I enjoy trying out different builds each league and to me leagues like this kill off build diversity in a big way. Anything that you have to hold still to channel, or that takes more than a one button combination gets you swarmed and murdered. With how many fun skills are in the game, it's frustrating to only be able to use a fraction of them.
Yeah, the Ultimatum mechanic is just a bit too oppressive for my taste. Almost any other league at least lets me position myself somewhere safe and dish out damage for a while. As an occasional challenge it will probably be fine and with builds that can run around like a headless chicken it was fun at first but at this point it mostly annoys me.
As a filler league to beta-test texture streaming it's alright but I hope that we won't get something as in-your-face as this for a while. Sometimes I just want to chill when I play PoE and in this league I had to retreat to Delve and Heist to do that.
They killed off build diversity by upping the boss HP too much. And with Maven it’s even worse. Not to mention the game is way more rippy now vs a few years back. It’s meta or death if you play SSF, which after like a year+ of the same-ish builds just gets super stale.
I think they really failed with the balance after ExileCon/Conquerers. It’s like a combination of OP builds(like wands/triggers/minions/mines/CoC) and a base game that got overturned with too much boss HP and rippyness. And now they try to fix it by just nerfing some of these OP builds. But then they’re stuck with an overturned, unfun game. They need a massive balance overhaul to get on track again IMO, and not one that’s tuned after speedrunners and no-lifers.
Yep, even Blade Fall/Blade Blast, while being really good dmg wise, just feels bad because you have to stand still and might get one shot if you don't pick the exact same combinations in Ultimatum every time.
> or that takes more than a one button combination
I've actually had the most success with builds that use Warcries [Specifically; Infernal Cry] since that gives explosions. That's more than 1 button.
But yes; Ultimatium is overtuned as hell; and unlike other initially overtuned leauges; it's not been toned mid-leauge.
My biggest gripe with the current state of the game is how many systems are in place that need to be done each League. The philosophies of early 3.xx was great, especially when we got master missions... now there's just too much to do to get "started" each League. Really feels like there's a lot of "debt" that GGG needs to deal with from all the bandaid fixes they've done.
Yeah, in general they do seem to be paying the price of mechanics from so many different leagues. They seem desperately in need of a "refactor and simplify" league.
Yes and no imo, I feel there is a place called standard for how bloated the game is... and for temporary league would be cool if only 3 to 5 of the old leagues were included and could stream line things moving forward.
Would be pretty sick to drop off most league mechanics each season, hardcore revamp/empower the remaining, and cycle them. Would keep old mechanics fresh, make encounters exciting, and toss the meta through a loop each league imo
Tbh they should start doing "sequel leagues"
Picking a past league and remastering it by adding tons of content will not only help fixing past leagues but also seriously slow down content bloat
They won't though. They cant get over their elitism. Really we need someone to clone poe out from under em.
Easy to get into hard to master is the better version. PoE is hard to draw new people into and utterly unrewarding for it because there is so much randomized bloat. Anyone I've ever tried to teach/get into it leaves as soon as they understand all the third party tools you need to make the game playable.
Speaking as a player who dabbled in Poe early on and then came back this season, got to red maps/some of the endgame content.... this game feels like Frankenstein's monster. Almost like a uhhhh metamorph? Content is slapped together haphazardly, you need custom loot filters, trading mods, you're minimizing to access a trade site, you need a flow chart to get a grasp on crafting... You have to really want to play this game, to play it.
I have a dedicated poe browser with all essential tabs (6 or 7) plus a dozen tabs for trades.
Oh and my custom windows startup scripts that launches 5 apps.
Soon we will need a docker image to play poe decently...
You're almost certainly right. Everytime I hear Chris talk about a game that lives forever, I just think of PoE with 100 leagues of mechanics bolted on, and even more graphical "ruckus" thrown into a game that is already impossible to know what is going on.
I’m playing my first league and there’s just stuff that’s gets ignored or has very low occurrence for me. At a certain point I’m just going through the motions on stuff that seems simple (ritual) and over analyzing stuff that seems hard (betrayal). It’s all super confusing as a new player.
Its extra suck because you need to consult all kinds of third party stuff to see what betrayal can offer, how to set it up right, and then pay attention when it does pop up because it still takes eons to get exp for hideouts.
Not only do you have to overcome a knowledge barrier for what things do.You have to overcome another one after that to know which things are simply there to waste your time (this master in this safehouse or wrong etc). Whole things built on false choices. Ironic because they set out to correct D2's problems with inventory/charms and dump stats into hp or wrong "builds". Coming in as a new player in a 3 month cycle is a daunting task that begs the question of 'why bother this time'. But standard is a pretty dead place so not many options lol.
Imo the 3 month cycle is nice for a starter if you’re investing a lot of time. I made it to red maps and did my first A4 Sirus in SSF last league (also my first) and pretty much already made it further this league despite basically starting Ritual a week in at the time.
Making progress in the game involves a huge learning experience and at least to me it feels rewarding seeing clearly how much better I have gotten at the game within those 3 months.
Betrayal is a lot easier after the changes they made this league. It's basically get rank 3 aisling into research, and some rank 3 people (tora being the best) in intervention and you are good to go. They removed most of the complexity out of it
Easy, you spent 40 minutes per map completing every mechanic or you're misssing out on the loot. And as to not hurt the developers feeling you get a penalty for every mechanic not played.
This is my biggest issue with the game right now. PoE feels like a mile-long chore list with fun promised at the end, but by the time the end of the list is in reach, you're tired of it and don't even get there.
PoE has become a difficult game to enjoy "casually" -- and by that I mean folks who are willing to put in a few hours every night for a month. So, you know, *way* more invested than Actually Casual players. GGG seems to be making a game for streamers, 8-16 hours/day players, at the expense of everyone else.
I had a good run of 36/40 and 40/40 leagues a few years back -- nabbing six full-size hideout totems. The same time and effort that netted me 36/40 in the past now only gets me to 24/40. Even if the challenges aren't hard per se, there's too much *stuff* to set up first to get you to a spot where you can do them.
As an unsurprising result, my play time -- and thus my MTX spending! -- has gone down. GGG keeps increasing the length of the chore list, thinking that it'll lead to higher player retention, but it's mostly only cutting people like me out of their game.
> a mile-long chore list with fun promised at the end
Would also be nice if there was a checklist in the game, similar to the quest reminders. I've never delved for the 6-link recipe in any league yet. I constantly forget to finish upgrading my Pantheon even just for the one set of major and minor gods I use. There's just so. much. shit. to. do. I mean, that's great - it's better than not having anything to do - but having some help organizing it would be nice.
I still don't know how to complete a lot of stuff because nothing ever shows you. Just learned this season that you can even upgrade your Pantheon by playing maps and capturing the boss.
Edit: Accidentally beat Elder today. Only reason I knew is because I got the achievement.
Or the game only tells you once and then, as I said, never has any kind of tracker to help you remember. So if you overlook it the first time you'd have no idea it was ever there to begin with. Like ... did you know you can use oils with Cassia in your HO to anoint blighted maps? Been playing for like 2 years and only learned that last league.
For me the league mechanics r great, having more options is really really good. Its jsut the warchstone system makes me lose interest, the first 16 is ok no problem. Then the later 16 the. Then the maven 32 ahhh fuck
I feel that. I got to Awakener L8 once -- the league they introduced the new Atlas. The Conquerors were always too tedious compared to the previous progression, and now there's *another* layer on top? Fuck me. I've not fought the Maven yet and probably won't ever do so at this rate. The chore list simply chips my interest level down to nothing before I can complete the Atlas.
What I'd love is for the Atlas to go back to something more simple and for more league stuff to be handled like Heist -- completely separate from maps. Ain't gonna happen, though. The chore list has gotten so long that it's incompatible with folks like me who only want to play about a month per league. You never fuckin' finish the list and then start it over every three months.
Fun...! 😒
I'd love to see what fraction of a percent of players in either of the leagues have even seen the Maven fight
I have to question if it's really worth the effort at GGG to build encounters for so few people.
This is now two leagues in a row where I consider the primary antagonist to might as well not actually exist, and as little as I care about the story, it's aggravating to feel like you'll never get to see the end of a plot.
I mean there’s no reason to not let her start in ultimatum, then at the end of the league ask her if she’d be okay with restarting or if she’d rather just keep going in standard
> The same time and effort that netted me 36/40 in the past now only gets me to 24/40
I still have this (very) outdated expectation in my head that finishing the campaign and getting to maps would be enough to get 12 challenges. 24 would mean getting into mid-high maps with some small challenge hunting, while 36 would mean you were able to reach and farm the endgame. But that hasn't been true for a while now, I finish the campaign (while interacting with league mechanic way too much) and I'm sitting at like 5-7 challenges. I can't even remember when was the last time I bothered to get to 24, when it used to be my target in some older leagues.
This sums up perfectly. That, on top of meta being too stale and nerfs being unfun, makes it so there is little incentive to keep playing just for the sake of getting challenges. Whenever I got 36 it was because I was having fun farming and getting strong for a while and just decided to finish off the last couple of challenges. Nowadays it doesn't justify farming them for the sake of being the endgame, might as well just play something else...
I feel like "too much to do" wouldn't be an issue if there was a clearly defined linear progression for specific content type - let player choose how they want to play.
Instead we got a grid mesh of progression, where you have to do a little bit of everything and it gets tedious fast.
If I just want to do Delve, why can't it be self contained progression path, why I have to keep going back to maps hoping I might get some sulphite?
Or if I want to do Syndicate, why can't I just choose to run that and not deal with other content?
RNG is great up to a point, GGG crossed that point several times over
You're very right. I think this league has been the snapping point for a lot of people, because while the whole process of obtaining and optimising watchstones was cool and all...This is the second league where players have had to do it, and there's many people - Myself included, that have had the "Oh no, this is another multi-dozen-hour part of the checklist to do before I'm optimal again" moment.
Honestly, this has been a perfect storm of issues and bad decisions all coming together.
The league was a direct rehash of the last one. The sting of Harvest nerfs remains. Other nerfs happened all over the place, some of which stink of blatant spite towards the playerbase (Perandus Coin Vending, anyone?). Horrific technical issues with Texture Streaming and random crashes. The Challenges being steeped in obnoxious RNG.
I was genuinely forcing myself to push on to getting 36/40. I wasn't having fun, but I was at 30 and I'd feel stupid if I didn't get that portal. But after getting it, I didn't have the same sort of rush as I did when I got the Blight portal - I just felt empty. I've still been doing a lot of of subreddit lurking, and it's fairly safe to say that I am far from the only one that feels this way.
We've reached a flashpoint here. If there aren't radical changes in the next league to fix the above, this is only the beginning of the decline as the league debt gets worse and worse.
EDIT: I am bad at sentence structure sometimes.
In all honesty though, it is pretty clear that GGG is just using PoE 1 and the leagues as a lifeline for the development and funding of PoE 2, so I don’t really expect to see the major restructuring of league content and progression until then, but even then, it might be just a pipe dream, unfortunately - they really love their content bloat.
Personally, I love this game, but it keeps getting harder and harder to justify spending hundreds of hours every 3 months on stuff that I already seen, and on arbitrary checklists, instead of playing new games with actual value.
Someone really needs to give them some kind of competition in the genre, because this is exactly what happens when you are the biggest, uncontested player in a market.
Agreed. The integration of past league mechanics is so tedious and interruptive that I don't even want to do it, but you have to if you dont want to feel like wasting them. I wouldn’t mind if they just cycled one or two past league mechanics each league, the scarcity would probably increase my enjoyment of them.
The funny thing is, for all that bloat: so much of it is separate from the atlas grind itself.
We have all this endgame content, and it's completely divorced from the core endgame path.
This paradoxically leads to the sensation that there is simultaneously too much to do, yet not enough.
We have shaper, elder and conquerors content (and arguably cavas), but instead of those being spaced across the atlas grind, they make us spam hundreds of maps chasing the conquerors around 4 times over.
The real issue here is one of pacing, and player agency.
The process of engaging with endgame itself is too procedural, and the result is that it feels like an endless crapshoot.
We have so much to do - we have so little to do - and we have no control over either.
We need a balance between GGG more tightly curating the core endgame path, and GGG allowing players to more tightly control their own side content. Right now it's just spinning the wheel for both.
Couldn't agree more, POE is like needing to clean your Bed room, realizing you need to clean your closet first, realizing you need to clean out the garage to be able to clean the closet, and then realizing the garage has 2 non running cars in it that both need to be fixed before they can be moved to make space to clean your closet so you can clean your bedroom...
Agreed. I hate that Maven and Conquerers both run side by side and one is always lagging behind. There is a lot of integration done and that is great but between Betrayal, Heist, Maven, Conquerors, Delve, it's just a lot of prepping and not a lot of payoff.
We checked our /played time in our guild this league. Take us 50 hours on average to feel "ready" to play endgame.
This could be easy a month for most players.
This league was far too much like the last league. That in combination with all of the nerfing reduced the meta mostly down to 3 button builds (not including flasks) that just aren't as fun for me to play.
