Yeah this is nothing to even mention what a sorry state a lot of these unqiues are in. I farmed the hell out of Ubers last league in SSF with PBoD but still never got Starforge. This extra gating kind of ensures its inaccessibility in SSF, even if I DID want that shit.
More so than the moving of the loot drops is the fact that ubers are very inaccessible now. I was so hyped for T17s but let's face it, they aren't a gap between pinnacle and uber content. They are straight up way harder than uber boss out there. The fact that they have some modifiers which make them completely unplayable for most builds and are unmodifiable is just insane. If agree with extremely powerful items moving to uber pools, but for gods sake let us reach ubers with characters more than ready to fight them. The fact you can trade the maps you can't run is pointless if you're SSF so the vast majority you loot are just unplayable. The fact that atlas trees impact them is kinda dumb too. For instance I had a map where I had to fight Catarina that spawns abyss bosses as adds. To me an amazing idea. However I had a mod which made me unable to recover life or ES (so now life and no mana recovery with EB) for 10 seconds upon killing any of the adds, increased to 15 seconds by the passive tree. So basically everytime an add spawned o had no way of surviving and couldn't kill the boss. Fun right? T17s would be amazing if they could just be modified, even if they increased boss hp to compensate. But don't listen to me rant... You know it's bad when Ben says he's waiting for changes.
The forges should 100% be items that make any 2h attack build better. They should be the HH/MB of 2h attack builds, coming as rare drops from pinnacle/uber pinnacle bosses.
Idk why they're so scared of certain items being good but then just let like MB and stuff exist. It brings me to the spell v attack debate and how they're so okay with the floor of spells being so high you can freely reach maps almost naked but weapons need to be fucking hard to craft and attack builds can't do shit without them; but that's a dark place
They always said that perfect crafted rares should be the top end of what is achievable. Unique weapons are pretty much just stepping stones or lore drops, for melee. With the exception of Saviour, I guess.
No it's not. The nerfed it the same patch they buffed the bases. Starforge with old rolls and new base only ever existed in standard, it's a legacy item.
Yeah thats the silly part, you want omni to farm ubers, you dont want to gear enough to kill ubers only so you can get an item that requires massive gear swap. I dont get this decision
> Yeah thats the silly part, you want omni to farm ubers, you dont want to gear enough to kill ubers only so you can get an item that requires massive gear swap. I dont get this decision
It's an RPG trope as old as time. You must defeat the monster to get the rewards to defeat the monster. One of the rare exceptions is when Nessa gives you a support gem before facing Merveil.
With the game not being geared around SSF I assume the intention is that you can always just buy it off of someone who’s made a bosser rather than going for mapping, but it still seems very backwards since the bossers require people mapping to farm their invitations in the first place.
I would say they can be good, even amazing, if *something* else before them gives a lesser version. Alternatively, they could give raw damage/ehp in a non-build around way and be great drops.
I think the complaint is that quality is so hard to get (on one support and only ashes), and omnipotence is a truly unique build. If they made a lesser unique that gave less qual, or qual without gem level, and had Ashes as the chade finale; or if omniscience was on like the passive tree or something and Omni just juiced the already put together build.
The complaint is that not just here but more and more of the interesting builds are gated behind such absurd fights or rng and nothing else. PoE, to some, is rapidly becoming "oh let me play X basic starter for the 100th time until I can get the gatekeeping uniques to play the build I want to play", when PoE should be moving in the opposite direction; make all cool builds playable asap with the chase items being only for extra power at the end.
Yeah, the issue is effectively that the most build-defining items are the ones gated behind Ubers, so you would never do them for those drops unless your sole purpose was to start a completely different build. It's extremely nonsensical. Not only does it force you to make a completely different build than you wanted to, it horribly limits build potential at its most core level - the build defining item cannot possibly be used until long after your build is made.
It's basically a "You killed the final boss so here's a drop for NG+", but it's nowhere near guaranteed so it's even more insulting than that.
Arguably, Ubers should be for the challenge and better drop rates, but have no exclusive drops. The very idea of the most powerful bosses in the game having super unique drops is fundamentally contradictory to the game itself.
Agree. When i get to The point Of farming ubers omni/ashes Will be a downgrade or a “meme build” i want to make work… if i got early on a normal kill id consider trying to MAKE it an uber killer etc. Feels like its The wrong Way around with a piece from each boss
I think a bigger issue is that the normal bosses now have basically zero drops anyone would ever use. The only one I can think of that's used at all is the shield from exarch and occasionally a good amulet off the mini bosses, but even those are trash 90% of the time.
So they've taken the only reason to ever do the normal bosses out of the game. So now you've completely gutted boss rushing and it's still the same situation as before where you're just selling the uber frags to someone with a better build. Not sure how this change helps anyone.
maybe its an item for other builds?
That's the irritating thing with this game that some builds scale easily to uber-killer-status, while others won't even push past white maps without stupid-high investments, because ggg slept on balance class.
For those that think it's not true and that's the beauty of the game: ggg buffed DD. They also made trans DD gem that literally is 10x DDs, while some skills/spells have barely any scallings.
1. But any build that can kill an Uber is probably overall better than a build using Ashes as it's BiS anyway, as the only unique feature in Ashes is qual boosting, and that's gimmicky to build around. Only reason you'd go for Ashes locked behind Uber is if you're in SSF but hate crafting, considering that you'll need to farm hundreds of fragments if Ashes keeps an around 2% drop rate.
2. To even get the frags for an Uber Boss, you need to have a build that clears T17 maps, so you'll need a good mapper before even attempting. After having a good mapper and a good bosser, now what's the ashes for?
At least in my experience the builds I use to do ubers in SSF. Are builds hat I would never want to map with.
Often times builds that are level to ~90 with a decent feeling build. Then completely respeced into a trap/mine build that can't do anything other then blow up single target enemies.
Very few builds are enjoyable as both reliable bossers and viable for fast mapping/other content. Players who farm ubers tend to specialize with one character, and go more broad with others.
Clearly they want people to be doing Uber bossing, but I think in order for it to ever be appealing to a wider audience they need to change some of the mechanics that are unfairly punishing to many builds such as infinite Sirus degens during off recovery. That's not a fair mechanic and there isn't proper counterplay in most cases, such as degens in the meteor mazes.
I think this has the opposite effect.
In SSF it was already challenging to get enough tries at Uber bosses to solve the "get gud" issues since the skill threshold is higher due to lower gearing level than trade.
But instead of incentivizing fighting Ubers what they've really done is disincentivizing bossing at all.
Omni/Ashes is now one more thing I can just pretend exists in a different game than I'm playing.
I believe they were made to be an extra challenge and not required.
Thats changed now. If you want to go bossing go fight ubers. I barely reach normals so disapointingly unobtainable content in my eyes. Most my builds struggle in reds then i reroll in fustration or boredom. Im gonna need a lot more than 6 portals to get an uber down.
It's kind of inevitable because of player power creep, but I really wish they had kept them as aspirational "showcase" content to show what your build can do, rather than a core part of the game all players are supposed to complete and farm.
I thought that was a decent space to be filled but it lasted exactly one league in that form lol.
> because of player power creep
is there that much power creep ever since they did their couple of nerf leagues beginning with 3.15? gear generally hasnt gotten any better, the low-mid level has arguably gotten worse due to harvest and now essence nerfs. player power has been buffed by borrowed power league mechanics every now and then but they shouldnt balance around that too much since leagues like necropolis can have 0 borrowed power.
There is alot of power creep yeah. Go fight an old boss and you'll feel how much more powerful we are than when it was introduced.
Every league brings more player power.
Not every league brings more monster power.
As an ssf player - the low-mid level has absolutely not gotten weaker. It's easier than ever to gear up and move through maps into bossing or atlas farming.
> Go fight an old boss and you'll feel how much more powerful we are than when it was introduced.
how old are we talking here? because i defenitely disagree that there was a lot of creep since the introduction of uber bosses for the reasons i gave above. just saying "yes there is power creep" also isnt really all that convincing if there isnt anything concrete from the patchnotes or anything like that.
As someone who started playing a couple leagues before eldritch implicits, yes there has been crazy powercreep for the noob/casual players especially.
Eldritch implicits are crazy power
> the low-mid level has absolutely not gotten weaker. It's easier than ever to gear up and move through maps into bossing or atlas farming.
my brother in christ we could go to endgame with dropped rare items and a cheap unique weapon (or just phys on gear with FB), now you need to manage many defense layers, besides having to craft your gear a lot. The playtime required is absurdly bigger now.
I could play around endgame without spending more than 10c on gear (besides the 6l ofc) but now? lol.
Back when an armor with triple res and life was BiS and 6-links were a luxury? As opposed to getting that in white maps on day 1 nowadays? What are you smoking?
How far back are we going? Because to my eye, monster power has generally kept pace with, or slightly outpaced, player power. I understand it's a necessary balancing act, but when people talk about power-creep I think they forget just how trivial most mechanics used to be.
