Nothing I like better than being a level 86 and still getting killed in one hit on a tier 3 map. 75% on all resistances, 1,340 ARMOUR and 5,380 EVASION. Then, losing all that XP that you spent over an hour gaining.
The annoying thing is the mechanic could be fixed very easily by removing the crafting from the map. Give us a forge in the hideout, and make crucible monsters drop currency that can be used to forge those passive trees. You could even do a delve style tag based currencies to help influence what the passive will be if instead of u locking a whole tree you forged the next passive on as you go.
Actually an amazing idea. I would love something like this. I'm currently enjoying the present league and I've been able to craft some cool +1 bows with support gem on their trees but I feel like this would work way better.
I like that idea a lot but there would need to be some storage slots for league currency within the Crucible crafting bench. I already have a hard time keeping up with all of the miscellaneous items that drop from legacy mechanics.
Yeah, I agree this would've seemed/felt better and more smooth. As for the crucible enemies/mobs it could be cool to have some kind of portal that is located in maps/the world that you walk through to teleport to the "crucible" were it either starts auto spawning waves of enemies and the longer you stay the harder it gets.. kind of equivalent to the whole charge mechanic, but waves of enemies is what is "charging". Can maybe mix it up between waves of enemies or a kind of boss fight Once you go back through the little crucible portal is where your loot comes to you by just exploding where the portal was. That way you don't have to be concerned with shuffling through loot inside of the crucible. The crucible area/arena could just be reminiscent of the Roman colosseum, but have like lava/magma style look to it with an audience of monsters/demons hooting and hollering lol Idk I always like the league mechanics where it is fairly seamless to just activate it and do it, ie. breach, ritual, legion, even sanctum was kind of seamless, and quite a few others. Even delve is a lot of fun, because you just collect the sulphrite in the world and once you see you have a solid amount you can just go delve for a solid amount of time instead of running maps, or heists, etc.
i got to level 87 and quit. i made the mistake of playing melee on league start. you literally cant even move against most of the games mobs now. between chills and vines and ele pen and phys as extra chaos, it just doesnt matter what i do (unless i spend 100 divines) i just die. so i gave up. poe right now feels very much a game where u either play the meta or dont play at all. builds that used to be good are just trash now. you pretty much have to play around the league mechanic and the power it brings or else you'll wind up getting rickrolled. on top of that the game is just way grindier than its ever been. ive been playing since 2014, and in the first week of a league i easily had a complete build made, until around 2 years ago when they started adding more and more item requirements to make functional builds. now you need like 22 different item slots to fill in order to make a complete build that can do endgame maps, compared to 10 when i first started playing. in all honesty, with all the new skill trees within skill trees and jewels that provide jewel slots and jewel seeds that you need a third party program to find out what they do, poe is feeling so byzantine that it's becoming a parody of itself. complexity for complexity's sake.
Bro do you read what you typed? Maybe complexity and customization isn't for you then. The game is perfectly fine and there isn't much of a change to money-making. Quite the contrary. Maybe except sanctum since it was too rewarding. Regarding melee - as long as you are not HC ssf or ssfsc whos plan is to beat ubers melee is absolutely fine. Sure it needs some buffs to be competitive(except boneshatter) but that's only for racers. Melee stuff is also much cheaper on trade since a lot less people play it. Honestly you seem to be more attracted to diablo rather than Poe if anything you mentioned bothers you lol
My sentiments exactly about the current state of Poe . If I could say something to GGG it would be: Make us WANT to play more, don't just make us play more.
If GGG just focused on build diversity they could probably make PoE the greatest ARPG in existence and 100,000s of people could join in seeing the entire player base play different cool builds on TH-cam
My friends queried me if I would play the league. I said probably not. At first they tried to persuade me but to no avail. RNG, on top of layers of RNG isn't just interesting to me and I think you hit the nail in the head with their design philosophy problem. It's artificial length without tackling the game quality. A great game doesn't leave a player feel exhausted from a chore, a badly designed game does. To me games are primarily entertainment first, and PoE does not respect my time so I take it elsewhere.
Or as he said: "I play less, because i trade all day". PoE in a nutshell and the reason this ARPG is just not as superior as most people keep saying. The "complexity" of rng in multiple ways and requirement of actually using PoB to prepare your builds instead of playing, trying or developing your build (e.g. like in Last Epoch) just kills everythig that is fun in a ARPG. The game really needs to shift a step back to make SSF proper again. While Last Epoch is still far from perfect and still needs a lot of adjustmennts the whole SSF is so much more rewarding than all these layers of rng in poe nowadays that actually only let you play a economy / market simulator than a ARPG to be efficient.
The game has a terrible case of "doesnt feel good to play until 20+ hours". First characters feel terrible to play, especially if you play even slightly off meta skills. You cant kill rares? Get an upgrade. How do you get upgrades? you kill rares.... archnemesis did irreperable damage to the game
@@1Life2Little Fr it's bad enough that these idiots think slowing down the game is the right play but dear god having an auction house would be so nice buying things take forever because you have to whisper like 100 people to get a response because people don't want to stop playing to do a sale it's disruptive and then you'll be playing and you have to stop to make a sale like that sucks just automate that shit with an auction house and be done
Yep. Couldn't even make it 2 hours into this game. So boring. In those 2 hours, I used ONE skill, leveled up 5x, and felt no significant difference from the first minute of gameplay. If I need to play your game 20+ hours to start having fun, your game sucks. Hi Starfield!!!
@@faceman3585I mean it does pick up in say 4 hours but even me I'm 400hours into the game and I still can't complete all the content because I don't have a PhD. The game is honestly made for people who don't work, don't have a wife, an have no responsibilities at all. I loved it at first. Loved it so much I've spent $1000 in the store but now I'm regretting it. Not because I don't have the money, but because I feel ggg doesn't deserve my money. These mf take 10% xp when you die and trust me you die to alot of bs. 99% of the time you don't even know what killed you. Ggg has zero respect for our time. Taking xp is bs. Once you're a high level 10% of xp is hours of grinding. It's crazy
first ggg gave us 20 variants of hinders/vines now they're starting on the 20 variants of ele resistances (-res, pen, exposure, etc. does nothing against "x ailment and x element resistant" and damage cycling) also i swear frostbomb doesn't seem to cover all the regen-like mechanics anymore.
frost bomb isn't -100% anymore, so against strong regen it just doesn't cut it anymore, especially with the relatively small aoe. However there is strong alternatives now, the mark mastery that just straight up turns off all regen mechanics on the marked mob is the best one imho, and the combo I'm using on my current build is 50% reduced regen on enemies hit recently from a pantheon plus 50% reduced regen on nearby enemies from a recovery mastery.
imo it's not reasonable to expect every build to tick so many boxes, now including a mark + pantheon + many passive points. in a few patches they'd just add another regen-but-not-called-regen and the cycle starts over.
Nailed it, bro. Played 3 days and decided this is just more of the same. The first 3 or 4 weeks are always a beta where we complain of stuff being over tuned and not rewarding or respectful of time for them just to meet us halfway and say, "Are you not grateful?" By then, the player base is gone. I just can't keep playing this swinging pendulum of a game with Nerfs gutting fun and forcing us into new metas.
Not only this, but this has been in the game ever since they upped monster and boss power and made those a progression system, meanwhile you still have xp loss on death, i know not everyone should get to level 100, but maybe it is time to make the xp requirement higher and remove the xp loss on death, loads of players have to sacrifice playing the game as intended to go grind out a level so they dont lose all their xp and that sucks, it is so bad that people pay massive amounts of currency in 5 way farms to get to 100 and simply never having to care about dying again, which is how it should be, the 6 portal limit should be the limiting factor not xp loss on death discouraging you from doing bosses unless you have an op boss killer build.
GGG's intention has been clear from the start of 3.15 or even before. Slow the game down back to its roots. Move all power from tree to gear. I dont know if any of you remember, but shield charging use to be as fast as having an acceleration shrine rn, ailment immunity was free for a lot of bullds (raider node had it for example), every ascendancy node had misc stats (example, ricochet had %more dmg per chain remaining), monsters had 1/25th the hp (you could kill essences with a herald of ice explosion and a spirit charge from abyss helm LMAO). I feel like people forget how crazy, fun and easy the game was back then. I feel like a madman seeing people worry about powercreep when they give a skill a 20% more damage buff, their recency bias blinding them to all the shit we lost along the way.
this is my first time using shield charge over leap/teleport/dash and I actually hate it lol. it's fast af, but just feels terrible compared to other movement skills.
@@Tha_T1p It's something you need to get used to and you need a flame dash to go along with it. I hated it at first as well, now I use it over all others if my build has a shield.
Yep, i love it when they gave most, not even all, spells about 40% more damage back a few leagues ago and people were all celebrating to where i had to remind so many idiots that the buff they gave us only ALMOST gave you the power you had before 3.15, you're still at a huge lose with how the game felt for about 6 years before that.
The problem is that POE demand more luck than the diablo games. The people who buy into the lies of streamers will be dissapointed. Not only do you need the correct gear, you need to roll the CORRECT colors on the gear, and after that the correct bindings. So, you cant even follow a good build guide right to play the game without INSANE amout of luck behind it. It's bad, not as bad as D4, but still bad. And no full respecs. We got a full respec when they changed a lot just to get backstabbed. If you put out ONE point you lose your right to respec. The devs are morons!
the "each league gets removed but the nerfs stay" was a very valid point i read on reddit. It is SO true. It seems you guys are playing standard with a sprinkle of new content xD
The *potential* for player power has grown so much overtime. However, the base player power has shrunk sooo much. GGG really likes the pro/con opportunity cost so you can “specialize” your build but all that really did was create a huge checklist for us.
Potentials that only few will ever reach is how I feel about it. It's there, yes, but the cost to reach it is too much for most people that it's probably just not worth it. And the nerfs that came because of these "potentials" is quite silly.
I do not follow you with your opinion. Player power drops each league. Only few builds are viable if you want to play all the content. I am creating own builds and each league they have less power even with very high invest.
I don't think it is a great example. A lot of tanky builds end up with way easier legion encounters than they could handle, simply because of the timer preventing them from freeing more. Legion is one of the mechanics that double dips loot rewards on raw damage and nothing else.
@@ulfi5223 yup, having low dps double punishes you in this game: slower clearing is obvious but then you also get less stuff because arbitrary timers. See incursion, delve, betrayal, delirium, blight, breach, legion and i'm sure i'm missing some. All of these have some sort of timer or mechanic that punishes you in some level for moving slow or having low dps. You are forced to play fast or else you won't get all the rewards. This hurts the build diversity more than anything else. Not only you would clear and or move with less optimal builds but you would also get less stuff. Playing defensive is just not viable, unfair one shots aside
@@akaxjenkins Legion punishes you for bad reach. My Fire Trap ignite SSF build has no dps issues at the map tier im in rn, but i can do much in legions because i have to throw the trap, wait for it to explode and then wait again for dots to do their thing.
This league feels like Standard. The base game itself is decent, but with problems like overtuned rare mobs. I found myself taking a break more often than before because how frustrating it is to play fighting against Hasted Soul Eater rare mobs.
I usually just ignore bad leagues and still enjoy the game, so Crucible being bad is not really that bad for me. However, the overturned rares are definitely the most glaring issues for me. I love to map and have a gigachad build that I play along with my Aurabot buddy, yet I still find myself stopping and focusing the rare for like 30 seconds to 1 minute while I kite it around so it doesn't one shot me lmao. I am still enjoy the state of the game otherwise.
poe has one of the worst gear progression and itemisation systems in any RPG ever made, literally every upgrade comes down to farming currency and buying it from trade, even if you want to craft yourself you have to trade for the mats, the concept of killing mobs and clearing difficult content to get good items is unthinkable for GGG devs
I sold an item I was baking, felt so bad. To prevent it from doing it again, I had to slow down my inventory emptying time and be super careful. It was annoying.
YEah feels more and more like PoE2 is not going to be a game for me... Last Epoch is looking more and more like a game i will play instead of PoE and PoE2.
Playing the game for the grind is nice and all, but the fun of this game comes from getting stronger and trying new builds. In a game where it's ultimate goal for many players is to try a build, finish endgame and try out a new build to get the excitement all over again. It's really stupid to slow down the game. No one gains anything by slowing down the game. If we can get all of the fun in the game within 50-100 hours, finish the character and move on to a new and exciting build, we'll be happy and the game will flourish. It makes no sense to slow this shit down because then it takes longer till we get that adrenaline of powering up, grinding begins feeling more and more tedious rather than exciting, you'll be playing like 50 hours without a single upgrade which feels fucking awful and by the time we force ourselves through the endgame, we don't have any excitement left to make a new character because we know it'll just be hell. So dumb.
They also remove so many ways of playing the game in some way. - Endless Heist, - Breachstone leveling due to breach rework and stone rarity (I bet Legion rework next league to kill 5 ways) - map split farming - nem3/4 farming - not consume sextant farming - group mf and for sure many more.
I think all the crafters talked about the trickle down economy of better gear that's not perfect and trickle up of mats that group MF/harvest did, I still thought it was elitist and created inflation to entry costs of different farms. Still now the heist, and breach stone seems kinda lame.
Leagues are boring af. I play until I get to bosses and clear all maps and just quit. It's literally the sane shit every league. I want to like it with different builds, but it's so boring. The changes are constantly against players and to grief us. Just nothing else out there to play. D3 I've played to death and D4 is still little ways out.
Might just be my own opinion but some problems with PoE that i never see mentioned are: They desperately need to hire either a UX designer if they dont have one or fire and replace the current one, So many leagues have had problems with UI clarity of what the fuck youre supposed to do; Archnemesis, Syndicates board, Crucibles option to remove nodes from tree, Just general difficulty indications. Another problem is how every league they try to put out is way too big of a task and complicated for them, every league launch its riddled with bugs, crashes, trade site down. if they cant handle the pressure they put on themselves they need to lower the bar for standards, hire more people/better people, or increase the time inbetween leagues. and god please hire more playtesters.
the solution is to touch grass, play different games and not tryhard like a maniac in poe. yes it simple like that. we live in times when tryharding in any game is just pure cringe. just have fun and enjoy the game
thank you. I had a talk in my guild yesterday about this exact thing. The game just feels like a husk of what it was now. Soo many things were taken away from the players and now. 2 years after expedition, we still are in such a low estate from what we were before.
