Twitch VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/liftingnerdbro/v/102329149

YouTube Mirror: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jojH-eEGoho

Today's highlighted run-on sentence:

> If you're able to keep up with it and keep killing monsters, which might be tricky when you first reach that point, like the first time you do this, you might not manage it, but ideally once you've had a few attempts at it and you've got the hang of it, and especially if you can prepare for it, like you might want to switch your flasks, and make sure you've got the best movespeed boots and so on, then you'll be able to get all the way to the end of the zone, and if the Breach manages to reach the end of the zone, it opens the portal to the Breachlord's arena, where you can actually fight the Breachlord, and that isn't a timed -- you don't have to worry about time for the actual Breachlord encounter, you just need to get to it in time.

My annotations are in [Brackets]

Drinking game:

Take a sip when ProjectPT laughs.

Take a sip whenever someone says "obviously" or "basically."

Take a sip whenever Rory refers to a new skill by it's development codename.

Take a sip whenever Rory makes a joke. Finish your drink if you laughed.

Take a sip if you get tongue-tied reading the word "Breachlords."

Chug the rest for clearspeed Meta.

Today's discussion:

Breach League

Channeling skills

""""""Melee""""""

---

LiftingNerdBro: What's up guys? Welcome back to the Lioneye's podcast. This time, it's a very special thing. We have Rory Rackham with us, a GGG developer!

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Hello, everyone!

LiftingNerdBro: How's it going?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: How's it going?

LiftingNerdBro: Good, I'm doing good, how are you guys?

ProjectPT: / Hegemony: Doing pretty good.

LiftingNerdBro: I'm pretty excited to have you on here, especially with all the new league information just released. you're the perfect man for this.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Hopefully, yeah, yeah, there's lots of cool stuff we've been talking about. And some cool stuff that just came out as well.

LiftingNerdBro: Yes. What about you, PT?

ProjectPT: I'm anticipating the new league. It's always that one thing, getting that nice fresh restart you're like, "Yes! Everything! Go!"

LiftingNerdBro: It's my favorite thing. The past few weeks of Path of Exile league,it's just, it's the best thing.

ProjectPT: I'm like, "Soon, my stash tabs organize themselves."

Rory_Rackham_GGG: So you're saying we should do a new league every three weeks? I think we can manage that.

ProjectPT: Excellent! It's been confirmed. Rory said it.

[All laugh]

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Nope, nope. nope! I don't!

LiftingNerdBro: If you could choose, yourself, Rory, how long would be a league? If it were to suit your gameplay style, what would you enjoy?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Probably a month and a half. It's tricky for me because I've already played the league, before it's come out, to death. And I've played every version of it. So I end up playing what's the best version, but I've already played all the others, so it's hard to stay in it as long as everyone else.

LiftingNerdBro: It's the curse of being a developer, I guess.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Also the fact that if I spot something wrong while I'm playing on the actual league I can't just go and fix it right away.

ProjectPT: That's actually related --- Sorry.

Hegemony: Regarding that, can you specifically tell us what your involvement was in the 2.5 patch? What exactly you did and contributed.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: I was involved in the initial Breach design and throughout the process involved in design decisions. I didn't design the individual monsters and so on, but just helping plan it out and helping make decisions. And actually getting everything ready to be presented to the community was one of the big bits.

Hegemony: So when you say initially you started it, then who did you hand it off to?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: The original planning was between Chris, Jonathan, myself, and Neon. And then Neon and one of the other designers have been working on the boss designs and the monster designs, what the encounters will feel like, while I was working on the duration of the breaches, and how the breaches spawn, that sort of stuff. Working with the programmers on the core mechanics. Also with the small balance changes that we're hoping to make in the 2.5.0 patch, unrelated to Breach.

ProjectPT: Before we get into a lot of the Breach material, something that everyone has been asking, I'm sure: Do you know if Essence is staying?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: We haven't confirmed it yet.

ProjectPT: Goddammit!

Rory_Rackham_GGG: It's definitely something that we're -- We're going to have an announcement this week about exactly in what way it's going to stay in the game. Chance are, the current discussion, is that it's going to stay in, but with a reduced chance of appearing. But I'd really like to have it so you have a higher chance of getting -- like, you don't get them as often, but when you do get them, they are higher tier essences. Much more likely to be closer to your tier of play.

ProjectPT: But not confirmed! That's where the conversation's leaning.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: There will be a full confirmation later this week explaining exactly how it's going to stay in. If it is going to stay in. It seems at this rate everyone, well, a lot of people want it in. Let's say, in some way shape or form, it's staying in the game.

LiftingNerdBro: Cool. Before we get into the discussion, a more detailed approach to the actual Breach stuff, Rory, you had something you wanted to -- We know that you will be bringing up some information about some of the channeling skills, some gems, and we also know there's some melee stuff. Do you want to present it now? Or do you want to present it later on?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Let's tease it a bit now. I think I can give you the outline of it now, and we can go into more detailed questions in a little bit. Hopefully people will have time to come up with questions that way.

LiftingNerdBro: Sounds good.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: So we're having only one new support gem with the 2.5.0 patch. It is going to be Cast While Channeling. It's going to be similar to -- You link it to your channeled skill and regular spell just like Cast on Crit, except you have a channeling spell. And then every fraction of a second, it will cast a linked spell. [Hegemony: Holy moly.] For example, you can put your fire beam and link Flame Surge to it, so every however frequently, it's currently at 0.6 seconds, you'll get Flame Surges going off. Or you can have Incinerates with Fireballs linked and all these things to it.

LiftingNerdBro: [Laughs]. That's going to be visual -- Ah, that's going to be so good!

ProjectPT: I have a question but I'm going to wait.

Hegemony: I was wondering if there are concerns of server crashing even further, like from all the calculations.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: It's less spammy than Cast on Crit, even the nerfed version of Cast on Crit at the moment. It depends on how often we decide to fire off the spells. It's going to be a fixed time that goes up as the gem levels, so higher gem levels you get more casts while channeling. At least, that's the current balance iteration of it. If you want to cast heaps of stuff -- Stacking cast speed is still a faster way to produce that many Fireballs or whatever it is, but it just means you get the two things going off at once. So you get some cool synergies, obviously.

