I get the whole "there should be difficult" aspect of HC play but when the game has eye cancer for days it lessens it a fair margin. Added to that as well is if you do not have a top rig eye cancer often lowers your resolution by a fair amount in juiced maps. There are times where I couldnt tell what killed me even if I wanted it to because my screen is in 240p upscale.
not dying in hardcore is a scrub move, just shows ur not good enough to speedrun back to ur progress and level in 4-5mins
weak mindset....
I have read a lot of opinions saying things like "this patch is awful for HC everything is so rippy"
I would have zero interest in this game if you never had any sense of risk, never had any incentive to get smarter and better and prepare to take on the next thing
i feel like this patch crossed the line a bit with "crazy bullshit". the combination of AN + sentinel IS pretty rippy.. and there's a few things that feel just out of the players control when it comes to getting exposed to ground degens or surprise blasts.
the sentinel button itself is also a bit of a weird mental game. especially in HC where the stakes are higher. "you did it to yourself, and that's why it really hurts"
people used to gripe that PoE's problem was that you're just blapping mobs from off-screen.. now it feels like a necessity in Path of Running Away.
+2
38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
So... not sure how the rest of them go but you may want to do the unique sentinel empowered bosses in t1 white maps because I did it in a T16 rare map and I fought her for 30 mins before she died. A boss killer left in disgust after he died.
So... not sure how the rest of them go but you may want to do the unique sentinel empowered bosses in t1 white maps because I did it in a T16 rare map and I fought her for 30 mins before she died. A boss killer left in disgust after he died.
not dying in hardcore is a scrub move, just shows ur not good enough to speedrun back to ur progress and level in 4-5mins
weak mindset....
I have read a lot of opinions saying things like "this patch is awful for HC everything is so rippy"
I would have zero interest in this game if you never had any sense of risk, never had any incentive to get smarter and better and prepare to take on the next thing
i feel like this patch crossed the line a bit with "crazy bullshit". the combination of AN + sentinel IS pretty rippy.. and there's a few things that feel just out of the players control when it comes to getting exposed to ground degens or surprise blasts.
the sentinel button itself is also a bit of a weird mental game. especially in HC where the stakes are higher. "you did it to yourself, and that's why it really hurts"
people used to gripe that PoE's problem was that you're just blapping mobs from off-screen.. now it feels like a necessity in Path of Running Away.
Taking damage is often a thing that happens without your permission, yes
Less flippantly, understanding what's going to kill you in PoE isn't the kind of thing that necessarily gets telegraphed in the moment - though boss fights are generally quite fair about it - but it can still be learned and prepared for. Most of my decisions about how to build my HC character revolve around accounting for the ways I'm most likely to die given the content I'm doing. Chaos res matters, having a mix of mitigation and avoidance is important, being able to recover life reliably after getting chunked is the difference between surviving to fight another map and dying because I had no choice but to run back in to try to leech.
My build has bad damage in some situations because I don't have gear yet to do damage; in SC I could go full glass cannon, still have underwhelming damage thanks to being undergeared, and frustratingly die a bunch while doing higher tier maps for a long time until I finally had my PoB-tier items all traded for and equipped. and then what?
In HC my damage is still bad but I have to work to fix that somehow and I can't afford the luxury of dying. The difference between doing 200k DPS but surviving and 400k DPS with a six portal strategy isn't game changing, both are "just got into maps" numbers for the kind of build I've chosen to play and both are gonna spend a while in strugglesville. I don't find throwing bodies at content to be all that fun and from how a lot of people have reacted to most of the recent difficulty increases in PoE I don't think I'm alone in that.
AresProphet on
0
38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
edited May 2022
I can't kill the boss of the wasteland if he gets empowered he regens quicker than I can damage him.
So... not sure how the rest of them go but you may want to do the unique sentinel empowered bosses in t1 white maps because I did it in a T16 rare map and I fought her for 30 mins before she died. A boss killer left in disgust after he died.
Waste pool boss.
a coward who lacked commitment left
u stayed
ez
looking at my challenges, apparently you have to do it in one portal or it fails for some reason. So, that's fun.
you need to do it on an 8 mod map. Will be fun to do that again.