The monster power is just so weird and random and some mechanics like Expedition for example are way harder than others. You have to follow a meta build or really know what you are doing with an off meta build to be able to keep up with the game and some archetypes are inherently stronger than others, which is a shame, because there are many cool skills, that are just not viable or are only viable with insane investment, so you're stuck farming currency with a build you don't really want to play to be able to afford a build you want to play.
the thing however with expedition is that its actually worth doing it since you can craft really powerful items with ROG and get a lot of currency tuljen + the option of getting logbooks. Crucible had even harder monsters and you wont get any currency which is crinch
@@Skalarwelle I think pack size is the most important factor. Also maybe less logbooks but they do drop even at level 60. Also prob less refresh currency. Still top tier moneymaker
I honestly think GGG is trying to lower player power and rewards to help make the transition to PoE2 better. Obviously PoE2 will be harder since it is new content, realistically they won't have a league right away so generally the drops will feel worse. Also they will probably have widespread changes to player power. I just hope that it's being done to make PoE2 feel like a different game and not just to artificially extend how long players play. Also what makes crucible even worse, is it has almost no effect on player power until your character is already strong. By the time you can start working on crucible weapons your build is already strong enough to do most of the content in the game, if not all of it. I had all my watchstones before I even finished my first tree. All this league content was incredibly backloaded, I'm sure some insane items will exist from this league, but what's the point if they dont even help you with progression.
@@tehf00n I dont think the problem is not that we dont want meaningful harder rares to fight! The problem is the fighting in POE is nothing like a fight in Diablo 4! And i have feeling thats what they want. More meaningful fighting where u have to pup ur special cooldowns, build up power, dodge, use CC's etc... But POE for many years doesnt build like that.
@@pifoeko4580 what do you mean? There are plenty of bosses that enact that gameplay style. I mean, if you are underpowered against T11+ maps it feels like the fights are diablo boss fights. And let's face it... the Diablo boss fights are dogshit. I like the game but there is no danger in the fights.
My biggest concern is mandatory meta build usage. 5 defensive layers to survive t4 and because meta build is mandatory the steep entry curve of required divines to even do something fun without dying 500 times.
@@Sammysapphira not really, I played this game since shortly after launch. And for the passed 5-6 leagues the developers goals changed a lot. I've quit this league at t4, with 4k health, res cap, 100% spell suppression wearing a shield so include block chance. As occultist ice trapper. And it wasn't comfortable at all, it feels deadly anywhere I go. League mechanics are utterly overtuned. And there's plenty of stupid mods monsters can get to ruin your day. The game lost its fun when it needed to appeal to only users who first like to clear the whole atlas, grind 50div before starting to have fun with your build.
You are totally right... That's the reason i don't have fun anymore... every build needs 50+ divines to feel good in T10+ maps... It's fucking insane and stupid.
can someone at GGG HQ show this to the whole staf, this man just condensed in 16 minutes why a game i've been playing for 8 years has been rotting from the inside since 3.15.
@@tonnymiller123 just because you do doesn’t mean everyone else does. There are lots of things I find enjoyable that doesn’t mean they don’t suck though
@@tonnymiller123 Sorry about your luck. By that logic someone out there thinks dog shit takes better on pizza than pepperonis, and sadly you're that guy.. Wake the fuck up some, ok?
@@tonnymiller123 Not saying i hate the game i just have seen what it was & could be, not pleased by the constant erosion of fun slowly converting a game into a chore. But i really appreciate your input, even if after i feel like a new league ain't my cup of tea or if i feel like i'm done with it, that's what i already do. But thanks.
Poe1 barely makes enough money to stay afloat or they would have a bigger dev team, company wants to make money so Poe2 with it's ripoff of D4 stagger mechanic will be more money hungry
For PoE as a whole, the biggest issue has been bloat. That's really easy to say, and it is really hard to explain what it is and how it impacts the game. I started playing PoE in the beta, and I've been playing on and off since. The big draw for me a decade ago was that it really encouraged player choice, you could really customize your character and how you wanted to play. Back then you couldn't really make a "wrong choice". Your character might be less optimal and clearing cruel would be pretty hard, but you couldn't brick a character. The systems for scaling in PoE are cool in a vacuum, but every time they add a new mechanic it expands that. We are at a stage now where the player is asked to make hundreds of decisions and there are objectively wrong answers. The more they add, the less freedom players actually get. So basically, every new mechanic they add scales player power exponentially. Because of that people will find these exponential interactions and take advantage of them. If it just ended there we would be fine. However to counteract that they do two things, they nerf the scaling of the interaction, and they buff the monsters. That puts a gap between the people abusing strong mechanics and other people trying to just have fun and play their cool build. This has just happened over and over again for years and years and now that gap is so big that you need to abuse those mechanics to even play the game. There are so many exponential factors to scaling your power that if you miss even one of them you wont deal any damage. We are at this point now where all these things don't matter because the game is tuned for the high end of broken interactions (which they just nerf anyways). Mechanically every build plays very similarly to one another, and it's not about the moment to moment gameplay. It's become mostly centered around the planning of your build, not the execution of it. Most enemies die in one hit, and the ones that don't have a dozen different mechanics scaling their stats to a stupid amount and they one-shot you. Most of the cool mechanics you used to make builds with are so underpowered and just can't deal with the overtuned enemies anymore and 90% of the games content is locked behind that. You don't get to make choices for your character anymore, you follow a mathematically proven objectively strong build because if you don't, then you don't get to play the game.
TL;DR - GGG added too many mechanics to the game and it has removed player choice and gutted build diversity because if you don't use the objectively best builds then 90% of the game is unplayable.
Ultimatum was my favorite league, and I never got to fight the task master. GGG always seems to have an issue where they make the end-game of the league out of reach for 99% of the players. I just want to run my maps, click a button, fight a bunch of crucible monsters and collect my loot. Instead, I forage the floor for spine bows, unlock the first node and put them in a dump tab, selling 2% of them. FUN
It's not an issue... They are balancing the game around the streamers that play 8+ hours every day... That's why "normal" people got such a hard time to reach endgame... I got no idea why "normal" people still play this game. I got over 18k hours in PoE and even i got problems hitting "endgame" because of the insane grinds.
Your graph is perfect, really hits home how it feels to play Poe nowadays. Especially with so much power being shifted to gear over time, the checklist you need to complete gets bigger and bigger.
I think that's by design, sadly. The devs started this pattern when they made ailments powerful and prominent in pinnacle content, incentivizing players to invest in reducing their effects. Initially, players solved the ailment problem by having flasks grant us immunity. Then, they took that away, so we itemized our gear or ascendencies to fix it. Then, they took that away and gave it to us on auras, and now it's solved through a combination of auras or pantheon powers and jewels. This kind of constraint-oriented gameplay isn't intrinsically an issue, it just becomes build making chores. It's a hidden knowledge check, which is a fairly cheap kind of depth, but still a kind of depth, I guess. Dissatisfied by the playerbase's insistence on being immune to their impractically strong elemental ailments, they introduce "totally not chill" and "totally not shock" as a way to force players to receive those effects so that we can die to the unfairly designed incoming damage or unavoidable oneshot mechanic. The current gameplay of avoiding all hits at all cost because 1 in 1000 rares will delete you instantly is not compatible with mechanics that reduce player movespeed without meaningful counterplay. If the devs are upset that the best defense is not getting hit, they need to seriously internalize the reason why things are this way. It's not because we're cheesy minmaxers looking for the easiest way to pew-pew. I mean, some of us are, but high damage glass canon builds are always going to be an optimal solution in these types of games. The majority of the playerbase trends towards those sorts of builds because random affix generation on top of enemy damage reduction "league mechanic" scaling occasionally shits out an abomination with more effective hp than an uber boss and basic attack damage comparable to a slam.
I’m new to PoE. Wanted something to fill the time between Diablo 4. I’ve spent nearly a month across two different builds and each reached the same results. Getting one shot. Getting swarmed in half a second and dying before I can react. I don’t have access to a pc so I can’t use PoB. My second toon I followed a build guide. Guess I should have done more research on mind over matter and agnostic. Here I was thinking hey I’ll stack mana and use that as a huge life pool as my Elementalist arcs defensive measures. Well I guess that got nerfed into oblivion several leagues ago and I was following a build guide that was never going to allow me to see all the content in the game. How is this good game design? You stack spell suppression and evasion or you just get one popped by everything. I hear all about build diversity this and that. How is it diverse when the majority of builds throw totems or traps and stack spell suppression and evasion? It’s the same build with a different main skill. And if spell suppression and evasion is so imperative to survival, why tf is it not accessible in every section of the skill tree? Why does the upper and left side of the tree need to waste several points just to get spell suppression? I don’t get it. This game requires you to use multiple third party systems just to play it because the developers can’t be bothered to make things coherent in game. I don’t know what to do anymore. Two toons and over a month of my life wasted to hit the same brick wall of “you didn’t build your toon in this precise way so get fu(ked.”
Yea I played for 4 hours and can’t even get past act 1. I’m playing blindly but I really enjoyed d3, wasn’t a fan of d4 but never played it, just kind of saw streams of players playing it and was like hmmm, I’ll try PoE… thankfully Poe is free, cuz’ I might just get d4 and be a casual Andy with it; 😅… PoE is like having to sit in a math class I don’t want to be in. Definitely not new player friendly.
"You think you want wow classic but trust us you REALLY don't." Everytime a developer tells the players what they actually want they hemorrhage players until they walk it back.
yeah the whole design of melee for that league was just plain awful. it was brought up instantly as a potential issue on the dev interview and they were ok with it, it's just 10% of playerbase after all.
As game progressed over the years monsters got insane damage, hp, resists. Armor and evasion bases are the same as first day of this game and it's insane how determination aura is stronger then whole set of armor items, same for grace compared to evasion. Few leagues ago they finally buffed some item bases but it's still very weak and defensive stats as armor and evasion are untouched yet. Plus defenses against degens are just nonexist, only insane hp regen but that's not the solution.
There are defenses against damage over time. Lethe shade, maximum resists, hp regen, life recovery/leech, damage over time mastery, arakali pantheon, enduring cry. With that said it's as always something you have to invest into so it either forces you to drop dps and/or requires you to get good (insane) gear. GGG's trend since expedition is taking away base player power and making mosters harder and giving that power back through high end gear that is increasingly more difficult to get.
That's a bit disingenuous. Bases may be the same, but crafting has got consistently buffed. More importantly, sources of +evasion% and +armour% have been buffed over the years, I'm talking in the passive tree in particular. For example, I just randomly picked an armour node on the tree, juggernaut used to give 16%, now it gives 24%. I can't recall when that changed though.
Over the years players became even more powerful as well with the addition of many mechanics. I agree, some monsters modifications were overtuned (archnemesis cough cough) but overall players power rose the same as monsters. Only thing is Uber bosses being quite hard without a serious investment in your character. But they are made in that purpose. Regular endgame bosses are easy af
I think you all have a point. Armor and evasion in theory are super strong. You can easly get tons of physical damage reduction etc. Everythng looks grate on paper untill you realize that you need SPELL SUPPRESSION. I've created gladiator bleed lacerate with max attack block, tons of armor and 81+ resist, life regen and leech(although leech isnt that effective on dot build) + shatter bleeding enemies and mobs from cruicible tends to just 2 tap me. They have killed spell block and introduced spell suppress witch feels like it's mandatory. You can play as elementalist with determination and supress and i bet you will die less than on build like mine. To be fair PoE is last game that I would complain about but this leauge isn't as fun. I loved forbidden sanctum. It was clear, rewarding, fun to engage. Only downside wast that you would have to run a lot of maps to get into it, but it's the best proof that it was great league since I was running maps to GET IN the sanctum.
@@Quaresma77pl Your example is perfect to show most how GGG doesn't care about melee specifically. I still remember how impale got nerfed not because of melee but because of minions using it.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the mapping situation. I feel like I've been playing Standard the last three leagues. I haven't felt that excitement coming across the mechanics ingame since Ultimatum and Expedition. The only excitement I get now is from the OLD league mechanics.
Very much not enjoying the changes they've made to rare mobs this league. Having an 80% resist, high armor, 6k ES build get popped in one shot by some cracked out rare is not fun. It's also not uncommon, I encounter one of these every other map it feels like. I would honestly be very happy if the only problem was that Crucible sucks, that I can deal with.
instead of lame modes such as ruthless, i propose they pull a WoW and give us PoE ritual classic. that way chris can have fun wrecking the main game with his vision all he wants, and we can enjoy when the game delivered the most fun.
Or, allow us to choose different leagues/patch. I would pick OP purposeful harbinger, aura stacking delirium league or harvest over and over. That's when the game was fun.
It's kinda crazy because honestly. I haven't enjoyed a single league as much as Legion. Every single one feels worse. And it's weird because stuff like the Atlas tree has been incredible, amazing stuff that I should really love, should be making me play the league for 2 months straight like Legion did. But the fun has just been sucked out lol. For gods sake stop balancing a single player game around trade for two seconds. Let me just play with the game mechanics holy shit. I don't want to craft 45 step things or trade. I just want to shoot things. Why does that have to feel like such a fucking chore?!? Why does it feel like I'm being punished for it? My favorite skill, Arc, has basically been worthless to self cast for years and it really, really pisses me off.
You know, this is a great insight for people who feel these things but don't know how to word it all. I really am curious how PoE2 is gonna be with all this in mind and I hope you do more videos like this. I hope that GGG actually looks at this and gauges how people feel and just make a fun experience without requiring so much more grind.
We really need content creators to look past themselves and make more videos like this. As he said at the end, hes a steamer, obviously the game is still fun, but it's important to bring the issues up and give players a voice. Someone streaming the game can grind over the hurdle, but for average Joe this league mechanic is a sad joke.
If they don't speed things back up then poe2 is gonna flop massively. They really need to realize that no one wants to slow down the game but them and when it comes to the state a game should go in, what the players want always trumps what the devs want. You can't have a game without the players so I don't understand why devs don't have the common sense to listen to their players. No one wants to spend 500 hours on one character just to get them to endgame. The combat isn't that fun in this game to warrant that. The fun comes from trying new builds and letting players farm faster and finishing their characters endgame quicker to get them on a new character is how the game should be ran. Slowing the game down is literally the absolute worst decision they could possibly make by far.
@@Zephyr_Havoc Thats a hot take and I disagree. I like one character builds and having permanence with them. I like having a single character I can put alot of time into and hate making "alts" or new characters. That's the whole point of the revamped gem system. So you can run more diverse and bigger builds on single characters without dumbing stuff down to one or 2 abilities that you spam constantly on specialized characters. I think the combat is just fine. I am also for letting people make OP builds. That's the whole point of endgame. To pretty much have a godlike build and go nuts with it. It's just there needs to be more viable options for doing things instead of the same boring meta cookie cutter stuff. Rushing to endgame and speed clearing is the thing I dislike about PoE and then just doing that ad nauseam. That sounds boring af. That's the whole point of the league system. Gives people and opportunity to do that and get their fix, then go take a break til the next season.
Chris has said they want to slow the game down and make it as seamless as possible with POE 2. I think the release of POE 2 will make or break it. Looking on the bright side Last Epoch has all the QoL GGG will never add to POE and even Blizzard seems to be listening to feedback on the beta.
Just general feedback for future videos. Please up your volume. I'm at 100% on YT and 50% on Windows and it is still a bit too quiet. "CTRL + SHIFT + =" in Resolve while having the clip marked will up the volume by +3db.
