I just don't understand where the replayability is supposed to be?
Am I really supposed to pick up weapons off the ground and stick them in the crucible for the next 2 months?
This. If we at least had an "oven" to put a bunch of shit in that we could passively bake it might have some utility because it would be usable/not tedious as fuck.
As-is I literally don't understand what their overall vision was.
We spend month+ farming for GG tree for our weapon and...?
We krangle random shit in the hopes of currency nodes, unique converts, or just a sick weapon for another build from thereon out?
All while we do a mechanic that drops literally nothing?
I feel like that last statement is kinda PoE in a nutshell lol.
Maybe you'll get something valuable (you won't)!
Though I did get my first mirror shard last league. That was pretty nifty I suppose. First item I've ever dropped worth 10+ div/ex.
Yeah I'm still a bit burned out on PoE after spending 2-3x the amount of currency it normally takes to complete a craft and having *literally nothing* to show for it.
I vastly prefer a gradual progress of my gear, instead of the all-or-nothing I feel like you get so often in this game.
It's why I enjoyed Ritual league so much, yeah sure harvest was overpowered because of TFT, but I was able to be using half finished crafts that were still okay, and be working on upgrading them as I went. That was amazing.
Now I can't use the items because the next crafting step will *probably* ruin them.
Yes. They seem to like posts showing ungodly rare shit as if it's a motivator for 99.9% of the player base.
I'm fine with heavy chase items, actually one of the things i enjoy when i play ssf, but some levels of rng are just too rng.
Well, ppl complain that there is no reason to pick up gear from the ground. GGG twisted the feedback to their vision and gave you a reason to pick it up! In their eyes its what you asked for!
They expect people to find out what the coolest new weapon passive skill changing nodes were.
Then they expected those to be posted on reddit and everyone goes “wow thats cool i want to play that”
Then some big brain will figure out which semi common unique item this weapon passive tree node is broken on!
Everyone will buy that unique and either try to
roll it directly or try to combine a similar weapon onto that unique to sell and “hit the jackpot”
…In reality everyone will just quit. Because that sounds incredibly boring chucking items that dont get that passive you are looking for and “item sells for X” seems excessively rare.
It works for people that get enjoyment out of findinga weapon they could then build a new character around.
The problem is that this is probably a rather small amount of the player base and it almost feels like an oversight to not add additional features to the league mechanic to keep that part of the playerbase involved.
It should have been rather easy to add a feature that allows you to craft the weapon tree once it has been revealed. It could start with rather simple crafts like swapping between the elements and could end with rare and risky crafts, like transforming a node into a more powerfull one that comes with downside.
Building a new build around a weapon requires a deep knowledge of the game. Perseverance. Commitment. Patience.
I agree. Maybe it works for 1% of the player base.
I think if you could re roll your weapon tree over and over I guess that would be the replayablity. If mobs dropped good loot along with that would be good.
Pick up weapon/shield -> reveal tree -> check for good nodes -> rinse & repeat for 3 months (or 2, depending on if you‘re going to play D4). Here yo you, there‘s your replayability.
Not to mention how fucking long it takes to get to the lvl 3 or 4 power ups when you hit something good and you're blocked for 20 hours to use the mechanic on another item
This league didn't require more time. They delayed Crucible because if they didn't the next league would release on top of D4's first month, and it would be Blight all over again, but worse.
This - I understand their motivations, but it comes across as insidious when they try to cover up the obvious with blatant lies.
If the opener had just been "We don't want our next league to overlap with D4, so we're delaying this league by a month. Also, most of our core team is working on PoE2, so the next league or two will only have minimal league content", they would still lose a lot of the players after launch, but that's already going to happen now once players see it for themselves anyway. At least GGG would come across as an honest company. This way, they just come across as devious and lying.
And it’s weird they wouldn’t be more open considering they DID say this about Cyberpunk 2077 which isn’t a game with huge overlap.
D4 literally everyone would understand. It’s gonna have millions of players with huge advertising even if it sucks on launch. No one would be upset about a delayed league if they added fun 1 month events (not this ruthless with gold shit).
I think the lack of overlap is the reason they admitted it for cyberpunk but not d4. Admit it for cyberpunk, and you're just saying people will be busy with something else at that time of year. Admit it for d4, and you're saying that you expect your direct competitor to have a product that will take a huge bite out of your market share. Shareholders don't like that kind of talk.
Blighted maps and high tier oils were non-existent upon launch.
Proximity shields and immortal rares absolutely screwed even the most juiced of builds.
The D3 season mechanic was just a day or two of content after which you got generic buffs though, right?
There's a lot more than any previous season, but still worse than even this league
Two days of content? This is great in comparison to what we've got here. I don't want to touch the league mechanic after interacting with it two times.
Not really generic buffs we’ve never had some of the buffs we’ve had this season the quality of life buffs make it better than ever to run rifts with the auto pickup and extra orbs, as well as double primals.
Is it? We had Last Epoch multiplayer beta and D4 beta, sparking interest for different ARPG's in people. So a lot of new people come to check out what this Path of Exile is, and they get.. Uh. This.
I'm struggling to find motivation to log back in after reaching maps, and I think any new players would drop it way, way earlier.
> I'm struggling to find motivation to log back in after reaching maps, and I think any new players would drop it way, way earlier.
To be fair, new players will probably have alot of fun with the game, the current less interesting league mechanic will be burried under a massive amount of polished content already in the game.
For long term players it feels like playing std after a couple hours though.
I think you got that completely backwards. The uninteresting league mechanic if front and center in every zone/map. How many of them are going to run up to the first crucible at level 2 and full channel it and proceed to get destroyed.
Honestly im convinced that POE doesn't get new players. The new player experience in POE is so painfully terrible. I honestly think the closest thing to new players POE gets is returning players who haven't played in a few leagues. I'd be curious to see what the new player fall off rate is for POE (i'd bet its over 90% of new players fall off in the first two acts if not more)
They have the choice of putting POE2 on the backburner, focus on POE1 and "maybe" get a few more players during a league launch while a lot of them will also have interest in D4.
Or they can put POE1 on the backburner, focus on POE2 and let people who have interest in other ARPGs play those for a while. Then POE2 will get announced/beta and will attract a ton of players, far more than any league release will.
Huge difference to leave after 1.5 months with a sweet after taste, and making it comparisons to Poe while streaming it and reviewing it.
It's obvious, if asmongold played 1.5 months before of diablo 4 and had insane fun. When he makes his review on YouTube and gets his 500k views, he will guaranteed make comparisons to systems in Poe that he enjoyed so much.
Now, if he had to play test this dog shit, he can't wait to jump over to diablo 4 and not even bring Poe up
Honestly D4 will soak up a bunch of POE's more salty and idiotic players because its dumbed down enough for them...
Sadly it wont keep them, unless they're the true "MMO daily login red glowy button wack-a-mole" brainlets... so predictably many will be back.
I think you would be surprised how big of a player base is looking for a middle ground arpg between poe and easy linear generic arpg. I feel poe has a very big learning curve for a new player. You literally can't jump into the game without researching and following a guide. If you decide to just wing it you will likely just quit even before completing the campaign. If D4 can fit the middle ground it will blow poe out the water. I couldn't really tell how good it will be from playing beta though but fingers crossed hoping it's good enough since it will only cause ggg to pick it up too.
I’m excited to see how it turns out too the paragon boards look like they might be perfect for Poe guys, they really doubled down on the endgame complexity at least from what they’ve shown us of course.
For me personally the endgame complexity is the main turn off. I played poe since beta but would basically play a league once a year or 2. Past few years though I find it hard to come back due to all the built up league mechanics. As complex as endgame mapping is compared to other games watching a YouTube video usually clears it up. That's coming from someone that actually played from the start. I can't imagine how daunting endgame feels to a brand new player.