So I found my first headhunter yesterday! It dropped off some random monster off in a corner of an Arsenal map.
I debated holding it for the buff… which came like 5 hours later and has seemed to raise the price about 17ex… but oh well. I took the opportunity to flip it into a Crystallized Omniscience and I’m good with that decision.
fRAWRstThe Seas CallThe Mad AnswerRegistered Userregular
the HH nerf and this fix is a sad tale
pour one out for the homie
0
38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
What was the nerf and the fix? As someone who has never and will never get that item it all seems like a 1% issue to me.
Finally felt like I made some progress, I finally got my last possessed rogue exile and freed up 10 atlas spots and it feels awesome.
Also managed to harvest roll my medium cluster to blessed rebirth so my minions have 4 seconds of life now.
Also I'm up to 1000 chaos, so 1/8 of the way to Ashes of the Stars.
It wasnt a nerf just good ol fashioned GGG not thinking it through with Archmage. With archmage you have some bad affixes you can get. And the timer was like 20 sec with no refreshing. They put it up to 60 seconds and able to refresh. So before if you got a mob with the same aura with 2 seconds left you still only had 2 seconds now you are back 60 seconds.
The guy I spoke with said it feels great and I guess that is why its jumping back up to 60ex. If you want to feel what it kind of feels like that unique sentinel pretty much it.
I really dislike how inconsistent they can be with patches. HH gets this major overhaul, but IL and Behead stay the same. Just doesn't feel well thought out.
Did they do something weird with Fortify support? I guess it stacks now, but I can't tell if it's actually working, it doesn't seem to have a skill effect with it anymore. I used to look for the little shape beneath my feet but it's not there anymore. (shield bash+fortify supporty with a wand if that matters)
0
fRAWRstThe Seas CallThe Mad AnswerRegistered Userregular
Did they do something weird with Fortify support? I guess it stacks now, but I can't tell if it's actually working, it doesn't seem to have a skill effect with it anymore. I used to look for the little shape beneath my feet but it's not there anymore. (shield bash+fortify supporty with a wand if that matters)
it is now based on the damage your hit, so casters cannot reliable proc it anymore
big slam attacks = max fortify stacks etc
this is why champ is a premiere ascend now, forever 20 fort
Hit the orb of domination in one go, but whiffed bigtime on the regal. Just gonna use it like that for now. That one mod gave me 500k damage per totem, so about 1.5m or so with all my totems going. I have another base I can keep throwing into harvests hoping to get some better stats.
+6
fRAWRstThe Seas CallThe Mad AnswerRegistered Userregular
I’m thinking Archnemesis will go down as my first and last 40/40.
Just kidding. Instead, I stubbornly pushed through to my first lvl 100, got all the ubers, and 40/40. Yay LS Champ haha.
Now that I proved to myself I could still do it, and have seen that most of it wasn’t really that much harder (just requiring a lot more time to basically check a box), I don’t think I’ll continue going for 40s. Gotta stay sane.
@Noggin would you mind linking a pob for you character? I want to make another character to do some challenges and figured if you were successful with yours that would be a good place to start.
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
character balance manifesto out
lots of cool little details like minions now having proper scaling with ailments etc but not a huge amount of super new stuff or massive changes to support gems / skill gems
some necessary changes to dumb stuff that people are going to complain about but slightly underwhelming given last patch had no changes at all
it's not proper patch notes, but that was an incredibly weak set of changes listed in the manifesto - it was basically a series of 'this is going to be the same as the last two leagues, but you gonna be weaker, longer'
the list of buffs on underused skills was not nearly long enough - if this league mechanic doesn't completely rock, this is lookin like a bit of a snoozer so far.
This is the future. This is what we built. This is what we wanted. It must have been. Because we all had the fucking choice, didn't we? It is only our money that allows commercial culture to flower. If we didn't want to live like this, we could have changed it at any time, by not fucking paying for it.
So let's celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger. -transmet
+1
BrodyThe WatchThe First ShoreRegistered Userregular
I wonder how much of this is because they are trying to save up stuff/pull people for the PoE 2 design?