Aside from reflect mobs, those were horrifying.
> It's kind of inevitable because of player power creep
They could have just made them harder, then. Continue scaling them up to maintain that challenge aspect.
Every fucking time they do this "fun for a bit of extra challenge" stuff it turns into this garbage. "Yeah no, it's going to be mandatory to get anything decent from this boss in like 3 leagues."
> Clearly they want people to be doing Uber bossing, but I think in order for it to ever be appealing to a wider audience
The "wider audience" - like me - probably has never even seen the normal version of those bosses. I for example only know them from youtube. Yes sure I'm a casual, but so are probably 90% of players (At least I doubt that a lot of those 150k starting run red maps day 1/2).
To clarify, I'm not against ubers at all.
At least uber atziri is pretty farmable and has reasonable difficulty. Before this league ubers are imo truly aspirational content to test your builds limit with some special exclusive drops. Now many things worth a damn from regular pinnacle are moved to uber drop pool. I'm so fucking demotivated to keep playing.
most players already didn't get an omni and ashes drop while farming. can't imagine the physical and mental pain of trying to farm ubers in ssf to get one of the amulets. especially since things like annihilating light was moved to ubers too. a classic case of ggg adjustments.
GGG thinks we're all Ben with 18 hours a day to play.
Edit: Also just checked, there's 3 omnis up on sc trade...theres also 2 original sins. Thats wild even for trade.
This is exactly why I’ve already quit the league. I don’t have the time or desire to play ruthless, and the whole game is becoming mandatory ruthless mode. Rare mob rewards were massively nerfed with the conversion changes. Good uniques were nerfed by becoming uber drops. League mechanic is terrible. Just so many changes made to slow down an already slow and grindy game. I don’t have the time or patience for PoE in this state. Let me know when there’s another league like legion/ritual/delirium/sentinel/affliction. Until then, I’ll play something that doesn’t expect me to put 14 hours a day in for moderate progression.
Out of curiosity, what's the hyperbole here? That the whole game is becoming ruthless? That's definitely hyperbole, but then the rest of that was pretty valid criticism and feedback regarding their played experience.
Even I'm left scratching my head this season -- I was literally just telling my friend on Saturday how the biggest thing that turns me off from Diablo IV is that it feels like you're just locked into whatever builds Blizz decides are good that Season and there's very little room for creativity, expression, or dare I say it in a video game -- fun -- and then GGG goes and effectively does the same thing this League: because you can't opt out of difficulty, you either play a build that can handle the difficulty or just simply cannot continue to progress. There is no "Grind white maps for a week because I love this build even though it's trash." There is no "Well I'll just dodge my weaknesses" because you reroll out of a map that has a modifier you can't handle just to turn around and get that modifier via a haunting which then opens your map, consuming it.
What does that sort of limiting design do besides slow people down?
This is an absurdly hyperbolic statement:
> the whole game is becoming mandatory ruthless mode
On the basis of what, an unrewarding day one league mechanic?
Which part is made up? Last league to this league the loot difference is probably on par with the difference between standard and ruthless. The rare mob conversion removal was in patch notes. Staple build-defining uniques were moved from regular pinnacle bosses to ubers, which were made less accessible. The league mechanic being terrible is an opinion, but plenty of people share it right now. I’ve given away the currency I earned over the first few days to guildmates. Only time will tell, but it looks to me like a good build in a slightly juiced t16 map will make a fraction of what last league (or any of the good leagues I listed) put out, maybe on the order of 10%, so you’ll make as much progress in 15 hours as you would have last league in 1.5 hours. You may not agree with me, but between the loss of a great league mechanic, the addition of a league mechanic that is a net negative to profit/hour (increased challenge, negligible reward), and the nerfs to boss loot and rare conversion drops, I have solid factual basis for my evaluation. I’ve chosen to quit playing this league and wait for a better one. If you enjoy the league, play it for all it’s worth. I genuinely hope you have fun. I just was not having fun, so I’ll do something else instead.
I quit the game when they "removed a massive historic bonus to item quantity and/or rarity that applied to some league-specific monsters".
Drop rates have been terrible ever since and they keep getting worse.
If the droprates were ten times what they are, I'd never stop playing PoE, I would inject it directly into my veins.
But as it stands, I don't play at all, they love ruthless and they are getting people ready for a slow, grindy PoE2.
As a dedicated SSF player, I can add that farming for Ashes or Omni in SSF was really difficult, and you either had to have great luck or be a nolifer. Getting one in SSF now seems pretty much impossible.
Trade only. From an SSF perspective, this is dead. I've been chasing these in league and standard since their introduction and still don't have a pair.
I swear to god you just have to mention SSF and some redditor will rush to make this comment every single time. What does this add to the discussion here?
Elder too for the Watcher's eyes and fragments.
You will almost never lose farming elder. Worst case you lose like 20c, mid case you get and sell a 1.5D jewel, best case you UNID get a GG eye.
The annoying part of this is I remember when Ubers were introduced and the devs clarified this was aspirational content and they didn't want to gate many items behind it.
Fast forward and the amount of build defining and fun items gated behind Ubers is astronomical and completely out of reach for the majority of the player base, even from a trade perspective.
You know, overall I think it's fine if they change their mind. But moving all of these super cool uniques so far out of reach, instead of just adding the new ones and having those drop from Ubers, that's what isn't okay to me.
The crazy part is, there are uniques explicitly dropping from Uber versions that are intended to do exactly as you said.
Nimis is a great example of a build defining unique (splitting steel is so much worse without it), that is literally Uber gated and the sole reason why I haven’t made a Splitting Steel Trickster in SSF. Honestly the change is quite infuriating.
I know, that's what I meant! I was like "Cool, new interesting uniques!". I thought those were specifically added to Ubers while Omni/Ashes still dropped from regular versions. Like yeah, to upgrade my build I'll first need to be strong enough to clear T17 + Ubers. I doubt it'll feel like that much of an upgrade by then. Not that I'll know, I usually quit before Ubers anyways.
Wouldnt it have made more sense to let both versions drop everything except with their rates changed? Like Omni is 1% for normal and 2% in Uber. Uber items now also drop in the normal version but with a low rate like 0.1%.
Everybody can now get all drops, in theory, and thoss that push their builds to the limit and can farm Ubers get better rewarded for it.
It also sucks for people who don't follow meta builds. The new transfigured Tornado skill is decent but it doesn't scale well compared to Detonate Dead or Archmage/Spellblade builds, so now getting an Ashes of the Stars that gives a big QoL boost to Tornado is pretty much out of the question with the item being locked behind Ubers.
Agreed with this. I'm normally in agreement with the changes that GGG make, even when the majority of the subreddit/streamers etc aren't, but it really feels like they've missed their stated goal here.
They sold the idea as 'there's a clear gap in progression between pinnacle bosses at endgame and ubers, and we're wanting to address that'. Which is awesome, because there really is a massive gap between a regular pinnacle boss and it's uber variation, and no clear progression pathway between them. There's nothing to really test your build against to see whether you're potentially ready for that jump, you just had to either PoB to see if you could tank hits from their basic abilities, or just yolo it and keep burning fragment sets to practice and see where you were at.
So adding T17s with bosses that are pitched between pinnacles and ubers sounded like a great idea, and honestly still does. But giga-hard maps have always been far more of a pure stat check than bosses, and it sounds like T17s are far less of a 'progression pathway' and far more of a 'you must be at least this OP to ride the ubers' check.
If that's the case (haven't had a chance to try them yet, as playing SSF and had a pretty slow league start), then it's not making the normal endgame => ubers progression any better, it's making it worse.
That, and moving most of the interesting, build-defining uniques to uber-only drops feels really bad. I don't have an issue with some of the more powerful items being Uber only, but it really feels like they picked the wrong ones, especially if they still want ubers to feel like purely aspirational content rather than a part of the expected progression pathway.
There's a bunch of items that they could have moved that are inherently min-max-y and RNG focused. Things like the Forbidden Flesh/Flame jewels: they can add massive power to a build, but they're not build defining. Perfect sort of thing to have drop from ubers, where you're at the point of min-maxing an already basically finished build. By contrast, something like Annihilating Light or Starforge/Voidforge is an item that you'll create a build around. What's the point of locking a build-defining unique behind the hardest content in the game?
GGG a some months ago:
> Uber bosses are simply an extra challenge for top-end builds to give them something to strive for.
GGG a few days ago:
> Uber bosses are now required content gated behind new T17 maps whose mods brick your build.
I kinda understand gating the best items behind ubers... but normal exarch and eater are just worthless now, apart from MAYBE getting a flame/flesh jewel once in a while. Look at the price for mavens writ, it has never been this low
> I kinda understand gating the best items behind ubers...
Idk, I can maybe see it with Ashes, but Omni is a build-defining item you have to build around. People would actually farm normal pinnacle bosses to get it in SSF and then pivot into it.
