Path of Exile - Development Manifesto: Delirium Improvements

Development Manifesto: Delirium Improvements

Posted: 16 Mar 2020 06:00 PM PDT

: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page [url=https://steamcommunity.com/ogg/238960/announcements/detail/3849954572258385380]here[/url].

Development Manifesto: Delirium Improvements

Posted: 16 Mar 2020 06:00 PM PDT

Thanks so much for your valuable feedback since launch. In this manifesto, we'd like to summarise the changes that we plan to make in the near future. Note that these are still in early discussion and haven't been implemented/tested yet, so the plans may change over the next few days.

For speed, we'll likely apply these types of changes in patches as soon as they're ready rather than delaying them to be deployed all at once.

Delirium Monster Damage
As you travel deeper into the mist, the life, damage and rewards from monsters become higher. Players have commented that they feel that monsters become too dangerous, deep in the encounters. The monster damage bonus scales up to 30% increased at absolute most. We are reviewing all of the Delirium monsters and skills to find any that are overtuned and will be making adjustments to any that might be dealing disproportionate damage.

Rewards Bar
When you touch the Mirror of Delirium, a random reward type is chosen for the encounter. When you kill a certain number of monsters, you earn an additional instance of that reward type that drops when the encounter finishes. Currently, the rate at which that reward bar fills up is not proportional to the depth of the monsters you are fighting (monsters deeper in the mist do not fill it up faster).

We felt this was appropriate for release because the other rewards that the league grants (such as Cluster Jewels, Delirium Orbs, Splinters and the extremely high quantity/rarity bonuses) do all encourage you to kill as many monsters as possible, which promised clearing as deep as you can.

We were considering having the reward bar fill more quickly as you kill deeper monsters, but didn't have the change ready in time for launch. We plan to make this change in the near future.

(At the time of publishing, we just found an issue where in many areas, Delirium monsters and spawners do not appear when extremely deep in the mist).

Paralysing/Wasting/Eroding/Diluting Touch Debuffs
We are reducing the length of these debuffs so that they are substantially shorter, which will also greatly reduce the quantity that accumulates on you. This change is likely to be in today's 3.10.0c patch.

Monster On-Death Effects
Currently, there's a random chance for individual Delirium monsters to have mods that cause On-Death effects. We are internally experimenting with moving these to be pack-based (so that there's more variance in when you encounter them), rebalancing them around this, and improving how they are signalled.

For those interested in why we use On-Death effects in content like this, it's because they are a viable way of making monsters that are killed instantly have an effect on players, and they aren't trivialised by clear-speed. Few to no other mods we can put on these monsters make any difference normally because they are eradicated by powerful builds in seconds. We're going to be toning these down, either way.

Delirium Alongside Previous Content
Delirium increases the difficulty and reward of all other Path of Exile content. However, players have reported that it doesn't feel worthwhile to run past content under the effects of Delirium because you lose precious time dealing with that content's overheads. We plan to add bonus time to the Delirium event when you trigger past content, in order to make up for this. The amount of bonus time will vary from content to content, to make it fair.

Delirium Item Drop Vacuuming
We totally understand the feedback that Delirium makes you want to go fast and not pick up items, requiring you to then backtrack to grab anything decent that dropped.

There have been requests to accumulate all items that would drop and instead drop them at the end of the encounter. This is not how we want the game to be played. We have only done it in the past when it would have been impossible to access the items afterwards (if they're in an Incursion area, or in the darkness during a Delve). While it's tempting to take every opportunity to vacuum up all the items that drop and present them to you in one go, that is not how the core game loop of Action RPGs should function. In addition, even if we wanted to, it's not really even practical to vacuum an entire map worth of items and drop them in one place.

During our internal testing before release, we increased the length of time that Delirium encounters last so that players have extra time to pick up items as they go. Item filters help alert you to which items are important to grab, and we did intentionally compensate with extra time for you to do so.

Depth Meter
Because the distance from the start of the encounter matters quite a lot for both the relative difficulty of the monsters, chance that additional mods are spawned and the level of increased item drops/rarity that you receive, we are considering adding an indicator in the user interface which shows the relative difficulty. This might be in the form of a number next to the reward bar that shows the rate at which they are increased by.

Performance
It looks like we broke something with 3.10.0. We don't know what it is yet, but are investigating and will fix it. This is a high priority and we're really sorry that it was released like that. We were unaware of the issue from our internal testing but became quickly aware of it upon launch.

Annoyingly, it affects some computers/users a lot more than others. We now have a couple of computers in the office that reliably reproduce problems so we're using those to debug it.

Visibility
We have various ideas to improve visibility such as investigating improving colour grading, adding clearer effects to monsters with mods, improving skill effects and so on. We don't know exactly which set of these experiments will be deployed yet, but we do want to make it easier to see what's going on. Expect to see some improvements soon.

Make the End Delirium Button Bindable
Absolutely! You'll be able to turn it on and choose a key to bind it to in the options.

Summary/TLDR

Monster Damage: Nerfing on a case by case basis, adjusting on-death effects and improving visuals.
Rewards: Monsters deeper in the mist will count more for progress on the encounter reward bar.
On-hit Debuffs: Substantially reduced duration.
On-death effects: Investigating pack-based mods instead of individual, balancing to be in line with this. Improving telegraphing.
Past Content in Delirium: Adding time to the Delirium encounter when interacting with these past encounters.
Item Drop Vacuuming: No, sorry!
Depth Meter: Investigating a way to do this.
Performance: Yes, is being investigated but we're not sure yet what is causing the recent regression.
Visibility: Yes, we're working on improving this.
Make End Delirium Button Bindable: Yes!

This is the set of Delirium changes that we are currently working on, and we're very eager to see what you think once they have been deployed. It's worth noting that this manifesto only outlines the changes that we're making to Delirium content. We're aware of bugs separate to these issues that need fixing. Thanks very much for your great feedback and patience as we work on the changes.