Why IMBALANCE is Important for Path of Exile - Podcast Inspired Learning Ep.20 with TarkeCat

Some Skills are OP, some Builds are extremely powerful, while others are quite lacking in one or several departments. But what if we balanced Path of Exile perfectly? Would that change the game for better or for worse?
Is cyclical balance the only way for a live service game? With Tarke we discuss and chat about balance and imbalance in video games as well as how it affects Path of Exile now and in the future with regards to PoE 2 and the road leading up to it. I hope you enjoy!
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[@ItsYoji]

You heard the man, follow him on twitter twitter.com/tarkecat

[@randybobandy7203]

I'm pretty sure the thing Take complained about is not being able to type boots in the search bar in your stash to highlight Le boots

[@Alloran]

Oh goddess of the algorithm, shower these young men with your riches. Edit "Balancing with a shotgun in a supermarket" is my favorite way to describe PoE balance, many thanks Tarke.

[@ToadstedCroaks]

I liken it more to "Fully geared riot police with tear gas launchers in a supermarket"

[@aharmlesszombie]

[@ItsYoji]

I haven't played league of Legends in ages but I still follow content around it loosely

[@widardd]

Tarke looks like that new pastor of a small provincial village, who's trying to keep the community together despite the elderly being very skeptical about this new outsider from far away.

[@Saiperia]

the big problem with most of the vaal skills is, that most fo support gems dont work on them while they work on the non vaal skill

[@TarkeCat]

Hey

[@ItsYoji]

Heyhey

[@SquishysAdventure]

@@ItsYoji people, seth here

[@TBrius88]

As someone who was trying out almost all of the strike skills this league - good luck Yoji!

[@davood123]

Vaal support skills !

[@Yakez42]

35:00 Guild Wars 1. And fun fact it actually inspired PoE development. Anet was really bad at balancing PvP meta, but it was INSANELY FUN with people bandwagoning from 1 OP strat to another.

[@tarantio85]

Badger, what you mean by saying : constant meta shifts ?? Last 2 years i see in meta only toxic rains, blade vortex, minions, coc ice nova, ball lightning,mines , and bow bleeds ...... so there is about 10-15 skills are in meta all the time, no matter if they are nerffed or not, and other 95% of skills are below 1% usage.

[@AnExercisInThought]

Damage is never the problem anymore it is the mechanics of the skill and feel that people build for now.

[@tarantio85]

​@@AnExercisInThought I dont agree here, ppl say melee are good, they have nice dmg , but what about stirke melee ?? and they have good damage ...if you build in certain way, if you copy build, or if you build glass cannon(90% of build guides) . Now ... melee is good if you build with impale,or blade blast ,mostly, but what if i want to play tanky cyclone but with full convert to cold ?? and i dont use impale and brutality ? or i want double strike slayer full cold ? then you dont have dmg, unless of course many exalted invested. What about my favourite Death Oath ? And why yesterday in reddit when i read topic about most succesfull starters ,moslty i see those skills above ? why if i look for Bane build for ES i can see only life versions ?? why i cant find builds for creeping frost or cold snap only, not multi skill cold dot occultist ? and so on ....

[@rkexiled7802]

Really enjoyed this podcast. Great topics and discussions.

[@mikewood8815]

Thankyou all for another great podcast 😁

[@RuvenCH]

I mean I'd agree with melee being trash in this game. Tarke using Lacerate as an example? I mean that's a projectile/aoe skill, how is that melee? might as well call Spectral Throw melee at that point. But regardless of getting high dps numbers, stuff like strike skills are just so bad to play in terms of clunkyness to use etc.

[@HermanManly]

Yaay more Tarke :D And ep 20 already! Time flies

[@sineupp]

I don't think many people would complain if they revert intervention, delirium, heist, etc to their original state, as long as the accompanying crap is fixed: asset preloading, visual clarity, server/instance stability respectively.

[@anathema1828]

Thanks for the podcast!

