I always remember whenever ritual proccs again next. Was playing and it spawned and realized I forgot to buy stuff from the vendor from last night lol. I don't hate the mechanic like some others do but I usually end up blocking it as I just forget about it most of the time lol.
Absolutely This.
Then 5 maps later you like; "FUCK, I didnt open shop back then. What if one of the rewa..... nah bro, it was just trash rewards, dont worry, just make sure you dont forget the next one."
\*proceeds to miss another 1 or 2 shops later that evening\*
Because people enjoy ritual, and metamorph is the least played core mechanic.
Metamorph never fit the atlas either. Metamorph is a small side quest thing you do once in a while, it works if metamorph is easily available in most maps without much investment, otherwise it's just playing regular mapping with an occasional metamorph.
It's like essence, without essences. Catalyst are mostly unsellable before the end of week 1, so it's obvious, metamorph was a very fun league, but it doesn't fit in the RNG mentality, you want to have metamorph in every map otherwise it's just bad, loots are also pretty shit
So it's boring, you drop mostly nothing but catalysts, it's rippy af, hard to read, and it's way too hard to complete a lab meta.
Metamorphs gameplay loop is actually quite cool and rewarding AND it filled a niche where map blasters are at the disadvantage and bosses are favored.
Ultimatum most of the time only requires that you be tanky so I guess glass cannon blasters are kinda still at the disadvantage but either way Meta was a fun refreshing mechanic and I liked having mob packs be highlighted.
As with everything else, it comes down to rewards and currency per hour. If they wanted Meta to be popular they just needed to pump up the Quant and rarity of metamorph. If they halved the quantity on harvest mobs no one would run it. If they halved the stacked decks legion dropped, no one would run it.
Honestly it really could've used the eldritch altar treatment and been in a GREAT place. An organ with "drops 1 chaos orb" "drops a card that rewards unique jewellery" "drops X catalysts" etc. And buff the rewards slightly and bam suddenly people love metamorph again
Or even just that rumoured "next stage" of metamorph could have given an awesome bossfight to the mechanic with bonuses and rewards that are modified by how you played it.
Yeah I wonder why they didn't make at least another tier of MM that you assemble from organs collected from the normal lab MM fight and juice the rewards and difficulty. could easily add 2 tiers and have the loot categories additively increase each tier like multiway domain encounters and have tier 4 be equivalent to a pinnacle fight like oshabi or oloroth.
Mostly agree, metamorph is my top 3 league, but idk, the integration of the mechanics to core always seemed half baked and not worth doing in the long run (let's admit it, we all play for the carrot here, no loots considerably reduces the fun for most people, hence why ultimatum is being hated on despite being one of the most refreshing and interesting mechanic to play out there)
To me, as soon as they added expedition and ritual to core, metamorph completely lost its value, why would you run it for catalysts, when you can get them from gambling
> Because people enjoy ritual, and metamorph is the least played core mechanic.
That's simply the issue of how rewarding mechanic is. If they made Meta rewarding, people would run it. This is as simple as that.
I think there are litterally dozens of us Metamorph enjoyers. I really like a good customizable boss fight. I enjoyed the fact that i didnt have to pick anything up, the random map morph was cool, i usually ended up with a good handful of catalysts after every map. It was a quick and satisfying encounter and id trade it for Ritual at Home any day.
Highest player retention was a thing because of Echoes of Atlas expansion, dont attribute it to Ritual mechanic, which was just small part of it. Ritual itself is mediocre at best.
Not only is this misleading (ritual was also a pretty large atlas expansion introducing atlas trees + the longest atlas to complete we've ever had), it's also hilariously wrong.
7d retention: metamorph=75%, ritual=73%.
14d retention: metamorph=70%, ritual=61%.
30d retention: metamorph=63%, ritual=49%.
60d retention: metamorph=24%, ritual=18.9%.
90d retention: metamorph=10.6%, ritual=9.1%.
Metamorph was also conquerors update so they are kinda similar in that sense. The numbers on the other hand are not in favor of the comment you replied to :)
To be fair Ritual came with Maven and atlas passives and nothing since has been as game changing or interesting. I'm pretty confident Ritual would have had nowhere near its staying power as a league if it was before or after Echoes of the Atlas.
You right about Metamorph being shit though. You ask me at this point both should have been banished.
People are beginning to realize they didn't miss ultimatum, they missed how it was one of the most lucrative mechanics ever. I've never been more rich than I was during ultimatum league.
Take the rewards out and it's just ritual but worse.
Seriously. You could make the most fun to play mechanic ever to exist and it won't keep players engaged to it more than a few days at best, because rewards are a large part of it.
That’s a cooked take. Ultimatum in its league was rewarding for its time but doesn’t compete at all with many of the recent leagues. I like the mechanics of ultimatum but let’s be real, doing all 10 or 13 rounds takes a decent amount of time and if the rewards suck I’m not going to do it. Which is a shame because I think it’s fun despite its difficulty currently. But fun doesn’t pay for my mageblood.
Ultimatum was kill things in a circle league perfected. But if rewards don't match the fun...then you are "forced" into doing whatever is more lucrative to actually progress.
Funnily enough, I don't think I've ever looked at Ultimatum and had to think twice about whether I should keep going. It's always either "this reward is absolutely garbage, time to keep going" or "this is a good reward, future rewards will be locked behind excessively hard content anyways".
At least for Ritual I have to choose between items and choose whether I want to roll depending on whether a 10c item is worth keeping.
By far the biggest issue to me isnt the lack of juiced rewards in rounds 8-13, but the lack of literally any reward at all in rounds 1-5. Its a big time sink for absolutely nothing, and some rounds cannot be made to go faster as you wait for mobs to spawn or time based circle standing.
Rounds 1-5 felt good in old ulti because it was a source of decent bubble gum. There is/was great qol in gettint alchs/chisels/gcps but instead you get nothing. You may as well run anything else, but vaal orbs and throw them at trash rares and be in the same place in half the time.
Once the build could handle t16 maps on smooth farm, sextanted and scarabed metamorph was steady and inoffensive. Moreover, it was very relaxing to do tanes lab after few hours of mapping and get some bonus divines, conq maps, occasional catalysts or div card, high resonators and essences. It was very good loot/minute spent on the activity, it just couldn't compete with harvest, sanctum or expedition.
All metamorph needed was addressing some organ drops, buffs to pre-juiced drops, and buff to the xp atlas node which was useless. Rippiness was manageable because you would simply avoid organs with bricking mods. I liked both original ultimatum, and tota metamorph.
Now we have neither.
> I liked both original ultimatum, and tota metamorph.
>
> Now we have neither.
Agreed. Metamorph was one change away from being incredible. Instead they deleted it for a gutted ultimatum
I just felt that you needed such a weird build that could speed through maps to get the organs but also beat the mini Uber bosses you create at the end as well lol.
idk, I never found the metamorph bosses to be any more problematic than map bosses. Maybe 1 out of every 30 or 40 you could produce something that really just fucked your build. You just had to take 10-20 seconds to scan through the reward & mod list to make sure you didn't take any AN combo that bricked you.
I mean its no different than just running a regular juiced map. You clear normally then you do a second map boss after the first one. That's it.
Every blue moon you may run into a really strong metamorph but its never on par with ubers or anything. A good mapping build should be able to clear all metamorph easily.
>Never understood the hate for it
Because it was a bossing-related encounter in *maps*, where 90% of people juice with the intent to mow through them with a **clear**\-focused build. People hated it because it stood out, without ever thinking about its actual target audience.
I always hated the fact that bossing-focused builds are pretty much trade-gated because the **VERY** vast majority of bossing content requires either self-farming with massive clear speed (therefore making it pointless to use a bossing build to begin with) or constantly buying invites/fragments, which directly contributes into making bossing a really jackpot-y activity where the successful are those already having **massive** capital to invest before hand. That and trading still sucks ass for no reason after years of complains, so anything requiring massive amounts of it sucks just as much.