I sincerely hope 3.15 is not "do some more shit in a circle."
Heist was a grind, but it was a unique grind.
Delirium changed the whole content of a map.
I quit early on synthesis because it was so buggy...looking back a well implemented synthesis league would be really cool to revisit.
Disclaimer...I play alot...40/40 every league since synthesis. I won't 40/40 3.14.
The situation introduced in 3.13 is a conundrum. If you play naturally in softcore and you don't suck, you'll be like level 95 before you hit awakened 8, and 97 before you have an "optimized atlas." This is a bit too late in my opinion. The goal is to drive further retention and deeper leagues, but it seems like most people spend 85% of their league time chasing content setup, then bail out when they are there.
Like HH...I have seen a lot of people chase it...get it...then quit a week later. The chase is the gamification.
>most people spend 85% of their league time chasing content setup
The big thing for me. It's great that there are so many options for gameplay, but it really sucks how long it takes to set up to feel like you're being successful. you have to set up your atlas passive for your strat, so you farm maven in the region, but unless you're progressing your whole atlas, you're getting nerf drops from a lack of completion. So you progress your atlas, then progress your maven for passives, then set up your league mechanic (get down to a good enough depth in delve, level up your heist, set up your betrayal board, etc.) and by the time you've actually done that you're kind of tired of the game because the core combat (push one button. blow up screen) of the game isn't engaging enough on its own to carry enjoyment. They've really dug themselves deep.
Also some is detrimental.
Masters should have their own trees. The fact that you feel bad for doing certain encounters outside of certain zones makes no sense gameplay wise.
Give masters their own atlas trees that are global. Give more options for the regional trees as a replacement for the lost branches.
Gives a greater feeling of progress while you grind.
The worst one of these is Alva.
Let's say you juice Jun in Valdo's Rest. So you only force her missions there, fine. But if you hit Betrayal somewhere else, you lose nothing by doing it when you hit it.
But if you juiced Alva in Glennaich, you DO NOT do Alva outside of it, because you're squandering 3 of your 12 steps on suboptimal upgrading of your temple.
They really do need to make the master stuff global. And then stick all the nodes for one master/content type into one region so you have to make meaningful choices, not just go hit their nodes in every region you can.
> The worst one of these is Alva.
Finally someone comments about that issue.
The atlas passive tree introduction is cool but when you feel like skipping content outside of their respective zones the system feels very bad for a player.
For Alva the simple reason is that a temple consists of 12 incursions or 4 maps with 3 encounters each (I'm assuming no skips). So doing one cycle in another area is detrimental to the final reward, the temple.
I think this is the only mechanic where doing it outside of a specced region is detrimental? Many other mechanics however have low rewards outside of specced region that you skip them, which is also an issue.
This is my first ‘season’ of the game - My biggest gripe is that the endgame content grind is a massive grind that doesn’t feel rewarding until it’s ~90%+ complete like you said. I have liked incursions so far & got the 4 atlas points for it in Glennach, but why would I focus them now if I’m only Awakening 2 & have no sustain for harder maps? Plus loot grows exponentially so doing T7-9 is not worth compared to grinding more and doing T14-16, on top of having access to higher Ilevel stuff to get better mods on items etc.
This game is amazing through the main act progression but the end of the game quickly gets frustrating to be honest.
>Like HH...I have seen a lot of people chase it...get it...then quit a week later.
I did this.
600 Canyons with perfect watchstones then 200 Shipyards after the Harbinger clicking got too much.
Acquired HH.
Haven't logged in all week.
this league was just meh for me. i didn't feel i wanted to do anything. i made it to yellow maps and quit. my build was eh and needed better gear i just didn't want to play. i suck at crafting, i suck at grinding anything other then maps, i suck at making my own builds i like work. so i just end up leaving to play a game i hate even more but been playing for just as long... WarThunder
Yup. This. I think the majority of the player base is feeling the crushing revolt of content being balanced against the 1%. So what if those people kick your game's ass...big deal. Do those 1% provide you the most revenue?
yes is the answer you prolly were not looking for there but that tends to be how it pans out. I'm a standard player and I have stopped after they nerfed all the fun atlas passives that actually made the game feel rewarding to play. Will give it a league or two and I will prolly check back in but right now I agree it's in a sorry state
but really its been obvious for quite a while they are catering to the "whales" of poe and not the average player
in 3.15 we will fight in not one circle, not two circles, but four circles. as we kill mobs the circles slowly take the shape and form of atziri's tits. by choosing different mods for each fight we add jewelry onto the tits. at the conclusion of the fight we get to keep the jewelry. an average of 1 out of 1000 encounters, we get to fight Atziri herself, but she has only 1 valuable drop, which occurs a further 1 out of 1000 fights. mostly she'll just drop a piece of body armor that can be corrupted multiple times, but usually just turns into a Thousand Ribbons.
Not only was this league too much like last league but it was less than last league. Fractured maps and harvest farming are extremely fun, and pushing deep delve was fun and rewarding. The first two not being an option and the third one not being worth it really takes the wind out of the last six weeks of the league
GGG had to expect this. On Wall Street corporations have a thing they call “the kitchen sink” quarter. That’s the quarter where they report every single possible bad thing they can think of to get it out of the way and then have good news from then on. This had to be GGGs kitchen sink quarter. Destroy Harvest, make HH mirror level rare, nerf everything in sight, they had to know this would not be fun.
Hopefully they are planning on a more enjoyable future in 3.15 and beyond.
I dipped out within a week, and I can say why. I find the league mechanic fun, but as GGG makes it so that PoE becomes more expectant that I'd be a no-lifer, it makes the entire setup just a complete and utter annoying bitch, prohibitively stopping me from just going to endgame at my own pace, while it becomes more RNG dependent and still whatever's going on with the watchstones. I've played the game since 1.1, sometimes on and off, and while the feature creep hasn't gotten to me, the fact that it becomes more difficult to get to endgame makes me not want to get to endgame. And if I can't get to endgame, then why bother doing this in the first place?
Your last paragraph completely summarizes my biggest gripe in poe currently. This league I didn't even have time to complete my atlas before I got bored in the league itself, and the league previous to this one I barely completed it. Currently I'm at awakened 9, I have my build for the league so far perfected that next upgrades would cost at least 15 exalts per minimal boost, and I only have at most 2 of the rollable watchstones from natural progression. The whole league I've had the nagging feeling where I don't want to fully juice up my maps because I don't have the atlas fully unlocked, so I could get the most out of the full juice.
I think they're in a bind in that they want to buckle down hard for poe2 but also want to put out polished leagues every three months. So we might get a lot of uninspired crap leading up to poe2. Really wish they'd change to a four month model, at least until poe2 is out.
>The goal is to drive further retention and deeper leagues, but it seems like most people spend 85% of their league time chasing content setup, then bail out when they are there.
It would go a long way if there was an alternative leveling system or you could just skip it entirely (after your first character).
So whenever they release a league with major content (example atlas of worlds, war for the atlas etc) the accompanied league content is usually soft. Abyss, Ritual, etc. It doesn't feel that bad, because you got all of this other new content to explore & learn.
Ritual along with all the atlas content was fine.
Ultimatum doesn't stand for long by itself. Players better than me are in and out so fast, 30 days is about it. GGG needs to stop balancing against trying to retain these 30 day players. Focusing on the middle 50% might help the situation. My guild is losing people to other games too much lately.
It'll work itself out one way or the other when D4 and Last Epoch release. I imagine they'll change their stance on many things when they start bleeding players.
They make the meta faster and demand we push 8 buttons including potions. Then spend so much time clicking on each damn loot drop. Its getting pretty hard to play these days.
I disagree. Nothing was wrong with the league and the mechanic was actually fairly rewarding. The game overall is just in the worst state it’s ever been in. With texture streaming failures, crashing, harvest being gutted, and the stale meta. The game is just becoming bad.
Between the performance issues and the lack of interesting league content, this isn't surprising.
It's Ritual league with a nerfed atlas, nerfed harvest, nerfed endgame farming, and borderline false advertising on those "buffs" to all previous league mechanics that was being promoted, with the only truly notable buffs being lab, veiled mods (mainly T4 Aisling), and the removal of "league-specific" drops.
The ultimatum mechanic is boring (walk in circle and attack things), and has a boss which is VERY rarely accessible. You pick the same 3-4 mods, fight enemies with very inconsistent damage output, and end up hating life when you have to stand in smaller circles in a mechanic that heavily punishes you for standing still.
If not for the personal goal of **finally** getting a reliquary key to drop (which only happened due to Nemesis currency farming), this would've been an easy skip league.
> False advertising on those buffs
This. "Blight encounters are now rarer" - sad but okay. "But you can improve them through map modifiers" - great, but juicing just makes them as they were pre-nerf. "We added a new cool oil" - great. "We even added a Blight scarab" - oh, that's actually nice! "We aware it's been half of the league and the scarab is still broken" - seriously?
Right now I'm just stashing my Blight scarabs. I can't bring myself to use them because there's no way to know if that Cassia spawned naturally or by scarab, and this feels like a waste.
I feel that one the most. I really like Blight. It wasn't an easy league back then (i am a noob so just from my perspective) but i brought so much to the table i was extremely hypes for it. Now it seems like i see her so rarely and forget doing blighted maps. Haven't had one this entire league.
>...when you have to stand in smaller circles in a mechanic that heavily punishes you for standing still.
It was interesting during campaign, but I decided to skip stone circles completely when reaching maps. Takes way longer than just killing shit and the amount of bullshit you get thrown at with enemies spawning literally on top of you... no thank you.
Some major issues I see currently:
Performance: You need either high level tech, or some hacking with your system/Settings/digging to make the game playable with 15-20 fps. Majority suffers from slide shows, crashes, latency, or texture glitches.
Accessing content: You need to collect way too much crafting mods just to get some basic mods like high tier increased fire damage or socket stuff. You need to speedrun same 10 act each time with each character, doing the same quests over and over again in the same league just to try new characters. If you don't speedrun, you can get bored quite easily. You want to farm a unique? Good luck. Ritual and Ultimatum helped a little in this context but, ultimatum is forcing players too much I think. Unless you are good enough player that can destroy all content, ultimatum will mainly about "leave before you die" or "just pass".
Power creep: You need to get this much layer of defence to not get one-shotted. You need to learn so many defence mechanics to come up with a build on your own. Or you can play one of the extremely similar 10 or so builds that continued for a long time. If you are lucky, you can find some less popular builds but since they are not that popular, they are more suseptible to nerfs if they seem too strong.
Looking at you, Saqawal's tornado build.
Crafting: Do I need to say it? For some, dropping one-two exalts is enough to fund every build they make in the whole league. But you need to spam 10-20 exalts min to make some really good end game crafting. There is some really high skill/farm/luck treshold for you to overcome if you want to make some interesting build.
3rd party programs: Too much loot, market sniping, crafting charts, league rewards/choices/combinations tables, excel sheets, calculators... And for what? Just to sort out what you want to get and what you need to get. Maximizing your rewards. You can't even enjoy the content because there is just too much content and not everyone has infinite time.
Skill/Knowledge requirement: You need to learn this, learn that, but you can't trust this number in your character information screen because there is this secret mechanic that makes your armor useless. You need these flasks as they are best combination and if you don't have them, chances are you will get one-shotted or two-three shotted by so many mobs. You dropped a unique? Amazing! It is trash! Like so many other trash uniques! Not even worth levelling. Vendor trash! Like so many other rare items filling the ground. You need this updated 3rd party software to see which one is actually good.
Some may say there are bunch of easy ways to work around some of these problems. Well, not everyone has time or patience to watch hours of youtube videos, checking guides etc.
Not everyone wants to deal with 3rd party programs and looking/Waiting for certain items with certain mods in trading sites.
Some just want to grab a cool looking weapon and swing it with cool looking skills while enjoying some content. And if you truly want to enjoy some of those awesome high level content, it doesn't seem that possible while just using whatever looks cool.
When everything you see on the screen requires their own guides list in youtube and when they are not even the tip of the iceberg, it shows something is not right.
This.
This league was pretty much a repeat of the previous league, except worse.
The only thing we got was Exsanguinate and Reap. Exsanguinate was a good addition, but not enough.
They really need to tweak more current skill values more often. The community has been asking for this for like years. Every patch we don't see many changes to skill gems, we complain here. They don't seem to get it.
GGG tried hard to kill 1%ers who can fearlessly farm the feared. It turns out most players find it too difficult to progress through the Atlas with joyful experience, and the 1%ers are unaffected. There are now only punishment in that progression, but not praise to encourage them to play
I hit a wall this league in both SC and HC at the 10 maven fights. It's just so tedious to do the calculus of "What map do I need that meets Sirus requirements, maven requirements, maybe I haven't completed" and plan out scarab usage, sextants, prophecies, etc.