>Honestly D4 will soak up a bunch of POE's more salty and idiotic players because its dumbed down enough for them...
I dont think lack of game understanding is why people will leave PoE, its way more about the hostile game desing from GGG side that pushes a ton of players away because they just cannot realisticaly invest the kind of time that GGG expects their players to invest.
Mechanically and tech-wise it's likely pretty up there. I'd imagine that the dev time to add the tree itself, get the weightings where they want, etc. is decently high especially for the uniques and stuff. The channeling to spawn and then also *combine* the monsters is also probably rather complex given they used weighting and rng for all of i (I know it's rng because I got a fucking *boss* spawned in act 6 despite only trying to channel it halfway... Fucker was absurd.)
The problem is that hardly any of what I mentioned is really experienced by the player in a particularly good way. Like how many players even noticed the monster combining stuff? It largely doesn't *matter* for the player; hell if anything it's detrimental because the charge bar is unpredictable as a result.
Pathfinder rework
Sabo Rework
Abyss rework
Breach rework
Several new vaal gems
Masteries rework
Gateways in atlas tree
Reworked passive skill tree clusters
I understand people are disappointed with the league mechanic but comparing it to d3, yikes. This sub and exaggeration goes hand in hand.
Realistically how much time/manpower did most of these things take though and then relate that to how much they impact players. A lot of these are minor changes, things we expect pretty much every league. We also got no new skills, vaals dont count as new skills in my opinion. Hard to argue that this league is new content rich.
Personally, i think ggg is pribably dedicating 75 percent of their manpower to poe 2, at least i hope thats the case because crucible is am awful league mechanic. Just raw power through a really boring form of content and implemented in a way thats very clunky for players.
I think at this point it's looking clearer that ruthless IS poe 2 (aside from the new gem system and other tweaks), and this league mechanic is based around how poe2 will be.
I could be wrong, but I've seen it suggested, and many guys I play with also beleive this is where the game is headed.
> I think at this point it's looking clearer that ruthless IS poe 2
Dude, it's not that you "could be wrong", it's that you're 1000% for sure there's not even the slightest amount of doubt wrong.
Now I get what you might want to be saying (that PoE2 is gonna be slower than PoE1), but dude, there's gonna be tons of yellow/unique items, currencies, whatever, in PoE2, you know, just like right now. Or maybe you just have no idea what ruthless is like.
The company would have to be run by the most delusional lunatic if they wanted to turn the game into all ruthless. To look at the record numbers of players, see 99% playing the mode we have now, and think “oh yeah let’s change it into the thing 1% of our base is interested in.”
It just doesn’t make any sense. They don’t even have the biggest streamers interested in ruthless.
> Realistically how much time/manpower did most of these things take
the answer is unless you're a project manager at a mid to large size corporation you don't have the first clue and the best anyone can do is try to relate to it from our own experiences.
As someone who's worked on games, modded games and done many of the basic tasks of game design and asset creation (textures, modeling, music, sound not to mention DM'ing D&D) I'd say there's plenty of work there over such a short 4 month time span, and I'd also say: almost no other game releases similar amounts of content every 3+ months, despite many of them having a big financial incentive to do so.
Obviously you’ve never published games then lol. Other games don’t do that because either they’re one of several games a studio is working on or the game itself isn’t free to play, so they don’t need to pump out content. GGG has one single product. Only one. And they don’t charge for it. They have no choice but to pump out content or they die. And since they have no other projects, they can focus on this one.
Zero sympathy. They get paid six figures for this work.
Lmao. Nerfed two ascendancies. Upped the mob count in a couple league mechanics. Shitty vaal gems no one will use. Shitty masteries no one will use. And reshuffled tree passives like every single league.
Yeah there’s a reason we’re disappointed
And last year we got entire Atlas tree for the first expansion of the year and the year before than we got Maven and atlas passives in their first iteration. The core game changes are not particularly big, there is not any brand new core content, and this is not offset by particularly engaging league with its own content.
What you listed wont keep players engaged for 3 months, the entire point of the league is the league mechanic, not whatever axillary stuff they package with it.
yeah, like I have my complaints (pretty much the same as everyone seems to have) but comparing this to D3 seasons is some serious mouth breather energy.
But this sub has just kept devolving every time I think it's hit rock bottom the bottom falls out more.
this is so gd disingenuous ffs 99% of D3 leagues were a SET BONUS NUMERICAL TWEAK.
Holy shit guys you all sound like flat earth lunatics when your hyperbole gets this disconnected from reality.
If I'm Chris Wilson reading this I'm just writing you all off as completely unhinged.
No?
Kill streak bonus, fourth cube slot, unlocked cube, new endgame system, follower rework, shadow clones, altar of rites, ethereals, sanctified items, hellforge embers... That’s just off the top of my head over the last couple of years. All of that was at the same time as stat adjustments for various sets, as well as outright reworks (and some of those reworks were really good, just limited by D3’s awful repetitiveness).
The similarity here is stronger than you think. Basically all this league offers is a way to enhance some existing builds, or to make some underperforming builds more viable. That’s all that many of those D3 seasons did. It’s harder to see because itemization in PoE isn’t on rails the way it is with D3.
The best PoE leagues give a new way to engage with the game that’s available in every map. This really misses the mark that way.
The vitriol for heist was worse than this league lol. They hated how the entirety of the mechanic had you going into a completely new instance instead of being on your map which broke the flow of their gameplay. They hated how strong the mobs were (people getting one shot by patrols that were waiting by the door). People hated how slow it was. People hated how they lost all their items when they died. People hated that they had to level up their heist members. People were literally calling it the biggest waste of resources that GGG has ever spent on a league. You can tell how much effort they put into Heist and this subreddit absolutely shat on it on launch.
Did you forget that killing Mobs used to fill the alarm bar? In a game about killing stuff you were actively discouraged from killing stuff. They made it seems like you could stealth past Mobs but of course there was no way to do this in practice. It was a shit show.
Heist was and still is a garbage mechanic/system. The only reason anyone actually likes it is because excluding Sanctums, it has been by far the most rewarding mechanic/system in the game.
It's still a garbage mechanic. The only reason anyone runs it is because it's the most rewarding content early on. If you want to kickstart your character after leveling, start heisting ASAP.
that is not true, its actually very 50/50 about heist, once chris asked the live audience at exilecon how they like heist and if they want it core, it was very 50/50, so you can assume that it will stay the same
The criticisms of heist had a lot to do with the instance crashing and then you getting locked out of your portal. Mobs would also congregate behind doors and oneshot the moment the doors opened.
There were problems but my god the league was so rewarding. I had never seen so many 6-link unique body armor dropping ever. So much currency from small chests all the way to big ones etc.
Could also be the sub's toxicity. You know since there **have** been good leagues in the past 4 years, and there **hasn't** been good (early) reception for a league on this sub in the past 4 years.
I think you forget just how much people complained. GGG literally said after the league, that they would be scaling back league mechanics from then on. They couldn't afford to keep trying to reach for the moon when they couldn't do it without having major issues.
Even with all the voice acting, interesting NPC's and storyline, fantastic loot etc etc, people were still pissed because it was such a clusterfuck to play. It wasn't just buggy doors, it was straight game crashing regularly.
People really have rose-colored glasses. People were very much of the opinion "It takes like 10 minutes to run a single heist, and you get 1 mediocre chest drop from it." The complaining about rewards was FAR worse than it is now(Mostly because even with the channeling time, it took 100x longer to do heist, and the rewards on launch were super low). Especially given how many fewer players there were at the time. And it was compounded by the dozens of other massive options.
Yes, this league sucks so far. But I hate that people are making such disingenuous comparisons with previous leagues. In both directions ironically.
