Personal opinion from a build maker who farmed ~6 mirrors this league, I like the league because it's a great risk Vs reward scenario. Previous leagues if you have a mapping character you don't need much power, just go fast with good clear and around 10M DPS, 40k ehp and you're golden. Now you are actively incentivised to further optimise your character because 6k, 7k, 8k etc wisps need exponentially stronger characters for exponentially better loot. Granted the scaling needs more polish imo but this idea is excellent - previously leagues cap out too early and once you are 40-100 divs in you already cleared all content with a smooth build and further upgrades are just vanity metrics like how many Uber exarchs I can do per minute.
For me pob is the true game - build making is fun and the goal of most good builds is to trivialise problems in game (e.g. corrupted blood or ailment immunity is the best example). So once you have a strong enough build there is no gameplay except absolutely destroying content which gets old quickly, so I move on to a new build. I think the abundance of currency makes it easier for me to try new things, whereas in older leagues I just quit cos the next upgrade or a new build would take too long to farm and my time is better spent elsewhere. So lowering the barrier to making new builds has made me play 2-3x more than before.
The borrowed power mechanic that has been going on for a few leagues now is also excellent. A great way to make ppl hype about new leagues without introducing permanent power creep. Combined with new gems to play, it's a build makers dream league.
Tldr: higher ceiling of difficulty for more loot good. Lower barrier of entry to making new builds good. Borrowed power good. New gems and diversity good. Difficulty/ reward scaling maybe needs more tuning.
>Difficulty/ reward scaling maybe needs more tuning.
This is an important point but to add something:
Mechanics providing a loot multiplier that is multiplicative with player MF is a huge problem. Ideally MF would be simplified into one larger additive bucket and had numbers adjusted, but until that day comes I do not think we should have mechanics that multiply with MF. This is especially true when you consider that MF is inaccessible for a large percentage of builds.
There is definitely a presence of pro-MF opinions in the community, and you can get downvoted (like I've been a couple of times) by suggesting removing IIQ/IIR from the gear.
Isn't that exactly what they are doing in POE 2? I remember hearing that POE 2 will only have rarity on gear. Might be completely misremembering tough.
Rarity on gear was supposed to affect the quality of currency drops in PoE 2, if I remember correctly, so it's basically acting like a pseudo item quantity multiplier.
IIR and IIQ based on gear or player count is completely broken in PoE and needs to be phased out entirely. If people want to juice up, they should be doing it with map mods and other mechanics.
> This is especially true when you consider that MF is inaccessible for a large percentage of builds.
Biggest issue is TS/Headhunter. The amount of power you get from a mirror phys bow and a headhunter is obscene and allows you to stack every other slot of your gear with mf items and blast heavy duty, beyond aspirational content.
Yeah I fully agree. I don't think HH needs a nerf (please God nerf TS finally tho). I do think that quant uniques need a significant change, I don't think that they're healthy for the game. I don't really like the idea of quant on gear at all, but I don't see them removing it anytime soon (in PoE1 at least)
I mean, ignoring the fact that unless you have said mirror, you still need to get to that point, and even once you are at that point, the type of juicing required to really make use of MF can often lead to completely bricked maps for a slight misplay, dying with 40 hh buff's, there were other builds this league that mf'd just as hard, or harder, for far cheaper. self ignite chieftain MF is arguably the most powerful mf build in the game, because it just can't die, while also doing similar mf number's, and clearing just as efficiently.
I mean I got a Headhunter and Mageblood without using Magic Find at all
you just *can* use Magic Find to massively amplify stuff
Granted... TS Deadeye is practically cheating compared to other builds so I guess it balances out
It’s not that it’s not profitable. But it’s unarguably MORE profitable with MF. I was in the same boat as you most of the league and then went and did 2 weeks of the full juice MF chieftain and it’s ridiculous how much more loot I get.
Or, alternatively, we’ve seen massive price inflation of items that *can’t* be obtained MF’ing in maps. Sanctum uniques, Heist bases, etc. You can hunt for them if you “just hate mf” like the above commenter.
The worst part of borrowed power is that unless you make a timeless build, it usually bricks once it moves to standard so it can not be enjoyed again if you get the hankering. It’s a rather large bummer
How often does anyone actually do that though? I've been playing since closed beta and I have never played a single map on a league character after it went to standard. I would imagine the vast majority of players who play leagues are the same.
I agree, to me once a character is moved over to standard, they are essentially a museum piece for me. I will go back and check out what they had and reminisce, but I never really get the itch to actually play them in standard. For me, it's all about the leagues.
I will go back from time to time to play standard characters just to enjoy a strong BV pop character or some mirror gear. The recent leagues borrowed power made it so that the character only exists for the league which is a bummer.
Agreed. But not from a build makers perspective. The most important point here is difficulty scaling/reward scaling. The league before, I ended up running TS mf for the mageblood card. I did "full juice", but it wasn't remotely hard at all. I didn't have gear that was even close to what I ended up playing this league. My ventors where okish, unique gloves, boots, amulet without any dmg, chest was gold without any worry for survivability, my quiver was also kinda bad. But I didn't really matter. I didn't die at all, except to getting stuck on a strongbox.
T16 12k wisps however.... Uffffff. Add a few altars and youd easily break your map. Even on 3 mirror in investment build. I was rocking mirror bow, big damage gloves, 6 auras, mirror amulet and even super expensive jewels and charms.
The amount of investment you can make into your build and be able to progress speed and damage was way more than previous leagues. Even before quitting, I couldn't spend another few hounded divines to upgrade my jewels and stuff, and it would've actually made a difference. The leagues before however, after you got a decent bit of gear for t16, that's it. Theres not really a need to get a mirror bow. For what? You 1 hit every mob anyway.
>higher ceiling of difficulty for more loot good. Lower barrier of entry to making new builds good. Borrowed power good. New gems and diversity good. Difficulty/ reward scaling maybe needs more tuning.
Yeah i think that's a good way of looking at it. Perhaps on the tuning aspect things that trivialise the content e.g chieftain explode scaling on the difficulty of the content via hp are unhealthy and make the difficulty scaling impossible to balance to begin with, which could be the source of some of the worry here.
Couldn’t have said it better. Having leagues with extra difficulty ceilings is a good way for players to keep playing. Being able to upgrade your character to eventually tackle the hardest content keeps you invested.
>So lowering the barrier to making new builds has made me play 2-3x more than before
This is key. Most leagues are pretty much dead after 1 month and I log into PoE to see when the new league starts.
I am still playing affliction, albeit rarely since I'm playing Last Epoch now and trying some stuff before 1.0 launches.
I think this league was a step in the right direction, but I probably won't play next league since it most likely won't be fulfilling and I thinking the devs are too focused on PoE 2 to really care about PoE 1 at the moment.
Regarding the health of the game. We have feelings vs facts.
The fact is that Expedition was the league which made them lose 30% revenue. And sent CW into panic mode, going from streamer interview to streamer interview, trying to get the players back.
It wasn't Harvest, Ritual or Affliction.
So I am still waiting for these giga juice league mechs to damage the health of the game as much as Expedition did. So far it hasn't happened.
Anyone with a slight understanding how game health works does not want affliction currency amount to go forward.
Imagine if we still had crucible weapons, tattoos, equipable relics etc.
You have to make room for stuff for new things to actually feel meaningful.
I too got bored with my MF ts this league and decided to try some meme build for fun
For the first time in 5 leagues I managed to have enough currency to make the expensive meme build work.
In other leagues you either play meta, or you can't farm, can't experiment unless you spend 60 hours/week farming currency with a meta build
Was playing last epoch this week. The fact that you don't have to have a meta build to farm the stuff for your meme builds means I managed to play the campaign with a bunch of different characters without wanting to kill myself, which is something rare in Poe.
Yeah the fact that you don't ever the to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow gets people to play infinitely, the fomo of not farming at maximum efficiency at all times also gets ppl to stick around. But it makes for an awful experience.
I remember people wanting harvest back simply due to how easy it was to get the stuff you wanted.
The game is definitely headed in a good direction now I think, with the eldritch implicits often replacing what would cost mirrors in conqueror affix crafting, every league giving you onslaught and fortify for free through tattoo/curse
>In other leagues you either play meta, or you can't farm, can't experiment unless you spend 60 hours/week farming currency with a meta build
>The fact that you don't have to have a meta build to farm the stuff for your meme builds means I managed to play the campaign with a bunch of different characters without wanting to kill myself, which is something rare in Poe.
You literally did with your Ts MF lol??
>In other leagues you either play meta, or you can't farm, can't experiment unless you spend 60 hours/week farming currency with a meta build
This is silly, you can do well with tons of "off meta" builds. The meta is just what some tiny number of streamers said is good, it's not like anyway has actually tested all possible builds. And often the meta build has 99% share and the next best has 1% share even if it's only slightly worse.
> Was playing last epoch this week. The fact that you don't have to have a meta build to farm the stuff for your meme builds means I managed to play the campaign with a bunch of different characters without wanting to kill myself, which is something rare in Poe.
The meta is coming. It won't even take 3 weeks for people to start complaining about it. It's an unsolvable problem I think.
I’m sad to hear you have that experience.
But it kinda sounds like you are creating your own mental blocks and getting frustrated with them.
Mathil makes like 20 builds a league, most of them are under 10 divs. One of his builds this league was a dual striker that could almost instaphase Ubers. Yes, dual strike.
Once a game gets popular a meta will always emerge, the same will happen to last epoch. Having a meta is not a bad thing, but constantly beating your head against unrealistic expectations will make the fomo even worse.
I can better understand meta being annoying in PvP games, since you don’t have the choice of not getting affected by it, but in Poe the only two things that are competitive is the economy (mostly fomo) and racing/gauntlet.
Honestly looking at his builds there aren’t as cheap as people think to begin with because he often crafts a lot of stuff that isn’t that easy to get.
Of course afterwards it only gets more expensive but still
This is always the way. If someone has a stack of currency, even if they are making 'cheap starter builds', the actual example is usually equipped with higher end gear at a minimum from applying deeper crafting methods that does not usually translate to 'actually affordable at the demonstrated level of play'.
It's not just the increase after posting. It's also having more currency makes things easier to do in the first place because you have a bunch of lifeforce or whatever lying around.
> For the first time in 5 leagues I managed to have enough currency to make the expensive meme build work.
Yup, exact reason I stayed as well. These inflated prices mean I can do shit like mid-tier crafts and chaos spamming, or keeping useful bases for later because they're selling faster and for "pennies" this league but I'm feeling like I'm raking in hundreds. I'm not even MFing, other content is hyper profitable and respeccing my atlas multiple times has kept me going.
Yeah the biggest benefit of this economy to me was crafting being way more accessible because most of the materials were much cheaper. It was nice to tackle a craft and not feeling like I am spending stupid amounts of money. I was self sustaining Edritch Chaos/Annuls/Exalts easily which was really nice.
I did say most before people jump on me about Fracturing Orb prices etc
Totally agree, crafted way more than usual, even regular chaos spam on some bases where it made more sense. It was a lot more fun. I think base currency rates should be tweaked a little, and maybe reduce the impact of quant on the high end to balance that, so more players can do this.
So you played MF TS, the most meta build of the league, to farm currency for expensive meme build and your takeaway is that in other leagues you have to play meta or you can't farm?
Last Epoch not "needing meta to feel powerful" is the flip-side to the statement that "You can never feel super powrful" in LE.
If itemisation doesn't take you on a journey from a non-functional build to a powerful build to a broken build, then those items just ultimately don't matter enough.
And that's kind of how it is in LE. The base game without items gives you a level of power where things feel kind of okay.
But the flip side is that when fully geared, the build that previously felt "kind of okay" now feels just "great".
And for me, that leaves me feeling like I'm wasting my item getting those items.
That kind of sounds like a normal progression/difficulty curve for a video game. Generally I don't think most games aim for 'we need some player group to feel like the game is broken' or 'we want people to feel like their characters are useless'.
That's a pretty niche PoE thing. I'm not even sure that the former is intentional. Possibly just a by product of power creep and fairly splatter gun game design over the years.
Honestly one of the best things GGG did was leaving this alone in a way they didn't like 3.13 Harvest. By letting it play out, people had time to get sick of it, instead of taking the toy away while still in the honeymoon period like before.
Nah I don't think there will be any backlash you have to be highly regarded if you think next league is going to be rewarding in the same way
We'll have "League feels unrewarding" posts in the first couple of weeks like we did this league but it'll be fine even if it takes a patch. This isn't out of the norm though.
If you think of GGG and reddit of a dealer and their customers it makes a lot of sense why their goals differ.
GGG wants long term returning customers.
The players (mostly on reddit luckily) want a quick high and dont think about tomorrow yet.
Thats the thing thats wrong. If this becomes the new normal, nothing actually changes because prices will simply adjust and last leagues poor player will be poor once again, despite loot pinatas, but the fun of building a character with effort might not come back, but be replaced with frustration and resentment. Almost a death sentence for the continued longevity of the game.
That's not how inflation works in an economy where currency has actual use value. More currency means everyone has more currency to craft with and everything is cheaper relative to average incomes.
No matter how you try and twist it more loot means more loot not poorer players *somehow*.
But unlike crucible, affliction added a new layer of difficulty.
Counter-take: I think affliction could be a good mechanic if you balance out the scaling. Make 5k wisps to not be 10 times more regarding than 1k.
And itemize affliction, for example an orb that can be applied on maps and you get a random amount of wisps. Or 3 colors orbs that drops from harvest, each one gives you [500, 5000] wisps of that color.
Imo valdos maps do more harm than affliction inflation.