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited August 2022
3.5x damage on minion ignites
finally... the dreamn....
with minion helms now giving +1-2 minion level global maybe we do something spicy like ground slam ignite stone golems... for the people
surrealitycheck on
0
Euphemonitsudemo sagashiteiruyodokka ni kimi no sugata woRegistered Userregular
edited August 2022
A lot of these nerfs are incredibly deserved (defiance banner stands out, for example), but without having played it, it's hard to tell if the nerfs will compound too hard (for example, mana res nerfs hitting grace+det+defi on top of losing "easy" spell suppress on top of defi nerf). Gut instinct says that GGG probably went too far in their typical way of nerfing every part of a broken combo. I also didn't think that defense was necessarily too strong, especially at the top end of content. Altar farming was savage, for example (I regularly died with 82+ allres, recovery on block, 75% attack/spell block w/o GB, defensive flasks, brass dome, lots of lgoh+cyclone). I can understand the desire to remove every build running grace+det+defi, and to reduce defenses on the low/mid end, but they went REALLY far up the scale.
Same thing with minions being too strong for too low investment for basically the lifespan of the game, but stacking nerfs and lack of big changes makes it a total snooze. High end minions will probably end up similar or stronger, so I understand the motivation behind the nerfs, but just from an excitement/interest standpoint, it's zzzzz. (also, was summon reaper even that good? I knew that some people had made decent builds with it in the past especially with bleed, but did it deserve a nerf??? i don't understand this. I guess they're super worried about reapers doing bleed+poison but I mean...you're still playing summon reaper...)
Biggest issue for me is more that the buffs don't stand out, whatsoever. Obviously this is just the manifesto, not the full notes, but the stuff they've shown don't seem to shake things up enough, especially considering this will be the third patch in a row with no big shakeups. I REALLY liked the sentinel league mechanic, not just because it absolutely shit out currency and recombs were insanely strong, but I actually liked the process of using and breeding them (well, using was a bit rough if you were playing minions/autobombers, but I mean, I personally don't have a huge issue with mechanics that reward some builds over others). Obviously they were too strong and too low-investment (glacier strat should not exist) but playing a league with mostly nerfs and no big changes, the league mechanic would have to be incredibly good to outweigh how I felt about sentinel league as a whole.
ps (also some of these changes are very strange what the fuck is the pathfinder change and how do they think that helps with their stated problem im really not sure like if you were playing a non-chaos build and looking at pathfinder why would you think "hmmmm, i would trade 6% less ele damage taken for 20% increased effect of magic utility flasks, that would make me choose this ascendency!" it doesn't actually help with the issue of there being no reason to take pathfinder when you give them a sidegrade or arguably a downgrade)
I get that GGG wants to encourage people to play longer by elongating the process of gearing your character and making challenges grindier, but I personally think they've taken it too far. Part of why I like PoE is the different progression curves of different builds. Here's a build that scales like shit but is really strong early, here's a build that doesn't work until 150ex, etc. I feel like they didn't need to make every build weaker early. People who like ARPGs are going to play longer anyway. Without getting too deep into the player retention numbers and what they mean, I feel like it's fair to say that they haven't succeeded in their goal, they've just made the early league experience worse.
Having said all that I'm going to crack the fuck out on the new league regardless. I'll see how I feel after that.
Definitely looks like they're trying to dial down the player power creep that's been happening. Continuing to prepare for PoE 2.
I'm just hoping this doesn't create a bunch of feel bad moments when people try to play their builds. The grace + determination + defiance banner combo was being run by too many builds, but the bigger problem is that's the only thing a lot of builds could do to survive.
I know they want to slow the game down, but by removing these defensive options they push the players into the only defensive option remaining: kill things as fast as possible.
I like the changes to melding of the flesh. Make it powerful, just make it so players can't be quite as powerful with it. I think it might be dead with the mana reservation node gone though, players ran purity of ice to get their resistance that high. Without reservation efficiency and the defiance banner nerf, it probably kills the aegis + melding defense so it isn't worth it anymore.
