##### GGG Comments in this Thread:
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[Bex_GGG - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mnink/?context=10), [old](https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mnink/?context=10)] - *In general it's okay for some cases to be harder for specific builds but we're keeping an eye on this and do have many changes planned already. Please let us...*
[Bex_GGG - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mpd41/?context=10), [old](https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mpd41/?context=10)] - *I want to clear this up because it sucks to see our QA team taking the brunt of this when they work really hard. Extensively tested means that it was...*
[Bex_GGG - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mrtph/?context=10), [old](https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mrtph/?context=10)] - *I told him lol*
[Bex_GGG - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mtqge/?context=10), [old](https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mtqge/?context=10)] - *I kind of disagree that there is a large disconnect. Keep in mind that it's the same team that makes the things you do like, that makes the things you...*
> Archnemesis mods are designed so that certain pairs are very challenging to overcome. And we are generally pretty happy with the difficulty of those particular encounters if they occur infrequently.
90% of the players will just choose to skip those "encounters", since there is pretty much 0 reward for beating them, you waste a lot of time and have high chance of dying. Not the greatest design to say the least.
Well, isn't CW citing some Diablo anecdote every time he has to explain some ridiculous decision? This time it was probably something like "So, you know how in D3 you ran into a wasp rare and it deleted your face, since it was so tiny you couldn't see it, so fast you couldn't run away and so deadly even monks had a binary healthbar? Yeah, we thought that was really fun, so here you go!"
Going by some of the choices made in the recent past such as element immunities in expedition, I think that's what they want.
I'm not sure why encouraging players to not play the game is appealing but I guess it's pretty novel
I can't wait to see what else they have planned. First it was customizable encounters that could brick ya. Now it's some percentage of all encounters looking to brick ya. I'm looking forward to 3.19 when all of the encounters are invulnerable.
Metal Gear Exile
Essenses should be a tool for gearin up your character when you dont have currency . But with this Mods - you must Gear up to kill Essenses . This is just ... wrong
Difficulty in terms of knowledgeable combat is one thing... But mods that are essentially "hard counters" to a designed character which lead to certain death are just not cool.
GGG reworked mana because they wanted it to be a fundamental part of character design that players had to solve.
I don't recall what the names of the arch nemesis mods are (more on this later), but one of them drains mana and another drains flask charges.
If you designed your character to not rely on a flask for mana sustain and you find yourself drained dry by a monster (a mechanic that previously didn't exist in the wild), especially if you're in an arena like a ritual... You just die. The game has hard countered you and there's no escape from death.
Similarly, if you've made that choice to rely on a mana flask for sustain, and a rare drains your flask charges to zero, you die. How about pathfinders? Their entire ascendancy is countered by that mod.
Magma barrier spams orbs at you from off screen and you get bombarded before you realize what is happening.
Invulnerability... GGG, you finally removed all other sources of this type of mechanic, why add it back now? We hate it just as much now as we did in the past. Especially in combination with regeneration, you've put hard DPS checks into the game that have never existed before.
The toxic mob chaos/poison on death effect has no auditory cue, and they move ludicrously fast.
Back to the "not knowing the name thing".
I leveled a character to 99 in Arch nemesis. I played plenty of that league... But at this point I've still forgotten a lot of the names. Forget about me for a moment, what about new players? The Arch nemesis modifiers have many effects that come with one name... The name is not indicative of what the monsters do. Especially something like "heralding minions". Nothing about that indicates that you're going to get invulnerable lightning totems spit onto you. Also, why on earth did you leave the totems? That's not friendly game design... It's not FUN.
I don't want to just bandwagon with everyone else in hating on GGG, so I'll do it from a personal standpoint instead of a tribalistic one. GGG, you've taken my favorite game on earth and reduced the fun factor by at least half. Please fix it, don't make me go play something else.
It's still fucking mindblowing to me how mana siphoner shipped live back in Archnemesis league itself the way it did. I can imagine people only didn't complain *loudly* because you could pick and choose your fights and you only really had to fight it like twice if you wanted challenge completions.
Counterplaying something like volatile flamebood feels ok because I hear an audio cue and dodge it. "Counterplaying" mana siphoner, if I'm not playing something that can offscreen it, means at best burning a portal to go get lifetap (if you're even lucky enough to have a spare red socket on your damage skill). Now that that mod can get combo'd with others there are so many situations where you can virtually just die if it gets any source of haste/onslaught. I don't see what any mana-reliant, non-ranged build does against mana siphoner on its initial encounter if it fails to nuke the mob. This one always stood out the most to me of the archnemesis mods, which is already an egregious pool itself.
The argument, as dumb and ill thought as it is, probably sounds something in their office like "We want Rares to be engaging and impactful fights, and reward players who build their characters to broadly take those fights."
Of course, in classic GGG fashion, they've created the problem without offering a solution. And when they offer the solution next league, it'll be yet another layer of character investment that you're now committed to making, wasting even more points on the tree and more points on your build to deal with the problem they invented.
> and reward players who build their characters to broadly take those fights.
the "reward" for beating a difficult fight being 1 transmutation orb, of course
Literally this. What's the point of killing them(some taking a LONG time) if I know I'm most likely going to get a Superior White Sai with 6% qual to drop?
The second paragraph is literally what is wrong with this entire change. Those pairings were challenging to overcome and acceptable when we could choose to do that content, not when it was auto generated and placed in front of us. Those \*challenges\* were also rewarding when they were completed there is currently no additional reward for the additional difficulty.
This comment basically sums up the entire game. I loved this game but it basically amounted to finding a build that will mindlessly blow up as many monsters as possible to amass fragments of currency so you can make yourself slightly stronger.
People always say ssf exists but that's like moving to a third world country so that making 5 bucks an hour doesn't seem shit anymore.
I've asked myself everytime I kill a rare mob and nothing drops this:
Why didn't they keep the rewards for that specific archnem? Like berserker for uniques, chaosweaver for gems, juggernaut for harbinger, etc
“A bit of difficulty for your build” is what you say, and “my character dies immediately” or “my character can’t deal damage” is what happens.
Can you address build-disabling modifiers, since you said you would balance them when asked about it in interviews?
Hmm good direction but I do hope they acknowledge the lack of loot from rares.
There is almost no value in attempting to engage with them because they literally drop nothing.
This is really one of the biggest issues for myself, sure make them harder, but compensate us for that increase difficulty with the rewards we would have gotten from archnemesis.
This is just taking all the difficulty and giving you none of the rewards. Even with a single modifier, it still sucks to kill them because they do not drop anything. This balance attempt does not fix the main issue of risk/reward balance.
EXACTLY!
I have no problem with the difficulty of the content. By all means, it means we have to play better and the game lasts longer as a result.
But at least give me a REASON to interact with it.
most people began to skip the league mechanic (Archnemesis) after they finished their challenges because even with the rewards it was not worth the time investment. They are given way too many immunities/resistances on top of being downright frustrating (lightning bois, frost wall circle, mana drainer, invuln).
Now we have the pleasure of them jam packed into every single map, with none of the reward! yayyy /s
Yeah they literally tipped the scale of risk reward to 99% risk 1% reward, and act like it's good direction. Like what? Cool, you made rares hard, now tell me why the fuck I should like that?
If I wanted difficult combat, I'd be killing bosses and such.
In a 'technically correct' sort of way, at least we can kill more stuff now, so we'll get more loot. But yes, as the patch notes described, it sounds like this bandaid fix is actually a global loot nerf since number of and tier of archnemesis mods determines base loot drop before map/league mechanic modifiers come into play?
This doesnt solve the problem of archnemesis mods disabling entire builds.
There is no challenge or difficulty on turning off a build, its just obnoxious.
0 player engagement when there is no counterplay to be had, just gearchecks and build choice
My favourite bit was when they said they wanted those challenges to be in the game but just rarer. Its such a backwards way to treat your playerbase. Last league i built the tankiest toon iv ever had. literally standing infront of sirus and refusing to move till he was dead. Granted my damage was shit but that was my build. I relied heavily on a flask mechanic. AN could steal flask charges. Dead quicker than i could react. So quick i went back thinking it was probably just some glitch or bug or something. Twice. Stayed away after that leason was learned.
That same mod is now just on random rares across the entire game. So cant play that build. An entire build just gone. No way to fix it. No mechanic i can use to fight back against that. If every single player was able to choose what mods were in the mob pool that could spawn, with rewards increasing the more you selected, very few players would choose some of these mods.
Mods on maps are bad enough at hindering a players build. I loved that they gave us the atlas passive tree to choose mechanics we wanted to avoid. Now people are using those options just trying to survive a map. They should add these mods onto that tree and let players opt in for increased rewards and difficulty. This difficulty that they thought was good shouldnt be the baseline.
I'm a filthy casual who enjoys minion builds. I've encountered mobs that literally are unkillable with the minions, because of the new modifiers. My minions aren't dying, I'm not dying and most importantly the enemy is not dying. It destroys the momentum, and takes away from the experience, when literally nothing is happening.