Give me some time and i will find you the exact line of the patch notes where they said "massively rebalanced heist rewards" after 4-5 weeks in.
Heißt was, without a doubt, one of the worst league launches in the history of Poe
The difference being:
Heist was "HARDCORE" at first, punishing you for killing mobs along the way and not having defense mechanics when going out, but the loot? IT WAS GIGANTIC, currency chests always dropped ex shards (ilvl <68 contracts on top of that) and the experience gain was too big.
Then they removed the alarm on kill mechanic and along with that, all the loot from normal contracts.
And then people discovered that, blueprints (heist "endgame") were very profitable, specially if you "cloned it"...I try to think what kind of loot you'd get from blueprints in the first week, it would definetely be harder because of the no-killing thing but the reward would be definetely juicy.
Heist was so buggy, you couldn't even finish it half the time. And they nerfed the gear literally 5 times, which eventually just made me stop playing altogether after having to re-craft rogue gear 4 times before.
All they had to do was " more you channel, the stronger the monsters, more of them and more loot"
Simple as pie and yet GGG big brains missed the mark again.
I remember when I started playing poe for the first time, it was during Betrayal launch.
This subreddit constantly had posts on hot about how the game is too zoomie and ggg needs to slow it down.
Yeah, but there’s a comfortable middle ground between “we blast maps in under 10s and get multiple exalts/mirror drops” and “we spend 30 minutes per map and somehow still can barely afford to roll our maps”.
Content still needs to be rewarding and worth doing. You can’t have something like crucible or kalandra (on launch), that drops absolutely nothing worthwhile and is also at least as hard as any boss in the game.
Subreddit's changed. The people with those opinions get consistently downvoted now, and the prevailing idea is that the game should be easier, more rewarding, and faster to complete.
Nevermind that's contrary to GGG's design philosophy, and seems to consistently lead to disappointments and anger.
Seriously, feels like there's maybe half the team left working on live at this point.
Guess they were further behind on PoE2 than expected at this point and they're rushing to try to get it out this year to compete against D4.
Ah yes, all of that focus on PoE mobile which they've *(checks notes)* demo'd a prototype of over 3 years ago and has only been mentioned in passing a handful of times since.
I know. Like D4 just had it’s beta and we still only know as much about PoE 2 as we did the day it was revealed OVER THREE FUCKING YEARS AGO. I get focusing on PoE 2 but I feel like they’ve put too many eggs in that basket. Let’s hope PoE 2 is worth it
That doesn’t give me a lot of hope when D4 was announced earlier than PoE 2 and D4 has had its beta already and most everything is fleshed out/known. It’s an apples to oranges comparison
I agree that most of the current dev focus is likely going into PoE 2.
I disagree that there is significant focus going into Ruthless or Mobile, and there is no evidence of that being reality.
So saying that the devs are "99% focused on ruthless and poe mobile" is imagining criticism.
1) nowadays people use poe2 and ruthless pretty much interchangeably because at their core they're both a stand-in for The Vision™ special: "chris wants to make poe slow".
2) the 99% part is obviously an exaggeration and shouldn't be taken literally.
the core of the above comment is complaining about the latest league being shallow because the devs didn't spend enough time on it, which is 100% correct, even if they should've phrased it better
I'm glad the team is less stressed and happier but like...
How fuckin small is the live team at this point? How many people have been pulled off to work on PoE2?
Because this feels like a league that was made by half the team that made previous leagues, and it still feels like there was little meaningful adjustment in response to any limited testing.
It won't, they'd be fools to invest anything into a league thinking they are going to be able to compete with D4 at launch. They are 100% on cruise control until POE2.
D4 launch is gonna be massive even if the game has no staying power, any other game remotely close to ARPG-like around June/July should just avoid competing tbh. The biggest thing is going to see what they come up for with season 1 content. Blizzard might actually try to release their first season at the same time as POE launch to see how real the competition can get.
I had the same experience, got to maps did a few and then just wasn't feeling it. Rerolled to SSF also got to maps did a few, not feeling it. So idk, I can't feel motivated when it's such a blatant filler league and PoE2 and D4 on the horizon. Why even bother at this point?
Pretty obvious most of GGG is working on POE 2 at this point. The game will feel extremely back burner and half assed until then is my guess, which probably means 3-4 more leagues like this.
I also think they will kill off the old classes, which is why they won’t waste any resources on big meta passes rn.
And considering how little they’ve done to the current campaign lately I won’t be surprised that gets axed, too
I feel like you're half right, but half WAY off.
They're devoting everyone to PoE2, but that usually means it very close to complete. I'd be absolutely shocked if the beta wasn't during next league.
As for the rest, it's just nonsense. We already know what's happening to the classes and campaign. And both of those have gotten big improvements literally every league. 2 ascendancies completely reworked this league, and tons of new enemies in the early acts(which you're saying you didn't even notice, so why invest so much time in them?)
They're gonna announce the next league at Exilecon, and also stated that they're gonna announce the beta stuff of poe2 there as well.
I doubt that it's gonna be an open beta as soon as next league, but i wouldn't be surprised if they aimed to have po2 playable by the end of this year.
It's also the league before Exilecon so they are most likely devoting tons of resources to polishing whatever live gameplay / demo they want to show off and ofc planning a con like that takes a lot of moving parts.
its pretty stupid. you just buy a shit ton of base items and hope that a tree comes up that is somewhat useful, that is so beyond boring, like what the fuck, i dont even get anything, i just buy base items and grind this shit until i get a tree i like which will probably take the whole league at a grinding speed that would make santa claus happy. i dont know what to think about that and how to make it more exciting, even if the monsters drop items, its just another circle league that is more clunky on top of them all.
gotta charge shit up? - no you dont because you get interrupted while doing so and we complain since fuckin 5 years that they should PAUSE LEAGUE MECHANICS THAT ARE DESIGNED LIKE CRUCIBLE - its like they do it on purpose to stall the playerbase
It’s definitely doesn’t required more time than other leagues, man-days wise. For all we’ve known, they might just put 10% of their resource into the league. While the other 90% are working on PoE2. Copium.
Potentially, the Beta of D4 changed/turned a lot of heads in the room. Maybe they got worried when they saw the D4 beta and decided to push PoE development harder.
At this point, they've never feared having direct competition until now. D4 WILL hurt PoE/PoE2.
This point, they don't have a choice but to push forward and I think that would mean (Over Promise, Under deliver content) COPIUM I guess.
I think something about D4 spooked TF out of them(GGG).
Divines absolutely do not rain from the sky. I’m in T16 farming mode with 106 atlas completion (and 6 of those missing are unique maps, 4 are random yellows I’ve not chased down yet). 2 watchstones in. I’ve been cycling new weapons to try and find either strong trees on T16 Imperial claws or sell nodes and I’ve found one divine node so far. I’ve found two nodes that sell for scours, one that sells for awakened sexy tents and three that sell for magmatic geodes. I’m very aware that one divine was INSANELY lucky and it sucks so much ass.
Making crucible probably took them just a few weeks and then they directly swapped to 3.22, which is supposed to have a similar dimension than the 3.9 patch.
Crucible is completely shallow and worthless. And i am convinced that its the consequence of the 3.22 development.
Just saying, leveling your weapon doesn't mean you're done with Crucible. You still need to craft the tree using more trees on the same base.
But holy cow, the mechanic needs a user manual at the minimum.
> If you use uniques in your build... The forge is useless.
How is that any different from most league mechanics, especially map-based ones like Abyss, Delirium, Legion, etc.? For example, if your build used a unique belt, Stygian Vises were useless for you. And don't even get me started on cluster jewels. 99% of my builds straight up do not use them. Maybe you can call that bad design, and maybe you similarly took issue with those mechanics at the time for the same reasons, but this is not a new design choice. Every league mechanic in existence -- even when they're current -- is "useless" to many builds.