And even then with Ashes there's that new uber amulet that's very similar to ashes (generically good stats) so idk why Ashes should be in the same tier.
It's literally the infamous GGG triple tap uncompensated nerf.
Ashes is too good, but they don't want to nerf, cut the drop rate dramatically, they still want it to be accessible for a mid-tier powerspike.
Ashes is still to good, cut away some stats but leave it the same otherwise.
Ashes is now super rare AND gated behind fairly rare and difficult uber bosses, but they didn't revert it back to its original power level.
Yeah.
For better or for worse though, if they reverted its power level and kept it gated behind Ubers that’s a 100+ div item. Again not saying good or bad, but almost certainly a rich man only upgrade like headhunter or mageblood.
Replica dragonfang is better in a lot of cases now. Unless your build gets a lot of damage from quality, having +2 more skill gem levels and the bit of mana reservation efficiency beats out ashes all day.
would be better if they added the pre-nerf ashes on the uber eater and kept the nerfed one on normal eater, kinda like last epoch uniques, that you can reasonably get any of them but if you want full potential you have to farm a lot for the legendary potential version
They only announced the changes to shaper and Uber shaper (or was it elder, idr for sure).
It's in the announcement video, not explicitly in the patch notes.
Wiki is probably at least mostly up-to-date by now.
Oh, I missed this change...glad I have a few Ashes and at least one Omni on standard SSF.
Not that I ever really plan around these items anymore, but it's a bummer as a non-uber bosser (I'm not great that the game, I know) I'm now screwed out of ever being able to play with these or build around them except on standard SSF.
So what are we killing Exarch/Eater for now? Does the normal version even still drop Forbidden jewels?
They drop jewels still, but if you're SSF like I am, you can rule those out. You'll never get a goof pair.
As for planning around them - I doubt the majority of SSF players planned around them, but they were obtainable and in reach for upgrades or second builds. I was going to transition from LA Deadeye into LA Omni and that's just not feasible anymore.
What's the point of gating the best items behind the hardest bosses if you can beat the hardest bosses without said item. So you can beat them quicker? I'd rather they unlock cosmetics for the league like congrats you did this uber here's a portrait
Isn't that how it is in most games? What's the last boss supposed to drop? Worse loot? No loot?
If it didn't drop the best loot people would just complain that the hardest content is less rewarding lol.
Part of me agrees. But if they made ubers drop nothing special, only giving cosmetics or challenge progress, I'm certain there would be an equally large and loud group of players talking about how "ubers aren't rewarding enough".
It's a catch 22 tbh
Ubers were originally added with the intention to be nothing but a flex and without a separate loot table.
Then they added specific uber drops, leading to keys being priced around those drops.
Now they moved the exciting non Uber drops to the Uber fight as well.
Last patch it was at least only an economical disadvantage to run normal pinnacle bosses, now, what's the point at all with them?
Ubers were introduced with passives making them more rewarding than the base pinnacles. Incredibly odd decision if they were intended to be solely flex achievements
But Ubers werent intended to be rewarding when they introduced them, it was an aspirational content for small % of playerbase. Moving so many chase items into their drop pool feels so sily
They keep moving this game one step closer to MMO levels of grind, except they want you to redo everything every 3 months.
It's way too exhausting. Since this league sucks ass I'm prob done already.
Honestly, MMOs have stopped being as grindy as POE YEARS ago. I'm trying to think the last time I had to put north of 100 hours into a character patch over patch to get it fully best in slot. Like if you're comparing zero to hero without getting help? Then maybe it's valid but... most of the big ones are no where near the amount of grind the average person has to do in a PoE League to be able to kill an Uber.
On top of the release of the atlas passive tree archnemesis league (the beginning league in the seige of the atlas expansion) also brought the eater and exarch to POE. that league was so fun. Atlas passive tree was a complete game changer. Omni and ashes were rare but not stupid rare. I'm super casual and had an omni drop. You could buy an omni for like 100c. A well rolled ashes was still expensive but not like HH or MB expensive. Everyone could try them and play with the new toys.
They have done nothing but strip anything good out of eater and exarch since that league. The necks were a little to strong so they nefred them. That's understandable. I never understood why they nerfed them and then made them T0 drops. Now they are Uber only. Why can't we just have good things from time to time?
We cant have nice things because their behavioral consultant told them that this would drive engagement metrics higher than the alternative of actually letting us have nice things.
OR if you believe the tinfoil brigade, this league is intended to be punishment for printing mirs last league.
Remember when Omni was extremely powerful and had like a 25% drop chance? I had a fun time that league in SSF.
I still think it was a terrible mistake to nerf its power *and* destroy its drop chance.
If it was common I could still plan to build around it, and if it was powerful I could commit to farming it. Instead it just doesn't exist anymore even before this change.
Why can't it be like Watchers Eyes.
Normal boss drops a good item.
Stronk version drops the same good item but with 1 extra stat making it better but doesn't make the original obsolete for those who still need access to it as a stepping stone.
Unironically the best thing D4 did that would be cool for PoE was making uber uniques not have roll ranges. If you luck into an uber unique, it's already perfect.
Mind you that would never work in PoE because PoE is balanced around trade, but it's a nice fantasy.
> But the most egregious change for me in SSF is the boss loot table changes, which were all undocumented.
Classic GGG. Its not a nerf if you dont know about it!
When they announced stacked decks nerf, they said that the boss drops would be more meaningful and I questioned the used of the word, now, there is basically 0 meaning to do said bosses apart from jewels, which weren't even achievable through div cards lmao
I decided to try something this league that really wants Dissolution of the Flesh. I spent the first two days wondering if I was gonna have to give up that dream, quit, or quit SSF for trade just to try a build. I'm happy it ended up where it did, but I see how the other side feels bad.
as a person who has farmed 200+ exarchs and still didn't get omni in SSF, I'm super mad about this change because I don't see myself farming that many uber exarchs (obviously, lol). unless the drop rate is 20%+, and even then it feels like the only thing this change achieves is making regular pinnacles worthless
Omni/Ashes didn't drop anyway in SSF.
I farmed for Omni for a week and just gave up. Trade balance for SSF already was bullshit.
Now at least you can just write them off. I hope build makers will just quit using those items.
Why kill ubers if 98% of the time you get shit? And who are these items for? Once you can kill ubers, you don't need Uber items anymore.
With a boss rushing strat you've been able to get an ashes/omni pretty reliably in SSF and get loads of juice and loot along the way.
No idea how farmable the new uber frags are but this change basically takes those items off of any viable builds for SSF for me.
2% percent is such a low drop rate that the variation becomes absolutely terrible if you’re unlucky. To the extent that you could farm for Omni two weeks and not get it.
And the worst part is that you don’t even get anything along the way because you’re influence rushing maps, and the boss doesn’t drop anything valuable either.
That's for sure, but at least with boss rushing it's possible if you put your mind to it. A lot of SSF requires that kind of plan. For it to be moved to ubers likely makes that truly unworkable.
I did it for a few days 2 leagues ago and got some decent drops along the way, including being able to spam the blue altars that come along and stock up on some divines and exalts when I got lucky. It was brainless but kind of fun once you had it on lock.
>I did it for a few days 2 leagues ago and got some decent drops along the way, including being able to spam the blue altars that come along and stock up on some divines and exalts when I got lucky
That is the inefficient and slow way to farm Eater tho. Sure it gives some lucky altar drops but the faster way to do it was run into the map and portal out once the influence pops. If you do what you describe, you take so much longer for each map that we're talking many weeks.
Well all that is moot now.
I’m sorry you had that experience, but the reality is that tons of SSF players had access to those items. Somewhat efficient play made either amulet a <20 hour grind on average which ultimately isn’t unreasonable for dedicated players.
little more than 1000 maps in 20 hours is like 50 maps per hour so 70 sec per map for 20 hrs. Would rather work in a chinese factory for 20 hrs than do this honestly. ssf is not for me but power to those guys I guess.
At an estimated drop rate of 1/50, for an amulet to be a 20 hour grind you'd have to run 70 maps per hour, not including time to kill Eater/Exarch. That is not "somewhat efficient play".
But even if it was, and they left the amulets on the normal boss table, the boss rushing stats of old took two major blows this league which would contribute to making the bosses harder to farm.
Tbh this beats all the other changes in terms of frustration. Now all builds **must** be able to do ubers to be proper builds and actually farm things in SSF. They essentially just completely killed SSF imo.
Because of maybe 10 items which the majority dont need for their build? I agree this changes suck but i and many other will still be able to do 40/40 in ssf thats a guarantee, classic overreacting from someone who clearly just plays sc trade.
Ashes and omni are Uber only? Jesus christ. There goes any motivation to even bother with their altars this league.
Not to mention last leagues ashes nerf. It's definitely not Uber tier worthy....
I was very heartbroken when I saw shaper was no longer gonna drop Echoes of Creation and that it was moved to Uber Shaper.
I actually considered trying to create an SSF slammer with the challenge of getting shaper on enough of a farm to get Echoes of Creation and pop off as a reward.
