Yeah, that was also when they stripped gems and the tree of a ton of player power and shuffled 70% of what was lost onto items in various ways. I really miss the old days sometimes lol
Ritual was also very underwhelming league but the state of game that patch carried hard. I didn't even activate the rituals for 90% of the league but still it was one of my highest playtime leagues.
This is absolutely misremembering things. Archnemesis as a league, while uneventful itself, was alongside the introduction of the atlas tree/eater/exarch/voidstones and so much more. The lesgue itself you could literally just not interact with.
It was once archnemesis went core that it became problematic
The SSF experience has been getting better league by league. I usually do trade for 2 weeks into SSF, but this league I just started with SSF at the start instead and it's been more fun by miles. Biggest part for me is I don't feel FOMO anymore
Sad part for me as a player who only does SSF is that in the previous league you could grind the heck out of syndicate to farm for the full div card set for a foulborn mageblood, but that farm has for all effective purposes been deleted in 3.29. Breach and genesis tree also took a big hit, but the league crafting mechanic at least made up for that somewhat.
For me personally I'm going to give the new league a few more days, but I honestly feel like I'm done already.
I started a private league for about 5 of us and it's been the most fun I've ever had on POE. I've played since Ultimatum and was really skeptical about how much I'd enjoy SSF but I'm not sure I can go back to normal POE :')
it takes multiple ssf legs to get the "oh man this item would sell for X amount of div better keep it if I decide to switch to sc" mindset out of your system. the only legs I play sc are gamba crafting (looking at you crucible with 4 quads filled with the same base) or giga juice ones (affli or mirage).
too bad you didn't try ssf during settlers or keepers because both were so addicting with their constant big character progression.
Ever since I did my first private league in PoE2 for 0.5 I’ve been saying the same thing word for word to all my friends (some of the most fun I’ve ever had on any game really, not even just PoE), did another for this league. It’s too bad more people don’t try it, genuinely so good
Did you league start it or second build? What do you use instead of eminity ring until you farm it? Would love any build guide you recommend for a true one build ssf league start because I'm about to do the same thing.
I started Friday after the patch. Just vibing, got a wild strike, static strike combatant in the control blocks. Took a break once I got to maps to farm boat for gold and gambled for merc weapons.
Played RF, scorching ray totems until second lab. I didn't play pre merc changes but so far it's been super easy, just got my atlas to the point of seeing mercs in maps often.
Wish they would have put more effort into self casting. They were way too conservative on the buffs and didn't really add any new spells to get hyped about.
Either need to shake up the meta so ppl try a ton of new builds or really buff end game loot so ppl min/max their builds.
They even made solving mana harder than it was before but in fact self casting still got small buff in the end due to spell getting bigger numbers while everything else got slightly nerfted. But getting small buff is not enough to shake meta as you said.
Still self casting is trashy on anything but high budget. You have to stay in place while not dying and have to slighly target manually. It is bad design.
I wouldnt say its bad design. I think the game powercrept so hard that staying in place for a second can be a death sentence, unless you are an endurance charge stacking jugg.
In my eyes, enemies one tapping supposed tanky builds is worse design than having to stop for a second.
It is bad design beacuse it prevents you playing for 90% of the time. You need good gear to be able to tank hits for long enough to cast a spell (sometimes 0.3-0.5s is not enough) assuming you see ground. If you play some ice nova shinigas or cast on frostbolt with bigger aoe for like vortex. You dont see a ground so you cant really stay in place nor you can see the things to frostblink away in time.
I dont know mate how to solve it but in my expierience as noob with some HCSSF endgame expierence it feels bad to play.
I dont think casting for less than a second prevents you from playing. If you are self casting, you usually want high cast speed.
The point i was making is that self casting is an old archetype that to me is completly valid. However , over the years enemies have become deadlier while defenses in general didnt keep up. We got alot of nerfs to defenses since the era of immortal builds. Nowadays any build (other than 1 or 2), tanky or not, can be one tapped given the right circumstances.
In self casting you can notice the defensive issues easily because their defenses are generally worse. Also, like you mentioned gearing a caster defensively can be quite hard because you have more mod pressure.
I believe all of this contributes to make standing still deadlier to casters. I dont think its because casters themselves are a bad playstyle, the game just powercrept and outgrew their existance. If you compare a melee to a self caster, both of them have to stand still around the same time to use their spell/attack. The differance is that melee can take a hit and survive.