Steam: Spawnbroker
0
Euphemonitsudemo sagashiteiruyodokka ni kimi no sugata woRegistered Userregular
edited August 2022
Yeah I get that, people thought 3.15 was a huge hit to player power, which it was, but 3.16 giving SS and easy access to grace+det+defi combo as well as accessible elemental ailment avoid gave a huge amount of defensive power. 3.17 having archnemesis mods on rares (even nerfed) plus the atlas tree stuff balanced out a lot of that power. I thought the new atlas tree nodes were actually a really good move by GGG, it continues their trend of allowing players the option to make content difficult in return for better rewards. I didn't feel like I outscaled the content very much this league despite investing a lot (150+ex) and there was always more difficult/rewarding content.
That's why I think they're going a little far with elongating that process. Like if they think that 200+ex is the minimum to start doing late-end game stuff like altar farming (not even end-end game stuff like 100% delirious gigajuiced maps) without chain dying, that's too much for me.
Actually I'm more dreading the changes to the atlas passive tree. I have a feeling they're going to nerf it pretty hard, the altar farming stuff especially. Though, to be fair, the keystone that gave you grand ichor/embers instead of lesser/greater was actually busted, grand basically priced out lesser/greaters completely. But I mean, that's the point of something requiring a high investment build, no?
re: melding, that's basically what I was alluding to when I said that the nerfs to defenses were going pretty far up the scale. I think melding would still be worth it even if you ran the exact same setup, 86% allres is still really good, you just have to invest even more into mana res efficiency and you probably lose whatever incidental stuff (gravicius mod body armour for rf inq, for example, or small amounts of spell suppress), and obviously at the top end you add on a mageblood. But that's basically 200+ex builds territory if you want to go that high, even without the mageblood. It's the typical GGG thing of nerfing everything connected to a broken combo. Melding needed a nerf, mana res needed a nerf, spell suppress needed a nerf, but those compounded are rough. I suspect aegis aurora will get a nerf too, since it's clearly too strong, and that'll be another compounding factor.
Euphemon on
+1
surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
also worth noting that of course this doesnt cover the new league mechanic and skills/supports so some interesting things in there to add wrinkles
0
Euphemonitsudemo sagashiteiruyodokka ni kimi no sugata woRegistered Userregular
edited August 2022
Yeah I mean I'm going to be playing the next league no matter what. I'm personally a little skeptical of the new league mechanic/skills&supports but that's because I liked sentinel so much and I rarely see new skills actually release in a great state (pconc was the last one? i guess fr was the patch before and also had boneshatter/rage vortex so their batting average has been pretty good recently on second thought)
Worst case I just leaguestart animate weapon (which seems to be still really good) or rf inq for endless heist nonsense.
It'll be fine, it's still Path of Exile. I just personally dislike the trend they're heading in and I think for a patch after a league with no direct balance changes it's boring but it's not like I'm foaming in rage or even skipping the league.
Guhh. This isn't some "I'm quitting forever" post, but guhhh.
It does just feel like GGG doesn't want me to play their game more and more as time goes on. They've now nerfed the nerfed version of the nerfed version of the nerfed version of a build I really enjoyed for a long time (skeletons)..........and man this stuff is just exhausting.
When I started playing in Bestiary, I took 10+ characters to red maps for 2 exalts or less each. The builds were incredibly fun, varied, and viable for me to make as a player who just does not have the stamina to endlessly grind currency on the same character for hours and hours and hours on end. Having a ton of builds to play or interesting looking budget builds "on the horizon" to try out was the #1 reason I've enjoyed Path of Exile for so long and put 1000+ whatever hours in it.
Yeah it was never the most optimal way to play, but it was really fun and completely supported by the game for a couple of years. It's just hard to overstate how little I care about ultra meta streamers getting bored with the game being "too ez" after 3 days into a new league because they don't sleep and have memorized the mechanics to the point that it feels like a job.
But....that's the entire audience they balance around. They seem to feel personally offended when the .01% are trivializing the content in their game, and change it to make it a slog for everyone. The .01% always adapts, because they are on the cutting edge of the meta and will always find a way to be one step ahead of the latest patch. People like me....don't, because reaching that level of familiarity with the most cutting edge meta over and over again is the moment that the game starts to feel artificial, overly numbers-ey, and boring. And like a job that forces me to cancel all social commitments to keep up and play it like I have in the past.