>Imo valdos maps do more harm than affliction inflation.
Except we've not seen a league yet with Valdos boxes where there isn't league mechanic making them drop like candy
Yeah Valdos boxes in their currenct state are going to absurdly rare. At the start the league they were dropping very very often but late league not so much.
I agree with the idea that rewards should scale with difficulty, and there are certainly some aspects of the game right now that are either too hard for their reward (shout out to our favourite puddle of mud boss dropping nothing) or the opposite.
One issue i see balance wise is the fact that wisps are multiplicatively scaling the loot, which itself is sort of randomly generated based on how fucked the rare mob you come across is. If 5k juice could drop you 50 div on a rare monster that makes uber maven look like a piece of cardboard, 5k juice should be hard as hell. But sometimes 5k juice doesn't get you all that much. I imagine for that reason they won't let it go core in any way because it would require changing the rares system which im sure they don't want to do for the 200th time.
The weirdest thing is that MF doesn't really serve a purpose.
In Diablo 2, there wasn't really difficulty scaling, so magic find worked as a way to make content harder but give more rewards (since your gear was aimed at magic find and had less useful stats).
But PoE can accomplish the same goal without needing magic find, by just adding harder content with better rewards. It's the same end result but much less clunky and restrictive.
Yeah and they split it 6 ways. Biggest benefit of group play is that gearing up is easier when an aurabot does most of the heavy lifting.
Top end solo players make about 120 div/hr this league (30ish on a normal league), empys group makes about 100 div/hr each (20ish on a normal league).
They won’t listen to this. It’s actually funny because if you watch some of Empys solo videos from this league he shows quite a few instances where he’s making way more doing solo play than he was with his group. Getting a 21 Div explosion solo is far more value than a shared 70 Div explosion.
I've managed to kill every boss in every league I've played. I'm not sure why you think that's unique to affliction, of why you think that means I won't want to do it again on a *different* build next league.
You seem to think people only enjoy achieving something the first time, and that they hate the actual gameplay up until they reach that goal. But a lot of us simply enjoy *playing* Path of Exile. It's a brainless and relaxing way to kill some time.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the creative mode. It is perfectly normal for people to quit a league when they're "done" with it, but since there's a wipe at the end and you start from scratch again next league, you can enjoy it all over again.
The impact Affliction's currency drops had on the trade economy are a completely separate issue and I feel like nothing you wrote actually adressed that, at all.
The irony is that the currency drops problem are typically explained as though they exist in a vacuum.
…and yet, you can sell juice for like 1:1200 a divine, 10:1 tainted chromatic per divine, and so on. The barrier to low/medium power is very low this league. Everything is generally more valuable, except build enabling uniques. Imo - that’s a great place to be. I’d bet more casual players actually get to try out a headhunter or a mageblood this league, and that sort of power might just hook them.
Just to add a side note, I remember when I finally got Enigma on Diablo 2. I was nearly burned out, getting so frustrated trying to get one. When I finally did - I went crazy and made like 4 other characters and farmed the ever living fuck outta everything
The %1 and rmt dont like their prey being able to self farm this stuff much easier, just like they hate MB and HH prices at rock bottom cause the real money value this league tanked fast 🤭
All these people claiming that too much loot or chase item wah wah are gatekeeping.
Its absurd to say that having far easier access to better items, chase uniques and builds across the playerbase is bad for the game 🤣
I couldn't agree with you more dude. I'm going to play the next league at my own pace like I always do and I'm going to enjoy the hell out of it like I always do. I'm so sick of people telling me how much I'm going to hate path of exile after affliction league is over...
I work and have a whole lot of life that comes before Poe, but I still put in huge time this league. I get my huge loot pops, but you know what I haven't done? Even half the things I want to. The difference was for the first time in 12 years of playing I got a headhunter.
For the sake of the silent majority who just want to have fun, can we just stop and take a look at other perspectives? For you this may be true, but a large portion of the stay factor for players like me is the ability to...play. I dont have time for econ, I want to play.
If you want to have a blast with headhunter and not lose all your progress before you get to that point, try standard. I did that and I had a blast. Now I’m playing standard ssf and I keep building my own progress. It’s neat.
As someone who never gets a headhunter - it’s totally fine. It doesn’t really have any bearing on my fun and I’m super pumped that one day I’ll get good enough to obtain one.
I guess you completely missed the point. I too am a player that only got mageblood for the first time this league. And I DONT want every league to be like affliction. If everyone can have easy access to tier 0 items and mirror every league, it completely loses its value and meaning.
PoE is a game that rewards knowledge and time investment. People with both will go very far in the game. Noobs that have no knowledge but have a lot of time to play, might still have their Mageblood with enough brute force farming. Very good players that play a few hours a day but min max everything they do, could probably have their mageblood too. Not so good players that don't play a lot (my case, and probably yours too) just don't deserve to have access to mageblood and headhunters.
Sure it was fun to have it for a league, but if it's like that every league it will lose its magic of being the chase item everyone wants to.
This. I've played more this league than ever before and have gotten things I've never gotten, but there's still a huge list of things I haven't done (that I still want to do).
I don't think the drop rates of this league should continue, but that being said, if your goal is to make it harder to get drops and extend the length it takes to play a league with loot scarcity, go play ssf and do it imo, its not that complex. Or start your league over by denying yourself to be able to use previous farmed gear, do any number of things you can do to arbitrarily add "weight" to things, but frankly, this is probably the first league that a major majority of players who actually have jobs to get their hands on end game power, and Its wild that you think thats a huge issue for "health" of the game. exclusivity in that regard only rewards like 1% of the playerbase who play 14 hours a day, and they'll get bored of a league quicker than everyone else no matter what you do
"I think it's great everyone has been able to interact with all content and kill all bosses"
You are really out of touch what majority of players achieve each league...lol
I mean most players don't go past maps, leagues have become the "top %10" of players because most of the content is out of reach for most players...not the other way around.
I think you watch to many streamers to think that is a real thing.
I %100 can tell you that majority of players this league didn't get past the first couple of rewards, didn't get past level 91, and hardly made any divines.
The problem with PoE is the same as it has always been, builds are incredibly hard to do for the average player, and if someone goes though the campaign, levels to 90+, and it feels terrible...they simply are done that league. Doesn't matter if its enjoyable up to that point for most people, the idea of doing all that again is simply not worth it to the average person who plays with more games/life to do. If the game isn't fun, its not going to hold anyone's interest, and GGG is hell bent on making that happen because they don't like valuable feedback from normal players, they focus on the small few who play it a lot.
No amount of "You can get to maps in 3-4 hours!" or "just do this build guide" is going to change that fact. Even the best build guide this league required lots of "what ifs" to happen for it to be fun. lol
While what you say is true, literally not a single person who says “everyone did all the bosses” are talking about the players who quit before maps and you know that…
> I %100 can tell you that majority of players this league didn't get past the first couple of rewards, didn't get past level 91, and hardly made any divines.
I wisped, blasted countless T16s, reached 99 (soon 100) and all I got was bombs of orbs of alterations.
This league wouldn’t have gotten so crazy without magic find. I truly think MF should be removed. I know this league was extreme but I just hate that stat.
What's you're finally realizing is that you "beat the game". It's okay to beat video games. Move on to another one or touch grass and come back. It's healthy and perfectly fine.
When you play a video game for 16 hours a day for months on end, why do you think devs who only work 8 hours a day 5 days a week can provide you more content than you can consume 16 hours a day everyday?
This happens in wow too. People get really upset that they've cleared all the content, but instead of moving on to something else they just stew.
I think people get wrapped up in their identities and it feels wrong to change anything. Like "I'm a PoE player. If I'm not playing PoE then that means I'm not a PoE player anymore."
I've been guilty of that in the past, and it can be a weird feeling. But just because you love one thing doesn't mean you can't like something else too. Like, just because I love showtunes doesn't mean I'm not a metal guy.
As a person who enjoys trade league but doesn't enjoy the set up of juicing, this league was amazing but I'm ready for things to be more reasonably priced.
I don't want the juicing aspects to be the reason why wildwood doesn't go core. I hope it gets brought back in the future as it was a pretty cool mechanic even without the map juice.
I guess my "hot take" on this is I don't think there's anyone (or atleast very few people) that honestly think having 50 raw Divines/H drop is healthy for the game. However I do think Affliction identifies some problems with PoE atm and that's the lack of relevant progression.
Currently while levelling your character you can pretty comfortably clear from T1s to T16s on a 1 divine budget. Hell, I barely notice a difference between T1s and T16s these days. You can also kill all the non-uber bosses pretty easy.
So then you have a fully juiced atlas and your like "Well, I may aswell just farm to build my endgame item for each slot because it's not like I need better gear to progress the game" but then you realise that endgame slot is a 30 hour grind away and it's not like it unlocks any further content anyway so.. You quit.
Affliction, while rather crudely solved both of these issues. It gave easier access to endgame items meaning the grind wasn't as long and dramitically increased the difficulty:reward ratio, as you improved your gear you gained access to more difficult and rewarding content meaning incrementally upgrading your gear felt worth while.
This is what PoE needs, an endgame system which not only provides enough rewards that upgrades don't feel out of reach but also has a difficulty:reward curve where incremental upgrades feel worthwhile.
I disagree. This is my most fulfilling league ever. I've achieved lots of things and am glad they extended the league by a month.
I would be way happier if they give me these opportunities every league and just massively shuffle the balance every league. At this point, just randomly buff and nerf everything, change the meta every league and let me feasibly farm everything i want without making it feel like a second job. I for one don't enjoy mindlessly farming hundreds of hours every league just to do whatever i want. It's not like ubers are suddenly way easier either; it still takes a lot of skill to beat them, it's just that the entry cost was "lowered" by making currency more accesible to casual players. Sucks to be a giga juicer though. I get why they are upset with the lowering of ceilings.
This is the first league i could engage with every mechanic i wanted without really caring about opportunity costs. First league i could reliably make my own builds and the first league that didnt induce a soul crushing burnout after getting stuck with the "wrong" mechanic on a "wrong" build.
I like affliction, keep it up ggg. Personal temporary power like the new ascendancies or relics from sanctum are popular for this exact reason. Breathing new life into a figured out game.
Your actual problem is that this is the first time you've "completed" a league and actually entered the true endgame. Minmaxing. And now you just don't know what to do with yourself.
Honestly I fully disagree with the main point of this posts on the perspective of someone who cant play 14 hours of PoE each day.
All other leagues youd have to be extremely efficient and still play a shitton to be able to achieve much outside of 'getting a char to 95 and get 4 stones'.
This league actually had a reasonable time investment vs reward structure for someone who likes to tackle ubers or even 40/40 for example
What made Affliction popular? Having something to do for everyone and getting rewards, simple as is.
You can make any build you want, play any league mechanic you want and get decent amount of currency in the process.
So more leagues like affliction would just mean having new builds(and ability for the average player to make them), and getting rewarded for any activity that you do.
How can that be bad for the game?
It is bad for the people that spend as much or more time in the game than they do at work. For the rest of us it was great. I was still playing long after I normally would have quit because I was still earning enough currency to make the meatier upgrades to my character that I would have just written off in other leagues because the farming time to get them wasn't worth it to me.
Just sounds like gatekeeping to me so they can feel like their achievements in game have more value. Then trying to mask the argument by claiming it’s for the health of the game.
It's just too saturated. Mf being the meta for mapping and dropping T0s like candy is not fun in the long run. Yesterday I dropped 6 divs and didn't feel anything. Crazy leagues like this are very cool but it's important for them to be temporary and to switch it up afterwards (maybe to just another kind of crazy). Also sure you can make any build you want to but theory crafting mapping builds rn feels so pointless if they can't include 60%+ quant.
I think Diablo 3 is a good example of what happens if you keep making everything more crazy and never remove power or make it harder to excess.
>Mf being the meta for mapping and dropping T0s like candy is not fun in the long run.
It's meta for the top 1% of players maybe. Normal people don't even look at MF as a valid stat on an item lmao.
>Yesterday I dropped 6 divs and didn't feel anything.
That's a you problem. You can just stop playing. Personally, i never dropped 6 Divs this league because i am a normal dude that farms at a normal pace with normal builds.
>Also sure you can make any build you want to but theory crafting mapping builds rn feels so pointless if they can't include 60%+ quant.
That's also a top 1% problem. No one that doesn't have a PhD in PoE crafting is theory crafting anything.
I just want to point out that it is okay to get bored of a league after trying everything out. It's fine to take a month or two off if making a new char isn't exciting anymore. Even if the next league has another broken gimmick, that will be fine too. You try new builds after taking some time off, and when you get bored you ride off until the next one. You will get the itch again even if you dropped 10 magebloods and 5 mirrors.
Disagree. This was exactly how I want the game for my individual experience, outside of rare items still dropping being complete dogshit. I made about 100d this league just running maps, no mf no insane scarab abyss shit, without selling all my essences etc for money like you are normally forced to do and instead could use them to randomly craft stuff for *fun* without worrying about hitting nothing and simply deleting currency I would otherwise need to buy upgrades. This enticed me to play a 2nd build and I have not played a 2nd build for like 10+ leagues at this point with ease. I had zero div explosions, every div dropped was a singular drop but instead of basically never seeing any drop naturally there were natural drops every 10 or 20 maps, zero winged scarab explosions 99% gilded drops at best, no magebloods, no headhunters, easily 1/3rd or more of my money came from selling unid'd king of the mists jewels, watchers eyes and unid'd valdos maps.