LiftingNerdBro: How would you go about changing the amount of procs you can get? If that's possible.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: As a player? It would mainly just be increasing the level of the support gem. So if you have stuff that raises support gem level, that's the easiest way. But it's not going to be by a huge amount.

LiftingNerdBro: So you're not going to scale it via other stats or attributes?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Yeah. The time acts similar to the cooldown on Cast on Crit. That sort of hard limit on how often it's going off. You have to be channeling the skill for that amount of time before the first one goes off. It doesn't go off instantly as soon as you start channeling, so you can't bypass the cast time.

ProjectPT: We're going to jump into the skill discussion a little bit later on. There was another thing you wanted to tease a little bit, that will go in later as well.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: We're currently testing, in our local copy, a version of melee targeting for shift-attack that's way more forgiving. Basically, it will -- At the moment, when you shift-attack, it checks a line directly in front of you at your weapon range. If it finds something in that direct line, it hits it, otherwise, you just swing and miss. Now, once it's checked in the line, it also checks to the sides, at a reasonable distance. So you've got a fair amount of -- You can hold shift, and as long as there's something in front of you, you're probably going to hit it. So it's much easier to play "requiring hitting an enemy" melee skills. We've also drastically increased melee weapon range to be much closer to the animations. We now have a way to measure what it looks like, how far away you're hitting, and it was clear that a lot of weapons weren't measuring up to what they looked like they were. Rapiers can now effectively have +5 weapon range from what they had.

ProjectPT: WHAT!?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Other weapons to a lesser degree. Rapiers are now, by a fair amount, the largest weapon range of all weapon types. You have a reason to use them that way. We're also going to display weapon range on the weapons, so you'll know, "Daggers have this range," [ProjectPT: Thank you!], that's what I'm paying for, the cost of using a dagger. It's not a very high cost, compared with crit.

LiftingNerdBro: I want to hear some examples of that later, then. Before that, let's head into the Breach League discussion. Would you do us a favor? Just for anyone who hasn't read all the articles, could you describe for us what is Breach League, in short?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Sure. While you're traveling around the world in the Breach League, you'll start seeing these soul coasters travelling across the area. You'll follow them to their source, and you'll come across this hand-like portal. As soon as you approach it, it bursts open and this extraplanar field starts covering the zone. As it covers the zone, the monsters from that alternate plane start emerging from the edges of it and will rush towards you and attempt to kill you as all good extraplanar entities do. [LiftingNerdBro: [Laughs].] You'll have to fight for your life. There will be commanders, and if you're really lucky / unlucky, one of the Breachlords themselves will emerge. You'll also come across special Breach chests and things like that inside these Breaches. Once the bloodshed has faded, once the Breach has closed, it only remains open for a short time -- Once it closes, you'll be able to get the loot that they dropped behind when they were killed, which will include shards that open up the endgame content of the league, these Breach Domains, where the Breachlords can be fought and actually slain.

ProjectPT: You made a comment about -- There was a word that you said: "Commanders." That's not appeared in any of the press stuff.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Ah. They are some exceptionally tough rare monsters that only appear in Breaches that we've dubbed internally as the "commanders," but they are the ones that will make the Breach encounters challenging.

Hegemony: The Breachlords?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: No, they're not the Breachlords. They are a step below the Breachlords. They are Breach monsters that you can see quite early on in the game. They're tougher encounters within a Breach.

LiftingNerdBro: They're considered "rare" monsters, not "unique" monsters.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: That's right. They can have rare-monster mods.

Hegemony: With that design, what did you guys learn from previous leagues that made you choose the Breach design?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: In a way, Breach was a call back to some slightly earlier leagues that people were asking for back again. More encounter heavy, more challenging encounters over a longer time. The Essence and Perandus leagues were bite-sized fights. We spent more design time on the rewards than we did on the encounters themselves. This one is more of a focus on making really interesting encounters. Making the kills and the experience and the regular drops from the monsters as worthwhile as the special rewards because it is a really intense fight. And also showcasing some cool new tech we had. We originally had the plan of it stopping time in the area as well, but it had weird multiplayer implications, where someone was off on the other side of the map and time stops. [All: [Laughs]]

LiftingNerdBro: Usually, weird stuff happens when you try to stop time.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: I've found that.

ProjectPT: Segueing from that, I was curious, what were some of the previous iterations? I'm sure this wasn't the first one. You talked about a little bit earlier that you tried the other styles. What did you originally have, and why did these iterations not make it? And then, what made you stick with this one?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: During the design phase, there were a lot more iterations, where you had things like the entire zone was covered in these monsters, but then it basically became an absolute clear speed league. You just want to clear the entire zone in the time you have before the Breach closes. Again, we tried the time-stopping. Later on in development, when we actually had the [taken?] -- We had much longer Breaches. You would spend a minute and a half over a larger area, which was cool the first time, but after a while became really draining: "Do I really want to spend a minute and a half in this zone?" In the zone, while leveling? So we went for more concise. The times are shifting, at the moment it's about 35 seconds that you can keep a breach open for, and that's if you're fully clearing out the place. It'll be an intense fight if that's the case.

LiftingNerdBro: On that note, the Breach expansion you're talking about here, it has that set duration. Is there any other way of manipulating the Breaches?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: If you don't kill anything in the Breach, for some reason, then it will only stay open for about 16 to 18 seconds at our current balance values. Every time you kill, it extends the time, but every time you kill the extension is lower. So, in order to keep the Breach open for most of its time, you only need to kill 40 to 50 monsters, which is easy to do in that time. Basically any build can do that. To get the full length, you want to be killing 100 monsters or more, but that's a little bit of extra reward for having a lot of damage and clear speed.