I don't think poe players are a ware of skinnerbox term, because this is the most skinnerbox game of all time, it condition's player to do a lot of work waste a lot of time for a little reward , oh and those rewards are buried under layers upon layers of RNG.
@@LAKEDRAGON413 Def my own fault. I'd been on for hours and vendored a couple other 6 sockets from a map and just ctrl clicked it too. I usually put important things on the right of my inv. Had it on the left so it would show up in the crucible. Something like a dream furnace would be nice. I'm having fun playing, but I don't interact with the league really at all at this point.
Yeah I stopped after 4 days... I'm tired of GGG releasing untested stuff for like 4 years now... Simply not good enough for a AAA developer... They are not a small indie company anymore.
They've been sandbagging the last year+ of content by working on poe2. My copium take is that they're much closer to releasing the game than they're letting on and will have some crazy announcements at exile con. Wouldn't be the first time they've done something like that
highly doubt it. The last few leagues have all had a lot of effort put into them. There's just been no thought put into the changes, or extensive QA testing. But shit like sanctum, building a fully functional balanced roguelite into an existing game, that's not "sandbagging content". That's literality building a new game. They could go and take sanctum, copy paste the code literality, rescale it, and sell that as a seperate game. Same as when they did the battle royale. The issue isnt the amount of content or the effort put into the content, it's just GGG's shitty game direction and whoever does QA testing over there not representing the playerbase whatsoever.
@@MyNameIsSalo they are using alot of poe2 assets to pad league design. They also disguise leagues as mechanic reworks to current systems so they can kill two birds with one stone (scourge league being the beyond rework and betrayal being the rework to the master system)
Crucible was such a disappointment for me. The idea of passive trees on weapons got me So Hyped, however first two days of the league broke that bubble. Playing standard but harder is the best way to describe the experience atm and its just not what I’m looking for. Sanctum RIP
I think that the main problem with kalandra was that the main mechanic of kalandra (the reflective mist that you make your own items with) was soooo rare that you might have only found 2-5 in the entire league for most people
i do the same like in every new POE League. Playing it for 1 week, having fun, then quit and wait till the next league. Since like 3 years i never played longer then a week. I hope diablo 4 is playable longer then 2 weeks before it gets boring
One of my biggest gripes with GGG is that they’re always stretching and expanding the minimum requirements you need to meet in gearing without giving more tools to meet those requirements or even taking some of those tools away
I usually just ignore bad leagues and still enjoy the game, so Crucible being bad is not really that bad for me. However, the overturned rares are definitely the most glaring issues for me. I love to map and have a gigachad build that I play along with my Aurabot buddy, yet I still find myself stopping and focusing the rare for like 30 seconds to 1 minute while I kite it around so it doesn't one shot me lmao. I am still enjoy the state of the game otherwise.
Yeah I've been just ignoring crucible altars... I haven't played in a while and am trying out a new build too, I was thinking maybe my build is just trash because of the rare mobs... I keep coming across rares that feel harder than the map boss itself. I guess it's good to know it's probably not my build, and just the balancing of them this league then. Kind of annoying tbh.
@@KjKase Yeah its definitely not your build, trust me. Lol. I'm playing a 50 to 80div build with a 50div aurabot following me around and they are just cracked out of their minds. They speed to me across the map like the flash and scratch me and I drop lmao.
Agree in all, todays PoE is unrewarding for people that work everyday, like if you have 2-3 hours a day, you could enter PoE but you cant certainly know if you are going to make a big progress or nothing at all, cause its all rng. What’s more, i like having trade, i dont like solo self found, but, i really hate having to rely on trading in order to do something, like being more time outside game in trading site than inside a map. In the end, i want to play poe but if i have 2-3 hours Rn, i just play another game. There is no way someone can enjoy league if you cant finish atlas and a good build. Game should have some type of starting items and driven quest to finish the atlas in order to help basic progress where there is no fun
It was ridiculous even in Sanctum. I delved hard on RF Jugg that league and I had to log out so many times to reset nodes because monsters would keep spawning forever and that goes together SO WELL with Soul Eater.
Honestly a great point about the scourge UI. Would be a perfect application to this mechanic. I think there might still be a small overtune to the crucible monsters in maps, but I also think for most people it is still too early to guage this since a lot of people are still running weaker league start builds. I just finished setting up a dot cap semi tanky build and fully charged crucibles are not really scary anymore for me. Sometimes I still die (especially to the flicker strike humanoid assholes), but to me I kind of understand that charging a difficulty bar to 100% means that it is going to be the hardest it can be. I have also felt for a while that the average player power is on the decline every single league with build and item nerfs, but GGG has also beem activly increasing monster and boss power every league (archnem mods, better monster combat, uber bosses, etc.). We have started to hit many points where it feels like the options for what builds you can play and how you have to play them gets narrower and narrower each league. Then this is all supported by an economy which for the most part requires you to play and farm currency efficently in order to be able to afford items. I am lucky and have plenty of time to play the game (lucky or lonley), but I really can't imagine how difficult and discurouging this must be for people that play the game more casualy and are not able to put in 30+ hours a week.
I'm alching yellow maps so my left side is alch, two scrolls with thicket bow underneath. Never sold or dumped my crucible item. I do dump it to run a heist quest and forget to put it back in when I go back to mapping though. My only complaint is that when you have a weapon you want to fully bake it takes so ridiculously long. Charging to around 60% to get a sliver of progress to kill mobs that drop no loot sucks.
This makes no logical sense a casino is designed to make you lose. A video game is made to reward you through time spent in the game based on rng longer playing better chances of winning.
@@dandyjandon4231 it depends on how you take your measurements, here if you take a single instance then the comparison is fair. It also does make sense to measure it like that because of the amount of time you spend on a single instance.
It's nice that you bring up ultimatum. Because it's just straight out better. Crucible could have been ultimatum but krangle league. Instead. We got crucible. RIP sassmaster, I miss you to this day.
I hope they can address trade: -been out of town for 3 days, when i came back absolutely nothing in my stash, you NEED to be connected to sell stuff. -buying currencies is just atrocious, you need to PM so many persons to get an answer. -if you are selling stuff and you get many PMs, it's just stressful tbh -if the seller of the item of your dream is offline, get the L -if he's afk, same.
Imo ggg 100% endorses scamming / price fixing. First page on any chase item is price fixers. Same with mirrors. If a player has an item listed for 4x allow to me DIRECTLY buy it. This bs of wasting 2 peoplea time to invite and have them join my ho just for a 2sec interaction is the most brain dead approach. Also having multiple pages of price fixing is just cancer. Another reason player retention isn't great in this game.
When buying currencies just skip like the first 30. They are price fixers, or at least players making money just by trading are going to snipe those cheap items before you.
THIS!!!!! I rly love POE, spend probably 1000€ on that game already. But the trading system is absolute garbage, the fact you need 3rd party tool to even "handel" the trades is already horrible. but trading currencies or low 1c / 1 alch items is nearly impossible. you simply spam 30 ppl, and hope 1 picks up. and all of that just so i press a button on my 3rd party tool button to say "ty, bye" . there is 0 human interaction or socialising in the whole trade. no chat etc. Make everything that costs below 5 div or some treshhold instand trade ... (if the player wants to) otherwise its just rly bad. such a timewaste.
What I got from this and honestly just from experiencing these things myself: GGG is only focused on dragging out your play time, rather than trying to engage you longer. They’re trying to treat the symptom of disinterest in recent leagues rather than the cause. That or they’re trying to maximize player retention for the least possible amount of work. All in all it doesn’t feel like a game. It feels like a business transaction.
You see the pattern of GGG Vision? Add AN with loot -> Nerf a bit remove loot -> ninja buff AN Now it is crucible, they are going to Nerf fest but give you crucible power -> next league you have the nerfs left and crucible power gone GGG are obsess with their RUTHLESS Vision, they want you to play like Ruthless and keep sneaking the nerfs literally no body asking for. It's not like only nerfing OP stuff for example Seismic Trap, they just want to cut the whole fraction of power from the player, for what?
Because they are just as stupid as when they played D1 and D2 as teenagers and want everyone to relive their shitty experiences. They need psychological assistance.
As a veteran PoE Player with 10k hours played I can relate to anything he says and agree with most of them. 3.21 feels like not playing a 3-Month-league, it feels like a small test case for a small new system like april fools joke battle royale was. I also played less and less during the last few leaues started with scourge while the leagues before I always went big dick and did all challenges, got myself a HH or Mageblood etc. Hopefully PoE 2 will safe us veterans.
Losing progress is best exemplified by maven, where you are losing 120c every time you fail it, and it's required for the voidstone, and there is no way to practice it without paying 120c every attempt.
Crucible? Nerfs?? What are you talking about, dude? It's 2020 and Delirium just released! C'mon let's go dude!! You gotta see these cool new Cluster Jewel things they added!
Tinfoil hat theory here: Before this league I had a suspicion that it might be one of those "meh" leagues because.... a) Sanctum was actually a big league. Like it or not - It had a lot of content, new assets, new items etc. Overall it was a substantial work that was put by devs. b) GGG officialy said they gonna prolong Sanctum to 4 months. Now... Say what you want, but I belive it HAS a lot to do with Diablo 4. D4 had a massive EA and open beta around the end of the sanctum and therfore the next PoE league would still be overshadowed by D4 hype train. So GGG decided to put a smaller, less substantial league now - Crucible. c) We also know, that shortly after D4 releases in June - The new league will be announced at exilecon. GGG knows they need to show another big league do get back some attention from aRPG fans. TL;DR - I think GGG on purpose released a... "meh" league not to waste resources before D4 launch and exilecon. And the fact it's their most popular league actually proves that poeple are hungry for more aRPGs - Even better idea to put more focus on exilecon announcements and don't waste them right now. (Btw. This is not some "which game is better" post. I love PoE and I'm super hyped about D4. I just think that from budget and PR point of view that's what I'd do. Save money and resources for now and focus on exilecon league announcement)
Which if true is a big missed opportunity because of how many new arpg fans are trying poe for the first time coming from d4 beta. I imagine quiet a lot of them are missing out on what a true poe experience could be if they played in a league mechanic that you wanted to engage in with every zone.
@@SpecShadow well thats there you are wrong. They don't publish one league and then go "ok everyone start working on next league NOW 4 months to go". Realistically its probably like early league discussions start 1-2 months in, development starts 2 months in, QA testing starts + patch notes drop 1 week before league launch. Like its most likely a
I don't think having to engange with high risk, high friction content for a chance at the top end rewards is inherently a problem, the problem is that there doesn't seem to be any baseline rewards for engaging with monsters that are often harder than pinnacle bosses. Encounters just would have to drop some compelling loot and the biggest problem would be solved imo. thanks for comprehensive video, great outline!
I’m sad sanctum didn’t go core. It was a peak Poe league. The amazing chase items that came with it and being able to grind the sanctum for currency or relics was so fun. I love leagues that add actual CONTENT to the game. Crucible just doesn’t do this, even the maps for it are just basically a crappy breach that’s skippable. They missed part hard with crucible, the weapon trees are an awesome idea, but everything else about it is a huge miss
sanctum was plain awful. first you need to gather sanctum rooms in every map until you can actually engage with the mechanic (criticism of kalandra apparently got us nowhere) and then you were forced into ranged engagement because you will just get instantly yeeted out of the run if you take damage even if your character is built tanky. blows my mind how people thought this was a good league.
The easiest hot fix would be: "if selected item x has no crucible tree, consume the crucible forge to grant a tree with no charge needed. If selected item y has a crucible tree, charge up the crucible forge to progress the leveling of the crucible tree." The other option would be: "select an item to grant a crucible tree after x number of forges." The caveat being you would need let say some arbitrary number 4 times, but killing monsters in maps would grant experience towards the crucible tree. This way you can cook up multiple crucible items while still mapping and getting experience passively as you are mapping.
Crucible is almost every bad decision they've made over the past year and a half or so. Don't have to say what's wrong about about it because you can just talk about older leagues. A barrage of nerfs again under the guise of "buffs" (after they said that wouldn't be the case mind you. That on it's own is a whole awful thing that keeps happening) Scourge had some absolutely heinous overtuned enemies with horrible attacks. Also mobs just popping up around you and clapping you instantly if you don't zoom out of the circle. The absolute trash that is Archnemesis just causing so many problems _yet again. For the 5th league in a row._ The lack of any reward from Lake. Taking forever and getting nothing. The complete letdown of a mechanic from Sanctum because of how it was designed. Absolutely horrid to interact with from all the last 3. Archnemesis version 1 was atrocious. Archnemesis 2 electric boogaloo was still trash because of how little space you got for sentinels. Lake was really awkward and weird. Sanctum only let you hold 8(?) rooms for some reason. Could rant all day about Archnemesis. It actually summarizes one of my biggest complaints about the path that PoE has been going down. There are so _so so so_ many issues with it. The biggest one being it added absolutely nothing to the game but frustration. They still absolutely hard counter builds and have all the gross ass properties that they used to have but _slightly_ tuned down. A lot of content creators were praising the "nerfs" to Archnemesis and they didn't really do anything at the end of the day when you actually read them. They are still as garbage as they were back then. Garbage is garbage. Can try to make it smell as different and look as different as you want - it doesn't change that it is shit. They literally did a change that makes an Archnemesis mod pop up through your entire map a while back. It is so unbelievably awful. It is just anti-fun. Archnemesis adds absolutely nothing to this game. It is so much worse than the old rares which mind you - people only complained about because they never bothered fixing mechanics spewing out 200 aurastacking rares. They didn't fix the problem at all because the same thing happens except now every single rare mob is aurastacking for itself. They "fixed" the problem by making a much worse problem. Now all the rares are aurastackers. That also completely ruin archetypes and builds and are way tankier than nearly everything in the game and just one shot you constantly if you haven't absolutely stacked the hell out of defensives. They also fling spells all over place which was not a thing before and ended up making that neat new spell suppression gimmick for bossing something that is borderline mandatory for mapping but is also incredibly inconvenient to get because it's only on certain types of items and on a certain part of the tree and it just goes on and on. It's annoying. It has so many problems man. Weird how we don't get a balance manifesto because people might be a little upset about certain things getting changes. Instead they just go "Not much is being changed" and shove it under the rug. That's just a thing they do now. Don't get me wrong there has been some fun stuff but I would say the negatives have been outweighing the positives for a while now even if it is only a little bit at a time (Archnemesis was more like a giant kick in the balls) and it creeps further and further towards negative every single one of these leagues. Whatever the decision making process is over at GGG has taken a very hard shift in a different direction. Fun should be the main priority but whoever is making stuff happen seems to be wanting that to be a secondary focus. Friction is honestly the perfect way to describe it. There's just been a little bit more and more friction every league since Expedition. The game is not "harder" or "more engaging." It's just way way more annoying and taking more time. I still get to the same point. I still have fun along the way. I'm just way more annoyed and wanting to play other things more often. My friends are way more annoyed and wanting to play other things more often. Would like to remind people that recombinators were literally a solution to something GGG themselves said was a problem. Loot on the ground being more interesting and the player picking it up more. And then they removed it after the extremely positive reception. Going completely against their own words and any sort of logic just to make the game more annoying. It's just so baffling. I am enjoying this league for the most part but not really for the league itself. But that's every league simply because it's a fresh restart and I want to try new builds. I hate using crucible. It's genuinely awful and almost all of the special nodes for skills make absolutely no sense at all. It's just not as fun as it could be because they make incredibly stupid decisions and as I recall - are pretty awful with feedback from their betas.