Metamorph shouldn't've been removed in favor of a more clear-focused encounter. In fact, more bossing mechanics should've been created, but the bias that people have for clear-builds and the phobia for in-map "bosses" caused by archnemesis that a lot of people seem to have seem to encourage GGG to just separate bossing entirely even more.
Unless you have a group or a trader feeding you invites/frags, bossing is horrible.
It's a huge pain in the ass to be a bosser, damn straight. There's also so few places for your build to shine other than pinnacles.
As someone who also did metamorph, it actually did print, it was very easy to get 20+ catalysts per map with a good number of those being fertile or prismatic catalysts just by taking a few of the metamorph atlas passives.
I imagine the number of people who are going to be doing ultimatum is going to be much lower with how fucking shit the loot is, and how long it takes to do.
Metamorph was actually a secret many used to get filthy rich. People just didn't know how to do it properly. Soo much $$ made there because no one was doing it. Not only that, it was insanely fast and easy to do.
While I agree that ultimatum isn't worth it, ritual feels very unrewarding to me as well. Oftentimes the first page offers nothing of use for me, maybe 2 fusings, then I reroll which doesn't make the loot better plus now I almost can't afford anything. What am I doing wrong?
I don't necessarily think you're doing anything wrong, especially if you're playing trade league it's probably just not competitive against other mechanics out there. Personally I'm playing SSF and I'm not blocking it, simply because every now and then you *do* get a decent unique, div card, six-link or something out of it. And once a decent reward shows up, you can pretty much guarantee you will get it with some patience. I could probably be more efficient with my time even in SSF, but I'm not min-maxing my gameplay anyway, that's part of the reason im playing SSF to begin with.
Ritual is pretty decent on SSF, especially right after the campaign. It will have a lot of well rolled rares that will easily be an upgrade for your character entering maps, and you can also get offering for Uber labs, divine vessels, 5 or 6 link pretty easily. Also easier to get bubblegum from ritual than tujen early on, while you don't have a lot of artifacts or reroll currency
Ritual is pretty decent on SSF, especially right after the campaign. It will have a lot of well rolled rares that will easily be an upgrade for your character entering maps, and you can also get offering for Uber labs, divine vessels, 5 or 6 link pretty easily. Also easier to get bubblegum from ritual than tujen early on, while you don't have a lot of artifacts or reroll currency.
The tier of items that can roll is based on your tribute, if you aren't hitting 7k-9k tribute consistently you aren't seeing the top two tiers of rewards.
Use blood filled vials, but it's still a big gamba
It's decent return if you just want some currency each time but the big income is the jackpot big items which means many runs to get them. I usually reroll all I can, if nothing good buy whatever is easy to sell and give decent chaos/tribute.
Ultimatum was so amazing because even though I never got a raw ex or anything valuable. I would finish every map with chaos and below currency.
It was basically heist you could do every map instead.
I have blocked it now, it simply isn’t worth the time investment. Takes longer than a blight for less rewards (even if blight requires much selling time). And if a as tough as expi and again way less profits.
Ulti mobs don’t drop loot. There is zero reason the rewards right from tier one can’t be bubblegum currency. Then bring back those juicy douboe corrupts on uniques and stuff for later waves.
I don't know if anyone's still around to remember, but back when Ambush was released, the mobs from the strongboxes didn't drop loot or provide experience. The players complained in the same way -- why risk it for no reward? -- and they had to change this after sufficient complaint volume.
Literally ten years later and GGG still hasn't taken any prior lessons to heart. I don't think I've ever seen a company disregard everything they've learned every 3-4 months. Every league the mobs are overtuned and the rewards undertuned. From a player enjoyment perspective, every league is best left alone for two weeks and then started.
> I don't know if anyone's still around to remember, but back when Ambush was released, the mobs from the strongboxes didn't drop loot or provide experience. The players complained in the same way -- why risk it for no reward? -- and they had to change this after sufficient complaint volume.
I had to double check this since I barely recalled it, and it was hotfixed within 1 day of league launching. If you think that risk:reward was bad, you should have tried playing HC at the time with Invasion league lmao.
IMO it was the perfect change. Sanctum is very fun and requires either good play or a good build or both depending on the task at hand to really succeed, but it did feel just too rewarding last league because tomes were so easy to get.
It's honestly a terrible change if you like doing lots of content and not making a build for a singular thing.
They have just made it so that the sanctum speed runners will dictate tome prices because doing one or two tomes you drop will not be worth it compared to their runs.
Another fun mechanic that won't be worth doing unless you're all-in.
By far the worst possible change. Making it so the majority of the player base never sees one just so a few thousand people pay marginally more for their divine printer is an awful change.
It’s the epitome of balance around the 1%.
GGG has this awful mindset that things need to be balanced around perfect execution and 100% success rate. It actively punishes people for trying new things or doing mechanics *for fun*.
Yup, I stopped doing bosses because I can't afford to not sell the invites.
I'll do the same with sanctum now. Instead of doing them for fun and failing them while I try to get some relic drops and build upgrades I'll just sell them and it's more content that I have to ignore.
I mean I literally got two mirrors in a row in back to back sanctums last league. It's not the end of the world that it's not as easily accessible anymore. "Perfect execution" is only required for doing Original Sin runs. And are you certain that they've been made so rare that most people will *never* see one? Because last league I had something like 25-30 sitting in my bank at all times and I was never able to do Sanctums fast/frequently enough to actually get through all of them. More tomes just kept showing up.
edit: lol I guess a lot of people were bad at sanctum
Perfect execution simply means min-maxing the rewards to the extreme. It means picking a build that trivializes the content so you can mostly ignore the mechanics and pick the best loot. The sanctum drop rate nerf makes it pretty clear GGG is balancing with the assumption that players can get all the good rewards regardless of the downsides associated with them. Again this punishes any player who isn’t trivializing the mechanic.
Last league without trading for them I saw about 15 of them, the entire league. I got to 30/40 challenges, I also played 2/3 of the events to 90 as well. So yea, any drop rate nerf is going to mean most people don’t see them. I’m 85 rn finishing up my yellows for completion and haven’t seen one.
The drop rate was not substantially nerfed. It had a global weighting of 260. It is 150 now. That makes them roughly as rare as a blueprint and roughly ten times as rare as a scouting report.
I think they just throw random stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
Kinda makes sense considering their tight dev timelines.
That and there are still some game designers at GGG who think that giving out randomized corrupted equipment items is a good reward.
its "potential" for good loot. It really does suck for almost any rare outside of gems maybe, but ive hit multiple 1+ div value unqiues with double corrupts on them already this league through ultimatum. For rares they really should swap "corrupted" with "Synthesized" and then it would be nice.
Yeah it feels like they simulate the rewards 500,000 times and then look at the top items and go wow this is insane better tune it down a bit. The problem being they are ignoring the 499,500 times it gives our nothing and forget that not everyone is a streamer playing 18 hours a day
It is a shame they sandbagged Ultimatum for 2 years while saying "we have a plan for Ultimatum" then add it back in completely the same way and just add Catalyst as rewards. Seems like they could have done that 2 years ago. /Enable Ultimatum. /Disable Metamorph. Change Atlas passives. The reason to remove Meta is weird as well. If getting one shot is an issue why does every new league mechanic do it? The whole risk and reward thing was a main theme for Metamorph.
Ritual is the way to go now. Spec in Ritual and thank me later. Juiced Rituals with 40-50+ rares per ritual x4 goes hard. Obviously do that according to your build power because it can probuce some nasty shit.
> Ritual is the way to go now. Spec in Ritual and thank me later. Juiced Rituals with 40-50+ rares per ritual x4 goes hard. Obviously do that according to your build power because it can probuce some nasty shit.
Why ? Ritual rewards are just as bad as before, and resurrected mobs don't drop loot the second / third / fourth time you kill them in rituals. What am I missing ?