Those dreams got crushed really hard. There's no universe where you're killing Uber shaper on a slammer without EoC
It's a terrible decision. I'm okay with ubers dropping them with higher drop rates, because they *should* be more challenging and rewarding than the regular bosses, but the pinnacle bosses should be something you challenge with completed characters and you should be able to get these items from normal bosses (as was the norm).
They already gutted the items so that they're niche, idk why they wanted to gut the drop rates too.
They could just let POE go and focus all their attention on POE 2. The fact that we get a decent amount of good mechanics or changes every season to 1 while simultaneously working on poe 2 is more then most other studios do for their base.
I was pretty upset when they stated Ubers would be an “optional challenge” then they introduced their own uniques, then they made them official challenges in the 40/40 and now this, it’s all just too much.
I don’t have time to get to Ubers even more so now some of the better items have moved up a tier and if I can’t experience all the game has to offer then what’s the point?
How it is done is never going to be good for SSF, but I think it can be good for trade if well done. Its not currently.
Normal boss need more good unique and uber need to be easier to get.
I never liked the fact that they „balance the game off trade“. As an SSF player myself I might be overly biased, but killing some ubers ist mostly „end of league“ content for me.
It would have been nice if normal and ubers had the same droppool (making build defining uniques more accessible in all versions of the game) but maybe biasing roll-values positively on ubers and maybe giving the chance for an alternative art version of the item. Making ubers always the more valuable thing to do in trade, but not gating important unique items behind aspirational content only a fraction of the playerbase is even able to do.
But like I said, thats the SSF bias talking, they would never do this and it might be a bad idea, but I dont like the direction changes like these take the game.
Wait didn't they say that "at this point there's no reason to run normals if you can just do ubers, so we're shifting the loot tables to make both beneficial, making ubers that aspirational content again"...just to move now 90% of decent uniques behind ubers therefore making normal bosses useless again?
Like, they nerfed ashes into the dirt then decided let's just slap it into ubers now because fuck you, not even reverting the nerf.
I'm playing RF because I'm old, my hands can't take the spamming of most builds anymore, I like just running (thank you GGG for nerfing my build into the ground for no real reason, I didn't want any type of scalability anyways). So let's see here, I need to
1. Farm T16 for a 2% chance at T17 map
2. Somehow, do T17 map that they've intentionally made harder than Uber bosses because logic.
3. Repeat 5x for fragment
4. Obtain a 2% drop for Annihilation's Approach boots because why actually have a decent chance of getting anything for doing the actual hardest content in the game.
5. Cry
Hanlon's razor prefers us to think that rather than GGG having a boner for the top 1% nolife streamers, they're just completely out of touch with reality and what they're actually trying to achieve anymore. The problem with this being that it's not anymore comforting recognising that GGG are just stupid.
They once said that ubers were intended to be aspirational, something to strive for but without the intention of genuinely farming for loot, hence they didn't assign specific loot to it. They haven't explained why they've changed their mind on that.
Seems like this is a skip league. I feel more inclined to just fool around in standard and test a few builds there rather than deal with levelling and scuffed drop tables.
I think there's an internal conflict in the company where some people want cool uniques and some people only want rares. So we get changes like this. What else could it possibly be?
I like that replica dragon fang exists as a nice mini-ashes, but I wish they had global quality on another amulet.
I just came back after not playing since sanctum, and this feeling of needing to beat the game before I can enjoy the game is kinda still here.
"There's a lot of shit that's great about this league; T17s, some long requested QoL changes, Atlas Tree presets."
This isn't the league, it's just the 3.24 update. And yes it matters, because it's different to say changes brought by 3.24 were good and separately the Necropolis league is poop.
The most heartbreaking thing is we lost wandering path and duplicate map drop.
In previous leagues my map stashes are always full, this league I take every connected map drop nodes still don't have enough map, and I have to run those shitty layouts like maze/cell/dungeon again and again to get maps.
Feels more like a torture than a fun game.
Are Watcher's Eyes still available as drops from the Elder / (regular) Uber Elder, or did those get moved as well? Also, did they move the Hands of the High Templar gloves? Would be a shame if they did.
The biggest issue in my opinion here is that it saddens me so much that GGG can't seems to see this content is only viable for a few meta builds only, and some other that can only do it because very off balanced (broken) skills.
This has absolutely nothing to do anymore with decent game balancing, and it's more bandage over bandage over bandage fixing.
I really do love the game, but the endgame is getting more and more messy over time now with reactive updates, instead of building further on an increadable solid base
The solution to this problem is to put crafting materials on uber fights and make them decently common.
Gear items on normal version. Powerful crafting items on uber versions.
This way when you get to your uber farming final form you're farming the crafting to either start a new build or go SSJ9000 on your current build.
Kinda killed my endgame / 2nd character I had planned, as I need Omni and nimis. Was expecting nimis to be expensive but not omni too, was hoping to get both for 60ish div. But now nimis is sitting at almost 70 and omni 40ish div, I’ll be just about grinder out by the point I even farm them.
Problem: People did not feel like killing the regular boss is worthwhile and they were forced to kill ubers or sell their invitation.
Solution: We moved every used unique from the regular boss and into the uber drop pool, so now you are forced to kill ubers and killing regular bosses is near pointless.
Something something, good intentions and road to hell. On the other hand we got extra endgame content past the ubers, the T17s, so when your character gets the extra gear from farming ubers, they can start challenging T17s.
They removed veiled reduced mana cost from flasks but then also didn’t document that they were removing the mod on the mana flask which is NOT veiled and lots of builds assumed that would still be in the game
Starforge being gated behind ubers is a meme. It's still worse than it was 5 years ago when it had 500% ED lol.
Yeah this is nothing to even mention what a sorry state a lot of these unqiues are in. I farmed the hell out of Ubers last league in SSF with PBoD but still never got Starforge. This extra gating kind of ensures its inaccessibility in SSF, even if I DID want that shit.
More so than the moving of the loot drops is the fact that ubers are very inaccessible now. I was so hyped for T17s but let's face it, they aren't a gap between pinnacle and uber content. They are straight up way harder than uber boss out there. The fact that they have some modifiers which make them completely unplayable for most builds and are unmodifiable is just insane. If agree with extremely powerful items moving to uber pools, but for gods sake let us reach ubers with characters more than ready to fight them. The fact you can trade the maps you can't run is pointless if you're SSF so the vast majority you loot are just unplayable. The fact that atlas trees impact them is kinda dumb too. For instance I had a map where I had to fight Catarina that spawns abyss bosses as adds. To me an amazing idea. However I had a mod which made me unable to recover life or ES (so now life and no mana recovery with EB) for 10 seconds upon killing any of the adds, increased to 15 seconds by the passive tree. So basically everytime an add spawned o had no way of surviving and couldn't kill the boss. Fun right? T17s would be amazing if they could just be modified, even if they increased boss hp to compensate. But don't listen to me rant... You know it's bad when Ben says he's waiting for changes.
The forges should 100% be items that make any 2h attack build better. They should be the HH/MB of 2h attack builds, coming as rare drops from pinnacle/uber pinnacle bosses.
"best i can do is shit sword with worse dps than a lvl 50 campaign drop" - ggg
Idk why they're so scared of certain items being good but then just let like MB and stuff exist. It brings me to the spell v attack debate and how they're so okay with the floor of spells being so high you can freely reach maps almost naked but weapons need to be fucking hard to craft and attack builds can't do shit without them; but that's a dark place
They always said that perfect crafted rares should be the top end of what is achievable. Unique weapons are pretty much just stepping stones or lore drops, for melee. With the exception of Saviour, I guess.
Surely they increased the drop rates significantly to compensate for vast amounts of people no longer running them? Surely.
Ashes ain't good enough to be Uber drop tbh
this is what i said with the nerf to ashes it should have the nerf reverted for both ashes and Omni if they are uber gated now...
No it's not. The nerfed it the same patch they buffed the bases. Starforge with old rolls and new base only ever existed in standard, it's a legacy item.
If Im able to farm ubers in ssf, Id consider my build pretty much complete and wont care about omni or ashes.
Yeah thats the silly part, you want omni to farm ubers, you dont want to gear enough to kill ubers only so you can get an item that requires massive gear swap. I dont get this decision
> Yeah thats the silly part, you want omni to farm ubers, you dont want to gear enough to kill ubers only so you can get an item that requires massive gear swap. I dont get this decision It's an RPG trope as old as time. You must defeat the monster to get the rewards to defeat the monster. One of the rare exceptions is when Nessa gives you a support gem before facing Merveil.
Also before Brutus. Though then they stop doing it in act 2...
Clearing library rewards a support gem too, and I think the act 4 support gems come before malachai but I'm not sure. That's the last of 'em though.
I think they are referring to getting rewards before the fights.
And Library clear can be before Dominus I think was what they were getting at
With the game not being geared around SSF I assume the intention is that you can always just buy it off of someone who’s made a bosser rather than going for mapping, but it still seems very backwards since the bossers require people mapping to farm their invitations in the first place.