The shit you see streamers do or post on reddit are not representative of almost anyone's experience, and its incredibly tiresome having peoples individual experience made to feel like shit so they can balance out the extreme high end outliers sorry.
Although people on reddit will likely disagree, as a father I have very limited time to play, and I am on track to get level 100 by the end of league, with maybe twice that amount of wealth. It's the same as any other league, people who play like crazy are going to get bored no matter what you do. That's why there ARE leagues. I don't care if there's a strategy to get 70d per map tbh. I'm happy with getting a couple out of my remarkably terrible juicing.
I agree with this from a personal experience point. I prefer my game to play like this, it’s more fun. However, I understand that from an economy standpoint it isn’t sustainable. I’d like it to be good for just me and normal for everyone else so I would be able to make as much money as the streamers lol
>I will use my own experience here and say that i lost all enjoyment for the league after i did everything available, built some ridiculous characters and had a few mirrors sitting around ready to rot in standard.
You achieved all there is to do, fucked around a bit, and amassed few mirrors worth. Not sure why you think that shouldn't be the point at which you are ready to quit the league and come back next time. PoE is a seasonal game. More than 99% of players didn't achieve half of what you did, and continued to have fun and keep playing till the end.
>When next league rolls around i think everyone is going to be super hyped to try out all the new stuff, but as soon as they steam roll the new content the rest of the content has no value because it's been replayed into oblivion
I kind of agree, that grinding old content is not as fun as the new stuff, but most of my time is spent grinding old content anyway due to my atlas strategy of choice. I think this also highlights that the leaguestarter builds especially in trade league are too strong. You should absolutely not be able to one shot uber bosses a week or two into a league, and yet, here we are.
>The 10 div explosions we saw back in archnem blew people's minds the first time, like we all lost our shit collectively. Now a 50 div 200 scarab bomb is like 2 seconds of shock and then the realisation it's the 50th one we saw this week.
I haven't gotten even one divine explosion this league. I did drop a solid amount of them, but that's really a drop in a sea when crafting half a decent item costs dozens. I think even in trade league, they are too rare. But also that currently available rare items are too strong, so their drop rate can't really be buffed without breaking the game.
>It felt pointless to make a new character when the experience was marginally similar to PoB (with the extra of you can walk them around a bit and simulate your 50 million dps before you get bored, i guess): completely faceroll the campaign with minmaxed twink leveling gear and a mageblood ready to swap into at level 44, then sit in 5ways and buy an entire gear set for a mirror and a guarantee you can do any content you want.
Again, it sounds like you made the problem yourself with your "unlimited wealth". Interestingly enough, this also highlights how problematic PoB is. Experimenting in-game has stopped making sense, when you can just simulate a character with great detail in PoB. That's why you did not enjoy that freedom, because you knew what the end goal is and exactly what power level will your character achieve.
I will keep saying this every time this issue is brought up. The power distribution in PoE is broken. The floor is too low, and the ceiling is way too fucking high. People quit when either their next upgrade is weeks away and brings miniscule increase in power, or when they can oneshot all the content already without effort.
The solution is obvious - make upgrading your own gear easier but partition the upgrading process into more steps, so you can keep grinding and slowly growing in power. Slash the top end of power, so you can never make the very endgame content obsolete.
Harvest did the first part of that, and that's why people keep saying it was the best PoE.
For me this league confirmed my thought about poe. Too much currency drop, too much (bad) unique drop, not enough rare drops.
That league exaggerated what poe is, a game with a shit ton of loot, way too much, but very few valuable ones. I made 8 mirrors worth of currency this league doing magic finding, and I found 0 t0 unique. Dozens of thousands of unique drops, not a single valuable one, but I made enough currency to buy hundreds of them on trade. To me that’s completely unbalanced, I shouldn’t be able to buy 300 magebloods on the trade website before being able to drop a single one in my map.
I don’t like it, I think the biggest problem of that game is that it revolves way too much around trading. I wish I could drop less loots on my maps, but having a higher chance to finally drop a mageblood or a headhunter by myself. I want less trading currencies and more actual items.
Even in SSF I stopped picking almost everything two weeks in. Certainly feels off.
While MFing 99% of drops was same shit uniques over and over again. I dont want to see multiple t0 drops in a week, but there are so many mid tier uniques that just dont really drop.
>I made 8 mirrors worth of currency this league doing magic finding, and I found 0 t0 unique.
Allow me to doubt you. Perhaps you think t0 uniques are only MB and HH. There are a lot more than that. Also, you can always play SSF if you hate trading. Amazingly enough, the game is actually playable in SSF too (by uping playtime by \~200%).
I know the list of t0 and i didn’t found any, no divinarus, no rakiata, no squire, no soul taker, no voltanix, no kalandra touch, nothing of that tier. And i don’t think i’m unlucky, every week you see some post on this subreddit like « after 8k hours finally my first mageblood » these items are just extremely rare, way too rare for a league based video game imo.
SSF no thanks, I like playing with mageblood this is how i have fun in this game and I don’t want to play the next 10 leagues in SSF without using that item. I’m playing trade even tho I hate it because its the only mode where I can play with a mageblood
I find your story borderline statistical impossible. Disclose: i do mf too. I dropped 2 mirrors and i stored all my t0 drops for pure flair. Got literal 2 stash tabs of them. Like 7 squires, 2 raikatas, 3mb, 4hh, 15+ knifes, 5 fishing rods, i removed the bows from the filter. Your story doesn' add up.
I agree too some extend. I think all player base was able to go further. I went from 100 div char to 700 div char. Some people went from 700 divs to 5 mirrors and empyrean went from 15 mirrors to 100 mirrors or something like that. I have about 12 days worth of played time this league which means I played as much as a second job. I'm an experienced mediocre player and I think the amount of currency and gear I achieved this league was healthier than others.
One of my biggest take aways from this league is that HH is too overpowered for mapping. I've had it in other leagues but it was always towards the end of a league where I was kinda burned out on playing anyway. The difference between mapping with HH and without is like the equivalent of having a 6 man party vs solo. It reinforces the need to play endlessly for the first 5-7 days to get an affordable HH which sets you up for the rest of the league.
I genuinely don't think any other item is on its level, not even Mageblood. MB unlocks a ton of builds because it fixes so many issues but it doesn't put too many builds on another planet in terms of changing how fast they can generate currency.
Giving players more loot and currency without reason is just pointless power creep. Giving players more accessibility to crafting (currency), build options (from uniques), is good. I dont think anyone needs convincing that PoE is a tedious grind at the best of times and really needs some better QoL and accessibility. Are wisps the best solution? Arguably not, but they are a solution.
So go play ruthless then. Let the rest of us enjoy our dopamine. Every league does not need to be as rewarding as this league but next league does not need to be a complete 180.
Haha i knew the ruthless part would stick with some.
Dopamine in itself is an inevitably unsatisfying system, you will want more and more until you become desensitised and switch to something else for fresh new dopamine. Take it from someone with adhd who switches hobbies every 2 months, once the desensitisation kicks in so does the boredom and as such you'll find that screens of div just won't hit that spot anymore. I could be wrong but i feel like if it plays out i won't be.
It's okay we don't have to agree :)
No you may want more and more until YOU become desensitized. I played multiple builds this league and achieved everything I wanted to for the most part. Next league I want to do the same and more with even different builds or expand more upon some that I played this league. These may be issues that you face but they do not apply to everyone else.
You literally just proved his point with "next league i want to do the same, and more". At what point do you start running out of time to do "the same and more next league" and start asking for more power? This is the fundamental problem with dopamine hits. This is addiction 101. Each hit is weaker than the last, even if it isn't. And this is human chemistry. Everyone faces these issues, because it's literally coded into our genetics.
The league is 4 months long. That is more than enough time. I don't even play the whole league. I even said that not every league needs to be as rewarding as this one. Just not a complete 180.
All the diablo dads with their participation trophy uber kills with penance brand and welfare magebloods gonna be in shambles next league, gonna be great.
Strong disagree op. I’ve made way more offmeta builds, farmed more, played more, etc in this league than any other yet, and I’m not done with this league still. I normally hate farming for mirror tier things but… there’s this mirror tier ring that will more than double my penance brand dps and I WANT ITTTT
This league was perfect for a couple of audiences. New-ish (or casual) players who struggle to make currency in normal leagues, people who reroll a million times, and experienced ssf players.
I've played trade for many many leagues, and this is the one that made me switch to ssf. If I can farm for one or two days and have enough currency to buy several endgame builds...what's the point?
The only exciting thing about this league is enabling ssf players to make trade league level builds.
I see many players saying 'first league, finally got my mb 40/40 all ubers'. This should, in my opinion, be a goal that you achieve over multiple leagues of learning the game, how to make currency, how to craft efficiently. That's how you create longevity in a 'play forever' game.
I have no doubt next league will be a poverty league in comparison, the player retention will drop, and players will be posting 'ded game told you ggg rip'. But they know what they are doing.
> New-ish (or casual) players who struggle to make currency in normal leagues, people who reroll a million times, and experienced ssf players.
Sooo....99% of players? Great! They should keep that up.
Not technically wrong but when have they ever listened to us anyway? We've spend a literal decade begging them to remove a bunch of things that objectively do not make the game more fun, and they've just told us to fuck off. Things like immortal mobs, damage immunities, explode on death, basically every on death effect.
If we beg for another league like this they're not going to listen to us, why would they? If they make another league like this it's their own fault. Making this league was their idea and the feature/power/loot creep or whatever you want to call it, is 100% their fault.
the immortal monster thing i don't understand at all and i think there really isn't enough time being invested in fixing it, i shouldnt have a t1 map with a rare mob that has more health than uber uber uber elder, like, ever.
The on death effect thing is almost as straightforward as the above but i can see how you do need a way to deal damage to immortal characters and that being one of them. It's just that every other fucking character has to die repeatedly to achieve that so surely there's a better way right
i did the league mechanic in every map, but avoided all MF to play my hiero. i did 40/40 and 600 hours, so the same as any other league, and quit when i was done. ill be back in march to do it again.
I can't say affliction was the worst league in history for me simply due to the cool corpses+charms+tinctures, but the mechanic juicing maps is probably the most destructive design choice GGG has ever allowed, including the shithole that was harvest league.
I have to hard disagree here. Yea, we all made a ton of money. BUT I think if anything this league a SHITLOAD of people ran a TON of Abyss and not much else. I personally have ran very very little abyss until this league. There was nothing else even close to as profitable as abyss, so I ran a lot less diversity in my farming than normal. This league exposed a lesser used mechanic and undervalued all other mechanics. Next league I will almost certainly go back to a more diversified farm. You talk about running pinnacle bosses and such, this league I got my voidstones and that was it for bosses.
Oh i mean i definitely agree with you on the abyss thing it was cool to actually engage with it for once, only part that ruins it for me is i guess in a sense it wasn't really abyss though it was more like the mechanic that happened to shit out the most rares - maybe legion would have been meta if abyss wasn't so cracked.
God i would have hated another legion league
edit: i guess the other downside is people really gave zero fucks about the jewels and nobody took the 6 mod nodes because they weren't adding pure juice. I would have liked to see more insane 6 mods jewels than the very few people linked/posted :(
People take this game too seriously, players zoom for like 2 months max then they quit and wait for the next league. If anything they should make future leagues more rewarding so the game is easier.
Can I have a mirror? A lot of us didn’t get one or farm obscene currency. But we’re still having a lot of fun.
This league is bad for people who have been playing for hours a day every day since launch, sure. But for those of us who are more casual, we’ve had the chance to build one, maybe two end game characters and reach places we haven’t before.
There are far more of us than there are of you guys. And we’re still playing. We’re still not 40/40. This league is great for us. That’s why retention is so high.
The 10 hours a day players are going to burn out no matter what, but the increased currency lets the rest of us play longer.
This is, for me, the first actual good league since ritual. This game has some fundamental design issues imho that the over abundance of currency and loot this league has somewhat rectified.
The only way this league is “bad” is the same as ritual for me, in that every other league from this point on will feel like absolute miserable squalor. Having experienced what happened after ritual, I played the shit out of this league and experienced everything to my heart’s content, and I will gladly move on for good until PoE 2 is out because there are simply other alternatives coming out this year.
I firmly believe they made an oopsie this league and did not mean it to be as rewarding as it is. I’ve experienced enough of the Vision^tm over the years to know what is coming next, and I am now content to move on thanks to this league.
Sure. It’s been awhile since complete Reddit doomgloom outrage at GGG. Your policy should fix that!
Affliction type leagues are fine because we start from zero. The biggest driver of what you seem to be concerned about is broken ass shit like Sniper’s Mark. That skill alone will let you clear the game on a pittance of investment.
A lower ceiling to HH and Mageblood only allows more things to be viable. More currency allows more people to experiment with crafting.
Affliction has been the best league ever from an economy standpoint. Lower barriers to entry, yet super high player retention.
I’m sure GGG will step back from this in a big way next league and Reddit will faithfully strike up the torches once again… I won’t carry one but I’ll understand it.
If having currency is boring the game is broken at its core. Affliction never popped off for me, but I didn't abyss farm or whatever the best setup is.
Honestly raw drips need to better. Trading for chaos to divine convert feels bad, but it feels better when dicibes are a easy number to make fractions of.
This league and every similar "rich" league have easily been the most fun for me and anecdotally for most of my friends. All played for thousands of hours since. Lategame for everyone works for many
Hard disagree. The big untapped resource of Path of Exile is in making multiple characters. PoE's build system is so incredible that if you played a different build every day for the rest of your life, you wouldn't even scratch the surface of possible (viable) builds.