I just....wish there were space for me to roll my 10 alts, mess around on them until I get to red maps, see something cool and shiny, and then go try out that new budget build too on an alt with some fun power leveling items. The cost of doing business has risen tremendously, and it's pretty rapidly outpacing the fun value that is received. For quite a long time they were doing a great job of offsetting nerfs to builds with fun buffs to old skills and fun powerful new skills, but that well has noticeably dried in the last year.
I'll find some shiny cool build to play at some point, probably not this league, but the days of "oh man 10 new cool builds to try out that I can afford and are effective" are gone. It's not that I'm tired of the good ones I loved, it's that they've all been nerfed into the ground and are not being replaced at anywhere near a similar rate. Unfortunately that appears to be design philosophy and not coincidence or error.
Yeah I played the last league and the changes are really not defensible. The whole "prep for POE2" is pretty pathetic justification considering that isnt even on the horizon yet. And if this is the game they want PoE2 to be then my hype train for it is almost non existent now. The game isnt hard in a "fair" manner. You often die to things you cannot even see because of the light show and the power curve even on "OP" builds didnt top out within a fair amount of currency spent. Played skeles and RF and having reflect dmg on blue mobs from off screen back to me was just insanely bad design and they should be laughed at for it. They really dont seem to know what they are doing and throwing things at the wall to see what sticks and what ends up being too much and then they buff it back up. Its is not fun to play design.
Jubal77 on
+1
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
After thousands of hours, last league I went in with a full head of steam but then realized every build worth a damn was like 50 ex and required insane grind commitments to sell things early so you could afford to do it and...
Man, I love the inherent complexity of the game and the depth of the systems presented, I absolutely do. I've come around on the various ways things can be augmented, I'm familiar with the Timeless Jewels, I've got a pretty good idea of what Cluster jewels make things work, I love how the synergies of the support gems and skills work.
I just think the way the enemies are designed and the spiky damage is designed has become untenable, especially when they nerf the only way to reliably not die from out of nowhere, by a hit you can't avoid, because the entire screen is jammed full of trash mobs and there's a constant fireworks show on screen. And I was fine with it up until a few leagues ago, I think when the Maven was introduced.
If there's something that kills me and I can't possibly know what it is, or keep track of the quarter million buffs/debuffs on top of the screen, then I start losing interest. Actual character build design in this game is incredible and remains incredible, but player agency in determining the outcome of fights has dwindled to fucking zero.
A big part of why they use so much spikey damage is the game is balanced around being about to alt-f4 or logout macro, so one shots end up being the only viable counter.
A big part of why they use so much spikey damage is the game is balanced around being about to alt-f4 or logout macro, so one shots end up being the only viable counter.
Heh yeah, stuff like that is insane to me. They could patch that out, orrrr design the entire game around the ability to panic quit in any situation, something that no one thinks is compelling gameplay. Let's go with the latter.
i used to be a HC player.. but several patches ago the slippery slope of silly numbers started to feel evident.
HC felt less like a calculated challenge and more like i was just playing russian roulette with my free time. it didn't particularly matter how hard i tried, because odds were some random crazy event would catch me off guard. (unless i played in an incredibly boring and "safe" manner where i didn't really get to engage with the league mechanics fully)
nowadays i just accept it and stick to softcore, where i can laugh at the deaths while GGG indulges in... whatever they're doing to the game.
I think it’s more that they’ve shifted a chunk of your influence over the outcome into the prep work. Whatever league it was, I remember Chris saying he wanted people to be more careful about what they were running, and not just “Alch and go”.
There’s obvious risk from all your content and pack size, but also plenty of mods that are quite dangerous depending on your build, especially if you then start doubling up on your invites with Height of Hubris.
Instead of just looking to reroll reflect, I was rerolling maps with double phys-as-ele, double crit, reduced aura effect, and certain others… like don’t give shaper/elder guardians life as extra ES. The game feels much safer if you’re careful about what you open.
For me the horrible design was you could make safe maps but you werent safe from reflect because of their not thinking it through with arch mods. It was just so horrible and broke away from even what they "stated".