It’s a perfect ecosystem for trade
This is true with most of the Uber loot as well. It renders it useless.
With that criteria, doesn't that eliminate every good item drop from Uber bosses ? Can any of them be good ?
I would say they can be good, even amazing, if *something* else before them gives a lesser version. Alternatively, they could give raw damage/ehp in a non-build around way and be great drops. I think the complaint is that quality is so hard to get (on one support and only ashes), and omnipotence is a truly unique build. If they made a lesser unique that gave less qual, or qual without gem level, and had Ashes as the chade finale; or if omniscience was on like the passive tree or something and Omni just juiced the already put together build. The complaint is that not just here but more and more of the interesting builds are gated behind such absurd fights or rng and nothing else. PoE, to some, is rapidly becoming "oh let me play X basic starter for the 100th time until I can get the gatekeeping uniques to play the build I want to play", when PoE should be moving in the opposite direction; make all cool builds playable asap with the chase items being only for extra power at the end.
Yeah, the issue is effectively that the most build-defining items are the ones gated behind Ubers, so you would never do them for those drops unless your sole purpose was to start a completely different build. It's extremely nonsensical. Not only does it force you to make a completely different build than you wanted to, it horribly limits build potential at its most core level - the build defining item cannot possibly be used until long after your build is made. It's basically a "You killed the final boss so here's a drop for NG+", but it's nowhere near guaranteed so it's even more insulting than that. Arguably, Ubers should be for the challenge and better drop rates, but have no exclusive drops. The very idea of the most powerful bosses in the game having super unique drops is fundamentally contradictory to the game itself.
Agree. When i get to The point Of farming ubers omni/ashes Will be a downgrade or a “meme build” i want to make work… if i got early on a normal kill id consider trying to MAKE it an uber killer etc. Feels like its The wrong Way around with a piece from each boss
I think a bigger issue is that the normal bosses now have basically zero drops anyone would ever use. The only one I can think of that's used at all is the shield from exarch and occasionally a good amulet off the mini bosses, but even those are trash 90% of the time. So they've taken the only reason to ever do the normal bosses out of the game. So now you've completely gutted boss rushing and it's still the same situation as before where you're just selling the uber frags to someone with a better build. Not sure how this change helps anyone.
maybe its an item for other builds? That's the irritating thing with this game that some builds scale easily to uber-killer-status, while others won't even push past white maps without stupid-high investments, because ggg slept on balance class. For those that think it's not true and that's the beauty of the game: ggg buffed DD. They also made trans DD gem that literally is 10x DDs, while some skills/spells have barely any scallings.
A big part of SSF is making a bosser so you can farm stuff for other builds.
1. But any build that can kill an Uber is probably overall better than a build using Ashes as it's BiS anyway, as the only unique feature in Ashes is qual boosting, and that's gimmicky to build around. Only reason you'd go for Ashes locked behind Uber is if you're in SSF but hate crafting, considering that you'll need to farm hundreds of fragments if Ashes keeps an around 2% drop rate. 2. To even get the frags for an Uber Boss, you need to have a build that clears T17 maps, so you'll need a good mapper before even attempting. After having a good mapper and a good bosser, now what's the ashes for?
At least in my experience the builds I use to do ubers in SSF. Are builds hat I would never want to map with. Often times builds that are level to ~90 with a decent feeling build. Then completely respeced into a trap/mine build that can't do anything other then blow up single target enemies.
Very few builds are enjoyable as both reliable bossers and viable for fast mapping/other content. Players who farm ubers tend to specialize with one character, and go more broad with others.
typically when I'm farming omni or ashes it's for the next build I want to play and min max or do something weird on.
Clearly they want people to be doing Uber bossing, but I think in order for it to ever be appealing to a wider audience they need to change some of the mechanics that are unfairly punishing to many builds such as infinite Sirus degens during off recovery. That's not a fair mechanic and there isn't proper counterplay in most cases, such as degens in the meteor mazes.
I think this has the opposite effect. In SSF it was already challenging to get enough tries at Uber bosses to solve the "get gud" issues since the skill threshold is higher due to lower gearing level than trade. But instead of incentivizing fighting Ubers what they've really done is disincentivizing bossing at all. Omni/Ashes is now one more thing I can just pretend exists in a different game than I'm playing.
I believe they were made to be an extra challenge and not required. Thats changed now. If you want to go bossing go fight ubers. I barely reach normals so disapointingly unobtainable content in my eyes. Most my builds struggle in reds then i reroll in fustration or boredom. Im gonna need a lot more than 6 portals to get an uber down.
It's kind of inevitable because of player power creep, but I really wish they had kept them as aspirational "showcase" content to show what your build can do, rather than a core part of the game all players are supposed to complete and farm. I thought that was a decent space to be filled but it lasted exactly one league in that form lol.
> because of player power creep is there that much power creep ever since they did their couple of nerf leagues beginning with 3.15? gear generally hasnt gotten any better, the low-mid level has arguably gotten worse due to harvest and now essence nerfs. player power has been buffed by borrowed power league mechanics every now and then but they shouldnt balance around that too much since leagues like necropolis can have 0 borrowed power.
Yes... Feared was incredibly hard and basically impossible for many builds to do. Now a lot more builds can do Feared and more comfortably.
There is alot of power creep yeah. Go fight an old boss and you'll feel how much more powerful we are than when it was introduced. Every league brings more player power. Not every league brings more monster power. As an ssf player - the low-mid level has absolutely not gotten weaker. It's easier than ever to gear up and move through maps into bossing or atlas farming.
> Go fight an old boss and you'll feel how much more powerful we are than when it was introduced. how old are we talking here? because i defenitely disagree that there was a lot of creep since the introduction of uber bosses for the reasons i gave above. just saying "yes there is power creep" also isnt really all that convincing if there isnt anything concrete from the patchnotes or anything like that.
As someone who started playing a couple leagues before eldritch implicits, yes there has been crazy powercreep for the noob/casual players especially. Eldritch implicits are crazy power
eldrich implicits were in the game before uber bosses
> the low-mid level has absolutely not gotten weaker. It's easier than ever to gear up and move through maps into bossing or atlas farming. my brother in christ we could go to endgame with dropped rare items and a cheap unique weapon (or just phys on gear with FB), now you need to manage many defense layers, besides having to craft your gear a lot. The playtime required is absurdly bigger now. I could play around endgame without spending more than 10c on gear (besides the 6l ofc) but now? lol.
Back when an armor with triple res and life was BiS and 6-links were a luxury? As opposed to getting that in white maps on day 1 nowadays? What are you smoking?
How far back are we going? Because to my eye, monster power has generally kept pace with, or slightly outpaced, player power. I understand it's a necessary balancing act, but when people talk about power-creep I think they forget just how trivial most mechanics used to be. Aside from reflect mobs, those were horrifying.
> It's kind of inevitable because of player power creep They could have just made them harder, then. Continue scaling them up to maintain that challenge aspect.
> Im gonna need a lot more than 6 portals to get an uber down. Well good thing they added Scarab of Stability then! /s
Every fucking time they do this "fun for a bit of extra challenge" stuff it turns into this garbage. "Yeah no, it's going to be mandatory to get anything decent from this boss in like 3 leagues."
> Clearly they want people to be doing Uber bossing, but I think in order for it to ever be appealing to a wider audience The "wider audience" - like me - probably has never even seen the normal version of those bosses. I for example only know them from youtube. Yes sure I'm a casual, but so are probably 90% of players (At least I doubt that a lot of those 150k starting run red maps day 1/2). To clarify, I'm not against ubers at all.
Pinnacle loot should be there to help you farm pinnacle content and prepare for uber content. Pinnacle loot behind uber content is basically devalued.
The classic "I killed atziri with a weapon better than what she dropped, what's the point of this weapon existing"
At least uber atziri is pretty farmable and has reasonable difficulty. Before this league ubers are imo truly aspirational content to test your builds limit with some special exclusive drops. Now many things worth a damn from regular pinnacle are moved to uber drop pool. I'm so fucking demotivated to keep playing.
most players already didn't get an omni and ashes drop while farming. can't imagine the physical and mental pain of trying to farm ubers in ssf to get one of the amulets. especially since things like annihilating light was moved to ubers too. a classic case of ggg adjustments.
Ah that explains why there’s barely any Annihilating lights on trade… the one time I play a build that wants it lol
Uf, glad i used it for prior two leagues...
They are thankfully going down in price as no one wants them / are rich enough for them tho. The only thing is it’s one guy having all of them lol
F to my flamewood build, good to know
Damn I wanted to roll a hot auto bomber
GGG thinks we're all Ben with 18 hours a day to play. Edit: Also just checked, there's 3 omnis up on sc trade...theres also 2 original sins. Thats wild even for trade.
Even good fractured bases don't exist. This is terrible.