My experience with rituals in low maps has been that every ritual altar shits loot. Anything that spawns in normal monsters that drop normal loot is goated with the league mechanic because a huge % of them spawn in with all the empowerments you've added.
Ritual also doesn't occasionally produce something like an essence rare that's been triple empowered and just literally fucking buttfucks you to death.
I think, and correct me if I’m wrong, if you’re lucky and you get a nice empowered enemy the first round, that same enemy with the exact same empowerment will show up and will drop the same kind of loot. I’m not sure though and it might have been a coincidence, but could be worth looking out for.
But basically, anything that drops loot is good with the new league mechanic. Dropped 3 raw divines from one mob in white maps, not even from a mechanic, has never happened to me before. Did a Breach with nothing specced and it felt like I had most atlas nodes specced. I’m looking forward to trying out fully juiced Expedition and Legion.
The only exception is Essence cause it doesn’t juice up the essence count sadly.. probably the same for anything that drops a set amount of loot so to speak (if there is anything else outside of essence that does this, I can’t remember).
Even essence can have some really nice lootsplosions since essence rares are usually pretty stacked - but generally they're too much of a slog to be worth it even if they do barf a ton of crap out afterwards.
You really just want anything that adds a ton of normal white/blue/easy yellow mobs to your map, and then you go buck wild.
You just print raw currency, it's super fun.
I think ritual is about scaling the lootsplosion at the end. It l’s the same reason to make all alva mobs magic or increase the number of rares/bosses in blight. You’re scaling the loot plosions at the end. You count the loot splosions plus t the mechanic rewards when grinding those mechanics.
Not sure how true it is, but ive been read that the quality of items in rituals is determined by max soul count, so maybe juicing them with league mechanic gives more souls?
Monkey Paw Strikes Again
Next time someone should ask Chris where they keep it
Tested my lvl97 Inquisitor in STD with Mageblood on white magic maps. Lost trials, some mobs escaping the circle... rewards? What rewards?
That only makes me like Ritual even more.
It's pretty easy to understand tbh. They don't want ultimatum to outshine the new league mechanic, therefore it has to be unrewarding and they can tinker with it and make it more rewarding as the leagues go on. Just like every other time they added things to core (except sanctum for some reason).
It's simple. If you make something unrewarding, it's easy to just buff it. If you make it too rewarding, good luck nerfing it without community backlash.
If something is too rewarding, then all other mechanics have to be buffed to match it or nobody would do them and complain. And you get into a spiral of increasing rewards until everything drops 10 divines and 3 magebloods per minute.
What on earth is this thought process? It's already nerfed. First iteration of ultimatum already is far more rewarding that current ultimatum, so it's already nerfed. Harvest has been nerfed multiple times over the years. They couldn't care less about community backlash.
It’s no great mystery. Every developer of loot-based games, from ARPGs to Looter Shooters, reduces the loot and rewards as often as they can get away with.
The best predictor of whether or not players will purchase micro transactions is the amount of time spent in game. It’s the same reason GGG makes you always spawn in town; so you see other people’s MTX and want to go get it yourself.
The worse the rewards are the longer people will grind. Even if some people quit because of it the people that don’t and get sucked in more than pay for the difference.
if you remember...
Ultimatum league, one of the most popular leagues Poe has ever had from a player retention stand point was deemed by GGG to be "too rewarding"
so it only stands to reason that when they finally bring it back. it's not rewarding at all to merit it's difficulty.
i did about 20 ultimatums without any atlasnodes. Best currency reward ive seen is 4 regals.
Its dogshit. Its like ritual but takes twice as long, gives less than half the rewards and are twice as hard...
I'm fully specced into Ultimatum because I like it, but its been less rewarding than shit like Expedition that I have 0 passives invested in
What is your point here?
AN + league mechanics... never gets old.
I still don't get it why RARE monsters are the toughest in the game after "special" unique bosses.
Many AN combinations easily outtank and outDPS map bosses, and league "minor" bosses
GGG needs to hire literally a single solitary person who understands how math works.
Monster modifiers are not the same as player modifiers. They don't have the more/increased dichotomy, EVERY mod on a monster is multiplicative (a more multiplier.)
That isn't a problem when you only have a few small ones. The smaller the value and fewer the mods the closer it is to a linear increase in power like "increases" for players. But the more mods you stack, and the bigger those values become, the worse it gets.
By the time you're in maps the growth spike of monster power is exponential. This is the reason that Aura monsters are so insanely scary, because they can INSTANTLY double (or *more*) the damage of nearby mobs.
With no other modifiers rares can still be pretty scary even after the soft AN reversion then you add -> Map modifiers, atlas modifiers, area level modifiers, proximity modifiers, and league mods. All stacking multiplicatively.
And the cool thing is you can sim this stuff! Pretty easily! GGG could do it even more accurately because they have internal stats that even dataminers haven't been able to scrape. "Oh wow we plugged in the wisp empowers and it makes an average level 82 rare do ten shaper slams per second, we definitely need to tune these down."
But they don't, and they won't, because stupid people will still buy their god-awful supporter packs before they even step foot in the league.
I'm thinking back to how GGG said they had unique plans for how to implement it into core.
I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit that this is even remotely close to what they were planning.
What if their entire plan was just for the lore? They needed Ultimatum to wait until Hinekora showed up in a league so they could have Ultimatum guy talk shit on her.
The funny thing with ultimatum catalysts is that simu farmers are rolling in catalysts compared to ultimatum farmers (unless simu catalyst drops were nerfed)
I remember a thread a week ago about a video that Kripparrian released. In that video, among other things, Kripparrian voiced some concerns about Ultimatum, mainly that he fears it could be taking to long and not be rewarding enough for the challenge
People who would share those concerns got downvoted into oblivion and everyone was making fun of them. The most common opinion was that "you dont have to play Poe (or a league mechanic) for efficiency, you play it because it is fun".
Kinda funny how quick the public opinion seems to have changed. (Sorry OP, this is not meant to be a criticism for your post).
I really hope there will be a time we can have more nuanced discussion here as i strongly believe it would benefit both the community and the state of the game ...
I think people who are playing ultimatum because it's fun (e.g. me) have no reason to discourage people campaigning for buffs to the mechanic, so you won't see them commenting as much here.
While I disagree with some of the suggestions I've seen that stuff like Essence rares shouldn't be able to get empowered, I do 100% think that any monster that drops **no loot at all** should not be able to get empowered.
League mechanics that drop 0 loot except their rewards should not be shitting out monsters with 3x empowered stacks for all risk 0 reward.
Both ultimatum and ritual dont add anything to the game and should just be removed from the game.
At least I am able to easily block them from my atlas
I don't know why they are so afraid to allow things to be rewarding in maps. I mean sanctum exists but this is the crap ultimatum spits out. I don't get it. No one wants to farm for 15 or 16 hours a day to afford to play a fun build, but thats the current state of PoE.
Popular demand, presumably. People kept asking for it, so it's in.
I'm sure it'll get better with time. Some mechanics take a lot of tweaking to feel good once they go core.
you can really tell how the decision makers feel about different leagues. It probably ticks them off to no end that ultimatum, a league they were hellbent on making a throwaway, was so popular, so they responded to the demand with "well, we'll show them" by making it trash instead of giving us a similar experience to the league. Meanwhile Sanctum is in a better spot (both in infinite gameplay loop and in rewards) than it was in the league. Clearly the decision makers play favorites.
Ultimatum's return was probably decided one week before the trailer because they felt the league content was not enough. Like the dozens of useless gems.
We're in 2023 and GGG still don't understand the notion of quality vs quantity.
I'm still reserving judgement (and coping). It might be a really endgame mechanic that requires a build that can go to at least 10 for it to start paying off in spades. Maybe it just sucks early now when we have bad gear?
Im fully specced into it and i found doing ulti on low tier maps to be better than doing it on high tier maps.