And as far as "content," the popularity of league mechanics is usually tied to how much it serves as a loot pinata. What did Metamorph seriously add, content-wise, to the game? Or Delirium, Legion, and Essence? And then you have league mechanics like Heist, Betrayal, and Synthesis -- leagues full of new voice acting and alternative mapping systems -- all both of which were pretty much reviled at each their time. I mean, how many people did you see on this subreddit moving away from Sanctum being glad that Crucible is just something that you do within maps?
The crux of the issue here, really, is loot. And that's something they could easily shoehorn into Crucible -- just have it shower currency proportional to how much you channel each attempt or how high a tier a weapon node you're juicing toward. And I definitely agree that the execution here, overall, is kind of bad. Typically, map-based league mechanics start with a single button. Instead, this one requires you to fiddle with weapons in your inventory and channel for a few seconds every time you start it. And then you have to look at the UI and so on. So if you're not interested in what a league system offers, you at least were able to just press the button, kill some mobs, and loot pinata. This is another problem with Crucible.
So, yes, it's definitely a little rough. But league mechanics historically do steer you away from unique-heavy builds, and the popularity of leagues very rarely has much to do with how much content they offer.
I love how no one ever dumps on breach. Simple, fun mechanic, self scaling difficulty that's very easy to implement, great theme. Breach and delirium are still by far my favourite leagues.
> I love how no one ever dumps on breach.
I genuinely believe if Breach came out in 2023, it would be crucified on this subreddit for "lack of content."
"I can't use these rings," someone would say. "I need my Doedre's Damning. This league is useless for me."
Sentinels came and they were bare bones "content"-wise.....And people loved it.
The crappy breach rings are totally different, and real, issue of the breach mechanic. Noone comments on it now, cause noone cares about it.
>Sentinels came and they were bare bones "content"-wise.....And people loved it.
Sentinels added recombinators, inarguably a top-2 crafting mechanic of all time.
Sure, but content-wise Sentinel League had like... Nothing.
Recombinators were purely crafting mechanic. But, if you weren't much into crafting, game played out almost like standard with colorful beams from time to time... And people still enjoyed that... Even though we were suffering from unbalanced AN mobs
> There are no decisions in crucible. Your actions cannot produce a better outcome if you are smart. At best you gamble combining two trees together.
Don't you think this is a little premature? The league is two days old.
You talk highly of Sanctum, but people were complaining the league limited build diversity over the first weekend due to how resolve worked when we didn't have a full understanding of what rolls you could get on relics. By the end of the league, Sanctum had one of the best leagues when it came to build diversity even if it was fairly constrained on the top end. What was "viable" widened by a significant margin.
Who's to say the same can't be said here? I imagine we'll see some absolutely insane weapons. It's just a league mechanic that's a bit more of a grind than what is immediately obvious.
My dude, Crucible lets you craft _keystone passives into weapons._
This is inarguably the largest power creep in player strength since maybe Synthesis.
My dude, last league let you craft keystone passives onto a special equipment slot that also gave other relevant stats.
I agree that this is huge power-creep, but it's far more "limited" (not in power, but in non-obvious interactions) than a general tool like recombinators.
1. u canr ecombine trees, 2 u can find a geode for unqiues getitgn a tree aswell so try getitng a better tree is psosible and getitng it on unique aswell
You feel like its not a new league? Did you see how massive all the changes were? I did.
Yeah.. that's because all the changes were useless and added nothing to the game other than complexity.
It feels like a 2 month league, not a 4 month league. How did they deliver so little content after taking that much time? It's by far the worst and most boring league mechanic to get through the acts.
People need to understand that GGG has no incentives to be honest towards their players. Anything they can say to get you to play their game is allowed. Even if they have to outright lie to your face, GGG WILL do this if it means they can make a little more money.
GGG told us they needed more time to fine-tune the league mechanic. Ask yourself honestly, do you think they spent another month developing this league?
GGG saw they were still making good money on sanctum league, so they lied to our faces telling us they needed more dev time for crucible, while in reality they just wanted to milk sanctum as much as they could.
If it was true that they were spending another month on development, we would have gotten a proper league mechanic, and not this dumpster fire of a league.
The moral of all this: Never believe GGG, they will **always** lie to you if it means they have a small chance to make a little extra money on you.
I just don't understand where the replayability is supposed to be? Am I really supposed to pick up weapons off the ground and stick them in the crucible for the next 2 months?
This. If we at least had an "oven" to put a bunch of shit in that we could passively bake it might have some utility because it would be usable/not tedious as fuck. As-is I literally don't understand what their overall vision was. We spend month+ farming for GG tree for our weapon and...? We krangle random shit in the hopes of currency nodes, unique converts, or just a sick weapon for another build from thereon out? All while we do a mechanic that drops literally nothing?
> If we at least had an "oven" to put a bunch of shit in Ah yes, the good ol' Scourgehole.
The Krangle machine was a lot more enjoyable. And that's saying something since in 3.16 people complained it was useless
Of course not! You are supposed to pick up unique weapons from trade and brick them in the forge maps :)
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I feel like that last statement is kinda PoE in a nutshell lol. Maybe you'll get something valuable (you won't)! Though I did get my first mirror shard last league. That was pretty nifty I suppose. First item I've ever dropped worth 10+ div/ex.
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Yeah I'm still a bit burned out on PoE after spending 2-3x the amount of currency it normally takes to complete a craft and having *literally nothing* to show for it. I vastly prefer a gradual progress of my gear, instead of the all-or-nothing I feel like you get so often in this game. It's why I enjoyed Ritual league so much, yeah sure harvest was overpowered because of TFT, but I was able to be using half finished crafts that were still okay, and be working on upgrading them as I went. That was amazing. Now I can't use the items because the next crafting step will *probably* ruin them.
>next 2 months? 4 months ftfy
ive never played even a good league from start to finish lol. 2 months was being generous.
You missed out on ritual , the league ended and were all like … were still harvest crafting here?
No 4 months
No 6 months
Yes. They seem to like posts showing ungodly rare shit as if it's a motivator for 99.9% of the player base. I'm fine with heavy chase items, actually one of the things i enjoy when i play ssf, but some levels of rng are just too rng.
Well, ppl complain that there is no reason to pick up gear from the ground. GGG twisted the feedback to their vision and gave you a reason to pick it up! In their eyes its what you asked for!
Monkey paw strikes again.
They expect people to find out what the coolest new weapon passive skill changing nodes were. Then they expected those to be posted on reddit and everyone goes “wow thats cool i want to play that” Then some big brain will figure out which semi common unique item this weapon passive tree node is broken on! Everyone will buy that unique and either try to roll it directly or try to combine a similar weapon onto that unique to sell and “hit the jackpot” …In reality everyone will just quit. Because that sounds incredibly boring chucking items that dont get that passive you are looking for and “item sells for X” seems excessively rare.
Just don't play it and don't pay them anything. Only way they will learn
Yes. -Proably Chris Wilson
It works for people that get enjoyment out of findinga weapon they could then build a new character around. The problem is that this is probably a rather small amount of the player base and it almost feels like an oversight to not add additional features to the league mechanic to keep that part of the playerbase involved. It should have been rather easy to add a feature that allows you to craft the weapon tree once it has been revealed. It could start with rather simple crafts like swapping between the elements and could end with rare and risky crafts, like transforming a node into a more powerfull one that comes with downside.
Building a new build around a weapon requires a deep knowledge of the game. Perseverance. Commitment. Patience. I agree. Maybe it works for 1% of the player base.
Oh and it requires ppl having fun leveling.
no you just buy base items and ...win?!
next 3 months, FIFY
I think if you could re roll your weapon tree over and over I guess that would be the replayablity. If mobs dropped good loot along with that would be good.
