Supporter newsletter 62

Issue
This is a copy of Eternal and Diamond Supporter Newsletter #62, published by Grinding Gear Games.

Hello Supporters,

This week in the office we are finishing up the 1.1.3 patch which you will get to see later this week, as well as the next mini-expansion and league content, which will coming through in a few months.

This week Nick will be talking about unique monster difficulty, while Rory will be showing off some upcoming Unique art in Insider Info.

- Carl

Boss Difficulty

The next content patch (coming this week!) is bringing more balance changes to the Invasion and side-area bosses. It's something we've been gradually tackling since their introduction in 1.1.0.

Balancing difficulty in a game like Path of Exile is very tricky. The effectiveness of a character can vary wildly compared to most other games out there. A player who tries to be effective at several different skills may be, compared to someone who focuses on just a couple, effective at none. If we balance around that player, the player who focuses their character down will blow through content quickly and easily. If we focus solely on the highly effective players, most others find themselves dying too much.

The Vaal Oversoul is a really great balance reference point, since it rewards observant and mobile players and punishes players who try to just out-damage the boss. It's challenging without being unfair, and if you're skilled, basically any build can beat it. But we can't reuse the Oversoul mechanics for every fight.

Making fights difficult but beatable at all skill levels is, in itself, really difficult. Besides the vast number of skill and passives options we have to contend with, we have a vast gap between a poorly-geared player and a well-geared player. What may be a long, challenging and fun fight for one player may be a right-click-and-kill moment for another.

That's something we saw a lot of with some of the invasion and side area bosses. Mechanics that were difficult and interesting at lower levels and with moderate gear were totally trivial with high-leech melee builds. Finding the sweet spot between pleasing the average gamer without alienating the high- and low-skill players is something we're still working on.

That's not to say that we didn't perhaps make some of these bosses far too difficult for most players. We did, and in fact some of the difficulty was unintended. Bosses that can offscreen you aren't fun. In particular, bosses that use ranged skills that are indistinguishable from player skills (such as flameblast). This adds to encounter difficulty in a really unfun way, and we try to avoid it, but occasionally we have to reuse effects simply because we don't have an alternative ready. New spell effects are something we are in the process of improving.

Lastly, the number of players in an encounter is something we have to keep in mind. Some fights, due to the nature of how monsters target players, become exponentially easier as more players participate. A mechanic we sometimes use to combat this is to have monsters trigger skills based on the health they lose, since that increases with player numbers. But that can occasionally have unwanted side effects, especially in high-damage but otherwise fragile groups of players. Fun fact: Shivershell's sandspitter-spawning works on this mechanic, which is why when you're fighting him with friends he's got so many more corpses to detonate. - Nick

Insider Info

We've got some large images of some upcoming GGG unique items for you this week:

http://i.imgur.com/Qu1HOll.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/mnfPEsP.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/0UuDFfz.jpg

- Rory