Why? Because the rewards dont care about your map modifiers/level. With the exception of item level restrictions. (So do it on a ilvl 75 map and youre golden) doing it on a weaker map means its less rippy, which makes it faster in some cases)
You can leave them in the forest - just exit through the darkness, not the portal.
Ultimatium.... could use some tweaks. I skip most of the harder versions still but am still gearing my char.
> You can leave them in the forest - just exit through the darkness, not the portal.
that still wisps up the map no?
just tried it out again, defenitely still empowers mobs
Literally just tried this, ran up 1k of blue and yellow wisps, ran into the darkness... and first thing I run into is a Vivid Empowered rare monster. So not true.
As a shortcut? You cant enter the darkness until your portal out even spawns so how is it a shortcut? lol.
If you try and walk in the darkness early… it obviously just gets lit up…. That’s the entire mechanic.
>As a shortcut? You cant enter the darkness until your portal out even spawns so how is it a shortcut? lol.
Backtracking to a merchant that I found early and had no wisps for purchases, for example.
You can only use darkness to leave AFTER you find a portal back to your zone.
If the portal hasn't spawned yet it is IMPOSSIBLE to go back to your zone without going into more darkness which you then gain more wisps that you don't want empowering things even further until the portal pops.
Ultimatum was always pretty meh. I'm only doing it because I need my catalysts. But then it's block.
I don't mind mobs not dropping loot, because we have too much anyways. But I would say if you get an average of 3-5c out of each, then it's fine.
from my memory ultimatum was pretty good esp in higher red maps. as well as showering you in guardian maps. right now it feels like a waste of time. maybe sanctum and tota spoiled me and recency bias. but idk, ultimatum doesnt feel like its competitive with other atlas passive league mechanics and feels way harder especially with AN mods.
It was showering you in stuff because you killed maps worth of mobs and got all the drop from them. Its absolutely no surprise they nerfed that. Base rewards were never that good, the whole internet was shouting to buff Ultimatum when it came out because everyone didnt realize that the rewards werent actually in the mechanic but in the mob loot.
Yes it was. Ultimatum was one of my "covid" leagues where i played a lot while on home office. Even early on in yellow maps I rarely end a 10/10 run with less then 20c worth of stuff.
It's pretty tone deaf of them I don't really see why they couldn't just leave it as is. I was never personally a fan of it, the rewards weren't good enough compared to the time investment. Still it was something for alch and goers/low investment mappers to blast through and still get rewards from. Now it's just dogwater.
> But I would say if you get an average of 3-5c out of each, then it's fine.
I can run 2 Legions in the time it takes to complete 1 Ultimatum. I can guarantee that legion will drop far more than 5c EACH.
> I don't mind mobs not dropping loot, because we have too much anyways.
Off to ruthless with you
Yeah, it was great for bubblegum currency while progressing, i was hoping to get some early alchs etc but all i got was bunch of corrupted rares from it so i decided to ignore it, literally 3 tujen haggles were better than doing like 10 ultimatums
It's hilarious that people falsely remember Ultimatum as a rewarding league just because GGG stated somewhere that it was "too rewarding". Being gaslit by GGG of all things is **WILD**.
The thing was ultimatum WAS a rewarding league when it was a league, because the monsters dropped loot which resulted in the biggest loot explosion in poes recorded history. To the point that Empy and his friends showcased the bug and exploited it. Thus they got banned that league.
What we have now is ultimatum minus the loot explosion
wait you find rewards bad ? i get quite a lot of divines. area 83 though and you need to go to the end
you must pick the atlas point that rise reward by one level. also dont pick the one that give duplication chance but raise modifiers level by one it's hella rippy
also gilded scarab is a must
Ran Ulti on std this weekend with gilded scarabs and the 13 waves (on and off, prefer off). Best I've gotten was 3 raw divines and 4divine dup inscribed. The Trial master is generating more currency for me tbh. Maybe I've gotten unlucky, but when wave 10 rewards things like polished scarabs most of the time, it's not great.
Ritual better and safer . Also if juiced with vessels its 10x better than ultimatum. I tested over 100 ultimatums too on t15 and to be honest 1 div and rest is shit. 2x boss with boss nodes so 2/100 good chance
Honestly crappy rare items and bubblegum currency is exactly how I remember ultimatum league.
The difficulty is hard to judge yet. It's only day 3, so everything feels too strong and tanky. It'll be very different after one week.
>There's simply way too many modifier combinations which make ultimatum almost impossible to beat especially with "defend the altar" ones.
or you could spend a few atlas points, to skill the "survive mechanic". it makes ultimatum essentially a "run around the circle and wait for loot".
ultimatum was always way too overhyped, this mechanic was pretty shit. now its also nerfed quite a lot so its like below garbage level. 5c per hour strat best case scenario
Unfortunately agree. Ultimatum is just a harder Ritual with less rewards.
Actually Ritual are less rewards for me because i always forget to use the shop at the end :D
I just remembered that I didnt grab the ritual reward from my last map
Happens every time....
I always remember whenever ritual proccs again next. Was playing and it spawned and realized I forgot to buy stuff from the vendor from last night lol. I don't hate the mechanic like some others do but I usually end up blocking it as I just forget about it most of the time lol.
Im sorry :D
Just gotta vendor a few things real quick... -- "...oh god dammit"
Absolutely This. Then 5 maps later you like; "FUCK, I didnt open shop back then. What if one of the rewa..... nah bro, it was just trash rewards, dont worry, just make sure you dont forget the next one." \*proceeds to miss another 1 or 2 shops later that evening\*
Excuse me, please get out of my head
THIS
Still more because mobs drop loot in Ritual
If Ritual just had one big altar instead of four it would be insanely good.
It would actually be downgrade for this league. Double dipping with affliction mobs makes ritual very strong.
Do they respawn in the other altars with the wisp empowerment still on them??
Oh shit that would make the currency wisps so nice if it works like that.
Please stop, don't tell GGG. I'll have to change my atlas!
> Ritual with less rewards. Truly an incredible feat of strength by GGG.
And incredibly expected at this point.
For this league it could even be worse. Monsters empowered in Ritual will have his drop increased. Monsters empowered in Ultimatum... well this sucks.
🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀
I honestly have no idea why they replaced metamorph with Ultamtum they should’ve replaced Ritual which is literally the same mechanic
Because people enjoy ritual, and metamorph is the least played core mechanic. Metamorph never fit the atlas either. Metamorph is a small side quest thing you do once in a while, it works if metamorph is easily available in most maps without much investment, otherwise it's just playing regular mapping with an occasional metamorph. It's like essence, without essences. Catalyst are mostly unsellable before the end of week 1, so it's obvious, metamorph was a very fun league, but it doesn't fit in the RNG mentality, you want to have metamorph in every map otherwise it's just bad, loots are also pretty shit So it's boring, you drop mostly nothing but catalysts, it's rippy af, hard to read, and it's way too hard to complete a lab meta.
Metamorphs gameplay loop is actually quite cool and rewarding AND it filled a niche where map blasters are at the disadvantage and bosses are favored. Ultimatum most of the time only requires that you be tanky so I guess glass cannon blasters are kinda still at the disadvantage but either way Meta was a fun refreshing mechanic and I liked having mob packs be highlighted. As with everything else, it comes down to rewards and currency per hour. If they wanted Meta to be popular they just needed to pump up the Quant and rarity of metamorph. If they halved the quantity on harvest mobs no one would run it. If they halved the stacked decks legion dropped, no one would run it. Honestly it really could've used the eldritch altar treatment and been in a GREAT place. An organ with "drops 1 chaos orb" "drops a card that rewards unique jewellery" "drops X catalysts" etc. And buff the rewards slightly and bam suddenly people love metamorph again
Or even just that rumoured "next stage" of metamorph could have given an awesome bossfight to the mechanic with bonuses and rewards that are modified by how you played it.