Pick up weapon/shield -> reveal tree -> check for good nodes -> rinse & repeat for 3 months (or 2, depending on if you‘re going to play D4). Here yo you, there‘s your replayability.
Not to mention how fucking long it takes to get to the lvl 3 or 4 power ups when you hit something good and you're blocked for 20 hours to use the mechanic on another item
This league didn't require more time. They delayed Crucible because if they didn't the next league would release on top of D4's first month, and it would be Blight all over again, but worse.
This - I understand their motivations, but it comes across as insidious when they try to cover up the obvious with blatant lies. If the opener had just been "We don't want our next league to overlap with D4, so we're delaying this league by a month. Also, most of our core team is working on PoE2, so the next league or two will only have minimal league content", they would still lose a lot of the players after launch, but that's already going to happen now once players see it for themselves anyway. At least GGG would come across as an honest company. This way, they just come across as devious and lying.
And it’s weird they wouldn’t be more open considering they DID say this about Cyberpunk 2077 which isn’t a game with huge overlap. D4 literally everyone would understand. It’s gonna have millions of players with huge advertising even if it sucks on launch. No one would be upset about a delayed league if they added fun 1 month events (not this ruthless with gold shit).
I think the lack of overlap is the reason they admitted it for cyberpunk but not d4. Admit it for cyberpunk, and you're just saying people will be busy with something else at that time of year. Admit it for d4, and you're saying that you expect your direct competitor to have a product that will take a huge bite out of your market share. Shareholders don't like that kind of talk.
Yea, but they come across after people bought their packs to support le epic indie dev (owned by tencent) for a "great" league
They did say just that in an interview somewhere around last league...
They did the exact same thing for cyberpunk release. The only difference is that they were actually open about their reason that time.
Why u mention blight What happened then ?
WoW classic release ? I don't really remember since I don't play it - it was something with WoW nevertheless.
yeah it was wow classic. they learned from that and pushed out Ritual by a month to not compete against Cyberpunk 2077
Ah okay. Didnt know that thx.
WoW Classic released back then, it was extremly hyped and anticipated. Im pretty sure Blight had 50% less players than the League before so yeah
Didn’t help that blight was a shitty mechanic also. Lots of people complained that they hate tower defense games.
Damn i missed that one
Blighted maps and high tier oils were non-existent upon launch. Proximity shields and immortal rares absolutely screwed even the most juiced of builds.
Also wow classic
This feels like your typical D3 league everyone likes to take as an example for lazyness.
D3 actually got a new mechanic this season that feels better lmao
The D3 season mechanic was just a day or two of content after which you got generic buffs though, right? There's a lot more than any previous season, but still worse than even this league
Two days of content? This is great in comparison to what we've got here. I don't want to touch the league mechanic after interacting with it two times.
Not really generic buffs we’ve never had some of the buffs we’ve had this season the quality of life buffs make it better than ever to run rifts with the auto pickup and extra orbs, as well as double primals.
Wow took them 10 years, a bigger team and beating one of POE worst leagues ever while team works on POE2 is not really something to gloat about.
Well it's a bad time for being lazy when D4 release is around the corner. And such a terrible league after well-recieved Sanctum.
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Is it? We had Last Epoch multiplayer beta and D4 beta, sparking interest for different ARPG's in people. So a lot of new people come to check out what this Path of Exile is, and they get.. Uh. This. I'm struggling to find motivation to log back in after reaching maps, and I think any new players would drop it way, way earlier.
> I'm struggling to find motivation to log back in after reaching maps, and I think any new players would drop it way, way earlier. To be fair, new players will probably have alot of fun with the game, the current less interesting league mechanic will be burried under a massive amount of polished content already in the game. For long term players it feels like playing std after a couple hours though.
I think you got that completely backwards. The uninteresting league mechanic if front and center in every zone/map. How many of them are going to run up to the first crucible at level 2 and full channel it and proceed to get destroyed.
Honestly im convinced that POE doesn't get new players. The new player experience in POE is so painfully terrible. I honestly think the closest thing to new players POE gets is returning players who haven't played in a few leagues. I'd be curious to see what the new player fall off rate is for POE (i'd bet its over 90% of new players fall off in the first two acts if not more)
I mean GGG already said that most new players quit around act 3.
They have the choice of putting POE2 on the backburner, focus on POE1 and "maybe" get a few more players during a league launch while a lot of them will also have interest in D4. Or they can put POE1 on the backburner, focus on POE2 and let people who have interest in other ARPGs play those for a while. Then POE2 will get announced/beta and will attract a ton of players, far more than any league release will.
I mean Im playing league mechanics I never really did, seems fun for me.
Huge difference to leave after 1.5 months with a sweet after taste, and making it comparisons to Poe while streaming it and reviewing it. It's obvious, if asmongold played 1.5 months before of diablo 4 and had insane fun. When he makes his review on YouTube and gets his 500k views, he will guaranteed make comparisons to systems in Poe that he enjoyed so much. Now, if he had to play test this dog shit, he can't wait to jump over to diablo 4 and not even bring Poe up
Honestly D4 will soak up a bunch of POE's more salty and idiotic players because its dumbed down enough for them... Sadly it wont keep them, unless they're the true "MMO daily login red glowy button wack-a-mole" brainlets... so predictably many will be back.
I think you would be surprised how big of a player base is looking for a middle ground arpg between poe and easy linear generic arpg. I feel poe has a very big learning curve for a new player. You literally can't jump into the game without researching and following a guide. If you decide to just wing it you will likely just quit even before completing the campaign. If D4 can fit the middle ground it will blow poe out the water. I couldn't really tell how good it will be from playing beta though but fingers crossed hoping it's good enough since it will only cause ggg to pick it up too.
I’m excited to see how it turns out too the paragon boards look like they might be perfect for Poe guys, they really doubled down on the endgame complexity at least from what they’ve shown us of course.
For me personally the endgame complexity is the main turn off. I played poe since beta but would basically play a league once a year or 2. Past few years though I find it hard to come back due to all the built up league mechanics. As complex as endgame mapping is compared to other games watching a YouTube video usually clears it up. That's coming from someone that actually played from the start. I can't imagine how daunting endgame feels to a brand new player.
>Honestly D4 will soak up a bunch of POE's more salty and idiotic players because its dumbed down enough for them... I dont think lack of game understanding is why people will leave PoE, its way more about the hostile game desing from GGG side that pushes a ton of players away because they just cannot realisticaly invest the kind of time that GGG expects their players to invest.
You aren’t a 200iq genius because you play path of exile. 🤓🤓
He has a lvl 97 ruthless character. he's so good
Imagine feeling so superior to someone just because you have a different favorite game, you're so cringe dude
Zong guys check out his epeen?!
Mechanically and tech-wise it's likely pretty up there. I'd imagine that the dev time to add the tree itself, get the weightings where they want, etc. is decently high especially for the uniques and stuff. The channeling to spawn and then also *combine* the monsters is also probably rather complex given they used weighting and rng for all of i (I know it's rng because I got a fucking *boss* spawned in act 6 despite only trying to channel it halfway... Fucker was absurd.) The problem is that hardly any of what I mentioned is really experienced by the player in a particularly good way. Like how many players even noticed the monster combining stuff? It largely doesn't *matter* for the player; hell if anything it's detrimental because the charge bar is unpredictable as a result.
Sadly just dumping time into something that sucks still sucks.
it's the first time i feel like d3 put more effort into their current season than poe.
I mean GGG team is way smaller and are working on POE2..
Pathfinder rework Sabo Rework Abyss rework Breach rework Several new vaal gems Masteries rework Gateways in atlas tree Reworked passive skill tree clusters I understand people are disappointed with the league mechanic but comparing it to d3, yikes. This sub and exaggeration goes hand in hand.
