Easy Fix for Energy Shield Nerf in 3.0

For anyone upset about the upcoming Energy Shield nerf in 3.0, there's an easy fix.

Energy Shield Fix

1. Find the game in your game library.
   
2. Right-click on the game and select "Uninstall..."
   
   
3. Problem fixed!

Game Review (Part 1)

Published by Grinding Gear Games (known affectionately as GGG by their fanbois), Path of Exile is an action RPG based on the ancient history of Australia and New Zealand. In those days, Australia was called Wraeclast and New Zealand was called Oriath. Both countries were run by autocratic Romans who spoke with British accents. In an inspired act of brilliant social engineering, Oriath would regularly banish the dregs of their society to Wraeclast where they were euphemistically referred to as "exiles". Surprisingly, this practise still occurs today, except they are now called "unemployed dole bludgers" instead of "exiles".

A typical ARPG, the main story has 4 Acts repeated 3 times (Normal, Cruel, and Merciless). In Merciless difficulty, the Atlas of Worlds is unlocked. It's basically the mapping system from Torchlight II with an additional storyline that allows players to grind maps to get to another endgame boss. These maps are essentially self-contained pseudorandomly generated instances using assets recycled from the main game with a boss fight at the end. In the upcoming Fall of Oriath expansion, the 4 Acts will be expanded to 10 Acts with no repetition.

The main storyline is relatively short and can be completed from scratch three times (one for each difficulty) in less than a day by experienced players. After this is done, the endgame is mainly about grinding Atlas maps and farming the Atlas boss, Shaper, for loot. There are also other endgame bosses such as the cat-like quad-mammary Atziri, and her harder counterpart Uber Atziri, and Uber Izaro the boss of the rogue-like Uber Labyrinth.

There are 3 primary stats and 6 classes to choose from: Marauder, Duelist, Templar, Witch, Shadow, and Elf. The Marauder, Witch, and Elf are associated with their corresponding primary stat of Strength, Intelligence, and Dexterity. The Duelist, Templar, and Shadow are more hybrid orientated classes associated with Strength-Dexterity, Intelligence-Strength, and Dexterity-Intelligence respectively. An additional class, the Scion, is unlockable through normal gameplay. The Scion allows players to pick from the watered down abilities of the other 6 classes and sounds exciting but is sadly rubbish.

Using a system of skill gems and a vastly complex web-like passive skill tree, there are literally thousands of ways to build a character. However this freedom is an illusion, and only true when talking about casual play in Normal and Cruel difficulties. In the Merciless endgame, only certain builds are viable. Of these endgame viable builds only a subset would be considered 'budget' and thus within reach of the average player. If playstyles and aesthetics are added into the mix, there is even less freedom.

As the name of the publisher implies, grinding for gear is the aim of the game. You're either grinding for better gear, or grinding for currency to buy better gear. There's a crafting system, but that involves yet more grinding. This grinding is perpetuated through the use of randomness in almost every aspect of the game. Indeed the randomness is intoxicating, having an addictive lottery-like effect that's especially effective against vulnerable OCD gamers. This is no accident.

There are thousands of items in the game and they all have varying degree of randomness in their stats. So the chance of getting the items you need, with the stats you need, from random drops by pure luck is infinitesimally small. For players who don't want to spend hundreds of hours grinding and farming, it's easier to farm currency and trade for items. Although there's one major caveat, the trading system is absolutely archaic, coming straight out of the middle-ages from the time of the Hanseatic League. The original source code was written by Fred Flintstone using cave paintings.

Items for sale are listed by placing each item in a public Premium Stash Tab (purchased with real-world money). These items are then listed (with some delay) on a separate website where other players can search and browse. If someone wants to buy your item, they will send you a PM and you invite them into a group to complete the transaction. Naturally a transaction can only occur when both buyers and sellers are online and active. It's a terribly time-consuming manual system plagued by AFKers, listing lag, and other shenanigans with no signs of being updated anytime soon.