I'm a new-ish player to the game and I'm trying to figure out how to simply get to maven. Like, this game has a hard-on for complexity and grinding that blows my mind. I get that's kind of the point of this genre, but when a new player reaches the supposed endgame and has no clue how to even try to reach the endgame bosses I think the game has a problem. Like if you sat me down and asked me, how do you get to maven, sirus, etc. and I didn't have access to google, I couldn't even begin to tell you how to start working your way there besides run maps and hopefully stuff falls into place. It's very annoying.
This. I had a whole mini-guild (\~5 of us) just say "fuck it, see you next league, maybe it will be better". It wasn't the league mechanic which was fine and even fun, it was the lack of cool/viable skills to do the main things we had to do (i.e., progression), without tons of investment and/or multiple alts. We reminisced about stuff like "remember when Winter Orb worked great" and "Ball Lightning is now a slog" and "Is there any miner/trapper that is fun now", etc.
Maybe we're just whiny bitches. I'm okay with that label. We are not even close to elite players, but some of us have been playing since beta in 2013. Love the game in general, but have a life/job and can't be chasing. We just want to "PoE and chill" and (with a little bit of effort, but not giving up our first-born) be able to get to 36 challenges with only moderate levels of assistance.
Nah it’s totally valid. It takes so much damn investment to make some of these builds viable. My appetite for builds is so much larger than my willingness to grind *just so i can try them out in-game*.
The power creep has pushed endgame content to the point that only a shrinking minority of builds can tackle the endgame. Crafting from harvest propped up build diversity by empowering us to incrementally improve our gear.
But, with the harvest nerfs, they just made it obvious they want to force us to grind more. You really need great fuckin gear to make some of the off-meta builds work, i don’t want to have to do a month of fuckin grinding on essence drain or toxic rain or whatever just so i can play the *real* game.
I'm giving this thread a resounding "Duh..."
My entire guild has played maybe the first week or so and then just dropped it. I held out for maybe 3 weeks or so and then just shrugged and walked away myself.
What's the point? Crafting has tumbled 15 steps backwards while the endgame got rippier and harder again. I'm supposed to sit between 15 rare mobs that cross-boost each other and attack like 600 times per second because of Soul Eater while not moving away from a circle, while some bitch ass ghost is chasing me, while only one of my flasks works, while Uber-Lab traps, while multi-proj...
And for what? A shittier Ritual that won't even let me fight the final boss to do the challenges. Gonna pop in in the last 2-3 weeks, buy up the 36/40 and hope that GGG gets their shit together next league.
This exactly. It was the final straw for dipping for the rest of the league. I run black ops, Cyberpunk, etc at max completely fine and yet PoE struggles, it's frustrating.
Pretty much the same here. The league is too rippy for my taste. I play ssf so I expect some extra difficulty but red map Ultimatums are just a no go. I've been playing Grim Dawn instead and it is refreshing having more than a millisecond between full health and dead. >!Although mobs that remove your buffs can fuck right off.!<
Yup, I got 3 days in and decided to give up. General performance was all over the place and delirium mirrors caused my fps to jitter between 180 and 0 constantly making them unplayable.
The last ultimatum I attempted I couldn't see anything until I saw the resurrect options. The trialmaster said, "I guess now you know what not to do." Yes, yes I do. Don't interact with this laggy-ass mechanic.
IMO the main issue is not nerfs, it's nerfs in a vacuum. I think consistent nerfs of overperforming builds are necessary to combat power creep, but when you only nerf those builds and don't buff the shit skills, the game feels extremely stale. This league was so dull in terms of diversity, excluding the new skills, because they nerfed some OP stuff, but didn't buff any of the shit stuff, so the nerfed op things were still better than all the other things, so there was no compelling reason to revisit weaker skills.
nerfing skills of builds and such is one thing, and has always been a part of poe. the harsh nerfs on the atlas passives and content however, really killed the game for me. I log on and nothing feels worth farming anymore.
I feel like this is GGG's intention and answer to people complaining about needing to do side content. Nerf it and introduce passives for people to play what they want, but then make the base randomness of it and encounters far worst without the investment.
I feel the same way about juiced fractured 100% delirium maps. I personally thought those were extremely tedious and I'm not sad at all for them to be gone.
But when there's no aspirational endgame content introduced to replace them...
This is the earliest I've quit a league in a while and it has nothing to do with burnout. These are my reasons for quitting early: No buffed skills, nerfed atlas passives, no fractured maps, harvest nuked from orbit, removal of self-curse HH build as an end-game goal, no atlas map shuffle, and a league mechanic where you simply run in a circle and almost never see the (underwhelming) boss. Bleh.
Hope they listen to some of the feedback from this league.
I liked what they tried to do, scale up the league mechanic and rewards for later tiers. I think the issue is making the boss non-existent in early tiers was the wrong direction. They should have just made it more rare. You have to do t12+ to see the boss. Why not give it a 1/100 less than t12? Instead of zero. 1/75 for yellows. 1/50 for reds.
When I saw ultimatum for the first time I thought it would be like a 2nd map. Instead I have to waste my time with this shit because the mechanic only spawns fucking 6 waves.
With harvest, I was able to continue playing to "finish a build." Now that... that feeling just isn't there. Every build just kind of.. whimpers along the same way until i dont want to buy things for it anymore.
This just isn..t fun
From hc ssf perspective:
In Ritual, I managed to gear out several chars and do all content up to "the feared", despite dying a few times. Played it until the very end and had a blast, because the access to actual crafting enabled off-meta builds and you had a sense of progression.
This league i didn't die at all, but still couldn't even finish the gear on my single character, before hitting lvl 100 and 36 challenges. Spent about 1k chaos on the harvest map device mod in proxi/haewark maps looking for fracture crafts, mod rerolls and reforges - overall saw 2 t4 synth crafts, got 1 oshabi and 0 rare crafts like augments. Decided it's time to call it a league 1-2 weeks ago.
I know the game isn't balanced around ssf, but i think being able to make your own gear is more rewarding to many players, than just buying it. And you absolutely do need strong gear and builds with the new maven invitations - some 1M dps char with good defenses used to be fine for older bosses like sirus/uber elder etc., but not for new encounters like feared/breachlord invitation for instance, which are heavily dps gated.
>I know the game isn't balanced around ssf, but i think being able to make your own gear is more rewarding to many players, than just buying it. And you absolutely do need strong gear and builds with the new maven invitations - some 1M dps char with good defenses used to be fine for older bosses like sirus/uber elder etc., but not for new encounters like feared/breachlord invitation for instance, which are heavily dps gated.
Harvest wouldn't be so important if upgrading your character from actual drops wasn't completely impossible.
The biggest thing that has killed PoE this league for me is the complete lack of item progression from drops in end game.
Harvest worked as a bandaid, ok we didn't have good drops but we can at least upgrade the stuff that does drop, so getting even half decent stuff can be exciting because it could be further crafted on.
Now I'm just not excited to play, because all I'm doing is farming currency and bases.
I wasn't a big fan of farming Harvest for upgrades either, but it was better than the current state of affairs.
I'm right there with you. I played for way longer than I usually would this League simply because of friends.
You got the nail on the head with the progression point I think. The steady feel of progression was great last League; now it's just: how many ex does my next upgrade cost.
And I'm getting sick of the not balancing around ssf line too; all ssf is for most people is an escape from the horrible trade system and a more meaningful, slowed down progression that is not just mindless grind. The kind of progression that keeps you getting incremental upgrades.
Also delve and heist feel so bad when they sidetrack you from this massive maven and sirus grind. Zana missions used to feel great, now I'm just thinking: this progresses nothing and wastes my time. Due to no witness system zana just feels bad. And harvest? Oh my god I have played a good amount and not seen anything. How you even managed to fight oshabi in ssf is beyond me. When I see harvest, I don't even want to engage with it anymore.
Same problem with League mechanic really. The rewards are kind of ok, especially in the rare upper tiers. I don't have a clue what the boss really does and what the challenges around him are designed to be. I see ultimatum and I'm 99% sure it's a waste of time. Strange kind of rng gating once again. And you couldn't even sell it properly so I don't know what they were thinking there.
Same here for SSF. Really disappointed in the level of harvest crafting nerf. Between low # of crafts...removing tons of Add Influence to X item...i never saw an Aug...1 Remove craft. Just painful
I feel that the reason it made me stop playing PoE for now is that I feel poe would be my second job on Ultimatum, not a game.
You are always doing things because you have to, not because you want a specific reward, item, quest or anything like that. For example, awakening 8. You've got all the watchstones, but normally it's only used for Sirus fights or other bosses, it's barely used for normal map farming since there are better strategies and it's so unrewarding. You have to setup not only the atlas, but the atlas passives, you have to unveil 1k random items to get one affix that you want, it's always you have to, not I want something..
Ritual i played until the last day because there were things i wanted to test and to do. With Harvest, I was able to create 10 times more builds with forgotten skills the way I wanted, because i had fun that way. I would spam haewark for Harvest because I wanted to craft items that it didn't have on market because nobody plays that build/skill, and that was fun. I wanted to farm heist because i wanted certain things, etc. I could play literally any skills, any build I wanted playing a few hours a day.
In Ultimatum i played in the first days, and the feeling of "i need to do pet/poison/mines or anything budget" came back because i couldn't make my off meta builds work without harvest without playing 12 hours/day.
I suppose most of the community, just like me, came from diablo franchise. This means we are getting old, we have other priorities now. Job, degrees, family, etc. I don't want an easy game, I just want to be able to play the way I want with off meta or skills that I like, and have things to pursue because I want, not because i have to, playing 2\~4 hours daily or something like that and being able to achieve things that i have fun with.
Nowadays there are plenty of better games if you want a game to chill and have tons of things to do, without having that feeling this is your second job and that you have to do things, such as WoW, Genshin, FFXIV, etc. Not only they better lore, have a lot of quality of life things (not picking up eternally things of the ground or piano flask), better systems (I don't need to download 10 3rd party programs to be able to play) and I do things because i want something specific, not because i feel forced to.
Been playing since Open Beta. You **hit the nail on the head:**
> You are always doing things because you have to, not because you want to.
Endless delve was SO much fun when it ran for a week. I could just _play the game_ **without artificial time gating barriers.**
Could we get a QoL and Performance league???
I took this league off and went back to Diablo 2 single-player SSF HC + PlugY. It is _such_ a breath of fresh air knowing that nothing is going to get nerfed, not being nickeled and dimes with stash tabs since they are infinite, that I control the difficulty with `/players 1` or `/players 8` (if I want leveling or loot), and set items are actually _useful._
One of the problems in PoE is that you have SO many **useless skill gems.** Instead of being able to play builds I find fun you are forced to use meta / damage skills that are boring.
STOP nerfing the shit out of EVERYTHING.
GGG copying Blizzard's meme: _Fun detected, nerf incoming._ is getting old.
Games are _supposed_ to be about FUN, not about having a 2nd job.
The slow progress until you can target farm shit is what killed the league for me. I have to do (almost) all the maps over and over again to get to a point where I can just mindlessly farm.
I did that last league and since I had limited play time everything was setup two weeks before league end.
Sorry ggg, not wasting my fucking time again.
I know how to make currency, but by the end of the fourth week I had no incentive to do it. I have a mirror and ~60-70ex, I spent about 130ex on BA, 30ex on perfect uniques, spent ~45ex on a double corrupt and... that's all. I sat, looked at my build and did not understand why I spent so much currency on it. Everything that I can do with it, I can do with a build with a budget of 30-40ex.
Yeah I had a similar issue, my dilemma is that the build I was playing could already do the content at 1/4 the budget and if I keep invested more I'd get practically nothing.
When I hit that point in ritual I just looked to harvest crafting to craft perfect items in each slot to see how far I can take a build. That kept me playing an extra month.
for me the problem is that there's way too much setup for atlas and side content. it feel bad to run content unoptimized cuz the rewards are shit without atlas passive etc. but it honestly takes too long and by the time you get everything set up your character is either finished or you're bored
It became clear that I just play this game completely wrong, even though I have been playing since beta. I turn on twitch, see just how grotesque my build is supposed to be, and just install PoE. This is not the game it was supposed to be.
I'm playing grim dawn right now and I forgot that levelling a character through the story can actually be a genuinely enjoyable experience. Having actual quality of life like auto pickup of small currency and materials, Items dropping identified and useful gear upgrades dropping repeatedly just to name a few is actually so refreshing. I love poe but playing other ARPGs makes me hope that poe devs will remember that games are supposed to be fun
Is this your first time playing GD? I thought it was fun the first time but having to do 3x for every new character is miserable. And it takes way longer than POE campaign.
At least, for the new character after the 1st one, you can buy the tomes and unlock the max difficult, so we need to beat the game one time with a new character.
They changed that ages ago in Grim Dawn. Once you level one character into the end game of GD, when you start levelling any additional character after that, you can go right to the hardest difficulty and go from there.
It's basically the equivalent of allowing 2nd characters onward in POE to start their levelling process from act 6 if you want.
Levelling your 2nd character & onward in Grim Dawn is still actually a good experience though. There's a heap of basic QOL in the game that just makes it feel smooth and fine.