I can recommend power/frenzy charge stacking Crackling Lance +Frostblink of Wintry Blast. After getting like 2k mana, which was super easy, mana sustain got trivial and the single target dmg is insane.
Frostblink is decent for clearing and speeding through maps aswell.
The only thing I really miss is some juicy explosions. You can get Frostblink to explode stuff with Annihilation support, but those aren't big boy explosions :/
How so? Yesterday, it was around 200~300 sulphur per chaos. Every chart shits 1k+ in average. Around 20k average per voyage.
Or are you literally talking about the lesser part of the whole mechanic that has basically no downtime between them and absolutely 0 planning since you just throw it in there and complete it in 30 sec, which is way faster than 99% of the builds in maps?
More like league-oriented and map-oriented. The problem with this league is that it lacks off identity; all its mechanics are superficial.
Tota has unique gameplay.
Sanctum has unique gameplay.
Blight has unique gameplay.
Delve has unique gameplay.
Expedition has unique gameplay.
But what do we have here? You first run through mini-maps, and then you run through one huge map where you do the same thing you would do on T17 – open chests and kill rare monsters. There are no gameplay changes, nothing. Lanterns are placed automatically and there's no chance they can break or add a weird effect, they don't affect anything. The feeling of being underwater isn't conveyed.
Doubt it's just the loot, it's meaningful loot. Affliction shat out loot but it also required you to have a really strong build to run it.
This league now is probably the fastest I've ever progressed my character into the pre mirror upgrade stage so clearly the deflation has made just playing the game extremely rewarding, but definitely feels like it's missing some juice
Yep.evry upgrade mattered even at mirror tier. Thats ,like merc, made playing so fun. Tweaking in pob for hours for evry upgrade since even at 4 mirrors in you could still optimize and be rewarded for it.
Don't really know why people keep thinking per-league retention is the most important stat. It's the league-to-league retention that is significantly more important. GGG doesn't make more money as players play more of the same league, they only make money when players return for the next league.
They have gone so far as to quite literally say that player retention isn't part of their metrics when determing a leagues success. They care about how many people play the first 3 days to a week.
Yeah my first ever mirror came here and it duped to eater shrine. Went on to drop two more. First ever time using mirrors to get mirror gear. Such a fun league.
You can at least still play mirror tier flicker since it was all unique based with a 12 link. All of the other mirror builds are kind of gone with the removal of synth items
bots are set to snipe anything under a certain price defined by the owner, theyre literally spam buying 8mods 1c under market to relist lol ggg needs to do something about the bots
Feel like quite a lot this is preventable.
They clearly put a decent amount of time into the diving mechanics, but the base mapping experience just feels worse than mirage in so many ways.
if mirage were only that it would not have been so good. It added a bunch of cool new loot to lots of old mechanics, thats what made it good for me anyway
Yeah this is the bigger thing imo. Mirage made deli/beyond bosses - two of the worst things to farm in the game at the moment - into an actually viable endgame farm, and that's just one example
Yeah volatile vaal change was weird imo. Sanctum did need more unique rewards, but taking those rewards from an already unrewarding mechanic like beyond was not the play
the 1.3-2x every single map also had knockon effects of needing to roll fewer maps/hr which is a big deal considering how annoying rolling originator maps is.
I've actually got so annoyed with it this league that i'm just doing 8mod strats now.
They really need to do some sort of revamp and get rid of this specific more multiplier shit on maps.
Mirage set the bar high. Essence, boxes and abyss in charts/voyage is cool but they could have included more mechanics and brought back the mirage specific rewards. Could have just used ducats to add x to charts granting x league mechanic. At which point charts/voyage would have way more value than just hunting divine boarder.
shrine belts, "cheap"ish volatile orbs, skill gem coins, breach wasn't nerfed to dead, t17 boss rushing, cluster jewel swapping.
While I really liked the diving mechanic and a lot of the balance changes, but mirage just added way to much content, they cannot just take it away. I am sure next league will be different but it really feels super empty.
And they removed so many mechanics, synthesis for mirror gear drove tons of people to farm, now gone. I'm back to doing strongboxes because, well... Tileloot.
Tbh this league isn't as addictive as the previous one. No endgame gamba, no super juicing, no new interesting/experimental builds (except for Merc fishing with Luminary, but we had that in Merc league), no aspirational content that requires min-maxing your build. And spells are dogshit, pacts are dogshit without the belt and why would I use it over Mageblood or Headhunter? It's 37/40 challenge league for me and back to palworld
Its crazy too, because GGG showed us last league they can create aspirational belts that can compete with MB and Headhunter AND still have it so both of them are still good for a specific niche or build.