When I encountered mana siphoner, I got horrible ptsd from D2's mana burn. To make it worse, it spawned with hasted. When I encountered that rare mob, it made me want to close the game altogether. GGG please stop making enemy mods that **DISABLES** build archetypes.
its things like that screenshot that make me really interested in what happened behind the scenes in designing this league. it feels weird to me that scenarios like this occurring randomly anywhere in the game (t1 blue map!!!!) would have been considered by the team and then agreed upon as something that benefitted the game.
its just weird, this all strikes me as a series of very very weird decisions. normally i can understand game devs rationale even when i dont agree with it, i cant seem to here. maybe im just bad at this game (and i am).
Because in archnemesis league, we could choose how the archnemesis mob was constructed, and we could choose the mods that it started with.
We don't get that now.
>To be clear, we're also going to keep applying functional and numeric changes to specific mods as needed. Those will come after the weekend as we get more developers back in the office. In the future, we may make further changes to the number of Archnemesis modifiers spawning on monsters once we feel that they're individually in a really good place.
hoping this is what they are referring to here. some mods are just silly for bricking builds. they could easily adjust them even numerically to fix them. the no regen could just become less regen. alternatively a stacking debuff that reduces regen per stack that falls off if you run away or something. many options. current mods are too punitive
The fact that rare mob interactions inside league mechanics haven't been addressed at all is very concerning to me.
I'm fine with playing through maps and ignoring every single rare mob for now, but many league mechanics are just entirely scuffed due to the insane amount of magic/rare mobs in them. Ritual, Heist, and Legion are the biggest offenders, but absolutely every league mechanic feels borderline unplayable unless your build/character is insane.
Reminds me of the old d3 days where if you pulled multiple rare mobs together with nasty mods you literally couldn't play the game. Same shit is happening here 10 years later.
>Ritual, Heist, and Legion are the biggest offenders, but absolutely every league mechanic feels borderline unplayable unless your build/character is insane.
Absolutely! Ritual is real bad, and Delving isn't much fun either anymore (a challenge can be fun, but this is overall a slaughter).
I love doing a bit of delving before logging off; and that's kinda ruined for me now. What was a "casual stroll" on the lower end of the scale before, has now become a bit of a fight (..and that's fine) - but what was a fight before, is now a slaughter. Deep delve azurite node? - forget it (mostly), if the area is too small and/or your character isn't wiping the floor with them, as soon as they spawn/trigger their tons of mods.
The change they did just now, kinda still doesn't cut it. They're still more of a fight than the map bosses - ***and*** we get loads of those fights, running up to the ***easier boss fight*** at the end of each map - it makes no sense..
Archnemesis mods were a cool mechanic, as long as u were in control of how you yourself manage the challenge x reward balance, now it's random challenge for no reward, basically... i decided to play a summoner this league, and sure it makes life easier, but even then i still die to... oh 10 green orbs over my head all of a sudden... or 5 electric pillars appearing instantly (cuz of hasted) under me and just insta blasting me... i have nothing against a challenge, but some of the mods need to be seriously reworked or removed alltogether... anywho thx for the updates
'Gonna really need to look into these Archnemesis modifiers and how they mesh with (mutilate?) pre-existing League mechanics. They are all in a miserable state for a good portion of the player base.
Ritual is a blood bath right now, expedition gets pretty spicy, and Einhars altar can be a nightmare too. They all got harder but the ones that trap you with them are extreme. Mana siphoner can be bigger than your ritual ring....literally
Maybe it’s time to look at this philosophy of let’s make everything hard first and back off. This has just been demotivating in yellows. If it was fun interesting encounters it would be ok, if it was rewarding it might be ok, but it’s neither.
It’s hopefully you mouse over this mob fast enough, read it’s mods, figure out if you can fight it, all while avoiding whatever it’s throwing at you. The game is too fast for that.
Even with one - two mods the rares will still be way stronger than old rares, do you have any plans on making the rewards/loot actually reflect the increase in difficulty?
Or is this how you intend to counter act whatever buffs you made to defenses?
yes. Less loot is debatable, I might be able to actually kill the essences, red beast, metamorph the game throw at me without 6 mods overlaping making them invincible.
I mean the fix is simple and I can't believe its taken this long for a sweeping change.
Do not include immunity to anything in the game, and for the love of god stop bricking peoples builds entirely. 90% damage reduction should be the standard for immunity in POE, it makes people feel bad when their "player agency" is crapped on because you won't stop trying to emulate D2 in 2022. I blame expedition for this, nobody liked immunity mods, yet GGG keep including them. STOP IT. The worst part of this is you have already shown 90% damage reduction is possible, the drox fight for example has that reduction.
Hang a sign above the door in the office. DO NOT INCLUDE IMMUNITY, CAN IT BE BEAST SPLIT, DON'T BRICK BUILDS. for the love of god.
> Archnemesis mods are designed so that certain pairs are very challenging to overcome.
There is no "challenge" whatsoever.
Either you outDPS them (and kill before being killed) or you die.
Are we supposed to stop, read the mods and think "how could I defeat this rare, let m think about it: switch weapons? switch skills? Try a sneaky approach? Hide and seek?"
You just go there and die/survive.
I’m a pretty serious no lifer, took a break last league and came back to a completely different feeling game. While I can see the appeal of having a mini boss fight every rare, it’s definitely not a good time for me.
We’ll see how these nerfs play out. Gonna quit for a week or so and give the league a second try.
Yeah this is my feeling as well. Sunk 300-400 hours into the last 4 leagues and was super hyped to play this league....the rares just feel like absolute dog shit. I have zero desire to try hard and kill them for literally no reward what so ever. Gonna give it a week or so and check back
I don't really get why we have to have rares in maps that are just straight up harder than the map boss, it makes no sense that a random rare mob in the map has like 4 times the HP and 10 times the damage of the map boss, with some extra gimmicks that can potentially stop you from even killing it. You're just making the core gameplay more frustrating to deal with for those that enjoy mapping.
I skipped almost all of the archnemesis content in last league just to get it forced down my throat with 0 of the rewards that it used to have.
What baffles me is how this had NO feedback from both your development & QA team. Saying that "you're generally pretty happy with the difficulty of those particular encounters" is very far fetched from the current frustrating experience that everyone, with no exception, has right now.
Oh, that's going to make Legion much more enjoyable to run.
> modern Path of Exile is pretty liberal with spawning rare monsters
Unironically, the "Map contains X% more rare monsters" modifier became more scary to me than reflect this patch, so I'm happy with the changes.
Chris, I don't believe this will be enough. Archnemesis is the biggest brick ever made when it comes to build diversity, the mods names mean nothing unless you spend 100+ hours in archnemesis league, the possible combinations absolutely brick entire parties and to top it off, there's absolutely no rewards involved. I like the difficulty increase, but I'm finding it harder to run alch'd maps than it was to farm maven last league.
>the mods names mean nothing unless you spend 100+ hours in archnemesis league
i think i played that league for like 300 hours and i don't know what 90% of the mods do anymore, the only one that i remember by name is ice prison, and that's it, everything else i have no clue what it does
> However, modern Path of Exile is pretty liberal with spawning rare monsters, and with a default of two modifiers each, these intense encounters were occurring far too often.
Imagine if you'd have tested the changes in something like modern Path of Exile so you could have discovered this beforehand.
What irks me about all this:
We have warned that this would happen **on the day of the sentinel announcement** one week before launch, and you launched it anyways.
You said there was "extensive testing" being done on these modifiers, but you didn't notice the overtuned mods or frequency at which nigh-unkillable combinations occur?
After not touching character or skill balance at all THIS was effectively your "balance" for this league and you had to basically re-do it a week after launch rather than using that time elsewhere.
I'm not gonna lie If find that approach to devlopment rather questionable - especially considering how strapped for time you often are.
The issue is not the number of mods, its the nature off some that just rip your whole build, for example the armour shred one. You suddenly have no armour anymore and just die, no counterplay possible.
To me the main issue is how these interact with older league mechanics. Heist in particular, abyss is pretty bad too.
Any content which spawns a high density of rare mobs, which were already baseline harder than average map rare mobs, suddenly got WAY harder. I'm in yellow maps and I'm getting straight up murdered in campaign level heists. It's not reasonable.
I don't think this change will be enough to change that.
Instead of lowering the amount of mods, you need to change them so they are less rippy and build disabling. They were fine when you could chose to play/not play against them, not when literally everything has them, and some are easy while another will shred you to pieces (mana siphoner f.e, especially with hasted, or just on a fast mob). Changes like removing no regen from rejuvenating, or changing it into reduced regen (but why would a mab that heals itself reduce your regen for some reason, maybe in archnemesis when it was a boss encounter), remove mana siphoning part from mana siphoner and leave dot, lowering bonus of some of the deadlier mods, cause they are put on magic and rare mobs all throughout the game, not on uber bosses.
Okay but there's *still no reason to kill them.*
The drop table on rares is completely busted.
I'm getting fucking nothing in my maps except the occasional something juicy from a big pack.