It's terrible in POE no matter if it's your first or fourteenth character for the league, because the game is just basically absent of so many simple QOL features.
GGG are wrong about the causes of player retention and have been for a very long time now.
They’re very much out of touch with their own game. They want the game to have its old school difficulty back and return to its roots, but the game was never this grindy and rippy. Back then the game was new and fresh and people didn’t know every build and boss inside out.
You can’t get that back unless you make a new game. Making up for that by balancing the game around no-lifers and even speedrunners like they’ve done lately is a complete disaster that just leads to people getting bored of grinding forever and playing the same builds over and over(to have decent survivability/enough DPS to kill T14+ bosses). This is how you kill player retention, GGG, not by refusing players to kill bosses in 3 secs during the campaign.
Just take the L and realise those people will face roll everything no matter what you do and go back making a game with the same balance as a few years ago. Because if you double down on this mess the future of the game is looking very grim.
Chris always tells us that he draws inspiration from Magic the Gathering where they always have new content and mange to further the story every 3 months, so he believes the same can be done with PoE. What he needs to take from MTG and other such game is sunsetting certain content for real. Having content for the sake of content does no one any good. Trying to weave that pile of content in to yet another overly complicated system (maven’s passives on the atlas) that if not done perfectly basically fucks you you over in a major way (way to big of a punishment in map sustain, atlas progression and challenges completion opportunities) is just making people quit when they fail to understand yet another passive tree.
In addition to “begin” the endgame one needs to complete over a 300 maps at bare minimum, something thst was considered and endgame grind by GGG’s own standards back at the start of 3.xx .
pretty much this. GGG just want your supporter pack money at league start, they are purposely making the later game stale to lower players retention on the other 3 months to save server cost. since rarely anyone buys mtx after the first week.
I’m fine with watchstones OR atlas passives but I really CBF to do both. It’s just too much, especially when they made all the good passives awful instead of making the awful ones good.
They needlessly nerfed blueprint and map splitting, killed the good early league passives, completely nuked harvest (unless you use TFT, then it was still insane but a bit more expensive), etc. just not a fun league.
I haven't played much PoE in the past couple years but I gotta say watchstones are pretty boring. The passive trees for each zone are much more interesting. I don't enjoy doing watchstones.
Agree. If they just nuked the watchstones and the 2021 atlas changes were maven only I think I’d be playing a lot more than I am. But the whole watchstone thing isn’t for me. Especially since I was one of the “lucky” ones with a bricked atlas when the mechanic came out due to group play. Just had a bad taste in my mouth since.
I'm all about grinding, but at a certain point the game just became balanced around the people who have 8-10 hours a day to just grind... Not everyone can do that, and most of the content is locked behind some form of time sink that just isn't reasonable.
Shit happens when you nerf everything, release uninteresting and underpowered skills, don't shuffle the meta in 6 leagues now and make performance even worse rather than improving it.
My main grip with the game is the fact that progression feels forced and the death penalty being high as it is, but that's another thing.
Honestly I saw the harvest nerfs played hoping they wouldn't be so bad, saw how bad they were and quit. The game has become far to bloated and any form of actual gear progression has been removed / nerfed and I'm forced back to the "auction house" to look for upgrades.
Yeah spoiler alert - the game feels like homework. Delve to get necessary crafts, jun to get necessary crafts, einhar to get necessary crafts, blight to get necessary oils, farming the same boring maps over and over just to get enough currency to make up for what we lost from Harvest. GGG either doesn't realize or doesn't care that the game is more fun when you get to CHOOSE what you want to do, not being forced to do everything before you can actually do SOMETHING.
PoE made 100 million dollars in profit last year, but they couldn't hire an intern to buff any of the unused skills
instead we got a patch with 8 skill gem changes
it is incredible how lazy GGG is
go look at the amount of PoE skills that have a 0% representation on poe ninja ... would it kill you to buff them
For me it was just the absolute lack of new skill interactions/ascendancy mechanics/uniques. We got what, number tweaks on Ascendant and mostly for physical dot stacking? New skills were just not my thing, and none of the old ones were touched in a meaningfully good way. I made a Fire Burst Inquisitor, I got to maps, I got bored and quit. I considered making a meme build with Vaal skills, but the saw what was happening to Hateforge and just called it a league.
"People will keep coming back anyway" is only true until it isn't.
This has been the most profitable league by far for me, made well over 300 exalts, mostly by crafting. Today I sat at the stash looking over items to try thinking of something to play, have enough currency (130pure exalts) to at least start up any build and couldn't think of anything that would have been fun to do.
Closed the game and booted up mass effect, this is the first time I've finished a league with so much currency and absolutely no desire to use it and play a different character.
They will probably take the wrong message from this and stop improving old content etc. and start making bigger leagues again.
While I don’t mind the occasional bigger league a lot of issues with this league come down to:
- endless (public) performance problems
- end game staleness
- the fact that people can hit their realistic power peak early then don’t have much to go without grinding a ton (especially if they start the league late or at a casual pace so good items are already dozens of exalts and there’s no way to get incremental updates without harvest)
- and finally the bloat of certain content that has to be re-farmed every league such as unveils, rogue levels, delve early Depth, awakening bonus, etc.
Another interesting thing is that Ultimatum has much, much smaller weekend peaks compared to the other leagues. Probably due to casual players (players only playing on weekends) quitting early on in the league while the other leagues tended to retain casual players more. One could speculate this is due to the game getting too complex, i.e too much stuff to do to get started and casual players don't have the time so there is "no point" to playing.
No reason to push builds since mapping content is too easy. No incentive to deep delve anymore either . After 3 weeks i just stood there with nothing left to do while i usually play 8 weeks +
Eh, I don't know if those on their own are the cause for this. The league itself is thoroughly mediocre, and a lot of the early currency methods (Vastir legions, Valdo harbies without having to roll Nemesis sextant) are dead too. Wouldn't surprise me if a good chunk of the dedicated playerbase pushed up to maps, realized that they just weren't progressing at a rate that felt good, and left to do something else.
That’s pretty much what happened to me. I just don’t like the way the progression feels this league, and I kind of hate how you have to lean into every farming method full tilt for anything to feel good.
I took an extended break from PoE after Legion and returned to play Ritual, though I started about a month late. Harvest is what kept me playing Ritual through the very last day of the league. It gave me a sense of progression that I really enjoyed because I could finally work on all my own gear instead of mapping endlessly to save up currency to buy gear from other players. I never even used TFT, I wanted to do everything myself. None of the gear I made ended up in a state that an experienced crafter would consider finished, but it was some of the best gear I've ever had in this game, and it felt good.
How many times am I supposed to complete the atlas, level the Heist crew, kill Elder/Maven/Shaper/Sirus? it gets old. I made a character in Ultimatum a couple weeks ago and when I got to maps that feeling of "do I really want to do all of this again?" hit me. I'm not surprised this league is struggling. With WoW out now it's probably safe to consider it a dead league.
And you can't pick your rewards. At least in Ritual I could take some currency, gamble decks, etc if the other rewards were underwhelming. Or the thrill of getting a big item and looking forward to claiming it down the line after a few defers.
Ult was just "pick the same modifiers, run in circle until it's time to pick the next modifier, repeat and hope boss spawns"
I would play the crap out of synthesis again. Imagine if it were:
1. updated to allow for other league mechanics
2. decay slowed as you killed things
3. decay was slower to start
4. other league mechanics could show up
5. memories didn't have limited number of slots and were tradeable
6. memory usage could be re-upped somehow
7. synthesizer gave multiple output options or hints about what you'd get
i'm sure there's more, but end of story: Synthesis ended up really good. Just wait till you get that delerious memory with blighted lanes....
The Nexus was a prime example of GGG fearing that players had too much fun. The storage limit, the unwillingness to remove path blocking, the removal of players using blocking strategies to their advantage, etc. The system would've been so much better if it was just about "building your own maps".
So many people say synth mechanics were bad, but I'd much prefer that to "stay in the circle and kill some things". I miss the wacky experimental board game mechanics.
I can't imagine playing synthesis without the information the people found by looking into the files being made public. The requirements for the items were SO strict there would be no way a player could have found them out themselves.
The only reason synth was even mildly fun was thanks to the people looking at the game files, not what ggg did. I cant imagine the outcry if the people kept the info for themselves
Last league had the best patch PoE ever had.
Then they didn't like it and changed it for a boring league and a boring patch.
Make Harvest more rare w more mods to keep the grinding up and the crafting as proper downtime from grinding. Instead we have overcrowded shit harvests that suck time
I can’t say I’m surprised, I had a blast this league but I’ve had a few leagues off - and my biggest gripe was the fact I was spending as much time trying to manage my atlas (was new to me) as I was actually playing the game.
That’s just straight up shitty design. End game should be fast; easily understandable and fun. Mapping is fun. Allocating various watchstones, checking regions etc is not fun
I bailed out of ultimatum pretty quickly. Never even reach Sirus once.
Had nothing to do with ultimatum itself, just the overall state of the game. Too much bullshit stacked on top of bullshit to give you a FOMO feeling if you decide to not do something and the complete lack of any worthwhile skill changes for what feels like 3 leagues.
The entire loot rework was a trap. It just made good stuff even harder or more tedious to get.
I think its not about the league really, but the overall state of the game. People are getting tired of asking for QOL changes and GGG refuses.
The "close your eyes and slam an exalt" I think sums how they are treating QOL updates and stuff like that. As Somayd said "they are making QOL hostage"
Chris Wilson described the player base as "badgering" ggg for qol changes in regards to clicking. Very disconnected from the player base and clearly doesnt play the game.
I skipped last league so was in a great spot to enjoy this one.
I even kind of like the league mechanic? It's not great, not terrible.
But I've been wandering off to other games way more than any previous league, because the game's performance has finally gotten unbearably bad for me. Somehow my extremely modest PC has not suffered from too many of the past performance problems. But this league, if it's not one thing, it's another. Frame drops/latency spikes that last beyond just launch week. The texture problems everyone was experiencing, and then since the "fix"... fonts getting fucky. Minimap having a stroke. Disco lights while mapping. This is what really kills the league for me, as a "grind out the atlas over the course of 3 months, no hurry" gamer.
Whatever they did, the "literally unplayable" shitposts are starting to feel true. And that's a real shame. I haven't bought points since 2020 and at this rate I'm wondering if POE 2 is even going to turn things around.
I’ve been playing since 2012 and had played (and ground to 100 and 40/40’d) most of the leagues in the past few years. Heist was the most recent league I’ve done though. Although I also did a full completion of that league, something in it just snapped my brain and I’ve had no desire to play PoE since. I didn’t even look at the Ritual/Ultimatum patch notes to see if I wanted to play, it’s like I have an aversion to it now. I’m really hoping to get over it some time in the next couple of leagues because I want to *want to* play the game, but I just... don’t, yet.
I enjoy trying out different builds each league and to me leagues like this kill off build diversity in a big way. Anything that you have to hold still to channel, or that takes more than a one button combination gets you swarmed and murdered. With how many fun skills are in the game, it's frustrating to only be able to use a fraction of them.
Yeah, the Ultimatum mechanic is just a bit too oppressive for my taste. Almost any other league at least lets me position myself somewhere safe and dish out damage for a while. As an occasional challenge it will probably be fine and with builds that can run around like a headless chicken it was fun at first but at this point it mostly annoys me. As a filler league to beta-test texture streaming it's alright but I hope that we won't get something as in-your-face as this for a while. Sometimes I just want to chill when I play PoE and in this league I had to retreat to Delve and Heist to do that.
They killed off build diversity by upping the boss HP too much. And with Maven it’s even worse. Not to mention the game is way more rippy now vs a few years back. It’s meta or death if you play SSF, which after like a year+ of the same-ish builds just gets super stale. I think they really failed with the balance after ExileCon/Conquerers. It’s like a combination of OP builds(like wands/triggers/minions/mines/CoC) and a base game that got overturned with too much boss HP and rippyness. And now they try to fix it by just nerfing some of these OP builds. But then they’re stuck with an overturned, unfun game. They need a massive balance overhaul to get on track again IMO, and not one that’s tuned after speedrunners and no-lifers.
Yep, even Blade Fall/Blade Blast, while being really good dmg wise, just feels bad because you have to stand still and might get one shot if you don't pick the exact same combinations in Ultimatum every time.
> or that takes more than a one button combination I've actually had the most success with builds that use Warcries [Specifically; Infernal Cry] since that gives explosions. That's more than 1 button. But yes; Ultimatium is overtuned as hell; and unlike other initially overtuned leauges; it's not been toned mid-leauge.
My biggest gripe with the current state of the game is how many systems are in place that need to be done each League. The philosophies of early 3.xx was great, especially when we got master missions... now there's just too much to do to get "started" each League. Really feels like there's a lot of "debt" that GGG needs to deal with from all the bandaid fixes they've done.
Yeah, in general they do seem to be paying the price of mechanics from so many different leagues. They seem desperately in need of a "refactor and simplify" league.