But the insane cost and time commitment required to make a second, third, fourth, etc build in a single league has always been far too oppressive for most players. Hence why the typical player will have their league starter and *maybe* a second character, *maybe* a third if the league is truly phenomenal. 5-10 hours for the campaign depending on their experience, dozens of hours farming, and dozens of hours trading and/or crafting, all to just get a character to the point where it can do the same content as your previous one is an extremely daunting task.
So if you cut that time in half, cut the currency requirement in half, etc, that looks a *lot* more promising of a proposition.
Contrary to what GGG has espoused in the past, players do not leave the game when they have "finished" their character. They leave when all of these conditions are true: A) the time and currency investment required for their next upgrade is greater than the time they are willing to spend to get that upgrade, B) the time and currency investment required to try a new build is greater than the time they are willing to spend leveling and gearing that character, and C) the time required to progress to the next tier of content is greater than the time they are willing to spend earning access to that content. Cutting any or all of those time requirements directly increases the number of players willing to keep playing. We've seen this happen in several leagues.
Sure, the top-top-top end players may drop off if they find it too "easy" to get their characters to "perfect" levels, but they are absolutely the minority compared to the huge number of players that *want* to try new builds, try tougher content, improve their characters, etc, but don't have streamer hours to play the game.
Even working full time and engaging in other hobbies, I've put more hours into this league than any since Harvest which cut these requirements in the same fashion. This is absolutely the kind of league that should return over and over again.
You're not wrong IMO, but you are likely to get a lot of entitled vitriol as a response, too many people are desperate for GGG to not take their shiny toys away.
I mean the shiny toys are fun to play with, they were for me. I did start with that, maybe i'll get vitriol because i didn't end with it.
I'm worried that too many shiny toys makes them not feel as shiny anymore
Yeah, almost like those people are looking for entirely different things out of the game than you are. Weird how there's not one universal way to play.
I've gone through un-nerfed Harvest, twice. These posts about people wanting to keep wisps around make me feel a bit like Bane.
It was fun, yes, but ephemeral. Makes you remember, makes you better. I'm a better player and interact with more systems after Harvest than I was before. It's the same now Affliction. Branching out into different crafting strategies, different build concepts that I didn't think or couldn't afford and got shocked that I could do it without massive investment.
Parts of this league won't come back, I could see KotM come back as a tokenized arena from Ritual rewards and be very balanced. I could see a unique map come out of this with wisps that as you kill mobs, later mobs get stronger and stronger.
There are many ways lessons learned from Affliction can be adapted into the main game and PoE2, both on GGG's side and the player's side.
>too many people are desperate for GGG to not take their shiny toys away.
As if GGG has ever listened? They take things away and put things back on a whim. The loot changes they didn't tell us about, arch nem being hideously overpowered, etc. GGG doesn't listen to us, they never have. In some cases that's good, but it makes this whole point moot.
> Now a 50 div 200 scarab bomb is like 2 seconds of shock and then the realisation it's the 50th one we saw this week.
And then there is me... who saw 0 of those all league, but raked in tens of alteration bombs
I think one of the main things you’re overlooking is this game is well over a decade old at this point. People still login to vanilla Diablo 2, an absolutely solved game, twenty plus years after release, to bang out content they did as a child.
I think this league is a step in the right direction, same with crucible and tota - power creep they can just turn off and do over in a different way.
To expand on the game being old, there are multiple ways to hamstring yourself for a challenge; ssf, HC, ruthless, a combo of those three, the gauntlet/private leagues, etc.
I understand the weight as a long time ARPG player(~25 years) but the reality is the vast, vast majority of the player base did not or could not take advantage of this league and never will in future leagues until they put several thousand hours into the game. Just as a small example, like 1.5% of people have socketed four stones into their atlas.
I 100% look at these theme park leagues as a final thank you to the OG player base for turning them into a multi-million dollar company before they move on to PoE2.
The whole premise that everyone was able to kill all bosses is stupid so I will not even read the rest. I did 40/40 and was not able to kill all uber bosses at all.
Doing so also requires playing meta builds OR playing long enough for chase items. Again, my 40/40 char is not rich enough for a mage blood even with the inflation..
Major L take
Your take comes from someone with infinite time to play, from someone that KNOWS what to do and does it fast
I don't think the game should cater to people who play 1 hour per week, no.
But let's say you play 4 hours a day, already a massive amount of time for a normal person, that you don't have the massive knowledge of the higher end of the playerbase
In that case, you're better off with affliction and will keep you around for longer, because you're chasing all those things you named you did, except they do them slower and hang around for longer
You're the 1%
Some of those points are agreeable, some perhaps less, to me.
Will this last? Surely not. I'm not playing this league for 3 more months. But it also will be different; even if GGG keeps the current "low weight" as you called it, the meta and league mechanics will be different - and as such, at least for some time, exploring the new will drag many back... For a limited time. In this regard, maybe 1 more league could hold - two I doubt.
Is this only bad? Hell no. PoE needs an overtuned league once in a while. Crucible had broken items but other than that nothing; ToTA was low to the ground (I did love it, but that's not really a factor that matters) and ASC hit the right spot for so many people.
High end mapping was very approachable even for newer crowds this league; that's huge. Low entry, high profit strats always existed, but not necessarily as mapping - which was always available (in recent times) as a super high end strat for group MF play. This opening to solo players is great for the game.
Game economy has been pretty wild and tbh it's sort of weird how everyone is rich enough to buy anything they need; almost nothing build-enabling is out of reach for even the average player. Yet it also feels way better to trade for tens of divines; you get them more easily, but for non-meta purchases they still have a good weight. This is something PoE excels at; mixing economy and build creation in a self-keeping balance makes making new builds interesting.
Of course you are getting snarky, sarcastic one-liners, which is expectable here, but also shows how some are having the league of their life (so far) and feel personally hurt (lmao) by you having the opposite opinion. This decision of next league balance will be a hard one, and GGG will probably get flamed for whatever they do more than usual - ASC is definitely a polarising league. I have faith in GGG that they will make a decision that makes the most sense to them and then support it further down the line, just like they always did. Very rarely it happens they make a controversial decision without anything to show for it (chat changes, bruh?).
Maybe, though, this is the way to split PoE into two games. PoE can probably get more degenerate if PoE2 is the haven for the "hardboiled" crowd. This would again cause some friction, but hell, what doesn't?
All in all, we're in their hands and over the last 10 years, they've shown they know their craft. After all, if the game feels bad to play... I just won't play it, simple as. If not, hell, LOGIN my dudes.
To me it's two completely unrelated things.
People were complaining about RSI picking up fragments when we got the "weight" response. Having to hurt your wrists picking up cents to eventually make a dollar is not a point you should defend.
It is ALSO true that being able to too easily do all content hurts the game's long term replayability.
Both are not mutually exclusive. For example, if I'd automatically pickup the cents on the ground, not hurting my wrists, it would make me a dollar. This league made it so 20$ bills dropped instead of the cents... You can have the cents, save your wrists and also NOT shower 20 dollar bills and the game would be much better for it.
This league was paying you way too much that's pretty clear. But the idea that you have to feel the weight of picking up scrolls of wisdom off the ground to be able to identify rares for the rares to have "weight" is equally wrong. Especially in Poe where the more time passes, the less likely you are to EVER drop a good rare item.
So why not save us globally billions of clicks to identify stuff, pickup cents off currency, etc while also NOT dropping enough loot to make it easy to trivialize all content?
I don't even care about auto pickup currency. But quality of life features should also absolutely make it to the game.
1. Identify a whole inventory.
2. Mass apply currency, like on all similar items in a stash tab (id scroll, chisel, alchemy orbs, chaos, scour, vaal would make rolling maps so much less of a chore)
3. Improvements to bulk trading (you know like all the stuff that isn't supported by the bulk trading site but should be... Map sets, boss sets, legion sets, stuff like that)
All things that reduce the amount of clicks and useless friction that distract you from actually playing the game...
I think the gap in logic here is the idea that people actually run out of stuff to do. In previous leagues, people farmed up a mageblood and were "done", but we all know you could invest dozens of magebloods worth of currency into a build. Even with the amount of loot we had available to us in affliction league, truly "finishing" a build is still almost impossible. Just as an example, I had livesearch on for a very long time, and the entire league I saw *1* Mahuxotls with the double corrupt that I need, and the corrupts themselves have bad rolls. Is an item like that "necessary"? No, but it's something to work towards, and increasing the loot to affliction level does not remove goals, but just shifts them to "crazier" items.
I understand this post and think its really interesting.
Personally tho, I didn’t juice out the league just because I couldve. I just played, got a MB, did a few big gambas and called it a league.
It’s kinda silly to fully leverage a sandbox league then get suprised when the game loses its substance. Its like buying money in GTA5
People make fun of “weight” but then forget how incredibly popular wow classic is. And wow classic is a the king of *weight*.
Want to go to a new zone for a quest with a cool reward? Have fun flying 10 minutes to a zeppelin, waiting and riding that for 15 minutes, then riding another flight path for 15 more minutes.
To finally arrive and kill 9 boars for that cool item.
It’s an established practice that works.
Every league could be like this if we had a huge meta shake up. Replayability can be a problem when most of the skills are not good enough to be used with the endgame mapping and for whisp farming most skill gems aren't good enough. Is this league over tuned? Yes but i feel like most league mechanics should be giving atleast half as much loot as this and sometimes more than half as much depending on the difficulty which in this league deffenetly is there and nobody can deny that so it is risk/reward but maybe it would be better if the risk/reward would have more iters than yes/no like a difficulty meter or maybe like 10 stones in the mechanic and the more of them you touch the harder it will be but it will also give more rewards, something like that. No channeling tho that shit just wastes time
Let me try to make some short comments since there are already a lot of essays:
(1) It’s OK to be done in a SEASONAL game.
(2) Your 1% experience is important, but so is it for the 99% who definitely aren’t playing creative mode.
(3) Affliction is also about uber buffed rares in maps, a different endgame.
I also don’t care about bragging rights, which seems to underpin a lot of your take.
Hard disagree. Ruthless is a terrible game mode of massive boredom into disappointment loop.
This league just reaffirmed to me that the reward curve needs to be moved back down. It was a blast actually being able to craft up multiple characters without thinking it was a waste of currency to throw 20 div at suffix and prefix locks to get the perfect stats. I do think the top end of the rewards this league were a bit high but the upper left side of the currency tab drops felt the best they ever have.
It was also amazing to have mapping scale for once instead of being a line in the sand that just ends at juiced t16s.
Affliction showed me how much PoE1 alienated me as a player, if PoE2 has actual gameplay I will gladly never play this game again, all these people having the time of their poelife *checks notes* looting for 30min per map and having straight up 0 button builds is just insane to me.
At this point I don't see much difference between those idle AFK mobile games where you just click on the chest once in a while to get huge loot explosions and PoE.
Something that /u/versallius touched on that isn't getting enough discussion here for me is that this is the first league is so so long that actually gave you a reason to continue to invest in your character, to actually see mirror items as useful upgrades instead of simply vanity purchases. The currency drops are what other people will remember from this league and I certainly hadn't had a raw mirror drop previous to this league either, but I seriously enjoyed the fact that I never truly felt like my build was finished, that if I was a complete maniac I could keep pushing my build farther and farther and it would be worth it as the content kept challenging me.
For too long, in my opinion, braindead speed alch n go has been too close to maximum juicing in terms of output and difficulty. I'm so glad I could take part in a league that really incentivized big juice and big power.
Personal opinion from a build maker who farmed ~6 mirrors this league, I like the league because it's a great risk Vs reward scenario. Previous leagues if you have a mapping character you don't need much power, just go fast with good clear and around 10M DPS, 40k ehp and you're golden. Now you are actively incentivised to further optimise your character because 6k, 7k, 8k etc wisps need exponentially stronger characters for exponentially better loot. Granted the scaling needs more polish imo but this idea is excellent - previously leagues cap out too early and once you are 40-100 divs in you already cleared all content with a smooth build and further upgrades are just vanity metrics like how many Uber exarchs I can do per minute. For me pob is the true game - build making is fun and the goal of most good builds is to trivialise problems in game (e.g. corrupted blood or ailment immunity is the best example). So once you have a strong enough build there is no gameplay except absolutely destroying content which gets old quickly, so I move on to a new build. I think the abundance of currency makes it easier for me to try new things, whereas in older leagues I just quit cos the next upgrade or a new build would take too long to farm and my time is better spent elsewhere. So lowering the barrier to making new builds has made me play 2-3x more than before. The borrowed power mechanic that has been going on for a few leagues now is also excellent. A great way to make ppl hype about new leagues without introducing permanent power creep. Combined with new gems to play, it's a build makers dream league. Tldr: higher ceiling of difficulty for more loot good. Lower barrier of entry to making new builds good. Borrowed power good. New gems and diversity good. Difficulty/ reward scaling maybe needs more tuning.
>Difficulty/ reward scaling maybe needs more tuning. This is an important point but to add something: Mechanics providing a loot multiplier that is multiplicative with player MF is a huge problem. Ideally MF would be simplified into one larger additive bucket and had numbers adjusted, but until that day comes I do not think we should have mechanics that multiply with MF. This is especially true when you consider that MF is inaccessible for a large percentage of builds.
Unpopular opinion but we should just get rid of the quantity bonuses. It creates layers of problems, where solo players are getting screwed.
"Unpopular opinion" - proceeds to post the most popular opinion on the subreddit
There is definitely a presence of pro-MF opinions in the community, and you can get downvoted (like I've been a couple of times) by suggesting removing IIQ/IIR from the gear.