That's a great summary of why User Experience matters and how inconvenient and not intuitive interactions make continuous playing just unbearable. UI design isn't a easy task and requires a lot of practice to get great design done, that shouldn't be an afterthought.
I honestly don't understand GGG's decision making after Ritual. It was so fun, you felt powerful, you could play basically any build, and now we have this
I agree with pretty much everything you said, and I've skipped the past two leagues because of it. I thought kalandra was especially bad. I just felt the scarcity of basic currency to progress my atlas was too much. As a recent dad, it makes me unmotivated to play because I just takes too much time for this period of my life right now. The leagues I've played the most were the leagues I felt rewarded for my time invested and or just had fun - ritual, ultimatum, expedition, scourge, Sentinel (of which I played nearly the whole 3 months). The nerfs are also disheartening It all kind of just makes me feel like 😮💨😮💨😮💨.
From what I see, Chris Wilson has a very specific feeling he wants to achieve for PoE, and for him it should be much more like D2, but now PoE already got out of hand and the playerbase would not accept directing the game into that kind of pace. Chris is probably taking notes from the mistakes in PoE that made the playerbase get used to explode screens of mobs and reach the highest bosses easily and making all that very different from the beginning for PoE2.
The biggest issue to me are all of the rng mechanics. Nothing you find really matters in this game unless you're willing to spend an ungodly amount of time grinding materials so you can jump through hoops a thousand times until you hit the affix you want, and then do it all over again with rng mechanic 2 and 3 and 4 and then slam a vaal orb and see everything brick. And if you're not willing to go through this torture than all of the materials hold no value beyond trading. But that's the gamedesign, to have a zillion rng mechanics for the sole purpose of stashing a zillion items and materials so that you'll buy a zillion tabs for hundreds of dollars. This game is abusive and unethical, it has no respect for player intelligence and time.
This honestly does feel like Kalandra league to me where in Kalandra I would completely skip the league mechanic and buy high tier reflect lakes as my way of "interacting" with the league. In this league after the first few days I just completely skip the league mechanic and just go for good bases to mash together and pray.
While Crucible is bunk for the most part. I still feel like the overall state of the game is excellent. I have my gripes about certain issues and you touched on most of these. Mostly to do with monster power creep and how, unless you have an insanely tanky build, and I mean like over the top defenses, you are going to get one shot out of nowhere from time to time. The idea of PoE isn't to grind through monsters at a steady rate, it's to kill shit before it kills you and move as fast as possible. I absolutely love the speed of PoE, but I truly wish they'd tone down some of these monsters. I'm ok with shit being absurdly difficult when I want it to be, but getting one shot in a T16 scoured map with a solidly defensed character feels pretty terrible. I have other gripes like inventory space and no auto-sort feature.
I don't understand why they are afraid to use convenient mechanics from previous leagues. Let me put the weapon out of the way in a handy cranglebox. Pause the damn game while I choose the difficulty of the encounter. Make the item combiner or tree unlocker pedestal into a currency item. Put mechanics and gameplay in the league specific map. Let me have a weapon tree that isn't 75% downsides. I'm enjoying the game but everything feels like it's missing a piece. Like getting a meal with good ingredients but they neglected to season it. I mean I killed the big 4 and unlocked almost all my favourite slots without having a crucible weapon I was happy with. How is a shield with +40 armour and +12% quality literally the best thing I've managed to find by the time I complete the map system?
I have a wand I have been crafting, the crucible tree is consistently bad but the wand as a whole increased damage by 20%. The best in slot crucible mods would give qol and roughly 10% damage. It seems like I can only guarantee the damage or the qol which would be things like a small amount of LGoH, having basically 3 int nodes or a bit of cooldown recovery for movement skills. You know, useless things when they come with downsides that nobody asked for. Then there are nodes like the totem hp or poison bow shit that are deleting endgame bosses.
I honestly thought scourge was a very good league. Not just because of the krangling of items, but because you weren't limited to just one slot. You could krangle most of your stuff. But the best thing about it was that you got to run your maps twice in one map. Playing MF builds during that league was probably the most fun I've had in the game. Crucible just kind of feels like a nerfed version of that. The skill specific passives are also super fucked.
totally agree with you.. I feel and observed the same thing, youtube people who can earn 7 div/hour are those fully utilize every mechanics, we no longer able to use league mechanic to earn as much, it feel so de-motivated as my time just wasted like that.. besides that, overall builds are getting weaker and weaker because of league balance. GGG like to say they weaken the passives while it get compensate through league mechanic, however not all league get absorb into main game, which mean those "compensation" only works for that league, and next league everyone are nerf due to they "compensate" with new league mechanic again... super frustrating as the game become like working/studying in real life, we can't just enjoy it, but have to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours to get the same build..
First, I'm a 10+ year veteran of POE. Since closed beta. Second, the league has half of what it needs but the two most important things are missing. The loot and the mechanic. The weapon nodes are great, but the time it takes to find something you will use is greater than the time it takes to farm and buy something. That's a mistake. Leagues need lootsplosions from the mechanic, or at least an interesting mini-game. Sanctum was perfect as it had everything. This league has nothing. Not even the node to sell for 3 divs is worth the time trying to find it. It's 1:1500 to hit it. Imagine doing that many crucibles just for a div. They need to add a loosplosion and it will keep people happy. But it seems like this is a stop-gap league waiting on Exilecon and POE2.
"The weapon nodes are great, but the time it takes to find something you will use is greater than the time it takes to farm and buy something. " This 1 million %. I haven't engaged with the mechanic at all. " It's 1:1500 to hit it. Imagine doing that many crucibles just for a div. " I bet if you calculated the time it takes to do a crucible it would come out that its way faster to just do maps back to back to get divs to drop(plus its a million times more fun to actually play maps)
Yeah, in the time time i am going to spend doing crusibles and managing/looting trash weapons to gain that 3 divine drop, i would be making double, possibly even triple that amount just by not interacting with the mechanic, it's so stupid.
0:59 I mean the numbers are somewhat deceptive right? Because most of the players like myself who launched POE alot of em left & some of us are coming back. Not to mention that they are adding in all the regions & all the consoles into that & the consoles themselves are a entirely different game. So sure they have more people, but most of them are a newer crowd, the same ones i assume that go game to game wherever their favorite streamer goes? Which is independent from what poe is actually doing. Now there are alot of changes i think is stupid on behalf of ggg, & yes crucible is a let down compared to what streamers where claiming it was. But its still has loads of potentially for openness Assuming you can actually survive long enough to do any of it lol. The battle pass thing i isn't worth 30$ & i really don't like the taste it leaves in my mouth. Because its a sign of what they are really attempting to go for which is a normal p2p F2p game. They also have further locked people into certain skills, by making sure all older skills largely are nerfed so much that well its pointless. Thats a huge problem because while they always did nerf gems, Never on this level as the whole purpose of why POE is so popular is because you can play how you want. Which you still can, well kind of because there is a whole list of skills that you can't even really use anymore making all the mtx that you bought worthless. Pushing people into a subset of skills & paths that everyone has to take or be not able to do anything without taking all day. Which is why you see everyone with the least diverse skill selection than ever has been in poe. So i can see all of that, The game is completely different now in many ways. Honestly i think the real issue is they promised during POE 2.0 that it would stay true & that it would be more like a expansion keeping everything you had & did in the game. However i think thats not really the case anymore, I think they are making skills that don't mesh with 2.0 nerfed so that no one can really use them but they keep their word & you can if you want to use them. Which is really what i feel is happening they are just destroying everything that isn't part of 2.0 so that it can't work or compete with the 2.0 stuff. Therefore making it to where no one will really complain because there is nothing to compare it too unless you played it way back in the day. Thats what it appears to me, what do you think?
What I really dislike about the game for a while now is the focus on player retention. I remember Chris saying on a Baeclast or something that GGG doesn't care about player retatention because PoE is a game which you play for a few weeks to months and then come back for the next league but nowadays it feels like they want you to stay the entire 3 months and therefore make things harder accordingly. Also very good video Mr Dog.
Last straw for me was going all in on one of the new skill based level 5 mods, building around and putting it on both weps and helm to find it doesn't even work properly. Friend went into chancing an item with a passive to build around, and that passive he chose to invest and build on also does not work properly. This is like wolcen, can't trust the passives on the tree to work
Good video, the league aint very good in many ways I agree. I've heard people talk about d4 beta and that being a reason for more people playing PoE, where the ARPG hype got going and transfered players over to 3.21 shortly after the d4 beta was over. I think there are factors like these that contribute to the very high player numbers, because this league on its own is imho not even close to a top tier league. Im gonna keep enjoying it for a while tho, we will know after the first month what will stay and what will change, and by then I'm probably tired of it regardless. :)
I think the 3 month league model is at its end. There is simply no time to polish the new leagues and it's hurting the game. Time to go 2 leagues a year a take their time to make meaningful content that doesn't need 2 months of patching to feel complete.
@@1Life2Little not really.. Think of it as the entire dev team having a month or 2 extra for a better product More time goes into planning and testing, and the product ends up having a longer lifecycle and better reception in general Although this won't change anytime soon since the investors in all probability like quarterly results and that won't sync with GGG's hypothetically new longer dev cycles
How nice would it be if map difficult determined your rewards received when killing the map boss. Juicing t16's with every mechanic and modifier possible and then killing monsters in the map fills some power bar on your screen and when you kill the map boss it drops appropriate crafting currency determined the by the difficulty of the map. Old Harvest, Sentinel Recombinators, and Kalandra Mirror levels of crafting power obtained from a clear and non-intrusive method; just clearing maps. Simple and sweet. I'd play the Hell out of that. This trend of baking something in an oven with unknown ingredients for power that is often times useless to your actual character is disengaging and I hope it changes in the future.
For me is simple, GGG wants Ruthless be the standard for its game since POE (Acording to GGG and some players/yuotubers) is a game from hardcore true-gamer to hardcore true-gamer, and for GGG a good game is not measured by the fun it can generate but for the hours spent. Good or Bad, soon there will be other option like LE and D4. I just regret that I started my experience with Harvest when I didnt know anything about the game and for worse I play until Ritual in SSF. If I had played POE two or three leagues before I would have had the fun of my life playing Harvest and Ritual with more knowledge about the game.
Chris Wilson makes a game for Chris Wilson and nobody else. Nobody wants Ruthless, he pushes Ruthless. Nobody wants DR-stacking Soul Eater Archnemesis Mobs, he pushes them anyway. Nobody wants gamble crafting, he forces it in every league.
![The Absolute State of Melee In Path of Exile [PoE 3.17 Archnemesis]](/img/n.gif)
Nothing I like better than being a level 86 and still getting killed in one hit on a tier 3 map. 75% on all resistances, 1,340 ARMOUR and 5,380 EVASION. Then, losing all that XP that you spent over an hour gaining.
The annoying thing is the mechanic could be fixed very easily by removing the crafting from the map. Give us a forge in the hideout, and make crucible monsters drop currency that can be used to forge those passive trees. You could even do a delve style tag based currencies to help influence what the passive will be if instead of u locking a whole tree you forged the next passive on as you go.
Imagine GGG could think of something like you said. Mental boom 😂
Actually an amazing idea. I would love something like this. I'm currently enjoying the present league and I've been able to craft some cool +1 bows with support gem on their trees but I feel like this would work way better.
I think for me the game was fun when it was about builds and not gear
I like that idea a lot but there would need to be some storage slots for league currency within the Crucible crafting bench. I already have a hard time keeping up with all of the miscellaneous items that drop from legacy mechanics.
Yeah, I agree this would've seemed/felt better and more smooth.
As for the crucible enemies/mobs it could be cool to have some kind of portal that is located in maps/the world that you walk through to teleport to the "crucible" were it either starts auto spawning waves of enemies and the longer you stay the harder it gets.. kind of equivalent to the whole charge mechanic, but waves of enemies is what is "charging". Can maybe mix it up between waves of enemies or a kind of boss fight
Once you go back through the little crucible portal is where your loot comes to you by just exploding where the portal was. That way you don't have to be concerned with shuffling through loot inside of the crucible.
The crucible area/arena could just be reminiscent of the Roman colosseum, but have like lava/magma style look to it with an audience of monsters/demons hooting and hollering lol
Idk I always like the league mechanics where it is fairly seamless to just activate it and do it, ie. breach, ritual, legion, even sanctum was kind of seamless, and quite a few others. Even delve is a lot of fun, because you just collect the sulphrite in the world and once you see you have a solid amount you can just go delve for a solid amount of time instead of running maps, or heists, etc.
i got to level 87 and quit. i made the mistake of playing melee on league start. you literally cant even move against most of the games mobs now. between chills and vines and ele pen and phys as extra chaos, it just doesnt matter what i do (unless i spend 100 divines) i just die. so i gave up. poe right now feels very much a game where u either play the meta or dont play at all. builds that used to be good are just trash now. you pretty much have to play around the league mechanic and the power it brings or else you'll wind up getting rickrolled. on top of that the game is just way grindier than its ever been. ive been playing since 2014, and in the first week of a league i easily had a complete build made, until around 2 years ago when they started adding more and more item requirements to make functional builds. now you need like 22 different item slots to fill in order to make a complete build that can do endgame maps, compared to 10 when i first started playing. in all honesty, with all the new skill trees within skill trees and jewels that provide jewel slots and jewel seeds that you need a third party program to find out what they do, poe is feeling so byzantine that it's becoming a parody of itself. complexity for complexity's sake.
I always go between lvl92-95 before I quit a char. I didn't even hit 90 on this one.
Bro do you read what you typed? Maybe complexity and customization isn't for you then. The game is perfectly fine and there isn't much of a change to money-making. Quite the contrary. Maybe except sanctum since it was too rewarding. Regarding melee - as long as you are not HC ssf or ssfsc whos plan is to beat ubers melee is absolutely fine. Sure it needs some buffs to be competitive(except boneshatter) but that's only for racers. Melee stuff is also much cheaper on trade since a lot less people play it. Honestly you seem to be more attracted to diablo rather than Poe if anything you mentioned bothers you lol
@@zzxxccvv01 I dont know what you are smoking but i want some.