Posts
i feel like this patch crossed the line a bit with "crazy bullshit". the combination of AN + sentinel IS pretty rippy.. and there's a few things that feel just out of the players control when it comes to getting exposed to ground degens or surprise blasts.
the sentinel button itself is also a bit of a weird mental game. especially in HC where the stakes are higher. "you did it to yourself, and that's why it really hurts"
people used to gripe that PoE's problem was that you're just blapping mobs from off-screen.. now it feels like a necessity in Path of Running Away.
Waste pool boss.
a coward who lacked commitment left
u stayed
ez
Taking damage is often a thing that happens without your permission, yes
Less flippantly, understanding what's going to kill you in PoE isn't the kind of thing that necessarily gets telegraphed in the moment - though boss fights are generally quite fair about it - but it can still be learned and prepared for. Most of my decisions about how to build my HC character revolve around accounting for the ways I'm most likely to die given the content I'm doing. Chaos res matters, having a mix of mitigation and avoidance is important, being able to recover life reliably after getting chunked is the difference between surviving to fight another map and dying because I had no choice but to run back in to try to leech.
My build has bad damage in some situations because I don't have gear yet to do damage; in SC I could go full glass cannon, still have underwhelming damage thanks to being undergeared, and frustratingly die a bunch while doing higher tier maps for a long time until I finally had my PoB-tier items all traded for and equipped. and then what?
In HC my damage is still bad but I have to work to fix that somehow and I can't afford the luxury of dying. The difference between doing 200k DPS but surviving and 400k DPS with a six portal strategy isn't game changing, both are "just got into maps" numbers for the kind of build I've chosen to play and both are gonna spend a while in strugglesville. I don't find throwing bodies at content to be all that fun and from how a lot of people have reacted to most of the recent difficulty increases in PoE I don't think I'm alone in that.
looking at my challenges, apparently you have to do it in one portal or it fails for some reason. So, that's fun.
you need to do it on an 8 mod map. Will be fun to do that again.
I debated holding it for the buff… which came like 5 hours later and has seemed to raise the price about 17ex… but oh well. I took the opportunity to flip it into a Crystallized Omniscience and I’m good with that decision.
Bosses are truly melting now
pour one out for the homie
Finally felt like I made some progress, I finally got my last possessed rogue exile and freed up 10 atlas spots and it feels awesome.
Also managed to harvest roll my medium cluster to blessed rebirth so my minions have 4 seconds of life now.
Also I'm up to 1000 chaos, so 1/8 of the way to Ashes of the Stars.
The guy I spoke with said it feels great and I guess that is why its jumping back up to 60ex. If you want to feel what it kind of feels like that unique sentinel pretty much it.
it is now based on the damage your hit, so casters cannot reliable proc it anymore
big slam attacks = max fortify stacks etc
this is why champ is a premiere ascend now, forever 20 fort
Hit the orb of domination in one go, but whiffed bigtime on the regal. Just gonna use it like that for now. That one mod gave me 500k damage per totem, so about 1.5m or so with all my totems going. I have another base I can keep throwing into harvests hoping to get some better stats.
Just kidding. Instead, I stubbornly pushed through to my first lvl 100, got all the ubers, and 40/40. Yay LS Champ haha.
Now that I proved to myself I could still do it, and have seen that most of it wasn’t really that much harder (just requiring a lot more time to basically check a box), I don’t think I’ll continue going for 40s. Gotta stay sane.
"The radius of Ground Effects from Map modifiers are no longer affected by increases and reductions to Map modifier effect."
so degen maps will be kinda runnable again?
""Added audio for Burning, Chilled and Shocked Ground Effects.""
but they'll be noisier?
https://poeplanner.com/b/gxi
lots of cool little details like minions now having proper scaling with ailments etc but not a huge amount of super new stuff or massive changes to support gems / skill gems
some necessary changes to dumb stuff that people are going to complain about but slightly underwhelming given last patch had no changes at all
the list of buffs on underused skills was not nearly long enough - if this league mechanic doesn't completely rock, this is lookin like a bit of a snoozer so far.