ProjectPT: During the press release stuff, it was pretty hard and commonly mentioned that it was 30 seconds minimum, 60 maximum. Obviously, you've decided to change that. Is there still a hard cap, and what is that hard cap currently?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Our current hardcap is, I believe, 38 seconds. But that is quite likely to change. We're finally at the point now where we completed almost all the mechanics of the league internally, now we're just playing the league and tweaking those numbers and getting them right. We're at the balance stage. It could easily change quite a bit.

ProjectPT: Going into what you said of your early iterations was just, you activated and it went everywhere and it was too rewarding to the fast gameplay -- Now, one of the questions that we did set up was, it does seem that because of the kills making the rifts last longer, it still is rewarding the fast play? It seems to be that tanky builds or jankier builds are going to be maybe unfairly punished?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: The diminishing returns make it so that it's not so bad. We knew going in that the design is going to be rewarding faster clears. I mean, we had to have some content that rewards you for doing that other than just growth of your character. But, the tankier characters can ideally spend more time in the faces of the Breachlords, rather than having to run 'round and kite them for damage. If there really is that much difference of advantage, the jankier builds as you put it will obviously not have the same advantage, but they're not going to be so far behind because of the diminishing returns. They're still going to be able to get most of it. A lot of the Breach shards can come from chests, or even just running around while the Breach is open can get you a decent number of shards.

LiftingNerdBro: They can drop from chests inside the Breach, or any type of content?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: They are most likely to drop from Breachlords themselves, and second-most-likely to drop from the Breach commanders, the big rare monsters. There is occasionally a very large chest, so large that you can actually see it before the Breach opens; you can see a faint glimmer of it. If you spot that, you know that's the direction you should head while the Breach is open. Those always have a fair amount of shards. And there's also smaller chests as well. And even the regular monsters have a small chance to drop a shard, so it's worth killing everything you can and opening everything you can in that time. But the commanders and the Lords are the ones you should focus on.

Hegemony: With this new mechanic, is the Breach going to be entirely avoidable?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: At the moment, it is. You can just step around it, assuming it's not in a doorway. You can avoid it. But, it's not recommended you do so, because even if you just fight there for a little bit and just avoid the commanders, you're still going to get more loot and experience.

LiftingNerdBro: Is there an increase of magic and rare monsters in the Breaches?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: There isn't an increase of magic and rare monsters, but they have better drops than regular monsters. They have increased quantity and rarity.

LiftingNerdBro: So it's worth spending your time on. Even if you're just interested in farming for experience.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Yes. In a map, it's obviously adding a bunch of extra monsters to the map, which is cool.

LiftingNerdBro: Absolutely. How long do you expect it takes for a player to get enough splinters to do a Breach boss?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Ideally, by the time you reach maps, you'll have one or all three of the fire, cold, or lightning, the core Breach bosses. After that, you'll be working towards the physical and chaos, the higher tier Breach bosses. During maps, we're still balancing that out. You get more shards at higher levels. You'll get one [Breach] map by the time you get to [regular] maps, and you spend as long as you would leveling to get the next one by a fair margin. We're still tweaking those exact times.

Hegemony: Hopefully they aren't like sextants when they first came out. [Laughs]

Rory_Rackham_GGG: No, no. They're going to be definitely more common than the other endgame content that we've had in the past. They'll be much easier to get than fighting the Pale Court or fighting Atziri.

ProjectPT: Going into the Breachlords, that's what you're doing. You collect 100 splinters, it's going to go into a rune of the five types, you activate a map. So what are the Breachlords? What triggers their encounters, exactly? Both in terms of the wild ones, and the maps. Will they just appear? Is there more to it?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: You know how I was saying we don't really want you having a two-minute Breach every time you come across them? When you enter the Breacher's Domain, it will look like a regular map. You might recognize similar designs to other maps with some cool new layouts. However, it will be devoid of monsters. All there will be is this gigantic Breach, and as soon as you open that, it starts spreading out through the entire zone. It's effectively a map-wide Breach. The maps are fairly linear, so you have to travel with the Breach as it's expanding and spawning monsters and keep clearing with it. If you're able to keep up with it and keep killing monsters, which might be tricky when you first reach that point, like the first time you do this, you might not manage it, but ideally once you've had a few attempts at it and you've got the hang of it, and especially if you can prepare for it, like you might want to switch your flasks, and make sure you've got the best movespeed boots and so on, then you'll be able to get all the way to the end of the zone, and if the Breach manages to reach the end of the zone, it opens the portal to the Breachlord's arena, where you can actually fight the Breachlord, and that isn't a timed -- you don't have to worry about time for the actual Breachlord encounter, you just need to get to it in time.

LiftingNerdBro: This is where the more jankier builds or the more tanky builds can maybe have a benefit because of the one-portal thing.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: To clarify, there isn't one portal. It's like a regular map where you enter the zone through the six portals. When you get to the Breachlord's thing, there is one portal that anyone can use any number of times.

LiftingNerdBro: Okay. That definitely changes your approach.

Hegemony: I thought it was going to be like the lab, where you only have one attempt.

LiftingNerdBro: So you were saying with the bosses here, how would you compare their difficulty compared to other endgame boss content in the game?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: The fire, cold, and lightning ones are definitely easier than Atziri, in terms of you're encountering them earlier and once you're able to reach them, you're probably able to take them on. But, the physical and chaos ones are significantly more challenging. I'm not sure if the chaos one is quite at Uber Atziri level. It's tricky, it's challenging just in terms of it's damage output.

LiftingNerdBro: Just that you're comparing it to Uber Atziri, that says a lot. [Hegemony: My jaw kind of dropped.] I did not expect that.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: The chaos one is the real endgame. That's the thing you work towards for the league.

Hegemony: Telling us to go CI? Got it.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: It doesn't deal all chaos damage, though. It's not a pure chaos damage boss, sorry.

ProjectPT: Still a bunch of chaos, I'm sure.

LiftingNerdBro: "This boss bypasses CI."

All: [Laughs.]