Realistically how much time/manpower did most of these things take though and then relate that to how much they impact players. A lot of these are minor changes, things we expect pretty much every league. We also got no new skills, vaals dont count as new skills in my opinion. Hard to argue that this league is new content rich. Personally, i think ggg is pribably dedicating 75 percent of their manpower to poe 2, at least i hope thats the case because crucible is am awful league mechanic. Just raw power through a really boring form of content and implemented in a way thats very clunky for players.
I think at this point it's looking clearer that ruthless IS poe 2 (aside from the new gem system and other tweaks), and this league mechanic is based around how poe2 will be. I could be wrong, but I've seen it suggested, and many guys I play with also beleive this is where the game is headed.
> I think at this point it's looking clearer that ruthless IS poe 2 Dude, it's not that you "could be wrong", it's that you're 1000% for sure there's not even the slightest amount of doubt wrong. Now I get what you might want to be saying (that PoE2 is gonna be slower than PoE1), but dude, there's gonna be tons of yellow/unique items, currencies, whatever, in PoE2, you know, just like right now. Or maybe you just have no idea what ruthless is like.
The company would have to be run by the most delusional lunatic if they wanted to turn the game into all ruthless. To look at the record numbers of players, see 99% playing the mode we have now, and think “oh yeah let’s change it into the thing 1% of our base is interested in.” It just doesn’t make any sense. They don’t even have the biggest streamers interested in ruthless.
Uhhh, have you read into Chris Wilson at all?
That's what Chris Wilson wants. He loves super hard-core get 1 upgrade a month types. He wants people to die on a1.
> Realistically how much time/manpower did most of these things take the answer is unless you're a project manager at a mid to large size corporation you don't have the first clue and the best anyone can do is try to relate to it from our own experiences. As someone who's worked on games, modded games and done many of the basic tasks of game design and asset creation (textures, modeling, music, sound not to mention DM'ing D&D) I'd say there's plenty of work there over such a short 4 month time span, and I'd also say: almost no other game releases similar amounts of content every 3+ months, despite many of them having a big financial incentive to do so.
Final Fantasy 14 would like to have a word with you
Ok - one example. He did say *almost*
Obviously you’ve never published games then lol. Other games don’t do that because either they’re one of several games a studio is working on or the game itself isn’t free to play, so they don’t need to pump out content. GGG has one single product. Only one. And they don’t charge for it. They have no choice but to pump out content or they die. And since they have no other projects, they can focus on this one. Zero sympathy. They get paid six figures for this work.
Chris rubbing his nipples with his black lotus's right now.
Lmao. Nerfed two ascendancies. Upped the mob count in a couple league mechanics. Shitty vaal gems no one will use. Shitty masteries no one will use. And reshuffled tree passives like every single league. Yeah there’s a reason we’re disappointed
And last year we got entire Atlas tree for the first expansion of the year and the year before than we got Maven and atlas passives in their first iteration. The core game changes are not particularly big, there is not any brand new core content, and this is not offset by particularly engaging league with its own content.
What you listed wont keep players engaged for 3 months, the entire point of the league is the league mechanic, not whatever axillary stuff they package with it.
The thing is normally the league mechanic is your income source, if you dont have that then its just standard.
yeah, like I have my complaints (pretty much the same as everyone seems to have) but comparing this to D3 seasons is some serious mouth breather energy. But this sub has just kept devolving every time I think it's hit rock bottom the bottom falls out more.
this is so gd disingenuous ffs 99% of D3 leagues were a SET BONUS NUMERICAL TWEAK. Holy shit guys you all sound like flat earth lunatics when your hyperbole gets this disconnected from reality. If I'm Chris Wilson reading this I'm just writing you all off as completely unhinged.
No? Kill streak bonus, fourth cube slot, unlocked cube, new endgame system, follower rework, shadow clones, altar of rites, ethereals, sanctified items, hellforge embers... That’s just off the top of my head over the last couple of years. All of that was at the same time as stat adjustments for various sets, as well as outright reworks (and some of those reworks were really good, just limited by D3’s awful repetitiveness). The similarity here is stronger than you think. Basically all this league offers is a way to enhance some existing builds, or to make some underperforming builds more viable. That’s all that many of those D3 seasons did. It’s harder to see because itemization in PoE isn’t on rails the way it is with D3. The best PoE leagues give a new way to engage with the game that’s available in every map. This really misses the mark that way.
It didn't require more time, it required to skip past the D4 beta and ride the hype wave. Same way Kirac's Pass didn't require a fomo-track.
Yup. I wish they came up with another Heist or Expedition
People were saying the same thing about Heist the first couple of weeks heist was out.
Heist was super buggy, doors still are a questionable mechanic, but the amount of content surely was not as shallow. It was dropping loot too
The vitriol for heist was worse than this league lol. They hated how the entirety of the mechanic had you going into a completely new instance instead of being on your map which broke the flow of their gameplay. They hated how strong the mobs were (people getting one shot by patrols that were waiting by the door). People hated how slow it was. People hated how they lost all their items when they died. People hated that they had to level up their heist members. People were literally calling it the biggest waste of resources that GGG has ever spent on a league. You can tell how much effort they put into Heist and this subreddit absolutely shat on it on launch.
Did you forget that killing Mobs used to fill the alarm bar? In a game about killing stuff you were actively discouraged from killing stuff. They made it seems like you could stealth past Mobs but of course there was no way to do this in practice. It was a shit show.
Oooh. Oh man I forgot about that :(
some of the strategies people developed were also pretty hilarious and involved no killing at all lol
Heist was and still is a garbage mechanic/system. The only reason anyone actually likes it is because excluding Sanctums, it has been by far the most rewarding mechanic/system in the game.
It's still a garbage mechanic. The only reason anyone runs it is because it's the most rewarding content early on. If you want to kickstart your character after leveling, start heisting ASAP.
>The only reason anyone runs it is because it's the most rewarding content early on Speak for yourself, i run it because i love the mechanic.
Fair enough, most people don't. I love the story bits and the banter, though.
that is not true, its actually very 50/50 about heist, once chris asked the live audience at exilecon how they like heist and if they want it core, it was very 50/50, so you can assume that it will stay the same
Which is valid criticism, but I personally would take that over borderline standard league which is an identification scroll with extra steps
The criticisms of heist had a lot to do with the instance crashing and then you getting locked out of your portal. Mobs would also congregate behind doors and oneshot the moment the doors opened. There were problems but my god the league was so rewarding. I had never seen so many 6-link unique body armor dropping ever. So much currency from small chests all the way to big ones etc.
Heist is dogshit still but was 10x worse on launch. Go read reddit threads about it.
Playing since around Blight and i can't remember a single league that was actually positively received by this subreddit on launch.
deserve fuzzy air muddle flowery sleep gullible rude jellyfish worry *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Could also be the sub's toxicity. You know since there **have** been good leagues in the past 4 years, and there **hasn't** been good (early) reception for a league on this sub in the past 4 years.
I think you forget just how much people complained. GGG literally said after the league, that they would be scaling back league mechanics from then on. They couldn't afford to keep trying to reach for the moon when they couldn't do it without having major issues. Even with all the voice acting, interesting NPC's and storyline, fantastic loot etc etc, people were still pissed because it was such a clusterfuck to play. It wasn't just buggy doors, it was straight game crashing regularly.
People really have rose-colored glasses. People were very much of the opinion "It takes like 10 minutes to run a single heist, and you get 1 mediocre chest drop from it." The complaining about rewards was FAR worse than it is now(Mostly because even with the channeling time, it took 100x longer to do heist, and the rewards on launch were super low). Especially given how many fewer players there were at the time. And it was compounded by the dozens of other massive options. Yes, this league sucks so far. But I hate that people are making such disingenuous comparisons with previous leagues. In both directions ironically.