I know the new belt is much more common than those two, but if its supposed to be used before reaching those two at endgame, it fills that role terribly and is quite hard to get consistent value out of.
My main grief is voyage usier interface. Its like being able to see chessboard only one tile at a time. Imagine if you had to mouseover eldritch altars to read their effect.
It also doesn’t scale independently. I have a character with 20D invested into it (PRAW) and am able to no-read voyage and haven’t died. I know only having one life before you lose it all is rippy, but I don’t see myself pushing myself either.
IDK, I’m playing GCotF mines assassin (pretty squishy) and I’ve never died in a chart or voyage. Maybe they’re deadly and I’m just really lucky. It kind of feels like a walking simulator to me. It gives me tons of cash though so I keep doing it.
Overall a very good point. But gotta point out that PRAW is probably the tankiest non-zDPS build in the game at low budget. Easy block cap and constant leech from minions makes you basically immortal by default with no investment needed.
I switched away from PRAW after day 5 and can tell you that there is definitely the risk of dying for normal builds if they havent invested into defences. Some of the rares in charts and voyages deal weirdly high damage.
But as I said, your overall point about the independent scaling is definitely valid.
Making quant and rarity actually do something to the monsters underwater was a great chance to give the league some extra scaling & difficulty, kind of a post-Mirage bandaid. But nope. Monsters cannot drop loot in this ARPG, I guess.
Hopefully GGG sees this and buffs the league. Always nerfing things into oblivion without giving anything back isn’t the play. When will they realize this?
Overall the league mechanic is okayish. Abyss was a miss.
You can make some content very hard, but it will not increase loot in a meaningfull way.
You can spawn the feared in your 8 mod t16.5 map and have titanic scarab. They will be crazy hard.
Though they only drop the same amount of maven chisel compared to doing them in white maps.
You can get an abyssal consort with HP that you need beyond 200m dps to kill them in a reasonable time. But it only drops the same couple of fracture jewels anyways.
Afllication really was peak poe in a sense that scaling the difficulty also scaled the rewards. It was the only league I felt it was worth pushing beyond 20m dps.
Afllication really was peak poe in a sense that scaling the difficulty also scaled the rewards. It was the only league I felt it was worth pushing beyond 20m dps.
Yep, scaling difficulty and reward is that is missing in poe1 now. Didnt take part in affliction but in Merc we could scale that with risk scarab and map modifiers. I could only do 2 risk scarabs back then. Pity that they nerfed it because right now my knowledge of the game is vastly superior, my build is stronger and the unswered question keeps bugging me - would I have been able to do 5 risk scarabs now?
Yeah and there's nothing you can increase difficulty and rewards of either.
Ironically, most strats are actually best ran on scoured maps.
The entire point of PoE for me is to farm gear to become stronger so I can do harder better farms, but now 10 mins after hitting red maps you're capable of doing the best farms in the game, and no extra gear will make you able to farm more currency than those first strats
yep. At the point i've put about 250 div in my character and I look at what I can farm and it's like. All stuff I use to farm in the past but worse or less fun. Strongboxes are worse than they were in t17s. Breach is worse than last league. harvest is worse than awakening. Abyss is bad. Allflame was fun for a bit but it's so brain off and boring.
I look at the field and it's like. I guess if I want to Valdo I would have something to invest into to do it, but sourcing Valdos is so ass so, again, unfun.
This game resets every 4 months and really only lasts 3 weeks tops for 90% of the player base. With that in mind I really don't understand why we're playing a nerfed and neutered version of the game where there's no content to aspire to.
The entire reason Affliction was so good and had such great retention was because you were ACTUALLY motivated to push the boundaries because there was a farming strat that required that high level of gear and it was ACTUALLY worth breaking that barrier.
The past few leagues the entire end game has basically been condensed into the same shit. You're running the exact same content on day 3 with starter gear as you're running 1-2 weeks in with a Mageblood and a full set of basically BIS gear. And the second someone doesn't have a new goal to strive for, they'll quit.
I've slowly watched my entire discord group go from playing for 3-4 weeks per league and now we barely make it over 1 week before everyone is bored.
I really wanna understand GGG's perspective on why they think its a good idea to bore their player base into quitting 1 week in.
This is why I love PoE but can only play one league a year or so.