Hegemony: In one of your releases on the webpage, you guys showed double properties on the ring whenever you're in a Breach. What was the reason for this design? Is it just that difficult? Are these going to be that advantageous? Are you going to feel that you need this?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: It won't feel like you need it, but obviously it will give you a big advantage. They're there so you have something special to collect, and also something cool to bring back to standard. There may be a way to have it used in Standard in the future. We'll have to see. The fact is, we just wanted to have more itemization. Currently, there's a bunch of interesting uniques, but we wanted something for people who didn't necessarily have a use for those uniques. Something you keep getting from Breaches that you can keep collecting, or work towards a great reward.

Hegemony: This is the first time you guys have actually designed something that's intended for only the league, right?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Yeah. Hopefully there will be some use for it outside the league, but yes, that is our current setup for it.

ProjectPT: The one that was shown was corrupted. Are they just going to be dropping corrupted? Or were you trolling us?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: That is going to be dropping corrupted and rare. All of them will be rare and corrupted.

All: Okay.

ProjectPT: The droprates of the blessings. One of the mechanics in the league, for those who don't know, is there's going to be uniques: three uniques of each of the elemental types. There's the jewelry piece, a weapon, and an armor. Then you can use the blessings to upgrade it to a "fated" version of the appropriate boss. The blessings drop from the Breachlords when you do the encounters. What droprate should we be expecting of those?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: That's still being worked out. They won't be 100%. You won't be getting one from every Breachlord. but they will be -- There's only one way to get them, so if you want them, that's the way you do it. It's around probably 50%, but it may be a quite lower value if we make these Breaches that much more accessible. We don't want the uniques to be too commonplace, considering their intended power level to be quite endgamey.

ProjectPT: From there, one of the things is, a lot of the leagues -- I don't want to necessarily stuck with a design, but a very common mechanic is, "Click the event, wave of mobs spawn in some form, and then get some currency token to bring yourself to a unique boss." That's Talisman encounters, Prophecy, the current league, Ambush didn't have the uniques. It's a similar style. Even Perandus. Do you have any possible ideas of adjusting this pattern? How do you differentiate the patterns every time so that it does give us a meaningful change?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: It's a good question. There's a point where we need to be grounded in certain things that we know is successful. Like, we will be adventurous in our encounters or our tech, or something we do with it, or the rewards, but, we want to keep it kind of safe. We want to know we're still going to have a half-decent league. So we ground our designs by doing stuff we know works. In this case, the Breach League really came from the theme. Everyone was in love with the theme of the extraplanar things. We wanted to hearken back to the theme of Beyond without straight up having the same mechanics. So we have very different mechanics of the actual encounters, but we have the same theme as Beyond. In fact, the five bosses matched the five bosses of Beyond.

ProjectPT: I can say for myself, it definitely had the Beyond feel, so you succeeded there.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: That's good. Future leagues -- we want to change something up every time, and leagues that go along with major acts, like act releases, have to be quite different than ones that just stand alone by themselves. The ones that stand alone, we want a full progression so there's a reason to go through it. That's kind of what we've stuck with with this one.

Hegemony: With league designs in general, and you talked about it with grounded elements as far as what you guys want, Beyond was one of the leagues where it was very "in your face." You were forced to engage with these monsters. You couldn't escape this. The past few leagues that we had, they were completely avoidable in its mechanics. Is this design going to continue going down the road? Do you find it to be more popular when it's optional versus "in your face?" Is there a possibility of some elements being mandatory?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: It's a much safer design in terms of new players can approach it and if they realize, "I can't handle Breaches, my build... it's the first build I've ever come up with. I spent my three points on dexterity down the right side of the ranger, so I can't quite handle the content. I can go around it and do stuff that's more reliably complete-able." It's not something we're going to keep doing every time, but it is something we keep in mind quite a bit. We don't want it to be too fatal to a new player.

Hegemony: So it's a continual debate?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Yeah. We wouldn't want to put Beyond on the non-Hardcore league because we'd probably lose a lot of new players who just didn't understand what was going on on top of just learning all the rest of the game.

LiftingNerdBro: Before we continue and talk about the new skills, I was curious, in your promotional content, there is the mace, Ngamahu's Flame, and it has a level 16 Molten Burst. What is that?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: This is my unique design, so I'm particularly fond of it. The Molten Burst is effectively Molten Strike that appears at the location of the hit. So effectively, your hits have a chance to have the projectiles from Molten Strike come out of them. It's worth noting that it's supported by supports in the item, so you could fill out Ngamahu's Flame with multiple projectiles and increases AoE and so on, and just buff those molten projectiles separately from your skill that you're using in your chest piece.

Hegemony: Similar to Whispering Ice?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Yeah, similar to Whispering Ice, except you have a skill that's actually proc'ing those hits.

Hegemony: Does it need to be linked?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Whatever hits you do, even if it's the default attack, can proc this Molten Burst.

LiftingNerdBro: If it proc's Molten Burst at the impact when it's hitting something, at that place, so you could use Spectral Throw for instance...

Rory_Rackham_GGG: I think it says only Melee hits.

ProjectPT: It does say Melee.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: So Cyclone is an excellent choice for it.

ProjectPT: Right when you said it was Molten Strike design, I was like, "It says 'Melee hits!' You can't Molten Strike Molten Strike! WHY?! That would have been so great."

Rory_Rackham_GGG: If you put Melee Splash on it, you can, sort of. But I don't know if that's the most efficient way to do it. At least you have a lot of projectile bursts.

ProjectPT: That's a bit dirty.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: There was a point in development where there was a miscommunication and we ended up with it proc'ing off itself. [All: [Laughs].] That was absolutely hilarious.

ProjectPT: Scales with Dying Sun.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: So as soon as it was 100% chance, everything went off the rails. We nerfed it a little bit since then.

Hegemony: I wanted to clarify, was this Molten Burst a spell, or an attack, or is it just considered an AoE thing like Infernal Blow?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: It's a triggered attack. Any attack damage will also boost it, as long as it isn't Melee attack damage, because they do still count as projectiles.