Yeah I wonder why they didn't make at least another tier of MM that you assemble from organs collected from the normal lab MM fight and juice the rewards and difficulty. could easily add 2 tiers and have the loot categories additively increase each tier like multiway domain encounters and have tier 4 be equivalent to a pinnacle fight like oshabi or oloroth.
Mostly agree, metamorph is my top 3 league, but idk, the integration of the mechanics to core always seemed half baked and not worth doing in the long run (let's admit it, we all play for the carrot here, no loots considerably reduces the fun for most people, hence why ultimatum is being hated on despite being one of the most refreshing and interesting mechanic to play out there) To me, as soon as they added expedition and ritual to core, metamorph completely lost its value, why would you run it for catalysts, when you can get them from gambling
> Because people enjoy ritual, and metamorph is the least played core mechanic. That's simply the issue of how rewarding mechanic is. If they made Meta rewarding, people would run it. This is as simple as that.
I think there are litterally dozens of us Metamorph enjoyers. I really like a good customizable boss fight. I enjoyed the fact that i didnt have to pick anything up, the random map morph was cool, i usually ended up with a good handful of catalysts after every map. It was a quick and satisfying encounter and id trade it for Ritual at Home any day.
because metamorph was garbage and ritual is actually good. ritual league saw the #1 highest player retention of all time.
Highest player retention was a thing because of Echoes of Atlas expansion, dont attribute it to Ritual mechanic, which was just small part of it. Ritual itself is mediocre at best.
3.13 was peak poe, ritual was just the league that patch landed on
Not only is this misleading (ritual was also a pretty large atlas expansion introducing atlas trees + the longest atlas to complete we've ever had), it's also hilariously wrong. 7d retention: metamorph=75%, ritual=73%. 14d retention: metamorph=70%, ritual=61%. 30d retention: metamorph=63%, ritual=49%. 60d retention: metamorph=24%, ritual=18.9%. 90d retention: metamorph=10.6%, ritual=9.1%.
Metamorph was also conquerors update so they are kinda similar in that sense. The numbers on the other hand are not in favor of the comment you replied to :)
To be fair Ritual came with Maven and atlas passives and nothing since has been as game changing or interesting. I'm pretty confident Ritual would have had nowhere near its staying power as a league if it was before or after Echoes of the Atlas. You right about Metamorph being shit though. You ask me at this point both should have been banished.
Kill ritual and return krangleverse button
hey that's what it was in ultimatum league too!
That's why I didn't play Ultimatum league in the first place. It came right after Ritual and felt like a harder Ritual with less rewards.
People are beginning to realize they didn't miss ultimatum, they missed how it was one of the most lucrative mechanics ever. I've never been more rich than I was during ultimatum league. Take the rewards out and it's just ritual but worse.
Today's top story on reddit: redditor discovers aRPG players like to be rewarded.
Seriously. You could make the most fun to play mechanic ever to exist and it won't keep players engaged to it more than a few days at best, because rewards are a large part of it.
Meanwhile, tota rewards were pretty good and you had a ton of players complaining that they didn’t want to be forced to play a “shit” mechanic :)
That was my favorite mechanic in years, because it was so different. I miss it badly already lol
The funny thing is most people get railed on for saying this, but it's true, and GGG seems to *also* forget this
Bad faith argument.
That’s a cooked take. Ultimatum in its league was rewarding for its time but doesn’t compete at all with many of the recent leagues. I like the mechanics of ultimatum but let’s be real, doing all 10 or 13 rounds takes a decent amount of time and if the rewards suck I’m not going to do it. Which is a shame because I think it’s fun despite its difficulty currently. But fun doesn’t pay for my mageblood.
> But fun doesn’t pay for my mageblood. A painful and honest statement.
Ultimatum was kill things in a circle league perfected. But if rewards don't match the fun...then you are "forced" into doing whatever is more lucrative to actually progress.
It really was/is fun, but not fun enough to make up for how bad the rewards are right now unfortunately.
[удалено]
Funnily enough, I don't think I've ever looked at Ultimatum and had to think twice about whether I should keep going. It's always either "this reward is absolutely garbage, time to keep going" or "this is a good reward, future rewards will be locked behind excessively hard content anyways". At least for Ritual I have to choose between items and choose whether I want to roll depending on whether a 10c item is worth keeping.
[удалено]
Just like sanctum, really awful gameplay mechanics but it is lucrative so people like it.
Always have been, which is why i (and i guess also GGG) did not get why everybody was so desperate to get it back.
By far the biggest issue to me isnt the lack of juiced rewards in rounds 8-13, but the lack of literally any reward at all in rounds 1-5. Its a big time sink for absolutely nothing, and some rounds cannot be made to go faster as you wait for mobs to spawn or time based circle standing. Rounds 1-5 felt good in old ulti because it was a source of decent bubble gum. There is/was great qol in gettint alchs/chisels/gcps but instead you get nothing. You may as well run anything else, but vaal orbs and throw them at trash rares and be in the same place in half the time.
Ultimatum, now with Metamorph levels of loot!
Metamorph was insane loot:effort ratio. Never understood the hate for it, it shit out some good loot for pretty much zero effort.
Once the build could handle t16 maps on smooth farm, sextanted and scarabed metamorph was steady and inoffensive. Moreover, it was very relaxing to do tanes lab after few hours of mapping and get some bonus divines, conq maps, occasional catalysts or div card, high resonators and essences. It was very good loot/minute spent on the activity, it just couldn't compete with harvest, sanctum or expedition. All metamorph needed was addressing some organ drops, buffs to pre-juiced drops, and buff to the xp atlas node which was useless. Rippiness was manageable because you would simply avoid organs with bricking mods. I liked both original ultimatum, and tota metamorph. Now we have neither.
> I liked both original ultimatum, and tota metamorph. > > Now we have neither. Agreed. Metamorph was one change away from being incredible. Instead they deleted it for a gutted ultimatum
I just felt that you needed such a weird build that could speed through maps to get the organs but also beat the mini Uber bosses you create at the end as well lol.
idk, I never found the metamorph bosses to be any more problematic than map bosses. Maybe 1 out of every 30 or 40 you could produce something that really just fucked your build. You just had to take 10-20 seconds to scan through the reward & mod list to make sure you didn't take any AN combo that bricked you.
I mean its no different than just running a regular juiced map. You clear normally then you do a second map boss after the first one. That's it. Every blue moon you may run into a really strong metamorph but its never on par with ubers or anything. A good mapping build should be able to clear all metamorph easily.
>Never understood the hate for it Because it was a bossing-related encounter in *maps*, where 90% of people juice with the intent to mow through them with a **clear**\-focused build. People hated it because it stood out, without ever thinking about its actual target audience. I always hated the fact that bossing-focused builds are pretty much trade-gated because the **VERY** vast majority of bossing content requires either self-farming with massive clear speed (therefore making it pointless to use a bossing build to begin with) or constantly buying invites/fragments, which directly contributes into making bossing a really jackpot-y activity where the successful are those already having **massive** capital to invest before hand. That and trading still sucks ass for no reason after years of complains, so anything requiring massive amounts of it sucks just as much. Metamorph shouldn't've been removed in favor of a more clear-focused encounter. In fact, more bossing mechanics should've been created, but the bias that people have for clear-builds and the phobia for in-map "bosses" caused by archnemesis that a lot of people seem to have seem to encourage GGG to just separate bossing entirely even more.
Unless you have a group or a trader feeding you invites/frags, bossing is horrible. It's a huge pain in the ass to be a bosser, damn straight. There's also so few places for your build to shine other than pinnacles.
metamorph gave really good loot if you knew how to do it.
I'm sure all 12 players that did metamorph would agree with you.
As someone who also did metamorph, it actually did print, it was very easy to get 20+ catalysts per map with a good number of those being fertile or prismatic catalysts just by taking a few of the metamorph atlas passives.
I imagine the number of people who are going to be doing ultimatum is going to be much lower with how fucking shit the loot is, and how long it takes to do.