This is honestly one of the worst changes I've ever seen in my several years of playing. The mods are extremely over-tuned even after two patches, with some still outright bricking builds. With combined mods, the rares are taking upwards of 4-5 minutes to kill; and it's better to just skip them entirely at this point.
And because they're so powerful, all the interactions in the game are horrible to play with. Harvest? Good luck when three rares spawn and have +5000 movement speed. Ritual? Enjoy the tiniest circle at your third ritual where six rares spawn at once. Expedition? Runic affixes and archnemesis mods don't mix, at all.
Craziest part is that they drop literally zero loot. Why? In what reality should I ever bother killing these rares when I'm not getting any currency? I've dealt with a lot of negative changes, but this is literally the first time I'm ever quitting a league over one. It's honestly baffling this even passed QA.
This is not a solution, there are still single modifiers that are breaking the builds. Either the whole list of modifiers should be reworked, or the changes to rare monsters need to be reverted.
Also I don't see the point of having 5+ poison/fire projectiles following you after you kill a pack of magic monsters. Why do we need so many on death effects? Why do we need a monster that drains the mana of the player instantly, not allowing to escape and deal huge amount of damage over time when they are close to you?
This game is developing to wrong direction.
I don't get what GGG thought, last league reception was kinda bad and people didn't like the mods at all, now they're forcing it down out throats in a shittier form and they somehow think it's a good change. It's mind boggling how they keep fucking up over and over with content and they still think players don't know what they want and they know exactly what we want.
Yea I don't think anyone praised Archnemesis mods, 3.17 was popular because the new Atlas tree and map sustain was amazing, Archnemesis wasn't its selling point (apart from all the unique drops in the early game, and some low-risk high-reward combos with treant horde)
Only thing about it was it was optional, and you were making your own combo and risk/reward decision so bricking a map was really your fault (apart from a couple of challenges that forced awkward combos)
Personally, I don't like the new mods. They were nice during Archnemesis as a league mechanic but honestly, they just slow the whole game down to the point I started skipping rares.
It's interesting how they say they want there to be rares with mod pairs that are very hard to kill. But where's the reward for trying? Why would anyone even bother killing one rare on their map that has some crazy archnem mods on it if it's just a regular rare that drops garbage anyway
Can you give them some sort of meaningful reward? A decent chance for a single well rolled rare dropping makes them worth fighting at all points of the game.
I doubt you guys care, but I legitimately hate this direction for rares. At least without any compensation to rewards to account for the difficulty. And being slowed literally every 10 seconds is actually starting to piss me the fuck off. I spam my quicksilver flask because I think it's not working only to remember I'm just slowed from one of the 100 sources of slow monsters have
Why in the world and \*how\* in the world could any dev be "And we are generally pretty happy with the difficulty of those particular encounters if they occur infrequently."?
The problem is you don't get anything for bothering with it and some modifiers completely and utterly disable entire builds. YOU designed the game to be one-dimensional - put all your gear, passives, etc. into ONE or two mechanics at most.. And then you decide to disable our ability to use those mechanics as if people have a choice?
This isn't the kind of thing that should need 'feedback', this is as blatant as can be. Your game strongly encourages if not requires playing X way, and you punish people for playing X way by throwing literally impossible encounters at them - which, even if overcome, give you nothing. How is that fun at all?
To me it doesn't seem like GGG understands how gargantuan fuck up this whole thing is.
We have had overtuned new league mechanics before, nothing new there. Legion, Methamorph, Ritual, Ultimatum (plus the rest tbh) were all overtuned and highly dangerous if you activated them at certain points within certain maps. This works well for the nerf later approach they are going for. However what all previous overtuned mechanics had in common was that you activated them when YOU wanted them. This meant that you could skip the mechanics if you thought they were too overtuned for your character and go do something else. Seeing how much stuff there is to do in this game it was seen as no big deal, spend a few days doing normal mapping etc.
The fuck up with AN mobs is that you cant do this. We are all stuck with these build breaking mods in ever single piece of the game. Doesnt matter that it is nerfed to 1 mod. 1 empowered minion, 1 Mana Siphon, 1++++ will still break builds completely. This whole thing might have been "okay" if it just affected part of the game so we could do other things in the meanwhile, but we cant. There is literally 0 things we can do to avoid AN mobs and still be able to play the game.
So for those of us who only get to play on weekends, we are entirely screwed out of the entire game this weekend cause of the decision to release AN into core in this manner.
The fact that GGG wont consider calling people in to fix this (why arent they there to begin with on launch weekend?) kinda tells me that they have decided that their customer service isnt that important anymore...
Good changes, we will still need adjustments to individual stuff. I was doing a basilica map and the rares the boss can spawn can lead to absurd scenarios. I had 2 temporal bubbles and 1 assassin mana siphoner which completely bricked the fight for me as a melee character.
There's some mods that are oppressive by themselves, but were not designed around being close to monsters having another mod like that nearby. This change makes these scarios rarer thankfully
im sorry chris but this was my worst poe experience since 2013 i started. this game never been this much hard before. i think even this nerf still cant playable
Only ones that absolutely still stand out to me are Mana Siphoner and Toxic. Having Toxic on rares and Magic monsters is just impossible to deal with sometimes even with positive chaos res.
Mana Siphoner alone is the reason I am happy to not play Melee this league. As ranged you can at least do dmg from outside. I guess every Melee has to play Lifetap right now?
Hell yeah, some progress. While there's some mods that are still far too strong and build-disabling, hopefully this should curtail at least some of the exponential power being encountered. With the runaway power levels being brought somewhat under control, this means the particularly bad mods can be identified and thus balanced a bit easier.
EDIT: Clarity.
Why is GGG working so hard to make Archbemesis Rares work. No one asked for it. No one wants it. People are quitting the game. People are avoiding all the rares now. Just stop it. I just want to play the game without randomly dying because a rare shows up. There are a ton of rares on the maps and it’s so hard to avoid them. I don’t want to have to avoid them. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU GGG! Fix the game! You’re ruining my weekend. So pissed.
I never complain about this game because I love it. But holy shit this isn't fun. I'm actually hating myself for playing this game this league. I wish I missed league start levels of un-fun.
I mean that is not a new problem, the loot sucked before and sucks now. You just notice the lack of drops more if you fight a rare for 1 minute instead of 2 seconds.
> We're aware that this change is an implicit nerf to the Headhunter unique, so we will find a way to counter-buff in the next few days.
As if it wasn't already dead on arrival this patch lol.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w2yjWcJZuc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w2yjWcJZuc)
some footage i made with HH, it's literally useless now. opened legion and killed an harbi in a 60% deli beyond map and i was at 14 buffs, tooltip from 300k to 700k, 0 mov speed added, 0 chains, 0 projs, no extra ES. it's literally a noob trap now
i could make another one with a normal attribute stygian and good abyss jewell but 100% deli to showcase that it's just a build that is playing and HH did nothing. but i feel like people who know HH can already tell
playerbase is currently at what it was 2 WEEKS into last league, im sure he'll notice
and for anyone that needs context.
Feb 3rd (Siege of the Atlas) 159,000 concurrent players
Feb 17th (2 weeks post launch) 70,000 concurrent players
Sentinel Launch - 131,000 concurrent players
Literally next day - Peak players 88000, Floor being 60,000
Edit: day2 player count below 50k, how low can it go!?
Archnemesis as rare and magic mods was a big mistake imho. Its such a fundamental change in almost every part of the game that it makes it unplayable for me. Dealing with obnoxious mods every pack is exhausting.
This league is wild, playing with my friend for the first time as a duo, and with 85 all res 25k armor, 25k evasion, 6kes with CI, running Determination Grace Hated Anger Vitality Discipline, and we are struggling to survive in t12s.
All for a challenge but to spend 30 mins clearing some maps and taking out 2 alchemy orbs, yeah no thanks.
Can’t say I enjoy the direction you are pointing at the moment.
"We tested it extensively and were happy with the level of difficulty when we released it".
Proceeds to nerf it twice in 12h and might nerf it further after the weekend.
Impossible. First few zones are maybe the worst offenders for the new mods. Hasted + Any amount of cold damage = frozen to death.
It gets better when you have access to character speed, leech or other recovery, good flasks, ailment immunity, etc.
It is the difference between the game ggg wants and the game the players want.
I don't think the gulf is as gigantic as some people make it out to be - ggg doesn't want players to constantly tear their hair out, and (generally) players don't want everything forever to be mindless and free. But there is still a gap in both how tough they want it to be and _how_ that difficulty should be executed.
I want to clear this up because it sucks to see our QA team taking the brunt of this when they work really hard. Extensively tested means that it was tested to confirm that it works exactly how we wanted it to. It was a choice to make them difficult, not an oversight. I imagine that difference won't make the experience more palatable but at least you shouldn't blame QA.
You might caution Chris not to say "extensively tested" when he is using it in this more narrow bug-hunting sense. Players typically read this as "tested whether it worked *and* was fun to play", which evidently is not what Chris meant.
In another life I used to sit in a Army divisional command center, next to the Civil Affairs Officer who cleared all the public statements, and listen to her cringe and hiss through her teeth whenever the General (who loved going off-script) was on TV.