[@angustin6590]

nice

[@randomguy3869]

*obligatory last time i was this early joke*

[@malteborgmanm2626]

Imagine not knowing much about PoE streamers and listening to the intro ;)

[@ToadstedCroaks]

That's really the disturbing, yet common, part about design decisions for this game ( and others ), where they start to do stuff "melee revamp" and wont touch it again ...so you end up with things like "bow revamp" that went absolutely nowhere ..and now we wont get another look at it forever. Then you get things like "randomly making a new thing like brands" and its such a small design inclusion with hardly any passive / gear / etc. representation ...and they wont touch that either for who knows when. They need to stop making random new things unless they intend on doing it proper, because we have way too many half assed demos of things in this game and it's all just cluttery junk.

[@garf412]

watched Live so here is a view, Like and comment ;)

[@giteshdhir]

Man... I miss old molten strike :(

[@jprocetti]

Hevy Strike should be chargeable skill

[@robertwilliams-fs8zq]

My simple issue.. if when devs are lazy and nerf is the first answer.. it starts with intelligent design... but when the design is ignored or the failure thats when IMO it dies.. i see in many fights mechanics that were just smart.. be it the phases or the inclusion of adds.. but when it becomes like it is now .. where clutter is the challenge vrs the mechanic its a issue

[@jesperborg3749]

I want a league/expention where they revamp all the skills at the same time

[@p.scottl3447]

Skills I believe you can really remove: Sweep (bladestorm is just better IMO), Lightning Strike (Frostblade or Wildstrike is just more used forever), and Lightning Tendrils

[@jujulipz1365]

Ah ZiggyD GGG's golden child, the favourite lol

[@reznovvazileski3193]

F, no crafting league :( I still stand by my point though, harvest would be completely balanced if they made it so you get the craft beforehand then physically put in your item and if you fail you lose the item and if you win you get the craft (like I hoped this league would've been :P )

[@Ashtarte3D]

A perfectly balanced game would be perfectly boring almost immediately. Imbalance will force some players to try the OP shit they might not have tried and other players (like my dumb ass) to be obstinate and prove that even garbage skills like Glacial Hammer can beat Maven. If everything was perfectly balanced we'd never see people doing challenges or making hilarious broken builds like OMGItsJousis does. Like, the most fun I have ever had in PoE was playing one of Jousis's old Cast on Ignite shenanigans builds that could afk red Elder. (This was before Uber Elder was a thing)

[@satanicrazgo616]

stay safe on twitter - got it

[@PolarisNC001]

Rock is OP, needs nerf. Buff scissors. Paper is fine. Thx.

[@brandonbussell5544]

The issue with the word Meta is that people will talk about what the meta is but not why it is. We dont talk about why things are powerful and why things are not powerful

[@craktsupermoto]

vaal golem skills inc lol

[@nebucadneza1914]

This is the fist time im haveing less to no interest in the new league... im bored of toxic rain or cyclone builds...

[@greedsin555]

"there are still people playing ds PvP" hahaha I wonder who dose that >.> also bloodborne pvp is great

[@btarczy5067]

Why did GGG not just make PoE 2 actual PoE 2? Just take what's good from the first one, give it a new coat of paint and leave the excess weight in the gutter. Developing it as a kind of PoE 4.0 is limiting them in their freedom to really change things up in my opinion. It probably won't be the clean slate I'd want it to be because in all likelihood it will delete current PoE from existence and that would be a bad thing for many - including myself - as well. I have not thought about it this way before but now the way GGG is doing it looks like such a mess to me.

[@colto2312]

ironically enough they don't know how to scale the business

[@voodoo1069]

Poe getting me hyped for a new league I read patch notes and I just want to uninstall the game but for some reason I log on on Friday for league start and hope I can ignore all my disappointment that I can't enjoy something I liked. Struggle to find something new I like spend a month or so forcing myself into a new love as it grows on me very slowly then next league they do this all over to me again. I don't think I've ever gone into patch notes and kept being excited to play next league.