LiftingNerdBro: There's an item that also has a line that states something about covering your enemies in Ash.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Yes, yes. This is something that we started off one of the Breach monsters, specifically the Breach commanders use this thing to cover you with Ash. When you're affected by it --

[Communication error]

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Covered in Ash is something on one of the Breach monsters that we ended up deciding to put on the item as well. You will be affected by it as well as causing enemies affected by it if you have this item. It means that you have 20% less movement speed and you take 20% increased fire damage. It's a nice boost for fire damage builds, while also protecting you.

LiftingNerdBro: Not to be confused with Covered in Ass. It gives very different properties. [ProjectPT: [Laughs].]

Rory_Rackham_GGG: I don't know how you found out about that in-development item.

All: [Laughs].

ProjectPT: Sometimes, Lifting... Your brain is just dicks and ass. I don't get it.

LiftingNerdBro: I'm a simple man.

ProjectPT: Moving on! Channeling support. You did talk about it a little bit, what it was. Cast When. Let's disect this. What are the current values at level 1 to level 20? Does it have a more multiplier, a less multiplier? Can we get a little more details about this thing?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: I'm still tweaking the balance on this, so it's not set in stone. Currently, it looks like it has a small less multiplier on the triggered skill, and casts at level 1 every 0.8 seconds, and that goes down to 0.6 seconds. That's the values that I'm starting with. We're going to see what's the best build that we can come up with, and then balance just below that point, so we'll see what sort of damage output we can expect from it. It could change quite a bit. The maths says that it should have about 25% less damage and cast every 0.65 seconds, but that's only if everything does the average amount of damage, and it doesn't work quite as well -- your supports aren't as effective at that point, since you're only getting three supports on a six link.

LiftingNerdBro: What kinds of setups have you tried so far that you've really enjoyed with it? Or do you want to spoil that?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Heh. There have been some fun ones, like Wither plus Essence Drain is pretty cool. You just have these projectiles firing off while you're reducing their resistance yourself. Blight goes well with a few chaos degen skills.

ProjectPT: I was going to say, is that why Blight sucks?

All: [Laughs].

Rory_Rackham_GGG: I'm going to look into that. I haven't had a chance to see why the values are so low. Sounds like I either accidentally committed a nerf rather than a buff at the last minute, or maybe there's a bug. I'm going to have to take a look into why Blight isn't doing as much damage as we were expecting.

LiftingNerdBro: So it's not intentional.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Uh, it's not intentional. Or at least it's not intentionally intentional?

ProjectPT: I took that and I went, "Blight skill, I'm going to go to The Coast!" Did a video, got the support links, go on the coast... "Okay, this is painful. It's level 1." I'd played Elemental Hit previously to this build, and Elemental Hit felt better. With a Lifesprig! "Oh no, this is awful."

Rory_Rackham_GGG: I'm not sure.

Hegemony: With the three new channeling skills, we waited for quite some time, and we'd like to get a little insight on why you guys decided to deploy the skills two weeks before the upcoming challenge league. In hindsight, it seems they still need some tuning. Was that the main strategy?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: It was definitely a good reason to release it two weeks before, rather than on time with the patch, but basically they became wrapped up in the DX11 client. A lot of things that affected that would mean reworking parts of the skills so that they continue to work in the previous version of the game. If we had released it before DX11. They worked on DX11 before they worked on the old version of the client. They were made for it. We had a hard time extracting them. In the end, we had to pull them together in order to not cause more problems for the skills and not double-up on work. It was more of a technical thing. Part of the reason why they are not as perfectly finely tuned is basically the QA guys, who are our most experienced players, are usually the ones giving the most back-and-forth feedback. They're building builds for this stuff. They spent most of their time finding bugs for the new DX9 DX11 stuff that the new versions of the clients. So they were overworked during their time. They spent time on the skills, but both the designers and them didn't have time to iterate as much as we usually would.

Hegemony: This is mainly a problem with the deployment of DX11. You guys had to wait for that, and therefore you released the skills at that time. This probably will not be the case moving forward, where we get the skills two weeks before the end of a league.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Yeah. It's a real pain, just from the development standpoint, not releasing the skills along with the league. In the future, we're definitely going to have skills along with the league, if I can help it at all.

ProjectPT: You didn't like getting hate mail every day about "Where's my new channeling skills?"

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Yeah... Charged Attack -- I'm sorry, Blade Flurry which was known internally as "Charged Attack" for a long time, went through massive amounts of iteration up to the weeks before its release, just trying to get it actually reaching usable at endgame. Whether we overshot remains to be seen, or maybe it doesn't.

LiftingNerdBro: Right now, there's the conception that Blade Flurry definitely seems to be endgame viable. To put it like that.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Part of that comes down to daggers, which, uh, that's a whole other problem that we'll hopefully get to address in the future. We made it so that the skill worked with claws, and then it happened to be insanely good with daggers after that.

ProjectPT: Isn't that telling you that there's a problem with claws, not necessarily daggers?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Definitely aware of that, and have plans to fix it. But they're the kind of plans that require such significant reworks that we can't release them in the next patch in the next two weeks.

ProjectPT: Two years, guys, we get claws expansion!

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Not two years, I swear!

ProjectPT: Not two years. Less than, or more than.

Hegemony: I had a question with Scorching Ray, one of the new skills. The initial ramp seems to fall behind in power because you have that small delay. How do you guys keep up with having a healthy build design between immediate payloads versus a ramp-up time?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: In an ideal world, there is a place for both. Part of the reason we added the fire resistance reduction to fire beam is so that it had some reason to use it over the others in some situations. But the fact of the matter is, a lot of encounters reward you for being able to build up and then let go at the opportune moment. There is more reward for Flameblast. Also, ignite from Flameblast pushes it well beyond where it really should be considering the dps values are similar. Fire beam doesn't have as many places where it's useful because of the build-up, but it is integral to the design. And it also differentiates it from other skills. It means that the way it can be supported is different because of it. Ideally, we'll introduce more tools to support it with. Not just supports but other things you can do with it that we can only do because it's got that damage ramping during casting.