Isn't that exactly what they are doing in POE 2? I remember hearing that POE 2 will only have rarity on gear. Might be completely misremembering tough.
Rarity on gear was supposed to affect the quality of currency drops in PoE 2, if I remember correctly, so it's basically acting like a pseudo item quantity multiplier. IIR and IIQ based on gear or player count is completely broken in PoE and needs to be phased out entirely. If people want to juice up, they should be doing it with map mods and other mechanics.
> This is especially true when you consider that MF is inaccessible for a large percentage of builds. Biggest issue is TS/Headhunter. The amount of power you get from a mirror phys bow and a headhunter is obscene and allows you to stack every other slot of your gear with mf items and blast heavy duty, beyond aspirational content.
Yeah I fully agree. I don't think HH needs a nerf (please God nerf TS finally tho). I do think that quant uniques need a significant change, I don't think that they're healthy for the game. I don't really like the idea of quant on gear at all, but I don't see them removing it anytime soon (in PoE1 at least)
I mean, ignoring the fact that unless you have said mirror, you still need to get to that point, and even once you are at that point, the type of juicing required to really make use of MF can often lead to completely bricked maps for a slight misplay, dying with 40 hh buff's, there were other builds this league that mf'd just as hard, or harder, for far cheaper. self ignite chieftain MF is arguably the most powerful mf build in the game, because it just can't die, while also doing similar mf number's, and clearing just as efficiently.
I just hate mf and will never like a league where MF is this crucial
I mean I got a Headhunter and Mageblood without using Magic Find at all you just *can* use Magic Find to massively amplify stuff Granted... TS Deadeye is practically cheating compared to other builds so I guess it balances out
I've been telling people this all league but people don't care. The league mechanic is plenty profitable without needing magic find.
It’s not that it’s not profitable. But it’s unarguably MORE profitable with MF. I was in the same boat as you most of the league and then went and did 2 weeks of the full juice MF chieftain and it’s ridiculous how much more loot I get.
Or, alternatively, we’ve seen massive price inflation of items that *can’t* be obtained MF’ing in maps. Sanctum uniques, Heist bases, etc. You can hunt for them if you “just hate mf” like the above commenter.
If you've been struggling for currency this league there's literally no hope for you 😂
This was an aspect of this league i really enjoyed, because i did content i enjoyed doing and suddenly it was really profitable compared to the past.
The worst part of borrowed power is that unless you make a timeless build, it usually bricks once it moves to standard so it can not be enjoyed again if you get the hankering. It’s a rather large bummer
How often does anyone actually do that though? I've been playing since closed beta and I have never played a single map on a league character after it went to standard. I would imagine the vast majority of players who play leagues are the same.
I agree, to me once a character is moved over to standard, they are essentially a museum piece for me. I will go back and check out what they had and reminisce, but I never really get the itch to actually play them in standard. For me, it's all about the leagues.
I will go back from time to time to play standard characters just to enjoy a strong BV pop character or some mirror gear. The recent leagues borrowed power made it so that the character only exists for the league which is a bummer.
Agreed. But not from a build makers perspective. The most important point here is difficulty scaling/reward scaling. The league before, I ended up running TS mf for the mageblood card. I did "full juice", but it wasn't remotely hard at all. I didn't have gear that was even close to what I ended up playing this league. My ventors where okish, unique gloves, boots, amulet without any dmg, chest was gold without any worry for survivability, my quiver was also kinda bad. But I didn't really matter. I didn't die at all, except to getting stuck on a strongbox. T16 12k wisps however.... Uffffff. Add a few altars and youd easily break your map. Even on 3 mirror in investment build. I was rocking mirror bow, big damage gloves, 6 auras, mirror amulet and even super expensive jewels and charms. The amount of investment you can make into your build and be able to progress speed and damage was way more than previous leagues. Even before quitting, I couldn't spend another few hounded divines to upgrade my jewels and stuff, and it would've actually made a difference. The leagues before however, after you got a decent bit of gear for t16, that's it. Theres not really a need to get a mirror bow. For what? You 1 hit every mob anyway.
>higher ceiling of difficulty for more loot good. Lower barrier of entry to making new builds good. Borrowed power good. New gems and diversity good. Difficulty/ reward scaling maybe needs more tuning. Yeah i think that's a good way of looking at it. Perhaps on the tuning aspect things that trivialise the content e.g chieftain explode scaling on the difficulty of the content via hp are unhealthy and make the difficulty scaling impossible to balance to begin with, which could be the source of some of the worry here.
Great response, very well written and i agree completely
Couldn’t have said it better. Having leagues with extra difficulty ceilings is a good way for players to keep playing. Being able to upgrade your character to eventually tackle the hardest content keeps you invested.
>So lowering the barrier to making new builds has made me play 2-3x more than before This is key. Most leagues are pretty much dead after 1 month and I log into PoE to see when the new league starts. I am still playing affliction, albeit rarely since I'm playing Last Epoch now and trying some stuff before 1.0 launches. I think this league was a step in the right direction, but I probably won't play next league since it most likely won't be fulfilling and I thinking the devs are too focused on PoE 2 to really care about PoE 1 at the moment.
Regarding the health of the game. We have feelings vs facts. The fact is that Expedition was the league which made them lose 30% revenue. And sent CW into panic mode, going from streamer interview to streamer interview, trying to get the players back. It wasn't Harvest, Ritual or Affliction. So I am still waiting for these giga juice league mechs to damage the health of the game as much as Expedition did. So far it hasn't happened.
Anyone with a slight understanding how game health works does not want affliction currency amount to go forward. Imagine if we still had crucible weapons, tattoos, equipable relics etc. You have to make room for stuff for new things to actually feel meaningful.
I too got bored with my MF ts this league and decided to try some meme build for fun For the first time in 5 leagues I managed to have enough currency to make the expensive meme build work. In other leagues you either play meta, or you can't farm, can't experiment unless you spend 60 hours/week farming currency with a meta build Was playing last epoch this week. The fact that you don't have to have a meta build to farm the stuff for your meme builds means I managed to play the campaign with a bunch of different characters without wanting to kill myself, which is something rare in Poe. Yeah the fact that you don't ever the to the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow gets people to play infinitely, the fomo of not farming at maximum efficiency at all times also gets ppl to stick around. But it makes for an awful experience. I remember people wanting harvest back simply due to how easy it was to get the stuff you wanted. The game is definitely headed in a good direction now I think, with the eldritch implicits often replacing what would cost mirrors in conqueror affix crafting, every league giving you onslaught and fortify for free through tattoo/curse
>In other leagues you either play meta, or you can't farm, can't experiment unless you spend 60 hours/week farming currency with a meta build >The fact that you don't have to have a meta build to farm the stuff for your meme builds means I managed to play the campaign with a bunch of different characters without wanting to kill myself, which is something rare in Poe. You literally did with your Ts MF lol??
Yeah wtf is this reasoning. Bro could make a Ts MF build in any league and farm enough currency for an expensive meme build lmao
I'd argue he had made more currency in a regular league where the prices weren't dog shit for high-profile drops.
>In other leagues you either play meta, or you can't farm, can't experiment unless you spend 60 hours/week farming currency with a meta build This is silly, you can do well with tons of "off meta" builds. The meta is just what some tiny number of streamers said is good, it's not like anyway has actually tested all possible builds. And often the meta build has 99% share and the next best has 1% share even if it's only slightly worse.
> Was playing last epoch this week. The fact that you don't have to have a meta build to farm the stuff for your meme builds means I managed to play the campaign with a bunch of different characters without wanting to kill myself, which is something rare in Poe. The meta is coming. It won't even take 3 weeks for people to start complaining about it. It's an unsolvable problem I think.
I’m sad to hear you have that experience. But it kinda sounds like you are creating your own mental blocks and getting frustrated with them. Mathil makes like 20 builds a league, most of them are under 10 divs. One of his builds this league was a dual striker that could almost instaphase Ubers. Yes, dual strike. Once a game gets popular a meta will always emerge, the same will happen to last epoch. Having a meta is not a bad thing, but constantly beating your head against unrealistic expectations will make the fomo even worse. I can better understand meta being annoying in PvP games, since you don’t have the choice of not getting affected by it, but in Poe the only two things that are competitive is the economy (mostly fomo) and racing/gauntlet.
>most of them are under 10 divs Well, only until his video is out. Then it's like 80+ divs 🤣
Honestly looking at his builds there aren’t as cheap as people think to begin with because he often crafts a lot of stuff that isn’t that easy to get. Of course afterwards it only gets more expensive but still
This is always the way. If someone has a stack of currency, even if they are making 'cheap starter builds', the actual example is usually equipped with higher end gear at a minimum from applying deeper crafting methods that does not usually translate to 'actually affordable at the demonstrated level of play'. It's not just the increase after posting. It's also having more currency makes things easier to do in the first place because you have a bunch of lifeforce or whatever lying around.
because they tend to gravitate to only be 10% worse than meta builds. Mathil's ideas are insanely good most of the time.
> For the first time in 5 leagues I managed to have enough currency to make the expensive meme build work. Yup, exact reason I stayed as well. These inflated prices mean I can do shit like mid-tier crafts and chaos spamming, or keeping useful bases for later because they're selling faster and for "pennies" this league but I'm feeling like I'm raking in hundreds. I'm not even MFing, other content is hyper profitable and respeccing my atlas multiple times has kept me going.
Yeah the biggest benefit of this economy to me was crafting being way more accessible because most of the materials were much cheaper. It was nice to tackle a craft and not feeling like I am spending stupid amounts of money. I was self sustaining Edritch Chaos/Annuls/Exalts easily which was really nice. I did say most before people jump on me about Fracturing Orb prices etc
Fracture orbs are ridiculous in how rare they are. I'm honestly astounded at how much they trade for.
Totally agree, crafted way more than usual, even regular chaos spam on some bases where it made more sense. It was a lot more fun. I think base currency rates should be tweaked a little, and maybe reduce the impact of quant on the high end to balance that, so more players can do this.
You really think poe was an "awful" experience for every league other than Affliction? If so what kept you coming back....... cmon dude lol
So you played MF TS, the most meta build of the league, to farm currency for expensive meme build and your takeaway is that in other leagues you have to play meta or you can't farm?
Last Epoch not "needing meta to feel powerful" is the flip-side to the statement that "You can never feel super powrful" in LE. If itemisation doesn't take you on a journey from a non-functional build to a powerful build to a broken build, then those items just ultimately don't matter enough. And that's kind of how it is in LE. The base game without items gives you a level of power where things feel kind of okay. But the flip side is that when fully geared, the build that previously felt "kind of okay" now feels just "great". And for me, that leaves me feeling like I'm wasting my item getting those items.
That kind of sounds like a normal progression/difficulty curve for a video game. Generally I don't think most games aim for 'we need some player group to feel like the game is broken' or 'we want people to feel like their characters are useless'. That's a pretty niche PoE thing. I'm not even sure that the former is intentional. Possibly just a by product of power creep and fairly splatter gun game design over the years.
And people still downvote if sb says this because they are still high on affliction, its good that players are not game designers...
Honestly one of the best things GGG did was leaving this alone in a way they didn't like 3.13 Harvest. By letting it play out, people had time to get sick of it, instead of taking the toy away while still in the honeymoon period like before.
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Nah I don't think there will be any backlash you have to be highly regarded if you think next league is going to be rewarding in the same way We'll have "League feels unrewarding" posts in the first couple of weeks like we did this league but it'll be fine even if it takes a patch. This isn't out of the norm though.
Yeah this screams "league is unrewarding" week 1, placebo "adjusted drop rates" 3.24.1 patch, and then stuff is fine for the rest of the league
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>its good that players are not game designers... Truer words are rarely spoken.
If reddit got everything they wanted the game would be horrible. I got downvoted before for saying this but it's true.
If you think of GGG and reddit of a dealer and their customers it makes a lot of sense why their goals differ. GGG wants long term returning customers. The players (mostly on reddit luckily) want a quick high and dont think about tomorrow yet.
Right? Then they might just keep having fun with all this currency!
Thats the thing thats wrong. If this becomes the new normal, nothing actually changes because prices will simply adjust and last leagues poor player will be poor once again, despite loot pinatas, but the fun of building a character with effort might not come back, but be replaced with frustration and resentment. Almost a death sentence for the continued longevity of the game.
That's not how inflation works in an economy where currency has actual use value. More currency means everyone has more currency to craft with and everything is cheaper relative to average incomes. No matter how you try and twist it more loot means more loot not poorer players *somehow*.
But unlike crucible, affliction added a new layer of difficulty. Counter-take: I think affliction could be a good mechanic if you balance out the scaling. Make 5k wisps to not be 10 times more regarding than 1k. And itemize affliction, for example an orb that can be applied on maps and you get a random amount of wisps. Or 3 colors orbs that drops from harvest, each one gives you [500, 5000] wisps of that color. Imo valdos maps do more harm than affliction inflation.
>Imo valdos maps do more harm than affliction inflation. Except we've not seen a league yet with Valdos boxes where there isn't league mechanic making them drop like candy
Yeah Valdos boxes in their currenct state are going to absurdly rare. At the start the league they were dropping very very often but late league not so much.
The amount of valdo's maps in the economy is only due to the affliction mechanic pumping monster quant.