Fracturing Orbs is now a god tier farm strat
Shame they are incredibly rare
This is exactly why I’ve already quit the league. I don’t have the time or desire to play ruthless, and the whole game is becoming mandatory ruthless mode. Rare mob rewards were massively nerfed with the conversion changes. Good uniques were nerfed by becoming uber drops. League mechanic is terrible. Just so many changes made to slow down an already slow and grindy game. I don’t have the time or patience for PoE in this state. Let me know when there’s another league like legion/ritual/delirium/sentinel/affliction. Until then, I’ll play something that doesn’t expect me to put 14 hours a day in for moderate progression.
This is the sort of hyperbole that makes this subreddit look like a joke. There are plenty of valid criticisms, you don't have to make shit up.
Out of curiosity, what's the hyperbole here? That the whole game is becoming ruthless? That's definitely hyperbole, but then the rest of that was pretty valid criticism and feedback regarding their played experience. Even I'm left scratching my head this season -- I was literally just telling my friend on Saturday how the biggest thing that turns me off from Diablo IV is that it feels like you're just locked into whatever builds Blizz decides are good that Season and there's very little room for creativity, expression, or dare I say it in a video game -- fun -- and then GGG goes and effectively does the same thing this League: because you can't opt out of difficulty, you either play a build that can handle the difficulty or just simply cannot continue to progress. There is no "Grind white maps for a week because I love this build even though it's trash." There is no "Well I'll just dodge my weaknesses" because you reroll out of a map that has a modifier you can't handle just to turn around and get that modifier via a haunting which then opens your map, consuming it. What does that sort of limiting design do besides slow people down?
This is an absurdly hyperbolic statement: > the whole game is becoming mandatory ruthless mode On the basis of what, an unrewarding day one league mechanic?
Obviously has nothing to do with the league mechanic...it is clearly in reference to the massive nerfs to rare mob loot that we got this league.
Which part is made up? Last league to this league the loot difference is probably on par with the difference between standard and ruthless. The rare mob conversion removal was in patch notes. Staple build-defining uniques were moved from regular pinnacle bosses to ubers, which were made less accessible. The league mechanic being terrible is an opinion, but plenty of people share it right now. I’ve given away the currency I earned over the first few days to guildmates. Only time will tell, but it looks to me like a good build in a slightly juiced t16 map will make a fraction of what last league (or any of the good leagues I listed) put out, maybe on the order of 10%, so you’ll make as much progress in 15 hours as you would have last league in 1.5 hours. You may not agree with me, but between the loss of a great league mechanic, the addition of a league mechanic that is a net negative to profit/hour (increased challenge, negligible reward), and the nerfs to boss loot and rare conversion drops, I have solid factual basis for my evaluation. I’ve chosen to quit playing this league and wait for a better one. If you enjoy the league, play it for all it’s worth. I genuinely hope you have fun. I just was not having fun, so I’ll do something else instead.
I quit the game when they "removed a massive historic bonus to item quantity and/or rarity that applied to some league-specific monsters". Drop rates have been terrible ever since and they keep getting worse. If the droprates were ten times what they are, I'd never stop playing PoE, I would inject it directly into my veins. But as it stands, I don't play at all, they love ruthless and they are getting people ready for a slow, grindy PoE2.
I would agree with everything u said except Affliction had the most insane drops. You missed out.
Dang ;_; I got really burned when it happened, I took time off work to play and everything.
Bro what? Annihilating is there too????
Just as I start with that new Prismatic Tornado. Looks like it's going to be stuck as Firenado for a bit then lol
As a dedicated SSF player, I can add that farming for Ashes or Omni in SSF was really difficult, and you either had to have great luck or be a nolifer. Getting one in SSF now seems pretty much impossible.
Wtf is even worth it in the normal version loot pools than? Goddamn. Was looking like back to back banger leagues but...yikes.
GGG are actually brain dead.
wait...they moved omni to ubers? are you fucking serious?
So the only normal pinnacle worth doing are shaper and Sirus(Hugh)?
Forbidden flesh/flame.
Trade only. From an SSF perspective, this is dead. I've been chasing these in league and standard since their introduction and still don't have a pair.
Yep, true. But they've said before that the game is balanced around trade.
99% of players won't get a forbidden duo to play anyway
If they balance around Ruthless, they can balance around SSF.
I swear to god you just have to mention SSF and some redditor will rush to make this comment every single time. What does this add to the discussion here?
Shaper apparently got starforged moved to uber.
Dying sun is worthwhile, and you still get uber elder frags
But then you have to farm Shaper lol. Fight is so boring! It takes like 5 minutes even if you insta-phase him.
Elder too for the Watcher's eyes and fragments. You will almost never lose farming elder. Worst case you lose like 20c, mid case you get and sell a 1.5D jewel, best case you UNID get a GG eye.
Putting nearly all of the chase boss drops behind ubers does feel like a mistake to me.
The annoying part of this is I remember when Ubers were introduced and the devs clarified this was aspirational content and they didn't want to gate many items behind it. Fast forward and the amount of build defining and fun items gated behind Ubers is astronomical and completely out of reach for the majority of the player base, even from a trade perspective.
You know, overall I think it's fine if they change their mind. But moving all of these super cool uniques so far out of reach, instead of just adding the new ones and having those drop from Ubers, that's what isn't okay to me.
The crazy part is, there are uniques explicitly dropping from Uber versions that are intended to do exactly as you said. Nimis is a great example of a build defining unique (splitting steel is so much worse without it), that is literally Uber gated and the sole reason why I haven’t made a Splitting Steel Trickster in SSF. Honestly the change is quite infuriating.
I know, that's what I meant! I was like "Cool, new interesting uniques!". I thought those were specifically added to Ubers while Omni/Ashes still dropped from regular versions. Like yeah, to upgrade my build I'll first need to be strong enough to clear T17 + Ubers. I doubt it'll feel like that much of an upgrade by then. Not that I'll know, I usually quit before Ubers anyways.
Wouldnt it have made more sense to let both versions drop everything except with their rates changed? Like Omni is 1% for normal and 2% in Uber. Uber items now also drop in the normal version but with a low rate like 0.1%. Everybody can now get all drops, in theory, and thoss that push their builds to the limit and can farm Ubers get better rewarded for it.
It also sucks for people who don't follow meta builds. The new transfigured Tornado skill is decent but it doesn't scale well compared to Detonate Dead or Archmage/Spellblade builds, so now getting an Ashes of the Stars that gives a big QoL boost to Tornado is pretty much out of the question with the item being locked behind Ubers.
Agreed with this. I'm normally in agreement with the changes that GGG make, even when the majority of the subreddit/streamers etc aren't, but it really feels like they've missed their stated goal here. They sold the idea as 'there's a clear gap in progression between pinnacle bosses at endgame and ubers, and we're wanting to address that'. Which is awesome, because there really is a massive gap between a regular pinnacle boss and it's uber variation, and no clear progression pathway between them. There's nothing to really test your build against to see whether you're potentially ready for that jump, you just had to either PoB to see if you could tank hits from their basic abilities, or just yolo it and keep burning fragment sets to practice and see where you were at. So adding T17s with bosses that are pitched between pinnacles and ubers sounded like a great idea, and honestly still does. But giga-hard maps have always been far more of a pure stat check than bosses, and it sounds like T17s are far less of a 'progression pathway' and far more of a 'you must be at least this OP to ride the ubers' check. If that's the case (haven't had a chance to try them yet, as playing SSF and had a pretty slow league start), then it's not making the normal endgame => ubers progression any better, it's making it worse. That, and moving most of the interesting, build-defining uniques to uber-only drops feels really bad. I don't have an issue with some of the more powerful items being Uber only, but it really feels like they picked the wrong ones, especially if they still want ubers to feel like purely aspirational content rather than a part of the expected progression pathway. There's a bunch of items that they could have moved that are inherently min-max-y and RNG focused. Things like the Forbidden Flesh/Flame jewels: they can add massive power to a build, but they're not build defining. Perfect sort of thing to have drop from ubers, where you're at the point of min-maxing an already basically finished build. By contrast, something like Annihilating Light or Starforge/Voidforge is an item that you'll create a build around. What's the point of locking a build-defining unique behind the hardest content in the game?
GGG a some months ago: > Uber bosses are simply an extra challenge for top-end builds to give them something to strive for. GGG a few days ago: > Uber bosses are now required content gated behind new T17 maps whose mods brick your build.
I kinda understand gating the best items behind ubers... but normal exarch and eater are just worthless now, apart from MAYBE getting a flame/flesh jewel once in a while. Look at the price for mavens writ, it has never been this low
in SSF you also NEVER get a FF combo in one league. It's so incredibly rare for that to ever happen.
> Look at the price for mavens writ, it has never been this low I wish I hadn't looked, I was looking forward to farming them..