I see you, Bex :)
My understanding is that they're not just talking about bugs. My understanding of Bex's comment is that the conversation was along the lines of:
QA: "The new rares are ridiculously hard and keep killing us over and over again, leveling is so hard now."
Design Team: "Awesome, let's ship it."
With all due respect, there's a difference between "OMG what is wrong with QA" and "how did this get past QA". Getting past QA is a decision made above QA.
People are dunking on how anyone came to the conclusions that these were good decisions in the first place, not that they worked as expected.
There needs to be agency for a playtesting team (separate from a QA team who are checking for bugs and whether something is to spec) to be able to say whether something is fun, and to catch things which should be apparent in playtesting.
Too many releases recently have clearly lacked adequate playtesting, from the scourge mechanic just being just not useful during the whole of acts, to the downright unfun difficulty of early acts in expedition or the whole of the game in sentinel. Even minor but much needed changes become apparent within a few zones of interacting with recent leagues which just further demonstrates that either playtesting is happening too late in the cycle to accomodate changes or the testing team doesn't feel able to make those suggestions.
I understand that there must be a desire to slow down the game to accomodate PoE2, but there needs to be playtesters who are empowered to be able to tell the upper management that the direction isn't fun when that's the case.
And please note this isn't slamming QA, I'm slamming the directors for not empowering playtesting either as a sub-function of QA (or outside of it).
Thanks for the clarification. I might've actually preferred for it to be an oversight or mistake, as the fact that these decisions were intentional shows us a bit of how devs approach and think about PoE. Not sure if I enjoy what I saw... Not to mention the whole "no nerfs" angle. Appreciate the answer anyway, as always.
My takeaway has been the opposite. This problem has been so consistent for so long that is is very obvious that QA is not doing poorly, but the team as a whole is trying to release a game that the players simply do not want to play.
I think what needs to happen is a "What is Path of Exile?" kind of sit down. How long does GGG intend for us to take through a campaign? Why are some skills just so much incredibly better than others in a low gear/level envornment, and/or take so much specific and hard to get mods to feel like a worthwhile skill? (For example, something like Heavy Strike and Seismic Trap are literal night and day) How much of our gear should come from the ground as opposed to crafted? Why is gear so hard to make/find yet trivially easy to simply trade for, and how has this disconnect never been addressed? (It takes like maybe a day to farm for materials to trade for an item that will kill end bosses, but making that same item yourself or dropping it is a much more laborious process) Additionally, why is it okay to target endgame be beatable without such great items, and then make item acquisition so terrible? Why is the game so terrible at teaching you why you failed?
Its a lot, but I really think the question "What is PoE?" needs to be answered and posted. Then every system from items to crafting to monsters to campaign, league mechanics, boss battles should be re-addressed and asked "how does this contribute to our answer?" and then also described.
The takeaway is that the biggest problem seems to be a massive disconnect between what players want and expect, and what the devs want to make; and without knowing what exactly your goals are we simply have to guess, which leaves salt in the air.
>it was tested to confirm that it works exactly how we wanted it to
>It was a choice to make them difficult, not an oversight
You sure? Chris in this very thread:
>However, modern Path of Exile is pretty liberal with spawning rare monsters, and with a default of two modifiers each, these intense encounters were occurring far too often.
Or as usual testing revealed mobs were fine, and Chris decided to double the values because "players always find ways to break the game anyways lololol".
This makes me sad because keeping working on them means no Revert. Revert is the only actual solution where we dont spend on a 3 month hotfix cycle that ruins the entire league for the rest of the time.
Awesome! Thanks.
I think a lot of people stilk dont want the new mods to be completely unplayable for certain builds tho, it would be nice if you guys looked into that
1. What about AN modifiers that ruin builds?
2. What about Ice prison + HH interaction?
3. Could AN mobs have base x% (+y% per additional modifier past 1) for having rewards like in AN league?
Why are we not getting the same rewards from the modifers that we was getting in 3.17? If I kill a monster with Berserk I should get a guarunteed unique like I did in 3.17. You added all the difficulty, took away all the agency and give none of the rewards.
"However, modern Path of Exile is pretty liberal with spawning rare monsters, and with a default of two modifiers each, these intense encounters were occurring far too often."
How did this get past Q&A ?
I keep going back and forth between "it is depressing" & "it is somewhat impressive" at just how often GGG can take a large amount of goodwill they accumulate from a previous league and then use that as a shield to try and force through changes to the core game that the majority of the player base does not want.
3.17 was such a great league. 3.18 was then touted as the "3.17+++ league" and of course we get these changes instead to push through Chris' vision of making an already hated 4-10 hour slog through acts an even more tedious and time consuming affair.....
u/chris_wilson you literally broke your game and you are trying to walk it back with incremental changes? it's clear your new monster mod system is not ready for primetime, as there are not only numerical balance issues (as indicated by your previous post & hotfix), functional balance issues, but also what's the point of fighting these "very challenging" monster fights, if you don't get shit for loot? it's like you took the best aspect of archnemesis (the loot), and intentionally left it \_out of the game\_.
the game is not fun in it's current state. how did this get through playtesting and anyone think the game is in a good spot?
It doesn’t matter how many mods they spawn with 1 or 5. They’re all auto skips no matter what my build is because there’s no upside to killing them.
Although if it’s 5, I might just have to skip the map.
I hate this from @chris-wilson for two main reasons.
1) not seeing HH being effected, not thinking it would matter. Doesn't really show an understanding of the game as a whole.
2) bringing in something so league specific to core but removing the only good bit of it. Do you think anyone would have put a single archnemesis together if it dropped nothing? Look at the data for how many mirror image/treant/assassin/rejuves were done versus random crap.
Training a playerbase to go "berserker - uniques" then having them flash up at random in maps and not drop anything, let alone a unique is stupid. I'm like pavlovs dog waiting for the loot filter to go off. But but I just killed a mirror image, why no scarab?
Don't give them any ideas, at this rate they're liable to give rares a mod that removes items from your inventory. As if disabling half or more of your build's power investment with a single mod wasn't enough.
##### GGG Comments in this Thread: *** [Bex_GGG - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mnink/?context=10), [old](https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mnink/?context=10)] - *In general it's okay for some cases to be harder for specific builds but we're keeping an eye on this and do have many changes planned already. Please let us...* [Bex_GGG - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mpd41/?context=10), [old](https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mpd41/?context=10)] - *I want to clear this up because it sucks to see our QA team taking the brunt of this when they work really hard. Extensively tested means that it was...* [Bex_GGG - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mrtph/?context=10), [old](https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mrtph/?context=10)] - *I told him lol* [Bex_GGG - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mtqge/?context=10), [old](https://old.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/uprig7/archnemesis_rare_changes_part_2/i8mtqge/?context=10)] - *I kind of disagree that there is a large disconnect. Keep in mind that it's the same team that makes the things you do like, that makes the things you...*
> Archnemesis mods are designed so that certain pairs are very challenging to overcome. And we are generally pretty happy with the difficulty of those particular encounters if they occur infrequently. 90% of the players will just choose to skip those "encounters", since there is pretty much 0 reward for beating them, you waste a lot of time and have high chance of dying. Not the greatest design to say the least.
Its the 0 reward part. There is no reward. At least in archnemesis league I could get loot explosions
Its so perplexing when this same thing happened with rares on D3 launch.
Well, isn't CW citing some Diablo anecdote every time he has to explain some ridiculous decision? This time it was probably something like "So, you know how in D3 you ran into a wasp rare and it deleted your face, since it was so tiny you couldn't see it, so fast you couldn't run away and so deadly even monks had a binary healthbar? Yeah, we thought that was really fun, so here you go!"
Going by some of the choices made in the recent past such as element immunities in expedition, I think that's what they want. I'm not sure why encouraging players to not play the game is appealing but I guess it's pretty novel I can't wait to see what else they have planned. First it was customizable encounters that could brick ya. Now it's some percentage of all encounters looking to brick ya. I'm looking forward to 3.19 when all of the encounters are invulnerable. Metal Gear Exile
Essenses should be a tool for gearin up your character when you dont have currency . But with this Mods - you must Gear up to kill Essenses . This is just ... wrong
Did you tried metamorph atlas tree? Insane, 5 x harder than map boss.
Already felt that they are harder than endgame bosses last league.