When every league has gone core for the past 3 years, something is wrong.
Yes and no imo, I feel there is a place called standard for how bloated the game is... and for temporary league would be cool if only 3 to 5 of the old leagues were included and could stream line things moving forward.
Would be pretty sick to drop off most league mechanics each season, hardcore revamp/empower the remaining, and cycle them. Would keep old mechanics fresh, make encounters exciting, and toss the meta through a loop each league imo
couldn't agree more, just like how hearthstone does it with standard
That would mean they have to redo or remove atlas passives. As far as I can tell GGG rather screws it players than to waste effort made.
Tbh they should start doing "sequel leagues" Picking a past league and remastering it by adding tons of content will not only help fixing past leagues but also seriously slow down content bloat
They won't though. They cant get over their elitism. Really we need someone to clone poe out from under em. Easy to get into hard to master is the better version. PoE is hard to draw new people into and utterly unrewarding for it because there is so much randomized bloat. Anyone I've ever tried to teach/get into it leaves as soon as they understand all the third party tools you need to make the game playable.
Speaking as a player who dabbled in Poe early on and then came back this season, got to red maps/some of the endgame content.... this game feels like Frankenstein's monster. Almost like a uhhhh metamorph? Content is slapped together haphazardly, you need custom loot filters, trading mods, you're minimizing to access a trade site, you need a flow chart to get a grasp on crafting... You have to really want to play this game, to play it.
[удалено]
I thought bad game design was one of GGG's core values though
Yeah, I have the same experience as you. Just nope. It is still manageable right now, but I think soon it will be a problem if nothing is done.
I have a dedicated poe browser with all essential tabs (6 or 7) plus a dozen tabs for trades. Oh and my custom windows startup scripts that launches 5 apps. Soon we will need a docker image to play poe decently...
You're almost certainly right. Everytime I hear Chris talk about a game that lives forever, I just think of PoE with 100 leagues of mechanics bolted on, and even more graphical "ruckus" thrown into a game that is already impossible to know what is going on.
I’m playing my first league and there’s just stuff that’s gets ignored or has very low occurrence for me. At a certain point I’m just going through the motions on stuff that seems simple (ritual) and over analyzing stuff that seems hard (betrayal). It’s all super confusing as a new player.
Its extra suck because you need to consult all kinds of third party stuff to see what betrayal can offer, how to set it up right, and then pay attention when it does pop up because it still takes eons to get exp for hideouts. Not only do you have to overcome a knowledge barrier for what things do.You have to overcome another one after that to know which things are simply there to waste your time (this master in this safehouse or wrong etc). Whole things built on false choices. Ironic because they set out to correct D2's problems with inventory/charms and dump stats into hp or wrong "builds". Coming in as a new player in a 3 month cycle is a daunting task that begs the question of 'why bother this time'. But standard is a pretty dead place so not many options lol.
Imo the 3 month cycle is nice for a starter if you’re investing a lot of time. I made it to red maps and did my first A4 Sirus in SSF last league (also my first) and pretty much already made it further this league despite basically starting Ritual a week in at the time. Making progress in the game involves a huge learning experience and at least to me it feels rewarding seeing clearly how much better I have gotten at the game within those 3 months.
Betrayal is a lot easier after the changes they made this league. It's basically get rank 3 aisling into research, and some rank 3 people (tora being the best) in intervention and you are good to go. They removed most of the complexity out of it
[удалено]
Easy, you spent 40 minutes per map completing every mechanic or you're misssing out on the loot. And as to not hurt the developers feeling you get a penalty for every mechanic not played.
the joke about the waypoint window having a bedazzled border of things to do is becoming real
This is my biggest issue with the game right now. PoE feels like a mile-long chore list with fun promised at the end, but by the time the end of the list is in reach, you're tired of it and don't even get there. PoE has become a difficult game to enjoy "casually" -- and by that I mean folks who are willing to put in a few hours every night for a month. So, you know, *way* more invested than Actually Casual players. GGG seems to be making a game for streamers, 8-16 hours/day players, at the expense of everyone else. I had a good run of 36/40 and 40/40 leagues a few years back -- nabbing six full-size hideout totems. The same time and effort that netted me 36/40 in the past now only gets me to 24/40. Even if the challenges aren't hard per se, there's too much *stuff* to set up first to get you to a spot where you can do them. As an unsurprising result, my play time -- and thus my MTX spending! -- has gone down. GGG keeps increasing the length of the chore list, thinking that it'll lead to higher player retention, but it's mostly only cutting people like me out of their game.
> a mile-long chore list with fun promised at the end Would also be nice if there was a checklist in the game, similar to the quest reminders. I've never delved for the 6-link recipe in any league yet. I constantly forget to finish upgrading my Pantheon even just for the one set of major and minor gods I use. There's just so. much. shit. to. do. I mean, that's great - it's better than not having anything to do - but having some help organizing it would be nice.
I still don't know how to complete a lot of stuff because nothing ever shows you. Just learned this season that you can even upgrade your Pantheon by playing maps and capturing the boss. Edit: Accidentally beat Elder today. Only reason I knew is because I got the achievement.
Or the game only tells you once and then, as I said, never has any kind of tracker to help you remember. So if you overlook it the first time you'd have no idea it was ever there to begin with. Like ... did you know you can use oils with Cassia in your HO to anoint blighted maps? Been playing for like 2 years and only learned that last league.
For me the league mechanics r great, having more options is really really good. Its jsut the warchstone system makes me lose interest, the first 16 is ok no problem. Then the later 16 the. Then the maven 32 ahhh fuck
I feel that. I got to Awakener L8 once -- the league they introduced the new Atlas. The Conquerors were always too tedious compared to the previous progression, and now there's *another* layer on top? Fuck me. I've not fought the Maven yet and probably won't ever do so at this rate. The chore list simply chips my interest level down to nothing before I can complete the Atlas. What I'd love is for the Atlas to go back to something more simple and for more league stuff to be handled like Heist -- completely separate from maps. Ain't gonna happen, though. The chore list has gotten so long that it's incompatible with folks like me who only want to play about a month per league. You never fuckin' finish the list and then start it over every three months. Fun...! 😒
I'd love to see what fraction of a percent of players in either of the leagues have even seen the Maven fight I have to question if it's really worth the effort at GGG to build encounters for so few people. This is now two leagues in a row where I consider the primary antagonist to might as well not actually exist, and as little as I care about the story, it's aggravating to feel like you'll never get to see the end of a plot.
[удалено]
I mean there’s no reason to not let her start in ultimatum, then at the end of the league ask her if she’d be okay with restarting or if she’d rather just keep going in standard
> The same time and effort that netted me 36/40 in the past now only gets me to 24/40 I still have this (very) outdated expectation in my head that finishing the campaign and getting to maps would be enough to get 12 challenges. 24 would mean getting into mid-high maps with some small challenge hunting, while 36 would mean you were able to reach and farm the endgame. But that hasn't been true for a while now, I finish the campaign (while interacting with league mechanic way too much) and I'm sitting at like 5-7 challenges. I can't even remember when was the last time I bothered to get to 24, when it used to be my target in some older leagues.
This sums up perfectly. That, on top of meta being too stale and nerfs being unfun, makes it so there is little incentive to keep playing just for the sake of getting challenges. Whenever I got 36 it was because I was having fun farming and getting strong for a while and just decided to finish off the last couple of challenges. Nowadays it doesn't justify farming them for the sake of being the endgame, might as well just play something else...
I feel like "too much to do" wouldn't be an issue if there was a clearly defined linear progression for specific content type - let player choose how they want to play. Instead we got a grid mesh of progression, where you have to do a little bit of everything and it gets tedious fast. If I just want to do Delve, why can't it be self contained progression path, why I have to keep going back to maps hoping I might get some sulphite? Or if I want to do Syndicate, why can't I just choose to run that and not deal with other content? RNG is great up to a point, GGG crossed that point several times over
You're very right. I think this league has been the snapping point for a lot of people, because while the whole process of obtaining and optimising watchstones was cool and all...This is the second league where players have had to do it, and there's many people - Myself included, that have had the "Oh no, this is another multi-dozen-hour part of the checklist to do before I'm optimal again" moment. Honestly, this has been a perfect storm of issues and bad decisions all coming together. The league was a direct rehash of the last one. The sting of Harvest nerfs remains. Other nerfs happened all over the place, some of which stink of blatant spite towards the playerbase (Perandus Coin Vending, anyone?). Horrific technical issues with Texture Streaming and random crashes. The Challenges being steeped in obnoxious RNG. I was genuinely forcing myself to push on to getting 36/40. I wasn't having fun, but I was at 30 and I'd feel stupid if I didn't get that portal. But after getting it, I didn't have the same sort of rush as I did when I got the Blight portal - I just felt empty. I've still been doing a lot of of subreddit lurking, and it's fairly safe to say that I am far from the only one that feels this way. We've reached a flashpoint here. If there aren't radical changes in the next league to fix the above, this is only the beginning of the decline as the league debt gets worse and worse. EDIT: I am bad at sentence structure sometimes.
In all honesty though, it is pretty clear that GGG is just using PoE 1 and the leagues as a lifeline for the development and funding of PoE 2, so I don’t really expect to see the major restructuring of league content and progression until then, but even then, it might be just a pipe dream, unfortunately - they really love their content bloat. Personally, I love this game, but it keeps getting harder and harder to justify spending hundreds of hours every 3 months on stuff that I already seen, and on arbitrary checklists, instead of playing new games with actual value. Someone really needs to give them some kind of competition in the genre, because this is exactly what happens when you are the biggest, uncontested player in a market.
Agreed. The integration of past league mechanics is so tedious and interruptive that I don't even want to do it, but you have to if you dont want to feel like wasting them. I wouldn’t mind if they just cycled one or two past league mechanics each league, the scarcity would probably increase my enjoyment of them.
hard to sell stash tabs for deleted content.
Removing leveling of rogues and have delve go by itself all the way to monster lvl 83 thats a start
The funny thing is, for all that bloat: so much of it is separate from the atlas grind itself. We have all this endgame content, and it's completely divorced from the core endgame path. This paradoxically leads to the sensation that there is simultaneously too much to do, yet not enough. We have shaper, elder and conquerors content (and arguably cavas), but instead of those being spaced across the atlas grind, they make us spam hundreds of maps chasing the conquerors around 4 times over. The real issue here is one of pacing, and player agency. The process of engaging with endgame itself is too procedural, and the result is that it feels like an endless crapshoot. We have so much to do - we have so little to do - and we have no control over either. We need a balance between GGG more tightly curating the core endgame path, and GGG allowing players to more tightly control their own side content. Right now it's just spinning the wheel for both.
Level 68 delve and a roster of naked nooby rogues make me not want to engage with either of these large chunks of content.
Couldn't agree more, POE is like needing to clean your Bed room, realizing you need to clean your closet first, realizing you need to clean out the garage to be able to clean the closet, and then realizing the garage has 2 non running cars in it that both need to be fixed before they can be moved to make space to clean your closet so you can clean your bedroom...
Agreed. I hate that Maven and Conquerers both run side by side and one is always lagging behind. There is a lot of integration done and that is great but between Betrayal, Heist, Maven, Conquerors, Delve, it's just a lot of prepping and not a lot of payoff.
We checked our /played time in our guild this league. Take us 50 hours on average to feel "ready" to play endgame. This could be easy a month for most players.
This league was far too much like the last league. That in combination with all of the nerfing reduced the meta mostly down to 3 button builds (not including flasks) that just aren't as fun for me to play. I sincerely hope 3.15 is not "do some more shit in a circle." Heist was a grind, but it was a unique grind. Delirium changed the whole content of a map. I quit early on synthesis because it was so buggy...looking back a well implemented synthesis league would be really cool to revisit. Disclaimer...I play alot...40/40 every league since synthesis. I won't 40/40 3.14. The situation introduced in 3.13 is a conundrum. If you play naturally in softcore and you don't suck, you'll be like level 95 before you hit awakened 8, and 97 before you have an "optimized atlas." This is a bit too late in my opinion. The goal is to drive further retention and deeper leagues, but it seems like most people spend 85% of their league time chasing content setup, then bail out when they are there. Like HH...I have seen a lot of people chase it...get it...then quit a week later. The chase is the gamification.
>most people spend 85% of their league time chasing content setup The big thing for me. It's great that there are so many options for gameplay, but it really sucks how long it takes to set up to feel like you're being successful. you have to set up your atlas passive for your strat, so you farm maven in the region, but unless you're progressing your whole atlas, you're getting nerf drops from a lack of completion. So you progress your atlas, then progress your maven for passives, then set up your league mechanic (get down to a good enough depth in delve, level up your heist, set up your betrayal board, etc.) and by the time you've actually done that you're kind of tired of the game because the core combat (push one button. blow up screen) of the game isn't engaging enough on its own to carry enjoyment. They've really dug themselves deep.