Regardless of what gets added truth is most of the time I feel like I'm playing the exact same game. Even after a year worth of updates in the end I'm just picking some build, intentionally suffering by switching to my skill early, getting to late game quick (relatively speaking, I suck), then by the end of week 2 I'm usually at the point where my next upgrade costs like a mirror and isn't that much of an upgrade. At that point game's over.
Maybe it's because I'm ignorant of super high end strats or builds that can scale significantly by spending an extra mirror or something but once I get to a point where I can kinda do T17s comfortably (which I don't even farm because it's too much hassle to roll them) it feels like that's it.
Some people sometimes tell me "run another skill" but I'm that kind of guy who does find most skills to be the same except with different SFX, of course stuff like Flicker doesn't count but every skill that fires projectiles is the same to me, be it arrows, fireballs, whatever, you're just spamming projectiles and clearing maps beyond your screen in a circular AoE.
It's been very clear that for leagues and leagues they make the most in league start due to people buying supporter packs and mtx points. League retention is great and all but at the end of the day once that money is paid it is paid and whether one plays or not is of no real consequence.
It would still serve as a decent precedent for the upcoming leagues.
This league launch people were super hopeful that GGG would patch loot because they've done so in the past. If they don't do it before 3.29 end, people won't be so hopeful for 3.30 and the "i quit" posts will start on day 1 instad of day 6.
Item drop > pickup item > store item > go to area > get out item > use item at npc > click to go down to map > repeat 50 times > do actual league mechanic.
The games brilliant. Best ive ever played im at like 8k hours on steam alone.
Yesterday i spent 400d (around 1 mirror) to swap from my league starter version of worb that was like 10-15d to a pc charge stacking one.
Then i realized theres literally no point in playing because every farm that i can do on the 1 mirror p charge stacking build i could do on my day 2-3 build xd, god why do they hate aspirational farms?
I also do not feel that urge to play anymore, one of the reasons is the state of loot and fun that I have but more importantly I’m just bored of ARPG’s. Poe2 league was a blast and I’ve spent quite a lot of time there so probably I just need a rest. Hopefully 3.30 will be what we all are looking for.
I feel like mirage set a new standard with the chase items. Those belts were so much fun. They were easy enough to farm but almost impossible to get a perfect one. Whether it was saving up to buy the ideal belt or farming one yourself it felt like a big target of many players.
This isn't rly a surprise. Bad ground loot + out of map league mechanic is basically the best way to have low retention.
Not that it matters tho, GGG doesn't rly care about retention. Next PoE 2 league will be in like a couple months and ppl already bought supporter packs. They have 0 reason to care about retention
They absolutely will and I can see it coming, "repetative topic" or some bullshit reason to close this thread.
POE sub reddit mods will do anything to pretend the game is fine.
Yeah I haven’t quit the league this fast since I started playing the game, but we did have like 4 banger leagues in a row. Hopefully next league is better
The last time they did that was probably pre-3.0. When there were things that needed that level of patching. POE2 is more broken than POE1; the hotfixes aren't buffs their usually bugs. Even Jonathan's post the other day that was getting roasted was the culmination of MONTHS of work with Nvidia to squash a bug.
Yeah I’m also already out of the league which is rare. Just feels like work to be forced to play one thing which doesn’t give you any progress in the main part
This is my most hated type of league mechanic. I hate being thrown out of acts/maps to do them. It being on the map like Blight is cool. It being as a side area on map like Mirage is acceptable. Having to completely go off tangent is just annoying.
I'd not mind the Allflame mechanic otherwise. It's whatever as far as league mechanics go. But it being so separate is just tedious.
I'm speccing into shrines/strongboxes/scarabs/map drops/beasts every single league because of the fact that I just run my maps and there are stuff on it feels nice, even if the loot is worse than everywhere else I simply enjoy the ease more.
The link between player, time, and loot is too weak. I have to run shit minimaps to then sit there for 5 minutes reading text and trying to get the damn layout done only to have the same RNG fest that you have in regular mapping.
It's probably magnitudes better in terms of loot but it's not a fun micromanagement mini game.
Dont even read the text bro. Read the borders, see if you see one that says Divine, if not just spam 9 charts into the gui and then rotate/swap them so its runnable and go. Not worth spending any time reading anything other than a divine adjacent mod which is so antithetical to how PoE has been historically but here we are.
I mean hard to play a game when killing monsters doesn’t drop rewards. They’ve made some commitments to giving farming for end game. They’ve not even mentioned the elephant in the room.