My sentiments exactly about the current state of Poe . If I could say something to GGG it would be: Make us WANT to play more, don't just make us play more.
this exactly! i play less because of those weird changes and forcing me to play more with barerly making it worth my time
This is so true. I dont play that much because of the lack of time. But tbh i dont want to play anymore... im just bored.
If GGG just focused on build diversity they could probably make PoE the greatest ARPG in existence and 100,000s of people could join in seeing the entire player base play different cool builds on TH-cam
My friends queried me if I would play the league. I said probably not. At first they tried to persuade me but to no avail. RNG, on top of layers of RNG isn't just interesting to me and I think you hit the nail in the head with their design philosophy problem. It's artificial length without tackling the game quality. A great game doesn't leave a player feel exhausted from a chore, a badly designed game does. To me games are primarily entertainment first, and PoE does not respect my time so I take it elsewhere.
Or as he said: "I play less, because i trade all day". PoE in a nutshell and the reason this ARPG is just not as superior as most people keep saying. The "complexity" of rng in multiple ways and requirement of actually using PoB to prepare your builds instead of playing, trying or developing your build (e.g. like in Last Epoch) just kills everythig that is fun in a ARPG. The game really needs to shift a step back to make SSF proper again. While Last Epoch is still far from perfect and still needs a lot of adjustmennts the whole SSF is so much more rewarding than all these layers of rng in poe nowadays that actually only let you play a economy / market simulator than a ARPG to be efficient.
The game has a terrible case of "doesnt feel good to play until 20+ hours". First characters feel terrible to play, especially if you play even slightly off meta skills.
You cant kill rares? Get an upgrade. How do you get upgrades? you kill rares.... archnemesis did irreperable damage to the game
You forgot go the a third party site and trade to get a rare that you will never get to drop yourself... Fun ARPG!!!
@@1Life2Little Fr it's bad enough that these idiots think slowing down the game is the right play but dear god having an auction house would be so nice buying things take forever because you have to whisper like 100 people to get a response because people don't want to stop playing to do a sale it's disruptive and then you'll be playing and you have to stop to make a sale like that sucks just automate that shit with an auction house and be done
My complain w the game, coming from D4 is how user unfriendly the whole UI is.. the content seems neutral so far -- so hopefully it picks up later.
Yep. Couldn't even make it 2 hours into this game. So boring. In those 2 hours, I used ONE skill, leveled up 5x, and felt no significant difference from the first minute of gameplay. If I need to play your game 20+ hours to start having fun, your game sucks. Hi Starfield!!!
@@faceman3585I mean it does pick up in say 4 hours but even me I'm 400hours into the game and I still can't complete all the content because I don't have a PhD. The game is honestly made for people who don't work, don't have a wife, an have no responsibilities at all. I loved it at first. Loved it so much I've spent $1000 in the store but now I'm regretting it. Not because I don't have the money, but because I feel ggg doesn't deserve my money. These mf take 10% xp when you die and trust me you die to alot of bs. 99% of the time you don't even know what killed you. Ggg has zero respect for our time. Taking xp is bs. Once you're a high level 10% of xp is hours of grinding. It's crazy
first ggg gave us 20 variants of hinders/vines
now they're starting on the 20 variants of ele resistances (-res, pen, exposure, etc. does nothing against "x ailment and x element resistant" and damage cycling)
also i swear frostbomb doesn't seem to cover all the regen-like mechanics anymore.
frost bomb isn't -100% anymore, so against strong regen it just doesn't cut it anymore, especially with the relatively small aoe.
However there is strong alternatives now, the mark mastery that just straight up turns off all regen mechanics on the marked mob is the best one imho, and the combo I'm using on my current build is 50% reduced regen on enemies hit recently from a pantheon plus 50% reduced regen on nearby enemies from a recovery mastery.
@@Failzz8 Read whole comment, there is a much bigger problems then life regen on monsters and you just ignore first part of teh comment.
@@ivanr.1005 Pretty sure they did read it but just commenting on the second half because there are actually decent alternatives for it.
imo it's not reasonable to expect every build to tick so many boxes, now including a mark + pantheon + many passive points. in a few patches they'd just add another regen-but-not-called-regen and the cycle starts over.
@@ulamss5 There's already leech. Some time in the future, GGG will make leech actually relevant.
Nailed it, bro. Played 3 days and decided this is just more of the same. The first 3 or 4 weeks are always a beta where we complain of stuff being over tuned and not rewarding or respectful of time for them just to meet us halfway and say, "Are you not grateful?" By then, the player base is gone. I just can't keep playing this swinging pendulum of a game with Nerfs gutting fun and forcing us into new metas.
Not only this, but this has been in the game ever since they upped monster and boss power and made those a progression system, meanwhile you still have xp loss on death, i know not everyone should get to level 100, but maybe it is time to make the xp requirement higher and remove the xp loss on death, loads of players have to sacrifice playing the game as intended to go grind out a level so they dont lose all their xp and that sucks, it is so bad that people pay massive amounts of currency in 5 way farms to get to 100 and simply never having to care about dying again, which is how it should be, the 6 portal limit should be the limiting factor not xp loss on death discouraging you from doing bosses unless you have an op boss killer build.
GGG's intention has been clear from the start of 3.15 or even before. Slow the game down back to its roots. Move all power from tree to gear. I dont know if any of you remember, but shield charging use to be as fast as having an acceleration shrine rn, ailment immunity was free for a lot of bullds (raider node had it for example), every ascendancy node had misc stats (example, ricochet had %more dmg per chain remaining), monsters had 1/25th the hp (you could kill essences with a herald of ice explosion and a spirit charge from abyss helm LMAO). I feel like people forget how crazy, fun and easy the game was back then. I feel like a madman seeing people worry about powercreep when they give a skill a 20% more damage buff, their recency bias blinding them to all the shit we lost along the way.
this is my first time using shield charge over leap/teleport/dash and I actually hate it lol. it's fast af, but just feels terrible compared to other movement skills.
@@Tha_T1p It's something you need to get used to and you need a flame dash to go along with it. I hated it at first as well, now I use it over all others if my build has a shield.
everytime I want to return to PoE I reach act 2 or 3 and I regret, then I unninstall... its just so tedious that I don't want to reach endgame.
@@zeroprogressive lol
Yep, i love it when they gave most, not even all, spells about 40% more damage back a few leagues ago and people were all celebrating to where i had to remind so many idiots that the buff they gave us only ALMOST gave you the power you had before 3.15, you're still at a huge lose with how the game felt for about 6 years before that.
The problem is that POE demand more luck than the diablo games. The people who buy into the lies of streamers will be dissapointed. Not only do you need the correct gear, you need to roll the CORRECT colors on the gear, and after that the correct bindings. So, you cant even follow a good build guide right to play the game without INSANE amout of luck behind it.
It's bad, not as bad as D4, but still bad.
And no full respecs. We got a full respec when they changed a lot just to get backstabbed. If you put out ONE point you lose your right to respec. The devs are morons!
the "each league gets removed but the nerfs stay" was a very valid point i read on reddit. It is SO true. It seems you guys are playing standard with a sprinkle of new content xD
The *potential* for player power has grown so much overtime. However, the base player power has shrunk sooo much. GGG really likes the pro/con opportunity cost so you can “specialize” your build but all that really did was create a huge checklist for us.
Potentials that only few will ever reach is how I feel about it. It's there, yes, but the cost to reach it is too much for most people that it's probably just not worth it. And the nerfs that came because of these "potentials" is quite silly.
what do you mean by base player power? I thought most builds are viable and strong
@@parleybae4321 Almost every builds are viable and strong IF you invest enough currencies into the build.
I do not follow you with your opinion. Player power drops each league. Only few builds are viable if you want to play all the content. I am creating own builds and each league they have less power even with very high invest.
Legion is a great example of controlling difficulty through good design. If your build can't pop them out, then you get an easier fight.
I don't think it is a great example. A lot of tanky builds end up with way easier legion encounters than they could handle, simply because of the timer preventing them from freeing more. Legion is one of the mechanics that double dips loot rewards on raw damage and nothing else.
Legion had horrible balance at release and was nerfed multiple times to the poiny where it is today
Legion at release had overtuned monsters. (Karui archers cough cough)
@@ulfi5223 yup, having low dps double punishes you in this game: slower clearing is obvious but then you also get less stuff because arbitrary timers. See incursion, delve, betrayal, delirium, blight, breach, legion and i'm sure i'm missing some. All of these have some sort of timer or mechanic that punishes you in some level for moving slow or having low dps. You are forced to play fast or else you won't get all the rewards. This hurts the build diversity more than anything else. Not only you would clear and or move with less optimal builds but you would also get less stuff. Playing defensive is just not viable, unfair one shots aside
@@akaxjenkins Legion punishes you for bad reach. My Fire Trap ignite SSF build has no dps issues at the map tier im in rn, but i can do much in legions because i have to throw the trap, wait for it to explode and then wait again for dots to do their thing.
true and real
waited 4 months for this btw
i wish i could play like im having fun like i did a while ago, not just because im addicted
This league feels like Standard. The base game itself is decent, but with problems like overtuned rare mobs. I found myself taking a break more often than before because how frustrating it is to play fighting against Hasted Soul Eater rare mobs.
I usually just ignore bad leagues and still enjoy the game, so Crucible being bad is not really that bad for me. However, the overturned rares are definitely the most glaring issues for me. I love to map and have a gigachad build that I play along with my Aurabot buddy, yet I still find myself stopping and focusing the rare for like 30 seconds to 1 minute while I kite it around so it doesn't one shot me lmao. I am still enjoy the state of the game otherwise.
poe has one of the worst gear progression and itemisation systems in any RPG ever made, literally every upgrade comes down to farming currency and buying it from trade, even if you want to craft yourself you have to trade for the mats, the concept of killing mobs and clearing difficult content to get good items is unthinkable for GGG devs
I'm right there with you. "I want to want to play PoE" hits me in my soul.
I sold an item I was baking, felt so bad. To prevent it from doing it again, I had to slow down my inventory emptying time and be super careful. It was annoying.
one thing that help me is if you stick any gem in it you'll get a pop up before selling it.
@@phantomviper211 That is a great tip, wish I had thought of that.
@@brickpharmer They should have given an inventory for it for the league and then also allowed you to use your bank tab items if u wanted
Very well said sir, game is not only getting harder, its getting grindier, less exciting, less rewarding each patch. I guess poe2 will suck.
I guess that's why they are called Grinding gear games then? Or maybe it's because it grinds my gears to play this game. Thinkge.
YEah feels more and more like PoE2 is not going to be a game for me... Last Epoch is looking more and more like a game i will play instead of PoE and PoE2.
Grind is good but rewards must keep up im out since ultimatum and dont think complexity just by itself can keep GGG as a benchmark in arpgs for long
Playing the game for the grind is nice and all, but the fun of this game comes from getting stronger and trying new builds. In a game where it's ultimate goal for many players is to try a build, finish endgame and try out a new build to get the excitement all over again. It's really stupid to slow down the game. No one gains anything by slowing down the game. If we can get all of the fun in the game within 50-100 hours, finish the character and move on to a new and exciting build, we'll be happy and the game will flourish. It makes no sense to slow this shit down because then it takes longer till we get that adrenaline of powering up, grinding begins feeling more and more tedious rather than exciting, you'll be playing like 50 hours without a single upgrade which feels fucking awful and by the time we force ourselves through the endgame, we don't have any excitement left to make a new character because we know it'll just be hell. So dumb.
They also remove so many ways of playing the game in some way.
- Endless Heist,
- Breachstone leveling due to breach rework and stone rarity (I bet Legion rework next league to kill 5 ways)
- map split farming
- nem3/4 farming
- not consume sextant farming
- group mf
and for sure many more.
I think all the crafters talked about the trickle down economy of better gear that's not perfect and trickle up of mats that group MF/harvest did, I still thought it was elitist and created inflation to entry costs of different farms. Still now the heist, and breach stone seems kinda lame.
3x beyond for 6L -> divine farming. I really wanted to do that one but before i learned the game enough to handle it, it got removed
Don't forget the big one they removed!: FUN!
Leagues are boring af. I play until I get to bosses and clear all maps and just quit. It's literally the sane shit every league. I want to like it with different builds, but it's so boring. The changes are constantly against players and to grief us. Just nothing else out there to play. D3 I've played to death and D4 is still little ways out.
Might just be my own opinion but some problems with PoE that i never see mentioned are: They desperately need to hire either a UX designer if they dont have one or fire and replace the current one, So many leagues have had problems with UI clarity of what the fuck youre supposed to do; Archnemesis, Syndicates board, Crucibles option to remove nodes from tree, Just general difficulty indications. Another problem is how every league they try to put out is way too big of a task and complicated for them, every league launch its riddled with bugs, crashes, trade site down. if they cant handle the pressure they put on themselves they need to lower the bar for standards, hire more people/better people, or increase the time inbetween leagues. and god please hire more playtesters.
the solution is to touch grass, play different games and not tryhard like a maniac in poe. yes it simple like that. we live in times when tryharding in any game is just pure cringe. just have fun and enjoy the game
thank you. I had a talk in my guild yesterday about this exact thing. The game just feels like a husk of what it was now. Soo many things were taken away from the players and now. 2 years after expedition, we still are in such a low estate from what we were before.
The monster power is just so weird and random and some mechanics like Expedition for example are way harder than others. You have to follow a meta build or really know what you are doing with an off meta build to be able to keep up with the game and some archetypes are inherently stronger than others, which is a shame, because there are many cool skills, that are just not viable or are only viable with insane investment, so you're stuck farming currency with a build you don't really want to play to be able to afford a build you want to play.
Its good u have to be good
the thing however with expedition is that its actually worth doing it since you can craft really powerful items with ROG and get a lot of currency tuljen + the option of getting logbooks.
Crucible had even harder monsters and you wont get any currency which is crinch
@@MeesterGgaming Is there any downside of doing lower tier expedition?
@@Skalarwelle I think pack size is the most important factor. Also maybe less logbooks but they do drop even at level 60. Also prob less refresh currency. Still top tier moneymaker
I honestly think GGG is trying to lower player power and rewards to help make the transition to PoE2 better. Obviously PoE2 will be harder since it is new content, realistically they won't have a league right away so generally the drops will feel worse. Also they will probably have widespread changes to player power. I just hope that it's being done to make PoE2 feel like a different game and not just to artificially extend how long players play.
Also what makes crucible even worse, is it has almost no effect on player power until your character is already strong. By the time you can start working on crucible weapons your build is already strong enough to do most of the content in the game, if not all of it. I had all my watchstones before I even finished my first tree. All this league content was incredibly backloaded, I'm sure some insane items will exist from this league, but what's the point if they dont even help you with progression.
this is how I felt since they started to make tankier systems. Especially when they changed the rares. They want longer fights but nobody else does.
@@tehf00n I dont think the problem is not that we dont want meaningful harder rares to fight! The problem is the fighting in POE is nothing like a fight in Diablo 4! And i have feeling thats what they want. More meaningful fighting where u have to pup ur special cooldowns, build up power, dodge, use CC's etc... But POE for many years doesnt build like that.