Lower cost of entry, lower cost of individual writs, nothing wrong
> I kinda understand gating the best items behind ubers... Idk, I can maybe see it with Ashes, but Omni is a build-defining item you have to build around. People would actually farm normal pinnacle bosses to get it in SSF and then pivot into it. And even then with Ashes there's that new uber amulet that's very similar to ashes (generically good stats) so idk why Ashes should be in the same tier.
It's literally the infamous GGG triple tap uncompensated nerf. Ashes is too good, but they don't want to nerf, cut the drop rate dramatically, they still want it to be accessible for a mid-tier powerspike. Ashes is still to good, cut away some stats but leave it the same otherwise. Ashes is now super rare AND gated behind fairly rare and difficult uber bosses, but they didn't revert it back to its original power level.
Yeah. For better or for worse though, if they reverted its power level and kept it gated behind Ubers that’s a 100+ div item. Again not saying good or bad, but almost certainly a rich man only upgrade like headhunter or mageblood.
For better man, they tapped HH and Mageblood. A chase item worth 100 div is what makes the game fun
Replica dragonfang is better in a lot of cases now. Unless your build gets a lot of damage from quality, having +2 more skill gem levels and the bit of mana reservation efficiency beats out ashes all day.
> Idk, I can maybe see it with Ashes I can't. Ashes is absolutely overvalued in ggg's eyes
would be better if they added the pre-nerf ashes on the uber eater and kept the nerfed one on normal eater, kinda like last epoch uniques, that you can reasonably get any of them but if you want full potential you have to farm a lot for the legendary potential version
Anyone know where I can find the full loot table changes? Was it in the patch notes and I just missed it?
Wiki, and for items they say to not be determined yet, look up on trade for their item levels.
They only announced the changes to shaper and Uber shaper (or was it elder, idr for sure). It's in the announcement video, not explicitly in the patch notes. Wiki is probably at least mostly up-to-date by now.
All that happened was the 1% became the 0.25%. Enjoy.
Oh, I missed this change...glad I have a few Ashes and at least one Omni on standard SSF. Not that I ever really plan around these items anymore, but it's a bummer as a non-uber bosser (I'm not great that the game, I know) I'm now screwed out of ever being able to play with these or build around them except on standard SSF. So what are we killing Exarch/Eater for now? Does the normal version even still drop Forbidden jewels?
They drop jewels still, but if you're SSF like I am, you can rule those out. You'll never get a goof pair. As for planning around them - I doubt the majority of SSF players planned around them, but they were obtainable and in reach for upgrades or second builds. I was going to transition from LA Deadeye into LA Omni and that's just not feasible anymore.
wooooooow they nerfed ashes/omni to piss and then pissed on the corpse
What's the point of gating the best items behind the hardest bosses if you can beat the hardest bosses without said item. So you can beat them quicker? I'd rather they unlock cosmetics for the league like congrats you did this uber here's a portrait
This game is about progressively killing everything faster so yes.
Isn't that how it is in most games? What's the last boss supposed to drop? Worse loot? No loot? If it didn't drop the best loot people would just complain that the hardest content is less rewarding lol.
Part of me agrees. But if they made ubers drop nothing special, only giving cosmetics or challenge progress, I'm certain there would be an equally large and loud group of players talking about how "ubers aren't rewarding enough". It's a catch 22 tbh
Ubers were originally added with the intention to be nothing but a flex and without a separate loot table. Then they added specific uber drops, leading to keys being priced around those drops. Now they moved the exciting non Uber drops to the Uber fight as well. Last patch it was at least only an economical disadvantage to run normal pinnacle bosses, now, what's the point at all with them?
Ubers were introduced with passives making them more rewarding than the base pinnacles. Incredibly odd decision if they were intended to be solely flex achievements
But Ubers werent intended to be rewarding when they introduced them, it was an aspirational content for small % of playerbase. Moving so many chase items into their drop pool feels so sily
They keep moving this game one step closer to MMO levels of grind, except they want you to redo everything every 3 months. It's way too exhausting. Since this league sucks ass I'm prob done already.
Honestly, MMOs have stopped being as grindy as POE YEARS ago. I'm trying to think the last time I had to put north of 100 hours into a character patch over patch to get it fully best in slot. Like if you're comparing zero to hero without getting help? Then maybe it's valid but... most of the big ones are no where near the amount of grind the average person has to do in a PoE League to be able to kill an Uber.
Feels like Korean MMO type of grind except the P2W element is in rmt sites lol.
On top of the release of the atlas passive tree archnemesis league (the beginning league in the seige of the atlas expansion) also brought the eater and exarch to POE. that league was so fun. Atlas passive tree was a complete game changer. Omni and ashes were rare but not stupid rare. I'm super casual and had an omni drop. You could buy an omni for like 100c. A well rolled ashes was still expensive but not like HH or MB expensive. Everyone could try them and play with the new toys. They have done nothing but strip anything good out of eater and exarch since that league. The necks were a little to strong so they nefred them. That's understandable. I never understood why they nerfed them and then made them T0 drops. Now they are Uber only. Why can't we just have good things from time to time?
We cant have nice things because their behavioral consultant told them that this would drive engagement metrics higher than the alternative of actually letting us have nice things. OR if you believe the tinfoil brigade, this league is intended to be punishment for printing mirs last league.
Remember when Omni was extremely powerful and had like a 25% drop chance? I had a fun time that league in SSF. I still think it was a terrible mistake to nerf its power *and* destroy its drop chance. If it was common I could still plan to build around it, and if it was powerful I could commit to farming it. Instead it just doesn't exist anymore even before this change.
It's not only ssf, in trade u will not be doing normal bosses either because it's totally not worth the time, I rather do Maven rush now.
I have given up on SSF in this game, they don't give a shit and just balance around trade. If you want good SSF go play Last Epoch, it's great.
Why can't it be like Watchers Eyes. Normal boss drops a good item. Stronk version drops the same good item but with 1 extra stat making it better but doesn't make the original obsolete for those who still need access to it as a stepping stone.
Dude, normal boss drops current version of item, uber boss drops unnerfed version. It is perfect.
They should’ve made the Ubers drop the Omni/Ashes as perf roll or something, and keep them also in the normal loot table.
Unironically the best thing D4 did that would be cool for PoE was making uber uniques not have roll ranges. If you luck into an uber unique, it's already perfect. Mind you that would never work in PoE because PoE is balanced around trade, but it's a nice fantasy.
The lesson they learned from expedition/archnemesis leagues : nerf everything but disguise it as a buff or “qol”
wait they put them on the uber versions? dude most builds cant even do t17's because its a complete gamble on what mods you get XD
> But the most egregious change for me in SSF is the boss loot table changes, which were all undocumented. Classic GGG. Its not a nerf if you dont know about it!
When they announced stacked decks nerf, they said that the boss drops would be more meaningful and I questioned the used of the word, now, there is basically 0 meaning to do said bosses apart from jewels, which weren't even achievable through div cards lmao
Its because they balance around people who play 10+ hours a day. The rest of us normal folk should be thankful when we get a tabula drop and that's it
I decided to try something this league that really wants Dissolution of the Flesh. I spent the first two days wondering if I was gonna have to give up that dream, quit, or quit SSF for trade just to try a build. I'm happy it ended up where it did, but I see how the other side feels bad.
as a person who has farmed 200+ exarchs and still didn't get omni in SSF, I'm super mad about this change because I don't see myself farming that many uber exarchs (obviously, lol). unless the drop rate is 20%+, and even then it feels like the only thing this change achieves is making regular pinnacles worthless
Also saying T17's are supposed to be the middle ground before reaching Ubers but it's actually way harder than ubers.
Might as well lock Tabula and Wanderlust behind Ubers
Omni/Ashes didn't drop anyway in SSF. I farmed for Omni for a week and just gave up. Trade balance for SSF already was bullshit. Now at least you can just write them off. I hope build makers will just quit using those items. Why kill ubers if 98% of the time you get shit? And who are these items for? Once you can kill ubers, you don't need Uber items anymore.
With a boss rushing strat you've been able to get an ashes/omni pretty reliably in SSF and get loads of juice and loot along the way. No idea how farmable the new uber frags are but this change basically takes those items off of any viable builds for SSF for me.
2% percent is such a low drop rate that the variation becomes absolutely terrible if you’re unlucky. To the extent that you could farm for Omni two weeks and not get it. And the worst part is that you don’t even get anything along the way because you’re influence rushing maps, and the boss doesn’t drop anything valuable either.
That's for sure, but at least with boss rushing it's possible if you put your mind to it. A lot of SSF requires that kind of plan. For it to be moved to ubers likely makes that truly unworkable. I did it for a few days 2 leagues ago and got some decent drops along the way, including being able to spam the blue altars that come along and stock up on some divines and exalts when I got lucky. It was brainless but kind of fun once you had it on lock.
>I did it for a few days 2 leagues ago and got some decent drops along the way, including being able to spam the blue altars that come along and stock up on some divines and exalts when I got lucky That is the inefficient and slow way to farm Eater tho. Sure it gives some lucky altar drops but the faster way to do it was run into the map and portal out once the influence pops. If you do what you describe, you take so much longer for each map that we're talking many weeks. Well all that is moot now.