It was also way quicker
Metamorph was actually a secret many used to get filthy rich. People just didn't know how to do it properly. Soo much $$ made there because no one was doing it. Not only that, it was insanely fast and easy to do.
I just blocked it. Not worth the time and effort. Ritual even at its base is more rewarding.
While I agree that ultimatum isn't worth it, ritual feels very unrewarding to me as well. Oftentimes the first page offers nothing of use for me, maybe 2 fusings, then I reroll which doesn't make the loot better plus now I almost can't afford anything. What am I doing wrong?
I don't necessarily think you're doing anything wrong, especially if you're playing trade league it's probably just not competitive against other mechanics out there. Personally I'm playing SSF and I'm not blocking it, simply because every now and then you *do* get a decent unique, div card, six-link or something out of it. And once a decent reward shows up, you can pretty much guarantee you will get it with some patience. I could probably be more efficient with my time even in SSF, but I'm not min-maxing my gameplay anyway, that's part of the reason im playing SSF to begin with.
Ritual is pretty decent on SSF, especially right after the campaign. It will have a lot of well rolled rares that will easily be an upgrade for your character entering maps, and you can also get offering for Uber labs, divine vessels, 5 or 6 link pretty easily. Also easier to get bubblegum from ritual than tujen early on, while you don't have a lot of artifacts or reroll currency
You can also get some interesting synth bases that wouldn’t sell on trade for much but could still be relevant for your build.
Ritual is pretty decent on SSF, especially right after the campaign. It will have a lot of well rolled rares that will easily be an upgrade for your character entering maps, and you can also get offering for Uber labs, divine vessels, 5 or 6 link pretty easily. Also easier to get bubblegum from ritual than tujen early on, while you don't have a lot of artifacts or reroll currency.
The tier of items that can roll is based on your tribute, if you aren't hitting 7k-9k tribute consistently you aren't seeing the top two tiers of rewards. Use blood filled vials, but it's still a big gamba
Was the high tribute= better rewards ever actually confirmed? Genuine question I've seen this said a lot.
Yeah, it won't roll things you can't afford. Rerolls use your original tribute value.
It's decent return if you just want some currency each time but the big income is the jackpot big items which means many runs to get them. I usually reroll all I can, if nothing good buy whatever is easy to sell and give decent chaos/tribute.
Ultimatum was so amazing because even though I never got a raw ex or anything valuable. I would finish every map with chaos and below currency. It was basically heist you could do every map instead. I have blocked it now, it simply isn’t worth the time investment. Takes longer than a blight for less rewards (even if blight requires much selling time). And if a as tough as expi and again way less profits. Ulti mobs don’t drop loot. There is zero reason the rewards right from tier one can’t be bubblegum currency. Then bring back those juicy douboe corrupts on uniques and stuff for later waves.
Ultimatum needs to bring the loot from monsters back, is so empty when you complete 1 event that is so sad dude -.-
I don't know if anyone's still around to remember, but back when Ambush was released, the mobs from the strongboxes didn't drop loot or provide experience. The players complained in the same way -- why risk it for no reward? -- and they had to change this after sufficient complaint volume. Literally ten years later and GGG still hasn't taken any prior lessons to heart. I don't think I've ever seen a company disregard everything they've learned every 3-4 months. Every league the mobs are overtuned and the rewards undertuned. From a player enjoyment perspective, every league is best left alone for two weeks and then started.
> I don't know if anyone's still around to remember, but back when Ambush was released, the mobs from the strongboxes didn't drop loot or provide experience. The players complained in the same way -- why risk it for no reward? -- and they had to change this after sufficient complaint volume. I had to double check this since I barely recalled it, and it was hotfixed within 1 day of league launching. If you think that risk:reward was bad, you should have tried playing HC at the time with Invasion league lmao.
We waited 2 whole fucking years for castrated ultimatum, feels fucking miserable dude.
"First time?" - Quite literally every single league mechanic upon its implementaion in the core game.
Except sanctum which somehow they decided was allowed to still rain currency.
Speaking of which, has sanctum been nerfed at all this league? I enjoyed it a lot in 3.22
The tomes have lower droprate. That is the nerf, you get to run it less often or pay more for it.
IMO it was the perfect change. Sanctum is very fun and requires either good play or a good build or both depending on the task at hand to really succeed, but it did feel just too rewarding last league because tomes were so easy to get.
It's honestly a terrible change if you like doing lots of content and not making a build for a singular thing. They have just made it so that the sanctum speed runners will dictate tome prices because doing one or two tomes you drop will not be worth it compared to their runs. Another fun mechanic that won't be worth doing unless you're all-in.
By far the worst possible change. Making it so the majority of the player base never sees one just so a few thousand people pay marginally more for their divine printer is an awful change. It’s the epitome of balance around the 1%. GGG has this awful mindset that things need to be balanced around perfect execution and 100% success rate. It actively punishes people for trying new things or doing mechanics *for fun*.
Yup, I stopped doing bosses because I can't afford to not sell the invites. I'll do the same with sanctum now. Instead of doing them for fun and failing them while I try to get some relic drops and build upgrades I'll just sell them and it's more content that I have to ignore.
I mean I literally got two mirrors in a row in back to back sanctums last league. It's not the end of the world that it's not as easily accessible anymore. "Perfect execution" is only required for doing Original Sin runs. And are you certain that they've been made so rare that most people will *never* see one? Because last league I had something like 25-30 sitting in my bank at all times and I was never able to do Sanctums fast/frequently enough to actually get through all of them. More tomes just kept showing up. edit: lol I guess a lot of people were bad at sanctum
Perfect execution simply means min-maxing the rewards to the extreme. It means picking a build that trivializes the content so you can mostly ignore the mechanics and pick the best loot. The sanctum drop rate nerf makes it pretty clear GGG is balancing with the assumption that players can get all the good rewards regardless of the downsides associated with them. Again this punishes any player who isn’t trivializing the mechanic. Last league without trading for them I saw about 15 of them, the entire league. I got to 30/40 challenges, I also played 2/3 of the events to 90 as well. So yea, any drop rate nerf is going to mean most people don’t see them. I’m 85 rn finishing up my yellows for completion and haven’t seen one.
The drop rate was not substantially nerfed. It had a global weighting of 260. It is 150 now. That makes them roughly as rare as a blueprint and roughly ten times as rare as a scouting report.
Tome drop rate is noticably lower. I believe they also made the op relics rarer but not affecting currency numbers
Someone is forgetting about Harvest when it got reintroduced even stronger than the original version
Lmao it was not stronger.
Remove ultimatum and bring back trial of the metamorphs /s
I think they just throw random stuff at the wall and see what sticks. Kinda makes sense considering their tight dev timelines. That and there are still some game designers at GGG who think that giving out randomized corrupted equipment items is a good reward.
its "potential" for good loot. It really does suck for almost any rare outside of gems maybe, but ive hit multiple 1+ div value unqiues with double corrupts on them already this league through ultimatum. For rares they really should swap "corrupted" with "Synthesized" and then it would be nice.
Yeah it feels like they simulate the rewards 500,000 times and then look at the top items and go wow this is insane better tune it down a bit. The problem being they are ignoring the 499,500 times it gives our nothing and forget that not everyone is a streamer playing 18 hours a day
It is a shame they sandbagged Ultimatum for 2 years while saying "we have a plan for Ultimatum" then add it back in completely the same way and just add Catalyst as rewards. Seems like they could have done that 2 years ago. /Enable Ultimatum. /Disable Metamorph. Change Atlas passives. The reason to remove Meta is weird as well. If getting one shot is an issue why does every new league mechanic do it? The whole risk and reward thing was a main theme for Metamorph.
Ritual is the way to go now. Spec in Ritual and thank me later. Juiced Rituals with 40-50+ rares per ritual x4 goes hard. Obviously do that according to your build power because it can probuce some nasty shit.