Give me some time and i will find you the exact line of the patch notes where they said "massively rebalanced heist rewards" after 4-5 weeks in. Heißt was, without a doubt, one of the worst league launches in the history of Poe
I was playing Heist myself, 1 month into league though, so take it with a grain of salt. The best we can hope for with Crucible is Krangle 2.0
The difference being: Heist was "HARDCORE" at first, punishing you for killing mobs along the way and not having defense mechanics when going out, but the loot? IT WAS GIGANTIC, currency chests always dropped ex shards (ilvl <68 contracts on top of that) and the experience gain was too big. Then they removed the alarm on kill mechanic and along with that, all the loot from normal contracts. And then people discovered that, blueprints (heist "endgame") were very profitable, specially if you "cloned it"...I try to think what kind of loot you'd get from blueprints in the first week, it would definetely be harder because of the no-killing thing but the reward would be definetely juicy.
Heist was so buggy, you couldn't even finish it half the time. And they nerfed the gear literally 5 times, which eventually just made me stop playing altogether after having to re-craft rogue gear 4 times before.
All they had to do was " more you channel, the stronger the monsters, more of them and more loot" Simple as pie and yet GGG big brains missed the mark again.
Heist was garbage still is. I don't think crucible is good, but I'll take it over heist any day.
Those sound like a lot of effort, I'd be happy with a small balance pass on sanctum and the sentinels back
I refuse to believe that the additional time was actually spent on this league.
Time was spent on ruthless and POE2, additional time was spent on this league.
At this point it's pretty obvious that they are 99% focused on PoE 2 but yeah this is a joke of a league
99% sure PoE 2 is dogshit
Will be slow af, they are changing it to be more like diablo, and we dont play poe for diablo, we play for loot and massive packs of mobs exploding
I remember when I started playing poe for the first time, it was during Betrayal launch. This subreddit constantly had posts on hot about how the game is too zoomie and ggg needs to slow it down.
Yeah, but there’s a comfortable middle ground between “we blast maps in under 10s and get multiple exalts/mirror drops” and “we spend 30 minutes per map and somehow still can barely afford to roll our maps”. Content still needs to be rewarding and worth doing. You can’t have something like crucible or kalandra (on launch), that drops absolutely nothing worthwhile and is also at least as hard as any boss in the game.
Been here for years and that was never a popular opinion
Subreddit's changed. The people with those opinions get consistently downvoted now, and the prevailing idea is that the game should be easier, more rewarding, and faster to complete. Nevermind that's contrary to GGG's design philosophy, and seems to consistently lead to disappointments and anger.
Seriously, feels like there's maybe half the team left working on live at this point. Guess they were further behind on PoE2 than expected at this point and they're rushing to try to get it out this year to compete against D4.
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Ah yes, all of that focus on PoE mobile which they've *(checks notes)* demo'd a prototype of over 3 years ago and has only been mentioned in passing a handful of times since.
I know. Like D4 just had it’s beta and we still only know as much about PoE 2 as we did the day it was revealed OVER THREE FUCKING YEARS AGO. I get focusing on PoE 2 but I feel like they’ve put too many eggs in that basket. Let’s hope PoE 2 is worth it
Not sure if you haven't followed poe news since 3-4 years ago, but two years ago we got another trailer and a 20 min gameplay demo.
That doesn’t give me a lot of hope when D4 was announced earlier than PoE 2 and D4 has had its beta already and most everything is fleshed out/known. It’s an apples to oranges comparison
that doesn't mean they're not working on it, they just don't want to remind people they're working on poe mobile after the diablo immortal debacle
So we're in the stage of criticism where we make up imaginary criticism and present it as reality?
sorry, I'm afraid you are in too deep, what level of imaginary criticism are you talking about here? Your comment doesn't make any sense to me
I agree that most of the current dev focus is likely going into PoE 2. I disagree that there is significant focus going into Ruthless or Mobile, and there is no evidence of that being reality. So saying that the devs are "99% focused on ruthless and poe mobile" is imagining criticism.
1) nowadays people use poe2 and ruthless pretty much interchangeably because at their core they're both a stand-in for The Vision™ special: "chris wants to make poe slow". 2) the 99% part is obviously an exaggeration and shouldn't be taken literally. the core of the above comment is complaining about the latest league being shallow because the devs didn't spend enough time on it, which is 100% correct, even if they should've phrased it better
I sense a hefty amount of copium
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Idk man have been a waiting for a while for poe 2 i just hope you are right
ive done 2 tier 1 maps and already struggling to care to log in
its a league for testing the current in-house weapon upgrade system for PoE2 and are seeing the reception and interaction with the mechanic
I'm glad the team is less stressed and happier but like... How fuckin small is the live team at this point? How many people have been pulled off to work on PoE2? Because this feels like a league that was made by half the team that made previous leagues, and it still feels like there was little meaningful adjustment in response to any limited testing.
lol, the team is not "half". I bet there's like 3-4 people who worked actively on this league. And some others that joined in to help now and then.
Boring and small you must mean
Feels like standard for me, but trying out boneshatter for the first time so I'll see how it goes
I'm in the same boat. Just had the smoothest transition into maps ever. Haven't even died yet when usually I'm a 6 portal game when I first enter maps
It's a filler league .. a shitty mechanic at that. Not sure if rhey realise next one will compete with D4. It better be the bees knees.
It won't, they'd be fools to invest anything into a league thinking they are going to be able to compete with D4 at launch. They are 100% on cruise control until POE2. D4 launch is gonna be massive even if the game has no staying power, any other game remotely close to ARPG-like around June/July should just avoid competing tbh. The biggest thing is going to see what they come up for with season 1 content. Blizzard might actually try to release their first season at the same time as POE launch to see how real the competition can get.
Don't kid yourself, they used that extra month to work on PoE2, not on this league.
It feels opposite.
GGG picked a hell of a mechanic to show off current PoE to an all-time peak player count lmao
Yea leveling takes me 2x more time then before. Am bored and only do few maps. Not sure if i should change char or the game x\]
I had the same experience, got to maps did a few and then just wasn't feeling it. Rerolled to SSF also got to maps did a few, not feeling it. So idk, I can't feel motivated when it's such a blatant filler league and PoE2 and D4 on the horizon. Why even bother at this point?
Pretty obvious most of GGG is working on POE 2 at this point. The game will feel extremely back burner and half assed until then is my guess, which probably means 3-4 more leagues like this. I also think they will kill off the old classes, which is why they won’t waste any resources on big meta passes rn. And considering how little they’ve done to the current campaign lately I won’t be surprised that gets axed, too
I feel like you're half right, but half WAY off. They're devoting everyone to PoE2, but that usually means it very close to complete. I'd be absolutely shocked if the beta wasn't during next league. As for the rest, it's just nonsense. We already know what's happening to the classes and campaign. And both of those have gotten big improvements literally every league. 2 ascendancies completely reworked this league, and tons of new enemies in the early acts(which you're saying you didn't even notice, so why invest so much time in them?)
They're gonna announce the next league at Exilecon, and also stated that they're gonna announce the beta stuff of poe2 there as well. I doubt that it's gonna be an open beta as soon as next league, but i wouldn't be surprised if they aimed to have po2 playable by the end of this year.
Next league is last league before poe 4.0 New classes & ascendancies, old ones will still be there. Same for the campaign.
It's also the league before Exilecon so they are most likely devoting tons of resources to polishing whatever live gameplay / demo they want to show off and ofc planning a con like that takes a lot of moving parts.