Surprisingly, grinding isn't the problem with the game. Tedious repetitive grinding has always been intrinsic to ARPGs and PoE is no different. After all, there's always new builds to try, and different skill and gear combinations to experiment with. The problem is with GGG's active and regular interference with how players play the game. Interference in the form of frequent pernicious nerfs against anything remotely meta.

GGG often makes changes that are ostensibly done to "balance" the game and increase build diversity, but in reality deliberately disruptive, designed not to balance, but to break popular builds. It forces players to spend time re-specing and re-gearing, or to play a new build completely from scratch. If an initial nerf does not break a build, they will continue to nerf until the build is dead and nobody plays it. The spurious explanations given for these nerfs are often disingenuous sophistry spiced with marketing spin phrased in an hilariously obtuse manner.

For example, GGG recently decided that AoE needed a nerf. The reason given via a barely intelligible pontification was: "Extreme min-max AoE builds are nerfed by these changes... This is an intentional rebalance with the specific goal of providing more decision variety and reducing the absolutely-mandatory feeling of AoE for certain builds." Which doesn't even make sense. How do you provide more "decision variety" by reducing choice? Why not just call it a DPS nerf and a CPU usage nerf for the upcoming XBOX port? What does "absolute-mandatory feeling" even mean? Are feelings absolute? What is Love?

The best excuse by far is the generic "trivialising endgame content". Without defining exactly what "trivial" means, it can be used to justify any nerf. Just before Legacy League, a bunch of items were retrospectively nerfed (e.g. Reach of the Council bow) on the basis that they were trivialising endgame content. But then, some of these items were then reintroduced back into Legacy League in their original un-nerfed form as an extremely rare Legacy "foil" variant. How is the game balanced if the same nerfed OP items are put back in the game in their un-nerfed form? It's definitely not game balance, but as a blatant way of robbing players of items they already have so that they would have to grind for it again, it's brilliant.

The most insidious and controversial nerf by far is the upcoming Energy Shield changes for release 3.0. This isn't just a simple balance change but the complete and wholesale destruction of the Energy Shield mechanic that will affect a very large number of builds. Although Energy Shields will still be available, it will be nerfed to the point of impotence and might as well be removed from the game entirely. Players who have spent hundreds of hours of grind to create their ES builds will see their efforts washed away in an instant. There are {LINK REMOVED}over 180 pages of posts in the forums on this topic which demonstrates the level of contention surrounding this issue.

Game Review (Part 2)

The official reason why Energy Shield needs such a harsh nerf is because it trivialises endgame content, obviously because anything that keeps you alive trivialises endgame. To justify this, they cited highly contrived examples of extreme Energy Shield builds. They way it's worded, it sounded like everyone and their pet dog plays builds like that. In reality, only a very small subset of builds focus exclusively on Energy Shields. Also, these builds are incredibly expensive to create and are way beyond the budget of the average player. It's something that's only achievable for perhaps the top 1% of players. It's like complaining that some sport is trivial based on the performance of Olympic standard athletes.

If GGG truly wanted to balance endgame, they could always balance the actual endgame boss encounter itself instead of doing a massive across-the-board nerf. They've already taken the lazy route and added Ignite and Poison immunity to some endgame bosses. Why not just add some kind of degenerative mechanic against shields? Although not very lore friendly, an EMP attack would work well. Perhaps they find the idea of extreme min-max Energy Shield builds offensive and this is an intentional rebalance with the specific goal of providing more decision variety and reducing the absolutely-mandatory feeling of Energy Shields for certain builds. Or perhaps they just want to justify a vastly unpopular nerf designed to slow the progression of the entire player base.

To compound the problem, GGG ascended to a whole new level of customer contempt by addressing the genuine concerns of aggravated players with a badly written {LINK REMOVED}rap. As in rap music. The perspicacity of doing a song and dance in front of an angry mob wielding pitchforks is questionable, but the drunken bravado is admirable. Granted the changes proposed for 3.0 are still in Beta and some furious backpedaling may occur, but as someone on the forums quipped, if they're dumb enough to propose it, they're dumb enough to push it through.