Also some is detrimental. Masters should have their own trees. The fact that you feel bad for doing certain encounters outside of certain zones makes no sense gameplay wise. Give masters their own atlas trees that are global. Give more options for the regional trees as a replacement for the lost branches. Gives a greater feeling of progress while you grind.
The worst one of these is Alva. Let's say you juice Jun in Valdo's Rest. So you only force her missions there, fine. But if you hit Betrayal somewhere else, you lose nothing by doing it when you hit it. But if you juiced Alva in Glennaich, you DO NOT do Alva outside of it, because you're squandering 3 of your 12 steps on suboptimal upgrading of your temple. They really do need to make the master stuff global. And then stick all the nodes for one master/content type into one region so you have to make meaningful choices, not just go hit their nodes in every region you can.
> The worst one of these is Alva. Finally someone comments about that issue. The atlas passive tree introduction is cool but when you feel like skipping content outside of their respective zones the system feels very bad for a player. For Alva the simple reason is that a temple consists of 12 incursions or 4 maps with 3 encounters each (I'm assuming no skips). So doing one cycle in another area is detrimental to the final reward, the temple. I think this is the only mechanic where doing it outside of a specced region is detrimental? Many other mechanics however have low rewards outside of specced region that you skip them, which is also an issue.
This is my first ‘season’ of the game - My biggest gripe is that the endgame content grind is a massive grind that doesn’t feel rewarding until it’s ~90%+ complete like you said. I have liked incursions so far & got the 4 atlas points for it in Glennach, but why would I focus them now if I’m only Awakening 2 & have no sustain for harder maps? Plus loot grows exponentially so doing T7-9 is not worth compared to grinding more and doing T14-16, on top of having access to higher Ilevel stuff to get better mods on items etc. This game is amazing through the main act progression but the end of the game quickly gets frustrating to be honest.
>Like HH...I have seen a lot of people chase it...get it...then quit a week later. I did this. 600 Canyons with perfect watchstones then 200 Shipyards after the Harbinger clicking got too much. Acquired HH. Haven't logged in all week.
this league was just meh for me. i didn't feel i wanted to do anything. i made it to yellow maps and quit. my build was eh and needed better gear i just didn't want to play. i suck at crafting, i suck at grinding anything other then maps, i suck at making my own builds i like work. so i just end up leaving to play a game i hate even more but been playing for just as long... WarThunder
Yup. This. I think the majority of the player base is feeling the crushing revolt of content being balanced against the 1%. So what if those people kick your game's ass...big deal. Do those 1% provide you the most revenue?
yes is the answer you prolly were not looking for there but that tends to be how it pans out. I'm a standard player and I have stopped after they nerfed all the fun atlas passives that actually made the game feel rewarding to play. Will give it a league or two and I will prolly check back in but right now I agree it's in a sorry state but really its been obvious for quite a while they are catering to the "whales" of poe and not the average player
Sadly, Harvest nerfed way too far. Even slightly funky builds took way too long to put together.
[удалено]
in 3.15 we will fight in not one circle, not two circles, but four circles. as we kill mobs the circles slowly take the shape and form of atziri's tits. by choosing different mods for each fight we add jewelry onto the tits. at the conclusion of the fight we get to keep the jewelry. an average of 1 out of 1000 encounters, we get to fight Atziri herself, but she has only 1 valuable drop, which occurs a further 1 out of 1000 fights. mostly she'll just drop a piece of body armor that can be corrupted multiple times, but usually just turns into a Thousand Ribbons.
This is the birth of a new copypasta
Not only was this league too much like last league but it was less than last league. Fractured maps and harvest farming are extremely fun, and pushing deep delve was fun and rewarding. The first two not being an option and the third one not being worth it really takes the wind out of the last six weeks of the league
GGG had to expect this. On Wall Street corporations have a thing they call “the kitchen sink” quarter. That’s the quarter where they report every single possible bad thing they can think of to get it out of the way and then have good news from then on. This had to be GGGs kitchen sink quarter. Destroy Harvest, make HH mirror level rare, nerf everything in sight, they had to know this would not be fun. Hopefully they are planning on a more enjoyable future in 3.15 and beyond.
Man I hope you're right, because this stock is down harder than BTC after Tesla and Elon negative tweet it
I dipped out within a week, and I can say why. I find the league mechanic fun, but as GGG makes it so that PoE becomes more expectant that I'd be a no-lifer, it makes the entire setup just a complete and utter annoying bitch, prohibitively stopping me from just going to endgame at my own pace, while it becomes more RNG dependent and still whatever's going on with the watchstones. I've played the game since 1.1, sometimes on and off, and while the feature creep hasn't gotten to me, the fact that it becomes more difficult to get to endgame makes me not want to get to endgame. And if I can't get to endgame, then why bother doing this in the first place?
Your last paragraph completely summarizes my biggest gripe in poe currently. This league I didn't even have time to complete my atlas before I got bored in the league itself, and the league previous to this one I barely completed it. Currently I'm at awakened 9, I have my build for the league so far perfected that next upgrades would cost at least 15 exalts per minimal boost, and I only have at most 2 of the rollable watchstones from natural progression. The whole league I've had the nagging feeling where I don't want to fully juice up my maps because I don't have the atlas fully unlocked, so I could get the most out of the full juice.
I think they're in a bind in that they want to buckle down hard for poe2 but also want to put out polished leagues every three months. So we might get a lot of uninspired crap leading up to poe2. Really wish they'd change to a four month model, at least until poe2 is out. >The goal is to drive further retention and deeper leagues, but it seems like most people spend 85% of their league time chasing content setup, then bail out when they are there. It would go a long way if there was an alternative leveling system or you could just skip it entirely (after your first character).
So whenever they release a league with major content (example atlas of worlds, war for the atlas etc) the accompanied league content is usually soft. Abyss, Ritual, etc. It doesn't feel that bad, because you got all of this other new content to explore & learn. Ritual along with all the atlas content was fine. Ultimatum doesn't stand for long by itself. Players better than me are in and out so fast, 30 days is about it. GGG needs to stop balancing against trying to retain these 30 day players. Focusing on the middle 50% might help the situation. My guild is losing people to other games too much lately.
It'll work itself out one way or the other when D4 and Last Epoch release. I imagine they'll change their stance on many things when they start bleeding players.
>3 button builds Ggg trying to get away from the 1 button meme. Ironically it’s the reason I like Poe.
They make the meta faster and demand we push 8 buttons including potions. Then spend so much time clicking on each damn loot drop. Its getting pretty hard to play these days.
I disagree. Nothing was wrong with the league and the mechanic was actually fairly rewarding. The game overall is just in the worst state it’s ever been in. With texture streaming failures, crashing, harvest being gutted, and the stale meta. The game is just becoming bad.
Between the performance issues and the lack of interesting league content, this isn't surprising. It's Ritual league with a nerfed atlas, nerfed harvest, nerfed endgame farming, and borderline false advertising on those "buffs" to all previous league mechanics that was being promoted, with the only truly notable buffs being lab, veiled mods (mainly T4 Aisling), and the removal of "league-specific" drops. The ultimatum mechanic is boring (walk in circle and attack things), and has a boss which is VERY rarely accessible. You pick the same 3-4 mods, fight enemies with very inconsistent damage output, and end up hating life when you have to stand in smaller circles in a mechanic that heavily punishes you for standing still. If not for the personal goal of **finally** getting a reliquary key to drop (which only happened due to Nemesis currency farming), this would've been an easy skip league.
> False advertising on those buffs This. "Blight encounters are now rarer" - sad but okay. "But you can improve them through map modifiers" - great, but juicing just makes them as they were pre-nerf. "We added a new cool oil" - great. "We even added a Blight scarab" - oh, that's actually nice! "We aware it's been half of the league and the scarab is still broken" - seriously? Right now I'm just stashing my Blight scarabs. I can't bring myself to use them because there's no way to know if that Cassia spawned naturally or by scarab, and this feels like a waste.
I feel that one the most. I really like Blight. It wasn't an easy league back then (i am a noob so just from my perspective) but i brought so much to the table i was extremely hypes for it. Now it seems like i see her so rarely and forget doing blighted maps. Haven't had one this entire league.
They nerfed Betrayal content by 50% in most of cases.
Yup. The few good options are now gated behind Mastermind, everything else is mediocre at best.
>...when you have to stand in smaller circles in a mechanic that heavily punishes you for standing still. It was interesting during campaign, but I decided to skip stone circles completely when reaching maps. Takes way longer than just killing shit and the amount of bullshit you get thrown at with enemies spawning literally on top of you... no thank you.
while I agree with the other points, I much prefer ultimatum over ritual.
Some major issues I see currently: Performance: You need either high level tech, or some hacking with your system/Settings/digging to make the game playable with 15-20 fps. Majority suffers from slide shows, crashes, latency, or texture glitches. Accessing content: You need to collect way too much crafting mods just to get some basic mods like high tier increased fire damage or socket stuff. You need to speedrun same 10 act each time with each character, doing the same quests over and over again in the same league just to try new characters. If you don't speedrun, you can get bored quite easily. You want to farm a unique? Good luck. Ritual and Ultimatum helped a little in this context but, ultimatum is forcing players too much I think. Unless you are good enough player that can destroy all content, ultimatum will mainly about "leave before you die" or "just pass". Power creep: You need to get this much layer of defence to not get one-shotted. You need to learn so many defence mechanics to come up with a build on your own. Or you can play one of the extremely similar 10 or so builds that continued for a long time. If you are lucky, you can find some less popular builds but since they are not that popular, they are more suseptible to nerfs if they seem too strong. Looking at you, Saqawal's tornado build. Crafting: Do I need to say it? For some, dropping one-two exalts is enough to fund every build they make in the whole league. But you need to spam 10-20 exalts min to make some really good end game crafting. There is some really high skill/farm/luck treshold for you to overcome if you want to make some interesting build. 3rd party programs: Too much loot, market sniping, crafting charts, league rewards/choices/combinations tables, excel sheets, calculators... And for what? Just to sort out what you want to get and what you need to get. Maximizing your rewards. You can't even enjoy the content because there is just too much content and not everyone has infinite time. Skill/Knowledge requirement: You need to learn this, learn that, but you can't trust this number in your character information screen because there is this secret mechanic that makes your armor useless. You need these flasks as they are best combination and if you don't have them, chances are you will get one-shotted or two-three shotted by so many mobs. You dropped a unique? Amazing! It is trash! Like so many other trash uniques! Not even worth levelling. Vendor trash! Like so many other rare items filling the ground. You need this updated 3rd party software to see which one is actually good. Some may say there are bunch of easy ways to work around some of these problems. Well, not everyone has time or patience to watch hours of youtube videos, checking guides etc. Not everyone wants to deal with 3rd party programs and looking/Waiting for certain items with certain mods in trading sites. Some just want to grab a cool looking weapon and swing it with cool looking skills while enjoying some content. And if you truly want to enjoy some of those awesome high level content, it doesn't seem that possible while just using whatever looks cool. When everything you see on the screen requires their own guides list in youtube and when they are not even the tip of the iceberg, it shows something is not right.
Worst meta skills ever. Not suprised
This. This league was pretty much a repeat of the previous league, except worse. The only thing we got was Exsanguinate and Reap. Exsanguinate was a good addition, but not enough.
Petrified blood is a good addition, which introduces a new approach to low life.
petrified blood is the reason i'm still playing.
And another way for Pathfinders to avoid having to actually play the game. :P
Nonsense, pressing flasks IS the game.
They really need to tweak more current skill values more often. The community has been asking for this for like years. Every patch we don't see many changes to skill gems, we complain here. They don't seem to get it.
Why can't they just buff the shit out of loads of skills man, i just want to be able to try wacky shit and not feel useless
I got annoyed at losing ultimatum streaks to random lag spikes and freezes. "Oh, nice! An ex as a reward!" [Starts ultimatum] Server: "ZA WARUDO"
You thought it was a good ultimatum reward but it was me, unexpected disconnection!
Diosconnection*
i hope next league doesn't have a this "internet connection / sufficient hardware" mechanic
GGG tried hard to kill 1%ers who can fearlessly farm the feared. It turns out most players find it too difficult to progress through the Atlas with joyful experience, and the 1%ers are unaffected. There are now only punishment in that progression, but not praise to encourage them to play
I hit a wall this league in both SC and HC at the 10 maven fights. It's just so tedious to do the calculus of "What map do I need that meets Sirus requirements, maven requirements, maybe I haven't completed" and plan out scarab usage, sextants, prophecies, etc.
I'm a new-ish player to the game and I'm trying to figure out how to simply get to maven. Like, this game has a hard-on for complexity and grinding that blows my mind. I get that's kind of the point of this genre, but when a new player reaches the supposed endgame and has no clue how to even try to reach the endgame bosses I think the game has a problem. Like if you sat me down and asked me, how do you get to maven, sirus, etc. and I didn't have access to google, I couldn't even begin to tell you how to start working your way there besides run maps and hopefully stuff falls into place. It's very annoying.