Hegemony: No matter how much cast speed I stacked, and even running Vaal Haste, I couldn't seem to bypass that initial fireball charge-up where it does nothing. That initial split second. You can't just click and get an immediate response like you could with Incinerate, or even Flameblast. Both, which are fire channeled skills, that can get immediate sources of damage. So the stutter step was a lot harder.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: That came from the ignite. Once you apply the ignite, it's on for the time, and can theoretically, in an ideal world with double-dipping, do more damage than a single cast of Flameblast could, by a fair margin. We wanted you to have a reason to turn the skill around, to spin the beam, as opposed to just tapping on every enemy individually.

Hegemony: Right, that makes sense.

LiftingNerdBro: Now that you have the whole channeling mechanic in the game, are you expecting to further develop lots of new skills using this mechanic?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Yep. We have a bunch of interesting support gem designs for it that are quite technically challenging actually. Those skills already have all the damage supports they need, they have the cast speed and the more damage multipliers. We want to introduce the supports that do special things with them, on the level of Multiple Projectiles and Chain. Make both beam skills, because ideally we'll have more beams like fire beam after the effort that we put into getting beams working nicely, and we'll have more skills that do stuff while channeling. I've mentioned before on previous podcasts that I'd like a defensive bonus while channeling as a support gem, so that channeling things can be tankier.

ProjectPT: If you make it Fortify While Channeling I'm going to be mad at you. Just so you know.

Hegemony: Blade Flurry is Melee. It can get Fortify.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: This is true. Fortify, I've said to every designer again and again, we're definitely reserving it for Melee attacks only. And then Duelist happens to get it because Duelist.

ProjectPT: I was going to bring up the Duelist! [Laughs]

LiftingNerdBro: I was going to quickly ask -- There's been a lot of talk about people wanting Cyclone to be a channeling skill. Is that even possible, or is that not a good alternative?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: It's the kind of thing where it's basically we rewrite the skill at that point. Either you get a new skill, or you get Cyclone, and Cyclone not acting that different from how it does now, just easier to use. It's something I'd like to do, but it's programmer time that could be spent elsewhere. It's a tough call. I know there are a lot of people who would be like, "Please! Cyclone! Just forget everything else, stop development, just get Cyclone perfect."

LiftingNerdBro: Probably be a lot of people who would say the opposite as well. It's not easy to make everyone happy.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: "Better" means "better for everyone."

ProjectPT: One of the things related to the new skills is, Blade Flurry has this fun Melee tag in it, and you can get this all the way across the screen area of effect. Reave and Vaal Reave can also do this, so it's not unique to itself, but is this going to continue happening in the design process, where Melee is going to be this physical caster style? What about the game is restricting you to the skill design that you're stuck with on Melee abilities?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Blade Flurry is really the perfect example of this because, during development, it was much closer to you. It was single target, it was hitting stuff close to you, it felt more like an attack. But we had to keep pushing the AoE. Basically, we tried that, for weeks, and again and again, everyone trying to build for it said this does not compete in any way, shape, or form with the things that we want. Originally, they were single hits and you could put Melee Splash in it, which made more sense as a Melee Attack, but again, it had to keep shifting away from that in order to fit into the meta we have at the moment, in order to be useable at endgame as your primary skill. This is the sort of thing that -- We can't just change the whole meta. We can't cut down the AoE of everything and the range of everything without rebalancing the entire game. But also, we're compromising the theme of Melee every time we do this.

More than anything, the Shadow treats Melee Attacks as a little bit like ranged attacks because that's his thing. He's weaker, he doesn't have as much life or as much armor, he can't handle lots of small hits that someone in melee needs to be able to handle, so he has Reave and he has Charged Attack. He'll likely get a level two similar semi-ranged skill, possibly more of a back-stab or early Flicker Strike type thing, at some point, if we want to fill out the progression of every class archetype. In the same way that the Ranger's melee attacks are things like Lightning Strike and Frost Blades, the things that are projectiles because that's what she's good at. While the focus on Marauder skills and Templar skills will be more close-range things like Molten Strike, as long as we can get them working towards endgame. The size of the AoE on Earthquake is huge, but it is Earthquake rather than just rocking the ground in front of you, so it kind of gets away with it.

Ideally, we would both shift the meta so that it's not so "fill the screen" without ruining the fun of the game, because that's a lot of fun when you destroy everything. But we want to -- Support gems, things like Molten Burst as a Support Gem, is something that would work better for that role. It's more like the skill is causing things to happen. But then you run into problems of too much going on at once because your thing is triggering other things that are triggering other things. So there's no cut-and-dry solution. There's no, bring melee closer to the character. There's a lot we need to consider, and we don't want to just throw something out there and throw a whole lot of stuff away just because of theme.

ProjectPT: Trying to get a little bit of perspective on that, when you talk about the Assassin, which was one of your examples, having some of the ranged, and that was kind of a give or take to it. That makes sense when you're going through the first time you play your game, and what skills you get access to try out, but when you get to the further end of the game; you talked about being bad against hits. I can go Assassin CI and I'm tanking any hit really possible until I get one-shot by a volatile. Makes sense thematically from the first playthrough, but those differences that you're defining, end up just making those skills kind of garbage once you have access and learn the tools of the game. So then, everything becomes this Area of Effect to God spells.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Sorry, I missed -- What was the actual question there?

ProjectPT: It's just, when we were talking about what causes melee to do that, and you brought up the identity of the melee and you brought up the identity of the Assassin, because of your skill tree design, and the progression of players having access to all the skill gems, don't you come into the situation that everyone will inevitably just become the area of effect caster?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Cyclone is a good example. It doesn't have as much AoE as other stuff, at least for a long time it was used, it was one of the most popular melee skills because it involved movement as well. As long as you're presenting something that equates to the clearspeed that you're getting from large AoE, you can have more diversity in endgame. But, the fact of the matter is, the area that players can reach at the moment with skills is absolutely colossal, so it's very hard to present a single element, or even multiple elements, that can equate to that much clearspeed, that much progression. It's something we've got to mind for future designs. It's something that potential balance reworks can shift that area down, bring other stuff in, but with the current meta, it's very hard to produce something without large AoE that can compete without adding a whole bunch of new mechanics and new systems that punish it.