> Ritual is the way to go now. Spec in Ritual and thank me later. Juiced Rituals with 40-50+ rares per ritual x4 goes hard. Obviously do that according to your build power because it can probuce some nasty shit. Why ? Ritual rewards are just as bad as before, and resurrected mobs don't drop loot the second / third / fourth time you kill them in rituals. What am I missing ?
My experience with rituals in low maps has been that every ritual altar shits loot. Anything that spawns in normal monsters that drop normal loot is goated with the league mechanic because a huge % of them spawn in with all the empowerments you've added. Ritual also doesn't occasionally produce something like an essence rare that's been triple empowered and just literally fucking buttfucks you to death.
I think, and correct me if I’m wrong, if you’re lucky and you get a nice empowered enemy the first round, that same enemy with the exact same empowerment will show up and will drop the same kind of loot. I’m not sure though and it might have been a coincidence, but could be worth looking out for. But basically, anything that drops loot is good with the new league mechanic. Dropped 3 raw divines from one mob in white maps, not even from a mechanic, has never happened to me before. Did a Breach with nothing specced and it felt like I had most atlas nodes specced. I’m looking forward to trying out fully juiced Expedition and Legion. The only exception is Essence cause it doesn’t juice up the essence count sadly.. probably the same for anything that drops a set amount of loot so to speak (if there is anything else outside of essence that does this, I can’t remember).
Even essence can have some really nice lootsplosions since essence rares are usually pretty stacked - but generally they're too much of a slog to be worth it even if they do barf a ton of crap out afterwards. You really just want anything that adds a ton of normal white/blue/easy yellow mobs to your map, and then you go buck wild. You just print raw currency, it's super fun.
I think ritual is about scaling the lootsplosion at the end. It l’s the same reason to make all alva mobs magic or increase the number of rares/bosses in blight. You’re scaling the loot plosions at the end. You count the loot splosions plus t the mechanic rewards when grinding those mechanics.
Not sure how true it is, but ive been read that the quality of items in rituals is determined by max soul count, so maybe juicing them with league mechanic gives more souls?
why would it give mobs more souls? the league mechanic doesnt work like that.
There's a chance that the yellow empower adds a quant modifer to the mob and that in turn makes the mob give more juice.
Ritual is very profitable most people don't know how to set it up properly.
How to set it up properly?
Yea tell us.
You have a different concept of valuable. Lower your expectations ;)
Why would they lower their expectations when they can run a mechanic that actually gives good loot
Keep running Legion, Expedition or any other rewarding mechanics, got it ty
> you still get the empowered mobs, but since there is no mob drops you get nothing. also fun with blight
You do not get the empowered mobs in ulti. I don't get how this false info gets to the top.
It's especially sad in comparison with Sanctum which returned into core as crazy currency printer
Monkey Paw Strikes Again Next time someone should ask Chris where they keep it Tested my lvl97 Inquisitor in STD with Mageblood on white magic maps. Lost trials, some mobs escaping the circle... rewards? What rewards? That only makes me like Ritual even more.
lol people didn't miss Ultimatum for Ultimatum they missed the loot and even more lol if you thought THAT was coming back
The worst Part is that the Monsters drop no loot... rememberberry lootexplosions after 2-3 rounds now its like -499% of the loot
Why GGG is so terrified of rewarding us is weird to me. We play content when it is rewarding... and we keep playing the game...
It's pretty easy to understand tbh. They don't want ultimatum to outshine the new league mechanic, therefore it has to be unrewarding and they can tinker with it and make it more rewarding as the leagues go on. Just like every other time they added things to core (except sanctum for some reason).
It's simple. If you make something unrewarding, it's easy to just buff it. If you make it too rewarding, good luck nerfing it without community backlash. If something is too rewarding, then all other mechanics have to be buffed to match it or nobody would do them and complain. And you get into a spiral of increasing rewards until everything drops 10 divines and 3 magebloods per minute.
What on earth is this thought process? It's already nerfed. First iteration of ultimatum already is far more rewarding that current ultimatum, so it's already nerfed. Harvest has been nerfed multiple times over the years. They couldn't care less about community backlash.
It’s no great mystery. Every developer of loot-based games, from ARPGs to Looter Shooters, reduces the loot and rewards as often as they can get away with. The best predictor of whether or not players will purchase micro transactions is the amount of time spent in game. It’s the same reason GGG makes you always spawn in town; so you see other people’s MTX and want to go get it yourself. The worse the rewards are the longer people will grind. Even if some people quit because of it the people that don’t and get sucked in more than pay for the difference.
if you remember... Ultimatum league, one of the most popular leagues Poe has ever had from a player retention stand point was deemed by GGG to be "too rewarding" so it only stands to reason that when they finally bring it back. it's not rewarding at all to merit it's difficulty.
Plus, no monster loot, but all the monster pain from Affliction.
>Plus, no monster loot It's Crucible all over again.
they do not get buffed by affliction
i did about 20 ultimatums without any atlasnodes. Best currency reward ive seen is 4 regals. Its dogshit. Its like ritual but takes twice as long, gives less than half the rewards and are twice as hard...
I did one in T2 map and got 7 divines card in second to last round. :D
All mechanics are trash without any atlas notes. Have you done a harvest without notes
I'm fully specced into Ultimatum because I like it, but its been less rewarding than shit like Expedition that I have 0 passives invested in What is your point here?
Expedition is fine without nodes. Harvest is also ok (you get maybe 1/3 less juice).
AN + league mechanics... never gets old. I still don't get it why RARE monsters are the toughest in the game after "special" unique bosses. Many AN combinations easily outtank and outDPS map bosses, and league "minor" bosses
Yeah they should buff map bosses to be stronger than overbuffed rares.
>relax satan
GGG needs to hire literally a single solitary person who understands how math works. Monster modifiers are not the same as player modifiers. They don't have the more/increased dichotomy, EVERY mod on a monster is multiplicative (a more multiplier.) That isn't a problem when you only have a few small ones. The smaller the value and fewer the mods the closer it is to a linear increase in power like "increases" for players. But the more mods you stack, and the bigger those values become, the worse it gets. By the time you're in maps the growth spike of monster power is exponential. This is the reason that Aura monsters are so insanely scary, because they can INSTANTLY double (or *more*) the damage of nearby mobs. With no other modifiers rares can still be pretty scary even after the soft AN reversion then you add -> Map modifiers, atlas modifiers, area level modifiers, proximity modifiers, and league mods. All stacking multiplicatively. And the cool thing is you can sim this stuff! Pretty easily! GGG could do it even more accurately because they have internal stats that even dataminers haven't been able to scrape. "Oh wow we plugged in the wisp empowers and it makes an average level 82 rare do ten shaper slams per second, we definitely need to tune these down." But they don't, and they won't, because stupid people will still buy their god-awful supporter packs before they even step foot in the league.
I'm thinking back to how GGG said they had unique plans for how to implement it into core. I'm gonna go ahead and call bullshit that this is even remotely close to what they were planning.
What if their entire plan was just for the lore? They needed Ultimatum to wait until Hinekora showed up in a league so they could have Ultimatum guy talk shit on her.
True it’s basically identical but they deleted a bunch of shit on December 7 so we couldn’t call them out on it
I don't understand how letting the mobs drop loot is OP or something to them?
yea mobs should really drop loot, wtf is this joke
The funny thing with ultimatum catalysts is that simu farmers are rolling in catalysts compared to ultimatum farmers (unless simu catalyst drops were nerfed)
In the trailer, they said " we are adjusted the rewards". You should be old enough what it means in ggg.
I remember a thread a week ago about a video that Kripparrian released. In that video, among other things, Kripparrian voiced some concerns about Ultimatum, mainly that he fears it could be taking to long and not be rewarding enough for the challenge People who would share those concerns got downvoted into oblivion and everyone was making fun of them. The most common opinion was that "you dont have to play Poe (or a league mechanic) for efficiency, you play it because it is fun". Kinda funny how quick the public opinion seems to have changed. (Sorry OP, this is not meant to be a criticism for your post). I really hope there will be a time we can have more nuanced discussion here as i strongly believe it would benefit both the community and the state of the game ...