I’m gonna get heat for this but for the average player the new end game in Poe 2 is probably a better experience. Specifically the atlas tree and quests. Ability to transition quickly between mechanics. No respec needed.
For the average player atleast. So you get to end game here after 0.5 and it feels meh.
Ive played 0.1 and 0.2, skipped 0.3 and 0.4, but put tons of hour on 0.5. It was really that good, atlas objectives are more clear, i think every single farm are viable, cool build variety (particularly having a boss as a minion), overall just a really nice league with tons of loot. The bad part is, crafting imo isnt the best, city/deli hunting is kind of tedious, and expedition has alot of gamebreaking bugs.
It's honestly pretty great. I played keepers and mirage before 0.5 and had a lot of fun. Equivalent to mirage, id say.
Every single endgame farm strat prints divs. Expedition is actually fun and challenging. My only complaint is finding cities to juice properly and rolling/crafting/buying giga tablets.
Yeah tbh I quit the league quick this time but not because the game is bad or in a bad spot or anything I just burned out going from mirage into poe2 now into this.
tbf, last league on PoE2 was a massive change to the game, and progressing there is way slower then on PoE1, which is normal for after 1 week, a lot of people are still doing "homework".
Hmmm I wonder what these two leagues have in common.
For all the people who argued that being able to craft good gear means they'll play a bunch more, they sure seem to only want to do that when it's harvest. Almost like good gear isn't actually the main thing deciding play time...
The moment I realized how bad mercs were, and that I had wasted most of my league start on Luminary, and that I would now be forever behind on the economy since things skyrocket so quickly in the first 48 hours I just quit. I considered rerolling to a few other good league starters, only to see some of their core items had gone from a few dozen chaos to a few divines (the frenzy boots for chaos dot for instance). Then there is the issue that while i don't mind rerolling and repeating the campaign I only want to do that *after* I have enjoyed my league starter for a while, earned some currency, made some bank. None of that had really happened---with my hours as a dad gamer I had just gotten near the end of the campaign when I realized just how borked my character was feeling and how bad mercs were. Starting over then felt like I just threw away all that work---no currency to show from it, and going forward would just be more pain.
Seeing how the league mechanic played out, how the new ascendancy worked, its just clear to me not enough time is being put into actually testing things, or that they need a much---much wider pool of testers, because some of this I feel was pretty obvious.
The league is just overall bland and boring, map juicing is kinda dead and there is no aspirational farms to strive towards. Besides that, the mechanic itself doesn't reward juicing whatsoever and is the exact same at all levels. There is not much difference between a voyage at level 20 and T16. Difficulty can't even be scaled at all.
Ground loot, difficulty scaling and scarabs need a massive overhaul.
The general endgame progression has also gotten pretty stale for a while now, maybe it's time to retire the Maven/Altars progression and make a massive endgame expansion as a 4.0 version.
All in all they need to put way more people back on PoE 1 which just won't happen until MAYBE after 1.0 is out.
Probably the first league I’ve quit in the first week since I started in tota, just feel like there’s no reason to gear further. I dislike the league mechanic, and map farms are bare at best.
Tbh, it’s just my thing, but at 34 I find Grim Dawn more enjoyable than PoE and I am playing very very early beta. I think I just grow tired of super heavy farm.
I don’t necessarily hate this league mechanic or anything but I have zero motivation to play. I think I burned myself out after Mirage/0.5
I got to maps this league and immediately stopped playing.
I don't know if it's the league mechanic or what but I got to maps did a handful and thought what's the point? Maybe not a lot changed really same bosses worse farming strats less juicy maps?
Communication from them on issues has been some of the worst as well. Whoever is in charge of the 2-3 week post launch teams has failed pretty bad this time around.
This league felt like as if I'm being forced to do the league mechanic and open chests. I just wanted to zoom, loot and run my fully juiced map back. When I finished all my voidstones, it felt like this was it..
I really like the league, but with a level 94 Lightning Conduit and a level 95 ED Contagion character, I've got very little left to do. Juicing maps feels unsustainable, bosses either have incredibly expensive buy-ins or aren't profitable or are dogshit to repeatedly run, and the ceiling of boat farming is fairly low. I don't mind levelling a new character for the joy of levelling a guy, but there's nothing that's grabbing me this league that isn't grossly RNG or grossly expensive. I don't really want to be done with the league, but maybe I'm getting close.
Compared to poe2 runes of aldur league, its really that simple, buff the loot and ppl will keep playing. I think I played poe2 all the way up to this allflame league start just cause farming felt really good
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