@@pifoeko4580 what do you mean? There are plenty of bosses that enact that gameplay style. I mean, if you are underpowered against T11+ maps it feels like the fights are diablo boss fights. And let's face it... the Diablo boss fights are dogshit. I like the game but there is no danger in the fights.
You are cooked 🎉 ding time to eat 😊
No body likes tough game with low rewards, GGG it's out of their god dam mind.
My biggest concern is mandatory meta build usage. 5 defensive layers to survive t4 and because meta build is mandatory the steep entry curve of required divines to even do something fun without dying 500 times.
You're exaggerating so much it's laughable
@@Sammysapphira not really, I played this game since shortly after launch. And for the passed 5-6 leagues the developers goals changed a lot.
I've quit this league at t4, with 4k health, res cap, 100% spell suppression wearing a shield so include block chance. As occultist ice trapper.
And it wasn't comfortable at all, it feels deadly anywhere I go. League mechanics are utterly overtuned. And there's plenty of stupid mods monsters can get to ruin your day.
The game lost its fun when it needed to appeal to only users who first like to clear the whole atlas, grind 50div before starting to have fun with your build.
You are totally right... That's the reason i don't have fun anymore... every build needs 50+ divines to feel good in T10+ maps... It's fucking insane and stupid.
@@agency_tv wait what you are playing softcore trade and cry about dying in tier 4 maps?????
you guys are just bad. got to t10 ssf, then traded to do t11+ smoothly.
can someone at GGG HQ show this to the whole staf, this man just condensed in 16 minutes why a game i've been playing for 8 years has been rotting from the inside since 3.15.
so go find another game to play..have played this for 9 years and still looove levelling a new toon.
@@tonnymiller123 just because you do doesn’t mean everyone else does. There are lots of things I find enjoyable that doesn’t mean they don’t suck though
@@tonnymiller123 Sorry about your luck. By that logic someone out there thinks dog shit takes better on pizza than pepperonis, and sadly you're that guy.. Wake the fuck up some, ok?
@@tonnymiller123 Not saying i hate the game i just have seen what it was & could be, not pleased by the constant erosion of fun slowly converting a game into a chore. But i really appreciate your input, even if after i feel like a new league ain't my cup of tea or if i feel like i'm done with it, that's what i already do. But thanks.
@@tonnymiller123 and...?
PoE2 will fix everything COPIUM
All the bad changes are being made to bring poe1 in line with poe2 my friend. Keep the copium for something that has some actual hope to cling to.
PoE2 probably gonna be a big pile of kako... Slow grindy and unfun.
Poe 2 will be poe ruthless
Hahaha
Poe1 barely makes enough money to stay afloat or they would have a bigger dev team, company wants to make money so Poe2 with it's ripoff of D4 stagger mechanic will be more money hungry
For PoE as a whole, the biggest issue has been bloat. That's really easy to say, and it is really hard to explain what it is and how it impacts the game. I started playing PoE in the beta, and I've been playing on and off since. The big draw for me a decade ago was that it really encouraged player choice, you could really customize your character and how you wanted to play. Back then you couldn't really make a "wrong choice". Your character might be less optimal and clearing cruel would be pretty hard, but you couldn't brick a character. The systems for scaling in PoE are cool in a vacuum, but every time they add a new mechanic it expands that. We are at a stage now where the player is asked to make hundreds of decisions and there are objectively wrong answers. The more they add, the less freedom players actually get.
So basically, every new mechanic they add scales player power exponentially. Because of that people will find these exponential interactions and take advantage of them. If it just ended there we would be fine. However to counteract that they do two things, they nerf the scaling of the interaction, and they buff the monsters. That puts a gap between the people abusing strong mechanics and other people trying to just have fun and play their cool build. This has just happened over and over again for years and years and now that gap is so big that you need to abuse those mechanics to even play the game. There are so many exponential factors to scaling your power that if you miss even one of them you wont deal any damage. We are at this point now where all these things don't matter because the game is tuned for the high end of broken interactions (which they just nerf anyways).
Mechanically every build plays very similarly to one another, and it's not about the moment to moment gameplay. It's become mostly centered around the planning of your build, not the execution of it. Most enemies die in one hit, and the ones that don't have a dozen different mechanics scaling their stats to a stupid amount and they one-shot you. Most of the cool mechanics you used to make builds with are so underpowered and just can't deal with the overtuned enemies anymore and 90% of the games content is locked behind that. You don't get to make choices for your character anymore, you follow a mathematically proven objectively strong build because if you don't, then you don't get to play the game.
TL;DR - GGG added too many mechanics to the game and it has removed player choice and gutted build diversity because if you don't use the objectively best builds then 90% of the game is unplayable.
@@TheTamallyyes, I've never been capable of seen late game contents
Ultimatum was my favorite league, and I never got to fight the task master.
GGG always seems to have an issue where they make the end-game of the league out of reach for 99% of the players.
I just want to run my maps, click a button, fight a bunch of crucible monsters and collect my loot.
Instead, I forage the floor for spine bows, unlock the first node and put them in a dump tab, selling 2% of them. FUN
It's not an issue... They are balancing the game around the streamers that play 8+ hours every day... That's why "normal" people got such a hard time to reach endgame... I got no idea why "normal" people still play this game. I got over 18k hours in PoE and even i got problems hitting "endgame" because of the insane grinds.
Your graph is perfect, really hits home how it feels to play Poe nowadays. Especially with so much power being shifted to gear over time, the checklist you need to complete gets bigger and bigger.
I think that's by design, sadly. The devs started this pattern when they made ailments powerful and prominent in pinnacle content, incentivizing players to invest in reducing their effects. Initially, players solved the ailment problem by having flasks grant us immunity. Then, they took that away, so we itemized our gear or ascendencies to fix it. Then, they took that away and gave it to us on auras, and now it's solved through a combination of auras or pantheon powers and jewels. This kind of constraint-oriented gameplay isn't intrinsically an issue, it just becomes build making chores. It's a hidden knowledge check, which is a fairly cheap kind of depth, but still a kind of depth, I guess. Dissatisfied by the playerbase's insistence on being immune to their impractically strong elemental ailments, they introduce "totally not chill" and "totally not shock" as a way to force players to receive those effects so that we can die to the unfairly designed incoming damage or unavoidable oneshot mechanic.
The current gameplay of avoiding all hits at all cost because 1 in 1000 rares will delete you instantly is not compatible with mechanics that reduce player movespeed without meaningful counterplay. If the devs are upset that the best defense is not getting hit, they need to seriously internalize the reason why things are this way. It's not because we're cheesy minmaxers looking for the easiest way to pew-pew. I mean, some of us are, but high damage glass canon builds are always going to be an optimal solution in these types of games. The majority of the playerbase trends towards those sorts of builds because random affix generation on top of enemy damage reduction "league mechanic" scaling occasionally shits out an abomination with more effective hp than an uber boss and basic attack damage comparable to a slam.
I’m new to PoE. Wanted something to fill the time between Diablo 4. I’ve spent nearly a month across two different builds and each reached the same results. Getting one shot. Getting swarmed in half a second and dying before I can react. I don’t have access to a pc so I can’t use PoB. My second toon I followed a build guide. Guess I should have done more research on mind over matter and agnostic. Here I was thinking hey I’ll stack mana and use that as a huge life pool as my Elementalist arcs defensive measures. Well I guess that got nerfed into oblivion several leagues ago and I was following a build guide that was never going to allow me to see all the content in the game. How is this good game design? You stack spell suppression and evasion or you just get one popped by everything. I hear all about build diversity this and that. How is it diverse when the majority of builds throw totems or traps and stack spell suppression and evasion? It’s the same build with a different main skill. And if spell suppression and evasion is so imperative to survival, why tf is it not accessible in every section of the skill tree? Why does the upper and left side of the tree need to waste several points just to get spell suppression? I don’t get it. This game requires you to use multiple third party systems just to play it because the developers can’t be bothered to make things coherent in game. I don’t know what to do anymore. Two toons and over a month of my life wasted to hit the same brick wall of “you didn’t build your toon in this precise way so get fu(ked.”
Yea I played for 4 hours and can’t even get past act 1. I’m playing blindly but I really enjoyed d3, wasn’t a fan of d4 but never played it, just kind of saw streams of players playing it and was like hmmm, I’ll try PoE… thankfully Poe is free, cuz’ I might just get d4 and be a casual Andy with it; 😅… PoE is like having to sit in a math class I don’t want to be in. Definitely not new player friendly.
Every league since they've shown their hand they could stop instances people ask for them to bring it back. They have the technology!
too much qol for us to handle and to expect XD
"You think you want wow classic but trust us you REALLY don't."
Everytime a developer tells the players what they actually want they hemorrhage players until they walk it back.
Saw a lot of people not enjoying sanctum because melee was literally next to impossible for people in ruthless and SSF.
yeah the whole design of melee for that league was just plain awful. it was brought up instantly as a potential issue on the dev interview and they were ok with it, it's just 10% of playerbase after all.
As game progressed over the years monsters got insane damage, hp, resists. Armor and evasion bases are the same as first day of this game and it's insane how determination aura is stronger then whole set of armor items, same for grace compared to evasion. Few leagues ago they finally buffed some item bases but it's still very weak and defensive stats as armor and evasion are untouched yet. Plus defenses against degens are just nonexist, only insane hp regen but that's not the solution.
There are defenses against damage over time. Lethe shade, maximum resists, hp regen, life recovery/leech, damage over time mastery, arakali pantheon, enduring cry. With that said it's as always something you have to invest into so it either forces you to drop dps and/or requires you to get good (insane) gear. GGG's trend since expedition is taking away base player power and making mosters harder and giving that power back through high end gear that is increasingly more difficult to get.
That's a bit disingenuous. Bases may be the same, but crafting has got consistently buffed. More importantly, sources of +evasion% and +armour% have been buffed over the years, I'm talking in the passive tree in particular. For example, I just randomly picked an armour node on the tree, juggernaut used to give 16%, now it gives 24%. I can't recall when that changed though.
Over the years players became even more powerful as well with the addition of many mechanics. I agree, some monsters modifications were overtuned (archnemesis cough cough) but overall players power rose the same as monsters. Only thing is Uber bosses being quite hard without a serious investment in your character. But they are made in that purpose. Regular endgame bosses are easy af
I think you all have a point. Armor and evasion in theory are super strong. You can easly get tons of physical damage reduction etc. Everythng looks grate on paper untill you realize that you need SPELL SUPPRESSION.
I've created gladiator bleed lacerate with max attack block, tons of armor and 81+ resist, life regen and leech(although leech isnt that effective on dot build) + shatter bleeding enemies and mobs from cruicible tends to just 2 tap me.
They have killed spell block and introduced spell suppress witch feels like it's mandatory. You can play as elementalist with determination and supress and i bet you will die less than on build like mine.
To be fair PoE is last game that I would complain about but this leauge isn't as fun. I loved forbidden sanctum. It was clear, rewarding, fun to engage. Only downside wast that you would have to run a lot of maps to get into it, but it's the best proof that it was great league since I was running maps to GET IN the sanctum.
@@Quaresma77pl Your example is perfect to show most how GGG doesn't care about melee specifically. I still remember how impale got nerfed not because of melee but because of minions using it.
I think you hit the nail on the head with the mapping situation. I feel like I've been playing Standard the last three leagues. I haven't felt that excitement coming across the mechanics ingame since Ultimatum and Expedition. The only excitement I get now is from the OLD league mechanics.
WE NEED ULTIMATUM BACK ! GIVVVVVVVV BACCCKKKKK GIGIGI!!!
Very much not enjoying the changes they've made to rare mobs this league. Having an 80% resist, high armor, 6k ES build get popped in one shot by some cracked out rare is not fun.
It's also not uncommon, I encounter one of these every other map it feels like.
I would honestly be very happy if the only problem was that Crucible sucks, that I can deal with.
instead of lame modes such as ruthless, i propose they pull a WoW and give us PoE ritual classic. that way chris can have fun wrecking the main game with his vision all he wants, and we can enjoy when the game delivered the most fun.
Or, allow us to choose different leagues/patch. I would pick OP purposeful harbinger, aura stacking delirium league or harvest over and over. That's when the game was fun.
It's kinda crazy because honestly. I haven't enjoyed a single league as much as Legion. Every single one feels worse. And it's weird because stuff like the Atlas tree has been incredible, amazing stuff that I should really love, should be making me play the league for 2 months straight like Legion did. But the fun has just been sucked out lol. For gods sake stop balancing a single player game around trade for two seconds. Let me just play with the game mechanics holy shit. I don't want to craft 45 step things or trade. I just want to shoot things. Why does that have to feel like such a fucking chore?!? Why does it feel like I'm being punished for it? My favorite skill, Arc, has basically been worthless to self cast for years and it really, really pisses me off.
You know, this is a great insight for people who feel these things but don't know how to word it all. I really am curious how PoE2 is gonna be with all this in mind and I hope you do more videos like this. I hope that GGG actually looks at this and gauges how people feel and just make a fun experience without requiring so much more grind.
That wouldn't be profitable or at least it wouldn't surprise me if that's what they think.
We really need content creators to look past themselves and make more videos like this. As he said at the end, hes a steamer, obviously the game is still fun, but it's important to bring the issues up and give players a voice. Someone streaming the game can grind over the hurdle, but for average Joe this league mechanic is a sad joke.
If they don't speed things back up then poe2 is gonna flop massively. They really need to realize that no one wants to slow down the game but them and when it comes to the state a game should go in, what the players want always trumps what the devs want. You can't have a game without the players so I don't understand why devs don't have the common sense to listen to their players. No one wants to spend 500 hours on one character just to get them to endgame. The combat isn't that fun in this game to warrant that. The fun comes from trying new builds and letting players farm faster and finishing their characters endgame quicker to get them on a new character is how the game should be ran. Slowing the game down is literally the absolute worst decision they could possibly make by far.
@@Zephyr_Havoc Thats a hot take and I disagree. I like one character builds and having permanence with them. I like having a single character I can put alot of time into and hate making "alts" or new characters. That's the whole point of the revamped gem system. So you can run more diverse and bigger builds on single characters without dumbing stuff down to one or 2 abilities that you spam constantly on specialized characters. I think the combat is just fine. I am also for letting people make OP builds. That's the whole point of endgame. To pretty much have a godlike build and go nuts with it. It's just there needs to be more viable options for doing things instead of the same boring meta cookie cutter stuff. Rushing to endgame and speed clearing is the thing I dislike about PoE and then just doing that ad nauseam. That sounds boring af. That's the whole point of the league system. Gives people and opportunity to do that and get their fix, then go take a break til the next season.
ggg dont care for players only foe the 1% that brings them content
Poe has its most players because they want something to play until Diablo 4. That’s facts.