LiftingNerdBro: I was curious -- When you designed the skill, was the original intent of the skill to make a melee skill? Or did you add the Melee tag to it so that we have an interesting way of scaling?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: It was intended to be a progression from Reave. Thematically, and also how a Shadow might pick up quest rewards. The core design of it was filling out that space, and making use of the channeling system that we had. The original idea came from a Dragon Age: Inquisition skill called Thousand Cuts. That one looks more like Flicker Strike than the current Blade Flurry. But it's the theme of slashing many many times, which channeling seemed perfect for. It just turned into slashing with AoE many many times just to fit the meta.

Hegemony: So with the upcoming Melee changes -- Essentially, it sounds like what you described was a small invisible cone? It checks your weapon range in front and you can just shift-click. Are you looking to further push the damage levels so that it is still competitive? It has to do extreme amounts of damage to compete with such AoE skills like Blade Flurry.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: There are a bunch of damage changes that we have planned, but they're so extreme that I don't think we can make them in 2.5.0 along with the Breach League. As much as I'd like to just throw all the changes in, it's much better to do a big overhaul, the kind of thing we have planned alongside a major expansion. I don't even know if at that point it'll still compete with the meta. At that point, there are so many changes going in that the meta could be entirely different, after 3.0.0. Or it could be similar, but a little less obvious.

ProjectPT: In 2.5, namelocking is going to feel a little bit smoother. And you're saying there's going to be a little bit more in 3.0 that melee should be looking forward to?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Yes. We will make some balance tweaks in simple ways, like we can buff certain skills' damage if certain skills aren't being used, or buff their AoE, or whatever we need to do to them. But a rework of weapon damage, or a rework of AoE is something that needs to come a bit later. We don't want to rush into that.

ProjectPT: One of the thigns you kind of brought up before, I think it was Rory that mentioned it, but it was Poison double-dipping and also double-dipping of Fire is more of a game limitation and it causes some balance issues. There was mention of it being fixed at some point in time. Is 2.5 that time?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: I can't say yet. We'll have to have more discussions, because it's a hot topic. And a poisonous one.

Hegemony: What kind of community feedback makes you stop and reconsider when a skill needs adjustment or rework? Or is this a case where statistics alone can do all the talking? What's more valuable to you guys?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: It really is a combination. The three factors we consider: are the popular community opinion, which comes from both streamers and reddit and things like that; the feedback of our players in the office, because they'll say, "Have you played these builds?" We trust them to have a completely objective, well mostly objective, opinion of this stuff, and we know how they usually feel about such things, a good judge of what they're likely to say; and then we also trust the statistics of everyone is doing this thing. Although, if everyone is doing this thing, it's usually because a popular streamer is doing this thing and showing that it can be awesome, as opposed to it is just that much easier to cheese content with it. You have to take the overall picture. You can't say, we released the patch two days ago, everyone is using these three new skills, we need to nerf them into the ground because they're way too popular.

ProjectPT: Blight nerf confirmed!

LiftingNerdBro: So, I think we've covered the channeling skills here. Chat, do you have any questions for Rory?

Hegemony: We have some fun questions coming up.

LiftingNerdBro: That's what I was thinking, if you want to ask some questions before... But if not, I'd be interested in hearing Rory: What is something you consider a common community misconception? And what is a common misconception about GGG?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: A lot of people think that Chris can walk on water. He told me that he can't walk on water. But now that I think of it, I've never seen him not walk on water. One second. Chris! Can you jump in a lake? He says, "no." I guess we'll never know for sure. I think there's a lot of community misconceptions about how much people play the game. And obviously not everyone in the company plays the game as much as they could, or should, or would, partially because they play it a lot at work in the office. Some people can only handle so much Path of Exile. I don't understand how, but apparently it's a problem some people have. [LiftingNerdBro: There is a limit.] We also have some people who play the game an awful lot. But even then, even with plenty people playing in the office, there are going to be holes in knowledge, because not everyone has played every build. We've got people who have played weird niche builds, and we have people who play whatever's meta, and we have people always coming up with some special build based on some combination of things and do their research. We have the advantage that sometimes we can test stuff out locally. I've seen the QA guys don't give feedback like "buff this skill" because they're using it, but you never know!

And so, we have a very diverse play group in the office. Which is perfect as long as you can make use of it, which ideally we can. We fill out those holes in knowledge with community feedback. Which is why it's always helpful, as long as it's polite. If not, it just makes me sad.

ProjectPT: [Laughs]. What's a way, in general, that you can have a higher quality of feedback? Just for the community that really does want to give the best possible feedback, what can they do to make the feedback better?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Context is everything, really. If you can say, "I've played this build, it felt really bad. Here's my setup. Here's what I played previously that felt really good. Here's the content I was handling." You basically need to know everything about that person's life story in order to understand what they're feedback really means, but as much context as possible is always handy. If you just say, "Ech, fire beam sucks, ech," then that tells us nothing because it might be the feel of it, maybe you've been playing without audio, and without audio it just doesn't feel as cool. Who knows?

LiftingNerdBro: That's really not to be underestimated. AS soon as someone sees flashy animations or has cool audio, there's a lot of people that think this skill is superior to something with less flashy animation.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Yep. We've had situations even in the office where we're showing something to a developer and they're like, "eh, it's no good, we're going to have to rework it," and then we get the effects hooked up and they're like, "Oh, it's much better now, it's all good."

LiftingNerdBro: It's all an illusion.

Hegemony: Streamer feedback could be very valuable because you guys have already determined what kind of player they are, whether they're a Spike, Timmy, or what they really look for in the game, and base their feedback on what type of player they are.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Yep. I think that's very true. Streamers shape the game a surprising amount, which I'm sure the average player is sad to hear. "Why can't I be famous and shape the game?" [LiftingNerdBro: For good and for worse.] A streamer has a different mentality from a regular player, so we do have to consider the regular player moreso than the streamer. But a streamer has the most outward opinion, the most easy to gather feedback.