[@Drspangleipo]

I'm someone who plays meta builds, and I love it when patch notes come and they just murder it all. Not even joking, the uncertainty of what's going to be the next big thing is exciting. I've been playing for years and no matter how badly they butcher the current meta, the next meta build will be stronger. Hopefully this mindset might help offset the disappointment when your current favorite build takes a hit

[@AaronX442]

When did Harry Potter start playing PoE?! nice.

[@jonahweaver1122]

big nope. see everyone next episode.

[@D3letedSoul]

Mandatory comment saying that tarke looks like my fun aunt i used to smokey doobies with and i hope that he s doing fine.

[@Philinnor]

Id just like to be able to use a damn bow skill in an arpg other than toxic rain.

[@fucgoogle4559]

You can you just also have to throw a lot of currency at it

[@junk3996]

yeah, you can...you just have to not compare it to toxic rain...and completely forget how amazing toxic rain feels for bows. TR is the cyclone of ranged.

[@gismo3564]

1:01:43 LOL Tarkes inner Gollum peaked out abit there 😁

[@maxwell4546]

Yo.

[@Ashtarte3D]

I forgot to mention that I'm sad you guys brought up Marvel Heroes. Both a crazy fun game and also ruined by what made it fun. Marvel Heroes is still the best example of horizontal expansion with all the heroes added and new ways to progress your characters. But when it came to vertical expansion for stuff to do at endgame with your heroes it was bafflingly shallow. The Omega system was just a crappy grindfest aping EQ's Alternate Advancement and the raids were so overdesigned only the truly hardcore could even attempt them. If you weren't a raider when you hit 60 with a hero you rapidly ran out of shit to do other than Prestige your character. Also that game mostly went down in flames after David Brevik left.

[@basildaoust2821]

Balance, if a game has PvP competitions and everyone in the top 20 or 30 is from two builds you probably have an issue. My best example of a game being unbalanced was WoW. And man every update just changed who was best. You all know how to race right, how many builds are used in racing and do like 5 usually win or is it more or less balanced I mean we have what 19 builds, are they all good? Hey, I just made it to act VI for the first time with many deaths by boss so don't ask me :)

[@watermelon58]

Tarke has some good insights to the dev cycle gave me some good food for thought!

[@ntma]

Tarke is a good boy. go staff heavy strike to be a blockyboi btwbtw

[@Shiirya]

Thanos not happy about this episode !

[@akaiappears]

Hello there

[@guitaraholic]

Completely missed the life show this week! Dunno how I managed that 😁 awesome episode as always peeps

[@AnExercisInThought]

I think that meta period that Tarke hates was the one where most everything was dead in the water except like 2-3 meta builds. The meta was solved by someone in like 2-3 weeks and stayed like that for 10 months and nothing new popped up.

[@Saiperia]

i expact a bladeblst nerv at some point in the future, not nesseary dmg wise but may be blade explosion trigger radius/ area effect / max number of blades detonated / cast or less baldes from blade skills. its just to mutch you can do with that skill with nearly no investment.

[@Saiperia]

some skills just suck because they need like additional utiitly support gems to feel good ( for example flicker strike or infernal blow, no ancestail call / spash gem and its crap

[@luan_luttrix]

This episode came on a really great timing. I was just arguing with an guy on fb, cause he said something like "why make change in things ppl like. They should focus on fixing stuff that don't work. Everybody loves harvest leave it that way. Everybody loves x skill why change it. They shouldn't change stuff that the player base enjoy" And my answer was "because the name need to be balanced?" This was pure gold video, gona send it to him hahaha

[@AnExercisInThought]

The argument I've had with people is that the "floor" needs to be higher. Changing the new OP and nerf buff cycle is fine, but there are a lot of non viable options for people that only play on weekends. Most totems, Most traps, Other spectres besides meta, and half of the bow skills are all in a bad place.

[@fast1nakus]

Good talk

[@SawtoothGrin1986]

Tarkecat looks like a teenage lesbian