Chris has said they want to slow the game down and make it as seamless as possible with POE 2. I think the release of POE 2 will make or break it. Looking on the bright side Last Epoch has all the QoL GGG will never add to POE and even Blizzard seems to be listening to feedback on the beta.
Just general feedback for future videos.
Please up your volume. I'm at 100% on YT and 50% on Windows and it is still a bit too quiet. "CTRL + SHIFT + =" in Resolve while having the clip marked will up the volume by +3db.
This is actually some pretty insightful analysis of balance systems over time, nice.
I don't think poe players are a ware of skinnerbox term, because this is the most skinnerbox game of all time, it condition's player to do a lot of work waste a lot of time for a little reward , oh and those rewards are buried under layers upon layers of RNG.
Hey guys, new sub here. Vendored a thicket bow that i can't find now for less than 10 divs, bc i had been baking it. Feels good. Great league!
Sounds like ur fault tho?
@LAKEDRAGON His fault but any sort of sane design choices could have completely prevented it
@@uhqliss8537 I see your point
@@uhqliss8537 ahaha what? ok bro design choices would not give that guy a brain to not sell his 10 div bow
@@LAKEDRAGON413 Def my own fault. I'd been on for hours and vendored a couple other 6 sockets from a map and just ctrl clicked it too. I usually put important things on the right of my inv. Had it on the left so it would show up in the crucible. Something like a dream furnace would be nice. I'm having fun playing, but I don't interact with the league really at all at this point.
Yeah I stopped after 4 days... I'm tired of GGG releasing untested stuff for like 4 years now... Simply not good enough for a AAA developer... They are not a small indie company anymore.
They've been sandbagging the last year+ of content by working on poe2. My copium take is that they're much closer to releasing the game than they're letting on and will have some crazy announcements at exile con. Wouldn't be the first time they've done something like that
no chance. poe2 late 2024 maybe, but probably 2025
if these leagues are anything to go by, PoE2 is gonna be more of a disappointment than alot of people are thinking of lmao
highly doubt it. The last few leagues have all had a lot of effort put into them. There's just been no thought put into the changes, or extensive QA testing. But shit like sanctum, building a fully functional balanced roguelite into an existing game, that's not "sandbagging content". That's literality building a new game. They could go and take sanctum, copy paste the code literality, rescale it, and sell that as a seperate game. Same as when they did the battle royale.
The issue isnt the amount of content or the effort put into the content, it's just GGG's shitty game direction and whoever does QA testing over there not representing the playerbase whatsoever.
@@MyNameIsSalo they are using alot of poe2 assets to pad league design. They also disguise leagues as mechanic reworks to current systems so they can kill two birds with one stone (scourge league being the beyond rework and betrayal being the rework to the master system)
Crucible was such a disappointment for me. The idea of passive trees on weapons got me So Hyped, however first two days of the league broke that bubble. Playing standard but harder is the best way to describe the experience atm and its just not what I’m looking for. Sanctum RIP
I think that the main problem with kalandra was that the main mechanic of kalandra (the reflective mist that you make your own items with) was soooo rare that you might have only found 2-5 in the entire league for most people
Yeah. Or not a single one 😒
@@4ndyLA yeah, i got my whole atlas done but didnt find 1
Got to level 100 and found zero and played the whole league. LMAO
i do the same like in every new POE League. Playing it for 1 week, having fun, then quit and wait till the next league. Since like 3 years i never played longer then a week. I hope diablo 4 is playable longer then 2 weeks before it gets boring
One of my biggest gripes with GGG is that they’re always stretching and expanding the minimum requirements you need to meet in gearing without giving more tools to meet those requirements or even taking some of those tools away
wtf do you mean? You can get loot in so many ways.
"just be res capped" into like 10 things that are required before even thinking about dmg / builds
I usually just ignore bad leagues and still enjoy the game, so Crucible being bad is not really that bad for me. However, the overturned rares are definitely the most glaring issues for me. I love to map and have a gigachad build that I play along with my Aurabot buddy, yet I still find myself stopping and focusing the rare for like 30 seconds to 1 minute while I kite it around so it doesn't one shot me lmao. I am still enjoy the state of the game otherwise.
Yeah I've been just ignoring crucible altars... I haven't played in a while and am trying out a new build too, I was thinking maybe my build is just trash because of the rare mobs... I keep coming across rares that feel harder than the map boss itself. I guess it's good to know it's probably not my build, and just the balancing of them this league then. Kind of annoying tbh.
@@KjKase Yeah its definitely not your build, trust me. Lol. I'm playing a 50 to 80div build with a 50div aurabot following me around and they are just cracked out of their minds. They speed to me across the map like the flash and scratch me and I drop lmao.
@@AlecWyld Are you running 100% deli + 100% crucible? There's no way in hell you can't handle 100% crucible only.
Only thing Im feeling yeah.
Sounds like you have terrible damage.
Agree in all, todays PoE is unrewarding for people that work everyday, like if you have 2-3 hours a day, you could enter PoE but you cant certainly know if you are going to make a big progress or nothing at all, cause its all rng. What’s more, i like having trade, i dont like solo self found, but, i really hate having to rely on trading in order to do something, like being more time outside game in trading site than inside a map. In the end, i want to play poe but if i have 2-3 hours Rn, i just play another game. There is no way someone can enjoy league if you cant finish atlas and a good build. Game should have some type of starting items and driven quest to finish the atlas in order to help basic progress where there is no fun
i swear Souleaters got massively buffed this league, they feel so much harder to deal with than ever before
It was ridiculous even in Sanctum. I delved hard on RF Jugg that league and I had to log out so many times to reset nodes because monsters would keep spawning forever and that goes together SO WELL with Soul Eater.
have a rare with good base stats, give it soul eater which has no time or charge limit and surround it with massive monster pack size
Never had issues with a soul eater. Get a better build.
@@Sammysapphira good for you, get a better attitude
@@Johnoez safe bet the dude doesn't even play the game anyway
There are so many people wondering what to do before D4 launch. This is the only reason poe has so many players now
Honestly a great point about the scourge UI. Would be a perfect application to this mechanic. I think there might still be a small overtune to the crucible monsters in maps, but I also think for most people it is still too early to guage this since a lot of people are still running weaker league start builds. I just finished setting up a dot cap semi tanky build and fully charged crucibles are not really scary anymore for me. Sometimes I still die (especially to the flicker strike humanoid assholes), but to me I kind of understand that charging a difficulty bar to 100% means that it is going to be the hardest it can be.
I have also felt for a while that the average player power is on the decline every single league with build and item nerfs, but GGG has also beem activly increasing monster and boss power every league (archnem mods, better monster combat, uber bosses, etc.). We have started to hit many points where it feels like the options for what builds you can play and how you have to play them gets narrower and narrower each league. Then this is all supported by an economy which for the most part requires you to play and farm currency efficently in order to be able to afford items. I am lucky and have plenty of time to play the game (lucky or lonley), but I really can't imagine how difficult and discurouging this must be for people that play the game more casualy and are not able to put in 30+ hours a week.
I'm alching yellow maps so my left side is alch, two scrolls with thicket bow underneath. Never sold or dumped my crucible item. I do dump it to run a heist quest and forget to put it back in when I go back to mapping though.
My only complaint is that when you have a weapon you want to fully bake it takes so ridiculously long. Charging to around 60% to get a sliver of progress to kill mobs that drop no loot sucks.
Crucible is like playing Roulette at a casino. But instead of having a 37/38 chance of losing, you have a 9,999/10,000 chance of losing.
This makes no logical sense a casino is designed to make you lose. A video game is made to reward you through time spent in the game based on rng longer playing better chances of winning.
@@dandyjandon4231 it depends on how you take your measurements, here if you take a single instance then the comparison is fair. It also does make sense to measure it like that because of the amount of time you spend on a single instance.
It's nice that you bring up ultimatum.
Because it's just straight out better.
Crucible could have been ultimatum but krangle league.
Instead. We got crucible.
RIP sassmaster, I miss you to this day.
I hope they can address trade:
-been out of town for 3 days, when i came back absolutely nothing in my stash, you NEED to be connected to sell stuff.
-buying currencies is just atrocious, you need to PM so many persons to get an answer.
-if you are selling stuff and you get many PMs, it's just stressful tbh
-if the seller of the item of your dream is offline, get the L
-if he's afk, same.
Imo ggg 100% endorses scamming / price fixing. First page on any chase item is price fixers. Same with mirrors. If a player has an item listed for 4x allow to me DIRECTLY buy it. This bs of wasting 2 peoplea time to invite and have them join my ho just for a 2sec interaction is the most brain dead approach. Also having multiple pages of price fixing is just cancer. Another reason player retention isn't great in this game.
When buying currencies just skip like the first 30. They are price fixers, or at least players making money just by trading are going to snipe those cheap items before you.
THIS!!!!!
I rly love POE, spend probably 1000€ on that game already.
But the trading system is absolute garbage, the fact you need 3rd party tool to even "handel" the trades is already horrible. but trading currencies or low 1c / 1 alch items is nearly impossible. you simply spam 30 ppl, and hope 1 picks up.
and all of that just so i press a button on my 3rd party tool button to say "ty, bye" . there is 0 human interaction or socialising in the whole trade. no chat etc.
Make everything that costs below 5 div or some treshhold instand trade ... (if the player wants to) otherwise its just rly bad. such a timewaste.
What I got from this and honestly just from experiencing these things myself: GGG is only focused on dragging out your play time, rather than trying to engage you longer. They’re trying to treat the symptom of disinterest in recent leagues rather than the cause. That or they’re trying to maximize player retention for the least possible amount of work.
All in all it doesn’t feel like a game. It feels like a business transaction.
You see the pattern of GGG Vision?
Add AN with loot -> Nerf a bit remove loot -> ninja buff AN
Now it is crucible, they are going to
Nerf fest but give you crucible power -> next league you have the nerfs left and crucible power gone
GGG are obsess with their RUTHLESS Vision, they want you to play like Ruthless and keep sneaking the nerfs literally no body asking for.
It's not like only nerfing OP stuff for example Seismic Trap, they just want to cut the whole fraction of power from the player, for what?
Because they are just as stupid as when they played D1 and D2 as teenagers and want everyone to relive their shitty experiences.
They need psychological assistance.
As a veteran PoE Player with 10k hours played I can relate to anything he says and agree with most of them. 3.21 feels like not playing a 3-Month-league, it feels like a small test case for a small new system like april fools joke battle royale was. I also played less and less during the last few leaues started with scourge while the leagues before I always went big dick and did all challenges, got myself a HH or Mageblood etc.
Hopefully PoE 2 will safe us veterans.
Came for the TLDR, stayed for the all thing. All valid points 10/10
Losing progress is best exemplified by maven, where you are losing 120c every time you fail it, and it's required for the voidstone, and there is no way to practice it without paying 120c every attempt.
Crucible? Nerfs?? What are you talking about, dude? It's 2020 and Delirium just released! C'mon let's go dude!! You gotta see these cool new Cluster Jewel things they added!
He was not live right now :(
Tinfoil hat theory here: Before this league I had a suspicion that it might be one of those "meh" leagues because....
a) Sanctum was actually a big league. Like it or not - It had a lot of content, new assets, new items etc. Overall it was a substantial work that was put by devs.
b) GGG officialy said they gonna prolong Sanctum to 4 months. Now... Say what you want, but I belive it HAS a lot to do with Diablo 4. D4 had a massive EA and open beta around the end of the sanctum and therfore the next PoE league would still be overshadowed by D4 hype train.
So GGG decided to put a smaller, less substantial league now - Crucible.
c) We also know, that shortly after D4 releases in June - The new league will be announced at exilecon. GGG knows they need to show another big league do get back some attention from aRPG fans.
TL;DR - I think GGG on purpose released a... "meh" league not to waste resources before D4 launch and exilecon. And the fact it's their most popular league actually proves that poeple are hungry for more aRPGs - Even better idea to put more focus on exilecon announcements and don't waste them right now.
(Btw. This is not some "which game is better" post. I love PoE and I'm super hyped about D4. I just think that from budget and PR point of view that's what I'd do. Save money and resources for now and focus on exilecon league announcement)
still weird this is what they came up after 4 months...
Sanctum didn't have "a lot" new assets. It had quite a lot of content, but also most of it was based on reused assets
Which if true is a big missed opportunity because of how many new arpg fans are trying poe for the first time coming from d4 beta. I imagine quiet a lot of them are missing out on what a true poe experience could be if they played in a league mechanic that you wanted to engage in with every zone.
@@SpecShadow well thats there you are wrong. They don't publish one league and then go "ok everyone start working on next league NOW 4 months to go". Realistically its probably like early league discussions start 1-2 months in, development starts 2 months in, QA testing starts + patch notes drop 1 week before league launch. Like its most likely a
Say what you want and we all know in a comment are great indicators for anyone to skip it.
I don't think having to engange with high risk, high friction content for a chance at the top end rewards is inherently a problem, the problem is that there doesn't seem to be any baseline rewards for engaging with monsters that are often harder than pinnacle bosses. Encounters just would have to drop some compelling loot and the biggest problem would be solved imo.
thanks for comprehensive video, great outline!
I’m sad sanctum didn’t go core. It was a peak Poe league. The amazing chase items that came with it and being able to grind the sanctum for currency or relics was so fun. I love leagues that add actual CONTENT to the game. Crucible just doesn’t do this, even the maps for it are just basically a crappy breach that’s skippable. They missed part hard with crucible, the weapon trees are an awesome idea, but everything else about it is a huge miss
sanctum was plain awful. first you need to gather sanctum rooms in every map until you can actually engage with the mechanic (criticism of kalandra apparently got us nowhere) and then you were forced into ranged engagement because you will just get instantly yeeted out of the run if you take damage even if your character is built tanky. blows my mind how people thought this was a good league.
The easiest hot fix would be: "if selected item x has no crucible tree, consume the crucible forge to grant a tree with no charge needed. If selected item y has a crucible tree, charge up the crucible forge to progress the leveling of the crucible tree." The other option would be: "select an item to grant a crucible tree after x number of forges." The caveat being you would need let say some arbitrary number 4 times, but killing monsters in maps would grant experience towards the crucible tree. This way you can cook up multiple crucible items while still mapping and getting experience passively as you are mapping.
Crucible is almost every bad decision they've made over the past year and a half or so. Don't have to say what's wrong about about it because you can just talk about older leagues.
A barrage of nerfs again under the guise of "buffs" (after they said that wouldn't be the case mind you. That on it's own is a whole awful thing that keeps happening)
Scourge had some absolutely heinous overtuned enemies with horrible attacks. Also mobs just popping up around you and clapping you instantly if you don't zoom out of the circle.
The absolute trash that is Archnemesis just causing so many problems _yet again. For the 5th league in a row._
The lack of any reward from Lake. Taking forever and getting nothing.
The complete letdown of a mechanic from Sanctum because of how it was designed.