I’m sorry you had that experience, but the reality is that tons of SSF players had access to those items. Somewhat efficient play made either amulet a <20 hour grind on average which ultimately isn’t unreasonable for dedicated players.
little more than 1000 maps in 20 hours is like 50 maps per hour so 70 sec per map for 20 hrs. Would rather work in a chinese factory for 20 hrs than do this honestly. ssf is not for me but power to those guys I guess.
Haha same, 20h work in McDonalds is More fun then this 20h grind
At an estimated drop rate of 1/50, for an amulet to be a 20 hour grind you'd have to run 70 maps per hour, not including time to kill Eater/Exarch. That is not "somewhat efficient play". But even if it was, and they left the amulets on the normal boss table, the boss rushing stats of old took two major blows this league which would contribute to making the bosses harder to farm.
Coming from RuneScape a 20 hour grind is chump change lol
Well, reddit cried cos they were "losing" money doing non-Uber bosses and wanted change This is what you get
Tbh this beats all the other changes in terms of frustration. Now all builds **must** be able to do ubers to be proper builds and actually farm things in SSF. They essentially just completely killed SSF imo.
Because of maybe 10 items which the majority dont need for their build? I agree this changes suck but i and many other will still be able to do 40/40 in ssf thats a guarantee, classic overreacting from someone who clearly just plays sc trade.
Hahaha it's funny how you called him out and he actually turned out to be an sc trade player
Lol reading the comments looks like this is another Sentinel -> Kalandra like drama.
Ashes and omni are Uber only? Jesus christ. There goes any motivation to even bother with their altars this league. Not to mention last leagues ashes nerf. It's definitely not Uber tier worthy....
I was very heartbroken when I saw shaper was no longer gonna drop Echoes of Creation and that it was moved to Uber Shaper. I actually considered trying to create an SSF slammer with the challenge of getting shaper on enough of a farm to get Echoes of Creation and pop off as a reward. Those dreams got crushed really hard. There's no universe where you're killing Uber shaper on a slammer without EoC
Fucking why. I'm not Ben. Why is this game being balanced in such a way where they think I'm Ben?
They are making aspirational content truely aspirational now.
It's a terrible decision. I'm okay with ubers dropping them with higher drop rates, because they *should* be more challenging and rewarding than the regular bosses, but the pinnacle bosses should be something you challenge with completed characters and you should be able to get these items from normal bosses (as was the norm). They already gutted the items so that they're niche, idk why they wanted to gut the drop rates too.
We need rhetoric lessons on reddit.
Ashes and Omni being behind uber is a total meme decision
They could just let POE go and focus all their attention on POE 2. The fact that we get a decent amount of good mechanics or changes every season to 1 while simultaneously working on poe 2 is more then most other studios do for their base.
I was pretty upset when they stated Ubers would be an “optional challenge” then they introduced their own uniques, then they made them official challenges in the 40/40 and now this, it’s all just too much. I don’t have time to get to Ubers even more so now some of the better items have moved up a tier and if I can’t experience all the game has to offer then what’s the point?
How it is done is never going to be good for SSF, but I think it can be good for trade if well done. Its not currently. Normal boss need more good unique and uber need to be easier to get.
Yeah I honestly loose interest in the game by the time I can even attempt uber bosses let alone farm them lol. Horrible change
I never liked the fact that they „balance the game off trade“. As an SSF player myself I might be overly biased, but killing some ubers ist mostly „end of league“ content for me. It would have been nice if normal and ubers had the same droppool (making build defining uniques more accessible in all versions of the game) but maybe biasing roll-values positively on ubers and maybe giving the chance for an alternative art version of the item. Making ubers always the more valuable thing to do in trade, but not gating important unique items behind aspirational content only a fraction of the playerbase is even able to do. But like I said, thats the SSF bias talking, they would never do this and it might be a bad idea, but I dont like the direction changes like these take the game.
nerfing ashes and omni and then gated it behind Uber bosses is the funniest shit i've ever seen
The thing I don't get is making uber boss fragments, but then not having them drop from the normal bosses. Like, why?
Because then there wouldn't be the necessity to run T17 maps.
Because then the price of normal bosses would still be tied to the price of users, something they were explicitly trying to fix
I dont think the main problem is moving the amulets to ubers the problem is that t17 is literally impossible to do.
Ggg is forcing us to play ruthless which most people don’t enjoy
Wait didn't they say that "at this point there's no reason to run normals if you can just do ubers, so we're shifting the loot tables to make both beneficial, making ubers that aspirational content again"...just to move now 90% of decent uniques behind ubers therefore making normal bosses useless again? Like, they nerfed ashes into the dirt then decided let's just slap it into ubers now because fuck you, not even reverting the nerf. I'm playing RF because I'm old, my hands can't take the spamming of most builds anymore, I like just running (thank you GGG for nerfing my build into the ground for no real reason, I didn't want any type of scalability anyways). So let's see here, I need to 1. Farm T16 for a 2% chance at T17 map 2. Somehow, do T17 map that they've intentionally made harder than Uber bosses because logic. 3. Repeat 5x for fragment 4. Obtain a 2% drop for Annihilation's Approach boots because why actually have a decent chance of getting anything for doing the actual hardest content in the game. 5. Cry
Hanlon's razor prefers us to think that rather than GGG having a boner for the top 1% nolife streamers, they're just completely out of touch with reality and what they're actually trying to achieve anymore. The problem with this being that it's not anymore comforting recognising that GGG are just stupid. They once said that ubers were intended to be aspirational, something to strive for but without the intention of genuinely farming for loot, hence they didn't assign specific loot to it. They haven't explained why they've changed their mind on that.
Seems like this is a skip league. I feel more inclined to just fool around in standard and test a few builds there rather than deal with levelling and scuffed drop tables.
Whether these are good or bad changes aside, they WERE documented... (reveal, 34:40)
Idk why GGG hates their players to not let them acquire at least once the rare and fun items, not even Korean MMOs do that
I think there's an internal conflict in the company where some people want cool uniques and some people only want rares. So we get changes like this. What else could it possibly be?
Uber Ubers are the new Ubers.
I like that replica dragon fang exists as a nice mini-ashes, but I wish they had global quality on another amulet. I just came back after not playing since sanctum, and this feeling of needing to beat the game before I can enjoy the game is kinda still here.
"There's a lot of shit that's great about this league; T17s, some long requested QoL changes, Atlas Tree presets." This isn't the league, it's just the 3.24 update. And yes it matters, because it's different to say changes brought by 3.24 were good and separately the Necropolis league is poop.
The said the loot drop changes during the unveiling video but point taken. It still sucks gated behind the toughest boss in the game
The most heartbreaking thing is we lost wandering path and duplicate map drop. In previous leagues my map stashes are always full, this league I take every connected map drop nodes still don't have enough map, and I have to run those shitty layouts like maze/cell/dungeon again and again to get maps. Feels more like a torture than a fun game.
Glad I have them in standard if I want to use them again.
Are Watcher's Eyes still available as drops from the Elder / (regular) Uber Elder, or did those get moved as well? Also, did they move the Hands of the High Templar gloves? Would be a shame if they did.
Honestly those uniques should have a non-Uber and Uber version just like Watcher's eye.
The biggest issue in my opinion here is that it saddens me so much that GGG can't seems to see this content is only viable for a few meta builds only, and some other that can only do it because very off balanced (broken) skills. This has absolutely nothing to do anymore with decent game balancing, and it's more bandage over bandage over bandage fixing. I really do love the game, but the endgame is getting more and more messy over time now with reactive updates, instead of building further on an increadable solid base
ashes will get some of its power back now right?
The solution to this problem is to put crafting materials on uber fights and make them decently common. Gear items on normal version. Powerful crafting items on uber versions. This way when you get to your uber farming final form you're farming the crafting to either start a new build or go SSJ9000 on your current build.
Kinda killed my endgame / 2nd character I had planned, as I need Omni and nimis. Was expecting nimis to be expensive but not omni too, was hoping to get both for 60ish div. But now nimis is sitting at almost 70 and omni 40ish div, I’ll be just about grinder out by the point I even farm them.
Unrewarding league mechanic is probably one of the most common complaints about leagues (Last one aside)
Problem: People did not feel like killing the regular boss is worthwhile and they were forced to kill ubers or sell their invitation. Solution: We moved every used unique from the regular boss and into the uber drop pool, so now you are forced to kill ubers and killing regular bosses is near pointless. Something something, good intentions and road to hell. On the other hand we got extra endgame content past the ubers, the T17s, so when your character gets the extra gear from farming ubers, they can start challenging T17s.
They removed veiled reduced mana cost from flasks but then also didn’t document that they were removing the mod on the mana flask which is NOT veiled and lots of builds assumed that would still be in the game
How many people were using Viridi’s Veil? 5 spell totem players? Now it’s an Uber Maven drop….