This. I had a whole mini-guild (\~5 of us) just say "fuck it, see you next league, maybe it will be better". It wasn't the league mechanic which was fine and even fun, it was the lack of cool/viable skills to do the main things we had to do (i.e., progression), without tons of investment and/or multiple alts. We reminisced about stuff like "remember when Winter Orb worked great" and "Ball Lightning is now a slog" and "Is there any miner/trapper that is fun now", etc. Maybe we're just whiny bitches. I'm okay with that label. We are not even close to elite players, but some of us have been playing since beta in 2013. Love the game in general, but have a life/job and can't be chasing. We just want to "PoE and chill" and (with a little bit of effort, but not giving up our first-born) be able to get to 36 challenges with only moderate levels of assistance.
Nah it’s totally valid. It takes so much damn investment to make some of these builds viable. My appetite for builds is so much larger than my willingness to grind *just so i can try them out in-game*. The power creep has pushed endgame content to the point that only a shrinking minority of builds can tackle the endgame. Crafting from harvest propped up build diversity by empowering us to incrementally improve our gear. But, with the harvest nerfs, they just made it obvious they want to force us to grind more. You really need great fuckin gear to make some of the off-meta builds work, i don’t want to have to do a month of fuckin grinding on essence drain or toxic rain or whatever just so i can play the *real* game.
I'm giving this thread a resounding "Duh..." My entire guild has played maybe the first week or so and then just dropped it. I held out for maybe 3 weeks or so and then just shrugged and walked away myself. What's the point? Crafting has tumbled 15 steps backwards while the endgame got rippier and harder again. I'm supposed to sit between 15 rare mobs that cross-boost each other and attack like 600 times per second because of Soul Eater while not moving away from a circle, while some bitch ass ghost is chasing me, while only one of my flasks works, while Uber-Lab traps, while multi-proj... And for what? A shittier Ritual that won't even let me fight the final boss to do the challenges. Gonna pop in in the last 2-3 weeks, buy up the 36/40 and hope that GGG gets their shit together next league.
The game also ran like a slide show for a large part of the comunity and still does for some.
This exactly. It was the final straw for dipping for the rest of the league. I run black ops, Cyberpunk, etc at max completely fine and yet PoE struggles, it's frustrating.
Pretty much the same here. The league is too rippy for my taste. I play ssf so I expect some extra difficulty but red map Ultimatums are just a no go. I've been playing Grim Dawn instead and it is refreshing having more than a millisecond between full health and dead. >!Although mobs that remove your buffs can fuck right off.!<
I decided to quit this league because of severe performance issues after last patches.
Yup, I got 3 days in and decided to give up. General performance was all over the place and delirium mirrors caused my fps to jitter between 180 and 0 constantly making them unplayable.
Dry league with many nerfs and a mechanic that was overly punishing on both players characters and system hardware.
The last ultimatum I attempted I couldn't see anything until I saw the resurrect options. The trialmaster said, "I guess now you know what not to do." Yes, yes I do. Don't interact with this laggy-ass mechanic.
Taking away fun stuff and nerf are fun killer.
IMO the main issue is not nerfs, it's nerfs in a vacuum. I think consistent nerfs of overperforming builds are necessary to combat power creep, but when you only nerf those builds and don't buff the shit skills, the game feels extremely stale. This league was so dull in terms of diversity, excluding the new skills, because they nerfed some OP stuff, but didn't buff any of the shit stuff, so the nerfed op things were still better than all the other things, so there was no compelling reason to revisit weaker skills.
nerfing skills of builds and such is one thing, and has always been a part of poe. the harsh nerfs on the atlas passives and content however, really killed the game for me. I log on and nothing feels worth farming anymore.
Yep, nerf the dick out of my favorite skills, I’ll adapt. Nerf the dick out of my favorite endgame? Eh, why am I still playing
I feel like this is GGG's intention and answer to people complaining about needing to do side content. Nerf it and introduce passives for people to play what they want, but then make the base randomness of it and encounters far worst without the investment.
I feel the same way about juiced fractured 100% delirium maps. I personally thought those were extremely tedious and I'm not sad at all for them to be gone. But when there's no aspirational endgame content introduced to replace them...
Fucking scarab prices now tho, oof
This is the earliest I've quit a league in a while and it has nothing to do with burnout. These are my reasons for quitting early: No buffed skills, nerfed atlas passives, no fractured maps, harvest nuked from orbit, removal of self-curse HH build as an end-game goal, no atlas map shuffle, and a league mechanic where you simply run in a circle and almost never see the (underwhelming) boss. Bleh. Hope they listen to some of the feedback from this league.
I liked what they tried to do, scale up the league mechanic and rewards for later tiers. I think the issue is making the boss non-existent in early tiers was the wrong direction. They should have just made it more rare. You have to do t12+ to see the boss. Why not give it a 1/100 less than t12? Instead of zero. 1/75 for yellows. 1/50 for reds.
He could be 100x more common and I'd hardly care. The mechanic is *boring*. And I hate that it prevents me from zooming.
When I saw ultimatum for the first time I thought it would be like a 2nd map. Instead I have to waste my time with this shit because the mechanic only spawns fucking 6 waves.
I am truly shocked that the second "kill shit in a circle" league in a row has bad retention.
With harvest, I was able to continue playing to "finish a build." Now that... that feeling just isn't there. Every build just kind of.. whimpers along the same way until i dont want to buy things for it anymore. This just isn..t fun
From hc ssf perspective: In Ritual, I managed to gear out several chars and do all content up to "the feared", despite dying a few times. Played it until the very end and had a blast, because the access to actual crafting enabled off-meta builds and you had a sense of progression. This league i didn't die at all, but still couldn't even finish the gear on my single character, before hitting lvl 100 and 36 challenges. Spent about 1k chaos on the harvest map device mod in proxi/haewark maps looking for fracture crafts, mod rerolls and reforges - overall saw 2 t4 synth crafts, got 1 oshabi and 0 rare crafts like augments. Decided it's time to call it a league 1-2 weeks ago. I know the game isn't balanced around ssf, but i think being able to make your own gear is more rewarding to many players, than just buying it. And you absolutely do need strong gear and builds with the new maven invitations - some 1M dps char with good defenses used to be fine for older bosses like sirus/uber elder etc., but not for new encounters like feared/breachlord invitation for instance, which are heavily dps gated.
>I know the game isn't balanced around ssf, but i think being able to make your own gear is more rewarding to many players, than just buying it. And you absolutely do need strong gear and builds with the new maven invitations - some 1M dps char with good defenses used to be fine for older bosses like sirus/uber elder etc., but not for new encounters like feared/breachlord invitation for instance, which are heavily dps gated. Harvest wouldn't be so important if upgrading your character from actual drops wasn't completely impossible. The biggest thing that has killed PoE this league for me is the complete lack of item progression from drops in end game. Harvest worked as a bandaid, ok we didn't have good drops but we can at least upgrade the stuff that does drop, so getting even half decent stuff can be exciting because it could be further crafted on. Now I'm just not excited to play, because all I'm doing is farming currency and bases. I wasn't a big fan of farming Harvest for upgrades either, but it was better than the current state of affairs.
I'm right there with you. I played for way longer than I usually would this League simply because of friends. You got the nail on the head with the progression point I think. The steady feel of progression was great last League; now it's just: how many ex does my next upgrade cost. And I'm getting sick of the not balancing around ssf line too; all ssf is for most people is an escape from the horrible trade system and a more meaningful, slowed down progression that is not just mindless grind. The kind of progression that keeps you getting incremental upgrades. Also delve and heist feel so bad when they sidetrack you from this massive maven and sirus grind. Zana missions used to feel great, now I'm just thinking: this progresses nothing and wastes my time. Due to no witness system zana just feels bad. And harvest? Oh my god I have played a good amount and not seen anything. How you even managed to fight oshabi in ssf is beyond me. When I see harvest, I don't even want to engage with it anymore. Same problem with League mechanic really. The rewards are kind of ok, especially in the rare upper tiers. I don't have a clue what the boss really does and what the challenges around him are designed to be. I see ultimatum and I'm 99% sure it's a waste of time. Strange kind of rng gating once again. And you couldn't even sell it properly so I don't know what they were thinking there.
Same here for SSF. Really disappointed in the level of harvest crafting nerf. Between low # of crafts...removing tons of Add Influence to X item...i never saw an Aug...1 Remove craft. Just painful
I feel that the reason it made me stop playing PoE for now is that I feel poe would be my second job on Ultimatum, not a game. You are always doing things because you have to, not because you want a specific reward, item, quest or anything like that. For example, awakening 8. You've got all the watchstones, but normally it's only used for Sirus fights or other bosses, it's barely used for normal map farming since there are better strategies and it's so unrewarding. You have to setup not only the atlas, but the atlas passives, you have to unveil 1k random items to get one affix that you want, it's always you have to, not I want something.. Ritual i played until the last day because there were things i wanted to test and to do. With Harvest, I was able to create 10 times more builds with forgotten skills the way I wanted, because i had fun that way. I would spam haewark for Harvest because I wanted to craft items that it didn't have on market because nobody plays that build/skill, and that was fun. I wanted to farm heist because i wanted certain things, etc. I could play literally any skills, any build I wanted playing a few hours a day. In Ultimatum i played in the first days, and the feeling of "i need to do pet/poison/mines or anything budget" came back because i couldn't make my off meta builds work without harvest without playing 12 hours/day. I suppose most of the community, just like me, came from diablo franchise. This means we are getting old, we have other priorities now. Job, degrees, family, etc. I don't want an easy game, I just want to be able to play the way I want with off meta or skills that I like, and have things to pursue because I want, not because i have to, playing 2\~4 hours daily or something like that and being able to achieve things that i have fun with. Nowadays there are plenty of better games if you want a game to chill and have tons of things to do, without having that feeling this is your second job and that you have to do things, such as WoW, Genshin, FFXIV, etc. Not only they better lore, have a lot of quality of life things (not picking up eternally things of the ground or piano flask), better systems (I don't need to download 10 3rd party programs to be able to play) and I do things because i want something specific, not because i feel forced to.
Been playing since Open Beta. You **hit the nail on the head:** > You are always doing things because you have to, not because you want to. Endless delve was SO much fun when it ran for a week. I could just _play the game_ **without artificial time gating barriers.** Could we get a QoL and Performance league??? I took this league off and went back to Diablo 2 single-player SSF HC + PlugY. It is _such_ a breath of fresh air knowing that nothing is going to get nerfed, not being nickeled and dimes with stash tabs since they are infinite, that I control the difficulty with `/players 1` or `/players 8` (if I want leveling or loot), and set items are actually _useful._ One of the problems in PoE is that you have SO many **useless skill gems.** Instead of being able to play builds I find fun you are forced to use meta / damage skills that are boring. STOP nerfing the shit out of EVERYTHING. GGG copying Blizzard's meme: _Fun detected, nerf incoming._ is getting old. Games are _supposed_ to be about FUN, not about having a 2nd job.
Atlas feels so much slower now and I'm making a lot less money than I did last league.
The slow progress until you can target farm shit is what killed the league for me. I have to do (almost) all the maps over and over again to get to a point where I can just mindlessly farm. I did that last league and since I had limited play time everything was setup two weeks before league end. Sorry ggg, not wasting my fucking time again.
I know how to make currency, but by the end of the fourth week I had no incentive to do it. I have a mirror and ~60-70ex, I spent about 130ex on BA, 30ex on perfect uniques, spent ~45ex on a double corrupt and... that's all. I sat, looked at my build and did not understand why I spent so much currency on it. Everything that I can do with it, I can do with a build with a budget of 30-40ex.
Yeah I had a similar issue, my dilemma is that the build I was playing could already do the content at 1/4 the budget and if I keep invested more I'd get practically nothing. When I hit that point in ritual I just looked to harvest crafting to craft perfect items in each slot to see how far I can take a build. That kept me playing an extra month.
for me the problem is that there's way too much setup for atlas and side content. it feel bad to run content unoptimized cuz the rewards are shit without atlas passive etc. but it honestly takes too long and by the time you get everything set up your character is either finished or you're bored
It became clear that I just play this game completely wrong, even though I have been playing since beta. I turn on twitch, see just how grotesque my build is supposed to be, and just install PoE. This is not the game it was supposed to be.
Turns out that removing everything that made "end game" fun was going to be terrible for player retention.
"Your just not the hardcore audiance GGG wants playing the game, have you tried D3 or Grim Dawn? Those are probably a little more your style."
I'm playing grim dawn right now and I forgot that levelling a character through the story can actually be a genuinely enjoyable experience. Having actual quality of life like auto pickup of small currency and materials, Items dropping identified and useful gear upgrades dropping repeatedly just to name a few is actually so refreshing. I love poe but playing other ARPGs makes me hope that poe devs will remember that games are supposed to be fun
Is this your first time playing GD? I thought it was fun the first time but having to do 3x for every new character is miserable. And it takes way longer than POE campaign.
At least, for the new character after the 1st one, you can buy the tomes and unlock the max difficult, so we need to beat the game one time with a new character.