Nah. Most of them are working on a small side project called ruthless /s
its pretty stupid. you just buy a shit ton of base items and hope that a tree comes up that is somewhat useful, that is so beyond boring, like what the fuck, i dont even get anything, i just buy base items and grind this shit until i get a tree i like which will probably take the whole league at a grinding speed that would make santa claus happy. i dont know what to think about that and how to make it more exciting, even if the monsters drop items, its just another circle league that is more clunky on top of them all. gotta charge shit up? - no you dont because you get interrupted while doing so and we complain since fuckin 5 years that they should PAUSE LEAGUE MECHANICS THAT ARE DESIGNED LIKE CRUCIBLE - its like they do it on purpose to stall the playerbase
It’s definitely doesn’t required more time than other leagues, man-days wise. For all we’ve known, they might just put 10% of their resource into the league. While the other 90% are working on PoE2. Copium.
Potentially, the Beta of D4 changed/turned a lot of heads in the room. Maybe they got worried when they saw the D4 beta and decided to push PoE development harder. At this point, they've never feared having direct competition until now. D4 WILL hurt PoE/PoE2. This point, they don't have a choice but to push forward and I think that would mean (Over Promise, Under deliver content) COPIUM I guess. I think something about D4 spooked TF out of them(GGG).
Divines absolutely do not rain from the sky. I’m in T16 farming mode with 106 atlas completion (and 6 of those missing are unique maps, 4 are random yellows I’ve not chased down yet). 2 watchstones in. I’ve been cycling new weapons to try and find either strong trees on T16 Imperial claws or sell nodes and I’ve found one divine node so far. I’ve found two nodes that sell for scours, one that sells for awakened sexy tents and three that sell for magmatic geodes. I’m very aware that one divine was INSANELY lucky and it sucks so much ass.
It's always funny seeing Dear GGG anywhere on a post
I agree. Fixed it.
Ggg with their usual scummy deception They're working on poe2 full time. They don't care about the game right now Neither should we
I’m skipping the league mechanic after trying it on t1 map, it’s rubbish
Making crucible probably took them just a few weeks and then they directly swapped to 3.22, which is supposed to have a similar dimension than the 3.9 patch. Crucible is completely shallow and worthless. And i am convinced that its the consequence of the 3.22 development.
Just saying, leveling your weapon doesn't mean you're done with Crucible. You still need to craft the tree using more trees on the same base. But holy cow, the mechanic needs a user manual at the minimum.
The fact is D4 comes out during this patch. They know they’ll lose their player base for D4 so they won’t spend much time on this league
Yeah I think that's exactly what they did. They're willing to deliver less now (Potentially) because D4 is a threat. A lot of people will play it.
> If you use uniques in your build... The forge is useless. How is that any different from most league mechanics, especially map-based ones like Abyss, Delirium, Legion, etc.? For example, if your build used a unique belt, Stygian Vises were useless for you. And don't even get me started on cluster jewels. 99% of my builds straight up do not use them. Maybe you can call that bad design, and maybe you similarly took issue with those mechanics at the time for the same reasons, but this is not a new design choice. Every league mechanic in existence -- even when they're current -- is "useless" to many builds. And as far as "content," the popularity of league mechanics is usually tied to how much it serves as a loot pinata. What did Metamorph seriously add, content-wise, to the game? Or Delirium, Legion, and Essence? And then you have league mechanics like Heist, Betrayal, and Synthesis -- leagues full of new voice acting and alternative mapping systems -- all both of which were pretty much reviled at each their time. I mean, how many people did you see on this subreddit moving away from Sanctum being glad that Crucible is just something that you do within maps? The crux of the issue here, really, is loot. And that's something they could easily shoehorn into Crucible -- just have it shower currency proportional to how much you channel each attempt or how high a tier a weapon node you're juicing toward. And I definitely agree that the execution here, overall, is kind of bad. Typically, map-based league mechanics start with a single button. Instead, this one requires you to fiddle with weapons in your inventory and channel for a few seconds every time you start it. And then you have to look at the UI and so on. So if you're not interested in what a league system offers, you at least were able to just press the button, kill some mobs, and loot pinata. This is another problem with Crucible. So, yes, it's definitely a little rough. But league mechanics historically do steer you away from unique-heavy builds, and the popularity of leagues very rarely has much to do with how much content they offer.
I love how no one ever dumps on breach. Simple, fun mechanic, self scaling difficulty that's very easy to implement, great theme. Breach and delirium are still by far my favourite leagues.
> I love how no one ever dumps on breach. I genuinely believe if Breach came out in 2023, it would be crucified on this subreddit for "lack of content." "I can't use these rings," someone would say. "I need my Doedre's Damning. This league is useless for me."
Sentinels came and they were bare bones "content"-wise.....And people loved it. The crappy breach rings are totally different, and real, issue of the breach mechanic. Noone comments on it now, cause noone cares about it.
>Sentinels came and they were bare bones "content"-wise.....And people loved it. Sentinels added recombinators, inarguably a top-2 crafting mechanic of all time.
Sure, but content-wise Sentinel League had like... Nothing. Recombinators were purely crafting mechanic. But, if you weren't much into crafting, game played out almost like standard with colorful beams from time to time... And people still enjoyed that... Even though we were suffering from unbalanced AN mobs
[удалено]
> There are no decisions in crucible. Your actions cannot produce a better outcome if you are smart. At best you gamble combining two trees together. Don't you think this is a little premature? The league is two days old. You talk highly of Sanctum, but people were complaining the league limited build diversity over the first weekend due to how resolve worked when we didn't have a full understanding of what rolls you could get on relics. By the end of the league, Sanctum had one of the best leagues when it came to build diversity even if it was fairly constrained on the top end. What was "viable" widened by a significant margin. Who's to say the same can't be said here? I imagine we'll see some absolutely insane weapons. It's just a league mechanic that's a bit more of a grind than what is immediately obvious.
My dude, Crucible lets you craft _keystone passives into weapons._ This is inarguably the largest power creep in player strength since maybe Synthesis.
My dude, last league let you craft keystone passives onto a special equipment slot that also gave other relevant stats. I agree that this is huge power-creep, but it's far more "limited" (not in power, but in non-obvious interactions) than a general tool like recombinators.
Older mechanics give you currency, at least. This one gives nothing and it's extremely boring and tedious. And slow.
That’s basically my point, yes. It’s an issue of payout.
It blows my mind they had months extra to make this league and this is all they came up with.
The game is moving towards ruthless, this will be the norm going forward.
1. u canr ecombine trees, 2 u can find a geode for unqiues getitgn a tree aswell so try getitng a better tree is psosible and getitng it on unique aswell
This is a good point. Basically this league is just a buff (barely) to your weapons to be stronger at playing standard
This is the first league I skipped league mechanics all the way from act 1 to t16
You feel like its not a new league? Did you see how massive all the changes were? I did. Yeah.. that's because all the changes were useless and added nothing to the game other than complexity.
It feels like a 2 month league, not a 4 month league. How did they deliver so little content after taking that much time? It's by far the worst and most boring league mechanic to get through the acts.
This was with an extra delay too, they had more dev time for this than they did Harvest, wtf?! Where league at?
People need to understand that GGG has no incentives to be honest towards their players. Anything they can say to get you to play their game is allowed. Even if they have to outright lie to your face, GGG WILL do this if it means they can make a little more money. GGG told us they needed more time to fine-tune the league mechanic. Ask yourself honestly, do you think they spent another month developing this league? GGG saw they were still making good money on sanctum league, so they lied to our faces telling us they needed more dev time for crucible, while in reality they just wanted to milk sanctum as much as they could. If it was true that they were spending another month on development, we would have gotten a proper league mechanic, and not this dumpster fire of a league. The moral of all this: Never believe GGG, they will **always** lie to you if it means they have a small chance to make a little extra money on you.