Some people argue that PoE is "Free-to-Play" and therefore don't owe players a thing, but this is a complete fallacy. Although advertised as a "Free-to-Play" game, it most definitely isn't. While the appearance items and Supporter Packs are truly optional, purchasing additional inventory tabs is absolutely mandatory. With thousand of items to collect, it is impossible to play the game for any reasonable length of time using only the default free inventory tabs.

Given that it makes commercial sense to keep customers happy and entertained, it's difficult to fathom why GGG is hellbent on doing the opposite. Slowing player progression and increasing the already excessive grind may seem irrational and self-destructive, but it keeps players playing for longer and maximises financial {LINK REMOVED}conversion rates. After all you cannot sell to someone not playing the game, and it's ultimately about making as much money from addicted customers as possible. It's a vicious (virtuous for the business stakeholders) cycle where the more players spend in the game, the less likely they are to walk away. The average gamer is unsophisticated, and not understanding financial concepts like {LINK REMOVED}Sunk Costs will continue to throw good money after bad.

The other benefit (to GGG) of constant nerfing and "balance" changes is that it's a lot cheaper than developing new content. By entrapping players in an endless cycle of broken builds and deliberately cycling the meta, it gives the impression that there is something "new" without having to actually invest in actual new content, like say, new Character Classes and Skills. The Atlas of Worlds is mainly just assets recycled from the main game with a few new boss fights, and although the upcoming Fall of Oriath expansion is advertised as "6 new Acts", it looks like most of it will also be recycled with perhaps only one new Act of actual new content. Most players won't actually notice this because they'll be too busy arguing about Life vs. Energy Shields and fixing broken builds.

To be fair, these dirty tricks aren't specific to PoE but endemic to every single online game, especially MMOs. The only difference is how they communicate and implement this process. Unfortunately, GGG's idea of communication is to treat customers like ignorant kids. Although it's true that some of their customers really are ignorant kids and you can tell who they are on the forums, the majority of them aren't.

The tragedy is Path of Exile is an excellent ARPG. It's fun, charming, and they've done a lot of things well. Nobody really cares that the majority of the game is just recycled content when they're having fun, but they care when the builds they've spent hundreds of hours grinding for is broken. ARPG's are all about getting the best possible gear and building ultimate bad-ass god-slayers. No one wants to play a ♥♥♥♥♥ mediocre DPS build. The whole point is to trivialise endgame. Watching mobs explode into fountains of gore is fun. Smashing bosses is fun. Grinding and farming isn't fun, but that's the price of admission we pay. Having achieved some measure of commercial success, GGG seems to have forgotten this. Whether it's due to hubris and/or avarice, they no longer understand the product they're selling. It's no longer about building customer trust for the long-term, but about recklessly squandering customer goodwill and maximising profit in the short-term. If the only long-term reward players can expect is a broken build, then all the grinding and farming is a complete waste of time just like Path of Exile is right now.

Addendum

There seems to be a lot of misconceptions regarding how gaming corporate decisions in general are made and for the benefit of the average gamer, I'll take a stab at explaining it.

High level strategic decisions are usually made at the highest executive levels of a company by an elite few. These people don't play the game and they certainly don't read the forums. They don't even know what a meta is. Meta shmeta. All this tedious mundane stuff is delegated to marketing shills and developer drones. Instead they mostly talk about stuff like SWOT analysis, Six Sigma belt colours, and the alcohol budget for the next board meeting. They also like to argue over topics like how to milk more money from cash cows (aka customers), how to improve golf handicaps, and whose turn it is to take the minutes. Contrary to public expectations, they actually don't do pros and cons because nobody really does pros and cons anymore except people who write boring game reviews on Steam.

Anyway, these management executives use something called an "Excel Spreadsheet". On this spreadsheet there are lots of numbers and lots of colourful graphs, bar charts, and probably a few pie charts. These diagrams are really important because they look really good on PowerPoint. The actual colours don't really matter and are for good looks only. It's also something to look at while they're drinking Chardonnay and eating caviar.