LiftingNerdBro: That's why streamers really need to be responsible with their opinions, sometimes.

ProjectPT: Was that an attack at me?

LiftingNerdBro: Especially PT. PT, you need to shut the fuck up sometimes.

All: [Laughs].

Rory_Rackham_GGG: It's also why we lower drops for streamers as well, just to keep them playing.

ProjectPT: I don't know. Have you checked Reddit? They would disagree with you.

LiftingNerdBro: It seems like it's the opposite.

ProjectPT: What type of player are you?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Usually, when I play the game, I'm playing a skill that I'm considering reworking, or something that I've released and I want to see how it actually feels. Recently, my most recent playthrough was Siege Ballista, because I designed Iron Commander and I just wanted to see how it felt. I want to make more uniques like that, where it's a build on a unique, and so I needed to work out. I played three different Whispering Ice builds just to get the feel of what worked, how it can interact in different ways. And same for Iron Commander. So more stuff like that is what I end up playing. But I usually play off a build guide, just so I'm understanding why they're suggesting these things in the build guide.

ProjectPT: So who's build guides do you like to follow? [Laughs].

LiftingNerdBro: [Whispering] LiftingNerdBros.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Uh, whichever looks the most fun. I don't really follow any particular person.

LiftingNerdBro: You're one of those people who needs the flashy stuff. This looks great.

Hegemony: I wanted to ask -- You've done so many different jobs at GGG. You started with supporter uniques, you did skill trees, skill design, boss design, league design, and even balance. What do you enjoy most as a GGG dev? What would you prefer to do?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Skill design is probably the most love-hate, because it is the most cool coming up with awesome designs that last forever and have all these interactions, it's great. But, it's also the most hard work. There's so many factors to consider with every skill design, from the effects to the code to the interaction with supports and items, all that stuff. It's just out of control. It takes three months to make a skill, if you're not doing it full time, which obviously I'm doing other stuff at the same time. It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of pressure, because the game lives or dies by its skills a lot of the time. But it's really rewarding when you pull it off and see people having fun with it. It's not about making the most meta skill, the most popular skill. It's about making the one that some guy messages you and they're like, "Thanks for making this skill. It's a lot of fun." The random person on the street saying thanks, is what makes that stuff worthwhile.

Hegemony: If possible, can you tell us if we can expect to see some skill tree adjustments or changes, if they are going to happen? And if there are changes coming, who does them now? Who looks at them?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Most of these major changes go through Neon and myself. We sit in a meeting room with a whiteboard like that and write stuff and discuss it and find out what we're wanting to do. Then it gets approved, we run ideas past people, it's back-and-forth at that point. The core ideas come from us. We do want to have skills stuff in 3.0.0, but it will be part of results of any rebalancing we do at that point.

LiftingNerdBro: I think we're about at the end then. You guys have anything you want to add?

ProjectPT: I was wondering if there was anything specific that we covered or anything we didn't cover Rory that you would like to bring up or discuss?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Hmm, nothing immediately comes to mind. I'm sure I'll think of something in five minutes that I wish I'd said that, but, no, not now.

LiftingNerdBro: That's how it works, typically. We appreciate you coming on, Rory.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Thanks for having me.

LiftingNerdBro: It's nice to meet you as well. It's the first time we've talked.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Nice to meet you too. I think it's my first time meeting PT as well.

ProjectPT: Yay!

LiftingNerdBro: That has been less enjoyable, hasn't it? You can be honest. You didn't like PT, that's alright.

All: [Laughs].

ProjectPT: You didn't say that.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: talk about, get off my chest. I'm not gonna...

ProjectPT: Someone doesn't want to start a fight. There was a question earlier that was related to the Breach mechanics that we went over. The rate of the expansion of the Breaches. Is that a static rate of expansion, or does it increase based on how quickly you're killing?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: It's a constant rate of expansion. It's a slowly decreasing rate of expansion, because the area gets larger as the Breach expands. The time the Breach is open is determined by your kills.

ProjectPT: So killing faster is no benefit as long as you hit that kill threshhold?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Yes. Everything you kill increases the time, which means the Breach travels a little bit further out, which means more monsters. But it's not like it's going to get significantly larger in some situations than others.

ProjectPT: Alright. Thank you very much, that was just a clarification we ended up missing.

Hegemony: If you have any comments you'd like to make on the topic of ES versus Life, we would be very interested in this.

LiftingNerdBro: You gave chat what they wanted, man.

Hegemony: Would you like to say anything about the next patch and what we have to expect about ES versus Life?

Rory_Rackham_GGG: I can't say anything yet. It's still being discussed. It's not a simple black and white thing. It's the sort of thing that would be nice to make in a big rebalance, but, there's a lot of stuff interwoven in that that's not easy to just up and change. We can just lower values, but ES is technically worse than life, although every time a cool unique or keystone or whatever comes out it brings them a little bit closer together. Yeah. Yeah... I have opinions that differ from other people's opinions. We'll sort something out. I can't say when and where and how... and why...

LiftingNerdBro: I feel there's some tension in the GGG office.

Hegemony: It's a war! They fight for what they love.

ProjectPT: There's Team Life, and there's Team CI. Throwing shit at each other all day.

LiftingNerdBro: Rory, thank you for dedicating your time joining up here tonight, we appreciate that.

Rory_Rackham_GGG: Thanks for having me. I hope I didn't say anything too incriminating.

LiftingNerdBro: Let's hope so. We hope you'll be able to join us another time if you're interested, but we don't want to put that pressure on you yet. If you want to see the next podcast, next week we have Kripparian on, and we'll be talking about the game back then until now. What has changed, what is the difference between the games, and just some general discussions about that. And we'll catch up on some of the new league stuff if there's new information. If you want to check that out, make sure you follow the twitch channel here. Also, if you didn't catch the entire podcast tonight with Rory, make sure you check out the VOD posted on Hegemony's YouTube. It will be uploaded in five or six hours. Thank you everyone who tuned in. We will see you guys next Sunday.

ProjectPT: Thank you for the time, Rory.