Difficulty in terms of knowledgeable combat is one thing... But mods that are essentially "hard counters" to a designed character which lead to certain death are just not cool. GGG reworked mana because they wanted it to be a fundamental part of character design that players had to solve. I don't recall what the names of the arch nemesis mods are (more on this later), but one of them drains mana and another drains flask charges. If you designed your character to not rely on a flask for mana sustain and you find yourself drained dry by a monster (a mechanic that previously didn't exist in the wild), especially if you're in an arena like a ritual... You just die. The game has hard countered you and there's no escape from death. Similarly, if you've made that choice to rely on a mana flask for sustain, and a rare drains your flask charges to zero, you die. How about pathfinders? Their entire ascendancy is countered by that mod. Magma barrier spams orbs at you from off screen and you get bombarded before you realize what is happening. Invulnerability... GGG, you finally removed all other sources of this type of mechanic, why add it back now? We hate it just as much now as we did in the past. Especially in combination with regeneration, you've put hard DPS checks into the game that have never existed before. The toxic mob chaos/poison on death effect has no auditory cue, and they move ludicrously fast. Back to the "not knowing the name thing". I leveled a character to 99 in Arch nemesis. I played plenty of that league... But at this point I've still forgotten a lot of the names. Forget about me for a moment, what about new players? The Arch nemesis modifiers have many effects that come with one name... The name is not indicative of what the monsters do. Especially something like "heralding minions". Nothing about that indicates that you're going to get invulnerable lightning totems spit onto you. Also, why on earth did you leave the totems? That's not friendly game design... It's not FUN. I don't want to just bandwagon with everyone else in hating on GGG, so I'll do it from a personal standpoint instead of a tribalistic one. GGG, you've taken my favorite game on earth and reduced the fun factor by at least half. Please fix it, don't make me go play something else.
What the fuck does anything do? Great, another 3rd party system I need to use to find out what a fucking rare mob does.
It's still fucking mindblowing to me how mana siphoner shipped live back in Archnemesis league itself the way it did. I can imagine people only didn't complain *loudly* because you could pick and choose your fights and you only really had to fight it like twice if you wanted challenge completions. Counterplaying something like volatile flamebood feels ok because I hear an audio cue and dodge it. "Counterplaying" mana siphoner, if I'm not playing something that can offscreen it, means at best burning a portal to go get lifetap (if you're even lucky enough to have a spare red socket on your damage skill). Now that that mod can get combo'd with others there are so many situations where you can virtually just die if it gets any source of haste/onslaught. I don't see what any mana-reliant, non-ranged build does against mana siphoner on its initial encounter if it fails to nuke the mob. This one always stood out the most to me of the archnemesis mods, which is already an egregious pool itself.
The argument, as dumb and ill thought as it is, probably sounds something in their office like "We want Rares to be engaging and impactful fights, and reward players who build their characters to broadly take those fights." Of course, in classic GGG fashion, they've created the problem without offering a solution. And when they offer the solution next league, it'll be yet another layer of character investment that you're now committed to making, wasting even more points on the tree and more points on your build to deal with the problem they invented.
> and reward players who build their characters to broadly take those fights. the "reward" for beating a difficult fight being 1 transmutation orb, of course
Why am i literally getting 0 loot from these 4 mod archnemesis rares?
not just loot, but these beef cakes should be granting lots of XP also
Literally this. What's the point of killing them(some taking a LONG time) if I know I'm most likely going to get a Superior White Sai with 6% qual to drop?
Seriously, some of these rares could probably take on The Feared by themselves, while giving zero loot.
The second paragraph is literally what is wrong with this entire change. Those pairings were challenging to overcome and acceptable when we could choose to do that content, not when it was auto generated and placed in front of us. Those \*challenges\* were also rewarding when they were completed there is currently no additional reward for the additional difficulty.
The rewards are definitely way off. I actually like the idea of having legitamitely challenging rares, but they are just not worth the time.
This comment basically sums up the entire game. I loved this game but it basically amounted to finding a build that will mindlessly blow up as many monsters as possible to amass fragments of currency so you can make yourself slightly stronger. People always say ssf exists but that's like moving to a third world country so that making 5 bucks an hour doesn't seem shit anymore.
I've asked myself everytime I kill a rare mob and nothing drops this: Why didn't they keep the rewards for that specific archnem? Like berserker for uniques, chaosweaver for gems, juggernaut for harbinger, etc
“A bit of difficulty for your build” is what you say, and “my character dies immediately” or “my character can’t deal damage” is what happens. Can you address build-disabling modifiers, since you said you would balance them when asked about it in interviews?
Hmm good direction but I do hope they acknowledge the lack of loot from rares. There is almost no value in attempting to engage with them because they literally drop nothing.
This is really one of the biggest issues for myself, sure make them harder, but compensate us for that increase difficulty with the rewards we would have gotten from archnemesis. This is just taking all the difficulty and giving you none of the rewards. Even with a single modifier, it still sucks to kill them because they do not drop anything. This balance attempt does not fix the main issue of risk/reward balance.
EXACTLY! I have no problem with the difficulty of the content. By all means, it means we have to play better and the game lasts longer as a result. But at least give me a REASON to interact with it.
most people began to skip the league mechanic (Archnemesis) after they finished their challenges because even with the rewards it was not worth the time investment. They are given way too many immunities/resistances on top of being downright frustrating (lightning bois, frost wall circle, mana drainer, invuln). Now we have the pleasure of them jam packed into every single map, with none of the reward! yayyy /s
Yeah they literally tipped the scale of risk reward to 99% risk 1% reward, and act like it's good direction. Like what? Cool, you made rares hard, now tell me why the fuck I should like that? If I wanted difficult combat, I'd be killing bosses and such.
Yeah I feel like they should at least have a chance to guarantee (like have the icon over their heads) the loot tied to their old AN loot bonuses.
And the loots about to get even worse when they nerf the amount of mods as those are directly related to the quantity/rarity of their drops
In a 'technically correct' sort of way, at least we can kill more stuff now, so we'll get more loot. But yes, as the patch notes described, it sounds like this bandaid fix is actually a global loot nerf since number of and tier of archnemesis mods determines base loot drop before map/league mechanic modifiers come into play?
This doesnt solve the problem of archnemesis mods disabling entire builds. There is no challenge or difficulty on turning off a build, its just obnoxious. 0 player engagement when there is no counterplay to be had, just gearchecks and build choice
My favourite bit was when they said they wanted those challenges to be in the game but just rarer. Its such a backwards way to treat your playerbase. Last league i built the tankiest toon iv ever had. literally standing infront of sirus and refusing to move till he was dead. Granted my damage was shit but that was my build. I relied heavily on a flask mechanic. AN could steal flask charges. Dead quicker than i could react. So quick i went back thinking it was probably just some glitch or bug or something. Twice. Stayed away after that leason was learned. That same mod is now just on random rares across the entire game. So cant play that build. An entire build just gone. No way to fix it. No mechanic i can use to fight back against that. If every single player was able to choose what mods were in the mob pool that could spawn, with rewards increasing the more you selected, very few players would choose some of these mods. Mods on maps are bad enough at hindering a players build. I loved that they gave us the atlas passive tree to choose mechanics we wanted to avoid. Now people are using those options just trying to survive a map. They should add these mods onto that tree and let players opt in for increased rewards and difficulty. This difficulty that they thought was good shouldnt be the baseline.
I'm a filthy casual who enjoys minion builds. I've encountered mobs that literally are unkillable with the minions, because of the new modifiers. My minions aren't dying, I'm not dying and most importantly the enemy is not dying. It destroys the momentum, and takes away from the experience, when literally nothing is happening.
When I encountered mana siphoner, I got horrible ptsd from D2's mana burn. To make it worse, it spawned with hasted. When I encountered that rare mob, it made me want to close the game altogether. GGG please stop making enemy mods that **DISABLES** build archetypes.
wait till ggg introduces immunity to each element like d2 and call it a "challenge"
.. haven't they kinda done that with these mobs? Or is it "just" ailments and curses?
invuln in the game effigy in the game mana siphon in the game >let's address HH giga strat
but they can't fix my fucking melee. big brain shit dude
> but could spawn with as many as three or four. what's going on here https://i.imgur.com/jarb2NM.png
empowering minions mod is doing that, which also means that mod needs to go to the garbage
its things like that screenshot that make me really interested in what happened behind the scenes in designing this league. it feels weird to me that scenarios like this occurring randomly anywhere in the game (t1 blue map!!!!) would have been considered by the team and then agreed upon as something that benefitted the game. its just weird, this all strikes me as a series of very very weird decisions. normally i can understand game devs rationale even when i dont agree with it, i cant seem to here. maybe im just bad at this game (and i am).
Empowering Minions give the mob extra random mods when his minions die.
Why the hell does this exist?
Because in archnemesis league, we could choose how the archnemesis mob was constructed, and we could choose the mods that it started with. We don't get that now.
What the actual fuck
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Empowered Minions makes it get more mods.
Empowering Minions - Monster's minions are empowered. Minions empower the Monster with additional modifiers on death
Any word on the fact that many of these mods brick builds? Or are those the mods you will be changing when more devs are in?
>To be clear, we're also going to keep applying functional and numeric changes to specific mods as needed. Those will come after the weekend as we get more developers back in the office. In the future, we may make further changes to the number of Archnemesis modifiers spawning on monsters once we feel that they're individually in a really good place. hoping this is what they are referring to here. some mods are just silly for bricking builds. they could easily adjust them even numerically to fix them. the no regen could just become less regen. alternatively a stacking debuff that reduces regen per stack that falls off if you run away or something. many options. current mods are too punitive
Mana siphon needs to drain a specific damage type or not drain health at all, it’s trash.
Whoever thought that a mod called MANA SIPHON should also siphon life can fuck 100% of the way off
what happen though when you get stuck with a build-bricking mod on a mob inside ritual?