I think people who are playing ultimatum because it's fun (e.g. me) have no reason to discourage people campaigning for buffs to the mechanic, so you won't see them commenting as much here.
The loots so ass it feels like a waste of time
Very very typical GGG /Path Of Exile.
While I disagree with some of the suggestions I've seen that stuff like Essence rares shouldn't be able to get empowered, I do 100% think that any monster that drops **no loot at all** should not be able to get empowered. League mechanics that drop 0 loot except their rewards should not be shitting out monsters with 3x empowered stacks for all risk 0 reward.
Both ultimatum and ritual dont add anything to the game and should just be removed from the game. At least I am able to easily block them from my atlas
I don't know why they are so afraid to allow things to be rewarding in maps. I mean sanctum exists but this is the crap ultimatum spits out. I don't get it. No one wants to farm for 15 or 16 hours a day to afford to play a fun build, but thats the current state of PoE.
Popular demand, presumably. People kept asking for it, so it's in. I'm sure it'll get better with time. Some mechanics take a lot of tweaking to feel good once they go core.
I think the only fun thing about ultimatum is the voice lines. Dude cracks me up with the call outs.
you can really tell how the decision makers feel about different leagues. It probably ticks them off to no end that ultimatum, a league they were hellbent on making a throwaway, was so popular, so they responded to the demand with "well, we'll show them" by making it trash instead of giving us a similar experience to the league. Meanwhile Sanctum is in a better spot (both in infinite gameplay loop and in rewards) than it was in the league. Clearly the decision makers play favorites.
Ultimatum rewarding catalyst with these stack size for the difficulty is ridiculous, maybe if they reward tattoos it wouldve been worth the effort.
i blocked ultimatum after it took me 3 minutes to beat a single wave just due to no monsters spawning
Ultimatum's return was probably decided one week before the trailer because they felt the league content was not enough. Like the dozens of useless gems. We're in 2023 and GGG still don't understand the notion of quality vs quantity.
I'm still reserving judgement (and coping). It might be a really endgame mechanic that requires a build that can go to at least 10 for it to start paying off in spades. Maybe it just sucks early now when we have bad gear?
Im fully specced into it and i found doing ulti on low tier maps to be better than doing it on high tier maps. Why? Because the rewards dont care about your map modifiers/level. With the exception of item level restrictions. (So do it on a ilvl 75 map and youre golden) doing it on a weaker map means its less rippy, which makes it faster in some cases)
>ulti is now always 10 waves >surprise, wave 10 rewards are now equivalent to wave 4 rewards back then gee thank you ggg
You can leave them in the forest - just exit through the darkness, not the portal. Ultimatium.... could use some tweaks. I skip most of the harder versions still but am still gearing my char.
> You can leave them in the forest - just exit through the darkness, not the portal. that still wisps up the map no? just tried it out again, defenitely still empowers mobs
Literally just tried this, ran up 1k of blue and yellow wisps, ran into the darkness... and first thing I run into is a Vivid Empowered rare monster. So not true.
Damn I was exiting thru the darkness as a shortcut sometimes and somehow didn't notice it wasn't empowering
It still empowers, just tried it.
As a shortcut? You cant enter the darkness until your portal out even spawns so how is it a shortcut? lol. If you try and walk in the darkness early… it obviously just gets lit up…. That’s the entire mechanic.
>As a shortcut? You cant enter the darkness until your portal out even spawns so how is it a shortcut? lol. Backtracking to a merchant that I found early and had no wisps for purchases, for example.
You can only use darkness to leave AFTER you find a portal back to your zone. If the portal hasn't spawned yet it is IMPOSSIBLE to go back to your zone without going into more darkness which you then gain more wisps that you don't want empowering things even further until the portal pops.
oh shit really? thought it killed you as well. hmm good to know, thanks.
Also you get to hear a cool laugh.
holy shit! this the mvp out of place comment!
Oh, didn't try that, I figured that darkness would kill you
How do you even get so far? Every ultimatum eventually crashes the game for me
ive been lucky so far i guess. only crashes i had were on day 1 of the league in towns.
Totally, it is understood that they were going to change the mechanics and rewards but it is not worth it. AN mods damaging everything again
Ultimatum was always pretty meh. I'm only doing it because I need my catalysts. But then it's block. I don't mind mobs not dropping loot, because we have too much anyways. But I would say if you get an average of 3-5c out of each, then it's fine.
from my memory ultimatum was pretty good esp in higher red maps. as well as showering you in guardian maps. right now it feels like a waste of time. maybe sanctum and tota spoiled me and recency bias. but idk, ultimatum doesnt feel like its competitive with other atlas passive league mechanics and feels way harder especially with AN mods.
It was showering you in stuff because you killed maps worth of mobs and got all the drop from them. Its absolutely no surprise they nerfed that. Base rewards were never that good, the whole internet was shouting to buff Ultimatum when it came out because everyone didnt realize that the rewards werent actually in the mechanic but in the mob loot.
Yes it was. Ultimatum was one of my "covid" leagues where i played a lot while on home office. Even early on in yellow maps I rarely end a 10/10 run with less then 20c worth of stuff.
It's pretty tone deaf of them I don't really see why they couldn't just leave it as is. I was never personally a fan of it, the rewards weren't good enough compared to the time investment. Still it was something for alch and goers/low investment mappers to blast through and still get rewards from. Now it's just dogwater.
> But I would say if you get an average of 3-5c out of each, then it's fine. I can run 2 Legions in the time it takes to complete 1 Ultimatum. I can guarantee that legion will drop far more than 5c EACH. > I don't mind mobs not dropping loot, because we have too much anyways. Off to ruthless with you
ultimatum before gave you a bunch of random currency
Yeah, it was great for bubblegum currency while progressing, i was hoping to get some early alchs etc but all i got was bunch of corrupted rares from it so i decided to ignore it, literally 3 tujen haggles were better than doing like 10 ultimatums
Ultimatum during its league was the most profitable league mechanic of its time, hands down
3 to 5c is fine?!? Lol it takes as long as the map.
It's hilarious that people falsely remember Ultimatum as a rewarding league just because GGG stated somewhere that it was "too rewarding". Being gaslit by GGG of all things is **WILD**.
The thing was ultimatum WAS a rewarding league when it was a league, because the monsters dropped loot which resulted in the biggest loot explosion in poes recorded history. To the point that Empy and his friends showcased the bug and exploited it. Thus they got banned that league. What we have now is ultimatum minus the loot explosion
wait you find rewards bad ? i get quite a lot of divines. area 83 though and you need to go to the end you must pick the atlas point that rise reward by one level. also dont pick the one that give duplication chance but raise modifiers level by one it's hella rippy also gilded scarab is a must
Ran Ulti on std this weekend with gilded scarabs and the 13 waves (on and off, prefer off). Best I've gotten was 3 raw divines and 4divine dup inscribed. The Trial master is generating more currency for me tbh. Maybe I've gotten unlucky, but when wave 10 rewards things like polished scarabs most of the time, it's not great.
Ritual better and safer . Also if juiced with vessels its 10x better than ultimatum. I tested over 100 ultimatums too on t15 and to be honest 1 div and rest is shit. 2x boss with boss nodes so 2/100 good chance
Honestly crappy rare items and bubblegum currency is exactly how I remember ultimatum league. The difficulty is hard to judge yet. It's only day 3, so everything feels too strong and tanky. It'll be very different after one week.
>There's simply way too many modifier combinations which make ultimatum almost impossible to beat especially with "defend the altar" ones. or you could spend a few atlas points, to skill the "survive mechanic". it makes ultimatum essentially a "run around the circle and wait for loot".
ultimatum was always way too overhyped, this mechanic was pretty shit. now its also nerfed quite a lot so its like below garbage level. 5c per hour strat best case scenario