So let's celebrate by all going out and buying the same burger. -transmet
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
finally... the dreamn....
with minion helms now giving +1-2 minion level global maybe we do something spicy like ground slam ignite stone golems... for the people
Same thing with minions being too strong for too low investment for basically the lifespan of the game, but stacking nerfs and lack of big changes makes it a total snooze. High end minions will probably end up similar or stronger, so I understand the motivation behind the nerfs, but just from an excitement/interest standpoint, it's zzzzz. (also, was summon reaper even that good? I knew that some people had made decent builds with it in the past especially with bleed, but did it deserve a nerf??? i don't understand this. I guess they're super worried about reapers doing bleed+poison but I mean...you're still playing summon reaper...)
Biggest issue for me is more that the buffs don't stand out, whatsoever. Obviously this is just the manifesto, not the full notes, but the stuff they've shown don't seem to shake things up enough, especially considering this will be the third patch in a row with no big shakeups. I REALLY liked the sentinel league mechanic, not just because it absolutely shit out currency and recombs were insanely strong, but I actually liked the process of using and breeding them (well, using was a bit rough if you were playing minions/autobombers, but I mean, I personally don't have a huge issue with mechanics that reward some builds over others). Obviously they were too strong and too low-investment (glacier strat should not exist) but playing a league with mostly nerfs and no big changes, the league mechanic would have to be incredibly good to outweigh how I felt about sentinel league as a whole.
ps (also some of these changes are very strange what the fuck is the pathfinder change and how do they think that helps with their stated problem im really not sure like if you were playing a non-chaos build and looking at pathfinder why would you think "hmmmm, i would trade 6% less ele damage taken for 20% increased effect of magic utility flasks, that would make me choose this ascendency!" it doesn't actually help with the issue of there being no reason to take pathfinder when you give them a sidegrade or arguably a downgrade)
I get that GGG wants to encourage people to play longer by elongating the process of gearing your character and making challenges grindier, but I personally think they've taken it too far. Part of why I like PoE is the different progression curves of different builds. Here's a build that scales like shit but is really strong early, here's a build that doesn't work until 150ex, etc. I feel like they didn't need to make every build weaker early. People who like ARPGs are going to play longer anyway. Without getting too deep into the player retention numbers and what they mean, I feel like it's fair to say that they haven't succeeded in their goal, they've just made the early league experience worse.
Having said all that I'm going to crack the fuck out on the new league regardless. I'll see how I feel after that.
I'm just hoping this doesn't create a bunch of feel bad moments when people try to play their builds. The grace + determination + defiance banner combo was being run by too many builds, but the bigger problem is that's the only thing a lot of builds could do to survive.
I know they want to slow the game down, but by removing these defensive options they push the players into the only defensive option remaining: kill things as fast as possible.
I like the changes to melding of the flesh. Make it powerful, just make it so players can't be quite as powerful with it. I think it might be dead with the mana reservation node gone though, players ran purity of ice to get their resistance that high. Without reservation efficiency and the defiance banner nerf, it probably kills the aegis + melding defense so it isn't worth it anymore.
That's why I think they're going a little far with elongating that process. Like if they think that 200+ex is the minimum to start doing late-end game stuff like altar farming (not even end-end game stuff like 100% delirious gigajuiced maps) without chain dying, that's too much for me.
Actually I'm more dreading the changes to the atlas passive tree. I have a feeling they're going to nerf it pretty hard, the altar farming stuff especially. Though, to be fair, the keystone that gave you grand ichor/embers instead of lesser/greater was actually busted, grand basically priced out lesser/greaters completely. But I mean, that's the point of something requiring a high investment build, no?
re: melding, that's basically what I was alluding to when I said that the nerfs to defenses were going pretty far up the scale. I think melding would still be worth it even if you ran the exact same setup, 86% allres is still really good, you just have to invest even more into mana res efficiency and you probably lose whatever incidental stuff (gravicius mod body armour for rf inq, for example, or small amounts of spell suppress), and obviously at the top end you add on a mageblood. But that's basically 200+ex builds territory if you want to go that high, even without the mageblood. It's the typical GGG thing of nerfing everything connected to a broken combo. Melding needed a nerf, mana res needed a nerf, spell suppress needed a nerf, but those compounded are rough. I suspect aegis aurora will get a nerf too, since it's clearly too strong, and that'll be another compounding factor.
Worst case I just leaguestart animate weapon (which seems to be still really good) or rf inq for endless heist nonsense.