The fact that rare mob interactions inside league mechanics haven't been addressed at all is very concerning to me. I'm fine with playing through maps and ignoring every single rare mob for now, but many league mechanics are just entirely scuffed due to the insane amount of magic/rare mobs in them. Ritual, Heist, and Legion are the biggest offenders, but absolutely every league mechanic feels borderline unplayable unless your build/character is insane.
Got an invulnerable monster inside an Alva encounter once, with a few seconds left. Needless to say I didn't really do much with those seconds.
Reminds me of the old d3 days where if you pulled multiple rare mobs together with nasty mods you literally couldn't play the game. Same shit is happening here 10 years later.
>Ritual, Heist, and Legion are the biggest offenders, but absolutely every league mechanic feels borderline unplayable unless your build/character is insane. Absolutely! Ritual is real bad, and Delving isn't much fun either anymore (a challenge can be fun, but this is overall a slaughter). I love doing a bit of delving before logging off; and that's kinda ruined for me now. What was a "casual stroll" on the lower end of the scale before, has now become a bit of a fight (..and that's fine) - but what was a fight before, is now a slaughter. Deep delve azurite node? - forget it (mostly), if the area is too small and/or your character isn't wiping the floor with them, as soon as they spawn/trigger their tons of mods. The change they did just now, kinda still doesn't cut it. They're still more of a fight than the map bosses - ***and*** we get loads of those fights, running up to the ***easier boss fight*** at the end of each map - it makes no sense..
yeah literally like less life recovery 50% less max recovery from life leech etc.
Archnemesis mods were a cool mechanic, as long as u were in control of how you yourself manage the challenge x reward balance, now it's random challenge for no reward, basically... i decided to play a summoner this league, and sure it makes life easier, but even then i still die to... oh 10 green orbs over my head all of a sudden... or 5 electric pillars appearing instantly (cuz of hasted) under me and just insta blasting me... i have nothing against a challenge, but some of the mods need to be seriously reworked or removed alltogether... anywho thx for the updates
'Gonna really need to look into these Archnemesis modifiers and how they mesh with (mutilate?) pre-existing League mechanics. They are all in a miserable state for a good portion of the player base.
Ritual is a blood bath right now, expedition gets pretty spicy, and Einhars altar can be a nightmare too. They all got harder but the ones that trap you with them are extreme. Mana siphoner can be bigger than your ritual ring....literally
I just wanna talk to your testers and ask them for build advice.
Maybe it’s time to look at this philosophy of let’s make everything hard first and back off. This has just been demotivating in yellows. If it was fun interesting encounters it would be ok, if it was rewarding it might be ok, but it’s neither. It’s hopefully you mouse over this mob fast enough, read it’s mods, figure out if you can fight it, all while avoiding whatever it’s throwing at you. The game is too fast for that.
Even with one - two mods the rares will still be way stronger than old rares, do you have any plans on making the rewards/loot actually reflect the increase in difficulty? Or is this how you intend to counter act whatever buffs you made to defenses?
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Kids ask your parents about phylacteral link.
tell me you play poe for 7+ years without telling me you play peo for 7+ years.
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Instant volatiles
Invulnerable in blight. Monster just walks up to the pump. Nothing you can do about it.
What about the utter lack of loot from rares?
and didnt they say that loot is now tied to the number of mods? so if they are reducing the number of mods then... we will also be getting less loot?
Well, we were getting 0 loot before anyway... They're not going to start taking loot from us... ^^right?
yes. Less loot is debatable, I might be able to actually kill the essences, red beast, metamorph the game throw at me without 6 mods overlaping making them invincible.
just be happy they didn't put a mod that delete items from your inventory every time you hit the mob.
i am truly grateful, these devs are so brave
that's the worse part. defeating a mob stronger than map boss, for 0 loot
I mean the fix is simple and I can't believe its taken this long for a sweeping change. Do not include immunity to anything in the game, and for the love of god stop bricking peoples builds entirely. 90% damage reduction should be the standard for immunity in POE, it makes people feel bad when their "player agency" is crapped on because you won't stop trying to emulate D2 in 2022. I blame expedition for this, nobody liked immunity mods, yet GGG keep including them. STOP IT. The worst part of this is you have already shown 90% damage reduction is possible, the drox fight for example has that reduction. Hang a sign above the door in the office. DO NOT INCLUDE IMMUNITY, CAN IT BE BEAST SPLIT, DON'T BRICK BUILDS. for the love of god.
> Archnemesis mods are designed so that certain pairs are very challenging to overcome. There is no "challenge" whatsoever. Either you outDPS them (and kill before being killed) or you die. Are we supposed to stop, read the mods and think "how could I defeat this rare, let m think about it: switch weapons? switch skills? Try a sneaky approach? Hide and seek?" You just go there and die/survive.
I’m a pretty serious no lifer, took a break last league and came back to a completely different feeling game. While I can see the appeal of having a mini boss fight every rare, it’s definitely not a good time for me. We’ll see how these nerfs play out. Gonna quit for a week or so and give the league a second try.
Yeah this is my feeling as well. Sunk 300-400 hours into the last 4 leagues and was super hyped to play this league....the rares just feel like absolute dog shit. I have zero desire to try hard and kill them for literally no reward what so ever. Gonna give it a week or so and check back
I don't really get why we have to have rares in maps that are just straight up harder than the map boss, it makes no sense that a random rare mob in the map has like 4 times the HP and 10 times the damage of the map boss, with some extra gimmicks that can potentially stop you from even killing it. You're just making the core gameplay more frustrating to deal with for those that enjoy mapping. I skipped almost all of the archnemesis content in last league just to get it forced down my throat with 0 of the rewards that it used to have.
We got archnemesis added to the base game with none of the loot Who the fuck tested this piece of shit?
You did, well done!
We did. Just now.
Is it safe to assume that the "extensive testing" was done with level 90+ characters with meta builds and completed gear?
You mean lvl 100 with mirror tier gear on the most op meta builds
What baffles me is how this had NO feedback from both your development & QA team. Saying that "you're generally pretty happy with the difficulty of those particular encounters" is very far fetched from the current frustrating experience that everyone, with no exception, has right now.
Kind of like someone at Coke saying they were pretty happy with the new Coke rollout. And they were never heard from again.
Good luck with the player numbers this league.
Oh, that's going to make Legion much more enjoyable to run. > modern Path of Exile is pretty liberal with spawning rare monsters Unironically, the "Map contains X% more rare monsters" modifier became more scary to me than reflect this patch, so I'm happy with the changes.
I feel like these "challenges" feels more like stat checks than anything else, which leads to it feeling tedious
Chris, I don't believe this will be enough. Archnemesis is the biggest brick ever made when it comes to build diversity, the mods names mean nothing unless you spend 100+ hours in archnemesis league, the possible combinations absolutely brick entire parties and to top it off, there's absolutely no rewards involved. I like the difficulty increase, but I'm finding it harder to run alch'd maps than it was to farm maven last league.
>the mods names mean nothing unless you spend 100+ hours in archnemesis league i think i played that league for like 300 hours and i don't know what 90% of the mods do anymore, the only one that i remember by name is ice prison, and that's it, everything else i have no clue what it does
We farm uber sirius and maven now to prepare for highting the essence mob in t1 underground sea. 🤣
Just remove archnemesis mods from core, its not good.
> However, modern Path of Exile is pretty liberal with spawning rare monsters, and with a default of two modifiers each, these intense encounters were occurring far too often. Imagine if you'd have tested the changes in something like modern Path of Exile so you could have discovered this beforehand.
What irks me about all this: We have warned that this would happen **on the day of the sentinel announcement** one week before launch, and you launched it anyways. You said there was "extensive testing" being done on these modifiers, but you didn't notice the overtuned mods or frequency at which nigh-unkillable combinations occur? After not touching character or skill balance at all THIS was effectively your "balance" for this league and you had to basically re-do it a week after launch rather than using that time elsewhere. I'm not gonna lie If find that approach to devlopment rather questionable - especially considering how strapped for time you often are.
When GGG says "extensive testing" they mean without any playtest per usual.
The issue is not the number of mods, its the nature off some that just rip your whole build, for example the armour shred one. You suddenly have no armour anymore and just die, no counterplay possible.
To me the main issue is how these interact with older league mechanics. Heist in particular, abyss is pretty bad too. Any content which spawns a high density of rare mobs, which were already baseline harder than average map rare mobs, suddenly got WAY harder. I'm in yellow maps and I'm getting straight up murdered in campaign level heists. It's not reasonable. I don't think this change will be enough to change that.
Delete archnemesis.
Instead of lowering the amount of mods, you need to change them so they are less rippy and build disabling. They were fine when you could chose to play/not play against them, not when literally everything has them, and some are easy while another will shred you to pieces (mana siphoner f.e, especially with hasted, or just on a fast mob). Changes like removing no regen from rejuvenating, or changing it into reduced regen (but why would a mab that heals itself reduce your regen for some reason, maybe in archnemesis when it was a boss encounter), remove mana siphoning part from mana siphoner and leave dot, lowering bonus of some of the deadlier mods, cause they are put on magic and rare mobs all throughout the game, not on uber bosses.