Absolutely horrid to interact with from all the last 3. Archnemesis version 1 was atrocious. Archnemesis 2 electric boogaloo was still trash because of how little space you got for sentinels.
Lake was really awkward and weird.
Sanctum only let you hold 8(?) rooms for some reason.
Could rant all day about Archnemesis. It actually summarizes one of my biggest complaints about the path that PoE has been going down. There are so _so so so_ many issues with it. The biggest one being it added absolutely nothing to the game but frustration. They still absolutely hard counter builds and have all the gross ass properties that they used to have but _slightly_ tuned down. A lot of content creators were praising the "nerfs" to Archnemesis and they didn't really do anything at the end of the day when you actually read them. They are still as garbage as they were back then. Garbage is garbage. Can try to make it smell as different and look as different as you want - it doesn't change that it is shit. They literally did a change that makes an Archnemesis mod pop up through your entire map a while back. It is so unbelievably awful. It is just anti-fun. Archnemesis adds absolutely nothing to this game. It is so much worse than the old rares which mind you - people only complained about because they never bothered fixing mechanics spewing out 200 aurastacking rares. They didn't fix the problem at all because the same thing happens except now every single rare mob is aurastacking for itself. They "fixed" the problem by making a much worse problem. Now all the rares are aurastackers. That also completely ruin archetypes and builds and are way tankier than nearly everything in the game and just one shot you constantly if you haven't absolutely stacked the hell out of defensives. They also fling spells all over place which was not a thing before and ended up making that neat new spell suppression gimmick for bossing something that is borderline mandatory for mapping but is also incredibly inconvenient to get because it's only on certain types of items and on a certain part of the tree and it just goes on and on. It's annoying. It has so many problems man.
Weird how we don't get a balance manifesto because people might be a little upset about certain things getting changes. Instead they just go "Not much is being changed" and shove it under the rug. That's just a thing they do now.
Don't get me wrong there has been some fun stuff but I would say the negatives have been outweighing the positives for a while now even if it is only a little bit at a time (Archnemesis was more like a giant kick in the balls) and it creeps further and further towards negative every single one of these leagues. Whatever the decision making process is over at GGG has taken a very hard shift in a different direction.
Fun should be the main priority but whoever is making stuff happen seems to be wanting that to be a secondary focus. Friction is honestly the perfect way to describe it. There's just been a little bit more and more friction every league since Expedition. The game is not "harder" or "more engaging." It's just way way more annoying and taking more time. I still get to the same point. I still have fun along the way. I'm just way more annoyed and wanting to play other things more often. My friends are way more annoyed and wanting to play other things more often.
Would like to remind people that recombinators were literally a solution to something GGG themselves said was a problem. Loot on the ground being more interesting and the player picking it up more. And then they removed it after the extremely positive reception. Going completely against their own words and any sort of logic just to make the game more annoying. It's just so baffling.
I am enjoying this league for the most part but not really for the league itself. But that's every league simply because it's a fresh restart and I want to try new builds. I hate using crucible. It's genuinely awful and almost all of the special nodes for skills make absolutely no sense at all. It's just not as fun as it could be because they make incredibly stupid decisions and as I recall - are pretty awful with feedback from their betas.
Let me grab pot of coffee for this one..
@@BenTheMan667 Perhaps an egg in these trying times
That's a great summary of why User Experience matters and how inconvenient and not intuitive interactions make continuous playing just unbearable. UI design isn't a easy task and requires a lot of practice to get great design done, that shouldn't be an afterthought.
I honestly don't understand GGG's decision making after Ritual. It was so fun, you felt powerful, you could play basically any build, and now we have this
Bro has the such a thick eye brow. How ? Does he do his facial tutorial? I want to grow my eyebrows like cutedog.
I agree with pretty much everything you said, and I've skipped the past two leagues because of it. I thought kalandra was especially bad. I just felt the scarcity of basic currency to progress my atlas was too much. As a recent dad, it makes me unmotivated to play because I just takes too much time for this period of my life right now.
The leagues I've played the most were the leagues I felt rewarded for my time invested and or just had fun - ritual, ultimatum, expedition, scourge, Sentinel (of which I played nearly the whole 3 months).
The nerfs are also disheartening
It all kind of just makes me feel like 😮💨😮💨😮💨.
3.0-3.9 was the peak era of zoom zoom, 3.9-3.15 was peak balance and its been downhill since.
From what I see, Chris Wilson has a very specific feeling he wants to achieve for PoE, and for him it should be much more like D2, but now PoE already got out of hand and the playerbase would not accept directing the game into that kind of pace. Chris is probably taking notes from the mistakes in PoE that made the playerbase get used to explode screens of mobs and reach the highest bosses easily and making all that very different from the beginning for PoE2.
im liking poe right, the reason i havent played in a year and crucible is by far the mechanics i am not interested in
The biggest issue to me are all of the rng mechanics. Nothing you find really matters in this game unless you're willing to spend an ungodly amount of time grinding materials so you can jump through hoops a thousand times until you hit the affix you want, and then do it all over again with rng mechanic 2 and 3 and 4 and then slam a vaal orb and see everything brick. And if you're not willing to go through this torture than all of the materials hold no value beyond trading. But that's the gamedesign, to have a zillion rng mechanics for the sole purpose of stashing a zillion items and materials so that you'll buy a zillion tabs for hundreds of dollars. This game is abusive and unethical, it has no respect for player intelligence and time.
There is one stash tab required for you to buy in an otherwise free to play game. But yeah can't disagree with all the rng mechanics.
This honestly does feel like Kalandra league to me where in Kalandra I would completely skip the league mechanic and buy high tier reflect lakes as my way of "interacting" with the league. In this league after the first few days I just completely skip the league mechanic and just go for good bases to mash together and pray.
While Crucible is bunk for the most part. I still feel like the overall state of the game is excellent. I have my gripes about certain issues and you touched on most of these. Mostly to do with monster power creep and how, unless you have an insanely tanky build, and I mean like over the top defenses, you are going to get one shot out of nowhere from time to time. The idea of PoE isn't to grind through monsters at a steady rate, it's to kill shit before it kills you and move as fast as possible. I absolutely love the speed of PoE, but I truly wish they'd tone down some of these monsters. I'm ok with shit being absurdly difficult when I want it to be, but getting one shot in a T16 scoured map with a solidly defensed character feels pretty terrible. I have other gripes like inventory space and no auto-sort feature.
I don't understand why they are afraid to use convenient mechanics from previous leagues.
Let me put the weapon out of the way in a handy cranglebox.
Pause the damn game while I choose the difficulty of the encounter.
Make the item combiner or tree unlocker pedestal into a currency item.
Put mechanics and gameplay in the league specific map.
Let me have a weapon tree that isn't 75% downsides.
I'm enjoying the game but everything feels like it's missing a piece. Like getting a meal with good ingredients but they neglected to season it.
I mean I killed the big 4 and unlocked almost all my favourite slots without having a crucible weapon I was happy with. How is a shield with +40 armour and +12% quality literally the best thing I've managed to find by the time I complete the map system?
It's *the vision* owo
We gotta add *weight*
I have a wand I have been crafting, the crucible tree is consistently bad but the wand as a whole increased damage by 20%. The best in slot crucible mods would give qol and roughly 10% damage. It seems like I can only guarantee the damage or the qol which would be things like a small amount of LGoH, having basically 3 int nodes or a bit of cooldown recovery for movement skills. You know, useless things when they come with downsides that nobody asked for.
Then there are nodes like the totem hp or poison bow shit that are deleting endgame bosses.
Didn't expected to find ya here XD
Fafnir here.
I honestly thought scourge was a very good league. Not just because of the krangling of items, but because you weren't limited to just one slot. You could krangle most of your stuff.
But the best thing about it was that you got to run your maps twice in one map. Playing MF builds during that league was probably the most fun I've had in the game.
Crucible just kind of feels like a nerfed version of that. The skill specific passives are also super fucked.
I’ve only ever seen clips so to see this deep dive was awesome. Way more respect for this guy now for sure!
totally agree with you.. I feel and observed the same thing, youtube people who can earn 7 div/hour are those fully utilize every mechanics, we no longer able to use league mechanic to earn as much, it feel so de-motivated as my time just wasted like that..
besides that, overall builds are getting weaker and weaker because of league balance. GGG like to say they weaken the passives while it get compensate through league mechanic, however not all league get absorb into main game, which mean those "compensation" only works for that league, and next league everyone are nerf due to they "compensate" with new league mechanic again... super frustrating as the game become like working/studying in real life, we can't just enjoy it, but have to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours to get the same build..
First, I'm a 10+ year veteran of POE. Since closed beta.
Second, the league has half of what it needs but the two most important things are missing.
The loot and the mechanic.
The weapon nodes are great, but the time it takes to find something you will use is greater than the time it takes to farm and buy something. That's a mistake. Leagues need lootsplosions from the mechanic, or at least an interesting mini-game. Sanctum was perfect as it had everything. This league has nothing. Not even the node to sell for 3 divs is worth the time trying to find it. It's 1:1500 to hit it. Imagine doing that many crucibles just for a div. They need to add a loosplosion and it will keep people happy. But it seems like this is a stop-gap league waiting on Exilecon and POE2.
"The weapon nodes are great, but the time it takes to find something you will use is greater than the time it takes to farm and buy something. "
This 1 million %. I haven't engaged with the mechanic at all.
" It's 1:1500 to hit it. Imagine doing that many crucibles just for a div. "
I bet if you calculated the time it takes to do a crucible it would come out that its way faster to just do maps back to back to get divs to drop(plus its a million times more fun to actually play maps)
Yeah, in the time time i am going to spend doing crusibles and managing/looting trash weapons to gain that 3 divine drop, i would be making double, possibly even triple that amount just by not interacting with the mechanic, it's so stupid.
0:59 I mean the numbers are somewhat deceptive right? Because most of the players like myself who launched POE alot of em left & some of us are coming back. Not to mention that they are adding in all the regions & all the consoles into that & the consoles themselves are a entirely different game. So sure they have more people, but most of them are a newer crowd, the same ones i assume that go game to game wherever their favorite streamer goes? Which is independent from what poe is actually doing. Now there are alot of changes i think is stupid on behalf of ggg, & yes crucible is a let down compared to what streamers where claiming it was. But its still has loads of potentially for openness Assuming you can actually survive long enough to do any of it lol. The battle pass thing i isn't worth 30$ & i really don't like the taste it leaves in my mouth. Because its a sign of what they are really attempting to go for which is a normal p2p F2p game. They also have further locked people into certain skills, by making sure all older skills largely are nerfed so much that well its pointless. Thats a huge problem because while they always did nerf gems, Never on this level as the whole purpose of why POE is so popular is because you can play how you want. Which you still can, well kind of because there is a whole list of skills that you can't even really use anymore making all the mtx that you bought worthless. Pushing people into a subset of skills & paths that everyone has to take or be not able to do anything without taking all day. Which is why you see everyone with the least diverse skill selection than ever has been in poe. So i can see all of that, The game is completely different now in many ways.
Honestly i think the real issue is they promised during POE 2.0 that it would stay true & that it would be more like a expansion keeping everything you had & did in the game. However i think thats not really the case anymore, I think they are making skills that don't mesh with 2.0 nerfed so that no one can really use them but they keep their word & you can if you want to use them. Which is really what i feel is happening they are just destroying everything that isn't part of 2.0 so that it can't work or compete with the 2.0 stuff. Therefore making it to where no one will really complain because there is nothing to compare it too unless you played it way back in the day. Thats what it appears to me, what do you think?
What I really dislike about the game for a while now is the focus on player retention. I remember Chris saying on a Baeclast or something that GGG doesn't care about player retatention because PoE is a game which you play for a few weeks to months and then come back for the next league but nowadays it feels like they want you to stay the entire 3 months and therefore make things harder accordingly.
Also very good video Mr Dog.
Last straw for me was going all in on one of the new skill based level 5 mods, building around and putting it on both weps and helm to find it doesn't even work properly. Friend went into chancing an item with a passive to build around, and that passive he chose to invest and build on also does not work properly.
This is like wolcen, can't trust the passives on the tree to work
Good video, the league aint very good in many ways I agree. I've heard people talk about d4 beta and that being a reason for more people playing PoE, where the ARPG hype got going and transfered players over to 3.21 shortly after the d4 beta was over. I think there are factors like these that contribute to the very high player numbers, because this league on its own is imho not even close to a top tier league. Im gonna keep enjoying it for a while tho, we will know after the first month what will stay and what will change, and by then I'm probably tired of it regardless. :)
I think the 3 month league model is at its end. There is simply no time to polish the new leagues and it's hurting the game. Time to go 2 leagues a year a take their time to make meaningful content that doesn't need 2 months of patching to feel complete.
Agreed with the first point
Without the 3 month leagues PoE will die... The reason they started making them in the first place was because people left the game...
@@1Life2Little not really..
Think of it as the entire dev team having a month or 2 extra for a better product
More time goes into planning and testing, and the product ends up having a longer lifecycle and better reception in general
Although this won't change anytime soon since the investors in all probability like quarterly results and that won't sync with GGG's hypothetically new longer dev cycles
@@labubasi Not really? That is literally what happened dude... Chris even said it him self in an interview...
Just wanted to say that the quality of your videos has drastically improved man, keep it up. Great job!
But sanctum was fucking fun D: just give me back my sanctum runs GGG.
How nice would it be if map difficult determined your rewards received when killing the map boss. Juicing t16's with every mechanic and modifier possible and then killing monsters in the map fills some power bar on your screen and when you kill the map boss it drops appropriate crafting currency determined the by the difficulty of the map. Old Harvest, Sentinel Recombinators, and Kalandra Mirror levels of crafting power obtained from a clear and non-intrusive method; just clearing maps. Simple and sweet. I'd play the Hell out of that.
This trend of baking something in an oven with unknown ingredients for power that is often times useless to your actual character is disengaging and I hope it changes in the future.
For me is simple, GGG wants Ruthless be the standard for its game since POE (Acording to GGG and some players/yuotubers) is a game from hardcore true-gamer to hardcore true-gamer, and for GGG a good game is not measured by the fun it can generate but for the hours spent. Good or Bad, soon there will be other option like LE and D4. I just regret that I started my experience with Harvest when I didnt know anything about the game and for worse I play until Ritual in SSF. If I had played POE two or three leagues before I would have had the fun of my life playing Harvest and Ritual with more knowledge about the game.
If you're playing trade you can still make insane builds 1 week into league. Ssf suffers though as more and more power is rng gated.
@@DrDanQ92 in a week if I play 8 hours a day XD. However, league starters are relatively cheap.
Chris Wilson makes a game for Chris Wilson and nobody else. Nobody wants Ruthless, he pushes Ruthless. Nobody wants DR-stacking Soul Eater Archnemesis Mobs, he pushes them anyway. Nobody wants gamble crafting, he forces it in every league.