And a new conception of attributes. Soul, Force, Precision.
- Meta: The current objectively most powerful build, the dominant strategy.
- Build: The players choice of character design.
- Balance: How all builds and monsters compare to each other.
- Nerfs: Choices by developers to weaken a given aspect of the game world.
- AOE: Area of effect, an unrealistic game concept where force is applied equally over everything in that region.
A permanent meta is acceptable so long as the vast majority of other moderately achievable builds can clear the vast majority of boss content. Not everyone plays with the goal of being the strongest they can be by any means. In competition gaming, such might by a problem, but not in mixed multiplay co-op games as most ARPGS are.
Balance vs the meta forces everyone to play it. There’s apparently a misconception among developers that if one build is clearly best no one else will play anything, but that’s only true of people not playing for fun.
What’s actually happening is all other builds by default are prevented from seeing the majority of content because they’ve been shut out by the developer response. Their mistake lies in addressing a specific problem (meta) with general changes that apply to all other builds.
The meta is not a problem because it plays well, the meta is a problem because it actively harms all other builds due to the mistake.
I am against net nerfs. But used correctly a nerf can over all amount to a power upgrade for everyone else, especially in the long term. Nerfing one over powered skill can amount to powering up all other skills but only assuming the monsters are already balanced fairly vs only average builds, and not previously inflated by misguided efforts to control the meta. This is why people hate nerfs. Because of this core and common mistake.
In most games with a problem-meta leading to a dominant strategy the issue is that both the meta’s core skill and the monsters generally need a nerf at the same time.
Path of exile has completely painted themselves into a corner on this by committing to never making the game “easier” which precludes general reductions to monster power. There’s a solution to this but it requires fundamental changes.
One aspect is to adapt the system to be more realistic. The biggest offender here is AOE.
In games AOE is usually implemented in a farcical impossible way. AOE damage is often over unity in the sense that each cast of an AOE spell actually does infinite damage assuming you can cram in infinite targets. Monsters often overlap in ARPGs, so this makes the AOE problem worse.
AOE don’t actually exist irl. Every weapon that seems AOE irl actually isn’t. Gas, fire, explosives, radiation, all have finite damage they can do. This is a little hard to explain. But let me try via examples.
A fragmentation grenade is an easy to understand example, each fragment is just a bullet fired, and only so many are being fired. Yes assuming no impacts the bullets have an area of effect through empty space or normal air, but that’s just a conceptual shortcut. It’s not actually an area, it’s actually a large number of unpredictable trajectories arranged roughly in a sphere. We shorthand this as AOE. But if one solider bravely belly flops that grenade the entire squad can be saved because the finite capacity of the grenade is absorbed all by a single target and the ground. This is why humanity had to develop stronger and larger explosives because in actuality AOE doesn’t exist. You always only get a little less than what you put in. (Yay entropy.) This is also why we developed firearms, so we could focus all that energy into a single trajectory. This is also why demolition explosives require drilling for best effect in most cases.
Gas in exactly the same way is not truly AOE, it’s actually more like a clip of ammunition fired in all directions. With each “bullet” being the minimum dose required for the the desired effect, be it sleep or death or whatever.
There’s only so many lungs this finite capacity of gas can impact. In games one liter of gas could fill an infinite amount of overlapping lungs, this absurdity is why balancing spells vs melee in ARPGs is so hard.
Spells and magic in games heavily rely on this absurdity. While melee is more tethered to reality because it’s intuitive. Instead of correcting AOE, path of exile for example has typically chosen to add AOE to melee and make melee skills amount to physical spells. So we end up with just different flavors of spells.
The solution is a whole new system. I propose 3 core stats renamed based more on their new function: Force, Precision, and Soul. Str/dex/int. (I renamed int mostly because it’s absurd to imply people are low intelligence just because they are strong or accurate. IRL there’s no such balance. Some people hit the genetic lottery, some don’t, most have a mix of the two. True immersion requires relatability and relatability requires accuracy.)
Each stat represents a source of power. Force is how much kinetic energy can you deploy, Precision is how controllably you can apply force, and Soul is the metaphysical source of magical force. (See below.)
The ground floor of balance in this concept is the idea of total power. Pretend each max level character gets 1000 power. And design the monsters accordingly. Now all you have to do is make sure each character gets a third of that power from stats and skills, items, and exp. (Or eliminate exp all together, separate essay. Comment if you’d like to read it, I’ll write it if a couple people care.)
A 100% force build would win vs groups by using very large sweeping weapons, like a zweihander or even an over sized odachi. The idea is that a finite amount of damage is being dealt per swing, and you would cut through monsters until all that damage is dealt.
A 100% precision build would be dealing that same amount of damage only, target by target in some precision way. Knives, arrows, whatever. You wouldn’t be sweeping as much, but you could attack much faster and deal the same amount of damage via thrusts.
A 100% soul build would deal the same amount of damage but via magical means.
Hybrid stats allow for total build diversity so long as the total damage dealt remains the same.
A hybrid force and precision character for example could throw a heavy javelin with good accuracy over distance.
A hybrid force and soul build could be a giant. Same power, just over a larger area. The damage with a thrust would be the same because you just traded some of your force for some soul.
This base power system is meant to represent the laws of physics. 1000 would be the max, but in practice most will never get all the way there due to diminishing returns and availability. That’s progression.
In a sense each character would be a three way hybrid build as they progress, training, equipment, and conditioning. Skills, equipment, attributes.
A word about soul. I feel soul is the perfect name for the magical stat. It’s intangible and subject to arbitrary metaphysics. It would be the source of the magic’s power. The implication is that everyone has this potential they just have to learnt o harness it. And that harnessing is where all the magical themed things come from. Rituals, artifacts, seemingly nonsensical processes. They are how they are in game because that’s just how this outer world of soul works. It’s an exterior physics. A metaphysics.
But while you are doing rituals and meditating you aren’t doing push ups or training. So your force and precision suffer. A full soul build would be an animated corpse or something else fully magical. but the core possible power would always be the same, this has the added bonus of implying no soul is greater than another. The stat’s value represents how much of your maximum available soul power have you become able to harness for our-world effect.
A word about EXP. I don’t like the levels system it’s also a short hand. But it is important to note that information, being an abstraction, does work like AOE. You can cram as many ears as you want into a region and one reader can inform them all, so in this way in party play, it’s fair for the same monster to give all three the full exp value.