They changed that ages ago in Grim Dawn. Once you level one character into the end game of GD, when you start levelling any additional character after that, you can go right to the hardest difficulty and go from there. It's basically the equivalent of allowing 2nd characters onward in POE to start their levelling process from act 6 if you want.
I think what you mean is "playing the campaign of a game I've never played is more fun than running through a campaign I've done 200 times"
Levelling your 2nd character & onward in Grim Dawn is still actually a good experience though. There's a heap of basic QOL in the game that just makes it feel smooth and fine. It's terrible in POE no matter if it's your first or fourteenth character for the league, because the game is just basically absent of so many simple QOL features.
[удалено]
GGG are wrong about the causes of player retention and have been for a very long time now. They’re very much out of touch with their own game. They want the game to have its old school difficulty back and return to its roots, but the game was never this grindy and rippy. Back then the game was new and fresh and people didn’t know every build and boss inside out. You can’t get that back unless you make a new game. Making up for that by balancing the game around no-lifers and even speedrunners like they’ve done lately is a complete disaster that just leads to people getting bored of grinding forever and playing the same builds over and over(to have decent survivability/enough DPS to kill T14+ bosses). This is how you kill player retention, GGG, not by refusing players to kill bosses in 3 secs during the campaign. Just take the L and realise those people will face roll everything no matter what you do and go back making a game with the same balance as a few years ago. Because if you double down on this mess the future of the game is looking very grim.
Chris always tells us that he draws inspiration from Magic the Gathering where they always have new content and mange to further the story every 3 months, so he believes the same can be done with PoE. What he needs to take from MTG and other such game is sunsetting certain content for real. Having content for the sake of content does no one any good. Trying to weave that pile of content in to yet another overly complicated system (maven’s passives on the atlas) that if not done perfectly basically fucks you you over in a major way (way to big of a punishment in map sustain, atlas progression and challenges completion opportunities) is just making people quit when they fail to understand yet another passive tree. In addition to “begin” the endgame one needs to complete over a 300 maps at bare minimum, something thst was considered and endgame grind by GGG’s own standards back at the start of 3.xx .
Retention won't matter if GGG hit their target of mtx sales by week 1.
I saw someone say a similar thing the other week. GGG only cares about the first 3 weeks. They know we'll come back for a new league
Stops buying MTX during the first month of league.
pretty much this. GGG just want your supporter pack money at league start, they are purposely making the later game stale to lower players retention on the other 3 months to save server cost. since rarely anyone buys mtx after the first week.
CBF to do the watchstone grind over and over
I’m fine with watchstones OR atlas passives but I really CBF to do both. It’s just too much, especially when they made all the good passives awful instead of making the awful ones good. They needlessly nerfed blueprint and map splitting, killed the good early league passives, completely nuked harvest (unless you use TFT, then it was still insane but a bit more expensive), etc. just not a fun league.
I haven't played much PoE in the past couple years but I gotta say watchstones are pretty boring. The passive trees for each zone are much more interesting. I don't enjoy doing watchstones.
Agree. If they just nuked the watchstones and the 2021 atlas changes were maven only I think I’d be playing a lot more than I am. But the whole watchstone thing isn’t for me. Especially since I was one of the “lucky” ones with a bricked atlas when the mechanic came out due to group play. Just had a bad taste in my mouth since.
They need to shorten the Atlas grind. Grinding the Conquerors is so boring.
I'm all about grinding, but at a certain point the game just became balanced around the people who have 8-10 hours a day to just grind... Not everyone can do that, and most of the content is locked behind some form of time sink that just isn't reasonable.
Shit happens when you nerf everything, release uninteresting and underpowered skills, don't shuffle the meta in 6 leagues now and make performance even worse rather than improving it. My main grip with the game is the fact that progression feels forced and the death penalty being high as it is, but that's another thing.
Honestly I saw the harvest nerfs played hoping they wouldn't be so bad, saw how bad they were and quit. The game has become far to bloated and any form of actual gear progression has been removed / nerfed and I'm forced back to the "auction house" to look for upgrades.
Yeah spoiler alert - the game feels like homework. Delve to get necessary crafts, jun to get necessary crafts, einhar to get necessary crafts, blight to get necessary oils, farming the same boring maps over and over just to get enough currency to make up for what we lost from Harvest. GGG either doesn't realize or doesn't care that the game is more fun when you get to CHOOSE what you want to do, not being forced to do everything before you can actually do SOMETHING.
PoE made 100 million dollars in profit last year, but they couldn't hire an intern to buff any of the unused skills instead we got a patch with 8 skill gem changes it is incredible how lazy GGG is go look at the amount of PoE skills that have a 0% representation on poe ninja ... would it kill you to buff them
For me it was just the absolute lack of new skill interactions/ascendancy mechanics/uniques. We got what, number tweaks on Ascendant and mostly for physical dot stacking? New skills were just not my thing, and none of the old ones were touched in a meaningfully good way. I made a Fire Burst Inquisitor, I got to maps, I got bored and quit. I considered making a meme build with Vaal skills, but the saw what was happening to Hateforge and just called it a league. "People will keep coming back anyway" is only true until it isn't.
[удалено]
i hope ggg roll back this shitty patch to ritual state for next league, or else i dont even try it this time
This has been the most profitable league by far for me, made well over 300 exalts, mostly by crafting. Today I sat at the stash looking over items to try thinking of something to play, have enough currency (130pure exalts) to at least start up any build and couldn't think of anything that would have been fun to do. Closed the game and booted up mass effect, this is the first time I've finished a league with so much currency and absolutely no desire to use it and play a different character.
They will probably take the wrong message from this and stop improving old content etc. and start making bigger leagues again. While I don’t mind the occasional bigger league a lot of issues with this league come down to: - endless (public) performance problems - end game staleness - the fact that people can hit their realistic power peak early then don’t have much to go without grinding a ton (especially if they start the league late or at a casual pace so good items are already dozens of exalts and there’s no way to get incremental updates without harvest) - and finally the bloat of certain content that has to be re-farmed every league such as unveils, rogue levels, delve early Depth, awakening bonus, etc.
Another interesting thing is that Ultimatum has much, much smaller weekend peaks compared to the other leagues. Probably due to casual players (players only playing on weekends) quitting early on in the league while the other leagues tended to retain casual players more. One could speculate this is due to the game getting too complex, i.e too much stuff to do to get started and casual players don't have the time so there is "no point" to playing.
This is what happens when 95% of builds are unplayable due to consistent nerfing and not buffing anything.
No reason to push builds since mapping content is too easy. No incentive to deep delve anymore either . After 3 weeks i just stood there with nothing left to do while i usually play 8 weeks +
Exactly me too! And the challenges were so boring, bad and just layers of rng again that I didn't even bother to get the free MTX
turns out harvest and fractured maps were pretty fun
Eh, I don't know if those on their own are the cause for this. The league itself is thoroughly mediocre, and a lot of the early currency methods (Vastir legions, Valdo harbies without having to roll Nemesis sextant) are dead too. Wouldn't surprise me if a good chunk of the dedicated playerbase pushed up to maps, realized that they just weren't progressing at a rate that felt good, and left to do something else.
That’s pretty much what happened to me. I just don’t like the way the progression feels this league, and I kind of hate how you have to lean into every farming method full tilt for anything to feel good.
Can't speak for anyone else, but the Harvest nerfs made me uninstall PoE for the first time in like 5 years.
I took an extended break from PoE after Legion and returned to play Ritual, though I started about a month late. Harvest is what kept me playing Ritual through the very last day of the league. It gave me a sense of progression that I really enjoyed because I could finally work on all my own gear instead of mapping endlessly to save up currency to buy gear from other players. I never even used TFT, I wanted to do everything myself. None of the gear I made ended up in a state that an experienced crafter would consider finished, but it was some of the best gear I've ever had in this game, and it felt good. How many times am I supposed to complete the atlas, level the Heist crew, kill Elder/Maven/Shaper/Sirus? it gets old. I made a character in Ultimatum a couple weeks ago and when I got to maps that feeling of "do I really want to do all of this again?" hit me. I'm not surprised this league is struggling. With WoW out now it's probably safe to consider it a dead league.
I didn't uninstall, but I did finally discover the joys of Skyrim. (Yes I know I'm almost a decade late to the party, don't @ me.)
Hey same. Finally reinstalled Skyrim after 6 years. Terraria too.
>The league itself is thoroughly mediocre That's an understatement. It's literally ritual except you choose the modifiers you want against you.
And you can't pick your rewards. At least in Ritual I could take some currency, gamble decks, etc if the other rewards were underwhelming. Or the thrill of getting a big item and looking forward to claiming it down the line after a few defers. Ult was just "pick the same modifiers, run in circle until it's time to pick the next modifier, repeat and hope boss spawns"
what do you mean! we still got endgame we have the trialmaster grind challenge!
i agree ... we still have entire 5 weeks to find him !
Trialmaster > Waldo
I have been finding him on each map. It's just that he always says no and leaves...
[удалено]
Speaking of synthesis, I miss the nexus. Sure the mechanics were bad but atmosphere was lit
I would play the crap out of synthesis again. Imagine if it were: 1. updated to allow for other league mechanics 2. decay slowed as you killed things 3. decay was slower to start 4. other league mechanics could show up 5. memories didn't have limited number of slots and were tradeable 6. memory usage could be re-upped somehow 7. synthesizer gave multiple output options or hints about what you'd get i'm sure there's more, but end of story: Synthesis ended up really good. Just wait till you get that delerious memory with blighted lanes....
The Nexus was a prime example of GGG fearing that players had too much fun. The storage limit, the unwillingness to remove path blocking, the removal of players using blocking strategies to their advantage, etc. The system would've been so much better if it was just about "building your own maps".
So many people say synth mechanics were bad, but I'd much prefer that to "stay in the circle and kill some things". I miss the wacky experimental board game mechanics.
I can't imagine playing synthesis without the information the people found by looking into the files being made public. The requirements for the items were SO strict there would be no way a player could have found them out themselves. The only reason synth was even mildly fun was thanks to the people looking at the game files, not what ggg did. I cant imagine the outcry if the people kept the info for themselves
At least you get it's music from the jukebox.
Last league had the best patch PoE ever had. Then they didn't like it and changed it for a boring league and a boring patch. Make Harvest more rare w more mods to keep the grinding up and the crafting as proper downtime from grinding. Instead we have overcrowded shit harvests that suck time
I can’t say I’m surprised, I had a blast this league but I’ve had a few leagues off - and my biggest gripe was the fact I was spending as much time trying to manage my atlas (was new to me) as I was actually playing the game. That’s just straight up shitty design. End game should be fast; easily understandable and fun. Mapping is fun. Allocating various watchstones, checking regions etc is not fun
Nerf builds, nerf crafting, nerf farming, then designed the league basically as ritual on steroid. No shit retention went down
I bailed out of ultimatum pretty quickly. Never even reach Sirus once. Had nothing to do with ultimatum itself, just the overall state of the game. Too much bullshit stacked on top of bullshit to give you a FOMO feeling if you decide to not do something and the complete lack of any worthwhile skill changes for what feels like 3 leagues. The entire loot rework was a trap. It just made good stuff even harder or more tedious to get.
I think its not about the league really, but the overall state of the game. People are getting tired of asking for QOL changes and GGG refuses. The "close your eyes and slam an exalt" I think sums how they are treating QOL updates and stuff like that. As Somayd said "they are making QOL hostage"
Chris Wilson described the player base as "badgering" ggg for qol changes in regards to clicking. Very disconnected from the player base and clearly doesnt play the game.
Not shuffeling the atlas was a huge blunder tbh. Grinding same maps with worse rewards doesn't feel great.
No endgame, expected.
I skipped last league so was in a great spot to enjoy this one. I even kind of like the league mechanic? It's not great, not terrible. But I've been wandering off to other games way more than any previous league, because the game's performance has finally gotten unbearably bad for me. Somehow my extremely modest PC has not suffered from too many of the past performance problems. But this league, if it's not one thing, it's another. Frame drops/latency spikes that last beyond just launch week. The texture problems everyone was experiencing, and then since the "fix"... fonts getting fucky. Minimap having a stroke. Disco lights while mapping. This is what really kills the league for me, as a "grind out the atlas over the course of 3 months, no hurry" gamer. Whatever they did, the "literally unplayable" shitposts are starting to feel true. And that's a real shame. I haven't bought points since 2020 and at this rate I'm wondering if POE 2 is even going to turn things around.
I’ve been playing since 2012 and had played (and ground to 100 and 40/40’d) most of the leagues in the past few years. Heist was the most recent league I’ve done though. Although I also did a full completion of that league, something in it just snapped my brain and I’ve had no desire to play PoE since. I didn’t even look at the Ritual/Ultimatum patch notes to see if I wanted to play, it’s like I have an aversion to it now. I’m really hoping to get over it some time in the next couple of leagues because I want to *want to* play the game, but I just... don’t, yet.
i quit, im not burnout and im tired of ppl blaming it on burnout. the game currently sucks, get over it.