It'll be fine, it's still Path of Exile. I just personally dislike the trend they're heading in and I think for a patch after a league with no direct balance changes it's boring but it's not like I'm foaming in rage or even skipping the league.
It does just feel like GGG doesn't want me to play their game more and more as time goes on. They've now nerfed the nerfed version of the nerfed version of the nerfed version of a build I really enjoyed for a long time (skeletons)..........and man this stuff is just exhausting.
When I started playing in Bestiary, I took 10+ characters to red maps for 2 exalts or less each. The builds were incredibly fun, varied, and viable for me to make as a player who just does not have the stamina to endlessly grind currency on the same character for hours and hours and hours on end. Having a ton of builds to play or interesting looking budget builds "on the horizon" to try out was the #1 reason I've enjoyed Path of Exile for so long and put 1000+ whatever hours in it.
Yeah it was never the most optimal way to play, but it was really fun and completely supported by the game for a couple of years. It's just hard to overstate how little I care about ultra meta streamers getting bored with the game being "too ez" after 3 days into a new league because they don't sleep and have memorized the mechanics to the point that it feels like a job.
But....that's the entire audience they balance around. They seem to feel personally offended when the .01% are trivializing the content in their game, and change it to make it a slog for everyone. The .01% always adapts, because they are on the cutting edge of the meta and will always find a way to be one step ahead of the latest patch. People like me....don't, because reaching that level of familiarity with the most cutting edge meta over and over again is the moment that the game starts to feel artificial, overly numbers-ey, and boring. And like a job that forces me to cancel all social commitments to keep up and play it like I have in the past.
I just....wish there were space for me to roll my 10 alts, mess around on them until I get to red maps, see something cool and shiny, and then go try out that new budget build too on an alt with some fun power leveling items. The cost of doing business has risen tremendously, and it's pretty rapidly outpacing the fun value that is received. For quite a long time they were doing a great job of offsetting nerfs to builds with fun buffs to old skills and fun powerful new skills, but that well has noticeably dried in the last year.
I'll find some shiny cool build to play at some point, probably not this league, but the days of "oh man 10 new cool builds to try out that I can afford and are effective" are gone. It's not that I'm tired of the good ones I loved, it's that they've all been nerfed into the ground and are not being replaced at anywhere near a similar rate. Unfortunately that appears to be design philosophy and not coincidence or error.
Man, I love the inherent complexity of the game and the depth of the systems presented, I absolutely do. I've come around on the various ways things can be augmented, I'm familiar with the Timeless Jewels, I've got a pretty good idea of what Cluster jewels make things work, I love how the synergies of the support gems and skills work.
I just think the way the enemies are designed and the spiky damage is designed has become untenable, especially when they nerf the only way to reliably not die from out of nowhere, by a hit you can't avoid, because the entire screen is jammed full of trash mobs and there's a constant fireworks show on screen. And I was fine with it up until a few leagues ago, I think when the Maven was introduced.
If there's something that kills me and I can't possibly know what it is, or keep track of the quarter million buffs/debuffs on top of the screen, then I start losing interest. Actual character build design in this game is incredible and remains incredible, but player agency in determining the outcome of fights has dwindled to fucking zero.
Heh yeah, stuff like that is insane to me. They could patch that out, orrrr design the entire game around the ability to panic quit in any situation, something that no one thinks is compelling gameplay. Let's go with the latter.
HC felt less like a calculated challenge and more like i was just playing russian roulette with my free time. it didn't particularly matter how hard i tried, because odds were some random crazy event would catch me off guard. (unless i played in an incredibly boring and "safe" manner where i didn't really get to engage with the league mechanics fully)
nowadays i just accept it and stick to softcore, where i can laugh at the deaths while GGG indulges in... whatever they're doing to the game.
There’s obvious risk from all your content and pack size, but also plenty of mods that are quite dangerous depending on your build, especially if you then start doubling up on your invites with Height of Hubris.
Instead of just looking to reroll reflect, I was rerolling maps with double phys-as-ele, double crit, reduced aura effect, and certain others… like don’t give shaper/elder guardians life as extra ES. The game feels much safer if you’re careful about what you open.