-like game. The campaign feels that way because of the much more narrow power differences and you can have that meaningful combat with relatively close power levels between you and the mobs but that can never be the case for late game where the huge variate in gear and skills starts to kick in.

Sure, but there are more fundamental mechanical differences in combat and especially level design.

From Soft's games have meticulous environmental design. The play space informs what you are fighting and how. From Soft's games are nunacned and owe a lot specifically to game design from the 1980s to mid 90s.

These critiques of POE2 regarding "Souls-like" are often reductive and misunderstand both "Souls-like" and ARPGs.

The problem is that the level of commbat engagement POE2 has is what comes from the Character-Action genre. Where combat encounters and (importantly) combat composition; that is to say what adversaries make up a combat encounter, are spaced apart and have lower inputs at a higher rate.

A good example of this disparyof game design is the forest area after the cemetery. Players encounter a far tracking projectile enemy, forward charging enemies, leapin enemies with an AOE, and movement tracking poison over time projectile enemies all in the same compositional group every few steps.

In a Character-Action game, you may encounter all those enemy archetypes. But you are unlikely to encounter them all at once every few steps.in Wanted: Dead, Bright Memory, or Godhand.

It's the wrong pace for POE2 in a genre where ayers typically rave many horde enemies with high frequency but low input.

You want to see GGG cook in encounter design? Battlefield map in the POE1 campaign. Perfect combat envounter composition in the genre.

Whoever even started that comparison and people who continue to do so are just...

Those 2 games are so different if just makes no sense. Might aswell compare PoE2 to Pokémon.

Dodge roll is one of the worst mechanics in any game including elden ring

Apples to oranges.

Maybe I'm an outlier, but I found the boss fights to be the worst part of the campaign in 0.2 after they were the best part in 0.1.

My experience in 0.2 was running out of mana flasks on almost every boss from normal and cruel difficulty and then having to finish the boss off with my auto attack while I waited for mana to regen.

I had the unique amulet that gave 75% mana regen, clarity, and was using lightning spear. My spear had +3 to projectiles and I had a +1 from my neck.

Every boss fight felt like a boring ass slog where I'm just throwing white spears and watching tiny chips come off. There was no challenge, just tedium.

I think the only boss I died to was the skeleton that comes out of the hole in maps because his punch is very hard for me to read for some reason. It just seems like I have no time to react. Maybe it's only when there is +action speed on mobs.

It's not that you can't mitigate all damage with skill. There are other mechanics not present in soulslikes that fix this, like recouping, flask regen, life steal and such. It's not hard to get enough numbers.

The problem is the sheer number of monsters that spawn on maps. It's already nonsensical in the campaign, but maps can tank my framerate with the number of mobs on screen. Between their auras and explosions, you don't even see enough of what's going on to be able to respond with positioning. It becomes a test of who has the biggest nuke. Mob packs need to be cut by half, even if it means beefing creatures up. Otherwise, the game will inherently scale back into PoE1.

This is especially bad with melee weapons, as you get hit by on-ground effects and have to run up to archers. The only way to play mace is either stacking 75% block chance or getting so much damage and AoE you're a walking explosion.

Also arpgs are simple in mechanics, there is no much animations and you don't move in a real 3d scenario, so you need to use stat to overcome the simplicity

If you're going to make an argument against the developers, perhaps you should find something the developers have actually said and then counter against each point they make. Instead what you've done is concocted an idea of what you believe the developers said, and then generally argue against that idea.

Like, he literally mentions that they understand they need to figure out a balance between stat checks and skill checks, and that the game takes inspiration from many different sources, not just Elden Ring.

"We take inspiration from everywhere, and it's hard to even nail down the list." "Obviously, recent action games because it was approaching the combat stuff that we were doing, stuff like Elden Ring. I kind of play jsut about every type of genre of video game, I'm not locked into just ARPGs. But I think probably, strangely enough single player action games are probably my favourite genre." "It's really what I love, so those types of games are what I take a lot of inspiration from in terms of boss design and stuff like that. We really want the bosses in PoE 2 are world class as far as action games go. There's lots of interesting mechanics, a lot of abilties, and it takes a lot of work to make a boss like that. In PoE 2 we also have to take into consideration dodge rolling right? So there are more action game type considerations you have to make. We have to be an action game and a stat game at the same time, which is quite tricky."

Yeah trying to apply souls-game mechanics into an ARPG like POE was just a recipe for disaster, I have no idea what they were thinking. You would have to make fundamental changes to the actual monsters themselves, but we've seen that not be the case.

Are you tanky enough to survive the hits? Because the dodge roll isn't getting you anywhere outside of boss fights.

That's not true. Not all trash mobs hits are equal. You do have to stat check the basic unavoidable hits but then bigger windup attacks do exist outside bosses and you can choose to either stat check those as well or manually dodge them.

I think they got the bosses in a really good spot right now and with this last patch I think they are getting it in the sweet spot for regular mobs… a little more tweaking and I can see it really start to pop off!

Boss fights and mechanics are fun to play against and all they need to do in my opinion is tone down the trash mobs a little more.

Just like everyone else here in the sub… more currency is 100% needed during the campaign to sustain leveling early on!

And because it is a stat check, it is an RNG check. I went through Act I with only ONE upgrade, found in the first area. That was the best weapon I found. I found no currency, and gold gambling didn't yield anything. So that's game over, unless you want to grind the first Act for several hours. I have played hundreds of hours of PoE2 and thousands of hours of PoE1, so I will probably try another character, but I guarantee you that if a new player has bad RNG in Act I, they will never play the game again.

This game has nothing in common with the souls franchise and I don't know why PoE 2 is being described as a soulslike. You can't just slap "soulslike" on any game that lets you roll, level up or that it has bosses.

Trust me that you'll absolutely stomp the souls games if you're following a guide to get a strong build. Most people in souls however just play whatever build they're feeling to play while in PoE 2 they're following a guide blindly without thinking for themselves.

The skill check in PoE 2 is a mix of mechanical skill and you creating a good enough build while itemizing efficiently. It's made this way in order to engage your brain throughout the league instead of being able to auto-attack every pinnacle boss to death fresh in a league just because you know their moveset.

Yeah you're not beating Xesht, etc on this game named using a dance pad. Lmao.

PoE 2 Reddit

This game is like dark souls since mobs take 500 hits to kill!

Actual Darksouls Elden Ring TTK's.

With the starting battle axe / longsword you can one hit the peasants

You can 2-3 hit the soldiers

Knights usually go down to 3-6 by the time you face em

The only thing that takes more then maybe 4+ swings big mobs / bosses

Dark souls/Elden Ring/Demon souls only punishes you for taking hits, not forcing you into 500 hour boss fights and 1 hour basic mobs. Most mobs when you're good go down rather quickly as you can play more aggressive, people learning a fight play more defensive, block more, and poke back less.

I got all achievements and one shot all bosses early after release. I don't know how it is now but back then I just channeled Comet Azur and bosses melted before they reached me. So yeah you can out gear Elden Ring too.

I don't reallt get the point of trying to find differences between PoE 2 and Dark Souls/Elden Ring/From Soft games - frankly it's easier to find what's similar. Dodge roll, and... yep we're out. The games have as much in common with eachother as much as my bank account has in common with Elon Musk's.