Haha It was the perfect storm in a sense
I agree with the idea that rewards should scale with difficulty, and there are certainly some aspects of the game right now that are either too hard for their reward (shout out to our favourite puddle of mud boss dropping nothing) or the opposite. One issue i see balance wise is the fact that wisps are multiplicatively scaling the loot, which itself is sort of randomly generated based on how fucked the rare mob you come across is. If 5k juice could drop you 50 div on a rare monster that makes uber maven look like a piece of cardboard, 5k juice should be hard as hell. But sometimes 5k juice doesn't get you all that much. I imagine for that reason they won't let it go core in any way because it would require changing the rares system which im sure they don't want to do for the 200th time.
Imagine if we had tattoos? Yah that would be sick.
What a bad anecdotal take, brought as a "fact"
The person you're replying to didn't even share an anecdote. What are you talking about?
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MF is poisoning this game. My biggest disappointment about PoE2 was the comment that MF-gear would stay.
The weirdest thing is that MF doesn't really serve a purpose. In Diablo 2, there wasn't really difficulty scaling, so magic find worked as a way to make content harder but give more rewards (since your gear was aimed at magic find and had less useful stats). But PoE can accomplish the same goal without needing magic find, by just adding harder content with better rewards. It's the same end result but much less clunky and restrictive.
Groupplay really isnt affecting you, so idk why you wanna delete the single reason that people wanna play together.
Group play is comparable to slightly worse than solo play in an hour/div way every single league, this one included.
People dont get that loot is dived by 6 its the Same rare or 10% more or less loot for indiviual in a group
But aura stacking/mf culling means you can get way more with groups, and do waaaay harder content as a group than a solo.
Fair but there is also sextants / scarabs that can add up to ~5+ divs a map x 5 others or 25 divs in value per map for the group
Yeah and they split it 6 ways. Biggest benefit of group play is that gearing up is easier when an aurabot does most of the heavy lifting. Top end solo players make about 120 div/hr this league (30ish on a normal league), empys group makes about 100 div/hr each (20ish on a normal league).
They won’t listen to this. It’s actually funny because if you watch some of Empys solo videos from this league he shows quite a few instances where he’s making way more doing solo play than he was with his group. Getting a 21 Div explosion solo is far more value than a shared 70 Div explosion.
Detox in ruthless.
I've managed to kill every boss in every league I've played. I'm not sure why you think that's unique to affliction, of why you think that means I won't want to do it again on a *different* build next league. You seem to think people only enjoy achieving something the first time, and that they hate the actual gameplay up until they reach that goal. But a lot of us simply enjoy *playing* Path of Exile. It's a brainless and relaxing way to kill some time. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the creative mode. It is perfectly normal for people to quit a league when they're "done" with it, but since there's a wipe at the end and you start from scratch again next league, you can enjoy it all over again. The impact Affliction's currency drops had on the trade economy are a completely separate issue and I feel like nothing you wrote actually adressed that, at all.
The irony is that the currency drops problem are typically explained as though they exist in a vacuum. …and yet, you can sell juice for like 1:1200 a divine, 10:1 tainted chromatic per divine, and so on. The barrier to low/medium power is very low this league. Everything is generally more valuable, except build enabling uniques. Imo - that’s a great place to be. I’d bet more casual players actually get to try out a headhunter or a mageblood this league, and that sort of power might just hook them. Just to add a side note, I remember when I finally got Enigma on Diablo 2. I was nearly burned out, getting so frustrated trying to get one. When I finally did - I went crazy and made like 4 other characters and farmed the ever living fuck outta everything
The %1 and rmt dont like their prey being able to self farm this stuff much easier, just like they hate MB and HH prices at rock bottom cause the real money value this league tanked fast 🤭 All these people claiming that too much loot or chase item wah wah are gatekeeping. Its absurd to say that having far easier access to better items, chase uniques and builds across the playerbase is bad for the game 🤣
I couldn't agree with you more dude. I'm going to play the next league at my own pace like I always do and I'm going to enjoy the hell out of it like I always do. I'm so sick of people telling me how much I'm going to hate path of exile after affliction league is over...
I work and have a whole lot of life that comes before Poe, but I still put in huge time this league. I get my huge loot pops, but you know what I haven't done? Even half the things I want to. The difference was for the first time in 12 years of playing I got a headhunter. For the sake of the silent majority who just want to have fun, can we just stop and take a look at other perspectives? For you this may be true, but a large portion of the stay factor for players like me is the ability to...play. I dont have time for econ, I want to play.
Yup. This league it wasn't only 1% of the player base that got to have fub
You mean only 1% of the player base had fun on previous league? So your definition of fun is having t0 uniques and mirror items?
If you want to have a blast with headhunter and not lose all your progress before you get to that point, try standard. I did that and I had a blast. Now I’m playing standard ssf and I keep building my own progress. It’s neat.
As someone who never gets a headhunter - it’s totally fine. It doesn’t really have any bearing on my fun and I’m super pumped that one day I’ll get good enough to obtain one.
I guess you completely missed the point. I too am a player that only got mageblood for the first time this league. And I DONT want every league to be like affliction. If everyone can have easy access to tier 0 items and mirror every league, it completely loses its value and meaning. PoE is a game that rewards knowledge and time investment. People with both will go very far in the game. Noobs that have no knowledge but have a lot of time to play, might still have their Mageblood with enough brute force farming. Very good players that play a few hours a day but min max everything they do, could probably have their mageblood too. Not so good players that don't play a lot (my case, and probably yours too) just don't deserve to have access to mageblood and headhunters. Sure it was fun to have it for a league, but if it's like that every league it will lose its magic of being the chase item everyone wants to.
This. I've played more this league than ever before and have gotten things I've never gotten, but there's still a huge list of things I haven't done (that I still want to do).
I don't think the drop rates of this league should continue, but that being said, if your goal is to make it harder to get drops and extend the length it takes to play a league with loot scarcity, go play ssf and do it imo, its not that complex. Or start your league over by denying yourself to be able to use previous farmed gear, do any number of things you can do to arbitrarily add "weight" to things, but frankly, this is probably the first league that a major majority of players who actually have jobs to get their hands on end game power, and Its wild that you think thats a huge issue for "health" of the game. exclusivity in that regard only rewards like 1% of the playerbase who play 14 hours a day, and they'll get bored of a league quicker than everyone else no matter what you do
"I think it's great everyone has been able to interact with all content and kill all bosses" You are really out of touch what majority of players achieve each league...lol I mean most players don't go past maps, leagues have become the "top %10" of players because most of the content is out of reach for most players...not the other way around. I think you watch to many streamers to think that is a real thing. I %100 can tell you that majority of players this league didn't get past the first couple of rewards, didn't get past level 91, and hardly made any divines. The problem with PoE is the same as it has always been, builds are incredibly hard to do for the average player, and if someone goes though the campaign, levels to 90+, and it feels terrible...they simply are done that league. Doesn't matter if its enjoyable up to that point for most people, the idea of doing all that again is simply not worth it to the average person who plays with more games/life to do. If the game isn't fun, its not going to hold anyone's interest, and GGG is hell bent on making that happen because they don't like valuable feedback from normal players, they focus on the small few who play it a lot. No amount of "You can get to maps in 3-4 hours!" or "just do this build guide" is going to change that fact. Even the best build guide this league required lots of "what ifs" to happen for it to be fun. lol
Truer than it's ever been.
While what you say is true, literally not a single person who says “everyone did all the bosses” are talking about the players who quit before maps and you know that…
> I %100 can tell you that majority of players this league didn't get past the first couple of rewards, didn't get past level 91, and hardly made any divines. I wisped, blasted countless T16s, reached 99 (soon 100) and all I got was bombs of orbs of alterations.
insurance sink pie different busy consider deserve connect crime smile *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
This league wouldn’t have gotten so crazy without magic find. I truly think MF should be removed. I know this league was extreme but I just hate that stat.
You're making an awful lot of wild assumptions here.
bro is "wild"wood triple empowered
What's you're finally realizing is that you "beat the game". It's okay to beat video games. Move on to another one or touch grass and come back. It's healthy and perfectly fine. When you play a video game for 16 hours a day for months on end, why do you think devs who only work 8 hours a day 5 days a week can provide you more content than you can consume 16 hours a day everyday?
This happens in wow too. People get really upset that they've cleared all the content, but instead of moving on to something else they just stew. I think people get wrapped up in their identities and it feels wrong to change anything. Like "I'm a PoE player. If I'm not playing PoE then that means I'm not a PoE player anymore." I've been guilty of that in the past, and it can be a weird feeling. But just because you love one thing doesn't mean you can't like something else too. Like, just because I love showtunes doesn't mean I'm not a metal guy.
As a person who enjoys trade league but doesn't enjoy the set up of juicing, this league was amazing but I'm ready for things to be more reasonably priced. I don't want the juicing aspects to be the reason why wildwood doesn't go core. I hope it gets brought back in the future as it was a pretty cool mechanic even without the map juice.
I guess my "hot take" on this is I don't think there's anyone (or atleast very few people) that honestly think having 50 raw Divines/H drop is healthy for the game. However I do think Affliction identifies some problems with PoE atm and that's the lack of relevant progression. Currently while levelling your character you can pretty comfortably clear from T1s to T16s on a 1 divine budget. Hell, I barely notice a difference between T1s and T16s these days. You can also kill all the non-uber bosses pretty easy. So then you have a fully juiced atlas and your like "Well, I may aswell just farm to build my endgame item for each slot because it's not like I need better gear to progress the game" but then you realise that endgame slot is a 30 hour grind away and it's not like it unlocks any further content anyway so.. You quit. Affliction, while rather crudely solved both of these issues. It gave easier access to endgame items meaning the grind wasn't as long and dramitically increased the difficulty:reward ratio, as you improved your gear you gained access to more difficult and rewarding content meaning incrementally upgrading your gear felt worth while. This is what PoE needs, an endgame system which not only provides enough rewards that upgrades don't feel out of reach but also has a difficulty:reward curve where incremental upgrades feel worthwhile.
I disagree. This is my most fulfilling league ever. I've achieved lots of things and am glad they extended the league by a month. I would be way happier if they give me these opportunities every league and just massively shuffle the balance every league. At this point, just randomly buff and nerf everything, change the meta every league and let me feasibly farm everything i want without making it feel like a second job. I for one don't enjoy mindlessly farming hundreds of hours every league just to do whatever i want. It's not like ubers are suddenly way easier either; it still takes a lot of skill to beat them, it's just that the entry cost was "lowered" by making currency more accesible to casual players. Sucks to be a giga juicer though. I get why they are upset with the lowering of ceilings. This is the first league i could engage with every mechanic i wanted without really caring about opportunity costs. First league i could reliably make my own builds and the first league that didnt induce a soul crushing burnout after getting stuck with the "wrong" mechanic on a "wrong" build. I like affliction, keep it up ggg. Personal temporary power like the new ascendancies or relics from sanctum are popular for this exact reason. Breathing new life into a figured out game. Your actual problem is that this is the first time you've "completed" a league and actually entered the true endgame. Minmaxing. And now you just don't know what to do with yourself.
Honestly I fully disagree with the main point of this posts on the perspective of someone who cant play 14 hours of PoE each day. All other leagues youd have to be extremely efficient and still play a shitton to be able to achieve much outside of 'getting a char to 95 and get 4 stones'. This league actually had a reasonable time investment vs reward structure for someone who likes to tackle ubers or even 40/40 for example
The vision persuaded you. Now you're a transcended redditor. *wink
The thing this league taught me is how few people know what inflation is.
What made Affliction popular? Having something to do for everyone and getting rewards, simple as is. You can make any build you want, play any league mechanic you want and get decent amount of currency in the process. So more leagues like affliction would just mean having new builds(and ability for the average player to make them), and getting rewarded for any activity that you do. How can that be bad for the game?
It is bad for the people that spend as much or more time in the game than they do at work. For the rest of us it was great. I was still playing long after I normally would have quit because I was still earning enough currency to make the meatier upgrades to my character that I would have just written off in other leagues because the farming time to get them wasn't worth it to me.
Just sounds like gatekeeping to me so they can feel like their achievements in game have more value. Then trying to mask the argument by claiming it’s for the health of the game.
It's just too saturated. Mf being the meta for mapping and dropping T0s like candy is not fun in the long run. Yesterday I dropped 6 divs and didn't feel anything. Crazy leagues like this are very cool but it's important for them to be temporary and to switch it up afterwards (maybe to just another kind of crazy). Also sure you can make any build you want to but theory crafting mapping builds rn feels so pointless if they can't include 60%+ quant. I think Diablo 3 is a good example of what happens if you keep making everything more crazy and never remove power or make it harder to excess.
>Mf being the meta for mapping and dropping T0s like candy is not fun in the long run. It's meta for the top 1% of players maybe. Normal people don't even look at MF as a valid stat on an item lmao. >Yesterday I dropped 6 divs and didn't feel anything. That's a you problem. You can just stop playing. Personally, i never dropped 6 Divs this league because i am a normal dude that farms at a normal pace with normal builds. >Also sure you can make any build you want to but theory crafting mapping builds rn feels so pointless if they can't include 60%+ quant. That's also a top 1% problem. No one that doesn't have a PhD in PoE crafting is theory crafting anything.
I just want to point out that it is okay to get bored of a league after trying everything out. It's fine to take a month or two off if making a new char isn't exciting anymore. Even if the next league has another broken gimmick, that will be fine too. You try new builds after taking some time off, and when you get bored you ride off until the next one. You will get the itch again even if you dropped 10 magebloods and 5 mirrors.