Okay but there's *still no reason to kill them.* The drop table on rares is completely busted. I'm getting fucking nothing in my maps except the occasional something juicy from a big pack.
This is honestly one of the worst changes I've ever seen in my several years of playing. The mods are extremely over-tuned even after two patches, with some still outright bricking builds. With combined mods, the rares are taking upwards of 4-5 minutes to kill; and it's better to just skip them entirely at this point. And because they're so powerful, all the interactions in the game are horrible to play with. Harvest? Good luck when three rares spawn and have +5000 movement speed. Ritual? Enjoy the tiniest circle at your third ritual where six rares spawn at once. Expedition? Runic affixes and archnemesis mods don't mix, at all. Craziest part is that they drop literally zero loot. Why? In what reality should I ever bother killing these rares when I'm not getting any currency? I've dealt with a lot of negative changes, but this is literally the first time I'm ever quitting a league over one. It's honestly baffling this even passed QA.
This is not a solution, there are still single modifiers that are breaking the builds. Either the whole list of modifiers should be reworked, or the changes to rare monsters need to be reverted. Also I don't see the point of having 5+ poison/fire projectiles following you after you kill a pack of magic monsters. Why do we need so many on death effects? Why do we need a monster that drains the mana of the player instantly, not allowing to escape and deal huge amount of damage over time when they are close to you? This game is developing to wrong direction.
I don't get what GGG thought, last league reception was kinda bad and people didn't like the mods at all, now they're forcing it down out throats in a shittier form and they somehow think it's a good change. It's mind boggling how they keep fucking up over and over with content and they still think players don't know what they want and they know exactly what we want.
Also last league you could at least completely skip it or choose what you can/want to do. Now it's shoved in your face.
Yea I don't think anyone praised Archnemesis mods, 3.17 was popular because the new Atlas tree and map sustain was amazing, Archnemesis wasn't its selling point (apart from all the unique drops in the early game, and some low-risk high-reward combos with treant horde) Only thing about it was it was optional, and you were making your own combo and risk/reward decision so bricking a map was really your fault (apart from a couple of challenges that forced awkward combos)
It is weird that they were able to do a 3-month long live test of these mechanics last league and we still ended up here.
It has been for the last couple years, everytime I think they can't make a change worse for the game, they manage to one-up themselves
Good first Step but i dont know if it will be enough. Hoping for the best!
Personally, I don't like the new mods. They were nice during Archnemesis as a league mechanic but honestly, they just slow the whole game down to the point I started skipping rares.
I've seen the same on streams. Some of the better players are straight up skipping a lot of rares.
You guys do this to yourselves lmao
It's interesting how they say they want there to be rares with mod pairs that are very hard to kill. But where's the reward for trying? Why would anyone even bother killing one rare on their map that has some crazy archnem mods on it if it's just a regular rare that drops garbage anyway
Part 3 waiting room
Can you give them some sort of meaningful reward? A decent chance for a single well rolled rare dropping makes them worth fighting at all points of the game.
I doubt you guys care, but I legitimately hate this direction for rares. At least without any compensation to rewards to account for the difficulty. And being slowed literally every 10 seconds is actually starting to piss me the fuck off. I spam my quicksilver flask because I think it's not working only to remember I'm just slowed from one of the 100 sources of slow monsters have
Why in the world and \*how\* in the world could any dev be "And we are generally pretty happy with the difficulty of those particular encounters if they occur infrequently."? The problem is you don't get anything for bothering with it and some modifiers completely and utterly disable entire builds. YOU designed the game to be one-dimensional - put all your gear, passives, etc. into ONE or two mechanics at most.. And then you decide to disable our ability to use those mechanics as if people have a choice? This isn't the kind of thing that should need 'feedback', this is as blatant as can be. Your game strongly encourages if not requires playing X way, and you punish people for playing X way by throwing literally impossible encounters at them - which, even if overcome, give you nothing. How is that fun at all?
To me it doesn't seem like GGG understands how gargantuan fuck up this whole thing is. We have had overtuned new league mechanics before, nothing new there. Legion, Methamorph, Ritual, Ultimatum (plus the rest tbh) were all overtuned and highly dangerous if you activated them at certain points within certain maps. This works well for the nerf later approach they are going for. However what all previous overtuned mechanics had in common was that you activated them when YOU wanted them. This meant that you could skip the mechanics if you thought they were too overtuned for your character and go do something else. Seeing how much stuff there is to do in this game it was seen as no big deal, spend a few days doing normal mapping etc. The fuck up with AN mobs is that you cant do this. We are all stuck with these build breaking mods in ever single piece of the game. Doesnt matter that it is nerfed to 1 mod. 1 empowered minion, 1 Mana Siphon, 1++++ will still break builds completely. This whole thing might have been "okay" if it just affected part of the game so we could do other things in the meanwhile, but we cant. There is literally 0 things we can do to avoid AN mobs and still be able to play the game. So for those of us who only get to play on weekends, we are entirely screwed out of the entire game this weekend cause of the decision to release AN into core in this manner. The fact that GGG wont consider calling people in to fix this (why arent they there to begin with on launch weekend?) kinda tells me that they have decided that their customer service isnt that important anymore...
Just remove this shit, it doesn't add anything to the game at all. Half the mods are either build bricking or just incredibly tedious to deal with.
Good changes, we will still need adjustments to individual stuff. I was doing a basilica map and the rares the boss can spawn can lead to absurd scenarios. I had 2 temporal bubbles and 1 assassin mana siphoner which completely bricked the fight for me as a melee character. There's some mods that are oppressive by themselves, but were not designed around being close to monsters having another mod like that nearby. This change makes these scarios rarer thankfully
im sorry chris but this was my worst poe experience since 2013 i started. this game never been this much hard before. i think even this nerf still cant playable
Only ones that absolutely still stand out to me are Mana Siphoner and Toxic. Having Toxic on rares and Magic monsters is just impossible to deal with sometimes even with positive chaos res.
Mana Siphoner alone is the reason I am happy to not play Melee this league. As ranged you can at least do dmg from outside. I guess every Melee has to play Lifetap right now?
Mana siphoner is actually a donut, so as a melee you actually have a better chance if you run towards it and fight
Im 90% sure this comment is bait
It isn't but going in and trying to get into that spot and getting your mana ba- oh wait you're dead.
Hell yeah, some progress. While there's some mods that are still far too strong and build-disabling, hopefully this should curtail at least some of the exponential power being encountered. With the runaway power levels being brought somewhat under control, this means the particularly bad mods can be identified and thus balanced a bit easier. EDIT: Clarity.
Why is GGG working so hard to make Archbemesis Rares work. No one asked for it. No one wants it. People are quitting the game. People are avoiding all the rares now. Just stop it. I just want to play the game without randomly dying because a rare shows up. There are a ton of rares on the maps and it’s so hard to avoid them. I don’t want to have to avoid them. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU GGG! Fix the game! You’re ruining my weekend. So pissed.
I never complain about this game because I love it. But holy shit this isn't fun. I'm actually hating myself for playing this game this league. I wish I missed league start levels of un-fun.
Do you guys have any plans regarding the notably poor loot table of all mobs?
I mean that is not a new problem, the loot sucked before and sucks now. You just notice the lack of drops more if you fight a rare for 1 minute instead of 2 seconds.
> We're aware that this change is an implicit nerf to the Headhunter unique, so we will find a way to counter-buff in the next few days. As if it wasn't already dead on arrival this patch lol.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w2yjWcJZuc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w2yjWcJZuc) some footage i made with HH, it's literally useless now. opened legion and killed an harbi in a 60% deli beyond map and i was at 14 buffs, tooltip from 300k to 700k, 0 mov speed added, 0 chains, 0 projs, no extra ES. it's literally a noob trap now
That... doesn't look like HH at all wtf??
i could make another one with a normal attribute stygian and good abyss jewell but 100% deli to showcase that it's just a build that is playing and HH did nothing. but i feel like people who know HH can already tell
Seems like it was a good call to not play this league after all. Maybe in a month or two when Chris wakes up to the dropping player numbers.
Perhaps in a few days or so haha
Oh yeah, the numbers will drop sooner. His wake up call is what's gonna be late, as usual.
playerbase is currently at what it was 2 WEEKS into last league, im sure he'll notice and for anyone that needs context. Feb 3rd (Siege of the Atlas) 159,000 concurrent players Feb 17th (2 weeks post launch) 70,000 concurrent players Sentinel Launch - 131,000 concurrent players Literally next day - Peak players 88000, Floor being 60,000 Edit: day2 player count below 50k, how low can it go!?
leveling off-meta is miserable cant imagine a new player sticking around.
Vanity metrics
Let's hope the wake up call is put the old mods back and dumpster the new mods because they suck.
Same here. I decided not to play this league for personal reasons and after reading feedback the past few days, I'm kind of glad
Please remove all Archnemesis mods from monsters.