On this spreadsheet there's a column labelled 'Revenues' and usually a graph next to it hopefully tracking higher month after month. Now, and here's the important part, as long as the numbers in this column are increasing and the chart goes up, nothing else matters. It's underpants on the head do whatever you want. However, if the revenue numbers were to fall, say due to disgruntled customers withholding spending, then there would be hell to pay. Usually a lot of shouting, finger pointing, ass covering, and sometimes chair throwing. Even worse, lots of meetings will be scheduled. Meetings that cannot be avoided unless there's a fire in the server room, which coincidentally seem to always happen when lots of meetings are scheduled.

Sometimes, but very rarely, when management realises that they are wrong, they bow to the wisdom of their cash laden customers and take corrective action. When this happens, somewhere in the Universe, a unicorn is born. More often though, management simply stick their collective fingers in their collective ears and say something along the lines of "la la la, not listening, not listening." It's full steam ahead, she'll be right mate. After all, the ship is unsinkable and a little bit of floating ice isn't going to hurt anyone.

And that, in a nutshell, is how corporate decisions are made.

Beta Feedback Links

Calling out GGG balance team

{LINK REMOVED}https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1924749

Forced meta shifts

{LINK REMOVED}https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1925431/page/2

Originally posted by Snorkle_uk:

I think where they go wrong is that the fail to appreciate theres probably a far larger group of people who simply want to have fun and enjoy the game. they get way too heavy handed, minmaxers are doing X, lets change the meta so that minmaxers will get something fresh to do. Sure, but theres many people who want to do X, enjoy it, and they will still do it even if X is not the 'correct' choice. Rather than simply shift the balance though they have a habit of simply destroying X entirely to make sure people have switched away from it. That ♥♥♥♥♥ up all the people who play the game to have fun because now its not an option at all, theyve made it so bad to enforce a meta shift that even players who dont care about playing THE best build or strat cant even justify playing it for fun.

Such a big expansion such a big disappointment?

{LINK REMOVED}https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1926673/page/5

Originally posted by Prisus:

There is no reason to play all of this new content other than finishing the story.

Neutering builds that people enjoy is not how to grow this game. I have friends that saw some old CoC videos and asked me to help them build it in 3.0. It sucked having to tell them that it was pretty much impossible to create if you want to actually survive all of the new OP damage w/ double boss health.

You Tube is a thing. Old builds are still out there...and explaining to players that builds that worked in 2.0 stopped working right in 2.5 and a lot of builds in 2.6 no longer work right in 3.0 is shocking to those people. First question I get: "Why would a ARPG dev remove builds that players actually enjoy?"

It's very disheartening.

Definite feedback and probably the last one from this beta

{LINK REMOVED}https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1921441

Beta Wave 4 Deployed - Shock/Chill/Power Charges/Frenzy Charges Changes

{LINK REMOVED}https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1927472/page/8#p14637825

On Balance Feedback and Charge Changes

{LINK REMOVED}https://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/1927828/page/1

[Prince Saiyarine]

goodbye whiny boy

[gifted child retarded adult]

man what the fuck how comes my boy tyrese cant play 21 aura salute witch and let me play with 25k es and instant leech and double dipping

this game fuckin suck who these honkey ass developas

[Orma]

it's a trash game i regret spending any money on

[@RaDiKaL_]

when was ES great anyway...

[Zarremgregarrok]

It seems like you play only non-league. :D The whole post makes no sense in league play.

[loremantes]

oh no my 25k ES build got nerfed while these 5k life builds are getting buffed i am salt durrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
the irony is that playing CI is still fine. my gear is utter trash and i've got 7k ES and 65% block chance.

[Braethias]

Sorry they nerfed your OP build to make other "lesser" builds more viable.

[Widget]

sounds to me someone needs to get thier poop in order when the ES builds make PvP so unbalanced then they need to do something, so get over yourself and make a new build.

[TommyDagger]

rofl u mad bro? of course balance has to be done around the top 1% of players. For someone who claims to know so much about the gaming industry you sure bring up some dumb points. If a game gets balanced around imperfect play then it creates grossly unbalanced classes/specs/heroes/whatever.

[Jeb]

I genuinely don't understand all the hate for this guide. It makes fair points