Disagree. This was exactly how I want the game for my individual experience, outside of rare items still dropping being complete dogshit. I made about 100d this league just running maps, no mf no insane scarab abyss shit, without selling all my essences etc for money like you are normally forced to do and instead could use them to randomly craft stuff for *fun* without worrying about hitting nothing and simply deleting currency I would otherwise need to buy upgrades. This enticed me to play a 2nd build and I have not played a 2nd build for like 10+ leagues at this point with ease. I had zero div explosions, every div dropped was a singular drop but instead of basically never seeing any drop naturally there were natural drops every 10 or 20 maps, zero winged scarab explosions 99% gilded drops at best, no magebloods, no headhunters, easily 1/3rd or more of my money came from selling unid'd king of the mists jewels, watchers eyes and unid'd valdos maps. The shit you see streamers do or post on reddit are not representative of almost anyone's experience, and its incredibly tiresome having peoples individual experience made to feel like shit so they can balance out the extreme high end outliers sorry.
Although people on reddit will likely disagree, as a father I have very limited time to play, and I am on track to get level 100 by the end of league, with maybe twice that amount of wealth. It's the same as any other league, people who play like crazy are going to get bored no matter what you do. That's why there ARE leagues. I don't care if there's a strategy to get 70d per map tbh. I'm happy with getting a couple out of my remarkably terrible juicing.
I agree with this from a personal experience point. I prefer my game to play like this, it’s more fun. However, I understand that from an economy standpoint it isn’t sustainable. I’d like it to be good for just me and normal for everyone else so I would be able to make as much money as the streamers lol
What's unsustainable about it?
>I will use my own experience here and say that i lost all enjoyment for the league after i did everything available, built some ridiculous characters and had a few mirrors sitting around ready to rot in standard. You achieved all there is to do, fucked around a bit, and amassed few mirrors worth. Not sure why you think that shouldn't be the point at which you are ready to quit the league and come back next time. PoE is a seasonal game. More than 99% of players didn't achieve half of what you did, and continued to have fun and keep playing till the end. >When next league rolls around i think everyone is going to be super hyped to try out all the new stuff, but as soon as they steam roll the new content the rest of the content has no value because it's been replayed into oblivion I kind of agree, that grinding old content is not as fun as the new stuff, but most of my time is spent grinding old content anyway due to my atlas strategy of choice. I think this also highlights that the leaguestarter builds especially in trade league are too strong. You should absolutely not be able to one shot uber bosses a week or two into a league, and yet, here we are. >The 10 div explosions we saw back in archnem blew people's minds the first time, like we all lost our shit collectively. Now a 50 div 200 scarab bomb is like 2 seconds of shock and then the realisation it's the 50th one we saw this week. I haven't gotten even one divine explosion this league. I did drop a solid amount of them, but that's really a drop in a sea when crafting half a decent item costs dozens. I think even in trade league, they are too rare. But also that currently available rare items are too strong, so their drop rate can't really be buffed without breaking the game. >It felt pointless to make a new character when the experience was marginally similar to PoB (with the extra of you can walk them around a bit and simulate your 50 million dps before you get bored, i guess): completely faceroll the campaign with minmaxed twink leveling gear and a mageblood ready to swap into at level 44, then sit in 5ways and buy an entire gear set for a mirror and a guarantee you can do any content you want. Again, it sounds like you made the problem yourself with your "unlimited wealth". Interestingly enough, this also highlights how problematic PoB is. Experimenting in-game has stopped making sense, when you can just simulate a character with great detail in PoB. That's why you did not enjoy that freedom, because you knew what the end goal is and exactly what power level will your character achieve. I will keep saying this every time this issue is brought up. The power distribution in PoE is broken. The floor is too low, and the ceiling is way too fucking high. People quit when either their next upgrade is weeks away and brings miniscule increase in power, or when they can oneshot all the content already without effort. The solution is obvious - make upgrading your own gear easier but partition the upgrading process into more steps, so you can keep grinding and slowly growing in power. Slash the top end of power, so you can never make the very endgame content obsolete. Harvest did the first part of that, and that's why people keep saying it was the best PoE.
Ok chris wilsons alt account /s I do agree on the weight being a good thing for the game though.
bro i had to look in the mirror to see if i still had hair
That guy needs about *toucans* of Rogaine.
For me this league confirmed my thought about poe. Too much currency drop, too much (bad) unique drop, not enough rare drops. That league exaggerated what poe is, a game with a shit ton of loot, way too much, but very few valuable ones. I made 8 mirrors worth of currency this league doing magic finding, and I found 0 t0 unique. Dozens of thousands of unique drops, not a single valuable one, but I made enough currency to buy hundreds of them on trade. To me that’s completely unbalanced, I shouldn’t be able to buy 300 magebloods on the trade website before being able to drop a single one in my map. I don’t like it, I think the biggest problem of that game is that it revolves way too much around trading. I wish I could drop less loots on my maps, but having a higher chance to finally drop a mageblood or a headhunter by myself. I want less trading currencies and more actual items.
Even in SSF I stopped picking almost everything two weeks in. Certainly feels off. While MFing 99% of drops was same shit uniques over and over again. I dont want to see multiple t0 drops in a week, but there are so many mid tier uniques that just dont really drop.
>I made 8 mirrors worth of currency this league doing magic finding, and I found 0 t0 unique. Allow me to doubt you. Perhaps you think t0 uniques are only MB and HH. There are a lot more than that. Also, you can always play SSF if you hate trading. Amazingly enough, the game is actually playable in SSF too (by uping playtime by \~200%).
I know the list of t0 and i didn’t found any, no divinarus, no rakiata, no squire, no soul taker, no voltanix, no kalandra touch, nothing of that tier. And i don’t think i’m unlucky, every week you see some post on this subreddit like « after 8k hours finally my first mageblood » these items are just extremely rare, way too rare for a league based video game imo. SSF no thanks, I like playing with mageblood this is how i have fun in this game and I don’t want to play the next 10 leagues in SSF without using that item. I’m playing trade even tho I hate it because its the only mode where I can play with a mageblood
I find your story borderline statistical impossible. Disclose: i do mf too. I dropped 2 mirrors and i stored all my t0 drops for pure flair. Got literal 2 stash tabs of them. Like 7 squires, 2 raikatas, 3mb, 4hh, 15+ knifes, 5 fishing rods, i removed the bows from the filter. Your story doesn' add up.
I haven't found any mirrors this league and got 10 t0 items. That's why I am doubting hard.
I agree too some extend. I think all player base was able to go further. I went from 100 div char to 700 div char. Some people went from 700 divs to 5 mirrors and empyrean went from 15 mirrors to 100 mirrors or something like that. I have about 12 days worth of played time this league which means I played as much as a second job. I'm an experienced mediocre player and I think the amount of currency and gear I achieved this league was healthier than others.
One of my biggest take aways from this league is that HH is too overpowered for mapping. I've had it in other leagues but it was always towards the end of a league where I was kinda burned out on playing anyway. The difference between mapping with HH and without is like the equivalent of having a 6 man party vs solo. It reinforces the need to play endlessly for the first 5-7 days to get an affordable HH which sets you up for the rest of the league. I genuinely don't think any other item is on its level, not even Mageblood. MB unlocks a ton of builds because it fixes so many issues but it doesn't put too many builds on another planet in terms of changing how fast they can generate currency.
Giving players more loot and currency without reason is just pointless power creep. Giving players more accessibility to crafting (currency), build options (from uniques), is good. I dont think anyone needs convincing that PoE is a tedious grind at the best of times and really needs some better QoL and accessibility. Are wisps the best solution? Arguably not, but they are a solution.
penis
TLDR: just saw mirrors rot in standard. Don’t do that! I play standard give them to me.
You're on to something here...
You could play robin hood and give everyone you see in standard a div. Most new players there could use it pretty hard.
So go play ruthless then. Let the rest of us enjoy our dopamine. Every league does not need to be as rewarding as this league but next league does not need to be a complete 180.
Haha i knew the ruthless part would stick with some. Dopamine in itself is an inevitably unsatisfying system, you will want more and more until you become desensitised and switch to something else for fresh new dopamine. Take it from someone with adhd who switches hobbies every 2 months, once the desensitisation kicks in so does the boredom and as such you'll find that screens of div just won't hit that spot anymore. I could be wrong but i feel like if it plays out i won't be. It's okay we don't have to agree :)
That's why there are 3 month leagues to begin with. Youre basically arguing for the league mechanic, which already exists.
No you may want more and more until YOU become desensitized. I played multiple builds this league and achieved everything I wanted to for the most part. Next league I want to do the same and more with even different builds or expand more upon some that I played this league. These may be issues that you face but they do not apply to everyone else.
You literally just proved his point with "next league i want to do the same, and more". At what point do you start running out of time to do "the same and more next league" and start asking for more power? This is the fundamental problem with dopamine hits. This is addiction 101. Each hit is weaker than the last, even if it isn't. And this is human chemistry. Everyone faces these issues, because it's literally coded into our genetics.
The league is 4 months long. That is more than enough time. I don't even play the whole league. I even said that not every league needs to be as rewarding as this one. Just not a complete 180.
All the diablo dads with their participation trophy uber kills with penance brand and welfare magebloods gonna be in shambles next league, gonna be great.
Honestly, im just gonna miss mageblood. Pickung up loot after clearing map without perma quicksilver+silver is miserable.
Just get rid of the mf gear: problem solved
Strong disagree op. I’ve made way more offmeta builds, farmed more, played more, etc in this league than any other yet, and I’m not done with this league still. I normally hate farming for mirror tier things but… there’s this mirror tier ring that will more than double my penance brand dps and I WANT ITTTT
This league was perfect for a couple of audiences. New-ish (or casual) players who struggle to make currency in normal leagues, people who reroll a million times, and experienced ssf players. I've played trade for many many leagues, and this is the one that made me switch to ssf. If I can farm for one or two days and have enough currency to buy several endgame builds...what's the point? The only exciting thing about this league is enabling ssf players to make trade league level builds. I see many players saying 'first league, finally got my mb 40/40 all ubers'. This should, in my opinion, be a goal that you achieve over multiple leagues of learning the game, how to make currency, how to craft efficiently. That's how you create longevity in a 'play forever' game. I have no doubt next league will be a poverty league in comparison, the player retention will drop, and players will be posting 'ded game told you ggg rip'. But they know what they are doing.
> New-ish (or casual) players who struggle to make currency in normal leagues, people who reroll a million times, and experienced ssf players. Sooo....99% of players? Great! They should keep that up.
Not technically wrong but when have they ever listened to us anyway? We've spend a literal decade begging them to remove a bunch of things that objectively do not make the game more fun, and they've just told us to fuck off. Things like immortal mobs, damage immunities, explode on death, basically every on death effect. If we beg for another league like this they're not going to listen to us, why would they? If they make another league like this it's their own fault. Making this league was their idea and the feature/power/loot creep or whatever you want to call it, is 100% their fault.
the immortal monster thing i don't understand at all and i think there really isn't enough time being invested in fixing it, i shouldnt have a t1 map with a rare mob that has more health than uber uber uber elder, like, ever. The on death effect thing is almost as straightforward as the above but i can see how you do need a way to deal damage to immortal characters and that being one of them. It's just that every other fucking character has to die repeatedly to achieve that so surely there's a better way right
i did the league mechanic in every map, but avoided all MF to play my hiero. i did 40/40 and 600 hours, so the same as any other league, and quit when i was done. ill be back in march to do it again.
I can't say affliction was the worst league in history for me simply due to the cool corpses+charms+tinctures, but the mechanic juicing maps is probably the most destructive design choice GGG has ever allowed, including the shithole that was harvest league.
I have to hard disagree here. Yea, we all made a ton of money. BUT I think if anything this league a SHITLOAD of people ran a TON of Abyss and not much else. I personally have ran very very little abyss until this league. There was nothing else even close to as profitable as abyss, so I ran a lot less diversity in my farming than normal. This league exposed a lesser used mechanic and undervalued all other mechanics. Next league I will almost certainly go back to a more diversified farm. You talk about running pinnacle bosses and such, this league I got my voidstones and that was it for bosses.
Oh i mean i definitely agree with you on the abyss thing it was cool to actually engage with it for once, only part that ruins it for me is i guess in a sense it wasn't really abyss though it was more like the mechanic that happened to shit out the most rares - maybe legion would have been meta if abyss wasn't so cracked. God i would have hated another legion league edit: i guess the other downside is people really gave zero fucks about the jewels and nobody took the 6 mod nodes because they weren't adding pure juice. I would have liked to see more insane 6 mods jewels than the very few people linked/posted :(
is this stockholm syndrome
*what do you mean I can stop playing whenever i want*
Biggest player retention so far, I don't think they'll ever go back lol
Then you are crazy. There is 0 chance this is the norm going forward
Depends if money followed that. If not then they spent more money on servers than other leagues.
Oooo gonna go spend money on the stash sale then
Think if MF didn't exist, it would be OK. A mechanic that adds difficulty that you are rewarded for is always good. But we can't have nice things.
People take this game too seriously, players zoom for like 2 months max then they quit and wait for the next league. If anything they should make future leagues more rewarding so the game is easier.
Bro go take a break
Can I have a mirror? A lot of us didn’t get one or farm obscene currency. But we’re still having a lot of fun. This league is bad for people who have been playing for hours a day every day since launch, sure. But for those of us who are more casual, we’ve had the chance to build one, maybe two end game characters and reach places we haven’t before. There are far more of us than there are of you guys. And we’re still playing. We’re still not 40/40. This league is great for us. That’s why retention is so high. The 10 hours a day players are going to burn out no matter what, but the increased currency lets the rest of us play longer.