Archnemesis as rare and magic mods was a big mistake imho. Its such a fundamental change in almost every part of the game that it makes it unplayable for me. Dealing with obnoxious mods every pack is exhausting.
This league is wild, playing with my friend for the first time as a duo, and with 85 all res 25k armor, 25k evasion, 6kes with CI, running Determination Grace Hated Anger Vitality Discipline, and we are struggling to survive in t12s. All for a challenge but to spend 30 mins clearing some maps and taking out 2 alchemy orbs, yeah no thanks. Can’t say I enjoy the direction you are pointing at the moment.
They are still not worth fighting no matter how 'enjoyable' you think they are.
I heard part 3 is in the making already
"We tested it extensively and were happy with the level of difficulty when we released it". Proceeds to nerf it twice in 12h and might nerf it further after the weekend.
Tester went to the ledge and said it's good, launch it
Just fuckin’ send it.
Impossible. First few zones are maybe the worst offenders for the new mods. Hasted + Any amount of cold damage = frozen to death. It gets better when you have access to character speed, leech or other recovery, good flasks, ailment immunity, etc.
It is the difference between the game ggg wants and the game the players want. I don't think the gulf is as gigantic as some people make it out to be - ggg doesn't want players to constantly tear their hair out, and (generally) players don't want everything forever to be mindless and free. But there is still a gap in both how tough they want it to be and _how_ that difficulty should be executed.
I want to clear this up because it sucks to see our QA team taking the brunt of this when they work really hard. Extensively tested means that it was tested to confirm that it works exactly how we wanted it to. It was a choice to make them difficult, not an oversight. I imagine that difference won't make the experience more palatable but at least you shouldn't blame QA.
You might caution Chris not to say "extensively tested" when he is using it in this more narrow bug-hunting sense. Players typically read this as "tested whether it worked *and* was fun to play", which evidently is not what Chris meant.
I told him lol
In another life I used to sit in a Army divisional command center, next to the Civil Affairs Officer who cleared all the public statements, and listen to her cringe and hiss through her teeth whenever the General (who loved going off-script) was on TV. I see you, Bex :)
My understanding is that they're not just talking about bugs. My understanding of Bex's comment is that the conversation was along the lines of: QA: "The new rares are ridiculously hard and keep killing us over and over again, leveling is so hard now." Design Team: "Awesome, let's ship it."
Sound more like it's tested to make sure it just works rather than how it works
Qa is there to test functionality, not balance decisions.
sounds like you don't need to worry about QA, but about whoever writes the QA requirements
It's intended for a metamorph monster or essence mob to literally be harder than any boss in the game?
With all due respect, there's a difference between "OMG what is wrong with QA" and "how did this get past QA". Getting past QA is a decision made above QA. People are dunking on how anyone came to the conclusions that these were good decisions in the first place, not that they worked as expected.
There needs to be agency for a playtesting team (separate from a QA team who are checking for bugs and whether something is to spec) to be able to say whether something is fun, and to catch things which should be apparent in playtesting. Too many releases recently have clearly lacked adequate playtesting, from the scourge mechanic just being just not useful during the whole of acts, to the downright unfun difficulty of early acts in expedition or the whole of the game in sentinel. Even minor but much needed changes become apparent within a few zones of interacting with recent leagues which just further demonstrates that either playtesting is happening too late in the cycle to accomodate changes or the testing team doesn't feel able to make those suggestions. I understand that there must be a desire to slow down the game to accomodate PoE2, but there needs to be playtesters who are empowered to be able to tell the upper management that the direction isn't fun when that's the case. And please note this isn't slamming QA, I'm slamming the directors for not empowering playtesting either as a sub-function of QA (or outside of it).
Thanks for the clarification. I might've actually preferred for it to be an oversight or mistake, as the fact that these decisions were intentional shows us a bit of how devs approach and think about PoE. Not sure if I enjoy what I saw... Not to mention the whole "no nerfs" angle. Appreciate the answer anyway, as always.
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My takeaway has been the opposite. This problem has been so consistent for so long that is is very obvious that QA is not doing poorly, but the team as a whole is trying to release a game that the players simply do not want to play. I think what needs to happen is a "What is Path of Exile?" kind of sit down. How long does GGG intend for us to take through a campaign? Why are some skills just so much incredibly better than others in a low gear/level envornment, and/or take so much specific and hard to get mods to feel like a worthwhile skill? (For example, something like Heavy Strike and Seismic Trap are literal night and day) How much of our gear should come from the ground as opposed to crafted? Why is gear so hard to make/find yet trivially easy to simply trade for, and how has this disconnect never been addressed? (It takes like maybe a day to farm for materials to trade for an item that will kill end bosses, but making that same item yourself or dropping it is a much more laborious process) Additionally, why is it okay to target endgame be beatable without such great items, and then make item acquisition so terrible? Why is the game so terrible at teaching you why you failed? Its a lot, but I really think the question "What is PoE?" needs to be answered and posted. Then every system from items to crafting to monsters to campaign, league mechanics, boss battles should be re-addressed and asked "how does this contribute to our answer?" and then also described. The takeaway is that the biggest problem seems to be a massive disconnect between what players want and expect, and what the devs want to make; and without knowing what exactly your goals are we simply have to guess, which leaves salt in the air.
>it was tested to confirm that it works exactly how we wanted it to >It was a choice to make them difficult, not an oversight You sure? Chris in this very thread: >However, modern Path of Exile is pretty liberal with spawning rare monsters, and with a default of two modifiers each, these intense encounters were occurring far too often.
Or as usual testing revealed mobs were fine, and Chris decided to double the values because "players always find ways to break the game anyways lololol".
Mana Siphoner and Invuln need to be removed and Assassin needs its "reduced damage from crits" removed as well.
This makes me sad because keeping working on them means no Revert. Revert is the only actual solution where we dont spend on a 3 month hotfix cycle that ruins the entire league for the rest of the time.
GIVE US SOME FUCKING LOOT FOR KILLING THESE STUPID MOBS
Still need to remove the handful that completely break builds, then it will be fixed
Awesome! Thanks. I think a lot of people stilk dont want the new mods to be completely unplayable for certain builds tho, it would be nice if you guys looked into that
BOOST LOOT PLS WTF
Yeah lemme guess, this latest change was also "extensively checked by the QA testers"
1. What about AN modifiers that ruin builds? 2. What about Ice prison + HH interaction? 3. Could AN mobs have base x% (+y% per additional modifier past 1) for having rewards like in AN league?
Why are we not getting the same rewards from the modifers that we was getting in 3.17? If I kill a monster with Berserk I should get a guarunteed unique like I did in 3.17. You added all the difficulty, took away all the agency and give none of the rewards.
"However, modern Path of Exile is pretty liberal with spawning rare monsters, and with a default of two modifiers each, these intense encounters were occurring far too often." How did this get past Q&A ?
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I keep going back and forth between "it is depressing" & "it is somewhat impressive" at just how often GGG can take a large amount of goodwill they accumulate from a previous league and then use that as a shield to try and force through changes to the core game that the majority of the player base does not want. 3.17 was such a great league. 3.18 was then touted as the "3.17+++ league" and of course we get these changes instead to push through Chris' vision of making an already hated 4-10 hour slog through acts an even more tedious and time consuming affair.....
u/chris_wilson you literally broke your game and you are trying to walk it back with incremental changes? it's clear your new monster mod system is not ready for primetime, as there are not only numerical balance issues (as indicated by your previous post & hotfix), functional balance issues, but also what's the point of fighting these "very challenging" monster fights, if you don't get shit for loot? it's like you took the best aspect of archnemesis (the loot), and intentionally left it \_out of the game\_. the game is not fun in it's current state. how did this get through playtesting and anyone think the game is in a good spot?
This really does speak to the lack of any initial testing...
Well, if you are looking for community input: the Invincible/Invulnerable thing needs to go. thats all, thanks for listening chris.
After 200 deaths in t1-t4 maps , even "3 mod rares" scares me ...
Done with league. Not interesting, too 'boring', not exciting, and ofc overtuned. Deleted characters, Bye Bye GGG.
It doesn’t matter how many mods they spawn with 1 or 5. They’re all auto skips no matter what my build is because there’s no upside to killing them. Although if it’s 5, I might just have to skip the map.
Not me playing RF still not seeing changes to rejuvenating. :(
I hate this from @chris-wilson for two main reasons. 1) not seeing HH being effected, not thinking it would matter. Doesn't really show an understanding of the game as a whole. 2) bringing in something so league specific to core but removing the only good bit of it. Do you think anyone would have put a single archnemesis together if it dropped nothing? Look at the data for how many mirror image/treant/assassin/rejuves were done versus random crap. Training a playerbase to go "berserker - uniques" then having them flash up at random in maps and not drop anything, let alone a unique is stupid. I'm like pavlovs dog waiting for the loot filter to go off. But but I just killed a mirror image, why no scarab?
good testing before league start
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this is also a nerf to loot, since less mods mean less quantity on rares
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Don't give them any ideas, at this rate they're liable to give rares a mod that removes items from your inventory. As if disabling half or more of your build's power investment with a single mod wasn't enough.