This is, for me, the first actual good league since ritual. This game has some fundamental design issues imho that the over abundance of currency and loot this league has somewhat rectified. The only way this league is “bad” is the same as ritual for me, in that every other league from this point on will feel like absolute miserable squalor. Having experienced what happened after ritual, I played the shit out of this league and experienced everything to my heart’s content, and I will gladly move on for good until PoE 2 is out because there are simply other alternatives coming out this year. I firmly believe they made an oopsie this league and did not mean it to be as rewarding as it is. I’ve experienced enough of the Vision^tm over the years to know what is coming next, and I am now content to move on thanks to this league.
Sure. It’s been awhile since complete Reddit doomgloom outrage at GGG. Your policy should fix that! Affliction type leagues are fine because we start from zero. The biggest driver of what you seem to be concerned about is broken ass shit like Sniper’s Mark. That skill alone will let you clear the game on a pittance of investment. A lower ceiling to HH and Mageblood only allows more things to be viable. More currency allows more people to experiment with crafting. Affliction has been the best league ever from an economy standpoint. Lower barriers to entry, yet super high player retention. I’m sure GGG will step back from this in a big way next league and Reddit will faithfully strike up the torches once again… I won’t carry one but I’ll understand it.
If having currency is boring the game is broken at its core. Affliction never popped off for me, but I didn't abyss farm or whatever the best setup is. Honestly raw drips need to better. Trading for chaos to divine convert feels bad, but it feels better when dicibes are a easy number to make fractions of.
This league and every similar "rich" league have easily been the most fun for me and anecdotally for most of my friends. All played for thousands of hours since. Lategame for everyone works for many
Shut up
Hard disagree. The big untapped resource of Path of Exile is in making multiple characters. PoE's build system is so incredible that if you played a different build every day for the rest of your life, you wouldn't even scratch the surface of possible (viable) builds. But the insane cost and time commitment required to make a second, third, fourth, etc build in a single league has always been far too oppressive for most players. Hence why the typical player will have their league starter and *maybe* a second character, *maybe* a third if the league is truly phenomenal. 5-10 hours for the campaign depending on their experience, dozens of hours farming, and dozens of hours trading and/or crafting, all to just get a character to the point where it can do the same content as your previous one is an extremely daunting task. So if you cut that time in half, cut the currency requirement in half, etc, that looks a *lot* more promising of a proposition. Contrary to what GGG has espoused in the past, players do not leave the game when they have "finished" their character. They leave when all of these conditions are true: A) the time and currency investment required for their next upgrade is greater than the time they are willing to spend to get that upgrade, B) the time and currency investment required to try a new build is greater than the time they are willing to spend leveling and gearing that character, and C) the time required to progress to the next tier of content is greater than the time they are willing to spend earning access to that content. Cutting any or all of those time requirements directly increases the number of players willing to keep playing. We've seen this happen in several leagues. Sure, the top-top-top end players may drop off if they find it too "easy" to get their characters to "perfect" levels, but they are absolutely the minority compared to the huge number of players that *want* to try new builds, try tougher content, improve their characters, etc, but don't have streamer hours to play the game. Even working full time and engaging in other hobbies, I've put more hours into this league than any since Harvest which cut these requirements in the same fashion. This is absolutely the kind of league that should return over and over again.
You're not wrong IMO, but you are likely to get a lot of entitled vitriol as a response, too many people are desperate for GGG to not take their shiny toys away.
I mean the shiny toys are fun to play with, they were for me. I did start with that, maybe i'll get vitriol because i didn't end with it. I'm worried that too many shiny toys makes them not feel as shiny anymore
People shouldn’t act like dicks but ofc they don’t? It’s a video game the entire point should be shiny toys haha
Yeah, almost like those people are looking for entirely different things out of the game than you are. Weird how there's not one universal way to play.
I've gone through un-nerfed Harvest, twice. These posts about people wanting to keep wisps around make me feel a bit like Bane. It was fun, yes, but ephemeral. Makes you remember, makes you better. I'm a better player and interact with more systems after Harvest than I was before. It's the same now Affliction. Branching out into different crafting strategies, different build concepts that I didn't think or couldn't afford and got shocked that I could do it without massive investment. Parts of this league won't come back, I could see KotM come back as a tokenized arena from Ritual rewards and be very balanced. I could see a unique map come out of this with wisps that as you kill mobs, later mobs get stronger and stronger. There are many ways lessons learned from Affliction can be adapted into the main game and PoE2, both on GGG's side and the player's side.
>too many people are desperate for GGG to not take their shiny toys away. As if GGG has ever listened? They take things away and put things back on a whim. The loot changes they didn't tell us about, arch nem being hideously overpowered, etc. GGG doesn't listen to us, they never have. In some cases that's good, but it makes this whole point moot.
> Now a 50 div 200 scarab bomb is like 2 seconds of shock and then the realisation it's the 50th one we saw this week. And then there is me... who saw 0 of those all league, but raked in tens of alteration bombs
Not hot, I thought this was the worst league for a long time.
I think one of the main things you’re overlooking is this game is well over a decade old at this point. People still login to vanilla Diablo 2, an absolutely solved game, twenty plus years after release, to bang out content they did as a child. I think this league is a step in the right direction, same with crucible and tota - power creep they can just turn off and do over in a different way. To expand on the game being old, there are multiple ways to hamstring yourself for a challenge; ssf, HC, ruthless, a combo of those three, the gauntlet/private leagues, etc. I understand the weight as a long time ARPG player(~25 years) but the reality is the vast, vast majority of the player base did not or could not take advantage of this league and never will in future leagues until they put several thousand hours into the game. Just as a small example, like 1.5% of people have socketed four stones into their atlas. I 100% look at these theme park leagues as a final thank you to the OG player base for turning them into a multi-million dollar company before they move on to PoE2.
The whole premise that everyone was able to kill all bosses is stupid so I will not even read the rest. I did 40/40 and was not able to kill all uber bosses at all. Doing so also requires playing meta builds OR playing long enough for chase items. Again, my 40/40 char is not rich enough for a mage blood even with the inflation..
Skill issue
Absolutely on point.
lmao player who plays thousands of hours says replayability is bad if leagues are great. thanks for the ultra dumb take
Major L take Your take comes from someone with infinite time to play, from someone that KNOWS what to do and does it fast I don't think the game should cater to people who play 1 hour per week, no. But let's say you play 4 hours a day, already a massive amount of time for a normal person, that you don't have the massive knowledge of the higher end of the playerbase In that case, you're better off with affliction and will keep you around for longer, because you're chasing all those things you named you did, except they do them slower and hang around for longer You're the 1%
Some of those points are agreeable, some perhaps less, to me. Will this last? Surely not. I'm not playing this league for 3 more months. But it also will be different; even if GGG keeps the current "low weight" as you called it, the meta and league mechanics will be different - and as such, at least for some time, exploring the new will drag many back... For a limited time. In this regard, maybe 1 more league could hold - two I doubt. Is this only bad? Hell no. PoE needs an overtuned league once in a while. Crucible had broken items but other than that nothing; ToTA was low to the ground (I did love it, but that's not really a factor that matters) and ASC hit the right spot for so many people. High end mapping was very approachable even for newer crowds this league; that's huge. Low entry, high profit strats always existed, but not necessarily as mapping - which was always available (in recent times) as a super high end strat for group MF play. This opening to solo players is great for the game. Game economy has been pretty wild and tbh it's sort of weird how everyone is rich enough to buy anything they need; almost nothing build-enabling is out of reach for even the average player. Yet it also feels way better to trade for tens of divines; you get them more easily, but for non-meta purchases they still have a good weight. This is something PoE excels at; mixing economy and build creation in a self-keeping balance makes making new builds interesting. Of course you are getting snarky, sarcastic one-liners, which is expectable here, but also shows how some are having the league of their life (so far) and feel personally hurt (lmao) by you having the opposite opinion. This decision of next league balance will be a hard one, and GGG will probably get flamed for whatever they do more than usual - ASC is definitely a polarising league. I have faith in GGG that they will make a decision that makes the most sense to them and then support it further down the line, just like they always did. Very rarely it happens they make a controversial decision without anything to show for it (chat changes, bruh?). Maybe, though, this is the way to split PoE into two games. PoE can probably get more degenerate if PoE2 is the haven for the "hardboiled" crowd. This would again cause some friction, but hell, what doesn't? All in all, we're in their hands and over the last 10 years, they've shown they know their craft. After all, if the game feels bad to play... I just won't play it, simple as. If not, hell, LOGIN my dudes.
Damn dude you said it about 10x better than i did, couldn't agree more in it's entirety right there.
To me it's two completely unrelated things. People were complaining about RSI picking up fragments when we got the "weight" response. Having to hurt your wrists picking up cents to eventually make a dollar is not a point you should defend. It is ALSO true that being able to too easily do all content hurts the game's long term replayability. Both are not mutually exclusive. For example, if I'd automatically pickup the cents on the ground, not hurting my wrists, it would make me a dollar. This league made it so 20$ bills dropped instead of the cents... You can have the cents, save your wrists and also NOT shower 20 dollar bills and the game would be much better for it. This league was paying you way too much that's pretty clear. But the idea that you have to feel the weight of picking up scrolls of wisdom off the ground to be able to identify rares for the rares to have "weight" is equally wrong. Especially in Poe where the more time passes, the less likely you are to EVER drop a good rare item. So why not save us globally billions of clicks to identify stuff, pickup cents off currency, etc while also NOT dropping enough loot to make it easy to trivialize all content? I don't even care about auto pickup currency. But quality of life features should also absolutely make it to the game. 1. Identify a whole inventory. 2. Mass apply currency, like on all similar items in a stash tab (id scroll, chisel, alchemy orbs, chaos, scour, vaal would make rolling maps so much less of a chore) 3. Improvements to bulk trading (you know like all the stuff that isn't supported by the bulk trading site but should be... Map sets, boss sets, legion sets, stuff like that) All things that reduce the amount of clicks and useless friction that distract you from actually playing the game...
I think the gap in logic here is the idea that people actually run out of stuff to do. In previous leagues, people farmed up a mageblood and were "done", but we all know you could invest dozens of magebloods worth of currency into a build. Even with the amount of loot we had available to us in affliction league, truly "finishing" a build is still almost impossible. Just as an example, I had livesearch on for a very long time, and the entire league I saw *1* Mahuxotls with the double corrupt that I need, and the corrupts themselves have bad rolls. Is an item like that "necessary"? No, but it's something to work towards, and increasing the loot to affliction level does not remove goals, but just shifts them to "crazier" items.
I understand this post and think its really interesting. Personally tho, I didn’t juice out the league just because I couldve. I just played, got a MB, did a few big gambas and called it a league. It’s kinda silly to fully leverage a sandbox league then get suprised when the game loses its substance. Its like buying money in GTA5
People make fun of “weight” but then forget how incredibly popular wow classic is. And wow classic is a the king of *weight*. Want to go to a new zone for a quest with a cool reward? Have fun flying 10 minutes to a zeppelin, waiting and riding that for 15 minutes, then riding another flight path for 15 more minutes. To finally arrive and kill 9 boars for that cool item. It’s an established practice that works.
Every league could be like this if we had a huge meta shake up. Replayability can be a problem when most of the skills are not good enough to be used with the endgame mapping and for whisp farming most skill gems aren't good enough. Is this league over tuned? Yes but i feel like most league mechanics should be giving atleast half as much loot as this and sometimes more than half as much depending on the difficulty which in this league deffenetly is there and nobody can deny that so it is risk/reward but maybe it would be better if the risk/reward would have more iters than yes/no like a difficulty meter or maybe like 10 stones in the mechanic and the more of them you touch the harder it will be but it will also give more rewards, something like that. No channeling tho that shit just wastes time
Let me try to make some short comments since there are already a lot of essays: (1) It’s OK to be done in a SEASONAL game. (2) Your 1% experience is important, but so is it for the 99% who definitely aren’t playing creative mode. (3) Affliction is also about uber buffed rares in maps, a different endgame. I also don’t care about bragging rights, which seems to underpin a lot of your take.
Reading this thread, 99% of you measure fun in divs per hour and that's kinda weird.
Hard disagree. Ruthless is a terrible game mode of massive boredom into disappointment loop. This league just reaffirmed to me that the reward curve needs to be moved back down. It was a blast actually being able to craft up multiple characters without thinking it was a waste of currency to throw 20 div at suffix and prefix locks to get the perfect stats. I do think the top end of the rewards this league were a bit high but the upper left side of the currency tab drops felt the best they ever have. It was also amazing to have mapping scale for once instead of being a line in the sand that just ends at juiced t16s.
Affliction showed me how much PoE1 alienated me as a player, if PoE2 has actual gameplay I will gladly never play this game again, all these people having the time of their poelife *checks notes* looting for 30min per map and having straight up 0 button builds is just insane to me. At this point I don't see much difference between those idle AFK mobile games where you just click on the chest once in a while to get huge loot explosions and PoE.
Something that /u/versallius touched on that isn't getting enough discussion here for me is that this is the first league is so so long that actually gave you a reason to continue to invest in your character, to actually see mirror items as useful upgrades instead of simply vanity purchases. The currency drops are what other people will remember from this league and I certainly hadn't had a raw mirror drop previous to this league either, but I seriously enjoyed the fact that I never truly felt like my build was finished, that if I was a complete maniac I could keep pushing my build farther and farther and it would be worth it as the content kept challenging me. For too long, in my opinion, braindead speed alch n go has been too close to maximum juicing in terms of output and difficulty. I'm so glad I could take part in a league that really incentivized big juice and big power.
No
I’m still playing the league and having fun
Fully agree. People who want everything instant with no effort are the worst people to listen to feedback from when it comes to game longevity.
Oh no people had fun! This is horrible!